Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  To his amazement, Silverberg found himself in the editor’s office on East Forty-Fifth Street, with its view of the United Nations, where Garrett announced, “This is Robert Silverberg, a great new science fiction writer.” After hearing their idea, Campbell proceeded to invert the premise—the hero shouldn’t be the human scientist, but the alien—and ordered them to turn it into a series of novelettes. When Silverberg came back with the first installment, Campbell bought it on the spot.

  Silverberg reminded the editor of another Jewish prodigy from Columbia, and Campbell realized that he could be just as useful: “Bob Silverberg is a kid, a nice kid, whom I like, just as I did Ike Asimov. . . . Bob needs time and experience; Ike did, twenty years ago.” For his part, Silverberg couldn’t believe his good luck: “I was so excited at the thought of having sold a story to John Campbell. . . . I couldn’t sleep all night, just revolving that notion.”

  Within a year, Silverberg and his partner were practically making a living by writing up the editor’s ideas, and Randall Garrett became a frequent guest at the house in Mountainside. It was hard to imagine anyone less like Campbell than Garrett, a bearded Texan who was known within the science fiction community as a drunk and a sexual predator, but the two men grew surprisingly close—and on one of his visits, the author got to know Jane Kearney.

  When Garrett began to date Campbell’s stepdaughter, it was a startling development, and their courtship was remarkably rapid—they met when Jane was back from college for the summer, and she fell for him in about two weeks. At first, Campbell approved. Despite his interest in the mind, he was blind to Garrett’s personal problems, and when they announced their engagement, with a wedding scheduled for the following August, he seemed delighted by the match.

  Jane Kearney in the early fifties.

  Courtesy of Leslyn Randazzo

  In private, Garrett was shockingly frank about his intentions. He boasted to Silverberg about the liberties that he had taken with Jane, and he openly mocked her appearance—she was skinny, verging on bony, with what Campbell casually described in a letter as a “lack of breast development.” Garrett said that he was willing to overlook such shortcomings for the prestige of marrying into the editor’s family, which he cynically regarded as his big break.

  On a visit to MIT in the fall of 1956, Campbell told Asimov about the engagement, expecting to be congratulated. Instead, Asimov fell silent. They were seated in a darkened car, and Campbell couldn’t see his expression. “What’s the matter, Isaac? Don’t you approve?”

  Asimov was torn. He liked Garrett, with whom he traded jokes at conventions, but he was finally swayed by his loyalty to Campbell. “I don’t think I approve, actually. Randall is a brilliant fellow, generous and kind to a fault, but I don’t know if he would be right for your daughter.”

  These words turned Campbell against Garrett, or made him realize what should have been obvious all along, and he became opposed to the engagement overnight. When the writer promised to change his behavior, Campbell took it on as his new project, and for three and a half months, he treated Garrett at the house. Some of these sessions were recorded, and the editor insisted on playing a tape for Asimov, who protested in vain that it wasn’t any of his business. Campbell also told him that Garrett had “guessed” that Asimov had spoken of him disparagingly, and as a result, the two writers were estranged for years.

  When it ended, the engagement was over, although Campbell blithely reached out to Garrett a few months later with a story idea: “It’s been so long since I’ve heard from you I don’t know whether you’ve quit writing, or what.” Jane left for the Bay Area, where she married John Allen, the son of the head of the biochemistry department at the University of California, Berkeley. They eventually divorced, and Campbell remarked afterward that Jane had fallen for the first two intellectually stimulating men she met, one of whom was a “slob” and the other a “complete bum.”

  From his perspective, he had better luck with Peedee and Leslyn. Of the two, Peedee, who was headstrong and impulsive, was harder to manage. She had trouble in school and with her weight, and Campbell wasn’t always the most patient teacher, although he could be amusing. After she used the word “damn,” he told her that she couldn’t say it again until she was tall enough to touch the top of the door frame. Six years later, reminding him of their deal, she demonstrated that she could reach it. Campbell replied, “Well, by damn—so you can.” She failed to take any interest in his various causes, however, and she finally left for Ohio State University.

  Leslyn, whom Campbell described as “the brightest and kindliest” of his daughters, was his favorite, although she wasn’t a fan of science fiction—she loved horses instead. On April 4, 1958, she was sitting bareback on a friend’s horse in a field by the highway, with a line of brush and brambles between them and the road. Without warning, her horse leaped over the barrier into traffic and was hit by a car, rolling over the hood and severing one of its legs. Leslyn tumbled back over a concrete divider, and if she had fallen badly, the accident might have been fatal.

  Instead, she landed on her feet, leaving her with a broken ankle and “an Italian sunset color display” on her buttocks. When Campbell arrived at the hospital, he barged into her room and demanded without any preamble, “What happened?” He forced her to tell him every detail of the incident until it bored her, using a technique that he had learned from Hubbard, and it apparently worked—the next morning, the pain in her ankle was almost gone.

  “Leslyn got started right,” Campbell once wrote, by which he only meant that she had fewer aberrations to overcome from her mother. Doña had moved with George O. Smith to the Jersey Shore, where they had a son named Douglas in 1952. In a weirdly misguided gesture, Heinlein had sent all of her letters—including those about her marriage—to Campbell, in a breach of trust that she never forgave. Campbell disapproved of their bohemian lifestyle, and he disliked being reminded of the circumstances of their divorce. When the skeptic Martin Gardner wrote that Doña had left him over dianetics, the editor accused him of intellectual fraud: “He hasn’t creative ability enough to be a scientist, so he has made himself a genuflecting acolyte of science.”

  His eagerness to push beyond the limits of the magazine had taken him into unfamiliar territory. In his search for “a stick of dynamite to blast off the rigidity of thought,” he continued to explore psionics, faith healing, and other forms of pseudoscience, and he clashed with his more skeptical acquaintances. When de Camp told him that the famous medium Eusapia Palladino had been exposed as a fake, Campbell shouted back, “Bullshit!” An attempt to host a radio anthology series, Exploring Tomorrow, went nowhere—Campbell lectured his listeners, rather than expressing his ideas in dramatic form, and the show was canceled after less than a year.

  He made much the same mistake in his most determined effort to reach past his existing audience. After Russia launched the satellite Sputnik on October 4, 1957, Campbell responded with the Interplanetary Exploration Society, a research organization for “gentleman amateurs.” It was another effort to found a movement that he could oversee in the real world, and it may have been partially inspired by Hubbard, whose efforts along those lines had been ridiculously successful. Asimov was persuaded to attend its inaugural meeting at the American Museum of Natural History on December 10, 1958, and when he arrived, he found just fifty attendees in a room with capacity for four hundred.

  After providing a few introductory remarks, Asimov wound up seated next to F. Darius Benham—a public relations expert who had partnered with Campbell—as the editor launched into his speech. As usual, Campbell had no idea how to speak to outsiders, and after a minute, Benham whispered loudly, “What’s all this? He’s killing the club. This isn’t what we’re here for.” Asimov flushed, but Campbell had no choice but to continue. There was never another event in New York, but Asimov went to four meetings of a chapter in Boston, which quietly folded after an event at an arboretum in which nobody was able to find anybod
y else.

  Campbell was left with the magazine, a fallback option that often dissuaded him from taking greater risks. Yet he was still searching for a change in direction, and another opportunity seemed to arise in 1959, when Street & Smith was bought by Condé Nast. Its new owner, Samuel I. Newhouse, was more interested in Mademoiselle, but he kept Astounding, which was modestly profitable, and the acquisition encouraged Campbell to make a decisive break from the past.

  He had been mulling it over for a long time, and there had been hints of it in his correspondence. Years earlier, he had written to Heinlein, “You—and many another—have attacked my use of analogs in discussion.” Campbell had always been fond of the idea of science fiction as an “analog simulator” for the future, and in the January 1960 issue, he announced without warning that the title of the magazine was changing from Astounding to Analog Science Fact & Fiction.

  The new title amounted to a statement that what fans believed was central to the genre—its sense of wonder—wasn’t what mattered, and the response was resoundingly negative. Campbell wrote the following month, “I’ve already received a number of comments, ranging from howls of anger to gentle wails. To date, no compliments on the change.” He argued that the previous title was “unhelpful,” and that a new name would clarify what the magazine really was:

  Now Analog is a term most men-in-the-street don’t know. With that title, we will, for once, be able to tell him what the magazine is, before our title tells him . . . and gives him a wrong answer. . . . The science fiction we run in this magazine is in actual fact a good analog of the science facts to come. . . . We’ve earned the title Analog; having earned it—we have a right to wear it!

  Not everyone agreed with his reasoning. Asimov felt that the editor had thrown away “a name of memories and tradition,” and he wrote much later, “I have never quite managed to forgive Campbell for the change.”

  14.

  Strangers in a Strange Land

  1951–1969

  Under extreme environmental pressure, [animals] can go into panic behavior, acting with great violence and determination in a manner entirely different from the normal behavior patterns of the organism. This applies all the way up to and including man. . . . When the probability of survival is zero on the basis of all known factors—it’s time to throw in an unknown.

  —JOHN W. CAMPBELL

  Campbell’s three most significant collaborators spent the fifties in transition, after a decade in which they had worked closely with the man who had been as responsible as anyone else for the shape that their careers had taken. They were also entering uncharted territory. It amounted to a test, conducted in real time, of science fiction’s central assumption—that the skills that it developed in its writers and readers would prepare them for an unknown future.

  For all of Campbell’s flaws, his presence had been a corrective and a goad, and Hubbard, Heinlein, and Asimov had developed in large part along the lines that he laid down. In his absence, they became authority figures to distinct circles of their own, leading to a cycle in which they were encouraged to become more like what they already were. They retreated into isolation while holding sway over separate slices of the world—and the real question was what they would do with it.

  IN APRIL 1951, HUBBARD HAD EMERGED FROM A PLANE IN WICHITA, DRESSED IN A TROPICAL SUIT. Files and furniture—some of which belonged to Peg Campbell, who had to sue for compensation—were shipped from Elizabeth to Kansas, which had been chosen, a spokesman claimed, as “one of the most central points, geographically, in the United States.” Hubbard’s upcoming book, Science of Survival, threw out most of the cybernetic material that Campbell had contributed, replacing it with an emphasis on the tone scale. He was redefining dianetics on his own terms.

  Don Purcell, his new benefactor, had made a fortune in oil and real estate, and Wichita became the headquarters of the second foundation. Later that summer, however, a newcomer disrupted the dynamic. Mary Sue Whipp, a nineteen-year-old from Houston, had been persuaded to make the trip by a friend who had read about dianetics in Astounding, and she became Hubbard’s lover and auditing partner. His other favorite auditor was Perry Chapdelaine, a science fiction fan who later grew convinced that a man named Ron Howes was the world’s first true clear. When this was perceived as a challenge to Hubbard’s authority, the two men split off on their own.

  In the meantime, Purcell reached out to Campbell, who didn’t want to get involved. Hubbard, for his part, wrote in 1951, “Two of the early associates, John W. Campbell and J. A. Winter, became bitter and violent because I refused to let them write on the subject of dianetics, for I considered their knowledge too slight and their own aberrations too broad to permit such a liberty with the science.” Elsewhere, he called van Vogt, who had sacrificed so much for the foundation, “a heavy foe of dianetics . . . for years, although pretending to be involved in it.”

  Hubbard was happy to be the sole authority in Wichita, with Purcell serving as little more than a source of cash. When the businessman belatedly realized that he was vulnerable to claims from creditors, he decided that he had no choice but to file for bankruptcy. In response, Hubbard resigned to set up a competing Hubbard College across town, while Purcell acquired the foundation’s assets—including the rights to the term “dianetics”—for just over six thousand dollars.

  The college lasted for six weeks. Its high point was a convention at which attendees were shown the E-meter, a metal box hooked up to two tin cans that had been devised by Volney Mathison, another pulp author, after hearing Hubbard mention the need for it in a lecture. The device measured emotional stress by tracking the galvanic skin response of the subject, who held a can in each hand—much like a lie detector that van Vogt had described in The World of Null-A.

  It was exactly what Hubbard had wanted. In Elizabeth, electroencephalograph readings had been taken during auditing sessions, but this was much easier to use, and Hubbard touted it as a tool for measuring subjective mental forces. It was strikingly similar to the impulse that would make psionics attractive to Campbell, who wrote of the E-meter, “It works magnificently for therapists who have the sensitivity and wisdom to interpret its readings.”

  Hubbard also announced that dianetics had been superseded by a theory called Scientology, which he said had been its original name—the term “dianetics” had been forced on him by his publisher. The change was partially inspired by the group’s legal situation, but it marked a genuine shift in direction. Even after the trademark dispute was resolved, dianetics—which, with its echo of cybernetics, may have been too reminiscent of Campbell—was deemphasized, and in April 1952, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists was established in Phoenix.

  Scientology came to focus on the concept of the individual as a “thetan,” which made its first known appearance in a session that Hubbard conducted in April with his new wife, Mary Sue. A thetan—derived from “theta,” a form of life energy—was an immortal entity that occupied countless bodies over time. Unlocking its power would lead to such abilities as telepathy, levitation, and full access to memories of past lives, which had moved decisively to the center of the founder’s teachings.

  It was a pivotal change, and it arose directly from the men and women with whom Hubbard was surrounded. He had never much cared for science fiction, but his followers did, and the disciples who joined him in Phoenix unconsciously drew on the genre’s conventions when audited about their previous lives—which even Hubbard conceded might be “fantasies built upon reading and imagination.” They gave him material, and he fed it back to them in an amplified form, in an editorial role that resembled Campbell’s relationship with his writers.

  Not surprisingly, his theories quickly evolved to appeal to the only audience that he had available. In What to Audit, Hubbard wrote that disembodied thetans reported to implant stations on Mars, and several years later, he published a dozen case studies of past lives with science fiction elements, which his followers evidently provided o
f their own accord. He even claimed to have audited E. E. Smith, whose novels were reinterpreted as actual events—except that Hubbard was reaching into the past, not the future, resulting in a cosmology that stretched back for millions of years.

  One of Hubbard’s most faithful supporters was Helen O’Brien, the head of the Philadelphia branch, where he delivered a series of lectures. Hubbard spoke highly of the book Twelve Against the Gods by William Bolitho, which he had first encountered in his days with Jack Parsons, and he paid close attention to the chapter on Muhammad, whom he followed Bolitho in calling a “small-town booster” who founded a religion for practical reasons. He may also have been struck by one line: “The lever of his position is now his own converts, his own past, the picked fanatics.”

  On April 10, 1953, Hubbard wrote to O’Brien—whom he had asked to build a machine that induced hypnosis using sound, which recalled one of his Ole Doc Methuselah stories—about another development:

  I await your reaction on the religion angle. . . . A religious charter would be necessary in Pennsylvania or [New Jersey] to make it stick. But I sure could make it stick. We’re treating the present time beingness, psychotherapy treats the past and the brain. And brother, that’s religion, not mental science.

  Recasting the movement as a religion also offered potential tax and legal benefits, and his work was undeniably inching into mystical territory. Churches were soon incorporated in New Jersey, California, and Washington, D.C., and Hubbard asked existing branches to begin the process of conversion.

  It was a crucial moment, and the reasoning behind it was more complicated than it might seem. According to multiple witnesses, over the previous decade, Hubbard had uttered some variation on the statement “If you want to get rich, you start a religion.” Yet he had made no serious effort along those lines for years. He had described dianetics as a new science of the mind, and his initial goal had been to win over the medical establishment. If founding a religion had been his plan from the beginning, he had approached it in a very roundabout way.