The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (52 page)

Most of Asimov’s early efforts were space operas, or invention stories, or stories of future oppression and rebellion. Campbell might take stories of these kinds from other writers, but he wouldn’t accept them from Asimov. From Asimov he had to have new ideas, or nothing at all.

Campbell would spy a first hint of possibility in Asimov’s ninth manuscript, “Ad Astra.” The youngster happened to be earning needed money typing and taking notes for a sociology professor who was working on a book about social resistance to technological innovation. Asimov adapted the idea to science fiction, including a passing mention of social resistance to space travel in his latest story. Campbell hadn’t seen that notion before, and he picked it out immediately.

It was Campbell’s habit to snatch up an idea like this one, reduce it from conclusion to initial premise, and throw it back to the writer again. In this case, he called Asimov into his office for a chat and told him that his story as it was wouldn’t do, but that he might have a viable piece of work if he would take this problem of resistance to space travel and make it his central concern.

So Asimov tossed away what he had and began again. He would still think it was the same story he was writing and continue to call it by the same title—“Ad Astra.” Campbell, knowing better, would retitle it “Trends.”

In its new incarnation, Asimov’s story would show the more powerful trend of scientific progress, represented by space travel, winning out over the lesser trend of a social reaction against science in the form of a temporary religious revival. And that was a story that Campbell would happily buy. He was a strong advocate of scientific progress and it was highly important to him to see science portrayed as more fundamental, powerful and effective than society or religion, to show advances in knowledge triumphant over mere fleeting social spasms.

But after “Trends,” it would be another full year and many more tries by Asimov before he came to visit Campbell with another idea that the editor responded to. In this case, it was the notion of a story in which Earth, having achieved interstellar space travel, is welcomed into the bosom of a Galactic Federation.

As in the earlier instance, Campbell perceived Asimov’s original simple notion not as a sufficiency, but as a starting point. But this time it proved to be much harder for Campbell to get exactly what he wanted from Asimov. It would take several months and three versions of the story before he would be satisfied with “Homo Sol”—a tale in which the newly received Earthmen are analyzed by galactic mathematical psychologists and discovered to be both dauntingly competent and mentally distinct from every other space-traveling race.

What hung this story up for so long was personal limitation—both Asimov’s and Campbell’s. Asimov’s limitation was that he was still groping in the dark for the key to modern science fiction. But Campbell’s limitation here was, if anything, even greater.

As his authors would gradually come to learn, John Campbell had a highly conservative side as well as a radical and heretical side, and one old-fashioned notion to which he was firmly wedded was the Edwardian belief that Man must prevail and shall prevail. Ultimately, it was not scientific progress that Campbell truly cared about, but human progress and power.

This particular bias wasn’t just Campbell’s alone, but was shared by a number of people in his generation who were able to accept the overwhelming new universe revealed by modern science, but who had not given up their attachment to Techno Age elitism. The elitism they embraced was not the old traditional elitism of blood and birth, but rather the newer Wellsian elitism of knowledge, ability and competence. For these people, it was only this kind of specialness that might allow Man to tackle and master the vast indifference of material existence and the hostility of alien beings.

It was this generational bias, which Campbell held with an unusual purity and fervor, that he aimed to impose on Asimov’s story. Writing about their conflict of aims subsequent to Campbell’s death in 1971, with the advantage of thirty years of maturation and insight, Asimov would say:

“Homo Sol” has a plot of a sort that particularly appealed to Campbell. Although the human beings in the story are far behind the other intelligences of the Galaxy, it is clear that there is something special about them, that they have an unusual ability to move ahead very quickly, and that everyone else had better watch out for them.

Campbell liked stories in which human beings proved themselves superior to other intelligences, even when those others were further advanced technologically. It pleased him to have human beings shown to possess a unique spirit of daring, or a sense of humor, or a ruthless ability to kill when necessary, that always brought them victory over other intelligences, even against odds.

But in early 1940, the young Asimov didn’t immediately understand what it was that Campbell really desired him to write—partly because Campbell wouldn’t come right out and say what it was he wanted, and partly because Asimov simply didn’t share Campbell’s special attachment to the exaltation of Man.

Asimov was not the person to press notions of innate human superiority, even though he himself was brighter than almost everyone he knew. He was a Jew born in Europe, where World War II—Hitler’s demonic crusade for Aryan dominance and racial purification—was already in progress.

Moreover, Asimov was a member of the post-World War I generation to whom human chauvinism and aggression seemed a more powerful and immediate threat than anything the physical universe was likely to dish out. Years before such attitudes became a commonplace in science fiction, Asimov was a committed liberal; even his very earliest stories presented earnest condemnations of racism and pleas for human tolerance.

It was because of his initial ignorance of Campbell’s true intent, and because their values were so divergent here, that it took Asimov so many tries before he finally adjusted “Homo Sol” into something like the shape that Campbell really wanted.

However, in the months after “Homo Sol” was finally accepted, Asimov very gradually came to the realization that he had somehow been maneuvered into writing a story he didn’t altogether like. And he felt compromised. More than anything else, he wished to sell further science fiction stories to John Campbell, whom he admired and respected as he did no other man. But not if it was to be at the cost of having to espouse views that he found personally repugnant.

Asimov couldn’t tackle this problem head-on. It was unthinkable to Asimov to quarrel with Campbell, possibly offend him, and thereby lose this relationship that was of such central importance to him. But neither was he willing to compromise his own personal sense of decency, equity and integrity.

So just how was he to get around this apparently inflexible rule of Campbell’s that human beings must be superior, yet still write about the issues of relative power and dominance that were of central importance to him? More than any other single thing, it was Asimov’s search for a solution to this problem that turned him into the unique writer of modern science fiction that he became.

The method of approach that Asimov picked was persistent experimentation. He would try one thing, and then another, and then another, until at last he found something that worked. This, in fact, was the very method that had won Asimov admittance to graduate school the previous year when it seemed that the Columbia University Department of Chemistry was determined not to let him in. And it would become the standard operating procedure of the classic Asimov character.

Asimov’s first ploy would be to try another story with a galactic setting—a story related to “Homo Sol” for whatever weight that might carry—but without any human beings involved. “The Imaginary” was precisely the same length as “Homo Sol.” In it, the idea of a scientific psychology operated with mathematical rigor was even more explicitly advanced. There just happened to be no human-nonhuman conflict in this one. It was only in passing that men of Earth were mentioned at all.

But this attempt to circumvent Campbell was not successful. The editor showed no interest in “The Imaginary.” He may very well have been pleased and intrigued by the notion of math-based psychology; in time, it would become a central supposition of much of Asimov’s work for him. Quite plainly, however, if mathematical psychology was going to be placed at the center of a story, it wasn’t going to be a story without human beings.

The editor who would eventually buy “The Imaginary” and publish it in the November 1942
Super Science Stories
was Asimov’s friend and Campbell’s one-time student in editing, Fred Pohl. Of the early Asimov stories that Campbell did not respond to or wasn’t shown, Pohl’s magazines would print no fewer than eight, and he would even commission Asimov to write a ninth. He was Asimov’s first steady market—if not the market that Asimov most desired to hit.

After “The Imaginary,” Asimov tried once more to evade his situation. He liked
Unknown
better if anything than
Astounding,
and
Unknown
did not involve problems of superiority and inferiority. So he wrote a fantasy story aimed at
Unknown
in which an oak tree foretells the future by rustling its leaves.

The story wasn’t successful. Campbell didn’t buy it, and neither did anyone else. The real significance of “The Oak” was that it would be the very last story (except for two short-shorts) that Asimov would fail to sell. Even though he had not yet mastered Campbell’s special requirements, he was now able to write to a consistently professional standard.

Then twice more during the summer of 1940, Asimov tried again to write as he had been used to writing. The stories he produced were frank expressions of his own feelings—one was about overcoming groundless prejudice, and the other was about the futility of war. But neither story was particularly original as science fiction. Campbell rejected them, and it was again left to Pohl, who was another young idealist responsive to sentiments of this kind, to give them publication.

So this was the situation, with nothing that he tried working very well, that Asimov found himself in at the end of the summer of 1940, when two of his stories appeared on the newsstands at nearly the same moment. One was “Homo Sol” in the September
Astounding.
Seeing it in print made the true acuteness of his disagreement with Campbell explicitly evident to Asimov. The other story was “Strange Playfellow” in the September issue of Pohl’s
Super Science Stories.
And it offered an indication of a possible way out of his dilemma.

Going over “Homo Sol” was a dismaying business for Asimov. As he read it, he discovered that even those changes and adjustments he had been chivvied into making for Campbell had not been sufficient to satisfy the editor, who had thought it necessary to insert comments of his own in several places in which he offered special tribute to the warmaking abilities of Earthmen. Asimov did not appreciate this one bit. He did not like being apparently responsible for sentiments that seemed to him both racist and militaristic.

At this point in his dealings with Campbell, Asimov was feeling frustrated and desperate and, even though he might not care to admit it, more than a little angry. In two dozen attempts he had managed to sell only two stories to the man, and he could readily wonder if he was ever going to escape the maze presented to him by Campbell’s strictures, judgments and demands. Especially after what Campbell had just done to “Homo Sol.”

Asimov knew he had a problem. It was clear to him that Campbell wanted him to write about universal operating principles. But it was also evident that except for a story like “Homo Sol,” in which Earthmen present themselves to be measured by alien scientists and the aliens then blush, stammer and tremble at the readings they get, Campbell just wasn’t going to tolerate stories in which intelligences other than human controlled these principles and mankind didn’t. On this point, the editor was unyielding.

But, for his own part, Asimov would never see the day when he would be ready to write stories in which superior human beings lord it over lesser aliens. That was simply contrary to everything he believed.

He could see that something had to be done if he were to continue to try to write for Campbell. But what?

When Asimov picked up his other story, he saw that it, too, had an obvious if less acute problem—its title. He had written this little tale of the vindication of a robot nursemaid the previous year and called it “Robbie.” But Pohl had seen fit to retitle it “Strange Playfellow”—and Asimov found this change exquisitely embarrassing.

It wasn’t at all unusual for a pulp editor to change a title and not bother to notify the author. Campbell had casually altered “Ad Astra” to “Trends.” “Stowaway” had been changed by Pohl into “The Callistan Menace” (
Astonishing,
Apr. 1940). One of Asimov’s titles would even be altered from “Pilgrimage” to “Black Friar of the Flame” (
Planet Stories,
Spr 1942). The crucial difference that made Campbell’s change acceptable to Asimov where others were not was that it was evident to him that Campbell was attempting to express the pure, undiluted essence of things, whereas other SF editors were merely aiming for cheap and easy pulp sensationalism.

Aside from the change in title, however, Asimov wasn’t displeased with what he saw. He says, “After reading ‘Robbie’ in cold print in the magazine, I decided I liked it more than any other story I had written yet.”
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“Robbie” was a story with a purpose. It had been written as a reaction to all those Romantic Era and Techno Age horror stories, from
Frankenstein
to
R.U.R.,
in which created beings turn on their human makers and destroy them.

In Asimov’s story, a man buys an early model nursemaid robot to mind his little daughter, but his wife doesn’t like the idea at all. She says:

“ ‘You listen to me, George. I won’t have my daughter entrusted to a machine—and I don’t care how clever it is. A child just isn’t made to be guarded by a thing of metal. . . . Some little jigger will come loose and the awful thing will go berserk and—and—’ ”
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