Final night is called “the one problem they do not want to solve—the problem they are sure they cannot solve.”319 Long ago, the machines permitted a degenerating humanity to pass from the scene. Now they can see the end of things approaching for them, too, and they welcome surcease.
Even the traveler is ready to lie down and commit suicide . . . until suddenly he finds himself back in his own time again, being given oxygen by his friends.
“The Last Evolution,” “Twilight,” and “Night” are extreme examples of the intermixing of radical and conservative elements so typical of Thirties SF. In their depiction of the decline and extinction of man, in their presentation of a fixed and unalterable framework of time, and in their relentless Earth-centeredness, these stories were highly old-fashioned. At the same time, however, in their bold experimentalism as science fiction, in their vision of the machine as man’s favored child, and most of all, in their exponential widening of scale from thousands to millions to billions of years, these stories were distinctly new.
These three central stories, with their restatement and updating of themes familiar from H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Olaf Stapledon, set forth the major problems that John W. Campbell would attempt to resolve during the Thirties. His primary (though by no means only) mode of attack would be under the guise of Don A. Stuart.
Don A. Stuart was conceived as a professional questioner and heretic. As Campbell would one day say in introducing a collection of Stuart stories: “In many of the Don A. Stuart stories, there is the element of a dirty, underhanded crack at the pretensions of science-fiction—dressed in the most accepted terms of science-fiction.”320
As Don A. Stuart, Campbell would write stories about small scientific observations and inventions that have major unforeseen consequences, about the burdens of excessive knowledge and freedom, and about scientists wasting their lives aiming for results they have already unwittingly achieved. When challenged with the supposed impossibility of such things, Campbell/Stuart would also attempt a science fiction love story and a science fiction mystery. But of the sum total of sixteen Don A. Stuart stories published between the end of 1934 and the end of 1939, fully half would be concerned with the interrelated problems of ending human overdependence on the machine, fighting back from cultural stagnation, and throwing off the tyranny imposed by superior invading aliens.
In the meantime, Campbell would be involved in two other significant projects under his own name. By far the more important of these was the assignment he accepted from F. Orlin Tremaine in 1936 to write a series of articles on the subject of the Solar System. These appeared in eighteen consecutive issues of Astounding from June 1936 to November 1937.
A Study of the Solar System would prove to have great continuing influence. By setting forth the known facts about the planets in a lively and dramatic fashion, Campbell presented science fiction with a new and higher standard than it had previously felt the need to observe.
Campbell’s essays drew a line in the dirt: These were the true facts—and the facts must be respected. No longer would it be possible to write dumb-dumb space opera stories about slave traders trekking through the jungles of Saturn with the beat of native drums throbbing in their ears.321
At the same time, however, the verve and fire of Campbell’s writing suggested that nothing vital need be lost by this change. Fact, and speculation based on fact, could provide the subject matter for a thousand and one new and better stories.
The other of Campbell’s projects under his own name was a first attempt to put this new standard into practice. In a series of five Weinbaum-influenced stories published in the post-Gernsback Thrilling Wonder, Campbell presented two human adventurers, Penton and Blake, encountering menacing life forms on different planets of the Solar System and overcoming them through a mastery of known scientific fact.
In actual practice, the Penton and Blake stories were relatively trivial. In the first of the series, “The Brain Stealers of Mars” (Thrilling Wonder, Dec. 1936), for example, Penton and Blake have the problem of distinguishing each other from a host of Martian imitators. Penton picks the Blake who sneezes and kills all the rest, knowing that the coordination of no less than five hundred sets of muscles is necessary to produce a sneeze, and betting that the Martians can’t mimic that. Fortunately, he is right. And Blake distinguishes amongst all the Pentons by challenging them to drink a concentrated dose of tetanus—which he knows the real Penton has been inoculated against.
There were large holes in this story. Why, for instance, would two adventurers on a jaunt to Mars “happen” to have tetanus toxin lying around their laboratory?
But trivial and contrived though it may have been, “The Brain Stealers of Mars” nonetheless did set forth a new and more exacting set of values that would prove central to the creation of modern science fiction. Campbell would demonstrate as much a year and a half later by taking the problem and solutions presented in “The Brain Stealers of Mars” and generalizing upon them. The Don A. Stuart story that resulted, “Who Goes There?” (Astounding, Aug. 1938), would come to be recognized as a point of departure—the first story of modern science fiction.
Before that moment, however, one more highly significant Don A. Stuart story would see publication—“Forgetfulness” (Astounding, June 1937). In this story, Campbell would take the basic materials of “The Last Evolution” and “Twilight” and subject his own work and thought to the Don A. Stuart process. The result, if not exactly modern science fiction, would be a final classic statement of Technological Age SF.
In “Forgetfulness,” a colonizing expedition from another star has landed on Earth ten million years in the future. The space travelers discover magnificent crystalline cities and mighty machines beyond their understanding—but all long abandoned.
As in “Twilight,” the human descendants of the city builders yet survive. They are not misshapen Big Brains, however, but a tall, lean telepathic folk who live pastoral lives in little domed houses among the trees. When asked about the scientific principles that underlie the cities and the machines, they can only smile apologetically and say that they have forgotten them.
The colonizers are shocked and saddened by this great degeneration. All the more so when they come to realize that the departed city builders of Earth were the golden gods of their own legends who long ago brought them the secrets of fire and the bow.
In true imperial style, the colonizers propose to confine the degenerate descendants of the city builders to reservations for their own protection. They themselves will occupy the crystalline cities and rediscover the ancient forgotten knowledge. Instead of this, however, they find themselves instantaneously transferred by the mental power of the Earth people back through space to their home planet—a journey that had taken their own ships six full years to accomplish.
Humanity, it seems, is not degenerate at all. It has simply passed beyond the need for cities and machines:
“Seun is not a decadent son of the city builders. His people never forgot the dream that built the city. But it was a dream of childhood, and his people were children then. Like a child with his broomstick horse, the mind alone was not enough for thought; the city builders, just as ourselves, needed something of a solid metal and crystal, to make their dreams tangible.”322
“Forgetfulness” may be seen as a culminating synthesis. In this one story, Campbell interwove the three great problems of the age that he had set out to solve: the problem of human dependence on the machine; the problem of human degeneration; and the problem of alien invasion. And, without firing off a single colored ray or exploding a single planet, Campbell managed to satisfactorily answer all three problems at once.
The way past the traps of dependence, degeneration, and defeat, Campbell now perceived, lay in a grand leap to a higher state of being where such problems were no longer problems. Like his model, E.E. Smith, Campbell had come to accept the necessity of higher levels of human being and becoming.
In “F
orgetfulness,” Campbell envisioned no less than four stages of human evolution: first, the step from less-than-man to man, as exemplified by the leap taken by the invaders in that long-ago moment when they were first stimulated with the gift of fire by the golden gods; then the further step from man to scientific man, who as master of the atom and space travel need no longer remember how to chip flint or scrape hides; and finally, the step from scientific man to mental man, who no longer need understand the workings of crystalline cities and mighty machines, but who can accomplish all things by the power of mind alone.
In “Forgetfulness,” the chancy wider universe that had haunted the early Twentieth Century was perceived not as hostile and threatening, but as offering mankind every fair chance:
The chance not to degenerate into Big Brain, but to become a higher and finer kind of being—more human, not less.
The chance to use the machine for a time and then put it away. To face the threat of aliens and lightly turn their folly aside. To solve even ultimate problems, if not now, then eventually.
The chance to grow up.
What a promise! In the context of “Forgetfulness,” all the overwhelming problems of Western scientific man and Village Earth in the early Twentieth Century suddenly shifted and became merely relative—the growing pains of human infancy.
Very shortly after he came to this new perspective on man’s relationship to the universe, John W. Campbell, Jr. was offered his own opportunity for personal evolution.
In the summer of 1937, within a few months of the publication of “Forgetfulness,” and with E.E. Smith’s first Lensman novel, Galactic Patrol, on line and ready to begin serialization in Astounding, F. Orlin Tremaine received a promotion at Street & Smith. From being a magazine editor, he became an editor-in-chief, with the responsibility of supervising a number of different magazines. Suddenly, it was necessary to hire a new editor for Astounding. And not altogether surprisingly, the man Tremaine selected as his successor was his most reliable and thoughtful writer.
John W. Campbell, Jr. became the editor of Astounding Stories beginning with the October 1937 issue. And through changes of title and changes of publisher, he would remain editor of the magazine until his death in 1971.
12: Universal Principles of Operation
WHEN YOUNG JOHN CAMPBELL, JR., recently turned 27 years old, was offered a job as a magazine editor late in the summer of 1937, it must have come as a great relief to him. An end, at last, to his state of continuing uncertainty.
Ever since his graduation from college, all through the long, hard, grinding Depression years, Campbell had had to thrash and struggle constantly to stay alive and produce his science-fictional visions and investigations. Living always on the thin edge of nothing, writing when and as he could, but by no means getting everything he wrote published, Campbell had dedicated himself to nothing less than the solution of the great outstanding problems of the age.
And now this was his reward for all his effort and sacrifice—to be offered the editorship of Astounding Stories. At last, a regular job that Campbell could stomach. What a splendid opportunity this was for one like him!
Nonetheless, the challenge that Campbell faced was formidable. Street the pre-eminent pulp publisher of the period, and Astounding Stories was dominant amongst science fiction pulp magazines. The natural assumption of Campbell’s new employers was that Astounding would remain successful, even in the face of competition in science fiction from other pulp chains who were now buying up the old Gernsback-originated magazines or starting new titles of their own.
But John Campbell’s actual editorial experience was mighty slim. He really didn’t know the first thing about how to produce a monthly pulp magazine. As of yet, he hadn’t even learned how to type.
It was quite true, of course, that Campbell had been selected by F. Orlin Tremaine to be his successor for his questioning turn of mind, and not for his editorial expertise. But the first question that Tremaine’s protégé chose to ask—as recalled by Campbell in later years—was nothing less than a revelation of his state of near-total ignorance:
“When I first came to Street & Smith—quite some years ago, now—I asked the editor-in-chief: ‘What does an editor do when he doesn’t get enough stories to fill the magazine?’ He sort of looked at me and said: ‘An editor does.’ ”323
Campbell was quick to recognize that he had a great deal to master in order to become a man who could fill the pages of Astounding with stories each month. The very first thing he set out to do was to teach himself the fundamental mechanics of his new profession.
In these early days of his editorship, one of Campbell’s regular visitors was Frederik Pohl, a 17-year-old high school dropout who was attempting to pass himself off as a literary agent, selling his own stories and the SF stories of his friends, mostly fellow young New York City science fiction fans. And Pohl remembers himself as a beneficiary of John Campbell’s own learning process.
A visitor to Astounding Stories like Pohl would be directed by a secretary to walk through the Street & Smith printing plant, past great strong-scented rolls of pulp paper, through a maze of corridors back to the little office hidden behind more rolls of paper where the editor waited. And John Campbell, a large, sharp-featured man who looked like a bear with glasses, would swivel around in his chair, lean back, and fit a cigarette into his cigarette holder. Then he would toss out his latest provocative notion, or suggest a story idea, or simply begin to lecture.
Pohl remembers Campbell’s good writing advice and Campbell’s habit of sharpening his arguments on all visitors in advance of writing his monthly editorial. Pohl adds: “He was also a fount of information on the technological infrastructure of publishing: line engraving, halftones, four-color separation, binding machines. . . . He was a great teacher. Later I figured out why. He was learning the same things, too, maybe forty-eight hours ahead of me on the track, rehearsing his own learning by teaching it to me.”324
Pohl attests to the great influence this personal instruction had upon him: “Every word he said I memorized. . . . I had never known anyone else who knew about these things, and I learned from him as from Jesus on the Mount.”325 Pohl was a particularly apt pupil, too. Just two years later, when he was still not yet twenty, Pohl would be hired as founding editor of two new SF pulps, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories.
How strange it seems that John Campbell, in these early days of his own ignorance and uncertainty, should spend so much care and attention on a boy like Pohl! Campbell would buy precious few stories from Pohl in his role as agent, and none from Pohl as a writer. All that he accomplished was to train Pohl to be his own competitor. Why ever did he do that?
The least good answer—though it does have some small measure of truth to it—is that Campbell simply could not help himself. He was a compulsive argufier, and holding forth for an audience was his primary social mode. Even thirty years later, Campbell would still be attracting crowds of respectful teenage boys to listen to his latest heretical notion and chorus, “Whatever you say, Mr. Campbell.”
A better answer might be that Campbell got back from Pohl just as much as he gave him. This sharp youngster offered Campbell a highly useful opportunity to practice his craft, to learn and experiment, test and suggest. As Pohl himself half-intimates, Campbell was making an editor out of himself even as he was making an editor out of Pohl.
But the answer that may be closest to the mark is that Campbell conceived of himself as a teacher of science-fictional thinking, taking on all comers and giving each one whatever clues he would accept. What he taught Pohl was what Pohl was ready to learn, which was editing. And it mattered not at all to Campbell that along the way he might be creating a competitor.
It says much about the two men and the nature of their relationship that some twenty-five years after they first met, Campbell was present to hear Pohl deliver a keynote address to the American Astronautical Society. Running into Pohl at the airport afterward, he patted him o
n the shoulder and said, “Fred, you did real good for science fiction.”326 And Pohl could still blush with embarrassed pleasure at the unexpected compliment.
However, not only was Campbell as a new editor open enough to latent possibility to devote valuable working time to the nurture of bright kids come walking in off the street—Fred Pohl being by no means the only one—but he was ready to solicit advice on science fiction from any quarter in hopes that it might lend him light. Campbell’s receptivity to every clue is apparent in the account given by Catherine Crook, a schoolteacher who would soon marry science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp, of her first visit to Campbell’s apartment in New Jersey in the spring of 1939:
When I first met him, John was ensconced in a lounge-chair with his feet propped up on a hassock. He could not rise for introductions because his lap, the chair arms, and the floor around him were covered with manuscripts. He waved a manuscript at me and said: “Come right in. I want you to read this story and tell me what you think of it.”
I protested: “But I don’t know anything about science fiction . . .”
“Splendid,” John replied. “That’s exactly why I want your reaction.” So I sat on a pale green sofa in a sea-green living room and read story after story. Every so often, I would look up to see John studying my face. “What made you smile just then?” he would ask. Or: “You look puzzled. Why?”
Once, hoping my remarks would not blight the career of some budding writer, I remember saying: “Well, it took three pages to find out where I was and why I was there.”
“Just what I thought myself,” he replied. And back the story went for revision.327
It would soon become clear, however, that John Campbell had much more in mind than just achieving a technical command of pulp publishing, or tutoring receptive youngsters, or learning to gauge the effect of a story on the ordinary unversed reader. From the very outset, he was determined to become a complete editor—not merely a filler of pages with stories, but a setter of new directions.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 35