For one who knows the subject matter, or who thinks so, reading Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding will prove an enriching but also a disturbing experience. Enrichment belongs obviously to Nevala-Lee’s intention. He sees John W. Campbell—editor of the science fiction magazine Astounding from 1937 until his death in 1971—as a central figure in American popular culture. Nevala-Lee acknowledges the stable of writers whom Campbell recruited and encouraged as having significantly shaped the American popular imagination in the mid-twentieth century, and not merely in terms of the genre that they cultivated and patented. Indeed, Nevala-Lee documents that during the Second World War the federal government saw in Campbell and his authorial coterie a high-level propaganda asset and duly put them to work to aid the war effort.
The disturbing aspect of Astounding, one which links itself only tenuously to Nevala-Lee’s intention, consists in the study’s exposure of the selfish, banal, and prurient little world that his group of contributing personae,all of whom knew and socialized with one another, constituted. Nevala-Lee himself treats of that selfishness, banality, and prurience rather indifferently, as though it neither shocked nor repelled him. Perhaps the ambient moral relativism has inveigled his outlook. Nevala-Lee’s book will spur cognoscenti of the genre to reevaluate Heinlein, Asimov, and the others not only in respect of their newly revealed peccadilloes, but also in respect of their literary merit, an avenue of investigation that Campbell’s otherwise intrepid biographer mostly avoids. The discussion will return to the matter of that artistic reevaluation.
Read Full Article »
