2. John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, was both a visionary and complete crackpot. He was a formative influence on many careers (Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert). Also a promoter of, variously, a perpetual motion machine, ESP, slavery, smoking & Dianetics
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3. Campbell was type of contrarian crank of the type all too familiar to us today: a failed engineer, he banged off editorials on the merits of slavery (calling for its revival), deriding the idea that smoking was bad for you & promoting Dianetics as a cure for health problems
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4. Lately there has been a lot of controversy about Campbell in science fiction circles because of his pretty brutal racism (his name was taken off a big award). Frank Herbert's Dune itself shows Campbell's ambiguous legacy was sometimes use against him.
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5. Campbell's Analog was the top-paying sci fi magazine in its time & lots of writers cynically tailored their stories to fit Campbell's various obsessions: ESP, genetic supermen, human conquest of universe, eugenics etc. Frank Herbert put all that in Dune: but with a twist
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6. One way to read Dune is that Herbert took all the things that made Campbell excited (ESP, superman, galactic imperial conquest, eugenics) but showed the downsides: he inverted Campbell's universe (mostly in later books not serialized in Analog).
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7. Lots more going on in Dune: a prescient critique of resource extraction imperialism & US foreign policy, the myth of Lawrence of Arabia, Catholicism, Islam, Indigenous cultures (particularly the Quileute).
@DavidKlion & I talk about this & more here:https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/dune-bugs?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source= …Show this thread
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Pretty good pedigree if u ask me.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Well, Campbell gave us Heinlein who gave us "Starship Troopers". The novel itself was serialised (as "Starship Soldier") in F&SF in 1959
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Interestingly both arrive at the same time: Herbert crafted
#Dune to be the anti-#Foundation: His analogue (!) for Seldon’s Foundation-the Bene Gesserit- have their long range plan for humanity upended by the unforeseen psychic Paul, Asimov’s “mule” flipped from villain to hero -
From villain to hero…and then to genocidal murderer. Herbert to fans.pic.twitter.com/rIPCn2sphG
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