John W. Campbell

“John W. Campbell at the Open Directory Project”

“John W. Campbell at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database”

“[John W.] Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fucking fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone for science fiction that haunts this genre to this very day.”

“Suppose you meet a man who asks you what your field of endeavor is and you tell him that you are the world's greatest living vertebrate paleontologist, which is, of course, what you are. And suppose that, on hearing this, the man you meet fixes you with a glittering eye and proceeds to lecture you for five hours on vertebrate paleontology, getting all his facts wrong, yet somehow leaving you unable to argue them. You will then have met [John W.] Campbell.”

“[[w:Stanley G. Weinbaum|[Stanley] Weinbaum]] met the challenge of a demand John Campbell was to make of his writers in later years: "Write me a story about an organism that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man."”

“In the so-called Golden Age of American science fiction, when the late John W. Campbell, editor extraordinary, gathered around him in a handful of months the greatest stable of science fiction talent ever seen, he would throw out challenges to his writers, like: "Write me a story about a man who will die in twenty-four hours unless he can answer this question: 'How do you know you’re sane?'"; and this one — surely one of the most provocative of all: "Write me a story about a creature that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man."”

“Of course, I never wrote the "important" story, the sequel about the first amplified human. Once I tried something similar. John Campbell's letter of rejection began: "Sorry — you can't write this story. Neither can anyone else."”

“Immunity corrupts; absolute immunity corrupts absolutely.”

“Logic happens to be one of the levels of reality; ignoring it is perfectly possible, just as it is possible for a drunken driver to ignore the concrete-and-steel bridge abutment in his path. The difficulty is that logic—like the bridge-abutment—won’t ignore the individual man.”

“Hypnosis has been a seriously neglected factor of the human mind; now it must be attacked as a major engineering problem. For once, we have an aspect of the mind that ties directly into a solid engineering job; it will require that psychology submit to that harshest of all disciplines—the absolutely inflexible, utterly autocratic, uncompromisingly dogmatic discipline of “Does it work?””

“The curve of progress in the physical sciences is, assuredly, still rising rapidly. But I wonder how fast the curve of human-effort-invested-per-discovery-achieved is rising?”

“A successful crackpot is still a crackpot.”

“The world’s prize stupid oaf is the man who thinks he already has all the answers.”