For one thing, the World War II years would be the period in which the United States did its best impression of the machine-state first dreamed of in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. That might be no impression at all when compared to totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia which attempted to treat their people like cogs in a machine. Even so, during the war American society would be mobilized as a whole—organized and prioritized, rationed and regulated, ordered and compelled as it had never been before. The entire country would be turned into a war industry.
The most fit, able and well-educated young men would be snatched away from the careers they had been attempting to put together out of the shambles left by the Depression, and set to the work of fighting and winning the war. And among those called away to the armed services, defense plants and research laboratories would be the brightest and best of the modern science fiction writers that John Campbell had been laboring so hard to gather and train. This could not help but have a great impact upon Astounding.
Between missing manpower and the new national priority of defeating Germany and Japan and their allies, limitations would be imposed on many aspects of ordinary life. Not the most important of these, but also not the least, would be that there were fewer lumberjacks on the job, and fewer railroad cars available to transport logs and paper and printed pulp magazines. That would have its effect on Astounding, too, and upon science fiction in general.
But the American people would be ready to accept shortages, disruptions and extraordinary impositions of authority. There was great anger in the country over Japan’s all-too-successful surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii, and a deep accumulated dislike of the fanaticism, arrogance, brutality and treachery that had been displayed by Germany ever since the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
From the time the United States entered World War II, a public consensus rare in American history would exist that this war was just and had to be fought. This wasn’t merely one more conflict imposed upon the people by rich men in high places out to line their pockets and prove their power. Ordinary Americans had a pretty good notion that if the likes of Hitler and Mussolini and the military party that had recently seized control in Japan were allowed to win this war and rule the world, the cost would be their own freedom, and they were ready to fight to see freedom preserved.
In American eyes, the Axis powers would be looked upon as the embodiment of old-time attitudes that were now revealed as excessive and unacceptable. This was to be a war fought against all those who would set themselves up as superior to everyone else because of their race or nation or class, against those incapable of accepting difference in thought or diversity of kind, and against those who would seek to impose their will on the world through the rule of force and violence.
Offered in opposition to this elitism, intolerance and determination to prevail at any cost would be the recently emerged American ideal of democratic pluralism, the conviction that each man has his own individual value and ought to be allow the opportunity to demonstrate it. If the people of the United States were ready to overlook their differences and work toward a common goal, it wasn’t because they were forced to, or because some monolithic central authority permitted them to think no other thought, but because they aimed to show the totalitarian states what free men working together in voluntary cooperation could manage to do if they were of a mind to.
America’s new ideal can be seen in its simplest and purest form in World War II combat movies—particularly those made in the decade of reassessment that followed the war. The standard World War I story had been about the futility and waste of sending a generation of young men out of the trenches and over the top to be cut down by gas and machine gun fire in No Man’s Land, or about dashing but doomed young pilots attempting to face fate and the end of Western civilization with a smile. But the archetypical movie of the Second World War would feature a squad of infantrymen—a Texan, an Italian, a Jew, a spoiled rich kid, an immigrant Slavic coal miner, a farm boy, and a wiseguy from Brooklyn—learning to get along together and win the war.
The actual conduct of the United States during World War II wouldn’t always be equal to its best new ideal, of course. For instance, the American people may have believed that they were fighting for the principles of free thought and free speech, but during the war the actual willingness of the U.S. government to trust in the power of free thought and speech would be something less than total, and the American people would be subjected to internal censorship and propaganda.
The government was capable of a measure of Techno Age excess, particularly at the beginning of the war. The most flagrant example of this was the doubting of the loyalty of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast. Anger against Japan over Pearl Harbor and lingering fears of the Yellow Peril—an unstoppable horde of invading Asians—would be discharged upon these American citizens. They would be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty and property and herded off into desert concentration camps.
If indeed that all-American infantry squad ever did exist during the war, it most certainly would not have included Nisei, or Negroes, let alone women. During World War II, each of these would be kept in segregated military units, separate and apart from the central melting pot of male American soldiery.
More than this, women would be allowed to serve only in highly limited roles, such as clerk, typist and nurse. And blacks in uniform would be treated, if anything, with even greater prejudice, confined to assignments such as cook, stevedore, manual laborer and truck driver, but not permitted to fight.
Even after all this has been said, however, it nonetheless remains true that Americans would be convinced they were waging this war for the ideal of democratic pluralism. While the war was on, certain sacrifices and compromises in personal freedom might be demanded. And yes, the United States might display some highly visible imperfections in its current ability to live up to its own highest ideals. But the unprecedented degree of social assent and cooperative effort that would be achieved in the U.S. during the Second World War would only be obtained through a mutual understanding between government and people that when this war was over, a more just and equitable society would emerge.
And even while the war was being fought, the United States would start becoming more genuinely pluralistic. Women and Negroes would begin to be offered opportunities and responsibilities that previously had been denied them. A woman might put on pants and go to work on an aircraft assembly line. A black man might become a streetcar conductor in Philadelphia.
It would also be during the war years that teenagers, who through the Techno Age had been considered either older children or young adults, would first begin to define themselves as a separate age group with its own distinctive clothing and music. This was the period of teenage girls in bobby socks and saddle shoes swooning over Frank Sinatra.
The ongoing broadening of society would even affect the American armed forces. Before the war was over, Negroes would be allowed a limited combat role, and Nisei from the West Coast and Hawaii would distinguish themselves fighting as a unit in Europe.
Such would be the success of these experiments in the toleration and trust of difference that shortly after the war, President Truman would issue an executive order ending all racial segregation in the military. And that would be the first major step in the tearing down of legal barriers based upon race, religion and sex which would be a central American preoccupation throughout the Atomic Age.
The pluralization of society that began taking place during the war years would have its parallel in the pages of Astounding. Aliens, robots and mutants would shed their former aura of fundamental otherness and be seen in new light, not as evolutionary competitors, but as variations upon the larger theme of being human.
Before the U.S. entered the Second World War, L. Sprague de Camp had stood out for his insistence that a Vandal could be the equal of a Goth, and that a talking bear, a mutant baboon, or
a surviving Neanderthal might be every bit as much a man as the ordinary Joe in the street. But by the last two years of the war, humanistic pluralism would become the insight of the hour in science fiction.
John Campbell would be swept along by the tide of change. However, there would be aspects of the new expanded humanism that he would never wholly accept or completely understand. In this instance, he would clearly be led by his writers rather than leading them, as he had always been able to do before.
But democratic pluralism wouldn’t be the only aspect of the contemporary state of mind to have its effect on Campbell’s modern science fiction. An even greater impact would be made upon Astounding by the wartime mood of radical disequilibrium.
These years were heady, upsetting and uncertain, a wild emotional roller-coaster ride of stomach-churning lows and giddy highs:
There was a great overturning of familiar customs and habits in American society. All sorts of folk would use the war as their excuse for ignoring established behavior and start acting in ways that to an older generation had to seem casual, heedless, disrespectful and individualistic.
Nothing was to be counted upon, time was fleeting, anything at all might happen tomorrow, and no one could say for certain what the outcome of the war would prove to be—who would survive and by what measures, which things would prosper and which would fade away, or what the world was going to look like when all the jumbled and scattered pieces of existence were finally fit back together again.
Beneath America’s public face of confidence, solidarity and good cheer, World War II would be a time of subjectivity, introspection and strange flights of mind.
It was the war years that would see the appearance of abstract expressionist painting, a form of art whose purpose was not to represent the external world, but rather the artist’s own mental and emotional state. It would be a common thing for movies and plays of the time to feature questionings of personal sanity, psychiatric probings into the unconscious mind, dream sequences, and drunken hallucinations that just might prove to have their own reality. And there would also be a resurgence of interest in spirit-based horror and fantasy.
For its part, science fiction in Astounding would become a good deal queerer after America entered the war than it had been in the first phase of the Golden Age, with much more interest in mystery than in plausibility. But rather than SF writers seeking out one unknown realm of existence after another, as they had done when the constraints of the imagination had become loosened during the First World War, this time it was the universe of consciousness that they would explore.
What an alteration in perspective had taken place in the years between the two World Wars! Taking their initial clues from the otherworld adventures of the Teens, science fiction writers of the Twenties and Thirties had traveled joyfully into the furthest reaches of time and space. They had explored what it might mean to be citizens of the wider universe and had offered the exhilarating possibility that humanity’s true business might be the assumption of responsibility for the entirety of existence.
John Campbell’s first aim on taking over the editorship of Astounding in 1937 had been to place a grounding of plausibility beneath this wonderful glimmering vision of a new and better human destiny. He offered his writers a powerful new set of arguments and assumptions and then demanded that they use them to resolve the great Techno Age conundrum—the haunting certainty that man was ultimately doomed to failure and extinction.
So it was that in the modern science fiction stories that Campbell published, men left Village Earth to tame our own solar system and then reach out to grasp the stars. Again and again the power of cyclical history to spell an end to man was gainsaid by characters able to show that they could respond effectively and creatively to any challenge they encountered. And the most constructive of Campbell’s contributors—L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—went even further to imagine new systems, laws and sciences that harnessed major aspects of the multiverse to the power of human knowledge and will.
But what was not recognized and assimilated in this exuberant initial phase of problem-solving and empire-building was that in the course of resolving the Techno Age dilemma, the modern science fiction of John Campbell had placed itself outside—or beyond—the Western scientific frame of reference made by men like Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Darwin.
The universe as presented by Campbell was no longer the same universe that the followers of these great scientists had striven to deal with. It wasn’t exclusively material in nature. It wasn’t a simple machine like a clock. It wasn’t a cold, remote, lifeless wasteland. Nor was it a place of unceasing hostility, competition and struggle for survival. Rather, the cosmos he was asking his writers to deal with was a super-system, a responsive whole, a natural blabbermouth that was always ready to give the right answer to any properly phrased question put to it by one of its children.
In this new ordering of existence, humanity was no longer a cosmic orphan, a fluke of nature to be eliminated by the blind grindings-on of matter, or by other creatures determined to knock mankind off his precarious perch on the evolutionary ladder, or by the inevitable senescence and failure of the race. Instead, man belonged in the universe and had a part to play there—perhaps a crucial one. And if he kept learning and maturing and accepting every challenge that came his way, there was no limit to what he could become.
A universe of consciousness giving birth to an ever-more-aware humanity . . . Mankind contriving to raise itself higher by asking questions, solving problems, and growing in understanding . . . Consciousness arising out of consciousness by means of consciousness . . . That was the picture of existence underlying all of the triumphs of the Campbell Astounding.
But the writers of modern science fiction didn’t immediately realize that this was so. The giants of the early Golden Age still thought of themselves as writing about transcendent science, just as their predecessors had done. Except that instead of dreaming of new drugs, new machines and new forces, it was new orders of scientific command that they were aiming to envision. That’s all.
They didn’t recognize that the new laws and systems and sciences they were imagining were vitally different in one central respect from the science-beyond-science they had grown up with. Old-time transcendent science had always been conceived in material terms. Even the Lens in Doc Smith’s Lensman stories—a telepathic device and mental amplifier with certain lingering soul-like characteristics—was still presented in the form of a physical object strapped to the wrist of a wearer.
But the likes of paraphysics and the Future History and the Laws of Robotics had no physical correlatives of any kind, not even a button to push. They were new mental constructs—new states of knowledge and control.
These thought systems were something more and something other than material super-science. And it was precisely their extra-scientific, extra-rational and extra-physical transcendent nature which made them so effective in dealing with the intractable problems that the Atomic Age had inherited from three hundred years of Western fixation upon the rational scientific consideration of material existence.
All of the factors in this initial pattern—a universe understood in more-than-materialistic terms; a humanity reoriented within the cosmos; and transcendence in the new form of a knowledge system, yet still treated as though it were one more manifestation of super-science and applied to the old Western problems—would be on display in Astounding as late as Isaac Asimov’s first two Foundation stories, written on the eve of U.S. involvement in the Second World War and published in the spring of 1942:
In “Foundation” and “Bridle and Saddle,” as we have seen, the universe is presented as a stairway of consciousness for mankind to ascend, with “science” the name of just one step. But this radical reconception of the nature of existence is buried in background and in story structure. It is never explicitly stated.
In these stories, there has also been a dramatic shift in the psychic
orientation of man. His ties to Village Earth have been cut with such completeness that he can no longer remember on which planet it was that he originated. So much a child of the universe as a whole has he become that galaxy-wide empire is now the normal, accustomed human frame of reference.
The highest manifestation of transcendence to be seen in the Foundation stories is psychohistory, a mode of understanding that is presented as a new form of science, but which might as readily be taken as religious, or occult, or mathematical, or psychological, or historical, or holistic. But the problems to which this multifaceted new form of transcendent knowledge is applied are the old Techno Age problems of survival in the face of stronger material power and of overcoming the threat posed to humanity by cyclical history.
The one writer in the pre-war Astounding who understood most clearly that he was no longer dealing with old-time science-beyond-science, but rather with a holistic universe, the powers of non-rational thought, and the higher potential of mankind was A.E. van Vogt. And, as we know, in the burst of stories that he published in 1942, after he had quit his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence and become a full-time writer for John Campbell, van Vogt would insist that the universe had to be related to as a responsive whole with level upon level of potential being and becoming.
In the altered context of a World War II America that not only was psychically unsettled, but also was becoming aware of different states of mind and learning how to speak of them in the new terms of Twentieth Century psychology, other writers would begin to join van Vogt in acknowledging the holistic universe of consciousness. With more than a little trepidation, particularly at the outset, they would start to investigate the nature and meaning of this new interactive reality.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 79
