Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (43 page)

As is immediately evident from the above description, Smith and Garby thought big. Whatever the flaws of their story — and a modern reader will find many—Smith and Garby successfully conveyed the joy that comes from discovering something new, going someplace unfamiliar, and doing something exciting. Writing alone, Smith would provide several sequels to “The Skylark of Valeron,” all proving very popular with Amazing Stories’ readers, then in 1934 start a different series, the Lensman series, with the publication of “Triplanetary.” In 1941 the fan Wilson Tucker would call the fast-moving stories of Smith and his imitators “Space Opera,” an occasionally pejorative but generally affectionate term that played off popular slang (westerns were “horse operas”) and popular culture (sponsored serialized radio shows were “soap operas”) to describe a science fiction work of spectacle, action, simple emotions, dominant plot, and larger than life characters. Without Smith and Garby, Space Opera would certainly have come into existence, but it is Gernsback who recognized what Smith and Garby had to offer.

In early 1929, for reasons that are still debated, Gernsback declared bankruptcy and lost control of the Experimenter Publishing Company. He promptly established another publishing company, the Stellar Publishing Corp, and published Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories in mid-1929; the first lasted but 11 issues, the second, 12. (After Science Wonder Stories was renamed Wonder Stories, it lasted 66 issues.) In addition, there was a Wonder Stories Quarterly, established in the Summer of 1930, which lasted some 11 issues. Many of the writers who first appeared in Gernsback’s Amazing Stories continued to appear there, for the magazine’s new editor, the elderly T. O’Conor Sloane, continued Gernsback’s editorial vision, but these writers also began to appear in Gernsback’s new magazines. One could thus continue to find stories by M. John Brueur, Clare Winger Harris, J. Harvey Haggard, P. Schuyler Miller, David H. Keller, and Jack Williamson, as well as such new names as Nat Schachner, Morrison Colladay, Henrik Dahl Juve, Ed Earl Repp, Edsel Newton, Clifford Simak, and Leslie F. Stone. All became names recognized by science fiction readers, as did Clark Ashton Smith, who was probably familiar to many for his work in Weird Tales.

Of all the new names who began to appear in the new magazines, the most significant was unquestionably a young man with a degree in physics from Duke University, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell began his writing career with “When the Atoms Failed,” published in the January 1930 Amazing Stories. The story of a scientific genius whose brilliant inventions allow him to repel a Martian invasion singlehandedly, “When the Atoms Failed” was sufficiently popular that Campbell wrote a sequel, “The Metal Horde” (Amazing Stories, April 1930), which utilizes many of the same characters, this time engaging them in repelling an invasion of mechanical brains from Sirius. Campbell was to follow these stories with additional series, most popular of which were the five stories that featured Richard Arcot, William Morey, and Wade, whose adventures started with “Piracy Preferred” in the June 1930 Amazing Stories.

John W. Campbell rapidly became one of the two most popular writers of Space Opera in Gernsback’s science fiction magazines, the other of course being E. E. Smith, Ph.D. Campbell excelled at presenting the odder aspects of contemporary science and technology, and although his stories could (and did) flag when the characters stopped to reflect upon what had occurred or to explain the ways in which technology could be adapted to stop the seemingly unstoppable and defeat the seemingly invulnerable, his readers could forgive him.

In 1937, the publishers of Astounding Stories— Amazing Stories’ chief rival—offered the young John W. Campbell the editorship of the magazine, succeeding first editor F. Orlin Tremaine. Campbell accepted, effectively ending his career as a science fiction writer but starting a long career as an influential editor. Nevertheless, even before he became editor, Campbell had roundly rejected Gernsback’s editorial tenets, stating in a 1937 speech at the World Science Fiction Conference that “science-fiction is not an educational force—it never has been, and I don’t think that it ever can be one. But it can consist of good stories, with really human characters, and not inhuman combinations of Albert Einstein and Saint Augustine.” Thus, from his earliest days as editor, Campbell stressed believable characterizations, scientific accuracy, literary merit, and logical extrapolations, and he was not averse to returning stories to be rewritten according to his dicta. Astounding Stories had thrived under Tremaine’s editorship, and under Campbell’s control it rapidly became the premier market for science fiction writers: but very few of Gernsback’s writers were ever able to crack this market. Furthermore, in April 1938, young Raymond A. Palmer became editor of Amazing Stories, and he immediately revamped and remade the magazine, rejecting almost all of the authors accepted by T. O’Conor Sloane.

With the advent of Campbell as editor of Astounding Stories, American magazine science fiction had entered what is commonly called its Golden Age. The majority of Gernsback’s writers, no longer having a market in Amazing Stories and unable to make the transition to Astounding Stories, were rapidly forgotten. Gernsback continued to associate with the fields he had helped establish, and later in life he received numerous honors for his work in radio broadcasting. He remained interested in science fiction magazines and in 1953 launched Science Fiction Plus; it had little to offer and lasted but seven issues. He remained a presence at science fiction conventions, and in 1953 science fiction fans honored him when they began awarding the Hugo award for creative endeavours. Gernsback was in 1960 awarded an honorary Hugo as “The Father of Magazine Science Fiction.” He died in 1967.

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Richard Bleiler
is the Humanities Librarian at the University of Connecticut.

(1885–1930)

Born a coal miner’s son in Nottinghamshire, D. H. Lawrence was an unconventional writer, which contributed to a life of constant struggles: with publishers and authorities (who accused him of obscenity); with finances; with friends and relationships; and with his always-precarious health. To some degree, he welcomed that struggle. Lawrence was always moving from place to place, wandering across Europe, Asia, Australia, and the United States and then back again as he became estranged from different places. He befriended people everywhere, and those friendships devolved into quarrels and betrayals. The woman he married (who was married to someone else and had three small children when they met) he described as “the one possible woman for me, for I must have opposition—something to fight.” While he is mostly remembered for his novels, particularly Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he was a prolific poet and essayist as well. This series of poems on science fictional themes was completed shortly before his death from tuberculosis, and published posthumously.

First published in More Pansies, 1932

FUTURE STATES

Once men touch one another, then the modern industrial form of machine civilisation will melt away

and universalism and cosmopolitanism will cease;

the great movement of centralising into oneness will stop

and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness;

many vivid small states, like a keleidoscope, all colours

and all the differences given expression.

FUTURE WAR

After our industrial civilisation has broken, and the civilisation of touch has begun

war will cease, there will be no more wars.

The heart of man, in so far as it is budding, is budding warless

and budding towards infinite variety, variegation

and where there is infinite variety, there is no interest in war.

Oneness makes war, and the obsession of oneness.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE MACHINE

They talk of the triumph of the machine,

but the machine will never triumph.

Out of the thousands and thousands of centuries of man

the unrolling of ferns, white tongues of the acanthus lapping at the sun,

for one sad century

machines have triumphed, rolled us hither and thither,

shaking the lark’s nest till the eggs have broken.

Shaken the marshes, till the geese have gone

and the wild swans flown away singing the swan-song of us.

Hard, hard on the earth the machines are rolling,

But through some hearts they will never roll.

The lark nests in his heart

and the white swan swims in the marshes of his loins,

and through the wide prairie of his breast a young bull herds his cows,

lambs frisk among the daisies of his brain.

And at last

all these creatures that cannot die, driven back

into the uttermost corners of the soul,

will send up the wild cry of despair.

The trilling lark in a wild despair will trill down arrows from the sky,

the swan will beat the waters in rage, white rage of an enraged swan,

even the lambs will stretch forth their necks like serpents,

like snakes of hate, against the man in the machine:

even the shaking white poplar will dazzle like splinters of glass against him.

And against this inward revolt of the native creatures of the soul

mechanical man, in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine

will be powerless, for no engine can reach into the marshes and depths of a man.

So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine

will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day

the machines will turn to run into one another

traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out crash of collision

and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life

will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down.

Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate, remote places

the swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head

and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his wings

will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky glitter of a new day

and the lark will follow trilling, angerless again,

and the lambs will bite off the heads of the daisies for very friskiness.

But over the middle of the earth will be the smoky ruin of iron

the triumph of the machine.

SEA-BATHERS

Oh the handsome bluey-brown bodies, they might just as well be gutta-percha,

and the reddened limbs red india-rubber tubing, inflated,

and the half-hidden private parts just a little brass tap, robinetto,

turned on for different purposes.

They call it health; it looks like nullity.

Only here and there a pair of eyes, haunted, stares out as if asking:

Where then is life?

Men Like Gods

Men wanted to be like gods

so they became like machines

and now even they’re not satisfied.

MAN AND MACHINE

Man invented the machine

and now the machine has invented man.

God the Father is a dynamo

and God the Son a talking radio

and God the Holy Ghost is gas that keeps it all going.

And men have perforce to be little dynamos

and little talking radios

and the human spirit is so much gas, to keep it all going.

Man invented the machine

so now the machine has invented man.

OH WONDERFUL MACHINE!

Oh wonderful machine, so self-sufficient, so sufficient unto yourself!

You who have no feeling of the moon as she changes her quarters!

You who don’t hear the sea’s uneasiness!

You to whom the sun is merely something that makes the thermometer rise!

Oh wonderful machine, you who are man’s idea of godliness,

you who feel nothing, who know nothing, who run on absolved

from any other connection!

Oh you godly and smooth machine, spinning on in your own Nirvana,

turning the blue wheels of your own heaven

almighty machine

how is it you have to be looked after by some knock-kneed wretch at two pounds a week?

Oh great god of the machine

what lousy angels and archangels you have to surround yourself with!

And you can’t possibly do without them!

ROBOT FEELINGS

It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street

is a robot, and incapable of love

he is capable of an endless grinding, nihilistic hate:

that is the only strong feeling he is capable of;

and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street,

they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.

ROBOT-DEMOCRACY

In a robot-democracy, nobody is willing to serve

even work is unwilling, the worker is unwilling,

unwilling.

The great grind of unwillingness, the slow undergrind of hate

and democracy is ground into dust

then the mill-stones burst with the internal heat of their own friction.

WELLSIAN FUTURES

When men are made in bottles

and emerge as squeaky globules with no bodies to speak of,

and therefore nothing to have feelings with,

they will still squeak intensely about their feelings

and be prepared to kill you if you say they’ve got none.

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Copyright © 1932 by D. H. Lawrence. Reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.