With a crack, the tree shattered and came crashing down. Afterward, when Campbell went to examine the remains, he found that the wood seemed strangely frayed—like the ends of a length of rope—but not scorched or burned, as if the water inside had expanded suddenly into steam. The entire incident, which had lasted for just ten seconds, was witnessed by four other people at the house, two of whom later cut up the fallen tree for firewood.
Campbell, who had seen a similar phenomenon at the age of eleven at his grandmother’s house in Ohio, reported the incident to a physics professor at MIT. To his chagrin, his old teacher said that what he was describing was impossible, and that the sphere had been nothing but the afterimage of the initial flash on his retinas. No competent observer, he was informed, had ever witnessed ball lightning, the existence of which would not be widely acknowledged for decades.
The response infuriated him—he didn’t see how an afterimage could splinter a tree into toothpicks—and it only confirmed a growing suspicion. In college, he had been impressed by how little his instructors took for granted, but in practice, scientists could be as resistant to new ideas as anyone. When it came to challenging orthodoxy, he concluded, he would be on his own.
His departure from MIT had inserted a pause into his life. After returning briefly to his mother’s house, he had left on a trip for Europe. For two months, he explored Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany, returning to Paris by way of Holland before flying across the channel to London. He told Heinlein years later that he had been searching for social patterns: “My one advantage is that, at twenty, with remarkably sound physical constitution and an immense interest in anything and everything, plus a constitutional objection to wasting time sleeping, I was able to absorb at least two years’ worth of data. . . . I still haven’t sorted out all the stuff I soaked up then!”
In reality, his observations were about as perceptive as those of the average American male in his twenties. He found the Spanish childlike and “stupid,” though friendly, while in Paris, which he described as “the city where every pimp spoke at least six different languages,” he was relieved of his camera, watch, and fountain pen on three successive days. In an echo of what Hubbard had written about China, he concluded, “Paris itself is fine; too bad there are so many French in it.”
He was looking for alternatives to the traditions that he had spent most of his life trying to escape, but he also benefited from his family’s position, which gave him more options than most college dropouts. On his return, he was accepted by Duke University, stating that his intended occupation was “physics research.” As before, his father would cover the entire cost of his education.
After a short stay in Wilson, North Carolina, Campbell enrolled at Duke, where he was listed as a student in 1932, although he didn’t move to Durham until the following spring. His performance in his first semester, which consisted mostly of math and physics classes, was undistinguished—a B, two Cs, a D. But after an intensive summer course, he finally passed German, freeing him to pursue his interests without a language requirement hanging over his head.
He was searching for direction, and he was naturally drawn to Joseph B. Rhine, who was the most insistent questioner in sight. Rhine, who had established a lab for parapsychology at Duke, was best known for his statistical studies of telepathy, which he tested using the cards designed by the psychologist Karl Zener, with a circle, a cross, a set of wavy lines, a square, or a star. At the time of Campbell’s arrival, Rhine had allegedly obtained exceptional results from two students, but his findings were never convincingly replicated.
Campbell underwent runs with the Zener cards, but failed to demonstrate any psychic abilities—although he did become convinced of the existence of “the evil eye.” He never became close to Rhine, as he had with Norbert Wiener, but both left their mark on his work. Rhine would be frequently invoked in Campbell’s stories, as well as in those that he published by others, and the entire genre was subtly shaped by his undergraduate encounters with the paranormal.
Otherwise, he was rudderless, and he had mixed feelings about North Carolina, which wasn’t the sort of place where he could feel at home. Still, he explored it as thoroughly as he had in Europe, visiting family farms—“You can generally smell them before you see them”—and small towns. He also kept an eye on race relations, which were more visible here than they had been in New Jersey or Massachusetts, and his opinions on the subject began to grow silently inside of him.
Campbell was drifting away from physics. He later presented himself as an aspiring physicist who had been unable to find work in the Great Depression, but his transcript told a different story. In his last year at Duke, he took no science classes at all, with electives in English, philosophy, and religion. Apart from two As in philosophy, his grades were average, and it looked for all the world like the schedule of a student who was questioning his priorities.
A different writer might have worked out these issues in his fiction, and Campbell eventually did, but not in ways that were immediately visible. He had continued to write during his gap year between MIT and Duke, which saw the appearance of “The Derelicts of Ganymede,” “Invaders from the Infinite”—which reused the title of the story that Sloane had lost—and “The Electronic Siege.” None moved beyond the easy formulas that he had established, and he seemed interested mostly in keeping his name in print, as well as in the money.
Campbell’s only memorable effort from this period was “The Last Evolution,” which described the creation of a vast army of intelligent robots to turn back an invasion by extraterrestrials. It fails—mankind is annihilated—but the machines survive to defeat the aliens, and with their masters gone, they spread across the universe as the heirs of humanity. The story, which ran in Amazing, was the strongest work that he ever published under his own name, and it looked ahead to themes that would later become central to science fiction.
At Duke, he remained as mercenary an author as always, cranking out “Beyond the End of Space,” “The Battery of Hate,” and a chapter of Cosmos, a collaborative novel for a fanzine by seventeen different writers. “Space Rays,” which appeared in Wonder Stories, was so far-fetched that it inspired a rebuke in print from the editor Hugo Gernsback, and Campbell never forgot the slight. Yet most of these stories were undeniably poor. His heart wasn’t in it, any more than it was in his studies, and when he earned a bachelor of arts degree in physics, with a minor in math, he didn’t even attend his graduation ceremony.
When he left college in 1934, he entered one of the worst economies imaginable for recent graduates. Franklin D. Roosevelt had begun his first term as president the year before, and Campbell had been impressed by his policies. During a visit home, however, he had made the mistake of mentioning his views to his father, who demolished his notions in three minutes. It marked the last time that he held political beliefs that were even remotely progressive, and he came to despise Roosevelt, despite the black cigarette holder that they both affected.
Campbell’s future seemed just as uncertain as ever, but there was one important difference. He was no longer alone. Two years earlier, in the summer after his flight from MIT, he had married a young woman who would turn out to be his most important ally. She would play a pivotal role in his career and, by extension, in the history of science fiction as a whole, and in many ways, she remains the most intriguing figure in his life story.
DOÑA LOUISE STEWART STEBBINS WAS BORN IN OHIO IN 1913. HER PARENTS, GEORGE AND MOLLY Stebbins, divorced shortly thereafter, and she moved with her mother to the Boston area. Doña’s mother, a Canadian citizen, was her closest friend and confidante for most of her childhood, which appears to have been a lonely one. Her father wasn’t a part of her life, and she was set apart from her peers from an early age by her obvious wit, irony, and intelligence.
She was attractive but not conventionally pretty, with a long nose and dark complexion, although her background, like Campbell’s, was primarily Scottish and English
. Doña first encountered her future husband while attending a Latin high school in Waltham, but not even their children ever knew how they met. She was evidently the first woman with whom he was ever romantically involved, and years later, she only said to her daughter, “We were two lost souls looking for love.” They married after she graduated in 1931, and while she never legally changed her name, from the beginning, Campbell introduced her to everyone as Doña Stuart.
Doña Stebbins in her late teens.
Courtesy of Leslyn Randazzo
Decades afterward, with the benefit of hindsight, Campbell wrote, “I quit MIT at twenty-one and got married—to the wrong gal for me, too. Doña’s a very nice, basically sweet girl—there’s nothing wrong with her, any more than there’s anything wrong with a well-made left shoe on your right foot.” He also said that she disapproved of his writing and wanted him to enter respectable research. But he was speaking at a time when he was inclined to minimize her impact on his career, and he overlooked the remarkable patience that she demonstrated during their marriage, in which they endured countless hardships—many of his own creation—as a team.
They depended on each other enormously. By any standard, Doña was the first wholly positive female influence in Campbell’s life, apart from his sister, and despite their differences, they fulfilled each other. Campbell was drawn to her artistic and theatrical side, and he gave her the intellectual partner she had always wanted. She was smart, creative, and widely read, and he stimulated her as no one else ever would, as a friend remembered: “When his wife Doña was new, she would sit on a hassock at his feet in adoring puppy dog style, while he discoursed on the problems of the universe.”
In most respects, however, she was his equal, and she served as his ambassador to the world. Doña was as outgoing as Campbell was introverted, with a good singing voice and a sense of humor that came through in her letters. She was a talented homemaker who attended the Boston School of Cooking, as well as a cheerful hostess at parties, which her husband grudgingly tolerated. Doña also enjoyed a glass of beer in the evening, while Campbell claimed to rarely drink, saying that alcohol made him feel as if his brain “were walking in about two feet of water.”
They had their disagreements. Doña, Campbell said, had trouble dealing with conflict directly, and because she wouldn’t hold still for long enough to have a real conversation, they were unable to address any underlying issues: “She considered the proper thing to do with problems was to shove them out of sight in a closet somewhere and pretend they didn’t exist.” But he defended her faithfully, even against his family. When his mother tried to dominate Doña, as she did with most other people, Campbell put her savagely in her place.
Above all else, Doña—who wrote at least one unpublished story, “Beyond the Door,” when she was twenty—changed his writing, although it took years for the full implications to emerge. Campbell was a lousy speller and typist, and Doña took it on herself to retype his stories, silently correcting his spelling and grammar. She became his first reader, taking his father’s place, and he submitted ideas and openings for her approval. According to a friend who later knew them both well, Doña was a “sounding board” who reminded Campbell “that science was for people.” The man who said this was L. Ron Hubbard.
In 1932, while they were living in Wilson, North Carolina, Campbell—still smarting over Gernsback’s dismissal of “Space Rays”—began a new project. He had recently read the adventure novel The Red Gods Call, by C. E. Scoggins, which had awakened him to a new appreciation of tone. Campbell conceived of a story that started in a similar fashion, with its narrator picking up a hitchhiker who has returned from seven million years in the future, in an era when humanity has been robbed of all initiative by machines that fulfill its every need.
The result, with its evocation of “the lingering, dying glow of man’s twilight,” was haunting, atmospheric, and like nothing else that Campbell had ever written. There had been hints of it in the opening of “The Black Star Passes,” which elegiacally described a waning alien culture—but here, crucially, it was the human race. On some level, it was only revisiting themes that H. G. Wells had already explored, but by reintroducing a sense of melancholy to the pulps, it single-handedly ushered in the modern age of science fiction.
At first, however, it didn’t seem that the story he called “Twilight” would have any impact at all. Campbell worked on it for longer than usual, but it was turned down everywhere, even by Amazing. He set it aside, focusing in the meantime on an unsuccessful effort to unload a backlog of his unsold manuscripts on Wonder Stories, and nothing might ever have come of it without the encouragement of an editor named F. Orlin Tremaine.
In 1933, Tremaine had assumed the helm of Astounding Stories, after it was acquired from the bankrupt publisher William Clayton by the pulp powerhouse Street & Smith. He had no particular interest in science fiction, but he was a seasoned professional who knew how to build an audience, and he began by systematically courting the field’s top writers. Tremaine went aggressively after E. E. Smith, and the next name on his list was Campbell’s.
When Tremaine reached out to him, Campbell had a story ready to go. A serial called The Mightiest Machine had been out for consideration with Amazing for a full year without being accepted. He pulled it and sent it to Tremaine, who took it at once—and Campbell was pleased to find that the editor paid on acceptance, rather than publication. It was slated to run in five installments, starting in the December 1934 issue, and its appearance was treated as a major event, with an announcement in the magazine proclaiming, “And Now Campbell!”
For better or worse, it was the epitome of the superscience genre. Its hero, Aarn Munro, was born on Jupiter, granting him superhuman strength to go with his enormous intelligence. When he and his friends stumble across a war between two alien cultures, they pick sides based solely on one race’s devilish appearance—a notion that Arthur C. Clarke would later borrow for Childhood’s End—and deploy an entire moon as a weapon. It was comparatively brisk, but only slightly more readable than usual, and cheerfully accepting of genocide on a planetary scale.
Tremaine liked “Twilight” as well, but he was concerned that its publication alongside The Mightiest Machine would confuse readers, since it was so different from the author’s previous work. He asked Campbell to use a pseudonym, which he did, choosing a pen name that would double as a private tribute to the most important person in his life. When it appeared in the November issue, it was credited to Don A. Stuart. A second story under that name, “Atomic Power,” came out the following month, and before long, Tremaine could write in the magazine that Stuart had emerged as a reader favorite “almost overnight.”
In the years that followed, Campbell, who otherwise would have been happy to recycle his stock plots forever, grew considerably as a writer. It was a transformation that he owed to two people. One was Doña, who was unlikely to have found his superscience stories particularly interesting. When she replaced his father as his reader of choice, she nudged him toward fiction that was more conscious of style and theme. Their collaboration, if not literal, was very meaningful, and they often worked together, smoking, on two typewriters set side by side.
His other major influence was Tremaine, who forced Campbell to evolve by closing off certain avenues while encouraging others. He personally preferred works of the Stuart type, and by rejecting all of Campbell’s superscience stories, including the sequels to The Mightiest Machine, he offered a model of an editor’s guiding hand. Campbell seethed at this, but he never forgot it. Occasionally, he would make a splash with a gimmick story—“The Irrelevant,” which he published under the name Karl van Campen, led to a scientific debate in the letters column that ran for months—but he found his greatest success with stories that focused on mood and atmosphere.
It led to a profound change in his published work. His superscience stories, which he had written for his father, had often shared the same basic plot. A lone genius develops
atomic power and uses it to build a spacecraft, drawing on the limitless resources of a wealthy benefactor. After a loving description of the ship, he encounters a war between two alien races, takes sides without hesitation, and triumphs through his superior weaponry. Technology was portrayed as an unalloyed good, while the heroic scientist or engineer—the avatar of the technocratic movement of the early thirties—was elevated to the status of a god.
In the Don A. Stuart stories, Campbell interrogated his previous assumptions with an intensity that recalled the boy who had been forced to question every statement that his mother made. He described them as “a dirty, underhanded crack at the pretensions of science fiction—dressed in the most accepted terms of science fiction,” and they were aware of the limits of technology, which could deprive mankind of its most precious qualities—its curiosity and initiative. The shift in tone has often been interpreted as a response to the Great Depression, but in fact, he engaged in both modes simultaneously, and it was Tremaine who favored one over the other.
Readers responded strongly to the ambivalence of the Stuart stories, which resonated with issues of personal and cultural insecurity, even as the author was about to enter the most frustrating chapter of his life. In one of his defenses of “The Irrelevant”—which appeared on the same page of the magazine as the first letter from a fan named Isaac Asimov—he mentioned offhandedly, “I’m doing some work now in connection with automobiles.” This was true, but not entirely forthcoming. Campbell, who had studied physics at MIT, was working as a car salesman at MacKenzie Motors in Brighton, Massachusetts.
AFTER CAMPBELL GRADUATED FROM DUKE IN 1934, HE AND DOÑA HAD MOVED TO THE BOSTON area, where they became friends with a prominent science fiction fan named Robert Swisher and his wife, Frances. Their apartment in Cambridge was just a short walk from MIT, but the gap between Campbell’s aspirations as an undergraduate and his current situation could hardly have seemed more stark. He wanted to move into research work, but no jobs were available, so he ended up selling the Ford V8 when he couldn’t afford a new car of his own.
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