Astounding Stories #20: “Unwillingly to School”

Note: With less than half a year to go until the publication of Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, I’m returning, after a long hiatus, to the series in which I highlight works of science fiction that deserve to be rediscovered, reappraised, or simply enjoyed by a wider audience. You can read the earlier installments here. 

In its broad outlines, “Unwillingly to School” looks pretty much like the kind of novella that you’d expect to find in the January 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, with a premise straight out of a Heinlein juvenile. Its narrator is a stubborn teenager working on a small family farm in a mining colony around the star Excenus. Through a series of unlikely developments, the protagonist goes reluctantly to college on earth, displays a few surprising talents, and ends up studying Cultural Engineering, which is the science of intervening discreetly in the development of immature civilizations—all of which is very Campbellian. The difference is that the main character is a nineteen-year-old girl named Lysistrata “Lizzie” Lee, and she speaks in the first person with the kind of distinct, funny voice that rarely made it into the magazine. For instance, here’s a description of visitors to the farm: “Peoples’ wives from Town come out to board some times, Dad lets them because he thinks they will Mother me. Well mostly I manage to steer them off and no hard feelings, it is my home after all they got to be reasonable about it if they want to stay.” And a little later, when Lizzie still thinks that the plan to send her off to college is part of a convoluted trick to get her out of a jam:

We are to go shopping buying some clothes for me to wear on Earth, it seems to me this is carrying realism too far but I do not want any more time in the hotel with nothing to do…M’Clare is all the time trying to get me to talk, he says for instance Have I ever thought about going to College? I say Sure, I count my blessings now and then.

It’s a tightly imagined, utterly engaging story, and John W. Campbell loved it. In his acceptance letter to the author, Pauline Ashwell, who had originally submitted the story under the pseudonym “Paul Ash,” the editor wrote enthusiastically:

I’m taking “Unwillingly to School”; it’s completely delightful and completely unique. On this one, I really feel you should use your own feminine name; only a woman could have achieved that precise presentation of a girl’s enthusiastic, bubbling-with-life, confused, yet strongly directed thinking…I hope you’ll be able to make the London Science Fiction Convention this September; I’ll be there, and I’d enjoy meeting you.

And in the announcement of the contents of the upcoming issue, Campbell described the novella in terms that would have struck longtime readers as unusually glowing:

The lead novelette will be “Unwillingly to School,” by Pauline Ashwell. She is genuinely, no-kidding, a new author, not an old one in a new disguise. There has never been a science-fiction story like this before; I am hopefully praying, however, that Miss Ashwell can repeat and extend the adventures of Lizzie Lee, who must be read to be believed. Lizzie is a teenage girl that I am extremely glad I never met, and delighted to have read about; she’s a menace, and in the course of “Unwillingly to School” she breaks every rule of English grammar, punctuation, and composition I ever heard about, and I think invents a few in order to rebel against them, too. Lizzie is this year’s Christmas present to the readers, from Astounding Science Fiction.

In the end, the response from readers was underwhelming. “Unwillingly to School” ranked third in the monthly Analytical Laboratory poll, behind “All the King’s Horses” by Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett, a story that was much more typical of what Campbell was publishing in the late fifties. (Both Ashwell and her story did receive Hugo nominations the following year, which wouldn’t be the last time that the tastes of the readers diverged from those of the major awards.) Almost two years later, there was a sequel, “The Lost Kafoozalum,” a likable story that gave up much of Lizzie’s voice—it was basically a Competent Man story with a female lead, which shouldn’t understate how unusual this was. It also ranked third. And on March 25, 1962, Campbell felt obliged to write to Robert A. Heinlein in his rejection of the story that became Podkayne of Mars:

The last yarn we ran which had a teenage girl as the central character was “Unwillingly To School”; it was written by an expert on teenage girls (she had been one; she taught at a girl’s school; she was a biologist-anthropologist—and she could write and had a magnificent sense of humor). It didn’t go over so hot—our readers appear to be less than enthusiastic about the peculiarities of teenage girl’s thinking. That seems to be a reasonable attitude; teenage girls don’t like teenage girls’ thinking either—including their own. They’re inherently frustrated, squeezed thereby into an inferiority complex type of apparent self-satisfaction, are immensely erratic, and utterly undependable.

It’s a shame, because Lizzie was, frankly, a more interesting character than Poddy, and while Ashwell later wrote two more installments in the series in the eighties, which I haven’t read, it would have been nice to see more of her in the sixties.

And the episode gets at something important about Campbell. As an editor, he never had much of an interest in diversifying his writers or characters, at least when it came to race, but he would have been happy to have had more women. His readers, who were overwhelmingly male, weren’t particularly interested, and when such efforts as “Unwillingly to School” failed to make an impression, he dropped it. On some level, this reflects the role that he claimed to see for himself, writing decades earlier: “A magazine is not an autocracy, as readers tend to believe, ruled arbitrarily by an editor’s opinions. It is a democracy by readers’ votes, the editor serving as election board official. The authors are the candidates, their style and stories the platform.” And there’s no question that he listened seriously to feedback from his readers as a whole. On another level, though, it only tells us which battles he was willing to fight. Campbell was more than glad to take on issues that he thought were important, like psionics, and persistently force them onto his audience in the absence of any conceivable demand. He could have chosen to invest the same energy into issues of representation, which could only have elevated the quality of the fiction that he was publishing, but when the readers pushed back, he didn’t press it. That’s more revealing than anything else, and it represents a real loss. Campbell published important work by such authors as Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Judith Merril, and Anne McCaffrey, but the magazine mostly lacked straightforward stories like “The Lost Kafoozalum,” in which women appeared without comment as the heroes of the stock gadget and engineering stories that filled the pages of Astounding and Analog. As a result, the migration of women into hard science fiction never really took place, at least not under Campbell’s watch. He wanted it to happen. But not quite badly enough.

The failure of the oracles

There’s a scene in Samuel R. Delany’s convoluted but extraordinary novel Nova, which is set in the year 3172, in which a character performs a reading with tarot cards. In the interstellar civilization in which the story takes place, the tarot is taken for granted as a source of useful information, and when a supporting player named Mouse expresses his skepticism, he’s told that he sounds “like somebody living a thousand years ago.” As the tarot reader explains:

Mouse, the cards don’t actually predict anything. They simply propagate an educated commentary on present situations...The seventy-eight cards of the Tarot present symbols and mythological images that have recurred and reverberated through forty-five centuries of human history. Someone who understands these symbols can construct a dialogue about a given situation. There’s nothing superstitious about it. The Book of Changes, even Chaldean Astrology only become superstitious when they are abused, employed to direct rather than to guide and suggest.

The italics are mine. After Mouse objects that “cards aren’t educated,” someone else replies: “You’ve got some odd ideas, Mouse—admittedly, they’re fascinating. If somebody had told me I’d be working in the same crew, today in the thirty-first century, with somebody who could honestly be skeptical about the Tarot, I don’t think I would have believed it.”

What I like about Delany’s treatment of the subject is that it suggests that an entire culture can pass from superstition through skepticism to something more advanced on the other side. (As the character quoted above continues: “As soon as you have people from the times of the great stellar migrations, you’re dealing with cultures sophisticated enough to comprehend things like the Tarot.”) A blind faith in the tarot as a means of predicting the future, like any form of divination, is characteristic of childhood, and most of us mature to the point where we no longer take it seriously. For artists like Delany, however, there’s another stage beyond this, in which we realize that structured repositories of arbitrary symbols—often preserved in the cultural memory as oracles—can be a tool for thinking through questions that are resistant to more rational analysis. Writing about the tarot a few years ago, I called it “a portable machine for generating patterns,” and I noted that it results in a temporary structure, spread out across the table, that feels like an externalization of the problem in your head. You can examine it, scrutinize it from different angles, or even walk away from it. I suspect that it’s the spatial aspect of the tarot that makes it a valuable source of connections between ideas, even more than the symbols on the cards themselves. It won’t tell you the future, but by forcing you to map or analogize your current situation onto a matrix of charged symbols, it can provide surprising insights into the present.

And here’s the really interesting part: you can make the same argument for science fiction. The genre has always made a big deal of its predictive side, but like the oracular powers of tarot cards or the I Ching, it’s best to regard this as a kind of bait designed to reel in susceptible minds. It’s a mislead, but a necessary one, if you want these art forms to survive. By promising everyone the ability to tell the future, you trick a select few into thinking seriously about the real purpose of the craft, which is to figure out where we are now. For most readers, it’s easier and safer to sell science fiction as a vision of the future than as a commentary on themselves. For instance, my battered paperback copy of Podkayne of Mars calls it “a remarkable picture of the customs and characters of the coming Age of Space,” which I don’t think even Heinlein would say he was writing. The blurb for an old edition of The Currents of Space says much the same thing: “In this novel, Dr. Asimov’s probing imagination has created a fascinating tale set in the not-too-distant future—an adventure that could change from fiction to fact any day now.” You could excuse this as a marketing strategy to promote this kind of fiction to a wider audience, but more insidiously, it encourages readers to focus on accidental, totally irrelevant acts of prediction while ignoring deeper insights of real value. Heinlein’s article on Wikipedia notes that he anticipated the waterbed, but not that he foresaw the Cold War. And I know which of the two I find more impressive.

This is all pretty harmless, but it becomes more worrisome when it influences how we define the practice of science fiction from the inside. As I see it, we’re faced with a stark pair of options. We can approach it like a phony psychic who makes a lot of wild predictions, hopes that her hits are remembered and her misses are forgotten, and leverages one lucky guess into an entire career, like Jeane Dixon allegedly predicting the Kennedy assassination. The net amount of information gained in the process, needless to say, is zero. Or we can think of ourselves as educated commentators on the present, which seems like the more valuable goal. If science fiction often seems stuck in a state of arrested development in the eyes of the overall culture, it’s largely due to the fact that critics see a preoccupation with prediction as a sign of immaturity. And maybe they’re right. If nothing else, it’s a form of superstition, or an inability to distinguish between the genre’s surface pleasures and its actual value. Science fiction has always whispered to certain readers, once they were lured inside: “You thought we were talking about the future, but we were really talking about you.” Like the tarot, it employs symbols that have recurred and reverberated throughout history and uses them to construct a dialogue, or an analogy. Responding instinctively to the symbols and missing the underlying pattern is a common, if understandable, mistake—these symbols wouldn’t work in the first place if they weren’t powerful enough to be subject to that kind of misinterpretation. But it’s only when we remember the real point of the exercise that science fiction, like the tarot in Nova, becomes something that no educated person can afford to dismiss.