The result is that the old question “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” is a very good philosophical question indeed. The only answer I can give, now, is “I know too little about genetics to be able to give a reply based on understanding; I cannot compute the risks and benefits involved for the next few generations.”
In another letter, Campbell considered the question of whether he would “condemn” a man for the color of his skin: “Essentially, I am forced to answer, ‘Yes.’ His skin color is genetically determined; it is not something he chose. But his mental-emotional patterns are also genetically determined. . . . If he can’t choose one—why expect him to be able to choose the other?”
For a man who took pride in questioning the beliefs of others, Campbell’s opinions on race were horrifyingly unexamined. He had always believed that intelligence was the paramount factor in human life, and, by that logic, if a group was disadvantaged, it had to be due to statistical inferiority. Asimov’s patience with such views could only go so far. Less than two years after his break with Heinlein, Campbell was risking a breach with his most loyal author, who later wrote, “I think [Campbell] saw himself as fulfilling Socrates’ function as gadfly. . . . There were times when I feverishly wished I had a cup of hemlock handy—for him, of course.”
Peg saved them. After they had traded blows for a few months, she stepped in: “Any more and the friendship will be destroyed, and this argument is not worth a friendship.” They called a truce, which saved Campbell from alienating Asimov forever—although it also made it easier for the author to write for other editors at a crucial point in his career. And their differences occasionally resurfaced. Writing to Asimov in 1957, Campbell indulged in a twisted kind of psychohistory, saying that Africans were the only race never to develop “a high-order civilization,” despite the presence of nearby Egypt: “The Negro does not learn from example.”
Campbell’s views also began to infect the magazine. In 1955, he had published the serial The Long Way Home, by Poul Anderson, which featured a slave who refused to be freed, arguing that she was better off the way she was now. Anderson saw this as a minor plot point, but the editor seized on it as “a new heresy,” writing to Heinlein in their discussion of Citizen of the Galaxy, “Slavery is a useful educational system; it has a place in the development of a race, just as the tyranny of parents has a place in the educational development of an individual.”
Heinlein responded that he didn’t have the time to answer Campbell’s “interesting letter” at length. Unlike Asimov, he knew better than to take the bait. Yet he never forgot it, and it inspired a novel, Farnham’s Freehold, that was conceived in part as a response. Its characters—including the protagonist’s alcoholic wife—are thrown by an atomic bomb into a future in which blacks enslave whites, underlining the absurdity of the notion that slavery could be preferable for anyone. Unfortunately, his black ruling class also engages in cannibalism, distracting from whatever point he wanted to make, and the book as a whole was a frustrating misfire.
If Heinlein’s experience pointed to the fine line that the genre had to walk with regard to race, Campbell was untroubled by it, and racial issues began to appear frequently in his editorials. In 1960 he offered readers his own definition of slavery: “Slavery is a system in which one group of individuals, the slaves, are forced by another group, the masters, to learn something they do not want to learn.” Before long, he was arguing that blacks and whites had different bell curves for intelligence. On a visit to the office, the author Harry Harrison found himself shouting in exasperation to Campbell and Harry Stine, “Gentlemen, you can’t reduce everything in life to a bell-shaped curve!” In response, they said, “Yes, you can!”
Campbell’s sense of oppression throughout his life made him unsympathetic to calls for social justice, and as the sixties unfolded, he grew even more reactionary. In 1962, he editorialized for eight pages about being given an unfair traffic ticket. Three years later, his views on the police were strikingly different:
The police have as their function the imposition of discipline on those who lack self-discipline. . . . To one who denies that discipline should exist, this is torture. It’s deliberately inflicted pain—emotional pain of frustration at the very least. Therefore, the police are clearly being brutal. . . . Statistically speaking, the Negroes lack self-discipline.
This is incredibly painful to read, and the question of how Campbell’s views affected the fiction he published is central to any consideration of his legacy. He certainly lacked any interest in diversity: “Think about it a bit, and you’ll realize why there is so little mention of blacks in science fiction; we see no reason to go saying ‘Lookee lookee lookee! We’re using blacks in our stories! See the Black Man. See him in a space ship!’ ” The implication was that protagonists should be white males by default—a stance that he might not even have seen as problematic.
Campbell argued elsewhere that he had no idea what a writer’s race might be when he read a submission: “If Negro authors are extremely few—it’s solely because extremely few Negroes both wish to, and can, write in open competition.” He often touted the high sales of the magazine in black neighborhoods, which he attributed to its policy of “minimizing race problems,” but it never occurred to him that the dearth of minority writers might be caused by the lack of characters who looked like them, or that he had any ability or obligation to address the situation as an editor.
These assumptions affected his treatment of Samuel R. Delany, the most important black writer the genre had ever produced. Campbell rejected several stories from Delany, but he had high regard for his talents, repeatedly stating, “The guy can write, and he has a lot of brilliant ideas.” In 1967, after winning his first Nebula Award, Delany—who had briefly met Campbell at a convention—submitted his novel Nova. He recalled of its rejection, “Campbell . . . didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. . . . Otherwise, he rather liked it.”
Campbell expressed similar views about other minorities. In 1966, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, he encountered a young fan named Joe Haldeman, who had risen early to smoke a cigarette. Seeing his University of Oklahoma sweatshirt, Campbell went off on a speech about Native Americans—unlike blacks, he believed, they couldn’t be enslaved, so they died instead. In the thirties, he had written in the magazine, “The aboriginal race of Australia are . . . useless beggars without self-respect hanging on the fringes of the white man’s civilization.”
On the subject of homosexuality, Campbell shared the casual homophobia of his era, and his letters were peppered with such terms as “queer,” “fairy,” and “pansy.” He wrote to Asimov in 1958:
And Ike, my friend, consider the case of a fairy, a queer. They can, normally, be spotted about as far off as you can spot a mulatto. I’ll admit a coal-black Negro can be spotted a bit further than a fairy can, but the normal mulatto can’t. Sure, I know a lot of queers don’t look that way—but they’re simply “passing.”
In his editorials, Campbell stated that homosexuality was a sign of cultural decline, and he had thought that it could be cured by dianetics, approvingly citing “successful” cases to Heinlein: “My God! You should hear the things that actually lie behind homosexuality—what sort of unspeakable violence it takes to aberrate the sexual drive in human beings that badly.”
When it came to women, Campbell was dismissive of feminists, saying that they demanded equal rights but refused to give up their “girlish special privileges.” He believed that men and women thought in inherently different ways, and that a woman’s greatest contribution was to ask, “Are you sure, dear?” He wrote elsewhere, “No woman has ever attained first-rank competence in literature in any Indo-European language.” But he also published such authors as Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Jane Rice, Judith Merril, Wilmar H. Shiras, Katherine MacLean, Kate Wilhelm, Pauline Ashwell, Anne McCaffrey, and Alice Bradley Sheldon, whom he knew as James Tiptree, J
r.
Campbell admired Islam, but his feelings toward the Jews were more complicated. Asimov wrote firmly, “He never, not once, made me feel uncomfortable over the fact that I was Jewish.” Yet the editor also referred to Mort Weisinger in passing as “a fairly decent little Jew-boy,” and he famously asked Milton A. Rothman to write as Lee Gregor. As a joke, Randall Garrett once proposed that Silverberg use the pseudonym “Calvin M. Knox,” on the assumption that the editor preferred gentile names, without telling him that the middle initial stood for “Moses.” When Silverberg revealed this fact years later, Campbell replied, “You ever hear of Isaac Asimov?”
When he tried to demonstrate a lack of prejudice, it didn’t always go as intended. At lunch one day with Philip Klass, who wrote as William Tenn, Campbell saw a military pin in his lapel and asked if he had seen a concentration camp. Klass replied that he had. Campbell was clearly impressed, and before they ordered, he covered Klass’s hand with his own: “Phil, I want you to know something I’ve always believed. I’ve always believed the Jews are Homo superior.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Klass said. When Campbell asked why, he explained, “Because it’s racism. And at the moment I don’t want to hear any—I can’t live with any kind of racist formulation.”
Campbell didn’t get it. “You didn’t understand me. I said superior—Homo superior.”
Klass informed him that it was racist either way, but the editor didn’t get the point. Campbell later recounted his own version of the conversation in Klass’s presence: “The man didn’t hear the prefix. I said superior. He didn’t hear the prefix.” And he never understood why Klass might have been offended.
His most fraught relationship with a Jewish writer was, inevitably, with the combative Harlan Ellison. Ellison had written to the editor in the late fifties to complain about the excess of psionics in Astounding, but he also asked him years later to contribute a story to his groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions. Campbell declined, saying that he had a “shocker” that he couldn’t write himself, and even if he did, he would want to save it for his own magazine.
Ellison thought that Campbell disliked him because he was Jewish, while their mutual friend Ben Bova felt that their differences were more temperamental. In Dangerous Visions, Ellison mocked the editor’s submissive circle of writers and referred to “John W. Campbell, Jr., who used to edit a magazine that ran science fiction, called Astounding, and who now edits a magazine that runs a lot of schematic drawings, called Analog.” Campbell dismissed Ellison in turn as a “destructive, rather than constructive” genius: “He needs a muzzle more than a platform.”
Bova finally persuaded Ellison to submit their collaboration “Brillo” using a pseudonym, but it was accidentally sent under both of their names. Ellison was convinced that it would be rejected, and after hearing that the editor was taking it instead, he became ecstatic: “He’s buying it?” Bova later thanked Campbell: “Harlan’s always wanted to win your approval.” Yet the author’s suspicions might not have been entirely off the mark. In 1966, Campbell wrote of Ellison:
I don’t know whether it’s the hyper-defensive attitude of the undersize or what, but he’s an insulting little squirt with a nasty tongue. He’s one of the type that earned the appellation “kike”; as Einstein, Disraeli, and thousands of others have demonstrated, it ain’t racial—it’s personal.
As the decade wore on, Campbell’s political stances continued to harden, with his reflexive contrarianism colliding with the progressive tendencies of many of his readers. Asimov argued that he was on the wrong team, comparing civil rights to other causes that Campbell had defended:
In fact, John, I think you’re on my side and as soon as you get it through your head that the Negroes are the way-out people facing the authoritarianism of Big Whitedom, you’re going to come charging out to fight on the side of the Negro, as you have staunchly borne the standards for everything from dianetics to Krebiozen.
If Asimov truly hoped that Campbell would take up civil rights with the same enthusiasm that he had shown toward Krebiozen—an alternative cancer treatment that briefly caught his eye—he was disappointed. In 1968, Campbell complained in an editorial that Democrats and Republicans had become indistinguishable, closing with the startling announcement that he was voting for George Wallace: “I want a chance to vote for a different approach!” In private, he defended his right to cast a protest ballot, although he also conceded that Wallace was “a terrible choice.”
His last years were spent attacking such targets as the protesters at Kent State and the ecologist Rachel Carson, and his contrarianism, which had once been an engine for generating stories, began to limit what he could say or publish. The writer Michael Moorcock saw him as the editor of “a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine,” which, given Campbell’s lifelong war against the establishment, was profoundly ironic. Despite his belief in new modes of thought, he was hostile to change that he couldn’t control. The counterculture shared his interest in transformation and alternative viewpoints, but not in supermen or psionic machines.
As the country around him underwent the seismic upheavals that he had long prophesized, he dug in his heels, losing his chance to participate seriously in the most important social conversations of his time—and the question of whether his statements reflected his true feelings is secondary to the damage that they caused. In his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., told the haunting story of an American secret agent posing as a Nazi propagandist, concluding, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” And he gave the character a name that must have resonated with many readers: Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
Campbell was reducing his audience at a time when it was already slipping away, and he began to alienate even fans who admired him. One was Barry Malzberg, a volunteer editor for the Science Fiction Writers of America. Malzberg, who was twenty-nine, had adored Campbell for most of his life, and he decided to use his position as an excuse to visit the editor on June 18, 1969.
Their conversation, which lasted for three hours, was a disaster. Malzberg and Campbell spent most of it arguing within earshot of Kay Tarrant, who had remained the one constant at the office. Several years earlier she had suffered a heart attack, taking her out of work for months, which only underlined how indispensible she was—it took five others to do what she handled alone.
As Tarrant listened, she tried not to smile. Malzberg asked Campbell to sympathize with his critics, who were concerned by the dilemmas that technology presented: “These are the issues that are going to matter in science fiction for the next fifty years. It’s got to explore the question of victimization.”
The editor refused to budge. “I’m not interested in victims,” Campbell said calmly. “I’m interested in heroes. I have to be. Science fiction is a problem-solving medium. Man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and, given enough time, can find out.”
“But not everyone is a hero,” Malzberg said. “Not everyone can solve problems.”
“Those people aren’t the stuff of science fiction. If science fiction doesn’t deal with success or the road to success, then it isn’t science fiction at all. Mainstream literature is about failure, a literature of defeat. Science fiction is challenge and discovery.” Campbell’s face lit up. “We’re going to land on the moon in a month and it was science fiction which made all of that possible. Isn’t it wonderful? Thank God I’m going to live to see it.”
“The moon landing isn’t science fiction. It comes from technological advance—”
Campbell broke in. “There’s going to be a moon landing because of science fiction. There’s no argument.”
Malzberg saw that the conversation hadn’t gone as he had hoped, and he stammered that he had to leave. Standing up, he shook the editor’s hand, nodded at Tarrant, and fled. In the corridor, as he pressed the button for the elevator, a sinking sense of the encounter washed over him, and he began to tremble.
A second later, Campbell came around the corner, probably on his way to the bathroom. For an instant, the two men simply looked at each other. At last, the editor’s eyes twinkled.
“Don’t worry about it, son,” Campbell said gently. “I just like to shake ’em up.”
EVEN AS ANALOG LOST GROUND TO ITS COMPETITORS, THERE WAS A GROWING SENSE THAT THE future of science fiction might not lie in the magazines at all. On September 8, 1966, NBC aired the series premiere of Star Trek, which in many ways was an extension of the tradition embodied by Campbell. Gene Roddenberry, its creator, had been turned on to science fiction in his teens by the Astounding of the Tremaine era. He provided pulp covers from his own collection as inspiration to his art directors, counted Asimov and Heinlein among his influences, and turned to the existing ranks of science fiction writers when it came time to hire a writing staff.
To some extent, this was just common sense, but on another level, Roddenberry was positioning himself as the successor to Campbell—an organizer and arranger of the talents of others, in a medium that had the potential to reach an even wider audience. The names on his list of potential writers included Heinlein, Asimov, and Ellison, who went on to write the classic “The City on the Edge of Forever.” He signed Robert Bloch, Sturgeon, and van Vogt, who wrote outlines but was unable to work within the confines of television, while the plot of “Arena,” in which Kirk faced an alien in a fight to the death, was credited to the Astounding story by Frederic Brown.
Roddenberry was laying the groundwork for a fundamental shift in the genre’s center of power, although this development wasn’t immediately obvious. At the World Science Fiction Convention in 1966, he presented a preview of the episode “The Cage.” As the screening began, a man in the front row failed to quiet down, and Roddenberry spoke up: “Hey, fellow, stop talking. That’s my picture they’re starting to show.” The speaker fell silent, and it was only then that Roddenberry was informed that he had scolded Isaac Asimov. He tried to apologize, but Asimov quickly admitted that he had been the one in the wrong.
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