Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Alec Nevala-Lee

Clarke’s first sale, “Rescue Party,” appealed almost by accident to Campbell’s prejudices, with an encounter between mankind and an alien race that implied that humans would have the advantage. But Campbell rejected his excellent “Against the Fall of Night,” an ambitious effort to extend the mood of the Don A. Stuart stories into the postwar era,

Will Jenkins wrote the landmark “First Contact,” based on an idea from Campbell that looked ahead to the Cold War, and “A Logic Named Joe,” which was one of the few stories of any era to anticipate the Internet.

Catherine L. Moore, writing as Lawrence O’Donnell, produced her masterpiece, “Vintage Season,” about time travelers who visit past disasters as tourists,

Campbell even published E. E. Smith’s Children of the Lens, at the urging of a fan who argued that the magazine ought to honor one of its most beloved author...

In 1947, at a convention in Philadelphia, the writer Judith Merril—who married Frederik Pohl the following year—tipsily cornered Campbell at a party in a hotel suite: “John, I wrote a story ’at’s so good, ish mush too good for you.” Campbell was drunk as well: “You’re right. If’sh that good, we do...

Air Trails Pictorial, a model aircraft periodical devoured by hobbyists—including a teenage Neil Armstrong—who built miniature planes that flew on gasoline or rubber bands.

a model airplane magazine, which Campbell filled with psychology and the bomb: “We can already control atomic weapons—it’s men who need control.”

These two incomplete sciences—psychology and nuclear physics—are now abruptly confronted with the atomic bomb. . . . Psychology has not yet advanced far enough to permit all men to live sane, balanced, and tolerant lives. That has not hitherto been essential to survival; in the not too distant future it may be. What was required, he wrote, was “a total reorganization of the pattern of civilization,” and his final lines amounted to a prelude to dianetics: “We must learn more about atomic forces. But we’d be wise if, first, we learned more about man—the one greater force that can twist atomic energies to its will.”

he proved unresponsive to both hypnosis and narcosynthesis. He later gave a possible reason: “I had known [Hubbard] as a professional, accomplished liar since 1938; nothing he said could be believed without personal conscious cross-checking. That sort of barrier makes hypnosis damn near impossible!”

Campbell’s daughter Leslyn rose from where she had been playing with her toys, walked across the room, and kicked Hubbard in the shins.

Hubbard evidently believed in his own theories, which amounted to a formalization of his intuitive methods of emotional manipulation.

he spent the second half of the year working on the screenplay for the film Rocketship X-M. He said that the producers hoped to benefit from the publicity for Destination Moon, the movie that Heinlein was making with George Pal, and that if it did w...

in the December 1949 issue, in which Campbell wrote: It is an article on the science of the mind, of human thought. It is not an article on psychology—that isn’t a science. It’s not General Semantics. It is a totally new science, called dianetics, and it does precisely what a science of thought should do. . . . The articles are in preparation. It was the first attested use of the word “dianetics,” which was allegedly derived from the Greek for “through the mind.” Campbell, notably, failed to mention Hubbard by name—although

He decided against presenting himself as a coauthor, a decision that would have important consequences, and asked Hubbard to obtain a rebuttal that could run alongside the article. In response, Hubbard said that he couldn’t get any doctors to listen to him, so he and Winter composed a fake reply, “A Criticism of Dianetics,” credited to the nonexistent Dr. Irving R. Kutzman, M.D. Hubbard claimed that it consisted of comments from four psychiatrists he had consulted, which he had “played . . . back very carefully” using his own perfect memory.

The article was never published,

Yes it was. I had that issue.

On March 8, Sara—who later claimed that Hubbard had kicked her in the stomach in an attempt to induce an abortion—gave birth to a daughter named Alexis Valerie.

Sara had read Science and Sanity in the late forties, and she recalled that her husband was excited by it: “He became a big follower of Korzybski.”

Hubbard, like Campbell, was unable to finish any of Korzybski’s books,

Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

he wrote an appendix on the scientific method, signing it “John W. Campbell, Jr., Nuclear Physicist,” and thanking the engineers of Bell Labs. Campbell also composed the appendix “Advice to the Pre-Clear,” of which Hubbard said years later, “You can tear that out. . . . I didn’t write it in the first place. Written by John W. ‘Astounding’ Campbell, Jr., who the older he gets the more astonishing he is.”

what the living hell she did to Peeds and Leslyn that she feels must never, never, never come out.” Campbell warned Heinlein that if he wrote to Doña, “you’ll also get a long discussion of how I’m playing God, I put pressure on her, dianetics is untried, dangerous, deadly, and drives people crazy.” It was the first recorded attempt—but not the last—to cast doubt on a critic of dianetics, and the same letter included the chilling passage: So it works out that the only way we could get her straightened out would be to use force; i.e., tie her down, put a nitrous oxide mask over her face, knock her out, and work on her in deep trance therapy. In a few hours’ work that way we could break loose the commands that keep her from accepting dianetic therapy. From then on, we’d be able to straighten her out.

When “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” appeared at last in the May 1950 issue of Astounding, Campbell’s first order of business was to convince his audience that it wasn’t a joke.

The success of “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” had inspired a series of hoax articles by other writers, leading to some mild confusion among readers,

I recall "The Dread Tomato Addiction."

Hubbard had given van Vogt’s address to prospective applicants, and he received five thousand dollars in fees. After eighteen days, he was convinced. Obtaining a copy of Dianetics, he read it through twice. For his first test subject, he chose his wife’s sister, who shrieked at the touch of the forceps during a memory of her birth. Next on his couch was Forrest Ackerman, who experienced a cathartic sense of grief over the death of his brother in the war.

She remained wary of dianetics, warning the Heinleins that the therapy, while potentially helpful in certain cases, would be dangerous “in the hands of a couple of crackpot world-savers.”

By the end of June, Doña was back in town. As a treat for the girls—who would live with their father—she and Campbell took them to see Destination Moon, the movie that Heinlein had written for George Pal. At the theater, where the doorman was dressed in an orange space suit, a teenage fan in the row behind them tapped Campbell on the shoulder to say hello. His name was Robert Silverberg.

Winter’s older sister Margaret Kearney, who was known as Peg, had arrived earlier that month in New Jersey. Peg, who was born on March 15, 1907, had grown up with her brother in Negaunee, Michigan, where their father had been a bank president

Pohl left with his head still throbbing. Shortly afterward, he wrote to Campbell, “Incidentally, my dianetics-induced headache didn’t go away until I woke up the morning after I saw you. That’s powerful stuff you’ve got there!”

[sic]

?

Eric Frank Russell was more diplomatic. He joked in a letter to Campbell that Hubbard could use his discoveries to destroy all religion, but he took a rather flippant stance toward the treatment itself: “If I concentrate hard enough I can concoct a picture of my mother breast-feeding me. . . . However . . . I suspect it of being pure imagination. Evidence in favor of imagination—I can equally well picture Rita Hayworth or Myrna Loy doing the same.”

Campbell, in turn, recognized the impact that Heinlein’s endorsement would have: “You, for instance, could do a far, far better job [than Hubbard] of presenting dianetics.” His involvement was limited by distance. Heinlein had gone to Hollywood to serve as a consultant on Destination Moon, which he had sold as a screenplay in 1949. He failed to get along with his coauthor, but he respected the director, Irving Pichel, who threw out most of what the other screenwriter had written—although he retained the comic sidekick from Brooklyn, who annoyed Asimov when he saw it. The result was flawed, but it signaled the migration of science fiction into movies for a mass audience, and Heinlein had reason to be pleased after he left in February 1950.

Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press had contracted to do a collection of his robot stories, proposing that it be called I, Robot. When Asimov replied that this was impossible—Eando Binder had published a story of that title in the thirties—Greenberg responded, “Fuck Eando Binder.” Asimov was also feeling envious of Heinlein’s success: “It was like having a stomachache in the mind, and it seemed to spoil all my fun in being a science fiction writer.”

Campbell took it upon himself to get to the bottom of the rumors, and the foundation established a board of ethics. There was concern over “black dianetics,” which twisted the therapy into a form of mind control, but the investigation was primarily an extension of Hubbard’s accusations about communism. The editor began “a simple process of getting all the gripes I could, airing them in the meetings, and back-checking on the information until we found where it started,” with the assistance of the former FBI agent C. Parker Morgan, whose investigative methods included “desk-prying [and] wastebasket studying.”

Hubbard arrived, took the baby, and left. After depositing Alexis at the Westwood Nurses Registry in Palm Springs, he went to Sara’s house and forced her into the car. As they pulled away with de Mille behind the wheel, Sara shrieked at her husband, who shot back, “If you really loved me, you would kill yourself.” When they halted at a red light, she tried to jump out, but he wrestled her inside by the throat. After dropping off Dressler, they continued to San Bernardino, where Hubbard tried unsuccessfully to find a doctor who would declare Sara insane.

Hubbard also found time to phone Sara, who recalled, “He said that he had cut [Alexis] into little pieces and dropped the pieces in a river and that he had seen little arms and legs floating down the river and it was my fault, I’d done it because I’d left him.”

Hubbard told an agent that Art Ceppos was organizing a rival organization called the Caduceus Foundation. His interviewer concluded that Hubbard was “a mental case.”

On May 28, 1951, Campbell told Asimov that he had broken with Hubbard. Asimov was less than surprised. He later recalled, “I knew Campbell and I knew Hubbard, and no movement can have two Messiahs.”

Campbell was about to see Heinlein for the first time in six years, and it would be no ordinary reunion. Heinlein was still the best writer he had ever known, and Campbell wanted to recruit him as badly now as he once had for dianetics—not for the Parker Machine, which he was reserving for his fellow investors, but for the research program that he had undertaken with Peg.

Ginny had learned from their doctor that her husband was sterile.

Due to TB or other illness?

harridan.”

driving at the legal limit of seventy miles per hour. Directly ahead of him, moving slightly more slowly, was a trailer truck loaded with twenty tons of slag,

Joe plowed into it at high speed.

He worked hard on an article, “Design Flaw,” to mobilize his writers and readers, and when it appeared in the October issue, Asimov thought that it was the most powerful piece that Campbell had ever written.

1955

Hubbard also announced that dianetics had been superseded by a theory called Scientology, which he said had been its original name—the term “dianetics” had been forced on him by his publisher.

Campbell himself saw Scientology as “intellectual garbage,” and criticism of the church was growing. In 1965, the Australian Board of Inquiry called it “evil,” stating in its report, “Some of [Hubbard’s] claims are that . . . he has been up in the Van Allen Belt, that he has been on the planet Venus where he inspected an implant station, and that he has been to Heaven.”

Rhodesia—he believed that he had been Cecil Rhodes

William S. Burroughs—would

New Zealand, the socialist economy of which Heinlein dismissed as “a fake utopia.” In a world defined by the Cold War, he was losing patience with the economic ideals to which he had devoted himself as a young man.

In 1956, Heinlein wrote The Door into Summer, an adult novel about time travel that ranked with his best work, and Citizen of the Galaxy, a juvenile about a young slave who becomes a spy. Campbell rejected the former, but bought the latter, taking the opportunity to share a few thoughts on the institution of slavery itself. Dalgliesh, in turn, worried that its treatment of religion would pose problems for book publication, causing Heinlein to recoil more than usual: “Two changes, admittedly easy and unimportant, threw me into [a] spin and lost me ten days’ working time.”

it was Heinlein who was changing. He felt that the juveniles were his most important work, a sense that was underlined by Sputnik, which left him “very shook up.” His concerns for the future resulted in the lovely Have Space Suit—Will Travel, in which a boy represents humanity in an interstellar court. It was as strange and moving a novel as he ever wrote, and Campbell was tantalized by it, but passed. When Dalgliesh asked Heinlein to tone down its violence, his response indicated how his feelings had evolved: “I do not think we have better than an even chance of living, as a nation, through the next five years. . . . I don’t ever want to pull my punches again.”