Astounding: Four men who, despite their flaws, helped form science fiction

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally pinned to the decade from 1939 to 1950, and while a host of people contributed in various ways, pretty much everyone agrees that if one could point to a single dominating figure it would John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, the pre-eminent magazine for science fiction at the time. In Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (2018), Alec Nevala-Lee explains how Campbell, and the trio of quite different authors who made up his highly influential stable of writers, came to have such outsized influence and then, for Campbell, how it was lost over the decades to follow.

Nevala-Lee divides the book into five segments: 1907-1937, 1937-1941, 1941-1945, 1945-1951, and 1951-1971. In addition, a prologue offers up a general overview of the players and of Nevala-Lee’s reasons for writing the book, and an epilogue carries the history forward through the deaths of all four, ending with Asimov’s in 1992.

Within the segments the book weaves back and forth in time and place, following one then another of the big four throughout their personal and professional lives, showing major events they experienced individually and also detailing their many interactions, again both personal and professional. Some were face to face meetings at the Astounding offices, others were social gatherings — parties, conferences, dinners — and others were by letter and then eventually email.

And while Astounding’s focus is the big four, Nevala-Lee also introduces us to a good number of other writers and editors whose lives intertwined with theirs, such as Lester Del Rey or A.E. Van Vogt, and chronicles as well the rise of sci-fi fandom, competing magazines, and eventually the shift in influence from magazines and books to TV and film, making this not simply a multi-biography but a true work of pop-culture history.

As for the biography itself, it’s a balanced mix of the personal and professional. I wouldn’t have minded, myself, a bit more focus on the actual writing and editing, the genesis and shaping of stories, but that’s a personal preference, and certainly there’s a good amount of that sort of exploration going on here. We learn, for instance, that Asimov’s justly famous Three Laws of Robotics really might have been more accurately labeled “Campbell’s Three Laws” (a point Asimov himself made more than once), that the genesis for two of Asimov’s most popular works — Nightfall and the FOUNDATION series — came from Campbell (it was also Campbell who later told Asimov he needed to upset the predictable arc of FOUNDATION with a monkey wrench of some sort; Asimov then came up with the idea of the mutant Mule).

Campbell had less direct influence on Heinlein (though more than Heinlein later admitted), but we still see how some of Heinlein’s work came out either in response to something Campbell suggested (as for instance when “Campbell proposed an idea about a generation starship … that forgets its original mission, which Heinlein turned into the classic “Universe”) or, especially later, in opposition to some of Campbell’s beliefs. We also get a glimpse of Heinlein’s thinking in his non-Campbell work, as when Nevala-Lee shares his rules for writing his juveniles (which I consider to actually be his best work):

Never write down to them. Do not simplify the vocabulary nor the intellectual concepts … No real love interest and female characters should be only walk-ons.

As for Hubbard, he was the one who was the least a fan of the genre and who wrote the least regularly. Campbell’s influence here was less in the literary (a word meant very broadly when it comes to the quality of Hubbard’s writing) field as in the religious one, with Campbell heavily involved in the early stages of Scientology (he was, for instance, one of the first to be audited and regularly proselytized the religion to his writers).

It was, in fact, Campbell’s deep dive into pseudoscience like Scientology, then later psionics and a strange little “space drive” that defied physics, that found him more and more removed from “his” writers. His views on the military further distanced him from Heinlein, while his clear racism meant he was more and more isolated as the world changed and he did not. Nevala-Lee doesn’t shy away from these uglier aspects of the men’s lives. Not just Campbell’s racism, but other acts and words as well. Charges of forced abortions, physical and mental abuse for Hubbard. Adultery and pettiness from Heinlein. And for Asimov, his well-known philandering, but much worse, his sexual harassment and casual groping of women at conferences or work.

Despite the misogyny of the day, as always, people are complicated. So, while Campbell had racist, sexist, and homophobic views for sure, he also, somehow, was the guy who published a host of women authors at a time when that was rare — women such as Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Kate Wilhelm, and James S. Tiptree, Jr. (whom he well knew was actually Alice Sheldon). Speaking of women, one of the nice touches of the book is that the women in the big four’s lives, who usually are either simply not mentioned or, at best, relegated to the deep background, here are brought forward more fully, such as Catherine Tennant, who was Campbell’s second-in-command at Astounding.

As time passed, Campbell’s writers moved on from him, as did the genre. He had nothing to do, for instance, with the New Wave, and the greater diversity was beyond him — he once told Samuel Delaney he liked a story by him but didn’t think Astounding’s audience would relate to a black main character.

While, as noted, I would have preferred a little more focus on that rather than the personal details surrounding divorces and the like, Astounding remains an entertaining, informative, and above all clear-eyed look at the incubation of several giants of the genre and of the genre itself. Recommended.

~Bill Capossere

Alec Nevala-Lee

For me, the mark of a good non-fiction book is whether I excitedly tell other people about it; a great book is one that I push, with aggressive cheerfulness, into other peoples’ hands while recounting factoids and tidbits I learned from that book. Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction is definitely a great book, if the high number of sentences and paragraphs I’ve read aloud to nearby people is any indication.

I thought I already knew quite a bit about Heinlein and Hubbard, in particular, but Nevala-Lee’s careful research into his four subjects and their effects on the wider world of science fiction, science, and pseudoscience was eye-opening and educational. I was unaware of the elastic relationships between these four men, their lifelong struggles to maintain friendships and working relationships despite shifting power dynamics and changes within their personal lives, and Nevala-Lee crafts it all into a compelling and fascinating narrative with appearances by fellow notables throughout the genre. It was difficult to put Astounding down between chapters, and I eagerly awaited each new chance I would have for some free time to dive back in and find out what new turning point was on the horizon, what new interaction would spark the creation of works like Asimov’s FOUNDATION series or Heinlein’s various groundbreaking and influential novels.

Astounding is definitely an examination of the personal life affecting the professional; Nevala-Lee doesn’t shy away from the rougher or more disgusting aspects of these men, and the ways in which they regarded other people (particularly the women in their lives or their encounters with people of color) indelibly informed how they wrote about people and the types of stories they told. He neither demonizes nor slips into hagiography, but rather presents a well-rounded portrait of Campbell, Asimov, Heinlein, and Hubbard — four men who did their best to shape science fiction and the very real world around them, each with varying degrees of success. Highly recommended.

~Jana Nyman