The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  For a time, at least, F. Orlin Tremaine had been such an editor. But Campbell aimed to pick up the torch—just as he had been challenged to do. He would become a true editor and alter both Astounding Stories and the face of science fiction.

  And so it was that Campbell embarked on a program of systematic change in the magazine. The very first thing that he did was to widen the scope of the letter column, which since the beginning of 1937 had been restricted to scientific discussions. He wanted feedback and reader participation in Astounding, and he specifically invited them.

  Then Campbell asked for new writers to come forward and contribute. This was a theme he was to sound again and again in the coming months: there was an ongoing open contest at Astounding, all comers welcome, with payment and publication as the prize. Step forward and try your skill.

  When Campbell did find a new writer, he would point the fact out. And when he could, he would have the new writer contribute stories under one or more pseudonyms as well, and then would proudly point to those “new writers,” too.

  As early as his fourth issue—the Astounding dated January 1938—Campbell began to draw attention to his policy of change. In his editorial, which was titled “Mutation,” Campbell asked the question, “Does evolution apply to Astounding Stories?” And answered, “Certainly.”328

  As evidence of this, Campbell instituted a new feature in this issue, a regular preview of upcoming things running under the title “In Times to Come.” And in both the first installment of this column and in his editorial, Campbell made the promise of significant changes in Astounding. Beginning with February, there would be a series of “Mutant issues.”329

  Campbell wrote: “In each of the Mutant issues that are to come during 1938, the change may seem small in itself, but it will be fundamental. It will help to determine the direction that the evolution of Astounding Stories and science fiction must take.”330

  The very first such “genuine, fundamentally different and original”331 mutation that Campbell asked his audience to note was the cover of the February issue of Astounding. This was an astronomical painting—a view of the Sun as seen from Mercury—the visual equivalent of Campbell’s now concluded series of articles on the Solar System.

  Back in 1926, on the first cover of Amazing Stories, the beloved Frank R. Paul might include a view of Saturn as background for a picture illustrating Jules Verne’s Off on a Comet. But that Saturn resembled nothing so much as a brightly striped toy gyroscope. And the foreground of the picture was a band of merry human ice skaters, their attention all on their fun—ignoring the lack of cometary gravity, ignoring the lack of atmosphere, ignoring their precarious cosmic situation.

  This Astounding cover was different. It placed human figures—tiny and spacesuited—in intimate relationship to the true facts of the wider universe. The implication of this cover picture was that Astounding was not idle fancy, but about real human possibility. Here was a place that men might really go, and this is how things would appear to them.

  In the course of 1938, Campbell would print no less than three of these cover pictures of men swarming abroad in the Solar System. The third of these—of Jupiter as seen from its moon Ganymede—had an error in it. Campbell did not just admit this—he proclaimed it. He made a game out of it, and challenged readers to imagine themselves in this perspective and catch the glitch.

  The next month after the first astronomical painting, Campbell introduced yet another meaningful innovation. Throughout the Thirties, the title of the magazine had flip-flopped back and forth between Astounding Stories of Super-Science and plain Astounding Stories. Now Campbell altered the title to Astounding Science-Fiction. It was Campbell’s intention to gradually shift the name of the magazine from Astounding (which he didn’t much care for, perhaps thinking it imitative of Amazing—which, we may remember, it had been) to the generic Science Fiction. He would be forestalled when, early in 1939, one of the many new SF pulps then springing up was named Science Fiction first.

  And still, Campbell had established a point. The first magazine to specifically present itself as science fiction—using those words as part of its title—was the Campbell Astounding.

  Month after month, the changes continued. Another new department was added—“The An Lab”—with ever-more-exacting numerical analyses of reader reaction to the stories in each issue. There were increasingly speculative and far-ranging science articles. And, before the end of 1938, there was a redesign of the magazine’s contents page and title.

  But what was ultimately the most important change of all was one that was completely unforeseen. In May 1938, Campbell’s supervisor, F. Orlin Tremaine, came to a parting of the ways with Street & Smith, leaving the company abruptly. From this moment on, John Campbell would be in complete editorial command of Astounding with no superior above him to question his understanding of science fiction or his choice of direction for the magazine.

  For the next dozen years—until May of 1950—John W. Campbell, as editor of Astounding, would completely dominate American magazine science fiction. He would oversee and orchestrate the shift from science fiction as it had been since 1870 to the new modern science fiction of the Atomic Age. In Campbell’s hands, the disparate pieces of Technological Age SF would be regularized and rationalized, unified and codified. Without losing its essential plausible yet mysterious character, science fiction would undergo an alteration. It would become a dynamic new literature with attitudes, ideas and style befitting a new age.

  The crucial moment of society-wide transition to the Atomic Age occurred during exactly that period in 1938-39 when John Campbell was taking command of Astounding and launching his series of radical changes in the magazine. Just as the beginning of the Age of Technology may be conveniently linked to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71—which explicitly demonstrated the latent power of applied science—so the end of the Age of Technology and the inception of the Atomic Age may be effectively reckoned from the splitting of the uranium atom that was achieved by German scientists in 1938 and recognized by the international scientific community early in 1939.

  During the coming era, the new irrational and immaterial Twentieth Century high science would pass from merely being speculative theory that might be conveniently ignored to being an undeniable world-altering everyday actuality. At the same time, there would be vast social change. After this pivotal moment of 1938-39, the balance of worldly power would shift ineluctably from the hands of those who were born superior to those clever and competent enough to master the laws of higher science.

  Throughout the Age of Technology, Western society had been run for the benefit of a class of special privilege that varied somewhat from country to country, but still might be said to be defined by its money, position, race, religion and breeding. The social favoritism enjoyed by this class of privilege was ultimately rooted in inherited notions of innate superiority based upon gradations of refinement of soul.

  Standing in opposition to this accepted scale of relative human value were all of those who believed that with skill, talent and will—and perhaps a necessary smidgen of educational opportunity—a man might make anything of himself. H.G. Wells was living testimony of the possibility of this kind of self-actualization. And when Wells joined the radical Fabian Society at the turn of the century and attempted to redirect its efforts from intellectual debate to social action, or when he wrote semi-autobiographical novels exposing the waste of the brains and talents of the disadvantaged class, or when he produced polemic after polemic to urge that the present incompetent directors of society be replaced by an able and dedicated scientific elite, it was the principle of innate social privilege that was his true object of attack.

  After World War I, it seemed far less evident that one soul was born superior to another. In this new climate, the tendency was to justify the continued existence of special privilege by appeals to the survival of the fittest—those currently in power being presumed to be the fittest. But this was a thorough
ly dangerous ground of argument, since it left the disadvantaged complete latitude to assert their own fitness by any and every means.

  The tension between the advantaged and disadvantaged was only exacerbated by the coming of the Great Depression. Not only was immense pressure brought to bear on the stability and shape of the familiar social order, but the Depression also served to highlight all the continuing inequities, snobberies, barriers and exclusions of a socially stratified society. To many people during the Thirties, the Western world appeared to be hanging in the balance between violent revolt and massive repression.

  Even in the United States of America, the most democratic Western nation and the least traumatized by World War I, there were those to whom a radical restructuring of society seemed the only answer. The attractions of this point of view at this particular moment were so great that a bright scuffling Brooklyn kid like Fred Pohl might very well find the Flatbush Young Communist League the natural place to look for music, girls and political direction.

  In the event, however, no revolution would prove necessary to bring needed change to the United States. During the Thirties, without extremes of violence or repression, the American social contract was redrawn. And the chief architect of this change was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, himself a member of the class of privilege.

  Using the new medium of radio as his means of reaching out to the nation as a whole, and addressing his audience as “my friends,” Roosevelt drew the United States together against the fearsome Depression monster by making a fundamental commitment to alter society so that no one would be left in want and every man would have his fair chance. Roosevelt promised America a social New Deal.

  The European response to the economic, social and psychic trials of the Depression was not so inclusive or experimental. Rather than Europe moving on toward increased social equity, the tendency was to try to get back to where it once had been, to reaffirm all its old values and beliefs: racial superiority, national superiority, traditional religion, the old class structure, and the rule of the many by the few. One after another during the Thirties, postwar European experiments in democracy were subverted and overthrown.

  The country that was most wedded to the age that was passing was Germany. It was Germany more than any other Western nation that had invented and believed in the top-dog-of-the-era, survival-of-the-fittest, cyclical history mythos of the Age of Technology and done its best to live by it. The beginning of this age of Western technological empire had been signaled by the Prussian victory over France and the foundation of the united German state in 1871. Germany had naturally presumed that it was destined to rule the era.

  Instead, fate had treated Germany unkindly. The Germans had lost their bid for supreme power in the Great War, and afterward they had been humiliated, forced to accept total blame for the disaster. Not only had onerous conditions been imposed upon them, but ever since the war Germany had been kept at a continuing economic, political and military disadvantage by countries that it still despised and believed were its natural inferiors.

  Germany’s fragile postwar democratic government was caught between extremes of right and left. At last, under the stress of the Depression, at the very time in 1933 that a democratically elected Franklin Roosevelt was taking office in the United States, forces of nationalist and racist reaction were allowed to seize control of Germany.

  In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, the Austrian immigrant who headed the right-wing Nazi Party, was asked to serve as Chancellor. Within months of assuming office, by the judicious use of fraud and force, Hitler would make himself dictator of Germany.

  Like Roosevelt, Hitler also employed radio as a major means of addressing his country. But where Roosevelt, the patrician turned democrat, opened his arms to all Americans, Hitler, the marginal German, raised his voice to reiterate the old disastrous dreams of innate German specialness. Rather than promises of greater fairness of opportunity, Hitler offered the completion of cyclical history:

  If Germany had lost World War I, it was only because it had been betrayed by an international Jewish plot, a conspiracy of the inferior against the superior. But it was not too late—Germany might yet fulfill its appointed destiny.

  Germany must purify itself. There must be a ruthless weeding out of the weak, the inferior and the degenerate. Then Germany would be fit to exact its due revenge. The German Master Race would rule the world for a thousand years. Deutschland über alles!

  In our pivotal year of 1938, Hitler, at the head of a re-armed Germany, made his first warlike moves. In the spring he annexed his native Austria, and then in the fall he occupied a large part of Czechoslovakia—all in the name of the reunification of the German people. Though Britain and France temporized, unable then to nerve themselves to oppose Germany’s aggressions, it was clear that another Great War was coming. The only question was when—and that would prove to be September 1939, after Hitler had first occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland.

  This war that was on its way may be seen as a contest of force and will between the old Technological Age order of born superiority and the new democratic pluralism of the emerging Atomic Age.

  The year 1938 was not merely a turning point in science and international power politics. It can also be seen to mark a significant shift in social mood in the United States.

  In the breathing space of three years between the beginning of the Atomic Age and the moment in late 1941 when the United States finally became an active participant in the Second World War, a new societal consensus was reached. The confusion, doubt and amorality that had characterized the early Thirties were replaced by a clear-cut sense of direction and purpose. It seemed that the forces of oppression and tyranny were launching attacks everywhere upon tolerance and freedom. And it was imperative that these central values be maintained and defended no matter what the cost.

  There was a great rallying around the idea of democratic pluralism—which in the early and middle Thirties had been doubted by both the left and the right. In this new period, it would seem more and more apparent that the true strength and value of American society was that it guaranteed the right of every man, however humble or different he might be, to stand up and demonstrate his own individual knowledge, skill and worth.

  With the coming of this era of the ordinary Joe, the popular arts in America took on a legitimacy they had never had before. They concentrated and reflected the essence of this new hour. Suddenly, at the end of the Thirties, there was a creative Golden Age in one medium after another all across the spectrum of popular entertainment, from Hollywood movies and cartoons to swing music to comic books. And though science fiction was only relatively recently established as a form of popular art, it too took part in this creative flowering.

  At the time when John Campbell became an editor in 1937, there were still only three SF magazines: Astounding, Amazing and Thrilling Wonder. But by 1941, no fewer than twenty-one different SF pulp magazines were being published. As never previously, these were boom times for science fiction.

  Campbell’s Astounding was a beneficiary of the boom. In March 1939, Street & Smith would even see fit to launch a companion magazine for Astounding under Campbell’s editorship, a magazine at first called Unknown, and later retitled Unknown Worlds.

  Judged strictly in terms of circulation figures, Campbell’s Astounding and Unknown were not the most successful SF magazines of the boom period. Campbell did not print stories by the very biggest names of the Technological Age—no new fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs or reprints of classic A. Merritt stories. And he never sold as many copies as the magazines that did.

  But yet, within the microcosm of those concerned with the fortunes of science fiction—the writers and readers and fans—there was a universal recognition of the precedence of Astounding and Unknown among SF pulp magazines. Other editors were just doing a job as best they were able. John Campbell alone was in active public pursuit of the evolution of science fiction and his own mag
azine, and able to demonstrate over and over in action what this might mean. Campbell alone was seeking to remake SF in the image of the new can-do age.

  So complete would Campbell’s editorial dominance be during the early Atomic Age SF boom, and so lingering the effects of his editorial example, that afterward he would come to be commonly credited with complete responsibility for the emergence of modern science fiction. Indeed, this period would be remembered specifically as the Golden Age of Astounding, or as the Campbell Golden Age.

  Writer Isaac Asimov, who was another of the youngsters who found their way in to see Campbell and stayed to be instructed, once put it this way:

  To many science fiction readers who are now in their middle years, there was a Golden Age of Science Fiction—in capital letters. That Golden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his heart’s desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire.332

  Campbell’s pre-eminence was not merely because he was quicker off the mark than other SF editors, or more committed than they to seeking the path of evolutionary change during this sudden new moment of social and psychic realignment. The fact of the matter is that Campbell was the possessor of a great secret and an even greater vision, and it was ultimately these that set him apart from all other editors and that gave meaning and direction to his resolve to pursue change.

  John Campbell’s great secret was the degree of his belief in the usefulness, power and truth of science fiction. For Campbell, science fiction was neither sugar-coated education nor mere popular entertainment. Science fiction had its own validity. It was the literary embodiment of science, man’s most certain source of knowledge about the real universe. More than that—science fiction was a powerful tool of mind that could have actual effect on the world. Science fiction was dreams that might come true.