Seekers of Tomorrow (55 page)

One month later, astounding science-fiction, May, 1950, published his article
Dianetics, the Evolution
of a Science,
and L. Ron Hubbard was launched on a new career which marked a point of no return as far as his science-fiction writing was concerned.

A major landmark in science fiction may be credited to Hal Clement, pen name of Harry Clement Stubbs, a New England science teacher who reflects his specialty in his writing. In
Mission of Gravity
(astounding science-fic-tion, April to July, 1953), a novel dealing with the problems or recovering recorded information from a rocket probe grounded on a planet with nearly 700 times the gravitational pull of the earth, he wrote what is generally regarded as the epic of the scientific problem story in science fiction. As a solution for his problem he worked out the biological attributes for an alien race capable of living on this world and involved them in supplying the muscle for the recovery problem. To add to the interest, a good portion of the story is told from the viewpoint of the aliens.

Previously Clement had distinguished himself with a clev-erly fabricated interplanetary detective story,
Needle,
with both the hunted and the hunter aliens, serialized in astound-ing science-fiction, May and June, 1949.

There is a tendency to regard the format of
Mission of Gravity
and the style of its author, Hal Clement, as a throwback to the earlier days of science fiction, when Hugo Gernsback set policy and heavy science was more in the vogue. The implication is present that if the old science fiction had consistently produced material as provocative as
Mission of Gravity,
modern readers and critics would display more tolerance toward science fiction's pioneers. Actually this type of story is a manifestation of science fiction's modern development.

In truth, the popularizer of the scientific problem story was actually Ross Rocklynne in a series of stories about an inter-planetary policeman, Lt. Jack Colbie, who pursues criminal Edward Deverel in and out of a number of cosmic traps, beginning with the problem of getting out of the interior of a hollow planet in
At the
Center of Gravity
(astounding stories, June, 1936), and ending with the problem of escap-ing from the frictionless concave mirror on a newly discovered planet in
The Men and the Mirror
(astounding science-fiction, July, 1939).

Ross Rocklynne was also a successful exponent of telling the story from the viewpoint of the alien, as in his fantasy masterpiece of the intelligent spiral nebula "Darkness," who began his cosmic career in
Into the
Darkness
(astounding science-fiction, June, 1940).

Editor Campbell of astounding science-fiction favored the scientific problem story, encouraging the radio engineer George O. Smith to present and solve a number of technical dilemmas in interplanetary communications with a group of stories beginning with
QRM
—
Interplanetary
(astounding science-fiction, October, 1942), which were later collected as
Venus Equilateral
(Prime Press, 1947). Jack Williamson's contraterrene matter series, written under the pen name Will Stewart, were basically scientific problem stories.

An extremely capable author whose versatility has acted to minimize his reputation is Poul Anderson. He began writing in 1947 as an alternative to entering industry as a physicist. With the expanding science-fiction market he found little difficulty in selling all he could write, for he could write whatever the market demanded, and moreover he was able to do considerable work outside the field, in nonfiction, mys-tery, and historical sagas.

As the years passed and his skills sharpened, there were probably few authors in the field who did better financially. There were many outstanding stories, scattered among a large body of work, but it was not until the appearance of
The High Crusade,
a novel serialized in astounding science-fiction*, July to September, 1960, that he began to come into his own. This novel tends to contradict the thesis advanced by Mark Twain in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
that a man possessed of modern science would neces-sarily have been at an advantage in an encounter with the ancients. Poul Anderson's view is that the noblemen and knights of fourteenth-century England may have been igno-rant but they were not stupid. How they cope with the crew of a spaceship that lands in England during their period makes for a highly original and outstanding novel.

The year of
The High Crusade's
appearance Anderson was beaten out for the Hugo by
A Canticle for
Leibowitz,
but received the award for the best short story of the year for
The Longest Voyage
(analog science fact & fiction, December, 1960). For this, Anderson hypothesized a seafar-ing civilization, developed along the lines of the Norsemen, and their proposal to reactivate an old spaceship and their reasons for changing their minds. He again won the Hugo for

*Later known as analog science fact & fiction.

a shorter work for
No Truce with Kings
(the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, June, 1963), a story that also incorporated elements of the action and philosophies of past cultures in the hackneyed setting of a post-nuclear-war America, reemerging and reuniting. Anderson's interest in using historical cultures as the background for his science fiction has given him the stature in the field that his previous diversity of effort did not bring him.

One of the most renowned teams in literary history was that of Erckmann-Chatrian, French authors of the past cen-tury, noted for an impressive list of novels and plays, as well as their excellent short science-fiction stories, including
The Inventor
and
Hans Schnap's Spy-Glass.
Few collaborations have proved as successful as that team, for, in most partner-ships, dissident elements tend to creep in and disrupt the harmony. In recent times, one noteworthy short-term collab-oration was that of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in science fiction. Both had significant literary accomplishments to their credit, but their united effort in
Gravy Planet
(gal-axy science fiction, June to August, 1952), represent-ing the America of the future as completely dominated by the advertising agencies, seemed to strike a responsive chord in readers and critics alike. It was in part due to the times, when "Madison Avenue" had become both a symbol and a theme on the American scene. The science-fiction format, an excellent medium for satire, was especially well adapted to exaggerating the long-range effects of advertising's influence. Elements of the baronial business arrangement of the future presented in
Gravy Planet
(published in hard cover and paperback as
The Space Merchants),
particularly the legali-zation of feuds, owes some debt to L. Sprague de Camp's
The Stolen Dormouse.

It is claimed that the story was jointly plotted and then written in relays by Pohl and Kornbluth. At the time of the collaboration Kornbluth was by far the more prominent literary personality. He was born talent, displaying an ad-vanced stylistic and storytelling instinct even in his early teens. With Frederik Pohl and Donald A. Wollheim, he was a member of The Futurian Literary Society in the late thirties, a group that had as one of its major tenets that its members assist one another to literary advancement. When both Woll-heim and Pohl became editors of low-budget magazines, Kornbluth became one of their mainstays, contributing scores of stories under a variety of pen names to their various publications. After active service as a machine gunner in Europe in World War II, Kornbluth did not return to science fiction until 1949, although he wrote and sold many detective sto-ries. When he resumed writing for the science-fiction maga-zines, his short stories showed a snideness, an irreverence, a trace of a sneer, and a hint of blackness that clearly labeled them as coming from his typewriter. Blackness had frequent-ly been Kornbluth's mood even as a teenager, though the cause of his bitterness was not readily apparent. It intensified when both of his children were born mentally retarded.

Collaborations with Judith Merril under the pen name Cyril Judd resulted in the novels
Mars Child
and
Gunner Cade,
which appeared in galaxy science fiction (May to July, 1951) and astounding science-fiction (March to May, 1952) then quickly as books. When he teamed up with Fred Pohl,
Gravy Planet
followed quickly and reestablished him solidly.

Fred Pohl had collaborated with Kornbluth twelve years earlier when the two of them wrote stories for stirring science stories and astonishing stories, both now defunct, under the pen name S. D. Gottesman. Pohl was the first editor of the latter magazine, beginning in February, 1940, and also of a companion, super science stories from its first issue, March, 1940. He contributed stories to the maga-zine under the pseudonym James MacCreigh.

Suave and urbane, Pohl was an effective businessman and he entered a literary agency after World War II, building an impressive roster of leading science-fiction authors whose careers he guided into the early fifties. The success of
Gravy Planet
encouraged him to continue in a series of further joint efforts with Kornbluth, which, while well starred, did not again score as strongly as with
Gravy Planet.
Most readers had credited Kornbluth as the big talent in the collaboration and presumed that Pohl would be ineffec-tive on his own. Pohl had been in advertising agency work and had shown outstanding competence in putting together a number of science-fiction anthologies, the most impressive being a series of collections of original stories for Ballantine Books called
Star Science Fiction Stories.
Solo novelettes and short stories, predominantly for galaxy science fiction, began to appear. The most revealing was
Tunnel Under the World
(galaxy science fiction, January, 1955), in which researchers for advertising agencies have reproduced the brain patterns of an entire town of 21,000 people to market-research their techniques. Pohl's style in that story alternated between slick "savvy" and unabashed forthrightness. He wrote like a man who knew just what should be done and how to go about doing it.
Tunnel Under the
World
strongly suggests that if Fred Pohl, with his own advertising back-ground, did not indeed provide the plot framework for
Gravy Planet,
he certainly could have done so. Cyril Kornbluth, in his other major books
Takeoff
(Dou-bleday, 1952),
Syndic
(Doubleday, 1953), and
Not This August
(Doubleday, 1955), employs overdone, even trite themes for his frameworks, and while he, like the Danes, may serve mashed potatoes with fringed edges, they remain mashed potatoes with no steak in sight. His novels tell of getting the first space rocket up; of a bizarre "Utopian" future menaced by a gangster-operated culture; and of conquered Americans who overthrow the yoke of the conquering Rus-sians.

Pohl was well on his way to greater recognition as a writer, especially of novels, when he was seduced by the challenge of editing galaxy science fiction and its prolifer-ation of companions (if, worlds of tomorrow, and maga-book) after H. L. Gold suffered an illness which made him unable to continue. This was something he had always wanted to do, and he did it well. It became rapidly apparent that he soon would have to make a choice between continu-ing as an editor or returning to writing, in either of which pursuits he could be a success.

There comes a time when a magazine's policy and an author's direction seem to coalesce, when a writer is discov-ered who in style and subject matter epitomizes everything a publication stands for. That happy situation occurred when H. L. Gold finally coaxed Alfred Bester into writing a novel published as
The
Demolished Man,
which Gold triumphantly ran in galaxy science fiction (January-March, 1953). Bes-ter was in no way a Gold discovery, having first appeared as the winner of an amateur story contest in thrilling wonder stories (April, 1939), with
The Broken Axiom,
but he had previously never rated even as high as an

"also ran" in the roster. His climb from the ranks of pulp writers had led him into the anonymous oblivion but better-paid role of comic-strip continuity writer, then into radio, and finally into televi-sion. In television he did well enough so that science fiction was to him, at best, an avocation. The world of
The Demolished Man
is run by a new elite, a guild of ESPers (telepathic mind readers, practitioners of Extra-Sensory Perception), whose involvement in business, psychiatry, crime detection, and other pursuits revolutionized society. The difficulties of planning, committing, and keeping secret a murder in such a world provide the essence of the plot. There is a great amount of ingenuity displayed in describing a semitelepathic society, but the wholly unfair advantage of a detective who can read minds inveighs against the effectiveness of
The Demolished Man
as a mystery story. Its impact rests principally upon the dazzling narrative tech-nique of the author, whose ability to convey sight and sound, and to create special effects with words on the printed page, far transcends that of virtually all of his contemporaries. Laced through the entire fabric of the novel is an insight into the employment of psychoanalysis which gave the partially deserved designation to galaxy science fiction as "the magazine of psychiatric fiction." While Alfred Bester stylistically awed most of his fellow science-fiction writers, his view of himself was not as ele-vated. When
The Demolished Man
was issued in hard cover by Shasta Publishers, Chicago, in 1953, the biographical sketch on the book jacket stated: "Alfred Bester, the author of
The Demolished
Man,
is a successful writer for radio and television. . ... He is married to a well-known radio and television actress." The same year, the early paragraphs of his book
"Who He?"
(Dial) seemed frankly autobiographical, read-ing: "I'm a scriptwriter by trade, specializing in mystery shows. I'm married to an actress. We're both of us second-raters in the entertainment business . . . mostly anonymous to the public, fairly well-known to our colleagues. Between us we make from ten to twenty thousand dollars a year, depend-ing on the breaks. This is only fair money in our business.