One way to understand the radical indrawing of science fiction that took place during the first two years of the Atomic Age would be to recall the situation that existed back in 1870, just before the publication of “The Battle of Dorking” and the opening of the Technological Age. At that moment, the future did not yet belong to science-beyond-science. Rather, it was still imagined to be the land of utopian social perfection.
In a very similar way, at the onset of the Atomic Age in 1939, the far future was the exclusive property of Techno Age SF. It was envisioned as the country of Big Brains and red suns.
We might feel some inclination to say, then, that this was a moment for SF to draw in its horns. Modern science fiction as of yet had no alternative images of the most distant reaches of the multiverse. It had no business of its own to perform at the far ends of space and time. And consequently, it felt the need to restrict itself to comparatively well-defined territory until it had worked out new answers to the questions of what was to be done out there amidst the enigmatical immensities, and how, and why.
However, there is an alternative way of regarding this early modern science fiction of 1939 and 1940 that may catch a little more of the truth of the matter. To see things from the proper angle, we must recall the overwhelming degree to which the expansive superscientific SF of the early Thirties had emphasized mystery, while devoting comparatively little thought to the matter of plausibility.
In that hour of political and economic desperation, with the whole world apparently falling into collapse, a handful of exploratory writers had flatly denied the inevitability of the decline and fall of Western man. Instead, these bold visionaries had foreseen man bursting free of the bonds of Earth and leaping lightly to the stars. They’d imagined that men might run into alien races out there, wrestle with them for dominance, and win. So powerful would men become that they might destroy whole planets with nothing more than a seeming child’s toy or the pure overwhelming power of their thought. Out of the nothingness of space, they might produce anything their hearts desired. And there would even come a day when ancient alien races saluted humanity for its maturity and breadth of vision, and men served as the guardians of the galaxy.
The young John Campbell had perhaps gone the farthest. In his SF daydreams, he had imagined man as unique and alone in his power—a creator and destroyer, well-nigh a god.
This was certainly inspiring stuff—for some people, at least—in a time that could use all the inspiration it could get. But in no way could it be called inherently likely. It was all cobbled together out of unfounded hope and barefaced assertion.
And as wonderful and mysterious as the leaps beyond current possibility might be that were tossed off with such apparent casualness in the SF of the early Thirties, they could also be more than enough to test the credibility of even so uncritical a scientific believer as Hugo Gernsback. It might seem to us that there was nothing that this man could not swallow if only the word “science” were attached to it—but the kid John Campbell proved that even Hugo Gernsback had his limits.
In the December 1932 issue of Wonder Stories, Gernsback wrote a special editorial entitled “Reasonableness in Science Fiction” and attached it to a new Campbell story called “Space Rays.” Said Gernsback:
In the present offering, Mr. John W. Campbell, Jr. . . . has proceeded in an earnest way to burlesque some of our rash authors to whom plausibility and possible science mean nothing. He pulls, magician-like, all sorts of impossible rays from his silk hat, much as a magician extracts rabbits. There is no situation that cannot easily be overcome by some sort of preposterous scientific—(as he terms it)—gimmick. . . . If he has left out any colored rays, or any magical rays that could not immediately perform miraculous wonders, we are not aware of this shortcoming in his story.436
How odd of Gernsback to deliver this public rap across the knuckles! Even though his criticism may have had a certain justice to it, it would seem that the doubts and reservations he felt were not sufficient to prevent him from accepting Campbell’s story and publishing it—and, presumably, even paying for it by and by.
This reprimand from Hugo Gernsback, the guardian of all that was serious about science fiction, apparently smarted considerably. “Space Rays” would be the last story that Campbell would publish in Wonder for four full years. He wouldn’t appear there again until Gernsback had given up and sold the magazine and it had been remade into Thrilling Wonder Stories.
And yet, this reproof would seem to have been a turning point for John Campbell. It appears to mark the precise moment that he began to put aside his juvenile fantasies of the unstoppable power of science-wielding man and to turn his considerable critical intelligence to the task of setting forth the unresolved problems and challenging the unconsidered premises of Techno Age science fiction.
It was on the heels of Gernsback’s rebuke, in December 1932, that Campbell wrote “Twilight.” And by Campbell’s own reckoning, it was “Twilight” that “led to the development of the Don A. Stuart stories, and thus to the modern Astounding.”437
In fact, however, the whole variety of work that Campbell found to do during the Thirties following his initial super-scientific phase—his stories as Don A. Stuart, the Penton and Blake series, and his eighteen articles on the Solar System, beginning with one significantly entitled “Accuracy” (Astounding, June 1936)—can be seen as varying attempts to bring necessary plausibility to the dreams of human power and domination with which he had begun.
Campbell was not totally alone in this. We may remember, for instance, that one reason why Stanley Weinbaum’s first story, “A Martian Odyssey,” had such powerful impact was its relatively greater concern for plausibility. Even John Campbell himself was ready to take instruction from Weinbaum in conceiving and writing his Penton and Blake stories.
As the Thirties passed and Depression fears gradually began to wane, there was a decrease in demand for stories of escape to the far ends of space and time, or for stories of human scientific invincibility, and an increase in concern for what it might actually prove possible for human beings to be and do. More and more of the readers of science fiction—like the young Isaac Asimov—were receiving education in current science and beginning to care that the stories which inspired them should have some reasonable consonance with known fact. They wanted science fiction to be more than just made-up stuff.
By the later Thirties, so evident had the increased appetite for accurate science become that with the beginning of 1937, F. Orlin Tremaine would alter the letters column in Astounding from “Brass Tacks” to “Science Discussions.” In a sense, it was only the confirmation of this trend when eight months later John Campbell, the chief contemporary spokesman for scientific accuracy in science fiction, was chosen to become the new editor of Astounding.
As we’ve seen, the moment he became editor, Campbell began a series of radical changes in Astounding that were designed to alter it into a fit vehicle for an altogether new kind of SF—a modern science fiction that was not only good, but was also logical and possible. And, as we have also seen, by then Astounding had a readership that was more than ready to go along with Campbell in the new direction, to support his policy of mutation and to ask for more.
To understand the radically constrained science fiction of the 1939 and 1940 Astounding, then, we must be aware that at the hour it was published, it was not perceived as an imaginative retreat. Rather, it was hailed as a giant step forward, a radical advance in realism, rigor and relevance.
Observers like us, shielded by the passage of time from the pure overwhelming force of John Campbell’s self-confidence and the corresponding enthusiasm of his readers, might still only see that there was a moment when Campbell’s vaunted new modern science fiction actually amounted to no more than a small handful of relatively trivial stories about the human race becoming hairy, or a man falling in love with a female robot, or the problems of repairing a cracked drive shaft on a Martian spaceliner. And it could be wit
h a sense of near-embarrassment that we mentally compare these simple little stories to the ever-so-much-vaster dignity, scope and seriousness of a Techno Age work like Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, published as recently as 1937.
But then we have to pause and remember that every period has its own problems, its own priorities, and its own sense of exactly where it is that plausible transcendence is to be sought and found. Just as the Age of Reason had been concerned with the rational perfection of society, while the Romantic Era was bound on a Grail-quest in hopes of healing its wounded soul, so had it been the special business of the Age of Technology to come to terms with the vastness of the wider universe.
The Atomic Age simply wouldn’t be mesmerized by vastness in the same way. There would still be a few writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke who would continue to find a measure of inspiration in the thought of vast sweeps of time and space—in something of the same way that there had still been those during the Techno Age who continued to care about the fate of the soul. But modern science fiction as a whole would not concentrate its hopes and fears on the remotest imaginable distances. It would seek its mysteries in other places.
A third way—and perhaps the best way—to look upon the apparent constriction and limitation of SF in Astounding in the first years of the Golden Age would be to think of science fiction under Campbell’s direction as changing the focus of its vision from the far away and vague to the near and sharply defined. If that was a very small territory at the outset—the Solar System during the next hundred years or so—in short order, Campbell’s careful, thoughtful, plausible, human-centered modern science fiction would begin expanding its area of authority and control, moving out into the territory of Techno Age SF and taking it over.
There would be distinct limits to how far it would ultimately go. For the most part, no farther ahead in time than about fifty thousand years, and no farther out in space than the borders of our own galaxy. But within this broad-enough area of knowability, John Campbell would stake out his science fiction empire.
The first territory that was placed under Campbellian rule, however, would not be our time or space, but rather parallel universes—that multitude of alternate realms of being asserted to exist by Dunsany and Lovecraft, among others, but perhaps most tellingly evoked by H.G. Wells in Men Like Gods.
Assertion of authority over these not-quite-real places would take place in the not-completely-serious pages of Unknown in 1940—a time when Astounding was still concentrating its full attention on the immediate task of straightening and tidying up around the Solar System.
The writers responsible would be L. Sprague de Camp, fresh from the triumph of Lest Darkness Fall, and a collaborator, Fletcher Pratt. In a pair of comic short novels, “The Roaring Trumpet” (Unknown, May 1940) and “The Mathematics of Magic” (Unknown, Aug. 1940)—gathered in 1941 as a book entitled The Incomplete Enchanter—they imagined the power of universal operating principles as extending not just to the past and the fall of Rome, but as applying to every conceivable realm or dimension of being.
De Camp’s writing partner, Murray Fletcher Pratt, was a scholar, linguist, and gourmet born in 1897 on an Indian reservation in western New York State. In his youth, he was simultaneously a public librarian and a professional boxer. In later years, he chose to wear the loudest shirts he could find, raised marmosets in his apartment, and enjoyed reading sagas aloud in the original Norse. He would write more than fifty books of many different kinds, but at the time of his death in 1956, his chief reputation was as a Navy and Civil War historian.
Along with his many other interests, Pratt had an early and continuing involvement in SF. Back in the Twenties he had contributed a handful of collaborative scientifiction stories to Amazing. Then, in the Thirties, he translated novels from French and German for Wonder Stories—contriving to collect the money he was owed by Hugo Gernsback through the simple expedient of holding onto the final installment of a novel in serialization until he received his payment in full.
De Camp and Pratt were first thrown together by de Camp’s onetime college roommate, John D. Clark, the man who had introduced de Camp to magazine science fiction and also to John Campbell. At the time they joined forces, it was Pratt, ten years de Camp’s elder, who was much the better-known writer—at least outside the confines of Astounding and Unknown. What’s more, the initial notion of writing fantasies about modern characters in storybook settings was his, too.
As de Camp would eventually say: “With the appearance of Campbell’s Unknown, Pratt conceived the idea of a series of novels, in collaboration with me, about a hero who projects himself into the parallel worlds described on this plane in myths and legends.”438
What Pratt had to offer de Camp was his broad and loving knowledge of European myth and legend, together with a more lively imagination than de Camp possessed. It would be he who picked the worlds they would have their modern characters travel to—first the realm of Norse myth, and then the world of Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic poem, The Faerie Queene (1589-1596).
What de Camp offered to Pratt was a keen sense of story logic, and a lightness of touch that Pratt’s own fiction tended to lack. De Camp also knew how to write for John Campbell, while Pratt did not.
The two made a very odd couple: Pratt was as conspicuously short as de Camp was conspicuously tall. He was as flamboyant as de Camp was self-contained. And he was as romantic as de Camp was humorously skeptical. But the collaboration of these two proved to be a very happy blending of their separate talents. De Camp himself says, “I thought that the combination of Pratt and de Camp produced a result visibly different from the work of either of us alone.”439
If “The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic,” their first two collaborative stories, appeared altogether marvelous and new—by a considerable margin the most wonderful stories yet to see print in Unknown—that would be due in some degree to the freshness of the settings selected by Pratt. Even more, however, it would be because of the originality and scope of de Camp’s arguments for the existence of a multiplicity of worlds, each defined by its own individual set of operating principles, with a master set of operating principles ruling over all.
Just as in Lest Darkness Fall, the theory that is to be illustrated by the events of the story is set forth at the outset of “The Roaring Trumpet,” this time in a conversation between senior psychologist Reed Chalmers and the members of his staff at the Garaden Institute in Ohio on the subject of “ ‘our new science of paraphysics.’ ”440 Chalmers suggests:
“The world we live in is composed of impressions received through the senses. But there is an infinity of possible worlds, and if the senses can be attuned to receive a different series of impressions, we should infallibly find ourselves living in a different world.”441
To this, a young psychologist, the rash and romantic Harold Shea, responds:
“Do you mean that a complete shift would actually transfer a man’s body into one of these other worlds?”
“Very likely,” agreed Chalmers, “since the body records whatever sensations the mind permits. For complete demonstration it would be necessary to try it, and I don’t know that the risk would be worth it. The other world might have such different laws that it would be impossible to return.”
Shea asked: “You mean, if the world were that of classical mythology, for instance, the laws would be those of Greek magic instead of modern physics? . . . Then this new science of paraphysics is going to include the natural laws of all these different worlds, and what we call physics is just a special case of paraphysics—”
“Not so fast, young man,” replied Chalmers. “For the present, I think it wise to restrict the meaning of our term ‘paraphysics’ to the branch of knowledge that concerns the relationship of these multiple universes to each other, assuming that they actually exist.”442
Here, in the crucial term “paraphysics,” we can perceive a clear measure of the change from traditional thou
ght. In former times, the nature of being and the ultimate structure of the world were the subject of metaphysics, a branch of philosophy concerned with non-material spiritual reality. However, in the new order reflected in modern science fiction, these fundamental questions were now to be recognized as the subject of something quite different—paraphysics, which might be defined as the science of higher-order universal operating principles, or what might be called universal operating principles beyond universal operating principles.
And once again, just as in Lest Darkness Fall, in very short order in “The Roaring Trumpet” initial speculation is borne out by actual experience. Bored and brash young Harold Shea gathers those supplies that seem appropriate to him—including a .38 revolver, a box of matches, a 1926 Boy Scout Handbook, and a sporty hat with a green feather—and makes an attempt to transport himself into the world of Irish legend by reciting a series of logical equations designed to attune him with the mental state of that alternate universe. However, Shea doesn’t fully have the hang of what he is attempting, and instead his “syllogismobile”443 deposits him in the mud and snow of the realm of Norse myth, leaving him to try to cope with the likes of Odinn, Thor and Loki.
In this other universe, the science and technology of our world won’t operate at all. Shea’s watch doesn’t tick, his matches won’t light, his gun doesn’t shoot, and the Boy Scout Handbook turns into a meaningless blur before his eyes. Lost in this other reality, Harold Shea has none of the advantages of special knowledge that permitted Martin Padway to undo the fall of Rome.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 48
