The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (61 page)

The campaign left Heinlein not only completely broke, but with a mortgage payment coming due. It was then he recalled an ad he had seen in
Thrilling Wonder Stories
for an amateur story contest with a prize of $50. At that particular moment, this looked like a very attractive and useful sum of money.

The more Heinlein thought about it, the more it seemed to him that if he were seriously to attempt to write science fiction, he could do it. He had read SF practically forever. And once upon a time, for his own amusement while he was recovering from TB, he had even worked up a book-length quasi-historical account of the coming to power of an American religious dictator, the eventual overthrow of his line, and the establishment of a new rational society. Heinlein saw no reason why he couldn’t produce more commercial work if he were to try.

So he sat right down to it, and in four days he turned out a story entitled “Life-Line.” This was about Hugo Pinero, a man who has invented a machine that can accurately foretell the length of any person’s life, and the opposition he and his machine arouse among the entrenched interests of society. It opens not with the invention of the machine, but with Pinero attempting to justify his already-invented machine to a hostile and skeptical Academy of Science. And it ends with the inventor dead—rubbed out—at the very moment he himself has predicted.

In many ways, including its determinism, this was an old-fashioned story. But in presentation, it was very new. “Life-Line” was brisk, snappy, self-confident, and immensely knowledgeable about the workings of society—more like a Paul Gallico writing in the slick magazine
Collier’s
than anything ordinarily to be found in the science fiction pulp magazines of the late Thirties.

When Heinlein looked over what he had written, it struck him that it was much too good for
Thrilling Wonder Stories.
So acting boldly, he sent it off to
Collier’s
instead. But
Collier’s
wouldn’t take it. For one thing, they already had Paul Gallico. For another, they weren’t yet ready for science fiction in the spring of 1939.

Considering what to do next, Heinlein remembered that John Campbell, the new editor of
Astounding,
had declared the existence of a permanent open contest at the magazine, all comers welcome. Since
Astounding
paid a penny a word, this meant that a 7000-word story like his might earn $70 there.

So Heinlein sent his story off to Astounding—and Campbell not only accepted it, but paid for it immediately. Having found something that worked this well, Heinlein tried it again. He wrote a second science fiction story—“Misfit,” the tale of Andrew Jackson Libby, the young mathematical genius who is discovered among a space station construction gang. And Campbell bought that one, too.

But it wouldn’t continue to be quite this easy. Heinlein began his career with a simple, clean-cut, modern style, a background in science fiction, a wide range of knowledge, experience and developed opinion, and a fascination with human social behavior—just the qualities that John Campbell was looking for in 1938 and 1939. But Heinlein had not yet arrived at a sense of universal operating principles, and he would have to pick that up. And he would also have to learn which subjects and attitudes Campbell would accept and which he would not.

As an example, Heinlein was a sophisticated adult, which for the most part readers of pulp science fiction magazines in 1939 were not. Heinlein’s, third story, “ ‘Let There Be Light,’ ” concerned the invention of cheap and efficient solar receptors by a scientific team—Archie Douglas, a physicist, and Mary Lou Martin, a “biochemist and ecologist”
⁴⁶³
—and the threat they encounter from the powerbrokers until they find a way out by deciding to donate their discovery to the public. This was a perfectly satisfactory neo-Gernsbackian story, but it was also full of mild sexual banter. Campbell wouldn’t have that—and sure enough, when it was published under the pseudonym Lyle Monroe in the May 1940 issue of Fred Pohl’s
Super Science Stories,
there were readers who did protest what they perceived as smut.

However, the most significant point of contention between Campbell and Heinlein was this:

Heinlein’s sense of SF had been formed back in the Teens and Twenties, and included speculative notions of every kind. The first three stories that Heinlein wrote were all relatively tame and plausible neo-Gernsbackian projections, their one real point of novelty being the degree of their concern for social context. After that, however, Heinlein was ready to try some queerer speculations.

The next story he wrote was called “Elsewhen.” Here a professor of “speculative metaphysics”
⁴⁶⁴
and his students transfer themselves by means of “hypnosis and suggestion”
⁴⁶⁵
into a variety of alternate worlds that correspond to their respective natures. However, except for flittings-about from one world to another, nothing much really happens. By comparison with Heinlein’s earlier efforts, this story was vague and flabby.

Another of his 1939 attempts—and his own immediate favorite—was a short novel called “Lost Legacy.” In this one, a young doctor and a male-female team of parapsychologists join forces with mystical masters who reside on California’s Mt. Shasta—including the arch-doubter Ambrose Bierce, usually thought to have vanished in Mexico in 1914 at the age of 72. Together, scientists and mystics (and the Boy Scouts, too!) wage psychic war against the vilest and most regressive elements of society, the “antagonists of human liberty, of human dignity—the racketeers, the crooked political figures, the shysters, the dealers in phony religions, the sweat-shoppers, the petty authoritarians, all of the key figures among the traffickers in human misery and human oppression, themselves somewhat adept in the arts of the mind, and acutely aware of the dangers of free knowledge—all of this unholy breed. . . .”
⁴⁶⁶

Quite clearly, from the beginning Heinlein wanted to declare his long-held belief that there is a difference between real truth and what society takes to be true. He wanted to write stories in which the defects and corruptions of society are overcome and freedom is won. He wanted to give utterance to all the heresies and strange thoughts he’d kept locked inside him ever since he was a boy. And he was ready to employ any means that the broad-based SF he’d put together for himself could offer to express what he wanted to express.

But John Campbell was both more limited than this and more of a purist. He had no use for flabby occult nonsense in
Astounding
—or in
Unknown,
either. He was trying diligently to eliminate such stuff from his magazines. So he was prompt to bounce both of these stories, and several more squidgy or trivial attempts by Heinlein.

In fact, after the easy immediate success of “Life-Line” and “Misfit,” Campbell rejected four consecutive Heinlein stories. Young Fred Pohl would imagine this to be a major lapse on the editor’s part, snap up several of these stories for his own magazines, and count himself lucky to have them. But Campbell was quite sure that he knew what he was doing. He was in the process of creating modern science fiction, and he was determined that he would have plausible argument and universal operating principles from Heinlein, and nothing less.

In background and training and dedication, and even in their prejudices, these two men—Campbell and Heinlein—had more than a little in common. They were two highly dominant, self-willed Atomic Age engineers, so perhaps it was inevitable that they should wrestle to handle and adjust each other and to push each other’s buttons. We’ve already seen how ready Campbell was to align and direct writers to get just what he wanted from them. But Heinlein in his own right was a well-practiced people manipulator, too. Consequently, even at their moment of greatest mutual regard, with Heinlein at one end of the continent and Campbell at the other, their relationship would never be a completely easy one.

In this early moment, however, the leverage was all with Campbell. Heinlein not only had a mortgage, but the notion of paying it off by writing science fiction stories, and Campbell held the purse strings of the best and most reliable science fiction market.

So it was Heinlein who gave way. He altered what he was writing, adapting it to the shape of John Campbell’s rejections and suggestions. Where he was soft, he hardened up. Where he was fuzzy, he tightened his focus. His control of plausibility became more consistent and far more subtle and clever. And he picked right up on the idea of universal operating principles.

It had taken Isaac Asimov two and a half years of regular visits to Campbell before the penny finally dropped and he caught on to the trick of writing for the editor. By comparison, Robert Heinlein was so immediately adept, so uniquely well-prepared to write science fiction, and so generally attuned to the same wavelength as Campbell that he was able to sell the editor four (and later a fifth) of his first ten stories. By the end of 1939, only nine months after Heinlein first sat down to write, he was so well-zeroed-in on his chosen target that he could sell Campbell every story he wrote.

The pivotal sale for Heinlein was his third, which didn’t come until his seventh story, four months after “Misfit.” This was the short novel “ ‘If This Goes On—.’ ”

It was with this story—which was a rewriting into pulp fiction form of a portion of his old account of a religious dictatorship to come—that Heinlein made the happy discovery that it might be possible both to do the things that Campbell wanted done and also to scratch his own itches. If he wrote a story of universal operating principles at work in the future, it could also be a story of secret heresy and rebellion. And if he included enough plausible detail to satisfy John Campbell, he could also put in a substantial dollop of occultism for himself.

The result of this combination of aims was that “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” takes place in a curiously mixed future unlike any previously presented in SF. Things in this world are very different from now, but also oddly familiar.

The story opens with a young officer, the highly idealistic John Lyle, standing guard outside the apartments of the religious dictator of a latter-day United States. This citizen of the future (whose last name is the same as Heinlein’s mother’s maiden name) begins by telling us something about himself. And within the context of science fiction as it existed then, what he has to say and how he says it came across as wonderful and wild and weird.

Listen:

I was young then—a legate newly graduated from West Point, and a guardsman in the Angels of the Lord, the personal guard of the Prophet Incarnate.

At my birth my mother had consecrated me to the Church, and I was brought up to revere and venerate my spiritual elders. At eighteen my Uncle Absolom, a senior deacon, had used one of the appointments allotted to each member of the Council of Elders to send me to the military academy.

I was happy at West Point. The ideals of the service had seemed perfect and right. I hadn’t minded the routine. On the contrary, I had rather enjoyed it—up at five, two hours of prayer and meditation, then classes and lectures in the manifold subjects of a military education, strategy and tactics, theology, mob psychology, basic miracles. In the afternoons we practiced with vortex guns and blasters, drilled with tanks, and hardened our bodies with exercises—the friendly monastic life of the barracks. I longed for it.

But now, in spite of prayer and fasting, I sometimes envied my brother, Lemuel, who enjoyed the easier discipline of the Rocket Patrol. He did not bother with the ritualistic spear and buckler, which I must perforce wear constantly. I patted my vortex pistol.
That
was my defense should any of the ungodly seek to approach the revered person of the Prophet.
⁴⁶⁷

Wow! In these few paragraphs, we can see Heinlein’s major early SF influences gathered and integrated—the scientific advances beloved by Hugo Gernsback, the alternate societies of H.G. Wells, and the juicy anachronisms and narrative immediacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Heinlein combines all of these here to express—as science fiction—something of what it had felt like to grow up under the rule of Fundamentalist Christianity and then break free.

And what a strange mixed-up world it is that he shows us! Imagine a United States of the future so radically altered as to be ruled by a Prophet Incarnate! And yet this world is still in many ways the same as the one we know. West Point continues to be the national military academy. Cincinnati and Kansas City remain the cities they were. Even
The New York Times
continues to be published and read.

There is paradox and humor in what Heinlein writes—like the presentation of theology, mob psychology and “basic miracles” as taken-for-granted elements of a proper military education, every bit as appropriate as strategy or tactics. And there are head-bending juxtapositions, like those archaic words “spear and buckler” that appear sandwiched between the futuristic “Rocket Patrol” and “vortex pistol,” but which are rendered plausible for us by the casual additional word “ritualistic.”

Somehow, out of the apparently artless narrative voice, the right wrong details, and even the cockeyed relationship of one word or phrase to the next, a gestalt emerges. We find ourselves not only in a world other than our own, but identifying with a living, breathing individual who is operating within its context, and thinking and acting according to its terms.

It is very apparent that this world is highly advanced in certain ways, but backward in others. And that was also something new.

Through the Techno Age, society had been taken to be an indivisible whole in SF. Social progress and technological progress were seen as inseparable. If society progressed, it all progressed, and if it declined, it went downhill all at once and all over. It fell.

At the outset of his SF writing career, Robert Heinlein had still had it in his head that technological progress and social progress must be related. The space travel of “Misfit,” his second story, had been imagined as occurring only at a considerable distance in the future, after the overthrow of the Prophet and the establishment of a better society.