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.
Conversation
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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Haha nice stunt
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“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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Replying to
Sturgeon is on the margins of this story throughout, as told in the book, but not part of the central foursome. Like Newman on Seinfeld.

