Fandom Pulse presents a fascinating look into the history of science fiction with an intriguing article on The John W. Campbell Letters:
Campbell is generally credited with building the Golden Age of Science Fiction almost single-handedly. Isaac Asimov, in his autobiography, credited Campbell as the dominant force in the field for the first decade of his editorship. Before he became an editor, Campbell wrote his own fiction, first under his own name and later under the pen name Don A. Stuart, including “Who Goes There?”, the 1938 novella that became the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Once he took over Astounding, he largely stopped writing and turned his attention to the writers who would define the field for the next thirty years. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, and Hal Clement all passed through his door, and in many cases through his editorial red pen, on their way to becoming the names science fiction still measures itself against.
One letter shows exactly what that editorial pressure looked like at full force. In March 1959, Campbell wrote to Robert Heinlein’s agent, Lurton Blassingame, rejecting an early draft called “Starship Soldier,” the manuscript that would later become Starship Troopers. Campbell’s objection was not political squeamishness about the book’s militarism. It was a craft argument, rooted in a rule he considered a founding principle of the kind of science fiction he had spent two decades building: “Don’t tell the reader about the background; let him gather it from what happens.” Heinlein’s draft violated that rule directly, laying out its politics in what Campbell called direct, multi-page “preachments” rather than letting the reader arrive at the ideas through the story itself. Campbell went further, arguing that fiction persuades precisely because it never announces its conclusions, comparing the technique to parables, and noting that a skilled author could make a reader feel genuine sympathy for a committed Nazi if the story stayed inside that character’s head without editorializing. He then spent several more paragraphs disputing Heinlein’s actual thesis, that any two living organisms sharing a universe are doomed to physical combat, arguing instead that higher forms of competition had already replaced war as the most efficient way species out-compete one another. It is a strange letter to read today, an editor best remembered by his critics for a right-leaning editorial stance arguing at length that humanity was outgrowing warfare, on craft grounds, while rejecting the novel that became one of science fiction’s most famous defenses of the military.
Campbell, of course, has been posthumously cancelled by the deranged freaks of post-science fiction, as what was once the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer in science fiction was renamed because a foreign woman who doesn’t even write anything that can reasonably be recognized as science fiction objected to his politics of 60 years prior.
In 2019, the Campbell Award was renamed the Astounding Award after Jeannette Ng, that year’s winner, called Campbell a “fascist” during the Hugo Awards ceremony; soon afterward, Analog Editor Trevor Quachri announced that award sponsor Dell Magazines would change the prize’s name. Ng’s condemnatory acceptance speech went on to win the 2020 Best Related Work Hugo.
This is why you always sink the damn ships, both metaphorically and literally. And it’s why you always keep the creeps, freaks, and women out, because they don’t join organizations in order to participate in them or because they share the organizational vision, they join organizations in order to fundamentally change them. It’s not like they hide it either; the need for change is literally the first thing they say every single time they’re allowed in the door and they repeat it mindlessly regardless of how much change has already taken place.
Romantasy, diversity, and social justice didn’t kill science fiction. The Boomer generation of science fiction writers did by refusing to maintain the standards set by Campbell’s generation. Remember that when the freaks, creeps, and women come at your organization and demand that you relax your standards in the name of fairness, or kindness, or equality, or equity, or whatever other absurdity they think might serve as leverage.