Back | Next
Contents

Wrong Rabbit

And here is A. J. Budrys, who should know better, in a fairly recent (May 1979) issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction discussing 1940s science fiction: "Modern science fiction as you know17 was marked by a verve we do not often see these days, fueled by a pervading technological optimism and a set of ethical assumptions slightly to the right of the John Birch credo. Might was not only right, it was moral . . . technological action—exploring the physical possibilities and applying deft means of conveying maximum comfort to the maximum number of individuals—offers the best hope . . ."

It may do all of that—in the world which technology has bequeathed, only technological action can accomplish change—but Budrys is wrong about the science fiction of Campbell's first decade, and before shibboleth passes all the way into law and the forties ASF is forever characterized as being packed by the Happy Engineer, I would like to, as the man said to the committee, try to set the record straight.

The Happy Engineer is one of the great uninvestigated myths of contemporary science fiction. (Another is that Astounding/Analog was/is devoted to stories whose background is "hard science" requiring "heavy tech," but that is next Sunday's text.) The truth, as any fresh confrontation of the material would certainly make clear, is that the forties ASF is filled with darkness, that the majority of its most successful and reprinted stories dealt with the bleakest implications of technology and that "modern" science fiction (defined by Budrys as that which originated with Campbell's editorship of Astounding given him in October 1937) rather than being a problem-solving literature was a literature of despair.

Only in the fifties as Campbell's vision locked and dystopia was encouraged by Horace Gold and Anthony Boucher did Astounding begin indeed to invite in the Happy Engineer: the complexities of Heinlein became the reflexive optimism of G. Harry Stine, Christopher Anvil, Eric Frank Russell (some of the time) and the somewhat more ambivalent optimism of Gordon R. Dickson, Poul Anderson, or Randall Garrett. It would not be difficult to argue that this represented a drift from the periphery of the forties ASF: the Venus Equilateral stories of George O. Smith, say, or the Bullard series of Malcolm Jameson.

But consider the text entire. The Kuttners from the outset of their career were publishing stories of complexity and pessimism: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" and "Shock" and "What You Need" and "When the Bough Breaks"18 and the (superficially humorous) "Gallegher" series in which a drunken inventor's drunken inventions went crazy. "Jesting Pilot" and "Private Eye" and "The Prisoner in the Skull" were grim and desperate visions of the (failed) efforts to maintain autonomy and compassion in the shining, uncontrollable future. Heinlein's "Universe" is one of the grimmest visions in the history of the field; a centuries-long starflight gone astray, a civilization of the descendants of the original crew stripped of memory and reduced to barbarism.

Asimov's "Nightfall," not the best but certainly the best-known story Campbell ever published, describes the collapse of a civilization into anarchy and madness; L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, a freehand template of World War II cast into an ambiguous future, depicts—as does Heinlein's Sixth Column—the use of the machineries of destruction to destroy linear cultural evolution. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" is a solipsistic nightmare cast as a time paradox story in which the protagonist cannot escape the simple and repeated loop of his life (and has for friendship only versions of himself). Van Vogt's work, from his first story "Black Destroyer" (a murderous alien loose on a spaceship kills most of the crew; the alien is in terrible emotional distress), put vision after horrid vision of the future into ASF, paranoid reaction toward militancy ("The Weapon Shops" series), the hopelessness of human evolution ("The Seesaw"), the collapse of causality (The World/The Players of Null-A).

In the wake of Hiroshima, Campbell published a series of apocalyptic stories (Kuttner's Tomorrow and Tomorrow & The Fairy Chessmen, Chan Davis's "The Nightmare," Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses") and post-apocalyptic speculations (Russell's "Metamorphosite," Kuttner's "Fury") in such profusion that at the world science fiction convention of 1947, at which he was guest of honor, he begged for the fans' indulgence at the profusion of despair, claiming that he could only publish what the writers were delivering . . . but he was sending out pleas to cease and desist. (The writers got the message, finally, and fled to Gold and Boucher as soon as they opened shop.)

It could be said that by making good on this pledge, shutting down certain themes and approaches rather than (as before) encouraging the writers to get the best version of their ideas, Campbell was taking the first steps in the decline of his editorship and that the fifties Astounding can be seen as the product of a man who, having faced the abyss, had decided that he wanted no part of it. Through the fifties the other major editors accommodated the underside . . . but it must be noted that Godwin's "The Cold Equations," the best-known ASF story of the fifties, as "Nightfall" was the best-known of the forties, was a stunning and despairing enactment (a little girl stows away in a one-man rocket that does not have sufficient fuel to carry her and is jettisoned) of the limitations of technology, the implacability of the universal condition.

Seeing "modern" science fiction as cheerful and brave, upstanding and problem-solving—and Budrys is only the best of the critics to have taken this line; only John Clute seems to have disdained it thus far—makes for easy history of course: the primitive twenties, wondrous and colorful thirties, systematized and optimistic forties, quiet and despairing fifties, fragmented and chaotic sixties, expressionless seventies . . . and history, as has been noted, is an inherently comforting study, demonstrating, if nothing else, a retrospective order to what was chaotic. A proof that, at least, we got through.

But the price we are paying for this misapprehension is too high. It makes us consider science fiction as one thing when from the very beginning it surely was another.

Which makes us the inheritors of what we can never know, adopted children, scurrying obsessively through the closed or closing files of headquarters, seeking evidence that even if retrieved will be meaningless.

 

1980: New Jersey

 

Back | Next
Framed