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March 3 - March 8, 2019
Starship Troopers was published by Putnam shortly after the death of Heinlein’s father,
First serialized in F & SF
He returned to his Martian Mowgli story, which he had repeatedly failed to finish over the last decade, despite the fact that it was “the best setup for a novel I ever had in my life.” Heinlein filled it with his advice on how to live, “ignoring length [and] taboos,” with a picture of a religious movement that reflected the watchful eye that he was keeping on Hubbard.
his fiction was growing undeniably more didactic.
All the Hugo winners these days are didactic.
Farnham’s Freehold was conceived in part as a response to Campbell’s opinions on slavery, while his libertarian views, combined with the gravity gauge from Hubbard’s “Fortress in the Sky,” resulted in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which introduced a catchphrase into the wider culture: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” It was an exciting story, but Campbell felt that it was too long for a serial, and in his last known letter to Heinlein, he reluctantly rejected it. The novel won a record fourth Hugo, cementing its author’s status as the most acclaimed science fiction writer alive.
His most famous novel was taken as a statement about free love, but he wrote to one reader, “If a male and a female each loves the other, it is almost a certainty that they will also feel physically attracted—in which case, if they choose to do something about it, the safest arrangement is contractual marriage.”
And when he informed a woman at a party that he didn’t drink or smoke, she asked, “Well, what the hell do you do?” Asimov replied, “I fuck an awful lot, ma’am.” His extramarital activities made him more confident, but he wasn’t about to leave Gertrude, who had given birth to their first child, David, on August 20, 1951.
When Horace Gold suggested that he write a mystery about a detective with a robot partner, the result was The Caves of Steel, which Asimov set in an underground city that reflected his own preference for enclosed spaces. It was a major advance, and he followed it with The End of Eternity, his single best novel, as well as a secret repudiation of the Foundation series—it described a similar organization of scientists as a collection of “psychopaths.” Campbell turned it down.
“The Last Question,” in which he proposed an unforgettable solution to the problem of a dying universe. It became his favorite of his own short stories,
“Why, I would choose you, dear,” Asimov said. But he had hesitated, and she saw it.
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Asimov wrote in the parody The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, “The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched.” And Harlan Ellison remembered, “Whenever we walked up the stairs with a young woman, I made sure to walk behind her so Isaac wouldn’t grab her tush. He didn’t mean anything by it—times were different—but that was Isaac.”
Asimov thought that it was generally agreed that he was “harmless,” and that his attentions toward fans were usually welcome: “I kiss each young woman who wants an autograph and have found, to my delight, that they tend to cooperate enthusiastically in that particular activity.” An attendee at a convention in the late fifties recalled with wonder, “Asimov . . . instead of shaking my date’s hand, shook her left breast.”
Randall Garrett, with whom Asimov had reconciled, said of the Three Laws of Robotics, “Isaac says John made them up and John says Isaac did, and I say they’re both right. The laws were invented in symbiotic cooperation.” Asimov agreed, and a few years later, when the Foundation trilogy won a special Hugo Award as the best series of all time, he simply said in his speech, “I would like to thank Mr. John W. Campbell, Jr., who had at least as much to do with the Foundation series as I had.”
IN MARCH 1969, HEINLEIN FLEW WITH GINNY TO A FILM FESTIVAL IN RIO DE JANEIRO, WHERE HE met the director Roman Polanski.
Destination Moon showed?
he attended the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, which he called “the greatest spiritual experience I’ve undergone in my life,” telling the anchorman Walter Cronkite, “This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race. . . . Today is New Year’s Day of the Year One.”
The editor himself watched the moon landing at home. Campbell called it “the greatest show ever staged,” observing that no writer had ever predicted that it would be televised, and told readers, “There’s [a] considerable sense of fulfillment for someone who, like myself, has been discussing, considering, imagining, and visualizing this event for some forty years.”
For each human soul, there is a unique, constant value of “a.” The imaginary index “b,” however, is continuously variable. . . . At end of life, the soul abandons its complex eigenvalue and assumes a new wave form whose eigenvalue is real. . . . This change is known to be accompanied by conformal transformation, but . . . there’s disagreement about the details. —JOHN W. CAMPBELL, “ON THE NATURE OF ANGELS”
Norman L. Dean,
six pairs,
of what?
Dean had invented a reactionless space drive—a device that could fly without throwing away fuel as a propellant.
Like Welsford Parker, Dean refused to play by the rules, and like Campbell, he resisted being put to any definitive test. As Campbell moved on to such fixations as dowsing and astrology,
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he felt had “rejected discussion of his ideas” with fans for decades. Campbell thought that Heinlein was frightened of the implications of his own work, writing to E. E. Smith: He’s scared blue-with-chartreuse-spots of psi, and he’s got precognition and doesn’t-for-God’s-sake want to know it. It was all right writing “Solution Unsatisfactory” until the damned thing came true. Now he wants to stay way, way, way away from anything that might turn out to be true!
writer whose novels would pave the way for science fiction’s invasion of the bestseller lists.
I thought Heinlein did that.
Alan Dean Foster, who saw Campbell holding forth in favor of the Vietnam War. The editor’s position on it had evolved—he had once argued that Vietnam wasn’t ready for democracy, but he later signed a statement in support of American intervention—and after the discussion, he smiled and offered to switch sides, much as del Rey had seen him do after the Nazi invasion of Russia.
Gregory Benford, a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory who had written a paper on tachyons—hypothetical particles that travel faster than light—and proposed an article on the subject. Campbell had written dismissively of tachyons in the magazine, but Benford tracked him down at the hotel bar, where he pitched the idea again. To his dismay, Campbell didn’t seem to grasp the physics involved,
A year later, Benford tried again, and the editor replied that tachyons were “a bit too esoteric” for Analog.
Benford was even more struck by another statement that he had made. The year before, Campbell had cast a disapproving eye on the riots in Newark, saying that it was an example of blacks wanting “something for nothing.” And at Berkeley, in reference to the unrest outside, the editor had said, “The problem with this country is that it doesn’t know how to deal with the niggers.”
IF ASKED, CAMPBELL MIGHT HAVE EXPLAINED THAT HE HAD A PARTICULAR DEFINITION OF THE word in mind. Two years earlier, he had written in a letter, “There is such a thing as a nigger—just as there are spicks and wops and frogs and micks. A bum of Italian ancestry is a wop; a b...
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The competent Negro moves North or West to an area where he can achieve something.
“Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” is a very good philosophical question indeed. The only answer I can give, now, is “I know too little about genetics to be able to give a reply based on understanding; I cannot compute the risks and benefits involved for the next few generations.”
“I think [Campbell] saw himself as fulfilling Socrates’ function as gadfly. . . . There were times when I feverishly wished I had a cup of hemlock handy—for him, of course.”
Asimov
writing to Heinlein in their discussion of Citizen of the Galaxy, “Slavery is a useful educational system; it has a place in the development of a race, just as the tyranny of parents has a place in the educational development of an individual.” Heinlein responded that he didn’t have the time to answer Campbell’s “interesting letter” at length. Unlike Asimov, he knew better than to take the bait. Yet he never forgot it, and it inspired a novel, Farnham’s Freehold, that was conceived in part as a response. Its characters—including the protagonist’s alcoholic wife—are thrown by an atomic bomb
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Campbell argued elsewhere that he had no idea what a writer’s race might be when he read a submission:
Delany—who had briefly met Campbell at a convention—submitted his novel Nova. He recalled of its rejection, “Campbell . . . didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. . . . Otherwise, he rather liked it.”
He wrote elsewhere, “No woman has ever attained first-rank competence in literature in any Indo-European language.” But he also published such authors as Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Jane Rice, Judith Merril, Wilmar H. Shiras, Katherine MacLean, Kate Wilhelm, Pauline Ashwell, Anne McCaffrey, and Alice Bradley Sheldon, whom he knew as James Tiptree, Jr.
Campbell admired Islam, but his feelings toward the Jews were more complicated. Asimov wrote firmly, “He never, not once, made me feel uncomfortable over the fact that I was Jewish.” Yet the editor also referred to Mort Weisinger in passing as “a fairly decent little Jew-boy,” and he famously asked Milton A. Rothman to write as Lee Gregor.
In 1968, Campbell complained in an editorial that Democrats and Republicans had become indistinguishable, closing with the startling announcement that he was voting for George Wallace: “I want a chance to vote for a different approach!” In private, he defended his right to cast a protest ballot, although he also conceded that Wallace was “a terrible choice.”
Michael Moorcock saw him as the editor of “a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine,” which, given Campbell’s lifelong war against the establishment, was profoundly ironic. Despite his belief in new modes of thought, he was hostile to change that he couldn’t control. The counterculture shared his interest in transformation and alternative viewpoints, but not in supermen or psionic machines.
the question of whether his statements reflected his true feelings is secondary to the damage that they caused. In his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., told the haunting story of an American secret agent posing as a Nazi propagandist, concluding, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” And he gave the character a name that must have resonated with many readers: Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
The editor refused to budge. “I’m not interested in victims,” Campbell said calmly. “I’m interested in heroes. I have to be. Science fiction is a problem-solving medium. Man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and, given enough time, can find out.”
Malzberg saw that the conversation hadn’t gone as he had hoped, and he stammered that he had to leave. Standing up, he shook the editor’s hand, nodded at Tarrant, and fled. In the corridor, as he pressed the button for the elevator, a sinking sense of the encounter washed over him, and he began to tremble. A second later, Campbell came around the corner, probably on his way to the bathroom. For an instant, the two men simply looked at each other. At last, the editor’s eyes twinkled. “Don’t worry about it, son,” Campbell said gently. “I just like to shake ’em up.”
On September 8, 1966, NBC aired the series premiere of Star Trek, which in many ways was an extension of the tradition embodied by Campbell. Gene Roddenberry, its creator, had been turned on to science fiction in his teens by the Astounding of the Tremaine era. He provided pulp covers from his own collection as inspiration to his art directors, counted Asimov and Heinlein among his influences, and turned to the existing ranks of science fiction writers when it came time to hire a writing staff.
The names on his list of potential writers included Heinlein, Asimov, and Ellison, who went on to write the classic “The City on the Edge of Forever.” He signed Robert Bloch, Sturgeon, and van Vogt, who wrote outlines but was unable to work within the confines of television, while the plot of “Arena,” in which Kirk faced an alien in a fight to the death, was credited to the Astounding story by Frederic Brown.
he suffered from gout, which left him with painful tophi—deposits of uric acid in his feet—that
In the short film Lunch with John W. Campbell, Campbell was seen discussing a story at the Hotel Commodore with Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson. He had a cigarette in his hand the entire time.
much of his final decade—his alcohol use, his estrangement from his writers, the tone of his editorials—reflected his physical decline.
readers paid occasional pilgrimages to the house, and he remained an idol to the likes of Roger Ebert, who pitched him an article in college and referred to him as “my hero.”
September 1971 issue featured the short story “On the Nature of Angels,” the last piece of fiction that he ever wrote. Campbell proposed that the soul was a complex number in which the variable b stood for the level of sin.
On December 4, 1972, the ocean liner SS Statendam sailed from New York to Florida, where its passengers would witness the launch of the final manned mission to the moon. The guests included Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, Sturgeon, Harry Stine, Ben Bova, Marvin Minsky, Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, and the newscaster Hugh Downs, who served as the master of ceremonies. Also present were members of the press, many of whom, on account of the title of Porter’s most famous book, felt obliged to refer to the cruise as “a ship of fools.” The enterprise was the brainchild of a science lecturer named
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There's a video on youtube.
Mailer and Downs smoked a joint with a pair of stowaways,
Glancing back, Pohl saw Asimov, Heinlein, and Sturgeon standing together with their faces lit by the flare. A sound like thunder caused the hull of the ship to vibrate. Heinlein compared it to an atomic explosion, while Asimov was more struck by the reaction of the underground publisher Rex Weiner, who was gazing up behind him, stoned out of his mind: “Oh, shit. Oh shi-i-i-it.”
