Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  On January 8, 1970, the San Francisco Herald-Examiner ran a story on the front page under the headline “Manson’s Blueprint? Claim Tate Suspect Used Science Fiction Plot.” Later that month, Time printed an article that began:

  In the psychotic mind, fact and fantasy mingle freely. . . . In the weeks since [Manson’s] indictment, those connected with the case have discovered that he may have murdered by the book. The book is Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, an imaginative science-fiction novel long popular among hippies.

  Manson subsequently denied having read the novel, but it was undeniably familiar in his circle. When his son was born in 1968, his mother named him Valentine Michael, after the man from Mars, and Heinlein received at least two other letters from members of the Manson Family.

  Years earlier, Manson had been exposed, to a far more significant extent, to the work of another science fiction writer. At McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Manson gave his religion as “Scientologist,” saying that he was looking for insights from “the new mental health cult known as Scientology.” In his memoirs, Manson wrote, “A cell partner turned me on to Scientology. With him and another guy I got pretty heavy into dianetics and Scientology. . . . There were times when I would try to sell [fellow inmate Alvin Karpis] on the things I was learning through Scientology.”

  Manson received about one hundred and fifty hours of auditing. In 1968, he visited a branch of the church, where he asked the receptionist, “What do you do after ‘clear?’ ” Some of his followers were audited as well, although the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi dismissed any connection, and Heinlein’s and Hubbard’s superficial influence on Manson was largely a testament to the cultural position that they had attained. As an attorney representing Leslie Van Houten, another disciple, said of his client, “That girl is insane in a way that is almost science fiction.”

  Yet it also cut deeper. Manson represented the psychopathic fringe of an impulse toward transformation in the face of overwhelming cultural change, and science fiction provided it with a convenient vocabulary—as it would, decades later, for the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which was partially inspired by Asimov’s Foundation series. But the Manson Family seemed indifferent to its more transcendent manifestations. At the ranch where they were living, a woman had remarked, “There’s somebody on the moon today.” And another replied, “They’re faking it.”

  15.

  Twilight

  1960–1971

  For each human soul, there is a unique, constant value of “a.” The imaginary index “b,” however, is continuously variable. . . . At end of life, the soul abandons its complex eigenvalue and assumes a new wave form whose eigenvalue is real. . . . This change is known to be accompanied by conformal transformation, but . . . there’s disagreement about the details.

  —JOHN W. CAMPBELL, “ON THE NATURE OF ANGELS”

  In the December 1959 issue of Astounding, just before the title change was announced, Campbell dropped a tantalizing hint to readers: “I’ve seen some pictures of a gadget.” It was the brainchild of Norman L. Dean, an executive specializing in mortgage appraisal, who had built a device in his spare time that he had actually patented in 1956. Despite his best efforts, however, he had failed to convince NASA, the Office of Naval Research, or the Senate Space Committee to even look at the invention of which Campbell wrote, “By all the physics I ever learned, it’s nonsense.”

  It would be the editor’s last great provocation. When Dean sought him out in the fall of 1959, Campbell was intrigued, and after studying pictures of the mechanism, he drove down to Washington, D.C., to see it in person. It was “a contraption of rotating eccentric weights, solenoids, and clutches,” driven by the motor from an electric drill. By continuously shifting the center of gravity of each weight, Dean claimed, the whole assembly would rise, and when it was placed on a bathroom scale and switched on, the reading on the dial seemed to go down. With six pairs, it could supposedly lift itself off the ground, although a working model no longer existed.

  Upon further investigation, Campbell convinced himself that Dean had invented a reactionless space drive—a device that could fly without throwing away fuel as a propellant. He knew that he had something outrageous on his hands, and he devoted a long article to it in the June 1960 issue. Before diving into the details, he spent seven pages arguing that it wasn’t just a technical problem, but an emotional and political one. The fact that nobody had tested the Dean Drive was the real scandal, although the editor also made his own views clear: “I believe the true space drive has been discovered, tested in models, and patented.”

  Asimov—who met Dean at the editor’s house—was doubtful, and according to such skeptics as John R. Pierce of Bell Labs and the roboticist Marvin Minsky, it was more likely that the device resonated with the springs of the scale, which made it look as if its weight had decreased. After a test by the military failed, Campbell said that it proved his point—the government had conducted a lynching, and now it was belatedly holding the trial. At a convention, he was giving a speech on the subject when he saw de Camp in the front row. “Now, Sprague!”

  De Camp glanced up. He had an uncomfortable sense of what was coming. “Yes?”

  “You know about strain gauges, from having worked at the Navy Yard,” Campbell said. “Well, the strain gauge is a sophisticated, modern device, isn’t it? And the Navy, instead of testing the drive with this accurate modern device, used a crude, simple hookup like a rope, a couple of pulleys, and a spring scale. That proves that they never intended to get favorable results, doesn’t it?”

  De Camp could have told him that the spring gauge was used for forces that couldn’t be measured directly, and that an ordinary scale would have been fine for the Dean Drive. But Campbell had already moved on.

  In the years that followed, Campbell continued to defend both the Dean Drive and the new principles of physics that it seemed to demonstrate. Few others were impressed, and even the most meticulous attempts to build working models repeatedly failed—the drive tended to fly apart at the exact moment when it seemed on the verge of doing something interesting, and Campbell suspected that the inventor was keeping aspects of the design to himself. Like Welsford Parker, Dean refused to play by the rules, and like Campbell, he resisted being put to any definitive test.

  As Campbell moved on to such fixations as dowsing and astrology, he began to badly trail Pohl, who had taken over as editor of Galaxy. Between the two of them, Campbell was having more trouble developing new voices—his discoveries tended to stay within Analog, which increasingly emphasized nonfiction—and Pohl no longer felt any of his former awe. Yet there were also moments when it seemed as if no time had passed at all. One day, as they were flying home from a speaking engagement, Campbell touched Pohl’s shoulder and said, “Fred, you did real good for science fiction.” And Pohl found himself blushing.

  Campbell was also isolated from the New Wave, a generation of experimental authors who took his innovations for granted. He insisted that readers wanted heroes—his publication of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider series felt like an effort to recover ground that had been lost to fantasy—and he rejected stories that depicted psionics in a negative light, which annoyed Philip K. Dick: “[Campbell] considered my writing not only worthless but, as he put it, ‘nuts.’ ” Dick sold just one story to Campbell, who never published such rising stars as Richard Matheson, Ursula K. Le Guin, or even Larry Niven, who recalled, “He liked his ideas better than mine.”

  The editor was also losing touch with established writers. As early as 1957, he had written, “Sprague de Camp can’t make the magazine any more; Jack Williamson’s pretty much out. Bob Heinlein still hits about thirty percent of the time. Ike Asimov is about the only one who’s been able to grow fast enough to keep leading the field.” Not even Asimov was exempt, with Campbell referring to him privately as “a book-learning follower; he’s a sucker for propaganda.” He lamented in public, “The Great Old Authors . . . aren’t gonna
be told what they should write by that dictatorial, authoritarian, uncooperative Campbell. . . . They hate me for shoving new concepts and new ideas at them—and damn me for their lack of a Sense of Wonder!”

  He was particularly disillusioned by Heinlein, who he felt had “rejected discussion of his ideas” with fans for decades. Campbell thought that Heinlein was frightened of the implications of his own work, writing to E. E. Smith:

  He’s scared blue-with-chartreuse-spots of psi, and he’s got precognition and doesn’t-for-God’s-sake want to know it. It was all right writing “Solution Unsatisfactory” until the damned thing came true. Now he wants to stay way, way, way away from anything that might turn out to be true!

  Campbell told another correspondent that if he had been offered Stranger in a Strange Land, he would have rejected it: “[Heinlein is] much more concerned with selling his philosophy of sexual promiscuity than in writing science fiction tales.” If he tried to give Heinlein any ideas, Campbell added, the author would view it “as an effort to confine his artistic creativity,” and he was probably right—Heinlein was dismissive of his old editor, telling Blassingame that he was tired of wading through “ten pages of his arrogant insults, explaining to me why my story is no good.”

  Campbell also had “really bitter” arguments with Sturgeon over genetics, taking him into a private room during a convention, closing the door, and letting him have it with both barrels. They never saw each other again after the late fifties. He had even fallen out with Silverberg, in whose eyes he had “invalidated” himself as an editor. In 1967, Silverberg was walking through a convention around midnight when he saw Campbell sitting alone in his hotel room with a bottle of scotch. Campbell, who seemed depressed, poured him a drink and asked why he, Asimov, and Sturgeon no longer wrote for him. Silverberg didn’t mince his words: “I can’t speak for Isaac or Ted, but I don’t feel comfortable with your thoughts any more.”

  Almost by accident, however, Campbell had stumbled across the most famous story that he would ever publish. In 1957, Frank Herbert, a journalist who had contributed occasionally to the magazine, began researching a serial called “Dune World.” Six years later, he submitted it to Campbell, who bought it. The editor wasn’t particularly interested in its philosophy or the ecology of the desert world of Arrakis. Instead, he saw it as a superman story, with his comments concentrating on the teenage clairvoyant Paul Atreides, who resembled an “adolescent demigod” of whom he had mused about writing years earlier.

  In his acceptance letter, Campbell told Herbert, “Congratulations! You are now the father of a fifteen-year-old superman!” After repeating his favorite point that it was impossible to imagine how a superior being would act or think, he complimented Herbert for following the approach that van Vogt had used in Slan, which showed the superman before his development was fully complete. For the sake of future stories, he advised him to limit Paul’s gifts, but Herbert pushed back, and his hero’s powers remained mostly unchanged.

  Campbell and Herbert never met in person, but they frequently discussed the story in letters or over the phone. The editor reviewed Herbert’s proposals for later installments, buying “Prophet of Dune,” and requested small changes and clarifications. In a piece of advice that had a pivotal impact on the series, he suggested that they save Paul’s younger sister Alia, who died in the first draft: “Sorry to see her go, by the way; did she have to be eliminated?”

  In general, though, the serial remained essentially as Herbert conceived it. Campbell offered ideas for sequels, including the proposal that Paul be challenged by an alien race, which Herbert declined to use. When Analog won a Hugo the following year, Herbert accepted it in the absence of the editor, who noted that the win was mostly due to the enthusiastic reception of Dune.

  When Herbert submitted Dune Messiah in 1968, however, Campbell objected to the treatment of its protagonist: “Paul was a damn fool, and surely no demigod; he loused up himself, his loved ones, and the whole galaxy.” After a revision, he remained unconvinced:

  In this one, it’s Paul, our central character, who is a helpless pawn manipulated against his will, by a cruel, destructive fate. . . . The reactions of science-fictioneers, however, over the last few decades have persistently and quite explicitly been that they want heroes—not antiheroes.

  In the end, the sequel went to Galaxy, ending Campbell’s chance to influence the career of a writer whose novels would pave the way for science fiction’s invasion of the bestseller lists.

  The editor took comfort in his eight Hugo Awards, which he proudly displayed in his office, and in the fact that the sales of his magazine were still the highest in the field. As always, Campbell retained what Heinlein called his “slightly open-mouthed adoration” of businessmen—he loved Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, although he suspected that its author was “somewhat of a lesbian”—and it was widely perceived that his views had grown more entrenched after the acquisition by Condé Nast. In practice, he was unaffected by the change in ownership, and he joked that he employed the company to get his ideas out, rather than the other way around.

  Campbell had once told his father that the magazine was “carefully expurgated to suit the most prudish—while I’m busy sawing away at the piling on which the whole crazy structure is resting.” Yet he took capitalism at face value, and in the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue—where he might have crossed paths with Diana Vreeland of Vogue—he identified with his corporate superiors. When a fan told him that he had written a story but wasn’t sure whether it was right for the magazine, Campbell drew himself up: “And since when does the Condé Nast Publications, Incorporated pay you to make editorial decisions for Analog?”

  But a more troubling aspect of his personality was becoming harder to overlook. In 1968, the World Science Fiction Convention was held at the Hotel Claremont in Berkeley. The building sweltered, and antiwar protesters were demonstrating nearby—when the wind was right, fans could smell tear gas. One of the attendees was a college senior named Alan Dean Foster, who saw Campbell holding forth in favor of the Vietnam War. The editor’s position on it had evolved—he had once argued that Vietnam wasn’t ready for democracy, but he later signed a statement in support of American intervention—and after the discussion, he smiled and offered to switch sides, much as del Rey had seen him do after the Nazi invasion of Russia.

  Also in search of Campbell was Gregory Benford, a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory who had written a paper on tachyons—hypothetical particles that travel faster than light—and proposed an article on the subject. Campbell had written dismissively of tachyons in the magazine, but Benford tracked him down at the hotel bar, where he pitched the idea again. To his dismay, Campbell didn’t seem to grasp the physics involved, and Benford himself was in a puckish mood. After the editor mentioned that he had studied German in college, Benford switched to the other language. Campbell only stared at him.

  Benford was more impressed by the fact that over the course of their conversation, Campbell smoked five cigarettes and ordered two martinis with lemon—he was drinking more heavily in public now, although this left him no more receptive to Benford’s proposal. After the convention, Benford sent him a copy of his paper on the subject with a note attached: “Perhaps this will make it clearer.” Campbell didn’t respond. A year later, Benford tried again, and the editor replied that tachyons were “a bit too esoteric” for Analog.

  But Benford was even more struck by another statement that he had made. The year before, Campbell had cast a disapproving eye on the riots in Newark, saying that it was an example of blacks wanting “something for nothing.” And at Berkeley, in reference to the unrest outside, the editor had said, “The problem with this country is that it doesn’t know how to deal with the niggers.”

  IF ASKED, CAMPBELL MIGHT HAVE EXPLAINED THAT HE HAD A PARTICULAR DEFINITION OF THE word in mind. Two years earlier, he had written in a letter, “There is such a thing as a nigger—just as there are spicks and
wops and frogs and micks. A bum of Italian ancestry is a wop; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a kike—and a bum of Negro ancestry is a nigger.” And it was in the sixties that his attitudes about race, which until then had formed an unspoken backdrop to his work, rose poisonously to the surface.

  His racial views had begun to harden decades earlier at Duke. He once wrote to Poul Anderson:

  All human beings are not equal. When the Southern white says “Negroes aren’t human!” he is speaking from experience. I’ve been there, Poul; they are not human-in-the-normal-sense-of-the-term. They’re low grade morons and high-grade idiots. . . . The competent Negro moves North or West to an area where he can achieve something.

  Campbell added that there were young black girls “that I would not allow in my house in any role but that of serf labor, the role of pure slave. . . . They are to be dealt with as one deals with a domestic animal.”

  His feelings grew more pronounced in response to the civil rights movement. When Asimov told him that he was against segregation, Campbell wrote back, “If you deny the existence of racial differences, the problem of racial differences cannot be solved.” He then transitioned into what verged on a personal attack: “Why should all races be alike, Isaac? Simply so you wouldn’t have to think so hard to understand a different kind of intelligent entity? Simply so that you wouldn’t have to work out more than one set of right-wrong values? Simply so that people can identify the Good Guys from the Bad Guys without the trouble of making basic evaluations?”

  On some level, Campbell was needling Asimov’s progressivism, as he had taken contrarian stances on so many other issues, but he was also expressing his true feelings. Toward the end of 1955, he wrote to Asimov: