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John W. Campbell

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   John Wood Campbell, Jr. ( June 8, 1910 – July 11, 1971) was an
   influential science-fiction writer and editor. As a writer he was first
   influential under his own name as a writer of super-science space opera
   and then under the name Don A. Stuart, a pseudonym he used for moodier,
   less pulpish stories. However, Campbell's primary influence on the
   science-fiction field was as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction,
   a post that he held from late 1937 until his death. In that role he is
   generally credited with helping to create the so-called Golden Age of
   Science Fiction, which is often held to have started with the July 1939
   issue of Astounding. Isaac Asimov, in his autobiography, calls Campbell
   "the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten
   years of his editorship he dominated the field completely." At the time
   of his sudden and unexpected death after 34 years at the helm of
   Astounding, however, his quirky personality and occasionally eccentric
   editorial demands had alienated a number of his most illustrious
   writers such as Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein to the point where they
   no longer submitted works to him.

Biographical information

   Campbell was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1910. His father was a cold,
   impersonal, and unaffectionate electrical engineer. His mother, Dorothy
   (née Strahern) was warm but changeable of character and had an
   identical twin who visited them often and who disliked young John. John
   was unable to tell them apart and was frequently coldly rebuffed by the
   person he took to be his mother. Campbell attended Massachusetts
   Institute of Technology (MIT), where he befriended Norbert Wiener, one
   of the godfathers of computers. He began writing science fiction at age
   18 and quickly sold his first stories. By the time he was 21 he was a
   well-known pulp writer of super-science space opera but had been
   dismissed by MIT: he had failed German. He then spent one year at Duke
   University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in
   physics in 1932.^, Asimov notes Campbell's presence at Duke and
   speculates that Duke was "best known in my youth for the work of Joseph
   B. Rhine on extrasensory perception, and that may have influenced
   Campbell's later views on the subject." Damon Knight writes that
   Campbell was a "portly, bristled-haired blond man with a challenging
   stare" who told him once that "he wasn't sure how much longer he would
   edit Astounding. He might quit and go into science. 'I'm a nuclear
   physicist, you know,' he said, looking me right in the eye." . He was
   married to Dona Stewart in 1931, divorced in 1949, then remarried in
   1950 to Margaret (Peg) Winter. He spent most of his life in New Jersey
   and died at home, "quietly, quickly, painlessly, as he sat before his
   television."

Writing career

   Campbell's first published story, "When the Atoms Failed", appeared in
   the January 1930 issue of Amazing Stories, when he was 18; he had had a
   previous story, "Invaders from the Infinite", accepted by Amazing's
   editor, T. O'Conor Sloane, but Sloane had lost the manuscript.
   Campbell's early fiction included a space opera series based around
   three characters, Arcot, Morey and Wade; and another series with lead
   characters Penton and Blake. All were eventually published in book form
   in the 1950s and 1960s. This early work established Campbell's
   reputation as a leading writer of space adventure; and when he began in
   1934 to publish stories with a different tone, he used a pseudonym, Don
   A. Stuart, perhaps because of the difference in style. The pseudonym
   was derived from the maiden name of Campbell's wife, Dona Stuart.

   Soon Stuart also had a strong reputation as a leading writer, and from
   1930 until the later part of the decade Campbell was prolific and
   successful under both his own name and the Stuart pseudonym. Two
   significant stories published under the pseudonym are "Twilight"
   (Astounding, November 1934), the first Stuart story, which immediately
   established the reputation of the apparently new author; and " Who Goes
   There?" (Astounding, August 1938), about a group of Antarctic
   researchers who discover a crashed alien vessel, complete with a
   malevolent shape-changing occupant. This was filmed as The Thing from
   Another World ( 1951) and again as The Thing ( 1982). "Who Goes
   There?", published when Campbell was only 28, was his last significant
   piece of fiction. As Sam Moskowitz has written about Campbell in his
   early critical study of science-fiction writers, "From the memories of
   his childhood he drew the most fearsome agony of the past: the doubts,
   the fears, the shock, and the frustration of repeatedly discovering
   that the woman who looked so much like his mother was not who she
   seemed. Who goes there? Friend or foe?"

Editorship of Astounding and Unknown; the Golden Age

   In late 1937, F. Orlin Tremaine hired Campbell as the editor of
   Astounding.^, Campbell was not given full authority for Astounding
   until May of 1938, but in fact had been responsible for buying stories
   somewhat earlier, perhaps as early as the October 1937 issue, although
   the statement of ownership in the November 1937 issue listed Tremaine
   as the editor as of October 1, 1937. An editorial notice in the April
   1938 issue made it clear he was responsible for stories appearing as
   early as February.^,

   Campbell began to make changes almost immediately. He instigated a
   mutant label for unusual stories, and in March 1938 changed the title
   of the magazine from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction.
   He had intended to eventually change the name to simply Science
   Fiction, but Blue Ribbon Magazines brought out a magazine with that
   title in March 1939, and Campbell decided to retain the existing name.

   Lester del Rey's first story, in March 1938, was a notable find for
   Campbell, but in 1939 such an extraordinary group of new writers were
   published for the first time in the pages of Astounding that the period
   is generally regarded as the beginning of the Golden Age of science
   fiction, and the July 1939 issue in particular. The July issue
   contained A. E. van Vogt's first story, "Black Destroyer"; and Isaac
   Asimov's early story "Trends"; August brought Robert A. Heinlein's
   first story, "Lifeline", and the next month Theodore Sturgeon's first
   story appeared. Virginia Heinlein writes in her collection of
   Heinlein's letters that Campbell was "a large, tall man who threw off
   ideas like a sparkler.... Robert did not admire his writing style and
   objected strenuously to the various changes JWC made in Robert's
   stories."

   Also in 1939, Campbell started the fantasy magazine Unknown (later
   Unknown Worlds) . Although Unknown was cancelled after only four years,
   a victim of wartime paper shortages, the magazine's editorial direction
   was significant in the evolution of modern fantasy.

   Campbell was regarded by many of the Astounding stable of writers as an
   important and encouraging influence on their work, and there are many
   stories in the reminiscences of writers such as Isaac Asimov and Lester
   del Rey of their interactions with him. Generally, he is widely
   considered to be the single most important and influential editor in
   the history of science fiction. As the Science Fiction Encyclopedia,
   edited by Peter Nicholls, wrote about Campbell: "More than any other
   individual, he helped to shape modern sf." This influence is generally
   considered to be during the period between 1938 and about 1950. After
   that, new magazines such as Galaxy and the Magazine of Fantasy and
   Science Fiction, building upon the foundation Astounding had laid
   during the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, moved in different
   directions and developed talented new writers who were not directly
   influenced by him.

   Asimov says of his unmatched influence on the field: "By his own
   example and by his instruction and by his undeviating and persisting
   insistence, he forced first Astounding and then all science fiction
   into his mold. 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."

   The most famous example of the type of speculative but plausible
   science fiction that Campbell demanded from his writers is Deadfall, a
   short story by Cleve Cartmill that appeared during the wartime year of
   1944, a year before the detonation of the first atomic bomb. As Ben
   Bova, Campbell's successor as editor at Analog, writes, it "described
   the basic facts of how to build an atomic bomb. Cartmill and...
   Campbell worked together on the story, drawing their scientific
   information from papers published in the technical journals before the
   war. To them, the mechanics of constructing a uranium-fission bomb
   seemed perfectly obvious." The FBI, however, descended on Campbell's
   office after the story appeared in print and demanded that the issue be
   removed from the newsstands. Campbell convinced them that by removing
   the magazine "the FBI would be advertising to everyone that such a
   project existed and was aimed at developing nuclear weapons" and the
   demand was dropped.

   Campbell was also responsible for the grim, and controversial, ending
   of the famous short story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. Joe Green
   says that Campbell had "three times! sent "Cold Equations" back to
   Godwin, before he got the version he wanted.... Godwin kept coming up
   with ingenious ways to save the girl! Since the strength of this
   deservedly classic story lies in the fact the life of one young woman
   must be sacrificed to save the lives of many, it simply wouldn't have
   the same impact if she had lived."

   Campbell revealed a sly sense of humor in the November 1949 issue. He
   had always encouraged literary criticism by Astounding's readership,
   and in the November 1948 issue he published a letter to the editor by a
   reader named Richard A. Hoen that contained a detailed ranking of the
   contents of an issue one year in the future. Campbell went along with
   the joke and contracted stories from most of the authors mentioned in
   the letter that would follow the fan's imaginary story titles.
   Ironically, when the issue actually appeared, Hoen had forgotten his
   original letter, and was supposedly "amazed at how many of my favorite
   authors appeared in one issue". One of the best-known stories from that
   issue is "Gulf", by Robert A. Heinlein. Other stories and articles were
   written by a number of the most famous authors of the time: Isaac
   Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, A. E. van Vogt, L. Sprague
   de Camp, and the astronomer R. S. Richardson.

   In 1996, Campbell was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy
   Hall of Fame, in the first year of its existence.

Editorials and opinions

   Campbell was well known for the opinionated editorials in each issue of
   the magazine, wherein he would sometimes put forth quite preposterous
   hypotheses, perhaps intended to generate story ideas. An anthology of
   these editorials was published in 1966. He also suggested story ideas
   to writers (including, famously, "Write me a creature that thinks as
   well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man"), and
   sometimes asked for stories to match cover paintings he had already
   bought.

   Isaac Asimov once asked Campbell why he had stopped writing fiction
   after he became the editor of Astounding. Campbell explained, "Isaac,
   when I write, I write only my own stories. As editor, I write the
   stories that a hundred people write."

   Science-fiction writer Joe Green writes that Campbell "enjoyed taking
   the 'devil's advocate' position in almost any area, willing to defend
   even viewpoints with which he disagreed if that led to a livelier
   debate." As an example, he says that during a conversation with him
   Campbell "pointed out that the much-maligned 'peculiar institution' of
   slavery in the American South had in fact provided the blacks brought
   there with a higher standard of living than they had in Africa." Green
   goes on to say that he was "very much afraid that in fact he was
   sincere. I suspected, from comments by Asimov, among others — and some
   Analog editorials I had read — that John held some racist views, at
   least in regard to blacks." Finally, however, Green agreed with
   Campbell that "rapidly increasing mechanization after 1850 would have
   soon rendered slavery obsolete anyhow. It would have been better for
   the USA to endure it a few more years than suffer the truly horrendous
   costs of the Civil War."

   In the 1950s, Campbell developed strong interests in alternative
   theories that began to isolate him from some of his own mainstream
   writers such as Asimov. He wrote favorably, for instance, about such
   things as the " Dean drive," a device that supposedly produced thrust
   in violation of Newton's third law, and the " Hieronymus machine,"
   which could supposedly amplify psi powers. He published many stories
   about telepathy and other psionic abilities. In 1949 Campbell also
   became interested in Dianetics. He was initially a strong supporter,
   writing of Hubbard's initial article in Astounding that "It is, I
   assure you in full and absolute sincerity, one of the most important
   articles ever published." He also claimed to have successfully used
   dianetic techniques himself: "The memory stimulation technique is so
   powerful that, within thirty minutes of entering therapy, most people
   will recall in full detail their own birth. I have observed it in
   action, and used the techniques myself." In addition to publishing L.
   Ron Hubbard's first articles on the subject, Campbell continued to
   write editorials in support of Dianetics for a time.

   Writing about the Campbell of this period, the noted science-fiction
   writer and critic Damon Knight commented in his book In Search of
   Wonder: "In the pantheon of magazine science fiction there is no more
   complex and puzzling figure than that of John Campbell, and certainly
   none odder." Knight also wrote a four-stanza ditty about some of
   Campbell's new interests. The first stanza reads:

          Oh, the Dean Machine, the Dean Machine,
          You put it right in a submarine,
          And it flies so high that it can't be seen --
          The wonderful, wonderful Dean Machine!

   And Isaac Asimov writes: "A number of writers wrote pseudoscientific
   stuff to ensure sales to Campbell, but the best writers retreated, I
   among them."

   Asimov was not alone in his opinion. In 1957, the novelist and critic
   James Blish could write: "From the professional writer's point of view,
   the primary interest in Astounding Science Fiction continues to centre
   on the editor's preoccupation with extrasensory powers and perceptions
   ("psi") as a springboard for stories.... 113 pages of the total
   editorial content of the January and February 1957 issues of this
   magazine are devoted to psi, and 172 to non-psi material.... [By
   including the first part of a serial that later becomes a novel about
   psi] the total for these first two issues of 1957 is 145 pages of psi
   text, and 140 pages of non-psi."

   Asimov also says that "Campbell championed far-out ideas.... He pained
   very many of the men he had trained (including me) in doing so, but
   felt it was his duty to stir up the minds of his readers and force
   curiosity right out to the border lines. He began a series of
   editorials... in which he championed a social point of view that could
   sometimes be described as far right. (He expressed sympathy for George
   Wallace in the 1968 national election, for instance.) There was bitter
   opposition to this from many (including me — I could hardly ever read a
   Campbell editorial and keep my temper).

   This attempted (and often successful) steering of writers' efforts led
   to a filksong:

          On yonder hill there stands a building,
          and upon the fourteenth floor
          stands a group of authors moaning
          as they've never moaned before:
          Oh, no, John, no, John, no, John, no!

   Between December 11, 1957 and June 13, 1958, Campbell hosted a weekly
   science fiction radio program called Exploring Tomorrow. The scripts
   were written by authors such as Gordon Dickson and Robert Silverberg.
   Transcripts of some programs are still available.

   The John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and
   John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer were named in his honour.

In the eyes of others

   Asimov says in his autobiography that Campbell was "talkative,
   opinionated, quicksilver-minded, overbearing. Talking to him meant
   listening to a monologue.... He was a tall, large man with light hair,
   a beaky nose, a wide face with thin lips, and with a cigarette in a
   holder forever clamped between his teeth." "Six-foot-one, with hawklike
   features, he presented a formidable appearance," says Moskowitz. Damon
   Knight's opinion of Campbell was similar to Asimov's: "No doubt I could
   have got myself invited to lunch long before, but Campbell's
   lecture-room manner was so unpleasant to me that I was unwilling to
   face it. Campbell talked a good deal more than he listened, and he
   liked to say outrageous things." . The notable British novelist and
   critic Kingsley Amis, in his seminal 1960 book about science fiction,
   New Maps of Hell, dismisses Campbell brusquely: "I might just add as a
   sociological note that the editor of Astounding, himself a deviant
   figure of marked ferocity, seems to think he has invented a psi
   machine."

   The noted science-fiction writer Alfred Bester, an editor of Holiday
   Magazine and a sophisticated Manhattanite, recounts at some length his
   "one demented meeting" with Campbell, a man he imagined from afar to be
   "a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford," across the
   river in Newark. The first thing Campbell said to him was that Freud
   was dead, destroyed by the new discovery of Dianetics, which, he
   predicted, would win L. Ron Hubbard the Nobel Peace Prize. Over a
   sandwich in a dingy New Jersey lunchroom Campbell ordered the bemused
   Bester to "think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when
   your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You've never stopped
   hating her for it." Shaking, Bester eventually made his escape and, he
   says, "returned to civilization where I had three double gibsons." He
   adds: "It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the
   science-fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their
   marbles."

   Asimov's final word on Campbell was that "in the last twenty years of
   his life, he was only a diminishing shadow of what he had once been."
   Even Robert A. Heinlein, perhaps Campbell's most important discovery
   and, Virginia Heinlein tells us, by 1940 a "fast friend", eventually
   tired of Campbell. "When Podkayne [ Podkayne of Mars] was offered to
   him, he wrote Robert, asking what he knew about raising young girls in
   a few thousand carefully chosen words. The friendship dwindled, and was
   eventually completely gone." In 1963 Heinlein wrote his agent to say
   that a rejection from another magazine was "pleasanter than offering
   copy to John Campbell, having it bounced (he bounced both of my last
   two Hugo Award winners) — and then have to wade through ten pages of
   his arrogant insults, explaining to me why my story is no good."
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