Astounding, Dec. 1949, Part 3
L. Ron Hubbard, Willy Ley, M. C. Pease
The December 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction is by now something of a dead horse for our purposes. I previously flogged a review of “The Witches of Karres” by James H. Schmitz out of it, which turned into a reflection on woman and girls in early American magazine science fiction. Later I considered the conclusion of Robert A. Heinlein’s Man and Superman serial Gulf from this same issue.
Today I’m going to risk returning to this issue of Astounding a third and final time mainly because I’m interested in a Willy Ley nonfiction article on Soviet science. I’m also going to touch on a couple short stories that are negative examples of what science fiction shouldn’t be.
Fiction
“A Can of Vacuum” by L. Ron Hubbard
This is a pointless comedy story with science fiction window dressing. A superior officer in a space navy tries to get the goat of an aww shucks new graduate of a technical university who has just mustered in as an ensign. He sends him on a mission to obtain “a quart of rudy rays,” a nonexistent substance that he tells the ensign will be able to power the intergalactic fleet for millennia. Through an error in the superior officer’s planning, the ensign successfully requisitions an expensive spacecraft to fly out and find the rudy rays.
In the ten days the ensign is gone, most of the drama is related to the superior officer and in turn his admiral imagining their future careers going down the drain as successive attempts to contact or track down the ensign fail. When the ensign returns he has discovered a substance with the properties of the imagined rudy rays. The ensign’s return fortuitously coincides with the arrival of his former superior officer from a different naval outfit. The former superior officer reveals that the ensign himself is something of a practical joker. The best I can say for this story is that it is short. But mainly I want to complain that it uses science fiction window dressing to tell a story with no substantive science fiction element.
“Reversion” by M. C. Pease
This is less a story and more an idea for a story expressed in monologue and dialogue. The idea is that a nuclear engineer or some such was in an accident that has reversed his perception of time. He’s in a quasi-schizophrenic stupor with a flat affect only periodically interrupted by expressions of great terror. He speaks backwards which a psychological researcher is able to figure out by playing recordings backwards. Pease doesn’t quite know what to do with this, so he has the researcher smoke a cigar and explain it dramatically to a group of interested parties. This story is a good object lesson in that science fiction needs not only to have an idea but also to do something with that idea.
Nonfiction
Science and “Truth” by Willy Ley
This article is a piece by piece dissection of a number of spurious Russian nationalist claims made by Soviet news services, such as the newspaper Pravda (“Truth”), about the alleged Russian provenance of inventions that Willy Ley convincingly demonstrates were—as is popularly believed—actually invented in various Western countries. I want to try to thread a needle here. For the record, I take the Soviet Union’s descent into Russian nationalism under Stalin as a negative development in a polity that was founded on the principle that it needed to rectify the Russian Empire’s status as “a jailhouse of nations.” Still I think it is more important to emphasize the pernicious nature of Western Russia-bashing. I don’t doubt Ley’s sincerity as a principled man of science but I worry about whose interests are served when we focus our ire on the foibles and crimes of a national enemy. Surely we are in a better position to clean our own house.
In any event, I was mainly interested in this article because it also tackles to a small extent the Lysenko Affair and the question of Neo-Lamarckism in Soviet biology. In short, during the Stalin years, Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko and Soviet education minister Sergei Kaftanov propounded a Party-backed biological theory that traits an organism acquires during its lifetime are inheritable by its offspring. This theory gained the force of orthodoxy in the socialist world because of its proximity to power. Our short hand for this today is Lysenkoism.
Ley’s coverage of this issue takes the form of some polemical paragraphs aimed at Lysenko and Kaftanov. Ley’s attack is largely rhetorical. In terms of the science of Neo-Lamarckism, Ley points to a failed experiment by German Neo-Lamarckian August Weisman and falsified data in an experiment by Viennese Neo-Larmarckian Paul Kammerer. He doesn’t cover any of Lysenko’s own research, leaving the reader to assume it is just as flawed.
I feel conditioned to think of Lysenkoism as crackpot stuff, or worse, science warped by ideological statecraft. However, in the light of the relatively new field of epigenetics, it becomes at least possible that the 20th century Neo-Lamarckians might have been onto something. Last month I acquired a monograph entitled Lysenko’s Ghost written by Loren R. Graham, a recently deceased American historian of Russian science. The book purports to give Lysenkoism a fair hearing and also consider it in the highly politicized atmosphere of today’s resurgent Russian nationalism. I’m sure my impressions of this book will unavoidably come out in future newsletters.
Process Note
This issue of Astounding also featured an installment of Isaac Asimov’s final Foundation serial . . .And Now You Don’t. I plan to cover that at a future time as part of my Foundation read through, previous installments of which are here and here.