The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (96 page)

The universe as presented by Campbell was no longer the same universe that the followers of these great scientists had striven to deal with. It wasn’t exclusively material in nature. It wasn’t a simple machine like a clock. It wasn’t a cold, remote, lifeless wasteland. Nor was it a place of unceasing hostility, competition and struggle for survival. Rather, the cosmos he was asking his writers to deal with was a super-system, a responsive whole, a natural blabbermouth that was always ready to give the right answer to any properly phrased question put to it by one of its children.

In this new ordering of existence, humanity was no longer a cosmic orphan, a fluke of nature to be eliminated by the blind grindings-on of matter, or by other creatures determined to knock mankind off his precarious perch on the evolutionary ladder, or by the inevitable senescence and failure of the race. Instead, man belonged in the universe and had a part to play there—perhaps a crucial one. And if he kept learning and maturing and accepting every challenge that came his way, there was no limit to what he could become.

A universe of consciousness giving birth to an ever-more-aware humanity . . . Mankind contriving to raise itself higher by asking questions, solving problems, and growing in understanding . . . Consciousness arising out of consciousness by means of consciousness . . . That was the picture of existence underlying all of the triumphs of the Campbell
Astounding.

But the writers of modern science fiction didn’t immediately realize that this was so. The giants of the early Golden Age still thought of themselves as writing about transcendent science, just as their predecessors had done. Except that instead of dreaming of new drugs, new machines and new forces, it was new orders of scientific command that they were aiming to envision. That’s all.

They didn’t recognize that the new laws and systems and sciences they were imagining were vitally different in one central respect from the science-beyond-science they had grown up with. Old-time transcendent science had always been conceived in material terms. Even the Lens in Doc Smith’s Lensman stories—a telepathic device and mental amplifier with certain lingering soul-like characteristics—was still presented in the form of a physical object strapped to the wrist of a wearer.

But the likes of paraphysics and the Future History and the Laws of Robotics had no physical correlatives of any kind, not even a button to push. They were new mental constructs—new states of knowledge and control.

These thought systems were something more and something other than material super-science. And it was precisely their extra-scientific, extra-rational and extra-physical transcendent nature which made them so effective in dealing with the intractable problems that the Atomic Age had inherited from three hundred years of Western fixation upon the rational scientific consideration of material existence.

All of the factors in this initial pattern—a universe understood in more-than-materialistic terms; a humanity reoriented within the cosmos; and transcendence in the new form of a knowledge system, yet still treated as though it were one more manifestation of super-science and applied to the old Western problems—would be on display in
Astounding
as late as Isaac Asimov’s first two Foundation stories, written on the eve of U.S. involvement in the Second World War and published in the spring of 1942:

In “Foundation” and “Bridle and Saddle,” as we have seen, the universe is presented as a stairway of consciousness for mankind to ascend, with “science” the name of just one step. But this radical reconception of the nature of existence is buried in background and in story structure. It is never explicitly stated.

In these stories, there has also been a dramatic shift in the psychic orientation of man. His ties to Village Earth have been cut with such completeness that he can no longer remember on which planet it was that he originated. So much a child of the universe as a whole has he become that galaxy-wide empire is now the normal, accustomed human frame of reference.

The highest manifestation of transcendence to be seen in the Foundation stories is psychohistory, a mode of understanding that is presented as a new form of science, but which might as readily be taken as religious, or occult, or mathematical, or psychological, or historical, or holistic. But the problems to which this multifaceted new form of transcendent knowledge is applied are the old Techno Age problems of survival in the face of stronger material power and of overcoming the threat posed to humanity by cyclical history.

The one writer in the pre-war
Astounding
who understood most clearly that he was no longer dealing with old-time science-beyond-science, but rather with a holistic universe, the powers of non-rational thought, and the higher potential of mankind was A.E. van Vogt. And, as we know, in the burst of stories that he published in 1942, after he had quit his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence and become a full-time writer for John Campbell, van Vogt would insist that the universe had to be related to as a responsive whole with level upon level of potential being and becoming.

In the altered context of a World War II America that not only was psychically unsettled, but also was becoming aware of different states of mind and learning how to speak of them in the new terms of Twentieth Century psychology, other writers would begin to join van Vogt in acknowledging the holistic universe of consciousness. With more than a little trepidation, particularly at the outset, they would start to investigate the nature and meaning of this new interactive reality.

John Campbell would have a considerable part to play in this process of probing and testing the holistic universe. Over and over again, he would point to van Vogt as a model for others to follow. And he would nudge and urge and challenge his authors as only he knew how to do to convince them to deal with the van Vogtian mysteries of indeterminacy, non-rational thinking, wild talents, and higher levels of human becoming.

But we should also know that there would come a time at the end of the war when the great editor would wake with a start and a splutter to find that somehow he had contrived to get himself in way over his head. Between one thing and another—the momentum of his investigations into the new van Vogtian reality, his need during the war to accept almost any story, however strange, that was of publishable quality, and the peculiar heartiness of the night air—he had allowed himself to be lured into far deeper and darker psychic waters than he was prepared to cope with. And this postwar Campbell would hastily beat a retreat to safer ground.

However, for as long as the war lasted and as long as it still seemed to Campbell that he was leading his writers in a scientific inquiry into non-logical phenomena, he would print a much queerer line of story in
Astounding
than he would have been ready to find acceptable in the first phase of the Golden Age, or would be able to tolerate once the war was over.

As a whole, then, we can say that some of the radical changes that took place in
Astounding
during World War II were due to wartime circumstances, some to the altering mood of the time, some to Campbell leading writers onward, some to Campbell being led, some to the pursuit of science and reason, and some to the siren call of the new transcendence. However, the very first change that occurred in
Astounding
after the United States entered the war was not only the sign of the beginning of a new phase, but was wholly and solely John Campbell’s doing.

When the January 1942 issue of
Astounding
appeared on the newsstand less than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor the magazine was no longer the same 7 by 10 inch pulp size it had always been throughout the dozen years of its existence. Instead, it was now 40% larger, expanded in its dimensions to the 8 1/2 by 11 1/2 inch bedsheet size of the old Gernsback
Science Wonder Stories.

For Campbell, altering the size of
Astounding
(and
Unknown
) was intended to accomplish a number of different purposes at once. It was a bold try for more prominent display on the magazine racks, for better sales, and for increased advertising revenue. More than anything else, however, it was a bid for greater respect and dignity.

The truth of the matter is that Campbell felt compromised and held back by the juvenile pulp company that his magazines were forced to keep. He wanted nothing so much as to shake free from it.

He knew how original and special
Astounding
and
Unknown
were, and how superior to their competition. He was well aware that they were read and appreciated by able, intelligent people—scientists, engineers, college professors and professional men. And he longed for them to be taken just as seriously by society in general.

The first step in this process, as he saw it, was to put some distance between his magazines and the others on the sales racks. But this was not at all easy to do.

The new
Astounding
and
Unknown Worlds,
as the magazine was now renamed, might indicate by their size that they would like to be thought of as different from all the other SF pulps. In actual fact, however, they still had to appeal to the popular audience that bought and read story magazines. They were still printed on cheap, rough, pulp paper. And they still had the style and appearance of large, skinny, pulp magazines.

Since there was no other reasonable place for them to be put, they continued to be grouped on the newsstand with the other SF pulps. And instead of receiving better display, now Campbell’s oversized magazines were all too likely to be tucked away behind the others so as not to block their covers from being seen.

The upshot was that there was no sudden leap in sales for
Astounding
or
Unknown.
They garnered no classy new audience. And there was no change at all in the nature or amount of advertising they attracted—only the same old ads as always for razor blades, trusses, correspondence courses, and other Street & Smith publications.

A fair assessment of this attempt to take on greater respectability might be that in fact no large, untapped market of bright, influential readers such as Campbell hoped for actually existed, and that he was already reaching the entire American audience which was capable of appreciating the modern science fiction and fantasy he published. A mass audience for SF was still a generation away.

At the same time, the change in size was something of an esthetic disaster. The pulp
Astoundings
of the early Golden Age, with their simple, clean-cut, definite modern design, and their bright, confident, human-centered Hubert Rogers covers, had been bold, dynamic and graceful physical objects. But in the redesign of the magazine, that artless pulp perfection was lost.

The taller, thinner issues, held together by only a single staple, were awkward, floppy and fragile. The new covers, with a central picture framed by broad borders, no longer had the old boundary-bursting immediacy. Individual pages were now less attractive and harder to read. Illustrations of a formerly sufficient size now seemed small and shoved off into the corner of the page.

Sixteen issues of
Astounding
and ten issues of
Unknown Worlds
would be published in the large size before this experiment was brought to an end by the wartime paper shortage. But
Astounding
would never manage to recapture the confidence, balance and perfect proportion that had seemed to come so effortlessly and naturally in the days before the war. . . .

Even before the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had begun the process of rearming itself, designing and building new ships, planes and tanks, and increasing the size of its armed forces. In the fall of 1940, unmarried young men began to be drafted into the military for a year’s service.

Once the United States had joined the war, conscription was expanded to take in men from the ages of 18 to 45, with registration of all men up to age 65. The term of service was to be the duration of the war, however short or long that proved to be, plus an additional six months.

Campbell lost his first writer to the war effort as early as the summer of 1941, when L. Ron Hubbard joined the Naval Reserve as an officer and was called to active duty. But that was just the beginning. During the spring and summer of 1942, all of the major players in
Astounding
and
Unknown
—with the exception of A.E. van Vogt—ceased to write and turned to war work.

E.E. Smith’s third Lensman story,
Second-Stage Lensman
(
Astounding,
Nov. 1941-Feb. 1942), was in the middle of its serialization even as the United States joined the war and
Astounding
increased in size. Doc Smith was 51 years old and had a family, and he had already served as an officer during the First World War. But after Pearl Harbor, he applied to the War Department for a job that would make use of his technical expertise.

He was thanked but turned down. So Smith followed up a want ad and took a job as a Junior Chemical Engineer in an ordnance works in Kingsbury, Indiana, making mines and bombs. He would work his way up to Chief Chemist, and then to Head of the Inspection Division.

Robert Heinlein, who only a few months earlier had feared that he might be suffering a third flare-up of his tuberculosis, wanted nothing so much as to get back into uniform and join the fight. But Navy doctors had their look at him and refused to restore him to active duty.

Heinlein’s oldest Navy friend was currently the director of the Materials Laboratory of the Naval Aircraft Factory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, so Heinlein arranged to have himself taken on there as a civilian research and development engineer. And with him, he brought Isaac Asimov as a civilian chemist, and L. Sprague de Camp, a new-made Naval Reserve officer, as an engineer. These three leading writers of modern science fiction would spend the war years working on the same floor of the same building.

Hubert Rogers, whose bold, bright cover paintings had formed the outward image of the exuberant pre-war Golden Age, went north and joined the Canadian Army. His final cover, in August 1942, was an illustration of Heinlein’s last story for
Astounding,
Anson MacDonald’s “Waldo.” His successor during the next four years was William Timmins, an artist who was no match for Rogers in technique, artistry, or vision. Under Timmins’ hand, the face of
Astounding
would grow dark and murky, as though even warmth and color had been rationed for the duration.