“Mere probability is all we have left.”304
It is this replacement of certainty by probability that is the key to all of the burgeoning of dimension that occurred in the SF of the Thirties. There was no longer to be merely one single Future in which the inevitable decline and fall of man was absolutely mandated. Rather, humanity was now free to choose among a variety of possibilities.
This was a breathtaking and wonderful realization, but also a frightening and demoralizing responsibility. This is shown in another Stanley Weinbaum story, “The Lotus Eaters” (Astounding, Apr. 1935).
In this story, Ham and Pat Hammond, two venturers on the dark side of Venus, encounter a mobile, warm-blooded sentient plant, whom they dub Oscar. Oscar is a deep philosophical thinker, an able extrapolator.
He says: “I start with one fact and I reason from it. I build a picture of the universe. I start with another fact. I reason from it. I find that the universe I picture is the same as the first. I know that the picture is true.”305
Oscar is a perfect informational mirror. He will answer any question for Ham and Pat—but only in the words they are able to provide him with. Pat asks:
“Oscar, I have the words time and space and matter and law and cause. Tell me the ultimate law of the universe?”
“It is the law of—” Silence.
“Conservation of energy or matter? Gravitation?”
“No.”
“Of—life?”
“No. Life is of no importance.”
“There’s a chance,” said Ham tensely, “that there is no word!”
“Yes,” clicked Oscar. “It is the law of chance. These other words are different sides of the law of chance.”306
Oddly enough, however, in this universe that is ruled by chance, Oscar’s own fate is still completely determined: Like the rest of his kind, he will be eaten in due course by a Venusian triops. Very soon, these philosophical plants will become extinct. And it really doesn’t matter much to them.
Pat tells Ham that this is the difference between humanity and Oscar’s kind: “An animal has will, a plant hasn’t. Do you see now? Oscar has all the magnificent intelligence of a god, but he hasn’t the will of a worm.”307
Without some exercise of will, a universe of chance must prove as inevitably deadly as the old absolutely determined universe. But to what end should human will be applied? It appeared that if mankind was not to succumb numbly to a storm of random buffets, like Oscar and his kind or the doomed Eighteenth Men of Neptune, then man must turn all of his science and power to the task of making himself master of the laws of chance.
The one writer of the Thirties to whom this was most evident was John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell approached science fiction as though it were a form of theoretical science. During the decade, in stories that were deliberate thought experiments, he sought to work out answers to the continuing dilemmas of the Age of Technology—the threat of the vast unknown universe, the dangers offered by hostile superior aliens, and the prospect of inevitable human decline—in terms suggested by the radical new science of the Twentieth Century and by the expansive new science fiction of Edmond Hamilton and E.E. Smith.
John Wood Campbell, Jr. was born in Newark, New Jersey on June 8, 1910. His father was a science-minded authoritarian. His mother was emotionally manipulative. Their influence bent John Campbell into a compulsive doubter and disputer, just the youngster to deliberately attempt to take apart the givens of Technological Age science fiction and then reassemble them in a new pattern.
Campbell’s father, John, Sr., worked as an engineer for Bell Telephone. He was a Vermont Yankee, a Scot, a Victorian, and a Man of Science—a cool, remote man who prided himself on his complete objectivity in all matters as he laid down the law for his family.
Very early, young John lit upon science as an activity that his father would not disapprove of and reject. One of his continuing fascinations became the new physics and astronomy as expounded by Arthur Eddington and James Jeans. He turned into an able scientific tinkerer and experimenter—except for one occasion as a teenager when he blew up his basement chem lab.
Campbell also did his best to overset his father’s rule by developing a superior command of fact and facility at argumentation. Campbell would become so successful at this by the time he reached his teens that all through the rest of his life, his major mode of relating to other people would be to attempt to draw them into argument.
It may be understandable that living in such a household, Campbell’s mother should rely on playing upon the emotions that her husband habitually denied as her most effective means of getting her own way. But greatly complicating this tendency toward emotional gamesmanship was the fact that Dorothy Campbell was one of a set of identical twins so alike that not even her own family could tell them apart. And never would she be more sweet and affectionate to her son than in the presence of her childless twin—who retaliated by snubbing and rejecting the boy. When he approached what appeared to be his mother, young John could never be certain what his reception would be.
John W. Campbell, Jr. grew up a doubter of appearances and a rebel against orthodoxy, always ready to stand up in class and challenge the pronouncements of a teacher. Not surprisingly, his grades were erratic. He failed to graduate from the prep school he was sent to, and his lack of enthusiasm for the required study of German caused him to flunk out of M.I.T. in his junior year. He completed his degree at Duke University in North Carolina in 1932.
Campbell was a longtime reader of SF. As a boy in the Teens, he had delighted in the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He bought Argosy and Weird Tales for their science fiction stories, and he snatched up the very first issue of Amazing Stories when it appeared on the newsstand. The climax of his SF reading was that wonderful moment in 1928 that saw “Crashing Suns” and The Skylark of Space published just as Campbell was preparing to set off for college.
The element in Campbell that chafed against all limits and restrictions responded to these radical new stories. He instantly adopted their expansiveness and power as his own personal means of liberation. Thus it came to be that at the very same time that Campbell the college student was failing in German and only barely squeaking by in his English classes, John W. Campbell, Jr., the whiz-kid science fiction writer, was engaged in emulating his mentors Hamilton and Smith, mastering the universe of his imagination with epics of super-science like The Black Star Passes (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1930) and Islands of Space (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring 1931).
These early stories expressed Campbell’s belief in the power of human-directed science. In his epics, men employing super-science were enabled to travel from star to star, galaxy to galaxy, and dimension to dimension. They turned aside the threat of ancient alien beings, dominated and directed lesser aliens, explored the cosmos, fought great battles in space, and exploded planets like rotten tomatoes.
By the conclusion of Invaders from the Infinite (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring-Summer 1932), Campbell’s bold inventors had come to command the power of gods. As one of them says:
“ ‘Man can do what was never before possible. From the nothingness of Space he can make anything. Man alone in this space is Creator and Destroyer.’ ”309
But there was something more to Campbell’s early super-scientific big bang stories than the mere display of overwhelming material power by men of overwhelming intellectual brawn. To a very real extent, his models, the expansive stories of Smith and Hamilton, were expressions of pure faith that did not deal with the limits of the Age of Technology so much as simply overleap them. John W. Campbell could not rest content with that. He had to test those limits for himself.
And so, even in a story like The Black Star Passes, there is the central suggestion that cultural decline need not be final and permanent. In this story, decadent aliens attempt to trade their dead star for ours, and are repulsed by Campbell’s heroes. But their contact with humanity is still enough to rouse these beings from their a
ncient lethargy and give them the resolve to capture a new sun yet: “They had fought, and lost, but they had gained a spirit of adventure that had been dormant for millions of years.”310
In Invaders from the Infinite, there is the implication that science may not be the ultimate power. When Campbell’s inventors name their mightiest spaceship, they do not call it Science. Rather, they dub it Thought:
“The swiftest thing that ever was, thought! The most irresistible thing, thought, for nothing can stop its progress. The most destructive thing, thought. Thought, the greatest constructor, the greatest destroyer, the product of mind, and producer of powers, the greatest of powers. Thought is controlled by the mind. Let us call it Thought.”311
And in the last of Campbell’s epics of super-science, The Mightiest Machine (Astounding, Dec. 1934-Apr. 1935), there is the contention that even though physical limits may exist, ways may also exist to bypass these limits:
“Here’s an illustration of the case. Take that piece of wire there—a piece of copper. I can truly and safely say that a wire as thin as the lead of a pencil can’t be made the shaft of a machine carrying ten thousand horse power twenty miles. Impossible! But that doesn’t mean that ten thousand electric horse power can’t be conducted through it. As a driving shaft, as direct mechanical energy in other words, it would be impossible. As a conductor for a second-hand energy, it is possible.”312
During his college days, Campbell was exposed to several radical new lines of scientific inquiry that would become a central part of his thinking. As a student at M.I.T., he attracted the friendship of Professor Norbert Wiener, who would be the founder of the science of cybernetics, with whom he argued problems of intelligent machines. And while he was at Duke University, he became interested in the pioneering efforts of Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke to place the study of parapsychological phenomena, formerly thought of as manifestations of spirit, on a firm scientific foundation—even serving as a subject in ESP experiments.
When Campbell graduated from college in the direst moment of the Great Depression, it soon became apparent that he could not make a living writing science fiction. So he took whatever jobs were available. He sold cars. He sold exhaust fans. He sold gas heaters. He worked in the research department of Mack Truck. He worked for an instrument manufacturer. And for six months he was a technical writer and editor for a New Jersey chemical company.
Meanwhile Campbell the science fiction writer had begun to try out a more thoughtful line of story than he had ever written previously—stories that directly addressed the most fundamental problems of Technological Age SF.
The first transitional example of this was “The Last Evolution” (Amazing, Aug. 1932). This short story contained all the offhand invention of machines and weapons that Campbell’s readers had come to expect from him—zap topping zap. But in its basic orientation, “The Last Evolution” was completely different from Campbell’s usual thing. Rather than picturing mankind as the natural boss of the universe, master of Thought, and all-powerful Creator and Destroyer, this story envisioned the decline and extinction of humanity.
In “The Last Evolution,” man in the year 2538 is imagined living in comfort on the labor of his machines. But then alien invaders—“the Outsiders”313—swoop down from the stars. They lightly turn aside the defenses of Earth, and begin to scour the planet with a deadly green ray that annihilates all life.
It is too late for humanity. One of the two remaining human scientists speaks prophetically:
“The end of man. . . . But not the end of evolution. The children of man still live—the machines will go on. Not of man’s flesh, but of a better flesh, a flesh that knows no sickness, and no decay, a flesh that spends no thousands of years in advancing a step in its full evolution, but overnight leaps ahead to new heights.”314
And new superior machines do appear in response to the attacks of the Outsiders. But when the power of the most advanced of these machines, F-2, still proves insufficient to defeat the invaders, an even higher evolution is demanded. F-2 produces an entity of “pure force and pure intelligence.”315
This glowing golden sphere still acknowledges itself an heir of man. It demonstrates its overwhelming superiority to the aliens by turning their flagship inside out and back again without harm. And it sends the Outsiders scooting back home, tails between their legs.
At the conclusion, the narrator of the story reveals himself to be none other than F-2. He is now the last surviving metal machine, living in a world populated by force-intelligences 125,000 years hence, and directing his story back through time for our edification.
Campbell elaborated upon this vision in two further experimental stories, “Twilight” and “Night,” published under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart, a variation upon the maiden name of Campbell’s wife, Doña. Taken together, “The Last Evolution,” “Twilight,” and “Night” may be seen as a kind of triptych, a three-part meditation on the destiny of man and the universe, a statement of the worst possible case.
“Twilight,” the first Don A. Stuart story, was written late in 1932. It was not a conventional story of conflict and response like “The Last Evolution.” Rather, it was a deliberate mood-piece, a melancholy vision of the remote future not unlike the last sad probings of distant time by Wells’s Time Traveller.
The protagonist of “Twilight” is a mysterious hitchhiker picked up along the roadside. This magnificent wide-browed man in soft silver clothing identifies himself as a venturer who has traveled from his own high scientific society of the year 3059 to a future moment fully seven million years from now. On his return he has overshot his mark by a trifling amount. In effect, he has made a slight detour to December 1932 in order to tell his story to an audience that will really appreciate it.
The venturer says that he found himself near a great city. The sun seven million years hence is still yellow, not red. But the people are gone from the city. And still it lives on, oiled and dusted and kept in good running order by the faithful abandoned machines of humanity.
In two other great cities, some humans do still survive, but these are shrunken, lonely Big Brains: “They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads.”316
Once men lived on all the planets of the solar system. Now they are in decline. They have few children, and they lack all curiosity or will. Long ago, they committed the error of eradicating all other earthly life except for a few decorative plants:
And now this last dwindling group of men still in the system had no other life form to make its successor. Always before when one civilization toppled, on its ashes rose a new one. Now there was but one civilization, and all other races, even other species, were gone save in the plants. And man was too far along in his old age to bring intelligence and mobility from the plants. Perhaps he could have in his prime.317
The venturer does what little he can. He learns the last mournful and bewildered human songs. And he programs the machines of man to develop the power of curiosity. Then, with a sigh, he sets off again back through time.
When it was written, “Twilight” was altogether too strange and plotless to be published. It was rejected by all the existing science fiction magazines. Only after the death of the Clayton Astounding and its resurrection by Street & Smith under the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine, was this highly different story accepted at last. It appeared in the November 1934 issue, one month before the beginning of the serialization of The Mightiest Machine.
Heretofore, Campbell had not been published in Astounding. But he was welcome there now. F. Orlin Tremaine perceived something extraordinary in this argument-prone young writer—another person besides himself who understood that science fiction could be an experimental mode of thought. Tremaine did his best to dissuade Campbell from writing further epics of super-science. Instead, he encouraged him to develop a new line of thoughtful and provocative stories for Astounding under the Stuart name.
This was an opportunity that Campbell the tester of limits could not resist. The M
ightiest Machine would be the only story ever published in Astounding under Campbell’s own name. But “Night” (Astounding, Oct. 1935)—the last of Campbell’s phrasings of the ultimate problem—would be the eighth Don A. Stuart story published in the space of one year.
“Night” was another mood-piece, an extension and completion of “Twilight” in something of the same manner that Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker would be an extension and completion of Last and First Men. In this story, our witness of things to come is a contemporary experimenter with anti-gravity who is suddenly hurled far into the future. Far, far into the future—120 billion years from now.
Man is gone. The faithful machines of Earth have finally sighed and died. The Sun is a great red cinder that gives no heat. The cosmos has fragmented into pieces and only a handful of stars are to be seen in the sky. The universe is a cooling corpse, and the traveler has been called to view the remains:
“The city had been dead a score of billions of years. The Sun was dead. The Earth was dead. The very atoms were dead. The universe had been dead a billion years. Time himself was dying now, dying with the city and the planet and the universe he had killed.”318
The traveler seeks some trace of humanity on Neptune, but all he finds are a last few highly evolved machines still carrying on. These glowing golden globes have power and curiosity, but they are lacking in purpose.
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