The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (97 page)

As soon as U.S. involvement in the war began, John Campbell understood that he would very shortly be losing the technically trained men who were his leading contributors. And he tried to prepare his readers for the inevitable with an editorial in the April 1942 issue of
Astounding
entitled “Too Good At Guessing.”

The pose he took was that in the ordinary way of things
Astounding
stories were only one short step beyond actual fact, but that henceforth it would be the patriotic duty of the magazine not to compromise actual secret research by publishing stories of near future invention. He said, “We will, in the future, try to be wilder guessers, place our stories further in the future, or base them on themes that can’t lead to those too-good guesses.”
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This was utter bushwah, of course.

The truth of the matter was that Campbell would continue to be just as receptive to SF based upon actual science and technology as he had ever been—when he was able to get it. He would try a variety of expedients in hopes of increasing the supply. And it wouldn’t bother him that he might be intruding into areas of real secret research. In fact, he wouldn’t mind at all if he did.

When the editor got even the slightest hint that a new writer had scientific or technical training, he would encourage him to make use of it in his fiction. In January 1942, just about the time that Campbell was writing this editorial, he received an unsolicited story submission from Detroit. Its author was George O. Smith, a 31-year-old electronics engineer who until recently had been laboring long hours trying to work the glitches out of an automatic tuner for car radios which refused to hold a station without drifting. In the switchover to wartime engineering, he temporarily had a little spare time on his hands, and he was using it to fulfill a long-standing urge to write science fiction.

His first submission wasn’t acceptable, but it did indicate to Campbell that Smith had writing talent, and also that he was someone who almost certainly had been technically educated. Just the kind of guy the editor needed most.

So Campbell wrote back to say that while he couldn’t use what Smith had written, he did like its style.
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And what’s more, he had a pretty good notion that Smith was someone with a technical background. Would it be possible for him to try writing another story which used his special knowledge and experience as a foundation?

Smith’s response to this Campbellian letter of invitation and indication was to write “QRM—Interplanetary,” a story about wisecracking engineers aboard an interplanetary radio relay station in the orbit of Venus who have to cope with their supervisor’s incompetence. Campbell received it with delight and ran it in the October 1942
Astounding.

It was in June and August 1942 that Campbell published the first stories by Harry Stubbs, an astronomy student at Harvard who wrote in his free time under the name Hal Clement. More than any other SF author before or after him, Clement would be concerned to write imaginative science fiction that employed and respected the facts of known science. His particular pleasure would be in conceiving of alternate forms of alien life.

In addition to these new writers, Campbell dug up an old one—Will F. Jenkins, the prolific storyteller who for years had produced science fiction with his left hand under the name Murray Leinster, but who had written no SF at all during the period that John Campbell had been editing
Astounding.
Jenkins, as a hobby, was a self-taught inventor who would eventually develop the front projection system that would revolutionize motion picture special effects and make possible SF movies like
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) and
Star Wars
(1977), but he had seldom attempted to apply his scientific knowledge to his SF writing in any serious way. For him, the story had always been the primary thing.

The editor invited him to try his hand at the new, more exact, modern science fiction. And Jenkins/Leinster responded with “The Wabbler” (
Astounding,
Oct. 1942), a fictional account of a semi-sentient air-dropped robot torpedo feeling its way into an enemy harbor to destroy a ship.

In a similar way, Campbell did what he could to adjust the approach to SF of another old-time writer, Jack Williamson. We may remember that when Williamson’s Galactic Empire novel,
Star of Empire,
was drying up in the fall of 1941, the editor had suggested to him that he might look to Heinlein, van Vogt and Asimov as models of the new science fiction.

More than this, Campbell told Williamson that he really ought to try adopting a pseudonym and write the new style of story from behind this screen. He said, “Fundamentally, I think a ‘Don A. Stuart’ stunt would help you a hell of a lot . . .”
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Williamson decided to go along with Campbell’s suggestion. He says of himself:

Looking for a new name and something entirely new to write, I come up with “Will Stewart” and the idea for a series about the planetary engineers who would “terraform” new planets to fit them for colonization—the word, I think, is my own coinage. He likes the idea and suggests the interesting problems they might meet on contraterrene worlds. “Contraterrene” was the term for antimatter, then. Campbell’s abbreviation was CT, and I spelled it out, “seetee.”
⁷⁷³

The editor had previously tried without success to interest Robert Heinlein in writing about contraterrene matter. Now he prompted Williamson with so much material on the subject that the writer would say, “The seetee stories, bylined Will Stewart, were almost collaborations with John Campbell.”
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Over the next eight months, Williamson wrote three seetee stories—a novelet, a short novel, and a two-part serial. If these ultimately proved to be something less than his best work, it may have been because the stories pulled in two different directions, with Williamson’s original idea of terraformed worlds tugging one way and Campbell’s intense desire to see fiction about men establishing their mastery over antimatter yanking another.

Campbell would feed specialized scientific information to other established SF writers who had only a limited amount of formal education in science, occasionally with very happy results. Early in 1942, after Lester del Rey had been rejected by his draft board for extreme tachycardia and it looked as though he might be available as a writer for a while, Campbell sent him the idea for a story about a catastrophic accident in an atomic plant.

Del Rey’s line as a writer had always been emotion-laden short stories, and it seems likely that Campbell was only expecting to get back a relatively brief glimpse of atomic disaster as it was experienced by the plant’s doctor. But del Rey had been secretly itching for some time to write a story of suspense, and he perceived the makings of a good one in this idea. He spent more time in research, preparation and plotting than he ever had before, and the result was his longest, most serious science fiction story to date, the short novel “Nerves” (
Astounding,
Sept. 1942).

In May, however, del Rey followed his girl friend to a new government job in St. Louis. And soon he himself was working for McDonnell Aircraft hammering tail assemblies into shape for DC-3 planes.

It went like that whenever Campbell thought he had a writer lined up whom he could count on. Jack Williamson was 34 years old and seeing a psychiatrist, and Campbell had high hopes for regular contributions from him. But at the end of July, Williamson finished “Opposites—React!,” his third and longest seetee story, and then joined the Army, which made him into a weatherman, and eventually promoted him to sergeant.

It became harder and harder for Campbell to arrange a continuing supply of science-minded SF for
Astounding.
Will F. Jenkins was occupied working for the Office of War Information in Washington. Harry Stubbs graduated from Harvard in 1943 and became an Air Force bomber pilot. George O. Smith was living in Cincinnati and working as a project engineer on the development of “the so-called ‘radar’ proximity fuse.”
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Campbell had to be content with the occasional story that he could get from these busy men writing in odd moments. But the editor never stopped prompting and adjusting, stroking and challenging in hopes of getting a good sound technically based story for his magazine.

After the publication of “QRM—Interplanetary” in the fall of 1942, for example, Campbell sent a letter off to George O. Smith in Cincinnati. After discussing his own basement experiments in electronics for a few pages, the editor let it drop that he was ready for Smith to send him another story as good as the one he had just published. He was waiting to see it.

Smith was flattered by this attention and moved by Campbell’s expectations of him. So when he was able to, he sat down and turned out another Venus Equilateral story. He says, “Hoping . . . not to be hauled off before a firing squad, I took some liberties with what little was known about radar, and wrote ‘Calling the Empress.’ ”
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Altogether, then, we can see that not only did John Campbell continue to publish SF based in science after the beginning of the war, and do whatever he could to generate more of it, but he knowingly and deliberately published stories about atomic power plants, air-dropped torpedoes and radar. He got into trouble over this playing with fire only once, when he published Cleve Cartmill’s story “Deadline” in the March 1944 issue of
Astounding.

Cartmill was a California newspaperman who had fallen in with Heinlein’s Mañana Literary Society in the days before the war, and then begun to write for Campbell, first for
Unknown
and then for
Astounding.
In this case, the editor had primed Cartmill with detailed information about the construction, shielding and detonation of an atomic bomb made of U-235, and Cartmill had embedded this data in an otherwise lame and unimaginative story set during a World War on some other planet. This story was filled with names like “Sixa” and “Seilla” and “Ynamre,”
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as well as other names that looked just as strange but were not as easily deciphered.

All this seemed suspicious enough to bring out agents of Military Intelligence, who feared that the security of the Manhattan Project had been compromised. So they looked up John Campbell and discussed the matter with him. They talked to Cleve Cartmill in California. They talked things over with the illustrator of the story, Paul Orban. An investigator even dropped by the Office of War Information to have a chat with Will F. Jenkins, who had a security clearance and presumably could be trusted.

Jenkins was able to tell the agent that “Deadline” was a perfectly ordinary science fiction story of a kind that
Astounding
was accustomed to publishing and that it was based on material that was public knowledge:

“I told him what I could about where Cartmill could have gotten the idea. There was a book published by the Bureau of Mines, a US Government publication, that stated definitely that when atomic energy was achieved it would be achieved through uranium.”
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John Campbell was not only ready and willing to point out to his own interrogators the unclassified pre-war publications that were his sources, but even had the audacity to argue that
Astounding
should be allowed to continue to publish stories of atomic power. If the Germans were watching (and it would turn out that some of them, at least, had been; Werner von Braun, the mastermind of the German rocket program, for one, would arrange to keep getting his own personal copy of
Astounding
all through the war), then it might very well seem suspicious if the magazine were to suddenly cease printing stories on this long-established topic.

Indeed, it is quite possible that Campbell went on to argue that since he had declared so publicly that actual secret research wouldn’t be compromised in
Astounding,
for the magazine to continue to publish atomic stories would be to actively mislead the enemy into thinking that we weren’t working on the Bomb. Whatever he actually said, the arguments the editor made were accepted by his questioners and their superiors, and
Astounding
was left to go its own way.

“Deadline” wasn’t all that much of a story, and it wasn’t innovative SF. But for years to come, this episode would be recounted with pride, and not a little glee, as evidence of the reality and seriousness of science fictional prediction.

Another squeeze suffered by Campbell after the beginning of the war—a direct result of the loss of his full-time authors, and the time pressures on those writers who remained—was in serial novels. There would be several long stretches during the war when no serial story was running in
Astounding.

Typically, Campbell would attempt to pass off these periods of shortage as the result of well-considered editorial policy. He would suggest that
Astounding
was not publishing serial novels out of concern for servicemen in the field, who might find it difficult to catch up with every installment of a multi-part story. In actual practice, however, it seemed that whenever the editor was able to get his hands on a halfway decent serial story, he wouldn’t hesitate to publish it, even though it might have to be spread out over four issues.

The one top writer who was left to Campbell with the departure of the other giants of the early Golden Age was A.E. van Vogt. He would be the editor’s great surety in the difficult days of 1942 and early 1943, when one after another of Campbell’s writers was putting the cover on his typewriter and stowing it away in the closet.

Van Vogt’s presence lent continuity to the magazine which otherwise would have been lost, and his industry assured that Campbell had a good head start each month toward filling the pages of his next issue. Beginning with his return to writing with “Recruiting Station” in March 1942, van Vogt would have contributions in eleven of the fourteen remaining issues of the bedsheet
Astounding.

In these stories, as we have seen, van Vogt insisted upon the connectivity and responsiveness of the universe, and the necessity for sentient beings to cooperate with each other. By the time he wrote “The Weapon Shop” and “The Search,” he had moved beyond this to imagine men and women with the character and capacity to serve as a permanent opposition force guaranteeing individual justice and freedom within a tyrannical society, or even the ability to function as an organization of immortal observers who have the power to stand outside the stream of time and direct the ongoing flow of human history like beneficent gods.