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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 Amazings 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?" Seekers of Tomorrow, Masters of Modern Science Fiction, Sam Moskowitz, page 52 Editorship of Astounding and Unknown; the Golden Age In late 1937, F. Orlin Tremaine hired Campbell as the editor of Astounding.• although the statement of ownership in the November 1937 issue listed Tremaine as the editor as of October 1, 1937.•,• 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 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
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." Bibliography For the main article, see Bibliography of John W. Campbell. This shortened bibliography lists each title once. Some titles that are duplicated are in fact different versions, whereas other publications of Campbell's with different titles are simply selections from or retitlings of other works, and have hence been omitted. The main bibliographic sources are footnoted from this paragraph and provided much of the information in the following sections.,,,, For more bibliographic information see the separate bibliography article. Dates indicate first book publication. Novels and fixups Short story collections and omnibus editions Edited books Nonfiction Sources | |||||||||
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