A collection of John W. Campbell's editorials, with an introduction by Harry Harrison.
"They are idiosyncratic, personal, prejudiced, far-reaching, annoying, sabotaging. They are never, never dull." (Harrison)
John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories in 1937, a position that he has held ever since. He guided the metamorphosis of that garish-covered pulp magazine through a number of wonderful and intricate title changes and physical shapes, to its present form as Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact. Or more simply, Analog -- or ASF -- to its quarter of a million readers and vociferous supporters. Every issue of ASF since 1938 has contained an editorial by John W. Campbell. In the very early years these usually took the form of a boxed page of description of the stories in the issue or future plans for the magazine, ordinary editor-reader matters. However odd bits of information and opinion began to creep in, until all the references to the fiction were squeezed out of the editorial and formed into other departments of the magazine. The editorials took on a unique character of their own, they became Campbell Editorials, and have been the center of controversy ever since.
It would be unfair to consider these editorials in the abstract, since they are irrevocably linked with the magazine that contained them and the man who wrote them.
ASF cannot be dismissed as just another science fiction magazine. As regards its fictional content the history is very clear -- the best of all the modem writers were developed in its pages, and the appearance of their stories in this magazine marked the change from pulp fiction to modern fiction. All credit must be extended to them for the maturity of their work, but at the same time due credit should be given as well to the editor for guiding their hands. None of these writers has been so small as to deny the influence of John Campbell, and the number of books that have been dedicated to him gives evidence of this. At a guess I would say there are at least thirty, a record that I am sure is unique in literature.
John W. Campbell is a born trouble-maker. The mere fact that something exists and that millions believe in it does not convince Campbell of its validity. Quite the opposite, this seems to be the point where he begins to doubt. His background appears to be ideally suited to this task, since he was introduced to physical science at the age of three, became interested in philosophy at six and read his first science fiction at the age of eight. He made himself thoroughly unpopular with other children by treating all their games and enthusiasms as problems in need of a solution. Once he had solved the problem -- such as using a standard naval search pattern, a spiral moving out from the center, to wipe out the game of hide-and-seek -- he lost interest and moved on to something new.
If we can thank the depression for anything, it is for blighting the career that Campbell was trained for. He went first to MIT, but graduated from Duke University where he took his degree in physics at a time when no one at all was interested in hiring physicists. His education may not have been the ideal training for the jobs he held as a car and air-conditioner salesman, but it certainly helped him to write science fiction. He had been writing -- and selling -- SF while still an undergraduate, and he continued to do so on an expanding scale. It was good fiction; stories written then for the pulps are still in print today --as books.
All of the parts of Campbell's work overlap and are related. First as a writer, then becoming editor of one of the magazines that published his stories. While he was editor he wrote a handful of stories and sold them to himself under a pen name. This is an accepted editorial practice, particularly when income tax payments are coming due, but Campbell did it because writers were not turning in the kind of "thought variant" stories he wanted to print. So he had to give them samples of what he was looking for. He stopped writing stories as examples as soon as he had mastered the technique of the Campbell editorial inquisition, or writer's conference. This has been likened, by writers who have experienced it, to being fed through a buzz saw or a man-sized meatgrinder. It is a painful process, I'll vouch for that, because a Campbell conversation consists almost entirely of loaded questions that demand answers. No one really likes to be forced to think. Campbell forces you. It is a heartening experience that should be part of the training of all budding SF writers, providing their hearts are in good shape and their sweat glands functioning well.
Through the years, while all of this had been going on, John Campbell was writing an editorial every month. These are idiosyncratic personal, prejudiced, far-reaching, annoying, and sabotaging. All of these terms have been applied by readers -- and far stronger ones as well. An editorial on physics always produces a flood of correspondence that appears as four or five pages of mathematical symbols in Brass Tacks, the letter column. The next editorial, on politics, will bring the social scientists out of the woodwork with arguments blasting, both pro and con. For almost thirty years now the Campbell editorials have produced shouts of joy and moans of pain from thousands of ASF readers.
Campbell is always happiest when far out on a limb, and a number of his editorials have been prognosticative. Very often the prophecy has been right. As long ago as 1938 he predicted that atomic energy would be released, and encouraged his writers to do stories about both the atomic bomb and the peaceful uses of nuclear fission. In the mid-1940s, just after the first atomic bomb had been dropped, he looked ahead to future developments and predicted that this weapon would someday be outclassed by the hydrogen bomb. Mulling over the problems that would face the designers of this bomb he suggested that they use the infinitely cheaper lithium hydride rather than tritium. Though a good number of atomic physicists read the magazine they did not consider using it as a textbook. They should have. A $2,000,000,000 plant was built to produce tritium and in 1952 the first hydrogen bomb was exploded. The Russians, who did not have facilities or techniques to manufacture tritium, found a way to make lithium hydride work instead in their hydrogen bomb. This chemical costs $12 a pound. If the Atomic Energy Commission had read the ASF editorials more closely they might have saved a few billion dollars.
There is no point in attempting to describe a Campbell editorial; in the following pages the reader may see for himself just what varied forms this creature takes. Neither will I claim that these are the only editorials that could be assembled in book form. Taken in their entirety they add up to a five-foot shelf of original thinking on a number of topics, and I have made a purely personal choice of those which I considered the most interesting and the most characteristic. I have called upon many people for aid, and have received it, since it appears that everyone has at least one favorite. There has been no shortage of material: at a modest estimate the editorials have totaled more than 900,000 words over the past twenty-eight years.
Inevitably, the passing of time has ruled out the inclusion of some. Many of the editorials of the late '40s and early '50s dealt with current and pending advances in atomic theory and practice. In other cases fact has caught up with editorial prediction.
Veteran readers of the magazine will look in vain for at least two topics that have been associated with the pages of ASF; the machine known as the Dean Drive, and that rather eccentric theory of mental aberration, Dianetics. This is not wilful censorship on my part, but has been dictated by the material. John W. Campbell never wrote an editorial advocating either of these discoveries. I will be glad to aid all those who raise a howl of agony at this bit of alarming news; you'll find the editorial about Dianetics in the May 1950 issue, and the one about the Dean Drive in the issue dated exactly ten years later, May 1960. About is the proper word to use since both editorials talk about the subject in question and mention briefly that an article or articles will appear on the subject. John W. Campbell did not champion either of these causes. The cause he supported -- with blasts on the trumpet and salvos of artillery -- was the right for controversial ideas to see print and to be considered by the authorities. That was all he ever said. His magazine printed the material, the follow-up articles, and the vitriolic correspondence. He himself championed neither -- just their right to be heard. Go and look. It surprised me too.
In making the final selection I have tried to be as far-reaching as I could, including representative pieces to form as broad a spectrum of topics as possible. But in one case I must admit to personal prejudice, that is the editorial entitled A Matter of Degree. It concerns a characteristic of atomic reactors termed the K-factor, and how this factor might be applied to human behaviour. When I first read this it sparked a train of thought that produced a story that I titled -- with great imagination - "The K-Factor." Campbell editorials, like Campbell conversation, are stuffed with story ideas that are free for the taking. That is all they are. There is no positive feedback cycle that guarantees that the editor will buy his own idea when dolled up as a piece of fiction. It must still be a successful piece of fiction in its own right. A small army of filing cabinets could be filled with the rejects of authors who imagined otherwise.
I have grouped the editorials for easy reference, though as far as interest goes this volume can be dipped into at random, or read from back to front. The editorials were written as separate and distinct entities, and defiantly remain that way. Four of them even managed to avoid categorizing, other than being forced into the very elastic mould of being used as the closing pieces in the book. It is here that you will find the only Campbell editorial ever written about science fiction itself, Non-Escape Literature. In the opening group there is Hyperinfracaniphilia, the editorial that raised the most enthusiasm -- or at least brought in the most mail.
Regular ASF readers who are hurt that John W. Campbell did not champion the Dean Drive or Dianetics, will be cheered by We MUST Study Psi, which uncompromisingly plugs for greater attention to what used to be called mental telepathy or extrasensory perception. But the backbone of the argument here is that there are incontrovertible forms of PSI that anyone can demonstrate. John Campbell is a difficult man to argue with.
In the March 1965 Analog he said this:
Editorially, I shall continue to try to investigate the nature of the stuffing in any suspiciously bulging shirts around. My business is directly concerned with the progress and achievement of the human race; any orthodoxy that tends to sidetrack or otherwise impede progress is interfering with my business. and I'll do what I can to sabotage them.
This is a good statement of what these editorials basically are, but it is not a complete one. It does not describe the unique twist of the Campbellian mind that sees the entire world from a different angle -- and holds up a mirror that enables us to see it that way too. It leaves out the capacity to pull in apparently unrelated factors from disparate fields to generate a new picture of reality. It omits the constantly renewed enthusiasm that makes reading the editorials a pleasure.
I would like to thank Dr. Leon E. Stover for both advice and aid in uncovering copies of magazines I no longer possessed, and Kingsley Amis for suggestions and literary succor. My gratitude also to Brian W. Aldiss, Poul Anderson, James Blish, and Tom Boardman, Jr., for their assistance.
I would particularly like to thank John W. Campbell for writing the editorials and for editing the magazine that I have read with pleasure for every one of those twenty-eight years. May he continue to do so in the twenty-eight to come.
Harry Harrison
London, January 1966
"Harry Harrison has made a good and representative choice from a span extending from 1943 to late 1965, and although one can quarrel with a few of his selections, mostly on minor grounds, the total effect is excellent and almost any one of the thirty-one essays reprinted here should be good for a lively if not violent discussion, as of course they already have been in Brass Tacks."