An Astounding Prophet

I’ve only met two prophets during my story-telling career. Both were active in New York City back in 1955 when I was pre-interviewing folks for an NBC News experimental program titled “People.” Our production unit had been set up to discover how to use motion-picture cameras to present interesting individuals at home or in their workplace, not in a TV studio. Also, our mandate was to discover how to get people to give us – not just information – but a sense of who they really were and what made them tick.

The first prophet I scouted was the owner of the Nostradamus Bookstore downtown on Canal Street who claimed to be that 16th Century soothsayer, reincarnated. He was skilled at quoting quatrains from The Prophecies, linking them to what had been happening in the 20th Century and warning about world disasters to come. When he started showing me how he’d cracked the code embedded in the Old and New Testaments, I became aware of being the only person in the store with Nostradamus. That made me nervous and I got out of there as soon as I could.

Safely back uptown, I reported to my boss, Reuven Frank, that the bohemian bookseller was a real character – a promoter and not a prognosticator – and that his musty-dusty old bookstore was really spooky. In short, reincarnated or not, this Nostradamus was just right for our show.

The second prophet Reuven sent me to pre-interview for “People” was John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction. If memory serves, Reuven had read Campbell’s editorial in that month’s issue of his magazine predicting that television would never replace radio.  Reuven wanted me to find out if Campbell would be willing to talk about that on film. “Or anything else,” Reuven added. “He’s an interesting guy. Do you know anything about him?”

I didn’t. So Reuven filled me in. Campbell’s biggest fans were scientists because he insisted that stories published in Astounding Science Fiction, no matter how fantastic or futuristic, were scientifically plausible. That’s what got him into trouble with the U.S. government during World War II.

In February of 1944, more than a year before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, Campbell’s magazine published a speculative article (or story – Reuven wasn’t sure which) that described how aliens on some planet somewhere in the future might build and detonate an atomic bomb.

Reuven had not actually read that article (or story) and neither had anybody else, he said, because the FBI confiscated all the copies of the magazine that hadn’t been distributed and bought all the copies they could find on the nation’s newsstands. “At least, that’s the story that has been going around since the end of the war,” said Reuven. “It’s never been confirmed or denied. So see if you can get Campbell to talk about that on camera.”

That proved easy enough. From the moment I entered his office, all I had to do was sit and listen. I can’t describe what he looked like that day. All I really remember is being completely spellbound. I’ve had a lasting impression of John Campbell, leaning forward with penetrating eyes, leaping from one topic to another – from secret weapons and technology, the existence of telepaths, to an explanation of how science fiction is a safe place to discuss controversial social issues freely.

“Did you know that our military can now take an aerial photo of a wheat field, process it somehow back at home base, and – Wham! – hundreds of miles away, that wheat vanishes and the field is left barren?” No, I didn’t know that. (I still don’t.) “ESP is real, but telepaths don’t dare let on. If it becomes known that they can read minds, they’ll be murdered!” That made sense, I guessed. “Our science fiction isn’t pulp! It’s the scientific mind at play. If we want to write about current problems between men and women, white people and Negroes, and help people consider them rationally without getting emotional, we  just make them Martians and Venusians and put them on a distant planet!”

And, yes, the FBI counter-intelligence agents did show up in his office that February in 1944 worried that there had been a security leak about the top-secret work to develop an atomic bomb. “We made some assumptions based on un-classified scientific papers that had already been published over the years. Turned out our educated guesses were pretty close to the mark, but there was no leak from Los Alamos or the Manhattan Project. Not to us, at least. But it took a while to convince the FBI of that.”

Campbell didn’t deny that the FBI had pulled the magazines off the newsstands and distribution centers. But, in later years, he claimed that he had talked the FBI into not taking any such action, lest enemy agents be tipped off that there was some truth to what the magazine had published. I learned about that only this month as 2012 was ending. I had decided to write about John Campbell because recent events caused me to believe that, when it came to prophecy, the editor of Amazing Science Fiction may have been the real McCoy. At least, what he predicted when I sat in his office that day in 1955 – about the way the human condition was inevitably changing – seemed to be coming true and was well on the way to becoming a fait accompli.

Now, when I started my rough draft of this post, I quickly realized that I’d better refresh my memory with a little research, by which I mean that I Googled “John Campbell.” The photo of him I found looked nothing like the fascinating, wild-eyed mad scientist type fellow I thought I remembered. The Wikipedia biography gave me his middle initial  and his ” Jr.” and a lot more information about the man and his career – some of it contradictory. But each clue, each hyperlink, led to another, and I finally discovered something I thought I’d never find: the original document that started me on this story.

I was able to read “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill for the very first time – the 30-page story from the March 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction that threw the FBI into such a tizzy, It’s one selection in a PDF anthology Visions of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Predictions That Came True. While reading “Deadline” a half-century after I first heard about it, I was stunned by Cartmill’s description of his imagined atomic bomb and its destructive power. It was if the author had looked into the future and seen all those awesome post-war newsreels I’d grown up with. I could understand why “Deadline” gave FBI counter intelligence such a scare during World War II. (Check it out on Amazon and you’ll understand, too.)

I’m glad I did some research for this post not only for that thrill of discovery but also for re-learning that, in real life, real stories keep going on and on and on. During this past year, I was struck by the details of the Obama campaign’s database operation that allowed Democrats to zero in on the concerns of specific groups and individuals. There were also a lot of other thought-provoking news stories during the year about internet hacking, identity theft, wire tapping, surveillance cameras, market research, airport full-body scanners, eyes-in-the-sky satellites, lethal drones, NSA and CIA electronic intelligence gathering, social networking, internet banking and stock-trading, computerized medical records, cell-phone cameras, viral political gaffe videos, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, texting, sexting and Facebooking. All that stuff got me thinking about John Campbell.

“The world is changing,” he told me in 1955. “Humanity is changing. Today we operate on the principles of a closed game like poker. I know what’s in my hand, but not what cards you hold. And we proceed from there. But now we’re gradually shifting to an open game – like chess where all the pieces are on the board and you and I can see every move. That’s where we’re heading. Soon, everybody will be able to know everything about everybody else – everywhere! Soon, there will be no more secrets! Everything about us will out there on the board: our earnings, our purchases, our investments and savings, our health, our habits, our politics, our whereabouts any time of day or night, who we meet, what we hear, what we say, what we read! Everything out in the open! Enough data to ascertain what we’re thinking, maybe. Certainly enough to predict what our next move might be. Science and technology are changing our social environment. One day soon, all human beings will have to learn how to play this new open game.”

Was John Campbell a real prophet? In this instance, predicting a major game change in the human condition, I think he was. There’s more and more evidence every day that we are fast approaching that “open game.” Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me how to play it.

Perhaps, in the future, people will figure out how. Perhaps they won’t. Either way, if John Campbell was right, it will be a major event in human history. So, younger reporters and writers, start your search engines. I have to leave it to you to find out what happens and finish this story.

Originally published on December 2, 2012