We Didn't Get Here By Accident (Part the Second)

So what's the point to these posts about the history of science fiction? Why bring up the crankery, anger, and general bigotry of John Campbell? The man has been dead for decades, so surely it can't do any good to talk about his very public failings as a decent human being?

Well, right now the SF community is going through a bit of an explosion. Google "Sad Puppies" and the Hugo awards if you really want the details, but what it boils down to is that the field is changing, and some people aren't comfortable with that change. They say the science fiction field has become politicized, and that the Hugo Awards are dominated by secret groups that only allow politically correct work to win. The problem with their claims is that they assume a past that was apolitical, where science fiction was purely about merit without regard for politics or social issues. And this view of the past is utter bullshit.

The editor of what was for decades the largest market for SF had a strict Non-Whites Need Not Apply policy for his magazine. He promoted pseudoscientific racial theories, publicized anti-scientific medical theories, and espoused political opinions that could politely be called Fascist. And many of his readers ate that material up. Some because they were young an impressionable and didn't know better, and some because they agreed with what he was saying and were happy to see it in print. And many of those readers went on to become writers, who continued to write stories that would fit quite nicely under Campbell's editorial policies.

The so-called apolitical stories of the past had a very specific political viewpoint baked into them. Claiming that the field has been recently overrun by people with a political agenda is dishonest. Science fiction was always deeply political. Pretending otherwise is either just ignorance, or malice.

So sometimes I'll write posts about the history of this genre, and how we got to where we are today. This needs to be looked at. Other days I'll post music videos, or reviews of books I love, because everyone needs to have fun sometimes. And other days I'll post pictures of cats, because internet.

But for now, it's meanderings on the history of the genre.

We Didn't Get Here By Accident

Three months after the awards banquet, in June, when it was done, with that first Nebula under my belt, I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous sf editor of Analog Magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility… .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset… .It was all handled as though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket. (In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it… .) Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry….

It’s not me, of course, it’s the audience. Those poor dears just aren’t ready (In 1967, in 2015, in 2062…) for anything other than a straight white male protagonist. That’s just how the world is, and I, the person responsible for selecting the stories the world sees, am powerless against it.

The arguments for exclusion haven’t changed a bit in fifty years.