Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  None of it mattered, and the magazine ceased publication in March 1933. For half a year, there was silence—and then, to the relief of fans, it was revived by the pulp publisher Street & Smith, which had bought it at an auction of Clayton’s assets. Its new owners were primarily interested in such titles as Clues and Cowboy Stories, and Astounding, which reappeared in October, was just part of the package. Fortunately, it was placed in the capable hands of F. Orlin Tremaine and his assistant editor, Desmond Hall, and within six months, they had totally transformed it.

  Tremaine wasn’t particularly fond of science fiction—he relied mostly on Hall’s advice—but he entered on a program of purposeful change. He introduced the “thought variant” story, which would develop some strikingly original idea, and sought out star writers like E. E. Smith and Campbell. He also made fascinating experiments, including serializing Lo! by Charles Fort, a collection of such unexplained phenomena as rains of frogs and poltergeists. His greatest finds were At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft, which are the only works from that era that a casual fan is likely to have read today.

  By 1935, Astounding had a circulation of fifty thousand, or more than twice that of its nearest rivals. In general, however, its stories weren’t appreciably higher in quality than those of its competitors, and if it ultimately developed a reputation as the best in its field, this was due in part to the structure of the market. By the late thirties, each title had evolved to fill a niche—Amazing for juveniles, Wonder Stories for teens, Astounding for adults. The first two served as essential bridges to the third, and all three had legitimate readerships.

  When Campbell arrived, the magazine was serializing E. E. Smith’s Galactic Patrol, the first novel in the Lensman series, which Asimov would remember as the climax of his infatuation with the genre. It was as close as any story can get to pure action, jumping from one thrilling high point to the next, and it represented the summit of what was possible under the traditional model. Campbell would carry it to the next level, but he had to move slowly. Tremaine, as managing editor, still had final discretion over stories, and although Campbell effectively took control of the contents by March 1938, apart from the title change to Astounding Science Fiction, most readers probably never even noticed the transition.

  From the beginning, Campbell’s workload was physically exhausting. He later said that he had read more lousy science fiction than anyone else alive, and he was spending up to twelve hours a day on manuscripts alone. The fact that he managed to survive—while still keeping his overall objectives in mind—was thanks largely to two women. One was Doña, who became his unofficial first reader, showing him the best submissions and offering notes for writers. After one session, she wrote, “At present my eyes feel as though they are resting uncomfortably on my jowls, from all the reading I’ve been doing at home, the most frightful stuff.”

  His second key partner was Catherine Tarrant, known as Kay, or, more often, as Miss Tarrant. Half a year after Campbell was hired, Tarrant, an outwardly nondescript woman in her early thirties, took the desk next to his, where she would remain for the next three decades. A devout Roman Catholic from Hoboken, Tarrant never married, and she would inevitably become known as a spinster. Campbell kept their relationship strictly professional—he always addressed her by her last name, and he never took her to lunch—and he continued to refer to her as his secretary for years. In fact, she handled the entire practical and administrative end of the magazine, assuming her role shortly after R. W. Happel, the previous assistant editor, had left the firm.

  The division of labor soon became clear. Campbell selected the fiction and the art, while Tarrant oversaw proofreading, copyediting, and production. In person, she had a salty sense of humor, but she occasionally took it on herself to remove bad language from stories—and her prudish reputation also provided Campbell with a convenient excuse whenever a writer objected to any changes. Throughout their partnership, she saw “Campbell,” as she always called him, as an oversize boy who would never get the magazine out on his own, and in all the anecdotes from those years, she was the unacknowledged presence in the room, seated a few feet away from the editor and the authors whom he was transforming into his kind of writer.

  Word of his appointment had spread rapidly through fandom, with the agent Julius Schwartz warning his clients to be more careful about their science: “Campbell’s editing Astounding.” He began by dividing submissions into two piles. Bad ones got a printed rejection slip, while those that showed promise received a note explaining how they could be revised to the new standards. Campbell also wrote to writers directly, telling them that the magazine was targeting mature readers, in an extension of Tremaine’s policy from “about fourteen months ago.”

  His task was complicated by the fact that he was about to lose the services of Don A. Stuart. He was working on the revision of “Who Goes There?” and on “Cloak of Aesir,” a sequel to “Out of Night,” while a few older sales—“The Brain Pirates” and “Planet of Eternal Night”—trickled into Thrilling Wonder Stories. Yet while there were no real obstacles to selling to himself, he no longer had the time to write anything new, as he hinted to a reader who innocently asked where Stuart had gone: “Stuart, I’m afraid, has had to retire due to pressure of outside work.”

  But this was less a retirement than a change of title. Campbell later said that it was Don A. Stuart who was really editing Astounding, and he became an inexhaustible source of plots for others, writing to Robert Swisher, “I’m thinking up ideas at a furious rate nowadays, and passing ’em out.” As an editor, he wanted good writing, accurate science, believable characters, and stories that logically accounted for multiple variables: “The future doesn’t happen one at a time.” It was a tricky needle to thread, and he learned to give the same premise to multiple writers, trusting that each one would come up with a different story entirely.

  As Campbell searched for new talent, his first regular visitor was a seventeen-year-old fan and aspiring writer from Brooklyn. Frederik Pohl, who was born in 1919, had submitted his stories in person to Tremaine, since it was cheaper to take the subway than to buy postage. After Campbell was hired, he paid a visit to the new editor, unsure of how he would be received.

  When Pohl arrived, Campbell sat back in his chair, inserted a cigarette into its holder, and said without preamble, “Television will never replace radio in the home. I’ll bet you don’t know why.”

  “Gee, no, Mr. Campbell,” Pohl replied hesitantly. “I never thought of that.”

  “Right, Pohl, and no one else did, either. But what is the audience for radio? The primary audience is bored housewives. They turn the radio on to keep them company while they do the dishes.”

  Pohl made an effort to squeeze a word in. “Yeah, I guess that’s right—”

  “And the point is, you can’t ignore television,” Campbell finished triumphantly. “You have to look at it.”

  Pohl concluded that Campbell was workshopping his editorials by trying out a new outrageous statement on everyone he saw, but it would be just as accurate to say that his editorials were an extension of his conversation. Campbell, who was naturally shy, was most comfortable in small spaces that he could fill with his presence—a big man in a tiny office. And he loved arguing with a worthy opponent like Pohl, with whom he often debated the merits of communism—the editor had a natural respect for business, while Pohl was a member of the Young Communist League.

  Tarrant didn’t care for Pohl, writing later to Campbell, “I’ve never liked him. If you’ll think back for a moment, you’ll recall that I never chatted with him when he came in. A sixth sense always seemed to say ‘Watch your step with this one.’ ” Campbell, in turn, seemed wary of the younger man’s energy, and there were occasional signs of animosity—when the editor learned that Pohl obtained free magazines from a friend in the circulation department, he told her to stop. Yet he also took him seriously. The ranks of fans who had come of age with t
he pulps were old enough to be authors themselves, and Pohl was their first emissary to Astounding.

  Pohl dreamed of becoming an editor one day, and Campbell shared what little he knew, even as he was figuring the job out for himself. He had been lucky to join the firm when it was undergoing a reorganization, leaving it with less inertia than usual, and he sought advice from Mort Weisinger at Thrilling Wonder Stories. To attract more sophisticated readers, he worked to improve the art—he would later ask authors to write stories around paintings that he had commissioned—and he hoped to change the title to the more refined Science Fiction. He was frustrated by the debut of a pulp of that name the following year, and he learned to live with Astounding.

  There were a few telling editorial changes. Campbell introduced a readers’ poll and a separate section called “In Times to Come” to discuss the upcoming issue, which freed up the editor’s page to become his primary creative outlet. Advances in science made this platform seem all the more important, and nuclear physics was his favorite topic, beginning with a proclamation in 1938: “The discoverer of the secret of atomic power is alive on Earth today.” He later said that he had been speaking, without knowing it, of Enrico Fermi.

  On the fiction side, Campbell had already made one major discovery. Jack Williamson, who was born in 1908, was a writer from New Mexico who had been a popular pulp author for years. He submitted a pitch that revolved around two possible futures, one utopian, the other apocalyptic, the emergence of which depended on the outcome of a single event in the present. To complicate matters, the hero was in love with women from both timelines—and while his heart may have belonged to the virtuous Lethonee, he was also drawn to the sinister Sorainya.

  “The Legion of Time,” which began its run in the May 1938 issue, was the first great story that Campbell acquired. When its parallel worlds—and heroines—fuse together in the end, the effect was unbelievably satisfying, and the serial itself read like a superimposition of possible futures for the genre, with a newfound respect for ideas and characterization mingling with all the primal pleasures of the pulps. Campbell told readers that it pointed to a new direction for the entire field, and—in a revealing choice of words that he used to describe covers or whole issues—he referred to it as the first “mutant” story of his editorship.

  He was also farming out ideas for stories. One early effort involved Arthur J. Burks, whose prolific output had led The New Yorker to call him “an ace of the pulps.” Campbell wasn’t a fan, but when he gave Burks a premise about a replication machine, the author wrote up a serial in three days. It was far from a classic, but Campbell needed writers like this. After joining the firm, he had asked Frank Blackwell, the editor in chief, what would happen if he couldn’t find enough stories to fill an issue. Blackwell had replied, “An editor does.”

  By the beginning of 1938, however, he was faced with an alarmingly lean inventory. He blamed it on writers submitting to the revived Amazing, which had been acquired by a new publisher, but his own higher standards were also to blame. Campbell was buying just one out of every fifteen submissions, and while he got a few good stories, he didn’t have as many as he needed.

  This was the situation that he faced when he was called out of his office for a meeting with Tremaine and Blackwell in the spring of 1938. When Campbell arrived, he discovered that two writers were already there, and as he listened, disbelieving, he was ordered to buy everything that they wrote. One was Burks. The other was a tall, imposing man of twenty-seven with red hair and skin so pale that it was almost transparent. It was L. Ron Hubbard.

  HUBBARD’S FIRST PROFESSIONAL SALE, “THE GREEN GOD,” HAD APPEARED IN THE FEBRUARY 1934 issue of Thrilling Adventure. Like all his earliest efforts, it had been written at a feverish pace—in the beginning, he wrote a story every day for six weeks. He would leaf through a magazine before going to bed, come up with the plot in his sleep, and write it the next morning, mailing it out without bothering to read it again. The approach bore fruit almost immediately. His first two acceptance checks came to three hundred dollars, which was more money than he had ever seen at any one time.

  Much later, he wrote, “A story jammed and packed with blow-by-blow accounts of what the hero did to the villain and the villain did to the hero, with fists, knives, guns, bombs, machine guns, belaying pins, bayonets, poison gas, strychnine, teeth, knees, and calks, is about as interesting to read as the Congressional Record and about twice as dull.” He might have been describing his own debut, a bloodbath set in Tientsin with the same casual disregard for accuracy that led him to refer to China, in another story, as “a country almost as large as the United States.”

  To celebrate the sale, he took his pregnant wife, Polly, on a vacation to Encinitas, California, where she went into premature labor. L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., was born on May 7, 1934, weighing just over two pounds. As soon as their son, whom they called Nibs, was healthy enough, Hubbard left on a trip to New York. He had no particular interest in being a father, and he had new worlds to conquer.

  For the first time in his life, he did a creditable job of it. In Manhattan, he checked into a run-down hotel with a reputation as a haven for writers. The only other author in sight was a man named Frank Gruber, who was hardly an advertisement for success—he told Hubbard how to get a free lunch of tomato soup by filling a bowl with hot water, ketchup, and crackers at the Automat.

  In exchange for a meal, Gruber brought him to a meeting of the American Fiction Guild, an association of pulp authors. Its president was Arthur J. Burks, who took a shine to the newcomer, and Hubbard soon broke through. A note in Thrilling Adventure stated, “I guess L. Ron Hubbard needs no introduction. From the letters you send in, his yarns are about the most popular we have published. Several of you have wondered, too, how he gets the splendid color which always characterizes his stories of the faraway places. The answer is, he’s been there, brothers. He’s been, and seen, and done, and plenty of all three of them!”

  Hubbard knew that his energy was more profitably spent on developing himself as a personality than on refining his craft. In 1935, he was elected president of the chapter, lining up speakers for their weekly lunches, including the New York coroner, who told him, “The morgue is open to you anytime, Hubbard.” He also became notorious for his rate of production, analyzing the percentage of stories that sold to each magazine and focusing on those with the highest return. Hubbard boasted that he wrote only first drafts, but he was occasionally capable of more, and the closer a story was to the sea, which he loved, the better it became.

  For the most part, however, it was just a job. Hubbard invested in an electric typewriter—a rarity in itself—and was rumored to work on a continuous scroll of butcher paper. He claimed to write a hundred thousand words a month, which was a gross exaggeration. As always, he turned himself into whatever he thought would impress everyone else in the room, whether they were pilots, explorers, or authors, and since he couldn’t be the best writer, he would settle for being the most prolific in a field defined by its monstrous productivity.

  Hubbard’s second child, Catherine, was born on January 15, 1936. After they moved to South Colby, Washington, Polly began to think that he was cheating on her, and when she found a pair of letters that he had written to two different girlfriends, she took her revenge by switching the envelopes. Hubbard later wrote, “Because of her coldness physically, the falsity of her pretensions, I believed myself a near eunuch. . . . When I found I was attractive to other women, I had many affairs.”

  If his home life didn’t meet his expectations, he was making progress elsewhere. He met H. P. Lovecraft, who called him “a remarkable young man,” and Columbia Pictures bought the rights to an unpublished novella that he adapted into the serial The Secret of Treasure Island, which featured an erupting volcano and a scientist forced to build “death bombs.” In 1937, he spent ten weeks doing uncredited rewrites in Hollywood, and he later said, without any evidence, that he had worked on Stagecoach, Dive Bomber, and
The Plainsman.

  In fact, Hubbard had finished a different sort of western, which was acquired by the publisher Macaulay for an advance of $2,500. Hubbard spent all the money on a boat, but the deal for Buckskin Brigades was noteworthy in itself—few pulp authors of the time ever made it into hardcover. Remarkably enough, it turned out to be a real novel. Its hero, Yellow Hair, was a stock white savior figure, but the plot vigorously took the side of the Native Americans, and it drew energy from Hubbard’s identification with his protagonist, who was the earliest version of a character type to which he would often return—the last honorable man in a world of ignorance.

  Despite favorable notices, Buckskin Brigades failed to sell out its first printing. Shortly afterward, Hubbard was invited to his fateful meeting at Street & Smith, where he had written for such titles as Top-Notch and Western Story. By his own account, he and Burks were met by Tremaine and “an executive named Black”—probably Frank Blackwell—who asked them to write for Astounding. They were unhappy, he recalled, with the magazine’s performance, as well as the fact that it “was mainly publishing stories about machines and machinery.”

  After airing their concerns, Hubbard remembered, the executives called in Campbell, who was told to buy everything that the two writers submitted: “He was going to get people into his stories and get something going besides machines.” The only source for this story is Hubbard himself, which is reason enough to be skeptical of it—but the timing is basically right, and it seems plausible that a meeting more or less like what he described did take place.