Thanks loads, Carlos

[james_davis_nicoll]

Collected John W. Campbell, Jr. editorials

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Point taken. But how better would you describe the kind of gleeful pile-on we're engaging in right here?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

A warning to others?

[seawasp]

"Beating a dead editor"? "Kicking acceptable targets that can't kick back?"


I mean, really, pretty much everything good, or bad, that could be said about JWC has been said over the last several decades. Is there really any point in going back over his old editorials and pointing out his failings again? Heck, he's credited as the guy who triggered the creation of Scientology and certainly helped promote it, isn't that posthumous humiliation enough?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

There are still a lot of people in denial. See below.

There are also people who have bought into the idea that science fiction is a morally superior genre, who might not be aware of its sordid recent past.

The people who love the horror genre have come to terms with what H.P. Lovecraft was: a very flawed but very talented human being. With Campbell, I posit he's more embarrassing for the people who love science fiction, since Campbell was clearly very flawed -- but also a shallow and gullible thinker. Whatever talents he had, they weren't intellectual as that word is commonly understood.

And that's problematic, because it's science fiction, the genre that supposedly is so much more accurate than all others.

[seawasp]

I suppose, but HPL is actually still heavily in the public eye, so I can see people wanting to both recognize his flaws and then deal with them. JWC's fading away; I'm pretty sure that the generation after mine (which is, alas, getting larger every day) either doesn't know who he is, or knows him only as "some guy who was an editor".

Heinlein's still pretty big, but I don't think Campbell's much thought ABOUT any more except by the old guard and the small, but admittedly vocal, group that thinks they've inherited the mantle or at least must burn those memorial fires; the latter group I of course have some contact with since a large number of them are at Baen.

But I think the era of JWC being anything more than a historic curiosity, whose talent was mainly in picking good authors and helping them bring out the stuff that made them good (within limits), is pretty much over.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It's hard to disentangle this from written science fiction's decline and break with its magazine-era tradition into young adult fiction.

(In fact, I might argue that it's precisely Campbellian SF's more-than-problematic nature that made that break necessary.)

[seawasp]

I'm not sure what you're talking about in terms of "science fiction's decline"; usually when I hear someone using that term, it turns out to be old fogey-type "BACK WHEN I WAS A KID" stuff, but you wouldn't seem to be the type of person I'd expect that from.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

There is a visible gap in transmission from science fiction derived from the magazine era to the science fiction that's currently being read (though it might be classified as young adult fiction etc). Compare the lines of transmission for fantasy, where people still discuss the writers of ninety years ago as living influences.

It's probably for the best: do we really want science fiction as a curated, backwards-looking genre, only in conversation with itself forever and ever and ever? But I can't help but think some babies have been thrown out with the bathwater.

[seawasp]

I'm not sure I see this gap you're talking about, or that a similar gap doesn't exist in fantasy if you look at it in certain ways. I think we'd have to define what you mean by "being read" and so on. If you mean that fewer people admit to having, say, Doc Smith as a direct influence, I'd agree, but his indirect influence remains as does that of all the other Big Names of the past. Urban fantasy (which as I understand it is the largest fantasy division) seems to me much more influenced by secondary (or tertiary) sources than by the originals, just like most SF.

In both cases there are people who still write stuff that directly acknowledges the roots of their genre, and with *epic* fantasy we do have the situation in which the great majority of the genre is still influenced by a single work (Lord of the Rings) which has remained sufficiently popular to stay in the public eye, instead of (like Doc Smith and his contemporaries) being relegated to mostly-obscurity. But even in the latter case there are still stories written that derive from and hearken back to the earlier works.