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

by Alexei Panshin

  “Nightfall,” in fact, was a story that was assigned to Asimov to write. As with so much else in the Golden Age Astounding, the idea for “Nightfall” was Campbell’s. He recognized the germ of an SF story in a lyrical sentence in the opening paragraph of Nature (1836), the first book by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England Transcendentalist lecturer and essayist.

  Emerson had begun his little book by proclaiming the visibility of the hand of God in Nature. In illustration of this thesis, he wrote: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”382

  Asimov recalls coming to a story conference at John Campbell’s office on March 17, 1941. On this occasion, Asimov’s own latest idea was quickly waved aside. Campbell had something he wanted to show him—this quotation, shorn of its last four words. When he’d read it, Campbell asked:

  “What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?”

  I thought, and drew a blank. I said, “I don’t know.”

  Campbell said, “I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that.”383

  What a powerful idea this was for Asimov to have dropped on him from out of the blue! And all the more so since prior to this moment, Campbell had never seen fit to offer Asimov an original story idea of any kind. He had played around with Asimov’s own ideas and expanded upon them, but he had never presented Asimov with a brand-new idea before.

  At the same time, however, as phrased here, what a curiously old-fashioned suggestion it was! This quote from Emerson dates from the height of the Romantic Period and is an embodiment of Romantic attitudes. It proposes that if the brilliance of the stars were to be visible for only one night in a thousand years, the souls of men would still instantly recognize the handiwork of God which had been revealed to them, and adore the Creator. That is what good Romantics would do.

  But the alternative reaction that Campbell was apparently touting was not new, either. It was straight out of the Age of Technology, the era when men had lost their grip on their souls, the long-cherished lifeline to God, and found themselves standing alone in the cold front yard of the new universe of space and time, dazzled and dismayed. Campbell’s counter-suggestion to Asimov was that men in the situation envisioned by Emerson would not worship God at all, but would react instead like some hysteric out of H.P. Lovecraft, who on discovery of the terrifying new vistas of reality and our frightful position therein promptly goes mad. Or like Olaf Stapledon’s hapless Last Men, who find the aloof and changeless presence of the constellations so horrifying, so demoralizing, and so maddening that all they can do is whimper and retreat from the stars.

  In fact, however, there was much more on Campbell’s mind than just these old-fashioned reactions. Emerson was only the jumping-off point for his thinking, and Techno Age cosmic fear but the first elaboration.

  We may remember Campbell suggesting to Asimov that when he presented an idea to a writer, he expected to get back more than he gave. In this case, the all-but-unstated something more that Campbell wanted was the special new perspective of modern science fiction, the perspective that Campbell had so patiently been teaching Asimov month after month through the preceding two and a half years.

  Something of Campbell’s true underlying attitude, thinking, and expectation can be caught by taking note of the stance that he automatically assumed toward this project. He himself was in no peril of either adoring God or freaking out. He stood outside the Emersonian situation—above it and beyond it—perceiving in it the substance of a formal thought experiment, the makings of a Campbell-style SF story. And he obviously expected the same kind of calm dispassion from Asimov, the two men practicing their science fiction together as though it were a kind of science.

  Campbell’s confident posture of detached rational consideration may be glimpsed in Asimov’s account of the balance of that crucial story conference. He says, “We talked about various things, thereafter, with Campbell seeming to circle the idea and occasionally asking me questions such as, ‘Why should the stars be invisible at other times?’ and listening to me as I tried to improvise answers.”384

  It was Campbell’s presumption that his new fact-manipulating modern science fiction would be able to find a way—and more than one way, many ways—to literalize, act out, and then master the uncertain Emersonian moment in which the stars are unveiled to human eyes that have not witnessed them in a thousand years. In this assumption, Campbell had the advantage—which Asimov did not share—of knowing that Robert Heinlein, the former Navy engineer who was Campbell’s most reliable new writer, had already delivered a major story to him on this very same theme.

  In “Universe” (Astounding, May 1941), Heinlein presents a pioneering spaceship that long ago was launched into the void between Earth and the nearest star. In generations past, this ship suffered mutiny and mutation. It has forgotten its purposes. What was once known to be historical and scientific fact has been turned into verse, a religious rigmarole that is committed to memory but no longer understood.

  The ship has lost its way, and no one looks outside. Words like “the Earth,” “a ship,” and “the stars” are now taken allegorically. So it is that when the stars outside the ship are revealed to the protagonist at last, the result is neither worship nor madness, but an onrush of understanding that what had been taken as so much fudge is in fact literal truth. This is experienced as a kind of emotional/esthetic tripout that Heinlein compares to orgasm:

  Light after jeweled light, scattered in careless bountiful splendor across the simulacrum sky, the countless suns lay before him—before him, over him, under him, behind him, in every direction from him. He hung alone in the center of the stellar universe.

  “Oooooh!” It was an involuntary sound, caused by his indrawn breath. He clutched the chair arms hard enough to break fingernails, but he was not aware of it. Nor was he afraid at the moment; there was room in his being for but one emotion. Life within the Ship, alternately harsh and workaday, had placed no strain on his innate capacity to experience beauty; for the first time in his life he knew the intolerable ecstasy of beauty unalloyed. It shook him and hurt him, like the first trembling intensity of sex.385

  Heinlein’s protagonist then wants nothing so much as to show the same sight to others so that they may know the truth and beauty of the stars, too.

  Campbell not only had this special story in hand, “Universe” was already set in print and would be appearing on the newsstands in only a month. But, as though in proof of his claim that he could feed half-a-dozen writers the same idea and get back six different stories, Campbell wanted Asimov to write another story containing the sudden revelation of the stars. However, this one was to be different from Heinlein’s. It was to be centered around a mass reaction of madness.

  Now Campbell was not requesting Asimov to write a story about the experience of madness, like Edgar Allan Poe in one of his more hallucinatory moods. Nor was he asking him to meditate on the prospect of society gone crazy from the shock of a suddenly revealed wider universe.

  What Campbell was ultimately proposing to Asimov was that he resolve a fundamental problem with the aid of universal operating principles, as Don A. Stuart, Campbell’s alter ego, had done in “Who Goes There?”, the seminal story Campbell had so impressed Asimov with at their first meeting. But the problem Campbell was offering for solution was not merely the minor problem of mass freakout at the sight of the stars, but the larger problem of cyclical history and the failure of humanity.

  Don A. Stuart’s “Twilight” and “Night”—which together presented Earthbound cyclical history taken to its ultimate declination—had been published only half-a-dozen years earlier. Asimov—who was just past 21 and a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia—had read these stories of Campbell’s when he was a senior in high school and a freshman in college. So when Campbell and
Asimov agreed before the close of that special story conference that the tale they were planning would be entitled “Nightfall,” Asimov must have recognized on some level that Campbell was deputizing him to deal with the problem that “Twilight” and “Night” had posed and then left unresolved.

  Something of the attitude with which Asimov approached this assignment can be seen in the tenor of the bell-note that he struck in his mind when he sat down to write “Nightfall.” He recalled the thought-variant stories once published in Astounding by Campbell’s predecessor, F. Orlin Tremaine. Asimov says:

  The thought-variants (however noticeable their errors in science to my increasingly hypercritical self) affected me profoundly. They struck me as science fiction par excellence, and by the time I began to write science fiction myself, I yearned to write thought-variants, even though the use of the term vanished with Tremaine. My story “Nightfall” was consciously written as a thought-variant.386

  We should be aware—as Asimov most certainly was aware—that neither “Twilight” nor “Night” had been identified by Tremaine as thought-variants. And with good reason. Campbell’s two stories had not offered any wonder-inspiring new ideas. Rather, they were late restatements of that Techno Age vision of far future Earth in decrepitude that had been presented in The Time Machine, “The World of the Red Sun,” and many other stories. Their special virtue was the vividness with which they evoked the early Twentieth Century devolutionary nightmare.

  An Asimov who had grasped the idea that “Nightfall” should in some sense be a companion piece to “Twilight” and “Night,” but who was also resolved that his story should be a thought-variant, was an Asimov who had indeed gotten Campbell’s message and understood the true nature of the task that had been laid out for him.

  We can see, then, that even in the planning stage, it was intended that “Nightfall” should incorporate a succession of stages of Western thought, a whole range of old and new attitudes toward transcendence.

  “Nightfall” would begin with a Romantic epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson declaring that the city of God—which we can take both as the heavenly city of traditional Christian conception and also as its successor, the rationally perfected utopian city of the Age of Reason—was not just some faded dream of spirit, but was actually to be glimpsed in the countenance of material nature . . . as men allowed to view the stars only once in a millennium would most surely be ready to testify.

  In its own time, this was a thoroughly radical assertion which aimed to indicate the way out of the old spirit-based belief and into the new materialistic head-state that was then emerging. But a hundred years later, working in the context of a different era, Campbell and Asimov could elect to treat it as though it were a conservative statement, a mere reaffirmation of traditional spiritual values.

  In contrast to this, the story proper would offer a situation that was a literalization of all the mental ups and downs suffered by Western scientific man since he gave up being spiritual and became materialistic. “Nightfall” would include the madness of Edgar Allan Poe and the intolerable cosmic revelations of H.P. Lovecraft. It would bow toward scientific utopia and toward the lost race story. It would invoke the red-sun-at-the-end-of-time melancholy of The Time Machine and “Night.” Its title would be an acknowledgement of the concerns of Don A. Stuart. And the story would also be a Tremaine thought-variant.

  All at the same time.

  And the new Campbellian modern science fiction, with its power to imagine any special set of circumstances and conditions, and its positive eagerness to pose problems and solve them, would manage to align all of these disparate elements and turn them into the backbone of a story resolving the thorny problems of cyclical history.

  At this point, Asimov, who could be as secretly unsure of himself as he could be outwardly brash, still considered himself only a tyro as a science fiction writer—a hopeful third-rater. In three years of effort, he had sold seventeen SF stories—but only four of these sales had been to John Campbell, who was his standard of measure. For Asimov, Astounding was the only game in town; sales other than to Campbell didn’t really count.

  So how was it that Campbell had sufficient confidence in Asimov to entrust him with this altogether special assignment? The answer is that John Campbell had been observing Asimov closely ever since the day he first showed up at his office, and he knew things about Asimov that Asimov himself didn’t yet know.

  To start, Asimov was not like his friends, other young would-be SF writers who made their way to Campbell’s office, found the overbearing manner and Socratic style of the great editor too intolerable to endure, and fought with him, insulted him, or fled from him, even unto the opposite coast. Asimov alone among these bright, hungry, talented, lippy New York kids was prepared to be patient and avoid argument, to carefully attend the significance of Campbell’s every word, and to find some way to follow the editor’s lead even when he might be in disagreement.

  Asimov says:

  I became the youngest member of the “stable” of writers he gathered around himself. Though others still younger came his way later, I don’t think that ever in his career did he have an acolyte less worldly and more naive than I was. I believe that amused him and that it pleased him to have so excellent an opportunity to do a bit of molding. At any rate, I have always thought that of all his writers I was his favorite and that he spent more time and effort on me than on anyone else. I believe it still shows.387

  Campbell tested him again and again. None of his other major contributors was ever asked to struggle and fight and hang in there to win acceptance from Campbell as a modern science fiction writer to the degree Asimov was. But the earnest, eager young Asimov rose to the challenge. He never gave up—never thought for a moment of giving up, even when he had written eighteen stories and Campbell had only seen fit to buy one.

  Asimov labored mightily to find the key to work that John Campbell might find acceptable. Many of his early attempts were naive, irrelevant, or simply wide of the mark. But, little by little, Asimov absorbed the editor’s message, and gradually but steadily his work moved in Campbell’s direction.

  When everything came together at last for Asimov, and he finally did succeed in transforming himself into a genuine writer of modern science fiction—and no ordinary one, at that—Campbell was there ready and waiting for him. He recognized what Asimov had managed to make of himself long before Asimov did, and knew how best to put him to use.

  “Nightfall” might be thought of either as a kind of final exam, or alternatively as a first opportunity. When Campbell handed the Emerson quote to Asimov in March 1941 and asked him to write a story around it, it was the crowning moment of all those months of personal instruction. By then, Campbell had a pretty fair notion of Asimov’s knowledge and abilities, and good and sufficient reason to think that Asimov might be ready to handle a challenge of this magnitude.

  A look in detail at the nature of the adjustments Asimov made in his writing and thinking in order to become a Campbellian science fiction writer will show exactly why Campbell could be so confident that Asimov was ready to take on a story like “Nightfall,” and also something of what was different and new and special about modern science fiction.

  Let’s begin with Asimov’s first inadequate story, “Cosmic Corkscrew.”388 Though it would never see publication, Asimov has described it in his collection of his earliest stories and again in the first volume of his autobiography.

  In this story, a time traveler penetrates the future only to find all animal life suddenly, recently, and mysteriously vanished from the planet. He has no way to discover exactly what has happened—the nature of time and of his device prevent him from investigating. And then, when the traveler returns to our era and tells his tale, he is reckoned to be mad and placed in an insane asylum.

  Pretty standard ho-hum Age of Technology stuff. A recognition of this was Asimov’s first lesson in modern science fiction.

  The point was made by Campbe
ll’s own new story, “Who Goes There?”, which he showed to Asimov at their first meeting in June 1938. “Who Goes There?” was a prototype for SF to come. Following the example of “Who Goes There?”, Campbellian modern science fiction would be concerned with posing problems of human relationship to the multiverse of space and time, and then finding the solution to these problems using the appropriate universal operating principles.

  At its best, “Cosmic Corkscrew” could only be another old-time scientifiction story. It posed no solvable problem at all, but only displayed a great cosmic enigma and then retreated from it.

  Asimov recognized immediately that there was a vital difference between the two stories, and he quickly gave indication that it was Campbell’s game he wished to play.

  In less than a month, he was back at Campbell’s office with a second story, “Stowaway.” This story had been heavily influenced by Asimov’s reading of “Who Goes There?” It featured a deadly creature that appeared mysterious but proved to be scientifically comprehensible. “Stowaway” also owed something to “Other Eyes Watching” (Astounding, Feb. 1937), a Campbell article on Jupiter in the series he was writing before he became editor.

  But Campbell turned this second story down, too. He said that it had no particular identifiable fault, but that it was amateurish and didn’t move smoothly. He advised Asimov that it would probably take him a year of effort and a dozen tries before Campbell could begin to find his work acceptable.

  Although Campbell didn’t say so explicitly, it was necessary for Asimov to learn that the modern science fiction story was not conceived, organized or written in quite the same way as the Age of Technology SF story.