Astounding Read online

  Dedication

  To Beatrix

  Epigraph

  I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger boy. But there’s more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. . . . So was I sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own?

  —URSULA K. LE GUIN, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

  We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

  —KURT VONNEGUT, JR., MOTHER NIGHT

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Asimov’s Sword

  Part I. Who Goes There? (1907–1937)

  1. The Boy from Another World (1910–1931)

  2. Three Against the Gods (1907–1935)

  3. Two Lost Souls (1931–1937)

  Part II. Golden Age (1937–1941)

  4. Brass Tacks (1937–1939)

  5. The Analytical Laboratory (1938–1940)

  6. In Times to Come (1939–1941)

  Part III. The Invaders (1941–1945)

  7. A Cold Fury (1941–1944)

  8. The War of Invention (1942–1944)

  9. From “Deadline” to Hiroshima (1944–1945)

  Part IV. The Double Minds (1945–1951)

  10. Black Magic and the Bomb (1945–1949)

  11. The Modern Science of Mental Health (1945–1950)

  12. The Dianetics Epidemic (1950–1951)

  Part V. The Last Evolution (1951–1971)

  13. A Fundamental Attack on the Problem (1951–1960)

  14. Strangers in a Strange Land (1951–1969)

  15. Twilight (1960–1971)

  Epilogue: Beyond This Horizon

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Asimov’s Sword

  My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. . . . Nevertheless, a meeting of such people may be desirable for reasons other than the act of creation itself. . . . If a single individual present . . . has a distinctly more commanding personality, he may well take over the conference and reduce the rest to little more than passive obedience. . . . The optimum number of the group would probably not be very high. I should guess that no more than five would be wanted.

  —ISAAC ASIMOV, “ON CREATIVITY”

  On June 13, 1963, New York University welcomed a hundred scientists to the Conference on Education for Creativity in the Sciences. The gathering, which lasted for three days, was the brainchild of the science advisor to President John F. Kennedy, who had pledged two years earlier to send a man to the moon. America was looking with mingled anxiety and anticipation toward the future, which seemed inseparable from its destiny as a nation. As the event’s organizer said in his introductory remarks, the challenge of tomorrow was clear: “That world will be more complex than it is today [and] will be changing more rapidly than now.”

  One of the attendees was Isaac Asimov, an associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University. At the age of forty-three, Asimov was not quite the celebrity he later became—he had yet to grow his trademark sideburns—but he was already the most famous science fiction author alive. He was revered within the genre for the Foundation trilogy and the stories collected under the title I, Robot, but he was better known to general readers for his works of nonfiction. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Asimov had been awakened to the importance of educating the next generation of scientists, and over the course of thirty books and counting, he had reinvented himself as the world’s best explainer.

  The day before the conference, Asimov had taken a bus from Boston to New York. It was a trip of over four hours, but he was afraid of flying, and he welcomed the chance to get out of the house—he was going through a difficult period in his marriage. On the morning of his departure, the papers carried photographs of the death of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đúc, who had set himself on fire in Saigon, and coverage of George Wallace, who had blocked a doorway at the University of Alabama to protest the registration of two black students. Just after midnight on June 12, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been shot in Mississippi, although his murder would not be widely reported until later that afternoon.

  Asimov followed the news closely, but on his arrival in New York, he was more concerned by the loss of a bankroll of two hundred dollars that he was carrying as emergency cash—“I just dropped it somewhere.” It left him distracted throughout the conference, and afterward, he remembered almost nothing about it. What he recalled most clearly was a discussion of the basic problem facing the scientists who had gathered there, which was how to identify children who had the potential to affect the future. If you could spot such promising students, you could give them the attention they needed while they were still young—but you had to find them first.

  It was a question of obvious significance, and it had particular resonance for Asimov. He had always thought of himself as a child prodigy—he had mixed feelings about entering middle age, noting that “there is no possibility of pretending to youth at forty”—and his life had been radically transformed by a mentor who had found him at just the right time. At the conference, he proposed what he felt was a practical test for recognizing creative youngsters, but no one else took it seriously.

  Two days after returning home to West Newton, Massachusetts, Asimov was asked to write an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the journal best known for its Doomsday Clock, a visual representation of the risk of nuclear war that currently stood at seven minutes to midnight. Asimov, who was deeply concerned by the bomb, decided to return to the idea that he had raised in New York. He went to work, typing away in his attic office, which had become a refuge from his unhappy personal life—his wife was talking openly about divorce, and he was worried about their son David, who seemed to have nothing in common with his famous father.

  Asimov began his essay, “The Sword of Achilles,” with an episode from the Trojan War. The Greeks desperately wanted to recruit the warrior Achilles, but his mother, Thetis, feared that he would die at Troy. To protect her son, she sent him to the island of Scyros, where he dressed as a woman and concealed himself among the ladies of the court. The clever Odysseus arrived in the guise of a merchant, laying out clothing and jewelry for the maidens to admire. Among the other goods, he hid a sword. Achilles seized and brandished it, giving himself away, and after being identified, he was persuaded to go to war.

  “Wars are different these days,” Asimov continued. “Both in wars against human enemies and in wars against the forces of nature, the crucial warriors now are our creative scientists.” It was a technological vision of American supremacy that Asimov had carried over from World War II, and it was about to be tested in Vietnam. For now, however, he only noted that while it was necessary to provide gifted students with ways to develop their creativity, it was too impractical and expensive to lavish the same resources on everyone.

  “What we need is a simple test, something as simple as the sword of Achilles,” Asimov wrote. “We want a measure that will serve, quickly and without ambiguity, to select the potentially creative from the general rank and file.” He then outlined what he saw as a useful method for finding the innovators of tomorrow. It was elegant and straightforward, and in the events of his own remarkable life, Asimov had witnessed its power firsthand: “I would like to suggest such a sword of Achilles. It is simply this: an interest in good science
fiction.”

  HALF A CENTURY LATER, SCIENCE FICTION HAS CONQUERED THE WORLD. ON THE SAME DAY THAT Asimov rode the bus down to New York, a huge crowd gathered at the Rivoli Theatre on Broadway for the premiere of Cleopatra, the Elizabeth Taylor epic that became the highest-grossing film of 1963. Today, the view from Hollywood has changed. For the last two decades, the most successful movie in any given year has nearly always featured elements of science fiction or fantasy, often refracted through the related medium of comic books, in what amounts to a universal language that can captivate or divert audiences worldwide.

  The same holds true for literature and television. By the early sixties, Asimov had sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, but he had never reached the bestseller lists. Nowadays, science fiction and fantasy fill the front tables of chain bookstores, and they make up much of the reading of the young adults of whom Asimov wrote in “The Sword of Achilles.” When his essay appeared, the first episode of Star Trek was three years away. The franchise created by Gene Roddenberry—who later became Asimov’s friend—is still thriving, and its successors on the networks, cable, and streaming services dominate the cultural conversation.

  In recent years, such movies as Interstellar and The Martian have made a conscious return to the values of what Asimov described as “good science fiction,” but their success would have been unimaginable when he wrote these words. Using the sales of his own books as a proxy, he estimated that just one out of every four hundred and fifty Americans was interested in science fiction. Today, it would be harder to find someone who wasn’t bombarded by it. The genre has been absorbed so completely into the mainstream that it can be easy to take its presence there for granted—or to forget that its most recognizable incarnation arose at a specific turning point in the thirties, when it seized hold of its readers and never let go.

  Despite its darker and dystopian streak, science fiction offers a vision of the world into which many fans still long to escape. It reached maturity at a time of economic depression and war, in which there was no guarantee that the future would be bright, and it was uniquely positioned to provide America with the new mythology—or religion—that it needed. This book is an attempt to figure out how this happened and what it means for us today, through the lives of a handful of extraordinary men and women who had an outsized influence on the outcome.

  By some definitions, science fiction is as old as Achilles himself. Even if we restrict it, as Asimov did, to “that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology,” it goes back as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with signal contributions from such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells. Its emergence as a viable genre was thanks largely to an immigrant from Luxembourg named Hugo Gernsback, who first published science fiction in the cheap magazines known as the pulps, culminating in the debut of Amazing Stories in 1926.

  These early stories were crude, but they fired up the imaginations of readers, and a vibrant fan culture was born, with dynamics strikingly like those of modern online communities. Toward the end of the thirties, fans who had grown up with science fiction became old enough to write for themselves, and unlike the mercenary authors of the earlier phase, they didn’t do it for the money, but out of love. Gradually, they built on the discoveries of their predecessors, and they pushed the field by trial and error into directions that no one could have foreseen.

  This advance would have occurred in one form or another, but it came to focus on the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, and in particular on its editor, who was nothing less than Asimov’s intellectual father. By the sixties, Asimov had grown apart from the mentor and friend whom he later called “the most powerful force in science fiction ever,” but he never forgot his debt to the man who had first thrust the sword of Achilles into his hands. His name was John W. Campbell, Jr.

  CAMPBELL NEVER BECAME AS FAMOUS AS MANY OF THE WRITERS HE PUBLISHED, BUT HE INFLUENCED the dreamlife of millions. For more than three decades, an unparalleled series of visions of the future passed through his tiny office in New York, where he inaugurated the main sequence of science fiction that runs through works from 2001 to Westworld. Despite his flaws, he deserves to be seen as one of the key cultural figures of the twentieth century, and his singular career—which has never been the subject of a full biography until now—is one of its great untold stories.

  He was born in Newark in 1910. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became one of the most popular authors of superscience, or space opera, cranking out futuristic pulp adventures that spanned the entire galaxy. His more mature stories—which he wrote under the pen name Don A. Stuart, in a tribute to his first wife, Doña—heralded the beginning of the genre’s modern age, and his most famous work, the novella “Who Goes There?,” would have been enough to ensure his immortality, if only through its multiple filmed adaptations as The Thing.

  By the time it appeared, Campbell had already moved away from writing. At twenty-seven, he landed the job as the editor of Astounding, stumbling into it almost by accident. He took control of the magazine just as fans were emerging as a formidable force in their own right, and he assumed the role of a gatekeeper who controlled access to the top of the genre, in which the pulps were the only game in town. Science fiction, which was still defining itself, was changed forever by his whims, prejudices, and private life. For more than thirty years, Campbell relentlessly worked a virtual staff of hundreds of writers, and they rewarded him with stories ranging from Asimov’s “Nightfall” to Frank Herbert’s Dune.

  Their peak became known as the golden age of science fiction, which ran roughly from 1939 to 1950—and Campbell was the most brilliant of them all. Asimov called him “the brain of the superorganism,” while the writer Harlan Ellison, one of his harshest critics, conceded that he was “the single most important formative force” in modern science fiction. He was synonymous with the genre, and his influence lasted long after his death in 1971. As a teenager in the seventies, Neil Gaiman paid more than he could afford for a box of old Astoundings, and decades later, when asked if Game of Thrones had been inspired by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, George R. R. Martin responded, “The Campbell that influenced me was John W., not Joseph.”

  If Campbell loomed large in the imaginations of his readers, he was even more daunting in person. He stood an inch over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, with sharp blue eyes and a black cigarette holder with a Chesterfield perpetually clutched in one hand. As a young man, he wore his light brown hair slicked back, emphasizing his aquiline profile, which bore a striking resemblance, he liked to say, to both Hermann Göring and the Shadow. In middle age, he switched to browline glasses and a crew cut, and he always struck others as huge. For much of his career, he was hated as much as he was loved, and he was inescapable even for writers he neglected, such as Ray Bradbury, who tried and failed repeatedly to break into the magazine.

  Science fiction might have evolved into a viable art form with or without Campbell, but his presence meant that it happened at a crucial time, and his true legacy lies in the specific shape that it took under his watch. Campbell had wanted to be an inventor or scientist, and when he found himself working as an editor instead, he redefined the pulps as a laboratory for ideas—improving the writing, developing talent, and handing out entire plots for stories. America’s future, by definition, was unknown, with a rate of change that would only increase. To prepare for this coming acceleration, he turned science fiction from a literature of escapism into a machine for generating analogies, which was why, in the sixties, he renamed the magazine Analog.

  He also expanded the range of the genre’s concerns. Before his editorship, most stories had centered on physics and engineering, but the rise of the Nazis led him to wonder if the study of civilization itself could be refined into a science. Working with Asimov, he developed the fictional field of psychohisto
ry, which could predict events for thousands of years in the future, and he openly dreamed of a similar revolution in psychology.

  After Hiroshima, history seemed on the verge of overtaking science fiction. With his audience looking to him for answers, Campbell felt that the next step was clear. His ultimate goal was to turn his writers and readers into a new kind of human being, exemplified by “the competent man,” who would lead in turn to the superman. As the atomic age dawned, nothing less than humanity’s survival seemed at stake, and Campbell teamed up with one of his own authors—L. Ron Hubbard—to achieve this transformation in the real world. But none of it went according to plan.

  CAMPBELL AND HIS THREE MOST IMPORTANT COLLABORATORS MET WHEN THEY WERE ALL YOUNG men. One was Hubbard, who seemed at first like an unlikely partner. In 1938, Hubbard was a successful pulp writer without any interest in science fiction, and he and the editor were paired up almost against their wills. They became friends, and a decade later, Hubbard approached Campbell with a new mental therapy that he claimed would turn psychology into an exact science. It was the expression of a longing inherent to the genre—many fans had always hoped that it would produce a major scientific discovery—and Campbell became the enthusiastic promoter and editor of the bestselling book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

  Their partnership collapsed after just one year, but they continued to affect each other from a distance. Campbell spent hours every night exploring the mysteries of the mind that dianetics had been unable to explain, while Hubbard inherited his original circle of followers from Astounding. He wasn’t a science fiction fan, but his disciples were, and in shaping his theories for his available audience, he emerged with the Church of Scientology, the doctrines of which rivaled the wildest excesses of space opera. Campbell despised it, but he grudgingly envied the cult that Hubbard had managed to create, with tens of thousands of members who still honor its founder as the most important human being of all time.