Collected Essays

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.