Seekers of Tomorrow (20 page)

Until now, almost all of Russell's plots had been carried along on a stream of physical action. In the short novel
Metamorphosite,
his sole contribution for 1946, which appeared in the December, 1946, astounding science-fic-tion, he constructed an absorbing plot in which a Galactic empire seeks to annex a world of apparent humanoids, only to learn, in a revelation ingeniously impacted by indirection, that evolution has made this impossible. As a result of this story, Russell's stock rose in the literary marketplace. Twist endings were a Russell specialty. He showed it again when Walter Gillings coaxed the Temple Bar Publishing Co. of London into getting out the first postwar British science-fiction magazine, with Russell's contribution,
Relic,
in the second (April, 1947) number. The mystery of a meteor-scarred spaceship which lands in England is solved when it released a robot, which after taking its bearing plunges into the ocean "returning to the Lemurians' Fathers' fathers."

Hobbyist
(astounding science-fiction, September, 1947) ended on an even more ironic note when a terrestrial and his pet macaw make a naturalist's study of a strange planet, departing unaware that a superior intelligence has duly re-corded both of them during a routine card-indexing of life on that world. Russell's most spectacular success in the forties proved to be the novel
Dreadful Sanctuary
(astounding science-fic-tion, June-August, 1948), built around the activities of The Normans, a secret society representing themselves as the only completely sane inhabitants of earth (all other races are the lunatics dumped here by other worlds). They are dedicated to sabotaging progress, fomenting wars, and generally creating hob, until such a time as natural evolution improves the breed. They turn out to be the true madmen, as might he surmised, and when they are deposed the way for the first landing on the moon is open. Well written and fast paced,
Dreadful Sanctuary
betokened the fact that Russell had writ-ten himself back into the front rank of science-fiction writ-ers.

Stories from his typewriter now began to increase in fre-quency, with emphasis on clever endings. A typical example was
U Turn,
published under the pen name of Duncan H. Munro in the April, 1950, astounding science-fiction, in which those who apply for euthanasia on a "perfect" but dull earth wind up as guinea pigs for matter transmitters, with survivors deposited as pioneers on Callisto. In these stories, Eric Frank Russell was, to some degree, writing for the market. This was not the case with
Dear Devil,
submitted to John W. Campbell for astounding early in 1950. Campbell returned it, suggesting some changes to strengthen the ending. Instead of obliging, Russell sent the story to Raymond A. Palmer, who had recently started a new science-fiction magazine in Chicago, other worlds science stories. As the cover story for the May, 1950, issue of that magazine,
Dear Devil
was most enthusiastically received and was nominated for the unofficial distinction of best novelette of the year.

"Dear Devil" is a Martian poet and artist who elects to stay behind when an exploring party finds Earth a war-blasted, nearly lifeless world. Hideously blue in color, with gigantic tentacles instead of hands, he overcomes the repug-nance of a group of deserted earth children in an exercise of kindness, and guides them as they grow up to build a new civilization. Related tenderly and compassionately, the story is one of the most effective calls for racial tolerance ever to appear, in or out of science fiction. Even more moving was
The Witness
in the September, 1951, other worlds science stories. An intelligent reptil-ian creature, which has landed from outer space on a farm, is put on trial as a menace to the human race. The legal twists through which prosecution makes innocent acts appear omi-nous are cleverly presented, as are the methods of the de-fense attorney, who shows the alien to be a telepathically en-dowed immature female of her species, fleeing from injustice and seeking asylum. The final passages contain great beauty of thought superbly handled.

The same theme of tolerance pervades
Fast Falls the Eventide
(astounding science-fiction, May 1952). In the distant future Earth has become a training school from which humans are sent by quota to live among diverse races of the galaxy, teaching by their very presence universal brother-hood, regardless of form. It has been suggested that this story, like
Dear Devil
and
The Witness,
is not actually a parable of racial tolerance at all, but merely an expression of Russell's encompassing love of most birds, animals, and even insects. Russell has admitted to having "friends" in his garden and to prolonged "discussions" with them. He has also let slip that he is frequently an object of suspicion at zoos. In the future of
Fast Falls the
Eventide,
even the insects have advanced in intelligence and listen intently if not comprehend-ingly to human talk directed at them. We read:

The children of this world were bugs.

And birds

And bipeds

Moth, magpies and man, all were related.

When Russell writes, "Thus it was in no way odd that Melisande should talk to a small beetle," he is writing of himself.

The concept that other forms of life are not inferior merely because they are different remains constant through-out Russell's writing. It is the central theme of the early story
The Prr-r-eet,
it appears in
Mana
and again in
The Eighth Wonder.
It even extends to a robot, such as Jay Score, and most certainly to his unusual Martian shipmates. It is the none-too-subtle message conveyed by the discovery of the telepathic power of camels in
Homo Saps
and is distinctly present in
The Hobbyist.
It is certainly Russell's point in the poignant
Postscript
(science-fiction plus, October, 1953), in which an old man finds he must adjust to the realization that a creature from a distant star system, with whom he has corresponded all his life and whose letters display an outlook of femininity, is actually a fungoid growth. Russell's total output across the years has not been great, though his most cherished ambition is to become a profes-sional writer. Yet he won a Hugo for the best short science-fiction story of 1955, presented at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention, September 3, 1955, for
Allamagoosa
(as-tounding science-fiction, May, 1955). And despite the limitations and diffuse spread of his output, Russell's influence has been substantial. For good or bad, the astonishing bulk of science fiction plastered around Fortean phenomena, and verging logically off into strange talents, stems from him. In fact, Russell virtually parodies the genre in his novel
The Star Watchers
(startling stories, November, 1951), which includes twelve major mutations each enjoying a variation in special powers. In addition, he has acted as a bridge to carry many of the ideas of Olaf Stapledon into the science-fiction magazines.

Most significant of all is the final impression the works give of the man. The display of outward toughness of manner, speech, and philosophy is a facade. A man who feels not only a reverence for but a communion with life, who transmits those feelings and with them his protests against prejudice in terms of poetry and parable—such a man is not a rational-ist.

The point is underscored in
I
Am Nothing,
where the dictator who has started a war for conquest and power reads the childish scrawl of an orphaned "enemy" girl: "I am nothing and nobody. My house went bang. My cat was stuck to a wall. I wanted to pull it off. They wouldn't let me. They threw it away." The dictator loses his appetite for the war and negotiates a peace. This is not an appeal from intellect to intellect. This is an appeal from emotion to emotion.

There have only been two humorists capable of effectively using satire who achieved their development in the science-fiction magazines. The first was Stanton A. Coblentz, intro-duced by amazing stories quarterly with his novel of Atlantis,
The Sunken World
(Summer, 1928), and the other was L. Sprague de Camp, who made his bow with
The Iso-linguals in
astounding stories for September, 1937. Coblentz, a poet and literary critic, did his best work from 1928 through 1935, particularly in the novel. Though at times he was crude and obvious,
After 12,000 Years, The Blue Barbarians, The Man from
Tomorrow,
and
In Caverns Below
have moments not only of hilarious satire but of real prophecy. De Camp's blend of humor and criticism was akin to Mark Twain's.
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court
served as the model for de Camp's most successful novel,
Lest Darkness Fall
(unknown, December, 1939). While de Camp acknowledged the shortcomings of our present civilization, he used satire to show that it was still better than any previous and possibly even better than most to come, and buttressed his opinion with impressive scholarship.

In
Lest Darkness Fall,
a lightning bolt sends archaeologist Martin Padway back to decadent Rome in the sixth century A.D. His attempts first to survive and then to use his scien-tific knowledge to halt the decline of Rome parallel the adventures of Twain's Yankee. De Camp's novel proved the most lighthearted exercise in the manner of Mark Twain since argosy began serialization of William Wallace Cook's
Marooned in 1492
in its December, 1904, issue. Others who wrote on this theme, such as Robert W. Chambers in
The Demoiselle d'Ys
(1895), A. Merritt in
Three Lines of Old French
(all story, August 9, 1919), and John L. Balderson and J. C. Squire in
Berkeley Square
(1928), dealt principally with romantic tragedy. Reference to the similarity of
Lest Darkness Fall
to
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court
did not bother de Camp (or hurt his popularity), but being labeled a satirist for this and other works elicited an incisive response.

"People sometimes accuse me of writing satire," he began in the introduction to his first short story collection,
The Wheels of If,
published by Shasta in 1948. "This, if not exactly a vile canard, is at least an inaccurate statement, because in the strict sense satire is ridiculing established conditions, conventions, or institutions by exaggeration or burlesque in the hope of changing them. In other words, it has social significance, which is just the thing I studiously avoid in my stories. These yarns are meant purely to amuse and entertain, and neither to instruct, nor to incite or im-prove."

Despite the fact that the family owned 20,000 acres in the Adirondacks (Herkimer County) which his father, Lyon de Camp, had inherited, Lyon Sprague de Camp was born in an apartment on 93rd Street, in congested New York City, November 27, 1907. The de Camps were not affluent, and the sale of parcels of land for the construction of summer camps as well as the ownership and operation of a sawmill were important sources of income. He was the first of three boys borne by his mother, Beatrice Sprague, daughter of the distinguished Civil War hero, educator, inventor, banker, economist, and linguist, Charles Ezra Sprague, founder of The School of Commerce at New York University, where a plaque has been erected in his memory.

The boy enjoyed his summers in the Adirondacks, canoe-ing around the swamps, digging up specimens and examining them under the microscope. His parents were practicing Episcopalians, which led to his being sent to Trinity School in New York because of its connection with that church. He was a difficult child, stubborn and insisting on his own way in everything. Figuring to take some of the contrariness out of him, the family decided to send him to an institution with military discipline, Snyder School in North Carolina. There young Sprague really ran into trouble. He was pre-cociously intellectual, already a master of the snide remark, and his tongue helped get him clobbered every day for ten years. Awkward and thin, he was an ineffective fighter and become a safe target for every bully on the campus. This perpetually humiliating personal agony described in
Judgment Day
(astounding science-fiction, August 1955), resulted in a protective veneer of unemotional impersonality which he found difficult to discard as he matured. He cultivated a smiling, agreeable manner but kept his feelings so well cov-ered that all but his close friends regarded him as cold.

He was a good student, but not an exceptional one. His earliest passion was the study of bugs. Later, he hoped to become a paleontologist. These were put aside to make way for the more practical prospects of aeronautical engineering, for which purpose he enrolled in the California Institute of Technology. He was delighted to find none of the persecu-tions of grade and high school in the intellectual atmosphere of the university and quickly achieved editorship of the college paper and even a small athletic distinction as a member of the fencing team.

When he graduated in 1930, he went to work with his father in the Adirondacks. The strenuous activity, including surveying, strengthened him physically. He decided to go for his Master's degree at Stevens Institute, Hoboken, New Jer-sey, and secured it in June, 1933, majoring in engineering and economics. His first job was with the Inventors Foundation Inc., Ho-boken, where he gave a course in patents for inventors. The school was taken over by the International Correspondence Schools, and he went to work for them in Scranton, Pennsyl-vania. When he resigned in 1937 he held the title of Principal of the School of Inventing and Patenting. Several years earlier he had collaborated with Alf K. Berle on a book which appeared as
Inventions and Their Management,
pub-lished by the International Textbook Co., Scranton, in 1937. This was his first professional work; a standard reference on the subject, it has gone through a number of revisions and editions since then, and has been cited in at least one Su-preme Court action. As early as 1936 he had attempted writing fiction. His first was
The Hairless Ones Come,
a prehistory tale eventually published in the January, 1939, issue of the short-lived golden fleece, though it had been rejected by several peri-odicals previous to that.