The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (46 page)

In later years, Hamilton would say in explanation: “The trouble was that I was trying to make a living writing s-f. John had very meticulous standards, and I would not be able to sell him enough s-f to live on. I sometimes regret I didn’t stay with John. With his help I could have become a lot better s-f writer.”
³⁴⁷

By contrast, a writer who was not attempting to make a living from SF alone and who was able to make the stretch to meet Campbell’s strictures might well perceive his appointment as editor as an unprecedented opportunity to do work of a kind and quality previously impossible. One such writer was newspaperman Clifford D. Simak. In the early Thirties, he had written “The World of the Red Sun” and several other science fiction stories, but after the failure of the Clayton
Astounding,
he had turned away from SF. But when he learned that John Campbell had become editor of
Astounding,
his interest was revived. Simak told his wife that Campbell would want a new kind of SF, and that he was confident that he would be able to satisfy Campbell’s requirements—both of which proved to be true.
³⁴⁸
Writing science fiction strictly as a sideline, Simak would contribute stories to Campbell for the next twenty-five years.

But it was not sufficient for Campbell to simply sort through the established writers of science fiction in search of those capable of working with him. Too few of the established writers of science fiction were in tune with the new scientific vision, and even fewer were prepared to be taken over the jumps by young John Campbell.

To write his new science fiction, Campbell had to draft, discover and invent a whole new set of writers. Of all the many labors that he performed as he strove to bring modern science fiction into being, this gathering and training of new writers would be by far the most significant.

Campbell was at his very best in pursuit of these unknown persons capable of presenting the new vision for him. He was subtle, observant, patient, persistent, and infinitely resourceful. And even so, one of the first writers he found was initially forced upon him against his will.

At the very outset of Campbell’s editing career, in that brief moment when he was still expressing a measure of uncertainty about filling the pages of a monthly magazine with new stories, his superiors at Street & Smith thought to provide him with an insurance policy. They called in a couple of top pulp adventure writers—reliable professional yarnspinners—and told Campbell to accept any work they cared to submit to him.

Campbell protested this vigorously. Science fiction was fundamentally different from other pulp literature. It wasn’t just to be cranked out by the yard. What is more, to pay these guys his top rates for anything and everything they wrote would cut the heart right out of his budget. He didn’t want to do it. But F. Orlin Tremaine was one person he would heed, and when Tremaine told him to do it, he did it.

Campbell was already familiar with one of the writers imposed upon him, Arthur J. Burks. Burks actually had some previous science fiction writing experience, including stories published in the Clayton
Astounding.
And one way or another, he and Campbell did accommodate themselves to each other to the tune of one so-so novel and a series of mild, rationalized space opera stories. But after only one year and half-a-dozen stories—and the departure of F. Orlin Tremaine from Street & Smith—Burks would be gone from the pages of
Astounding,
swept out in Campbell’s great spring housecleaning.

But the other writer who had been forced on Campbell would serve as a longer-term asset—of a kind. This was L. Ron Hubbard, who is best known for his later career as the founder of the religion/mind-control system Scientology.
³⁴⁹

This big redheaded people-charmer was born in Tilden, Nebraska on March 13, 1911.
³⁵⁰
Probably. Possibly. With Hubbard it is hard to know exactly where the real truth lies since his greatest continuing pleasure in life was in telling stretchers, striking poses, and seeing just how much falsity he could get other people to swallow. In a revealing moment, he once said:

“Now you say you have to be absolutely truthful. Sincerity is the main thing, and truthfulness is the main thing and don’t lie to anybody . . . and you’ll get ahead. Brother you sure will. You’ll get ahead right on that cycle of action, right toward zero! . . . It’s a trap not being able to prevaricate. . . .

“You say, ‘You know, I was downtown the other day and there’s this Yellow Taxi there, and I started to step into this Yellow Taxi, and I’ll be a son of a gun if there wasn’t a big ape sitting in the back smoking a cigar. And I closed the door and walked on down the street.’

“This makes life more colorful.”
³⁵¹

Hubbard’s usual public pretense at the time he and Campbell met was that he was a globe-trotting explorer who paused from time to time between adventures to catch his breath and turn out pulp stories. In this, he would be imitating earlier writers of pulp adventure who may or may not have had a better claim to the pose.

In fact, however, the only real accomplishment of this college dropout had been to sell his dreams of adventure to others in story form. And when he blew into town with his latest tale of being shipwrecked in the Aleutians and forced to survive on whale meat and seaweed, or whatever, the actual fact was that he was living in the state of Washington with a wife and son, either attempting to psych himself up to write or else pounding out stories at red-hot speed.

At the times when he was able to write, Hubbard would slap first-draft copy onto a long roll of typing paper, not wishing to be slowed down or have his mood broken by having to remove one sheet of paper and replace it with another. And when his stories were finished, he would have his wife check them over and mail them out, but he wouldn’t necessarily read them himself after they had passed through his typewriter.

The result of these habits was stories which moved along pell-mell, with a certain verve and charm and superficial plausibility, but which ultimately didn’t add up to much. They were good enough to get by, but they weren’t original or substantial work.

For the claim that Hubbard (and Burks) were initially forced upon Campbell over the editor’s protest, we have only the word of this dedicated toyer with the truth. So take warning that the tale is not completely to be relied upon.
³⁵²

What makes it seem possible, however, is that Hubbard had no previous background at all in writing science fiction, or even in reading it. He was in no way a natural writer for John Campbell to pick out and cultivate on his own. Not only did Campbell take him on as a writer, however, but it is clear that at the outset the editor was bowled over by Hubbard’s personal flash and dazzle. He went out of his way to find niches for this operator within his magazine and to work out grounds for him to write SF.

That took a certain amount of discussion and negotiation. The fact is that Hubbard had no more than a glancing acquaintance with most contemporary science. He’d lingered in engineering school only long enough to pick up the talk. He had read some fantasy—
The Arabian Nights
and Washington Irving’s
Tales of the Alhambra.
He’d read quite a bit of occult literature. And he had an interest in the hidden powers of the mind.

That was where he and Campbell found their first common ground. Hubbard began writing for
Astounding
with rationalized stories of wild mental talents—a short story, “The Dangerous Dimension” (July 1938), followed by the serial novel,
The Tramp
(Sept.-Nov. 1938).

And the next year, when Campbell started
Unknown,
he would even set aside a special preserve for Hubbard—stories of contemporary men involved with alternate worlds based on
The Arabian Nights.
The editor would write to Hubbard:

I’m damn glad you’ll be with us on the Arabian Nights stuff—and you needn’t worry about having it yours. I’ve been telling a few of the boys to read Washington Irving as an example of pure fantasy and complete acceptance of magic, enchantment, et cetera, and adding that they aren’t to do Arabian Nights because the field is preempted by you. It’s been held open for you.
³⁵³

By whatever means it was arranged, the open door for Hubbard’s stories at
Astounding
and
Unknown
represented a considerable opportunity for him. For perhaps the only time in a life that was generally misspent, Hubbard’s true nature, interests, knowledge and gifts coincided with the chance to do work with an aspect of genuine creativity, instead of his usual fakery.

Hubbard would never be one of John Campbell’s special pupils or central innovators. But during the time before he entered the Navy during World War II, Hubbard would be involved enough and reliable enough to serve as a steady hack writer for Campbell. He would sell the editor eleven novels and twenty-two shorter stories, published under his own name and three pseudonyms.

This was good-bad work, turned out far too fast, often flat and untranscendent, usually a little rickety, but generally good enough to serve. And sometimes, in a few rare conceptions and occasional brilliant moments, it was more than that.

But L. Ron Hubbard was not at all the usual Campbell writer. Far more typically, the writers that Campbell enlisted to produce the stories he needed were amateurs with some background in science and a long history of reading SF.

Indeed, what is truly remarkable, considering that Campbell was no populist and no social wiz, is the sheer range of people that he attracted or convinced to write for him. The editor was one of those who followed H.G. Wells in believing that the old elite of birth should be replaced by a new and more effective elite—an elite of competence. For Campbell, the value of democratic pluralism was that it allowed competence the opportunity to display itself.

What it took to get along with Campbell was a display of the hallmarks of competence—an eagerness to work, a willingness to question, a determination to think and to learn. In his usual state of high editorial dedication, Campbell would never pause to worry about non-essentials like age or reputation or ethnic background. He would work with anyone in whom he spied even the faintest glimmering of real understanding.

This is all the more important to note because on the ordinary emotional level, Campbell was not completely free of the common prejudices of the period and class in which he was raised. He might, for instance, state flatly that it would be better for all concerned if the United States marched down to Latin America and took the place over. And—coming as he did from an earlier era in which SF writers were
always
named something like Wells, Burroughs, Merritt, Smith, Hamilton . . . or Campbell—he was even capable of suggesting to several of his more exotically named writers that they might consider the possibility of adopting Anglo-Saxon or Scottish pen names, since such names were bound to ring better in the reader’s ear.

But that was as far as it went. As an editor, Campbell was usually able to keep his latent cultural prejudices from interfering with his higher aims. What truly mattered to him—far more than any White-Male-Scottish-American chauvinism—was that a writer be resilient enough, bright enough and capable enough to put up with his criticisms, his arguments and lectures, and his eternal testing and prodding—and then repay him for his trouble and effort by coming back to him with stories that were
new
.

If a writer could do that, Campbell didn’t care what his origins might be. In his eyes, all true makers of science fiction were of one kind—above and beyond questions of mere ethnicity. And, in actual practice, the contents page of the Golden Age
Astounding
would display a flowering rainbow of unusual surnames, their sheer variety and their aura of differentness helping to contribute to the unique appeal of the magazine.

The ultimate example of Campbell’s ability to exercise tolerance and patience in the name of science fiction with a person from a completely different background than himself may be seen in his treatment of one young would-be writer, an 18-year-old Jewish immigrant named Isaac Asimov.

In June 1938, Isaac Asimov made the trek from his father’s little neighborhood candy store in Brooklyn to Campbell’s office in lower Manhattan.
³⁵⁴
He was wearing his second-best suit and carrying his first attempt at an SF story, a manuscript entitled “Cosmic Corkscrew.” What a thoroughly unprepossessing character this Asimov was—a loud, bright, pimple-faced kid, particularly obnoxious when nervous, as he was at this moment of first encounter.

Asimov was born in Russia at the beginning of 1920, and then raised in the close confines of a series of Brooklyn candy stores. When he wasn’t studying, eating or sleeping, he was working in the family store. It was there, at the age of nine, that he had discovered magazine science fiction. He was certainly precocious—at 18 already at the end of his junior year as a premed student at Columbia—but all he knew of the world was narrow little neighborhood candy stores, books, school, and science fiction.

Nonetheless, when Asimov showed up unannounced at Street & Smith, Campbell had the outer secretary send him back. Asimov was a science fiction fan, and Campbell recognized his name.

Altogether, Campbell devoted more than two hours of working time to the youngster. He soothed Asimov’s jitters by showing him that he had a letter printed in each of the next two issues
of Astounding.
He told Asimov about the beginnings of his own writing career. He showed him “Who Goes There?” which was also about to see publication. And he promised the boy that he would give “Cosmic Corkscrew” prompt and complete attention.

And, in fact, he did. He read “Cosmic Corkscrew” overnight—and rejected it immediately. But not without a thoughtful two-page letter of comment.

By contrast, when Asimov read Campbell’s story “Who Goes There?”, it was with “delight mingled with despair.”
³⁵⁵
He recognized that the story presented a challenge to all would-be writers of science fiction.