John W. Campbell,
1910-
1971,
American SF editor and author.
Campbell was never much of a writer. He published his first story in
1920. His earliest work was clumsy pulp fiction, not much better than most
SF in those years. With time, he improved slightly. (Or more than slightly, as
ximenez observes below).
Campbell is best remembered as the editor of
Astounding Science Fiction (renamed
Analog in later years), where in the
1940s he "discovered", nurtured, and groomed most of the "
Golden Age" generation of important
SF writers like
Robert A. Heinlein and
A. E. van Vogt, along with a few insignificant "filler" writers like
Isaac Asimov. Campbell found
SF in a muddle of
Vast Corruscating Energies and
bug-eyed monsters, worked his will upon it, and left it as a medium that could support works like
Dune and writers like
Jack Vance and
Avram Davidson. Vance and Davidson were not Cambpell protégés, nor could have been; Campbell knew what he liked, and what he liked was
Man vs. The Universe (Man wins with a knockout in the last round) and whatnot
1. Well, that stuff gets old. What matters is that he insisted on decent writing, plausible characterization, and science that wasn't entirely absurd. Campbell was one of the first to take
science fiction seriously, and he demanded that his writers do the same. If they wouldn't, he found others who would. He did for
SF something like what
Ezra Pound did for
the Moderns.
In
1938, Campbell wrote
Who Goes There?, a, uh,
competent novella which was later rendered into film in
The Thing, starring
Kurt Russell.
The Thing is notable only in that it's less of an atrocity than most "
SF" movies. It's no more faithful to the novel than you'd expect, which is to say no more than it should be.
Robert A. Heinlein's
The Sixth Column is based on a plot provided by Cambpell.
1 Well,
Vance wasn't always so far off thematically, but something about him just doesn't fit . . .
ximenez: As it happens, I've got
Before the Golden Age at home, and I even read it, but none of it seems to have stuck in my mind -- which supports your
assertion very nicely :) I hadn't known "
Nightfall" was from a Campbell idea; that's one of the very few
Asimov things I've ever liked.
As for "
geek culture", such as it is, the word "
geek" defined itself out from under me when it became a
youth-culture marketing phenomenon aimed at
juvenile illiterates obsessed with
comic books,
tedious kiddie cartoons, and
cheap television shows, who write
HTML "code" and
trivial Perl scripts when they want to get
really technical.
Rant,
rant . . .
Gamaliel:
Carpenter's is the version of
The Thing I refer to above -- I
love that movie! Of course, I haven't seen the
1951 version, but it's hard for me to imagine how it could be any better. 'Course, all I care about in movies is
special effects.
YMMV, clearly.