Campbell badly wanted sci-fi to be relevant to the war and got investigated and a slap on the wrist for running a story speculating too close to the Manhattan project. He did it on purpose to get exactly such a response. Ultimately all he got to do was produce sonar manuals.
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It’s weird reading about this failed attempt at relevance in parallel with actual accounts of wartime R&D. Sci-fi as the insecure fanboy of the real thing, trying to Mary Sue itself into the real thing. Much fractal, so irony.
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Oddly this desire for relevance has never been any part of my own motivation for sci-fi experiments. My intentions are pure escapist self-indulgence.
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But I guess in 1942, science and science fiction still seemed like vaguely comparable human activities at the same level, kinda like programming vs using the internet did in the 90s.
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I hope there’s a similar book available for the counterculture era... PKD/Le Guin etc. And one for Jules Verne to Amazing era.
Why is there no proper Big History of all of science fiction? Or is there. It seems like a manageable project. About the size of a Caro book.
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The difference between good genre fiction and literary fiction is quantity over quality. You have to read a vast amount and absorb the intellectual currents across the aggregate. If you just read a couple you won’t get the appeal. If you read a few dozen from a period, you will.
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I’ve read almost all of Asimov and Clarke, and samples of most in the top 10-15 I think. Taken as a whole, the genre is a sort of fandom of technological civilization. It’s own fandom is 2nd order. This book captures that spirit.
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Lol apparently upsetting the Seldon plan was Campbell’s idea and initially Asimov didn’t want to do it. The result was the Mule, probably the most interesting episode in the series.
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Campbell was a tactical humbug, pulling PR stunts to position himself and science fiction in the post-war mythology. Some sort of greater good/creating what we would today call transhumans type mission. Reminds me a bit of Elon Musk, the way he appears to have pwned the plot.
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Looks like Hubbard wanted glory for himself, while Campbell wanted it for the greater glory of science fiction and the role he thought it ought to play in society. Both succeeded. Hubbard created a self-aggrandizing religion. Campbell faked it so future sci-if could make it.
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Replying to
“Cybernetics is the big new idea of the times, and it is my opinion Hubbard...has got cybernetics, and got it bad; this is to say, he has got it wrong” — Yvette Gittleson, American Scientist, 1950
Wiener strikes again. The 40s/50s apparently just contained like 10 people
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Current ranking of who I want to model my Act 2 after. I’m 2-15 older than any of them at the point in the story (1950) they’re at right now.
Campbell (1910, 40)
Asimov (1920, 30)
Heinlein (1907, 43)
Hubbard (1911, 39)
Similar fork in road though. Subculture —> mainstream leap
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Might seem like a weird comparison, but it seems reasonable actually. At that point, pulp sci-fi was about as marginal a subculture as insight-porn blogosphere is today. These 4 were not famous then the way they are now. But by 1950 each had the option to go mainstream or go home
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Unit economics sidebar. There’s an episode where Astounding tries to go up in quality from cheap digest to glossy “slicks” but fails to gain a foothold there, and goes back down to cheapie digest. Equivalent of serious blog trying to go magazine-scale in 2012 say.
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Today we don’t realize this, but all print is not the same. Print saw its own Moore’s law type cost curve, with each gen creating a cheaper class of media if you could fit the rigid specs to make unit economics work for you. Pulp fiction got its name from wood-pulp cheap paper.
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Think of pulp vs slick/glossy kinda like Wordpress blogs vs mainstream media websites built on bespoke web publishing stacks. Heinlein in 1950 trying to break out of astounding and into glossies is like blogger trying to get a New Yorker byline today.
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So where are we now, circa 1950?
Campbell is parlaying nuke-age attention on SF into mainstream influence
Heinlein is using YA fiction to slingshot into mainstream, and trying to get foot into space program
Hubbard has found cultish feet
Asimov starting to flex
Reading on...
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On a darker note, all 4 have woman trouble. Campbell’s wife Dona has left him, Heinlein’s wife Leslyn is out as an alcoholic, Hubbard has hooked up with clingy 18 year old he now wants to dump, Asimov is a mildly frustrated newlywed turning into a low-intensity harasser.
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Still wrapping my head around the fact that letters to magazines = blog comments.
Magazines printed addresses of letter writers so sliding into dms = writing to other fans.
Early fan conferences *were* the basic Facebook groups and slacks. Not escalations from something else.
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Magazines also ran reader polls like we do Twitter polls. The community dynamics, rivalries among different kinds of fan clubs etc all sound very, very familiar. We just do it all online now.
It truly is astounding (heh!) all this rhymes with blogosphere of last decade.
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To us all this sounds very heavyweight. But back then this *was* the lightest-weight, cheapest way to get anything done.
Fans coordinated regional meetups and stuff through *postcards* not even phone!
Stamp = 3c, postcard = SMS, letter = email
Local phone call = 5c
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Imagine how you’d form a group then
1. Postcards to letter writers you “follow”
2. Exchange of letters
3. Bunch of postcards to invite people to regional meetup
4. Asimov might show up
5. Escalate to phone for locals you meet more often on short notice/impromptu
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Phone was also limited because a) landlines b) answering machines weren’t yet big (first commercial failure = 1949, first successful ones ~1960)
Local postcards would have been easier, and as quick if high chance phone wouldn’t be answered it you had to leave a message anyway
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This all feels alien to me though I did grow up in landline/postcard/letter era. We did pen-pal crap in the 80s (my sister had one, I never bothered). Long-distance was letter-writing. “Trunk” calls were too expensive except for emergencies. Local phone was also sparingly used.
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In general I did very little non-locally except join a kids club sponsored by our regional newspaper which sent me a dumbass badge, membership card, and some stickers. I had one letter published in a comic book I subscribed to (more stickers as reward). Circa 1982-86 I think.
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Okay now we’re at dawn of Scientology, 1950 or so. Hubbard has convinced Campbell his stuff is real. They’re experimenting with hypnosis, regression to past lives, scopolamine, barbiturates. Terminology like engrams, clear, preclear, auditing is coming together. Dianetics time!
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Hubbard picked up his shtick via disciple of Alesteir Crowley, english occultist. This is outside scope of the book, but clearly occult and SoCal new age religion scene was the other parent of Scientology if sci-fi was the first parent.
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Heh, early Scientology is reminding me of current blogosphere interest in trauma. Question is who’s the Hubbard of this crowd? A charismatic older blogger with vaguely occult leanings and a line in technobabble-infused talk therapy and a self-improvement/perfection protocol? 🤔
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Oh shit, I know exactly where to map this. Won’t say it out aloud to avoid beef provocation.
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Gonna skip over Scientology bit in my live-tweeting.
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Okay maybe a snippet or two. This bit made me actually lol
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The book’s understanding of Wiener and cybernetics is weak. Planting a Gell-Mann amnesia flag for this bit. Like most outsiders he credits Wiener with way too much. He was at best a sort of P. T. Barnum of control theory with a few contributions.
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