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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.
When Lovecraft was a small boy, his father went violently insane and then died in a mental institution. Howard was a mama’s boy, dressed like a girl by his mother. At the same time, she constantly told him that he was hideously ugly and refused to touch him. She would eventually die in the same mental institution as his father.
Writers in Weird Tales even invented a new genre—sword-and-sorcery—that preserved magic, the occult, and the materials of the lost race story by removing them to remote moments in time. Clark Ashton Smith at times wrote of a magic-haunted dying Earth—a flat Earth—under the red sun of the far future. And, in his Conan stories (1932-36), Robert E. Howard, a Texan, recounted the adventures of a vigorous young barbarian in a world of black magic and sorcery located between the fall of Atlantis and the rise of known history.
In order to enter the Technological Age, the Romantics had to come to the perception that their most frightening problem, the rise of soulless science, was in fact the answer to their greatest need, the rediscovery of mystery.
Just so, in order to enter the coming Atomic Age, was it necessary for Techno-men to realize that what appeared to be their most terrifying problem—the vast new universe revealed by science—was in fact the answer to humanity’s pressing need to escape execution by grim Fate.
The Coming Race is not a utopian story. It is SF. It is not the superior society itself that is transcendent in The Coming Race. Rather, the advanced society that Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator discovers is supported and maintained by the super-scientific power, vril. Vril is the very basis of civilization.
Like the utopian story, The Coming Race admits the notion of progress, but this progress is specifically given as scientific progress. It is the scientific power vril that is the measure of difference between barbarism and civilization.
By the end of the Age of Technology, science fiction as a myth of scientific materialism was approaching a dead end—not least because of the very degree of its success.
Material science was losing its former mystery. All the old superscientific wonders so long imagined in science fiction stories—rockets, computers, television, atomic power—were beginning to come true. As they did, they were ceasing to be transcendent. They were changing from a might-be into an is.
Campbell would tell his young fellow editor, Fred Pohl:
"The trouble with Heinlein is that he doesn’t need to write. When I want a story from him, the first thing I have to do is think up something he would like to have, like a swimming pool. The second thing is to sell him on the idea of having it. The third thing is to convince him he should write a story to get the money to pay for it, instead of building it himself."
Campbell told him: “Asimov, when you have trouble with the beginning of a story, that is because you are starting in the wrong place, and almost certainly too soon. Pick out a later point in the story, and begin again.”
This most certainly was not Techno Age storywriting advice. That would have been to begin at the beginning, and then to go on until the end, telling everything that happened along the way. This was fundamental modern science fiction writing advice—to start a story as late as possible and tell no more than was necessary.
Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by the theory of one John Cleves Symmes that great holes exist at the Poles which lead to another world at the interior of the Earth. Poe suggested this theory a number of times in his stories without ever quite daring to propound it directly.
“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.
Fantasy stories are not fully mythic because they cling to ancient images of transcendent possibility which no longer appear plausible. Although these may inspire us with reminders of the mysteriousness of transcendence, they are inconsistent with our best knowledge and so cannot guide us to action.
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.
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.
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.”
Edwardian SF might admit—or half-admit—that time would bury all human accomplishment, that humanity might well be in jeopardy from cosmic indifference or cosmic hostility, and that mankind was only an animal. And still, Edwardian SF would cross its fingers, close its eyes, and hope. Somehow, human specialness would justify itself and win through.