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

by Alexei Panshin

  However, as we’ve seen in some detail, what we are electing to call universal operating principles were implicit in the way that John Campbell wrote and talked and related to his writers. They were the key assumption underlying the changes that Campbell made in the structure and direction of Astounding after he became editor. Most especially, they were depicted in all of those new laws and systems that he and his chief writers were so busily imagining into existence.

  At the same time, it is necessary for us to recognize that even in this exhilarating golden moment of creativity, this most central concept was still tacit, unspoken, inexpressible. It was picked up. It was caught. It was snatched out of the air. But it was never defined and it was never explained.

  However, if we range ahead in time a little to November 1953, we can locate a moment in which the parameters—and the contradictions—of Campbell’s universal operating principles would be expressed about as clearly as they ever would be. Here in the handclap between two different Campbellian statements we can recognize the basis upon which the Golden Age Astounding was constructed.

  The first statement comes from a letter that John Campbell wrote to Dr. Joseph Rhine on November 23, 1953, seeking recognition from the parapsychologist for all the wild talent stories he was publishing in Astounding. In the course of this letter, Campbell said, “Almost any first-rate, young, experimental research director will most freely and happily assure you that physics doesn’t know its ABC’s yet—and certainly hasn’t reached D!”563

  He went on:

  Your group, you know, is not the only group that finds the laws of physics seem to be breaking down at the edges. The nuclear physicists find that. So do the men at White Sands, where rocket research is probing out into something called “space,” and coming back with answers that don’t match anything the hypotheses of physics, sometimes known as “laws” of physics, call for. . . .

  Physicists aren’t one whit disturbed; physicists never did think the “laws” were anything more than temporarily useful methods of organizing data for reference and filing. It’s the non-physicists who consider physical law to be final.564

  Clearly enough spoken. But even while Campbell was writing these words to Rhine, the latest issue of Astounding was just appearing on the newsstands. Campbell’s editorial in this December 1953 issue was entitled “The Scientist,” and what he had to say here was very different from what he was saying to Rhine.

  In “The Scientist,” Campbell wrote:

  Many of the fine scientists I know and have known appear to me to act on a system of beliefs somewhat like this:

  They believe in the existence of a Supreme Authority in the Universe, an Authority they call “Natural Law.” They hold that that Authority is above and beyond the opinions and beliefs, the will or willfulness, of any human being. That that Authority can, moreover, be directly consulted by any man, at any time—and that every man is, at every time and in every place, directly and specifically obedient to that Authority, to Natural Law, whether he recognizes that fact or not.

  They believe that the highest task of Man is to seek to understand more fully the nature of the Laws of the Universe.

  That the highest good of Man is achieved by understanding and working with those Laws, and not by seeking to defy them.

  That the system of laws is absolutely inescapable, but that any individual law can be offset by proper use of the others of the total system of laws. . . .

  That Man thus has free choice with respect to any situation—but he cannot rationally speak of having free choice as to whether he will or will not obey the total system of the Laws of the Universe.565

  So which was it really? Were physical laws nothing more than temporarily useful methods of organizing data for reference and filing, or were they the Supreme Authority in the universe, above and beyond the opinions and beliefs of any human being?

  The truth is that Campbell would have it both ways, depending on which interpretation was more convenient. When law appeared ready to give him what he wanted, he would suggest that law was something that human beings could consult at any time, understand and work with, and thereby achieve their ends. But when law seemed to forbid and deny his hopes, then Campbell would claim that what was being taken for law was only inadequate contemporary understanding, and look beyond it for the sounder comprehension or the effective combination of other laws that would allow Man to have his way.

  Universal operating principles were Campbell’s attempt to bridge the gap between “law” and Law—between human half-knowledge and Ultimate Authority. They were an assertion that there was an intimate connection between the two, and that the more closely that humanity could make its “law” conform to True Law, the more power and authority would pass into the hands of Man.

  At the same time, universal operating principles were a flexible, pragmatic, engineering approach to the question of “law” and Law. To Campbell, it didn’t actually matter which one he had hold of, as long as the job got done.

  As he put it in his letter to Rhine:

  “The engineer is a hard-working man, and in his frame of reference, theory is an interesting side-light—anything that he can use effectively, on the other hand, is a good and respected tool. ‘To hell with why it works! Let’s make it work.’ ”566

  But always at the heart of Campbell’s version of natural law there would remain an area of fundamental ambiguity that in its way was not unlike the uncertainty lurking at the heart of the atom.

  To conservative interpreters among his authors, universal operating principles could continue to look like old-fashioned, rigid, deterministic, now-and-for-all-time Laws. Seen this way, they were a last attempt to maintain the original tenets of modern Western science, a final expression of Cartesian and Newtonian cause-and-effect thinking.

  To more radical writers, however, universal operating principles would just be “law,” convenient approximations, reflections of the particular biases of human perception and presumption. In this mode, it is possible for us to recognize universal operating principles as an early attempt to express emergent post-materialistic concepts—specifically, that both the patterns of human thought and the habits of the universe may be subject to change.

  In practice, the writers of the Golden Age would flip-flop between one interpretation and the other, just like Campbell. A good example is to be seen in the fantasy novels contributed to Unknown by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp.

  In “The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic,” it appears to be “law”—an imperfectly understood and operated system of symbolic equations—that is used to transfer Harold Shea and Dr. Chalmers to other worlds. But within a given alternate world, it would seem to be Law that holds sway. At least, once the proper decimal place has been found, the “laws of magic” operate with something like the predictability and exactitude of our own laws of chemistry and physics.

  However, what if an alternate world did not observe fixed Law? Such would be the case in de Camp’s and Pratt’s last published pre-war fantasy novel, The Land of Unreason (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941).

  In this story, an American diplomat, Fred Barber, is carried off as a changeling to Fairyland—that realm of magic presented in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  And early on, Oberon, the King of Fairyland, tells Barber:

  “ ‘Look you—you come from a land where natural law is immutable as the course of the planets. But in our misfortunate realm there’s nought fixed; the very rules of life change at times, altogether, without warning and in no certain period.’ ”567

  The truth of this statement would be explicitly demonstrated late in the story. Barber has this crucial exchange with the apple dryad Malacea, which is initiated by a protest from Barber that things in this world aren’t logical. Malacea asks:

  “What does that mean? A magic word?”

  “No, it means according to the laws of consistent reasoning. Things equal to the same thing are equal to ea
ch other, nothing can be both true and false, and two and two make four.”

  “A mortal word; and like most such, not true.”

  “Oh, but it is.” Barber disengaged himself and picked up four pebbles, two in each hand. “Look,” he said, “two!” and then opened the other hand to show the others. “Two!” He clapped the two hands together and opened them again. “Four!”

  “No,” said Malacea.

  Barber looked and gaped. His opened hands held five pebbles.

  It might have been an accident, or she might have dropped one in. He tossed away the extra stone, shut both hands resolutely, and clapped them together again.

  “Now will you admit there are four?” he demanded belligerently.

  “No,” said Malacea. She was right. There were eight pebbles. . . .568

  So disconcerting is this to Barber that he not only drops Malacea, with whom he has become intimate, but henceforth will never take another apple dryad as a lover. There is logic for you!

  However, the fact that really must be taken account of is that Pratt’s and de Camp’s Land of Unreason was not essentially different from the cosmos that Campbell was constructing in Astounding and Unknown with the aid of universal operating principles. The closer we look, the clearer it becomes that indeterminacy and mentalism were to be found everywhere within the Campbellian multiverse.

  We can find our example in the Harold Shea stories. In the course of this series, de Camp and Pratt offer two conflicting rationales for the existence of a multiplicity of alternate worlds:

  In “The Mathematics of Magic,” Shea asks Dr. Chalmers how it is that even though the laws of magic do not operate in our own universe, they do make an appearance in our fantasy stories. Chalmers answers:

  “The question is somewhat obvious. You remember my remarking that dements suffered hallucinations because their personalities were split between this universe and another? The same applies to the composers of fairy tales, though to a lesser degree. Naturally, it would apply to any writer of fantasy, such as Dunsany or Hubbard. When he describes some strange world, he is offering a somewhat garbled version of a real one, having its own set of dimensions quite independent of ours.”569

  However, at the outset of the third story in the series, “Castle of Iron” (Unknown, Apr. 1941), Harold Shea and his friends go astray in their travels and find themselves watching belly dancers at an Oriental banquet in the world described by the Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem “Xanadu.” And Harold Shea takes this as a crisis.

  He says: “ ‘That puts us in a jam. You remember the poem was unfinished. It might refer to an incomplete universe, one that is fixed in a certain set of actions, like a phonograph needle in a groove. If that’s the case, this performance might go on forever.’ ”570

  So which of these is true? Do these alternate realms of being have independent existence that is glimpsed by writers of fantasy and participated in by madmen? Or are these other worlds constructs of the mind of some poet that exist with only the degree of completeness with which they were first imagined?

  The answer is indeterminate. Pratt and de Camp have it both ways, and give us no reason to prefer one explanation to the other. But either way, whether alternate worlds are merely glimpsed from afar, or whether they are constructs of a poet’s imagination, consciousness underlies the human experience of these other worlds.

  Not only would the multiverse be mental in nature, but it would also be true that in every single instance of universal operating principles that we have discussed to this point, some crucial mental aspect can be discerned.

  We might recall, for instance, the very first official mutation in Astounding—those bold new scientifically accurate astronomical covers featuring spacesuited human beings at large in the most distant reaches of the Solar System.

  Where did consciousness intrude in these scenes? In publishing the first of them—a picture of the Sun as seen from the surface of Mercury—on the cover of the February 1938 issue of Astounding, Campbell made an editorial point of declaring that what was being depicted was not reality, but things as they would appear to human perception. He presented sketches showing how much larger the Moon rising above the horizon seems to a human observer than it actually is. And he promised, “As in this first, mutant cover, so in all of the series to come, our astronomical color-plate covers will be as accurate an impression as astronomical science and knowledge of human reaction can make them.”571

  A closely parallel instance is to be seen in Isaac Asimov’s pivotal novelet “Nightfall.” Here again what would be presented would appear to be a natural, factual situation—a problem to be settled by science—that instead would prove to be a question of human thought and perception.

  Simply put, if the disasters on the planet Lagash that regularly attend eclipses and the revelation of the stars are ever going to come to an end, what is necessary isn’t a change in physical circumstances, but rather an alteration in the state of knowledge and mental responses of the people of this planet.

  What’s more, exactly this was implicit in the initial conversation between Campbell and Asimov that led to the writing of “Nightfall.” We may remember Asimov telling us that Campbell asked:

  “What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?”

  I thought, and drew a blank. I said, “I don’t know.”

  Campbell said, “I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that.”

  It wasn’t just a physical situation that Campbell wanted represented, either in his astronomical covers or in “Nightfall.” He wanted mental reaction as well.

  We might recall Campbell saying specifically in the market report in Writer’s Digest at the outset of his editorship: “I want reactions rather than actions. I want human reactions. Even if your hero is a robot, he must have human reactions to make him interesting to the reader.”

  With some assistance from the editor, Asimov would follow Campbell’s lead here, too. In the series of robot stories that began with “Reason,” robot behavior has seemingly been brought under the control of universal operating principles. “Robopsychology”572 and the Three Laws of Robotics assure human beings that robots are safe and reliable.

  However, at the same time, these robots keep thinking their own private thoughts and keep acting as though they have free will. Persistently. So persistently that Chip Delany, a young black reader of science fiction in Harlem during the Fifties who would himself grow up to be a leading writer of SF, would find it only natural to interpret Asimov’s robots as wily slaves evading the unreasonable dictates of their masters.573

  And it is certainly true that in “Reason,” just as in “Nightfall,” it is human mental attitudes that must ultimately be adjusted—not the universe or the robot.

  However, it would be precisely the acceptance of this crucial fact—that changes in human thinking are not merely possible, or even desirable, but with the passage of time must be inevitable—that would open wide the imagined future in Astounding. This was the key insight of Robert Heinlein, master builder of future societies.

  Mental bent, far more than gadgets or inventions, would characterize and define Heinlein’s various futures. For all the difference it would make, it could as easily be the people of Methuselah’s Children who sleep on water beds and the folk of Beyond This Horizon who have wardrobes with the ability to snag a tossed garment out of the air and hang it up neatly, rather than the other way around. What really sets his societies apart is their radically different values, ideas and assumptions. They don’t think the same way.

  Taken in sum, Heinlein’s pre-war futuristic stories, such as “ ‘If This Goes On—,’ ” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Coventry,” “Magic, Inc.,” and “Universe,” would present a broad array of distinctly different frames of mind. This was an even more significant accomplishment than Heinlein’s formal framework of the Future History. By viewing futurity as a smorga
sbord of potential mental states to choose from, Heinlein transformed time-to-come from The Future—a procession of inevitabilities destined to culminate in the guttering out of the Sun—into a realm of multiplicity and indeterminism.

  However, there would be a certain number of stories published in Campbell’s magazines during the Golden Age which presented the new post-materialistic expressions of transcendence without even bothering to nod respectfully in the direction of universal operating principles. For as long as it continued to be published—until the fall of 1943—Unknown, the magazine of alternate possibilities offered in a spirit of good clean fun, was a more receptive home for these stories of shifting realities and the stranger side of consciousness than Astounding, the serious and responsible magazine of human control over the future and outer space.

  Of all Campbell’s writers, it was L. Ron Hubbard who was perhaps the most persistently drawn to the subject of reality and consciousness. Arguably, the best work that Hubbard would produce for Campbell was two mind-based short novels published in Unknown in 1940—“Fear” (July) and “Typewriter in the Sky” (Nov.-Dec.).