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

by Alexei Panshin

  But in Campbell’s mind, there was an essential formal distinction between his two magazines. And to aid his writers in their conceptions, he would tell them explicitly: “ ‘I edit two magazines, Astounding and Unknown. For Astounding I want stories which are good and logical and possible. For Unknown, I want stories which are good and logical.’ ”373

  What this meant in practice was that the special business of Astounding was stories of the future and outer space—the mainstream of science-fictional possibility. And the province of Unknown was variant realities.

  Within the context of the times, it was Astounding that was the vastly more important magazine. Astounding was engaged in the serious business of bringing the future of man into being. Unknown was just fun and games.

  But beyond the immediate moment, Unknown—which would only last for four years and thirty-nine issues—would have a considerable importance of its own. In Unknown, a basis would be made for perceiving traditional fantasy and pulp magazine science fiction as being different aspects of a larger SF. And, as the first presentation of SF not just as a literature of change, but of alternate possibilities, Unknown would be a portent of coming things in SF just as surely as The Steam Man of the Prairies had been a forehint of The Time Machine and The Skylark of Space.

  Of all Campbell’s writers, it was L. Sprague de Camp who found the freedom of Unknown most necessary and most congenial. De Camp suffered from one great inhibition in producing stories for Astounding—the “science fiction” published in Astounding was supposed to be possible, and the rational side of de Camp took this injunction with the utmost seriousness. But this meant that de Camp was not able to write about time machines or faster-than-light travel, since in his scientific heart-of-hearts he didn’t believe that either of these irrational modes of travel would ever be possible.

  Way back in The Skylark of Space, E.E. Smith might have his venturers casually dismiss Einstein and zoom away toward the stars at supralight speed, saying, “ ‘Einstein’s Theory is still a theory. This distance is an observed fact.’ ”374 But de Camp, the new Atomic Age man of reason, debunker of Techno Age credulity, was utterly incapable of this sort of imaginative recklessness.

  And because he couldn’t see how to leap lightly from here to there, de Camp was never fully at home writing about either the future or outer space. His strict imaginative scruples kept his science fiction stories in Astounding comparatively limited and Earthbound.

  Ah, but for de Camp stories thought of as “fantasy” and written for Unknown were crucially different from stories of “science fiction” meant for Astounding. Stories for Unknown were not expected to be possible—and this set de Camp’s imagination free.

  As one example, operating according to the standards of Astounding, de Camp would never have been able to imagine “The Gnarly Man,” his story of a prehistoric man coping easily with the challenges of the modern world. By what possible means, pray tell, might a Neanderthal man survive for 50,000 years, never aging? Certainly none that de Camp the rational man of science knew. But writing in the context of Unknown, he was permitted to posit that his prehistoric bison hunter had been physiologically altered by a (purely conventional) stroke of lightning, and then get on with the pure fun of imagining how modern people might react to him, and he to them.

  Unknown gave de Camp a license to take great leaps of the imagination—which he was then expected to develop logically and rigorously. John Campbell couldn’t have devised an imaginative formula more perfectly suited to the nature and knowledge of this particular writer.

  So it was, then, that in a story like Lest Darkness Fall (Unknown, Dec. 1939), the de Camp who could not in all conscience write about science fiction time machines felt free to assume yet another lightning-bolt-of-convenience—“the granddaddy of all lightning flashes”375—as a device to send his protagonist, archaeologist Martin Padway, back in time to a crucial moment in Western history, the final fall of Rome. Then, from that point, de Camp could play the game of what if and proceed to write a novel about the application of universal operating principles to the needs of an earlier moment and the transplantation of scientific progress into the past.

  It was Lest Darkness Fall that firmly established L. Sprague de Camp as the star writer of Unknown. The obvious model for this story was Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Lest Darkness Fall might be thought of as an attempt to take A Connecticut Yankee and do it right—that is, in Atomic Age terms.

  In both of these stories, contemporary protagonists are transferred to the past through unlikely accidents. Twain’s man is sent back through time as the result of a blow on the head from a crowbar in the hands of a dissident worker, while de Camp’s is sent to the past by that humungous bolt of lightning. The point of arrival in both cases is Europe in the Sixth Century A.D., the eve of the Dark Ages. And the aim of both of these modern men becomes to alter the past.

  But at that point, the two books diverge subtly but significantly.

  Twain’s Boss, Hank Morgan, is a man of the Techno Age, a maker of tools and engines and a superintendent of labor. He’s a guy who knows how to build machines and keep men in line. His natural impulse is to take the half-historical, half-legendary world he has entered and whip it into shape. Since it is what he knows how to do, he will make guns and railroads and electric lights and set out to turn Arthurian Britain into a facsimile of Nineteenth Century America whether the yokels and peasants like it or not.

  But because the story of King Arthur as we know it simply doesn’t go that way, eventually he must be slipped a sleeping draught by Merlin which has the effect of returning him to his own time. In the end we have to take all that comes between the blow on the head (which comes before the beginning of the narrative proper) and the sleeping potion at the end as some sort of dream or hallucination.

  De Camp, however, was the active beneficiary of all the stories of travel in time and dimension written in the fifty years since A Connecticut Yankee—even though he himself might spurn Wellsian time machines of nickel and ivory and crystal as scientifically impossible. And at the very outset of Lest Darkness Fall, before the crucial bolt of lightning strikes, he has an Italian professor set forth a very Wells-like theory of time as a tree with many branches:

  “I was saying all these people who just disappear, they have slipped back down the . . . trunk of the tree of time. When they stop slipping, they are back in some former time. But as soon as they do anything, they change all subsequent history. . . . The trunk continues to exist. But a new branch starts out where they came to rest.”376

  Thus, pure device of convenience though that stroke of lightning may be, we do have a basis of argument for taking it seriously as a time travel device. And when Martin Padway finds himself transferred to a known historical period—a declining Rome in 535 A.D., ruled by an Ostrogothic king and about to suffer invasion by Justinian’s brilliant general, Belisarius—it isn’t a dream and he isn’t going to just as suddenly find himself back in the Twentieth Century. He’s in Rome for real, and he’s there for good.

  What is more, he isn’t condemned to complete futility by what our history books say did happen then. He has some assurance that by the actions he chooses to take, he can alter the course of history. It is within his power to create a whole new reality if he is clever and able enough.

  Unlike Twain’s Techno Age Boss, who perceives the Sixth Century Britons as no better than children or animals, Martin Padway is an Atomic Age democrat who sincerely likes and respects the people he has fallen among. De Camp being de Camp, these various Italians, Goths, Vandals, Syrians, Jews, Greeks and such are presented as familiar, normal, decent, fallible human beings not very different in nature from ourselves.

  What distinguishes Padway from them is not that he is some sort of superior human being, higher on the evolutionary ladder than they, but rather his comparatively greater degree of knowledge and objectivity. He is forearmed by knowing something of history as
it would have been without him. And he is also a man of scientific training, an heir of the past few centuries of Western scientific progress.

  Padway’s impulse isn’t to attempt to re-create the Twentieth Century in Sixth Century Rome, erecting skyscrapers beside the Colosseum. Indeed, he doesn’t for an instant believe that such a thing would be possible. But he is deeply aware of the pivotal nature of the moment in which he finds himself:

  He was living in the twilight of western classical civilization. The Age of Faith, better known as the Dark Ages, was closing down. Europe would be in darkness, from a scientific and technological aspect, for nearly a thousand years. That aspect was, to Padway’s naturally prejudiced mind, the most, if not the only, important aspect of a civilization.377

  Almost inevitably, then, it occurs to Padway to wonder: “Could one man change the course of history to the extent of preventing this interregnum?”378

  It’s as though Padway were some special sort of doctor brought to the bedside of this ailing culture to give it a shot of what it needs the most. That isn’t an instant, inappropriate modernity, but rather transplants of appropriate inventions and techniques from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, stuff that may serve to start up the machinery of scientific progress.

  So it is that Padway introduces Arabic numerals, horse harnesses, distilling, the telescope, semaphore telegraphy, paper and printing, a postal system and schools. When he proposes this last, he says frankly, “ ‘I’m going to have things taught that really matter: mathematics, and the sciences, and medicine. I see where I shall have to write all the textbooks myself.’ ”379

  Of necessity—there is that invasion by the armies of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian to consider—Padway does become involved in military and political activities like Twain’s Hank Morgan, but he sees these only as means. He says: “ ‘The end is things like the telegraph and the presses. My politicking and soldiering may not make any difference a hundred years from now, but the other things will, I hope.’ ”380

  And by the end of the story, he has grown convinced that he has been successful. Whatever befalls him, these things he has introduced are now too widespread and well rooted to disappear. History has been changed. Darkness will not fall—at least not on this one new branch of the tree of time.

  What a triumph for the power of universal operating principles! To overset the primary example of cyclical history—the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—and replace the Dark Ages with a new era of scientific progress!

  De Camp would take the implied argument of Lest Darkness Fall and give it explicit expression in the fourth of his influential articles for Campbell, “The Science of Whithering” (Astounding, July-Aug. 1940). In this essay, de Camp examined one theory of civilization after another, including Oswald Spengler’s and Arnold Toynbee’s great expositions of cyclical history. But de Camp would come to the conclusion that cyclical history was not after all a grim inevitability for mid-Twentieth Century Western civilization. It might be overturned by the more effective power of modern scientific and technological development.

  The transition from Techno Age SF to the new modern science fiction of the Atomic Age reached its turning point in the summer of 1939, at just about the same time that de Camp was shifting his primary attentions from Astounding to Unknown. It was then that John Campbell’s patient efforts to alter Astounding and to change SF began to come together and take on synergetic power.

  By that time, Campbell had overhauled Astounding inside and out. It no longer presented the same face to the world. It had a revised title, new design, and new cover artists.

  The content of the magazine had gradually altered along with its outward appearance. In the pages of Astounding, Campbell had announced and defined a new kind of science fiction, and published examples by himself and others. And he had discovered or developed a nucleus of writers capable of producing this new SF.

  Campbell had given science fiction readers and writers a new humanized universe to consider: A universe that was not hostile to mankind. A universe in which human decision and human action counted. A universe that human beings might even come to control.

  And in editorials, in articles and in fiction, Campbell had set forth a new agenda of major projects for the modern science fiction writers of Astounding to concentrate their attention on—tests of this new universe. These central problems would be the essence of the Golden Age Astounding: learning to cope with the complexities of future living, developing space travel, controlling atomic power and the robot, and exploring the limits of the human mind. If men could learn to handle these operations, then surely they could master anything the universe had to offer.

  Finally, Campbell had created the modern fantasy of Unknown as an obvious contrast to the new science fiction of Astounding. But also as a less obvious reinforcement and extension of the methods and values of Astounding.

  And even so—through the first half of 1939, Astounding was not yet a magazine of modern science fiction, but still only striving to be one.

  But then, in the summer of 1939, this condition visibly began to alter. In the space of just three months—July, August and September—a host of new writers appeared for the first time in Campbell’s magazines, lured to him by the message of the changes in Astounding, by the sound and smell of action, or by the simple force of Campbell’s need for them.

  The July 1939 issue of Astounding marks the sunrise of the Campbell Golden Age. This was the first issue in which the preponderance of material was in the new style:

  Campbell’s editorial was a follow-up to the news that the atom had been split. He foresaw both commercial atomic power plants and the explosive potential of rapid fission, noting, “For sheer violence, the fission of the uranium atom is unmatched.”381

  There were two articles in July. One was “Tools for Brains” by Leo Vernon, a history of the development of thinking machines. The other, “Geography for Time Travelers” by Willy Ley—which owed something to de Camp’s previous article, “Language for Time Travelers”—pointed out that even the shape and location of continents are subject to change.

  In this issue, the cover story was “Black Destroyer,” a novelet by a new writer, a Canadian named A.E. van Vogt, who had been stimulated to take up SF writing by an impulsive newsstand reading of “Who Goes There?”

  Also here was “Trends,” the first story in Astounding by young Isaac Asimov, the eager kid from the candy store whom Campbell had been tutoring for the past year.

  Nor was that the end of the riches. Also in this July issue was a striking novelet of alternate futures, “Greater Than Gods,” the first story for Campbell by C.L. Moore, the author of “Shambleau” and the Jirel of Joiry stories. Not only would Moore contribute a number of distinguished stories to Campbell under her own name, but after her marriage to Henry Kuttner in 1940, they would jointly become two of Campbell’s most effective new wartime writers, Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell.

  And there were more new writers to come. In the August issue of Astounding, there appeared “Life-Line,” the first SF story by former Navy officer Robert Heinlein. He would become two major writers for Campbell: himself and Anson MacDonald.

  And still more. In the August Unknown there was “Two Sought Adventure,” a first novelet by Fritz Leiber, Jr., the son of a well-known Shakespearean actor. And the September Astounding contained “Ether Breather,” the first SF story by young merchant seaman Theodore Sturgeon.

  It was this horde of new writers so suddenly arrived—together with E.E. Smith, Jack Williamson, Clifford Simak, L. Ron Hubbard, Lester del Rey, and L. Sprague de Camp—who would be the makers of John Campbell’s Golden Age, the builders of his empire of the imagination.

  The most central of these would be de Camp, Asimov, Heinlein and van Vogt. It would be they who would take universal operating principles and apply them to other dimensions, to the robot, to time, to space, and to the higher evolution of man.

  13: Shifting Relatio
nships

  MODERN SCIENCE FICTION—THE NEW, streamlined, fact-minded, universe-manipulating science fiction designed by John W. Campbell that so visibly began to come on-line in the summer of 1939—may be seen as the culmination and fulfillment of Techno Age SF. But at the same time, it was something altogether different and new—the foundation for the following forty years of SF development.

  In the pages of Astounding and Unknown during the Golden Age that lasted from the summer of 1939 through the end of 1945, the great body of scientific fiction written since 1870 would become raw material to be drawn upon, played with, summarized, consolidated and extended. It would also be completely reformulated.

  The most epitomal example of this process of simultaneous fulfillment and transmutation is to be seen in the story “Nightfall,” a novelet by Isaac Asimov published in the September 1941 issue of Astounding. So unique and yet so completely typical of modern science fiction is “Nightfall” that nearly thirty years after it was first published, when the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America were asked to vote for the best SF stories produced prior to the founding of the organization in 1965, they would place this story first, ahead of Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey.”

  “Nightfall” is the most pivotal story of a pivotal moment. We can learn a great deal about how Campbell’s Golden Age was made and how it worked—and even catch some inklings of its eventual limitations—by taking a good look at the variety of Techno Age, Romantic, and even earlier materials that went into the inspiration and design of this central story; by looking beyond that to the nature of the apprenticeship in modern science fiction that Isaac Asimov had to undergo before John Campbell was ready to acknowledge him as someone capable of undertaking a project of this importance; and finally by seeing the way that old materials and the new attitudes developed by Asimov were successfully conjoined in “Nightfall” to produce a story of unique significance.