Croy Doctorow on John W. Campbell Jr.

Jeannette Ng touched off a storm of controversy this year when she called John W. Campbell Jr. a fascist (actually a fucking fascist) in her acceptance speech for the Campbell Award at the World Science Fiction convention. The award has since been renamed the Astounding Award.

Now Cory Doctorow has weighed in on the controversy in his column for Locus magazine and he strongly supports Ng.

So when Ng held Campbell “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists,” she was factually correct.

Not just factually correct: she was also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We’re trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We’re trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through the industry and through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to science fiction for safety and sanctuary and community.

I discovered Astounding magazine and its later incarnation, Analog, as a teenager and read many of his editorials. I respected him as an editor but it was pretty clear to me, even as a teenager, that many of his ideas ranged from strange to repugnant. This was confirmed when I read  Astounding:  John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee. And if you don't think so, back issues of Astounding are easy enough to find and you can see for yourself.