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Raymond F. Jones
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 Raymond F. Jones was one of the frequent contributors to Campbell's Astounding in the 40s and
50s; though his byline became infrequent after the mid-1950s, he continued to publish into the 1970s. Some of
his stories from that period are collected in The
Toymaker (1951) and The Non-Statistical
Man (1964). He is perhaps most famous, however, for one of his novels,
This Island Earth (1952), which was made into a
minor classic sf film of the same title. Many of his stories tended to reflect the pro-science/anti-bureaucracy,
anti-politician, sometimes xenophobic attitudes of Campbell's editorials; attitudes that are not readily apparent
in the classic stories of the very best writers of the era (Asimov and Heinlein, Kuttner and Simak) whose work
we still read, who most often tended to write in reaction to some of Campbell's attitudes, not to reflect them.
But part of Jones' ecological niche as a commercial writer was to sell to Astounding precisely by writing stories
that clearly reflected Campbell's editorials.
It was a cliche of Campbell and Golden Age sf that scientists and engineers (and sf fans) were
special, the elect if you will, the agents of human progress. Devotees of sf were told by Robert A. Heinlein himself,
in his famous guest of honor speech at the 1941 World SF Convention in Denver, that they were as a group
the next stage in human evolution. Slan (1940, serial), the classic novel by A. E. Van Vogt, portrayed lonely,
intellectually superior mutants surviving clandestinely in normal human society of the future, just waiting
to outbreed and supplant the ignorant and evolutionarily inferior homo sap. The catch-phrase "fans are slans"
was a powerful metaphor in sf in those days.
On the other hand, people who neither know nor do work with science are bumbling lesser creatures,
perhaps actively dangerous, or even malign. Coleridge claimed he would have finished "Kubla Khan" if that
clod from Porlock hadn't interrupted him and ruined his mood and concentration (so he wrote instead
his poem, "The Person from Porlock"). Jones' story captures much of that feeling, and converts it playfully into
paranoia, which is rewarded by salvation as one of the elect.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
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.