Читать книгу Collected Essays - Brian Aldiss - Страница 27

Setting nostalgia aside, what was achieved by Astounding Science Fiction under the editorship of John Wood Campbell? Campbell edited this famous magazine from May 1938, when he took full charge, until he died in July 1971, at the age of sixty-one. It was a long tenure. Many of us still think of those years, particularly the magazine’s rich decades of the 1940s and 1950s, as ‘Campbell’s years’.

The situation must be faced, that the stories in which we gloried in our youth become tarnished on a disillusioned re-reading, many years later. The revelations in the stories are now part of our world-outlook; that they have become incorporated in, have formed, our way of life is a tribute to their earlier power.

It is hard to define exactly what gives a story or novel perennial appeal. We’re dealing here with the fragile, things not designed to last, and sometimes written in desperation for four cents a word.

One reason why science fiction is so little regarded is because it is often ahead of its time, and therefore unpalatable to the general or even the literary reader. By ‘ahead of its time’ we mean mainly forward-looking in interests.

To take a random example: James H. Schmitz’s story ‘Grandpa’ was published in Campbell’s magazine in the mid-1950s. It is a story of symbiosis on an alien planet. A human being, Cord, is using a kind of giant perambulating lily pad to navigate round a bay. They call this raft ‘Grandpa’. But Grandpa buds and starts doing sinister and unexpected things, like heading out to the open sea, to the cold Zlanti Deep. A symbiote, the Yellowhead, has joined Grandpa and taken control of it. This is the dilemma from which Cord must extricate himself and his three companions.

It was a wonderful story. I went about for months muttering to myself that thrilling name, ‘The Zlanti Deep’—resonant synonym for the Unknown.

What was new to me at the time was the story’s sustained botanical aspect, although ASF writers and readers had long been interested in ideas of symbiosis. Researchers more skilled than I could trace this theme through the years. Also, ‘Grandpa’ was about ecology, some years before Herbert’s Dune appeared.

Well, forty years on, ecology has become one of the buzz words of the age. What one perceives, on going back to Schmitz’s clever story now, is that it belongs in a rather dated category: the resourceful human on an alien planet who solves a little puzzle with good old American know-how and a gun. In fact, its structure derives from the men’s adventure tales of the Clayton pulps, where Astounding Stories of Super-Science was born in 1930.

A generation has gone by since Schmitz wrote. Even the vast Zlanti Deep has been drained and cities are built upon the reclaimed land. Times change.

So, if the ASF stories have passed their sell-by date, why is Campbell’s magazine, rightly, so prized today? The answer must be that it was ASF itself which was the great work of dedication, the work of art. No, not quite a work of art: the spectrum was too narrow. No spirituality at one end, no eroticism at the other. What produced the excitement, the intellectual stimulation, was the whole ambience of the magazine, the variety of every issue, and, of course, that mixture of madness and sanity which is at the heart of SF.

It was a rich soup. Campbell’s Astounding (later Analog) nourished a generation of minds—and not only in the USA. We honour it still, although times have changed.