by L. Sprague de Camp;Frederik Pohl;David Drake;S. M. Stirling;Alexei
Unknown would be to Astounding something of what All-Story had once been to Argosy—a less dignified, less responsible and less respectable sibling. A place for sf writers to have some fun without being held to strict account for it.
In outward appearance, Unknown would seem not to be a magazine of science fiction at all—at least not science fiction as Hugo Gernsback might reckon it. Instead, it presented itself as a magazine of traditional fantasy, printing stories about gods, witches, genies, devils and gnomes.
But this appearance would be deceiving. To the degree that the fiction printed in Unknown might honestly be called a kind of fantasy, it was fantasy written as though it were a variant form of modern science fiction. The “magic” in Unknown would not be based upon spirit, as in traditional myth. Instead, it would come to be regarded as another kind of science, the result of the operation of alternative underlying operating principles—which L. Sprague de Camp and his collaborator Fletcher Pratt would call “the laws of magic.”
In fact, many of the stories printed in Unknown would bear little or no resemblance to traditional spirit-based fantasy. Rather, they would be contemporary sf stories with some impossible twist or odd assumption.
When Campbell received a good story that did not observe the strict parameters of plausibility and subject matter that he was attempting to establish in Astounding, it was highly convenient for him to be able to term the story “fantasy” and print it in Unknown.
Since Campbell was drawing from a common pool of manuscripts, there might at times appear to be a certain degree of arbitrariness in his decisions as to just what story would appear in which magazine. At least some of the stories that he published—de Camp’s invading alien story “Divide and Rule,” for instance—might as easily have appeared in one place as the other.
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.’”[Campbell's distinction between Astounding and Unknown is cited by Theodore Sturgeon in Earl Demp, ed., The Proceedings; Chicon III (Chicago: Advent, 1963), p. 122]
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.’ ” 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”—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 machi
nes 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.”
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.
Almost inevitably, then, it occurs to Padway to wonder: “Could one man change the course of history to the extent of preventing this interregnum?”
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.’ ”
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.’ ”
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.
“L. Sprague de Camp's Great Leap of Imagination” is adapted from Alexei and Cory Panshin's Hugo winning study of science ficiton, The World Beyond the Hill.
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THE DEADLY MISSION OF
PHINEAS SNODGRASS
Frederik Pohl
This is the story of Phineas Snodgrass, inventor. He built a time machine.
He built a time machine and in it he went back some two thousand years, to about the time of the birth of Christ. He made himself known to the Emperor Augustus, his lady Livia and other rich and powerful Romans of the day and, quickly making friends, secured their cooperation in bringing about a rapid transformation of Year One living habits. (He stole the idea from a science-fiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp, called Lest Darkness Fall.)
His time machine wasn’t very big, but his heart was, so Snodgrass selected his cargo with the plan of providing the maximum immediate help for the world’s people. The principal features of ancient Rome were dirt and disease, pain and death. Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy and to keep its people alive through twentieth-century medicine. Everything else could take care of itself, once the human race was free of its terrible plagues and early deaths.
Snodgrass introduced penicillin and aureomycin and painless dentistry. He ground lenses for spectacles and explained the surgical techniques for removing cataracts. He taught anesthesia and the germ theory of disease, and showed how to purify drinking water. He built Kleenex factories and taught the Romans to cover their mouths when they coughed. He demanded, and got, covers for the open Roman sewers, and he pioneered the practice of the balanced diet.
Snodgrass brought health to the ancient world, and kept his own health, too. He lived to more than a hundred years. He died, in fact, in the year a.d. 100, a very contented man.
When Snodgrass arrived in Augustus’s great palace on the Palatine Hill, there were some 250,000,000 human beings alive in the world. He persuaded the principate to share his blessings with all the world, benefiting not only the hundred million subjects of the Empire, but the other one hundred millions in Asia and the tens of millions in Africa, the Western Hemisphere and all the Pacific islands.
Everybody got healthy.
Infant mortality dropped at once, from 90 deaths in a hundred to fewer than two. Life expectancies doubled immediately. Everyone was well, and demonstrated their health by having more children, who grew in health to maturity and had more.
It is a feeble population that cannot double itself every generation if it tries.
These Romans, Goths, and Mongols were tough. Every 30 years the population of the world increased by a factor of two. In the year a.d. 30, the world population was a half billion. In a.d. 60, it was a full billion. By the time Snodgrass passed away, a happy man, it was as large as it is today.
It is too bad that Snodgrass did not have room in his time machine for the blueprints of cargo ships, the texts on metallurgy to build the tools that would make the reapers that would harvest the fields—for the triple-expansion steam turbines that would generate the electricity that would power the machines that would run the cities—for all the technology that 2,000 subsequent years had brought about.
But he didn’t.
Consequently, by the time of his death conditions were no longer quite perfect. A great many were badly housed.
On the whole, Snodgrass was pleased, for all these things could surely take care of themselves. With a healthy world population, the increase of numbers would be a mere spur to research. Boundless nature, once its ways were studied, would surely provide for any number of human beings.
Indeed it did. Steam engines on the Newcomen design were lifting water to irrigate fields to grow food long before his death. The Nile was
dammed at Aswan in the year 55. Battery-powered streetcars replaced oxcarts in Rome and Alexandria before a.d. 75, and the galley slaves were freed by huge, clumsy diesel outboards that drove the food ships across the Mediterranean a few years later.
In the year a.d. 200 the world had now something over twenty billion souls, and technology was running neck-and-neck with expansion. Nuclear-driven ploughs had cleared the Teutoburg Wald, where Varus’s bones were still mouldering, and fertilizer made from ion-exchange mining of the sea produced fantastic crops of hybrid grains. In a.d. 300 the world population stood at a quarter of a trillion. Hydrogen fusion produced fabulous quantities of energy from the sea; atomic transmutation converted any matter into food. This was necessary, because there was no longer any room for farms. The Earth was getting crowded. By the middle of the sixth century the 60,000,000 square miles of land surface on the Earth were so well covered that no human being standing anywhere on dry land could stretch out his arms in any direction without touching another human being standing beside him.
But everyone was healthy, and science marched on. The seas were drained, which immediately tripled the available land area. (In 50 years the sea bottoms were also full.) Energy which had come from the fusion of marine hydrogen now came by the tapping of the full energy output of the Sun, through gigantic “mirrors” composed of pure force. The other planets froze, of course; but this no longer mattered, since in the decades that followed they were disintegrated for the sake of the energy at their cores. So was the Sun. Maintaining life on Earth on such artificial standards was prodigal of energy consumption; in time every star in the Galaxy was transmitting its total power output to the Earth, and plans were afoot to tap Andromeda, which would care for all necessary expansion for—30 years.