Thanks loads, Carlos

[james_davis_nicoll]

Collected John W. Campbell, Jr. editorials

Comments

A sign of the digital times

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

My first reaction to the Table of Contents was, wow, those are some long editorials. The poverty of our modern attention span in action! Then I skimmed "Hyperinfracaninophilia" and realized it's because he tends to ramble. And also dislike and fear poor people, of course.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

This is obviously going to require a drinking game.

[jazzfish]

This is obviously going to require a drinking game.

FTFY.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

I started to skim over the first editorial, and apart from the pervasive background sexism it wasn't much more objectionable or insightful than any number of blog posts. Then I hit the part where he's speculating about how pure mutagens might be detected. Bear in mind that this was published in January 1963.

Inasmuch as we now have pretty good indication that genetic information is carried as a chemical code on protein molecules....

Protein molecules. *Ten years* after Watson and Crick published in Nature. That's not the sort of thing that gives me a lot of confidence in what he's saying, you know?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Campbell prided himself on his knowledge of chemistry.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

In his defense, better scientists than he had come to the same conclusion regarding proteins. The ones who were still alive, though, had changed their minds by then.

His argument diatribe against Dr. Frances Kelsey, the FDA official who blocked the sale of thalidomide in this country (particularly the not-so-veiled hints about "women's intuition" and aspersions on her education) was also not helped by a quick perusal of Wikipedia's article about her. She had a doctorate in pharmacology, an MD, and twenty years' teaching & research experience before she was hired by the FDA in 1960. (And she's still alive, over forty years after JWC's death. Good for her.)

So all of that in the first half of the very first of the hand-picked editorials. I don't think I'll be digging any further.

Edited to add Dr. Kelsey's name, which I had unaccountably left out.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

The style these have been written in really is the archetypical internet blowhard, isn't it, the ancestor of all the Bassiors and co.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

His style reminds me more than a little of Jerry Pournelle's. Well, Pournelle's been called the last of the Campbellian authors, so it makes some sense.

His writing isn't bad from a technical point of view, though, which gives him a leg up over a lot of random Internet posters.

[treddytrafalgar.livejournal.com]

And these are the ones deemed worthy of a book. It would be interesting to delve deep in the musty stacks and read all the others Campbell wrote over his thirty-odd years as editor. I bet some of those would need layers upon layers upon layers of memetic prophylactic.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

All the issues are on UMI Microform. Six hundred bucks for sixty-five years of insanity.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

My parents collected Astounding/Analog from about 1957 to 2005. There was one of his from, I'm guessing, late 1970/early 1971 that opens with a story about a railroad worker out west being attacked by a grizzly bear while he's alone at a siding. He's an amateur baseball pitcher, though, and blinds and drives off or kills the bear with rocks. I don't remember anything else specific about it; I infer, though, that it was part of a defense of the National Guardsmen at Kent State.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I remember reading this book as an undergraduate, when I harbored fantasies of writing science fiction and thought there might be some usable story-starting-points in there (after all, many authors talked about how Campbell was this Catherine-wheel of inspiration). Alas, the only one of them that gave me any pause was the one about writing a constitution for utopia, as in actually building the thing/place; and the result of this ended up just being nothing more than a (decent, I think, but no you may not read it) piece of Next Generation fanfic.

I'm also a little impressed that despite being in the dangerous age [1] to read the quasi-philosophical rambings of a blowhard know-it-all I escaped without being memetically damaged for life. I couldn't take any of it seriously. I suspect it's because I read this after I reached the Oh-Come-On Point [2] that broke me of listening to Heinlein for explanations of how the world is, or much of anything else.

[1] I was 20 or 21. My Dearly Beloved, the professional philosopher, notes that males between 10 and 25 really oughta hafta get professional approval before reading Nietzsche.

[2] It was the essay/story in Expanded Universe about how President Nichelle Nichols would save the world. I think specifically the line about abolishing internal combustion engines in favor of rocket cars.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

A search for the word "ribonucleic" eventually turns up a story in the September 1959 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, "On Handling the Data," by M. I. Mayfield, a copy of which may be found in Gutenberg.

Can mentions of DNA or RNA in Astoundingbe pushed back earlier? A nonfiction article would be especially good at embarrassing JWC further.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Oops, I meant to hang that off tandw's remark about genetic molecules and carloshasanax's response to it.

[seawasp]

Difficult to embarrass him when he's dead. He's beyond anyone's ability to touch now, unless there IS an afterlife.

doesn't say Negroes are inferior as such

[(Anonymous)]

Just, they've never produced any super-geniuses like Newton or Einstein, and also IQ tests show that on average they're dumber.

Totally different thing.


Doug M.

Re: doesn't say Negroes are inferior as such

[(Anonymous)]

"statistically speaking, the Negroes lack self-discipline."

it's astonishing how much of this is bog-standard paleocon stuff. corporal punishment is natural and good for children. colonialism is the best thing that ever happened to the colonized. the Negro Problem is the fault of blacks, not whites (it's a shame that a few bright blacks have to be lumped in with their fellows, but you can't blame white folks for that). The United States of 1957 was so overregulated as to have a "socialist" economic system. (too bad we gave up capitalism -- it was a great system while it worked.)


Doug M.

Re: doesn't say Negroes are inferior as such

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of Nobel laureate Arthur Lewis, the founder of development economics.

"I had never meant to be an economist. My father had wanted me to be a lawyer, but as he died when I was seven he had no vote at the appropriate time. That came when I was awarded the St. Lucia government scholarship in 1932, tenable at any British university. I did not want to be a doctor either, nor a teacher. That put me into a hole, since law, medicine, preaching, and teaching were the only professions open to young blacks in my day. I wanted to be an engineer, but neither the colonial government nor the sugar plantations would hire a black engineer."

And that was the *best* case scenario, in a place that had relatively good race relations for the period.

(Incidentally, we're living at the moment in human history when the majority of the world is experiencing the "Lewis turning point". Gosh all those economists and their hot air.)

Re: doesn't say Negroes are inferior as such

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

It is a damn shame nobody ever pointed out to JWC that IQ tests are made up primarily by white psychiatrists, and for some reason psychiatrists tend to score higher than, e.g., surgeons.

It is a CRYING shame that he didn't live long enough to hear Richard Pryor's routine about a trip he took to Africa with a bunch of white tourists.

(I am pretty goddamn sure that if I was in, say, Finland, with a bunch of black people, NOT ONE would EVER turn and ask me, "What are they saying?")

And it is a tragedy on multiple counts that he never knew Steven Barnes.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

This was intended to gift? Like, a kindness?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

What I can recommend unreservedly is the Algis Budrys review collection, Benchmarks Continued, available on Lulu. Thanks to Señor Beamjockey for bringing it to my attention.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

I see he's gotten everyone thinking and talking about stuff.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Only to mock.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Hey, are you still a lush? I have a bet.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Getting someone to point and laugh at you is not generally considered an equivalent.