Third Lecture

So far we've tracked science fiction (mostly in America) up to the Second World War. This period is also John W. Campbell Jr.'s halcyon as a distinct influence in the field. Indeed, this influence still persists today and can be found in the "hard science" science fiction of writers such as Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter and (the-still-alive-as-I-write-this) Arthur C. Clarke. I've also spoken of both Heinlein and Asimov as the quintessential Campbellians of this period. For most of World War II, in fact, Astounding was the place to publish literate science fiction even if all the other SF pulps-Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Super Science Fiction, Startling Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories and a host of others-were all going full tilt.

Also at this time, the space art of Chesley Bonestell began to appear. Bonestell's art appeared on the covers of Life Magazine as well as Astounding Science Fiction and F&SF throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Click on the image for just one site devoted to the space art of Chesley Bonestell.

The next few changes to the science fiction genre happened as a direct result of World War II. The first major development was the rise in inflation caused directly by the accelerated pace of wartime needs of the nation. This, in turn, led to a rise in the price of most of the magazines of the era, including the pulps, even if the discretionary income of the average American hadn't kept pace with the rise of the prices of consumer goods. Pulps began to go up a nickel here, a dime there, and by 1946 many pulps were now selling for twenty-five cents where in the mid-Thirties they were selling for ten or twenty cents. And while the war effort employed those Americans who wanted employment (as opposed to those Americans who, during the Great Depression, couldn't find employment no matter how hard they tried), there was even less money in an average household to be spent on recreational reading material. Though radio shows were as popular as ever, movies were beginning their ascendancy as America's favorite form of mass entertainment. And these still remained very affordable. But the dime you'd have earlier spent on a pulp magazine now went to the Saturday morning matinee at the local theater.

Art deco architecture and design have been popular in the United States since it was first introduced to the world at a Paris art exhibition in 1925. Next time you're in Santa Monica, take a look around you.

Magazines and newspapers also had to face the paper shortages brought about by the war. Print runs of the pulp magazines began to shrink and in 1943, Street and Smith, who published The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Astounding Science Fiction, began publishing their magazines in a smaller, "digest" format (approximately 5 1/2 inches by 7 1/2 inches in size), the size TV Guide is today.

While this was done to help the war effort, it also effected sales, even if other SF pulps did not undergo this same downsizing. Still, many of the most popular pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s had finally gone out of print by 1945 (the gangster, aviation and war pulps particularly). Most of the science fiction pulps, however, did stay in print well into the 1950s. Amazing Stories, Future Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Planet Stories were among the survivors. However, these pulps tended to publish stories of a more garish "comic book" nature than anything else and their covers became more and more campy, trying to appeal to SF's new, young audience.

Which brings us to the other factor that helped destroy the pulps: the onset of comic books.

The science fiction pulps had always had a young readership, but much of that readership was forever torn away from the pulps when comic books began publishing the adventures of superhero characters in 1939. Comic books evolved from the "funnies" and were reprints that first appeared in the Sunday papers across the country. A few companies began publishing them alone and in color in the late 1920s. Among these were Jungle Jim, Blondie, Krazy Kat, Polly & Her Pals, Barney Google, Tillie the Toiler, and Little Jimmie. But the "Golden Age" of comics doesn't really begin until Superman and Batman came along.

Superman (based on Doc Savage) appeared in Action Comics in June 1938 and Batman (a pastiche of The Shadow, the Spider and a detective called the Black Bat) appeared in May of 1939 in Detective Comics. Originally, however, Action Comics and Detective Comics were just comic-book renditions of pulp magazine stories of crooks, gangsters, and private detectives until they featured Superman in Action Comics and Batman in Detective Comics. They never looked back and the "detective" story, as such, never took hold in comics (unless the detective was wearing a cowl, cape and had a belt full of goodies).

The Marvel Comics line appeared soon thereafter. Marvel Comics started out in the late 1930s as Timely Comics under the helm of Martin Goodman. Employing the talents of a very young Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Marvel created bizarre science fictional characters such as the android Human Torch, the underwater monarch Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, and the scientifically-altered Captain America in the early 1940s.

These titles, and many more like them, stole both money and readership away from the pulps for as long as World War II lasted (they were also a great source of war propaganda). Comics were also easier to carry, easier to store-and easier to hide from Mom. They also used less paper per issue than pulp magazines, thus were less susceptible to the paper drives that crippled the pulp industry.

By the late 1940s most of the 1000 or so pulp magazines that had been published since the late 1890s had perished. Indeed, the forces of postwar inflation had also crippled the new comic genre. Even though comics--especially those with superheroes--sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies per issue, by the end of the 1940s very few comics had survived the decade. There were just too many of them. In comics, the Golden Age goes from 1938 to 1955. By then, the pulps were long dead and the few superhero comics left were sputtering along sustained only by Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and Blackhawk. Captain Marvel, however, soon disappeared when National DC sued the publishers of Captain Marvel for copyright infringement. They claimed that Captain Marvel was just a different version of Superman. Ironically, Captain Marvel later reappeared as a member of the DC universe.

Comics themselves began to lose their appeal in the early 1950s until National DC comics, home of Superman and Batman published a revamped Flash character in an issue of Showcase Comics in 1956. That one issue is considered by many to be as valuable as the first appearances of Superman and Batman in the late 1930 and it captured the youth market (mostly young white middle-class males) that pulp adventure magazines had captured only twenty years earlier.

This is an Alex Ross depiction of the modern-day Flash based on the Fifties version drawn by Carmine Infantino.

As if comics weren't enough of a threat to pulp science fiction, the late 1940s saw the first appearances of paperbacks. Cheap, easy to carry books made entirely of paper (without boards) go all the way back to the Renaissance in Italy. However, after World War II paperbacks became the reading venue of choice for most kinds of fiction, fiction that in just a decade earlier was published in the pages of pulp magazines. As mentioned in the last lecture, many pulps, particularly the hero pulps-Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, etc.-all had a single novel contained within each issue. These issues also contained "filler" material, usually three to four short stories or features. Paperback books did without the features and had the extra added attraction of being about the same price as a pulp magazine (then about 25 cents), but much more portable and durable. Indeed, these early paperbacks often contained the same lurid content of many of the "adult" pulps and nowadays fall under a category bookseller's call "sleaze" for all sorts of obvious reasons.

The paperback industry, though, also allowed writers who formerly made money by writing fast and furiously for the pulps to branch out into the bigger market of paperbacks and make much more money. (The Beatles satirize this trend in their song "Paperback Writer".) Mainstream writers, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and John O'Hara--to name just three--could also make a living from books formerly available only in hardbound versions. This also changed the landscape of bookselling itself. (Remember nothing exists in our culture in isolation. Everything is connected.) Gone were the giant magazine and newspaper stands of the Thirties and Forties and along came actual bookstores. Believe it or not, before 1950, bookstores were isolated affairs. There were no chains and books were mostly sold in department stores. Paperbacks also could be sold in narrow stand-alone racks and began appearing everywhere just about anything was sold.

These early paperbacks covered all the genre fiction markets created by the pulps with the only true exception being the sports fiction pulps. The readership for sports fiction virtually evaporated after World War II. Today it's hard to imagine a novel-length story published in Sports Illustrated. In fact most sports fans in this day and age would have no interest whatsoever in reading a magazine filled with sports fiction. But for a short time, readers in the 1930s couldn't get enough of sports action and would take it in any form they could get it. We get our action these days from television and moives. That particular pulp market was killed by television and has never recovered.

Dozens of sports pulps that thrived in the 1930s. Sports fiction, beyond the baseball novel, in virtually unheard of in this day and age. It is arguable that the average sports fan, anymore, doesn't have the patience for sports narratives that the common reader in the Great Depression had.

Of course science fiction comics thrived during the early 1950s both at National DC (home of Superman and Batman) and at Marvel (soon to be home of the Fantastic Four and Spiderman). But as readers matured, they had to turn to paperbacks to get their science fiction fix, as only Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Planet Stories survived into the 1950s.

Mystery in Space would soon become home to Adam Strange and Strange Adventures would later publish the first appearances of Deadman, Animal Man, the Atomic Knights and Carmine Infantino's extraordinary "Space Museum" stories.

Journey into Mystery would later contain Marvel's first stories featuring Thor. Tales to Astonish would harbor first Ant Man, then Giant Man, then The Wasp and God knows what all. Tales of Suspense is known for its creation of Iron Man, one of Marvel Comic's most enduring characters. As a side note, the covers here all happen to be drawn by Steve Ditko who is now considered to be one of the greatest comic artists who have ever put pen to paper. He and Stan Lee brought Spiderman to life in the mid-Sixties.

Still, Astounding Science Fiction thrived. One reason for this was that John W. Campbell kept the tone of the magazine serious. Court jesters did emerge in the pages of Astounding-Eric Frank Russell early on and Harry Harrison later on were the best of them-but by and large Campbell kept his whimsical stories to a minimum. The world of the mid- to late-1940s was still a serious place. Satire would come to the field later, but rarely in the pages of Astounding. Campbell was a practical man and the stories he published in Astounding reflected his no-nonsense view of science and the universe at large.

As we will see later in this section, Campbell's editorial biases will have its limits and other editors will be more flexible in allowing other perspectives, particularly during the early 1950s. Even so, the authors we've so far explored continue with their careers as World War II comes to an end. Though Heinlein's writing went into hiatus during the war (Heinlein, a career navy man, returned to work for the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia for the duration of the war) Asimov, Van Vogt, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Jack Williamson, among others, continued to flourish in the pages of Astounding.

One of SF's most beloved writers and a Campbell protégé, Clifford D. Simak, had begun publishing westerns in the early 1930s, but gave it up when Campbell encouraged him to pen science fiction stories for Astounding. Simak, a lifelong newspaper man-he was an editor until he retired with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune-only wrote SF as a hobby. But what a hobby. When Simak's career took off in the 1950s, the general readership never realized that writing SF wasn't Simak's main source of income. His production of stories was moderate but of a general high quality throughout his career. Simak has often been called SF's greatest writer of "pastoral" science fiction. Many of his stories take place on farms or in the Midwest, or on planets that resembled farms of the Midwest. (Ray Bradbury has this proclivity as well. His Martian Chronicles and many of his fantasy stories, particularly Something Wicked This Way Comes take place in a world resembling Greentown, Ohio, where Bradbury grew up.) Simak's protagonists thought and acted with the kindness and simplicity of farmers, even if the worlds they inhabited were neither kind nor simple. And like the diction found in Ray Bradbury's stories, Simak's story-telling voice is wholly Midwestern--laconic, to the point, and unembellished. Simak is mostly known for a series of stories taken from Astounding, loosely gathered under the title City, published in its final form in 1953.

City has rarely been out of print and has gone through many editions, including foreign editions.

The City stories are about the surviving robots and dogs of an earthly civilization that's blown itself up. Simak's important stand-alone novels are Time and Again (1951), Way Station, the Hugo winning-novel of 1967, and The Werewolf Principle (1967), one of his most popular books. His story "Desertion," originally published in 1944 in Astounding, is an unusual story for Simak in that the solution to the problem faced by the protagonist is actually a solution to an entirely different problem, one the reader---and the protagonist---is totally unaware of. Campbell often advocated the notion that the "normal way" of thinking might not be adequate enough for solving traditional problems, that sometimes we need to "think outside box," to coin a contemporary phrase. Simak's approach in his story "Desertion" is at once tragic yet strangely uplifting. (But you won't know what I'm talking about until you read the story.)

Murray Leinster's writing career went back into the early 1930s where, like Simak, he had written dozens of detective and western short stories for the pulp market. But Leinster became an immediate favorite with readers when he began publishing science fiction in Astounding. Leinster, like Asimov, wrote stories that posed difficult problems for his protagonists, such as the one facing the space ship crew in "First Contact." Triumph for Leinster's protagonists often lay in pure human craftiness, not merely in overwhelming intelligence (or brute, military force).

Again, "thinking outside the box" is the phrase that best applies here. Like Campbell's own "Who Goes There?", Murray Leinster's "First Contact" is about scientists who have to come up with a workable solution to a very thorny problem. However, there is a difference in the two stories. Leinster's story must also deal with a political solution as well. Getting out of the vicinity of the alien vessel is one thing; protecting the whereabouts of the Earth is wholly another. Here, the fate of many is in the hands of a few human beings. Leinster was really a master of the problem-story or conundrum story, but his stories really did push the boundaries of what science fiction can do.

If Campbell kept his writers within the bounds of science (even bizarre science as in the case of "Doc" Smith and A. E. Van Vogt), he had an even keener vision of the political side to science fiction. Campbell understood that humans are first and foremost political animals. He understood that humans can only survive if they adhere to (or at the very least understand) the rules of conduct and the needs of a community. Robert A. Heinlein was the first of Campbell's writers to explore future politics, but Theodore Sturgeon in "Thunder and Roses" takes it to its limits.

Thunder and Roses" is one of science fiction's first stories that reflects some of the fear people felt at the onset of the Cold War, where the actions of men, now that humans have the hydrogen bomb, must be scrutinized closely and that solutions to problems take a "broader view" of the outcome. That is to say, a single man's actions can have colossal consequences. (Recall what a single man did in "Fessenden's Worlds".) Ted Sturgeon was often the ironist among Campbell's crew. His stories frequently took a wry view of the human condition with a keen eye for the dangers inherent in new technologies. His most important story is "More Than Human," a novella, later expanded into a novel, dealing with the next stage in man's evolution. And it's not a pretty picture. Nor is the ending to "Thunder and Roses." Sturgeon was fearless and his stories resonate still, because even if the nuclear threat has been diminished (with the fall of the Soviet Union), humans still have the capacity to destroy itself through other means.

Setting aside the immediate destructive effects of a nuclear war, the aftereffects of residual radiation were only now making themselves known. By 1948 the United States had developed the hydrogen bomb and was actively testing them on land, in the sea, and in the air.

In fact, urban legend has it that John Wayne may have caught the lung cancer that eventually killed him during the filming of The Conqueror in southwestern Utah in 1956. Southern Nevada was where our government frequently exploded aboveground nuclear bombs throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Several were tested during the actual filming of The Conqueror and about a third of the cast and crew that worked on The Conqueror died of one form of cancer or another within a few years. John Wayne lasted a little longer than most. But the deaths, taken together, are considered a statistical anomaly.

The fact was that nuclear radiation was becoming the chief suspect in mutations of all kinds worldwide. Science only had an inkling of this when the Curies discovered radium in 1911. When nuclear testing by both the Soviets and the United States began in earnest in the 1950s, the horrors of residual radiation-which could linger in the ecosystem for centuries if not millennia-were only becoming known. Merril's story, "That Only a Mother" is based on that old saw, "The baby had a face that only a mother could love" and achieves its poignancy in what it has done to the mother. Yet mutants have long been a trope in science fiction with A. E. Van Vogt's Slan, Olaf Stapleton's Odd John and Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, among the best early SF novels about mutants.

Indeed, Sturgeon's above-mentioned More Than Human is a standout in that subgenre. As such, the science fiction trope of mutants in general will become important factors at Marvel Comics when they create both the Hulk and the X-Men. So while the Cold War might have ended in 1989 or thereabouts, the issue of mutants (or genetic accidents of one kind or another) still is around in our culture and still has relevance. (Of course if you live in the Ukrane, then you might have Chernobyl on your mind.) And remember that the 1950s was the heyday of the monster movie: Them, about giant ants invading Los Angeles, or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (based on Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Lighthouse"), The Creature of the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and the grandest mutant-monster of the all, Godzilla. These were the Frankenstein monsters of the Cold War.

I include Damon Knight in this class-and your anthology-not so much because he had produced an outstanding body of fictional masterpieces, but because of his presence as a powerful-and brutally honest-critic in the field. In fact A. E. Van Vogt has said on more than one occasion that Damon Knight's criticism of his work turned him into a better writer in the 1950s and 1960s. Be that as it may, we are now into a period in the development of science fiction to witness the influence of editors other than John W. Campbell Jr. Knight, then later on Frederick Pohl, would become an outstanding anthologist and editor, and his advocacy of intelligent writing definitely made its mark. Knight's short fiction is characterized chiefly by his wry wit and his playfulness, something often missing in science fiction. Most of you will already be familiar with his famous story, "To Serve Man," which became one of the classic episodes of the first Twilight Zone series in the early 1960s. You might say that "To Serve Man" is an updating of the phrase, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

Gradually by the end of the 1940s most of the great pulp magazines finally died out. All that remained were the science fiction magazines and a handful of romance magazines. Most pulps could not compete with the new paperback market opening up. However, the early 1950s saw a proliferation of digest-size SF magazines. The most important of these was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which appeared in the Fall of 1949. F&SF advocated a more "stylish" kind of writing and was open to more whimsical stories. F&SF also allowed writers of science fiction to try their hand at fantasy. Fritz Leiber was one, later on, Piers Anthony will become another.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction became Astounding's main competition during the 1950s, remaining digest-sized the entire decade. When Astounding changed its name to Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact it would experiment with a wide range of sizes.

While Astounding plodded along with its same, narrow vision, many of Astounding's former writers found Campbell's influence a bit stifling. Heinlein left, so too did Theodore Sturgeon. Science fiction was changing, developing a more human, social side, sometimes analyzing the inner life of human beings in the future as well as their outer lives. Ray Bradbury, a writer John Campbell would never have published, became one of the greatest SF writers of all time by going soft on the "hard" sciences and mixing in a little horror and a little fantasy in his stories. Unlike the writers of Campbell's stable, Bradbury wrote in a highly metaphorical style, rich in both Gothic elements and symbolism-something John Campbell and the die-hard readers of Astounding wouldn't have had the patience for.

Bradbury's stories from the very beginning were powerful and poignant and remain so to this very day. In fact, of the 300 or so stories Bradbury has written, few were originally published in science fiction magazines. Bradbury was one of the first SF writers to crack the "slicks" and reach a wider audience. He was a favorite of magazines such as Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, and later on, Playboy. His stories have been transcribed into episodes of many early television series, notably The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, not to mention the movies made from his books: Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Illustrated Man.

I've chosen the Bradbury story, "The Sound of Thunder" not only for the story's use of time travel, a familiar enough conceit in the field, but for its understanding of the relation of science to the realities of how people live their lives. And sometimes people don't like the world they've inherited because of that change. Also, where John W. Campbell was hopeful of the future and had faith in mankind's ability to correct its mistakes, other writers and editors had their doubts. Bradbury was one of these. Humans, he believed, had a lot to lose if some things came true. "The Sound of Thunder" is a stark reminder that even the best-laid plans of mice and men (and time travel safari companies) can go awry and the most inconsequential act can have staggering consequences. This same element infuses most of The Martian Chronicles (published in 1950), perhaps Bradbury's greatest achievement. The Martian Chronicles is filled with a trenchant sadness for what humanity once was and what it might be again, if it's lucky.

One of the most significant writers of "hard science" science fiction who appeared about the same time as Ray Bradbury was Hal Clement (the nom de plume of Harry Clement Stubbs), and Clement was another Campbell star. Clement's contribution to the field lies in his single-minded exploration of complex scientific ideas. He's less interested in exploring in-depth character development than he is with pushing the science of his stories.

His greatest work is the novel Mission of Gravity (1954), which is now part of the collection shown above, Heavy Planet. It also contains the sequel to Mission of Gravity called Starlight. "Critical Factor" presents the reader with a peculiar world and even more peculiar characters and the fun is trying to figure out what is happening (let alone what the characters look like). It's one of the rare SF stories told from the point of view of a totally alien character and you might have some fun comparing it to what happens to the protagonist in Simak's story, "Desertion."

But if there is a "hard SF" writer that could stand shoulder to shoulder with Isaac Asimov, it's British writer Arthur C. Clarke. Indeed, some have said that Clarke's creative imagination is much greater than that of Asimov. Clarke, like Asimov, brings the scientist's regard to his stories, but Clarke often explored regions of human experience (such as religion) that Asimov steered clear of. "The Nine-Billion Names of God" is Clarke's most famous story and has some similarities to "Fessenden's Worlds" by Edmund Hamilton. Here the thesis is that because of his machines, man just might be approaching the status of gods. What's also important about "The Nine-Billion Names of God" is it's exploration of what computers were believed to be capable of doing. Computers achieving Godlike status is a common conceit in SF, with the greatest novel in this category being D.F. Jones' frightening Colossus (1966), which was made into a fairly good movie, Colossus: The Forbin Project in 1970. And of course there is the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, another Clarke invention. The most familiar present-day movie in this vein is The Matrix series. Generally, the sentient computer story has an admonitory aspect to it and is, in this day and age, the best continuation of the Frankenstein story, the moral of which is: Be careful what you create; it might turn around and bite you in the ass.

"It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby is the only story that survives from Bixby's fairly prolific career as a writer. But it's a hell of a story and remains as one of the greatest SF stories of all time. Like "That Only a Mother," Bixby's "It's a Good Life" is about an all-powerful mutant boy who makes the world around him-and the adults in it-conform to his wishes. It was also made into one of the most memorable episodes of the original Twilight Zone series. It aired on November 11th, 1961 with Billy Mummy as the special child and scared the hell out of everybody.

"It's a Good Life" also is a perfect story to bring back into play our (my) definition of science fiction: Science fiction is an expression in literature of an author's sense of dread based on perceived or imagined changes in society brought about by science and technology since the time of the Industrial Revolution. Remember? "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby taps into that fear of mutants (and whatever made them that way) so prevalent in the 1950s. What makes the story so horrific is that it's told from the point of view of the helpless adults. It, too, is another Frankenstein story, and a damn good one at that.

Finally, to conclude this lecture, we have now reached a time in the evolution of science fiction (at least in America) during the 1950s when Campbell's influence as an editor was beginning to wane. Magazines such as Galaxy, If, Amazing and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction all stood to challenge the singular vision of John Campbell. The world at large was now faced with the threat of nuclear annihilation and the Cold War conjured visions of spies and subterfuge and the possibility that governments could fall-particularly our government. This was the era of James Bond (Casino Royale was published in 1953) and the international spy thriller.

One of the greatest novels of the 1950s was On the Beach by Australian writer Nevil Shute which appeared in 1957. This book, and the excellent movie made from it, scared everyone silly because everyone alive feared nuclear war. In the novel On The Beach everybody dies from the radioactive residue of a nuclear war that had taken place in the northern hemisphere. And I mean everybody. Had John Campbell been Shute's editor, the book would never have been published or published with a happier ending wherein the few surviving humans go to Mars or live underground or travel thousands of years into the future when the surface of the Earth had healed--something hopeful. Campbell was at heart an optimist. He felt that somebody somewhere would have survived and the race would continue.

The best is yet to come, however, as science fiction evolves further into realms of political satire and sociological commentary. Even so, Campbell's influence will remain strong. In the late 1950s Astounding will change its name to Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact and Campbell will publish authors such as Anne McCaffery and will serialize one of the greatest SF novels of all time (perhaps the greatest), Frank Herbert's Dune. Science fiction is starting to grow up, its readership is starting to expand and publishers are beginning to take it more seriously.