It wasn't only in the titles and the covers of the magazines that science fiction was a different breed of cat then. The craftsmanship was poorer. Thematically, it was limited. Large areas of discussion common in today's science fiction simply did not then exist: race, for one. If a black man appeared in a 1937 sf story he was likely to be either a villain or a shambling Stepin Fetchit figure of low comedy—or if neither of those, he was certain to come from Mars. Sex was a dirty word. It existed on the covers, but inside the magazines it was important mostly for its consequences: usually a state of mind which caused the principal boy to invent space travel so that he could win the principal girl. What he did with her after he won her was not described.
These were areas of science fiction which were not explored because they were off limits. There were other areas, and more important ones, which writers did not investigate because they didn't know they were there. In sf as in any other creative effort, today's practitioners stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. None of the kinds of sf that we write today fell as a gift from heaven. Each was given to us by some single writer somewhere in the world who woke up one morning and proceeded to invent a new kind of sf story, and some of them were just doing the inventing at that time. Their insights and innovations provided capital on which all of us have since drawn.
For instance, there was A. E. Van Vogt, a young Canadian who had been reading science fiction for some time and, at the age of 27, decided he could do as well as the published writers. He was right. His first stories included "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet," and with them he was an immediate success. The impact of "Discord in Scarlet" was perhaps helped along by the otherwise irrelevant fact that at the time the advertising department of Astounding was playing with two-color printing on a few pages, as a ploy to lure in advertisers, and so some of the pictures for "Scarlet" were scarlet—we will see again how front-office decisions have had large effects on science fiction—but they would have been hits anyway. Van Vogt had enlarged the canvas for everyone with his alien protagonists. Other writers had invented aliens —Wells made them real in The War of the Worlds, Wein-baum made them personalities in A Martian Odyssey—but Van Vogt's aliens carried the whole story; we saw events through their eyes and discovered that to them Earthmen were aliens.
Then there was that former bulldozer artist, hotel clerk, and would-be trapeze artist (he gave it up after six years' training, figuring that if he hadn't caught on by then he must be in the wrong line of work), Theodore Sturgeon. He started slow with a smart-alecky little joke piece called "Ether Breather," but before long he found a line of country all his own, with stories like "Killdozer" and "Microcosmic God" and dozens more. Sturgeon once said that all of his stories were about a single subject and that subject was love. What most writers have to say about their own work is interesting only to psychologists, but there is truth to this statement; he did indeed bring into science fiction a sort of tenderness and compassion which was very much his own—but which, too, has become a part of the repertoire for a hundred writers since.
Then there were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. Heinlein. I link them together because in their early work "at least they were rather alike, and quite different from anybody else. Their heroes were not aliens or supermen. They were not even heroes. They were the kind of fellow who pumped your gas at any crossroads filling station. What was special about de Camp and Heinlein was the engineering exactitude with which they fleshed out their imaginings. Their cities were complete with toilets and tax collectors; they were not stage sets but habitats, and though they might be filled with thousand-year-hence machines, one felt they were real and could be built and made to work. Heinlein and de Camp taught the rest of us to imagine in detail, warts and all.
One could go on forever cataloguing writers from this time. It is hard to omit the likes of L. Ron Hubbard, that dominating, picaresque creature who learned how to make his fantasies come true with Dianetics and Scientology, or a dozen writers hardly remembered now, but new and innovative then, like Ross Rocklynne and Malcolm Jameson. But the most interesting thing about these writers is not only what they are in themselves, but the organizing fact about them all. What gave them a home in science fiction was a single editor, with a single magazine. The magazine was Astounding Stories (now rechristened Analog as part of the general process of dignifying what we do), and the editor was, right up until his death the other day, John W. Campbell.
That particular golden age is usually called the Golden Age of Campbell's Astounding, and it was all that. There were other writers, good ones. There were other magazines, with merits of their own. But Campbell was the one who picked up everything and put it down again in a different and better form. As one who has labored long in that same vineyard, I cannot conceal my admiration for his feat. In a period of no more than a few years he single-handedly wrote off a whole generation of science-fiction writers and bred a new one to his own new standards.
That statement is so true that it is partly true even where it is false. There were writers—Clifford D. Simak, Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster—who were ornaments to Campbell's Golden Age, and who had been ornaments to other magazines while Campbell was still an undergraduate at M.I.T. What he did with them was almost more remarkable. He made them new writers. From purveyors of space opera and gimmick adventure, Campbell retooled them into writers who competed on equal terms with the best of his new breed.
How did he do it? I'm not sure I know. Perhaps Campbell never knew himself; perhaps no one can tell how much was due to his own wit and wisdom, and how much to the power of an idea whose time has come. Certainly the '30s and '40s were years of technological ferment. The fission of the uranium atom was discovered in 1938, and Campbell recognized its importance and had his writers using it in stories in a matter of months. It was a time of marvels. It seemed that every day there was a faster plane, or a bigger ocean liner, or a taller building. It was a time for looking ahead, and one of Campbell's great innovations was the systematic process of describing possible futures that the think tanks have called morphological mapping.
Of course, after a while other people began to see what he had done. Some of his writers were won away from him by the blandishments of other editors. New writers came along, and new things happened in science fiction, to which John Campbell and Astounding contributed only a minor part. But those few years of growth and change are a landmark forever, and they are all John Campbell's.
It was a golden age for me, too, although I really had no role in those Campbell years of Abounding, I did manage to appear once or twice, in pseudonymous or collaborative stories of no great importance, and I even managed to be one of the competitors wooing his discoveries away from him when, at the age of 19, I became editor of two sf magazines of my own, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories.
But I came at science fiction in a different way. I was a writer and editor pretty early, but long before that I was a fan.
That was the other revolution that took place in science fiction around the beginning of our golden age: The development of fandom, as an auxiliary force and seedbed for science-fiction writers.
The beginnings of fandom are lost in antiquity; it may be as far back as 1930 when the first trufans appeared: here and there around the world, mostly in the big cities of the United States, addict met addict and started a club. They weren't big, and they didn't last, but around 1932 Wonder Stories tried to type its circulation by starting a big mail-order club called the Science Fiction League. It did nothing for Wonder Stories, but it was the making of fandom. While Wonder was slipping steadily down the drain, the SFL was signing up members, chartering local clubs, bringing fanpower into contact with itself. Chapter Number One was in Brooklyn, and by mid-1933 it was having monthly meetings at which 15 or 20 of us teenagers (plus an occasional old man of 20 or 25) solemnly debated whether A. Hyatt Verrill or John Taine was the best writer in science fiction and bragged about our collections. Live chapters sprang up in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia (the latter two are still in existence, though they've changed names and membership lists over the years). A few split off from the SFL, and new clubs were born.