The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (44 page)

In this dawning moment of the Atomic Age, John Campbell was able to look around himself and recognize what no lesser editor was prepared even to consider: that the defining conditions of this new age had been conceived, directed, molded and made a bit at a time by the SF invention stories of the Age of Technology. From now on, Campbell realized, it was a science fiction world that people would be living in, filled with atomic power, rockets, thinking machines, helicopters, and television. All of the various gadgets, machines and inventions that had been imagined in the course of a thousand SF stories—but
all at once!

The evidence for this was plain enough. It would be on public display in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, where souvenir buttons would even be given out attesting “I Have Seen the Future.” And still no one but John Campbell was able to put the whole together and see that SF underlay the coming world. No one else quite tumbled to the immense power inherent in science fiction.

Though he would have been unlikely to use the term himself, John Campbell was the first to perceive science fiction as modern myth. For him, science fiction had the power of myth, the truth of myth, and the ability of myth to reshape the world. Accepting science fiction as myth, he had faith that there was no problem that it could not fruitfully address and resolve.

Some measure of the scope of science fiction as conceived by John Campbell—and also the reason that this conception was so much his own private belief—may be glimpsed in a highly revealing incident that happened shortly before Campbell’s death in 1971. Writer Harry Harrison remembers it like this:

His sense of humor was of the roguish kind and many of his declarations and editorials were designed to provoke cries of rage from his readers. Characteristic is a statement he made just a few months before he died. There was a group of us and the talk came around to literature and the place of science fiction in the greater whole of English letters. It was pointed out that some enthusiastic aggrandizers of SF stand on the barricades and declare that someday, due to innate superiority, the short story and the novel will be engulfed by science fiction and become a part of it. Others, perhaps more realistically, say that SF is one specialized part of the whole of literature. But not John Campbell! With a sweep of one great hand he dismissed these feckless arguments, then spread his arms wide. “This is science fiction,” he said, from open-armed fingertip to fingertip. “It takes in all time, from before the universe was born, through the formation of suns and planets, on through their destruction and forward to the heat death of the universe. And after.” His hands came together so that his index fingers delimited a very tiny measure of space. “This is English literature, the most microscopic fraction of the whole.”
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We have to take this statement seriously. For, even as Harrison suggests that Campbell must have been only foolin’, he also offhandedly acknowledges that here in Campbell’s assertion lies the essence of the Golden Age.

But what should be important for us to note is that as late as 1971, a crowd of science fiction writers—men who had grown up under the influence and direction of John Campbell, men who dealt with SF on a regular basis—could still choose to imagine that his personal concept of science fiction was just a joke, another of Campbell’s typical roguish provocations. From this, we may judge just how truly far ahead of his time, how invisibly powerful, and how solitary was a John Campbell armed with these convictions in 1938, in the moment when he first set out to bring change to science fiction.

But yet, even more fundamental than Campbell’s conception of the scope and role of science fiction was the vision of the unity and coherence of the universe that formed the foundation for this conception. We may see something of this vision peeking through in Campbell’s assertion that science fiction takes in all time, from before the universe was born until its death—and then after.

It is not just that no one had previously thought about science fiction in this way. No one had previously thought about the
physical universe
in this way—as a discrete event with a limited life span, a before and an after, which humanity might be superior to.

All through the Technological Age, the material universe had presented a demonic appearance. It was the vast Unknown, remote, incomprehensible and terrifying. It was the great enemy of man, his ultimate executioner.

But then, in the last days of the Age of Technology there was a turn of the cosmic kaleidoscope, and all of a sudden science-minded visionaries throughout the Western world were permitted to view the universe in a completely new light. To John Campbell, to the inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller, to the men who would conceive cybernetics and games theory and systems theory, and to a good many others to a greater or lesser degree, it suddenly came to seem apparent that the immensity and complexity displayed by the material universe must be only superficial appearance.

Beneath the surface of immaterial materiality, interconnecting it and holding it together, there must be a relatively small number of fundamental general principles. And everything in the universe—even life, even consciousness—was ultimately to be defined and controlled by these basic rules of nature.

We may understand this vision as the scientific and philosophic variant of the new understanding that was concurrently finding its social expression in the form of democratic pluralism: These universal principles were no respecters of person. They were not reserved for the private use of those born to privilege. They were radically democratic, applying to all and accessible to all.

It appeared that for anyone who was prepared to ask for them, these general principles of relationship and operation would not prove impossible to discover. John Campbell would express it this way in one of his early editorials: “I have heard it said that Nature will give a truthful answer to any intelligent question properly asked. . . . The trick in getting the oracle of Nature to answer is to ask intelligent questions properly.”
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Or, as he would say elsewhere: “Nature is a blabbermouth.”
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The promise implicit in this new scientific vision was that if men would just get on with their proper business of achieving mastery over the fundamental laws of existence, then there was no limit to potential human power, and no need for mankind to fear the universe.

In Buckminster Fuller’s case, this new vision had come upon him in 1927, in a moment when he was on the point of drowning himself in Lake Michigan. His beloved daughter had died on her fourth birthday, his business career was in shambles, and he was filled with despair at the meaninglessness of his existence. But then, in this totally hopeless moment, he was given a sudden glimmering of the order and beauty underlying incomprehensibility. Fuller immediately abandoned his attempt at suicide and dedicated himself to a new life work. As he would later put it: “I made a bargain with myself that I’d discover the principles operative in the universe and turn them over to my fellow men.”
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Even though John Campbell did not need to be pushed to the brink of suicide in order to arrive at his version of this vision, nonetheless, by his own route and in his own time, he had come to make a very similar compact with himself. Except that Campbell’s particular dedication was to discover the operating principles of the universe—and then to turn them over to his fellow men in the form of science fiction stories.

It was Campbell’s grasp of the new scientific vision and his personal dedication to seeing the vision fulfilled that account finally for his great edge as an editor. He was a man with a job to do, in precisely the right place at just the right moment to see it done.

To a degree that no other SF editor could possibly match, Campbell
knew
what his business was. And the series of changes that he made in
Astounding,
the writers he chose to favor, the scientific news and paradoxes and insights he stimulated them with, the content of the stories he picked to publish and the nature of the story revisions that he insisted upon—all of these are to be explained by John Campbell’s determination to place human hands on the controls of the universe.

That was the real nature of his work. And his means of seeing the work accomplished was “modern science fiction,” Campbellian science fiction, SF altered in such a way as to proclaim and to represent and to apply the new vision of underlying universal operating principles.

Modern science fiction was the answer that Campbell had so painstakingly worked out in the course of the Thirties to the early Twentieth Century dilemma—that unshakeable nightmare that said no matter what mankind might do or how far it might go, ultimately, inevitably, it must still be destroyed and eliminated by the universe. Campbell’s “mutations” in
Astounding,
taken in sum, offered an alternate picture of man in the universe—a whole new scenario. The story they told was this:

Things hang together. The universe is not to be feared; it will respond if only it is asked the right questions. The facts are the key, but the facts must be determined. The future may be anticipated. Human evolution is possible. The way to proceed is through the acceptance of change. The method is science and engineering applied with reason and imagination. The ultimate end is human dominion over the universe.

To write modern science fiction for John Campbell, all that would be necessary would be to take one or more of these fundamental tenets and give them expression in story form.

But before any modern science fiction stories had actually been written, their outline was already visible in the form and fabric of the 1938
Astounding.
In a very real sense, the first and best example of modern science fiction—the template, the basic model—would be the Campbell
Astounding
itself.

The new construction of reality was expressed in every possible way by the new
Astounding.
It was demonstrated, it was pictured, it was assumed, it was implied.

Campbell might say about the change in title design: “The new cover lettering . . . represents an effort to bring the style of type used, more into conformation with the type of material appearing in the magazine; a modern, simple type-face, clean-cut and definite.”
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And the implication was that Campbell wanted material that was modern, simple, clean-cut and definite. And also that all parts and elements of
Astounding
were a reflection of the whole.

Campbell might even state some portion of his credo loud and plain, as when he declared editorially, “The old order not only does change, but
must
change,”
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even as he was turning
Astounding
inside out.

But nowhere did Campbell state the whole of his vision as explicitly as we have just tried to do. That was because the closest thing to a complete statement of Campbell’s new ordering of things was the magazine itself.

But that was part of the message, too.
Things hang together,
said
Astounding.

Anywhere at all that you might look in the magazine would be some fragment or indication of the new whole: “The An Lab”—a new department of performance analysis. “In Times to Come”—a new department of prophecy. Cover paintings that portrayed man poking his nose into the far corners of the real Solar System. And—everywhere and always—change, change, change.

And even so, a leap of understanding would be required to grasp that what was being indicated was not just one thing and another, but different aspects of a new dynamic order.

Perhaps as close as Campbell came to stating the essence of his belief directly was in this comment in the March 1938 editorial that accompanied the change in title from
Astounding Stories
to
Astounding Science-Fiction:

“We presuppose, in these stories, two things: that there is yet to be learned infinitely more than is now known, and that Man can learn it.”
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What a deceptively simple thing to say, now that it was said—that men can always learn whatever it is they need to know! But to be able to say this and believe it, it was necessary first to accept that the universe, however unknown it might be, is not alien, hostile and incomprehensible; that necessary information will always be there when needed; that learning and change are always a human possibility; and that things do hang together.

In the continuing Twentieth Century debate between the forecasters of human glory and the criers of human doom, this was the implicit answer of the optimistic H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, E.E. Smith and John Campbell—the lineage of emergent modern science fiction—to the pessimist Wells, Bertrand Russell, H.P. Lovecraft, Olaf Stapledon and the Europeans. But only now, at last, able to be given utterance.

Campbell’s timing was just right. There proved to be a body of readers waiting who had enough sense of the new vision to be able to put together all the bits and pieces of his message, to make a whole of it, and to believe in it.

The readers of
Astounding
understood that
Astounding
was now a works project, an experimental laboratory, an open college dedicated to the creation of modern science fiction, and they leaped to support Campbell. They eagerly rated stories for him. They argued and debated his questions in the letter column. Above all, they applauded the changes he was making and yearned for more.

And all of this was before much in the way of actual modern science fiction even existed. It would not be too far off the mark to say that Campbell spent his first year as editor in preparing readers to understand and accept modern science fiction and in training writers to write it.

What is usually reckoned the essential early example of modern science fiction was not published until the August 1938 issue, almost a year after Campbell became editor of
Astounding.
This was a long novelet entitled “Who Goes There?” and its author was John Campbell’s alter ego, Don A. Stuart.