![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI happened to see a report the winner of a science fiction award named after John W. Campbell had criticized that editor during her acceptance speech. Campbell may be dead almost fifty years by now, but I’ll admit to knowing enough about his prejudices (implied, perhaps, in a big slice of science fiction “old” may be too quick a description of seeming capable of imagining everything but the inclusion of visible diversity) to think they’re unfortunately still a problem. (The specific criticism could also have had something to do with a somewhat convergent slice of science fiction ready enough to write off any form of democracy to have some jumped-up variant or another of aristocracy rule the future in perpetuity instead of finding some more imaginative solution, which I’ll admit irks me too.) As I took in a discussion of this, though, I did happen to see a recent biography on Campbell and some of his most widely recognizable authors brought up. When I looked up the e-book version on a whim, it seemed affordable enough to take a chance on and see a new perspective on things, so I bought Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Having often admitted to feeling disconnected from recent written science fiction (although I at least hope the reasons why don’t include “resenting diversity”), I’ll also admit I was surprised by the introduction proclaiming “the genre has been absorbed so completely into the mainstream that it can be easy to take its presence there for granted”, contrasting that to an estimate Asimov had made in the early 1960s that “just one out of every four hundred and fifty Americans was interested in science fiction.” The danger there, I suppose, is remembering the contempt I seemed to sense in the 1990s by those most interested in written science fiction for anything in any other medium sold with the genre name attached; still, at one point the book suggested that at the end of the 1930s there were three science fiction pulps targeted at three age demographics, with the two younger-leaning magazines feeding readers up to Astounding Science Fiction.
As for the lives of the editor and the three authors focused on in the book from their youths to their broken first marriages, and the other figures surrounding them, it could get all too easy to suppose their science fiction “by the damaged, for the damaged” (which then makes it all too easy to imagine asked “oh, so then you’re...”) The description of “fandom” at the beginning of the 1940s (even with a comment that “by one estimate, there were fewer than fifty active fans”) at least counters thoughts I’ve sometimes had of missing “golden ages of civility,” and a few “I declare myself as persecuted for my intelligence as any other downtrodden group is for anything else!” quotes show up, which didn’t seem to lead to any greater empathy. I fear in any case that Asimov’s eventual groping habits at conventions clash the most unfortunately with the apparent aspirations of his writing as compared to the other major figures; at the same time, though, it should be pointed out the book’s main figures don’t merely stand “condemned by a later time.” There were people who winked at Asimov’s busy hands, Heinlein idolators, and of course Hubbard’s Scientologists, but there were also people at the time who’d criticize them. If there was one thing I wondered about the book not going into, it was the apparent shift from fandom being a creepy boys’ club in the early 1940s to my understanding of female fans taking to Star Trek (the show itself does get described in the book as marking its own shift in balance) in the late 1960s.
So far as this book meshing into other takes on its history I was already aware of, I noticed a matter-of-fact comment about Heinlein knowing his having had tuberculosis meant he wouldn’t get back to sea in World War II, and had to contrast that with comments from Alexei Panshin the author had gone to a recruiting centre the day after Pearl Harbour, been turned away, and wound up not quite the same man. I was conscious of accusations Panshin is “an apostate Heinlein fan”; still, the acknowledgments of this book did include his name. Certainly, for all the interest I’ve taken in Alexei and Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill (included in the bibliography of the later book) for trying to build a narrative of “the golden age” as searching for “scientific transcendence in fiction” where more respectable literature had just quailed at scientific vistas and collective human darknesses, that book does end as World War II itself ended. Nevala-Lee’s goes on, as hard as its dissolutions can get.
At the same time, I found the book kept drawing me on through its story, and I was impressed by Nevale-Lee being able to offer comprehensive opinions of science fiction works in a few sentences, starting with ”The Skylark of Space, which was written with real passion, can still put a silly grin on a reader’s face”. Of course, I suppose a part of that was how I could agree with many of those comments.
Having often admitted to feeling disconnected from recent written science fiction (although I at least hope the reasons why don’t include “resenting diversity”), I’ll also admit I was surprised by the introduction proclaiming “the genre has been absorbed so completely into the mainstream that it can be easy to take its presence there for granted”, contrasting that to an estimate Asimov had made in the early 1960s that “just one out of every four hundred and fifty Americans was interested in science fiction.” The danger there, I suppose, is remembering the contempt I seemed to sense in the 1990s by those most interested in written science fiction for anything in any other medium sold with the genre name attached; still, at one point the book suggested that at the end of the 1930s there were three science fiction pulps targeted at three age demographics, with the two younger-leaning magazines feeding readers up to Astounding Science Fiction.
As for the lives of the editor and the three authors focused on in the book from their youths to their broken first marriages, and the other figures surrounding them, it could get all too easy to suppose their science fiction “by the damaged, for the damaged” (which then makes it all too easy to imagine asked “oh, so then you’re...”) The description of “fandom” at the beginning of the 1940s (even with a comment that “by one estimate, there were fewer than fifty active fans”) at least counters thoughts I’ve sometimes had of missing “golden ages of civility,” and a few “I declare myself as persecuted for my intelligence as any other downtrodden group is for anything else!” quotes show up, which didn’t seem to lead to any greater empathy. I fear in any case that Asimov’s eventual groping habits at conventions clash the most unfortunately with the apparent aspirations of his writing as compared to the other major figures; at the same time, though, it should be pointed out the book’s main figures don’t merely stand “condemned by a later time.” There were people who winked at Asimov’s busy hands, Heinlein idolators, and of course Hubbard’s Scientologists, but there were also people at the time who’d criticize them. If there was one thing I wondered about the book not going into, it was the apparent shift from fandom being a creepy boys’ club in the early 1940s to my understanding of female fans taking to Star Trek (the show itself does get described in the book as marking its own shift in balance) in the late 1960s.
So far as this book meshing into other takes on its history I was already aware of, I noticed a matter-of-fact comment about Heinlein knowing his having had tuberculosis meant he wouldn’t get back to sea in World War II, and had to contrast that with comments from Alexei Panshin the author had gone to a recruiting centre the day after Pearl Harbour, been turned away, and wound up not quite the same man. I was conscious of accusations Panshin is “an apostate Heinlein fan”; still, the acknowledgments of this book did include his name. Certainly, for all the interest I’ve taken in Alexei and Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill (included in the bibliography of the later book) for trying to build a narrative of “the golden age” as searching for “scientific transcendence in fiction” where more respectable literature had just quailed at scientific vistas and collective human darknesses, that book does end as World War II itself ended. Nevala-Lee’s goes on, as hard as its dissolutions can get.
At the same time, I found the book kept drawing me on through its story, and I was impressed by Nevale-Lee being able to offer comprehensive opinions of science fiction works in a few sentences, starting with ”The Skylark of Space, which was written with real passion, can still put a silly grin on a reader’s face”. Of course, I suppose a part of that was how I could agree with many of those comments.