Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Asimov wasn’t particularly impressed: “No breath of prescience stirred within me.” A few months later, in TV Guide, he made fun of an error in one episode, leading to a flood of angry letters from fans, including Janet Jeppson. After taking another look, he wrote a more positive take, and he corresponded with Roddenberry, who asked for advice on how to make better use of William Shatner. Asimov responded, “It might be well to unify the team of Kirk and Spock a bit, by having them actively meet various menaces together with one saving the life of the other on occasion.” Roddenberry wrote back, “I will follow your advice. . . . It will give us one lead, the team.”

  Heinlein was also drawn into the orbit of Star Trek, although much less willingly. After reviewing the teleplay for an episode by David Gerrold, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” the studio’s research firm noted a similarity between the tribbles—a species of furry alien that multiplied rapidly—and the “flat cats” in Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones. Heinlein agreed to waive any claim, but after the script arrived, he felt that he had been “overly generous, to put it mildly.” All the same, he admitted that he had lifted the basic notion from Ellis Parker Butler’s “Pigs Is Pigs,” and there was a certain similarity to a “very fecund” creature that Campbell had described in the Penton and Blake story “The Immortality Seekers.”

  As rumors of cancellation swirled in 1967, Roddenberry drafted a telegram to go out over Asimov’s name, saying that the space program “desperately” needed the publicity that the series provided. Roddenberry was also looking into securing the rights to I, Robot, and he approached Asimov about writing a spin-off novel. Of the show’s threatened end, Asimov wrote, “My major sadness is for the science fiction writers who see an adult market close for them. I’m sure they can write for other programs, but certainly not with equal satisfaction.” It was a measure of the extent to which Roddenberry was filling the role that Campbell had once occupied in print.

  For now, the show survived, and Campbell became involved as well. On January 23, 1968, he wrote to Roddenberry, “I’m joining in the campaign to promote Star Trek, naturally—it’s the world’s first and only true science-fiction program, and it averages really high in quality. . . . I’m writing a few letters—but I also thought of something that might help otherwise.” He proposed that winter caps with felt Vulcan ears be sold for kids, and Roddenberry passed the concept along to marketing: “Too often they’ve taken old space toys and simply slapped a Star Trek label on them.”

  The two men, a decade apart in age, continued to correspond, with Campbell pitching a story about the problems of trade between aliens from different planetary environments. After the Berkeley convention in 1968, he went down to Los Angeles to pay a visit to Desilu Studios, touring the lot on a day when the show wasn’t filming. He later dropped by Roddenberry’s apartment, where he admired the producer’s collection of mobiles and offered to send him a kalliroscope, a pane of heated glass that could create colored patterns.

  Their political differences often surfaced. In October, Roddenberry wrote that he had been invited to tour the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, which filled him with mixed feelings:

  Well, for that week . . . I will not wear my Peace medal, I will not mention Vietnam and the Nuremberg trials in the same breath, and when the mess boy brings me my coffee I will be delighted the Philippine Islands produced this race of pleasant little brown men for my comfort.

  Campbell, in typical fashion, responded with a long letter in which he expressed his opinion that slavery, under certain circumstances, could be beneficial. Like Heinlein, Roddenberry sidestepped the argument: “I can see no signs that the institution [of slavery] has vanished.”

  After Star Trek was banished to the Friday night “death slot,” Roddenberry stepped back from everyday involvement, writing to Campbell, “Time, I think, to wash Star Trek out of my hair.” Campbell lamented that the series could no longer tell the difference between fantasy and science fiction, thereby “lousing up the one good science fiction show that ever hit the air.” He thought that the network was trying to kill it deliberately, and he informed Roddenberry, “I’m afraid I can’t use Analog to support Star Trek again, as we did before—it’s simply moved out of the field of science fiction in nearly all the shows.” It was a sign of the degree to which the genre was becoming too large for any one man—even Roddenberry—to control.

  The editor was in no position to assume that role himself. He liked to think of himself as stronger than average—his fiction had always linked mental ability with strength, and he had embraced Hubbard’s contention that most illness was due to the mind. Walking down Madison Avenue one day with Sturgeon, he had asserted that he had so much control over his cellular structure that he wouldn’t die. As Campbell aged, this stance became harder to maintain. He was diagnosed with severe hypertension, and he suffered from gout, which left him with painful tophi—deposits of uric acid in his feet—that were the size of a raspberry.

  At home, he scooted around on a stool on wheels, and he put a chair on the landing from the basement, since he was no longer able to make it all the way up without resting. He and Peg began living on the ground floor, but he still commuted to New York twice a week. After experiencing pain in one arm, he was diagnosed with arthritis of the spine, caused in part by his heavy briefcase of manuscripts, which he just switched to his other hand. He was unable to manage the walk to the subway from the train at Fulton Street, so he hailed a cab for a single block. At the convention in Berkeley in 1968, Benford saw him fall down in the lobby, and at their final meeting, Poul Anderson found him so crippled that he needed help putting on his coat.

  Many of his health issues were due to cigarettes. Campbell was doubtful of the link between lung cancer and smoking, arguing that tobacco might even suppress cancer, and that those who were susceptible to it smoked instinctively. At last, in the July 1969 issue, he wrote:

  Tobacco is not habit-forming, and discontinuation causes no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever. . . . Last year, my family, friends, physician, and neighbors finally gave up trying to argue me into stopping. Since I had finally been granted freedom of choice—I decided to try quitting. So I did. I now smoke about two a day—I find I genuinely enjoy one after breakfast, and sometimes after dinner.

  He later clarified that his provocative assertion that smoking wasn’t “habit forming” in his case meant only that further research was required. But he also understated the situation. His doctor had ordered him to quit or die, conceding that two cigarettes a day wouldn’t damage his lungs any further, and he had trouble sticking to the regimen. In the short film Lunch with John W. Campbell, Campbell was seen discussing a story at the Hotel Commodore with Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson. He had a cigarette in his hand the entire time.

  When it came to most other drugs, Campbell was a skeptic, although he experimented with marijuana, which he believed should be legalized. As his illnesses left him in pain, his drinking increased—although he maintained a reputation as a teetotaler—and his poor health left a mark on his personality. He wrote to Frank Herbert, “Patience, tolerance, and forgiveness are hard-won attributes in anyone with a roaring gout attack.” And much of his final decade—his alcohol use, his estrangement from his writers, the tone of his editorials—reflected his physical decline.

  He sometimes struck others as lonely. In March 1970, he traveled by himself to Cape Canaveral to attend a satellite launch. The hotel was fully booked, so he ended up staying with the writer Joseph Green, who worked in the education office of the Kennedy Space Center. Campbell looked sick, but finally, after reluctantly climbing a set of stairs, he viewed the takeoff from an observation platform, watching as the rocket ascended toward “the distant, dark horizon.”

  At Mountainside, readers paid occasional pilgrimages to the house, and he remained an idol to the likes of Roger Ebert, who pitched him an article in college and referred to him as “my hero.” At conventions, he still hosted fans in his suite, serving up
beer and pretzels while Peg knitted in the corner. But he often seemed forgotten. At Lunacon in 1971, the fanzine editor Arnie Katz saw Campbell wander into the room. He asked a circle of younger fans if they had seen Sam Moskowitz, and when they said that they hadn’t, he drifted off. No one had recognized him.

  Although their nightly sessions on the nature of the mind were long over, Campbell’s relationship with Peg remained vibrant. A visitor to the house once asked how long they had been married, and after hearing the answer, he exclaimed, “My God, you talk together as though you’d just met!” But it was often just the two of them. Campbell’s father had died in 1959. Jane had married Ian Robertson, a printmaker in the graphic arts department at Colby College in Maine, where their son Justin was born. They moved from there to Chicago and finally to Alabama.

  In 1962, Peedee, who now went as Lynn, married James Hammond, a billing manager at a tire company. She taught remedial reading in Ohio, where she gave birth to their daughter Margaret. Leslyn enrolled in a secretarial program at Dean Junior College on the advice of her father—who pointed to Tarrant as a role model—and landed a job as an executive secretary, marrying Jasper Randazzo in 1970. The following year, they visited Mountainside. When Leslyn left to see Doña, her father and husband were deep in conversation at the kitchen table. When she returned after a few hours, she found that they were still talking.

  John W. Campbell and his daughter Leslyn Campbell.

  Courtesy of Leslyn Randazzo

  A week later, on July 11, 1971, Campbell felt unwell, with pain in his back and stomach, although a visit from his doctor in the afternoon revealed nothing unusual. At a quarter to eight, instead of eating dinner, he settled into an armchair with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk to watch his favorite television show—professional wrestling on the local Spanish channel.

  Peg went downstairs to her workroom. After about fifteen minutes, concerned by the lack of noise, she called for him. There was no response. Going up, she found that Campbell had passed away. It was the first time in their marriage that he had failed to hold up his end of the conversation.

  Campbell was sixty-one years old. He had died of an aortic aneurysm—the dangerously thin walls of his abdominal aorta had burst, leading to massive internal bleeding, which was one of the expected outcomes of extreme hypertension. According to Peg, he had been “a walking time bomb.”

  Earlier that night, Sam Moskowitz had driven by the house with his wife, a doctor, who later said that she had felt a premonition that she should check on Campbell. The editor may have also sensed that the end was coming. He usually turned in his editorials just before deadline, but shortly before his death, he handed three of them at once to Tarrant, and he quietly built up enough inventory to last the magazine through the end of the year.

  The day after he died, Tarrant was back in the office, typing up letters to notify correspondents of his passing. Word was spreading quickly, but Asimov, revealingly, heard it secondhand from Lester del Rey’s wife, Judy-Lynn. He had last seen Campbell at a convention in April, where the editor held forth on psychiatry as Peg crocheted in the corner: “It never occurred to me when I shook hands in farewell that night that I would never see him again. . . . He was the fixed pole star about which all science fiction revolved, unchangeable, eternal.”

  On July 14, Asimov picked up the del Reys, Gordon R. Dickson, and Harry Harrison, who had slept on the floor of Dickson’s room at the Algonquin, and they drove to Westfield for the memorial service. When they arrived, Harrison wondered where Campbell was, and after being told that he wasn’t there, he asked, “I know he’s not here, but where is he?”

  He had been cremated. The service was attended by a throng of science fiction luminaries, including Asimov, de Camp, del Rey, Dickson, Harrison, Hal Clement, Frank Kelly Freas, Philip Klass, and George O. Smith. Asimov recited the twenty-third psalm, Smith gave another reading, and Harrison, who had edited a collection of Campbell’s editorials, read from “one of the nasty ones.”

  Afterward, the mourners crowded into the house in Mountainside for dinner. As they sat in folding chairs, Peg played a recording of Campbell’s voice, allowing him to deliver his own eulogy—even in death he had to have the last word. Leslyn’s husband said that he was sorry that he hadn’t gotten to know him, and someone replied that no one had ever really known him at all.

  Before long, Asimov, back in his usual mode, was telling a dirty joke about a parrot. When he was finished, he suddenly remembered where he was. Growing red, he managed to choke out, “I’m sorry, Peg.”

  “Please go on, Isaac,” Peg said gently. “I don’t want this to be an unhappy occasion.”

  Fandom slowly began to realize what it had lost. On hearing of his death, the writer Laurence Janifer said to Barry Malzberg, “The field has lost its conscience, its center, the man for whom we were all writing. Now there’s no one to get mad at us any more.” The Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval reenactment group to which Campbell had given money, paid tribute to him with a march for the honored dead. But Heinlein and Hubbard were conspicuously silent.

  Campbell wasn’t entirely gone—the headlong momentum of his career kept the ideas coming even after he died. He had written numerous unsent letters, including a rejection of the story that became Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and they continued to trickle out with cover notes from Tarrant. At the time of his death, the page in his typewriter included a typical line: “One never can tell when some weirdo problem makes what looks all wrong the right answer.”

  He also made his posthumous farewells in the magazine. The September 1971 issue featured the short story “On the Nature of Angels,” the last piece of fiction that he ever wrote. Campbell proposed that the soul was a complex number in which the variable b stood for the level of sin. No one knew the exact level at which a spirit became good or evil after death, so it would be best, he said, “to keep our soul’s b value as close to zero as possible.”

  His own legacy rested on his achievements of twenty years before, which was not the ending that he would have wanted—but he never ceased to believe in its importance. In a conversation a few months before his death, Campbell had stretched his arms wide: “This is science fiction. It takes in all time, from before the universe was born, through the formation of suns and planets, on through their destruction and forward to the heat death of the universe, and after.” Then he put his hands an inch apart. “This is English literature—the most microscopic fraction of the whole.”

  His final editorial, on quasars, appeared in the December 1971 issue. It ended, “You know—things can go into a black hole, but nothing ever comes out. All roads lead to it only.”

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE FUNERAL, ASIMOV WAS INTERVIEWED OVER THE PHONE BY A RADIO SHOW in Dayton. Afterward, he took questions from listeners. A woman called to ask, “Who, in your opinion, did most to improve science fiction?”

  Asimov was tempted to go for an easy laugh and say, “Me.” In the end, however, he spoke the truth. “John Campbell.”

  “Good,” the young woman said on the other end of the line. “He was my father.”

  Epilogue

  Beyond This Horizon

  The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope. . . . Our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try to shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child.

  —OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

  On December 4, 1972, the ocean liner SS Statendam sailed from New York to Florida, where its passengers would witness the launch of the final manned mission to the moon. The guests included Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, Sturgeon, Harry Stine, Ben Bova, Marvin Minsky, Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, and the newscaster Hugh Downs, who served as the master of ceremonies. Also present were members of the press, many of whom, on account of the ti
tle of Porter’s most famous book, felt obliged to refer to the cruise as “a ship of fools.”

  The enterprise was the brainchild of a science lecturer named Richard C. Hoagland, who would become notorious years later as a conspiracy theorist with an obsession with the Face on Mars. A ticket for the combined cruise and conference cost upward of a thousand dollars, and it was soon clear that the venture known as Voyage Beyond Apollo was already a financial failure—there were only a hundred paying passengers on the ship, and Holland America, which operated the Statendam, would end up losing a quarter of a million dollars.

  At first, the experience hardly seemed worth the price. On the second night, during a screening of 2001, a rough sea sent people vomiting over the railing, and events were so disorganized that the guests openly wondered what they were supposed to be doing. But there were memorable moments. One panel featured Mailer and Asimov, two Jewish writers from Brooklyn who had crossed paths before. Asimov had been riding an elevator in New York when his eye was caught by the man beside him: “Did anyone ever tell you, sir, that you resemble Norman Mailer in appearance?”

  The most famous author in America had offered a deadpan response. “Yes, I get told that now and then.”

  Now they faced off on the subject of space. Mailer complained that NASA had turned the greatest achievement in human history into a “monumentally boring” spectacle. Like Campbell, he was intrigued by the possibility of communication that didn’t involve the electromagnetic spectrum, and he said that the astronauts should have conducted experiments in telepathy on the moon.

  Asimov’s response was diplomatic. “When you apply the scientific method to the supernatural, then it automatically becomes natural.”

  Mailer replied by expounding on his theory of the “thanatosphere,” a layer of the atmosphere populated by the souls of the dead. In another talk, he noted that the public was starting to view space travel with indifference, rather than as a form of adventure—which may have been his most insightful remark.