<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

John Wood Campbell, Jr. (June 8, 1910–1971) (Newark, New Jersey) began his career as Edward E. Smith's foremost rival in the writing of interstellar stories of "super-science" in the early 1930s. He then transformed himself into a writer of moody stories that attempted to transcend their intended place of publication in the pulp magazines, mostly under the pen name Don A. Stuart. But within nine years of his first publication, he essentially traded in his writing career to become the most important editor in the history of the field of science fiction.

Campbell studied at MIT for three years before flunking out of German, then completed his bachelor's degree at Duke. During his college years, he published a series of interplanetary adventures featuring Arcot, Wade, and Morey, three inventor-adventurers who have a propensity for solving interstellar problems by the creation of increasingly large weapons. One of the features that differentiated Campbell's form of "space opera" (as the form began to be called in the 1940s) is his focus on the problem to be solved in a given story rather than on the characters involved. In the fullness of time, this has tended to make Campbell's super science stories less fun to read—not to mention less compelling—than those of Doc Smith. The best of the Arcot, Wade, and Morey series is probably the first, The Black Star Passes (originally published in [the early 1930s and revised for publication in book form in 1953).

Campbell sought to overcome the limitations of the Arcot, Wade, and Morey stories with a series focused more on a single hero, Aarn Munro. The initial novel in the sequence, The Mightiest Machine (serialized in 1934 and published in book form in 1947), was very well received at the time, and it remains slightly more readable than The Black Star Passes. Perhaps fortunately, the editor of Astounding Stories, F. Orlin Tremaine, rejected the rest of the Aarn Munro series; it was eventually collected as The Incredible Planet (1949).

By 1934, Campbell had essentially done all he could as a writer of super science. Never a man content with barriers, he sought to develop a new way of writing SF, and the first result was his short story "Twilight," a time-travel tale that attempts to convey a dreamy vision of the far future. It was the first story Campbell published under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart (derived from Dona Stuart, his first wife's maiden name), and the letter columns of Astounding Stories, where it first appeared, praised it strongly. By today's standards, it moves unsteadily and is overwritten, but its style was a radical departure from the science fiction of its day. So was its substance: Campbell later wrote that the story's purpose was to evoke a strange, unnamable feeling on the part of the reader, rather than telling a standard tale of problem-solving.

The success of "Twilight" led Campbell to write stories that deliberately sought to overturn the prevailing notions in the field. One of the most successful of these efforts was the series of three short stories called "The Story of the Machine" when they were collected in Cloak of Aesir (1952). They span a period of several hundred years of future history, following the decline of civilization due to automation, the revival of humanity through contact with an alien civilization, and the subsequent decline of the aliens, which is caused by using human beings as slaves. It is worth noting that this was the first time that Campbell suggested that human beings were always going to prevail over alien races.

The most famous of Campbell's stories is one of the last tales to appear under the Stuart pen name: "Who Goes There?"" (1939). It is the basis for both the Howard Hawks and John Carpenter films called The Thing (1951 and 1982 respectively). In a way, the story is a re-telling of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness—set in the Arctic (rather than the Antarctic as in Lovecraft) and emphasizing the horror of contact with the truly alien. The story involves the discovery of an alien intelligence, buried for 20 million years in the Arctic ice, a life-form both telepathic and able to change its shape. The central aspect of its horror hinges on not knowing who among the team that discovered the alien is human, and who is not. Although the writing style is still a bit pulpy, Campbell tells his story economically and with some understated humor.

Campbell had become the editor of Astounding, the foremost magazine in the field, in 1937. The pre-publication announcement of "Who Goes There?" in the magazine in 1939 carried the implication that Campbell would write no more Stuart stories. And, except for filling a couple of unexpected gaps in Astounding's short-lived sister publication, Unknown Worlds, that was very nearly the last of Campbell's fiction.

As an editor, Campbell set out to find new writers, and to recruit a few of his contemporaries who could write science fiction of a higher quality than had ever been achieved before. Early in his editorial career, he would often indicate that he wanted his magazine to read as though it were an issue of The Saturday Evening Post from the future. In those days, the Post was the largest-selling general magazine in the country, and much of its content was fiction of every genre, including—very rarely—the occasional fantasy or science fiction story. Stories that ran in the Post tended to get made into films, or broadcast on the radio. It was the most respectable of the magazines published on slick paper, as opposed to the periodicals printed on newsprint, or pulp paper.

In that era before television appeared in every living room, when millions of people read fiction on a daily basis for entertainment, there was a strong prejudice against the pulps from those who did not want themselves considered lower class. Class consciousness, never anywhere near as important in the United States as ethnic identity, is a key element in explaining the divide between the slicks and the pulps, especially among the academics of the day. That said, the slicks may have had big budgets, but they had their limitations as well—the Saturday Evening Post was not a market for experimental literature or abstract poetry, but wanted a solid story, well told, with strong characters. It would not tolerate the less-rounded characterization prevalent in many of the newsprint fiction magazines—a perennial weakness of pulp westerns and science fiction, in particular.

Campbell imagined that his magazine would transcend its newsprint boundaries and read like a slick magazine, and very quickly he found two writers who could write to that level: L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000), whose first story in Astounding was actually published a few months before Campbell assumed the helm, and Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988), whose first story appeared in the magazine in 1939.

Heinlein quickly eclipsed de Camp as a writer of science fiction, although de Camp more than held his own as a writer of fantasy in Unknown Worlds. Much of the reason that the period 1939–45 is thought of as the "Golden Age" of Astounding is due to the enormous number of stories Heinlein produced until his work as a civilian in the war effort forced a halt to his efforts, in 1942. Heinlein produced the bulk of his "future history" series for Campbell during these years, and ended the era with one of his most influential works, Beyond This Horizon (serialized in 1942 and published in book form in 1948). To young writers of the 1940s and '50s, Beyond This Horizon was often seen as the model of how one writes a science fiction novel. It must be mentioned that Heinlein and Campbell had a falling-out shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 (covered in the posthumously released collection of Heinlein's letters, Grumbles from the Grave 1990), which forced Heinlein to seek other markets when he resumed writing after World War II. Tellingly, one of those markets was The Saturday Evening Post, to which Heinlein sold a number of his most successful stories.

Other notable writers either discovered or fostered by Campbell included A. E. van Vogt, whose greatest strength seems to have been to join suspense writing with a strangely dreamlike imaginative power; Theodore Sturgeon, arguably the greatest writer of the fantastic in the 20th century; L. Ron Hubbard, who excelled at comic fantasy and was highly successful at melodramatically charged science fiction; C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, whose surrealistic imaginations and amazing stylistic range opened up many of the avenues explored by science fiction writers of the 1950s and '60s; and Clifford D. Simak. Most of Simak's most-famous book, City (1952), appeared as short stories in the mid-1940s. Isaac Asimov was an early discovery of Campbell's who produced the first three Foundation books and I, Robot (1950) for Astounding in the 1940s. Finally, it must be noted that Campbell also published most of Eric Frank Russell's work and, toward the end of his life, said that Russell was his favorite writer.

Campbell's period of absolute dominance ended abruptly in 1949–50 with the start of publication of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy Magazine. In what remains a surprising response, Campbell began to explore areas not generally recognized as scientific, such as publishing L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics" in 1950, as well as a series of articles exploring machines intended to detect ESP, among others. In 1960, he changed the name of the magazine to Analog.

In the 1950s and '60s, Campbell grew increasingly dogmatic and wrote editorials that were demonstratively politically conservative. That notwithstanding, he remained a brilliant story-smith. Even toward the end of his career, he was responsible for publishing Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), and discovered writers as diverse as Piers Anthony and James Tiptree, Jr. (the pen name of Alice Sheldon).

Two of SF's major awards are named after Campbell--the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the years best SF novel, and the John W. Campbell Award for best new author in the genre. The former is a juried award presented in early July at the Campbell Conferenceat the University of Kansas. The latter is presented at the World Science Fiction Convention to the best new author in the genre from the previous two years.

Books about Campbell: Alva Rogers' A Requiem for Astounding (1964) is a brief survey of the Golden Age of the 1940s. Much more detailed (and theoretical) is Alexei and Cory Panshin's survey of the era, The World Beyond the Hill (1989).