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March 3 - March 8, 2019
Toward the end of the thirties, fans who had grown up with science fiction became old enough to write for themselves, and unlike the mercenary authors of the earlier phase, they didn’t do it for the money, but out of love. Gradually, they built on the discoveries of their predecessors, and they pushed the field by trial and error into directions that no one could have foreseen.
By the sixties, Asimov had grown apart from the mentor and friend whom he later called “the most powerful force in science fiction ever,” but he never forgot his debt to the man who had first thrust the sword of Achilles into his hands. His name was John W. Campbell,
Despite his flaws, he deserves to be seen as one of the key cultural figures of the twentieth century, and his singular career—which has never been the subject of a full biography until now—is one of its great untold stories.
Asimov called him “the brain of the superorganism,” while the writer Harlan Ellison, one of his harshest critics, conceded that he was “the single most important formative force” in modern science fiction. He was synonymous with the genre, and his influence lasted long after his death in 1971. As a teenager in the seventies, Neil Gaiman paid more than he could afford for a box of old Astoundings, and decades later, when asked if Game of Thrones had been inspired by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, George R. R. Martin responded, “The Campbell that influenced me was John W., not Joseph.”
For much of his career, he was hated as much as he was loved, and he was inescapable even for writers he neglected, such as Ray Bradbury, who tried and failed repeatedly to break into the magazine.
America’s future, by definition, was unknown, with a rate of change that would only increase. To prepare for this coming acceleration, he turned science fiction from a literature of escapism into a machine for generating analogies, which was why, in the sixties, he renamed the magazine Analog.
The bright child that Asimov evoked in “The Sword of Achilles” was a portrait of the artist himself—he was an awkward prodigy who escaped into science fiction—and Campbell took him on as an experiment to develop a writer from scratch, feeding him the premise for his landmark story “Nightfall,” the psychohistory of the Foundation series, and the revolutionary Three Laws of Robotics.
With more than four hundred books to his credit, he became, incredibly, the most prolific author in American history, although he never forgot what he owed to Campbell: “In the essential characteristics that made him my literary father, I am but a pygmy to him.”
Campbell’s most intriguing partnership was with the man who became the leading science fiction writer of his generation, with an unsurpassed body of work that often left both Hubbard and Asimov in its shadow. A prominent critic once called Robert A. Heinlein “the hand of John Campbell’s mind,” but he was already a major talent when he mailed in his first submission, and Campbell’s primary contribution was to recognize it. With his skills as a storyteller and his dazzling range of interests, he was everything that Campbell had ever wanted in a writer, and Heinlein seized the chance to express
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they all embodied Campbell’s conviction, which he never abandoned, that science fiction could change lives.
Campbell’s magazine counted Albert Einstein and the scientists of Bell Labs among its subscribers, and it made an indelible impression on such fans as the young Carl Sagan, who stumbled across it in a candy store: “A glance at the cover and a quick riffle through the interior showed me it was what I had been looking for. . . . I was hooked. Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding.” Public figures of all political persuasions—from Paul Krugman to Elon Musk to Newt Gingrich—have confessed to being influenced by its stories.
Yet it also encourages us to see all problems as provinces of engineering, and science as the solution to the dilemmas that it creates. When we propose technological fixes for climate change, or place our hopes in the good intentions of a few visionary billionaires, we unconsciously endorse a view of the world straight out of the pages of Astounding.
Asimov, who described himself as a feminist, casually groped female fans for years. Such women as Doña Campbell, Leslyn Heinlein, and Campbell’s assistant editor Kay Tarrant have fallen out of the history of the genre, while Hubbard’s first two wives have been erased from his official biography. This is their story as well.
Science fiction can seem inevitable, but it arose from luck, specific decisions, and the experiences of its creators at a particular moment in time. Their subculture has become our global culture, and its pattern is strangely like that of their lives.
If his audience ultimately refused to fall in line, it led, paradoxically, to the outcome that he wanted. Science fiction became an ongoing collaboration between writers and fans, and the most convincing proof of Campbell’s success is the fact that he lost control of it.
Campbell, who didn’t even like to drink at home, agreed to take phenobarbital, a sedative, followed by scopolamine, a notorious truth serum.
solve math problems in two different ways. An analog approximation, he pointed out, was usually right to the first few places, while a digital calculation could make a mistake in the units as easily as in the millionths, with each one serving as a check on the other.
Campbell, who identified as agnostic from an early age, came to doubt all pronouncements made by any adult whatsoever.
His most significant influence was Norbert Wiener, an associate professor of mathematics who later achieved worldwide fame as the founder of cybernetics.
Finagle’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.”
In 1928, in particular, Gernsback had published a novel that opened up the genre overnight to a vaster sense of scale than it had ever known before, with an atomic spacecraft that one character casually estimates as capable of “a velocity of something like seven billion four hundred thirteen million miles per second.” Campbell was fascinated by The Skylark of Space. The serial by E. E. “Doc” Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby—with a dashing villain who steals the hero’s ship and leads him on a chase six quadrillion miles from home—inaugurated the field of superscience, or space opera. It inspired
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The integraph, for example, was an actual instrument that was used to solve differential equations at MIT, and by incorporating it into his story, Campbell provided one of the first descriptions of a computer in science fiction.
ONE DAY IN 1912, ROBERT A. HEINLEIN LIKED TO RECALL, A YOUNG COUPLE WAS WALKING THROUGH Swope Park in Kansas City, Missouri. They were crossing the railroad tracks when the wife caught her heel in a switch—the pair of tapering rails that guided the cars—as a train’s whistle sounded its approach. A passerby, identified in press accounts as a tramp, stopped to help, but the men were unable to free her before the engine struck them all. The woman and the stranger were killed at once.
In reality, the incident didn’t occur when he was five, but twelve, and it took place over four hundred miles away, in Winnetka, Illinois. On September 1, 1919, William Tanner was killed while trying to save his wife from an oncoming train, while a flagman—not a tramp—named John Miller lost a leg in the rescue attempt but survived.
Sounds like an entirely different incident.
Heinlein slept on a mattress on the floor, and on summer nights, he snuck out to the park to play naked as Tarzan. He earned pocket money by selling The Saturday Evening Post, reading his homework on the streetcar, while such writers as Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, and Will Durant turned him into a budding socialist.
At night, under the bedcovers, he studied pages by candlelight—Kipling, Burroughs, the Tom Swift series, Horatio Alger, and the Gernsback science fiction magazines.
strengthening his eyes, which had always been weak, using the Bates Method,
after hearing the news, he felt suicidal.
?
Like Campbell, he had been impressed by the story The Skylark of Space,
they conducted experiments in telepathy, following the instructions in a book by the socialist writer Upton Sinclair. Heinlein was searching for approaches to mysticism, and he even considered joining the Freemasons.
When he read an introspective story in Astounding, “Twilight” by Don A. Stuart, he didn’t like it,
In 1933, while living in Durham, North Carolina, John W. Campbell had his first close encounter with the unknown.
Except the one noted later...
Campbell, who had seen a similar phenomenon at the age of eleven at his grandmother’s house in Ohio,
this one
in practice, scientists could be as resistant to new ideas as anyone. When it came to challenging orthodoxy, he concluded, he would be on his own.
In reality, his observations were about as perceptive as those of the average American male in his twenties.
?
Joseph B. Rhine,
He also kept an eye on race relations, which were more visible here than they had been in New Jersey or Massachusetts, and his opinions on the subject began to grow silently inside of him.
by reintroducing a sense of melancholy to the pulps, it single-handedly ushered in the modern age of science fiction. At first, however, it didn’t seem that the story he called “Twilight” would have any impact at all.
When she replaced his father as his reader of choice, she nudged him toward fiction that was more conscious of style and theme.
story—“The Irrelevant,” which he published under the name Karl van Campen, led to a scientific debate in the letters column that ran for months—but
Robert Swisher and his wife, Frances.
“Imitation,” his first attempt at a humorous story, in which two fugitives named Penton and Blake wrangle with a species of shape-shifting alien. It was bought by Mort Weisinger of Thrilling Wonder Stories, who retitled it “Brain Stealers of Mars,”
he worked hard on the story that he called “Frozen Hell,” generating five false starts and cutting an opening section of more than forty pages. He based the setting on a book by the explorer Richard Byrd, but he may also have been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” which had been serialized in Astounding. Campbell was no fan of Lovecraft’s—particularly of his trick of hinting at terrors “too frightful to mention”—but he was drawn to the challenge of depicting horrors that others left undescribed, and it gave him more pleasure than anything else he had ever written:
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“The conditions [man] tries to adjust to are going to change, and change so darned fast that he never will actually adjust to a given set of conditions. He’ll have to adjust in a different way: he’ll adjust to an environment of change.”
Its unquestioned peak was “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley Weinbaum, whose untimely death in 1935 prompted Asimov to write later, “If Weinbaum had lived . . . there would have been no Campbell revolution. All that Campbell could have done would have been to reinforce what would undoubtedly have come to be called ‘the Weinbaum revolution.’ ”
Brad Guy liked this
Doña, who became his unofficial first reader, showing him the best submissions and offering notes for writers.
he loved arguing with a worthy opponent like Pohl, with whom he often debated the merits of communism—the editor had a natural respect for business, while Pohl was a member of the Young Communist League.
Campbell had already made one major discovery. Jack Williamson, who was born in 1908, was a writer from New Mexico who had been a popular pulp author for years.
