Campbell’s racist views had a stifling effect on his writers even in the 1940s – Asimov said that one reason his stories never featured aliens was because Campbell would always insist that humans were superior to aliens, because he couldn’t cope with a worldview where white American men weren’t the best, so the left-leaning Asimov just didn’t write stories with aliens
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Campbell - fascist
Asimov - known sexual predator
Heinlein - just a sexist asshole
Hubbard - started his own fucked up nutty religion
Yeah, he glorified a bunch of really shitty people while being EVEN SHITTIER. He froze out great minority and women writers who MIGHT have been even better than these asswipes because he was such a prick.
Ideological purity doesn’t impress me either. But what REALLY doesn’t impress me is when you go out of your way to be a misogynistic, bloviating, racist, fascist, piece of lint on the buttcrack of society. . . and people still admire you while other worthy folks were ground under the boot heel of their control of who gets to get published.
It’s not “good manners and politics” to NOT be a racist, sexist, fascist pig. It’s called compassion, and it’s the most noble of human traits.
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Agreed.
I didn’t know who Campbell was, and the stuff I see (selected by peole who don’t like him, put probably true) doesn’t doesn’t encourage me to read more. I have an idea who Gernsbeck was, and I also have an association with Amazing Stories covers with rockets painted red, and women in space-suits cut to show their legs. That isn’t entirely great, but he seems a good figurehead for that age, particularly with the picture taken for Life Magazine wearing 3D TV goggles when he is 79. Anyone who can look like that is my brother in spirit.
Mister Watsisname I think we can forget.
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Cory, I think you mean the Kent Sate 4.
The Poe is strong with this one.
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When a person’s more worried about a fascist being disqualified for something… more worried than for all the people he disqualified over his career for their race or gender, well, that just shows their basic priorities, doesn’t it?
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I guess that, if Hugo Gernsback did anything really terrible, he kept it hidden in his own continuum.
Although, apparently H.P. Lovecraft*, Clarke Ashton Smith and other authors weren’t massive fans of Hugo’s dodgy and disreputable business practices.
*Himself dropped as an award by World Fantasy.
@Melizmatic Like Picasso; we can love the art, but not be too enamored of the antics of the man.
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Hey - nice hat.
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Wait wait wait, Asimov, Heinlein and Hubbard? I am sorry, but one of these things is not like the others!
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(I love that the Action Man’s battlecry is “Action-n-n-n!”)
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No, he was just a generic asshole with delusions of being superior due to knowing some math and Talking! Very! Sternly!
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On the one hand, I’m totally okay with that. On the other it feels like going for small fish, instead of acknowledging that St. Kennedy could’ve removed him from office any time, sitting in a capital named after a slave holder. While said dollars feature an abundance of slave holders.
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I hesitate referring to any person of power in Nazi Germany (and a member of the party) as a “small fish.”
It’s one thing to be a product of time and era; it’s another altogether to support a system of genocide and forced labor during a time when the world had long rejected anything related to those concepts.
If we are going to move away from individuals such as John Campbell, let’s be complete in that commitment while also being smart about it.
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Wait, was Campbell as much of a chiseler on the per-word rate as Gernsback? If so, he may be partially responsible for encouraging both Hubbard’s logorrheic prose and, on the basis the story of its origin, his horrible cult.
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If you want them to name the award for Valerie Solanas for her achievements as a powerful writer of dystopic and satiric sci-fi, you can just say so.
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I’m not sure why we still refer to this period of SF publishing as a ”golden age”. Most of the writing was mediocre, most of the characters were cardboard, the plots were usually rudimentary. Yes, the whole idea of SF had become more visible, if hardly mainstream. Yes, some great authors got published. However, it’s taken all this time to get SF to be more inclusive of viewpoints as well as creators, to embrace a wider view of what imaging the future can look like, to require more than adequate writing to show off your neat idea. I’d rather call the time we are in now closer to a golden age than the 40s-60s.
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Is that why he managed to find time for being actively enthusiastic about slavery?
I’d be vastly more sympathetic to this argument if it were a case of “$AUTHOR/$FIGURE ignores issues of day to focus on work”; both because that would actually be ‘little time to spare’; and because the business of digging people up and then dressing them down for being merely morally adequate, rather than above average or heroic, is more genuinely sanctimonious and unreasonable.
I don’t think we can make a good faith argument that this is what is going on here, however. The guy dedicated plenty of time to politics, and the politics he chose to indulge in are being judged. He’s not being castigated for having his nose in his books and failing to join The Correct Movement.
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Regarding to the individual harm he’s done by using slave labor, he’s small fish. Fewer slaves than Washington. Far fewer than Jefferson, who is on the two dollar bill and has dozens of schools named after him, despite being a rapist.
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Before dealing with any other issue, people should wait for Washington DC to rename itself?
Pointless whataboutism.
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