The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  The first of Gernsback’s great limitations was his fundamentally utilitarian attitude toward SF. He did not value it for itself, but only as one more tool of his own making that he was entitled to use in any way that seemed appropriate, whether it be to produce future science or to generate immediate cash.

  Even in the boom times of the mid-Twenties, Gernsback had a great need for cash. He knew how to live well. He required money for his experiments. He had all sorts of ongoing businesses and projects, and by no means all of these were financially productive. His radio station and television broadcasts in particular were a heavy continuing financial drain.

  Hugo Gernsback was an idealist—but he was always completely ready to be pragmatic. As much as he loved scientifiction and wished to promote it, he was prepared to squeeze Amazing Stories for every cent that it would produce. He saw it as a convenient personal pocket into which he could dip as he needed to.

  It was authors who first suffered from Gernsback’s pinchpenny tactics. At a time when a pulp magazine might pay as much as five cents a word for fiction, Gernsback was content to pay as little as one-fifth of a cent—if and when an author managed to catch up with him. On more than one occasion, Gernsback would have to be sued before he would pay up.

  One experience with Gernsback’s business methods proved to be more than enough for H.P. Lovecraft. He dubbed Gernsback “Hugo the rat” and retreated to the more honest environs of Weird Tales.213

  But it wasn’t only unknown authors who were abused by Gernsback. Edgar Rice Burroughs had such a time collecting payment for The Master Mind Of Mars that thereafter he was careful to set his price, even for reprints, well beyond Gernsback’s reach.

  Gernsback’s financial gamesmanship was not limited to his writers. As his radio station got into deeper and deeper trouble, he began to horse along all of his creditors as a matter of policy. It was a dangerous game that he was playing, and eventually Gernsback miscalculated.

  In February 1929, his printer and his paper supplier felt pushed too far, and sent Gernsback’s publishing companies into bankruptcy.214

  Gernsback’s scientifiction magazine, Amazing Stories, was considered a property valuable enough to keep alive. A new publishing company was organized by the receiver and creditors, and Amazing Stories continued regular publication without missing an issue. But Hugo Gernsback was out, severed from his invention.

  Gernsback was nothing if not resilient. He was not ready to abandon what he had come to consider his personal property. With an illicit copy of the Amazing Stories subscription list, unpublished manuscripts spirited away from the offices of Amazing, and financing from who-knows-where, Gernsback managed to have an entirely new SF magazine on the newsstands within two months of the time that he was thrown into bankruptcy.

  His new magazine, Science Wonder Stories, was a close imitation of Amazing. It was of the same large bedsheet size. It had its cover by Frank R. Paul and its story by H.G. Wells. It had a quiz, a contest, and a standard Gernsback editorial. It offered a new brand name for SF—“science fiction”215—a name that would soon be generally adopted and that eventually would appear in standard dictionaries while the original term “scientifiction” was all but forgotten.

  Science Wonder Stories even sported its own special slogan that was almost identical in sense to the slogan of Amazing—“Prophetic Fiction is the Mother of Scientific Fact.”216

  The following month, a second new Gernsback SF magazine appeared—Air Wonder Stories. Same size. Same Paul covers. Its slogan was “The Future of Aviation Springs from the Imagination.”217

  A magazine devoted solely to flying stories of the future was a bit too specialized to be successful, even in this, the era of Charles Lindbergh. Within a year, Air Wonder Stories was merged into Science Wonder Stories. The result was a general SF magazine simply called Wonder Stories.

  But Wonder Stories in any of its forms never really prospered. Even as it was born in 1929, the hard test of the Great Depression was just around the corner. And at this critical moment, Hugo Gernsback had not merely opened the door wide to competition. He had put himself in the peculiar position of attempting to imitate his own original creation, Amazing Stories.

  Something priceless had been lightly thrown away and could not be recovered. Hugo Gernsback no longer had a monopoly of magazine science fiction. He was no longer the one person in a position to say what SF was really like and enforce his opinions by what he chose to print. This was a time when science was changing, and with it science fiction. And at just this moment, SF began to escape the grasp of Hugo Gernsback.

  Amazing Stories should have been no real competition. The new editor of Amazing was T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., a white-bearded old man who had formerly been Gernsback’s chief subeditor. Sloane was an inventor whose son had married a daughter of Thomas Edison. When he became editor of Amazing in 1929, he was nearly 78 years old.

  Sloane completely lacked Gernsback’s vision and ambition. His ideas were narrow and fossilized. He did not believe in the possibility of space travel, for instance, and often said as much to his readers.

  Even so, Gernsback’s Wonder Stories never managed to overtake the Sloane Amazing. Part of the reason may have been that Sloane was not deterred from printing space travel stories simply because he did not believe in space travel. He was old-fashioned, but he was not doctrinaire. Another part of the reason may have been that writers who had tasted of Gernsback’s generosity welcomed the opportunity to submit their work to someone else, anyone else other than Hugo the rat.

  And then, suddenly, another order of competition made its appearance, a new magazine with a cover date of January 1930. It was a pulp magazine—the very first science fiction pulp—Astounding Stories of Super-Science.

  On the face of it, Astounding was not to be taken seriously. It was not even a sister publication to respectable magazines of science like Amazing Stories or Science Wonder. It was only a casual experiment, created primarily as a means of reducing overhead for the Clayton chain of pulp magazines. A new magazine of some kind was called for. Almost by accident, it turned out to be Astounding Stories of Super-Science.

  But, as a pulp, Astounding offered a direct and fundamental challenge to Hugo Gernsback’s proprietorial dictate that the proper purpose of SF should be the creation of future science. The editor of Astounding, Harry Bates, had studied Amazing Stories on the newsstand. He had gone so far as to copy Amazing’s title. He had found something impressive about its covers. But he had been appalled by the magazine’s contents:

  “Amazing Stories! Once I had bought a copy. What awful stuff, I’d found it! Cluttered with trivia! Packed with puerilities. Written by unimaginables!”218

  It was Bates’s strategy to outflank Gernsback. His aim was to produce a magazine that was more amusing and entertaining than Amazing—not more instructional, educational, scientific or prophetic. Instead of relying on bright-eyed amateurs of science for his stories, as Gernsback did, Bates called upon the professional pulp writers he was used to dealing with to supply his copy.

  These professional storytellers did not produce much SF that could be called innovative. Most typically, the Bates Astounding published conventional stories of action-adventure with only the thinnest veneer of fantastic science, often added by the editor. Even so, its livelier, more open-minded approach to science fiction—and its much higher rate of payment—made Astounding an immediately powerful competitor for the bedsheet SF magazines, placing great strain on their resolve to be serious and superior.

  Then, early in 1933, the chain which published Astounding abruptly collapsed when the publisher, William Clayton, attempted to buy out his partner and financial backer and failed. Astounding was purchased by another pulp chain, the doughty old firm of Street & Smith. After a hiatus of six months, the magazine made a reappearance with its October 1933 issue.

  At precisely this same moment, the two SF magazines that Hugo Gernsback had founded were forced by the difficult circumsta
nces of the Depression to reduce themselves in size and alter their approach. The Sloane Amazing Stories became a pulp magazine with its own October 1933 issue. The following month, Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, which had found it necessary to pass as a pulp for twelve issues in 1930-31 before re-establishing itself in bedsheet size, capitulated too, and firmly and finally became a pulp magazine.

  The commercial point was made—science fiction could not succeed by pretending to be educational literature. If it was to survive, it had to lower itself and fight to live as common pulp trash.

  From the end of 1933, if not before that, Astounding was dominant among the American science fiction magazines. In some measure, this was a matter of highly fortuitous outward circumstances. With Street & Smith, Astounding was the newest link in what was perhaps the most stable and powerful of all pulp chains, while Amazing and Wonder Stories were both highly marginal publications—lone pulp titles issued by companies with no background or experience in pulp publishing. Quite simply, Astounding was assured far better newsstand distribution than its rivals. It was able to pay better money to contributors, and it paid much more reliably.

  But the Clayton Astounding had offered similar advantages—including an even higher rate of payment—and still had not established such clear superiority to the other magazines. Far more central to the new dominance of Astounding was the greater vision of the editor Street & Smith put in charge of the magazine. F. Orlin Tremaine saw something in SF that Hugo Gernsback, T. O’Conor Sloane and Harry Bates had not perceived.

  For Tremaine, science fiction was not fiction about science. Neither was it mere action-adventure fiction not essentially different from other kinds of pulp storytelling. Tremaine conceived of SF as a literature of thought.

  Beginning with the December 1933 issue of Astounding, he announced a new editorial policy. In each issue, he meant to include at least one story that was a “thought variant.”219 These stories would either present some fresh new concept, or at the least stand some tired old idea on its head. It was this deliberate policy that made the Tremaine Astounding so much more exciting and innovative a science fiction magazine than its two rivals, a true precursor of the “modern science fiction” so soon to come.

  Hugo Gernsback, with his stodgy old utilitarian notions about SF, could not compete with F. Orlin Tremaine’s thought experiments. He and his magazine were left behind, floundering, falling more and more out of touch with the changes that were going on in science fiction.

  After it became a pulp, the heart went out of Wonder Stories. Gernsback’s dream had never been to publish a common pulp magazine. He appointed a high school boy, Charles Hornig, to be editor. To win new readers, he printed stories that he was ashamed of—and then he begged his old loyal readers’ pardon for having done it.

  Of the three SF magazines, Wonder Stories was dead last. The circulation continued to fall. Distribution became erratic, even in New York City where it was published. And authors found it harder than ever to collect payment.

  Finally, early in 1936, Gernsback gave up. He sold his failing magazine to the Thrilling Group of pulps and dropped out of the science fiction publishing business. The new owners renamed the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories and did very well with it.

  In 1938, a similarly faltering Amazing Stories—still under the editorship of 86-year-old T. O’Conor Sloane—would be sold to Ziff-Davis, another pulp chain. And once more a magazine that couldn’t make its way was altered into a highly successful publication.

  Science fiction suddenly became a very hot item in pulp publishing. In early 1939, each of the three pulp chains involved in science fiction added a second SF magazine. In January, Startling Stories was created as a companion to Thrilling Wonder.220 In March, Street & Smith added Unknown to Astounding. And in May, Ziff-Davis backed Amazing Stories with Fantastic Adventures. Other pulp chains hurried to jump on the bandwagon with their own SF magazines.

  The lesson was unmistakable. During the course of the Thirties, Hugo Gernsback’s functionalist concept of SF had been thoroughly tested in the public marketplace and decisively rejected. Gernsback’s educational and prophetic scientifiction could not draw and hold an elite audience. Neither could it command a popular pulp magazine audience, the one audience that was prepared to pay attention to SF. Only when Gernsback and all that he stood for were swept out of the way did science fiction flourish. Thank you very much, Hugo.

  However, even with science fiction firmly settled into its new role as a late and minor category of pulp publishing—the last distinct story type to emerge and establish itself in specialized magazines—some part of the original Gernsbackian ideal would manage to continue to be preserved. The pulp SF magazines would all identify themselves by the Gernsback-devised label “science fiction.” These magazines would pay their ritual respects to science, printing scientific news of interest and even speculative articles on borderline scientific subjects.

  But if the Gernsbackian ideal continued to some extent, it was only through being shorn of Gernsback’s limitations.

  The first of these—the proprietary, functionalist, utilitarian attitude he adopted toward science fiction—was what had turned authors against him and then cost him ownership of Amazing Stories. It might even be said that it was this fixed viewpoint that rendered Gernsback so incapable of effective response to the less restrained approaches to SF adopted by the pulp science fiction publishers.

  Gernsback’s second and more significant failure of vision, however, was less a matter of personal character. This was the failure that would leave Wonder Stories floundering in the wake of the Tremaine Astounding during the Thirties. And it was this same blindness that would ultimately alienate Gernsback to the point that he could refuse to recognize science fiction stories that had been specifically singled out to be honored with an award named for him. He would say, “Either you have science fiction, with the emphasis on science, or you have fantasy. You cannot have both—the two genres bear no relation to each other.”221

  The crucial limitation was this:

  As much as any man of the Age of Technology, Hugo Gernsback was a lover of science. He believed that he knew science thoroughly and intimately. Science was the entirety of his life. But then, while Gernsback was preoccupied with the serious business of proclaiming science and promoting science and creating the science of tomorrow—and without his ever quite taking in that it was happening—science itself altered radically.

  Advanced Twentieth Century science became something altogether different from the science that Hugo Gernsback’s generation had known and loved, and Gernsback—together with a good many others—got left behind. Gernsback never really caught on to the new thing. Even after the Atomic Age had arrived, he remained what he was, a mental citizen of the Age of Technology.

  One centrally important change was in scale. Between 1895 and the 1920s, the conceptions of science were radically extended in every dimension, so that a universe that was already disconcertingly vast and alien suddenly became incomprehensibly larger and more complex, as well as far older, than had previously been supposed.

  With the discovery of radioactivity and the subatomic realm, the small became much smaller. With identification of the existence of other galaxies lying far beyond the boundaries of our own—and the subsequent conclusion that all these great stellar aggregations were rapidly moving away from each other as the cosmos expanded—the large became immensely larger. Geological and astrophysical evidence both suggested that the scale of time past had to be altered from mere millions of years to billions of years.

  But even more disconcerting was a series of announcements from those physicists who had begun to probe into the microcosm and the macrocosm in search of the basic foundations of matter and energy. It was certainty and stability that they were seeking—the ultimate constituents of things. But what they managed to find instead was instability, uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox.

  These scientists reported that it now appeared
to be the case that where very large, very small, very fast and very prolonged processes were concerned, common sense and the familiar rules of classical physics did not necessarily apply. Time might vary. Space might be twisted or altogether abolished. Matter could be energy in another guise. And light was somehow both a particle and a wave—simultaneously matter and energy.

  Most provocative of all was the suggestion from the new science of quantum mechanics—which leaped into being at precisely the same time that Hugo Gernsback was establishing Amazing Stories—that on the subatomic level events did not happen by cause-and-effect, but by probabilities. All of a sudden, seemingly solid matter was replaced by pure chance.

  In short, at the very moment when material science had become the acknowledged leading edge of Western civilization, and society at large had followed science into finally rejecting the last remnant of insubstantial spirit, the most fundamental concepts of Western belief—time, space, matter, causality, even objective knowledge itself—were all being called into question. And by whom? By the masters of material science.

  How utterly strange! Western scientists—the most devotedly materialistic of men—had spent two full centuries and more examining their precious matter with an ever finer scrutiny. And now, suddenly, in the early Twentieth Century, matter itself had lost its solidity and become insubstantial in their hands. Like the spirit-seeking Romantics of the previous era, sober scientists had come around to the belief that the true reality of the world was nothing at all like its appearance.

  And so it was that you might now find a distinguished scientist like the British astrophysicist Sir James Jeans stepping forward to declare in his 1930 book, The Mysterious Universe: