A Hawk From a Handsaw, Part 1

Note: My article “The Campbell Machine,” which describes one of the strangest episodes in the history of Astounding Science Fiction, is now available online and in the July/August issue of Analog. To celebrate its publication, I’m republishing a series about an equally curious point of intersection between science fiction and the paranormal. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on February 15, 2017. 

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

—Hamlet

In the summer of 1974, the Israeli magician and purported psychic Uri Geller arrived at Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury, London, where the physicist David Bohm planned to subject him to a series of tests. Two of the appointed observers were the authors Arthur Koestler and Arthur C. Clarke, of whom Geller writes in his autobiography:

Arthur Clarke…would be particularly important because he was highly skeptical of anything paranormal. His position was that his books, like 2001 and Childhood’s End, were pure science fiction, and it would be highly unlikely that any of their fantasies would come true, at least in his own lifetime.

He met the group in a conference room, where Koestler was outwardly polite, even as Geller sensed that he “really wasn’t getting through to Arthur C. Clarke.” A demonstration seemed to be in order, so Geller asked Clarke to hold one of his own house keys in one hand, watching closely to make sure that it wasn’t switched, handled, or subjected to any trickery. Soon enough, the key began to bend. Clarke cried out, in what I like to think was an inadvertent echo of his most famous story: “My God, my eyes are seeing it! It’s bending!”

Geller went on to display his talents in a number of other ways, including forcing a Geiger counter to click at an accelerated rate merely by concentrating on it. (The skeptic James Randi has suggested that Geller had a magnet taped to his leg.) “By that time,” Geller writes, “Arthur Clarke seemed to have lost all his skepticism. He said something like, ‘My God! It’s all coming true! This is what I wrote about in Childhood’s End. I can’t believe it.'” Geller continues:

Clarke was not there just to scoff. He had wanted things to happen. He just wanted to be completely convinced that everything was legitimate. When he saw that it was, he told the others: “Look, the magicians and the journalists who are knocking this better put up or shut up now. Unless they can repeat the same things Geller is doing under the same rigidly controlled conditions, they have nothing further to say.”

Clarke also described the plot of Childhood’s End, which Geller evidently hadn’t read: “It involves a UFO that is hovering over the earth and controlling it. He had written the book about twenty years ago. He said that, after being a total skeptic about these things, his mind had really been changed by observing these experiments.”

It’s tempting to think that Geller is exaggerating the extent of the author’s astonishment, but here’s what Clarke himself said of it much later:

Although it’s hard to focus on that hectic and confusing day at Birkbeck College in 1974…I suspect that Uri Geller’s account in My Story is all too accurate…In view of the chaos at the hastily arranged Birkbeck encounter, the phrase “rigidly controlled conditions” is hilarious. But that last sentence is right on target, for [the reproduction of Geller’s effects by stage magicians] is precisely what happened…Nevertheless, I must confess a sneaking fondness for Uri; though he left a trail of bent cutlery and fractured reputations round the world, he provided much-needed entertainment at a troubled and unhappy time.

Geller has largely faded from the public consciousness, but Clarke—who continued to believe long afterward that paranormal phenomena “can’t all be nonsense”—wasn’t the only prominent science fiction writer to find him intriguing. Robert Anton Wilson, one of my intellectual heroes, discusses him at length in the book Cosmic Trigger, in which he recounts a strange incident that was experienced by his friend Saul-Paul Sirag. The year before the Birkbeck tests, Sirag allegedly saw Geller’s head turn into that of a “bird of prey,” like a hawk: “His nose became a beak, and his entire head sprouted feathers, down to his neck and shoulders.” (Wilson neglects to mention that Sirag was also taking LSD at the time.) The hawk, Sirag thought, was the form assumed by an alien intelligence that was supposedly in contact with Geller, and he didn’t know that it had appeared in the same shape to two other witnesses, including a psychic named Ray Stanford and another man who nicknamed it “Horus,” after the Egyptian god with a hawk’s head.

And it gets even weirder. A few months later, Sirag saw the January 1974 issue of Analog, which featured the story “The Horus Errand” by William E. Cochrane. The cover illustration depicted a man wearing a hawklike helmet, with the name “Stanford” written over his breast pocket. According to one of Sirag’s friends, the occultist Alan Vaughan, the character in the painting even looked a little like Ray Stanford, and you can judge the resemblance for yourself. Vaughan was interested enough to write to the artist, the legendary Frank Kelly Freas, for more information. (Freas, incidentally, was close friends with John W. Campbell, to the point where Campbell even asked him to serve as the guardian for his daughters if anything ever happened to him or his wife.) Freas replied that he had never met Stanford in person or knew how he looked, but that he had once received a psychic consultation from him by mail, in which Stanford told Freas that he had been “some sort of illustrator in a past life in ancient Egypt.” As a result, Freas began to consciously employ Egyptian imagery in his work, and the design of the helmet on the cover was entirely his own, without any reference to the story. At that point, the whole thing kind of peters out, aside from serving as an example of the kind of absurd coincidence that was so close to Wilson’s heart. But the intersection of Arthur C. Clarke, Uri Geller, and Robert Anton Wilson at that particular moment in time is a striking one, and it points toward an important thread in the history of science fiction that tends to be overlooked or ignored—perhaps because it’s often guarded by ominous hawks. I’ll be digging into this more deeply tomorrow.

How the solar system was won

Note: To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which held its premiere on April 2, 1968, I’ll be spending the week looking at various aspects of what remains the greatest science fiction movie ever made.

When Stanley Kubrick hired Arthur C. Clarke to work on the project that became 2001: A Space Odyssey, they didn’t have a title, a plot, or even much in the way of a premise. In Kubrick’s introductory letter to the author, he had written only that his interest lay in “these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character”:

1. The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
2. The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on earth in the near future.
3. A space probe with a landing and exploration of the moon and Mars.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know that almost none of what Kubrick describes here ended up in the finished film. The existence of extraterrestrial life is the anthropic assumption on which the entire story rests; there’s no real attempt to sketch in the larger social context; and the discovery of the alien artifact—far from having any impact on society—remains a secret until the end to all but a few scientists. There’s already a thriving colony on the moon when the main action of the story really starts, and Heywood Floyd only turns up after the monolith has been found. All that remains of Kubrick’s original conception, in fact, is a vague feeling that he tried to convey early in their partnership, which Clarke remembered later as the desire to make “a movie about man’s relation to the universe—something which had never been attempted, still less achieved, in the history of motion pictures.”

In this respect, they undoubtedly succeeded, and a lot of it had to do with Kubrick’s choice of collaborator. Yesterday, I suggested that Kubrick settled on Clarke because he was more likely than the other obvious candidates to be available for the extended writing process that the director had in mind. (This was quite an assumption, since it meant that Clarke had to be away from his home in Ceylon for more than a year, but it turned out to be right.) Yet Clarke was also uniquely qualified to write about “man’s relation to the universe,” and in particular about aliens who were far in advance of the human race. As Isaac Asimov has memorably explained, this was a plot point that was rarely seen in Astounding, mostly because of John W. Campbell’s personal prejudices:

[Campbell] was a devout believer in the inequality of man and felt that the inequality could be detected by outer signs such as skin and hair coloring…In science fiction, this translated itself into the Campbellesque theory that earthmen (all of whom, in the ideal Campbell story, resembled, people of northwestern European extraction) were superior to all other intelligent races.

Clarke had broken through in Astounding after the war—his stories “Loophole” and “Rescue Party” appeared in 1946—but geographical distance and foreign rights issues had kept him from being shaped by Campbell to any real extent. As a result, he was free to indulge in such works as Childhood’s End, the ultimate story about superior aliens, which was inspired by Campbell’s novel The Mightiest Machine but ran its first installment in the British magazine New Worlds.

Clarke, in short, was unquestionably part of the main sequence of hard science fiction that Campbell had inaugurated, but he was also open to exploring enormous, borderline mystical questions that emphasized mankind’s insignificance. (At his best, in such stories as “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” he managed to combine clever twist endings with a shattering sense of scale in a way that no other writer has ever matched.) It was this unlikely combination of wit, technical rigor, and awareness of the infinite that made him ideally suited to Kubrick, and they promptly embarked on one of the most interesting collaborations in the history of the genre. As an example of a symbiotic organism, the only comparable example is Campbell and the young Asimov, except that Clarke and Kubrick were both mature artists at the peak of their talents. Fortunately for us, Clarke kept a journal, and he provided excerpts in two fascinating essays, “Christmas, Shepperton” and “Monoliths and Manuscripts,” which were published in the collection The Lost Worlds of 2001. The entries offer a glimpse of a process that ranged freely in all directions, with both men pursuing trains of thought as far as they would go before abandoning them for something better. As Clarke writes:

It was [Kubrick’s] suggestion that, before embarking on the drudgery of the script, we let our imaginations soar freely by developing the story in the form of a complete novel…After various false starts and twelve-hour talkathons, by early May 1964 Stanley agreed that [Clarke’s short story] “The Sentinel” would provide good story material. But our first concept—and it is hard now for me to focus on such an idea, though it would have been perfectly viable—involved working up to the discovery of an extraterrestrial artifact as the climax, not the beginning, of the story. Before that, we would have a series of incidents or adventures devoted to the exploration of the moon and planets…[for which] our private title (never of course intended for public use) was How the Solar System Was Won.

And while 2001 arguably made its greatest impact on audiences with its meticulous art direction and special effects, Kubrick’s approach to writing was equally obsessive. He spent a full year developing the story with Clarke before approaching the studio for financing, and although they soon realized that the premise of “The Sentinel” would work better as an inciting incident, rather than as the ending, the notion of “incidents or adventures” persisted in the finished script. The film basically consists of four loosely connected episodes, the most memorable of which—the story of HAL 9000—could be eliminated without fundamentally affecting the others. But if it feels like an organic whole, this is largely thanks to the decision to develop far more material than could ever fit into a novel, much less a movie. (Clarke’s diary entries are filled with ideas that were dropped or transformed in the final version: “The people we meet on the other star system are humans who were collected from earth a hundred thousand years ago, and hence are virtually identical to us.” “What if our E.T.s are stranded on earth and need the ape-men to help them?” And then there’s the startling line, which Clarke, who was discreetly gay, records without comment: “Stanley has invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at their ease.”) It verged on a private version of development hell, without any studio notes or interference, and it’s hard to imagine any other director who could have done it. 2001 started a revolution in visual effects, but its writing process was just as remarkable, and we still haven’t caught up to it yet. Even Clarke, whose life it changed, found Kubrick’s perfectionism hard to take, and he concluded: “In the long run, everything came out all right—exactly as Stanley had predicted. But I can think of easier ways of earning a living.”

A Hawk From a Handsaw, Part 1

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

—Hamlet

In the summer of 1974, the Israeli magician and purported psychic Uri Geller arrived at Birkbeck College in Bloomsbury, London, where the physicist David Bohm planned to subject him to a series of tests. Two of the scheduled observers were the writers Arthur Koestler and Arthur C. Clarke, of whom Geller writes in his autobiography:

Arthur Clarke…would be particularly important because he was highly skeptical of anything paranormal. His position was that his books, like 2001 and Childhood’s End, were pure science fiction, and it would be highly unlikely that any of their fantasies would come true, at least in his own lifetime.

Geller met the group in a conference room, where Koestler was cordial, although, Geller says, “I sensed that I really wasn’t getting through to Arthur C. Clarke.” A demonstration seemed to be in order, so Geller asked Clarke to hold one of his own housekeys in one hand, watching it closely to make sure that it wasn’t being swapped out, handled, or subjected to any trickery. Sure enough, the key began to bend. Clarke cried out, in what I like to think was an inadvertent echo of one of his most famous stories: “My God, my eyes are seeing it! It’s bending!”

Geller went on to display his talents in a number of other ways, including forcing a Geiger counter to click at an accelerated rate merely by concentrating on it. (It has been suggested by the skeptic James Randi that Geller had a magnet taped to his leg.) “By that time,” Geller writes, “Arthur Clarke seemed to have lost all his skepticism. He said something like, “My God! It’s all coming true! This is what I wrote about in Childhood’s End. I can’t believe it.” Geller continues:

Clarke was not there just to scoff. He had wanted things to happen. He just wanted to be completely convinced that everything was legitimate. When he saw that it was, he told the others: “Look, the magicians and the journalists who are knocking this better put up or shut up now. Unless they can repeat the same things Geller is doing under the same rigidly controlled conditions, they have nothing further to say.”

Clarke also told him about the plot of Childhood’s End, which Geller evidently hadn’t read: “It involves a UFO that is hovering over the earth and controlling it. He had written the book about twenty years ago. He said that, after being a total skeptic about these things, his mind had really been changed by observing these experiments.”

It’s tempting to think that Geller is exaggerating the extent of the author’s astonishment, but here’s what Clarke himself wrote about it:

Although it’s hard to focus on that hectic and confusing day at Birkbeck College in 1974…I suspect that Uri Geller’s account in My Story is all too accurate…In view of the chaos at the hastily arranged Birkbeck encounter, the phrase “rigidly controlled conditions” is hilarious. But that last sentence is right on target, for [the reproduction of Geller’s effects by stage magicians] is precisely what happened…Nevertheless, I must confess a sneaking fondness for Uri; though he left a trail of bent cutlery and fractured reputations round the world, he provided much-needed entertainment at a troubled and unhappy time.

Geller has largely faded from the public consciousness, but Clarke—who continued to believe long afterward that paranormal phenomena “can’t all be nonsense”—wasn’t the only science fiction writer to be intrigued by him. Robert Anton Wilson, one of my intellectual heroes, discusses him at length in the book Cosmic Trigger, in which he recounts the strange experience of his friend Saul-Paul Sirag. The year before the Birkbeck tests, Sirag was speaking to Geller when he saw the other man’s head turn into a “bird of prey,” like a hawk: “His nose became a beak, and his entire head sprouted feathers, down to his neck and shoulders.” (Sirag was also taking LSD at the time, which Wilson neglects to mention.) The hawk, Sirag thought, was the form assumed by an extraterrestrial intelligence that was allegedly in contact with Geller, and he didn’t know then that it had appeared in the same shape to two other men, including a psychic named Ray Stanford and another who had nicknamed it “Horus,” after the Egyptian god with a hawk’s head.

It gets weirder. A few months later, Sirag saw the January 1974 issue of Analog, which featured the story “The Horus Errand” by William E. Cochrane. The cover illustration depicted a man wearing a hawklike helmet, with the name “Stanford” written over his breast pocket. According to one of Sirag’s friends, the occultist Alan Vaughan, the character even looked a little like Ray Stanford—and you can judge the resemblance for yourself. Vaughan was interested enough to write to the artist, the legendary Kelly Freas, for more information. (Freas, incidentally, was close friends with John W. Campbell, to the point where Campbell even asked him to serve as the guardian for his two daughters if anything ever happened to him or his wife.) Freas replied that he had never met Stanford in person or knew how he looked, but that he had once received a psychic consultation from him by mail, in which Stanford said that “Freas had been some sort of illustrator in a past life in ancient Egypt.” As a result, Freas began to employ Egyptian imagery more consciously in his work, and the design of the helmet on the cover was entirely his own, without any reference to the story. At that point, the whole thing kind of peters out, aside from serving as an example of the kind of absurd coincidence that was so close to Wilson’s heart. But the intersection of Arthur C. Clarke, Uri Geller, and Robert Anton Wilson at that particular moment in time is a striking one, and it points toward an important thread in the history of science fiction that tends to be overlooked or ignored. Tomorrow, I’ll be writing more about what it all means, along with a few other ominous hawks.