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John W. Campbell, Jr.
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 John W. Campbell, Jr. took the genre of science fiction and transformed it -- by his power as editor
of the highest-paying market and by the force of his personality and intellect -- into the kind of fiction today
recognized worldwide as American science fiction. He set new standards for scientific plausibility, for
prose style, and for the complex of attitudes that for decades defined "the real stuff," as opposed to some version of
fantasy using science fiction devices and/or settings. Campbell's concept of science fiction was defined both
by the example of what he bought and published and by the editorials he wrote for Astounding (later Analog),
his magazine. At least until the late 1950s his idea of science fiction, synonymous with hard science fiction,
was the dominant fashion of its day (though not by any means unchallenged by the mid-50s). It was only in
the late 1950s, when the term "hard science fiction" was coined by the regular book reviewer for Astounding,
P. Schuyler Miller, that there was a body of work in the genre and a body of influential opinion in opposition
to hard science fiction.
A part of Campbell's enduring prestige is a result of his Wellsian determination to predict the
future through science fiction, With a technical education from M.I.T. and Duke, Campbell knew that both
atomic power and space travel were possible in the near future, if not the day after tomorrow. He wrote about them
in his early editorials and he encouraged his new stable of writers to create plausible fictions about them
(and often added technical information to the stories himself). The atomic bomb proved him right in a big way
and gave the whole science fiction field a boost -- as Campbell had confidently predicted. It was an
extraordinary shock to Campbell and the field when the advent of space travel in 1957 had the opposite effect, of
reducing the sf readership for a time.
But before Campbell was the editor of Astounding, he was one of the most popular writers of the
1930s in science fiction, both under his own name as an adventure writer of serials and stories (later published as
novels and collections, e.g., The Mightiest
Machine [1947], The Incredible Planet [1949], and
The Moon is Hell! [1951] ) and under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart, which he used for his more ambitious efforts (later
collected in Who Goes There [1948] and Cloak of
Aesir [1952]). "Atomic Power" is a Don A. Stuart story
from 1934 that combines a vision of technological and scientific progress with a horrifying scenario of disaster
that could well be a precursor of Latham's in "The Xi Effect." "Atomic Power" is selling a vision and an
attitude, of a human future improved by science and of scientists and engineers as the saviours of humanity. It
is interesting to note that Robert A. Heinlein became the premier Campbell writer in part because he was the
best salesman of Campbell's attitudes. And that as an editor Campbell generally rejected disaster stories,
although they remained a popular form in the field. The major disaster sf of the later Campbell period, such as
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) and John Christopher's
The Death of Grass (a.k.a. No Blade of
Grass, 1956 ) was written in England and became an important form there; it later became the meat of
Ballard and the New Wave.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. |
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Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.