John W. Campbell, Jr.

John Wood Campbell, Jr., generally known as John W. Campbell, (June 8, 1910 – July 11, 1971) was the influential editor of Astounding Science Fiction from 1937 until his death in 1971. After first establishing himself as a well-known science-fiction author, he then devoted himself exclusively to editing. As the editor of the most important magazine in the field, he launched the careers of most of the key figures in what is still generally known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction, including Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, and Arthur C. Clarke. Although Campbell had many eccentricities, some of which, such as a belief in psionics, later found their way increasingly into his publications in the 1950s and '60s, he remains, almost without question, the single most important figure in the development of modern science fiction, with the possible exception of his protégé Robert Heinlein.

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 Sam Moskowitz, a well-known fan and historian of the field. 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."