Smoking on spaceships

When you read a lot of stories from the golden age of science fiction, which stretched roughly from the late thirties through the early fifties, one of the first things you notice is that everybody is smoking on spaceships. In Skylark of Space by E.E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby, arguably the first great work of the space opera or superscience genre, the splendid villain Marc DuQuesne accidentally sends himself and two hostages six quadrillion miles from the solar system, and as he tries to figure out how to get back home, he remains “self-possessed, smoking innumerable cigarettes.” A few years later, in Smith’s masterpiece Galactic Patrol, which I’ll be discussing at greater length tomorrow, three whole paragraphs of the first chapter are devoted to the favorite smokes of the futuristic law enforcement officers of the Lensmen, and an entire plot point hinges on the thriving market for Alsakanite cigarettes. Most of these authors were perfectly aware of the difficulties that smoking would present in the closed environment of a spacecraft, but this only meant that they had to work around the problem, since cigarettes were such an essential component of the concentrated thinking around which such stories revolve. John W. Campbell, a lifelong smoker himself, says as much in his short story “The Irrelevant,” which is also set aboard a spaceship: “Cigarettes were very precious, because oxygen was. It was surprising, though, how they aided thought.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the men—and the handful of women—who wrote pulp fiction for a living would regard cigarettes as an indispensable prerequisite for a civilized existence, even if you were halfway across the galaxy. As Frederik Pohl writes in his memoir The Way the Future Was: “If you want to think of a successful pulp writer in the late thirties, imagine a man with a forty-dollar typewriter on a kitchen table. By his right hand is an ashtray with a cigarette burning in it and a cup of coffee or bottle of beer within easy reach.” In the first issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the advertisement on the back cover is for Camels, which happened to be Campbell’s brand of choice for decades. (In their letters, we read of John and his remarkable wife Doña working side by side on a pair of typewriters, smoking all the while.) The debut edition of Astounding also included several small ads on its inside pages on how to quit smoking, although the health risks, to put it mildly, weren’t fully appreciated at the time. In R. DeWitt Miller’s excellent novelette “The Master Shall Not Die,” which was published in March 1938, the characters in the far future are constantly smoking, and there’s an offhand reference to a year long past in which “increased intensity of cosmic rays caused mutations in tobacco plants.” The italics are emphatically mine:

One of the products of these mutations was a hybrid which, although it looked and smoked like ordinary tobacco, secreted a vegetable alkaloid which caused a great increase of death from certain types of heart disease. You never heard of it apparently.

The idea that smoking might be dangerous, in other words, was a form of science fiction in itself, and it isn’t hard to see the irony. “The Master Shall Not Die” appeared in the first issue of Astounding edited primarily by Campbell, who is described as constantly gesturing in his office with a Camel in a black cigarette holder. Thirty years later, he was told by his doctor that he had to stop smoking or die, so he began to limit himself to two cigarettes per day, one in the morning, the other in the early afternoon. (He died suddenly, and apparently without pain, of a massive aortic aneurysm at the age of sixty-one, while watching professional wrestling on television.) In the late seventies, Robert A. Heinlein suffered a precursor to a stroke. William H. Patterson, his authorized biographer, writes of his visit to his doctor: “He had an unlit cigarette in his hand at this exact moment: he had smoked for nearly sixty years—since the very first Armistice Day, in fact, November 11, 1918. He put the cigarette back in its pack and never smoked again.” Heinlein ultimately died of emphysema, in combination with heart failure. L. Ron Hubbard, who had once touted dianetics as a way to stop smoking, was rarely seen without an unfiltered Kool in his hand, and toward the end of his life, he had a rotating team of nubile young assistants who were tasked with lighting his cigarettes and catching his ashes as they fell. At the relatively advanced age of seventy-four, he died of a stroke, or, in the words of the Church of Scientology, he decided to “drop his body.”

In an editorial in Analog, shortly after the release of the landmark surgeon general’s report on smoking, Campbell wrote: “Tobacco is not habit-forming, and discontinuation causes no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever.” But if we’ve learned anything since, it’s that the only habit harder to break than smoking is an attachment to a cherished assumption. Campbell and his writers were able to conceive of hyperspace travel and intelligent vegetables, but largely unable to imagine a world in which astronauts wouldn’t be smoking on the job. (Isaac Asimov, it should be noted, never smoked at all, and he hated being around people who did. And many of the Mercury and Gemini astronauts were smokers, although never, to my knowledge, in the space capsule itself) And the point here isn’t that these writers weren’t prescient about the risks of smoking, but that the stories they wrote—and they futures they conceived—were naturally rooted in the times in which they lived. Their feelings about smoking are manifestly dated; attitudes toward race, gender, and other subjects can be harder to spot. This might seem like an obvious point, but it bears repeating, especially because we can’t exclude ourselves. The futures that we imagine today are colored in ways that we can’t see by the world in which we live, and there are undoubtedly going to be elements in the stories we’re writing now that will seem just as incongruous in fifty years. And we’ve got to be mindful of this as we construct our own visions of the future, even if the smoking gun isn’t as clear.