Evolution, because of the unusual conditions on Antares, had proceeded along lines utterly different from those followed on the various bodies which had dotted the heavens when the deep was sprinkled with stars in the years now gone. Antares was the hugest sun that had leaped from the primeval chaos. When it cooled, it cooled far more slowly than the others, and when life once began it was assured of an existence not of thousands, not of millions, but of billions of years.
That life, when it began, had passed from the simple forms to the age of land juggernauts, and so by steps on and on up the scale. The civilizations of other worlds had reached their apex and the worlds themselves become cold and lifeless at the time when the mighty civilization of Antares was beginning.
The star, because of discords arising from its enormous population, had then passed through a period of warfare until such terrific and fearful scourges of destruction were produced that in the Two Days War seven billion of the eight and one-half billion inhabitants were slaughtered. Those two days of carnage, followed by pestilential diseases which carried off three-fourths of the remaining inhabitants, ended war for eons.
From then on, the golden age began. The minds of the people of Antares became bigger and bigger, their bodies proportionately smaller, until the cycle eventually was completed. Every being in front of the speaker was a monstrous heap of black viscidity, each mass an enormous brain, a sexless thing that lived for Thought. Long ago it had been discovered that life could be created artificially in tissue formed in the laboratories of the chemists. Sex was thus destroyed, and the inhabitants no longer spent their time in taking care of families. Nearly all the countless hours that were saved were put into scientific advance, with the result that the star leaped forward in an age of progress never paralleled.
The beings, rapidly becoming Brains, found that by the extermination of the parasites and bacteria on Antares, by changing their own organic structure, and by willing to live, they approached immortality. They discovered the secrets of Time and Space; they knew the extent of the universe, and how Space in its farther reaches became self-annihilating. They knew that life was self-created and controlled its own period of duration. They knew that when a life, tired of existence, killed itself, it was dead forever; it could not live again, for death was the final chemical change of life.
These were the shapes that spread in the vast sea before the speaker. They were shapes because they could assume any form they wished. Their all-powerful minds had complete control of that which was themselves. When the Brains were desirous of traveling, they relaxed from their usual semi-rigidity and flowed from place to place like a stream of ink rushing down a hill; when they were tired, they flattened into disks; when expounding their thoughts, they became towering pillars of rigid ooze; and when lost in abstraction, or in a pleasurable contemplation of the unbounded worlds created in their minds, within which they often wandered, they resembled huge, dormant balls.
From the speaker himself had come no sound although he had imparted his thoughts to his sentient assembly. The thoughts of the Brains, when their minds permitted, emanated to those about them instantly, like electric waves. Antares was a world of eternal, unbroken silence.
The Great Brain’s thoughts continued to flow out. “Long ago, the approaching doom became known to us all. We could do nothing then; probably we can do nothing now. It does not matter greatly, of course, for existence is a useless thing which benefits no one. But nevertheless, at that meeting in an unremembered year, we asked those who were willing to try to think of some possible way of saving our own star, at least, if not the others. There was no reward offered, for there was no reward adequate. All that the Brain would receive would be glory as one of the greatest which has ever been produced. The rest of us, too, would receive only the effects of that glory in the knowledge that we had conquered fate, hitherto, and still, considered inexorable; we would derive pleasure only from the fact that we, self-creating and all but supreme, had made ourselves supreme by conquering the worst and most powerful menace which has ever attacked life, time, and the universe: the Cosmic Dust.
“Our most intelligent Brains have been thinking on this one subject for untold millions of years. They have excluded from their thoughts everything except the question: How can the dust be checked? They have produced innumerable plans which have been tested thoroughly. All have failed. We have hurled into the void uncontrollable bolts of lightning, interplanetary sheets of flame, in the hope that we might fuse masses of the dust into new, incandescent worlds. We have anchored huge magnets throughout Space, hoping to attract the dust, which is faintly magnetic, and thus to solidify it or clear much of it from the waste. We have caused fearful disturbances by exploding our most powerful compounds in the realms about us, hoping to set the dust so violently in motion that the chaos would become tempestuous with the storms of creation. With our rays of annihilation, we have blasted billion-mile paths through the ceaselessly surging dust. We have destroyed the life of Betelgeuse and rooted there titanic developers of vacua, sprawling, whirring machines to suck the dust from Space and heap it up on that star. We have liberated enormous quantities of gas, lit them, and sent the hot and furious fires madly flashing through the affrighted dust. In our desperation, we have even asked for the aid of the Ether-Eaters. Yes, we have in finality exercised our Will-Power to sweep back the rolling billows! In vain! What has been accomplished? The dust has retreated for a moment, has paused—and has welled onward. It has returned silently triumphant, and it has again hung its pall of blackness over a fear-haunted and a nightmare-ridden Space.”
Swelling in soundless sorrow through the Hall of the Mist rose the racing thoughts of the Great Brain. “Our chemists with a bitter doggedness never before displayed have devoted their time to the production of Super-Brains, in the hope of making one which could defeat the Cosmic Dust. They have changed the chemicals used in our genesis; they have experimented with molds and forms; they have tried every resource. With what result? There have come forth raging monstrosities, mad abominations, satanic horrors and ravenous foul things howling wildly the nameless and indescribable phantoms that thronged their minds. We have killed them in order to save ourselves. And the Dust has pushed onward! We have appealed to every living Brain to help us. We appealed, in the forgotten, dream-veiled centuries, for aid in any form. From time to time we have been offered plans, plans which for a while have made terrific and sweeping inroads on the Dust, but plans which have always failed.
“The triumph of the Cosmic Dust has almost come. There is so little time left us that our efforts now must inevitably be futile. But today, in the hope that some Brain, either of the old ones or of the gigantic new ones, has discovered a possibility not yet tried, we have called this conference, the first in more than twelve thousand years.”
The tense, alert silence of the hall relaxed and became soft when the thoughts of the Great Brain had stopped flowing. The electric waves which had filled the vast Hall of the Mist sank, and for a long time a strange tranquillity brooded there. But the mass was never still; the sea in front of the dais rippled and billowed from time to time as waves of thought passed through it. Yet no Brain offered to speak, and the seething expanse, as the minutes crept by, again became quiet.
In a thin column on the dais, rising high into the air, swayed the Great Brain; again and again it swept its glance around the hall, peering among the rolling heaving shapes in the hope of finding somewhere in those thousands one which could offer a suggestion. But the minutes passed, and time lengthened, with no response; and the sadness of the fixed and changeless end crept across the last race. And the Brains, wrapped in their meditation, saw the Dust pushing at the glass shell of Antares with triumphant mockery.
The Great Brain had expected no reply, since for centuries it had been considered futile to combat the Dust; and so, when its expectation, though not its wish, was fulfilled, it relaxed and dropped, the signal that the meeting was over.
But the mo
tion had scarcely been completed, when from deep within the center of the sea there came a violent heave; in a moment, a section collected itself and rushed together; like a waterspout it swished upward and went streaming toward the roof until it swayed thin and tenuous as a column of smoke, the top of the Brain peering down from the dimness of the upper hall.
“I have found an infallible plan! The Red Brain has conquered the Cosmic Dust!”
A terrific tenseness leaped upon the Brains, numbed by the cry that wavered in silence down the Hall of the Mist into the empty and dreamless tomb of the farther marble. The Great Brain, hardly relaxed, rose again. And with a curious whirling motion the assembled horde suddenly revolved. Immediately, the Red Brain hung upward from the middle of the sea which had become an amphitheater in arrangement, all Brains looking toward the center. A suppressed expectancy and hope electrified the air.
The Red Brain was one of the later creations of the chemists, and had come forth during the experiments to produce more perfect Brains. Previously, they had all been black; but, perhaps because of impurities in the chemicals, this one had evolved in an extremely dark, dull-red color. It was regarded with wonder by its companions, and more so when they found that many of its thoughts could not be grasped by them. What it allowed the others to know of what passed within it was to a large extent incomprehensible. No one knew how to judge the Red Brain, but much had been expected from it.
Thus, when the Red Brain sent forth its announcement, the others formed a huge circle around, their minds passive and open for the explanation. Thus they lay, silent, while awaiting the discovery. And thus they reclined, completely unprepared for what followed.
For, as the Red Brain hung in the air, it began a slow but restless swaying; and as it swayed, its thoughts poured out in a rhythmic chant. High above them it towered, a smooth, slender column, whose lofty end was moving ever faster and faster while nervous shudders rippled up and down its length. And the alien chant became stronger, stronger, until it changed into a wild and dithyram-bic paean to the beauty of the past, to the glory of the present, to the splendor of the future. And the lay became a moaning praise, an exaltation; a strain of furious joy ran through it, a repetition of, “The Red Brain has conquered the Dust. Others have failed, but he has not. Play the national anthem in honor of the Red Brain, for he has triumphed. Place him at your head, for he has conquered the Dust. Exalt him who has proved himself the greatest of all. Worship him who is greater than Antares, greater than the Cosmic Dust, greater than the Universe.”
Abruptly it stopped. The puzzled Brains looked up. The Red Brain had ceased its nodding motion for a moment, and had closed its thoughts to them. But along its entire length it began a gyratory spinning, until it whirled at an incredible speed. Something antagonistic suddenly emanated from it. And before the Brains could grasp the situation, before they could protect themselves by closing their minds, the will-impulses of the Red Brain, laden with hatred and death, were throbbing about them and entering their open minds. Like a whirlwind spun the Red Brain, hurling forth its hate. Like half-inflated balloons, the other Brains had lain around it; like cooling glass bubbles, they tautened for a moment; and like pricked balloons as their thoughts and thus their lives were annihilated, since Thought was Life, they flattened, instantaneously dissolving into pools of evanescent slime. By tens and by hundreds they sank, destroyed by the sweeping unchecked thoughts of the Red Brain which filled the hall; by groups, by sections, by paths around the entire circle fell the doomed Brains in that single moment of carelessness, while pools of thick ink collected, flowed together, crept onward, and became rivers of pitch rushing down the marble floor with a soft, silken swish.
The hope of the universe had lain with the Red Brain.
And the Red Brain was mad.
* * * *
Copyright © 1927 by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company; copyright © 1944 by Donald Wandrei.
PART 3: The Golden Age
(1937–1945)
With the arrival of Astounding Science Fiction and other magazines, the quantity (and quality) of North American science fiction grew tremendously. Familiar names like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, Clifford Simak, Theordore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt, and Jack Williamson began to be published regularly. John W. Campbell, already an established writer, became the field’s most famous magazine editor, with a reputation for discovering new talent. Other writer-editors like Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey began to make their marks in the field.
One magazine, Planet Stories, created a sort of shared-world view of the Solar System which was to be used by all their writers (who included Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, and other greats). In the Planet Stories system Mars had canals and an ancient, dying (or dead) civilization; Venus was covered with jungles (sometimes dinosaur-inhabited); Saturn’s moon Titan was an ice planet, etc. Loosely based on Romantic imaginings of contemporary science, the Planet Stories Solar System was tremendously popular and adopted widely as a sort of science fictional equivalent of King Arthur’s court: a comfortable resting place for all sorts of stories ranging from wistful tragedies to space patrol adventures.
A shared conception of the Solar System was helpful as science fiction spread to new media: It was now possible to listen to SF programs on national radio broadcasts, and to watch serials like Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon as part of a weekly trip to the movies.
For science fiction readers, books were still very much secondary to magazines, and bookstores were rare. Book distribution was improving, however: World War II paper shortages led to the creation of pocket-sized mass market paperbacks, which would soon lead to dramatic changes in the science fiction market. The war also broadened the readership for science fiction, with huge numbers of bored soldiers and sailors sharing books and swapping stories.
ISAAC ASIMOV
(1920–1992)
I only knew Isaac very briefly at the end of his life, so I never really knew the boundlessly energetic practical joker who was sometimes perhaps a bit too energetic around his many female fans (somewhat to the despair of his wives). Mostly I knew him through his writing and editing: the incredible wealth of ideas in his stories; the equal wealth in new writers who I encountered through the anthologies he edited, and the introductions that made them all sound so interesting; the nonfiction he wrote on topics ranging from astronomy to the Bible. I knew him as a writer who needed to know about everything, as a man who wrote more than 500 books. People said he had a photographic memory (which wasn’t true), but what he really had was a thirst for knowledge, and an equal thirst to pass that knowledge on.
Asimov’s parents were Russian Jews who immigrated to the U.S. when he was three. He taught himself to read by the time he was five, and read everything he could lay his hands on—including the science fiction magazines in the family candy store. He was writing stories by age eleven, and submitted his first story to Astounding while still a teenager. John W. Campbell rejected it, but encouraged him to write more. Asimov sold his third story, “Marooned Off Vesta,” to Amazing Stories, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue.
“Nightfall” came out in 1941, the same year Asimov earned his MA at Columbia. It was his thirty-second published story, and a startling piece of what Asimov termed “social science fiction,” a movement away from space opera and toward speculation about social issues or the human condition. His stories put an emphasis on problem solving and real scientific content (sometimes to the detriment of characterization and prose style). Asimov’s approach fit exactly what John W. Campbell was looking for, and from 1943 to 1949, all of Asimov’s published science fiction appeared in Astounding. This included material that would later make up his first three Foundation novels, as well as the robot stories that would be collected in I, Robot (1950). Both works were profoundly influential, and would later become much longer, interconnected series.
Asimov spent World War II working as a civilian at th
e Philadelphia Navy Yard’s Naval Air Experimental Station before being drafted at the end of the war. After his discharge he returned to Columbia to earn a PhD in biochemistry, then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine in what became a rather loose association as Asimov’s literary fame grew. By the late 1950s he was writing primarily nonfiction books on science and popular history, before returning most of his attention to genre fiction again in the 1970s. That included lending his name to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov’s Science Fiction) and writing an editorial for each issue.
Asimov had a heart attack in 1977, and triple bypass surgery in 1984. Though it was not made public, he acquired HIV during a blood transfusion while undergoing that surgery, complicating his health further. He continued to write prolifically despite his health issues, until his death of heart and kidney failure in April, 1992. During his lifetime, Asimov won an astonishing number of awards, although it was something of a running joke that he didn’t win a Hugo until 1963, despite editing the Hugo Award anthologies. He would add five more Hugos and several Nebulas after that, along with awards for his writing on science and fourteen honorary doctorates; he would also have an asteroid and a crater on Mars named for him.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 115