Who Is John W. Campbell?

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer has been renamed The Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

The Campbell Conference was renamed (they are discussing names for the Campbell Memorial award).

Here's a DVD [reviewed here] that discusses much of what people have complained about. I was typically cautious in my approach. I may or may not read more of his essays to find out what he may or may not think.

Despite the title, I won't judge whether Campbell deserves the labels he's been given but will offer a framework within which he should be judged. I'm not old enough to have gotten to know him well enough to pass judgement, neither have I read many of his essays, but here is a novel perspective gleaned from those who did know him well.

None of us believe we should be defined by those who hate us—or, rather, if they count, it’s a datum added after constructing the figure of those who knew and understood us.

In an introduction to Campbell’s SF, Lester Del Rey wrote [unless otherwise noted, all quotes come from The Best of John W. Campbell], “Stuart, as Campbell later put it, was an annoying kind of writer. He refused to take the standard axioms for granted. When everyone knew that something was so, Stuart began questioning it.”

There’s more in there than it first appears. First, Stuart is John W. Campbell’s own pseudonym, Don A. Stuart, so Campbell is able to stand outside himself and judge himself; therefore, he retains some measure of objectivity about his person. Second, he considers himself “annoying” in the same sense that people found Socrates annoying: questioning standard axioms.

Del Rey validates this perspective later on:

His editorials in the magazine were always a source of controversy, as he meant them to be. He was using the editorial page to stir up thinking, to say, “Yes, but how do you know your obvious truth is so darned obvious? Now let’s try a different assumption.” He refused to accept any set idea of what might be good or bad.

Del Rey goes on to express astonishment that people found Campbell difficult to get: 

To my surprise, many of the writers and fans seemed to consider Campbell a hard man to know well.... Campbell was somewhat shy, particularly about personal feeling; and he hated to make conversation.... He had no fund of small talk. He was a man passionately in love with ideas, who wanted to chase such ideas back to their beginnings and forward to the furthest possible extension. To him, that meant an all-out, no-holds-barred argument.

His mind was like a rapier, darting out instantly to find any unprotected spot in an opponent’s thinking. He was a quick master of the fundamentals of any area of knowledge.... [T]o those who would return his passionate love of argument as mental exercise, he was a wonderful human being. And his delight was as great in losing an argument as in winning.”

In other words, Campbell was built from the atoms of his subject: speculative fiction. If you couldn’t engage with ideas passionately and oppose (or have opposed) conventional wisdom, he probably wasn’t much interested in you (or your work).

If that doesn’t mark Campbell’s figure for you, let’s consult his wife:

 

For the next twenty years... my son’s and daughter’s college friends... would come in without a “Hello” but with a well-thought-out refutation of some point of an argument begun during a previous holiday months before. They brought new people with them each time, to refuel the discussions and arguments that would last for days....

Many’s the time I had to interrupt one of those marathon debates [with his daughters’ beaux] to suggest that the girls might like to go out on their dates, rather than fidgeting, all dressed up. 

[H]is own children... would cease asking for help on science fair projects [etc.].... What with all the fascinating ramifications, byways and side issues John could think of, it took him at least twice as long to convey the information. He also was unnerving about the textbooks and the accepted authorities.

She goes on to describe their debates about the Linen Closet Arguments (they named their debates), which lasted ten years. They recorded their debates and listened to them and were unaware of and disappointed by how they sounded, so they altered how they debated (but it doesn’t sound like the quantity abated).

For a time she worried about the epithets he received over his “crackpot” ideas but she concluded, “He never carried a grudge or acted vindictively—he was not smug, but had some tough quality of mind that viewed ideas as fascinating... no matter where they led.”

At one point in her essay, Campbell’s wife said that she told her husband that he should be a teacher. He said he was... to a hundred thousand readers of his magazine.

Since his whole adult life had been devoted to science fiction—as an author and editor, an editor who took an active role in the speculation appearing in his magazine—it shouldn’t surprise us that he was science fiction embodied.

This, then, gets complicated when one reads his introduction to his retrospective anthology Analog 6 (written in September 1967), where he states and implies that while he knows what SF is (what he is?), he cannot readily nail it down although he does a fair job of describing the process of what methodical speculation does.

If you still question the validity of John W. Campbell being SF itself, read this passage: 

“Science fiction tries to take the skeleton of scientific facts and build around it a body of a living future. Sometimes we go pretty wildly wrong—as wrong as scientists have gone in their speculations.”

Note the “we.” Who is we? Not scientific facts as he differentiates “we” from scientists. Clearly, the “we” must be “Science fiction.” Campbell sees himself--perhaps unconsciously since he isn't trying define himself but the genre--and others have described him as the genre itself. He does seem to have consumed, processed and internalized so much of the field that he is a part of it.

As for crackpot ideas, he points out their utility: “For nearly three centuries now, Science has been stubbornly maintaining that there was no value whatever in astrological ideas.” And then he describes, through methodical speculation how astrology (through science) does impact real life. I’ll let you look up his logic and see whether or not you agree or disagree. But that isn’t my point. The point is that the utility of the crackpot ideas in SF is that it forces us to think in new directions, instead of being caught in scientific paradigms only. Scientists who read SF will admit to something similar. It’s not just crackpot ideas, but rigorous crackpot ideas that break open the mind to possibilities. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand SF, and you cannot understand Campbell because Campbell is SF. All criticism of John W. Campbell most flow out of this starting point. Anything else is simplistic and misleading.

Algis Budrys in his introduction to the story “Twilight” wrote that Campbell’s Stuart’s oeuvre, “do not in fact express any consistent view of the world; they express only a consistent rational mood,” [The Mirror of Infinity] which Budrys differentiated from Campbell’s editorials. I contend that “Twilight” at least is very consistent with Campbell’s view of the human race: that if we do not continue to think and challenge our thoughts, if we allow machines or others to do all our thinking, we will fade from the pinnacle of our former glory.

If one does not express critiques—serious flaws—through this filter as related by those who were close to him, near the time of his passing, a filter expressed both in his essays and most critically famed work, if one does not label him in light of this primary tenant of life—that he was all process, thinking about how we think and how humanity may be changed by it—one does not describe Campbell but aspects of one’s self. He was trying to save the world from the fate imagined in “Twilight”—the heat-death of intellectual curiosity—by means of science fiction.