3 golden age science fiction authors walked into a military institution

June 23, 2024 9:05 AM

Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard: In 1942 three of the country’s leading SF writers – Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague De Camp – all started working together at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The US had just entered WW II, and everyone wanted to contribute. Heinlein and De Camp were too old and too unfit to fight, and Asimov hated the getting-shot-and-dying part, but they still wanted to chip in. They were three of the most imaginative people in the country, so what did the Navy actually have them doing?
posted by bq (13 comments total)

The most satisfying meta-narrative of WW2 for me is the immense potential of concentrating an entire nation's talent and resources on solving a problem. Not sure what we'd get from putting three of 2024's best SF writers together at a Navy R&D facility, but it might be good.

TFA is wrongly dismissive of all of the defense R&D that never hit the WW2 battlefield, in part because of the big kahuna of defense R&D - the Manhattan Project - so thoroughly hitting its targets. That "late" R&D was leading edge of huge advances in aerospace and materials that were paying dividends well into the 1950s.
posted by MattD at 9:29 AM on June 23 [8 favorites]

There are some errors in that blog essay: Jack Parsons wasn't a Satanist but was a thelemite, and one of Aleister Crowley's former followers-turned-enemies from the OTO. Nor was Heinlein necessarily too unfit or old: but (per the Patterson biography) he seems to have made a list of Naval offcers who were not to be recalled for active service in wartime, due to perceived left wing sympathies: during the late 1930s he campaigned for Upton Sinclair's run for governor of California. (Heinlein's political drift rightwards really started when he met and later married Virginia in the lat 40s.)
posted by cstross at 9:34 AM on June 23 [27 favorites]

I’m rather disappointed that Asimov, a man who was interested in everything, wasn’t curious about this, dangerous though it might have been.
"A bureaucratic error stopped his pay, and he was removed from a task force that was scheduled to participate in the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll." [mensa]
posted by HearHere at 9:38 AM on June 23 [4 favorites]

It centers on these three, but throws in the unpleasant L. Ron Hubbard, the actively nasty John Whitesides Parsons (a rocket pioneer and satanist) ... "

Parsons gets a chapter in Apocalypse Culture including this bit about magically getting a mate:

In January, 1946, Parsons devised an Operation to, as he put it, “...obtain the assistance of an elemental mate.” The core of this Working consisted of the utilization of the Enochian Tablet of Air, or rather a specific angle of it. This was to be the focus of VIII° sexual magick, with the purpose of giving substance to the elemental summons. Parsons continued with this for 11 days, evoking twice daily. He noted various psychic phenomena during this period, but felt discouraged by the apparent failure of the Operation. However, success followed several days later. In his own words:

The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then, on January 18 at sunset, while the Scribe and I were on the Mojave Desert, the feeling of tension suddenly stopped. I turned to him and said “it is done,” in absolute certainty that the Operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me. She is describable as an air of fire type with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent and intelligence. During the period of January 19 to February 27 I invoked the Goddess BABALON with the aid of magical partner (Ron Hubbard), as was proper to one of my grade.

posted by mph at 10:04 AM on June 23 [2 favorites]

That’s not surprising – to this day no one knows how to stop guided missiles, be they human or robot-directed.

Uhhhh... shoot it a bunch?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:12 AM on June 23 [4 favorites]

"Ignore his later odd and cranky novels"
Always good advice for the Heinlein corpus.
posted by doctornemo at 10:52 AM on June 23 [3 favorites]

I tend to see Heinlein's military career--graduating from Annapolis, but getting med-boarded out before WWII cooked off--as probably having a big influence on some of the glorification of military service seen in Starship Troopers; he was fully indoctrinated in the military mindset, but left before he would see actual combat. (Compare/contrast with Joe Haldeman, actual combat veteran, who wrote The Forever War.) Heinlein would also write a rather acerbic letter to publisher/superfan Forrest J. Ackerman about SF fans who were anti-war during WWII; I mean, yeah, we had to beat Hitler et al. but Ackerman had just lost his brother and jeez, guy.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:04 AM on June 23 [11 favorites]

Halloween Jack: the difference goes back further—Heinlein studied at Annapolis (he originally wanted to be an astronomer but it was rather hard to get a university place in the 1920s if you weren't rich: Annapolis offered the basics and a career as a Naval officer on top, but then he got side-tracked). Meanwhile Joe Haldeman was conscripted during Vietnam—IIRC his number came up then his draft deferments ran out during his PhD.

So: one was a peacetime officer corps volunteer while the other was a wartime conscript (who ended up in the artillery and was wounded by enemy fire). It's no wonder there's a tonal difference between Starship Troopers and The Forever War!
posted by cstross at 11:37 AM on June 23 [9 favorites]

The article got a lot wrong about Asimov, mostly due to oversummarizing and plain misstatement. While Asimov's marriage did eventually fall apart and lead to a divorce, at the time he joined the Naval Yard he was happily married. One of the reasons he took the job was both it was a way for him to serve his country and earn some money as a newly married man (his earnings from writing, as per his own comments in his autobiography were modest and undependable).

As for being afraid of joining Operations Crossroads, that's the author's opinion. Asimov had been trying to get out of the Army from day one, as he hated every minute of military life. The war had ended about two weeks before he was drafted, so he saw his service as a waste of time and a delay to completing his post-doctorate.

Asimov did consider himself lucky to have avoided the risk of radiation related illnesses that thousands of other soldiers experienced, but that's an opinion that was based on information that was made public many years later; at the time, no one (not even Asimov) was aware of the real risks that the soldiers would face.

Lastly, while the end of Asimov's marriage was unpleasant, once the divorce was finalized he married Janet Jeppson, and they had a happy marriage that lasted until his untimely death from HIV. His post war literary career was also extremely successful, with over 500 books published and several bestsellers.
posted by Larry Duke at 2:30 PM on June 23 [3 favorites]

Asimov mentions his stint in the Army in one of his nonfiction books. He notes that a drill instructor liked to call him "azimuth." He also mentioned that it pissed him off. Anyway, I enjoyed the book and wrote him a letter telling him so. Thinking to be clever, I misspelled his name: Azimov.

In those days (the 1980s), he answered his fan mail on postcards using a manual typewriter. I was pleased to get a response, even though he scolded me for misspelling his name. He said he was still sensitive about that.
posted by mule98J at 3:04 PM on June 23 [7 favorites]

Thank you very much to everyone who shared corrections and additional information.
posted by bq at 12:55 PM on June 24

I read a book that dealt with their wartime experiences. I think it might have been "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction" by Alec Nevala-Lee. It really portrayed Asimov as the sheltered naif. It was a part of their story I'd not read before, and it continued my education about the entirety of Asimov as a person. I still have admiration for him, but it's been modified as we find out more about his behaviors.
posted by jkosmicki at 2:25 PM on June 24 [1 favorite]

Covering events and people of the same time (in particular Parsons), I highly recommend Strange Angel, by George Pendle.

Interesting... I just found out that Strange Angel was made into a TV series in 2018... Two seasons worth. I'll have to go find that.
posted by Snowflake at 7:52 AM on June 26