Astounding by Alec Nevada-Lee Review

Title: Astounding
Author: Terrence L. Brown

Astounding—John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Alec Nevada-Lee

Gray Planet Commentary

• Biography of John W. Campbell
• Exhaustive detail of Campbell’s relationships with Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and Isaac Asimov
• Documents Campbell’s racism and his fascination with pseudo science concepts particularly with respect to psychiatry

Gray Planet Indices

• Good Book Index: 95/100
• Literature Index: 75/100
• Magic Factor: 75/100
• Sense of Wonder: 60/100

In Astounding, Alec Nevada-Lee has compiled an exhaustive history of the golden age of science fiction, the time during which John W. Campbell was the editor of Astounding Stories (renamed Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction in 1960). The book focuses on Campbell’s relationships with three writers he developed and with whom he worked closely over a period of 30 years: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard.

The audience for this book is probably limited to serious science fiction readers and fans. Even then, it is mostly for those of us who remember the period. It is an important book of history, but few readers under 50 will be interested, except for academics and purists. But Astounding is an important book that provides an historical perspective on how science fiction came to be dominated by white heterosexual males and why it was so difficult to move it toward a genre more inclusive of women, people of color and those of the LGBTQ community.

I have read numerous biographies and memoirs of the science fiction writers who created the field and defined the tropes of science fiction during the time period of this book, 1938-1971, so I am familiar with many of the events related here about Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Hubbard, however, I knew only through my readings about the history of Scientology. This view of Hubbard, first as a science fiction writer, and then, secondarily almost, as the founder of Scientology is new to me. But Nevala-Lee brings it all together and provides a new perspective and new material as well.

Hubbard does not come off well. He is a journeyman writer with a talent for pure pulp writing. He is narcissistic and borderline crazy in his personal and professional lives. He eventually adapts his science fiction writing into the presumed revelations which become Scientology, a religion which exists to this day. The basis of Scientology is really a retelling of Hubbard’s science fiction—it is his attempt to monetize his talent to make shit up.

Campbell, particularly during the period from 1938 through 1950, was a fountainhead of ideas, ideas which, when placed in the hands of Asimov and Heinlein and others like L. Sprague de Camp and Lewis Padgett (the pseudonym used by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner), resulted in many classics of science fiction. Nevada-Lee tells how these stories came to be, and, along the way, how Heinlein and Asimov, particularly, became the dominant writers of their generation within science fiction.

But we also see the development of Hubbard and his crazy ideas—dianetics and scientology, in all their pseudo-scientific, crazy glory. Campbell is intimately involved in this development as well, and in the end, it is Campbell’s fascination with these kinds of unprovable and fallacious concepts presented as science, that are part of the reason his dominance in the field of science fiction comes to a necessary end.

Campbell was racist, misogynistic, and unscientific, but also creative and able to generate compelling arguments for his viewpoints, arguments which, when combined with his forceful personality, were difficult for most people to refute. In many ways, Campbell was egotistical enough to think that he knew more than experts in many fields, and was not shy about promoting pseudo-scientific ideas far beyond the mainstream. Campbell routinely blurred the boundaries between science fact and science fiction—he even renamed Astounding with that title. The result was compelling fiction you could almost believe, and which eventually motivated a generation of scientists and engineers (almost exclusively white and male) to try to make the concepts they read about a reality. But it is difficult to get past Campbell’s silliness and pseudoscience.

So Campbell leaves a very mixed legacy. Nevada-Lee does not limit himself to taking Campbell to task over these issues. Asimov continually harassed women with obscene comments and by touching them inappropriately and also was a philanderer. The extent of some of this was new to me as Asimov (unsurprisingly) did not go into this in his own autobiographies. Heinlein had various sexual proclivities of interest and was jingoistic personally and in his writing.

This time period was a different world, in some ways more simple than ours, easier to understand, and to navigate. But it also limited the opportunity of anyone not white, male and heterosexual. We should listen, learn, and understand, but not emulate.

John Campbell created, guided and controlled science fiction during the Golden Years, forming the basis of what is now a field he would not recognize, a genre more diverse and more creative that he could ever be. The spirit of John Campbell would have loved SF today with its unbridled ability to conceive of and examine science and its effect on our culture from myriad perspectives. The man would probably wonder where all the weirdos came from and why anyone is paying attention to them.

I’ll leave you with the fitting words of Jeannette Ng, the 2019 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in science fiction:

John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonizers, settlers and industrialists. Yes, I am aware there are exceptions.

But these bones, we have grown wonderful, ramshackle genre, wilder and stranger than his mind could imagine or allow.

And I am so proud to be part of this. To share with you my weird little story, an amalgam of all my weird interests, so much of which has little to do with my superficial identities and labels.