The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (50 page)

13: Shifting Relationships

M
ODERN SCIENCE FICTION—THE NEW,
streamlined, fact-minded, universe-manipulating science fiction designed by John W. Campbell that so visibly began to come on-line in the summer of 1939—may be seen as the culmination and fulfillment of Techno Age SF. But at the same time, it was something altogether different and new—the foundation for the following forty years of SF development.

In the pages of
Astounding
and
Unknown
during the Golden Age that lasted from the summer of 1939 through the end of 1945, the great body of scientific fiction written since 1870 would become raw material to be drawn upon, played with, summarized, consolidated and extended. It would also be completely reformulated.

The most epitomal example of this process of simultaneous fulfillment and transmutation is to be seen in the story “Nightfall,” a novelet by Isaac Asimov published in the September 1941 issue of
Astounding.
So unique and yet so completely typical of modern science fiction is “Nightfall” that nearly thirty years after it was first published, when the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America were asked to vote for the best SF stories produced prior to the founding of the organization in 1965, they would place this story first, ahead of Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey.”

“Nightfall” is the most pivotal story of a pivotal moment. We can learn a great deal about how Campbell’s Golden Age was made and how it worked—and even catch some inklings of its eventual limitations—by taking a good look at the variety of Techno Age, Romantic, and even earlier materials that went into the inspiration and design of this central story; by looking beyond that to the nature of the apprenticeship in modern science fiction that Isaac Asimov had to undergo before John Campbell was ready to acknowledge him as someone capable of undertaking a project of this importance; and finally by seeing the way that old materials and the new attitudes developed by Asimov were successfully conjoined in “Nightfall” to produce a story of unique significance.

“Nightfall,” in fact, was a story that was assigned to Asimov to write. As with so much else in the Golden Age
Astounding,
the idea for “Nightfall” was Campbell’s. He recognized the germ of an SF story in a lyrical sentence in the opening paragraph of
Nature
(1836), the first book by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England Transcendentalist lecturer and essayist.

Emerson had begun his little book by proclaiming the visibility of the hand of God in Nature. In illustration of this thesis, he wrote: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”
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Asimov recalls coming to a story conference at John Campbell’s office on March 17, 1941. On this occasion, Asimov’s own latest idea was quickly waved aside. Campbell had something he wanted to show him—this quotation, shorn of its last four words. When he’d read it, Campbell asked:

“What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?”

I thought, and drew a blank. I said, “I don’t know.”

Campbell said, “I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that.”
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What a powerful idea this was for Asimov to have dropped on him from out of the blue! And all the more so since prior to this moment, Campbell had never seen fit to offer Asimov an original story idea of any kind. He had played around with Asimov’s own ideas and expanded upon them, but he had never presented Asimov with a brand-new idea before.

At the same time, however, as phrased here, what a curiously old-fashioned suggestion it was! This quote from Emerson dates from the height of the Romantic Period and is an embodiment of Romantic attitudes. It proposes that if the brilliance of the stars were to be visible for only one night in a thousand years, the souls of men would still instantly recognize the handiwork of God which had been revealed to them, and adore the Creator. That is what good Romantics would do.

But the alternative reaction that Campbell was apparently touting was not new, either. It was straight out of the Age of Technology, the era when men had lost their grip on their souls, the long-cherished lifeline to God, and found themselves standing alone in the cold front yard of the new universe of space and time, dazzled and dismayed. Campbell’s counter-suggestion to Asimov was that men in the situation envisioned by Emerson would not worship God at all, but would react instead like some hysteric out of H.P. Lovecraft, who on discovery of the terrifying new vistas of reality and our frightful position therein promptly goes mad. Or like Olaf Stapledon’s hapless Last Men, who find the aloof and changeless presence of the constellations so horrifying, so demoralizing, and so maddening that all they can do is whimper and retreat from the stars.

In fact, however, there was much more on Campbell’s mind than just these old-fashioned reactions. Emerson was only the jumping-off point for his thinking, and Techno Age cosmic fear but the first elaboration.

We may remember Campbell suggesting to Asimov that when he presented an idea to a writer, he expected to get back more than he gave. In this case, the all-but-unstated something more that Campbell wanted was the special new perspective of modern science fiction, the perspective that Campbell had so patiently been teaching Asimov month after month through the preceding two and a half years.

Something of Campbell’s true underlying attitude, thinking, and expectation can be caught by taking note of the stance that he automatically assumed toward this project. He himself was in no peril of either adoring God or freaking out. He stood outside the Emersonian situation—above it and beyond it—perceiving in it the substance of a formal thought experiment, the makings of a Campbell-style SF story. And he obviously expected the same kind of calm dispassion from Asimov, the two men practicing their science fiction together as though it were a kind of science.

Campbell’s confident posture of detached rational consideration may be glimpsed in Asimov’s account of the balance of that crucial story conference. He says, “We talked about various things, thereafter, with Campbell seeming to circle the idea and occasionally asking me questions such as, ‘Why should the stars be invisible at other times?’ and listening to me as I tried to improvise answers.”
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It was Campbell’s presumption that his new fact-manipulating modern science fiction would be able to find a way—and more than one way, many ways—to literalize, act out, and then master the uncertain Emersonian moment in which the stars are unveiled to human eyes that have not witnessed them in a thousand years. In this assumption, Campbell had the advantage—which Asimov did not share—of knowing that Robert Heinlein, the former Navy engineer who was Campbell’s most reliable new writer, had already delivered a major story to him on this very same theme.

In “Universe” (
Astounding,
May 1941), Heinlein presents a pioneering spaceship that long ago was launched into the void between Earth and the nearest star. In generations past, this ship suffered mutiny and mutation. It has forgotten its purposes. What was once known to be historical and scientific fact has been turned into verse, a religious rigmarole that is committed to memory but no longer understood.

The ship has lost its way, and no one looks outside. Words like “the Earth,” “a ship,” and “the stars” are now taken allegorically. So it is that when the stars outside the ship are revealed to the protagonist at last, the result is neither worship nor madness, but an onrush of understanding that what had been taken as so much fudge is in fact literal truth. This is experienced as a kind of emotional/esthetic tripout that Heinlein compares to orgasm:

Light after jeweled light, scattered in careless bountiful splendor across the simulacrum sky, the countless suns lay before him—before him, over him, under him, behind him, in every direction from him. He hung alone in the center of the stellar universe.

“Oooooh!” It was an involuntary sound, caused by his indrawn breath. He clutched the chair arms hard enough to break fingernails, but he was not aware of it. Nor was he afraid at the moment; there was room in his being for but one emotion. Life within the Ship, alternately harsh and workaday, had placed no strain on his innate capacity to experience beauty; for the first time in his life he knew the intolerable ecstasy of beauty unalloyed. It shook him and hurt him, like the first trembling intensity of sex.
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Heinlein’s protagonist then wants nothing so much as to show the same sight to others so that they may know the truth and beauty of the stars, too.

Campbell not only had this special story in hand, “Universe” was already set in print and would be appearing on the newsstands in only a month. But, as though in proof of his claim that he could feed half-a-dozen writers the same idea and get back six different stories, Campbell wanted Asimov to write another story containing the sudden revelation of the stars. However, this one was to be different from Heinlein’s. It was to be centered around a mass reaction of madness.

Now Campbell was not requesting Asimov to write a story about the experience of madness, like Edgar Allan Poe in one of his more hallucinatory moods. Nor was he asking him to meditate on the prospect of society gone crazy from the shock of a suddenly revealed wider universe.

What Campbell was ultimately proposing to Asimov was that he resolve a fundamental problem with the aid of universal operating principles, as Don A. Stuart, Campbell’s alter ego, had done in “Who Goes There?”, the seminal story Campbell had so impressed Asimov with at their first meeting. But the problem Campbell was offering for solution was not merely the minor problem of mass freakout at the sight of the stars, but the larger problem of cyclical history and the failure of humanity.

Don A. Stuart’s “Twilight” and “Night”—which together presented Earthbound cyclical history taken to its ultimate declination—had been published only half-a-dozen years earlier. Asimov—who was just past 21 and a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia—had read these stories of Campbell’s when he was a senior in high school and a freshman in college. So when Campbell and Asimov agreed before the close of that special story conference that the tale they were planning would be entitled “Nightfall,” Asimov must have recognized on some level that Campbell was deputizing him to deal with the problem that “Twilight” and “Night” had posed and then left unresolved.

Something of the attitude with which Asimov approached this assignment can be seen in the tenor of the bell-note that he struck in his mind when he sat down to write “Nightfall.” He recalled the thought-variant stories once published in
Astounding
by Campbell’s predecessor, F. Orlin Tremaine. Asimov says:

The thought-variants (however noticeable their errors in science to my increasingly hypercritical self) affected me profoundly. They struck me as science fiction par excellence, and by the time I began to write science fiction myself, I yearned to write thought-variants, even though the use of the term vanished with Tremaine. My story “Nightfall” was consciously written as a thought-variant.
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We should be aware—as Asimov most certainly was aware—that neither “Twilight” nor “Night” had been identified by Tremaine as thought-variants. And with good reason. Campbell’s two stories had not offered any wonder-inspiring new ideas. Rather, they were late restatements of that Techno Age vision of far future Earth in decrepitude that had been presented in
The Time Machine,
“The World of the Red Sun,” and many other stories. Their special virtue was the vividness with which they evoked the early Twentieth Century devolutionary nightmare.

An Asimov who had grasped the idea that “Nightfall” should in some sense be a companion piece to “Twilight” and “Night,” but who was also resolved that his story should be a thought-variant, was an Asimov who had indeed gotten Campbell’s message and understood the true nature of the task that had been laid out for him.

We can see, then, that even in the planning stage, it was intended that “Nightfall” should incorporate a succession of stages of Western thought, a whole range of old and new attitudes toward transcendence.

“Nightfall” would begin with a Romantic epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson declaring that the city of God—which we can take both as the heavenly city of traditional Christian conception and also as its successor, the rationally perfected utopian city of the Age of Reason—was not just some faded dream of
spirit,
but was actually to be glimpsed in the countenance of material nature . . . as men allowed to view the stars only once in a millennium would most surely be ready to testify.

In its own time, this was a thoroughly radical assertion which aimed to indicate the way out of the old spirit-based belief and into the new materialistic head-state that was then emerging. But a hundred years later, working in the context of a different era, Campbell and Asimov could elect to treat it as though it were a conservative statement, a mere reaffirmation of traditional spiritual values.

In contrast to this, the story proper would offer a situation that was a literalization of all the mental ups and downs suffered by Western scientific man since he gave up being spiritual and became materialistic. “Nightfall” would include the madness of Edgar Allan Poe and the intolerable cosmic revelations of H.P. Lovecraft. It would bow toward scientific utopia and toward the lost race story. It would invoke the red-sun-at-the-end-of-time melancholy of
The Time Machine
and “Night.” Its title would be an acknowledgement of the concerns of Don A. Stuart. And the story would also be a Tremaine thought-variant.

All at the same time.

And the new Campbellian modern science fiction, with its power to imagine any special set of circumstances and conditions, and its positive eagerness to pose problems and solve them, would manage to align all of these disparate elements and turn them into the backbone of a story resolving the thorny problems of cyclical history.