The Curated Garden

Anthony over at SuperversiveSF recently wrote an article examining the fruits of Campbell's revolution on science fiction. Now, I have taken my swings at Anthony's ideas before, both here and at the Castalia House blog, but that is not my intent today. His article illustrates the nerd bet made by Campbell and the effects it had on American science fiction--and saves me the time making the same argument. Rather, I bring up his article is to answer a question he posed:

I don’t think a bunch of supervillains got together into a room and concocted evil plans; I do think a bunch of folks felt it fit to puff up their own influence while looking down on or sometimes outright disdaining stories from the past – and that this strategy worked. 

How did that happen?

Extrapolating from there that Campbell and the Campbellian era writers liked and wanted to push this narrative isn’t exactly a hard sell.

I've long considered Campbelline science fiction to be a divergent strand from world science fiction. World science fiction, as seen in continental Europe and East Asia, is closer to science fiction's roots in weird fiction, combining elements of fantasy, horror, and detective stories as appropriate. Like corn/maize, it hybridizes readily. And just like corn, if you want a specific flavor, you have to isolate the seeds of what you like from everything else, as Campbell and the Futurians have.

Leigh Brackett and Edmund Hamilton commented on the difficulties of writing for Campbell in their 1976 Tangent interview. Brackett said "I kept trying to sell him things because he was the top market, but when you wrote a Campbell-type story and it didn't sell then you had no place else to go with it." Within ten years of starting his editorship, Campbell's preferences were already walled away from the more hybridized science fiction around him. These preferences can best be seen in his Unknown magazine, where he forced a divorce of fantasy and horror from the Gothic roots of the genre. In his foreword to From Unknwon Worlds*, he stated that "horror injected with a sharp and poisoned needle is just as effective as when applied with the blunt-instrument technique of the so-called Gothic horror tale". Thomas Clareson would describe how Campbell's curation of the gardens of weird fiction "led to the destruction of 'not only the prevalent narrative tone but also most of the trappings that had dominated fantasy from The Castle of Otranto and The Monk through the nineteenth century to Weird Tales.'"

This isolation of influences is still under way, as in 2001, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg discussed those influences in science fiction that had a "devastating effect upon science fiction as Gold and Campbell and Knight and Sturgeon and Kornbluth and the other Futurians loved and built it." The names of such deplorables include Hugo Gernsback, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. E. van Vogt, Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, J. R. R. Tolkein, Richard Shaver, Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, and even Isaac Asimov. And with the exceptions of Asimov and Vonnegut, attempts have been made to try to run most of these names out of the genre. But Roddenberry, Lucas, and Tolkein proved to be too popular to banish. (Shaver, despite his sales, wasn't popular enough to avoid this.) However, the crime of Vonnegut, like Michael Crichton after him, was to refuse to let science fiction claim him. But while the inclusion of many of these authors on this list represents the fannish politics that plague the genre, they also represent the popular influences that had to be pruned away for the science fiction of Campbell and the Futurians to succeed.

And the quickest way to make the divisions needed to curate the garden of science fiction is to push the idea that the pulp and adventures of the past--and those that perniciously spring up between weedings of the genre--are somehow less influential and of poorer quality than the pure flowers of the genre. This curation is necessary to the survival of Campbelline fiction, as the French return to science fiction in the 1950s started from Campbelline roots, but, through exposure to continental science fiction and France's own traditions of adventure and dime novels, quickly ceased to remain Campbelline.

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UPDATE: No sooner than I write this, than a perfect example of present-day curation appears. Brian Niemeier has just posted screenshots and comments of a gentleman telling Mark Wandrey of the breakout Four Horsemen Cycle what science fiction is and is not. Frankly, science fiction needs Mark Wandrey more than Mark Wandrey needs to write "proper" science fiction, but I'll leave that particular dissection to Larry Correia and Brian Niemeier.

*****

*This foreword was written in 1948, one year after Campbell apologized for the despair flooding science fiction and promised to do something about it. His remarks also championed the idea that fantasy can make an amusing tale as well as one of gloom and terror. To see this sea change in action, read Swords Against Death, by Fritz Leiber. The earliest Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories in that collection are moodier pieces, while those written after Campbell's epiphany in 1947 are more humorous in nature.