Episode 65: Transcript

Episode: 65: We’re Officially Done with Lovecraft and Campbell

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else. I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:10] I’m Charlie Jane Anders. I’m a science fiction writer who thinks a lot about science.

Annalee: [00:00:14] It’s really true. I actually, I do little quizzes once in a while, and I’ll be like, Charlie are you thinking about science?

Charlie Jane: [00:00:20] I am!

Annalee: [00:00:21] She is!

Charlie Jane: [00:00:23] Quarks!

Annalee: [00:00:23] Just like, at that moment.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:23] Gluons!

Annalee: [00:00:24] It’s amazing. So, in this episode we’re going to talk about two dark influences on the history of science fiction. Two men who were powerful editors and influential writers before World War II, and whose reputations lived on long after their deaths. We’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft, editor of Weird Tales and inventor of the Cthulhu mythos, and John Campbell, editor of Astounding Stories and friend to golden age science fiction giants like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. In fact, Campbell was the first guy to publish Dianetics in the pages of Astounding.

[00:01:04] So we’ll be talking about why these two men were so powerful, but also why there’s a backlash against them right now, and how we can reclaim their contributions without falling prey to their racism and sexism.

[00:01:15] We are incredibly lucky to have an interview that Charlie Jane did with Alec Nevala-Lee, author of a book called Astounding, which chronicles the life of Campbell and his inner circle. All right, here’s the show.

[00:01:29] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:01:55] So let’s start by talking about the recent controversy over Lovecraft and Campbell, which happened at the most recent Hugo Awards, the 2020 Hugos. So, Charlie Jane, give us a quick thumbnail sketch of what the deal is.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:08] So the important backstory you need to know is that H.P. Lovecraft and John W. Campbell have both been kind of recently removed from some of the iconography around the awards. There was actually the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, which was a big deal in the science fiction world, and after a blistering and incredible, and just mind-blowingly awesome speech by Jeanette Ng talking about how Campbell was a fascist—

Annalee: [00:02:37] And that was at last year’s Hugo Awards.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:40] That was in 2019 at the Hugo Awards. Basically everybody realized that it was kind of a scandal that this major award was named after somebody who actually did say things like, we should bring back slavery. And did kind of express really extremely radical racist and fascist views, especially toward the end of his life. And so, his name was taken off the award and meanwhile, around the same time, the World Fantasy Award, which for a long time had been a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, like the actual physical award had been a bust of H.P. Lovecraft by artist Gahan Wilson.

Annalee: [00:03:15] A really horrible bust, by the way.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:18] Gahan Wilson’s art is very caricature-ish and it’s kind of—it’s not a good example of his art, though. It doesn’t—it’s not a particularly nice example of his work and it is very ugly and kind of disturbing to look at because it’s kind of this caricature of this kind of ugly, gross, weird guy. And it’s also a representation of this famous, again, super intense racist who had really kind of disturbing views on a lot of stuff. And so, basically that award statue of this guy, H.P. Lovecraft was changed into a kind of a nice tree or something, I think.

[00:03:53] Basically, in this year, in 2020, first of all the Retro Hugos which celebrate people from the past, from the 1940s where there were conventions but there was no Hugo Awards. The Retro Hugos gave awards to both H.P. Lovecraft and John W. Campbell, and then at the actual non-retro Hugos, the regular Hugo Awards, presenters George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg both kind of went out of their way to talk about Lovecraft and Campbell in glowing terms, and kind of defend their legacy. 

[00:04:25] Since we had just kind of purged them a little bit from the landscape of awards and all that stuff, people were not happy with that.

Annalee: [00:04:32] There was a lot of backlash, there was a lot of anger about feeling like, you know? We just had this debate. We just talked about how we don’t want these men to be honored as part of our community. We’re not saying their memory should be erased, but we don’t want them to be honored, like statues. And suddenly, it was being shoved in our faces again. Like, but these guys were great! And so people were pissed.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:59] I actually just read a book about John W. Campbell called Astounding, by Alec Nevala-Lee, and we actually an interview with him later in the episode. And basically John W. Campbell was this incredibly influential editor who edited Astounding Magazine and helped to create, kind of Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert A. Heinlein.

[00:05:18] But Annalee, who was H.P. Lovecraft and why do we still care about him?

Annalee: [00:05:23] Like Campbell, H.P. Lovecraft was a really important editor in the science fiction world. Especially in the late ‘20s when his short stories became pretty popular, and in the early 1930s when he was an editor at Weird Tales, which was a very influential pulp magazine that published a new type of science fiction. It published a lot of horror, cosmic horror as it was known at the time and is still kind of known that way. And he was really at the center of a big group of writers who came out of amateur press associations.

[00:06:04] So basically, the 1920s and teens equivalent of fandom today. And they were trading stories back and forth through the mail and mimeographed magazines through the mail that were actually called fanzines and term zine comes from fanzines that they were making back then. He influenced a lot of writers of his era. And in his nonfiction writing, he talks about how he is a chalk-white racist. That’s his term. And his fiction, which I think is probably more important to his legacy than his editing of Weird Tales, his fiction includes inventing the Cthulhu mythos and the figure of Cthulhu continues to haunt a lot of science fiction and a lot of horror today. Basically it’s a giant tentacly god that lurks sleeping at the bottom of the sea. He is a remnant of an alien race that once inhabited the earth.

[00:07:07] If you read a lot of Lovecraft, as I have, you kind of get the whole backstory on how Cthulhu got here, and there were all these different alien groups and they were fighting. And the spawn of Cthulhu are actually kind of a degraded, marginalized alien group. There were these other aliens that were kind of equivalent to the Ancient Greeks or Romans who created these vast cities underground and they’ve kind of died out and been replaced by these more degraded, terrible, savage creatures.

[00:07:42] And Lovecraft’s stories have this kind of mood to them, this dreamy, tentacly mood that I can’t quite sum up easily, but it’s really become a big trope, this idea of a tentacled monster that’s kind of lurking at the edge of consciousness that’s driving us mad. And in Lovecraft’s stories, these creatures are almost always associated with immigration. They’re associated with marginal groups, they’re associated with Africans and Caribbeans, and a lot of the time they’re explicitly connected with miscegenation.

[00:08:20] The spawn of Cthulhu want to come ashore and have sex with your women. Especially in tiny New England towns and there are a lot of stories where people who visit these New England towns discover that there’s these oddly fish-looking people who turn out to be these half-breed creatures who are part Cthulhu-spawn, and part human. And it really was Lovecraft’s explicit intention to use this to talk about what he viewed as the racial history of the world, and the racialized history of the world. And in his view, of course, white people should be on top and anything that deviated from that looked like a tentacled fish, literally.

[00:09:03] There’s a lot of reasons why he’s been rejected but today, his overt racism is absolutely unacceptable. It’s not the—frankly, not the direction that the horror genre has gone. It’s just his views are sort of the path not taken and yet, a lot of his imagery and tropes continue to be very much alive. So you and I have been talking a lot about how there’s been a resurgence of Lovecraftiana amongst science fiction writers, and they’re all responding to his racism. There’s a lot of Black authors who are playing with Lovecraft tropes. And of course, explicitly, Lovecraft Country, Jordan Peele’s new miniseries is dealing with basically racism and tentacles.

[00:09:51] Cherie Priest’s novel Maplecroft is a kind of feminist twist on Lovecraftian creatures. What are some other ones, Charlie?

Charlie Jane: [00:10:00] Well, okay, so more recently, obviously, N.K. Jemisin published The City We Became, which is all about Lovecraftian monters and around the same time, Silvia Moreno-Garcia published Mexican Gothic. Which is all about, again, tentacle monsters and weird inter-dimensional creatures and intrusions. And also, Victor LaValle published a highly acclaimed and award nominated novella called The Ballad of Black Tom, which is kind of a retelling of one of Lovecraft’s stories from the point of view of a Black character.

Annalee: [00:10:39] It’s so interesting that we’re seeing the exact kinds of people who are treated as monsters in Lovecraft’s work turning around and saying, nope, actually this is ours. We’re going to now take over these tropes and turn them into something really different. While still playing with the same issues… Playing with issues around race and immigration but just turning them on their head.

[00:11:02] One of the things that’s interesting to think about with Lovecraft, and I think this is kind of where we can leave off, is that Lovecraft had kind of—he’d been very popular in the ‘30s and he’d kind of slipped out of public view. He was still appreciated by fans of the genre but he started to get republished in the 1960s, long after his death. His short stories were republished in a couple of very influential collections in the 1960s, right around the same time that Lord of the Rings was brought out in a mass market paperback in the United States. So there’s a whole generation of basically young hippie kids who were discovering Lord of the Rings and Lovecraft at around the same time and they were both these sort of powerful fantasy mythos cycles that really appealed to people who were looking for something that was really cosmic and really out of this world and—

Charlie Jane: [00:12:03] Right. It was trippy and kind of cool and weird and stuff.

Annalee: [00:12:06] Yeah, exactly. And especially Lovecraft, because Lovecraft’s stuff really is trippy. There’s a lot of things like colors that can’t be named and madness that descends upon us and turns our geometry into something that’s unseeable and unknowable. Just crazy shit. Whereas Lord of the Rings, of course, evokes this kind of bucolic, hippie-ish countryside where everyone is smoking pot and telling stories and things.

[00:12:38] So I think that Lovecraft’s continued influence, at least right now, kind of assured, because this is. We’re sort of in the third wave of Lovecraft appreciation and appropriation. And I think that we’re likely to be seeing the same thing with Campbell’s work, and I think that’s what’s so interesting about your interview with Alec Nevala-Lee where he talks about how Campbell’s legacy kind of—it starts before World War II, and then it really changes during World War II and continues to kind of haunt us. So, let’s listen to that.

[00:13:18] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:25] I’m here with Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Thank you so much for joining us, Alec.

Alec: [00:13:38] Thanks Charlie Jane, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:40] Yeah, so this book is so amazing and I learned so much about the history of science fiction and about the origins of Scientology and about kind of a lot of the origins of geek culture in general. And when we were chatting before we started, you mentioned that this was darker that you had expected it to be. And I’m curious to hear more about that, plus, also, what made you want to write about John W. Campbell to begin with?

Alec: [00:14:05] So, I had the luxury of kind of going into this project without knowing a lot about the golden age of science fiction, which actually ended up, I think, being an asset for writing this kind of book. Which is, it’s a complicated story, and I think there are a lot of preconceived notions about that period and these writers that I came in without having a lot of baggage. Which, I think helped. 

[00:14:26] So, I’m a science fiction writer as well. I’ve written for a long time for the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact. My original goal was, or my idea was to write a book about the history of that magazine. So Analog has been published in various forms since 1930. Usually under the name Astounding. And I thought it would be wonderful to just kind of go back and read as many issues of the magazine as I could to kind of reconstruct the history of science fiction as reflected in the pages of Astounding.

[00:14:56] And again, that might have been a great book. I think I would love to read that book someday. But what happened is that, within probably a day of starting research for the project I realized there’d never been a biography of John W. Campbell. And Campbell was the editor of Astounding for its most famous period, a huge figure in science fiction. Very controversial, for good reason, but, you know, tremendously powerful and important. And I was amazed, and I still am, that there had never really been a full biography of Campbell because, I knew right away, this was a great subject for a book. He’s the kind of person who deserves a big biography and it’s one of those books I knew was going to happen eventually and I kind of wanted to write it.

[00:15:37] So I kind of pivoted and said, okay, this is a biography now. And from there it kind of expanded. I was told by my editor that Campbell, while a key figure in the science fiction community, is not as well known as some other writers, which is true. And she asked me if I could expand the book to kind of make it a group biography instead. And I said, well, you know, I’ve got Asimov, Heinlein and Hubbard. And she said great. So it kind of grew to become more of a group portrait of these four writers, their family and friends, and just the community of science fiction as it kind of emerged in the mid-‘30s through mid-‘70s.

[00:16:19] And yeah, I think, again, I kind of benefited from going in without a lot of—without a real sense of what I was getting into, because it ended up being much more intensive and much stranger than I could have ever imagined.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:30] Yeah, and part of what was so fascinating about reading this book is seeing how Campbell and Hubbard especially, but also Heinlein and even Asimov to some extent, created these mythologies about themselves and kind of made up stories about themselves to make themselves more epic, larger than life. I’m kind of curious as to what you ended up feeling about their obsession about writing about what they called the “superior man” in their fiction and how this led to them trying to create, maybe, cults of personality around themselves?

Alec: [00:17:01] So, to me, one of the reasons why you read or write literary biography is to see how the life of the author affects the fiction. And in this case, those connections are very clear. I think Campbell, especially, again, a very flawed figure. Very ambitious. When he was younger, he wanted to be a great inventor, a great scientist and that didn’t really happen. So he kind of transferred all of those ambitions to his editorship of Astounding. And he said, we’re going to write stories that talk about cultural change and kind of give readers the tools to think effectively about the future.

[00:17:35] And he drew other writers, like Heinlein, who had similar impulses. They wanted to change the world through the stories they were writing, and influenced writers lives and ultimately influenced the world beyond fiction itself. But it’s interesting because one thing that you notice is that a lot of these stories come to center around a certain kind of protagonist, who is called the competent man.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:58] Right.

Alec: [00:17:58] It’s a very loaded term. But this is a refinement of the pulp hero that Campbell and his writers kind of inherited. If you look at science fiction and the pulps, which have been around for about a decade before Campbell took over Astounding, they kind of have this formula that is, in turn, based on adventure fiction and nautical fiction and the western. Earlier pulp genres. And it has sort of a masculine protagonist who solves problems. What Campbell does is he transfers that hero into space. And it’s a great narrative tool. If you want to tell a story of any kind, it helps to have a strong protagonist. But the way this kind of figure evolves—it’s an interesting feedback loop. On the one hand, this figure reflects the values of its writers and their assumptions.

[00:18:49] At the same time, they sort of see themselves as competent men in real life. And a big part of the second half of this book and why it’s kind of tragic is that when you try to apply those values outside the realm of fiction, into the real world, it doesn’t always go as planned. And in the case of Campbell and Hubbard especially, you know, what it ended up becoming is very different from what anyone could have expected going in.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:10] Yeah, and World War II is sort of a turning point for all of these people, all these men, in different ways. They all had this mythology about themselves and then World War II put it to the test, both in terms of their ability to take part in the war, but also in terms of the nuclear bomb, which was something that Campbell had been obsessed with before hand and he always described himself as a nuclear physicist but actually did not really understand, it seems like, the actual mechanics. He tried. He obviously, he really wanted to prove that he understood it, even by violating state secrets. But can you talk more about how World War II was kind of a turning point for all of these?

Alec: [00:19:47] Yeah, I mean, one thing—I think about this a lot these days, because one thing I’ve learned, writing this book, and also reading the news, is that these global crises… If you’re a certain kind of person, you see a war or a massive catastrophe as kind of your chance to prove yourself and kind of advance the objectives you have for yourself in your own life. And this is very true of Campbell and the others. After Pearl Harbor, their first thought is: how can I, not so much make a difference, but how can I make an impact? How can I become the hero in real life that I’ve written about in my stories?

[00:20:22] And in the case of Campbell and Heinlein this, well, Heinlein had a very—he was very patriotic, and so he enlists and I think, does what I think ended up being productive work in the navy, as did Asimov. Campbell’s idea of making a contribution to the war effort was to come up with a big super weapon or a big technical innovation that would turn the course of the war. He kind of wished retroactively that he’d been in the Manhattan Project. He would have loved to have been among, in that circle of scientists. He didn’t have the background, but he kind of thought he did. And so there’s this amazing series of letters that Campbell sent to Heinlein in the ‘40s where he’s pitching ideas for weapons or sabotage tactics, none of which really work. But this is kind of the person he thinks he is. He thinks he is the competent man who can come up with these things, basically at his desk, that are going to make a difference.

[00:21:13] And then Hubbard, who’s been writing nautical fiction his entire life, says, I’m going to join the navy and be a pirate. I’m going to actually be the guy who I’ve written about. And it was terribly, I mean, he totally blows it, and I think—

Charlie Jane: [00:21:24] He got a bunch of people killed, I mean, you know…

Alec: [00:21:27] Yeah, no. It’s really—there could be no more extreme version of the disparity between the person that he thought he was and what he actually ended up becoming. And I think that, he realized this deep down. I think that insecurity actually fed into a lot of what happened later on with Scientology and Dianetics.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:45] It’s super interesting. The thing about nuclear physics. It feels like, for Campbell, you have these two obsessions, one of which is nuclear energy and nuclear physics, and the other, which is psychology, and this drive to turn psychology into an exact science, which gives us psycho-history and various other things like psycho-history in Asimov’s Foundation. But also, then, gives us Dianetics, which Campbell was all in on. Why do you think he was so obsessed with trying to create a hard science of psychology?

Alec: [00:22:15] I think he kind of came at it from two angles. One angle is just his desire to make a great discovery of any kind, from a fairly early point, Campbell saw science fiction as a laboratory. And he said, we have all these smart people, I’m smart, we’re really good at coming up with these interesting scenarios, so maybe someday a science fiction writer who I am editing will end up with a discovery that is going to change the world.

[00:22:38] That’s the thing about psychology, you can kind of do it in your basement. It doesn’t require a lot of equipment. You don’t have to have access to a big lab, you just need two guys in a room. And so, I think on the one hand psychology was a convenient field to explore because it didn’t require any special resources.

[00:22:55] And the other thing that you mentioned is the bomb. Campbell did come out, justifiably, World War II with, he was very concerned about the prospect of nuclear war. He saw psychology as the answer. He basically said, you know, to prevent World War III, we have to come up with an exact science of the human mind that will forestall conflict in the future. So when he works with Hubbard and develops this therapy, the way he sells it to his readers is that this is our answer to the atomic bomb. It’s a race between psychology and the bomb and the result is going to determine whether or not mankind survives. So those two impulses are very much connected in his mind.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:36] Yeah, and the whole ideology of scientific progress, which feels like it was very central to Campbell in which the reality of the bomb seems to have challenged him a little bit, is super fascinating. A couple of moments really jumped out at me in the book towards the end. One is where he’s—Campbell is sitting down with Barry Malzberg. Campbell is insisting, look at all these inventions, look at all these things that have come along. Science fiction created these, we did this. Science fiction writers came up with these things and then they became real. Which is something I heard a lot back in the 2000s with smart phones and iPads and a bunch of other stuff. Like science fiction, we created this! Science fiction created this, and then Apple went and made it real. And Malzberg is like, no we didn’t. Science fiction came up with a bunch of crap and some of it randomly came true and technology advanced, it wasn’t because of science fiction.

[00:24:25] And the other thing is where Asimov is trying to convince Campbell to basically stop being quite such an extreme racist and to join the Civil Rights movement, and Campbell’s response is, “I’m not interested in victims, I’m only interested in the superior man.”

[00:24:40] It feels like there’s kind of an indictment of this ideology of science fiction as progress and the perfecting of oneself and also the improving of the world. So, I’m interested in hearing more about that.

Alec: [00:24:52] Yeah, I mean, that is a key theme in this book, and I think it points to one of Campbell’s limitations. I think he was a hugely important figure, but he also was—he had a lot of blind spots, to put it mildly. And one of them was this idea that science fiction had to be about solving problems. It kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about the competent man and this sort of pulp protagonist that he refines and puts into space. The idea that stories have to be about people who are active, who have agency. And it kind of feeds into the idea of these stories that are about solving problems through technology. 

[00:25:28] One of Campbell’s assumptions is that every problem is ultimately a subset of engineering. And that if you put engineers and scientists in charge, they’ll be able to come up with solutions to social problems, which I think is a very flawed view of how the world actually works. But as Malzberg points out very accurately, what do you do about the people who don’t have agency? These are people who are the victims of technological change. Their stories are incredibly important. They matter tremendously. And Campbell just lacked interest in those stories.

[00:26:01] And I think, you know, just from a literary point of view, it constrained the kind of fiction he was publishing in the magazine, which was never the same after World War II, or after Dianetics. From a pragmatic point of view, this is a guy who wants to talk about cultural change but he’s unable to address a key part of it in the stories he’s publishing, so that is a huge part of Campbell’s story and a big part of why, after 1950, he actually becomes a much less powerful figure. And it’s partially because he’s unable to write the types of stories that moment demanded.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:36] Do you think that we would have had Dianetics or Scientology in the same form without the nuclear bomb?

Alec: [00:26:42] I think it would have been framed differently early on. A lot of this stuff comes out of Hubbard’s personality, and so that stuff, I think, would have remained the same. But Campbell played a huge role in presenting and shaping and it kind of giving it a vocabulary that he thought would appeal to his readers. 

[00:27:00] One thing about Dianetics that I like to talk about is people always say, oh Hubbard just was trying to scam people and he thought that the best way to make money was to start a religion. Which is something that he did actually say. But if you look at the earliest articles on Dianetics, they are pitched towards scientists. They are pitched towards a professional circle and they really wanted to publish the first article in a scientific journal or a medical journal. And it was only after they failed to get any interest that Campbell kind of fell back on Astounding as his second choice. 

[00:27:30] If you look at Scientology now, the language of Scientology has fossils, a fossilized remnant of that first phase that Campbell influenced. And later on it kind of diverged from that because Hubbard was not really a science fiction fan. He wrote a lot of science fiction but it was mostly for the money. His inclinations were actually very different. His vocabulary came from other sources, more mystical sources, more nautical sources.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:56] Right.

Alec: [00:27:56] Which you see later on. But there is still this sort of core of scientific language that is preserved in Scientology, and again, I think that comes out of the fact that Campbell had a particular audience in mind, and yeah, they were deeply concerned by the bomb. And on the one hand, this really is what Campbell thought this new therapy would do. It would serve as an answer to the threat of nuclear war, but it was also a rhetorical tool. It was his way of saying, you should take this seriously, given the people he was trying to reach.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:27] Part of what’s interesting about, what’s fascinating and compelling and gripping about your book is in addition to showing us how all of these things that are kind of the bedrock of science fiction, everything from the three laws of robotics to Foundation to Heinlein’s future history to Scientology, all came out of these relationships with Campbell, which I hadn’t fully appreciated before.

[00:28:48] It also kind of shows how the dark side of geek culture was emerging during this time. There’s a lot of bullying in your book. There’s a lot of really horrible behavior. There’s people boasting that they could drive anyone insane. So there’s one guy in the book who’s described as being able to ruin any fandom.

Alec: [00:29:04] It’s actually Donald Wollheim who became a hugely important editor later on.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:08] Yeah, I know! And you know, Daw books is still around. Was it kind of upsetting to read about the birth of, basically the precursor to a lot of the dark side of geekdom that we’re seeing nowadays, kind of.

Alec: [00:29:22] Yes, no this is very true. One of the big things I took away from my research is that if you look at the dynamics of fan culture in the ‘30s, it’s basically the same. Those impulses haven’t changed and if you look at these controversies and these little wars between clubs that happened in New York, they’re the same as the similar conflict you see on Twitter or Reddit. Except that they happened much more slowly. They happened via these mimeographed fanzines and letters columns, so it takes months for these things to unfold. But, you know, these were young guys, mostly men, and I would say it draws a certain type of obsessive personality, and you kind of see this pattern. The kind of conflict you end up with reflects the people who are going to start these clubs in the first place, and I think that’s true now. But it’s been accelerated. It’s been made vastly more powerful by technology.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:19] Yeah, and it’s just this very macho ethos. Again, it gets back to the superior man kind of thing of nobody—everybody’s posturing, everybody’s being kind of a dick. I actually felt a little bad for Asimov when he goes to this party and Heinlein hands him what he says is a Coke and it turns out to be an alcoholic beverage and Asimov doesn’t drink, and it’s just kind of this really—it’s very minor, but it feels kind of cruel and fucked up.

Alec: [00:30:44] Yeah, all these guys are trying to establish their territory, and the pecking order. You figure out who is the big man in the room? Campbell was usually the big man. That’s this interesting dynamic where he does dominate conversations and impose his thoughts on others and that’s a big part of why he’s able to have the outsized influence on science fiction he did have.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:05] Right, and people had to kiss his ring, kind of.

Alec: [00:31:08] Mm-hmm.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] Yeah, so was there anything that you couldn’t include in the book because it was just too extreme or too weird, or were there things that you were kind of pressured to kind of dial back on the nastiness of?

Alec: [00:31:17] I mean, I put all the weird stuff I could into it. And I was never pressured by anyone to not do that. I will say that going back, the one thing I do wish the book had more of was a deeper discussion of Asimov’s behavior toward women.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:30] Yeah, I was wondering about that.

Alec: [00:31:31] I’ve written about this elsewhere, at greater length. Partially because I kind of see it as an area that I wish I’d dwelled on a bit more in the book. Because right now, the book spent a couple of pages on it and I do think I put it—I kind of put it out there in a way that it had not been discussed before. So, just to be clear, Asimov was serial groper. He would engage in all kinds of unwanted touching and worse at conventions, usually with young female fans. And this also extended to secretaries at the publishers where he worked or who were putting out his books and just women he met casually. And this went on for years, I mean, decades. It really is a huge part of his personality that he talks about and kind of treats it as innocuous.

[00:32:13] And one of the big things that I do talk about elsewhere but not as much in the book as I would have liked is how this affected the community. It really did affect how women were perceived and how they felt as science fiction writers and fans. It’s a big part of his legacy. And I think if I went back now and had the chance to revise it, I would bring out that theme a bit more strongly.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:36] Yeah, and actually that leads me to my final question which is about the women in this book, which is something I’ve been dying to ask you about. You know, another thing that I was really astonished by is all of these women who are super central to the field who I’ve never even heard of before, like Dona Stuart and both of Heinlein’s wives. And Campbell had a woman, I think named Pratt working with him in the office.

Alec: [00:32:58] Kate Terent.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:00] Terent, sorry, Terent. You know, they were doing a lot of the work and they were getting none of the credit, and they were probably doing a lot of the writing. Was it kind of surprising to realize how much their contributions had kind of gone unsung?

Alec: [00:33:11] Yeah, no, I mean, it was a huge part of the story for me. One of my favorite anecdotes in the whole book is this story where Campbell and Heinlein were thinking about enlisting somewhere during the war and Campbell was concerned about the magazine. He thought the magazine would kind of fall apart without him. And Heinlein literally says, “I think that Dona and Leslyn could do as good a job or better of running the magazine as you could.” Which I think is interesting, because it reflects the huge role they had in their husbands’ careers. Dona clearly was an important influence on Campbell’s writing as it became more mature and became closer to what we think of now as modern science fiction.

[00:33:50] And Leslyn, you know, Heinlein would sit at the kitchen table and work out plots with her and she—he praised her as the best story doctor on the west coast. What happened is that they all get divorced. They remarry later on and the previous wife gets kind of written out of that story. They marry very different kinds of women later on. But yeah, I think a big part of what happens is that it just sort of on a biographical level, they get erased as not convenient to the narrative.

[00:34:17] And this is even more true of Hubbard’s wives, his first two wives who, again, were interesting people who obviously had the misfortune of getting involved with Hubbard at an earlier phase in his career, and it’s only the last one, Mary Sue Hubbard that kind of survives into his official biography. Because again, they go back and they revise things that don’t fit the picture.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:41] Right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Alec, where can people find you online?

Alec: [00:34:45] Well, the name is Alec Nevala-Lee. It’s pretty distinctive, so if you search for me, you’ll find Twitter, you’ll find my blog. Other places like that. So yeah, so please reach out. My contact information is on the blog and I love hearing from readers. So if anyone wants to say hello or reach out, that would be great.

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Annalee: [00:35:10] God, that is just so interesting. I hadn’t really understood how much this myth of the competent man starts really early in science fiction and then undergoes this incredible mutation during World War II. It was just so intriguing to see this group of—or to hear about this group of men who really thought of themselves as heroes and then they go through World War II and suddenly, they’re like, wait. What is heroism? What do we even do? And in some cases they decide, okay, let’s turn to cults. And in the case of Asimov, it’s much more like, let’s turn to technology and maybe robots will save us. Yeah, it’s super interesting and Campbell’s obsession with the atomic bomb is so creepy.

[00:36:03] It makes you realize how much people’s lives were just completely altered forever by that war.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:10] Yeah, and it’s really—the thing that I found super compelling about Alec’s book, which made it such a gripping read is you really get sucked into being invested in these kind of weird dudes and their obsessions, and their kind of mythology of themselves where they see themselves as the kind of archetypes of these heroic figures that they’re writing about. And then they actually have a moment where their heroic image of themselves is put to the test and they completely, more or less, fail to rise to the occasion. I think Heinlein and Asimov were marginally helpful during World War II but it’s not like, as Alec said, none of them really gets to be come the hero. None of them solves the problem of World War II with the power of their minds. It is the moment where they all take a dark turn and that’s the moment where Campbell becomes more of a really intense fascist and more obsessed with white supremacy. And that is the moment that starts giving us Scientology, as well.

[00:37:09] And it’s such an interesting thing to look at and Alec lays it out so beautifully. And it’s interesting to think about that in the context of Campbell and Lovecraft as these figures who, for better or for worse, we’re still kind of living with the kind of ruins or relics of their worldviews all around us. I think that part of what’s good about this is that we can kind of pick and choose and we can kind of reappropriate and maybe at some point there will be more of a conscious effort to take Campbell’s legacy and the competent man and all that stuff and all of his kind of tropes that he really developed around exploration and around problem solving, and recontextualize it in the way that people have been doing for Lovecraft. Like there will be more stories that actually explicitly critique that or take place from the point of view of people who are excluded from that. I think that that’s something that would be really interesting to see.

Annalee: [00:38:08] Yeah, I think the big question, which you’ve sort of been answering in what you just said, is how do we acknowledge the contributions of these men but not fall prey to their racism and sexism, and also just kind of authoritarian bullying. Because they weren’t just people who had crappy ideas, they also were kind of the boss of their communities and were not good guys. They fostered competitiveness. They fostered a kind of one-upmanship. They were not kind leaders.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:50] No, absolutely not. 

Annalee: [00:38:53] And they both, I think, had this sense that fandom and science fiction had an influence and a meaning far beyond the pages of their magazines and that they really did want to influence the course of human history. And to a certain extent, they have. They’ve entered, both of them helped create a whole discourse around the future and around our past and our relationship to the cosmos. And we’re still struggling with that legacy and I think, for me, books like Alec’s book help to kind of dispel the mythology of these men. Help to show them as just people instead of Great Men. And that that’s kind of what we need to hold onto. We need to tear down the statues to them, as it were. To stop the idealizing. To stop kind of honoring them.

[00:39:49] But we also need to remember them and remember where those tropes that we love come from. The tentacle trope, the dark, cosmic mystery at the bottom of the ocean or in deep space. Those come from Lovecraft. They come from a place of trying to imagine a superior race, basically, and what its position is in the cosmos. But it doesn’t have to be that. It can be a way of thinking about an alien history. It can be a way of thinking about what it feels like to immigrate to a new place where everyone seems like a monster, or where everyone makes you feel like a monster.

[00:40:29] And we can still play with these ideas and these tropes without becoming Lovecraft and Campbell. Without buying into their bullshit. And it’s a difficult line to walk, but I think that’s where we’re headed. I think that’s the path that science fiction is on and fantasy is on and that we always risk sliding into dark places. But I think that as long as we keep in mind the real history of these men, that we’re less likely to make the mistakes that they made.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:01] Actually, the good thing about somebody being very influential is that it kind of is a problem that solves itself. For example, I’ve never read any Lovecraft. I haven’t read a single word that Lovecraft ever wrote. But I’ve read people who were influenced by Lovecraft. I’ve read people who were kind of responding to Lovecraft. I’ve read, at this point I think that a lot of the stuff that I read is third generation. It’s people responding to people responding to Lovecraft. Or people influenced by people who were influenced by Lovecraft. I have no need to ever go and read Lovecraft because his influence has permeated into other better writers. Like, there are people who are much better writers than Lovecraft, at least from what I understand and what his prose—

Annalee: [00:41:46] Yeah, no, he’s sort of famous for having cheesy, florid prose.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:48] There are much better writers who are borrowing from Lovecraft’s ideas or his tropes, and those people are much more worth reading. And similarly, okay. So one of Campbell’s big authors was Robert A. Heinlein. And you know, I’ve read some Heinlein. I’m not a huge Heinlein fan. I’m going to just admit it. I hope I don’t get in trouble.

Annalee: [00:42:09] I am also not a Heinlein fan. I’m an anti-fan.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:13] Right. But, you don’t have to—nobody ever needs to read Heinlein, and I don’t think anybody ever will read Heinlein again. I don’t think young people are going to be reading Heinlein now. People can read John Scalzi who basically has admitted on like many, many, many occasions in my hearing, that he basically just writes what he calls Heinleinian fiction. And he is writing in Heinlein’s ethos but, you know, Scalzi’s—he’s more progressive. He’s more aware of other perspectives and he’s a little bit more savvy about some of the tropes that he’s handling. So you don’t need to read Heinlein because you can just read Scalzi or you could read Becky Chambers for that matter. You can read a bunch of other people who are playing with things that Heinlein came up with but just doing it in a—I would say in a better way, in a more interesting way.

[00:43:02] And I’m not going to cast aspersions on Heinlein’s prose, but I think that his work is of the time that it was written. His prose style is of the time that it was written. It’s much harder for someone who’s used to reading books written in the 21st century to go back and read 1960s, 1940s, even prose. And I think the same is kind of true for—

Annalee: [00:43:20] That kind of turgid, Great Man style.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:24] Yeah, it’s just—it’s a very different style of writing and Asimov, I think, is completely impenetrable to anybody who was not born in the mid-20th century. And I think that, again, nobody under the age of 40, let’s say, has ever really read Asimov at this point. I think people read people who were influenced by Asimov.

Annalee: [00:43:45] I totally agree with what you’re saying, that there is no need to read these men in order to be a science fiction fan.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:53] Yeah, absolutely.

Annalee: [00:43:54] Or even to just enjoy science fiction literature. However, I think maybe one way to think about what you’re saying and about this whole issue is that we can read these guys. I’ve read a ton of Lovecraft. But the real difference is we don’t have to pay homage to them. We can read them. We can say, sure, we see how they were important in the development of this genre. We get that this is what, in the 1930s, people were reading in the same way that today we’re reading Nora Jemisin. But, like I said, we don’t have to honor them. We don’t have to heroize them or idealize them. 

[00:44:38] And that’s the difference, right? Between kind of the old way of treating Campbell and Lovecraft. They were honored. They were treated as heroes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:47] So we can read them, we’re not obligated to read them.

Annalee: [00:44:53] Exactly.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:53] Nobody is required to read Heinlein or Asimov or Lovecraft or any of those other guys. Certainly nobody’s obligated to read Hubbard. Nobody is required to read them, they’re not… like, there’s been a lot of discussion about this actually since the most recent WorldCon where people are saying, well, you can’t really be a science fiction person if you haven’t read these—nobody has to read this stuff. Unless you really want to. If you are like, yeah, you know, I really want to see where these tropes came from, I think it’s interesting to go back to the beginning. I’m a completist, or I just really want to see the originals. But I don’t think you’re required and there’s a quote that I keep thinking about as we’re talking about this, which I was just trying to find online, now I can’t find it.

[00:45:32] The novelist V.S. Pritchet wrote an essay about Edgar Allen Poe back in the day and he said that Edgar Allen Poe was, “A third-rate writer but a fertilizing exclaimer.” Meaning that basically Poe’s writing wasn’t great. It was fine. But he inspired a lot of other people to write other stuff that was actually better and I think that that’s true of a lot of our heroes in general. Is that, you know? We can be glad that they were there and that they inspired other stuff. But we don’t need to feel like their writing is sacred in some way.

Annalee: [00:46:06] That’s right, and I think sacred is such a good word to use in this context because yeah, you don’t have to pay homage to them. You don’t have to worship them. And in fact, their ideas and their tropes belong to us now. They are ours. They’re in our hands, we can do what we want to with them. That’s how writing and art work. We inherit ideas and we change them. And if we didn’t change them, I don’t think we would be human anymore. I think I’m having a Star Trek moment of like, what makes us human. Is change. That’s how we—

Charlie Jane: [00:46:41] For sure.

Annalee: [00:46:41] —progress as a bunch of different civilizations and as humanity. That’s, I think, what the big pushback really is right now. It’s not against ever talking about these men, or ever using their ideas. It’s against the idea of deifying them. Of turning them into saints whose work must always be paid attention to and read in the original and appreciated and thought of as great. It’s like, nope! Sure, this is the origin story of these tropes, big deal. We’ve done a lot better things with those tropes, yay.

Charlie Jane: [00:47:21] Agree.

Annalee: [00:47:23] All right. Well, it is true that our opinions are correct, so I’m glad that we’ve reached this agreement. All right, well, I think that’s a great place to end. 

[00:47:31] You’ve been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. You can support us on Patreon. Yes, we have a Patreon, and if you give us a little cash, you can give us anywhere from $1 to a billion dollars. You get audio extras, you get essays, and writing prompts and excerpts from our as-yet unpublished writing every week.

[00:47:56] And you can find us on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can get this podcast probably where you got it in the first place, but also anywhere where great podcasts can be found. Please do leave us a review on Apple podcasts. And thank you so much to our intrepid producer, Veronica Simonetti at Women’s Audio Mission. And to Chris Palmer, who wrote the music.

[00:48:21] All right. Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:48:22] Bye!

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