John W. Campbell (1) (1910–1971)

The stories in this collection are pretty solid, from the sci-fi horror of the title story and the currently topical horror of Dead Knowledge, through the maguffin-based gadget stories, to the far-future tales about the Heat Death of the universe. The tone runs from an optimistically plucky "Good Ole American Grit Will Overcome", to a decidedly pessimistic "What's the Point?", even if that end is untold billions of years in the future.

I like to do a bit of reading about authors, and looked show more up Campbell on Wikipedia, where I was disappointed to be reminded that he was the editor of the sci-fi magazine who rejected A [author:Samuel R. Delany|49111] story with a Black protagonist because he considered that his readers wouldn't accept a Black character. From which, I suddenly understand that all the characters I've just read about are, without any statement as such, White. There is just one outright racist view expressed in the book, not out of keeping for the time and audience for which it was written, but jarring and shocking to see on the page now.

Reading of other writers' (including [author:Isaac Asimov|16667]) condemnation of Campbell's racist and right-wing views reminded me of a note by [author:Philip K. Dick|4764] for his story The Golden Man in [book:The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3: The Father-Thing|165913], in which he spoke of an editor who insisted that stories submitted on the subject of mutants would only be accepted if they were presented as superior to the common run of people, and ready to shepherd the "inferior" races into a utopian paradise. Sure enough, this editor turns out to be Campbell, by whom PKD refused to be constrained and sold his stories elsewhere, feeling unable to work with Campbell's supremacist views, which PKD explicitly compares to Nazi ideology.

Does it matter after all the years which have passed, and with Campbell's own passing? I think so. I'm put in mind of the Star Trek DS9 episodes in which Captain Sisko believes himself to be a 1950s sci-fi writer whose latest story, "Deep Space 9", is rejected by his editor because the captain of the space station is Black. Those episodes, surely inspired by Campbell and Delany, graphically illustrate the evil of systemic racism, of which Campbell was, as an influential editor, a significant part, and which system of oppression we clearly see continues today.

This understanding of Campbell's character and beliefs casts a different light on his stories of alien invaders determined to wipe out humanity (by which we now know he means Whites), of shapeshifting infiltrators able to pass as human instead of the sub-human beings they 'really' are, so that they can overrun us, and that "just one" instance of undisguised racism can be recognised as the tip of a most unpleasant iceberg.

Otherwise, pretty solid sci-fi. show less

There's a reason this film had to be remade: The abject terror of having people--and critters--you know and love completely taken over down to a cellular level can't be approximated by any other kind of monstrosity. This is in many ways a rape fable; the invasion is so personal that it's impossible to be anything but outraged, repulsed and terrified.

I've just finished reading the November 1948 Astounding (no, I'm not THAT far behind!), and there was much of interest, mainly by people we've never heard of since then. The stand-out story for me was In Hiding by Wilmar H. Shiras, all about a 12-year-old boy who is referred to a child psychologist because he doesn't seem to quite fit in, and turns out to be a towering intellectual genius way beyond his years. It turns out to be an "atomic mutation" story, and the denouement was a bit show more rushed, but it was well written and engaged my interest far more than you'd expect from that description. (Though a lot of the things the child psychologist does in terms of how he handles his patient would get him struck off nowadays, if not put on a register somewhere!) In Hiding was the first in a series of well-regarded stories about mutants who were benign and whose mutations didn't give their subjects uncanny powers and the desire to wear Spandex out of doors, which were eventually made into a novel, Children of the Atom.

Less impressive was a 'spaceship doctor' story by J.A. Winter. But there was also a short Theodore Sturgeon piece, homely but thoughtful.

Two 'science fact' articles were amusing for getting a lot of stuff wrong - Willy Ley on supersonic flight, stating that future supersonic aircraft would all be rockets (jet engines were no more than six or seven years old at the time of publication, so why Ley couldn't see them as being capable of further development I don't know, but he dismisses them as a engineering dead end), and E.L. Locke on A New Natural Law - an article about the connection between gravity and magnetism, which confuses magnetism, magnetic fields and gravity completely, putting all planetary magnetic fields down to rotation. I don't know when we found out about Mars' lack of a magnetosphere, but that rather demolishes Locke's argument.

The issue's headline story was the second part of the serialisation of A.E. van Vogt's The Players of Null-A. The kindest thing I can say of it is that it read like a bad pastiche of itself. show less

Four centuries in the future, humanity has colonised the solar system and is doing great when an alien race from a capricious and erratically-behaving star decide that the côterie of resource-rich planets around our much more stable Sun will be their new home. After an alien scouting party shows off their superior technology, a lone millionaire physics genius serving in the navy only has limited time to bring humanity's tech up to a level where they can compete with the Strangers. On top of show more that, he's got to do it single-handedly, and develop not only atomic power, but also faster-than-light space travel and a host of other militarily useful science.

This science fiction short was dated in so many respects that I found it hard to enjoy. First, there's the Van Vogtesque millionaire genius who, largely by himself, invents increasingly hand-wavey technological wonders to the point of ridiculousness (protective magnetic shielding, destructive UV rays, faster-than-light travel, culminating in his harnessing the power of Uncertainty itself). Then there's its naive conception of atomic power as consequence-free (the story was published in the 1930s) and easily neutralised with a "neutron gun". And finally, there's the complete lack of female characters: everyone is a strong-jawed male with a background in the military, and the whole thing reeks of mid-20thC American exceptionalism (historical and mathematical references are to 20thC USA).

A time capsule more than genuinely fun to read. show less