Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (82 page)

“Blair!” Barclay roared into the wind and when he was still a hundred yards away. “Blair!”

“Shut up,” said McReady softly. “And hurry. He may be trying a lone hike. If we have to go after him—no planes, the tractors disabled—”

“Would a monster have the stamina a man has?”

“A broken leg wouldn’t stop it for more than a minute,” McReady pointed out.

Barclay gasped suddenly and pointed aloft. Dim in the twilit sky, a winged thing circled in curves of indescribable grace and ease. Great white wings tipped gently, and the bird swept over them in silent curiosity. “Albatross—” Barclay said softly. “First of the season, and wandering way inland for some reason. If a monster’s loose—”

Norris bent down on the ice, and tore hurriedly at his heavy, windproof clothing. He straightened, his coat flapping open, a grim blue-metaled weapon in his hand. It roared a challenge to the white silence of Antarctica.

The thing in the air screamed hoarsely. Its great wings worked frantically as a dozen feathers floated down from its tail. Norris fired again. The bird was moving swiftly now, but in an almost straight line of retreat. It screamed again, more feathers dropped, and with beating wings it soared behind a ridge of pressure ice, to vanish.

Norris hurried after the others. “It won’t come back,” he panted.

Barclay cautioned him to silence, pointing. A curiously, fiercely blue light beat out from the cracks of the shack’s door. A very low, soft humming sounded inside, a low, soft humming and a clink and clink of tools, the very sounds somehow bearing a message of frantic haste.

McReady’s face paled. “Lord help us if that thing has—” He grabbed Barclay’s shoulder, and made snipping motions with his fingers, pointing toward the lacing of control cables that held the door.

Barclay drew the wire cutters from his pocket, and kneeled soundlessly at the door. The snap and twang of cut wires made an unbearable racket in the utter quiet of the Antarctic hush. There was only that strange, sweetly soft hum from within the shack, and the queerly, hecticly clipped clicking and rattling of tools to drown their noises.

McReady peered through a crack in the door. His breath sucked in huskily and his great fingers clamped cruelly on Barclay’s shoulder. The meteorologist backed down. “It isn’t,” he explained very softly, “Blair. It’s kneeling on something on the bunk—something that keeps lifting. Whatever it’s working on is a thing like a knapsack—and it lifts.”

“All at once,” Barclay said grimly. “No. Norris, hang back, and get that iron of yours out. It may have—weapons.”

Together, Barclay’s powerful body and McReady’s giant strength struck the door. Inside, the bunk jammed against the door screeched madly and crackled into kindling. The door flung down from broken hinges, the patched lumber of the doorpost dropping inward.

Like a blue rubber ball, a Thing bounced up. One of its four tentacle-like arms looped out like a striking snake. In a seven-tentacled hand a six-inch pencil of winking, shining metal glinted and swung upward to face them. Its line-thin lips twitched back from snake-fangs in a grin of hate, red eyes blazing.

Norris’ revolver thundered in the confined space. The hate-washed face twitched in agony, the looping tentacle snatched back. The silvery thing in its hand a smashed ruin of metal, the seven-tentacled hand became a mass of mangled flesh oozing greenish-yellow ichor. The revolver thundered three times more. Dark holes drilled each of the three eyes before Norris hurled the empty weapon against its face.

The Thing screamed in feral hate, a lashing tentacle wiping at blinded eyes. For a moment it crawled on the floor, savage tentacles lashing out, the body twitching. Then it struggled up again, blinded eyes working, boiling hideously, the crushed flesh sloughing away in sodden gobbets.

Barclay lurched to his feet and dove forward with an ice-ax. The flat of the weighty thing crushed against the side of the head. Again the unkillable monster went down. The tentacles lashed out, and suddenly Barclay fell to his feet in the grip of a living, livid rope. The thing dissolved as he held it, a white-hot band that ate into the flesh of his hands like living fire. Frantically he tore the stuff from him, held his hands where they could not be reached. The blind Thing felt and ripped at the tough, heavy, windproof cloth, seeking flesh—flesh it could convert—

The huge blowtorch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled disapproval throatily. Then it laughed gurglingly, and thrust out a blue-white, three-foot tongue. The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blowtorch. It crawled and turned on the floor, it shrieked and hobbled madly, but always McReady held the blowtorch on the face, the dead eyes burning and bubbling uselessly. Frantically the Thing crawled and howled.

A tentacle sprouted a savage talon—and crisped in the flame. Steadily McReady moved with a planned, grim campaign. Helpless, maddened, the Thing retreated from the grunting torch, the caressing, licking tongue. For a moment it rebelled, squalling in inhuman hatred at the touch of the icy snow. Then it fell back before the charring breath of the torch, the stench of its flesh bathing it. Hopelessly it retreated—on and on across the Antarctic snow. The bitter wind swept over it, twisting the torch-tongue; vainly it flopped, a trail of oily, stinking smoke bubbling away from it—

McReady walked back toward the shack silently. Barclay met him at the door. “No more?” the giant meteorologist asked grimly.

Barclay shook his head. “No more. It didn’t split?”

“It had other things to think about,” McReady assured him. “When I left it, it was a glowing coal. What was it doing?”

Norris laughed shortly. “Wise boys, we are. Smash magnetos, so planes won’t work. Rip the boiler tubing out of the tractors. And leave that Thing alone for a week in this shack. Alone and undisturbed.”

McReady looked in at the shack more carefully. The air, despite the ripped door, was hot and humid. On a table at the far end of the room rested a thing of coiled wires and small magnets, glass tubing and radio tubes. At the center a block of rough stone rested. From the center of the block came the light that flooded the place, the fiercely blue light bluer than the glare of an electric arc, and from it came the sweetly soft hum. Off to one side was another mechanism of crystal glass, blown with an incredible neatness and delicacy, metal plates and a queer, shimmery sphere of insubstantiality.

“What is that?” McReady moved nearer.

Norris grunted. “Leave it for investigation. But I can guess pretty well. That’s atomic power. That stuff to the left—that’s a neat little thing for doing what men have been trying to do with hundred-ton cyclotrons and so forth. It separates neutrons from heavy water, which he was getting from the surrounding ice.

“Where did he get all—oh. Of course. A monster couldn’t be locked in—or out. He’s been through the apparatus caches.” McReady stared at the apparatus. “Lord, what minds that race must have—”

“The shimmery sphere—I think it’s a sphere of pure force. Neutrons can pass through any matter, and he wanted a supply reservoir of neutrons. Just project neutrons against silica—calcium—beryllium—almost anything, and the atomic energy is released. That thing is the atomic generator.”

McReady plucked a thermometer from his coat. “It’s 120° in here, despite the open door. Our clothes have kept the heat out to an extent, but I’m sweating now.”

Norris nodded. “The light’s cold. I found that. But it gives off heat to warm the place through that coil. He had all the power in the world. He could keep it warm and pleasant, as his race thought of warmth and pleasantness. Did you notice the light, the color of it?”

McReady nodded. “Beyond the stars is the answer. From beyond the stars. From a hotter planet that circled a brighter, bluer sun they came.”

McReady glanced out the door toward the blasted, smoke-stained trail that flopped and wandered blindly off across the drift. “There won’t be any more coming. I guess. Sheer accident it landed here, and that was twenty million years ago. What did it do all that for?” He nodded toward the apparatus.

Barclay laughed softly. “Did you notice what it was working on when we came? Look.” He pointed toward the ceiling of the shack.

Like a knapsack made of flattened coffee tins, with dangling cloth straps and leather belts, the mechanism clung to the ceiling. A tiny, glaring heart of supernal flame burned in it, yet burned through the ceiling’s wood without scorching it. Barclay walked over to it, grasped two of the dangling straps in his hands, and pulled it down with an effort. He strapped it about his body. A slight jump carried him in a weirdly slow arc across the room.

“Antigravity,” said McReady softly.

“Antigravity,” Norris nodded. “Yes, we had ’em stopped, with no planes, and no birds. The birds hadn’t come—but it had coffee tins and radio parts, and glass and the machine shop at night. And a week—a whole week—all to itself. America in a single jump—with antigravity powered by the atomic energy of matter.

“We had ’em stopped. Another half hour—it was just tightening these straps on the device so it could wear it—and we’d have stayed in Antarctica, and shot down any moving thing that came from the rest of the world.”

“The albatross—” McReady said softly. “Do you suppose—”

“With this thing almost finished? With that death weapon it held in its hand?

“No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system, too. Antigravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars.
They
came from a world with a bluer sun.”

* * * *

Copyright © 1938 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

Science fiction is the literature of the Technological Era. It, unlike other literatures, assumes that change is the natural order of things, that there are goals ahead larger than those we know.

—John W. Campbell, Jr., introduction to
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology
(1952) (Westfahl 326)

* * * *

John Wood Campbell, Jr., is one of the essential figures in the development of contemporary science fiction. He revolutionized SF, helping move it from the realm of popular and entertaining pulps to what he saw as a respectful, realistic, and serious literature. He still evokes passionate responses as perhaps the most influential editor in the history of science fiction.

Campbell began reading SF at the age of seven, but turned into a lover of the genre through Norbert Weiner, his mathematics professor at MIT. His regular reads were
Argosy
,
Weird Tales
and, later,
Amazing Stories
; he was particularly fascinated when a story transgressed the boundaries of the solar system. His first attempt to write SF was inspired by E. E. “Doc” Smith’s
The Skylark of Space
—in emulation of which Campbell produced
Invaders from the Infinite
and “When the Atoms Failed.” He quickly established himself as a popular young writer, but Campbell’s writing career was soon curtailed. Astounding Stories editor F. Orlin Tremaine discovered Campbell’s talent for superscience storytelling through “Twilight” and The Mightiest Machine and hired Campbell as his assistant. This is how Campbell’s experience as an editor in the field began.

* * * *

Campbell was born on June 8, 1910 in New Jersey. A precocious child, he rarely made friends. His father, an electrical engineer, was an authoritarian and self-righteous disciplinarian. Campbell had a very changeable and moody mother who led him to bafflement and frustration. He was seven years older than his sister, Laura, his only sibling. Thus, his isolation led him to direct his sharp mind to voracious reading and experimentation of every kind. At school, he often corrected his teachers’ mistakes, but he never got his diploma despite his strength in physics. Then, he enrolled and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1928 to 1931. Again, he did not complete his studies, this time due to his failure in his German. Finally, he spent a year at Duke University; majoring in physics, he received his degree in science. In the meantime, he married Dona Stuart in the summer of 1931 (Moskowitz 36–44).

To make ends meet, Campbell held sporadic jobs such as selling Fords, installing exhaust fans for homes and shops, and promoting gas heaters (Ibid. 45), but he was instinctively inclined to science fiction. He was always on the hunt for pulp magazines containing SF, and began publishing short stories in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and Amazing Stories Quarterly as early as 1929 and 1930: “When the Atoms Failed” (January 1930), “Piracy Preferred” (June 1930), “The Black Star Passes” (Fall 1930), “Islands of Space” (Spring 1931), and “Invaders from the Infinite” (Spring–Summer 1932). In this way, Campbell launched his reputation as a “master exponent of super-science extravaganza” (Ashley 2000: 68) contriving “universe-shaking energy weapons to combat alien fleets in universe-wide battles” (Moskowitz 36) on intergalactic scales. These stories were later published as paperback novels: The Mightiest Machine (1947), The Incredible Planet (1949), The Black Star Passes (1953), Islands of Space (1956), Invaders from the Infinite (1961), and The Ultimate Weapon (1966). Campbell’s short stories were collected in the posthumous The Best of John W. Campbell (1973 & 1976).

Campbell began his career at
Astounding Stories
in October 1937, and after editor Tremaine left Street & Smith (the magazine’s publisher), Campbell took the full editorial reins in 1938. This forced him to cut back heavily on his writing, but he published
Who Goes There?
(August 1938) as an “impressive display of writing talent” (Ibid. 52) in
Astounding Science Fiction
. The story was twice adapted into film, as
The Thing from Another World
by Christian Nyby in 1951, and then as
The Thing
by John Carpenter in 1982 (Roberts 195).

A survey of Campbell’s editorial style demonstrates his influence in altering the direction of SF pulp magazines in many respects. He required authors to produce a more sophisticated form of SF than the one that had given SF magazines such a tawdry reputation. His approach was as follows:

1) Attacking the lurid cover art that was then normal in the pulps, Campbell changed the magazine’s image by changing the look of its covers. He employed new artists and insisted on covers with more scientifically and astronomically accurate details. He sought covers that would both attract more mature readers (Ashley 2000: 107) and enhance sales.

2) By raising the payment for writers of his magazine, Campbell attracted better writers while simultaneously increasing the magazine’s prestige.
Astounding
kept paying the highest rates in the field for many years, even through the war years when many magazines folded.

3) To inspire people with new ideas for stories and strengthen their critical analysis, he set aside a section of the magazine for regular nonfiction scientific articles (Ibid. 108). Campbell’s own editorials were indispensable to this section. He usually posited “strong and lateral” arguments to stimulate and challenge readers and writers alike but not always “positively” (Ibid. 2007: 7).

4) He also changed the magazine title from
Astounding Stories
to
Astounding Science Fiction
in March 1938. Campbell preferred the new title because in his mind the former was associated with pulp excesses of the past (Ibid. 2000: 107). Moreover, since the magazine published exclusively science fiction, the new title was more relevant.

5) He developed and secured a specific audience for the magazine. He intended the magazine to address mature and sophisticated readers not just reading for excitement and wonder. This audience would also be willing to experience the future and new worlds offered by science. To attract this audience, Campbell sought out stories in which science was humanized so that readers could relate as easily to new scientific inventions as to well-known everyday objects. In general, the scrutiny of the “social and psychological effects of advancing technology” (Fanzo 30) was more significant than technology per se, which required a strong imagination on the part of
Astounding
’s readership.

6) He started to develop a new stable of writers, while retaining sufficiently skilful and adaptable authors from Tremaine’s stable who could produce stories he assigned. Campbell’s authors were required to avoid hackneyed plots and to nourish innovative ideas in their work. Furthermore, Campbell was “looking for…stories that get in and really twist things in the reader…you can shock him out of a life-time pattern, and change him for the rest of his natural existence, if you can find and break one of his false cultural orientations.…Things can get in, because the barrier isn’t real” (qtd. in Adkisson 24). Thus, as “a proactive editor, with very definitive ideas of what constituted a good story,” Campbell was “unafraid to press authors into revisions, to revise their work himself without their say-so, or often simply to reject, in the service of a Platonic ideal SF story” (Roberts 195). Campbell’s authoritarian treatment of SF writers in his pulp magazine might have been reminiscent of his disciplinarian father’s influence on his son’s conduct, but in the son’s hands science fiction was salvaged from the melting pot of pulp culture and became a respectable genre. The difference between Campbellian stories and other pulp stories was in the fact that he wanted his authors to produce “hard(core)” SF; these stories dealt with hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, and showed little inclination toward “softer” sciences such as psychology and sociology (Mann 15). Campbell’s early authors included Robert Moor Williams, Lester del Rey, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, L. Ron Hubbard, Malcolm Jameson, and Henry Kuttner (Ashley 2000: 109–111).

7) A devoted editor, Campbell also revolutionized the notion of SF editorship. All editors read stories and made corrections or suggestions, and discovered new talents in the pile of stories sent to them. But Campbell’s zeal to educate new writers, and his discussion of their stories with them over luncheons in a friendly but strident way is well-remembered. Many of the writers nurtured under Campbell won awards: Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s “They’d Rather Be Right” (1954), Eric Frank Russell with “Allamagoosa” (1955), Clifford Simak with “The Big Front Yard” (1959), and Frank Herbert with “The Prophet of the Dune” (1965). But at times his over-editing of stories led those same talented writers he was so good at discovering to move away from his magazine.

* * * *

With the influx of talent working under Campbell’s direction,
Astounding Science Fiction
reached its Golden Age, the period between 1938 and 1943 (Mann 36). 1938 was famously a boom year for science fiction in the US pulp history. By then, science fiction had entered its teens and was now undergoing its turbulent phase of maturation. World War II (1939–1945) and the release of atomic energy pushed science fiction further into adulthood.
Astounding
introduced A. E. van Vogt with “Black Destroyer” and Isaac Asimov with “Trends” in July 1939. However, SF in 1940 was far from Campbell’s vision of where it should be; new titles appeared frequently, but they mostly focused on interplanetary expeditions, alien invasion, space opera, and sensational plots. These traits, still common in every other SFmagazine, belonged, in Campbell’s view, to the thirties.

Campbell was determined to look forward rather than backward, to bring new and challenging ideas to SF. That made
Astounding
stand out, but also caused its isolation among SF magazines. Campbell’s plan caused friction, but many writers, particularly those fed up with the old SF (not to mention with low rates of pay), decided to join him (Ashley 2000: 154). Among them was Asimov, who developed his robot stories in 1941, and posited his influential three laws of robotics. Asimov’s robot series were followed by his Foundation stories, among the best known series in SF, in 1942.

By then,
Astounding
was producing first rate science fiction, but World War II increased its distinctiveness from other magazines somewhat. The war increased the public appetite for excitement and adventure, and particularly stories addressing American victory in both terrestrial and extraterrestrial warfare. Many readers avoided the “more sinister aspects of science or the realism of nuclear war” (Ibid. 157), which were often the stories Campbell preferred to publish. Moreover, wartime censorship in the US sometimes made new scientific exploration in SF problematic for security reasons. A good example is Cleve Cartmill’s venturous “Deadline” (March 1944) which recounts an agent’s efforts to stop the detonation of an atomic bomb and contains details about the construction of atomic bombs. Military Intelligence immediately charged both Campbell and Cartmill with violation of security. Ultimately they were acquitted, and despite the wartime restrictions and changes in audience,
Astounding
proved there was still a significant audience for thought-provoking SF.

By the mid-forties, many magazines were still preoccupied with super-science and the fantastic;
Astounding
, though, was exploring new territories as Campbell’s interests evolved. Authors such as van Vogt, Simak, Leiber, Kuttner, and his wife C. L. Moore set out to look at the world and man’s identity not precisely in technological terms or by means of scientific explication. Instead, they started to look at the product of man’s mind and its potentialities in terms of transcendental science fiction and psi powers. Astounding was transformed from techno-centric to psycho-centric concerns. By 1946, Astounding’s Golden Age had passed and the sense of cutting-edge scientific discovery it once possessed had faded, though it continued to be a forum for the emergence of good talents.

In 1950 and 1951, the magazine underwent more turbulence. Campbell had become increasingly fascinated with the mind and psi powers. He particularly encouraged controversial SF writer L. Ron Hubbard to publish his article, “Dianetics” (May 1950), in
Astounding
. The article introduced dianetics as the science of the mind and claimed to help people overcome bad memories and fears through hypnosis. Many
Astounding
subscibers who read the article disapproved of it; some felt that
Astounding
, with its long reputation for hard science fiction, had fallen into the unsafe hands of “crackpots”

(Ibid. 228).

Campbell introduced restrictions on the type of stories
Astounding
would publish which made the magazine still less popular. The main themes he persuaded his authors, through long letters and proposals, to adopt were confined to “[l]ogic, the power of the individual, the power of the mind and the power of humankind throughout the universe.” This gave the impression that Astounding was rife with Campbell’s own ideas and theories, developed through his authors (Ibid. 2005: 19). Throughout the fifties, writers and readers were frustrated with Campbell’s alternative sciences, the Hieronymous machine, psionic machines, and “parapsychological superhumanity” (Stableford 67). Remarkably innovative for years, Astounding now seemed to have lost its distinctive strength. It could no longer claim to be a model for other magazines, because in many ways it was now the most conservative and hidebound SF magazine. Though still maintaining a core “hard SF” audience, it failed to widen that audience: science fiction readers and Campbell were both changing, but not in the same direction. Where he had once given writers freedom to create hard SF in a field filled with lurid stories fraught with pseudo-science, in the wake of the Dianetics fiasco, Campbell seemed to be the one pushing pseudo-science. And his insistence on tight editorial control and heavy editing caused writers of the New Wave to chafe.