The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (51 page)

At this point, Asimov, who could be as secretly unsure of himself as he could be outwardly brash, still considered himself only a tyro as a science fiction writer—a hopeful third-rater. In three years of effort, he had sold seventeen SF stories—but only four of these sales had been to John Campbell, who was his standard of measure. For Asimov,
Astounding
was the only game in town; sales other than to Campbell didn’t really count.

So how was it that Campbell had sufficient confidence in Asimov to entrust him with this altogether special assignment? The answer is that John Campbell had been observing Asimov closely ever since the day he first showed up at his office, and he knew things about Asimov that Asimov himself didn’t yet know.

To start, Asimov was not like his friends, other young would-be SF writers who made their way to Campbell’s office, found the overbearing manner and Socratic style of the great editor too intolerable to endure, and fought with him, insulted him, or fled from him, even unto the opposite coast. Asimov alone among these bright, hungry, talented, lippy New York kids was prepared to be patient and avoid argument, to carefully attend the significance of Campbell’s every word, and to find some way to follow the editor’s lead even when he might be in disagreement.

Asimov says:

I became the youngest member of the “stable” of writers he gathered around himself. Though others still younger came his way later, I don’t think that ever in his career did he have an acolyte less worldly and more naive than I was. I believe that amused him and that it pleased him to have so excellent an opportunity to do a bit of molding. At any rate, I have always thought that of all his writers I was his favorite and that he spent more time and effort on me than on anyone else. I believe it still shows.
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Campbell tested him again and again. None of his other major contributors was ever asked to struggle and fight and hang in there to win acceptance from Campbell as a modern science fiction writer to the degree Asimov was. But the earnest, eager young Asimov rose to the challenge. He never gave up—never thought for a moment of giving up, even when he had written eighteen stories and Campbell had only seen fit to buy one.

Asimov labored mightily to find the key to work that John Campbell might find acceptable. Many of his early attempts were naive, irrelevant, or simply wide of the mark. But, little by little, Asimov absorbed the editor’s message, and gradually but steadily his work moved in Campbell’s direction.

When everything came together at last for Asimov, and he finally did succeed in transforming himself into a genuine writer of modern science fiction—and no ordinary one, at that—Campbell was there ready and waiting for him. He recognized what Asimov had managed to make of himself long before Asimov did, and knew how best to put him to use.

“Nightfall” might be thought of either as a kind of final exam, or alternatively as a first opportunity. When Campbell handed the Emerson quote to Asimov in March 1941 and asked him to write a story around it, it was the crowning moment of all those months of personal instruction. By then, Campbell had a pretty fair notion of Asimov’s knowledge and abilities, and good and sufficient reason to think that Asimov might be ready to handle a challenge of this magnitude.

A look in detail at the nature of the adjustments Asimov made in his writing and thinking in order to become a Campbellian science fiction writer will show exactly why Campbell could be so confident that Asimov was ready to take on a story like “Nightfall,” and also something of what was different and new and special about modern science fiction.

Let’s begin with Asimov’s first inadequate story, “Cosmic Corkscrew.”
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Though it would never see publication, Asimov has described it in his collection of his earliest stories and again in the first volume of his autobiography.

In this story, a time traveler penetrates the future only to find all animal life suddenly, recently, and mysteriously vanished from the planet. He has no way to discover exactly what has happened—the nature of time and of his device prevent him from investigating. And then, when the traveler returns to our era and tells his tale, he is reckoned to be mad and placed in an insane asylum.

Pretty standard ho-hum Age of Technology stuff. A recognition of this was Asimov’s first lesson in modern science fiction.

The point was made by Campbell’s own new story, “Who Goes There?”, which he showed to Asimov at their first meeting in June 1938. “Who Goes There?” was a prototype for SF to come. Following the example of “Who Goes There?”, Campbellian modern science fiction would be concerned with posing problems of human relationship to the multiverse of space and time, and then finding the solution to these problems using the appropriate universal operating principles.

At its best, “Cosmic Corkscrew” could only be another old-time scientifiction story. It posed no solvable problem at all, but only displayed a great cosmic enigma and then retreated from it.

Asimov recognized immediately that there was a vital difference between the two stories, and he quickly gave indication that it was Campbell’s game he wished to play.

In less than a month, he was back at Campbell’s office with a second story, “Stowaway.” This story had been heavily influenced by Asimov’s reading of “Who Goes There?” It featured a deadly creature that appeared mysterious but proved to be scientifically comprehensible. “Stowaway” also owed something to “Other Eyes Watching” (
Astounding,
Feb. 1937), a Campbell article on Jupiter in the series he was writing before he became editor.

But Campbell turned this second story down, too. He said that it had no particular identifiable fault, but that it was amateurish and didn’t move smoothly. He advised Asimov that it would probably take him a year of effort and a dozen tries before Campbell could begin to find his work acceptable.

Although Campbell didn’t say so explicitly, it was necessary for Asimov to learn that the modern science fiction story was not conceived, organized or written in quite the same way as the Age of Technology SF story.

The typical Techno Age story was a linear narrative after the fashion of
Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The Time Machine,
or Asimov’s “Cosmic Corkscrew.” It was composed of a string of
and thens,
as a character made a transition from the Village into the World Beyond the Hill, had a series of adventures there, and then returned. The meat of the story was the detailed exposition of all that was encountered and the character’s reactions to it. The more adventures and the more reaction the better.

The modern science fiction story was very different. It was not framed as an endless, episodic process of probing into the unknown. Rather, it was conceived as a kind of mosaic, with every element in the story existing both for its own sake and also for its contribution to the pattern of the whole.

Like the multiverse it delineated, a modern science fiction story hung together. It could make do without a lot of the endless describing-and-reacting that earlier SF had considered indispensable. Since it was the shape of the whole that really mattered, much could now be said by implication or need not even be said at all.

As a result, modern science fiction was less emotive and more businesslike than Techno Age SF. With the coming of modern science fiction, story lengths became more compact. In giving Asimov his reasons for rejecting “Cosmic Corkscrew,” Campbell had cited the fact that at 9000 words its length was awkward, too long for a short story, too short for a novelet. But in former times, that wouldn’t have been an unusual length for a short story in
Astounding.

And just that quickly, Asimov seized hold of the proper new external standards of measure. At 6000 words, his second story “Stowaway” was exactly the right length. If his story still came out as amateurish and clunky, that was because Asimov didn’t yet grasp that the shorter length of the modern science fiction story was the result of packing more meaning into a smaller space.

The first real clues as to how modern science fiction was actually to be constructed came to Asimov in an exchange he had with writer Clifford Simak later in that summer of 1938. Simak, more than fifteen years older than Asimov, was the Midwestern newspaperman who had published a few stories in the early Thirties and then put science fiction aside until Campbell became editor of
Astounding.

When Simak’s first new story after his return, “Rule 18,” appeared in the July 1938 issue of
Astounding,
Asimov was not at all impressed by it. In his regular monthly letter to the magazine rating the stories, Asimov-the-fan ranked this relatively slight tale of time-traveling football players low.

Simak read Asimov’s letter when it was printed in the September issue. And he immediately wrote a sincere and temperate letter to the youngster in Brooklyn seeking to know the details of his criticism. What was it that had been wrong with the story?

Asimov says:

I reread the story in order to be able to answer properly and found, to my surprise, that there was nothing wrong with it at all. What he had done was to write the story in separate scenes with no explicit transition passages between. I wasn’t used to that technique, so the story seemed choppy and incoherent. The second time around I saw what he was doing and realized that not only was the story not in the least incoherent, but also that it moved with a slick speed that would have been impossible if all the dull bread-and-butter transitions had been inserted.

I wrote to Simak to explain and to apologize, and adopted the same device in my own stories. What’s more, I attempted, as far as possible, to make use of something similar to Simak’s cool and unadorned style.
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By copying that unadorned style and Simak’s technique of jump-cutting between significant scenes, Asimov was soon able to write stories that were sharper, sparer and more of a whole than his first few attempts. So swift a learner was young Asimov that it wouldn’t take him anything like a full year to sell his first story to John Campbell, but only another six months.

What Asimov was picking up from Simak was not just a simpler, less emotional style and a technique of shifting scenes without justifying the transition. It was also the orientation toward existence that underlay them.

During the Age of Technology, as in earlier periods, the known and the unknown had been clearly separate spheres. Village Earth was a small center of consciously known things surrounded by the vast unknown of the World Beyond the Hill.

But the redesigned cosmos presented in Campbell’s
Astounding
was not like this. It was a continuum, held together everywhere and at all times by constantly overlapping, interacting universal rules.

Within this multiverse of time, space and other dimensions, every single thing was accessible and potentially knowable.

In this new frame of reference, the human enterprise was no longer to be strictly identified with Village Earth. Human consciousness might have its locus anywhere in space or time, and manage to deal with things when it got there.

At the same time, however, it was apparent that any single locus or point of view within this new cosmos must have its limitations. If existence is the product of a complex net of causal factors too interwoven and far-reaching to ever be completely encompassed, then from any one vantage at any one moment some things will be clearly revealed, while others must necessarily be hidden—at least until a change in perspective occurs.

In Techno Age SF, transcendence had been found
out there
in the larger darkness. But in modern science fiction, transcendence could be located anywhere at all. Gaps, glitches and blank spots in our awareness were where mystery was now concealed.

But even in this uncertain new universe, constantly shifting in and out of focus, men could still make their way. What was essential was not that they know everything all at once, but only that they identify and master those particular principles that would produce desired results in a given set of circumstances.

It was this practical-minded engineering mentality that was central in the pages of the Golden Age
Astounding.
By contrast with the great philosophical ponderings and the fascination with vastness typical of a Wells or a Stapledon, Campbellian SF could seem small in scale and a bit nearsighted. But it would also display a compensatory immediacy, adaptability, verve and daring.

It wasn’t just that a modern science fiction story might leap lightly from one meaningful moment to another, unconcerned about the spaces in between. In the new SF,
anything
might be hidden or omitted or approached from a cockeyed angle. The writers of Golden Age science fiction would delight in starting their stories at any point in space or time, with action in progress, and would expect the reader to play the game, fill in the blank spots, and put together the ongoing situation from hints and clues and bits of exposition casually dropped in passing.

In the strange reality presented in the Campbell
Astounding
—half here and half not-here—it took a very cool operator who knew the way things really work to tell what was important and what was not and make things come out his way. And a not altogether dissimilar demand for Atomic Age street-smarts was made on the readers of
Astounding.

Isaac Asimov would gradually evolve his own personal brand of the new kind of story. More than any other of Campbell’s writers, he would come to specialize in stories of formal problem-solving. The classic Asimov story would be a schematic representation of the scientific method in action. Characters so sparely presented as to be little more than disembodied voices would tackle some science-fictional conundrum. They would propound, test, and discard one theory after another until at last they lit upon the proper principle, applied it, and resolved the problem before them.

Asimov would not attain this level of sublime abstraction overnight. But John Campbell would certainly encourage his tendencies in this direction. The stories he chose to buy from Asimov’s first two dozen attempts—“Trends” (
Astounding,
July 1939) and “Homo Sol”
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(
Astounding,
Sept. 1940)—would be the two that most closely resembled the work of the later Isaac Asimov. And, in large part, this would be so because Campbell nudged and pushed until these stories became what they were.