Jack Williamson

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The Future on a Chipped Plate: The World of John W. Campbell's 'Astounding'

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Williamson began writing in Gernsback's Amazing and never looked back. He was much influenced by Abe Merritt, and managed to assimilate Merritt's sense of colour and movement without taking over the fairies as well. His output was fairly prolific, as outputs needed to be if one was to live by writing sf in a field where Amazing and Wonder were paying half a cent a word on publication. His greatest early success was with a serial in a 1934 Astounding, The Legion of Space, a Goshwow! epic which thundered along on the cloven heels of Doc Smith. But there are three later novels of Williamson's which have more to offer, and which—unlike some of the so-called "classics" of the field—have not been reprinted as often as they might be.

The Legion of Time was a serial in a 1938 Astounding. Its plot, while being philosophically meaningless, is a delight. (p. 220)

Fairy tales have a way of revealing hard truths about everyday life. Science fiction so often turns out to be a fairy tale—never more so than in this instance! The significance of some of the inconsistencies in this tale have been discussed elsewhere; but its charm obstinately remains. Like Doc Smith's saga, this one also works on magic. Most traditional sf does so. The magical spells are given such names as "mentally released atomic power"; the hyper-drives light the way to Babylon.

Nor surprisingly, Williamson's best novel deals directly with magic. Darker Than You Think was published in Unknown in 1940. (p. 221)

[It] is extremely well worked out, full of genuine suspense and excitement, and with a good hefty sense of evil working for it. The characters, though obvious, are clearly drawn; but the major advantage of the novel is that it is full of the pleasure of wild life, of running free in the dark, of the forests, the mountainside, and of the scents on the breeze. The novel works like a novel, not a diagram, showing us without lecturing how splendid it would be to chase a white she-wolf through the night. (p. 222)

The plot hinge of Darker Than You Think is characteristic of the period: humanity, or reality, is revealed by some accident of scientific research or discovery to be other than we have assumed. The revelation is always unpleasant…. As the psychiatrist Glenn says in Williamson's novel, "The unconscious mind does sometimes seem a dark cave of horrors, and the same unpleasant facts are often expressed in the symbolism of legend and myth." Faced by the horrors of a global war, the sf writers were fashioning their own kinds of myth. Despite a slight clumsiness, Darker Than You Think still works in this manner.

Williamson's The Humanoids is less successful. As a novel-length sequel to a short story called "With Folded Hands," it appeared in Astounding in 1948 under the title … And Searching Mind. Williamson presents a well-constructed plot, but-tressed with learned bits of pseudo-science, which centres around the coming of robots to a planet geared for war with its neighbour. (pp. 223-24)

The humanoids arrive by the thousand and take over in the midst of the crisis. They are units of a cybernetic brain many light-years away, and their prime directive is "To Serve and Obey, and Guard Men from Harm." In effect, they bring peace by rendering men powerless—in the most benevolent possible way. Unlike Čapek's humanoids, Williamson's are utterly subservient, and he wisely leaves the ending open, as the humanoids lay their benevolent plans for Andromeda—is their peace-keeping a triumph or tragedy? As Damon Knight says …, the book is important because its theme is important.

Unfortunately, the impact is greatly muffled by having it set far away across the galaxy. To have set it on Earth would have been dramatically better. And, of course, the philosophical implications take second place to a tale of adventure. All the same, The Humanoids has plenty of readability, because Williamson's strong visual sense is at work, here as in Darker Than You Think (we are constantly reminded of the presence of the androgenous metal creatures), and his characters are not thick-ear supermen like Doc Smith's but pretty ordinary fallible people, in need of some sort of prop just like the rest of us. (p. 224)

Brian W. Aldiss, "The Future on a Chipped Plate: The World of John W. Campbell's 'Astounding'," in his Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (copyright © 1973 by Brian W. Aldiss; reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.; in Canada by Brian W. Aldiss and Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd.), Doubleday, 1973, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, pp. 215-43.∗

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