Chroniclers of the proto-autistic condition Asperger’s Syndrome have observed that a disproportionate number of sufferers have fathers who were engineers. Currently-fashionable opinion alleges that Asperger’s Syndrome bridges a wide gap between “full-blown” autism and normal male behavior on a spectrum of mental disconnection, describing the mind-set of those individuals (almost all of whom are allegedly male) who are not so severely afflicted that they cannot relate to other people at all, but are nevertheless prone to obsessions that take priority over social interactions: hobbies, collections and so on. Asperger’s Syndrome apparently assists the brain to be much better at handling physical data and abstract ideas than interpreting human behavior, and bringing such data and ideas into obsessive focus—in cases where it produces no acute symptoms it is, in effect, God’s gift to would-be mathematicians, scientists and lawyers.
As with the less problematic manifestations of Adler’s inferiority complex, a mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome might be reckoned by some to be a more desirable state of being than mere normality. Ordinary people sometimes find it difficult to cultivate the narrow focus and relentless preoccupation that are required for outstanding success in a specialized field; many are too easily distracted by the demands of family and fun. Anyone who aspires to be a mover and shaker in a specific endeavor, especially one requiring relentless data collection or mental abstraction, requires a strong sense of vocation. It is at least arguable that no real man—in an intellectual rather than a brutal sense—would want to be without a slight touch of Asperger’s Syndrome, even if he had to bear the cost of finding other people’s emotional states difficult to read or respond to.
John W. Campbell, Senior—whose own father had been a lawyer—was an engineer working for Bell Telephone in New Jersey when his similarly-named son was born in 1910. Sam Moskowitz records in the essay on Campbell in Seekers of Tomorrow that the young John Junior “had virtually no friends”, and that “his relationship with his parents was emotionally difficult” because “his father carried impersonality and theoretical objectivity in family matters to the brink of fetish” and “almost never used the pronoun I”. His mother, by contrast, seemed to young John to be “flighty, moody, and...unpredictable from moment to moment” and he was “baffled and frustrated” by her “changeability”. She also had a twin sister who lived with the family, who seemed to the young boy to be extraordinarily hostile to him. It is, of course, direly dangerous to offer diagnoses on the basis of such distant reportage, but it is probably safe to say—taking into account later developments as well—that there were few people who were in their teens during the heyday of pulp fiction who were better qualified than John W. Campbell Jr. to become the most obsessive science fiction fan in the world.
In a previous article in this series I observed—somewhat controversially, it seems—that Hugo Gernsback’s credentials as “the father of science fiction” were acquired by virtue of a relatively casual act of procreation, and that he subsequently neglected the fledgling genre. Had the infant been left to fend for itself, it would have turned into an exact replica of all the other wayward kids on the same slummy block. We know this perfectly well because we know exactly what happened to the two ex-Gernsback magazines, Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, when the former fell into the care of Ray Palmer and the latter became Thrilling Wonder Stories, both featuring garish pulp adventure fiction aimed at unsophisticated teenagers. Their foster-parents were not to blame; Palmer and Leo Margulies were following the dictates of logic and nature—but their newer neighbor, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, did not go the same way. After a slightly shaky start, it was adopted by a father who was fully prepared, and fully equipped, to lavish far more consistent attention upon it than had ever been lavished upon him.
Hugo Gernsback might have been the bibliographical father of science fiction, but John W. Campbell Jr. was the man who fostered, raised it and educated it in his own image, taking the infant Astounding Stories of Super-Science and transforming it, by slow degrees, into Analog: the magazine for obsessive but speculatively-inclined engineers.
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After serving four years as a high-school misfit, John Campbell Jr. studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was already a regular reader of Amazing Stories and his imagination was greatly inspired by Edward E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space, which became a key model for his own early writings.
The first story Campbell that submitted to Amazing was accepted, but the typescript was lost. The second—the first of five stories he published in 1930—was “When the Atoms Failed”, a story in which the future use of atomic power is superseded by a technology of matter-destruction, whose practicability is proved by an electrical calculating machine. The bulk of the story consists of a lecture delivered by the protagonist to an admiring but scientifically naïve friend. A sequel, “The Metal Horde”, swiftly followed, similarly employing an alien invasion as the necessity that mothers the protagonist’s further inventions. “The Voice of the Void”, set ten billion years in the future, uses the cooling of the sun as the spur that drives humankind to perfect faster-than-light travel, although the species’ subsequent colonial endeavors bring it into conflict with sentient but immaterial “pools of force” nourished by atomic energy. Unlike the earlier stories, this was an exercise in exposition, whose subject-matter and manner both suggest that, if Campbell had not yet read Olaf Stapledon’s recently-published Last and First Men, then he had probably read its blueprint, J. B. S. Haldane’s fictionalized essay “The Last Judgment”.
Campbell did not reprint any of these three stories in his subsequent collections—although his other 1930 publications, the more orthodox space operas “Piracy Preferred” and “Solarite”, were reprinted along with a further sequel in The Black Star Passes—but between them they laid the groundwork for the greater part of his subsequent work. Although the space opera series begun with “Piracy Preferred” continued—escalating its scale with each new phase—in Islands of Space (1931) and Invaders from the Infinite (1932), it was his shorter stories that became and remained his primary laboratory of thought.
Campbell’s dependence on his writing income increased when he married Dona Stuart in 1931, shortly after being thrown out of MIT without a degree. Some of the stories he turned out in the next year or so, while completing his degree at Duke University, are utterly trivial, but ideative threads already anchored in “When the Atoms Failed” and “The Voice of the Void” were extended to a logical limit of sorts in “The Last Evolution” (1932), a quasi-Stapledonian story in which mankind’s heirs give an account of post-human evolution. Here, the pressure of alien assault results in the devastation of Earth’s ecosphere, leaving the war to be continued by intelligent machines far less frail than their organic makers—but these “beings of Metal” are superseded in their turn under the same evolutionary pressure, yielding to superior “beings of Force” which use “the ultimate energy of annihilating matter” to defeat the Outsiders. One of the machines, Roal, delivers a curious eulogy for mankind, and for organic life itself, suggesting that the end of life might have been “ordained” and “right” because Man, like all living things, was “a parasite” and “a makeshift” destined to be replaced by machines capable of truly independent existence and of directing their own evolution towards the production of the ultimate “beings of Force”.
The idea that immaterial entities of “pure force” or “pure thought” might be the end-point of all evolution was not original to Campbell—his hero, “Doc” Smith, had suggested it in Skylark Three (1930) and George Bernard Shaw had earlier employed it in the final act of Back to Methuselah—but Campbell formulated his own idea of the likely path and pressure of that evolution. The only element of his later obsessions that had yet to be given a foundation within his work was his fascination with “psi-powers”—but his displacement from MIT to Duke sent him to the arena of J. B. Rhine’s pioneering endeavors in experimental parapsychology, two years before Rhine published Extra-Sensory Perception.
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Campbell told Sam Moskowitz that his short fiction changed direction sharply after 1932 because he wanted to capture something of the tone of the elegiac opening chapter of a novel called The Red Gods Call by C. E. Scoggins. “Twilight” is a quasi-Stapledonian tale that differs from “The Voice of the Void” only in attempting a quasi-lyrical style, which is actually closer to Donald Wandrei’s attempts to write pastiches of Clark Ashton Smith than to Scoggins’ work. It is also close to the spirit of such British scientific romances as E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and S. Fowler Wright’s The New Gods Lead, imagining a degenerate future mankind enfeebled by dependence on the bounty of machines.
“Twilight” was rejected by all the sf magazines extant at the beginning of 1933, but it sold to F. Orlin Tremaine, who took over Astounding from Harry Bates later that year. It appeared there in 1934 under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart (adapted, of course, from the name of Campbell’s wife). Campbell also sold his new space opera, The Mightiest Machine, to Tremaine, but Tremaine rejected its sequels, and Don A. Stuart then became Campbell’s principal literary identity. Although he published more action-adventure stories under his own name in Amazing and Thrilling Wonder, the significant further evolution of his work took place under the pseudonym.
By the time he wrote “Night” (1935), in which the machines faithfully maintaining mankind’s degenerate descendants have taken up the torch of evolutionary progress, exactly as they had in “The Last Evolution”, Campbell had written half a dozen other Stuart stories. Two dealt with the theme of atomic power and one with eugenics, but the most significant comprised a trilogy reprinted in the collection Cloak of Aesir (1952) as “The Story of the Machine” (1935). Earth is here visited by a sentient machine that takes pseudo-parental control over humankind but subsequently abandons its charges, having realized that its protection is initiating the kind of degeneracy featured in “Twilight”. This abandonment leaves mankind at the mercy of more brutal alien masters, but that enslavement turns out to be a blessing in disguise, restoring the selective pressure necessary to reinvigorate the race.
The final foundation-stone was incorporated into Campbell’s canon by “Forgetfulness” (1937), a parable in which mankind’s star-strewn descendants rediscover Earth, but find its cities deserted and their former inhabitants seemingly degenerate. These “last men” have, however, cultivated powers of the mind that have allowed them to transcend their dependency on machines, sidestepping the patterns of “The Last Evolution” and “Night” to take a short cut—or a giant leap—toward their ultimate destiny. This was followed by “Out of Night” (1937), which compounded the two alien invasions of “The Story of the Machine” into one, offering an account of the liberation of mankind from the benign rule of the explicitly maternal Sarn by a symbolic shadow of self-determination.
While he was completing the framework in which his vision of man’s place in the cosmos—and the spectrum of evolutionary possibilities which lay before him—was securely set, Campbell went through a series of temporary jobs in research and technical writing. He found nothing to suit him until he was offered, in September 1937, what must have seemed to him to be the best job imaginable: assistant editor to F. Orlin Tremaine. Within a matter of months, he had inherited the editorial chair; Tremaine left in May 1938, shortly after Campbell had completed the most famous of all the Don A. Stuart stories, “Who Goes There?”—whose reputation was assured when it became the basis of the film The Thing. Here, the alien invader is unremittingly hostile and supremely dangerous, providing the ultimate challenge—and hence, of course, the ultimate test of human worthiness and capacity for progress.
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Several stories that Campbell wrote in the late 1930s remained unpublished for a long time. “Marooned” and “All” were reprinted with the title story in the posthumous collection The Space Beyond (1976). It is not entirely clear why these stories were not published when they were written, but it evidently had much to do with an eccentric Street & Smith prohibition on their editors doubling as fiction writers, either for themselves or for the competition—a prohibition that Campbell reluctantly accepted as the cost of his influence on and effective control of what other (mostly better) writers were doing. He did publish “Cloak of Aesir”—a sequel to “Out of Night”—in 1939, as Don A. Stuart’s last gasp, and was later to write “The Elder Gods” for Unknown when a gap was in urgent need of filling, but he respected the ban.
“Marooned” was originally signed Karl van Campen, and was a sequel to an earlier story written under that name, “The Irrelevant”, carrying forward a controversial argument regarding the inviolability of the law of conservation of energy. “The Space Beyond” was yet another space opera involving atomic power. Although both stories seemed remarkably crude by 1976, they would have been perfectly acceptable in 1938. It now seems beyond doubt that the Galaxy novel Empire (1951)—which carried Clifford Simak’s byline although Simak never included it in lists of his own works—was also a Campbell space opera left over from the 1930s. The remainder of Campbell’s acknowledged output consists of the short novel The Moon Is Hell, issued by Fantasy Press in 1951 not long after the same publisher had issued the previously-unpublished sequels to The Mightiest Machine as The Incredible Planet, and a story written for Raymond Healy’s 1954 anthology, 9 Tales of Space and Time. The fate of “All”—a tale in which a future totalitarian state imposed upon the Earth by Chinese conquerors is toppled by ingenious scientists disguised as priests and prophets of a new religion—indicated the manner in which his creative ingenuity would subsequently be employed; he gave it to Robert A. Heinlein and asked him to write it anew. It became Sixth Column, aka The Day After Tomorrow.
For the next thirty years, Campbell would feed his story ideas to his regular writers, demanding that they develop them. Among many others, he fed “Nightfall” to Isaac Asimov, “The Lion and the Lamb” to Fritz Leiber, and “To the Stars” to L. Ron Hubbard; Mack Reynolds has commented that taking on the duty of writing Campbell’s stories for him was virtually compulsory in the 1950s and 1960s if the magazine were to serve as one’s primary market (as it was for Randall Garrett, Christopher Anvil, and James H. Schmitz, as well as Reynolds). Campbell also felt free to demand that stories submitted to him be brought into line with his own ideas about their development; he surely ought to be reckoned a collaborator in the conclusions of such stories as Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God”, Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, Jack Williamson’s “...And Searching Mind”, and Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s They’d Rather be Right. To judge by the remainder of Frank Herbert’s output, Campbell must also deserve a great deal of credit for helping to hammer Dune into proper shape.
No other editor in the sf field has ever taken such an active interest in shaping the work he published. In frank contradiction to the approved methodology of magazine editorship in the 1930s—which held that one should employ seasoned professionals to pander as cleverly as possible to existing tastes—Campbell set out to build a team of new writers and to cultivate a new audience. Within three years of inheriting Tremaine’s chair he had formulated that team, including Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Eric Frank Russell, and Lester del Rey. When his employers encouraged him to use the seasoned hacks Arthur J. Burks and L. Ron Hubbard, he tried as hard as he could to re-educate them in the art of constructive speculative thinking—and, in the latter case, succeeded (far too well, alas). When America’s entry into World War II depleted his resources, he filled the gap by encouraging Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore to develop new identities, recruited George O. Smith, and persuaded Fritz Leiber—a natural fantasist if ever there was one—to turn his hand to serious sf.
Campbell had very definite ideas about what science fiction ought to become, and as soon as he took sole charge of Astounding he set out in his editorial writings to persuade the audience to follow him in his crusade. He was eventually to die in the job in 1971, after thirty-three years of full-time parenthood. His obsession with science fiction was subjected to only one slight divergence, when he founded Unknown, a fantasy magazine that permitted his writers to extrapolate—usually in a farcical spirit—premises far more fantastic than those licensed by the scientific world-view. It was fun, and had it endured, it might have killed the science fiction genre by demonstrating, long before the US paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings made the fact clear, that modern readers were perfectly happy to read fantasy, and that it had a far wider constituency of potential readers than sf. Fortunately for lovers of sf, the war forced a choice to be made in 1942, and Campbell was the man who had to make it; in those circumstances, no other outcome was possible.
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Although the science fiction genre was never entirely submissive to Campbell’s image of it, and began to diversify in directions of which he did not approve after 1950, it did so because the best of his rivals gave writers greater freedom than he was prepared to offer; no one else ever successfully adopted the kind of imperious role to which Campbell appointed himself, although feeble echoes of it can be detected in the careers of Donald A. Wollheim and Michael Moorcock. The science fiction genre grew away from the influence of Campbell’s parentage—as all children eventually grow away from the influence of their early environment—and developed all kinds of spontaneous traits, but he was the one man who left his educative stamp indelibly upon its spectrum and its scope.
When he was invited to provide a foreword for Groff Conklin’s pioneering hardcover anthology The Best of Science Fiction (1946), Campbell summarized his notion of what science fiction could and ought to do. He took aboard the Gernsbackian notion that sf could be prophetic—although he took care to insist that all its predictions were hypothetical and contingent—and he freely acknowledged that there was a thriving species of “adventure science fiction, wherein the action and the plot are the main point”, but his own emphasis was on the way that hypotheses were developed: “The modern science fiction writer doesn’t merely say ‘In about ten years we will have atomic weapons.’ He goes further: his primary interest is in what those weapons will do to political, economic and cultural structures of society.”
This was the heart of the Campbellian enterprise: science fiction was, for him, a kind of “analytical laboratory”, which ought to be as scrupulous as possible in trying to anticipate the myriad ways in which technological development would permit, encourage and force social change. In the process, he pointed out in that same foreword, sf stories could not help but touch on deep philosophical questions regarding man’s place in nature and his role in cosmic history. He had already worked out what the core questions were, and although he would henceforth address them obliquely, he never lost sight of them. There is a sense in which the entirety of Campbellian science fiction can be seen as a series of footnotes to “The Last Evolution” and “Forgetfulness”.
It is easy enough, looking back at the history of magazine science fiction from 1938 to 1970, to conclude that its central theme was the conquest of space. Donald A. Wollheim—another man who devoted his life to science fiction—observed in The Universe Makers that there had emerged within the genre a broad consensus regarding the likely future shape of human history, whose significant benchmarks extended from the first moon landings to the birth, growth and eventual decline of a galactic empire. It is, indeed, the case that the galactic empire became such a convenient framework for planetary and interplanetary romances—ranging from gaudily exotic adventure stories to extraordinarily elaborate contes philosophiques—that hundreds of writers were happy to take it for granted (thus establishing Isaac Asimov’s pioneering Foundation series as the core project of Campbell’s revamped Astounding Science Fiction and of the genre) but that future history, and its attendant myth of conquest, was always a means rather than an end. The fundamental question that Campbell bequeathed to the genre he adopted was whether humankind’s relationship with technology was fated to lead the species into terminal decadence.
Campbell concluded, almost as soon as he first set pen to paper, that there was a very strong likelihood that humankind would one day be superseded by intelligent machines, whose remotest ancestors were the electric “integraphs” employed at MIT in the late 1920s. He was prepared to wonder whether that would be any bad thing, if the machines themselves were to evolve, in the end, into godlike entities of “pure force”—but he was also prepared to wonder whether there might be a way of cutting out the middleman, so that humankind might find a more direct route to quasi-godhood. That seemed to him to be the preferable alternative, but he was prepared to give supposedly dispassionate consideration to any means that might hasten the ultimate end.
Campbell’s attitude to alien beings was, from the very beginning, deeply ambivalent; whereas most of his contemporaries were avid to befriend the nice aliens and annihilate the nasty ones, Campbell wondered whether the ones which sought to enslave or destroy us might actually be far more use to us in the long run than those which were sincerely benign. In Campbell’s view, mankind could not possibly hope to win the great game of evolutionary progress without honing his skills against top class opposition. Some have called this “human chauvinism”, and a few have thought it incipiently fascist, but Campbell—whose idea of the big picture had been formulated in “The Voice of the Void” and “The Last Evolution”—always thought that his opponents were too narrow-minded.
We can now see, of course, that the fundamental nexus of Campbellian ideas is seriously misguided, if not downright silly. Even if the idea of sentient creatures of “pure force” were imagined to retain some faint shadow of credibility, the idea that humankind might—under the right evolutionary spur—enjoy an evolutionary leap to a magically-sustained post-technological society is patently ridiculous. The fact that we can no longer maintain any serious belief in the galactic empire is merely corollary to these deeper absurdities.
The termites of reason have, by now, eaten out the entire structure of ideas supporting the house of Campbellian sf—but that does not necessarily make his quest any less heroic, or his achievements any less titanic. The one enduring legacy of his work that has not lost its value, and never will, is his insistence—embodied in the colophon of Analog—that the methodology of science fiction is analogous to the methodology of science, employing rational extrapolation to establish thought-experiments as thoroughly and as cleverly worked out as the writer can contrive.
To do that properly, of course, requires the kind of tight focus and obsessive analysis that Asperger’s Syndrome produces—but only those unlucky enough not to be possessed of that precious gift are likely to be resentful of the fact. Some lovers of the genre may regret that science fiction fans have acquired a reputation and an image that link them irredeemably to train-spotters and computer nerds, but there is no doubt at all that, out of all the literary genres available, science fiction—and Campbellian “hard” science fiction most of all—is the one that is most closely adapted to the needs and skills of dedicated engineers and their precocious children.