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

by Alexei Panshin

  John Campbell would have a considerable part to play in this process of probing and testing the holistic universe. Over and over again, he would point to van Vogt as a model for others to follow. And he would nudge and urge and challenge his authors as only he knew how to do to convince them to deal with the van Vogtian mysteries of indeterminacy, non-rational thinking, wild talents, and higher levels of human becoming.

  But we should also know that there would come a time at the end of the war when the great editor would wake with a start and a splutter to find that somehow he had contrived to get himself in way over his head. Between one thing and another—the momentum of his investigations into the new van Vogtian reality, his need during the war to accept almost any story, however strange, that was of publishable quality, and the peculiar heartiness of the night air—he had allowed himself to be lured into far deeper and darker psychic waters than he was prepared to cope with. And this postwar Campbell would hastily beat a retreat to safer ground.

  However, for as long as the war lasted and as long as it still seemed to Campbell that he was leading his writers in a scientific inquiry into non-logical phenomena, he would print a much queerer line of story in Astounding than he would have been ready to find acceptable in the first phase of the Golden Age, or would be able to tolerate once the war was over.

  As a whole, then, we can say that some of the radical changes that took place in Astounding during World War II were due to wartime circumstances, some to the altering mood of the time, some to Campbell leading writers onward, some to Campbell being led, some to the pursuit of science and reason, and some to the siren call of the new transcendence. However, the very first change that occurred in Astounding after the United States entered the war was not only the sign of the beginning of a new phase, but was wholly and solely John Campbell’s doing.

  When the January 1942 issue of Astounding appeared on the newsstand less than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor the magazine was no longer the same 7 by 10 inch pulp size it had always been throughout the dozen years of its existence. Instead, it was now 40% larger, expanded in its dimensions to the 8 1/2 by 11 1/2 inch bedsheet size of the old Gernsback Science Wonder Stories.

  For Campbell, altering the size of Astounding (and Unknown) was intended to accomplish a number of different purposes at once. It was a bold try for more prominent display on the magazine racks, for better sales, and for increased advertising revenue. More than anything else, however, it was a bid for greater respect and dignity.

  The truth of the matter is that Campbell felt compromised and held back by the juvenile pulp company that his magazines were forced to keep. He wanted nothing so much as to shake free from it.

  He knew how original and special Astounding and Unknown were, and how superior to their competition. He was well aware that they were read and appreciated by able, intelligent people—scientists, engineers, college professors and professional men. And he longed for them to be taken just as seriously by society in general.

  The first step in this process, as he saw it, was to put some distance between his magazines and the others on the sales racks. But this was not at all easy to do.

  The new Astounding and Unknown Worlds, as the magazine was now renamed, might indicate by their size that they would like to be thought of as different from all the other SF pulps. In actual fact, however, they still had to appeal to the popular audience that bought and read story magazines. They were still printed on cheap, rough, pulp paper. And they still had the style and appearance of large, skinny, pulp magazines.

  Since there was no other reasonable place for them to be put, they continued to be grouped on the newsstand with the other SF pulps. And instead of receiving better display, now Campbell’s oversized magazines were all too likely to be tucked away behind the others so as not to block their covers from being seen.

  The upshot was that there was no sudden leap in sales for Astounding or Unknown. They garnered no classy new audience. And there was no change at all in the nature or amount of advertising they attracted—only the same old ads as always for razor blades, trusses, correspondence courses, and other Street & Smith publications.

  A fair assessment of this attempt to take on greater respectability might be that in fact no large, untapped market of bright, influential readers such as Campbell hoped for actually existed, and that he was already reaching the entire American audience which was capable of appreciating the modern science fiction and fantasy he published. A mass audience for SF was still a generation away.

  At the same time, the change in size was something of an esthetic disaster. The pulp Astoundings of the early Golden Age, with their simple, clean-cut, definite modern design, and their bright, confident, human-centered Hubert Rogers covers, had been bold, dynamic and graceful physical objects. But in the redesign of the magazine, that artless pulp perfection was lost.

  The taller, thinner issues, held together by only a single staple, were awkward, floppy and fragile. The new covers, with a central picture framed by broad borders, no longer had the old boundary-bursting immediacy. Individual pages were now less attractive and harder to read. Illustrations of a formerly sufficient size now seemed small and shoved off into the corner of the page.

  Sixteen issues of Astounding and ten issues of Unknown Worlds would be published in the large size before this experiment was brought to an end by the wartime paper shortage. But Astounding would never manage to recapture the confidence, balance and perfect proportion that had seemed to come so effortlessly and naturally in the days before the war. . . .

  Even before the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had begun the process of rearming itself, designing and building new ships, planes and tanks, and increasing the size of its armed forces. In the fall of 1940, unmarried young men began to be drafted into the military for a year’s service.

  Once the United States had joined the war, conscription was expanded to take in men from the ages of 18 to 45, with registration of all men up to age 65. The term of service was to be the duration of the war, however short or long that proved to be, plus an additional six months.

  Campbell lost his first writer to the war effort as early as the summer of 1941, when L. Ron Hubbard joined the Naval Reserve as an officer and was called to active duty. But that was just the beginning. During the spring and summer of 1942, all of the major players in Astounding and Unknown—with the exception of A.E. van Vogt—ceased to write and turned to war work.

  E.E. Smith’s third Lensman story, Second-Stage Lensman (Astounding, Nov. 1941-Feb. 1942), was in the middle of its serialization even as the United States joined the war and Astounding increased in size. Doc Smith was 51 years old and had a family, and he had already served as an officer during the First World War. But after Pearl Harbor, he applied to the War Department for a job that would make use of his technical expertise.

  He was thanked but turned down. So Smith followed up a want ad and took a job as a Junior Chemical Engineer in an ordnance works in Kingsbury, Indiana, making mines and bombs. He would work his way up to Chief Chemist, and then to Head of the Inspection Division.

  Robert Heinlein, who only a few months earlier had feared that he might be suffering a third flare-up of his tuberculosis, wanted nothing so much as to get back into uniform and join the fight. But Navy doctors had their look at him and refused to restore him to active duty.

  Heinlein’s oldest Navy friend was currently the director of the Materials Laboratory of the Naval Aircraft Factory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, so Heinlein arranged to have himself taken on there as a civilian research and development engineer. And with him, he brought Isaac Asimov as a civilian chemist, and L. Sprague de Camp, a new-made Naval Reserve officer, as an engineer. These three leading writers of modern science fiction would spend the war years working on the same floor of the same building.

  Hubert Rogers, whose bold, bright cover paintings had formed the outward image of the exuberant pre-war Golden Age, went north and joined the Can
adian Army. His final cover, in August 1942, was an illustration of Heinlein’s last story for Astounding, Anson MacDonald’s “Waldo.” His successor during the next four years was William Timmins, an artist who was no match for Rogers in technique, artistry, or vision. Under Timmins’ hand, the face of Astounding would grow dark and murky, as though even warmth and color had been rationed for the duration.

  As soon as U.S. involvement in the war began, John Campbell understood that he would very shortly be losing the technically trained men who were his leading contributors. And he tried to prepare his readers for the inevitable with an editorial in the April 1942 issue of Astounding entitled “Too Good At Guessing.”

  The pose he took was that in the ordinary way of things Astounding stories were only one short step beyond actual fact, but that henceforth it would be the patriotic duty of the magazine not to compromise actual secret research by publishing stories of near future invention. He said, “We will, in the future, try to be wilder guessers, place our stories further in the future, or base them on themes that can’t lead to those too-good guesses.”770

  This was utter bushwah, of course.

  The truth of the matter was that Campbell would continue to be just as receptive to SF based upon actual science and technology as he had ever been—when he was able to get it. He would try a variety of expedients in hopes of increasing the supply. And it wouldn’t bother him that he might be intruding into areas of real secret research. In fact, he wouldn’t mind at all if he did.

  When the editor got even the slightest hint that a new writer had scientific or technical training, he would encourage him to make use of it in his fiction. In January 1942, just about the time that Campbell was writing this editorial, he received an unsolicited story submission from Detroit. Its author was George O. Smith, a 31-year-old electronics engineer who until recently had been laboring long hours trying to work the glitches out of an automatic tuner for car radios which refused to hold a station without drifting. In the switchover to wartime engineering, he temporarily had a little spare time on his hands, and he was using it to fulfill a long-standing urge to write science fiction.

  His first submission wasn’t acceptable, but it did indicate to Campbell that Smith had writing talent, and also that he was someone who almost certainly had been technically educated. Just the kind of guy the editor needed most.

  So Campbell wrote back to say that while he couldn’t use what Smith had written, he did like its style.771 And what’s more, he had a pretty good notion that Smith was someone with a technical background. Would it be possible for him to try writing another story which used his special knowledge and experience as a foundation?

  Smith’s response to this Campbellian letter of invitation and indication was to write “QRM—Interplanetary,” a story about wisecracking engineers aboard an interplanetary radio relay station in the orbit of Venus who have to cope with their supervisor’s incompetence. Campbell received it with delight and ran it in the October 1942 Astounding.

  It was in June and August 1942 that Campbell published the first stories by Harry Stubbs, an astronomy student at Harvard who wrote in his free time under the name Hal Clement. More than any other SF author before or after him, Clement would be concerned to write imaginative science fiction that employed and respected the facts of known science. His particular pleasure would be in conceiving of alternate forms of alien life.

  In addition to these new writers, Campbell dug up an old one—Will F. Jenkins, the prolific storyteller who for years had produced science fiction with his left hand under the name Murray Leinster, but who had written no SF at all during the period that John Campbell had been editing Astounding. Jenkins, as a hobby, was a self-taught inventor who would eventually develop the front projection system that would revolutionize motion picture special effects and make possible SF movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977), but he had seldom attempted to apply his scientific knowledge to his SF writing in any serious way. For him, the story had always been the primary thing.

  The editor invited him to try his hand at the new, more exact, modern science fiction. And Jenkins/Leinster responded with “The Wabbler” (Astounding, Oct. 1942), a fictional account of a semi-sentient air-dropped robot torpedo feeling its way into an enemy harbor to destroy a ship.

  In a similar way, Campbell did what he could to adjust the approach to SF of another old-time writer, Jack Williamson. We may remember that when Williamson’s Galactic Empire novel, Star of Empire, was drying up in the fall of 1941, the editor had suggested to him that he might look to Heinlein, van Vogt and Asimov as models of the new science fiction.

  More than this, Campbell told Williamson that he really ought to try adopting a pseudonym and write the new style of story from behind this screen. He said, “Fundamentally, I think a ‘Don A. Stuart’ stunt would help you a hell of a lot . . .”772

  Williamson decided to go along with Campbell’s suggestion. He says of himself:

  Looking for a new name and something entirely new to write, I come up with “Will Stewart” and the idea for a series about the planetary engineers who would “terraform” new planets to fit them for colonization—the word, I think, is my own coinage. He likes the idea and suggests the interesting problems they might meet on contraterrene worlds. “Contraterrene” was the term for antimatter, then. Campbell’s abbreviation was CT, and I spelled it out, “seetee.”773

  The editor had previously tried without success to interest Robert Heinlein in writing about contraterrene matter. Now he prompted Williamson with so much material on the subject that the writer would say, “The seetee stories, bylined Will Stewart, were almost collaborations with John Campbell.”774

  Over the next eight months, Williamson wrote three seetee stories—a novelet, a short novel, and a two-part serial. If these ultimately proved to be something less than his best work, it may have been because the stories pulled in two different directions, with Williamson’s original idea of terraformed worlds tugging one way and Campbell’s intense desire to see fiction about men establishing their mastery over antimatter yanking another.

  Campbell would feed specialized scientific information to other established SF writers who had only a limited amount of formal education in science, occasionally with very happy results. Early in 1942, after Lester del Rey had been rejected by his draft board for extreme tachycardia and it looked as though he might be available as a writer for a while, Campbell sent him the idea for a story about a catastrophic accident in an atomic plant.

  Del Rey’s line as a writer had always been emotion-laden short stories, and it seems likely that Campbell was only expecting to get back a relatively brief glimpse of atomic disaster as it was experienced by the plant’s doctor. But del Rey had been secretly itching for some time to write a story of suspense, and he perceived the makings of a good one in this idea. He spent more time in research, preparation and plotting than he ever had before, and the result was his longest, most serious science fiction story to date, the short novel “Nerves” (Astounding, Sept. 1942).

  In May, however, del Rey followed his girl friend to a new government job in St. Louis. And soon he himself was working for McDonnell Aircraft hammering tail assemblies into shape for DC-3 planes.

  It went like that whenever Campbell thought he had a writer lined up whom he could count on. Jack Williamson was 34 years old and seeing a psychiatrist, and Campbell had high hopes for regular contributions from him. But at the end of July, Williamson finished “Opposites—React!,” his third and longest seetee story, and then joined the Army, which made him into a weatherman, and eventually promoted him to sergeant.

  It became harder and harder for Campbell to arrange a continuing supply of science-minded SF for Astounding. Will F. Jenkins was occupied working for the Office of War Information in Washington. Harry Stubbs graduated from Harvard in 1943 and became an Air Force bomber pilot. George O. Smith was living in Cincinnati and working as a project engineer on the develop
ment of “the so-called ‘radar’ proximity fuse.”775

  Campbell had to be content with the occasional story that he could get from these busy men writing in odd moments. But the editor never stopped prompting and adjusting, stroking and challenging in hopes of getting a good sound technically based story for his magazine.

  After the publication of “QRM—Interplanetary” in the fall of 1942, for example, Campbell sent a letter off to George O. Smith in Cincinnati. After discussing his own basement experiments in electronics for a few pages, the editor let it drop that he was ready for Smith to send him another story as good as the one he had just published. He was waiting to see it.

  Smith was flattered by this attention and moved by Campbell’s expectations of him. So when he was able to, he sat down and turned out another Venus Equilateral story. He says, “Hoping . . . not to be hauled off before a firing squad, I took some liberties with what little was known about radar, and wrote ‘Calling the Empress.’ ”776

  Altogether, then, we can see that not only did John Campbell continue to publish SF based in science after the beginning of the war, and do whatever he could to generate more of it, but he knowingly and deliberately published stories about atomic power plants, air-dropped torpedoes and radar. He got into trouble over this playing with fire only once, when he published Cleve Cartmill’s story “Deadline” in the March 1944 issue of Astounding.

  Cartmill was a California newspaperman who had fallen in with Heinlein’s Mañana Literary Society in the days before the war, and then begun to write for Campbell, first for Unknown and then for Astounding. In this case, the editor had primed Cartmill with detailed information about the construction, shielding and detonation of an atomic bomb made of U-235, and Cartmill had embedded this data in an otherwise lame and unimaginative story set during a World War on some other planet. This story was filled with names like “Sixa” and “Seilla” and “Ynamre,”777 as well as other names that looked just as strange but were not as easily deciphered.