The World Beyond the Hill
Alexei PanshinThe World Beyond the Hill Gönderileri
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Asimov had impressed his wife-to-be early in their courtship when she had asked him the old conundrum about what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object, and he had explained that it was impossible for the two to co-exist in the same universe. That was precisely the problem in the relationship between Heinlein and Asimov. One was irresistible, the other was immovable, and it wasn’t possible for the two to comfortably co-exist in the same little Navy Yard universe.
As it happened, during World War II, Canada saw fit to protect the tender sensibilities of its citizens by banning all American science fiction magazines. A partial exception was made for van Vogt, who needed to read Astounding for professional reasons, and he continued to receive his copies forwarded to him through the Canadian censor’s office.
Askeri İstihbarat'ın bilimkurgu dergisini soruşturması
Campbell had primed Cartmill with detailed information about the construction, shielding and detonation of an atomic bomb made of U-235, and Cartmill had embedded this data in an otherwise lame and unimaginative story set during a World War on some other planet.
All this seemed suspicious enough to bring out agents of Military Intelligence, who feared that the security of the Manhattan Project had been compromised. So they looked up John Campbell and discussed the matter with him. They talked to Cleve Cartmill in California. They talked things over with the illustrator of the story, Paul Orban.
John Campbell was not only ready and willing to point out to his own interrogators the unclassified pre-war publications that were his sources, but even had the audacity to argue that Astounding should be allowed to continue to publish stories of atomic power. If the Germans were watching (and it would turn out that some of them, at least, had been; Werner von Braun, the mastermind of the German rocket program, for one, would arrange to keep getting his own personal copy of Astounding all through the war), then it might very well seem suspicious if the magazine were to suddenly cease printing stories on this long-established topic.
Heinlein’s oldest Navy friend was currently the director of the Materials Laboratory of the Naval Aircraft Factory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, so Heinlein arranged to have himself taken on there as a civilian research and development engineer. And with him, he brought Isaac Asimov as a civilian chemist, and L. Sprague de Camp, a new-made Naval Reserve officer, as an engineer. These three leading writers of modern science fiction would spend the war years working on the same floor of the same building.
America’s new ideal can be seen in its simplest and purest form in World War II combat movies—particularly those made in the decade of reassessment that followed the war. The standard World War I story had been about the futility and waste of sending a generation of young men out of the trenches and over the top to be cut down by gas and machine gun fire in No Man’s Land, or about dashing but doomed young pilots attempting to face fate and the end of Western civilization with a smile. But the archetypical movie of the Second World War would feature a squad of infantrymen—a Texan, an Italian, a Jew, a spoiled rich kid, an immigrant Slavic coal miner, a farm boy, and a wiseguy from Brooklyn—learning to get along together and win the war.
Asimov would summarize its nature this way:
"Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again."
“The Search” was the first science fiction story to imagine that a continuing organization of human beings might stand apart from the flow of history and then dip back in wherever it seemed appropriate to positively affect the direction of human affairs. Van Vogt’s Possessors, ranging forth from their Palace of Immortality to play beneficent god with history and then returning to file reports on the subject, would stimulate the imaginations of many SF writers.
Writing out of mental imagery, lack of conscious foreknowledge of what was to come next, and dreamstuff was the only effective way that van Vogt knew to produce science fiction at all. He says, “I have tried to plot stories consciously, from beginning to end, and I never sell them. I know better, now, than to even attempt to write them that way.”
In place of a universe of constantly competing particles effectively going nowhere, Whitehead was offering the alternative vision of an organic and interconnected universe evolving through creativeness and cooperation.
Thinking such as this—neither spiritual nor materialistic, but holistic, organic, environmental and evolutionary—was a genuine rarity in the Twenties. But the young Alfred van Vogt found it highly appealing and took to it eagerly.