The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (36 page)

11: The Laws of Chance

W
HEN VIEWED FROM A DISTANCE,
the new American SF magazines that sprang into life in the last decade of the Age of Technology have the appearance of an unstable mishmash of fundamentally incompatible elements. These magazines were a place of summary, experiment, struggle and confusion as writers strove to find their way out of one mind-set that was no longer viable, and into a wholly new state of mind.

During the Thirties, all the forms of SF that had been current during the post-1870 era were given leave to exist at once in the pages of these marginal American pulp magazines. There was no kind of imaginative fiction—from stories of super-scientific experiment, to the lost race story, to stories of the exploration of alien realms, to stories of the supernatural—that could not find a home in one magazine or another.

Underneath all of this multiplicity and respect for the past, however, old familiar categories were breaking down. Story types that had once seemed clearly separate borrowed freely from each other, or casually crossbred. At the same time, whole new story formulations—like space opera and the time paradox—were finding their way into existence.

It is by no means always possible for us to be sure how the writers themselves felt about the materials they were presenting. The most extreme radical and conservative elements might be conjoined in the very same story:

The latest astronomical news might turn up in a story about cruelly indifferent higher beings who fly through the interplanetary ether on leathery wings. A bold spaceman on Mars might encounter an ancient mythological horror. The Earth might be presented as the egg of some immense and unknowable space creature, and all human history and purpose might be instantly shattered when the hour of its hatching finally arrives. Or the latest speculations of physics on the fundamental uncertainty of being might be presented in a mood of total despair—lightly covered over with breeziness, jokes and slang.

The Thirties were a period of general transition. Just as the social and economic spheres of life were caught up in change, so also were order and value within science fiction. In this agonizing extended moment of economic breakdown and cultural rearrangement, given attitudes and received truths of all kinds were subject to the most extreme question and doubt. Nothing was certain and anything might be possible.

Through this maze of ambivalence, breakdown and confusion, the thread for us to follow is the nature and direction of the changes going on in science fiction during the years of the Great Depression. Out of the apparent old-fashionedness, muddle and doubt, we will pick the writers, the stories and the special fictional moments that best illustrate the ongoing subliminal shift from the values and orientations of the Age of Technology to the new psychic state of the Atomic Age.

In particular, we will be looking at the work of two writers. One of these is John W. Campbell, Jr.—the writer of the period who was most consciously aware of the shift taking place, and who most directly occupied himself with the problem of reformulating science fiction.

Campbell was far from being the most popular or prominent science fiction writer of the decade, even though he did enjoy a certain measure of recognition as an SF writer, particularly in the first few years of his career when he seemed a bright young phenom. But during the Thirties, the special programmatic nature of Campbell’s effort went generally unremarked, in part because the major portion of it was performed under cover of a pseudonym, and partly because another large segment was nonfiction.

As a result of this work, however, at the end of the decade John W. Campbell, Jr. would be precisely the right man in exactly the right place to effectively serve as the chief architect in the establishment of modern science fiction.

The other writer of major concern is E.E. Smith. Beyond any doubt, Doc Smith was the SF magazine writer who was most popular and prominent during the last decade of the Age of Technology. His unparalleled reach and grasp were recognized from the moment that his first story saw publication.

It would be difficult to overstate the impact that
The Skylark of Space
had upon American SF readers and writers.
²⁶⁵
It turned heads. It blew minds. It. seemed an ultimate example of what science fiction could be. Even before the serialization of Smith’s first story was complete,
Amazing
was inundated by letters of praise for
The Skylark of Space,
and it was years before the murmurs finally died down.

But Smith didn’t rest with
The Skylark of Space.
He treated it as an opening card rather than a final statement, and through the decade he wrote novel after novel of ever-increasing scope. And when he tried to restrict his canvas to the solar system, as he did in the novel
Spacehounds of IPC
(
Amazing,
July-Sept. 1931), readers protested. They could get that from anyone, and they demanded more from Smith.

Smith’s great power was his breadth of vision. Far more than any other writer of the Age of Technology, Doc Smith was able to appreciate the incredible scope of the new universe revealed by science—and then to offset this mere vastness by imagining higher reaches of human potential and command of science.

Smith’s first rival, Edmond Hamilton, with his series of rewrites of a single story to larger and larger scale, was not a rival for long. In relatively short order, Doc Smith would adopt the most promising details of “Crashing Suns” and its sequels—the space patrol, battles in space, and domesticated aliens—and make them his own. Hamilton, by contrast, was completely unable to match either the scope or the complexity of Smith’s great vision. Very shortly, he would give up trying and content himself with work of lesser ambition.

Then, in the early Thirties, a second rival to Smith made his appearance—the young John Campbell. But this rivalry, too, was largely an illusion of the moment. Smith was a true innovator. Campbell, twenty years his junior, was at best a Smith imitator, at least at the outset, as Campbell himself was well aware.

In 1928, John W. Campbell, Jr., as an 18-year-old freshman at M.I.T., was one of those readers bowled over by the serialization of
The Skylark of Space.
And even as much as thirty-five years later, Campbell, by then long recognized as science fiction’s most distinguished editor, would still attest to E.E. Smith’s continuing centrality—and deny his own—saying: “
The Skylark of Space
was written in
1918!
Since
1918
nobody has come up with a major breakthrough in science fiction!”

Under the overwhelming stimulus of his first encounter with
The Skylark of Space,
the young Campbell was inspired to sit down and attempt a science fiction story of his own, which he submitted to
Amazing.
And, lo and behold, “Invaders from the Infinite” was actually bought!

It was never published, however. In the period of upheaval when
Amazing
changed ownership for the first time, “Invaders from the Infinite” turned up missing. Campbell had made the beginner’s mistake of keeping no carbon copy, and his story was permanently lost.

The first of Campbell’s stories actually to appear in print, “When the Atoms Failed,” was published in
Amazing Stories
in January 1930—the very same month that saw the publication of the first issue of
Astounding,
the magazine with which Campbell would eventually come to be identified.

Very shortly, Campbell launched himself into the new science fiction of scope and power, attempting to top his master Smith with evocations of mighty science. But there was no real contest between them. Campbell was a boy still struggling to form his own concepts, while Doc Smith was a mature man enjoying his freedom to give expression at last to ideas he had been forced to keep under his hat for years. Campbell was able to match Smith only in terms of gross throw-weight of imaginary scientific zap, but not at all in terms of basic writing skill, storytelling ability, human sensitivity, or overall conception.

The epitome of the early John W. Campbell—powerful, crude and more than a little vague and incoherent—may be this world-busting passage from a second story entitled
Invaders from the Infinite,
a novel published in the Spring-Summer 1932 issue of
Amazing Stories Quarterly:

What use is there to attempt description of that scene as 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of rock and metal and matter crashed against a wall of energy, immovable and inconceivable. The planet crumpled, and split wide. A thousand pieces, and suddenly there was a further mistiness about it, and the whole enormous mass, seeming but a toy, as it was from this distance in space, and as it was in this ship, was enclosed in that same, immovable, unalterable wall of energy.
²⁶⁶

In truth, the closest that the young zero-gargling John Campbell came to achieving parity with his hero was that thrilling moment in late 1934 when the two had serials running concurrently in the pages of the Tremaine
Astounding
—Smith’s third Skylark story,
Skylark of Valeron,
and Campbell’s last attempt at the epic of super-science,
The Mightiest Machine.
But after this, Campbell, too, dropped away. Or, more precisely, turned his attention elsewhere.

In the last half of the Thirties, E.E. Smith stood alone, completely without peer. And, competing with himself, Smith still contrived to top Smith. He put the Skylark series aside and launched himself into a new super-story that he had been incubating for ten years, ever since the moment he had finally sold
The Skylark of Space
to
Amazing.

The Lensman series—four novels serialized in
Astounding
from 1937 to 1947—was conceived on a scale that made even the Skylark stories seem limited and parochial. In this series, the entire galaxy is one ongoing multifaceted civilization, in which Earth—here often called “Tellus”
²⁶⁷
—was an early leader, but is not set apart or specially privileged.

These stories, as nothing else, would reveal the true difference between Smith and his quasi-rivals, Hamilton and Campbell. In his Interstellar Patrol stories, Edmond Hamilton presented human beings lightly turning aside the threats offered by larger and larger increments of space and time. In his epics of super-science, John W. Campbell imagined ever-larger quantifications of the potential power of human thought. But underlying all of Smith’s fiction was an altogether more subtle vision—the conviction of the existence of level upon level of potential being and becoming.

As early as
The Skylark of Space,
this conviction may be seen in the form of the disembodied intelligence who creates the illusion of a planet for the members of the Skylark party to land upon and toys with them for a brief hour before allowing them to depart. This being not only operates on another and higher level of existence, but also indicates to the Skylarkers that this other level may potentially be attained by human beings.

Richard Seaton himself is a leap-taker. The increases in power and scale from story to story in the Skylark series, until the dauntless companions are boldly jumping from galaxy to galaxy in mile-long spaceships, may be taken as exact reflections of Richard Seaton’s increases in imaginative grasp, scientific command, and personal acceptance of responsibility.

But there were limitations to the possible scope of the Skylark stories inherent in their very structure. They were the personal adventures of one contemporary genius from Idaho and his best buddy and their wives, and no more.

So, in a switch that was in itself a conceptual leap—an example of the very idea he was attempting to express in the form of fiction—Smith dropped the Skylark stories and launched the Lensman series.

In these novels, there is a hierarchy of being and responsibility in the galaxy. Galactic Civilization respects all forms of intelligent life. And the very best beings of any kind may aspire to become Galactic Patrolmen and help to maintain the peace of Galactic Civilization.

The most advanced members of the Galactic Patrol wear the Lens. This individually tailored “lenticular jewel”
²⁶⁸
is both a sign of their superior character and an instrument of overwhelming power. More than that, in a real sense it is the very basis on which Galactic Civilization is founded.

Early in the first story in the series,
Galactic Patrol
(
Astounding,
Sept. 1937-Feb. 1938), we are told:

“The Lens, which, being proof against counterfeiting or even imitation, makes identification of Lensmen automatic and positive, was what made our Patrol possible. Having the Lens, it was easy to weed out the few unfit. Standards of entrance were raised ever higher, and when it had been proved beyond question that every Lensman was in fact incorruptible, the Galactic Council was given more and more authority. More and ever more solar systems, having developed Lensmen of their own, voted to join Civilization and sought representation on the Galactic Council, even though such a course meant giving up much of their systemic sovereignty.”
²⁶⁹

Only some of the Lensmen are human, of course. Most are not. But the very best of the Lensmen is Smith’s protagonist, another John Carter figure, Kimball Kinnison, whose special talents and abilities increase from story to story as he and his Lens-wearing fellows are pitted against a succession of ever more powerful, repellent and dangerous antagonists, some human and some not.

But the obvious and apparent levels of galactic conflict in these stories ultimately prove not to be the most important level. Gradually, it would be revealed that behind the brave and able wearers of the Lens stand the beings who make the Lens—the good Arisians, a higher race who hide themselves from view lest the very fact of their immense superiority disturb and intimidate impressionable younger beings. And behind the layers of menace that the Galactic Patrolmen strip away, there is eventually to be found another superior race—the evil Eddorians, interlopers from another space/time continuum.