Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Fascinating tetrabiography of sci-fi luminaries

John W. Campbell (1910–1971) was the longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Isaac Asimov once called him “the most powerful force in science fiction ever.” Through the pages of Astounding, Campbell elevated science fiction from a pulp-fiction amusement to a serious exercise in speculative science aimed at an intelligent adult audience. Alec Nevala-Lee’s 2018 book Astounding is a joint biography of Campbell and three prominent science fiction authors whom he discovered, developed, befriended, and tormented: Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard. Through the intertwined lives of these four figures, and their personality quirks and strange obsessions, Nevala-Lee charts the history of the science fiction genre from its niche beginnings, through World War II and the Atomic Age, to its acceptance and ubiquity in mainstream American culture.

Originally titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the magazine was founded in 1930, not by Campbell, but he took over as editor in 1937 and held that position until his death in 1971. The publication went through a number of minor title changes, all of them begining with “Astounding.” In 1960, however, Campbell drastically changed the title to Analog Science Fact & Fiction, a change no one seemed to like but himself.

Of this book’s four main characters, Asimov comes across the most sympathetically in Nevala-Lee’s narrative. He’s shown as a nice guy, not too egotistical, but a terribly horny lecher. If he had lived several decades later, his career would have been cancelled by the Me Too movement. Hubbard is shown as a shameless braggart and schemer who pathologically lies about his background and achievements. For much of the time period covered here, he was the most financially successful author in sci-fi, but Nevala-Lee thinks his work is hacky and mediocre at best. Heinlein, on the other hand, is presented as the G.O.A.T. of science fiction. His personality is harder to pin down. He definitely had a big ego, but given his talent, that was probably justified. He comes across as the smartest and most serious of the four and uncompromising in his unconventional views. Campbell, though praised for his literary influence, is deservedly castigated for his overt racism and sexism. All four of these guys, by the way, were swingers to some extent, so their love lives make for lively reading, although one feels sorry for their wives.

Hubbard was, of course, the founder of Scientology, and that plays into this story quite a bit as well. Campbell was a collaborator or at least a supporter in the creation of Dianetics, the psychotherapeutic precursor to the religion of Scientology. Nevala-Lee makes Hubbard out to be a flim-flam man who just used Dianetics to con people for financial gain. Campbell, on the other hand, was a true believer who saw Dianetics as a tool for increasing human potential. He was obsessed with “psionics”—heightened mental powers such as ESP, ancestral memories, or telekinesis—and he often steered the contents of Astounding/Analog in that direction. (Frank Herbert’s Dune—right up Campbell’s alley—was first published in Analog). When writing about Hubbard, Nevala-Lee treats Dianetics as a scam. When writing about Campbell, however, Nevala-Lee makes it sound like his weird psychological experiments were actually successful­ and then doesn’t bother to examine how or why that might be. If Nevala-Lee means to paint Campbell’s pursuits as pseudoscience, he doesn’t sufficiently discredit them.

That’s the only reservation I have about this book. Though I am not by any means a science fiction expert, I was fascinated from cover to cover. You never know which way this story is going to twist and turn because these four guys were so idiosyncratic—a polite word for messed up. While envisioning alternate worlds, each tried to fashion his life into his own personal utopia, somehow above the rules of the real world. They treated their work and their lives like science experiments, and in this book they often resemble mad scientists engaged in cockamamie or failed experiments. The pulp fiction era was an exciting time in publishing that generated a lot of classics and a lot of trash. Nevala-Lee brilliantly captures that time in science fiction’s history, the genre’s triumphs of creativity, and its sometimes misguided hopes and dreams for the future.

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt by Edgar Allan Poe

A long story but only half a mystery

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s better-known mystery “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Both stories feature the Parisian detective C. Auguste Dupin. Both “Rue Morgue” and “Marie Rogêet” are generally classified as short stories, but the latter—the longest of Poe’s “short” stories—is probably lengthy enough to be called a novella. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was originally serialized in three issues of the magazine Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion in late 1842 and early 1843.

Marie Rogêt is a beautiful young working woman—what the French would call a grisette—who is well-known and well-liked in her neighborhood. One morning she leaves her home, stating that she’s going to visit her aunt nearby. She never arrives at her aunt’s house, however, and instead goes missing. A few days later her body is found floating in the Seine, showing signs of struggle indicating that she was murdered. Poe based this on the real-life murder of a Mary Rogers that happened in New York. There’s nothing wrong with how Poe uses the facts of the Rogers case as the basis for his fiction. He writes, however, as if he expects the reader to know all about Mary Rogers and the details of her case, in the same way that a writer of today might expect everyone in America to know about the Nicole Brown Simpson murder.

This story really makes it obvious that Dupin was an influential precursor to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Much like Holmes, Dupin is a master of deduction. His cases are narrated by his best friend who is also his roommate, much like Dr. Watson. The two are hanging out in their apartment when they are consulted by a police detective, “G,” who asks for their help—shades of Inspector Lestrade. Then the detective and his friend consult the newspaper accounts of the crime, and they have half the case figured out before they ever even venture out of their sitting room. This is the plot framework of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and it became the template for the majority of Holmes and Watson stories.

The deductive reasoning that Poe writes for Dupin in this story is impressively ingenious. One wonders how he even thought up some of these details. The way Dupin analyzes the accounts of the case and infers details about the crime would be commendable for a mystery written today; for a mystery written way back at the dawn of the genre, it’s rather stunning. This is a fantastic detective story up until the ending, or rather the lack of an ending. Whereas Holmes and Watson eventually get off the couch and go after the killer, here the reader is robbed of that satisfaction. The resolution of the case happens “off-camera,” so to speak, and the read never really gets to know who the killer is. How utterly disappointing! While Poe may have been a pioneer of the detective fiction genre, he still had some kinks to work out in his narrative approach.

Conan Doyle, of course, added a great deal to the mystery genre. Holmes and Watson certainly have more vivid personalities than Dupin and his unnamed narrator, who could just as well be soulless computers. Based on “Rue Morgue” and “Marie Rogêt,” however, one wonders what a marvelous series of mysteries Poe could have written if he had made a career out of it like Conan Doyle did. Dupin makes a third and final appearance in “The Purloined Letter” (1844).   

The Story of the Amulet by E. Nesbit

Charming time travel adventure for kids

I don’t read much children’s literature, but occasionally I’ll try a classic book that was intended for a juvenile audience. Children’s literature prior to World War I was generally written at a higher reading level than much of today’s kid-lit (think Treasure Island, for example), so today those children’s books of old mostly appeal to adult readers. I had read good things about E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, published in 1906, and decided to check it out. Nesbit (1858–1924; the E. is for Edith) was a prolific British author of fiction for both kids and adults. Unbeknownst to me before I started, The Story of the Amulet is actually the third novel in a trilogy. The events of the first two novels are briefly recapped in the first couple chapters of this third installment, so it’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. In this trilogy, four juvenile siblings discover a creature called the Psammead, or sand fairy, a kind of furry rodent-slug who can talk. The Psammead has the power to grant the children wishes, which leads them into all sorts of adventures.

In The Story of the Amulet, the kids are stuck at home with their nanny for the summer while their mom and dad and baby brother are out of the country. Their biggest complaint is boredom, and they long for their parents to return home to London and pay attention to them. (That’s rather ironic, because every good kid-lit adventure happens while the parents are away.) The children are reunited with the Psammead after finding him in a pet store. For some reason, the Psammead is unable to grant their particular wish, but he informs them of a wish-granting magic amulet, one half of which exists nearby. The children must find the other half for their wishes to come true. The half that they acquire in London, however, does have some powers, including time travel, so they use the first half of the amulet to search for the second.

Nesbit’s writing is really very lively and clever. The kids are quite likable and realistic. They are polite and intelligent without being saints or geniuses. The Psammead also has a fun personality, haughty and condescending, like a cross between The Odd Couple’s Felix Unger and that alien genie who used to hang out with Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble (the Great Gazoo, for those old enough to remember). The story has a touch of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to it, but smarter. The fish-out-of-water scenarios of time travel generate much amusing humor.

The plot has its faults. It reads more like a meandering series of scenes rather than a cohesive novel. The premise of the amulet is used as an excuse to put the children into time travel situations, but overall, it doesn’t really make much sense. What I mean by that, in the case of a fantasy book, is that it defies its own internal logic. Throughout the book, the Psammead is granting wishes left and right, but for some reason he can’t satisfy the children’s desire to bring their parents home? Likewise, the magic amulet exhibits an almost limitless power to transport people through time and space, but for some reason it can’t help them find what they’re looking for? The final chapter amounts to a weak ending. What happens in the conclusion leads the reader to ask himself: What was stopping this from happening ten chapters ago? Of course, that would have cut short the adventure, and it’s the ride that matters here. The book is good clean fun, and the characters are enjoyable. If you like classic children’s literature, The Story of the Amulet is worth a look-see.

The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris

Liberal common sense, well-argued

American science writer Timothy Ferris published about a dozen books on astronomy before the 2010 release of his book The Science of Liberty, which is about a whole lot more than just astronomy. Ferris was a friend and colleague of Carl Sagan (the two worked together on that gold record that went out with the Voyager 1 space probe), and, judging by this book, he shares a lot of common ground with Sagan as a science educator/promoter and liberal activist. The message of The Science of Liberty could have come from Sagan’s pen, but I actually like Ferris’s journalistic style of writing better than Sagan’s more personal Henry-David-Thoreau-of-space musings. In The Science of Liberty, Ferris makes the case that—as simply put as possible—science is beneficial to liberty and vice versa. He argues that science furthers human happiness and freedom, thus advancing the cause of classical liberalism, and that science can only prosper in a liberal-democratic society that values civil liberties, academic freedom, and emancipation from dogma.

That may sound like common sense, but it’s surprising how many people and regimes in history have tried to argue the opposite, as Ferris recounts in this historical overview. In the opening chapters, Ferris outlines the framework of his political hypotheses. Then follows a series of investigations into chronologically presented periods in history—the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, World War II, the Cold War, etc.—in which Ferris examines how science and liberty were furthered or hindered. Periodically interspersed are a few statistics-heavy chapters in which Ferris compares the successes and failures of liberal-democratic nations versus other, less scientifically inclined societies.

Ferris introduces a simple but insightful new model of political ideology. Instead of the familiar spectrum analogy in which liberals fall to the left and conservatives to the right, Ferris proposes a triangular model in which liberals, conservatives, and progressives are the three equidistant corners. This book was published before Donald Trump entered politics, so Ferris doesn’t cover the most recent wave of anti-intellectualism from the conservative right, though he does hint at its foreshadowing with some brief mentions of George W. Bush. Surprisingly, Ferris spends fewer pages discussing conservative anti-science (e.g. fascists, Christian fundamentalists, Islamist terrorists) than he spends discussing progressive anti-science (e.g. communists, Marxists, ultra-woke academics, postmodern deconstructionists). Ferris, in my opinion, is too dismissive of socialism, implying that it always leads to totalitarianism. While Stalin and Mao were nightmares that certainly didn’t do science or liberty any favors, FDR’s New Deal or Scandinavia’s social service programs could be considered socialist science experiments that worked out for the good.

Prior to reading this book, I already agreed with just about every aspect of Ferris’s thesis, so I didn’t really need any convincing. Most of what he argues here just seems like common sense to my Jeffersonian side. While reading the first couple chapters, I found myself wondering, do I really want to read a whole book that’s persuading me to believe what I already believe? As I got further into the book, however, I really enjoyed it, and I learned quite a bit. The historical chapters present a lot of familiar characters and stories from science history, but Ferris fleshes them out with many interesting details that were new to me. I gleaned all sorts of fascinating biographical tidbits on scientists like Galileo, Newton, Locke, Jefferson, Darwin, Edison, and even anti-science figures like Hitler. Ferris also has a real knack for selecting memorable and relevant quotes, and the statistics he cites are well chosen and quite eye-opening. Though I primarily expected a book on science history, Ferris’s explication of political ideologies as they relate to science and liberty also prompted me to reexamine some of my own political preconceptions. 

The Science of Liberty is a very thought-provoking read. It really spoke to me, not only aligning with much of what I believe but also helping to clarify some of those beliefs. People who already believe in liberalism and the value of science will appreciate this book immensely, but will it convince anyone who needs convincing? Will conservatives want to read it? They should read it, but unfortunately, they probably won’t.

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

The author is out of his element

Ethan Hawley, the protagonist and sometimes narrator of The Winter of Our Discontent, lives with his wife and two kids in New Baytown, a small town on Long Island, New York. Although Ethan is the descendant of glorious whalers, pilgrims, and pirates who founded New Baytown centuries ago, he has since descended from the distinguished heights of his ancestors. Due to the failure of some family business ventures, Ethan finds himself working as a clerk in a grocery store owned by an Italian immigrant and struggling to make ends meet for his family. With such a lowly position comes a fair amount of shame, and everyone in town seems to want Ethan to pick himself up by his bootstraps, aim for higher prospects, and live up to the aristocratic status of his ancestry.

Published in 1961, The Winter of Our Discontent is John Steinbeck’s last novel (not counting a book of King Arthur legends that was published after his death). This book is a bit of an oddball entry in Steinbeck’s oeuvre, for a number of reasons. Like many late-career artists, it seems that Steinbeck wanted to try something different in order to break out of his pigeonholes, but, also like many late-career artists, this effort is nowhere near as good as most of his earlier works.

Steinbeck is one of the great novelists, if not THE greatest, of Western America. Almost all of his stories take place in California or Mexico, and usually contain some notable level of appreciation for the natural landscape of those regions. The Winter of Our Discontent, however, is set on the Northeastern Atlantic Coast. Although technically not New England, the characters in this novel have a sort of stereotypical New England attitude of Anglo-Saxon arrogance. The characters take pride in the fact that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and they fret over whether they are upholding their blue-blooded Puritan pioneer heritage. I find it hard to believe that everyone in the Northeast brags about how long their family lineage has resided in the U.S., but this novel gives you the idea that that’s a constant preoccupation, at least for the whitest of the whites, who look down on more recent immigrants, such as the Italian businessman in this story.

Another irritating aspect of the book is that the dialogue is loaded with 1950s slang, which makes for slow and awkward reading. This problem is heightened by the fact that Ethan fancies himself a comedian, so his speech and interior narrative often resemble the rapid-fire string of extemporary non-sequiturs from an old Robin Williams stand-up routine. The plot of the book hints at film noir and dips its toe into crime fiction, but never goes far enough in either of those directions. Nobody really does much of anything until about 240 pages into the book. Prior to that, it’s all get-acquainted time. Then, when things finally start moving, albeit slowly, we’re led to believe that certain potentially exciting actions are going to take place. For the most part, however, they don’t. The purpose of this novel is to exhibit Ethan and his fellow townspeople as examples of moral decline, a fall from the greatness of America’s forefathers to the looser morals of the mid-20th century. In this fall, however, the fall is not great enough—barely a stumble.

TFor most of his career, Steinbeck wrote in a predominantly naturalistic form of realism. Compared to earlier California writers like Jack London and Frank Norris, Steinbeck was more of a proto-modernist, but still he generally opted for good old-fashioned naturalistic storytelling and social realism over narrative ambiguity and existentialist angst. Albert Camus he ain’t. Here in 1961, however, every novelist wanted to prove himself a cracker-jack psychoanalyst, and Steinbeck is likewise guilty of that conceit, so the bulk of this novel takes place inside Ethan’s head and beats his neuroses like a dead horse. The Winter of Our Discontent has little in common with the rest of Steinbeck’s literature, so even if you’re a fan of the author, don’t feel like you’re missing much if you skip this one.

The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Too ridiculous to succeed on any of its many levels

The Man Who Was Thursday, a novel by English author G. K. Chesterton, was published in 1908. In the (fictional) London suburb of Saffron Park, two would-be anarchist poets, Gregory and Syme, engage in a snarky debate about anarchy and poetry, in which they essentially accuse each other of being posers. Gregory reveals that he is indeed a true anarchist, and he invites Syme to a meeting of his underground terrorist cell, complete with a basement full of bombs. Syme, in turn, reveals that he is an undercover police detective from Scotland Yard assigned to a special counterterrorist task force designed to thwart the anarchists’ nefarious schemes. As the meeting proceeds, Syme meets the high council of this anarchist ring. Its seven members bear code names drawn from the days of the week: Sunday, Monday, Thursday, etc—hence the title.

Gregory and Syme, the anarchist and the detective, give each other their “word” that they won’t blow the other’s cover or turn the other in to their respective organizations. This is one of those absurd plot twists that Victorian British authors like to work into their stories in order to show off how clever they are and because they’re obsessed with what constitutes a “gentleman.” In reality, an anarchist, in dealing with a mortal enemy, would not consider himself bound by some conventional moral code, and a detective, hopefully, would take the possible loss of thousands of lives more seriously than any adherence to some “gentlemen’s agreement.”

This early plot element is just the start of many instances of ostentatious cleverness that remove the narrative from any semblance of reality. Some scenes in the book are clearly meant to be comical, but overall I’m pretty sure Chesterton intended this to be a suspenseful thriller. Though the novel is subtitled “A Nightmare,” however, it’s so far removed from realism that one can’t take it seriously enough to feel any fear, shock, or thrills from it. In the final two chapters of the book, Chesterton goes in an entirely different direction, abandoning the detective story altogether in favor of a more surreal scenario that seems intended to be profound. There are obvious allusions to God, Satan, Christ, and other Christian imagery, but how it all fits together is a puzzle to me. I don’t feel too bad about not knowing what’s going on, however, because the characters in the novel never know what’s going on either. Something else to note is that there really are no female characters in this book because women apparently don’t factor into Chesterton’s grand Christian-English-gentleman view of the universe.

In summation, The Man Who Was Thursday ostensibly begins as a mystery/thriller about terrorism, but it fails to deliver any thrills. For a while, it ventures into comedy (intentionally or not), but then it ultimately results in some kind of allegory of religious mysticism. It’s quite possible I’m just too lazy to figure this book out, but then again I have little desire to do so when I know the answer is just going to be some Christian sermon. If that’s what Chesterton wants to write about, he shouldn’t dress it up as a detective story. Some literary authorities—Kingsley Amis, Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Dirda—praised this book to high heaven, but I really ended up hating it. It’s just a pretentious and pointless waste of time.

Blood and Sand by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

The Raging Bull of bullfighting

Blood and Sand, a novel by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, was published in 1908. In some English-language editions, the original Spanish title, Sangre y Arena, has been translated as Blood of the Arena, which isn’t entirely inappropriate, since this is a novel about bullfighting. Juan Gallardo is born the poor son of a cobbler. At a young age, he develops a fascination with bullfighting and dreams of being a matador. He gradually works his way up as a bush-league journeyman before getting his first big break in a big-city arena. With success comes fame and fortune, and all the vices and vicissitudes that go with it.

The first couple chapters of this novel read as if it might turn out to be one of those clichéd, romanticized portrayals shown in every bullfighting movie you’ve ever seen. In fact, however, the reverse is probably true: the familiar image of the matador has become stereotypical because so many storytellers have patterned their bullfighting narratives after Blood and Sand. The novel was adapted into at least half a dozen films from 1916 to 1989. Much like boxing stories in American literature and film, there’s a whole set of preconceived expectations and familiar plot elements attached to the sport of bullfighting. Blasco Ibáñez, however, is not only a realist writer but also a naturalist in the ultra-bluntly realistic style of Emile Zola, so he doesn’t settle for predictable, contrived storytelling. As long as we’re making analogies to American boxing films, this would be the Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull of bullfighting. Blasco Ibáñez gives a much more complex and nuanced depiction of bullfighting than American authors like Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) or James Michener (Mexico).

One area where Blasco Ibáñez tends to depart from realism and venture into more romanticized territory is his romantic subplots. He likes to put a femme fatale character into his books, and in that regard the love story here is very similar to that found in his 1900 novel Entre naranjos (a.k.a The Torrent). One aspect of Blood and Sand that I really like, however, is his examination of issues of class. Gallardo is born a peasant but works his way up to celebrity, which allows him to mingle with the aristocracy while never really being accepted into their ranks. The members of Gallardo’s support team, or cuadrilla—his banderilleras and picadores—live very working-class, proletarian lives compared to the wealthy matador they serve. Gallardo’s right-hand man, Nacional, is a socialist agitator. These elements of class commentary in the story give the reader an insightful glimpse into Spanish society of the time.

Rest assured that this novel isn’t just a glorification of bullfighting. For those who think bullfighting is a barbaric sport and are disgusted by its cruelty to animals, Blasco Ibáñez has you covered too. This is not a flattering depiction of the sport. Blasco Ibáñez explores the role of the bullfight as a cultural phenomenon, giving it its due consideration as a Spanish institution, but he also admits the sport’s needless brutality and pageant of bloodlust. He likens the corrida to a gladiatorial spectacle in which cattle and horses are the sacrificial victims. Again, like Zola, Blasco Ibáñez doesn’t shy away from the more coarse and disgusting aspects of his subject and at times will exaggerate them for visceral (sometimes literally) dramatic effect.

The last chapter of Blood and Sand is a little odd. It feels tacked onto the end and somewhat ambiguously detached from the chronology of the narrative. That’s a shame, because the rest of the novel is well-conceived and tautly plotted. I’ve only recently discovered Blasco Ibáñez, and I’ve been impressed by everything I’ve read by him. Blood and Sand is not his strongest novel—I would more readily recommend The Cabin (La Barraca) or The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—but though it falls short of perfection, a subpar outing by Blasco Ibáñez is still better than at least 90 percent of the work of his contemporaries.