"Campbell, John W Jr - The Space Beyond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

THE SPACE BEYOND -- John W. Campbell, Jr.

Edited by Roger Elwood
Introduction by Isaac Asimov
Afterword by George Zebrowski

BIG, BIG, BIG
by Isaac Asimov

The thing about John Campbell is that he liked things big. He liked big men with big ideas working out big applications of their big theories. And he liked it fast. His big men built big weapons within days; weapons that were, moreover, without se"ous shortcomings, or at least, with no shortcomings that could not be corrected as follows: "Hmm, something's wrong-oh, I see-of course." Then, in two hours, something would be jerry-built to fix the jerry-built device.
- The big applications were, usually, in the form of big weapons to fight big wars on tremendous scales. Part of it was, of course, Campbell's conscious attempt to imitate and surpass Edward E. ("Doc") Smith. The world-shaking, escalating conflicts in Campbell's stories, as in The Space Beyond in this collection, is a reflection of the escalating conflict on the printed page between John and Doc.
A great deal of Campbell's science is sheer gobble-dygook that you must not take seriously. You have to read it as a foreign language that the characters understand and for which the action and the astronomical background serve as a translation.
In some places, Campbell is deliberately and bullheaded-ly wrong and one can never be sure whether he actually believes the nonsense, or whether he is doing it just to irritate and provoke his readers into thinking hard.
In the December 1934 Astounding Stories, John Campbell, writing under the pseudonym, Karl van Campen, published "The Irrelevant," hi which the heroes were rescued from a deadly interplanetary dilemma by working
out a method for creating energy out of nothing. In this way, they defied the law of conservation of energy which, it can be argued, is the most fundamental law of the universe.
Campbell did this by arguing that the quantity of energy produced by a change in velocity was different according to the frame of reference you chose for it, and that by switching from one frame to another you could create more energy than you consumed.
This is dead wrong. I won't argue the reasons here because I don't want to start a controversy. The argument that began with "The Irrelevant" continued in the letter columns of Astounding for an incredible length of time, with Campbell (always writing letters under the name of Karl van Campen) maintaining his views against all attacks-as in later years, he would maintain, with equal unswerving vigor, all attacks against his equally indefensible views in favor of dianoetics the Hieronymus machine, the Dean drive, and so on. He might stop arguing points and allow them to drop into oblivion, but he would never openly admit he was wrong.
"The Irrelevant" was the only story that John ever published under the van Campen pseudonym, but Marooned was a sort of never-published (till now) sequel under the same pseudonym, and it made use, in the end, of the same fallacy of a broken law of conservation of energy. I don't even feel guilty about giving away the climax in that story because I don't want anyone to be fooled by it. It doesn't work. You have been warnedl
Yet, on the other hand, John's incredibly vivid imagination would sometimes strike gold and would inspire other writers into striking gold also. The great writers of the Golden Age in Astounding were more Campbell than themselves. I admit, freely and frequently, that this was so in my case. Other writers are perhaps more reluctant to do so.
Campbell's hand is, I believe, quite obvious in the early work of the greatest of all writers of the Golden Age, Robert A. Heinlein. All, included hi this volume, became "Sixth Column" by Heinlein, published under the pseudonym of Anson MacDonald, hi the January, February, and March 1941 issues of Astounding.
The example of Campbell's golden prescience that struck me most forcibly in the stories of this collection occurs in The Space Beyond. There, Campbell mentions that lithium bombarded with protons gives off alpha particles and that beryllium bombarded with alpha particles gives off protons and that the two mixed together can keep each other going in a "self-maintaining atomic explosion."
Actually, this is not so. It takes a high-energy proton to initiate the lithium reaction and beryllium releases low-energy protons; at any rate, protons with too low an energy to break down the lithium. And the same is true in reverse for the alpha particles.
Nevertheless, the suggestion is remarkable. It was made in the mid-thirties and surely not many people were then thinking of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, which is what Campbell was suggesting. Eventually, not many years after The Space Beyond was written, a practical nuclear chain reaction was discovered, that of uranium fission. It was practical precisely because it worked under the impetus of tow-energy neutrons.
Campbell's brightness in seeing the importance of the nuclear chain reaction may well explain the most remarkable of his predictive visions. During World War II, he kept insisting that nuclear power would be developed before the war's end. Once he heard of the discovery of uranium fission, his understanding of nuclear chain reactions made the atomic bomb seem to him a natural consequence. This was also true for the physicist, Leo Szilard, but for practically no one else.
Campbell went on to inspire a series of stories by other authors on the subject of power through uranium fission, the most notable being "Blowups Happen" by Robert A. Heinlein, "Nerves" by Lester del Rey, and "Deadline" by Cleve Cartmill. (These all appeared in Astounding, in the September 1940, September 1942, and March 1944 issues respectively.)
Campbell was eventually investigated by a suspicious American government for knowing too much, but it was easy for him to demonstrate that he didn't know too much -it was the world that knew too little.
With characteristic cosmic-optimism, Campbell carried nuclear power forward to its extremes without ever considering its danger. To control nuclear power meant, to
Mm in All, the ability to cure disease miraculously; although, alas, the reality has shown us that radiation is the most deadly potential producer of disease the world has ever known.
In fact, there is a peculiar blind spot in prediction that affects us all, even Campbell. One sees the extrapolations of the present in a straight-line way. One misses the surprises.
In All, Campbell lists the few chemical specifics humanity had developed by the early 1930s and moves directly forward to nuclear panaceas-without ever foreseeing the antibiotics. And yet, I distinctly remember sitting with him in his office once, before antibiotics had been discovered, and listening to him tell me that since almost all pathogenic bacteria were destroyed in the soil, there must be substances in soil bacteria that would destroy harmful germs and cure disease.
In a way, Campbell's vision of nuclear power was self-defeating. Lured by his success there, he went on to attempt to lead the way into a morass of semi-mystical pathways, through psi and related subjects, from which he never entirely emerged.
Campbell's love of bigness showed itself at its most glamorous and remarkable in his tendency to describe astronomical bodies of the largest variety in dramatic but utterly realistic prose. It is here, for instance, that he shines in The Space Beyond and in Marooned.
But there, Campbell was, at times, betrayed. In the forty years since these stories were written, astronomy has made strides (thanks to radio telescopes and planetary probes) that not even Campbell could have foreseen, and the result has been to dwarf even the most liberal imaginations of earlier generations.
Campbell describes the super-giant stars vividly and beautifully in The Space Beyond and, indeed, they steal the show in that novelette. Making them Cepheids adds to the supernal glory (even though Campbell has the notion, it seems, that the more massive a Cepheid the shorter its period, when it is the reverse that is true).
However, no such super-star could exist by modern notions-or, indeed, by the astronomical notions of the time at which the story was written. In the 1920s, Arthur
S. Eddington advanced the mass-luminosity law which made it quite dear that stars very much more massive than our Sun could not exist. The radiation pressure from within would cause them to explode at once. In the case of a star as large as those Campbell describes, the result would be an immediate supernova.
Furthermore, even if a star as massive as Campbell's super-giants could be imagined to hang together, thb rate of consumption of hydrogen fuel that would be required to keep it glowing at its incredible level would probably drag it through its entire stay in the main sequence for a hundred thousand years. It would only be during that stay that planets could form and evolve in a fashion that would produce life" as we know it and if they had formed when the star itself had (at the appropriately colossal distance), there would simply have been no time for the planet to evolve any life at aM, to say nothing of advanced intelligences.
Imagine what Campbell could have done had he been able to write the story a generation later. In place of such super-giant stars, even groups of them, he could have had a quasar-an entire galactic center of millions of stars interacting in some fashion to form something as far beyond a star as a star is beyond a planet.
Or he could have imagined his stars collapsing (as they would surely have done) into black holes. Given an area in space where there were black holes by the dozens, whatever problems would have arisen, as sure as Campbell was Campbell, they would have been solved.
Or perhaps, he would have had his environment filled with a white hole-that area in space where the matter endlessly pushing into a black hole somewhere else is emerging hi great gouts of radiating energy. Perhaps a quasar is a white hole and he could have combined concepts and driven through space and time by using the cosmic ferry of a black hole.
And if, since these stories were written, our knowledge of the Universe has increased a thousandfold, our knowledge of our own Solar system has been refined ten-thousandfold. We have mapped, in detail, the hidden side of the Moon, and men have stood upon our satellite's surface. Unmanned probes have landed on Mars and Venus,
and the surfaces of Mars and Mercury have been mapped in detail, as well as those of the tiny Martian satellites, Phobos and Deimos. Jupiter has been seen at short distances, and a probe is gliding its way to Saturn even as I write.
How does Marooned seem in the light of all this?
We-must begin by forgetting about "synthium" that beautiful example of one mainstay of early science fiction-the wonder-metal. Element 101 has indeed been discovered since Campbell wrote Marooned but it is named mendelevium and it is unstable, as are all elements beyond atomic number 83. Even if it were stable, we know what its properties would be like, and they would be nothing like those of synthium. In fact, the properties of no conceivable metal in the real world would be like those of synthium.
Next, there is another old standby-the difficulty of getting past the asteriod belt. I used that one myself in my very first published story "Marooned Off Vesta." The asteroid belt, however, is a paper tiger. The material in it is strewn so widely over so vast a volume that any spaceship going through it is not at all likely to see anything of visible size. The Jupiter-probes, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, went through without trouble and detected less dust than had been expected.
Still a third commonplace of science fiction was its tendency toward water-oxygen chauvinism. Almost every world encountered in science fiction stories had its water ocean and its oxygen atmosphere.
Campbell needed an atmosphere for Ganymede, so he gave it one, but I think he knew better. Any gases in the vicinity of that satellite exist only in traces. However, Campbell was probably correct in placing quantities of ice on its surface. The low density of Ganymede and of its sister-world Callisto make the presence of such materials very likely. Campbell makes the ices those of water and carbon dioxide. It is likely, however, that frozen Хammonia is there rather than frozen carbon dioxide.
And what about Jupiter? Campbell suggests that this could only be explored with something like synthium since without it, ships could not pass the asteroid belt and could not even penetrate to the depths of Earth's own ocean. Not so, for within a quarter-century after the
story had been written, not only had the asteroid belt been shorn of its terrors, but human beings had made it down to the deepest abyss of the ocean in bathyscaphes-and without synthium.
But Jupiter itself is a harder nut, and Campbell portrays its giant intractable nature gloriously well. He is wrong in details, inevitably. He describes its atmosphere as mostly nitrogen and water with helium and "some hydrogen." Later on, he describes the hydrogen content as "a minute trace" and places a rather larger quantity of free oxygen there.