Reprint: Transhumanity

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Arthur C Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Charles Darwin, Christopher Evans, Frederik Pohl, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, Jack Finney, James Tiptree Jr, John W. Campbell, Martin Caidin, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Silverberg, S Fowler Wright, T.H. Huxley

We’re getting close to the end of the series of Cognitive Mapping columns I wrote for Vector. This one first appeared in Vector 194, July-August 1997.

Reprint: Space

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Arthur C Clarke, Cyrano de Bergerac, Douglas Adams, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Fred Hoyle, H.G. Wells, Hal Clement, Hugo Gernsback, Iain Banks, James Blish, James Tiptree Jr, Johannes Kepler, John W. Campbell, Jules Verne, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson

This is another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. In this instance it first appeared in Vector 190 (November-December 1996).

Reprint: Mars

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Arthur C Clarke, Ben Bova, C.S. Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Elisabeth Malartre, George Griffiths, Giovanni Schiaparelli, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, H.G. Wells, Ian McDonald, Ian Watson, John W. Campbell, Kim Stanley Robinson, Paul McAuley, Percival Lowell, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Z. Gallun, Roger Zelazny, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Terry Bisson

Another Cognitive Mapping column. This one, which discusses one of science fiction’s great objects of desire, appeared in Vector 214, November-December 2000:

Hard SF Redux

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Alfred Bester, Clifford Simak, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, F. Orlin Tremaine, Frederik Pohl, Ian Sales, Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Ted Chiang, Theodore Sturgeon, Thomas M. Disch, Tom Godwin, Ursula K. Le Guin

In 1937, John Wood Campbell, Jr, who had held a variety of dead-end jobs up to that point, was hired as an assistant editor at Street & Smith working on Astounding. Within the year, the then editor of Astounding, F. Orlin Tremaine, moved up in the Street & Smith hierarchy and Campbell, with next to no editorial experience, found himself running the magazine, which he continued to do for the next several decades.

Campbell was a reasonably proficient writer of ‘superscience’ stories, the sort of over-the-top extravaganzas that had come to dominate pulp science fiction in the 20s and 30s; but he achieved more under the pseudonym ‘Don A. Stuart’ with stories that were rather more restrained in their invention and melancholy in their affect. When he took on the editorial role at Astounding, he stopped writing; that creativity was instead channelled into the ideas he fed to his favoured stable of writers. One of the peculiarities of Campbell’s editorship of Astounding, at least during his first decade or so in that role (you don’t hear these stories attached to the magazine by the time he was changing its name to Analog), was the extent to which he fed ideas to his authors. I am sure any editor worth their salt is likely to suggest an idea to an author now and then, but the mythology attached to Campbell would have us believe that most of the great stories that appeared in Astounding during its heyday came directly from Campbell himself. And there is enough commonality in these stories, enough sense that they are the children of Don A. Stuart, to lend some credence to the myth.

Reprint: Hard Right

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Arthur C Clarke, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Greg Egan, Hal Clement, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Tom Godwin

My discussion of ‘The Cold Equations’ yesterday seemed to generate quite a bit of interest, so I thought I’d follow it up with this article, in which I consider why I characterise hard sf as intrinsically right wing. ‘Hard Right’ was first published in Argentus 8, December 2008.

Reprint: The Cold Equations

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James Gunn, John W. Campbell, Mark Bould, Sherryl Vint, Tom Godwin

My post about Histories the other day sparked a discussion on Twitter that ended up revolving around ‘The Cold Equations’ by Tom Godwin. It seems appropriate, therefore, to reprint this piece about the story that formed one of my ‘In Short’ columns in Vector. The column was first published in Vector 271, Winter 2012.

Histories

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Adam Roberts, Algis Budrys, Brian Aldiss, Donald Sassoon, Gary Westfahl, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, Lester Del Rey, Mark Bould, Nicholas Ruddick, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Sherryl Vint

I seem to have been immersed in various histories of science fiction lately. Or rather, since I still have my mind on the project I started but sort-of abandoned many years ago but can never quite bring myself to forget, I’ve found myself hyper-aware of historical perspectives on sf.

For a start, I have been working my way through Donald Sassoon’s monumental work, The Culture of the Europeans, a book that is so heavy it is almost impossible to carry, but that is unfailingly fascinating to read. And as I read through it, I keep being startled by ideas or bits of information that would belong in my own history of British science fiction. So I start to jot down notes. Unfortunately, my notes for the project are not actually in good order, there are three or four notebooks, scraps of paper, odd cuttings, and god knows how many pages of One Note, and I need to wrestle it all into some sort of shape.