* * *
I was in the U.S. Army and I was in Moreno, Texas, and we had an old valve radio, and we’d put it on the truck in the morning and play it, and then we’d have to push the truck back at night because we’d drained the battery in four hours. We were shooting off the guns and then the broadcaster came on and said: “A bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima—a bomb of a new type, reputed to have the power of ten thousand tons of dynamite.”
“Oh,” I said, “must be an atomic bomb.” The newsreader said: “It’s called the Atom Bomb.” The guys said, “Wha? How’d you know?” I said I read it in Astounding. It was all there … including in an early issue a spaceship powered by gasoline going pop-pop-pop-pop all the way to Mars! An internal combustion spaceship! John never pretended, he was always right!
John was a physicist; he went to M.I.T. and graduated from Duke University. He was a very hard-headed man, but he was also very open to new ideas. He wrote an editorial called We Must Study Psi. There were articles on dowsing. I never knew whether he believed in this nonsense, because he was a born troublemaker and liked to shake people up. When Dianetics first came along he believed in it, I think, like many people. By the time opinion changed he’d moved on to something else. I remember when Dianetics first appeared, it was in an article in the May 1950 issue of ASF and there was a very fine review of the book by Jim Blish. About three months later there were some very nasty letters destroying Jim Blish’s arguments completely—and they were written by Jim Blish! He’d read the book again and said: “That’s absolute nonsense!” John’s brother-in-law Joe believed it all, and he picked up an outboard engine and died of a heart attack. Belief can kill you.
People came up with these mad ideas and he would print them. Like the Dean Drive: Dean was an airline pilot who took a power drill and attached these fourteen balls to his drive and put it on a scale and photographed the scale, which said, I don’t know, twelve pounds, then turned the drive on and it weighed only eleven and a quarter pounds—three-quarters of a pound less. The correspondence came in—“It violates the law of conservation of energy!”—which of course it does (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive). John R. Pierce was an engineer, head of Bell Telephone Laboratories for a long time, and a good science fiction writer. As a physicist he couldn’t accept this: he knew conservation of energy was conservation of energy. So what John did, being a good researcher, was he went out and bought a scale with the same name on it, which was a spring scale and not a balance scale, and did the whole bit with the damned Dean Drive and set it working, and found that it didn’t decrease the weight of it—the vibration of this rotten apparatus caught the moment of vibration of the spring and affected the reading! If John Pierce hadn’t done this …
* * *
John Campbell wrote a lot of nutty editorials. John’s word for them was “eclectic.” They were argumentative, profound, and absolute madness sometimes. When I came back to New York—I was living in Denmark then—he said, “I’ve got a great idea for a book, Harry. A collection of my editorials.” I said, “Gee, what an idea for a book.” He said, “Yes, and I want you to edit it.” I said, “Gee, what a great idea for a book, John!”
At first I didn’t think it would be successful, but then it occurred to me that there’d be an ad every month in Analog—a free ad for the book. So I said yes. I went to work and started reading editorials, right back to number one. As soon as I saw the words “rocketry” or “nuclear power” I left it, because (a) it would be out of date and (b) it would be very boring. And John was often wrong about these things. I went through and it took quite a while. There were a lot of good editorials, and there were a lot of really bad editorials. And I put together a good book.
John read it and he liked it pretty well, but he said, “There’s one more I want you to include.” It was an editorial about rioting, and it said very simply that any riot, anywhere in the world—Calcutta, Belfast, London, New York—was controlled by the Communists in Moscow. The concept was absolute nonsense. “It is absolutely true,” John said. I said, “John, this is nonsense. How can they control all the riots from Russia?” “They have their ways,” he said. “They have a computer.” And it went on. We had no problem except on this one. I’d see him every couple of months when I’d be in New York, and he’d say, “Harry, you’ve really got to put it in.” And I’d say, “No, I can’t really use it.” And so finally I had the book approved and ready to be set in type, and he was still arguing about it, so I said to him, “Look, I’m very sorry, John, if you want to put it in, put it in, but take my name off the book. I will not be associated with a book that contains this editorial.” And he said, “Okay, you’re the editor!” The editor edits the editor! But he made me suffer for it.
I recall one day in his office, G. Harry Stine was there—he was writing juveniles under the name Lee Correy—and some moron in West Virginia had produced research that proved that the negro mentality was less than the white mentality because of a smaller braincase or whatever. And they had a curve—a bell-shaped curve of intelligence, with the whites up here and the blacks down there or something, and I said: “No, no.” They said: “But it’s proved in West Virginia.” And G. Harry was nodding his head. And I said, “You could prove anything in West Virginia!” Then finally in desperation I shouted: “Gentlemen, you can’t reduce everything in life to a bell-shaped curve.” And they both said: “Yes, you can!”
That was the thing with Campbellian theory; everything was analyzable that way.
John was not right wing, he was not a fascist. He was a technocrat. He loved technocracy. If you want to know what technocracy is, read a Bob Heinlein story called “The Roads Must Roll.” Basically the idea of technocracy arose in the States in the ’30s during the Depression—it was that all problems are solved by bell-shaped curves. Engineers would rule the world and they would take care of us. On a scale of left to right you might call it right, but I call it technocracy.
John didn’t really force his writers to accept his point of view. I’d argue with him often. And he’d win! You couldn’t win, but you could sometimes fight him to a draw.
One of my books, In Our Hands the Stars, had a character on Mars looking out at the view and giving a lecture expressing my point of view—not just about politics but about evil—and I’d typed two or three pages of conversation: I’d let the readers enjoy themselves a bit and now I was giving them the propaganda. It was really very left-wing politics, and John wrote back and pointed this out and said, “Harry, you’re making a point here that I disagree with completely. You’re being unfair, Harry, because the other guy isn’t replying. He shouldn’t say, ‘Oh, I understand,’ he should say…” And John had written about a page and a half of counterpropaganda. I looked at it and said: “Well, it’s his magazine. And I want to sell it.” So I put it in. I had John’s words coming out of the other guy’s mouth. I did bend the knee that once, but so what? But when the book edition came out I threw it away! It was my book! A small victory.
In Our Hands the Stars was about an imaginary machine that allowed a spaceship to accelerate at one gee for half the journey, then turn about and decelerate at one gee. John had written an editorial on this, and I kept thinking about it. I wrote the book about ten years later—I stole The Daleth Effect from this editorial of John’s. I wrote about a gravityless drive, and it works fine, but there was no explanation about where it comes from. You just leave that out. It just is. Because I wanted to have a gravityless drive. And no one queried it. John had said that with one gee continuous acceleration and one gee deceleration, it would take three days or whatever to get to the moon. I wanted to be more accurate, so I went to a computer expert, a science fiction writer who was living in San Diego. He had a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe, and he did the figures for me. The big Cray came up with the same figures John had worked out on his slide rule!
* * *
I’d written Deathworld what felt like thirty or forty times and published it in
various disguises, and I felt that there were other books in the world besides Deathworld. I wanted to get out, and that’s why I had the idea for Bill, the Galactic Hero, which is a satirical book. When I wrote that, I knew John wouldn’t buy it. Months after it was published he asked me, “Why did you write Bill, the Galactic Hero?” I said, “I’d be happy to tell you why I wrote it if you’ll tell me how you know I wrote it.” He said, “I saw it on a newsstand, so I bought it.” He didn’t read enough manuscripts that he bought paperbacks?! So I gave him some sort of waffling answer: I didn’t want to say, I didn’t submit it to you, John, because you wouldn’t have published the damned thing.
I spent a year writing Bill, and getting very depressed. I’d write it and I’d laugh, and then I’d read it next morning and think it wasn’t funny. I’ve learned one thing writing humor: don’t cut it—if you laughed in the first place, leave it in. Bill was a completely different book. Terry Pratchett said he was inspired by Bill, the Galactic Hero, and Douglas Adams said Hitchhiker’s was inspired by my book: he said it once to me on a radio show, and never repeated it in public! But it was a seminal book. People read it and laughed—there’s not much to laugh at in science fiction normally.
* * *
John Wood Campbell, Jr., died July 11, 1971. I wrote a brief obituary for Analog. I went over to New Jersey for the funeral. I met with Gordy Dickson—he was staying in the Algonquin, where all the writers stayed. He had a room and I couldn’t get a room so I slept on the floor. In the morning a car pulled up, Isaac Asimov was driving, and Lester del Rey was in the passenger seat, and somebody else was there. Gordy Dickson and I climbed in. There was a really good turnout; every single writer of note was there at the funeral home. His wife, Peg, had contacted them all. The only person not there was John. There was no body there—a good Campbellian funeral! We didn’t know where John was, and we were afraid to ask. “Where’s John?” I asked. “He’s not here,” the others said. “I know he’s not here, but where is he?” He didn’t want a funeral at all. He was cremated, I think, his ashes scattered somewhere. Peg wouldn’t say a word. Isaac read something from the Old Testament, George O. Smith read something, and I read from one of his editorials—one of the nasty ones. We had some food and made some jokes, and we knew John was up there enjoying the whole thing. Jim Gunn said we should have some kind of memorial for him and that stuck in my mind. Out of that came the John W. Memorial Anthology, a final edition of the magazine he edited. And then a few years later, after the Hugo had been bought and sold one more time, we were so annoyed at the award for best novel of the year that we founded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. We put together a jury of academics who are also fans—we figured their choice could be no worse than the ones made by the fans or the writers. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Although we were opposites politically, John and I got along extremely well; we spent a lot of time together and became good friends. During one of our conversations he said he wanted me to edit the magazine after his death. “God forbid,” I said. I didn’t say, when you die the magazine dies with you, but my feeling was that John was the magazine. “You’re going to live forever!” I said. Ben Bova edited it after John, and did a fine job, but it wasn’t Campbell’s Analog.
John Campbell was responsible for the Golden Age of science fiction. When Brian Aldiss and I edited our Decades series we chose the best stories, and everyone selected for the 1940s volume was from Astounding. It wasn’t done on purpose, it was just that the best writing in the field was going on there. The first SF novels published in paperback in the ’50s had all been sixty-thousand-word Astounding serials. This is all ancient history, which I can sum up in one sentence: John Campbell invented modern science fiction.
MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!
It was in 1970 that a Hollywood lawyer called my agent, saying how much he loved my book Make Room! Make Room! and that he wanted to make it into a film.
“That’s great!” I said when the good news reached me. But then I talked to the lawyer, who was gloomy about the future. “We’re a small company and it’s hard to put much money up front.” This was all new to me, but my agent seemed to know what he was doing. Alas, he didn’t. In fact he made the deal in an alcoholic haze and was dead of the same within a few months. My agent agreed on a low option fee and a modest price to buy the rights—based on a promise of a decent payment later if the film did well.
This was all dreamland. Before the ink was dry on the contract, they had sold all the rights to MGM for a dollar. The office and the lawyer were just a dummy company that had been set up to hide the fact that it was MGM who were buying the film rights all the time. This complicated dummy company and all the fancy footwork were there simply to make sure that I, the author, was completely shafted.
MGM knew what they were doing. Make Room! Make Room! had been recognized academically and included on reading lists because it was accessible. It was one of the very first books—fiction or nonfiction—that talked about overpopulation. My interest in the problem of overpopulation dates back a long way, right back to the borough of Queens in New York and the subway exit on Queens Boulevard, where I met a member of the Indian Communist Party. Very few people can say that. (This was after the war—I got out of the army in ’46.) When he heard I was a freelance writer he sighed. “Harry, you will starve with your writing. If you want to make a lot of money, I’ll tell you what you can do: go to India and sell them rubber contraceptives.”
“I’m a writer, why would I want to do that?”
“Because you’d be helping the world,” he said, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. “India is overpopulated now, and the overpopulation is going to get worse. And, tragedy, India is only the first. Soon the whole of the world will be overpopulated. But you can help. Sell them the contraceptives they so desperately need.”
Well, I never did get started in the rubber business. But he had planted the seed in my subconscious. Years later it grew into a book and, along with a great deal of needless thievery, into a film, Soylent Green.
As far as I was concerned, the lawyer’s call had come out of the blue. It was carefully designed to look that way. But some time later I was having chat with the producer’s secretary—the secretary is always the one to talk to, they know everything—and discovered that producer Walter Seltzer and Charlton (Chuck) Heston had been trying to get the backing from MGM to make the film for two or three years. They both liked the theme of overpopulation and wanted to get the film made. They didn’t tell me they’d been trying to flog my book to MGM for three years!
They really got me good. One of the more crooked parts of the contract I signed, in my simplicity, prevented me having any control over the screenplay. I was supposed to sign the contract and fade away into the woodwork. They wanted to be able to change the title and do whatever they wanted with the story. Having bought the rights, MGM said: “Overpopulation? Sorry, we’re not interested in that.” It wasn’t important enough, they said. That was one of the first rejections.
A hack called Stanley Greenberg was hired to write the screenplay. His script transmogrified and denigrated my novel, gutting it like a fish. If you do a screenplay of a book at full length, it would run for twenty hours, so you have to make cuts. Greenberg didn’t make cuts. He threw out everything and substituted garbage for it. He reduced it down to a cannibalism tale. In my book, nobody is eating human bodies. In the film, “Soylent Green is people!” Charlton Heston cries out in the last scene. “Yes, my God, cannibalism. That’s socially important. The audience will eat that up!” MGM shouted. This tells you something about the powers that be in Hollywood.
My novel Make Room! Make Room! is about overpopulation. I worked on it for a total of five years, digging out the material to make an intelligent estimate of what life would be like in the year 2000 AD. At this time, the 1950s, there were no popular nonfiction books on the dangers of overpopulation, overconsumption, pollution, and allied problems. But there was a great deal of talk
and speculation in the scientific journals, and that interested me greatly. I researched population growth curves, oil depletion, food growth, etc., and came up with the figures I used in the book. I went to specialists—demographers, pathologists, and agronomists—and read a great number of very thick books. It took a great deal of time to write the novel, which was the longest I had ever done, because as well as getting my facts right I had to write a realistic story set in that near-future world.
Overpopulation had been a recurrent theme for years, but I realized that science fiction had fudged this problem by setting stories in the far future, and they were about as relevant to life today as Doc Smith’s Lensman. I picked the year 2000 as being close enough to be a real threat. And I used the character of Solomon Kahn as the link to present-day readers—Kahn is my mother’s family name on one side, and I gave him my birthday and military record. I am not Sol Kahn, but I wanted to suggest a parallel. My idea was to set the book in our own lifetimes—twenty or thirty years ahead—and make the worst prediction I could, writing it as a warning of what may happen. Dystopia is something science fiction does very well—shaking the admonitory finger. When it was published it had the spectacular success that science fiction usually had—it sold a few hundred copies in total! It came out too early, before the world at large became aware of these problems, and vanished. But someone decided to turn it into a film. A film that wasn’t about overpopulation.
They showed me the screenplay—it was all wrong. I asked them if I could rewrite it. They said no. A clause in my contract said that I couldn’t say one word about anything, or there’d be no money. But even though I was forbidden by contract to make any changes to the script, I nevertheless pointed out a number of inaccuracies and mistakes I discovered. I sent little notes suggesting things. Credit goes to the producer for taking instant action.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 26