On the way, he consults a “wizard” opposite to himself, the hex-doctor Gramps Schneider. Scheider’s lair is the contrary of Waldo’s—it’s narrow and crowded, and where Waldo’s spacious orbital home is futuristic, Schneider’s wall calendar is a souvenir of the New York World’s Fair. Gravity holds literal sway here—books are “piled on the floor, hung precariously on chairs”, an ancient desk is “suporting a long-obsolete mechanical typewriter”, and the artifact that catches Waldo’s eye is a pendulum clock, which wouldn’t work in Waldo’s zero-gravity lair without artificial gravity being provided by a centrifuge. The elements of Schneider’s house are overtly organic—the clock hoots like an owl before a wooden bird pops out to call the time, and a hand-pump is described as having grown up out of the kitchen counter.
And Schneider introduces Waldo to the Other World, a realm of Chaos that intrudes into, and redeems, our otherwise strictly mechanical world. “How else could we live?” asks Waldo. “The mind—not the brain, but the mind—is in the Other World, and reaches this world through the body.” And later he muses, “It was laughably insufficient to try to explain the writing of a symphony in terms of the mechanics of colloids . . . Come to think of it, the whole notion of consciousness and thought was fantastically improbable.”
The thoughts are Waldo’s, but the question extends outside the story. If not by means of Waldo’s “Other World,” how do we explain the evident fact of free will in a physically ordered world?
These mystical concerns notwithstanding, Waldo is still recognizably a science fiction story, as in such small but verisimilitude-lending details as Stevens’ “speedster” briefly becoming matte black between the setting for transparent and the setting for silver—and, though it was published in 1942, we’re told that “the war of the forties” had brought the world atomic energy, first as a “superexplosive” and then as a source of manageable energy; and in order to investigate the operation of neurons and their synapses, Waldo “used the tiny waldoes to create still tinier ones . . . which could manipulate things much too small for the human eye to see.” These were in the 1942 magazine text, not added later.
Finally, having freed himself from the physically-incapacitating illness that dictated his destiny, having embraced redeeming chaos, Waldo decides, “I can tell you this: I’m going to have fun. I’m going to have lots of fun,” and goes out and becomes a world-renowned dancer who seems to love everybody uncritically.
Admirable!—but it’s nevertheless difficult to see this as something very different from a classically tragic fall. He at least performs surgery on the side, but he has apparently lost his personality—his curiosity, his shrewdness, and his power of incisive assessment. “It was wonderful to dance, glorious to be applauded, to be liked, to be wanted.” He happily signs legal documents without reading them, and he indiscriminately loves all the reporters who crowd around him: “They were all such nice fellows, such grand guys—the reporters, the photographers, all of them.” The last line of the story repeats “They were all such grand guys,” which seems to pre-echo the penultimate line of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon: “Im going to have lots of frends where I go,” and even the last line of George Orwell’s 1984: “He loved Big Brother.”
We see this dancer, but—where’s Waldo? After the dance performance that frames the story, Waldo is off to perform a cerebrectomy. I wonder if his discovery of free will has not in effect enabled him to perform one on himself.
Waldo was about letting the influence of the Other World, Chaos, leaven the clockwork predictability of the ordinary world. In Magic, Inc., this has already happened.
Magic Inc. appeared in the September 1940 issue of Unknown. Campbell had started that magazine in 1939, shortly after he took over the editorship of Astounding, because he found that many of his best science fiction writers, people like Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon and L. Ron Hubbard, were submitting stories to Astounding that edged across the line and were based more on the supernatural than on science—but they were still fine stories. They were, in fact, Cambpbell stories; they dealt logically and consistently with even their wildest extrapolations, and their protagonists were generally average people whose mundane concerns were complicated by variously extraordinary ones.
A lot of fantasy stories today take place in cities very like New York or Los Angeles or London—among buses and newspapers and muggers and television and characters worrying about the rent on their apartments or offices—but with the addition of magic as a fairly everyday commonplace, so that there are also things like werewolf warnings on the news channel, and gangs of juvenile delinquent vampires, and ads in the Yellow Pages for private detectives who specialize in lifting curses. Magic is just one routinely integrated element in daily life.
I’m pretty sure Heinlein invented this type of story in 1940, with Magic, Inc.
Campbell’s Unknown was the natural home for it; in July of ‘39, for instance, he published L. Sprague de Camp’s Nothing in the Rules, about a modern swimming contest that’s disrupted when a mermaid is entered in the women’s competition—but the officials and the other contestants are astonished by the fact of a mermaid, and at first can’t believe she’s genuine. This is our world experiencing an unprecedented intrustion of the uncanny.
But in the world of Magic, Inc., there would already be rules in the book about mermaids competing with ordinary humans; in that world the supernatural is as ordinary and socially assimilated as antibiotics. “We flagged down a magic carpet that was cruising past,” remarks the narrator casually; and it’s considered bad manners to vanish without saying goodbye; and people on diets order from “the left-hand side of the menu—all vanishing items, like the alcohol in my beer.”
This is not what has since come to be called Magic Realism. In a Magic Realism novel, like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, unnatural events happen, but not according to any comprehensible system—there is no rationale or structure to the magic. And though any outre, impossible thing may happen, the characters are somehow never particularly suprrised by any of it; and so, for instance, when Remedios the Beauty floats away into the sky one day while hanging out laundry, the reader is not encouraged to believe that an actual woman really did that, in a real place—a woman in a Salvador Dali painting did it.
The extents and limitations of magic in Magic Inc. are known and taken into responsible consideration. There are traffic ordinances that forbid those magic carpets from flying at any appreciable height, since—naturally—magic won’t work over consecrated ground, and there’s the risk that careless pilots might fly over churches and tumble out of the sky; and for certain sorts of problems you want an attorney who specializes in thaumaturgic jurisprudence. When Archie Fraser’s office is vandalized by gnomes, a salamander, and an undine, he’s dismayed, but not incredulous. It’s an admittedly uncommon setback for which a businessman must nevertheless be prepared. There’s even a Rotary Club sticker on the window of his office.
Magic, in this place, is a technology—as potentially dangerous as drugs or internal combustion or electricity, but, like those, a known and mostly manageable quantity.
The risk in using magic this way in a story is that the supernatural is likely to lose its numinous power, the potent wonder of glimpsing an unknown world.
For all the routine application of much of the magic—providing bleachers for sporting events, creation of textiles—Heinlein doesn’t make this mistake. Fraser has heard of salamanders but never seen one; the appearance of that creature is a wonder, and it is truly alien: “There was life in it, a singing joy, with no concern for—with no relation to—matters of right and wrong, or anything human. Its harmonies of color and curve were their own reason for being.”
And when Fraser and his companions enter the Half World, it’s very like what Waldo thought of as the Other World, though Waldo never actually entered his—“In the real world there are natural laws which persist through changes of custom and culture; in the Half W
orld only custom has any degree of persistence, and of natural law there is none . . . A place where ‘up’ and ‘down’ were matters of opinion, and directions might read as readily in days or colors as in miles.” It presents itself to Fraser as a living Heironymus Bosch landscape, and the accomplishment of Fraser’s mission is not as memorable as the chaos world it takes place in.
The risk at this point is that the machinations of the mundane world will come to seem too mundane, by comparison; that all the intriguingly Alice-in-Wonderland conflict will be on the supernatural side of the ledger. But when Fraser takes his case to the State Assembly, he finds a real-world situation in which it’s very nearly true that even up and down are matters of opinion: a speaker denounces a measure to aid in mining natural gas, not because of any concern about the issue in question, but for the apparently unconnected reason that billboards are important in his district; a bill is unanimously passed so that it can be unamimously dismissed afterward; bills proposed for vote late on a Saturday evening are considered to have been proposed the previous Thursday. Heinlein had run for a seat in the California State Assembly only two-and-a-half years before Magic, Inc., was published, and he knew at firsthand the solemn nonsense that politics consists of.
What Heinlein brought to both of these stories is a logical, common-sense approach to the irrational, and the result is that the dazzled reader takes it in as credulously as a reader of detective stories accepts the idea of corrupts cops. And whether these stories are science fiction or fantasy, they fulfill the core purpose of both—to let the reader vicariously experience, rather than simply note, adventures that the real world can’t provide.
John Campbell was fortunate that, when he brought his new vision to his magazines, good writers appeared who could make it tangible in fiction, and Heinlein was arguably the best of them; Astounding and Unknown revolutionized science fiction and fantasy, and in both of them Heinlein was a pioneer, blazing new trails that have become broad, familiar highways for modern writers.
Waldo, and Magic, Inc Page 24