Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  When he was six, they moved from Newark to nearby Maplewood, where his sister, Laura, was born on September 2, 1917. His life became incrementally less miserable—his father learned to leave the house during his mother’s tantrums, and they went from constant quarreling to an icy politeness—and the siblings got along well. They spent most of their summers with his grandparents in Ohio, where Campbell’s grandfather, a legendary arguer in the courtroom, taught him that the law was a game that rewarded those who could be truthful and biased at the same time.

  His parents presented him with different challenges. Campbell saw his father as an arrogant man who believed himself to be admirably humble and tolerant. He rarely showed affection toward his children. Instead of using the first person, he issued his commands as impersonal statements: “It is necessary.” “One must.” “One should.” He laid down endless rules, adding more without any warning, and approvingly recited the poem that began “The boy stood on the burning deck,” about a son who would rather die than disobey his father’s orders.

  Occasionally, Campbell remembered his father more fondly, particularly as he began to resemble him as he aged. He once described him as “a good and sincere guy” who introduced him at the age of three to science, which was the only way that they could be close. When Campbell was six, his father hung a crowbar from a thread, inviting him to marvel at how magnetic forces swung it around to the north, and he later said in all seriousness, “I feel there must be a wise creator who organized this universe—it can’t be just an accident that the coefficient of thermal expansion for steel and concrete come out so nearly the same.”

  After he started school, his father reviewed his homework, asking him to revise the answers if he didn’t approve—which taught him the useful skill of rewriting in the space that he had available. He also encouraged his son to solve math problems in two different ways. An analog approximation, he pointed out, was usually right to the first few places, while a digital calculation could make a mistake in the units as easily as in the millionths, with each one serving as a check on the other. At times, he criticized his son for being “a good beginner” who was unable to finish what he started, and Campbell often had reason to recall his father’s favorite saying: “Well, it was a good idea, John. But it didn’t work. Now clean it up.”

  His mother, by contrast, made so many inconsistent statements that he didn’t know what to believe. Campbell later dismissed her as “a would-be aesthete” and paranoid sadist whose Episcopalian upbringing taught her that her role in life was to give orders—to men, to servants, and to her own family. She would contradict herself in the same breath or apologize tearfully after flying into a rage, in a cycle that Campbell compared to brainwashing, and her children found their own ways of dealing with it. Laura learned to independently verify everything that their mother said, while Campbell, who identified as agnostic from an early age, came to doubt all pronouncements made by any adult whatsoever.

  Many of these recollections come from letters written years after the fact, and there were times when Campbell thought more kindly of his mother: “She was a very brilliant woman, who had an extremely wide range of information, high intelligence, great personal charm. . . . She was very pretty as a girl and young woman, and gave an appearance of being generous and thoughtful.” He once described his father as “a failure” who “almost destroyed my ability to enjoy life,” adding without explanation, “My mother helped to preserve that for me.”

  Campbell was also marked by his mother’s twin. Dorothy and Josephine were impossible to tell apart, and they had been in constant competition since girlhood. Like their mother, who had attended Wellesley College, they were strikingly intelligent, and they despised each other: “They clawed each other viciously, with the most fiendishly expert belittling imaginable, for some fifty-five years. Sugar, with strychnine sauce. They wouldn’t have used cyanide; it produces too easy a death.” Campbell thought that his aunt “cordially detested” him, and she handled him roughly on her visits until he figured out that she was afraid of reptiles. After he started keeping a garter snake or toad in his pocket, she learned to stay away.

  His mother and her twin also stand at the center of the single most famous anecdote from his childhood. As a boy, Campbell recounted, he would rush home from school to see the woman who he thought was his mother, only to be greeted by a distant figure—his aunt—who treated him like a stranger. In some versions of the story, which are hard to believe, the sisters dressed to fool him deliberately. But he always concluded by saying that he could never be sure whether the person with his mother’s face would turn out to be his friend or his enemy.

  Much later, he claimed that this memory inspired the most famous story that he, or perhaps any other science fiction author, would ever write—about an alien that could assume the form of any living thing, until it was impossible to know whether you were facing an ally or a murderous impostor. But this was only half true. Campbell’s real enemy, as he repeatedly indicated, wasn’t his aunt, but his mother, and his ambivalence toward her cast a shadow across the rest of his life.

  If he owed his mother anything, it was the fact that she introduced him to science fiction and fantasy. Campbell turned to books for escape, and he devoured works of popular science, Greek and Norse myths, and the Arabian Nights. Mythology and science were both potential sources of answers, and he read them indiscriminately, along with such pioneers of speculative fiction as Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  He had no choice but to take comfort in reading, because he didn’t have any friends. Campbell’s kindergarten teacher was convinced that he would grow up to be either a genius or a criminal, and he was insufferable in elementary school: “[I was] the damn fool who, while in first grade, lectured the third grade class on the annual and diurnal motions of the earth. Boy, was I smart!” Writing years later to Heinlein, he spoke from bitter experience of the price of precocity:

  Kids who don’t get angry, get teased. Adolescents who think freely in terms of nuclear physics, spaceships and wonder fascinatedly about the origin of the solar system lose friends at a remarkable rate. They get kidded, and rejected by the group until they learn the lesson of not thinking. If they persist in thinking, they get completely rejected. Until they succeed in finding a group of [Homo superior] and gradually learn what the trouble is.

  “I was unpopular with local kids, because I solved games,” Campbell wrote elsewhere, explaining that he had figured out a way to win hide-and-seek: “Once I taught the kids the formula”—based on a standard naval search pattern, with a spiral moving out from the center—“that ended hide-and-seek in the neighborhood.” His size didn’t stop the bullies, and although he went after them, “heart set on dismemberment,” it was easier to seek protection from friendly adults on the walk home. Genius, he decided, was the worst handicap of all—which later made him less than sympathetic to those who felt like outcasts for other reasons.

  He was happiest in a workshop. In grade school, he built a catapult in his yard, using an iron pipe as a lever arm, and conked himself soundly on the head. He loved his Meccano set, constructing a crane that won a contest sponsored by a department store. At thirteen, he assembled a radio receiver with lead ore and a steel phonograph needle, and he put together his first car using two batteries and a Studebaker starting motor. He blew up his basement chemistry lab, fixed bikes and appliances, and constructed an eavesdropper that could hear a conversation from a block away.

  Gradually, he also figured out how to deal with his parents. He took pleasure in bending the rules by following their instructions to the letter, and he loved science because it allowed him to counter his father with facts: “The old son of a bitch couldn’t cram in a new rule anymore.” With his mother, he perfected a “mental beating technique” that worked because his attention span was longer than hers: “My childhood battles with her did a great deal to build, in me, the ability to put a given set of facts together in sixtee
n dozen new and unsuspected ways in the space between two sentences. She’s good at that; I had to be better at it.”

  Campbell was twelve when his parents separated. His mother moved to Lemon Grove Avenue in Hollywood, California, with the children, and their divorce was finalized a year later. By then, Campbell was a tall, lanky kid, and in his father’s absence, his mother began to feel physically threatened by him. None of her old tactics were working, and her son finally “had her so thoroughly scared that she didn’t want me in the same house with her.”

  When they returned to the East Coast after the divorce, his mother sent him away for the summer to Kittatinny Campground in Barryville, New York, and then to Blair Academy, an exclusive boarding school for boys in Blairstown, New Jersey. Campbell tried to approach the situation with a positive outlook. Instead of his mother’s assumption that everyone was against her, he experimented with the opposite point of view: “Everybody is trying to be nice to me.”

  It didn’t quite work. At Blair, he made a few friends, but in general, he did an admirable job of failing to get along with anybody. His intelligence was scored at 145—“I’d have gotten a higher score if I hadn’t known so damn much”—but he earned mediocre grades, excelling at physics but nearly flunking English. Campbell applied himself to subjects that he found interesting, ignored the rest, and never passed up the opportunity to correct his teachers in class. He joined no teams or societies, and he listed one of his weekly activities as “hiking,” perhaps because it allowed him to think for extended periods on his own.

  On the social side, he was as unbearable as before. His size gave him an advantage at sports like football, but he tended to spoil the game. In tennis, he taught himself a few dirty tricks with a steel racket, spinning the ball so that it dropped dead on the court or striking the top of the net so that it barely toppled over to the other side. When he played chess against the school’s best player, he traded pieces savagely until they were each down to four, proceeding to win the simplified game three times in a row. Campbell only wanted the contests to end, as if he were conserving his energy for the greater challenges to come.

  He never received his diploma. A student could graduate only if he had enough credits for the college of his choice, and he lacked French and trigonometry. Yet an attractive prospect beckoned. His father had proposed that he apply to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, promising that he would cover the full cost of his tuition. Campbell plowed through two years of French in a single summer and got a high score on the trig exam after skimming the book the night before—and, like that, he was headed for Cambridge.

  As far as he was concerned, it was just in time. Years later, he wrote, “I’ve felt a vast need for love and affection—and a complete lack of ability to go outward seeking to establish those human contacts necessary to fulfill my needs.” College, he felt, was the one place where he could find the emotional connection that he craved, using nothing but his brain. In Orange, New Jersey, he said goodbye to his mother and her second husband, an unassuming appliance salesman named James A. Middleton. Then he left without looking back, hoping to finally escape the trap of his childhood.

  But he had been changed by it in ways that he would never overcome. As he told his father decades afterward, “You and Mother between you gave me immunity to many things that neither one of you could have; either of you would have crippled me. . . . At the time, of course, I felt a vast injustice; I do not forgive you, because that’s a useless and arrogant thing.”

  John W. Campbell, circa 1928.

  Courtesy of Leslyn Randazzo

  WHEN CAMPBELL ENTERED COLLEGE IN THE FALL OF 1928, HE SENSED THE DIFFERENCE AT ONCE. HE described Cambridge as “a little, dingy town,” but his nostalgia for it remained a constant throughout his career, particularly toward his professors. In high school, the teachers had seemed certain of everything, while at MIT, he wrote, “I found a bunch of rather bewildered men.” They acknowledged that they didn’t have all the answers, and for Campbell, who would make questioning others his life’s work, it felt like a place that he could call home.

  In his freshman year, he was associated with the department of physics, where he read through his textbook at the beginning of the semester, plowing through it like a novel in three days. Sometimes, as he had at Blair Academy, he failed to make a good impression. During a course in analytical chemistry, he was asked to identify a sample of an unknown substance. Instead of going by the book, he looked at the reddish crystals, guessed that they were ferric nitrate, and performed two tests to confirm his hunch, which only annoyed his instructor. On another occasion, he brought an entire experimental apparatus to the classroom just to prove a professor wrong.

  His most significant influence was Norbert Wiener, an associate professor of mathematics who later achieved worldwide fame as the founder of cybernetics. Like Campbell, Wiener had been a child prodigy with a complicated relationship to his father, whom he called his “dearest antagonist.” Campbell later described him as the worst teacher he had ever seen—he would write a complicated expression on the blackboard, state that the result was clear, and move on without elaboration.

  Yet Wiener’s genius was undeniable, and his example left a lasting impression. Decades later, Campbell fondly remembered college as the place where dirty limericks were born, where students spread chemicals on locker room benches in order to play practical jokes, and where handwritten signs in dorm rooms proclaimed Finagle’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.” He rowed crew, played tennis, and began smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, a habit that he would retain for the next forty years.

  Almost by accident, he also became a science fiction writer. He had been a fan of the pulps since high school, buying Argosy, Weird Tales, and the first issue of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, which might have been conceived with him in mind—it emerged from a close community of electronics hobbyists, with stories in which intelligence was rewarded not with ostracism but with infinite power. In 1928, in particular, Gernsback had published a novel that opened up the genre overnight to a vaster sense of scale than it had ever known before, with an atomic spacecraft that one character casually estimates as capable of “a velocity of something like seven billion four hundred thirteen million miles per second.”

  Campbell was fascinated by The Skylark of Space. The serial by E. E. “Doc” Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby—with a dashing villain who steals the hero’s ship and leads him on a chase six quadrillion miles from home—inaugurated the field of superscience, or space opera. It inspired endless imitations, and it even influenced Campbell’s decision to major in physics—atomic energy, he felt, was the big scoop of his lifetime, a conviction shared by few of his professors. Yet it didn’t occur to him to write until he was a freshman, and when it did, it was for a reason that the captain of the Skylark might have approved. He wanted a new car.

  A Model A Ford cost five hundred dollars, and his father informed him, “I owe you a good education; luxuries you get for yourself.” Amazing paid half a cent per word, so Campbell cranked out “Invaders from the Infinite,” writing it as fast as he could because he needed the money. He showed the result to his father, who liked it enough to send it to editor T. O’Conor Sloane. Incredibly, it was accepted, along with his next effort, “When the Atoms Failed.”

  As the months passed, however, neither story appeared, and the magazine only paid on publication. The summer after his freshman year, Campbell decided to visit the editor in person. Going to the publisher’s offices on Fourth Avenue in New York, he was ushered inside to meet Sloane, who was notorious both for his stodginess—he didn’t believe that humans would ever enter space—and for his tendency to hold on to submissions until the pages crumbled. He was also eighty years old.

  Campbell was only nineteen. To his eyes, Sloane, with his flowing white beard, must have seemed ancient, and neither man suspected that the encounter was a passing of the torch. Sloane treated him kindl
y, and he confessed that “Invaders from the Infinite” had been lost. Campbell didn’t have a carbon, so the story was gone forever. All that he later remembered of it was that it turned on the problem of heating a ship in space, with its hero harnessing “material energy,” which was a thousand times greater than the power of the atom.

  Yet it isn’t hard to guess how it read. His second story, “When the Atoms Failed,” ran on the cover of Amazing in January 1930, and it felt like E. E. Smith with the excitement, love interest, and villain removed. Its protagonist uses an integraph—a machine for doing calculus—to develop atomic power and fend off an invasion from Mars, but its author was less interested in action than in describing the spaceship, with its “six-inch iridio-tungsten alloy shell,” and in delivering endless technical lectures that might have been transcribed straight from his textbooks.

  It must have pleased his father, but it also struck a chord with fans. Campbell was one of the only writers at the time with any knowledge of theoretical physics at the college level, and his use of scientific jargon made readers feel as if they could almost understand what was happening, with enough realism to offer the illusion of more. The integraph, for example, was an actual instrument that was used to solve differential equations at MIT, and by incorporating it into his story, Campbell provided one of the first descriptions of a computer in science fiction.

  He was off and running, and between sessions of summer school, he churned out stories, falling back repeatedly on the same formulas. Once he figured out how to recombine the pieces, it became just another game to solve, and none of his early stories is worth reading today. The Skylark of Space, which was written with real passion, can still put a silly grin on a reader’s face, while “When the Atoms Failed” showed barely any competence as a writer and minimal affection for the genre. Its sequel, “The Metal Horde,” featured a machine that could build more copies of itself, resulting in a story with millions of spaceships and no recognizable human beings.