Yet he was a natural salesman—he would be peddling one idea or another for most of his life—and he approached it as another game to solve. After leaving the dealership, he worked for an air-conditioning company in Boston. He convinced a restaurant to buy fans and leave its windows open to create a pleasant flow of air, advertising the result with his most profitable piece of writing from that year: “Always a Breeze.” In another sales position, he sold so many gas heaters that it left the company with more orders than it could fill, which put him out of a job.
His father gave them some money, but Campbell still had to write to make ends meet. In “The Machine,” “The Invaders,” and “Rebellion,” he returned to his favorite theme—the death of initiative—and he produced three unusually bleak stories, “Blindness,” “The Escape,” and “Night,” all of which were credited to Don A. Stuart. He also clung to his earlier mode in “Conquest of the Planets” and the unpublished “All,” which imagined an invasion of the United States by Asia. His most ambitious effort was The Moon Is Hell, a genuine hard science fiction novel about an expedition stranded on the far side of the moon, and although it went unsold, it remained at the back of his mind, informing his private sense of what the genre might be.
In the end, he never sold another story under his own name to Tremaine, who asked him instead to write a series of articles on the solar system. It was an influential piece of popular science that impressed Asimov and Heinlein, among others, and it kept his byline alive, while providing some badly needed income. He and Doña had left for New Jersey in February 1936, with their car threatening to break down for the entire drive. After staying briefly with his mother in Orange, they made their way to Hoboken and settled at last in New Brunswick.
Doña called it “a factory town” and “a terrible hole.” Their apartment was tiny, with hideous mahogany furniture, and their finances were equally dismal. Street & Smith was culling its titles, and Tremaine, who had to keep costs down to avoid attracting attention, wasn’t sending any checks. Campbell had tried unsuccessfully to get a job at Wonder Stories, and he was casting about for technical writing positions when he landed an offer from International Motors, better known as Mack Truck. His title, he proudly announced, was “Experimental Engineer.”
In reality, Campbell was a secretary, drafting memos for a supervisor for whom he worked for two days on a single letter, prompting Doña to observe, “Poor John, who has spent seven years or so making two words do where one is sufficient.” He hoped to turn it into a research role—he still dreamed of becoming an inventor—but no such opportunity presented itself, and his work left him too exhausted at night to do any writing of his own.
Money was a constant concern. After complaining once too often to their landlord in New Brunswick about the lack of heat, the couple was evicted. They were down to their last five dollars, and they spent all day looking for a new place, with Doña’s spirits growing steadily lower. When they slunk back home, they found, miraculously, that Tremaine had sent a check for “Frictional Losses,” an alien conquest story most notable for its anticipation of kamikaze attacks by the Japanese.
The reprieve was brief. Mack Truck was reducing overhead, and in late April, Campbell was laid off. During this dark period, he wrote two of his best stories, “Elimination,” about a machine that allows the user to preview the decision points of his own future, and “Forgetfulness,” in which mankind abandons its technology in favor of a life of the mind. Campbell later wrote that the latter story came directly out of his “rejection of an up-till-then idea that I wanted to be the Great Inventor.” It was a fantasy that seemed increasingly out of reach.
Swallowing his pride, Campbell decided to leverage his family connections, reaching out to his father and to his uncle, Samuel B. Pettengill, an Indiana congressman who was married to his mother’s twin sister. In the meantime, they survived on as little as possible. It was a hot summer, and they spent evenings at a beer garden in New York, where Doña ordered one drink, Campbell stuck with water, and they asked the singer to perform “Die Lorelei.” Tremaine was bouncing all his stories “with a nasty little sneer,” but Doña maintained her sense of humor: “I’m beginning to get restless. We haven’t moved in over a month!”
In June, thanks to his uncle’s efforts, Campbell found work at the Pioneer Instrument Company, a manufacturer of electronic equipment for ships. They moved back to Hoboken, where he started punching a time clock. Technically, he was in research, but in practice, the job meant walking seventy blocks to fetch machinery or dipping pressure gauges into kerosene that was kept below freezing with dry ice. It was painful, tedious work, and it couldn’t have been further from the ideal of engineering that he had described so often in his stories.
His employers were unimpressed by his low “tweezer dexterity,” and Campbell quit after two months. Remarkably, he found a new job right away at the chemical firm Carleton Ellis, where he rewrote stacks of abstracts for the second volume of The Chemistry of Petroleum Derivatives. The job allowed them to move to a nicer place in Orange, but Campbell grew bored. After failing to find any teaching positions, he left anyway in February 1937. He was still writing, selling the unremarkable story “Uncertainty,” but his financial difficulties contributed to his belief, which he would later share with his authors, that fiction was no way to make a living.
Yet he was growing as an artist. After a conversation with a chemist, he came up with the idea of a creature that could change itself into any living being. The result was “Imitation,” his first attempt at a humorous story, in which two fugitives named Penton and Blake wrangle with a species of shape-shifting alien. It was bought by Mort Weisinger of Thrilling Wonder Stories, who retitled it “Brain Stealers of Mars,” and Campbell followed it with three sequels—“The Double Minds,” “The Immortality Seekers,” and “The Tenth World”—that amounted to the most likable work that ever appeared under his real name.
“The Double Minds” also looked ahead by describing a science of psychology that allowed both halves of the brain to work together. In an earlier story, Campbell had written that “no man in all history ever used even half of the thinking part of his brain,” and he expanded on this “pet idea” in an author’s note: “The total capacity of the mind, even at present, is to all intents and purposes, infinite. Could the full equipment be hooked into a functioning unit, the resulting intelligence should be able to conquer a world without much difficulty.”
He found time for an excellent novella, “Out of Night,” which depicted the conquest of mankind by an alien matriarchy—but a different sort of extraterrestrial formed the basis of the work that would ensure his lasting fame, to the point that it threatened to overshadow all of his later accomplishments. It occurred to him that “Brain Stealers of Mars” could be rewritten as a horror story set on Earth, playing up the idea, which was left implicit in the original, that no one could be trusted. Once he situated it in Antarctica and wrote the first scene, he said, the rest was easy.
In fact, he worked hard on the story that he called “Frozen Hell,” generating five false starts and cutting an opening section of more than forty pages. He based the setting on a book by the explorer Richard Byrd, but he may also have been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” which had been serialized in Astounding. Campbell was no fan of Lovecraft’s—particularly of his trick of hinting at terrors “too frightful to mention”—but he was drawn to the challenge of depicting horrors that others left undescribed, and it gave him more pleasure than anything else he had ever written: “Doña says I clicked.”
And he had. It would ultimately appear in Astounding as “Who Goes There?,” and it remains the greatest science fiction suspense story of all time, with iconic scenes—as the characters confront the alien killer in their midst—that have lost none of their power. The premise was so good that Campbell was unable to resist it, although he was pointedly uninterested in exploring its philosophical implications, perhaps beca
use it reminded him of his childhood. Years later, he quoted the line: “We’ve got monsters, madmen, and murderers. Any more ‘M’s’ you can think of?” Campbell added sardonically, “M, my friend, stands for ‘mother!’ She belonged.”
But this all lay in the future. Campbell was still revising the story when he was felled by an attack of appendicitis in July 1937. The operation lasted for hours, and when the anesthetic wore off prematurely, he heard the doctors talking over his helpless body—an unpleasant experience that would later contribute to his interest in dianetics. For now, it left him depressed, unable to climb stairs more than once a day, and even deeper in debt than before.
He was distracted by rumors at Street & Smith. The firm’s president had died in 1933, leading to a series of estate disputes. In September, ten titles were dropped, and the following month, Tremaine was promoted to managing editor, with oversight of multiple magazines—which pointed to another possible development. As Campbell wrote to his friend Robert Swisher on October 4, “But Tremaine, while able to keep a watchful, fatherly eye over Astounding, his pet, will not be in direct charge of it. Who will be, I don’t know yet.”
At that point, Campbell had no apparent interest in a magazine job. He was on good terms with Tremaine—he had finished a long story, “Dead Knowledge,” in six days to fill a gap in inventory—and he planned to submit “Frozen Hell” soon. But he was still focused on finding a technical writing position, and if it ever occurred to him to hope for anything more, he kept it to himself.
What happened next was something that no one could have foreseen, with Tremaine playing the role of one of the improbable benefactors in his stories. On October 5, Campbell wrote to Swisher on the letterhead of Astounding. The letter just said, “Hiya, Bob!” And it was signed “John W. Campbell, Editor.”
Campbell had stumbled, unbelievably, into the job that he had been born to have—and his talent, which was undeniable, was less important than the fact that he was available. He was always hanging around the office; he was a dependable writer with a loyal following; and he was in a position to start right away. His background in technical writing and editing may have played a role, but above all else, it was a stroke of luck—and far from the last—without which the history of science fiction might have unfolded along utterly different lines.
At twenty-seven, Campbell couldn’t have known any of this, but he knew what he had in Astounding. It was the perfect outlet for all of his frustrated ambitions, and he was bursting with ideas. For now, some would remain unfulfilled—Tremaine retained editorial control, and a backlog of stories still had to be published. But one change became visible almost at once. A few months later, when the March 1938 issue arrived at the candy store in Brooklyn, Isaac Asimov saw with approval that its title was no longer Astounding Stories. Now it was Astounding Science Fiction.
II.
Golden Age
1937–1941
I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. . . . Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “NATURE”
4.
Brass Tacks
1937–1939
There are times of evolutionary stress that have immensely hastened developments. Now I claim that this is, and will continue to be, such a time.
—ARTHUR MCCANN, IN A LETTER TO ASTOUNDING, APRIL 1938
For readers of Astounding Science Fiction in the late thirties, the name of Arthur McCann would have been a familiar one. McCann was described as a Harvard-educated endocrinologist, originally from the Midwest, “a tall, rather thin, good-natured, easy-going guy.” He contributed nonfiction articles and filler pieces to the magazine, and he became a regular presence in Brass Tacks, the letters column, often to respond to a point that the new editor had made.
In fact, he never existed. McCann was an alter ego for Campbell, named after an ancestor on his mother’s side, that he assumed whenever he wanted to write an unofficial editorial or nudge the conversation in a particular direction. In April 1938, he used it for a letter that amounted to a declaration of principles that he would follow for decades: “The conditions [man] tries to adjust to are going to change, and change so darned fast that he never will actually adjust to a given set of conditions. He’ll have to adjust in a different way: he’ll adjust to an environment of change.”
What was left unstated was the important point that the subjects of this transformation would be the readers of Astounding itself. It was an impossibly ambitious agenda, and it was built on a foundation that Campbell never could have made on his own. He had stumbled into the editorship after the magazine had reached a position of unprecedented strength, and much of what followed might have occurred without him, if not nearly in the same form. The groundwork had been laid by others—and when he took over, it was as if he had been entrusted with a spacecraft at the precise instant that it was ready to make its next leap into the unknown.
TO MOST OUTSIDERS, CAMPBELL’S NEW JOB WOULD HAVE SEEMED ANYTHING BUT GLAMOROUS. THE offices of Street & Smith were housed in a decaying hulk of a building—actually several older structures that had been joined together—on Seventh Avenue and West Seventeenth Street, not far from a women’s prison. Campbell took the train and ferry from Orange, New Jersey, and when he arrived, he went through a side entrance, where he had to punch a time clock. As the floor vibrated underfoot from the printing press, he headed for an ancient elevator, which he operated by yanking a rope, and rode it up to a storage level filled with massive rolls of paper.
At the rear, next to the office occupied by John Nanovic, the editor of Doc Savage, was a tiny room with two desks and a spare chair for visitors. This was where Campbell would be stationed for years. Because of all the paper, smoking was officially forbidden, and he learned to hide the copper ashtray in his rolltop desk whenever the fire inspector paid a visit. He also suffered from a chronic sinus condition, giving him “a continuous very mild sniffle,” and he began to keep a vaporizer on hand, using it to periodically spray his nostrils.
Campbell was feeling his way into a magazine that had spent most of its existence in a state of transition. Its founder, William Clayton, was a publisher whose company had put out thirteen titles in the genres of love, adventure, western, and detective fiction. The pulps, named after their cheap, rough paper, were a hugely successful form of mass entertainment—the most popular sold a million copies each month, and a prolific writer could make a living by cranking out stories—and Clayton’s offerings, including Air Adventures and Danger Trail, all had the garish painted covers that had become synonymous with the field.
For reasons of economy, the covers for all thirteen magazines were printed each month on the same enormous sheet of paper, which had four rows and four columns, leaving it with three blank spaces. In 1929, as Clayton looked at the proofs in his office, he realized that the empty areas, which were going to waste, could be used to print three more covers—the most expensive part—at minimal cost. He mentioned this to the editor Harry Bates, who pitched the title Astounding Stories of Super-Science. A year after its launch, in 1931, it became Astounding Stories.
The market was already there. In 1908, Hugo Gernsback, who had recently emigrated from Luxembourg, started Modern Electrics to educate prospective customers of his radio supply business, with fiction—he came to call it “scientifiction”—that described the inventions of the future. Eighteen years later, he launched Amazing Stories, which was the first pure science fiction magazine. Its main attraction was the cover art by Frank R. Paul, who defined the look of the entire genre, and its contents were mostly unremarkable. As Theodore Sturgeon said decades afterward, “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud.”
Th
is was certainly true of Amazing, but there were a few noteworthy efforts, including The Skylark of Space and the Buck Rogers series. Its circulation eventually rose to over 100,000, but it remained on financially shaky ground, and Gernsback was eventually forced out of his own company, rebounding with a family of titles known collectively as Wonder Stories. Its unquestioned peak was “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley Weinbaum, whose untimely death in 1935 prompted Asimov to write later, “If Weinbaum had lived . . . there would have been no Campbell revolution. All that Campbell could have done would have been to reinforce what would undoubtedly have come to be called ‘the Weinbaum revolution.’ ”
In the meantime, Astounding had appeared, with a debut issue dated January 1930. It cost twenty cents, a nickel cheaper than Amazing or Wonder Stories, and unlike its competitors, which had the large format of the “slicks,” it was the same small size as the titles with which it shared its proof sheet, as well as its literary qualities. Harry Bates wasn’t a science fiction fan, but a professional editor going after an existing audience, and despite its obligatory nods to Gernsback’s educational goals, Astounding was pure pulp—its writers simply transferred their stock western or war stories to space, and its first cover showed a hero in a flight suit punching out a gigantic bug.
Forty years later, when Asimov recalled this period, he couldn’t think of a single story worth remembering. In time, Bates might have been able to turn it into something special—the magazine paid promptly and well, which naturally drew the best authors—but it was hitched to the sinking ship of Clayton, whose company suffered from financial problems that had nothing to do with any one title’s performance. Sensing that the clock was ticking, Bates tried a series of frantic innovations. He wrote editorials on science, published nonfiction, included a ballot for story grades, and promised to focus more on ideas and less on action, in response to reader demand.
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