Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright

Author:John C. Wright [Wright, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Castalia House
Published: 2014-05-02T14:00:00+00:00

The Big Three of Science Fiction

As a bit of a relief to my readers who are no doubt weary of hearing my Jeremiads and screeds against the evils both political and philosophical which corrupt the modern world, let us turn from the disappointments of today to yesterday’s golden dreams of tomorrow, and talk about the three major science fiction writers of Campbell’s Golden Age.

The Big Three are Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and—wait for it—A.E. van Vogt.

Perhaps you have read books by the first two and never heard of the third. That is sad but not surprising. Perhaps, being a lover of triads, you thought the third Big Name of the Golden Age should be Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury.

Admired as these authors were and are, no one in the day considered them one of the Big Three. Van Vogt was, for a time, bigger than Asimov and Heinlein in popularity. I have seen articles, including the notoriously unreliable Wikipedia, list one or the other of Clarke and Bradbury as the third of the triad. It is partly to dispel this disturbing tendency toward historical revisionism that I write this article.

For neither of these were Campbell authors, and, indeed, I would argue that Arthur C. Clarke is from an older tradition of science fiction than Heinlein and Asimov, and is an heir to H.G. Wells, whereas Bradbury was a man before his time, and fathered a younger tradition. He was “New Wave” a precursor to character-driven SF, years before the New Wave was new. So even if Clarke and Bradbury are cherished men of the Golden Age, they were not of Campbell’s Golden Age. Neither Clarke nor Bradbury wrote in the genre Campbell established.

I cannot speak with any authority about the economic conditions of the time, but I do know that a man could make a living wage in the 1930s and 1940s just by short story sales if he could sell regularly even to the lower scale magazines, the pulps.

And if he sold a story to the high scale magazines, the slicks, one story could pay his rent and grocery bills for a year. Magazines were the primary source of cheap popular entertainment, more ubiquitous than talkies and more portable than radio. They had a power over the popular imagination unimaginable these days.

Likewise, I cannot say anything about the condition of the genre from my own memory, since this was some twenty years or more before my time, but reading omnivorously as I did of everything in the genre that existed in my youth, any reader could come away with a fairly accurate impression of the state of the genre before and after John W. Campbell, Jr. during his tenure on Astounding Science Fiction later called Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Indeed, the change of the name itself would give anyone a clue about that change. Aside from a few reprints of literate yet readable speculations from England, the works of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, and excruciatingly, (if not

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