In all likelihood, the ultimatum was inspired less by poor numbers—Astounding was still the leading title in its field—than by a desire to fill out the magazine’s inventory. Hubbard and Burks were known for generating copy on demand, and they had both been officers of the American Fiction Guild, which gave them useful connections to other writers. In an editor’s note that appeared a few months later, Campbell confirmed that Hubbard’s debut was part of “the effort to get the best stories of the science fiction type by the best authors available.”
Initially, however, the partnership seemed like a step backward. In a letter dated April 5, 1938, Campbell accused his new writer, whom he addressed as “Hubbard Snubbard,” of deliberately avoiding him, and Hubbard had misgivings of his own. He wasn’t a science fiction fan—he later wrote that he was “quite ignorant of the field and regarded it, in fact, a bit diffidently”—and his only work of speculative fiction, aside from The Secret of Treasure Island, had been “The Death Flyer,” a throwaway about a ghost train. But he was happy to take work wherever he could find it, and within a few weeks, he had sent in his first submission.
At first, Campbell wasn’t sure how he felt about “The Dangerous Dimension,” a work of borderline fantasy about a scientist who discovers an equation that teleports him wherever he thinks, willingly or otherwise. It was amusing, but little else, and it made the editor uncomfortable—he repeatedly asked his friends and family what they thought of it, and in his note on the upcoming issue, he mentioned every writer except Hubbard. Yet the response was positive. It introduced a welcome note of humor, and in the monthly readers’ poll, the Analytical Laboratory, it placed first in fiction, above the final installment of “The Legion of Time.”
This reaction, more than anything else, reconciled Campbell to Hubbard, whose name appeared on the cover two months later with “The Tramp.” Like “The Dangerous Dimension,” it featured a weak, milquetoast lead who couldn’t have been further from the heroes of Hubbard’s adventure fiction—which hinted, perhaps, at his secret opinion of his audience. But the relationship between the two men had thawed just in time. After a corporate reorganization, Blackwell and Tremaine were fired in May, leaving Campbell with complete control of the magazine. If he had still wanted to drop Hubbard, he could have—but he didn’t.
It helped that Campbell had discovered a better venue for Hubbard’s talents. The idea of a companion fantasy magazine had been kicked around by Tremaine, who spoke of starting “a weird or occult mag,” and in 1938, Campbell took the first serious steps toward launching it. He wrote to authors asking for fantasy, but he didn’t mention the new title. Instead, he spread a rumor that he was following up on the success of stories like “The Dangerous Dimension,” which led Hubbard to believe that the magazine, Unknown, had been founded expressly for him.
In reality, the true catalyst was an extraordinary novel titled Forbidden Acres, by Eric Frank Russell, a writer based in Liverpool. It was a wild fantasy, inspired by the writings of Charles Fort, that proposed that countless unexplained events were the work of a race called the Vitons, who took the form of ball lightning and fed on human fear. After receiving a requested rewrite, Campbell thought that it was the best story that he had read in a decade—it still deserves to be ranked as one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written—and it was published as Sinister Barrier in the inaugural issue of Unknown, which was dated March 1939.
The following month, the lead novel was Hubbard’s The Ultimate Adventure, which introduced a formula that its author would frequently exploit—an ordinary man magically plunged into a story straight out of The Arabian Nights. Using a protagonist from the real world made it easier to deliver exposition, but it also reflected a fascination with personal transformation that Hubbard shared with Campbell. Much of his work parodied the visions of change that were on the verge of becoming central to science fiction, but he also wouldn’t have taken so naturally to Unknown if he hadn’t had so much in common with its editor.
Hubbard was cultivating Campbell, as he did with other useful contacts, and he began to pay visits to the editor’s home, filling his ears with stories about running a cruise ship in the Caribbean and serving with the U.S. Marines in China. “Ron can do almost anything extraordinarily well,” Campbell wrote to Swisher, and a mutual respect was growing on both sides—when Hubbard visited a university science department, he found that everyone there wanted to ask him about Campbell.
Yet there was one aspect of his life that he kept secret. On New Year’s Day, 1938, while undergoing a dental operation under anesthesia, Hubbard had felt himself leaving his body. Rising as a spirit from his chair, he drifted toward a gate behind which lay the answers to all of mankind’s questions, but before he could reach the final revelation, he was pulled back. Opening his eyes, he asked, “I was dead, wasn’t I?” And he was allegedly told that his heart had indeed stopped beating.
The vision faded, and he spent several days trying in vain to recover it. At last, early one morning, he awoke with the memory of what he had seen. Working like a madman, he produced a draft of over two hundred pages. It took the form of a fable about a sage from the time of The Arabian Nights who tried to distill all of human wisdom into one book, cutting it down to a tenth of its length, then to one line, and finally to a single word: SURVIVE.
When Hubbard finished the manuscript, which he titled Excalibur or The One Command, he cabled publishers, telling them to meet him in Penn Station to bid for the rights. Hubbard later claimed to have withdrawn the book after the first six people who read it went insane, while another jumped from the window of an office tower, and he wrote of his ambitions to Polly:
Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. . . . I do know that I could form a political platform, for instance, which would encompass the support of the unemployed, the industrialist and the clerk and day laborer all at one and the same time.
He showed it to Arthur J. Burks, who recalled, “It was the strangest book I ever read. Reading it seemed to open queer windows in the bodies of everyone one thereafter met. It was a squirmy, self-revealing book.” Yet Hubbard didn’t mention it to Campbell, perhaps because he suspected that the editor would try to take control of the project—a hunch that later turned out to be more than justified.
Years afterward, Hubbard implied that such stories as “The Dangerous Dimension” reflected his interest in philosophy: “I didn’t tell John that the idea was actually as old as Buddha.” In fact, his published fiction showed minimal regard for ideas, and he was content to work within the pulps, where he became popular among fans. One raved in a letter to Unknown, “Give me the L. Ron Hubbard fairy tale any time and I’m happy.” In the following issue, he added: “With Hubbard . . . I consider anything below perfect a letdown.” The reader who wrote these words was Isaac Asimov.
IN THE FALL OF 1935, ON HIS FIRST DAY AT CITY COLLEGE, ASIMOV TOOK TWO EXAMS. THE FIRST was a physical. With his bad complexion and scrawny build, Asimov was classified as “poorly developed”—the only student in his group to earn that designation. The second was an intelligence test. His score was off the charts, and the college wrote an astonished letter asking him to report back for further testing. By then, Asimov was already gone. He had been there for a total of three days.
Asimov had assumed that he wouldn’t be able to afford Seth Low Junior College, the Columbia University affiliate in Brooklyn, but he landed a scholarship and a job with the National Youth Administration. A year after he enrolled, Seth Low closed, and he was transferred to the main campus of Columbia, in Morningside Heights. He still had to come back in the afternoon to work at the candy store, however, and he failed to make any friends.
In December 1936, his father bought a new store in Park Slope. The family moved into a railroad apartment across the street, with their rooms laid out in a line: Asimov, his sister, Marci
a—whom he constantly annoyed with his wisecracks—and the bedroom that his mother shared with his brother, Stanley. The store was doing well, so he didn’t have to worry about a summer job, and the uninterrupted stretch of time got him thinking about fiction again. He began a time travel story, “Cosmic Corkscrew,” but abandoned it halfway through.
Asimov was also writing every month to Brass Tacks, stating in one letter, “When we want science fiction, we don’t want swooning dames.” His nervousness around girls—he had never been on a date—could express itself as hostility, as it did throughout the fan community, and in a later issue, he added, “Let me point out that women never affected the world directly. They always grabbed hold of some poor, innocent man, worked their insidious wiles on him . . . and then affected history through him.” Asimov concluded that he should stop before he created a “vendetta” of all the female fans in the country: “There must be at least twenty of them!”
Astounding arrived at the store on the third Tuesday of each month, and Asimov was always ready to slice open the bundle as soon as it came. On May 10, 1938, it didn’t appear. Fearing that it had been canceled, he called Street & Smith. Whoever answered the phone informed him that it was still being published, but he spent the next week staring at the magazine rack with dread—and on the following Tuesday, sure enough, there was no sign of it.
He made a fateful decision. After obtaining permission from his mother to take two hours off, he boarded the train to Manhattan. He was eighteen years old, but it was one of the first times that he had ventured into the city by himself, except for school—and if he had lived even as far away as Staten Island, it might never have occurred to him to go at all. When he arrived, he confirmed that the publication date was now the third Friday of each month, and he immediately went home again.
The episode seemed like a minor one, but it made the magazine feel closer in his imagination, and he realized that he wasn’t content with just being a fan—he wanted to be a writer. By now, his junior year was over, and he had the summer off. Pulling out “Cosmic Corkscrew,” he noticed that part of it was reminiscent of “Dead Knowledge,” by Don A. Stuart, but he decided that it wasn’t worth worrying about the similarities, and he finished it.
Like Pohl, he wondered if it might not be better to hand it over in person. As it happened, the current issue was late again, which gave him an excuse to pay another visit. He consulted his father, who advised him to put the manuscript directly into Campbell’s hands, as well as to shave and put on a good suit. Asimov decided to compromise—he shaved, but he didn’t change clothes—and then he headed for the train. It was June 21, 1938.
At Street & Smith, he was told that the magazine was now slated to come out on the fourth Friday of the month. From there, he went to find the editor, and he was astonished when the receptionist said, “Mr. Campbell will see you.”
Following her directions, Asimov made his way through a storage room filled with stacks of magazines and rolls of paper. He finally arrived at the rear office, where he saw Campbell—and probably Tarrant—for the first time.
Campbell was friendly. He liked having an audience, and he recognized the skinny, pimpled fan’s name from Brass Tacks. Asimov had letters in the July and August issues, and when he eagerly pointed them out in the advance copies on the editor’s desk, Campbell only smiled. “I know.”
They talked for more than an hour. Campbell revealed that he was Don A. Stuart, whose stories Asimov hadn’t liked, and promised to read “Cosmic Corkscrew.” Two days later, Asimov received a polite rejection that cited its slow beginning and poor dialogue. But he was overjoyed, and he began another submission, mostly for the excuse to visit Campbell again.
Asimov went back on July 18 with “Stowaway,” a story about alien worms that killed using magnetic fields. When he asked hesitantly if it was all right to keep bringing his work in person, Campbell told him that it was fine, as long as he didn’t come when they were laying out an issue. He refused to say when this was, however, and Asimov suspected that the editor just wanted to have an excuse whenever he didn’t feel like seeing him. His second effort was bounced as well, but Asimov wrote in his diary, “It was the nicest possible rejection you could imagine.”
At the end of July, Asimov finished “Marooned Off Vesta.” It was a scientific problem story—about astronauts coping with their damaged ship—of the kind that later came to dominate the magazine, and Asimov, whose rational personality drew him to mysteries and puzzles, latched on to it instinctively. Reasoning that one submission each month was plenty, he waited until August to deliver it. At the office, Campbell, who had been on vacation, indicated a stack of manuscripts. “I’ve got to skim over these and put aside the hopeless ones for rejection.”
Asimov wondered if there might be a hidden message there. “Is that personal?”
Campbell regarded the younger man kindly. “No. I don’t consider you hopeless.”
But the story was soon back in Asimov’s hands. Campbell later wrote that he thought it was “a sound, and pretty fair piece of work, just lacking humanity,” but the curt rejection gave Asimov a crisis of confidence. He sent it to Amazing, even though he considered the magazine “trash,” and felt that his visits with Campbell were all that was keeping him going.
On October 22, Asimov returned home from school to find his mother and sister smiling. Going upstairs, he learned that he had received a letter—which his father had blithely gone ahead and opened—from Raymond Palmer of Amazing. He was buying “Marooned Off Vesta.”
It was Asimov’s first sale. The money came to sixty-four dollars, or enough to pay for a full month’s tuition. Asimov wrote about it proudly to the author Clifford Simak, with whom he was corresponding. Simak congratulated him, but he also disclosed that he had just sold a serial to Campbell for more than five hundred dollars. Astounding, Asimov saw, remained the top of the market.
And he was still unable to break in. When Campbell told him that one of his stories was “hackneyed,” Asimov wrote back to apologize. Elsewhere, Campbell noted that his work was “definitely improving, especially where you are not straining for effect,” but he also said that it lacked an indefinable “umph.” Asimov continued his monthly visits—he was speaking to Campbell by now at greater length than he did to his own father—but he was feeling discouraged.
For his job with the National Youth Administration, he had been assigned to the sociologist Bernhard J. Stern, who asked him to type up excerpts from books that described opposition to technological change. It occurred to Asimov that the same reaction might apply to spaceflight, and he submitted the resulting story, “Ad Astra,” before Christmas. A week later, he received an invitation to discuss it after the holidays. He worked himself into a state of frenzied anticipation, and he went to see Campbell on the first possible day, which was January 5, 1939.
Campbell didn’t want to buy the story outright, but he was intrigued by the notion of resistance to space travel, and he asked Asimov to revise it with that theme in mind. Asimov was nervous, but he was encouraged by the appearance of “Marooned Off Vesta” in Amazing, in which he described himself in an author’s note: “I am of medium height, dark, and my mother thinks I’m handsome. . . . I hope and hope again that this first story does not prove to be a flash in the pan.”
The revision of “Ad Astra” took him three weeks, interrupted by the distraction of his first fistfight, with a local kid who left him “properly banged up.” It had the same flat dialogue and characters as all of his early work, but the idea of a reaction against science—and the implication that it followed a historical cycle—was exactly the kind of concept that Campbell loved to explore. Asimov also allowed one character to express his anxieties about the mounting tensions in Europe: “It was a time of political chaos and international anarchy; a suicidal, brainless, insane period—and it culminated in the Second World War.”
And it was enough. One week after Asimov brought Campbell the rewrite, his father called
from downstairs, “Isaac, a check!” There was no letter. When Campbell bought a story, he sent the payment alone, and “Ad Astra,” his ninth submission, had sold for sixty-nine dollars. He was nineteen years old.
Much later, Asimov asked Campbell why he had encouraged him, saying that it must have seemed impossible. Campbell agreed: “Yes, it was impossible. On the other hand, I saw something in you. You were eager and listened and I knew you wouldn’t quit no matter how many rejections I handed you.” And his eagerness was visible to everyone, including Tarrant, who remembered how the young Asimov “sat in adoring admiration of Campbell, drinking in every word he said.”
Campbell had also encouraged Asimov as much for what he represented as for what he was in himself. The editor had successfully given ideas to established writers, but he wondered whether it might be possible to build an author from the ground up, and Asimov came along at just the right time to serve as an experimental subject. In a letter, Campbell referred to him as “the fan who’s been trying to be a writer,” which was precisely how he saw him—as a representative, located conveniently nearby, of a rising generation of fans who had grown up with the magazine.
It didn’t occur to him to lavish the same attention on Pohl, who never sold Campbell a story that he wrote on his own. Pohl was just as available and arguably more promising, but he was also pushy, aggressive, and manifestly eager to take the editor’s place. Asimov was more deferential, recalling of Campbell, “I could endure him. . . . I was fortunate in the sense that he was in some ways a lot like my father.” He would submit to an apprenticeship that no professional would tolerate, and the editor began to think of other ways to put him to use.
In the meantime, Campbell rejected “Robbie,” Asimov’s first attempt at a robot story, and there was also the slight problem of his name. Asimov had heard that the fan Milton A. Rothman, who had sold two stories to Campbell, had been asked to use the pseudonym Lee Gregor, which he was advised would be more acceptable to readers. Asimov never felt the slightest hint of personal anti-Semitism in their interactions, but it was evident that Campbell generally regarded gentile names—and their bearers—as preferable to the alternative.
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