Anonymity & Empire
TO THE AMERICAN LITERARY COMMUNITY—to the American arts establishment—the science fiction writers of the forties were invisible. There is no more graceful way to put this. There were, for the first half of the decade, almost no books at all: no anthologies, no reprints, no second-serial rights. Novels and stories were written for genre magazines of limited circulation, were published and went out of print, presumably forever. Asimov has written that everything about his career after 1946 came as a surprise; he had no idea at the time he was writing “Nightfall,” “Foundation,” or the robotics series that this work would live beyond the issues of the magazines in which they appeared. This did not bother him (it might have bothered others) at all: what purpose did science fiction have except to live briefly and die forever in the magazines for kids? There was sufficient reward in becoming part of the ongoing literature. The Queens Science Fiction League was certainly not the world, but for the young Asimov its approval and awe were all that he could have asked.
It must be understood that in certain respects science fiction was no different for its writers, offered nothing less, than did the other branches of popular literature. It was pulp and appeared in the torrent of pulp magazines which by the hundreds got on in various degrees of health until wartime paper shortages and, finally, the curse of television put almost all of them in the ground by the beginning of the fifties. Western and romance writers, adventure and sports pulpeteers, also worked for a half cent to two cents a word and knew that when the magazines went off sale their work would never be seen by a nonrelative or nonlover again. (Mystery writers did have a small book market but in the pre-Mystery Writers of America days only a vanishingly small percentage of magazine work could in expanded form find a book market—and advances, averaging around $250 even for first-rank writers like Woolrich, were an insignificant part of their income.) The difference between science fiction writers and those of the other pulp genres, however, was that science fiction writers took their work seriously, put far more into it psychically and were writing (because of the dominant presence of Campbell) to a consistently higher standard, an imposed rigor and specialized background. It was impossible, then as now, to write science fiction without the most intimate reading knowledge of the form, simply because the field was advancing so quickly in its language and devices that each story either made a direct contribution to the ongoing literature or risked rejection on the basis that it did not.
Surely—I defer to my sometime collaborator Bill Pronzini here with whom I have discussed the issue—western, romance, sports, and certainly mystery writers might have been no less serious about their work, no less dedicated or professional. They certainly were not their inferiors technically, and the anonymity must have had profound effects upon them no less than upon the science fiction writers.
But almost all the science fiction writers were specialists. If they did not have a thorough working knowledge of the literature and the cutting edge, they did not survive. By 1940, very few of the science fiction writers who had been in Astounding prior to Campbell were still there; others had been thrown out and their names—Schachner, Schopeflin, Cummings—were legion. They had been evicted not through Campbellian malice but because they were either unable or unwilling to meet his editorial demands.
Campbell did better—felt that he had no alternative, really—by bringing in writers who had no sales background or alternate markets at all so that he could work with them from the outset . . . and because they had no alternate markets, they were less inclined to put up a battle against Campbell’s demands.
Most of the pre-Campbell writers were pulp generalists who wrote through the entire range of fiction magazines and for whom science fiction constituted only a small percentage of output. Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat, for instance, were enormously prolific and successful pulp writers; science fiction was only 10 percent of their output (and after their eviction less than that), but ironically they are remembered now only for their science fiction. Lester del Rey in his time did a fair amount for the confessions and sports magazines, but most of the first Campbell generation—Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, de Camp—wrote little else. (The Kuttners under their own names and a plethora of pseudonyms wrote a great deal of fantasy but did not appear, as far as can be determined, to any extent in the other category magazines. The Kuttners, however, knew where to bury all the bodies.)
The rigor of the medium, demands of the market, and anonymity in which the work was done must have had their effect upon these writers. Asimov’s feelings are known, but one can only surmise what science fiction did to the Kuttners, who were turning in work like “Vintage Season,” “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” “Shock,” “When the Bough Breaks” for a cent and a half a word; what science fiction did to van Vogt, who was turning out over two hundred thousand words of it a year working sixteen hours a day in a small apartment (and doing some confession stories too); what science fiction meant to Heinlein, who wrote Sixth Column for about $900 and “By His Bootstraps” and “Universe” for maybe $300 each—all of these writers putting out this work without an inkling that it would ever appear again or be read by other than the young core audience for the magazines.
In a sense this anonymity may have been liberating—one of the benefits of writing without a sense of posterity or audience may be a great and abounding freedom, the conviction that since what one is doing really does not matter one can, accordingly, do anything one wants—and the texts and commentaries of the time indicate that to a degree all the writers felt this way. It was a new kind of fiction being written in a different fashion; the knowledge that it was breakthrough literature of a sort might have been comforting to writers who could rationalize that what they did was too ambitious for a mass audience. Nonetheless, the record makes clear that almost all of this generation were finished by the end of the decade and looking for other things to do. Heinlein had turned (after a few stories for Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, the first mass-magazine science fiction in decades) to the juvenile book market and was writing on contract for Scribner’s with only a few “adult” novels—The Puppet Masters, Double Star, The Door into Summer—serialized in the magazines. L. Ron Hubbard with A. E. van Vogt and Katherine MacLean had disappeared into the Dianetics Institute, from which the latter two emerged to write again only a decade and a half later. L. Sprague de Camp turned to nonfiction, juveniles, and a scattering of fantasy and was a small factor in fifties science fiction. Asimov had taken a doctorate in biochemistry, and in 1949, after a few months of excruciating ambivalence, took a full-time teaching position at Boston University (the controlling aspect of his decision being that he had never made nor had any reason to believe that he could ever make a living from science fiction). 1
The Kuttners had returned to school at USC, seeking undergraduate degrees in psychology and then going on to graduate work; Henry did a series of mysteries for Harper’s but with the exception of “Humpty Dumpty” (finishing off the series published immediately thereafter by Ballantine as Mutant), never appeared in Astounding in the decade and only once in Galaxy (and once in Fantasy and Science Fiction). Del Rey and Sturgeon stayed in the hunt but changed their markets, Sturgeon publishing only one story in ASF in the nineteen-fifties and del Rey a bare scattering. The creation and expansion of the book market for science fiction, the restoration to print (in certain cases highly remunerative) of the work written in anonymity must have been highly gratifying to these writers, but it appeared to inspire none of them to return to the steady production of science fiction. An entire new generation—one could say several generations—of science fiction writers were needed to pursue the vastly expanded category in the fifties and of course they presented themselves. Among them were the finest writers who had ever worked in the form, and collectively they gave science fiction its great decade.
But the first Campbell generation did not play a significant role in the science fiction of the fifties. Nor did Campbell: he stayed behind, doing exactly as he had been doing; but science fiction had been taken from him and, as the decade went on, surely he knew it. His magazine began to enact his increasing bewilderment and recrimination. The price the forties had imposed had been exacted; the battle had, long after the fact, been won . . . but only after the writers had ceased to fight. This late outcome from early and lonely struggle must have been the true bitterness of the decade for these writers, and why so very few of them, although relatively young long after the decade, were unable to reproduce their best work.
Anonymity is at least an openness of promise; outcome, whatever it may be, is a weight upon the heart.
1980: New Jersey