279

JOHN W. CAMPBELL (June 8, 1910-July 11, 1971)

Born in Newark, New Jersey, where his father was an electrical engineer for Bell Telephone, he himself studied engineering and science at MIT and Duke University, but the direction his career was to take had been determined when he sold his first science fiction at the age of seventeen. Writing under his own name and the pseudonyms Arthur McCann, Don A. Stuart and Karl van Campen, he quickly established himself as a leading science fiction author. His later phenomenal success as an editor has tended to eclipse his own writing achievements, but two of his stories, “Twilight” (1934) and “Who Goes There?” (1938), are included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame collections, the honor roll of all time great science fiction stories selected by members of Science Fiction Writers of America; and when a list was recently compiled of the best short science fiction written before 1940, four of the six stories were by John W. Campbell.

In 1937 he began editing Astounding Stories as an assistant to F. Orlin Tremaine, and in 1938 he succeeded Tremaine as editor.

! As Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine moved to the head

‘ of the field and remained there, and the list of writers Campbell discovered and developed reads like a science fiction honor roll: Heinlein, del Rey, Asimov, Sturgeon, de Camp, van Vogt, Leiber, Simak, Anderson, Budrys … the list goes on and on. He edited Astounding Stories, later Analog, for thirty-four years and two months, and during that time he was the only reader the magazine

_ had. lie read every manuscript submitted.

His fiction is widely anthologized, and paperback collections of his stories are still reissued. Nonfiction writings include a collection of his editorials from Analog (1968) and one of the first books on atomic energy, The Atomic Story (1947). As editor, he compiled a series of anthologies of stories from his magazine, Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (1952), Prologue to Analog (1962) and the series beginning with Analog I (1963).

“And now that he is dead, where can we find ten people who by united effort might serve as a pale replacement for the man who, in the world of science fiction, lived a super-story more thrilling than any even he ever wrote.” -Isaac Asimov

“John Campbell began an era in science fiction. He found it a literature of gimmicks and stage effects and made it a literature of ideas.” -P. Schuyler Miller

“He … stood as its most massive and central pillar for over three decades; and the development of science fiction itself had literally been dominated by his ideas and his presence.” -Gordon R. Dickson

… the greatest editor science fiction ever had.” -Frederik Pohl

“John was the great discoverer, the knower, the teller and teacher. He was uncompromising in his wants and demands, but you couldn’t fault him for that; he was always willing to work harder than you to get it out of you. Once I got seven thousand words of comment from him on a five-thousand-word story.” -Theodore Sturgeon

“Of course you can give me whatever I want. I know that! And if I tell you what I want, that’s exactly what you’ll give me. Un-uh! Go home and do me something I won’t know I want until I see it!” -John W. Campbell, quoted by artist Kelly Freas

“lie was the only man I know who could say ‘Good Morning,’ and make it an order.” -Bjo Trimble

“Science fiction, to which he devoted his life, forever will bear the hallmark of his greatness.” -Clifford D. Simak

“Losing him now is very much like having Jupiter or Saturn ripped from the solar system: it leaves a huge empty place and sets up all sorts of cosmic perturbation and reverberations.” -Robert Silverberg

“As an editor, he was so large a man that he made a tiny and seemingly unimportant field grow to fit his vision and his stature. As a man and a friend, he was much greater.” Lester del Rey

AUGUST DERLETH (February 24, 1909-July 4, 1971)

Author, anthologist, editor, publisher, he was born, lived and died in Sauk City, Wisconsin. He wrote his first story at the age of thirteen, and at sixteen he sold a story to Weird Tales. At the University of Wisconsin he wrote his B.A. thesis-on “The Weird Tale in English Since 1890.”

He personally produced more than one hundred books, ran three publishing houses and was a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines. An ardent disciple of H. P. Lovecraft, he founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 when he was unable to persuade any publisher to bring out an omnibus volume of Lovecraft’s works. He became executor of Lovecraft’s estate and continued to publish his works and correspondence.

His own writing ranged from weird and detective stories to poetry, biography and history. In 1938 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to enable him to continue his Sac Prairie Saga, books about the prairie country. Derleth edited nine anthologies of science fiction stories and six of supernatural stories.

GUY S. ENDORE (July 4, 1900-February 12, 1970)

Novelist, biographer and screenwriter, he was born in New York City and attended Carnegie Institute of Technology before graduating from Columbia University. His short story “Men of Iron” appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949. Fantasy novels were Methinks the Lady (1945) and The Werewolf of Paris (1933).

JOHN BEYNON HARRIS JOHN WYNDHAM] (July 10, 1903-March 11, 1969)

Although his occupations ranged from farming to advertising, with an interval of reading for the bar, Harris was the dean of British authors in the science fiction and fantasy fields, where he was active for almost forty years. lie began writing in the 1930s under his own name; later he used the pseudonym “John Beynon.” After service in World War II, he adopted the pseudonym “John Wyndham,” under which he became one of the foremost science fiction authors, with a large following outside the field.

The Day of the Triads (1951) appeared in Collier’s, was widely reprinted and translated, received the International Fantasy Award in 1952, was serialized on BBC Radio, and was released as a feature film in 1963. The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) was produced as a film entitled Village of the Damned, released in 1960. Other novels were Out of the Deeps (British title, The Kraken Wakes, 1953), Re-Birth (British title, The Chrysalids, 1955), Chocky (1968), The Outward Urge (1959), Planet Plane (1936), The Secret People (1956), The Trouble with Lichen (1960). Some of his numerous short stories were collected under the titles Consider Her Ways (1961) and Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (1956).

WILLY LEY (October 2, 1906-June 24, 1969)

One of the most popular science fiction personalities of this era, paradoxically Willy Ley was not (except for three stories published under the pseudonym Robert Willey) a writer of science fiction. He was born in Berlin, and his early ambition was to be a paleontolo

gist. He was one of the founders of the German Rocket Society, was the author of the first book about rockets and space travel for the layman, and collaborated with Fritz Lang on a famous science fiction film, The Girl in the Moon. When the Nazis ordered him to stop writing articles on rocketry, he came to the United States with the help of the American Rocket Society. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944.

He called himself an historian of science, and in America he became a foremost writer of popular books on scientific subjects. He wrote voluminously about rocketry, space travel, astronomy, historical zoology and the many fascinating byways of science and science history his inquiring mind had. touched. Conquest of Space (with Chesley Bonestell, 1949) won the International Fantasy Award.

Ley was a popular lecturer on science subjects, and he attended and addressed many of the World’ Science Fiction Conventions, beginning with the first, in New York City, in 1939. He died just four weeks before his dreams of a lifetime were realized in the first moon landing.

NOEL M. Loomis (April 3, 1905-September 7, 1969)

A linotype machinist by trade, he was born in Wakita, Oklahoma, attended Clarendon College and the University of Oklahoma, and worked as a printer, editor and newspaperman in several western cities. He wrote fiction in many fields, often under the pseudonym “Benj. Miller.” Ile was best known as a writer of Western and mystery stories, and he held offices in Western Writers of America. His most prominent science fiction books were City of Glass (1942), its sequel, Iron Men (1945) and Man with Absolute Motion (1955).

SEABURY QUINN (January 1, 1889-December 24, 1969)

Born in Washington, D.C., he graduated from the National University in 1910 and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar. He alternated between law and journalism throughout his life. He edited trade papers, taught medical jurisprudence and worked as a government lawyer while authoring some five hundred stories, many of which appeared in Weird Tales, where Quinn was a noted writer. Best known are stories of the Jules de Grandin series, which were published in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1951.

SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT (August 7, 1897-March 31, 1970)

Though born in Butler, Pennsylvania, Wright spent the early years of his life in Toledo, Ohio, and graduated from the University of Toledo. In World War I he served in the Chemical Warfare Section, and subsequently he worked on newspapers in Toledo, Portland and Tulsa. In 1920 he joined an advertising agency in Springfield, Illinois, which he later purchased and named S. P. Wright and Co. He was a radio ham and proud of the fact that he described radar in a science fiction story before it was invented. He wrote in several fields, and his books include a text on advertising. His first science fiction story was sold in 1923, and in the 1930s he became a well-known science fiction writer. His best remembered stories are those of his John Hansen series.

PHILIP WYLIE (May 12, 1902-October 25, 1971)

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Wylie attended Princeton University for three years. He subsequently worked as a press agent, advertising manager and screenwriter, and he collaborated on the script for the screen version of H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau, released as Island of Lost Souls.

Wylie was a leader and prophet in the fight against pollution and for environmental protection, and he wrote numerous magazine articles in these causes. He helped to establish the Everglades National Park. Though best known as a critic of contemporary man and society, especially through his nonfiction book Generation of Vipers (1942), he wrote a number of science fiction novels: Gladiator (1930), The Disappearance (1951), Tomorrow (1954) and Triumph (1963). Los Angeles 2017 was written first as a television motion picture (1970). His final novel, The End of the Dream, is also science fiction and was published posthumously (1972).

When Worlds Collide and its sequel, After Worlds Collide, both written in collaboration with Edwin Balmer, were considered science fiction classics when they first appeared, 1932-1933.

A film version of When Worlds Collide was released in 1951.