John W. Campbell

Death

Campbell died in 1971 at the age of 61 in Mountainside, New Jersey. At the time of his sudden death after 34 years at the helm of Analog, Campbell's personality and editorial demands had alienated some of his writers to the point that they no longer submitted works to him. One of his writers, Theodore Sturgeon, opted to publish most of his works after 1950 and only submitted one story to Astounding during that same timeframe.

Influence

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction wrote: "More than any other individual, he helped to shape modern sf", and Darrell Schweitzer credits him with having "decreed that SF writers should pull themselves up out of the pulp mire and start writing intelligently, for adults". After 1950, new magazines such as Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction moved in different directions and developed talented new writers who were not directly influenced by him. Campbell often suggested story ideas to writers (including "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.

Campbell had a strong formative influence on Asimov and eventually became a friend. Asimov credited Campbell with encouraging developments within the field of science fiction field by forgoing conventional plot points and requiring its writers to "understand science and understand people." He also called Campbell "the most powerful force in science fiction ever" and said the "first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely."

Campbell encouraged Cleve Cartmill to write "Deadline", a short story 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, wrote, 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 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 Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations". Writer Joe Green recounted that Campbell had rejected Godwin's 'Cold Equations' on three different occasions due to disagreements over the fate of the female protagonist.

Between December 11, 1957, and June 13, 1958, Campbell hosted a weekly science fiction radio program called Exploring Tomorrow.

Views

Race, slavery and segregation

Green wrote how 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, Green wrote:

[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 ... 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.

However, Green also said about this stance 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 a June 1961 editorial called "Civil War Centennial", Campbell noted slavery had been a dominant form of human relationships for most of history. He also took the position the present was unusual in how anti-slavery cultures dominated the planet.

It's my bet that the South would have been integrated by 1910. The job would have been done – and done right – half a century sooner, with vastly less human misery, and with almost no bloodshed ... The only way slavery has ever been ended, anywhere, is by introducing industry ... If a man is a skilled and competent machinist – if the lathes work well under his hands – the industrial management will be forced, to remain in business, to accept that fact, whether the man be black, white, purple, or polka-dotted.

According to Michael Moorcock, Campbell suggested some people preferred slavery:

He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks [Russian peasants] when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

By the 1960s, Campbell began to publish controversial essays including his supporting segregation. These views led to many in the science fiction community distancing themselves from Campbell. In 1963, Campbell published an essay supporting segregated schools and arguing "the Negro race" had failed to "produce super-high-geniuses". In 1965, he continued his defense of segregation and related practices, critiquing "the arrogant defiance of law by many of the Negro 'Civil Rights' groups". On February 10, 1967, Campbell rejected Samuel R. Delany's Nova a month before it was ultimately published, with a note and phone call to Delany’s agent explaining he did not feel his readership "would be able to relate to a black main character".

It is argued all these views were reflected in depiction of extraterrestrial life in Astounding/Analog. Throughout his editorship, Campbell demanded depiction of contact between aliens and humans must favor humans. For example, Campbell accepted Isaac Asimov's proposal for "Homo Sol" (in which humans rejected an invitation to join a galactic federation) in January 1940, which was published later that year in the September edition of Astounding Science Fiction. Similarly, Arthur C. Clarke's "Rescue Party" and Fredric Brown's "Arena" (which formed the basis of the Star Trek episode of the same name) and "Letter to a Phoenix" (all first appeared in Astounding) also depict humans more favorably than aliens.

Medicine and health

Campbell was a critic of government regulation of health and safety, excoriating numerous public health initiatives and regulations.

Campbell was a heavy smoker throughout his life and was seldom seen without his customary cigarette holder. In the Analog of September 1964, Campbell published a response to the Surgeon General's first major warning about the dangers of cigarette smoking had been issued which had been issued January 11, 1964. Campbell’s response, "A Counterblaste to Tobacco" took its title from the anti-smoking book of the same name by King James I of England. Campbell proposed the Surgeon General’s warning of a connection between tobacco use and lung cancer was "esoteric" and referred to "a barely determinable possible correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer". Furthermore, Campbell said tobacco's calming effects led to more effective thinking. In a one-page piece about automobile safety in Analog dated May 1967, Campbell wrote of "people suddenly becoming conscious of the fact that cars kill more people than cigarettes do, even if the antitobacco alarmists were completely right..."

In 1963, Campbell published an angry editorial about Frances Oldham Kelsey who, while at the FDA, refused to permit sales of the medication thalidomide in the United States. The drug was later shown to cause major birth defects.

In other essays, Campbell supported crank medicine, arguing government regulation was more harmful than beneficial and also claiming regulating quackery prevented the use of many possible beneficial medicines (e.g., krebiozen).

Pseudoscience, parapsychology, and politics

In the 1930s, Campbell became interested in Joseph Rhine's theories about ESP which earned significant publicity. Rhine had already founded the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University when Campbell was a student there. Over the following years Campbell’s growing interest in parapsychology would be reflected in the stories he published when he encouraged the writers to include these topics in their tales, leading to the publication of numerous works about telepathy and other purported psionic abilities. This post-war "psi-boom" has been dated by science fiction scholars to roughly the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and continues to influence many popular culture tropes and motifs.

Campbell rejected the Shaver Mystery in which the author claimed to have had a personal experience with a sinister ancient civilization that harbored fantastic technology in caverns under the earth.

Campbell’s increasing beliefs in pseudoscientific claims would eventually alienate him from some of his writers, including Asimov. He wrote favorably 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.

In 1949, Campbell worked closely with L. Ron Hubbard on the techniques that Hubbard later turned into Dianetics. When Hubbard's therapy failed to find support from the medical community, Campbell published the earliest forms of Dianetics in Astounding. He wrote of L. Ron Hubbard's initial article in Astounding that "[i]t is, I assure you in full and absolute sincerity, one of the most important articles ever published."

Campbell continued to promote Hubbard's theories until 1952, when the pair split acrimoniously over the direction of the movement.

Asimov wrote: "A number of writers wrote pseudoscientific stuff to ensure sales to Campbell, but the best writers retreated, I among them. ..." Elsewhere Asimov went on to further explain

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).

Assessment by peers

Damon Knight described Campbell as a "portly, bristled-haired blond man with a challenging stare". "Six-foot-one, with hawklike features, he presented a formidable appearance," said Sam Moskowitz. "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", wrote Asimov.

Algis Budrys wrote that "John W. Campbell was the greatest editor SF has seen or is likely to see, and is in fact one of the major editors in all English-language literature in the middle years of the twentieth century. All about you is the heritage of what he built".

Asimov said that Campbell was "talkative, opinionated, quicksilver-minded, overbearing. Talking to him meant listening to a monologue..." Knight agreed: "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."

British novelist and critic Kingsley Amis dismissed 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."

Several science-fiction novelists have criticized Campbell as prejudiced – Samuel R. Delany for Campbell's rejection of a novel due to the black main character, and Joe Haldeman in the dedication of Forever Peace, for rejecting a novel due to a female soldier protagonist.

British science-fiction novelist Michael Moorcock, as part of his "Starship Stormtroopers" editorial, said Campbell's Astounding and its writers were "wild-eyed paternalists to a man, fierce anti-socialists" with "[stories] full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell's image of himself)"; they sold magazines because their "work reflected the deep-seated conservatism of the majority of their readers, who saw a Bolshevik menace in every union meeting". He viewed Campbell as turning the magazine into a vessel for right-wing politics, "by the early 1950s ... a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an 'alternative' that was, of course, no alternative at all".

SF writer Alfred Bester, an editor of Holiday Magazine and a sophisticated Manhattanite, recounted 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". 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. 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." Bester commented: "It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science-fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles."

Asimov remained grateful for Campbell's early friendship and support. He dedicated The Early Asimov (1972) to him, and concluded it by stating that "There is no way at all to express how much he meant to me and how much he did for me except, perhaps, to write this book evoking, once more, those days of a quarter century ago". His 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 Heinlein, perhaps Campbell's most important discovery and a "fast friend", tired of him.

Poul Anderson wrote that Campbell "had saved and regenerated science fiction", which had become "the product of hack pulpsters" when he took over Astounding. "By his editorial policies and the help and encouragement he gave his writers (always behind the scenes), he raised both the literary and the intellectual standard anew. Whatever progress has been made stems from that renaissance".