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March 3 - March 8, 2019
Many authors would be excused for health reasons—if they had been better physical specimens, they might not have been writers at all—but it didn’t take long for Campbell to find that even those who escaped the draft would be hard to keep.
Campbell was more interested in the Mañana Literary Society, which had just been memorialized in the mystery novel Rocket to the Morgue, by Anthony Boucher.
Kuttner and Moore, on the advice of the editor, had begun to collaborate, working in shifts under the name Lewis Padgett. Their run culminated in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and “When the Bough Breaks,” two extraordinary stories with an unusual interest in marriage and the inner lives of children. It was an enormously promising line of development, but Campbell never followed up on it, in part because it seemed unrelated to the war. Yet no one else did so much to carry Astounding after Pearl Harbor.
Of his two magazines, Unknown was the more vulnerable.
Unknown ceased publication after its October 1943 issue, and its paper was allocated to Astounding.
Campbell’s other strategy was to solicit ideas from writers in private correspondence. Heinlein encouraged this, and he also approached Will Jenkins, a brilliant inventor who wrote science fiction under the name Murray Leinster. Jenkins responded with “a very careful, long, and elaborate letter in which I listed all the imaginative gimmicks that I thought could help win the war,” and the three men formed an unofficial triumvirate for brainstorming, with Heinlein at the Navy Yard, Campbell at the magazine, and Jenkins at the Office of War Information.
Jenkins, who was in contact with underground resistance movements, was especially interested in dirty chemical tricks that could be used by factory workers to sabotage the Nazis. Campbell saw that this was the perfect place to get credit for something that might be used in the field, and he pitched ways to weaken wing struts and disable boilers, while Willy Ley contributed the “diabolic” notion of using airplanes to drop poison ivy or Japanese beetles over Germany. The editor also bombarded Heinlein with his own proposals, including using flares to destroy an attacking pilot’s night vision and
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since hearing about the cubic foot of uranium at Columbia, he had been keeping a close eye on experiments in atomic power, and he wrote to Cartmill: There might be a story in this thought. . . . U-235 has—I’m stating fact, not theory—been separated in quantity easily sufficient for preliminary atomic power research, and the like. They got it out of regular uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods; they have quantities measured in pounds. They have not brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it. . . . They’re afraid that that explosion of energy would be so
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“Deadline,” appeared in the March 1944 issue, which was out by February 11. Most readers didn’t think highly of it—one called it “mediocre fantasy”—and it ranked last in the Analytical Laboratory poll. But Campbell had a particular audience in mind.
And its impact was felt at once. The Manhattan Project counted many science fiction fans among its workers, and word of the story rapidly spread, until employees were talking about it openly in the cafeteria of the atomic weapons lab in New Mexico. Cartmill’s device bore minimal resemblance to the designs under development, but it didn’t matter. Edward Teller, who would later be known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, recalled that the reaction at Los Alamos was “astonishment.”
Atomic physics . . . could end the war in a day, in a fraction of a second, beyond doubt—but there’s considerable doubt as to whether there would then be a postwar world to worry about. —JOHN W. CAMPBELL, ASTOUNDING, AUGUST 1943
Campbell also provided Cartmill’s address and offered to suppress future Swedish copies of the magazine, which seemed most likely to fall into German hands—and in fact, Wernher von Braun, the head of the Nazi rocket program, was allegedly obtaining it using a false name and a mail drop in Sweden, although there was no way that either man could have known this at the time.
A legend later developed that Campbell was relieved that Riley had failed to notice a map on his office wall, on which he used pins to keep track of the addresses of subscribers—including a suspicious clustering around a post office box in Santa Fe. The story is probably apocryphal, but he may well have had his suspicions.
Why apocryphal?
He certainly kept an eye on the geographic distribution of sales, and a large number of copies were sold at the drugstore near Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
the gamble with “Deadline” had succeeded. Campbell had a hunch about what the government was doing, and he had successfully cast out a lure to test it. He took satisfaction in the result,
the Navy became concerned by the threat of kamikaze attacks, and in the fall, he was asked by the Office of Naval Intelligence to assemble a group to brainstorm unconventional responses. Heinlein, who had trained as a gunnery officer and was familiar with the technical background of aviation, was the ideal man to organize talent and evaluate ideas. It was close to Campbell’s dream, and Heinlein asked the editor to join—although he also left no doubt about who was in charge.
The core of the team consisted of Campbell, Stanton, de Camp, Pratt, and George O. Smith. Jenkins had been overruled as a full member because he had never graduated from high school, but as the most resourceful inventor of them all, he was informally consulted. Heinlein also asked Campbell to invite Sturgeon, who had returned from St. Croix in October and was suffering from depression.
Hubbard, in turn, was spinning stories as furiously as ever. If he had failed to become a hero, it was easy enough to pretend to be one.
an allegation that has not been otherwise corroborated.
Heinlein recommended that he seek out Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist in Pasadena whom he had met through the American Rocket Society, and Hubbard said that he would.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1944, MARK HUBBARD, LESLYN HEINLEIN’S BROTHER-IN-LAW, WAS KILLED BY the Japanese. Three years earlier, he had been living on Luzon in the Philippines with Keith and their two sons, working as an engineer on a research expedition, when the island was taken. Dynamiting his gold mines to keep them from being taken by the enemy, he disappeared into the bush, listening to the news with makeshift radios that he fueled with alcohol that he distilled himself. It was an example of the competent man at his best, but Mark Hubbard did not get the ending that he deserved. He caught
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they learned that Mark Hubbard had died. Leslyn was devastated. Worn out by work and worry, she descended further into alcoholism, and Heinlein was in no condition to help. As the war wound to a close, his emotions grew overpowering. After encountering a group of marines, one with a missing leg, another with “just enough of him left to sit down,” he went into the bathroom, locked the door, and cried for fifteen minutes.
When word came that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, one day after he had predicted it, Heinlein said, “That’s the end.”
he also had another project in mind, which he described in a memorandum just before the announcement of the Japanese surrender. The memo was titled “Tentative Proposal for Projects to Be Carried On at NAMC.” Its actual subject was rockets—the deployment of atomic bombs on missiles like the ones that had rained down on London, in a terrible combination of the two weapons that had embodied the genre’s greatest fears. Heinlein proposed that the Navy organize a mission to the moon, since the technical problems were largely the same, and he strongly implied that he was the one best prepared to lead
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Heinlein quietly put the officer in his place: “I sent word to him, indirectly, which let him know that Isaac had been making more money the last couple of months pulp writing than he gets paid to be a crackerjack chemist. This lunk can be impressed only by money and I know it will burn him up.”
“The Mule,” was his finest work to date. It had one of the best twist endings that the genre had ever seen,
employees were destroying war surplus, squashing radios in a compression machine and cutting up flight jackets with knives,
I recall something about that in The Forrestal Diaries.
ON JANUARY 20, 1946, THE PHILADELPHIA Record published a story titled “Stranger Than Fiction,” by the reporter Alfred M. Klein. It described a secret research laboratory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard that had been staffed by three science fiction writers, Heinlein, de Camp, and “Azimov,” who had been asked to build “some of these superweapons and atom-powered spaceships you’ve been creating on paper.”
his quotes were almost certainly authentic—the article included an account of the “Deadline”
Asimov had met Bradbury at the Hydra Club, a successor to the Futurians that included del Rey, Sturgeon, and Judith Merril, whom Asimov described as “the kind of girl who, when her rear end was patted by a man, patted the rear end of the patter.” He was speaking from experience, but he softened the facts—Merril had actually grabbed at his crotch.
“There was a question in my mind as to how much of the success of my stories was mine and how much Campbell’s. . . . What would happen to me, then, if something happened to Campbell? If he quit or were fired or died? Might it not be possible that I would then find suddenly that I was no writer at all?”
Asimov
Cornog presented them with a hunk of the translucent green glass produced by the detonation of the bomb at Alamogordo.
trinitite
Jack Parsons, an engineer who had been one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Parsons was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a group associated with the occultist Aleister Crowley, to whom he sent money. He was also a science fiction fan, and Heinlein, Williamson, and Cartmill all attended meetings of the temple, which de Camp called “a conspiracy to seize control from the extroverts.”
Hubbard was unable to write. He had exaggerated his injuries—if he could no longer be the most impressive person in the room, he would settle for being the most damaged—but his ulcer was real enough, and his medication had left him impotent and depressed. It combined to reveal a strain of weakness that he had previously been able to conceal, as de Camp wrote to Asimov: “He always was that way. . . . What the war did was to wear him down to where he no longer bothers with the act.” Heinlein saw Hubbard, unquestioningly, as a wounded veteran, and he was forgiving of him, even when he snuck
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it occurred to Heinlein that he could earn money and reach a wider audience with a juvenile novel for boys. He conceived The Young Atomic Engineers and the Conquest of the Moon as a successor to the Horatio Alger and Tom Swift books that he had loved growing up, with an emphasis on the values of hard work and education, and he set certain rules for himself: “Never write down to them. Do not simplify the vocabulary nor the intellectual concepts. . . . No real love interest and female characters should be only walk-ons.”
Heinlein worked on “The Green Hills of Earth,” which he had once seen as his “swan song” for Campbell, who had even mentioned it in the magazine. Instead, it was bought by the Post. The sale was a milestone for the entire genre—Asimov was filled with “miserable envy” when he heard about it—but Heinlein was sorry that he hadn’t sent it to his old friend: “I deeply regret that it should have worked out with hurt feelings, for John nursed me along a lot at the beginning.” Even better, his juvenile novel, which would be retitled Rocket Ship Galileo, was acquired for hardcover by Alice Dalgliesh at
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Leslyn’s drinking had grown worse. At home, Heinlein emptied the liquor into the sink, and after Ginny caught Leslyn swigging from a bottle, he searched for stashes of alcohol. They were both seeing a psychiatrist—Leslyn couldn’t drive, so he dropped her off at her appointments and waited until she was done—and
hey now it lets you end a highlight on a dash. Before it treated them as hyphens. Just this book or a sw upgrade?
Left alone with Leslyn, who was confined to her room, Heinlein despaired. He couldn’t sleep, and he was feeling miserable himself: “During the past eighteen months there have been more times when I wanted to be dead than there were times when I wanted to go on living.”
In 1948, there were signs of a turnaround. Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis, proposed that they collaborate on a film about a voyage to the moon, and after seeing Campbell in New York, Heinlein went to Los Angeles. The partnership with Lang went nowhere—Heinlein distrusted his leftist politics—but he reached a more successful agreement with a producer named George Pal.
With his second juvenile, Space Cadet, Heinlein began to grasp that his works for younger readers were an ideal playground for his talents—he saw a technical education as a royal road to the stars, and these books, which were designed to inspire students to study science and engineering, amounted to the best propaganda imaginable. Nothing else that he ever wrote would so fully utilize his gifts or affect the future so profoundly.
the magazine had printed a letter from a fan claiming to review an issue from a year in the future. One of the nonexistent stories was “Gulf,” by Heinlein’s pseudonym Anson MacDonald, and he proposed that if they persuaded the other writers to play along, they could do it for real. Campbell loved the notion, and Heinlein set to work. The title “Gulf” could mean almost anything, and when Heinlein turned to Ginny for suggestions, she proposed a plot about a “Martian Mowgli,” a human orphan raised by aliens on Mars. Heinlein drafted the first and last chapters and asked Campbell for feedback on
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Hubbard thanked him, saying he was hard at work on the project—a book on psychology—that he had described the year before: “If it drives you nuts, don’t sue. You were warned!”
he was overheard saying that the best way to make money would be to start a religion—although the legend that Heinlein bet him that he couldn’t is undoubtedly apocryphal.
I doubt it's apocryphal.
Hubbard also tried to get back into Heinlein’s good graces, “heartily and affectionately” congratulating him on breaking into The Saturday Evening Post, although he conceded that he was in “the Heinlein doghouse” over the misunderstanding with Leslyn’s nephews. Heinlein never replied, but he made his opinion clear in a note attached to the letter in his files: “I no longer trust you. . . . I think a lot of those ribbons on your chest, even if Polly doesn’t. You’re an authentic hero, even though a phony gentleman. I’ll give you money to get you out of a jam but I don’t want you in my house.”
it went on to make a rather peculiar claim: Here and there throughout the world many men have been thinking about rockets for some time. . . . I recall that in 1930 L. Ron Hubbard, a writer and engineer, developed and tested—but without fanfare—a rocket motor considerably superior to the V-2 instrument of propulsion and rather less complicated. Campbell—who failed to question the idea that Hubbard had been conducting rocket research at nineteen—provided
He concluded, “Don’t know why I suddenly got the nerve to go into this again and let it loose. It’s probably either a great love or an enormous hatred of humanity.”
he sent a letter to Parsons, saying that he could have Sara back.
December 1946 issue of the magazine Air Trails Pictorial, Campbell, its new editor, wrote an article titled “Bikini Balance Sheet.” He provided an overview of the atomic bomb tests at the Marshall Islands and discussed matters of civil defense, with a full page devoted to a map of the aftermath of a hypothetical nuclear attack on New Jersey.
A profile by Dickson Hartwell in the February 1946 issue of Pic caught Campbell in a typical moment: If you want to know what a hell of a fix this world is in I suggest you listen for a few minutes, in a mood of deepening gloom, to Mr. Atomic. . . . It is not the way he says it so much as what he says about the future which makes Mr. Atomic the man of the hour. For it was he who scooped the world press on the atomic bomb, not by hours or weeks but by years.
January 1946 issue: The uranium reaction is reasonably potent, but another one, discovered in 1930 by Lord Rutherford, is nearly twice as powerful, pound for pound, and uses cheap lithium and ordinary hydrogen. It won’t start until a temperature of several million degrees is reached, but the Hiroshima U-235 bomb would make an excellent primer to start the more violent explosion. Campbell anticipated not only the hydrogen bomb, but the lithium hydride method that would be utilized by the Russians seven years later. In many ways, it was the shrewdest guess that he would ever make.
