
John W. Campbell, a chief architect of science fiction's Golden Age - Hooke
https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-astounding-20181115-story.html
======
seszett
For people in the EU, who are blocked by latimes.com, the content is available
on archive.is: [http://archive.is/FTAz5](http://archive.is/FTAz5)

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ASipos
For a long time, I thought he and Joseph Campbell were the same person (as in
"the mentor of Asimov, the one with the hero's journey").

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bouvin
Extra Credit in their series on the history of science fiction did a rather
good episode on his influence, for good and for bad:
[https://youtu.be/Ctpvd2VvukQ](https://youtu.be/Ctpvd2VvukQ)

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eesmith
The article barely touches on Campbell's racism, bringing it up only in the
context of being an "angry old man" in the 1960s.

To give another example, he rejected a story by Samuel R. Delany in 1967 -
[https://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-
fiction-.html](https://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html) :

> ... with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel
> his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was
> one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the
> slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice:
> Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There
> reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a
> year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a
> technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological
> impossibility. . . .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a
> prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance,
> chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose
> father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in
> America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset. . . .

But he was a racist all his life. You ever wonder why the 'Golden Age' SF
almost all has white men as the main character, with humans almost always
winning over aliens? It's in part because his big influence on SF caused his
racism to permeate the stories I read and enjoyed as a kid.

Here's a paraphrase from Asimov (Campbell, btw, felt that Jews were a superior
species of human), quoted at [https://andrewhickey.info/2017/08/09/the-
prometheans-wheels-...](https://andrewhickey.info/2017/08/09/the-prometheans-
wheels-within-wheels/) :

> Campbell’s racist views had a stifling effect on his writers even in the
> 1940s – Asimov said that one reason his stories never featured aliens was
> because Campbell would always insist that humans were superior to aliens,
> because he couldn’t cope with a worldview where white American men weren’t
> the best, so the left-leaning Asimov just didn’t write stories with aliens
> in, to avoid the problem.

Heinlein's 1941 "Sixth Column" was an idea originally developed by Campbell.
Quoting
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein#Race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein#Race)
:

> The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell,
> and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to re-slant it to remove racist
> aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be
> an artistic success."

~~~
imglorp
Not to condone his views, but we have to remember the societal context.

Racism as a concept that needed a word was barely present in the early 60s
[1], until then it was completely normal and expected by everyone. Bus
desegregation wasn't until 1956. "I Have a Dream" was 63. Blacks couldn't vote
until 1965. We might find it surprising now, but if he had written about an
integrated community then, readers would have been shocked.

Now, for us, it serves as a valuable window into past culture. On a similar
note, Roddenberry's Star Trek was 1966 - featuring aliens and--more shocking:
Russians--cooperating. They received flak for that but HE was visionary.

1\.
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=racism&year_st...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=racism&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cracism%3B%2Cc0)

~~~
snowwrestler
This is ignorant and wrong. Integrated communities date to before the founding
of the United States. Frederick Douglas was a prominent and internationally
recognized voice for equality and integration 100 years before the 1960s. We
fought a civil war over it. Immediately following that civil war, there were
strong legal protections created for the rights black Americans to own
property, run businesses, vote etc. in an equal and integrated way. These
protections were then chipped away down to Jim Crow levels through the
sustained and vigorous efforts of racists who wished they had won the civil
war and perpetuated slavery.

To be even more specific, you have authors _who worked directly with Campbell
during that time_ saying that they knew that he was racist and that it was
wrong.

This idea that racism was normal and not remarkable in 1960s is a pernicious
fiction that is promulgated by racists and their apologists. If you feel that
this is an unfair inference about you, I would recommend you spend some time
with history and get caught up.

~~~
imglorp
Thank you for the education about the earlier protections. I agree that the
culture was intentionally pushed backwards.

It almost seems like we are witnessing another backwards swing currently.

~~~
snowwrestler
Thanks for a graceful reply to my comment, which was probably more strongly
worded than it needed to be to get the point across.

I think we are currently seeing an attempt to swing things backward, which is
why I think it's important to speak up against that.

~~~
eesmith
I think your response was well-worded and appropriate given a comment which
argued that we need to look at historical context - after some of that context
was already given - then proceeded to give an invalid context.

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bsenftner
As a avid reader, some would say obsessive, I have never respected the work of
John Campbell. His science fiction simply feels naive and implausible,
composed of technological awe that would not exist in a real situation. His
writing always struck me as childish, and the members of my book club (during
elementary, where I was the only kid in a club of adults) warned me of his
racism, so it was easy ti disregard him. After all, there is much better SF
than his kiddie wow.

~~~
stan_rogers
He also went hook, line and sinker for Hubbard's _Dianetics_ nonsense, which
probably wouldn't have gone anywhere without the publication of an abstract in
_Astounding_.

~~~
winchling
He seems also to have been responsible for that tiresome predilection for 'psi
power' and parapsychology in science fiction which lasted until at least 1980.

But, even so, I've gained a huge amount of pleasure from the selection of
Golden Age SF I've read. So I guess not all his influence was bad.

~~~
bsenftner
I always considered Robert Silverberg and his 50's era optimistic SF to be the
Golden Age; the Buck Rogers type.

