Ninety years ago today, on May 5, 1932, the last of Charles H. Fort's four books was published. Entitled Wild Talents, it arrived in bookstores too late for the author to have seen it there himself, for Fort had died two days before in a New York hospital. He was just fifty-seven years old.
In writing Wild Talents, Fort concerned himself with psychic powers, among other strange, unexplained, and anomalous phenomena. At around the same time at Duke University in North Carolina, there were other people looking into these things, a field they called--then or later--parapsychology. Leaders of Duke's group of researchers were Anglo-American psychologist William McDougall (1871-1938), and the founder of parapsychology, American botanist Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980). Yes, the founder of parapsychology was a botanist.
Somebody else was at Duke University during the early 1930s, somebody we know far better than those two men. His name was John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971), and he spent two years at Duke, graduating in 1934 with a B.S. in physics. Before graduating, Campbell made runs on Dr. Rhine's ESP cards, called Zener cards after their inventor, psychologist Karl Zener (1903-1964). Writing to Dr. Rhine in 1953, Campbell remembered: "Later, for some years I lived across the street from the brother of your experiment designer, Dr. Charles Stewart." Campbell added, "I had a good many discussions with Charlie about your work." (1)
Campbell began as editor at Astounding Stories, soon retitled Astounding Science-Fiction, in October 1937. Already a published author by then, he went about assembling a circle of other young writers, including Lester del Rey, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, Henry Kuttner, and C.L. Moore. He also fed these men and women story ideas from his very fertile imagination. As a consequence of these and other developments, Campbell's first dozen years at the helm of Astounding are now called the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
In the 1940s and '50s, Campbell and his circle worked on the Superior Man both as a concept and as a protagonist or hero in science fiction. Campbell also tried to scientify (my not-so-new-word) psychic powers, in other words to turn this nonscientific or at best quasi-scientific idea into something scientifically plausible, hopefully, I guess, into something measurable and quantifiable. There was even a sciencey (another not-so-new-word) kind of term for it, psionics, first used in print in Jack Williamson's story "The Greatest Invention," published in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1951.
John W. Campbell wrote to J.B. Rhine on November 23, 1953, telling him about some "private research on the mind" that he and his wife Peg had been conducting. (Peg Campbell is going to come up again soon. She's actually one of the reasons I started writing this series.) In his letter, Campbell wrote:
The psionic functions exist in all of us--but use of them is violently (and I definitely mean violently!) suppressed by the Society. This is not without reason; a Society cannot exist if its individuals don't acknowledge a mutual commonality. The psionically gifted individual, however, tends to splinter off and go his own separate way. They [sic] tend toward egocentricity [. . .] . (2)
Campbell proceeded to refer to that "psionically gifted individual" as "the Genius" and "the psionically gifted genius," that is, a person quite obviously above the mind-level of his fellows. That "Genius," I think, showed up again and again in the Astounding--or Campbellian--brand of science fiction of the 1940s through the 1960s. I can't think of any better example than Jommy Cross, hero of A.E. van Vogt's story "Slan," serialized in Astounding Science-Fiction in September-December 1940. Alfred Bester's hero, Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination (1956), also exercises psionic powers, most obviously in his (eventual) ability to teleport himself among the stars.
The psionic genius or psychically superior man appeared again and again under Campbell's influence. Sometimes when reading the science fiction of this period, I wonder: Wasn't there any other kind of science fiction story? Does every one of them have to involve psychic powers? But this appears to have been Campbell's obsession, and he seems to have been determined, like a cultist or an evangelist, to get his readers to share his obsession, to recruit them into his new religion of the uber-powerful psionic mind:
But there's a sly trick here. If the reader is to enjoy the entertainment of the story, he must temporarily accept the validity of psionic powers. Never again can he be wholly opposed to the idea, for he has already accepted it in a certain degree. Accepting the idea is already associated with pleasure-satisfaction; that association makes it psychologically difficult for him to reject the idea flatly. [Emphasis is in the original.] (3)
Difficult to reject the idea flatly? Watch me.
Anyway, in The Stars My Destination, teleportation is called jaunting after the scientist who discovered it. Unlike "Slan," The Stars My Destination wasn't serialized in Astounding Science Fiction but in a competing title, Galaxy Science Fiction. Still, the concept of psychic powers--Campbell's psionics--moreover, of the Superior Man, showed that it had a deep and wide reach in the science-fictional imagination. (4, 5, 6) We actually still have in the real world a manifestation of the supposed psychically superior man, the Genius who strides over us all like a colossus. There will soon be more on that in this series . . .
By the way, one possible source of Bester's title for The Stars My Destination is a passage written in the 1940s by rocketeer, occultist, and L. Ron Hubbard friend, associate, and mark John Whiteside Parsons (1914-1952).
Oh, and one more thing: the inventor of jaunting is named Jaunte--Charles Fort Jaunte.
To be continued . . .
Notes
(1) From a letter by John W. Campbell, Jr., to Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, dated November 23, 1953, in The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1 (Franklin, TN: AC Projects, 1985), pages 222-229. The quote is from page 222.
(2) Ditto, page 228.
(3) Ditto, page 229.
(4) One example of the reach of the Superior Man concept in science fiction: "Science and Superman: An Inquiry" by Poul Anderson in Amazing Stories, November 1959. Anderson's emphasis is on Darwinian evolution and genetic or physical superiority versus psychic superiority. Still, the lingo of superiority--Superman and Homo Superior--is in Anderson's article.
(5) There is jaunting or teleportation in the final installment of Jack Williamson's Humanoids trilogy, The Humanoid Touch, published in 1980. The first installment, entitled "With Folded Hands . . .", was in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1947. John Carter of Mars also jaunted between his native planet and Barsoom.
(6) Once George Lucas turned the Force into a material versus nonmaterial force, the Star Wars saga became, more or less, about the Superior Man/Psionic Genius as well, or the Superior Man/Psionic Genius as a kind of Chosen One, Savior, or Messiah.
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| An advertisement from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 26, 1958, a warning too late for Jack Parsons to heed. |
Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley
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