THE Astounding SCIENCE FICTION ANTHOLOGY.
by JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.
INTRODUCTION.
No extensive development of a literary form, the work of many keen and highly trained minds, can take place without some powerful social force behind it. Normally, such a development starts uncertainly, in a loose, uncertain and self-conscious manner; only with pa.s.sing years and interacting development does it begin to find itself, and its agents of expression--the authors. In any general history of literature, the critical a.n.a.lysts who study the field from the vantage point of half a century or more overlook the straggling, groping, uncertain beginnings, and pick up their thread of discussion only after the field is well developed, sure of itself and its own general nature.
In the development of an individual, as a child there is relatively little certainty. It is hard to determine from the nature of the child what he will become as an adult. He himself feels that, someday, he will become something important and useful; during childhood he is uncertain, probing various directions, seeking self-knowledge by greater knowledge of the world around him.
So with any field of literature. It becomes somewhat understandable only when it reaches adolescence; it becomes a powerful force, with clear meaning, only when it reaches early maturity.
Before it acquires the fine, smooth polish of the mature adult, however, the deep, strong forces that brought it into being are more visible. The adolescent is somewhat gawky; his bones and muscles are sometimes painfully evident. His sincerity of effort and belief is clearer at that time than when, later on, he has acquired somewhat greater polish of delivery.
We are, today, at the point of early maturity of science fiction, a totally new form of general literature, a form that is the legitimate child of the forces that have made our world today. It has, in the past decade, pa.s.sed through its period of adolescence from the childhood form of self-conscious and rambunctious say to a sincere self-searching. The decade from 1941 to 1951 is probably the most significant; the stories in this volume show some of that growth. They have been arranged in chronological order; truthfully, the understanding of science fiction would have been improved had I included some of the stories of 1930, 935, and the earlier years. But the primary purpose of this volume is to present fascinating and exciting ideas in story form--and those other, earlier stories tended to be very weak in actual story value.
So--here is a sample of science fiction in its period of most rapid growth.
And the purpose of this introduction is to explain, in some measure, why it is not a Topsy creation that "jest growed." It"s as inevitable an outgrowth of our time as is the vacuum tube and the rocket plane.
Our present civilization actually started during the Renaissance, with the rise of the craftsman. It shifted, during the Industrial Revolution, and has now undergone a change as great as either of those earlier two, into the Technological Era. The Renaissance was, in a large sense, the outgrowth of a great concept: that men could make things they wanted. The craftsman worked the materials nature provided to create beauty and utility beyond their natural forms. The bowl could not merely be a container, but, by application of human art and craft, could become a Cellini masterpiece.
Cloth could be not only warm, it could be beautiful and warm.
Simultaneously, the study of natural law began--for only by understanding nature could the craftsman make the most of it. Leonardo da Vinci, typical of the greatest minds of his time, was a great artist, and equally a great craftsman-scientist. This was the period when Man learned to make things by controlling nature and natural law.
Where the Greeks had sought to understand natural law--and died of pestilence because they would not apply those laws to the construction of a sewer system--the Romans had developed techniques of getting Nature under control without understanding her. The Renaissance began the period of both understanding and using nature.
The Industrial Revolution brought a second stage of development.
Before that time, men made things by understanding natural law; in the Industrial Revolution, natural law was harnessed to make things. Steam engines drove lathes; natural law was turned against the problem of getting what Man wanted. The machine replaced the craftsman.
Man solves most of his problems of life by traditional means; there are precedents for handling this situation or that. The problems of daily life are immensely complex; a routine makes it easier on the mind, relieving it of the problem of continual thinking out of repeated problems. In a completely stable society, where the work descends from father to son to grandson without notable change, the patterns of life become well worked out, simple, understandable, and each man can settle comfortably into a groove he, and all his neighbors, can understand.
There can be a great measure of happiness, because ninety per cent of the problems of life are solved by simple custom and tradition.
By the time the Renaissance philosophy had been at work for a couple of centuries, most of the people of Europe lived in such comfortable, well-rounded grooves. There was little friction in life, and a great deal of simple contentment.
And the literature was as conventional and simple as the life, and, in general, as pleasantly gentle. Of course, in such a period, the truly great minds that see far and feel strongly are violently discontented.
Such minds demand change, advancement, not placidity. A Shakespeare is not going to be a calm, contented, satisfied man in any period; such a mind is the core of change, the drive that forces change in any period.
Then the Industrial Revolution started. Immediately, the effects of that change were to make nonsense of all the smoothly worn social conventions.
An immense social force was at work, and the old grooves wouldn"t hold it.
New grooves had to be cut, grooves that lay athwart all the old patterns, gouging men out of their safe, known patterns. Tradition ...
custom ...
precedent ... all were smashed by the tremendous power of the new philosophy. The unhappiness it brought with it made the Machine the very symbol of the Devil. Because now, instead of solving ninety per cent of life"s problems by tradition, one had to solve them by taking thought.
The fury of that storm gradually wore itself out as new traditions came into being. The grandson of the craftsman settled down to being the machine-tender, knowing his machine and his place, and his routine. It was comfortable again.
The literature of the time, naturally, reflected much of the turmoil and misery. But by 1 890, it had all settled down again to a gentle glow of understandable, peaceful living....
... and the Technological Revolution started.
The Machine, in the Industrial Revolution, did mechanically what the craftsman had done before. The technological revolution brought the organization, the concept of pooled mental resources that forced immensely complex, interacting mechanisms to produce that which never before existed.
The original craftsman learned to understand and shape nature; the Industrial Revolution brought the machine that shaped nature. The Technological Revolution has brought the methods of creating new things that do not exist in nature: plastics and automobiles; and the ancient fire that warmed the cave man and powered the steam engine is replaced by that unnatural and supernal fire, atomic energy.
Since 1900, the conventions have been shattered time and again, year after year. No conventional routine built up today can be expected to endure long; some new technique will eliminate its meaning. The most skilled buggy-whip maker is jobless; the washwoman--whose job had endured from before the dawn of history to this century--is gone. The robot washer today does everything the washwoman of old did except talk to the housewife.
Don"t think of the robot as a tin man, either; a robot is a quasi-intelligent organization of functional parts. The modern oil-steam furnace is a first-cla.s.s robot, replacing the old-time furnace man.
The convention of 1900 as to how a boy courted a girl involved the surrey with the fringe on top; in 1920 it included the tin lizzie and the flickers. In 1940 it was the jallopy, jitterbug and the talkies.
Today it"s back to the living room--well darkened, and with the TV set on low.
The strongest, oldest, firmest foundations of custom and precedent are shaken, torn out, and a new one has to be painfully constructed--but never quite gets established before a new change forces it out.
There is only one precedent, one rule, in the Technological Era: "There must be a better way to do this d.a.m.n job...."
For those minds that dislike thinking, and want the warm, cushioning blanket of precedent and convention, it"s a period of neurosis, madness, ulcers and misery. The whole history of the world is gone; it was a convention and a precedent, based on things that existed only because knowledge was missing. The knowledge destroys the vacuum in which those things could exist. A man who knows that such drugs as penicillin are possible will nevermore accept the world wherein people died regularly of pneumonia and simple wound infection.
The workman who has lived on a diet of air-freighted California fruit, fresh-frozen vegetables from last-year"s crop, and fresh-frozen fish caught six months ago in Danish waters, the man used to this diet no King of old could imagine, will not settle for black bread and salt meat. However great his unhappiness that his customs cannot remain customary, that the best and truest answers of yesteryear are nonsense today, still he demands the technological triumphs. In essence, he is cursing not the fact that he can"t have his cake and eat it too, but that he must accept the cake in order to eat it, and the cake leaves his fingers sticky.
Science fiction is the literature of the Technological Era. It, unlike other literatures, a.s.sumes that change is the natural order of things, that there are goals ahead larger than those we know. That the motto of the technical civilization is true: "There must be a better way of doing this!"
"This," however, doesn"t refer solely to gadgets and machines. Only in its early childhood did science fiction consider that facet solely, or even primarily. "This" is a method of living together; a method of government, a method of thinking, or a method of human relations.
Machines and gadgets aren"t the end and the goal; they are the means to the true goal, which is a better way of living with each other and with ourselves.
Once, ninety per cent of man"s tasks were handled by routines and traditions, so that his energies could all be directed at the hard and terrible labor of forcing Nature to surrender a living. The goal now is to harness Nature so that natural law and the machine will do ninety per cent of the work of providing a living. But that is a fruitless effort, unless man then devotes the great energies he has to the higher task of learning how to enjoy that living, learning how to live with each other.
The cave-man had no time to spend understanding his fellows; he had to get a living, and leave understanding to a pattern of customary responses.
The eventual goal of man is to understand man--but to do it, he must devise nonhuman servitors that can understand and manipulate Nature for him.
Science fiction, in its earliest days, considered the machine. In its adolescence it considers the effect of the machine and the technology on Man. And in its more mature forms it considers Man"s proper relationship to Man and the Universe. You see but short horizons when your nose is hard against the grindstone; when you get a robot to keep the grindstone happy, you have time to look at the far horizons--the planets rising in the East, and the far, bright stars overhead.
These are tales of Far Horizons, in the days when Man can build the robots that free him of the grinding labor--and can accept change freely and well.
These are tales written by minds that ranged free and deep and wide--and loved it. They"re written with zest and enthusiasm, conviction and sincerity. They"re written by the men who have shaped a new literature--even though some of them, such as T. L. Sherred, have written only one story in the field. For science fiction is young, and its strength is in its concepts and its thoughts, not in its polish and routine and formula. One strong, penetrating thought, thrown into the field, influences all the stories written thereafter.
The strongest influences in the field have been such men as Robert A.
Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Lewis Padgett--to single out arbitrarily a few of the many who have, time and again, thrown in important new thoughts.
It should be noted that other highly significant writers can be only inadequately represented here because of the s.p.a.ce limitations of the anthology: Jack Williamson is one whose strength is--unfortunately for the purposes of this volume--in his novels; he cannot be fairly represented by a short story, yet he is one of the oldest hands in the field in point of time, though still a young man. A. E. van Vogt, another of the great shapers of the literature, is another who has done nearly all his work, and all his truly significant work, in novel form.
Eric Frank Russell, on the other hand, is a prolific and powerful writer who, fortunately, has worked largely at the novelette length.
The stories herein are, then, stories I feel are genuinely intriguing, important, and good--though not necessarily "the very best" of each author"s works.
This volume is, I believe, representative of the moods and forces at work in the development of the new literature of the Technological Era.
It is essential in the nature of things that there is, at such a period of change-over, two different literatures. One, the old, will at this period be bitter, confused, disillusioned, and angry. Those novelists dealing with broad themes will have stories of neurotic, confused and essentially homeless-ghost people: people who are trying to live by conventions that have been shattered and haven"t been able to build new ones, who have seen every effort to build a new stable society wrecked by new forces.
The new literature will tend to be filled with a touch of unreality, but will tell of goals and directions and solid hopes. Naturally it has a touch of unreality; the old goals are gone, the new ones not yet here. Therein is the implicit unreality of any hopeful, optimistic literature of such a period; it a.s.serts that the goal is real, but not yet achieved. Most people want goals that someone has already achieved and reported on fully.
Herein, I suggest, is just such a goal. There are two kinds of stability the engineer recognizes: the stability demonstrated by Cheops" Pyramid-static stability; and the immense stability of the planet Earth itself, the spinning, revolving Earth, the dynamic stability that lies in going instead of in being. The stability of the compa.s.s needle that points always to the pole it never attains, but knows surely is there, instead of the stability of a fallen tree that points the way a long-gone wind blew it. The compa.s.s, if deflected from its goal, returns to its original direction. That"s a far higher, longer-range stability than the stolid, solid stability of The Glory That Was Rome, the Law Giver.
Science fiction isn"t as yet the mature literature it should be, and will be. But the science-fictioneer doesn"t find that too troublesome; he recognizes that he hasn"t reached his goal--and recognizes also that that does nothing to prove his goal is either unattainable or undesirable.
Whatever his failures, he maintains with a cheerful stubbornness: "No--it hasn"t been done ... yet!"
Basically, of course, the science-fictioneer is simply the citizen of the Technological Era, whose concern is, say, the political effect of a United States base on the Moon. The technical achievement of such a base he knows full well he can a.s.sume; the engineering knowledge of how to handle the technical problem is on hand. But the political knowledge of how to handle the consequences definitely isn"t.
Science fiction has a place that never existed before--but will exist forevermore.
John W. Campbell, Jr.
Mountainside, N. J.
October, 1951
T H E AsTounding SCIENCE FICTION A N T H O L O G Y.
First published: 1940
BLOWUPS HAPPEN *
by: Robert Heinlein
* This is the original magazine version of Blowups Happen, based entirely on information available to the author in late 1939. A rewritten version, incorporating post-war knowledge, has appeared elsewhere. Since one purpose of this collection is to indicate changing styles and emphases in science fiction in the past dozen years, none of the stories have been altered or rewritten for their publication here. Thus no effort has been made to ferret out possible small factual discrepancies in any of them that may have been uncovered by the findings of later years.--J. W. C., Jr.
"PUT DOWN THAT WRENCH!".
The man addressed turned slowly around and faced the speaker. His expression was hidden by a grotesque helmet, part of a heavy, leaden armor which shielded his entire body, but the tone of voice in which he answered showed nervous exasperation.
"What the h.e.l.l"s eating on you, doc?" He made no move to replace the tool in question.
They faced each other like two helmeted, arrayed fencers, watching for an opening. The first speaker"s voice came from behind his mask a shade higher in key and more peremptory in tone. "You heard me, Harper. Put down that wrench at once, and come away from that "trigger." Erickson!"
A third armored figure came around the shield which separated the uranium bomb proper from the control room in which the first two stood.
"Whatcha want, doc?"
"Harper is relieved from watch. You take over as engineer-of-the-watch.
Send for the stand-by engineer."
"Very well." His voice and manner were phlegmatic, as he accepted the situation without comment. The atomic engineer, whom he had just relieved, glanced from one to the other, then carefully replaced the wrench in its rack.
"Just as you say, Dr. Silard--but send for your relief, too. I shall demand an immediate hearing!" Harper swept indignantly out, his lead-sheathed boots clumping on the floor plates.
Dr. Silard waited unhappily for the ensuing twenty minutes until his own relief arrived. Perhaps he had been hasty. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that Harper had at last broken under the strain of tending the most dangerous machine in the world--an atomic power plant. But if he had made a mistake, it had to be on the safe side--slips must not happen in this business; not when a slip might result in the atomic detonation of two and a half tons of uranium.
He tried to visualize what that would mean, and failed. He had been told that uranium was potentially forty million times as explosive as TNT. The figure was meaningless that way. He thought of it, instead, as a hundred million tons of high explosive, two hundred million aircraft bombs as big as the biggest ever used. It still did not mean anything. He had once seen such a bomb dropped, when he had been serving as a temperament a.n.a.lyst for army aircraft pilots. The bomb had left a hole big enough to hide an apartment house. He could not imagine the explosion of a thousand such bombs, much, much less a hundred million of them Perhaps these atomic engineers could. Perhaps, with their greater mathematical ability and closer comprehension of what actually went on inside the nuclear fission chamber--the "bomb"--they had some vivid glimpse of the mind-shattering horror locked up beyond that shield. If so, no wonder they tended to blow up He sighed. Erickson looked up from the linear resonant accelerator on which he had been making some adjustment. "What"s the trouble, doc?"
"Nothing. I"m sorry I had to relieve Harper."
Silard could feel the shrewd glance of the big Scandinavian. "Not getting the jitters yourself, are you, doc? Sometimes you squirrel sleuths blow up, too "Me? I don"t think so. I"m scared of that thing in there--I"d be crazy if I weren"t."
"So am I," Erickson told him soberly, and went back to his work.
The accelerator"s snout disappeared in the shield between them and the bomb, where it fed a steady stream of terrifically speeded up subatomic bullets to the beryllium target located within the bomb itself. The tortured beryllium yielded up neutrons, which shot out in all directions through the uranium ma.s.s. Some of these neutrons struck uranium atoms squarely on their nuclei and split them in two. The fragments were new elements, barium, xenon, rubidium--depending on the proportions in which each atom split. The new elements were usually unstable isotopes and broke down into a dozen more elements by radioactive disintegration in a progressive chain reaction.
But these chain reactions were comparatively unimportant; it was the original splitting of the uranium nucleus, with the release of the aweinspiring energy that bound it together--an incredible two hundred million electron-volts--that was important--and perilous.
For, while uranium isotope 35 may be split by bombarding it with neutrons from an outside source, the splitting itself gives up more neutrons which, in turn, may land in other uranium nuclei and split them. If conditions are favorable to a progressively increasing reaction of this sort, it may get out of hand, build up in an unmeasurable fraction of a micro-second into a complete atomic explosion--an explosion which would dwarf the eruption of Krakatoa to popgun size; an explosion so far beyond all human experience as to be as completely incomprehensible as the idea of personal death. It could be feared, but not understood.
But a self-perpetuating sequence of nuclear splitting, just under the level of complete explosion, was necessary to the operation of the power plant.
To split the first uranium nucleus by bombarding it with neutrons from the beryllium target took more power than the death of the atom gave up. In order that the output of power from the system should exceed the power input in useful proportion it was imperative that each atom split by a neutron from the beryllium target should cause the splitting of many more.
It was equally imperative that this chain of reactions should always tend to dampen, to die out. It must not build up, or the entire ma.s.s would explode within a time interval too short to be measured by any means whatsoever.
Nor would there be anyone left to measure it.
The atomic engineer on duty at the bomb could control this reaction by means of the "trigger," a term the engineers used to include the linear resonant accelerator, the beryllium target, and the adjacent controls, instrument board, and power sources. That is to say, he could vary the bombardment on the beryllium target to increase or decrease the power output of the plant, and he could tell from his instruments that the internal reaction was dampened--or, rather, that it had been dampened the split second before. He could not possibly know what was actually happening now within the bomb--subatomic speeds are too great and the time intervals too small. He was like the bird that flew backward; he could see where he had been, but he never knew where he was going.
Nevertheless, it was his responsibility, and his alone, not only to maintain the bomb at a high input-output efficiency, but to see that the reaction never pa.s.sed the critical point and progressed into ma.s.s explosion.