Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  At their first meeting, Hubbard struck Heinlein as “a red-headed boy” with whom he shared many opinions: “He is our kind of people in every possible way.” During the party, Hubbard and Campbell hashed out a plot together, with the editor concluding, “No, I know you. Once you’ve talked out a story you’re through with it. You won’t bother with it.” Hubbard decided to prove him wrong. After leaving the apartment that night, he went to the train at Penn Station. He wrote the entire story—probably “One Was Stubborn”—on the way home to Washington, mailing the first half from Chicago and the second from Seattle.

  On June 2, Heinlein attended a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction League and hosted the Futurians, although Asimov—who was moping over the departure of a college crush—was absent. A week later, Campbell proposed that Heinlein rewrite “All,” the editor’s unpublished story about the conquest of America by an Asian empire. Since it wouldn’t fit into his future history, Campbell advised him to use a pseudonym—Anson MacDonald—based in part on Leslyn’s maiden name, much as the editor had once written as Don A. Stuart.

  Heinlein agreed, and he gave Campbell a copy of For Us, the Living. He and Leslyn left on June 14. In just a few weeks, they had developed a powerful bond with the Campbells, and the feeling that something significant had passed between them was shared on both sides. As Doña wrote to them much later, “Our personal contact was of such short duration—why or rather how did we come to feel so strongly about you, individually and as a couple?”

  ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 23, 1940, DOÑA’S WATER BROKE WHILE SHE WAS ALONE AT HOME. She was seven months pregnant. They had recently moved to Maple Hill Farms, a housing development in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. It was their first house, with an enclosed porch, two bedrooms half a flight up, and a basement that soon became cluttered with equipment from Campbell’s electronics hobby—he was working on an improved kind of fuel battery.

  For several months, they had been gardening, refinishing furniture, and preparing for the family that they had postponed, although they failed to make many friends. Campbell wrote to Heinlein, “My personality is too cold. . . . Friendship with me seems to require a sort of mutual, friendly respect, something I can build up only in certain limited types of people. . . . Doña doesn’t belong to the Ladies Bridge Club; it would bore her silly. . . . As far as I can make out, normal people . . . are unhappy, uncomfortable, in the presence of genuine intensity of any sort.”

  Campbell may have been projecting onto Doña, who was considerably more social than he was—but when she felt her water break, “scaring the living daylights out of her,” she didn’t know any of their neighbors well enough to ask for help. Fortunately, Campbell had a cousin nearby who drove her to Orange Memorial Hospital. Before the pregnancy, Doña had suffered from health issues—a year earlier, after an operation for a uterine cyst, she had been hospitalized for weeks. Now she was experiencing false labor, and both she and her husband were terrified for the baby.

  After she didn’t give birth after her fourth day at the hospital, she was sent home on Tuesday. On Wednesday, around midnight, she felt persistent pains. Campbell took her back to the hospital, driving so carefully that they didn’t arrive for forty minutes, and active labor began an hour later. The doctor gave Doña phenobarbital as an anesthetic, but she had an unusual reaction to it—her pelvic muscles relaxed completely, and the baby just slipped out.

  Philinda Duane Campbell, or Peedee, was born early in the morning of August 29. She seemed likely to survive, but her organs were incompletely developed, and she had to remain in an incubator until she reached five pounds. Doña was given a breast pump for the daily milk delivery, and they had to don gloves whenever they wanted to see their daughter at the hospital.

  In his letter of congratulations, Heinlein noted that Philinda had the same birthday as Leslyn: “That ought to make her a patroness, or a godmother, or something.” Campbell responded that Leslyn could be a fairy godmother, and that he hoped that she could wish away the curse of the baby’s nose, which she had inherited from her father. At the end of October, Philinda finally came home, and Campbell told Heinlein that Doña was still intrigued by their offer to be godparents: “D’ja mean it?”

  When Heinlein confirmed that they were serious, Campbell replied, “Among friends of our own generation, you two rate tops. . . . We are now trying to line things up in a practical and legal way as well as we can.” In the end, Campbell’s father—who had married a woman named Helen Putnam—asked to be the godfather, but Heinlein and Leslyn would be next in line, and everyone thought of Philinda as their goddaughter. Campbell wrote, “You and Leslyn were the type of people we’d want to have as guardians for any children we might have.”

  The exchange spoke to the intensity of their relationship, although they had only met a handful of times. Heinlein had finished his new version of “All,” retitled Sixth Column, in which he clarified why the resistance against the Asian invaders took the form of a fake religion—“This will just look like any one of half a dozen cockeyed cults of the sort that spring up overnight in Southern California”—and attempted to tone down the racism. He wasn’t entirely successful, in part because he was a stronger writer, and he was unable to keep from investing his characters with rhetorical vigor as they spoke of “our slant-eyed lords.”

  They were soon discussing other possible stories. Heinlein sent the editor a list of potential plots, including one about a house that collapses into a tesseract and another about extreme longevity, which respectively became “—And He Built a Crooked House—” and Methuselah’s Children. Campbell, in turn, proposed an idea about a generation starship—a spacecraft designed to travel for centuries—that forgets its original mission, which Heinlein turned into the classic “Universe.”

  Kay Tarrant was skeptical—she thought that Heinlein’s writing was “bad clear through”—but he had become the writer closest to Campbell’s heart. Despite their political differences, they had more in common with each other than either one ever would with anyone else. They both loved a good argument; Leslyn and Doña had played similar roles in their careers; and Heinlein, who appreciated how Campbell treated him as an equal, was everything that the editor had wanted in a writer. They saw each other as men in a genre dominated by overgrown boys, and both were convinced that science fiction could change lives.

  But Heinlein wasn’t alone. Astounding was publishing such landmarks as “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, which would later be adapted as The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Unknown was flourishing creatively. Campbell had rewritten an unreadable submission by Arthur J. Burks, “The Elder Gods,” into a minor masterpiece, and his two magazines gave him room to indulge all sides of his personality. It purified science fiction and fantasy at a crucial time, and both genres might have evolved along different lines if they had continued to mingle in adjacent pages.

  Campbell was building his research team, and there was always room for more. Because of Street & Smith’s strong finances, he could afford to pay the highest rates on acceptance, which came to a penny and a half per word for a popular author like Hubbard. Combined with his relatively mature readership, it made him the editor of choice for the most talented and innovative writers. The pulps may have been a literary ghetto, but those same conditions—a closed world with rapid feedback from fans—enabled him to deploy and test new ideas with a minimum of interference.

  The editor wanted writers who embraced the challenge, and many became his friends. One was L. Sprague de Camp, a Caltech graduate who was born in 1907. Campbell liked de Camp’s background—he was an expert on inventions and patent law—and they had many interests in common. In February 1938, they saw Orson Welles’s famous modern-dress staging of Julius Caesar, which led Campbell to remark, “It represented, in a way, what I’m trying to do in the magazine. Those humans of two thousand years ago thought and acted as we do—even if they did dress differently.”

  Another aspect of the performance stuck in
his head. A few months later, he asked de Camp, John Clark, and Willy Ley—a rocket scientist and science writer who had recently fled the Nazis—what they would do if they found themselves in ancient Rome. He initially planned to write up their responses as an editorial, but de Camp turned the premise into Lest Darkness Fall, a time travel novel for Unknown that read like a wishful hymn to the hero’s sheer competence—he distills brandy, constructs the first printing press, and single-handedly saves Europe from the Dark Ages.

  A second key protégé was the short, bespectacled Lester del Rey, whom Campbell greeted at their first meeting: “You’re not at all what I pictured.” Del Rey had started out as a prominent fan, but unlike Asimov, he sold his first submission, which he wrote on a dare from his girlfriend when he was twenty-two. Campbell wanted more, and del Rey responded with the robot romance “Helen O’Loy” and “The Day Is Done,” which was based on the editor’s idea that the Neanderthals had died of heartbreak. When a lack of money left him unable to write, Campbell, an avid photographer, paid him to print enlargements.

  Del Rey’s masterpiece was “Nerves,” a thriller about a nuclear accident that the editor pitched “not merely as an idea, but as to the viewpoint and the technique that made it possible.” Like Lest Darkness Fall, it reflected Campbell’s desire to develop a new kind of protagonist—a hero with the sensibilities of an engineer, confronting challenges that only science could solve. This figure became known as “the competent man,” as memorably evoked decades later by Heinlein:

  A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

  The next step was the superman—a being of superior intellect who would emerge, perhaps by mutation, from within the human race—and Campbell began to make efforts “to get some superman stories of a new type written.”

  His answer came from an unlikely direction. If Heinlein was the writer whom Campbell had always hoped to find, A. E. van Vogt, a Canadian born in 1912, gave him what he never knew he wanted. Van Vogt had been galvanized by the publication of “Who Goes There?,” half of which he read standing up at a newsstand, and he based many of his hallucinatory plots on his dreams. Most of the stories from those years could have been credibly attributed to Heinlein, whose versatility seemingly knew no bounds—but there was nobody else like van Vogt.

  It culminated in the sensational Slan, the first installment of which appeared in September 1940. Campbell had concluded that a superman was only believable if you kept him offstage or showed him before the onset of his powers, and van Vogt took the latter approach, inventing a young mutant with psychic abilities, or a slan, whose race is being hunted down in a genocide meant to recall the situation of the Jews. It was embraced by readers who saw themselves as persecuted geniuses, leading to a widespread rallying cry: “Fans are slans.”

  More authors soon followed. In late 1939, Campbell bought two submissions in one week from Leigh Brackett, who recalled of her first acceptance at the age of twenty-four, “No matter what may come after, the unforgettable day in any writer’s life is the day when he sold his first story. The day upon which he could stop saying ‘I hope to be’ and say ‘I am.’ John Campbell gave me that day. I shall always be grateful.” Brackett later expressed surprise at her early success—“They weren’t very good stories”—but Campbell clearly saw her as a major find, and he took obvious pleasure in correcting a reader: “The ‘Leigh’ in ‘Leigh Brackett’ is feminine.”

  Brackett, who lived in Venice, California, joined the Mañana Literary Society, where she attended gatherings hosted by the Heinleins and became close friends with the teenage Ray Bradbury, whose drafts she read as they lay together on the beach. She displayed a rare ability to translate the conventions of other genres—the western, the war story—into science fiction, but she was insecure about her lack of a scientific background, and after Campbell rejected one of her efforts “rather viciously,” she moved on to other markets, commencing a successful career as a novelist and screenwriter that culminated decades later with The Empire Strikes Back.

  Campbell steered writers to Astounding or Unknown based on their strengths, and one who was comfortable in both worlds was Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon, who was born in 1918, was fascinated by the challenges that the editor presented to his authors, including “Write me a story about a creature that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man.” He later called Campbell “my best friend and my worst enemy” for labeling him as a science fiction writer in the eyes of critics, but he maintained to the end, “I owe him more than I owe any other single human being in the world.”

  Sturgeon’s finest work—and perhaps the single most spellbinding story ever to appear under Campbell’s editorship—was “Microcosmic God,” which was published in April 1941. Its hero, a biochemist named Kidder, might have been a thinly disguised version of Campbell himself:

  He was always asking questions, and didn’t mind very much when they were embarrassing. . . . If he was talking to someone who had knowledge, he went in there and got it, leaving his victim breathless. If he was talking to someone whose knowledge was already in his possession, he only asked repeatedly, “How do you know?”

  Frustrated by the slow progress of scientific research, Kidder develops an artificial civilization in his laboratory, populated by tiny creatures who live and think at a rate hundreds of times faster than humans. When he poses problems to them in the guise of their god, it takes them just two hundred days to replicate all known science, followed by unprecedented discoveries.

  It was nothing less than an allegory for Astounding, which Campbell saw as a kind of time binding—an evolutionary collaboration between authors and fans to develop ideas at blinding speed. Campbell encouraged his writers to compete, to the point of handing out manuscripts to read at parties, and his ultimate goal was to create a new kind of person in both the magazine and its audience—a competent man who might pave the way for the superman to come. Even as he enthralled his readers, he was training them to think about the future.

  The stakes would soon seem enormous. Campbell’s thoughts were never far from the war in Europe—his sister Laura, who had attended Swarthmore College, had been in Paris when it fell, working with her husband at the U.S. embassy. The situation also affected the pulps, many of which had sold their remainders in England, where they were brought over as ballast on cargo ships. This source of revenue was gone, and publishers were unable to collect on their existing debts. Sales suffered, and the circulation of Astounding declined to around fifty thousand.

  But Campbell was looking ahead to the next phase, in which he felt that science fiction would play a crucial role. He wrote that the Nazis had to be “science fiction addicts,” judging from the part in the conflict that mechanization had assumed: “The battle of robots is on.” And in his first editorial after the invasion of Poland, Campbell had written, “May we hope that attempts to release the unimaginable energy locked in uranium atoms, on a useful scale, remain complete and unmitigated failures until such time as the family fight in Europe is concluded?”

  6.

  In Times to Come

  1939–1941

  In 1939 and 1940 I deliberately took the war news about a month later, via Time magazine, in order to dilute the emotional impact. Otherwise I would not have been able to concentrate on fiction writing at all. Emotional detachment is rather hard for me to achieve, so I cultivate it by various dodges whenever the situation is one over which I have no control.

  —ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, IN A LETTER TO JOHN W. CAMPBELL

  Early in 1940, Hubbard decided to go to Alaska. He was one of the most highly paid authors in the pulps—his novel Slaves of Sleep had sold to Unknown for the largest check
in that magazine’s short history—and he was contributing regularly to Campbell, both in his own name and under such pseudonyms as René Lafayette, Kurt von Rachen, and Frederick Engelhardt. Campbell was a reliable market, and Hubbard was more than happy to use the editor’s ideas. Yet he also had expectations for himself that a writing life was unable to satisfy.

  Hubbard was dividing his time between South Colby, Washington, where he spent his summers, and New York, where he rented a winter apartment on Riverside Drive, setting up a typing nook with a curtain and a blue bulb that reduced the shine on the paper. He still didn’t care much for science fiction, but he enjoyed fantasy. Despite his considerable following, he had minimal contact with fans, with whom he had little in common and who failed to strike him as immediately useful.

  He was more interested in expanding his professional circle. At Campbell’s invitation, he became a fixture at the war games at Fletcher Pratt’s apartment, of which the editor wrote to him, “If you have the interest therein that you might well have, you would probably be welcomed with open arms.” At these weekly gatherings, Hubbard met John Clark and de Camp, with whom he played poker, and he impressed everyone with his improvised voodoo drumming, beating out the rhythm so furiously that his hands were left bruised.

  His work for Astounding had settled into a pattern, alternating between humorous fantasy, war or adventure yarns with superficially futuristic settings, and stories that looked like space opera but hinged on predictable twists. All were undermined by a palpable lack of interest in science. Hubbard, who had spun a colorful persona for himself out of thin air, saw through Campbell’s pretensions about the competent man—many of his heroes were pointedly incompetent, and even when he offered up a more conventional lead, it was with a trace of contempt.