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December 17 - December 30, 2018
Campbell’s sense of oppression throughout his life made him unsympathetic to calls for social justice,
The police have as their function the imposition of discipline on those who lack self-discipline. .
JWC
Statistically speaking, the Negroes lack self-discipline.
JWC
protagonists should be white males by default—a
“If Negro authors are extremely few—it’s solely because extremely few Negroes both wish to, and can, write in open competition.”
JWC
Campbell . . . didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. . . . Otherwise, he rather liked it.”
Samuel R. Delaney
“The aboriginal race of Australia are . . . useless beggars without self-respect hanging on the fringes of the white man’s civilization.”
JWC
Campbell shared the casual homophobia of his era,
Campbell stated that homosexuality was a sign of cultural decline, and he had thought that it could be cured by dianetics,
Campbell was dismissive of feminists, saying that they demanded equal rights but refused to give up their “girlish special privileges.”
“No woman has ever attained first-rank competence in literature in any Indo-European language.”
JWC
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.
He’s one of the type that earned the appellation “kike”; as Einstein, Disraeli, and thousands of others have demonstrated, it ain’t racial—it’s personal.
JWC on Harlan Ellison
His last years were spent attacking such targets as the protesters at Kent State and the ecologist Rachel Carson,
JWC
his contrarianism, which had once been an engine for generating stories, began to limit what he could say or publish.
JWC
Despite his belief in new modes of thought, he was hostile to change that he couldn’t control.
JWC
that he had long prophesized,
prophesied - there is no such word as prophesized
losing his chance to participate seriously in the most important social conversations of his time—and the question of whether his statements reflected his true feelings is secondary to the damage that they caused.
JWC
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Campbell was reducing his audience at a time when it was already slipping away, and he began to alienate even fans who admired him.
“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.”
Mainstream literature is about failure, a literature of defeat. Science fiction is challenge and discovery.”
JWC
Campbell was doubtful of the link between lung cancer and smoking, arguing that tobacco might even suppress cancer, and that those who were susceptible to it smoked instinctively.
Tobacco is not habit-forming, and discontinuation causes no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever.
JWC
As his illnesses left him in pain, his drinking increased—although he maintained a reputation as a teetotaler—and
JWC
Our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try to shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child. —OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
it was a repellent combination of radical weirdness and smug complacency, with the barest hint of what it might have been if the reader had been able to care about the characters.
RAH's I Will Fear No Evil
When the writer George R. R. Martin asked him to contribute an introduction to a volume in honor of Campbell, Heinlein called back to refuse, saying that the editor had never taught him anything.
Hubbard, who insisted that he wrote science fiction only to finance his research and systematically erased all collaborators from his life story.
[Heinlein] had a definite feeling that he knew better and to lecture you into agreeing with him. Campbell did this too, but Campbell always remained serenely indifferent if you ended up disagreeing with him, whereas Heinlein would, under those circumstances, grow hostile.
IA
He insisted that he was no longer connected to the church—which sent him fifteen thousand dollars a week—but he was just as involved as always.
LRH
now his most sadistic tendencies took hold, amplified by a closed world in which he had total authority, with nothing to prevent him from becoming the worst possible version of himself.
LRH
As he had with Polly and Sara, Hubbard was ready to cast off Mary Sue as soon as she became inconvenient,
Hubbard confessed that he had been driven by “an insatiable lust for power and money.”
regaled his followers with accounts of his past lives, some of which were drawn from his old stories.
LRH
many of those who were driven out refused to blame Hubbard, whom they thought was either dead or imprisoned. In fact, he was “deeply involved” with Miscavige’s actions,
weekly orders designed primarily to increase the flow of money into his private accounts.
In the introduction, Hubbard alternately built Campbell up and tore him down, often in the same sentence,
When Janet met the editor, who lectured her on her own field of psychiatry, she thought that he was “exasperating—but fascinating.”
When he was awake, he was often in pain, but in contrast to Campbell, Hubbard, and Heinlein, whose sufferings had revealed so much of what they had tried to hide, his sense of humor remained intact.
IA
Campbell and his authors had been the men—and women—who sold the moon. They hadn’t predicted the future—they had made it.
In quoting letters, I have generally corrected and standardized the spelling and punctuation.
But apostrophe placement is very questionable.
