Asimov continues, in his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green:
The Greater New York Science Fiction Club, concerning which Rubinson had written me, was suffering from this contentiousness. There was one faction, led by a fan named Will Sykora, along with James Taurasi and sam Moskowitz himself, that wished to confine the activities of the club to science fiction, without any admixture of politics.
Another group, one to which Rubinson apparently belonged, felt that the world situation was such that it made no sense to imagine science fiction as existing in a vacuum, it could not remain above the strife.
Rememberthat 1938 was a hectic and fearful year in Europe. In March, Hitler had taken over Austria without a fight... In the months following, Hitler, facing a fearful and hesitant France and Grat Britain, demanded the border sections of Czechoslovakia...
By September the demand had brought Europe to the brink of war. Peace was saved only by the craven surrender of Great Britain and France to Germany at Munich...
With that in mind, the group to which Rubinson belonged wanted to use science fiction as a way of fighting fascism, and it was almost impossible to do this in those days without making use of Marxist rhetoric, so that these activists were accused of being Communists by the opposition.
In between the postcard I received on the 12th and the one I received on the 15th, the final split took place. The Sykora group renamed itself the Queens Science Fiction Fan Club, while the activists called themselves the "Futurian Science Literary Society," a name that was quickly shortened to Futurians.
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