Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  With The Mightiest Machine receiving reader accolades, Campbell thought sequels were in order. He wrote three, continuing the adventures of Aarn Munro and his compan-ions. The first, a 15,000-word novelette, The Incredible Plan-et, utilized the well-worn device of losing his characters in space thus enabling them to stumble upon a world whose inhabitants have remained in suspended animation for 400

  billion years; a second sequel, The Interstellar Search, finds the earthmen aiding a planet whose sun is about to become a nova; and in the final story, The Infinite Atom, they arrive home in time to block an invasion by creatures whose previ-ous visits to earth gave rise to the centaur legends. Tremaine rejected all three. He felt that the day of the superscience epic was past and insisted that Campbell stick strictly to Stuart-style stories. Another augury was the mild response to Mother World, a story of the revolt of the oppressed working groups against their fiendish masters, with the planet as the prize, serialized at last in the January, February, and March, 1935, issues of amazing stories as The Contest of the Plants. The three sequels to The Mightiest Machine eventually were published as a Fantasy Press book, The Incredible Planet, in 1949.

  Campbell was forced to give full emphasis to Don A. Stuart in a series which he called "The Teachers," but which never was so labeled, beginning in the February, 1935, astounding stories with The Machine. In this story, a think-ing machine that has provided every comfort for man leaves the planet for their own good, forcing them to forage for themselves. This story inspired Jack Williamson's With Fold-ing Hands and its sequel ".. . And Searching Mind," con-cerning robots that overprotect man from every possible injury or error, and from himself.

  The Invaders (astounding stories, June, 1935), a sequel to The Machine, describes a mankind reverted to savagery, easily enslaved by the Tharoo, a race from another world.

  Rebellion (astounding stories, August, 1935) finds the human race, through selective breeding, growing more intel-ligent than the Tharoo, driving the invaders back off the planet. The foregoing were not primarily mood stories, but they were adult fare—the predecessors of an entirely new type of science fiction.

  In Night, a sequel to Twilight, published in the October, 1935, astounding stories, Campbell stirringly returned to the mood story. A man of today moves into the inconceiv-ably distant future, when not only the sun but the stars themselves are literally burnt out. At his presence, machines from Neptune move to serve him, but he recognizes them for what they are: "This, I saw, was the last radiation of the heat of life from an already-dead body—the feel of life and warmth, imitation of life by a corpse," for man and all but the last dregs of universal energy are gone.

  "You still wonder that we let man die out?" asked the machine. "It was best. In another brief million years he would have lost his high estate. It was best." Campbell had matured. A civilization of machines, he now understands, is but parody, movement without consciousness. It is not and can never be "the last evolution."

  Campbell returned to his home state of New Jersey, in 1935, working at a variety of jobs: the research department of Mack Truck in New Brunswick; Hoboken Pioneer Instru-ments; and finally Carleton Ellis, Montclair, in 1936, setting up residence at Orange, New Jersey, to be near his work. Carleton Ellis, namesake and founder of the firm, had more chemical patents than any man in the world and was a consultant on the subject. He is credited with making the first paint remover that worked. Campbell was able to toler-ate only six months of writing and editing textbooks and technical literature for Ellis, but nevertheless the position gave him discipline in editing and publishing that would soon prove invaluable. Out of work, Campbell accepted the assignment of writing a monthly article on astronomy for Tremaine, plus an occa-sional Stuart story. These activities barely kept food on the table. Campbell's most successful story in 1936 was Frictional Losses (astounding stories, July, 1936), under the Stuart byline, in which a method of eliminating friction proves the ultimate weapon against invaders from outer space. wonder stories had been sold by Gernsback to Standard Magazines and now appeared as thrilling wonder stories. Campbell arranged with the editor, Mort Weisinger, for a series of stories under his own name, built around the charac-ters of Penton and Blake, two fugitives from Earth. The best of the group was the first, Brain Stealers of Mars (thrilling wonder stories, December, 1936), concerning Martians capable of converting themselves into an exact replica of any object or person. They provide a knotty problem for the visitors from Earth. This story and those that followed had the light note of humor and the wacky alien creatures which Stanley G. Weinbaum had recently made so popular. Closest in quality to Night and Twilight proved to be Forgetfulness (astounding stories, June, 1937), in which earthmen landing on a distant planet assume that a race is decadent because it has deserted the automatic cities and mighty power devices that man, in his current state of pro-gress, associates with civilization.

  Influential as well as entertaining was his novelette of the Sam, Out of Night (astounding stories, October, 1937). A matriarchal society of aliens who have conquered the earth and have ruled it for 4,000

  years are challenged by Aesir, a black, amorphous mass vaguely in the shape of man, ostensi-bly personifying humanity's unified yearnings past and present. This device was picked up by Robert A. Heinlein in Sixth Column, where it helps to route the Asiatic con-querors. Cloak of Aesir, a sequel, demonstrated the use of psychol-ogy in driving the "people" of the Sam from their domination of Earth, and terminated the short series in astounding science-fiction for March, 1939. Tremaine's duties had been expanded to cover editorial directorship of top-notch, bill barnes, romance range, clues, and a number of other Street & Smith periodicals. To assist him, he hired an editor for each of the magazines. Campbell's availability, his skill as a writer, and his intensive if limited editorial experience with Carleton Ellis put him in line for the position with astounding. He was put on the payroll of Street & Smith in September, 1937. Inevitably his writing, except for special occasions, had to cease. F. Orlin Tremaine left Street & Smith in May, 1938, as the result of internal politics. Campbell was completely on his own, and there would be less time than ever.

  Few authors ever made their literary exit more mag-nificently than did Campbell. From the memories of his childhood he drew the most fearsome agony of the past: the doubts, the fears, the shock, and the frustration of repeatedly discovering that the woman who looked so much like his mother was not who she seemed. Who goes there? Friend or foe? He had attempted the theme once before, employing a light touch, in Brain Stealers of Mars. This time he was serious. Who Goes There?

  (astounding science-fiction, August, 1938) deals with an alien thing from outer space that enters the camp of an Antarctic research party and blends alternately into the forms of the various men and dogs in the camp. The job is to find and kill the chimera before, in the guise of some human being or animal, it gets back to civilization.

  An impressive display of writing talent, Who Goes There? is in one sense one of the most thrilling detective stories ever written. The suspense and tension mount with each para-graph and are sustained to the last. Reading this story inspired A. E. van Vogt to turn to science fiction with Vault of the Beast, a direct take-off on the idea. In Europe, Eric Frank Russell picked up the notion in Spiro, one of his most effective stories. RKO, altering the story considerably, pro-duced it as a profitable horror picture called The Thing (1951).

  A few more Stuart stories would sporadically appear. The Elder Gods (unknown, October, 1939), a swiftly paced sword-and-sorcery tale, was written as a last-minute fill-in when a cover story by Arthur J. Burks proved unsatisfactory. Together with The Moon is Hell, a short novel of stark realism drawing a parallel between the survival problems of Antarctic and moon explorers, it made its appearance as a Fantasy Press book in 1951.

  Fifteen years after he had quit writing for a living, Camp-bell still displayed excellent technique in The Idealists, a novelette written expressly for the hard-cover anthology, 9 Tales of Space a
nd Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy for Henry Holt in 1954. Scientists aren't always "good guys," was the point he made, and a high degree of technical development does not necessarily carry with it maturity in dealing with different cultures.

  But for all practical purposes, Campbell's writing career ended at the age of 28 with Who Goes There?

  As one of the first of the modern science-fiction writers, he had a profound influence on the field. As editor of the leading, best-paying magazine, he taught, coerced, and cajoled his type of story. As a result, for the more than a quarter-century since he ceased writing, older readers have been haunted by half-remembered echoes in the plot structure of hundreds of stories and in the lines of scores of writers. It is not strange if sometimes readers shake the hypnotic wonder of the wheel-ing cosmos from their minds and demand:

  "Who goes there?"

  3 MURRAY LEINSTER

  "The whole thing began when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backwards." That was the opening sentence of The Runaway Skyscraper in the February 22, 1919, issue of argosy and with those words Murray Leinster began his science-fiction writing career. Already a veteran with two years of steady magazine sales behind him, young Leinster had sold argosy a series of Happy Village stories and was fed up with predigested pablum. There would be no more in that series for a while, he wrote editor Matthew White, Jr., since he was working on a story opening with the lines, "The whole thing began when the clock on the Metro-politan Tower began to run backwards."

  "By return mail," recalls Leinster, "I got a letter telling me to let him see it when I finished. So I had to write it or admit I was lying."

  At the time the story was written, the tower of the home office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was one of the tallest and most distinctive skyscrapers in New York topped by a clock that was a city landmark. Readers of argosy were enthralled to read of the building's remarkable journey in time back to a period hundreds of years before white men appeared on this continent. Some two thousand workers in the skyscraper thus find themselves confronted with the task of obtaining enough food to eat and suitable fuel to run the building's mammoth generators. Little help can be expected from the few thoroughly

  "shaken" Indians that have witnessed this strange occurrence. The scientific "explanation," that the skyscraper has sunk back in time instead of down into a pool of water created by a spring beneath it, taxed one's credulity only slightly less than the unimpaired functioning of the entire elevator, telephone, and cooking systems of the building, even though outside sources of power were hundreds of years away. Leinster's characters poked around a bit, but since the author couldn't quite seem to figure out the solution of the sustenance problem, he had the hero reestablish the equilibrium of the structure in its own time by pouring soapsuds into the subsurface water. The building reappears at exactly the same moment it left, and no one believes the tale its occupants tell.

  An argosy readership that was still completing Garret Smith's novel that whisked them into the future of After a Million Years and had accepted the revival of Aztec gods in the modern world as offered by Francis Stevens in Citadel of Fear only months earlier was not inclined to quibble over "details." They greeted Murray Leinster's effort with enthusi-asm and one of the most fabulous writing careers in science-fiction history was launched. Forty-three years later, in 1962, Murray Leinster was voted one of the six favorite modern writers of science fiction; more of his stories had been anthol-ogized than any living science-fiction writer's, including clas-sics as First Contact, The Strange Case of John Kingman, Symbiosis, A Logic Named Joe, and The Lonely Planet.

  Other writers who started and achieved fame in the same period as Leinster—Ray Cummings, Garret Smith, Victor Rousseau, Francis Stevens, Homer Eon Flint, Austin Hall, J. U. Giesy—are dead and their work lives only in the nostalgic memories of a dwindling group of old-time readers. But their contemporary, Murray Leinster, is very much alive; his novelette Exploration Team received the Hugo* as the best story in its class in 1956, and in 1960 his novel Pirates of Ersatz was nominated for the best novel of the year.

  *The "Hugo" is the science fiction world's equivalent for the "Oscar," a cast metal spaceship awarded annually at the World Science Fiction Convention, to the field's outstanding contributors. William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1896. His alter ego, Murray Leinster, would not come into being until Jenkins had passed his twenty-first birthday. His family tree has roots deep in colonial times; an ancestor eight generations back, was governor of North Carolina. Another of his roots lay in Leinster County, Ireland, inhabited by a people proud in the knowledge that the kings of Leinster were the last of that country to give up their indepen-dence.

  His education terminated abruptly after three months of the eighth grade, never to be resumed. Young Jenkins' burn-ing ambition was to be a scientist, and inquiry into the nature of things prompted him to buy materials to build a glider, which he successfully flew at Sandstorm Hill, Cape Henry, Virginia, in 1909, winning a prize from fly, the first aeronautical magazine, for his achievement. The same year, at the age of 13, he placed an essay about Robert E. Lee in the Virginian pilot, making that his first published work. Technically, it was also his first "paid" authorship, for an old Confederate veteran sent him five dollars upon reading it. To earn a living, he worked as an office boy, writing at night. Every day for a year he wrote 1,000 words and tore it up. At the age of 17 he began to place fillers and epigrams with smart set, the new yorker of pre-World War I days. Such fragments did not constitute a living ($5 for 12 epigrams) so Will Jenkins set his sights on the pulps, which were replacing the dime-novel as the reading matter of American youth. The editors of smart set, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken who included one epigram in a book and paid a five-cent beer for royalties, perfectly straight-faced, suggested that he use a pen name for argosy or all-story so as not to hurt his reputation in the "big time." Jenkins thought this was Grade-A advice and together with a friend, Wynham Martyn, concocted Murray Leinster out of his family lineage.

  He had moved to Newark, New Jersey, to work as a bookkeeper for the Prudential Insurance Company, and that city later served as the locale of a number of his stories, most notably The Incredible Invasion. Clicking regularly at Munsey and other publishing houses, Leinster resigned his post with Prudential on his twenty-first birthday and, apart from a stint in the Office of War Information during World War II, has never held a salaried position since.

  In 1919, Street & Smith, watching the prosperity of Mun-sey's argosy and all-story magazines, with their heavy em-phasis on science-fiction, fantasy, supernatural, and off-trail stories, decided to bring out a magazine whose fiction would stress those elements. They called it thrill book and put it under the editorship of Eugene Clancy and Harold Hersey. Before the first issue appeared, dated March 1, 1919, the edi-tors found that new fantasies were difficult to obtain, so they dropped the notion of an all-fantasy periodical and filled out the greater part of the magazine with straight adventure and mystery stories. Hersey had read Leinster's The Runaway Skyscraper in argosy a few weeks earlier and was also familiar with the Will Jenkins stories in smart set. He urged the young writer to try his hand at science fiction for thrill book. Three stories resulted. The first, A Thousand Degrees Below Zero, in the July 15, 1919, number, involved an inventor who succeeds in building a machine which will draw all heat from objects toward which it is directed, resulting in death for living things and brittle disintegration for inanimate objects. A vigorous bout with the United States government ends in the inventor's defeat, but this story pattern, with a variety of inventions, was to remain a Leinster standard for the next twenty-five years. A sequel, The Silver Menace, appeared in two install-ments, in the September 1 and September 15, 1919, numbers of thrill book. This time the world is threatened by a swiftly multiplying life-form that virtually turns the seas to glimmering jelly.

  The final issue of thrill book, October 15, 1919, carried Leinster's
third story, Juju, a straightforward adventure novel-ette set in an African locale. What makes this story worth mentioning is that by this time the value of the "Murray Leinster" name rated the cover illustration of the magazine. Jean Henri Fabre's books on insects inspired Leinster to write The Mad Planet, the first of a trilogy which, if not his finest contribution to science fiction, is among his best. A secondary purpose of the author was to confound those literary critics who claimed that stories with little or no dialogue could not retain a modern reader's interest. The Mad Planet was a sensation when it appeared in argosy for June 12, 1920. Depicting a world of the far distant future, where climatic conditions have made it possible for insects and plants to grow to gigantic proportions and mankind is reduced to a primitive, hunted state, The Mad Planet held readers in thrall. Burl, a primitive genius, slowly begins to lead man back out of savagery. The Mad Planet struck a chord of universal appeal.

  The sequel, Red Dust, in argosy for April 2, 1921, is an even better story than the original. Burl's adventures and explorations thrillingly expand the scope of man's knowledge and hopes. Each time these two stories have been reprinted—in amazing stories in 1926; in tales of wonder in 1939; and in fantastic novels, 1948-49—a new generation of readers has endorsed Leinster's artistry. Finally, twenty-two years after the appearance of the first story, Leinster completed the trilogy with Nightmare Planet in the June, 1953, issue of science fiction plus. It was an older, more philosophical, more thoughtful Leinster writing in this story, but the magic of the first two was still there. With the locale changed to another planet for scientific reasons, the three appeared in hard covers as The Forgotten Planet, a book of such appeal that it is unlikely to become a forgotten classic. From 1923 on, one of the pillars of fantasy in the United States was weird tales, a magazine which developed such favorites as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, C. L. Moore, and many others during its lifetime. Leinster's initial contribution to this magazine, The Oldest Story in the World, was done more as a favor to editor Farnsworth Wright than for monetary re-ward. A tale of greed and torture in Old India, it was the favorite story in the August, 1925, issue in which it appeared, receiving such wildly enthusiastic salutes from fellow writers Seabury Quinn and Frank Belknap Long as "equal to Kip-ling."