The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (48 page)

Third, and by no means least important, was “Hezekiah Plantagenet.” This was the name of an oral round-robin game that de Camp had played as a boy and then came to introduce to the writers circle. In this game, one player would invent a terrific predicament for Hezekiah, the continuing hero, and then pass the story on. The challenge for the next person was to think of a way out—and then to imagine Hezekiah into a new and even tougher fix for the succeeding player to cope with.

But these science fiction writers were asked to play the game in science fiction terms. Hezekiah was to be opposed by a mad scientist, Homer Mifket. And however farfetched the problems posed and the solutions offered (and, by all means, the wilder the better) they were not allowed to run contrary to the known laws of nature.

Not only was this game of de Camp’s a great deal of fun and wonderful exercise in SFish one-upmanship, but it was also highly revealing of knowledge, attitude and character. It cannot have been altogether lost on Campbell that certain writers were just too old-fashioned, too lacking in contemporary scientific knowledge, or too slow to play the game well. Or, that whenever it seemed convenient to him, careless facile young Henry Kuttner might simply throw out something outrageous along the lines of, “Well, just then a hole in space happened along, and Hezekiah stepped into it”
³⁶⁴
—at least until he was hooted down by his fellows.

Most of all, however, it cannot have escaped Campbell’s attention that despite his impulses toward irreverence, L. Sprague de Camp was one SF writer willing and able to play strictly within the rules, paying all due respect to scientific law, and yet still able to be consistently inventive and amusing.

De Camp was a rebel within the law. And that made him just the man for Campbell.

If there was a fourth point of recommendation, it was that de Camp was available. De Camp had long been restive off in Scranton, feeling himself in exile there. At the end of 1937, he was glad to leave the place for another job as assistant editor of a fuel oil trade journal. After just a few months, however, de Camp’s new job was terminated in an economy measure and he found himself out of work.

Campbell’s need and de Camp’s need came together. In very short order de Camp would be a free-lance writer living in New York City, producing stories and essays for John Campbell.

It didn’t take Campbell long to see that de Camp had a highly developed sense of a universe of interconnection, a universe in which all things hang together. And Campbell was able to recognize this as the same in essence as the universe of his own vision—the universe of underlying operating principles.

De Camp became Campbell’s right-hand man. In 1938, Campbell would publish only three short stories and one article by de Camp. But in 1939, the figures would be two two-part articles, two novels, and six stories, and Campbell would also use de Camp as a script doctor to do a complete revision of another author’s not-quite-acceptable novel.

It would be hard to overstate the value de Camp held for Campbell in those early years. It was a complex and interrelated program of change that Campbell was attempting to engineer in
Astounding
through 1938 and 1939, and the writing that best exemplified the modern science fiction that Campbell was striving to bring into being was the work of L. Sprague de Camp. Until other writers finally showed up with their own versions of the new Atomic Age vision, it was de Camp who served as Campbell’s corroboration and proof.

We might think of Campbell as an architect designing and erecting a mighty building—a house of many mansions—within the conceptual space over which E.E. Smith had spread his tent during the Thirties, rendering formal and permanent what had previously been improvised and temporary. And the articles and stories that L. Sprague de Camp contributed to Campbell in 1938 and 1939 were the first pillar of this edifice.

In this work, de Camp set out to answer the evolutionary conundrum that had so baffled and dismayed the Age of Technology: What was the true position of man within the universe?

To the Techno Age, it had seemed pretty evident that the universe had no liking and little tolerance for man in his present form. It appeared that if man was to survive, he must evolve. If he did not, then he would certainly be subject to supersession by more nimble Earthly creatures like octopuses or ants, or to subjugation by more ruthless and advanced beings sweeping in from the reaches of time and space. But if man were to evolve—into the alien and monstrous Big Brain, say—would that not come at the complete cost of his precious humanity?

This was the puzzle that de Camp was attempting to challenge and answer. He aimed to make a natural place for humanity within the universe by redefining “man” and “universe” and “evolution,” and the connections between them, in the new terms of the Atomic Age vision.

For de Camp there was no longer a radical split between the Village and the World Beyond the Hill. No more was there a safe and tidy here-and-now that was completely known, completely controlled, and totally rational, which then stood in contrast to a wild and unfathomable out-there in which all familiar rules were suspended and anything at all might happen.

In de Camp’s writing, the universe was presented as a continuum, everywhere partly known, everywhere holding surprise. This may be seen in the articles that de Camp contributed to
Astounding.
Here he was at pains to demonstrate the familiarity that might be inherent in the strange and different—and also to show the difference that could lurk within the accepted and familiar.

That something as seemingly fixed and familiar as the language we speak and write and read might become strange to us was asserted in “Language for Time Travelers” (
Astounding,
July 1938), the initial article that de Camp contributed to Campbell. Here he pointed out that our own English language that we take for granted as stable and constant, in actual fact changes and evolves continually through time.

And the complementary thought, that even the most apparently alien of beings might actually prove to be familiar and comprehensible to us, was expressed in his next article, “Design for Life” (
Astounding,
May-June 1939), in which de Camp discussed the form that intelligent life must necessarily take from an engineering point of view. He came to the conclusion that “if intelligent life did develop on another planet, it is unlikely that it would look like a chrysanthemum, or a starfish, or a fire hydrant. There are good reasons for thinking that it would probably look something like a man.”
³⁶⁵

The effect of these articles—and de Camp’s next essay, “There Ain’t No Such!” (
Astounding,
Nov.-Dec. 1939), which discussed Earthly creatures as bizarre in appearance and habit as any alien being imagined by SF—was to suggest that the universe was of a common piece, that man was not out of place in the universe, and that evolution was not altogether strange and other, but was an everyday process of small increments of change in which mankind might already be participating without even being aware of it.

In the proto-ecological universe projected by de Camp, to be human was not some exclusive privilege of
Homo sapiens
—the special result of our possession of a rational soul and a personal relationship with God—but rather was a natural state of being which we might share with a wide variety of creatures. So it was that invading aliens in de Camp stories like “Divide and Rule” (
Unknown,
Apr.-May 1939) or “The Warrior Race” (
Astounding,
Oct. 1940) might fancy themselves to be innately superior to us, but then reveal what might be termed all-too-human frailty. Conversely, de Camp was capable of imagining what previously would have been thought of as lesser beings—a black bear experimentally raised to high intelligence in “The Command” (
Astounding,
Oct. 1938), a Neanderthal man surviving into the present day in “The Gnarly Man” (
Unknown,
June 1939), and a tribe of mutated baboons in “The Blue Giraffe” (
Astounding,
Aug. 1939)—and of portraying all of them as being as decent, rational and civilized as most men manage to be, and maybe even a bit more so.

De Camp was perfectly willing to concede that men of our own kind might still run afoul of the forces of evolution and pass from the scene. But if that were to happen, it would not be because evolution was some hostile outside force single-mindedly bent on bringing us down, but because we were so careless, stupid and greedy that we tripped ourselves up.

This may be seen in the short story “Living Fossil” (
Astounding,
Feb. 1939). Here, the intelligent 150-pound capuchin monkeys who have succeeded a devolved and nearly extinct mankind suggest that our fall came to pass not through the operation of some iron law of growth and decay, but rather as the result of a multiplicity of human failings, not the least of which was abuse of the environment.

As a monkey scientist puts it:

“We know that Man, during the period of his civilization, was prodigally wasteful of his resources. The exhaustion of the mineral oils is an example. And the world-wide extinction of the larger mammals at the close of the last ice age was probably his doing, at least in part. We’re sure that he was responsible for wiping out all the larger species of whales, and we suspect that he also killed off all but two of the twenty or more species of elephant that abounded at that time. Most of the large mammals of today have evolved in the last few million years from life forms that were small enough to sit in your hand in Man’s time.

“We don’t know just why he became extinct, or almost extinct. Perhaps a combination of war and disease did it. Perhaps the exhaustion of his resources had a share. You know what a hardboiled materialist I am in most things; but it always has seemed to me that it was a case of outraged nature taking its revenge. That’s not rational, but it’s the way I feel. And I’ve dedicated my life to seeing that we don’t make the same mistake.”
³⁶⁶

But for de Camp, mankind was by no means inevitably doomed. There was an obvious way forward, and that was for us to embrace nature, and not to rebel against it.

As early as his first story for Campbell, “Hyperpilosity” (
Astounding,
Apr. 1938), de Camp imagined a near-future world in which humanity has encountered a virus and suddenly sprouted fur. In Techno Age SF, human change of almost any kind had been perceived as inherently dangerous and destabilizing, the herald of coming decay. For those with this attitude, the growth of fur on human beings must be taken as a hideous sign of degeneration into animality.

Not so for de Camp, the dedicated debunker of Techno Age illusions. For him, fur on human beings was only a superficial change—something to laugh about, but nothing to get worked up over. Rather than resistance and denial, the course recommended by de Camp was adaptation to circumstances. In his story, the person who ultimately prospers in the new furry society is not the man who buys stock in hair remover, but rather the man who invests in currycombs.

In sum, the answer that de Camp presented to the evolutionary conundrum of the Techno Age in his early writing was this: The universe was not to be feared as fundamentally hostile and other. We ourselves were a natural product of that universe, so that even though we might discover much there that was strange to us, nothing that we would encounter was likely to be wholly alien. If we kept calm, used our science to learn the rules of the universe, and did what was appropriate at each turn, we could get along.

Here in de Camp’s work was essentially the same message as the message of “Who Goes There?” but laid out as a complete, carefully made argument without the vestiges of horror and hysteria that had marked Campbell’s story.

The science fiction short stories and the science articles that de Camp wrote during 1938 and 1939 helped to replace Techno Age emotionalism with a new tone of rationality and good humor. They made a strong case for the legitimacy, value and power of human nature. And they tended to suggest that immediate human survival and advancement would not come by way of evolution, which was a slow, gradual, long-term process that could be trusted to take care of itself, but rather through scientific progress, the cumulative mastery of universal operating principles.

Useful, even essential, as this early work was, however, it would not be de Camp’s most original and significant contribution to Campbell’s enterprise. This would come in the novels and short novels that he began to write both alone and collaboratively for
Unknown,
the new companion magazine of
Astounding.

This second magazine, which started publication in March 1939, was the true measure of John Campbell’s breadth and subtlety. It was the culmination of Campbell’s early editorial experiments with SF form and content.

Unknown
would be to
Astounding
something of what
All-Story
had once been to
Argosy
—a less dignified, less responsible and less respectable sibling. A place for SF writers to have some fun without being held to strict account for it.

In outward appearance,
Unknown
would seem not to be a magazine of science fiction at all—at least not science fiction as Hugo Gernsback might reckon it. Instead, it presented itself as a magazine of traditional fantasy, printing stories about gods, witches, genies, devils and gnomes.

But this appearance would be deceiving. To the degree that the fiction printed in
Unknown
might honestly be called a kind of fantasy, it was fantasy written as though it were a variant form of modern science fiction. The “magic” in
Unknown
would not be based upon
spirit,
as in traditional myth. Instead, it would come to be regarded as another kind of science, the result of the operation of alternative underlying operating principles—which L. Sprague de Camp and his collaborator Fletcher Pratt would call “the laws of magic.”
³⁶⁷

In fact, many of the stories printed in
Unknown
would bear little or no resemblance to traditional spirit-based fantasy. Rather, they would be contemporary SF stories with some impossible twist or odd assumption.