one man towers over 20th century sci-fi
more than any other you might be
expecting me to say arthur c clarke
Robert Heinlein or of Isaac Asimov at
least those of you who clicked on this
without looking at the title but I'm
talking about the man who discovered
them or propelled their careers to
superstardom I am talking about the
editor who was the editor of Golden Age
science fiction John W Campbell
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john w campbell saved science-fiction
john w campbell remade science fiction
john w campbell ruined science fiction
all of these are true statements so who
was john w Campbell he started out as
one of the eager young authors who grew
up in the Pope era by eighteen he was
published in Hugo Gernsback amazing
stories the magazine that he would
eventually push outta business and by 21
he was writing so much that he managed
to flunk out of MIT he picked up his
degree at Duke the following year but by
this point it was clear that he was
gonna use his physics degree to improve
his writing not have his writing
supported by his physics degree for
years he wrote space adventures similar
to what was common in the Pope's in
those days but when he was 24 he adopted
a pseudonym and began writing a
different kind of story a heavier story
a more grounded one he started to
develop a philosophy around what science
fiction could be culminating in perhaps
his greatest piece
who goes there or as you may better know
it the story that the thing was based
off of by the time he was 21 astounding
stories hired him to act as editor and
it was at this point that his writing
dried up
he stopped publishing his own works and
threw himself into editing because he
had a vision an idea of what science
fiction could be in the words of Isaac
Asimov by his own example and by his
instruction and by his undeviating and
persisting insistence he forced first
astounding and then all of science
fiction into his mould he abandoned the
earlier orientation of the field he
demolished the stock characters who had
filled it eradicated the penny dreadful
plots extirpated the sunday supplement
science in a phrase he blotted out the
purple of Pulp instead he demanded that
science fiction writers understand
science and understand people a hard
requirement that many of the established
writers of the 1930s could not meet
Campbell did not compromise because of
that those who could not meet his
requirements could not sell to him and
the carnage was as great as it had been
in Hollywood a decade before while
silent movies had given way to the
talkies and this is true Campbell almost
single-handedly
wrenched out of the genre all of the
elements that made people dismiss
science fiction as juvenile with the
collapse of amazing stories there was
basically only one place around to
publish science fiction Campbell's
astounding stories and he would be
damned if non Campbell's stories were
getting in there the hacks were out
there was a new type of idea driven
story that was coming in and with it a
new type of author and Campbell didn't
just edit his authors works he trained
them he had rules and dictums for how he
thought science fiction should be
written that he taught to his new crop
of minds that he was developing rather
than get lost trying to show the
audience how cool spaceships or
computers or ray guns would be he pushed
his authors to make those things seem
mundane because if these things seemed
ordinary to people in the story then the
whole period the story was set in would
seem amazing to a present-day reader he
wanted stories that used science but
that weren't about science and he really
wanted stories that had a central idea
that you could summarize in a sentence
or two but spends pages exploring in
fact he was famous for throwing such
ideas at his authors telling them to
write me a story about a man who will
die in 24 hours unless he can answer
this question how do you know you're
sane or write me a story about a
creature that thinks as well as a man
but not like a man he even helped to
craft Asimov's laws of robotics
of course this love of depth and well
thought out stories did get him in
trouble at times like in 1944 when he
was working with one of his authors on
the piece about the possibility of
atomic war and the FBI came knocking
because their guesses in the story were
a little too good hilariously after
convincing them that any well-read
person could guess exactly what the US
government was doing with its nuclear
program
obviously he convinced them to let him
publish the story anyway because pulling
it might arouse more suspicion and in a
final coup de Gras he told them by the
way you're doing the project in Los
Alamos I can tell because a surprising
number of astounding story subscribers
have suddenly moved their subscriptions
there in the last few years through the
30s and the 40s his unrelenting attitude
coupled with a genuine philosophy of
what
fiction should be really did uh sure in
what we'd now refer to as the Golden Age
of science fiction whose authors we are
going to be talking about for many
episodes to come but by the 50s the
cracks in Campbell's dictatorial editing
style began to show he a lien Aidid many
of the authors he once trained still
trying to impose his will on writers who
had frankly outgrown him he became
enamored of pseudoscience defending
ideas about psionic powers and wildly
unscientific anti-gravity devices he
also became a loud and vocal proponent
of an idea that one of his authors had
brought him it was a piece by one l ron
Hubbard called Dianetics a new science
of the mind yes indeed it was campbell
who published the first piece on
scientology and he bought into it
completely his tenure at amazing stories
which by this point had been renamed to
analog magazine had one last great work
in it for it was the first place that
you could ever read dune but the great
flaws and Campbell's dictums for sci-fi
and in him as a person were starting to
become clear while he had wrenched
science fiction out of the hacky pulps
and made the world acknowledged that it
wasn't just a juvenile fad his iron grip
on the genre had propelled it into
another form of stagnation the Golden
Age left us with square-jawed men doing
practical things in a practical universe
it wasn't as much about characters as it
was ideas and the characters it did have
were mostly those of the American ideal
that Campbell's so admired stoic men
making hard decisions or damira women
there to support their stoic hard
decision-making men also Campbell was a
racist and there is just no reason to
sugarcoat it
it doesn't make science fiction as a
genre worse or make any of us bad people
for enjoying it but I think it's
important that we do accept that reality
perhaps the most important editor in the
history of sci-fi wrote editorials
defending slavery has one of the most
prevalent forms of human interaction in
history and stating that the United
States would have been better off not
fighting the civil war because
capitalism and industrialization would
have eventually made slavery obsolete
anyway he was Pro George Wallace and
generally regressive whenever matters of
race came up he was also fairly a
authoritarian in his views the ever
outspoken Michael Moorcock who would
eventually lead the charge to move
sci-fi away from the cam belly and model
even went so far as to call him a
crypto-fascist and Campbell let his
authoritarian streak bleed over into his
editorials and the works he published
Campbell's legacy is a complicated one
we usually date the beginning of the
Golden Age of science fiction with the
start of his tenure as the editor of
astounding stories and as the editor of
astounding stories he threw the hacks
out of sci-fi and made it something more
than it was as the editor of astounding
stories he trained many of the greatest
science fiction authors of the 20th
century but he also published a number
of reactionary and downright dangerous
ideas he fought against the stagnation
of the time and in turn created a new
form of stagnation that later authors
would have to fight against but to the
credit of the authors and the genre even
many of those he trained distanced
themselves from him as his more extreme
views became clear so join us next time
as we delve into the work of one of the
most prominent of Campbell's disciples
Isaac Asimov
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