my introduction to goncharov was watching a flash animation in 2005 called “Bongcharov” which was basically just a recap of the movie but with epic weed jokes. I didn’t realise it was actually a real thing for another like 10 years lmao
“She is steered mighty strangely, for she doesn’t mind the hand on the wheel; changes about with every puff of wind. We’ll hear more of her before this time tomorrow.”
me, pointing at the perpetual memory of John W Campbell: “FUCK THAT GUY IN PARTICULAR”
oh? Give us the dirt on him
@fancyfrogg
John W Campbell was a major figure in early sci fi; an author of science fiction (whose notable works include Who Goes There?, which was adapted into The Thing multiple times) and significantly was editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later called Analog Science Fiction and Fact), from 1937 and thus the golden age of science fiction and its foundational era during which many of the tropes and concepts that would characterize the genre emerged, until his death in 1971.
It’s not really an exaggeration at all to say that Campbell was THE shaping force in science fiction. Among other things, to get published at all in Astounding Science Ficiton, which was THE magazine for the genre and essentially the only way to get published unless you could do so independently, you had to abide by his fairly strict regulations and personal tastes; he apparently flat out turned down everything that did not stick to his preferences. He has been said to have shaped modern science fiction his entirety, as well as the careers of notable sci fi authors such as Isaac Asimov, Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.
This in, turn, leads us to a lot of the problems and why I resent him so much; he was also a noted racist and his bigotry is fairly easy to see as having a influence in the treatment of aliens in the genre, as well as imperialistic attitudes that led to colonization appeal becoming an element in the genre; he spoke out in favor of continued segregation (among several factors that caused a rift between him and other science fiction writers of the time. He spoke out in FAVOR of slavery claiming that it provided them a better standard of living than in their ancestral homelands, and even went so far to claim that some people were ‘natural slaves’ and would be happier in perpetual servitude.
A glance at some of his thoughts indicates the man was aggressively racist and clearly felt that POC were intellectually inferior to Europeans (or to be plain, whites) and outright referred to the Civil Rights movement as an ‘arrogant defiance of law’. This, in turn, leads us to why I feel his influence was so damaging towards the sci fi genre; these ideas also influenced his depictions of nonhumans in general, and it seems clear that he treated aliens as stand-ins for PoCs in contrast to how all his characters, both those he wrote and the stories he allowed, universally were white men.
He apparently had a strict blanket ban against depicting alien characters as capable as a human, in intelligence, morality and techhnical skill; going against this had him instantly banning the submitted work, and with the focus on colonizing alien worlds during the golden age of sci fi (particularly with lionizing the idea of killing all alien life to take their land for your own), the parallels are… clear and grotesque. Additionally, he routinely rejected submissions staring POC of any kind, stating that he didn’t think his readership ‘would be able to relate to a black main character’.
So as such, his imperialistic qualities shaped early sci fi at a foundational level. If you agreed with his views, you wrote things he liked; if you didn’t, you didn’t get published. So we see early sci fi with a heavy emphasis on the idea of all aliens being either enemies to oppose without moral qualm or sub-human creatures to be killed off for our convenience; seeing aliens depicted as akin to us on a moral level would have been unheard of. We can see similarities to Victorian fiction in how it depicting non-British in that conquest of them was doing them a FAVOR, or that wholesale slaughter was at worst morally neutral, and simply transferring that to aliens.
While there’s a lot more bullshit involved with this guy (among other things, he thought L Ron Hubbard should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize for Dianetics and by proxy Scientology), this is my grudge against him for what he did to sci fi; his biases and horrible personal ideologies baked in imperialism, biogtry and human-centric outlooks at both a textual and meta level.
To this day we see the effects of it; while we don’t see aliens dehumanized as severely, we do still see ‘kiling them all off is fine if it benefits us or we make them seem bad enough’ as a fairly common plot thread, and I would argue even Humans As Space Orcs (which is less violent in tone) to be variant of this concept; it mostly involves humans just existing and every alien race reacting to them in scandalized awe so that humanity’s most mundane traits are considered perfection incarnate; that we are INHERENTLY special, or that all aliens are dirty and disgusting brutes that don’t understand the concepts of basic hygiene and medical care. (This isn’t made up, I saw that in a writing prompt here once.) The imperialist attitudes are, again, baked in, and its largely because of THIS FUCKING DIPSHIT RIGHT HERE.
Linking a video by Extra History that goes into detail on him
!!!!!! as a lover of old sci fi this is a VERY IMPORTANT read and incredibly important to know and understand the motives and history behind so many foundational tropes. This is also a very, very good reason we should all think about ways to create sci fi that defies these conventions.
