The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (41 page)

The element in Campbell that chafed against all limits and restrictions responded to these radical new stories. He instantly adopted their expansiveness and power as his own personal means of liberation. Thus it came to be that at the very same time that Campbell the college student was failing in German and only barely squeaking by in his English classes, John W. Campbell, Jr., the whiz-kid science fiction writer, was engaged in emulating his mentors Hamilton and Smith, mastering the universe of his imagination with epics of super-science like
The Black Star Passes
(
Amazing Stories Quarterly,
Fall 1930) and
Islands of Space
(
Amazing Stories Quarterly,
Spring 1931).

These early stories expressed Campbell’s belief in the power of human-directed science. In his epics, men employing super-science were enabled to travel from star to star, galaxy to galaxy, and dimension to dimension. They turned aside the threat of ancient alien beings, dominated and directed lesser aliens, explored the cosmos, fought great battles in space, and exploded planets like rotten tomatoes.

By the conclusion of
Invaders from the Infinite
(
Amazing Stories Quarterly,
Spring-Summer 1932), Campbell’s bold inventors had come to command the power of gods. As one of them says:

“ ‘Man can do what was never before possible. From the nothingness of Space he can make anything. Man alone in this space is Creator and Destroyer.’ ”
³⁰⁹

But there was something more to Campbell’s early super-scientific big bang stories than the mere display of overwhelming material power by men of overwhelming intellectual brawn. To a very real extent, his models, the expansive stories of Smith and Hamilton, were expressions of pure faith that did not deal with the limits of the Age of Technology so much as simply overleap them. John W. Campbell could not rest content with that. He had to test those limits for himself.

And so, even in a story like
The Black Star Passes,
there is the central suggestion that cultural decline need not be final and permanent. In this story, decadent aliens attempt to trade their dead star for ours, and are repulsed by Campbell’s heroes. But their contact with humanity is still enough to rouse these beings from their ancient lethargy and give them the resolve to capture a new sun yet: “They had fought, and lost, but they had gained a spirit of adventure that had been dormant for millions of years.”
³¹⁰

In
Invaders from the Infinite,
there is the implication that science may not be the ultimate power. When Campbell’s inventors name their mightiest spaceship, they do not call it
Science.
Rather, they dub it
Thought:

“The swiftest thing that ever was,
thought!
The most irresistible thing,
thought,
for nothing can stop its progress. The most destructive thing,
thought.
Thought, the greatest constructor, the greatest destroyer, the product of mind, and producer of powers, the greatest of powers. Thought is controlled by the mind. Let us call it
Thought.
”
³¹¹

And in the last of Campbell’s epics of super-science,
The Mightiest Machine
(
Astounding,
Dec. 1934-Apr. 1935), there is the contention that even though physical limits may exist, ways may also exist to bypass these limits:

“Here’s an illustration of the case. Take that piece of wire there—a piece of copper. I can truly and safely say that a wire as thin as the lead of a pencil can’t be made the shaft of a machine carrying ten thousand horse power twenty miles. Impossible! But that doesn’t mean that ten thousand electric horse power can’t be conducted through it. As a driving shaft, as direct mechanical energy in other words, it would be impossible. As a conductor for a second-hand energy, it is possible.”
³¹²

During his college days, Campbell was exposed to several radical new lines of scientific inquiry that would become a central part of his thinking. As a student at M.I.T., he attracted the friendship of Professor Norbert Wiener, who would be the founder of the science of cybernetics, with whom he argued problems of intelligent machines. And while he was at Duke University, he became interested in the pioneering efforts of Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke to place the study of parapsychological phenomena, formerly thought of as manifestations of spirit, on a firm scientific foundation—even serving as a subject in ESP experiments.

When Campbell graduated from college in the direst moment of the Great Depression, it soon became apparent that he could not make a living writing science fiction. So he took whatever jobs were available. He sold cars. He sold exhaust fans. He sold gas heaters. He worked in the research department of Mack Truck. He worked for an instrument manufacturer. And for six months he was a technical writer and editor for a New Jersey chemical company.

Meanwhile Campbell the science fiction writer had begun to try out a more thoughtful line of story than he had ever written previously—stories that directly addressed the most fundamental problems of Technological Age SF.

The first transitional example of this was “The Last Evolution” (
Amazing,
Aug. 1932). This short story contained all the offhand invention of machines and weapons that Campbell’s readers had come to expect from him—zap topping zap. But in its basic orientation, “The Last Evolution” was completely different from Campbell’s usual thing. Rather than picturing mankind as the natural boss of the universe, master of Thought, and all-powerful Creator and Destroyer, this story envisioned the decline and extinction of humanity.

In “The Last Evolution,” man in the year 2538 is imagined living in comfort on the labor of his machines. But then alien invaders—“the Outsiders”
³¹³
—swoop down from the stars. They lightly turn aside the defenses of Earth, and begin to scour the planet with a deadly green ray that annihilates all life.

It is too late for humanity. One of the two remaining human scientists speaks prophetically:

“The end of man. . . . But not the end of evolution. The children of man still live—the machines will go on. Not of man’s flesh, but of a better flesh, a flesh that knows no sickness, and no decay, a flesh that spends no thousands of years in advancing a step in its full evolution, but overnight leaps ahead to new heights.”
³¹⁴

And new superior machines do appear in response to the attacks of the Outsiders. But when the power of the most advanced of these machines, F-2, still proves insufficient to defeat the invaders, an even higher evolution is demanded. F-2 produces an entity of “pure force and pure intelligence.”
³¹⁵

This glowing golden sphere still acknowledges itself an heir of man. It demonstrates its overwhelming superiority to the aliens by turning their flagship inside out and back again without harm. And it sends the Outsiders scooting back home, tails between their legs.

At the conclusion, the narrator of the story reveals himself to be none other than F-2. He is now the last surviving metal machine, living in a world populated by force-intelligences 125,000 years hence, and directing his story back through time for our edification.

Campbell elaborated upon this vision in two further experimental stories, “Twilight” and “Night,” published under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart, a variation upon the maiden name of Campbell’s wife, Doña. Taken together, “The Last Evolution,” “Twilight,” and “Night” may be seen as a kind of triptych, a three-part meditation on the destiny of man and the universe, a statement of the worst possible case.

“Twilight,” the first Don A. Stuart story, was written late in 1932. It was not a conventional story of conflict and response like “The Last Evolution.” Rather, it was a deliberate mood-piece, a melancholy vision of the remote future not unlike the last sad probings of distant time by Wells’s Time Traveller.

The protagonist of “Twilight” is a mysterious hitchhiker picked up along the roadside. This magnificent wide-browed man in soft silver clothing identifies himself as a venturer who has traveled from his own high scientific society of the year 3059 to a future moment fully seven million years from now. On his return he has overshot his mark by a trifling amount. In effect, he has made a slight detour to December 1932 in order to tell his story to an audience that will really appreciate it.

The venturer says that he found himself near a great city. The sun seven million years hence is still yellow, not red. But the people are gone from the city. And still it lives on, oiled and dusted and kept in good running order by the faithful abandoned machines of humanity.

In two other great cities, some humans do still survive, but these are shrunken, lonely Big Brains: “They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads.”
³¹⁶

Once men lived on all the planets of the solar system. Now they are in decline. They have few children, and they lack all curiosity or will. Long ago, they committed the error of eradicating all other earthly life except for a few decorative plants:

And now this last dwindling group of men still in the system had no other life form to make its successor. Always before when one civilization toppled, on its ashes rose a new one. Now there was but one civilization, and all other races, even other species, were gone save in the plants. And man was too far along in his old age to bring intelligence and mobility from the plants. Perhaps he could have in his prime.
³¹⁷

The venturer does what little he can. He learns the last mournful and bewildered human songs. And he programs the machines of man to develop the power of curiosity. Then, with a sigh, he sets off again back through time.

When it was written, “Twilight” was altogether too strange and plotless to be published. It was rejected by all the existing science fiction magazines. Only after the death of the Clayton
Astounding
and its resurrection by Street & Smith under the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine, was this highly different story accepted at last. It appeared in the November 1934 issue, one month before the beginning of the serialization of
The Mightiest Machine.

Heretofore, Campbell had not been published in
Astounding.
But he was welcome there now. F. Orlin Tremaine perceived something extraordinary in this argument-prone young writer—another person besides himself who understood that science fiction could be an experimental mode of thought. Tremaine did his best to dissuade Campbell from writing further epics of super-science. Instead, he encouraged him to develop a new line of thoughtful and provocative stories for
Astounding
under the Stuart name.

This was an opportunity that Campbell the tester of limits could not resist.
The Mightiest Machine
would be the only story ever published in Astounding under Campbell’s own name. But “Night” (
Astounding,
Oct. 1935)—the last of Campbell’s phrasings of the ultimate problem—would be the eighth Don A. Stuart story published in the space of one year.

“Night” was another mood-piece, an extension and completion of “Twilight” in something of the same manner that Olaf Stapledon’s
Star Maker
would be an extension and completion of
Last and First Men.
In this story, our witness of things to come is a contemporary experimenter with anti-gravity who is suddenly hurled far into the future. Far, far into the future—120 billion years from now.

Man is gone. The faithful machines of Earth have finally sighed and died. The Sun is a great red cinder that gives no heat. The cosmos has fragmented into pieces and only a handful of stars are to be seen in the sky. The universe is a cooling corpse, and the traveler has been called to view the remains:

“The city had been dead a score of billions of years. The Sun was dead. The Earth was dead. The very atoms were dead. The universe had been dead a billion years. Time himself was dying now, dying with the city and the planet and the universe he had killed.”
³¹⁸

The traveler seeks some trace of humanity on Neptune, but all he finds are a last few highly evolved machines still carrying on. These glowing golden globes have power and curiosity, but they are lacking in purpose.

Final night is called “the one problem they do not want to solve—the problem they are sure they cannot solve.”
³¹⁹
Long ago, the machines permitted a degenerating humanity to pass from the scene. Now they can see the end of things approaching for them, too, and they welcome surcease.

Even the traveler is ready to lie down and commit suicide . . . until suddenly he finds himself back in his own time again, being given oxygen by his friends.

“The Last Evolution,” “Twilight,” and “Night” are extreme examples of the intermixing of radical and conservative elements so typical of Thirties SF. In their depiction of the decline and extinction of man, in their presentation of a fixed and unalterable framework of time, and in their relentless Earth-centeredness, these stories were highly old-fashioned. At the same time, however, in their bold experimentalism as science fiction, in their vision of the machine as man’s favored child, and most of all, in their exponential widening of scale from thousands to millions to billions of years, these stories were distinctly new.

These three central stories, with their restatement and updating of themes familiar from H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Olaf Stapledon, set forth the major problems that John W. Campbell would attempt to resolve during the Thirties. His primary (though by no means only) mode of attack would be under the guise of Don A. Stuart.

Don A. Stuart was conceived as a professional questioner and heretic. As Campbell would one day say in introducing a collection of Stuart stories: “In many of the Don A. Stuart stories, there is the element of a dirty, underhanded crack at the pretensions of science-fiction—dressed in the most accepted terms of science-fiction.”
³²⁰

As Don A. Stuart, Campbell would write stories about small scientific observations and inventions that have major unforeseen consequences, about the burdens of excessive knowledge and freedom, and about scientists wasting their lives aiming for results they have already unwittingly achieved. When challenged with the supposed impossibility of such things, Campbell/Stuart would also attempt a science fiction love story and a science fiction mystery. But of the sum total of sixteen Don A. Stuart stories published between the end of 1934 and the end of 1939, fully half would be concerned with the interrelated problems of ending human overdependence on the machine, fighting back from cultural stagnation, and throwing off the tyranny imposed by superior invading aliens.