Review: Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

I read Alec Nevala-Lee's group biography of the editor and writers at the heart of Astounding Science Fiction and Fact in its "Golden Age of science fiction" glory days (Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction) back when it came out with considerable interest. As one with some prior familiarity with the material I found it well-researched and lucidly written, making for a brisk and informative read--but also a very, very unbalanced one.

I remember that reading the book it seemed to me there was a great deal that I would have liked to know more about, like Astounding editor John Campbell's ideas about what science fiction is, and ought to be--and that far from breaking new ground here Nevala-Lee actually covered this very important matter less well than a good deal of other work I had previously seen (including, frankly, my own in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry). I also wanted to know more about an aspect of the group that had long interested me and regarding which I had thus far found little deep or comprehensive treatment, the way in which Campbell and many other members of his group, amid the World Crisis of the 1930s and 1940s, the years of Great Depression, the ascent of fascism, world war and the beginning of a nuclear age threatening far, far worse, were less interested in some kind of reconstruction of society as so many were than an elitist vision of exceptional individuals transcending the mass somehow as the only hope for the human race, with this "transcendence" extending to outright superpowers (for psi is certainly such). Nevala-Lee says something of these interests of the group's members in the book, can hardly do otherwise given how large they loomed in the not merely private but public thinking of all of them, but more in the course of stressing the foibles of the group's members, all as I suppose that were he really interested in this he would have changed his story's cast of characters slightly--perhaps brought in A.E. van Vogt, the author of the psi-themed Slan and the "Non-Aristotelian logic"-themed Null-A novels, as he left out Isaac Asimov (who was aloof from this particular craziness).

But he didn't. Because his interest, whether personal or commercial, was in the Biggest Names as seen by a later generation (according to which rule it had to be Asimov, not van Vogt, who got his attention here), and frankly in their failings as seen in the post-Gamergate, post-#MeToo, identity politics-in-overdrive era, emphasizing attention to this side of the issue even where he didn't break much new ground--except perhaps in the way Nevala-Lee marshaled his information and presented them to the audience (ditto). If few were surprised by Campbell's racism (certainly anyone who had ever read his conveniently republished editorials!), a good many more persons, myself included, were unpleasantly surprised by the presentation of Asimov in line with the post-Gamergate feminist stereotype of the predatory male nerd with all its very heavy weight of baggage.

I have seen no one question the claims that Nevala-Lee makes about Asimov's behavior in regard to women, and certainly have no intention of making any "It was a different time" excuses for it. (Indeed, I think that the antics reported about him weren't considered good behavior then any more than they are now.) Still, there is no questioning the extreme "presentism" of Nevala-Lee's broader attitude toward his subjects, which is evident in the small things as in the large, as when he criticizes the young Asimov for not having worried about the White maleness of fandom when he found kindred spirits in the Futurians fan club. Setting aside the extent to which he was applying a twenty-first century, postmodernist standard of "diversity" that even now not everyone accepts as fair or right to a group of young people circa 1940, the fact remains that at that time the small and essentially local New York-based group was living in a city that was according to the official statistics 93 percent White, and so rather less unrepresentative of the social environment they were living in than Nevala-Lee implies in his risibly sanctimonious tone--all as it was not then the common assumption that any grouping in which women were not represented at least in proportion to their numbers in society at large must be excluding them out of structural sexism first, last and always. Alas, such indifference to historical fact, and such moralizing, has always been central to the postmodernist package--and the response to Nevala-Lee's book makes it clear that its author was rewarded rather than penalized by the commentariat for such failings amid a broad assault on the genre's pantheon of icons, canon of works, traditional concerns, generally acknowledged line of development in the name of "inclusiveness." Especially given that the particular science fiction tradition of Campbell and his cohorts was by that point long in decline--perhaps by the time Nevala-Lee's book appeared (2018), already ended--it can seem a reflection of the disproportion between the objects over which people fight, and the investment they make in fighting over them, when the matter is the rancid politics of status.