efore John W. Campbell ever achieved fame at the helm of Astounding magazine, where he revolutionized science fiction by fostering such talents as Asimov and Heinlein, he started his life in the field as a fiction writer. Under his own name, he published titanic space operas rivaling those of E.E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton. But something within him yearned to write a different kind of SF—more nuanced, poetic, even melancholy—and to satisfy those urges he adopted the pen name of Don A. Stuart. Under this byline, he produced 16 stories—the bulk of which ran in Astounding prior to his occupancy of the editorial chair—and two non-fiction pieces. All these are gathered in this rich compendium, along with an introduction by Barry Malzberg, who has made a lifelong study of Campbell and oeuvre.
"Twilight," perhaps the most famous Stuart story, tells of an accidental time traveler who gets to witness the dying days of mankind in a wasteland of perfect machines. Is the whole universe a mere atom in some larger structure—and what if our home particle should fall under the crushing force of a macroscopic atom smasher? The answer to this conundrum is revealed in "Atomic Power." A trilogy of stories begins with "The Machine," wherein an all-beneficent alien machine has inadvertently undermined the human race. Having departed Earth, the Machine left us open to alien conquest by the Tharoo in "The Invaders." But humanity's tenacious spirit resurges after centuries in "Rebellion."
"Blindness" details how one elderly scientist's altruistic obsession with the ultimate power source prohibits him from seeing the utopia right under his nose. An odd love story forms the core of "The Escape," where a brave new world relies on neural coercion to enforce matings. Although not explicitly a sequel to "Twilight," "Night" deals with the same theme of entropy, although carried to even greater dimensions, placing a human visitor in a future cosmos shrunken and cold. Should some inventions be forever kept from public knowledge? Campbell presents his best case for this in "Elimination."
Old Hugh is a member of the pitiful remnants of mankind who wander the ruins of an Earth decimated by the Granthee. Temporarily free of their conquerors, the humans hopelessly await a second wave of Granthee invaders—little knowing that Old Hugh has assured their victory in the form of "Frictional Losses." Are the arcadian remnants of mankind complete innocents—or are they masters of all they survey? Such a puzzle greets the alien explorers in "Forgetfulness." A diptych is formed by "Out of Night" and "Cloak of Aesir." For 4,000 years, the Sarn Mother and her brood have ruled over Earth. But certain human inventions—cast in the form of a supernatural savior—will soon change that.
On a planet whose cities all lie deserted, and whose people all suicided, a crew of three men from Earth must unriddle the agent of the world's destruction out of shreds of "Dead Knowledge." "Who Goes There?"—famously filmed as The Thing in 1951 and 1982—tells of the plight of a polar research crew at the mercy of an alien shape-changer. Co-written with Arthur J. Burks, "The Elder Gods," which appeared in Unknown, charts the downfall of decadent empire at the hands of a lone Conan-type figure employed by living gods. Finally, the short essay "Strange Worlds" is a meditation on the limits of human senses, while "Wouldst Write, Wee One?" shares some of Campbell's tricks of the writing trade.
A titan's philosophy
on stirring display
Let's start with the first gem in this casket of treasures. Barry Malzberg's essay on Campbell, "The Man Who Lost the Sea," is one of the best pieces this famed critic has ever done; it neatly, perceptively and broodingly captures the essence of both Campbell the editor and writer Stuart, his alter ego. It's almost enough reason alone to buy this book.
But of course, the best is yet to come. These stories—excluding a few stylistic infelicities and narrative longueurs here and there—are so much better than the standard 1930s SF that it is no wonder "Stuart" was hailed as a master during his heyday. The dialogue is all credible, the concepts are big, bold and brilliant, the plotting is swift and airtight, the puzzles are genuine mysteries with genuine solutions (especially in the suspenseful, almost Hitchcockian "Who Goes There?"), the sense of wonder is palpable, and the overall tone of delicious melancholy across the stories is positively Byronic. Here for almost the first time in embryo was a kind of SF that would exfoliate as the New Wave. Don Stuart giving birth to Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard? It's not too far a stretch.
Naturally, though, these stories also remain firmly of their time. And we are glad they do. The rudimentary vigor of alien invasions and instant paradigm-shattering inventions and vast vistas of time and space are elements lost or muted in today's SF. Here we can still thrill to such sentences as "A pencil of ravening, intolerable fury burst [forth] ... a pencil of inconceivable energies that reft the air in its path in screaming, shattered atoms ... " True, we lose some modern improvements: The women in these stories don't play much of a part, but even that observation is undercut by the rebellious figure of Aies Marlan in "The Escape."
What's particularly interesting is to see both the germs of Campbell's later editorial crotchets—superb Aryan humans going up against ultimately inferior aliens; psi powers saving the day; anti-gravity devices cobbled together out of tin cans—and the germs of story ideas he later fed to his stable of writers. Heinlein's Sixth Column and Leiber's Gather, Darkness! lurk implicitly in Stuart's tales of the revolts against the Tharoo and the Sarn, for instance.
Whether prefiguring Sturgeon in his description of the music of entropy in "Twilight," or foreshadowing Bradbury's Mars in the depiction of the ghost world of "Dead Knowledge," Campbell shows in this volume that he was a complex figure even more essential to our field's growth than generally acknowledged.
