The Best of John W. Campbell (1976)

This collection, which I purchased from a used book store for a whopping dollar, contains Twilight, the short story originally published under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart. Editor Lester del Rey states in the intro that Campbell originally wrote pulpy stories under his real name. He then briefly developed the pseudonym Don A. Stuart to write stories of a more serious nature. The first story in this collection, The Last Evolution, isn’t of much interest as it’s one of his more pulpy efforts, but the other stories, starting with Twilight and (almost) concluding with Who Goes There? (the inspiration for The Thing From Another Planet and John Carpenter’s The Thing) provides a nice cross-section of his contributions to the genre.

In his memoirs I, Asimov, the good doctor talks favorably of Campbell for the most part, but later expresses dismay over the man’s decision to buy into L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, the original book of Scientology. Many of the writers who had been loyal to Campbell, then the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (formerly Astounding), turned their backs on him. In his introduction to this collection, Lester del Rey only briefly mentions Campbell’s foray into pseudoscience, stating, “His eternal quest for undiscovered fields of knowledge led him into what I considered cultist beliefs, and I fought against those both privately and publicly.”

Although I was previously aware of his role in spreading Scientology, it wasn’t until after I read these stories that I learned Campbell was a racist, writing articles in support of segregation; writers such as Samuel R. Delaney and Harlan Ellison publicly spoke out against him. I did not feel, at the time of reading these stories, that any of that baggage made its way to the page, but it’s clear that when such a man writes about alien threats, it is often with the subtext of, “I think you know who I’m really talking about.”

So I wouldn’t recommend this collection to anyone who’s only interested in good yarns and cares little about the history of golden age science fiction. Having said that, I also find the personal views of Heinlein to be detestable (though he was not, as far as I know, a racist) and still thoroughly enjoy much of his fiction.

I Learned Science from Arthur C. Clarke

Two years ago today, the last living member of science fiction’s “Big Three” died. It was Arthur C. Clarke, whose prose was never what anyone else would call masterful, but it was sufficient. That wasn’t the point. He was an ideas man and his imagination was both awe-inspiring and troubling, grounded and mystical.

Clarke often had science on his side—real science—which is why I believe that science fiction is important. Consider how many real-life scientists say they were initially inspired by books, TV shows, etc. The inventor of the cell phone was inspired by the communicators on Star Trek, Paul Krugman became the world’s most famous economist after reading Asimov’s Foundation, and Robert Goddard, the inventor of the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket, cited The War of the Worlds as his inspiration.

Rendezvous with Rama

Rendezvous with Rama, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula, was equal parts haunting and mysterious. It’s primarily an adventure story told without the prerequisite heroes and damsels in distress (the main character isn’t just married, he’s got two wives which is, uh, apparently a thing space travelers like to do in the future), yet it’s every bit as entertaining as, say, Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure. Science is often the cause of the characters’ dilemma, such as when they realize the weather inside the alien spacecraft will turn dangerous as it approaches the sun, but in Clarke’s world, science is usually the solution to the problems as well.

Clarke’s seminal work begins: “Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.”

On September 11th, 2077, a meteorite strikes Earth and kills six hundred thousand people. This plot point is foreshadowed by Clarke’s narration of real-life events: in June of 1908, he writes:

Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivaling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.

And about the fictional meteorite of 2077:

Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent that more than a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones.

The incident spurs the creation of SPACEGUARD, a program to ward against such catastrophic collisions. Fifty years later, SPACEGUARD discovers what scientists will soon call Rama: an enormous cylindrical spacecraft which has mysteriously entered the solar system and will soon leave. This gives humans a small window to study the alien craft. I was instantly hooked and spent a very long night inhaling the novel beneath my covers with a flashlight.

Rendezvous introduced me to conceptual physics. Rama, constantly spinning about its axis, generates the illusion of gravity for its occupants via centripetal force. Inside, separating the two halves of the cylindrical craft is an ocean in the form of an equatorial band. Perhaps I struggled with this imagery at first: a giant band of water that “sticks” to the inside of the cylinder’s continuous wall. When the characters ride a boat in the middle of this ocean, they can look up and see more of the ocean ahead and above them.

Sure, this type of setup has been a staple of science fiction many times before and since, but it was likely my first brush with the concept. In an interesting subplot somewhere in the middle of the book, the explorers want to get a look at the device at the far end of the craft, which they assume is some sort of a space drive. You see spaceships in movies that don’t have any visible means of propulsion all the time, but in an Arthur C. Clarke story, this is particularly curious because it violates Netwon’s third law of motion.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Some time after inhaling the entire Rama series (only the first one is essential), I found the book version of 2001, which was more or less written concurrently with the film’s production. It expanded on the Dawn of Man stuff seen in the opening of the film, which was perhaps the first time I considered human evolution and our prehistoric ancestors. The novel also expands on how Hal 9000 tries to kill the main character, which in some ways is scarier than the movie. The sequence as designed by Clarke was probably too expensive for Kubrick’s budget.

The Early Stuff

Some of Clarke’s earlier works may seem lackluster compared to mainstream classics like 2001 and Rama, but the science is still fairly hard and the stories are charming if nothing else. Some of the things he dwells on is now common knowledge for SF fans (we don’t need to be frequently reminded “There’s no up or down in space”), but I think it’s interesting to note he was writing this stuff before humans ever went to space.

An excerpt from Islands in the Sky, a novel aimed at teenagers in which the narrator wins a trip to space:

There were also, I’d discovered, some interesting tricks and practical jokes that could be played in space. One of the best involved nothing more complicated than an ordinary match.

What happens is the other astronauts play a prank on the boy: they tell him the way you make sure you have a fresh supply of oxygen is the same way miners do it back on Earth: you light a match. (Never mind why astronauts have matches on board.) If the match goes out, “well, you go out too, as quickly as you can!”

One of the astronauts demonstrates by lighting a match which promptly extinguishes itself, much to the boy’s dismay.

It’s funny how the mind works, for up to that moment I’d been breathing comfortably, yet now I seemed to be suffocating.

The narrator panics before he realizes that, in the absence of gravity, smoke has nowhere to go and suffocates the flame.

Childhood’s End

Childhood’s End is possibly the most loved of Clarke’s earlier novels. At one point in the story, the characters successfully use a device that’s essentially a spirit board, which is disappointing to those who love Clarke’s hard science. Beyond the detailed explanations of time dilation at relativistic speeds (possibly the first time I was introduced to that concept), the only thing about Childhood’s End that really sticks out in my mind is the introduction included in my edition (1990, Pan Books LTD.). There, Clarke admits that he was impressed by evidence for the paranormal when he wrote Childhood’s End, which would not hold true later in his life.

When Childhood’s End first appeared, many readers were baffled by a statement after the title page to the effect that “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.”

This was not entirely facetious; I had just published The Exploration of Space, and painted an optimistic picture of our future expansion into the Universe. Now I had written a book which said, “The stars are not for Man,” and I did not want anyone to think I had suddenly recanted.

Today, I would like to change the target of that disclaimer to cover 99 percent of the “paranormal” (it can’t all be nonsense) and 100 percent of UFO “encounters.”

At any rate, I just thought I’d use this anniversary of Clarke’s death to geek out about him.

Masters of Science Fiction: The Discarded

The Discarded, based on the short story by Harlan Ellison, is narrated by Stephen Hawking—yes, the famous professor with the electronic voice. It stars John Hurt, whose character has two heads, and Brian Dennehy, who has a gigantic arm. You may be reminded of a running gag in Mother, in which Albert Brooks plays a fledgling science fiction author who wrote novels of questionable value: “Did you like the character with the big hand?” he’d ask readers.

The discards are a colony of mutants who were quarantined on a space station. Life sucks so bad that many kill themselves in inhumane ways. One day, a ship from Earth makes an unscheduled rendezvous. The visitor, an ambassador from Earth, tells them that after they were discarded, the virus responsible for the mutations evolved following a period of dormancy. Earth’s only hope for a cure lies in the enzymes manufactured by those who were originally infected.

Like one of the stronger episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the quandary is an ethical one, which is why it should come as no surprise that the episode’s director is Jonathon “Riker” Frakes, working with a teleplay written by Josh Olson and Harlan Ellison himself. The climax won’t involve laser weapons or dramatic space battles. It will involve small group politics, blind faith, and diplomacy. Dennehy’s street smart leader of the colony is steeled in his resolve not to trust Earth even though everyone else has turned against him. The audience is given no more information than what we see on the screen. We literally don’t know who’s right.

Some may snicker seeing these actors adorned with heavy prosthetics on a science fictional set, but Hurt and Dennehy take their jobs seriously. This is great acting, period, but for TV it’s phenomenal acting. A lot of seasoned actors would have written this material off as nothing more than a paycheck. Hurt and Dennehy, and in no small part the cast of supporting characters, treat it as if it’s Shakespeare. It’s remarkable how endearing this crew of misfits become in such a short span of time.

The whole production reminds me of the 90s revival of The Outer Limits and it’s brought to you by genre fanatic Mick Garris, the same mind behind Showtime’s Masters of Horror. This is made by fans of science fiction and it shows. One of my favorite hours of TV ever produced.