The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (102 page)

And yet, even this isn’t all that Joe is good for. It seems that the subconscious Gallegher has a yen for a singing partner. And the story ends with a drunken Gallegher sinking “Frankie and Johnnie” in a duet with his can opener.

This isn’t untypical of Gallegher’s solutions. In “Gallegher Plus” (the plus is his subconscious), he is being assailed by three different people who have hired him to solve their problems while he was drunk past the point of remembering. And the answer to all three of the problems turns out to be one machine. It is a dirt excavator, a hole maker. And the dirt that it eats, it converts into super-strong, super-fine wire which can be used variously as a manual spaceship control or as the basis for a three-dimensional TV screen.

It sings, too. The story ends with Gallegher—drunk, of course—harmonizing with this new machine on “St. James Infirmary.”

This year—1943—in which Kuttner and Moore were for a brief period the leading writers in
Astounding,
was the trippiest and most uncertain of the war. It might be compared to that deep dark moment in the midst of World War I when writers began to cut loose from old notions of a fixed reality and set forth to explore other realms of being.

By the middle of 1943, the initial thrusts of the Axis powers into Russia, North Africa and the Western Pacific had all become stalled, but the Allies had yet to take the offensive in the war and begin to force Germany, Italy and Japan out of the territories they had seized. During this temporary moment of stasis, with the immediate pressure to survive relieved but no end to the war yet in sight, there was space to catch a breath, but also an opportunity for strange thoughts to enter the mind.

The old familiar living patterns of the Western countries had been thoroughly disrupted by the demands of the war, and “normality”—whatever that might be—seemed a distant dream. It was at this hour that art forms of all kinds started to perceive the mind as a new unknown and began to probe its uncertainties.

People were ready to reach out and try new and weird states of mind. And non-rational states of mind were also ready to force themselves upon people’s attention.

As an example of this latter, we might consider the discovery in April 1943 of the mind-altering properties of LSD, the first man-made hallucinogenic drug.

In the years before the war, a young Swiss biochemist named Albert Hofmann had been doing research in the alkaloids of the poisonous fungus ergot. It was his hope to find a circulatory and respiratory stimulant which could be marketed by his employers, the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, Ltd.—and, indeed, he would eventually prove successful in this.

In 1938, Hofmann had synthesized d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, the twenty-fifth in a series of lysergic acid derivatives. But when animal experiments indicated that this wasn’t the drug he was seeking, he had set it aside.

Now, however, in the spring of 1943, he decided to prepare another batch of LSD-25. There was no pressing reason for him to do so. In fact, reflecting on the subject at a later time, Hofmann would say, “This was quite unusual; experimental substances, as a rule, were definitely stricken from the research program if once found to be lacking in pharmacological interest.”
⁸³²

What is more, in handling the substance, Hofmann suffered an uncharacteristic laboratory accident. While crystallizing LSD-25, he apparently got a trace of the substance on his fingers and it was absorbed through a cut in the skin. Very shortly, the chemist had to leave work and go home to cope with the effects of the world’s first acid trip.

To Hofmann, perhaps the most marvelous part of the whole affair was the minuteness of the dose that he took compared with the power this new drug had to affect his mind.

It would almost seem that LSD had nagged, schemed, shouted and pushed to force an awareness of its effects upon a heedless human intermediary—and that 1943 was somehow the appropriate moment for such a thing to happen.

Another example of a light suddenly dawning during 1943 where the powers of the non-rational mind are concerned may be drawn from the experience of A.E. van Vogt. Here was a writer who was strongly oriented toward the holistic function of the right brain—but who worked with excruciating slowness and who felt himself to be out of touch with his powers of intuition. Van Vogt wanted nothing more than to discover a system that would allow him regular contact with what he (like Padgett) thought of as the subconscious mind.

From the very beginning of his writing career, van Vogt had had repeated anxious moments when he would wake during the night not knowing where his current story was going next. He would lie awake and mull over the problems of the story until he fell back to sleep. But then, in the morning, a solution to the problem he had been so anxious about would suddenly come to him. He says, “All my best plot twists came in this way.”
⁸³³

However, it was only in July 1943, a dozen years after he first began writing stories, that the penny finally dropped and van Vogt at last became consciously aware that this same sequence of events had happened to him again and again. He immediately determined to induce it deliberately rather than accidentally, to force himself to lie awake thinking about his latest story and see whether an appropriate creative flash came to him the next day:

That night I got out our alarm clock, and moved into the spare bedroom. I set the alarm to ring in one and one-half hours. When it awakened me, I reset the alarm for another one and one-half hours, thought about the problems in the story I was working on—and fell asleep. I did that altogether four times during the night. And in the morning, there was the unusual solution, the strange plot twist. Exactly as when I had awakened from anxiety. So I had my system for getting to my subconscious mind. During the next seven years I awakened myself about three hundred nights a year four times a night.
⁸³⁴

Just as with Albert Hofmann and LSD, the basis for this breakthrough in consciousness had been there for years and years, right under van Vogt’s nose, before he finally took notice of it. But it was in 1943, that strange, unsettled time of mind, that the eyes of both men finally became opened to what they hadn’t been able to see before.

Astounding
would go through a series of physical changes during this same volatile year. The stimulus for its radical reconstruction would be government-imposed restrictions in the amount of paper available to magazine publishers.

In the year before the United States entered the war, there had been a great over-expansion in the number of science fiction magazines being published, followed by a severe die-back that left about a dozen titles at the end of 1941. Now, however, with the imposition of paper rationing, there would be a further die-off of SF pulp magazines. Only half-a-dozen titles would still survive by 1944, and to maximize sales, all would be quarterlies.

All of them, that is, but
Astounding.
It was a very different strategy that John Campbell would elect to follow.

The first decision that he made, in May 1943, was to change
Astounding
and
Unknown Worlds
from bedsheet size to pulp size—a slightly compressed pulp size, 7 by 9 1/2 inches, with too much type jammed onto each page, so that the magazine had an overcrowded look. Six issues of
Astounding
and three issues of
Unknown Worlds
would be published in this format.

Then, after the October 1943 issue of
Unknown Worlds,
the editor would make the decision to kill off his magazine of modern fantasy. It would be one of the SF magazines that was unable to survive the wartime paper crunch.

At the same time—after the October 1943 issue of
Astounding
—Campbell would change the dimensions of his science fiction magazine again, to so-called digest size, that is, the size of
Reader’s Digest,
5 1/2 by 8 inches. The result would be one dark, squat, ugly little magazine.

But it would still be a monthly. By appropriating the former paper budget of
Unknown
and by making this second reduction in the dimensions of
Astounding,
Campbell was able to hold his magazine to a monthly schedule at a time when other SF magazine publishers were deciding to keep more than one title alive but to publish each of these less frequently than before. What is more, because of its new smaller size, it was now
Astounding
which got placed at the front of the magazine rack, and the pulp magazines which were stuck away behind.

At last, Campbell’s magazine was effectively set apart from all the others!

In this new smaller size, the editor was even able to add an expanded science article section that was printed on paper of Sunday supplement quality, paper that would reproduce photographs. This increased concern for the presentation of actual leading-edge science may have been an attempt on Campbell’s part to compensate for the smaller proportion of science-based stories now appearing in
Astounding.

More and more, the leading edge stories in
Astounding
were based in transcendent consciousness rather than in transcendent science. A turning point may be seen in the October 1943 issue of
Astounding,
its last as a pulp-sized magazine. In this issue, whether by chance or by design, every one of the stories would be consciousness-based.

In the digest-sized
Astounding,
a number of writers would pick up themes that Lewis Padgett had presented in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and the Gallegher stories and enlarge upon them: the acceptance of the primacy of non-rational thought; toleration of aliens and robots and other creatures who would previously have been taken to be evolutionary competitors of mankind; and recognition of education in new forms of thought as the key to higher human development.

But Lewis Padgett would have no part to play in these explorations. At about the same time that
Astounding
was switching over to digest size, Henry Kuttner was drafted into the Army, despite a heart murmur, and made into a medical corpsman.

This was the man, we will remember, whose most fundamental belief was that all authority is dangerous, and that, bend though he might, he must never give in to it. It would take the Army a little more than a year to come to the conclusion that Kuttner was someone with a total inability to accept military discipline, and to give him a medical discharge on psychoneurotic grounds.

In the meantime, Lewis Padgett would be silent as a writer, and when he was able to return to work for Campbell at the beginning of 1945, it was to find that others had pressed on beyond his limits in dealing with the new reality. Kuttner and Moore would write well for Campbell, but never again as innovatively as in 1942 and 1943.

As an example of just how queer and non-scientific SF could be in
Astounding
in the last years of the war, we might look at the short story printed immediately before Lewis Padgett’s “The Proud Robot” in the October 1943 issue—Fredric Brown’s “Paradox Lost.”

Fredric Brown was born in Cincinnati on October 29, 1906. He was a student at two different colleges without being able to finish. He sold his first mystery story in 1936, but until he began publishing mystery novels after the war and was at last able to write full-time, he would earn his primary living as a proofreader for the
Milwaukee Journal
while turning out pulp magazine stories on the side.

Like Kuttner, Fredric Brown was another small, soft-spoken, hard-drinking man with a love for Lewis Carroll and doubts about the sufficiency of our ordinary notions of reality. Among his mystery novels would be one entitled
Night of the Jabberwock
(1950) that would lead off with the very same verse which figures so centrally in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.”

Brown found the plotting and writing of mystery stories extremely hard work, and turned to SF writing as a form of relief. He knew nothing and cared nothing about science. His SF stories would be primarily philosophical in nature, but with the philosophy made sweet and simple by means of cockeyed humor and a spare, highly readable pulp writing style.

His first SF story was “Not Yet the End” (
Captain Future,
Win 1941), but more than half of the stories that he published before the end of the war would appear in
Unknown
or
Astounding.
Altogether, about a quarter of his work, including five novels, would be science fiction.

In the introduction to his first collection of SF stories, Brown would say:

Science-fiction stories are the least painful of all stories for me to write and when I have put
THE END
on the final page of one, I feel greater satisfaction than with any other kind of story. . . . The important reason is that science-fiction, by giving greater scope to the imagination and by imposing fewer rules and limitations, comes closer than any other type of fiction to being honest writing.
⁸³⁵

Whatever rules and limitations science fiction did have would certainly be tested by “Paradox Lost,” the second story by Brown to be published in
Astounding.
As its title would suggest, it was an exercise in playfulness, full of humor, puns, paradox and uncertainty.

In this story, a paleontology student named Shorty McCabe is seated in the back row of a logic class in 1943, wondering what he is doing there. He has more interest in watching the erratic flight of a blue bottle fly than in listening to the professor.

As he is watching, the fly passes through a hole in reality and disappears. McCabe puts his hand into this space. When he brings it back, he can still feel with the hand, but he can no longer see it.

After determining the size and shape of the hole with a series of tossed paper clips, McCabe decides to follow his hand into the other space. He stands up in the aisle and finds himself elsewhere.

It is dark here, but a sneeze reveals that someone else is present. For this person, it apparently isn’t dark. Not only can he see McCabe, but he is also aware of what is going on back in the classroom—but in 1948. He is having a hoot listening to a professor tell a class that the dinosaurs died out because they got too large to keep themselves fed and starved to death. As far as the observer is concerned, that isn’t at all the way it happened.