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March 3 - March 8, 2019
he was called out of his office for a meeting with Tremaine and Blackwell in the spring of 1938. When Campbell arrived, he discovered that two writers were already there, and as he listened, disbelieving, he was ordered to buy everything that they wrote. One was Burks. The other was a tall, imposing man of twenty-seven with red hair and skin so pale that it was almost transparent. It was L. Ron Hubbard.
New York coroner, who told him, “The morgue is open to you anytime, Hubbard.”
he later said, without any evidence, that he had worked on Stagecoach, Dive Bomber, and The Plainsman.
one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written—and it was published as Sinister Barrier in the inaugural issue of Unknown, which was dated March 1939.
When Hubbard finished the manuscript, which he titled Excalibur or The One Command, he cabled publishers, telling them to meet him in Penn Station to bid for the rights. Hubbard later claimed to have withdrawn the book after the first six people who read it went insane, while another jumped from the window of an office tower, and he wrote of his ambitions to Polly: Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. . . . I do know that I could form a political
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One raved in a letter to Unknown, “Give me the L. Ron Hubbard fairy tale any time and I’m happy.” In the following issue, he added: “With Hubbard . . . I consider anything below perfect a letdown.” The reader who wrote these words was Isaac Asimov.
Asimov was also writing every month to Brass Tacks, stating in one letter, “When we want science fiction, we don’t want swooning dames.” His nervousness around girls—he had never been on a date—could express itself as hostility, as it did throughout the fan community, and in a later issue, he added, “Let me point out that women never affected the world directly. They always grabbed hold of some poor, innocent man, worked their insidious wiles on him . . . and then affected history through him.” Asimov concluded that he should stop before he created a “vendetta” of all the female fans in the
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Much later, Asimov asked Campbell why he had encouraged him, saying that it must have seemed impossible. Campbell agreed: “Yes, it was impossible. On the other hand, I saw something in you. You were eager and listened and I knew you wouldn’t quit no matter how many rejections I handed you.”
As he was leaving, he passed a stack of the July 1939 issue.
it would come to be seen as the first issue of the golden age of science fiction,
And the team was about to expand. In the September 1939 issue, Campbell predicted, “Astounding will find and develop not less than four now-unknown top-rank new authors during the next year.” Van Vogt was one obvious discovery. Others were waiting in the wings. And before the summer was over, the golden age would find its embodiment in a writer whose life would entwine with Campbell’s—and Asimov’s—in ways that none of them could have foreseen.
The key figure among the extremists was Donald A. Wollheim,
In May 1938, Moskowitz and the fan William Sykora, who had formed an alliance against Wollheim, organized the First National Science Fiction Convention in Newark.
By the time Campbell rose to speak, the crowd had grown to over a hundred fans. The editor held forth on the importance of fandom, which he described as the inner circle of his readership, and expressed his support for a World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, to be held next summer. Wollheim had asked to speak as well, but permission was denied out of fear that Campbell would be offended by his prepared remarks, which questioned why anyone with a college degree in science would want to edit a pulp magazine.
David Kyle,
Author of A Pictorial History of SF.
the film Metropolis, which Asimov hated,
he volunteered at EPIC, where he was given oversight of seven precincts. After a decisive loss, Heinlein remained at the group’s newspaper, and he became friends with Cleve Cartmill, a journalist and aspiring science fiction writer.
In May, he was admonished by the secretary of the Navy for writing a letter to the Hollywood Citizen-News—to which he had signed his rank—condemning the police response to a student riot. He took responsibility, but he grew wary of being labeled an extremist. Unlike the Futurians, many of whom held a rosy view of Moscow, he saw the Soviet Union as “a grisly horror.”
Heinlein had made an unsuccessful stab at real estate, and he fell short in his attempt to run for a seat in the California State Assembly in 1938.
Alfred Korzybski. In his monumental book Science and Sanity, Korzybski warned against the fallacy of confusing words with their underlying objects, as expressed in the aphorism for which he would be best remembered: “The map is not the territory.”
Heinlein decided to structure For Us, the Living around his interest in a proposal for a universal basic income, and he worked on it diligently until Christmas.
“I am a retired naval officer. When I was in the fleet, my specialty was ballistics, with emphasis on the electro-mechanical integrators used in fire control.”
Campbell praised its logic as magnificent, especially “the mass of small details that made it real,” which he identified decades later as the author’s primary contribution to the genre: Cultural patterns change; one of the things Heinlein “invented” was the use of that fact. . . . Like the highly skilled acrobat, he makes his feats seem the natural, easy, simple way—but after you’ve finished and enjoyed one of his stories . . . notice how much of the cultural-technological pattern he has put over, without impressing you, at any point, with a two-minute lecture on the pattern of the time.
Heinlein rapidly became a fan favorite. Asimov praised “Life-Line” in a letter to the magazine, and he also wrote Heinlein directly. Pohl, who had talked his way into editing the pulps Astonishing and Super Science Stories at the age of nineteen, bought “Let There Be Light,” a gadget story that Heinlein published as Lyle Monroe. He was saving his real name for Campbell, to whom he sent the ambitious “Lost Legacy,” which was inspired by an item that the editor had written in Unknown about the apparently unused structures of the brain.
Heinlein was getting to know other writers in Los Angeles, with the breakfasts that he had held for his precinct workers evolving into a writer’s group called the Mañana Literary Society. It allowed him to assume a leadership role, which suited his personality—although Leslyn was equally prominent—and he passed ideas from Campbell to its members, who included an eager, unpublished nineteen-year-old named Ray Bradbury. Years later, Bradbury gratefully remembered his mentorship: “Heinlein taught me human beings.”
Campbell proposed that Heinlein rewrite “All,” the editor’s unpublished story about the conquest of America by an Asian empire. Since it wouldn’t fit into his future history, Campbell advised him to use a pseudonym—Anson MacDonald—based in part on Leslyn’s maiden name, much as the editor had once written as Don A. Stuart.
The exchange spoke to the intensity of their relationship, although they had only met a handful of times. Heinlein had finished his new version of “All,” retitled Sixth Column, in which he clarified why the resistance against the Asian invaders took the form of a fake religion—“This will just look like any one of half a dozen cockeyed cults of the sort that spring up overnight in Southern California”—and attempted to tone down the racism. He wasn’t entirely successful, in part because he was a stronger writer, and he was unable to keep from investing his characters with rhetorical vigor as
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Campbell’s desire to develop a new kind of protagonist—a hero with the sensibilities of an engineer, confronting challenges that only science could solve. This figure became known as “the competent man,” as memorably evoked decades later by Heinlein: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
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he echoed a growing interest of Campbell’s: “The fact that psychiatry has succeeded in healing but a small percentage of the known ills of mind rather indicates that the subject is not, as yet, ready for its place among the sciences.”
Hubbard’s stories appealed to such fans as Asimov and Ray Bradbury, but most were forgettable. The exceptions were Death’s Deputy, perhaps his best story, which came out of conversations with Campbell about “a man who officiates, all unwillingly, for the god of destruction”; Final Blackout, the postnuclear war novel that had impressed Heinlein; and Fear, a work of straight horror that had been conceived over grilled steaks at the editor’s house. Bradbury called this last story a “landmark novel in my life,” and he was so taken by it that he privately recorded it as a play.
Hubbard’s son, who was known as Nibs, was awakened one night by screaming. He was six years old. Peeking into his parents’ room, he saw his father seated on his mother in their bed with a twisted coat hanger in his hands. Nibs went back to sleep, and the next day, he found a bloodstained sheet in the trash. Hubbard later said that Polly had undergone “five abortions” during their marriage.
In his note for “If This Goes On—,” Campbell had written: Robert Heinlein . . . presents a civilization in which mob psychology and propaganda have become sciences. They aren’t, yet. . . . Psychology isn’t a science, so long as a trained psychologist does—and must—say “there’s no telling how an individual man will react to a given stimulus.” Properly developed, psychology could determine that.
Asimov proposed a sequel about a robot that could read minds. Campbell liked it, and after they had tossed the idea back and forth, the editor said, “Look, Asimov, in working this out, you have to realize that there are three rules that robots have to follow. In the first place, they can’t do any harm to human beings; in the second place, they have to obey orders without doing harm; in the third, they have to protect themselves, without doing harm or proving disobedient.” The result, after some refinement, would become known as Three Laws of Robotics, and their impact would be felt endlessly
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On June 22, 1941, the Nazis had invaded Russia. When the news broke, Campbell argued about it with Lester del Rey for four hours, insisting that Russia wouldn’t last six weeks. The two men then took the train to New Jersey, where the author watched with amazement as Campbell told another passenger that the Nazis didn’t stand a chance—and added a few new points of his own. Not only had he changed his mind, but he had even improved on the argument.
BY 1941, HEINLEIN WAS ON THE VERGE OF BECOMING THE MOST RESPECTED WRITER IN SCIENCE fiction. The high point was the May issue of Astounding, which included the complete timeline of his Future History.
Heinlein had inspired greater devotion than any writer since E. E. Smith. As the guest of honor at the third World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, he was pestered by a group of Futurians and told the crowd in his speech, “Mrs. Heinlein and I are in almost complete collaboration on everything. She never signs any of the stories, but I do better if she’s there.”
Heinlein would serve as an “unofficial scout.” He had generous words for “Nightfall” and its author: “We were delighted to see Asimov in the cover position. . . . As a young prodigy yourself, I think you will admit that Isaac’s present stuff is more subtle, sensitive, and mature than yours of ten years back.”
a short war, invention has no time to apply its full weight; in a long-term conflict, the role of inventive ingenuity will be powerful, if not ultimately decisive. In as thoroughly unpleasant a world as we now inhabit, there’s a definite element of comfort in that. A people with the record of inventive ability that Americans have proven can, if forced to it, make of itself a most terrible enemy. —JOHN W. CAMPBELL, ASTOUNDING, JANUARY 1941 7.
when Ray Bradbury joked that if he were at risk of being drafted he would pretend to be gay, Heinlein was so offended that he refused to speak to him for years.
source?
Heinlein made an extraordinary suggestion: “Of course, it would be kinda rough on Street & Smith for you to go into research or such, but, as has been pointed out a long time ago, Doña could do just as good a job of editing, if she had to, as you do. With a maid-cook at home she would keep those two books going, quality high and making money, for the duration.” Heinlein went on to propose that Leslyn and Doña run the magazines together—a remarkable acknowledgment of their uncredited roles in their husbands’ careers.
Heinlein flew out to visit Scoles in Philadelphia, where he was told that the job, if it materialized, would involve recruiting engineers. He recommended de Camp, who had applied for the Naval Reserve, and he apparently also thought of Asimov. In
Heinlein laughed. “No wonder Isaac doesn’t drink. It sobers him up.”
At Scotch Plains, with Campbell’s input, he wrote “Waldo” and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” framing the latter around an affectionate portrait of a married couple not unlike the Heinleins themselves. They would be his last stories until after the war.
Heinlein figured out that an issue in his disciplinary file—stemming from the angry letter to the Citizen-News that he had written years earlier—meant that he couldn’t be assigned to active duty, so he joined up as a civilian. On May 2, he received his appointment as an assistant mechanical engineer, and he and Leslyn rented a place near the Navy Yard.
In February, Hubbard was ordered home: “By assuming unauthorized authority and attempting to perform duties for which he has no qualifications, he became the source of much trouble.” On the way back he fell from a ladder on a ship, which was evidently the cause of his limp,
On May 11, Heinlein formally began work at the Navy Yard, asking that his pension be stopped. On the same day, Asimov was appointed a junior chemist, and soon he was on the train to Philadelphia, writing to Pohl, “Frankly, I’m scared stiff about going off to live alone.” Before long, however, he would feel differently. At the end of May, he told Pohl, “My job is really a reasonable facsimile of paradise on earth. The work is interesting, the surroundings ideal, the coworkers congenial, my room very nice—and my spirits in great shape.” And he had another piece of news. “Freddie, old man, old
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For now, Heinlein had established the pecking order, but it left Asimov—who remembered such slights for decades—conscious of “a meanness of spirit” in a man he otherwise admired.
He liked to snap their bras through their blouses, and, once, he broke the strap. It was a bad habit, he admitted, that he never lost, and it was at the Navy Yard that he began to let his fingers roam more freely.
Asimov
“A war requires subordination,” Heinlein wrote to Campbell, “and I take a bitter pride in subordinating myself.”
“shapfu,” in which the “hap” stood for “hopelessly and permanently.”
