The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (49 page)

When Campbell received a good story that did not observe the strict parameters of plausibility and subject matter that he was attempting to establish in
Astounding,
it was highly convenient for him to be able to term the story “fantasy” and print it in
Unknown.
The tale usually told about the way
Unknown
came into being
³⁶⁸
is that John Campbell had a novel submitted by British writer Eric Frank Russell concerning scientifically unexplained “Fortean phenomena.”
³⁶⁹
Under Harry Bates or F. Orlin Tremaine, this story,
Sinister Barrier,
would have fit right into
Astounding,
but not under Campbell. So he dreamed up
Unknown
just to contain it.

L. Ron Hubbard would tell a different story.
³⁷⁰
There can be no doubt that with three Arabian Nights otherworld adventure novels in
Unknown
in 1939, he was the contributor whom Campbell initially most depended upon. Late in his life, Hubbard would suggest that it was for his own personal benefit that Campbell invented
Unknown,
since he was more comfortable writing fantasy than science fiction.

At best, however, both stories are only partial truths. Campbell himself said about
Sinister Barrier:
“I can assure you that one does not start a new magazine because of the arrival of any one story alone.”
³⁷¹
And he also said: “One of the things that led to the launching of
Unknown
 . . . was the fact that more first-rate manuscripts than
Astounding
could publish were coming into the office.”
³⁷²

Since Campbell was drawing from a common pool of manuscripts, there might at times appear to be a certain degree of arbitrariness in his decisions as to just what story would appear in which magazine. At least some of the stories that he published—de Camp’s invading alien story “Divide and Rule,” for instance—might as easily have appeared in one place as the other.

But in Campbell’s mind, there was an essential formal distinction between his two magazines. And to aid his writers in their conceptions, he would tell them explicitly: “ ‘I edit two magazines,
Astounding
and
Unknown.
For
Astounding
I want stories which are good and logical and possible. For
Unknown,
I want stories which are good and logical.’ ”
³⁷³

What this meant in practice was that the special business of
Astounding
was stories of the future and outer space—the mainstream of science-fictional possibility. And the province of
Unknown
was variant realities.

Within the context of the times, it was
Astounding
that was the vastly more important magazine.
Astounding
was engaged in the serious business of bringing the future of man into being.
Unknown
was just fun and games.

But beyond the immediate moment,
Unknown
—which would only last for four years and thirty-nine issues—would have a considerable importance of its own. In
Unknown,
a basis would be made for perceiving traditional fantasy and pulp magazine science fiction as being different aspects of a larger SF. And, as the first presentation of SF not just as a literature of
change,
but of
alternate possibilities, Unknown
would be a portent of coming things in SF just as surely as
The Steam Man of the Prairies
had been a forehint of
The Time Machine
and
The Skylark of Space.

Of all Campbell’s writers, it was L. Sprague de Camp who found the freedom of
Unknown
most necessary and most congenial. De Camp suffered from one great inhibition in producing stories for
Astounding
—the “science fiction” published in
Astounding
was supposed to be possible, and the rational side of de Camp took this injunction with the utmost seriousness. But this meant that de Camp was not able to write about time machines or faster-than-light travel, since in his scientific heart-of-hearts he didn’t believe that either of these irrational modes of travel would ever be possible.

Way back in
The Skylark of Space,
E.E. Smith might have his venturers casually dismiss Einstein and zoom away toward the stars at supralight speed, saying, “ ‘Einstein’s Theory is still a theory. This distance is an observed fact.’ ”
³⁷⁴
But de Camp, the new Atomic Age man of reason, debunker of Techno Age credulity, was utterly incapable of this sort of imaginative recklessness.

And because he couldn’t see how to leap lightly from here to there, de Camp was never fully at home writing about either the future or outer space. His strict imaginative scruples kept his science fiction stories in
Astounding
comparatively limited and Earthbound.

Ah, but for de Camp stories thought of as “fantasy” and written for
Unknown
were crucially different from stories of “science fiction” meant for
Astounding.
Stories for
Unknown
were not
expected
to be possible—and this set de Camp’s imagination free.

As one example, operating according to the standards of
Astounding,
de Camp would never have been able to imagine “The Gnarly Man,” his story of a prehistoric man coping easily with the challenges of the modern world. By what
possible
means, pray tell, might a Neanderthal man survive for 50,000 years, never aging? Certainly none that de Camp the rational man of science knew. But writing in the context of
Unknown,
he was permitted to posit that his prehistoric bison hunter had been physiologically altered by a (purely conventional) stroke of lightning, and then get on with the pure fun of imagining how modern people might react to him, and he to them.

Unknown
gave de Camp a license to take great leaps of the imagination—which he was then expected to develop logically and rigorously. John Campbell couldn’t have devised an imaginative formula more perfectly suited to the nature and knowledge of this particular writer.

So it was, then, that in a story like
Lest Darkness Fall
(
Unknown,
Dec. 1939), the de Camp who could not in all conscience write about science fiction time machines felt free to assume yet another lightning-bolt-of-convenience—“the granddaddy of all lightning flashes”
³⁷⁵
—as a device to send his protagonist, archaeologist Martin Padway, back in time to a crucial moment in Western history, the final fall of Rome. Then, from that point, de Camp could play the game of
what if
and proceed to write a novel about the application of universal operating principles to the needs of an earlier moment and the transplantation of scientific progress into the past.

It was
Lest Darkness Fall
that firmly established L. Sprague de Camp as the star writer of
Unknown.
The obvious model for this story was Mark Twain’s
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889).
Lest Darkness Fall
might be thought of as an attempt to take
A Connecticut Yankee
and do it
right
—that is, in Atomic Age terms.

In both of these stories, contemporary protagonists are transferred to the past through unlikely accidents. Twain’s man is sent back through time as the result of a blow on the head from a crowbar in the hands of a dissident worker, while de Camp’s is sent to the past by that humungous bolt of lightning. The point of arrival in both cases is Europe in the Sixth Century 
A.D.
, the eve of the Dark Ages. And the aim of both of these modern men becomes to alter the past.

But at that point, the two books diverge subtly but significantly.

Twain’s Boss, Hank Morgan, is a man of the Techno Age, a maker of tools and engines and a superintendent of labor. He’s a guy who knows how to build machines and keep men in line. His natural impulse is to take the half-historical, half-legendary world he has entered and whip it into shape. Since it is what he knows how to do, he will make guns and railroads and electric lights and set out to turn Arthurian Britain into a facsimile of Nineteenth Century America whether the yokels and peasants like it or not.

But because the story of King Arthur as we know it simply doesn’t go that way, eventually he must be slipped a sleeping draught by Merlin which has the effect of returning him to his own time. In the end we have to take all that comes between the blow on the head (which comes before the beginning of the narrative proper) and the sleeping potion at the end as some sort of dream or hallucination.

De Camp, however, was the active beneficiary of all the stories of travel in time and dimension written in the fifty years since
A Connecticut Yankee
—even though he himself might spurn Wellsian time machines of nickel and ivory and crystal as scientifically impossible. And at the very outset of
Lest Darkness Fall,
before the crucial bolt of lightning strikes, he has an Italian professor set forth a very Wells-like theory of time as a tree with many branches:

“I was saying all these people who just disappear, they have slipped back down the . . . trunk of the tree of time. When they stop slipping, they are back in some former time. But as soon as they do anything, they change all subsequent history. . . . The trunk continues to exist. But a new branch starts out where they came to rest.”
³⁷⁶

Thus, pure device of convenience though that stroke of lightning may be, we do have a basis of argument for taking it seriously as a time travel device. And when Martin Padway finds himself transferred to a known historical period—a declining Rome in 535 
A.D.
, ruled by an Ostrogothic king and about to suffer invasion by Justinian’s brilliant general, Belisarius—it isn’t a dream and he isn’t going to just as suddenly find himself back in the Twentieth Century. He’s in Rome for real, and he’s there for good.

What is more, he isn’t condemned to complete futility by what our history books say did happen then. He has some assurance that by the actions he chooses to take, he can alter the course of history. It is within his power to create a whole new reality if he is clever and able enough.

Unlike Twain’s Techno Age Boss, who perceives the Sixth Century Britons as no better than children or animals, Martin Padway is an Atomic Age democrat who sincerely likes and respects the people he has fallen among. De Camp being de Camp, these various Italians, Goths, Vandals, Syrians, Jews, Greeks and such are presented as familiar, normal, decent, fallible human beings not very different in nature from ourselves.

What distinguishes Padway from them is not that he is some sort of superior human being, higher on the evolutionary ladder than they, but rather his comparatively greater degree of knowledge and objectivity. He is forearmed by knowing something of history as it would have been without him. And he is also a man of scientific training, an heir of the past few centuries of Western scientific progress.

Padway’s impulse isn’t to attempt to re-create the Twentieth Century in Sixth Century Rome, erecting skyscrapers beside the Colosseum. Indeed, he doesn’t for an instant believe that such a thing would be possible. But he is deeply aware of the pivotal nature of the moment in which he finds himself:

He was living in the twilight of western classical civilization. The Age of Faith, better known as the Dark Ages, was closing down. Europe would be in darkness, from a scientific and technological aspect, for nearly a thousand years. That aspect was, to Padway’s naturally prejudiced mind, the most, if not the only, important aspect of a civilization.
³⁷⁷

Almost inevitably, then, it occurs to Padway to wonder: “Could one man change the course of history to the extent of preventing this interregnum?”
³⁷⁸

It’s as though Padway were some special sort of doctor brought to the bedside of this ailing culture to give it a shot of what it needs the most. That isn’t an instant, inappropriate modernity, but rather transplants of appropriate inventions and techniques from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, stuff that may serve to start up the machinery of scientific progress.

So it is that Padway introduces Arabic numerals, horse harnesses, distilling, the telescope, semaphore telegraphy, paper and printing, a postal system and schools. When he proposes this last, he says frankly, “ ‘I’m going to have things taught that really matter: mathematics, and the sciences, and medicine. I see where I shall have to write all the textbooks myself.’ ”
³⁷⁹

Of necessity—there is that invasion by the armies of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian to consider—Padway does become involved in military and political activities like Twain’s Hank Morgan, but he sees these only as means. He says: “ ‘The end is things like the telegraph and the presses. My politicking and soldiering may not make any difference a hundred years from now, but the other things will, I hope.’ ”
³⁸⁰

And by the end of the story, he has grown convinced that he has been successful. Whatever befalls him, these things he has introduced are now too widespread and well rooted to disappear. History has been changed. Darkness will not fall—at least not on this one new branch of the tree of time.

What a triumph for the power of universal operating principles! To overset the primary example of cyclical history—the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—and replace the Dark Ages with a new era of scientific progress!

De Camp would take the implied argument of
Lest Darkness Fall
and give it explicit expression in the fourth of his influential articles for Campbell, “The Science of Whithering” (
Astounding,
July-Aug. 1940). In this essay, de Camp examined one theory of civilization after another, including Oswald Spengler’s and Arnold Toynbee’s great expositions of cyclical history. But de Camp would come to the conclusion that cyclical history was not after all a grim inevitability for mid-Twentieth Century Western civilization. It might be overturned by the more effective power of modern scientific and technological development.