The Engines of the Night Read online

  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

  John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971

  CAMPBELL. WHEN I BEGAN TO READ SCIENCE FICTION in the fifties, he was the field, an autocratic figure synonymous with the genre and as inaccessible to a twelve-year-old as—well, as Heinlein, Asimov, or Duke Snider. I wrote him a couple of letters (I wrote the Duke a letter too) but received no reply (as with the Duke). Much later in the sixties when I started to write seriously in the field, he was already the living symbol of everything that I had to overcome to make a contribution. Nonetheless, my early stories went to him first and the rejection slips became a personal repudiation, stoking my rage. In the seventies I won the first award given in his name and the cries of pain resonated in his magazine for months thereafter. Still resonate. The point seemed to be that Beyond Apollo, a despairing novel about the collapse into madness of the first Venus Expedition, was not exactly the kind of material Campbell would have published. Full of sex and dirty words too. An insult to his memory.

  Everything that supersedes the dead must be an insult to their memory. The only real tribute—I know what I am talking about—would be for the world to end with them, and in a certain sense, with the large figures, it might. Beyond Apollo was, to me, a logical extension of John Campbell’s editorial vision of the forties: if his magazine had continued to move past 1950 as it had in the previous decade, my novel would have fit almost indistinguishably into the pages of the 1972 Analog. Nonetheless, if there is no real tribute to the dead, there is no arguing with them either; one can rave at them in the spaces of the night, prove one’s father a fool, demonstrate to an uncle that it never could have worked his way after 1963 . . . but the dead have no comment, the arguments rebound to the damaged self, there is no answer, Lear, never, never, never, never, never. To accept the idea of one’s death is at last to accept all the others and then after a long time the recrimination may end . . . but we never accept the idea of our own death, do we now, doctor? What do you think?

  I have only one Campbell story but I think it is a fairly good one and worth entering in the ephemeral permanence of these pages; I told it for the first time in Chicago in April 1973 when accepting the Campbell award, but I don’t think that anyone there got the point, least of all myself because it was many years later and in a different land before I understood, and now the wench is dead. (At least for me, alas. Generalizations are dangerous.) I met Campbell on June 18, 1969, a month and two days before the Apollo landing. As the newly installed volunteer editor of the SFWA Bulletin I had an excuse at last; I wanted to discuss “market trends,” I said to him over the phone. “All right,” he said, “same as ever though.” What I intended to do, of course, was to finally, after two decades, meet the man who had changed my life. I knew the stories, the sacred texts and the apocrypha; I certainly knew what had happened to him since the fifties but intellection is not to feeling formed . . . regardless of my shaky professionalism I came to that desk with awe. Trying not to show it, of course. I was there to go the full fifteen or die. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. I am the greatest / Just you wait / Big John Campbell/ Will fall in eight I might have gibbered if I had had a Bundini.

  I stayed with him in his office for three hours, fighting from the bell. Catherine Tarrant19 sat at her desk in the far corner typing and making notes and trying hard not to smile. A young man’s intensity can be a terrible thing to bear (for no one so much as the
young man himself) and I came off the chair right away, throwing jabs, pumping and puffing, slipping the phantom punches, going in desperately under the real ones.

  Not interested in market conditions, no sir. I wanted to know why Analog was the restrictive, right-wing, anti-literary publication that it had become. Didn’t Campbell care what all of the new writers, the purveyors of street fiction and venturesome prose, thought of him? “You’ve got to understand the human element here,” the young man said, “it’s not machinery, it’s people, people being consumed at the heart of these machines, onrushing technology, the loss of individuality, the loss of control, these are the issues that are going to matter in science fiction for the next fifty years. It’s got to explore the question of victimization.”

  “I’m not interested in victims,” Campbell said, “I’m interested in heroes. I have to be; science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out.”

  “But not everyone is a hero. Not everyone can solve problems—”

  “Those people aren’t the stuff of science fiction,” Campbell said. “If science fiction doesn’t deal with success or the road to success, then it isn’t science fiction at all.”

  Much later—after his death—it occurred to me that he must have been lonely in those last years. Many things had changed in and out of science fiction in the late sixties, the writers were spread all over the country and didn’t come up to the office much anymore, the old guard had very little to do with him, the new writers were with Carr and Knight, Ellison and Ernsberger. Fred Pohl was responsible for buying the first stories of most of the writers who in the sixties were to go on to careers; Campbell’s discoveries—he was still hospitable to unknowns—tended to stay in the magazine. If, like Norman Spinrad, they began to write a different kind of fiction and publish elsewhere, they were not welcomed back. At the time this seemed to be arrogance and editorial autocracy, but seen from Campbell’s side it could only have been reaction to ingratitude and perversity. Why weren’t his writers selling in the book markets and why did those who he broke in, so many of them, stop listening? It was very hard to handle and his sinusitis had turned to emphysema. Gout made him limp. Some fanzines were venomous.

  “Mainstream literature is about failure,” Campbell said, “a literature of defeat. Science fiction is challenge and discovery. We’re going to land on the moon in a month and it was science fiction which made all of that possible.” His face was alight. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he said. “Thank God I’m going to live to see it.” (He must have been thinking of Willy Ley, who had died just a few weeks before. Ley, the science columnist of Galaxy, had been with the German Rocketry Society in the thirties, had dedicated his working life to the vision of space travel. The timing of his death was cruel; even though they had been at odds for almost twenty years Campbell had gone to the funeral and been shattered.)

  “The moon landing isn’t science fiction. It comes from technological advance—”

  “There’s going to be a moon landing because of science fiction,” Campbell said. “There’s no argument.”

  Probably there wasn’t. (Most of the engineers and scientists on Apollo had credited their early interest in science to the reading of science fiction, which meant, for almost all of them, Astounding.) Still, the young man’s intensity had turned at last to wrath. Here was the living archetype of science fiction, right here, and he wasn’t reasonable.

  No, he was just a stubborn, close-minded, bigoted sixty-year-old who had endorsed Wallace in 1968, had said that the Chicago police hadn’t hit long or hard enough and was now pursuing dowsing as a legitimate research method. I lunged at him verbally. Engaged he lunged back. We argued civilization. The electoral process (Campbell thought most were too dumb to deserve the vote). The fall of cities, the collapse of postindustrial democracy because of the pervading effect of ideologies like Campbell’s. (“Good,” Campbell said, “we’ll find something better.”) The editor would not budge. Neither would the soon-to-be-editor emeritus of the SFWA Bulletin. It became, at great length, one o’clock. The young man twitched like an elongated White Rabbit. “Better go,” he said, “better go, it’s late. I’m late.” For nothing. But I would not presume on Campbell’s time further. Besides, it was time for his lunch. Besides, arguing with him had made me sick.

  “All right,” Campbell said. Much later too I realized that he might have wanted me to go out with him, but in light of the argument knew no way to ask. “Nice talking to you.”

  “Nice talking to you,” I said. “An honor.” I stood shakily, took his hand, shook it, nodded at Catherine Tarrant and stumbled down the corridor. Later I stood by the elevator bank at 420 Lexington Avenue and waited.

  For quite a long time. While I stood there, briefcase clutched, trying to straighten my tie with one hand (I was a self-important young fella) the fuller sense of the morning came over me. The schism between us, the irreparable distance, the sheer unreason of this man from whom I had learned so much, expected so much more. There were, if you considered it in one way, aspects of tragedy here.

  It should not have come to this; it was terribly sad. I began to shake with recrimination. It was wrong. This was not the way Campbell should have ended, the way it should have been the only time I met him—

  Still no elevator.

  Around a corner loomed suddenly the figure of John Campbell on his way either to or from—I surmised—the lavatory. He regarded me for a while. I looked back at him, shook my head, sighed, felt myself shaking as a sound of despair oinked out.

  A twinkle came into the Campbell eye as he surveyed it all.

  “Don’t worry about it, son,” he said judiciously. And kindly after a little pause. “I just like to shake ’em up.”

  So he did.

  And so do I try. Still.

  1980: New Jersey

  The Science Fiction of Science Fiction

  ROBERT SILVERBERG’S TWO 1970S STORIES, “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” (1972) and “Schwartz Between the Galaxies” (1973), are central to any analysis of the form; they are extremely important as works of literary criticism and may in that regard transcend their value as fiction (which is not to say that as fiction they are contemptible). Neither has received a great deal of attention; short stories in this category rarely do. Neither in my opinion has been properly understood, because to properly grasp these stories is, perhaps, to cease reading and writing science fiction. It is astonishing, a tribute to professionalism and the contradictory nature of the writers’ persona that Silverberg continued to write past these stories, and after a three-year pause seems to stand on the verge of yet another major career, his third in this field.

  (But this is not to single out Silverberg. My own 1973 Herovit’s World reads like the last will and testament of a bitterly exhausted writer about to quit science fiction; that posture did become mine for a time but only three years later. Between Herovit’s World and my public scream of pain I wrote more than fifteen additional science fiction novels and a hundred short stories. Persistence or the beckonings of the market, culture lag or most likely of all proof of Robert Sheckley’s aphorism: It is very hard to learn from something that we already know.)

  To jump the argument herein right to the end and to anticipate my conclusion (a habit quite common among writers who fear the point may otherwise wriggle off like a fish and evade them forever), what Silverberg is clearly saying in both “Schwartz” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” is that science fiction is doomed by its own nature and devices to be a second-rate form of literature. It can never aspire to the effects of the first rate, which are to break the reader (and writer) through to new levels of perception, to a reorganization of the materials of his life. It cannot do this because the purposes of science fiction, at the base, must work against this kind of heightening of insight, confrontation of self.

  Yet at the same time that both of these stories drive through
to the point conclusively, they are themselves very close to first-rate work. “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” is not science fiction (it is a literary story which incorporates the genre as a metaphor for the protagonist-narrator’s condition), but “Schwartz Between the Galaxies” is, and the fact that the latter at least can take the reader to a conclusion which the existence of the story denies is one of those large or little paradoxes not uncharacteristic of the field. The tension between what is said and what is meant—what is indicated and what is done. It is all of a mystery.

  “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” was published in Infinity Three, a long-departed volume of an extinct original anthology series (it reached five volumes; a sixth was compiled but never published) edited by Robert Hoskins. It is less a work of fiction than what the French might call a meditation: the nameless protagonist, employed in an unstated executive job in an anonymous corporation, discusses the role that his obsession with reading and collecting science fiction has imposed upon him. He is ambivalent about science fiction: on the one hand he feels that it is a carryover of adolescent escapism and fantasizing which, shamefully, he has not been able to put away; on the other he feels that the transcendent and predictive qualities of the genre grant him broader perspective than most of his friends in the corporate lower middle class. (But he feels vaguely embarrassed defending the genre to his friends and conceals his library.) He fornicates with a lady friend while watching the Apollo landing; the moment of orgasm, colliding with the first steps on the moon (a coincidence which would not work with ninety writers out of a hundred but which Silverberg makes appealing through dry understatement), yields only a sense of blankness, the same blankness which he feels at this culmination of the science-fictional vision. Old magazine covers and paragraphs from the classic stories drift through the protagonist’s mind toward sleep; he can chant the names of the greats and of their oeuvre. The story comes to no conclusion whatsoever but it is fair to say that if it had appeared in The New Yorker (where it would have fit in stylistically without a tremor) instead of Infinity it would have been taken as a perfectly turned template of late-century urban angst and loss as portrayed through the metaphor of escapist fiction. The story, one of Silverberg’s finest, has attracted virtually no attention, probably because it is not science fiction and its true audience (whatever that audience might be) has never found it.