Black Gate

John W. Campbell is one of the most important figures in 20th Century science fiction and fantasy.

If Campbell’s name seems familiar, it’s no accident. He’s come up multiple times in this series so far. In my last article, The Best of Hal Clement, I noted that Clement’s heroes frequently quoted Campbell’s pulp heroes Morey and Wade, and that Clement had been discovered by Campbell in June 1942, when Campbell was editing Astounding Science-Fiction.

In my previous piece, on The Best of Jack Williamson, I also observed that Williamson had “survived the coming of Campbell,” by which I meant that he was one of the few authors talented enough to continue writing SF in the pulps after about 1939, when Campbell had re-made the entire field in his image.

I could go back through all the other articles in this series and see just how often Campbell comes up, but I think you get the point. In the first half of the 20th Century, science fiction existed almost solely in the magazines and Campbell dominated the field so thoroughly that the start of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” is usually marked by the year he began editing Astounding — the year he discovered writers like Robert Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, and many others.

In his memoir, I, Asimov, Asimov called Campbell “the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely.”

But we’re not here to talk about Campbell the editor. We’re here to talk about Campbell the writer. And specifically, the eleven short stories he wrote between 1932 and 1939 collected in The Best of John W. Campbell.

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Hal Clement was perhaps the least well-known subject in the Classics of Science Ficiton series, even in 1979, when The Best of Hal Clement appeared. He’s virtually forgotten today, 10 years after he died.

Ironically, he was probably the author I was personally most familiar with. Not because I read much of his fiction (not a lot was in print by the late 70s), but because of Maplecon.

Maplecon was the small local science fiction convention in Ottawa, Canada. I started attending in 1978, riding the bus downtown to the Chateau Laurier, a pretty daring solo outing at the age of fourteen. Hal Clement lived just a few hours away from Ottawa, in upstate New York, and he’d been a Guest of Honor at one of the earliest Maplecons; after that, he became a regular attendee. The convention staff referred to him warmly as “our good luck charm.”

I remember Clement — whose real name was Harry Clement Stubbs — as a friendly, highly articulate, and good-humored man. He was in his early 50s when I first saw him, so of course I considered him infinitely old. He was also soft-spoken and not prone to talking up his own work, which probably explains why all those times I heard him speak didn’t result in a lingering interest in his novels.

Clement wrote in a category that is nearly extinct today: true hard science fiction, in which The Problem — the scientific mystery or engineering puzzle at the heart of the tale — is the central character, and the flesh-and-blood characters that inhabit the story are there chiefly to solve The Problem. When Clement talked about writing, he mostly talked about the requirement to keep his stories as scientifically accurate as possible; he described the essential role of science fiction readers as “finding as many as possible of the author’s statements or implications which conflict with the facts as science currently understands them.”

Okay, that ain’t how I view my role as a reader — and I read a fair amount of hard SF. But your mileage may vary.

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