John W. Campbell, Jr., has been called perhaps the first writer to devote his life deliberately to science fiction, and certainly an examination of a career begun at the age of eighteen and continued until his death at sixty-one bears out this...

His plate may be full, but it's well organized From food for the palate to food for thought, he's a galloping gourmet If Hollywood put out a casting call for a harried-executive-type, John Campbell wouldn't have a prayer. For starters,...

2003 was a breakout year for the outspoken Irvine Assemblyman, former auto dealer and occasional Business Journal commentator. With the state budget deficit exploding and the Gray Davis administration imploding, John Campbell was transformed from a mere minority party gadfly into a driving...

Campbell was a true giant in popularity among those authors who had grown out of the science-fiction magazines. The Mightiest Machine … epitomized the type of story that had created his followng. Mighty spaceships move at speeds faster than light from star system to star system, warping themselves through another dimension at the whim of Aarn Munro, a mental and physical superman, descendant of earthmen raised on the surface of the planet Jupiter. He custom-contrives universe-shaking energy weapons t...

It's becoming increasingly obvious that we need a long, objective look at John W. Campbell, Jr. But we're not likely to get one. When he was alive, Campbell was mind-numbingly complex but greatly influential because he could be seen taking major actions which could be labelled simply. Between 1932 and 1938 he made himself the co-equal of E. E. Smith among fabulists of technological optimism. "Superscience fiction" realized its full potential at his hands, and created a body of re...

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally presented as a lecture at the Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside, in 1980.] [In trying to determine the relationship between fantasy and science fiction, fantasy] honors the emotive side of the self, what I call the nighttime perspective. The extreme alternative is literature devoted to the exercise of the daytime powers of the intellect. Here my quintessential specimen is John Campbell'...