Nevala-Lee has subtitled his book “John W. “We were extensions of himself,” Isaac Asimov is quoted as saying about the writers Campbell published “we were his literary clones each of us doing, in his or her own way, things Campbell felt needed doing things that he could do, but not quite the way that we could.” He was clearly self-confident enough to believe that as an editor he could get other writers to follow suit and shape the fiction to his standards.

Stuart pseudonym when he was offered the gig at Astounding. He had been writing a more thoughtful and reflective type of science fiction for three years under his Don A.

Campbell’s success as a writer of science fiction led inevitably to his being tapped to edit it. It succeeds admirably in tracing the deflection of Campbell’s frustrated ambition to become a scientist into his embrace of the role of science fiction writer and his approach to it as a sort of literary war game in which he could move his hero scientists and inventors around on a playing field the size of innumerable galaxies. As any reader of Locus knows, Astounding was the tool that Campbell used to terraform the landscape of science fiction, nudging it along the evolutionary path from space opera and the super-science fiction that he himself had made his reputation from as a writer to a more sophisticated literature of ideas – or, as Nevala-Lee puts it, “he turned science fiction from a literature of escapism into a machine for generating analogies.”Īlthough the scope of Nevala-Lee’s study is broad enough to encompass the development of science fiction during the pulp era – both in Astounding and in the magazines that either tried to follow Astounding‘s lead or distinguish their contents from its – his book is primarily a biography of Campbell. The name change was the first imprint Campbell made on the magazine but it was far from his last. Campbell inherited the editorship of Astounding Stories, soon to be rechristened Astounding Science-Fiction.

Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, you might well believe that it’s actually 27. After reading Alec Nevala-Lee›s Astounding: John W. The old joke has it that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is… 12 (i.e., the age at which most fans begin reading it). Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Alec Nevala-Lee ( Dey Street Books, 978-0-06-257194-6, 528pp, $28.99, hc) October 2018.

Alec nevala lee astounding