Eventually, Campbell brought up the possibility of a pen name. “On this point,” Asimov recalled, “I clearly expressed intransigence. My name was my name and it would go on my stories.” Campbell never pressed it, in all likelihood because it wasn’t important to his overall plans.
Later that month, exactly one year after his first visit, Asimov dropped off a new story. As he was leaving, he passed a stack of the July 1939 issue. He knew that it included “Ad Astra,” so he helped himself to a copy. In the previous issue, Campbell had written, “Next month, Astounding introduces a new author, and one of unusual promise.” It wasn’t Asimov—who wasn’t even mentioned—but A. E. van Vogt, whose debut, “Black Destroyer,” was featured on the cover.
Leafing through the issue, Asimov saw that “Ad Astra” had been retitled “Trends,” which struck him as an improvement. There were stories by van Vogt, Nat Schachner, Nelson S. Bond, Ross Rocklynne, Amelia Reynolds Long, and Catherine L. Moore; an article titled “Tools for Brains”; and an editorial on uranium fission in which Campbell said, “A university equipped with the necessary cyclotron has already arranged for the purchase of a cubic foot of uranium oxide.”
Asimov didn’t know it, but the university was Columbia, where Campbell would later visit the cyclotron in person—and the editorial was as significant, in its way, as any of the stories in the issue. With atomic energy on the threshold of becoming a reality, predicting the future was no longer merely an educational strategy, as it had been for Gernsback, or a pretext for stock adventures, as it had been for the other magazines. Now it was something far more urgent.
A month earlier, Asimov had earned his bachelor of science degree, but he wasn’t in the mood to celebrate—he had been rejected by the medical schools to which he had applied. As he took home his copy of Astounding, he had no reason to suspect that it would come to be seen as the first issue of the golden age of science fiction, due in no small part to his presence there. But there had been signs. Asimov had once ventured to ask, “Mr. Campbell, how can you bear not to write?”
“I discovered something better, Asimov,” Campbell replied. “I’m an editor. When I was a writer, I could only write one story at a time. Now I can write fifty stories at a time. There are fifty writers out there writing stories they’ve talked with me about.” On another occasion, he clarified, “When I give an idea to a writer and it comes back to me exactly the way I gave it to him, I don’t give that writer any more ideas. I don’t want it my way; I can do that myself. I want my idea his way.”
Asimov remembered, “That was the way he saw us all. We were extensions of himself; we were his literary clones; each of us doing, in his or her own way, things Campbell felt needed doing; things that he could do but not quite the way we could; things that got done in fifty different varieties of ways.”
And the team was about to expand. In the September 1939 issue, Campbell predicted, “Astounding will find and develop not less than four now-unknown top-rank new authors during the next year.” Van Vogt was one obvious discovery. Others were waiting in the wings. And before the summer was over, the golden age would find its embodiment in a writer whose life would entwine with Campbell’s—and Asimov’s—in ways that none of them could have foreseen.
5.
The Analytical Laboratory
1938–1940
[Science fiction] writers, confronted with desperate problems, may mope, but are much more likely to break out by some dazzling improvisation; they have what Arthur Koestler calls “the coward’s courage.”
—DAMON KNIGHT, THE FUTURIANS
While Asimov was paying his monthly visits to Campbell, he was engaged in another life that seemed for a time to be equally significant. It began with a postcard on August 2, 1938, from Jack Rubinson, a high school classmate who had recognized Asimov’s name from his letters to Astounding. When he wrote to strike up a correspondence, Asimov responded eagerly, and a month later, Rubinson sent him a package so big that it cost an extra penny to mail.
Inside were three issues of a fan magazine, which Asimov found “fairly interesting.” He was more intrigued by the postcard that came the following week, in which Rubinson mentioned that he was a member of the Greater New York Science Fiction League in Queens. As soon as he heard about it, Asimov badly wanted to join—even if getting there would mean “double carfare”—and he asked Rubinson to let him know when the next meeting would take place.
Three days later, he got a postcard from Frederik Pohl, who didn’t mention the Greater New York Science Fiction League at all. Instead, he invited him to the first meeting of the Futurian Science Literary Society in Brooklyn. Asimov wasn’t clear about the reasons for the change, but he was glad that it was closer to home. He wrote back to ask if it was a house or an apartment—in fact, it was a hall used by the Young Communist League—and concluded, “That’s all right, I’ll get to the right place somehow and I’ll bring the card you sent me as identification.”
He was innocently wandering into a drama that had been unfolding around him for years. Science fiction fandom had sprung into existence almost by accident, after Hugo Gernsback printed letters from readers in Amazing, along with their addresses, allowing them to correspond in private with like-minded fans. In cities with a critical mass of enthusiasts, like New York, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles, they gathered in small groups and printed mimeographed fanzines full of inside jokes—a meeting ground for such creative teenagers as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster of Cleveland, who went on to create the character of Superman.
The first officially sanctioned club, the Science Fiction League, was established in 1934 by Gernsback and Charles Hornig of Wonder Stories. It received free coverage in the magazine, but it also became seen as a tool of the publishers, drawing attacks from fandom’s radical wing. The key figure among the extremists was Donald A. Wollheim, who later became a major figure in science fiction in his own right—although in his late teens, he was closer to what today would be called a troll, boasting that he could single-handedly drive “any fan from the field.”
It was a small world—by one estimate, there were fewer than fifty active fans—that magnified certain personality traits. The most devoted members were usually young, obsessive, and confrontational. Disputes between clubs were driven by personal grudges, and a lone player like Wollheim could exert a disproportionate influence. The dynamics were much like those of modern online communities, except considerably slower, and a pattern was established in which a club would be founded, persist for a while, and then implode, either because of internal tensions or because Wollheim came in and dissolved it.
Before long, fandom in New York had broken into two rough divisions. One was led by Sam Moskowitz, an athletic kid of eighteen who was less interested in political disputes than in running conventions and meeting professionals. The other group gathered around Wollheim and his friend John Michel, whose views were expressed in a leftist manifesto, “Mutation or Death,” that argued that fans should strive for the kind of social change that they saw in their favorite stories.
In May 1938, Moskowitz and the fan William Sykora, who had formed an alliance against Wollheim, organized the First National Science Fiction Convention in Newark. When Campbell showed up with the writers John Clark and L. Sprague de Camp, there were fifteen people in attendance. Looking out at the gathering, the editor remarked dryly, “Better than I expected.”
By the time Campbell rose to speak, the crowd had grown to over a hundred fans. The editor held forth on the importance of fandom, which he described as the inner circle of his readership, and expressed his support for a World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, to be held next summer. Wollheim had asked to speak as well, but permission was denied out of fear that Campbell would be offended by his prepared remarks, which questioned why anyone with a college degree in science would want to edit a pulp magazine.
Fandom quickly split into factions over who would run the Worldcon. In July, Campbell and Leo Margulies of Thril
ling Wonder Stories had lunch with Sykora and Wollheim to settle the issue. Margulies did most of the talking—Campbell was uncharacteristically quiet—and ruled that Wollheim would be in charge. Moskowitz responded by founding a rival organization, New Fandom, to wrest back control. The situation became so rancorous that Margulies was forced to dissolve the Greater New York Science Fiction League, and Wollheim and Michel responded by starting the group that became known as the Futurians.
When Asimov arrived at the inaugural meeting on September 18, he was aware of none of this. The other attendees included Wollheim, Michel, Pohl, Rubinson, Dick Wilson, Robert Lowndes, and Cyril Kornbluth. Many were Jewish, and most were fervent communists, more out of the excitement of being part of a movement than from any deep ideological conviction. Asimov was especially interested in their fanzine, of which he wrote in his diary, “I intend to write for [the magazine], but hesitate to put my name to violently radical and probably atheistical articles, so I am wondering if they will allow me to write under a pseudonym.”
Afterward, they went out for banana splits and sandwiches, although Asimov, who was smarting from the expense of joining—the initiation fee was a quarter—ate nothing. He was powerfully drawn to the combative Wollheim, and the others seemed like fellow outsiders. Wollheim had suffered from polio, while Michel—whose stammer made it impossible for him to speak in public—had been paralyzed by diphtheria as a child. Pohl had missed a year of school because of scarlet fever, Lowndes had a clubfoot, Kornbluth’s teeth were green, and they were all poor.
Asimov saw them as kindred spirits. The Great Depression had led to a contraction of possibilities for fans who were already on the edge, and science fiction told them that there was a point to it all—although most of the factors that kept them apart could be overcome with time or effort, with little to keep them from becoming productive members of society once they had emerged from their larval stages. Science fiction had less to offer those who felt excluded for reasons that couldn’t be outgrown, and with few exceptions, most fans were white males.
The Futurians, circa 1939. (Front row:) Harry Dockweiler, John Michel, Isaac Asimov, Donald Wollheim, Herbert Levantman. (Middle row:) Chester Cohen, Walter Kubilis, Frederik Pohl, Richard Wilson. (Back row:) Cyril Kornbluth, Jack Gillespie, Jack Rubinson.
Courtesy of the Richard Wilson estate and the Damon Knight papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries
None of these points would have occurred to Asimov, who was happy to have found a world where he belonged—although he might have been equally pleased to have stumbled into the ranks of their rivals. In any case, he was caught up by their fervor. On September 28, he went to see Campbell at the office, where he expounded on his new Futurian ideals. He was shocked to learn that the editor was a conservative, and he worried that he might have offended him.
By the third meeting, Wollheim and Michel, typically, were growing bored, and they moved that the club be recognized along new lines—a motion that Asimov opposed “like hell.” On October 30, the Mercury Theatre broadcast its adaptation of The War of the Worlds, narrated by Orson Welles. Campbell seemed to resent Welles’s intrusion on his turf, but the Futurians loved it, and at their next gathering, they held a debate on the prospect of an alien invasion, with Wollheim speaking for the Martians. Asimov took the side of mankind and lost, but he made up for it by picking out “The Internationale” on the piano.
He was enjoying the atmosphere of mild rebelliousness—at the next meeting, he actually smoked two cigarettes—but the other members were mixed on his presence. On one occasion, he was ejected for talking too loudly, and after failing to receive invitations for two meetings, he wrote to Pohl, “Have I been blackballed out?” He once brought his sister, Marcia, along, only to have the others yank her inside and lock the door as a joke: “I got very panicky. I had some vague notion that they might do something to her, and I’d never be able to explain it to my parents.”
At times, Asimov felt out of place—his friends were all ambitious, but he was the only one who had sold a story to Campbell—and he even attended a meeting of the rival Queens Science Fiction League, at which he rose to introduce himself: “Now you see the world’s worst science fiction writer!” Of the Futurians, he was the closest to Pohl, who tried to become his agent, offering to rewrite his unsold stories “in accordance with certain suggestions previously given me by Campbell, Weisinger, and Tremaine,” in exchange for the majority of his earnings. Asimov declined: “Campbell is a good friend of mine.”
Campbell was a constant presence in their letters, as if they were rival siblings competing for a father’s love. Pohl wrote, “Campbell once remarked to me that he could pick out a specific flaw in a story and identify [it] so that the author could correct it with ease; but that he could do nothing when a story simply did not click.” In another letter, he added, “Through your acquaintance with Campbell, you’re in a better position than most beginning or even fairly well established authors.”
Asimov would later deny knowing anything about Marx, but in his late teens, he characterized his politics rather differently, as Pohl revealed in the same letter: “You call yourself a communist; well, if you’ll allow me to handle some of your manuscripts and will contribute any profits therefrom to the [Communist Party], I’ll waive commission—and I do need the money. . . . If you don’t need money yourself, they certainly do.” Asimov replied that he might not need the money, but he welcomed it. Finally, he agreed to take on Pohl as his agent for three months.
In the meantime, the dispute over the World Science Fiction Convention—which was scheduled for the Fourth of July weekend, to coincide with the World’s Fair—grew more acrimonious. New Fandom won back the sponsorship, due in part to the widespread assumption that Campbell was on its side. The editor became a regular guest of the Queens Science Fiction League, an affiliate of New Fandom, and even Doña was dragged along, “much against her will,” to one meeting.
Campbell had little reason to be sympathetic to the Futurians. Their politics couldn’t have been more different; he was ambivalent toward Pohl; and he had tangled with Wollheim before. A year earlier, Wollheim had circulated an open letter criticizing him for publishing “Three Thousand Years,” by Thomas McClary. Wollheim had blasted the serial—of which Pohl had also written to complain—as “fascistic” and “an outrage,” and Campbell forwarded his comments to Robert Swisher with a wry note: “Maybe he didn’t like the story?”
As a rule, however, the editor was content to let fandom take its course. He took a practical interest in its existence, and he occasionally tossed a coin with the fan H. C. Koenig to see who would host visitors from out of town, but he had never been active in such circles, and he was a decade older than its most vocal members. Campbell hoped to utilize its growth, but he was also aware of how quickly it could turn against him, and he mostly kept his distance.
On July 2, 1939, the doors opened at last for the first World Science Fiction Convention. At ten in the morning, a crowd began to gather on the fourth floor of the Caravan Hall on East Fifty-Ninth Street, which had been decorated with cover art from the pulps. The fans Forrest J Ackerman and Ray Bradbury had come all the way out from Los Angeles, and the professional attendees included Jack Williamson, L. Sprague de Camp, and Campbell himself.
When Asimov arrived, freshly shaved and wearing a new suit, he was nervous. There were rumors that all the Futurians would be excluded, and he wasn’t sure whether Moskowitz, who knew that he was a published author, would extend the ban to him or not. He found his friends lurking across the street in the Automat, and they all headed upstairs together.
On the fourth floor, they were met by James Taurasi, one of Moskowitz’s cronies. New Fandom had decided that the Futurians would be allowed inside if they swore to behave themselves, but Moskowitz and Sykora hadn’t arrived, and without their approval, Taurasi didn’t want to admit them.
When Moskowitz showed up, Taurasi was still arg
uing with the Futurians by the elevators. Wollheim asked if they could enter, but before Moskowitz could respond, a fan named Louis Kuslan passed him a leaflet that he had been handed outside. It referred to New Fandom as “ruthless scoundrels,” and its headline was BEWARE OF THE DICTATORSHIP.
Moskowitz showed it to Wollheim. Both he and Taurasi were big guys—they each weighed close to two hundred pounds, and Moskowitz was an amateur boxer—who outsized most of the Futurians. “I thought you just stated that you would do nothing to hurt the convention.”
“I didn’t print them,” Wollheim replied. In fact, they were the work of a fan named David Kyle, a Futurian who had printed them on the presses of a newspaper owned by his brother in upstate New York.
“But his group was passing them out,” Kuslan piped up. In response, Moskowitz went downstairs to look for Sykora. Instead, he saw the police—Taurasi, anticipating trouble, had called the cops. He also found piles of leftist tracts, which he assumed the Futurians were planning to distribute.
Moskowitz told the police to come back in an hour. Then he went up to see Wollheim again. “If we let you in, will you promise on your word of honor that you will do nothing in any way to disturb the progress of the convention?”
“If we do anything to disturb the convention,” Wollheim said, “you can kick us out.”
“We don’t want to kick you out,” Moskowitz replied. “We simply want your honored promise not to harm the convention.”
When Wollheim refused, Moskowitz asked the others in turn, including Asimov and Jack Rubinson, who promised not to make trouble. He later recalled, “But the core of the group . . . chose to remain without.”
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