The typical Techno Age story was a linear narrative after the fashion of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The Time Machine, or Asimov’s “Cosmic Corkscrew.” It was composed of a string of and thens, as a character made a transition from the Village into the World Beyond the Hill, had a series of adventures there, and then returned. The meat of the story was the detailed exposition of all that was encountered and the character’s reactions to it. The more adventures and the more reaction the better.
The modern science fiction story was very different. It was not framed as an endless, episodic process of probing into the unknown. Rather, it was conceived as a kind of mosaic, with every element in the story existing both for its own sake and also for its contribution to the pattern of the whole.
Like the multiverse it delineated, a modern science fiction story hung together. It could make do without a lot of the endless describing-and-reacting that earlier SF had considered indispensable. Since it was the shape of the whole that really mattered, much could now be said by implication or need not even be said at all.
As a result, modern science fiction was less emotive and more businesslike than Techno Age SF. With the coming of modern science fiction, story lengths became more compact. In giving Asimov his reasons for rejecting “Cosmic Corkscrew,” Campbell had cited the fact that at 9000 words its length was awkward, too long for a short story, too short for a novelet. But in former times, that wouldn’t have been an unusual length for a short story in Astounding.
And just that quickly, Asimov seized hold of the proper new external standards of measure. At 6000 words, his second story “Stowaway” was exactly the right length. If his story still came out as amateurish and clunky, that was because Asimov didn’t yet grasp that the shorter length of the modern science fiction story was the result of packing more meaning into a smaller space.
The first real clues as to how modern science fiction was actually to be constructed came to Asimov in an exchange he had with writer Clifford Simak later in that summer of 1938. Simak, more than fifteen years older than Asimov, was the Midwestern newspaperman who had published a few stories in the early Thirties and then put science fiction aside until Campbell became editor of Astounding.
When Simak’s first new story after his return, “Rule 18,” appeared in the July 1938 issue of Astounding, Asimov was not at all impressed by it. In his regular monthly letter to the magazine rating the stories, Asimov-the-fan ranked this relatively slight tale of time-traveling football players low.
Simak read Asimov’s letter when it was printed in the September issue. And he immediately wrote a sincere and temperate letter to the youngster in Brooklyn seeking to know the details of his criticism. What was it that had been wrong with the story?
Asimov says:
I reread the story in order to be able to answer properly and found, to my surprise, that there was nothing wrong with it at all. What he had done was to write the story in separate scenes with no explicit transition passages between. I wasn’t used to that technique, so the story seemed choppy and incoherent. The second time around I saw what he was doing and realized that not only was the story not in the least incoherent, but also that it moved with a slick speed that would have been impossible if all the dull bread-and-butter transitions had been inserted.
I wrote to Simak to explain and to apologize, and adopted the same device in my own stories. What’s more, I attempted, as far as possible, to make use of something similar to Simak’s cool and unadorned style.389
By copying that unadorned style and Simak’s technique of jump-cutting between significant scenes, Asimov was soon able to write stories that were sharper, sparer and more of a whole than his first few attempts. So swift a learner was young Asimov that it wouldn’t take him anything like a full year to sell his first story to John Campbell, but only another six months.
What Asimov was picking up from Simak was not just a simpler, less emotional style and a technique of shifting scenes without justifying the transition. It was also the orientation toward existence that underlay them.
During the Age of Technology, as in earlier periods, the known and the unknown had been clearly separate spheres. Village Earth was a small center of consciously known things surrounded by the vast unknown of the World Beyond the Hill.
But the redesigned cosmos presented in Campbell’s Astounding was not like this. It was a continuum, held together everywhere and at all times by constantly overlapping, interacting universal rules.
Within this multiverse of time, space and other dimensions, every single thing was accessible and potentially knowable.
In this new frame of reference, the human enterprise was no longer to be strictly identified with Village Earth. Human consciousness might have its locus anywhere in space or time, and manage to deal with things when it got there.
At the same time, however, it was apparent that any single locus or point of view within this new cosmos must have its limitations. If existence is the product of a complex net of causal factors too interwoven and far-reaching to ever be completely encompassed, then from any one vantage at any one moment some things will be clearly revealed, while others must necessarily be hidden—at least until a change in perspective occurs.
In Techno Age SF, transcendence had been found out there in the larger darkness. But in modern science fiction, transcendence could be located anywhere at all. Gaps, glitches and blank spots in our awareness were where mystery was now concealed.
But even in this uncertain new universe, constantly shifting in and out of focus, men could still make their way. What was essential was not that they know everything all at once, but only that they identify and master those particular principles that would produce desired results in a given set of circumstances.
It was this practical-minded engineering mentality that was central in the pages of the Golden Age Astounding. By contrast with the great philosophical ponderings and the fascination with vastness typical of a Wells or a Stapledon, Campbellian SF could seem small in scale and a bit nearsighted. But it would also display a compensatory immediacy, adaptability, verve and daring.
It wasn’t just that a modern science fiction story might leap lightly from one meaningful moment to another, unconcerned about the spaces in between. In the new SF, anything might be hidden or omitted or approached from a cockeyed angle. The writers of Golden Age science fiction would delight in starting their stories at any point in space or time, with action in progress, and would expect the reader to play the game, fill in the blank spots, and put together the ongoing situation from hints and clues and bits of exposition casually dropped in passing.
In the strange reality presented in the Campbell Astounding—half here and half not-here—it took a very cool operator who knew the way things really work to tell what was important and what was not and make things come out his way. And a not altogether dissimilar demand for Atomic Age street-smarts was made on the readers of Astounding.
Isaac Asimov would gradually evolve his own personal brand of the new kind of story. More than any other of Campbell’s writers, he would come to specialize in stories of formal problem-solving. The classic Asimov story would be a schematic representation of the scientific method in action. Characters so sparely presented as to be little more than disembodied voices would tackle some science-fictional conundrum. They would propound, test, and discard one theory after another until at last they lit upon the proper principle, applied it, and resolved the problem before them.
Asimov would not attain this level of sublime abstraction overnight. But John Campbell would certainly encourage his tendencies in this direction. The stories he chose to buy from Asimov’s first two dozen attempts—“Trends” (Astounding, July 1939) and “Homo Sol”390 (Astounding, Sept. 1940)—would be the two that most closely resembled the work of the later Isaac Asimov. And, in large part, this would be so because Campbell nudged and pushed until these stories became what they were.
Most of Asimov’s early efforts
were space operas, or invention stories, or stories of future oppression and rebellion. Campbell might take stories of these kinds from other writers, but he wouldn’t accept them from Asimov. From Asimov he had to have new ideas, or nothing at all.
Campbell would spy a first hint of possibility in Asimov’s ninth manuscript, “Ad Astra.” The youngster happened to be earning needed money typing and taking notes for a sociology professor who was working on a book about social resistance to technological innovation. Asimov adapted the idea to science fiction, including a passing mention of social resistance to space travel in his latest story. Campbell hadn’t seen that notion before, and he picked it out immediately.
It was Campbell’s habit to snatch up an idea like this one, reduce it from conclusion to initial premise, and throw it back to the writer again. In this case, he called Asimov into his office for a chat and told him that his story as it was wouldn’t do, but that he might have a viable piece of work if he would take this problem of resistance to space travel and make it his central concern.
So Asimov tossed away what he had and began again. He would still think it was the same story he was writing and continue to call it by the same title—“Ad Astra.” Campbell, knowing better, would retitle it “Trends.”
In its new incarnation, Asimov’s story would show the more powerful trend of scientific progress, represented by space travel, winning out over the lesser trend of a social reaction against science in the form of a temporary religious revival. And that was a story that Campbell would happily buy. He was a strong advocate of scientific progress and it was highly important to him to see science portrayed as more fundamental, powerful and effective than society or religion, to show advances in knowledge triumphant over mere fleeting social spasms.
But after “Trends,” it would be another full year and many more tries by Asimov before he came to visit Campbell with another idea that the editor responded to. In this case, it was the notion of a story in which Earth, having achieved interstellar space travel, is welcomed into the bosom of a Galactic Federation.
As in the earlier instance, Campbell perceived Asimov’s original simple notion not as a sufficiency, but as a starting point. But this time it proved to be much harder for Campbell to get exactly what he wanted from Asimov. It would take several months and three versions of the story before he would be satisfied with “Homo Sol”—a tale in which the newly received Earthmen are analyzed by galactic mathematical psychologists and discovered to be both dauntingly competent and mentally distinct from every other space-traveling race.
What hung this story up for so long was personal limitation—both Asimov’s and Campbell’s. Asimov’s limitation was that he was still groping in the dark for the key to modern science fiction. But Campbell’s limitation here was, if anything, even greater.
As his authors would gradually come to learn, John Campbell had a highly conservative side as well as a radical and heretical side, and one old-fashioned notion to which he was firmly wedded was the Edwardian belief that Man must prevail and shall prevail. Ultimately, it was not scientific progress that Campbell truly cared about, but human progress and power.
This particular bias wasn’t just Campbell’s alone, but was shared by a number of people in his generation who were able to accept the overwhelming new universe revealed by modern science, but who had not given up their attachment to Techno Age elitism. The elitism they embraced was not the old traditional elitism of blood and birth, but rather the newer Wellsian elitism of knowledge, ability and competence. For these people, it was only this kind of specialness that might allow Man to tackle and master the vast indifference of material existence and the hostility of alien beings.
It was this generational bias, which Campbell held with an unusual purity and fervor, that he aimed to impose on Asimov’s story. Writing about their conflict of aims subsequent to Campbell’s death in 1971, with the advantage of thirty years of maturation and insight, Asimov would say:
“Homo Sol” has a plot of a sort that particularly appealed to Campbell. Although the human beings in the story are far behind the other intelligences of the Galaxy, it is clear that there is something special about them, that they have an unusual ability to move ahead very quickly, and that everyone else had better watch out for them.
Campbell liked stories in which human beings proved themselves superior to other intelligences, even when those others were further advanced technologically. It pleased him to have human beings shown to possess a unique spirit of daring, or a sense of humor, or a ruthless ability to kill when necessary, that always brought them victory over other intelligences, even against odds.
But in early 1940, the young Asimov didn’t immediately understand what it was that Campbell really desired him to write—partly because Campbell wouldn’t come right out and say what it was he wanted, and partly because Asimov simply didn’t share Campbell’s special attachment to the exaltation of Man.
Asimov was not the person to press notions of innate human superiority, even though he himself was brighter than almost everyone he knew. He was a Jew born in Europe, where World War II—Hitler’s demonic crusade for Aryan dominance and racial purification—was already in progress.
Moreover, Asimov was a member of the post-World War I generation to whom human chauvinism and aggression seemed a more powerful and immediate threat than anything the physical universe was likely to dish out. Years before such attitudes became a commonplace in science fiction, Asimov was a committed liberal; even his very earliest stories presented earnest condemnations of racism and pleas for human tolerance.
It was because of his initial ignorance of Campbell’s true intent, and because their values were so divergent here, that it took Asimov so many tries before he finally adjusted “Homo Sol” into something like the shape that Campbell really wanted.
However, in the months after “Homo Sol” was finally accepted, Asimov very gradually came to the realization that he had somehow been maneuvered into writing a story he didn’t altogether like. And he felt compromised. More than anything else, he wished to sell further science fiction stories to John Campbell, whom he admired and respected as he did no other man. But not if it was to be at the cost of having to espouse views that he found personally repugnant.
Asimov couldn’t tackle this problem head-on. It was unthinkable to Asimov to quarrel with Campbell, possibly offend him, and thereby lose this relationship that was of such central importance to him. But neither was he willing to compromise his own personal sense of decency, equity and integrity.
So just how was he to get around this apparently inflexible rule of Campbell’s that human beings must be superior, yet still write about the issues of relative power and dominance that were of central importance to him? More than any other single thing, it was Asimov’s search for a solution to this problem that turned him into the unique writer of modern science fiction that he became.
The method of approach that Asimov picked was persistent experimentation. He would try one thing, and then another, and then another, until at last he found something that worked. This, in fact, was the very method that had won Asimov admittance to graduate school the previous year when it seemed that the Columbia University Department of Chemistry was determined not to let him in. And it would become the standard operating procedure of the classic Asimov character.
Asimov’s first ploy would be to try another story with a galactic setting—a story related to “Homo Sol” for whatever weight that might carry—but without any human beings involved. “The Imaginary” was precisely the same length as “Homo Sol.” In it, the idea of a scientific psychology operated with mathematical rigor was even more explicitly advanced. There just happened to be no human-nonhuman conflict in this one. It was only in passing that men of Earth were mentioned at all.
But this attempt to circumvent Campbell was not successful. The editor showed no interest in “The Imaginary.” He may very well have been pleased and intrigued by the notion of ma
th-based psychology; in time, it would become a central supposition of much of Asimov’s work for him. Quite plainly, however, if mathematical psychology was going to be placed at the center of a story, it wasn’t going to be a story without human beings.
The editor who would eventually buy “The Imaginary” and publish it in the November 1942 Super Science Stories was Asimov’s friend and Campbell’s one-time student in editing, Fred Pohl. Of the early Asimov stories that Campbell did not respond to or wasn’t shown, Pohl’s magazines would print no fewer than eight, and he would even commission Asimov to write a ninth. He was Asimov’s first steady market—if not the market that Asimov most desired to hit.
After “The Imaginary,” Asimov tried once more to evade his situation. He liked Unknown better if anything than Astounding, and Unknown did not involve problems of superiority and inferiority. So he wrote a fantasy story aimed at Unknown in which an oak tree foretells the future by rustling its leaves.
The story wasn’t successful. Campbell didn’t buy it, and neither did anyone else. The real significance of “The Oak” was that it would be the very last story (except for two short-shorts) that Asimov would fail to sell. Even though he had not yet mastered Campbell’s special requirements, he was now able to write to a consistently professional standard.
Then twice more during the summer of 1940, Asimov tried again to write as he had been used to writing. The stories he produced were frank expressions of his own feelings—one was about overcoming groundless prejudice, and the other was about the futility of war. But neither story was particularly original as science fiction. Campbell rejected them, and it was again left to Pohl, who was another young idealist responsive to sentiments of this kind, to give them publication.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 43
