Frederik Pohl has done it all in science fiction, one of the few who have won Hugo Awards both for his stories and for his editing. Becoming a science fiction magazine editor while still in his teens in the 1930s, he had already made a name for himself as an active science fiction fan. Here are his memories of how the field evolved from the first science fiction magazines in the 1920s when science fiction readers were regarded as oddballs to the time when science fiction novels took over the best-seller lists and spawned some of the most popular TV shows and movies of all, along with vivid portraits of the shakers and movers who turned a cult field of writing into the mature literature it is today.