Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  For all his efforts, Campbell was unable to replicate Hubbard’s success in building a lasting social movement. He had to content himself with the influence that he held over his readers, a legion of fans epitomized by Isaac Asimov, who wandered into the editor’s office as a teenager to submit the first story that he ever wrote. The bright child that Asimov evoked in “The Sword of Achilles” was a portrait of the artist himself—he was an awkward prodigy who escaped into science fiction—and Campbell took him on as an experiment to develop a writer from scratch, feeding him the premise for his landmark story “Nightfall,” the psychohistory of the Foundation series, and the revolutionary Three Laws of Robotics.

  In time, Asimov outgrew him, and their friendship was strained by Campbell’s fixation on psychic powers. Asimov was too cautious and rational to follow the editor’s example, but he was unable to tear himself away. Instead, he diverted his energies into nonfiction, which rewarded him with a level of recognition unmatched by any other science fiction writer. With more than four hundred books to his credit, he became, incredibly, the most prolific author in American history, although he never forgot what he owed to Campbell: “In the essential characteristics that made him my literary father, I am but a pygmy to him.”

  But Campbell’s most intriguing partnership was with the man who became the leading science fiction writer of his generation, with an unsurpassed body of work that often left both Hubbard and Asimov in its shadow. A prominent critic once called Robert A. Heinlein “the hand of John Campbell’s mind,” but he was already a major talent when he mailed in his first submission, and Campbell’s primary contribution was to recognize it. With his skills as a storyteller and his dazzling range of interests, he was everything that Campbell had ever wanted in a writer, and Heinlein seized the chance to express his ideas in a form that could reach a vast readership.

  The two men lived on opposite sides of the country, but they fed off each other’s obsessions, and their friendship grew astonishingly intense, even if, as Heinlein’s wife later recalled, “[it] carried in it the seeds of its own destruction.” Its peak lasted for less than four years, but more than any body of work, it defined the golden age. After he and Campbell fell out in the early fifties, Heinlein went on to write such classic novels as Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, turning him into an intellectual hero to wildly different audiences. He was far from the first science fiction writer to advise his readers on how to live, but he did it more effectively than anyone else ever would.

  Campbell never reached the same heights of fame as Hubbard, Asimov, or Heinlein, but he marked each of them in turn. They drew energy from their rivalries, learning from one another’s triumphs and mistakes, and they had profound similarities. All were gifted children who endured professional or academic setbacks in their early twenties. Each remarried at a hinge point in his career, leaving the wife who had supported him at his most vulnerable for another as soon as he was ready to enter a new phase. All were generalists who saw science fiction as an educational tool—although to radically different ends. And they all embodied Campbell’s conviction, which he never abandoned, that science fiction could change lives.

  AND THEY CHANGED THE LIVES OF THOUSANDS OF READERS. AS ASIMOV NOTED IN “THE SWORD OF Achilles,” most fans discover the genre at a young age for many of the same reasons that it speaks to a huge popular audience. It offers fantasies of escape and control; it can be enjoyed by children or teenagers who might be intellectually precocious but emotionally inexperienced; and it tends to catch them at a moment when they are uniquely receptive to new ideas. As one fan famously observed, “The real golden age of science fiction is twelve.”

  This impact has both its light and its dark sides. In 1963, Asimov estimated that half of all creative scientists were interested in science fiction, and he acknowledged that this was probably an understatement. Campbell’s magazine counted Albert Einstein and the scientists of Bell Labs among its subscribers, and it made an indelible impression on such fans as the young Carl Sagan, who stumbled across it in a candy store: “A glance at the cover and a quick riffle through the interior showed me it was what I had been looking for. . . . I was hooked. Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding.” Public figures of all political persuasions—from Paul Krugman to Elon Musk to Newt Gingrich—have confessed to being influenced by its stories.

  Campbell and his writers were creating nothing less than a shared vision of the future, which inevitably informs how we approach the present. Science fiction’s track record for prediction is decidedly mixed, but at its finest, it was a proving ground for entire fields—such as artificial intelligence, which frequently invokes the Three Laws of Robotics—that wouldn’t exist for decades. Yet it also encourages us to see all problems as provinces of engineering, and science as the solution to the dilemmas that it creates. When we propose technological fixes for climate change, or place our hopes in the good intentions of a few visionary billionaires, we unconsciously endorse a view of the world straight out of the pages of Astounding.

  These values were expressed through the figure of “the competent man,” whose very name points to the way in which science fiction encourages certain assumptions. Editors like Campbell tended to favor writers who looked like them, and from the start, fandom was overwhelmingly male. Women were often regarded with suspicion, and even when they were welcomed, they could still be treated poorly—Asimov, who described himself as a feminist, casually groped female fans for years. Such women as Doña Campbell, Leslyn Heinlein, and Campbell’s assistant editor Kay Tarrant have fallen out of the history of the genre, while Hubbard’s first two wives have been erased from his official biography. This is their story as well.

  Many of the same factors apply to race. Campbell’s writers and their characters were almost exclusively white, and he bears part of the blame for limiting the genre’s diversity. At best, this was a huge missed opportunity. Astounding, which questioned so many other orthodoxies and systems of power, rarely looked at racial inequality, and its lack of historically underrepresented voices severely constrained the stories that it could tell. At his worst, Campbell expressed views that were unforgivably racist, and even today, the most reactionary movements in modern fandom—with their deep distrust of women and minorities—have openly stated, “We have called for a Campbellian revolution in science fiction.”

  This book is not a comprehensive history of the genre, and its focus on Campbell’s circle means that many other writers receive less attention than they deserve. It was inspired by the realization that the nature of Asimov’s sword has changed. In 1963, Asimov argued that science fiction appealed to an existing type of curious reader, but today, it seems more likely to subtly alter the way in which we all think and feel. This is closer to Campbell’s original intentions, and the implications can only be understood by considering why the genre evolved along the lines that it did. Science fiction can seem inevitable, but it arose from luck, specific decisions, and the experiences of its creators at a particular moment in time. Their subculture has become our global culture, and its pattern is strangely like that of their lives.

  These stories are fascinating in themselves, and they shed light on issues of inclusion and representation that still matter today. Science fiction is far too large now to be directed or defined by any one person, but this book concentrates on a period in which one man was thought to oversee it—until many of his readers broke free. Campbell liked to say that the genre’s true protagonist was all of mankind, but he saw it in terms of heroic figures, starting with himself. If his audience ultimately refused to fall in line, it led, paradoxically, to the outcome that he wanted. Science fiction became an ongoing collaboration between writers and fans, and the most convincing proof of Campbell’s success is the fact that he lost control of it.

  Campbell can seem like a tragic figure, and the last act of his life vividly illustrates the risks of trying to put the ideals of science
fiction into practice. He wanted to turn psychology and history into exact sciences, but the lunatic trajectory of his career proves how little any man can foresee of his own fate. In pursuing his dream of a great discovery that would emerge from the magazine, he was all too ready to sacrifice everything else—his friendships, his family, even science itself. Yet he was right that the future demands new ways of thinking, even if their ends remain unknown. If the Three Laws of Robotics and the Church of Scientology came from the same place, it only means that the sword of Achilles cuts both ways.

  Asimov himself may have sensed this. As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, he knew that the life of a warrior—or superman—could end in tragedy, but he never ceased to believe that he could imagine his hero into a more glorious future: “I even told myself stories designed to continue the Iliad after Homer had left off. I was Achilles, and although Homer clearly indicated that Achilles was slated for an early death, he never died in my daydreams.”

  I.

  Who Goes There?

  1907–1937

  You may have had troubles heaped on you for being a Jew; I had troubles heaped on me for being John W. Campbell, individual. You felt set apart and excluded from the great group; my friend, they had me set apart from the whole damn human race!

  —JOHN W. CAMPBELL: IN A LETTER TO ISAAC ASIMOV

  1.

  The Boy from Another World

  1910–1931

  Do not take on a Junior for your first case if you can avoid it. If father was named George and the patient is called George, beware of trouble.

  —L. RON HUBBARD, DIANETICS

  For most of his life, John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, had trouble remembering his childhood. He had filled his stories with extravagant images, but he had no visual memory, to the point that he was unable to picture the faces of his own wife and children. When L. Ron Hubbard, one of his most prolific writers, approached him with the promise of a new science of the mind, he was understandably intrigued. And he was especially attracted by the possibility that it would allow him to recall events that he had forgotten or repressed.

  In the summer of 1949, Campbell was thirty-nine years old. At his invitation, Hubbard, who was a year younger, had moved with his wife to Elizabeth, New Jersey, just up the road from the offices of Astounding. Hubbard could hardly have found a more receptive subject—Campbell had been openly searching for a scientific psychology that could save mankind from nuclear war and provide insights into his own faltering marriage. Yet it soon became clear that Hubbard’s therapy wasn’t working on the one man in the world whom he most desperately needed to persuade.

  The treatment, which became known as dianetics, was designed to relieve the psychological pressure caused by repressed memories. Hubbard later wrote, “The prize case in difficulty in dianetics is a patient who is a Junior named after either father or mother.” If the subject shared a parent’s name, he said, it led to subconscious trauma before birth, as the mother spoke badly of the father and the fetus absorbed her words as a negative description of itself.

  Campbell, of course, had been named for his father, and he turned out to be a difficult patient in other ways. In its earliest incarnation, dianetics amounted to a form of hypnotism—Hubbard was an accomplished hypnotist who liked to show off at parties—but the editor was stubbornly resistant to suggestion. It was a defense mechanism, he said, that he had used to deal with his mother, leaving him with “a permanent—but useful!—scar.” But it also left him unable to recover any of the memories that had to be accessed for Hubbard’s treatment to proceed.

  They decided to try drugs. Campbell, who didn’t even like to drink at home, agreed to take phenobarbital, a sedative, followed by scopolamine, a notorious truth serum. He hated one course of the latter so much that he refused to try it again—it left him dehydrated, confused, and listless—but he was willing to consider other approaches. Hubbard, in turn, knew that the editor was his best hope of bringing his ideas to a wider audience, and he was equally determined to continue.

  By all indications, they had reached a dead end, but Hubbard had one last idea, which he claimed to have based on an apparatus described by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who had taught hypnosis to Sigmund Freud. Four mirrors were arranged in a truncated pyramid on a record player, with a lit candle placed nearby. When the turntable revolved at its highest speed, the result was a flicker of light that flashed at more than three hundred times per minute.

  Campbell sat across from the phonograph. They turned it on. Almost immediately, he found himself overwhelmed by a feeling of pure horror, followed by a wave of memories that he had locked away. The editor confessed, “I’d been scared before in my life, but never that scared. I had to have Ron hold my hand—literally—while I spilled some of the fear. He’s a fairly big guy, and fairly rugged, but twice I damned near crushed his hand when some of the really hot ones hit.”

  In the end, Campbell spoke like a frightened child for six hours, and his terror was contagious—Hubbard was allegedly so shaken by the technique that they never used it again. The mirrors, Campbell came to believe, had accidentally coincided with his brain’s alpha rhythms, and he compared its effects to electroshock therapy or the use of drugs to induce seizures in psychiatric patients.

  It would be months before he remembered what he had said. Hubbard supposedly erased the experiences themselves, leaving only the memory of the session behind—but it was enough. Later that summer, after additional treatment, Campbell wrote to Robert A. Heinlein, who was also friends with Hubbard, “Do I know things about my family I never knew I knew! . . . Come visit us, sometime, Bob, and I’ll show you how to get data to blackmail the hell out of parents—blackmail the hell out of them so they back down and behave like human beings instead of the high and mighty and perfect.”

  Many of the episodes that he recovered did, in fact, revolve around his family, including a traumatic memory of his birth. According to Campbell, the doctor at the delivery had barked at his mother in a German accent, “The cord is caught around his neck and it is strangling him. You must stop fighting—you are killing him. Relax! You are killing him with your fighting! You must think your way out of this!” The forceps had slashed open the baby’s cheek, and afterward, a nurse had put drops in his eyes and remarked, “He’s just not interested in people!”

  Campbell concluded that these words had shaped his personality, leading to much of his subsequent unhappiness. Other memories were equally disturbing. When he was six weeks old, he claimed, his mother—who had wanted to go to a party—had given him salt water to make him sick, which provided her with an excuse to leave him with his grandmother. He had almost drowned at age three, and a few months later, he had swallowed morphine pills and nearly overdosed.

  Or so he thought. In reality, most of these incidents were probably imaginary, either knowingly implanted by Hubbard, or, more plausibly, drawn out of what Campbell honestly believed about himself. But they undoubtedly reflected his feelings about his family—and, in particular, about the women in his life.

  Everyone agreed that his grandmother, Laura Harrison, had once been “a shrew.” Her first husband had been Harry Strahorn, Campbell’s maternal grandfather, to whom she bore identical twin girls, Dorothy and Josephine, in 1888. When he beat her, she left him for Joseph Kerr, whom she divorced after he ran out of money. Her third husband took a different approach, taming her into submission by playing on her feelings of guilt. It became a family legend, and Campbell heard it from all sides—because her last husband, William W. Campbell, was his paternal grandfather.

  Campbell liked to describe his family history, with characteristic understatement, as “somewhat involved.” William W. Campbell’s first wife had been a woman named Florence van Campen, who gave birth to Campbell’s father, John. After they divorced, William wed Laura Harrison Strahorn—and, years later, John married Dorothy Strahorn, his stepmother’s daughter by her first marriage. It meant that Campbe
ll, in practice, had only one grandmother, and it also had the effect of combining the two lines of his ancestry into a single imposing tree.

  His ancestors ran back through the Mayflower, the American Revolution, and both sides of the Salem witch trials, with traces of Irish, Dutch, Hungarian, English, and other nationalities—although Campbell always thought of himself as Scottish. His grandfather William had been raised in Rochester, Vermont. After obtaining a law degree and serving one term as a Republican congressman in Washington, William became a master in chancery and a judge in Napoleon, Ohio, where his son John Wood Campbell was born in 1884.

  John studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, returning home to marry Dorothy Strahorn. Instead of remaining in Napoleon, where their combined families ran the town, they moved to Newark. John Wood Campbell, Jr., their first child, was born in a frame house at 16 Treacy Avenue, a block away from the cemetery, on June 8, 1910. Decades later, he wrote to Heinlein, “Every individual starts out in life with a basic purpose. . . . Mine was ‘to understand and explain.’ ” And the first mystery he had to confront was that of his own parents.

  CAMPBELL’S FATHER WAS SEVERELY RATIONAL, WHICH SERVED HIM WELL IN HIS PROFESSIONAL life. After ten years with Bell Telephone in Newark, he was promoted to the company’s New York headquarters, where he worked as an expert in business methods, rising to the position of chief engineer for plant practices at American Telephone and Telegraph. In private, he was exacting and unemotional—he was a religious conservative who refused to allow his children to see movies on Sundays—and he never laughed at home, although he could be charming in public.

  He argued constantly with his wife, usually over money, and instead of “taming” her, as his father had done with her mother, he fought her to a draw. Their son felt ground between them—“Mentally speaking, I was brought up in hellfire, high water, and earthquake country”—and he looked elsewhere for affection. Campbell’s only friends as a boy were two women in the neighborhood, one French, one German, to whom he listened carefully, searching for points of view that were easier to grasp than the ones that he received from his parents.