Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee

This book has the longest subtitle I can remember seeing outside of academia: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. But that does explain the book pretty comprehensively: it's a group biography of the "Golden Age" of SF, focused on the central editor and three of his biggest writers, though Alec Nevala-Lee does tell us about a lot of other writers, editors, business people and others along the way.

The book is Astounding because the magazine was Astounding, and at the time - the early Thirties through at least the war years - is was the SF magazine, in an era when SF was magazines. Campbell's Astounding was the center of gravity for a genre in a way that nothing else was before, or could be afterward. (Maybe Harlequin, at the height of its dominance, had a similar position in romance, but, even there, a book publisher is vastly different from a magazine in terms of audience engagement and continuity.)

There have been biographies of Heinlein, I know. Asimov chronicled his own life, and I think others have as well. Hubbard has probably had a non-hagiographic biographer (and definitely a few of the other kind), and certainly has been a focus of many books on Dianetics and Scientology. But this is the closest we've seen to a biography of Campbell, I think. Nevala-Lee has a long and extensive bibliography, and his notes make it clear he talked to nearly everyone still alive - this is a 2018 book, so those conversations were close to a decade ago, and some people no longer "still alive" were consulted.

I used to work in this field, but that's both quite some time ago and not nearly as long ago as the Campbell years; he died when I was two. So I have a vague knowledge of some things in Astounding, but mostly as stories I heard told, second- or third-hand, in my early days in the field - legends retold in con suites and editorial gatherings. Given that, if I say that Astounding matches my knowledge and experience of the field doesn't mean much, but I'll say it anyway: this is recognizably the SF field I worked in for a decade and a half, thirty to fifty years later. Some of these people, or their successors, were still roaming around in those days, and this is what they were like.

Nevala-Lee has set himself a gigantic task, but he basically accomplishes it. I thought Astounding moved quickly a lot of the time, and covers more ground more often in a single paragraph than you'd expect, but it's all well-sourced and clear and, as far as I can judge, true. Nevala-Lee is even-handed, and has the double advantage of fifty years of history and his position as an Analog writer (that's the title Campbell changed Astounding to in the early '60s; it's still running today): he's inside the in-group, not just the general SF in-group but the cadre of writers that still look up to Campbell specifically.

The four central figures don't come across as admirable figures, which some readers might expect: they were real people living in their times, and all did things we might consider unforgivable. Asimov was probably the nicest, most positive person of the group, and he was a massive sex pest for decades. Hubbard was a phony in nearly every way possible, from the very beginning, though he fooled lots of people for long stretches of time. Heinlein was a grumpy overly-opinionated semi-recluse (some of that, admittedly, partially caused by long-running and recurrent health problems) who dumped a wife and his former opinions when a new model came along.

(Nevala-Lee could have - but didn't - organized the book around the wives each of these men abandoned. They all have at least one; I lost track of how many Hubbard dumped.)

And Campbell was many of the things Heinlein was, but even more so: more opinionated, more prone to lecturing in conversation, more prone to pseudoscience fads, more full of himself, more enamored with the idea of the "competent man," more blinded by his own ideas and prejudices. He comes across as an interesting person that you absolutely would never have wanted to spend much time with: a hectoring, tedious, obnoxious windbag who can't be argued with and just will not shut up. (I'm sure many people have said this many times, but he's clearly the model for so many of those tedious overexplainers in Heinlein: Heinlein had those tendencies himself, but Campbell, in this as so many other things, was just more so.)

Nevala-Lee tells his story chronologically, jumping around a bit to cover all four men roughly equally, and running through quick chapters on everyone's childhoods to get to the meat of the book: how they all worked together and bounced off each other, starting with Campbell's sudden assumption of the Astounding editorship in 1937. He gets a lot of facts and figures and dates into the book; he manages to mention dozens of other people - from semi-central figures like George O. Smith to the next generation like Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg - along the way, to tell what is basically "what SF was like in the Golden Age."

He also clearly explains that these four men had the usual support structure of their era: several of them had accomplished wives who did more of the work than was clear at the time. Doña Stewart and Leslyn Heinlein in particular are fascinating figures that we can only see obscurely at this distance, but Nevala-Lee at least signposts what we do know and what can be known about their contributions.

It's a good sign when you wish a book was longer; I wished this one was. There's lots more material and even a second tier of writers Nevala-Lee could have spent more time on - van Vogt and de Camp and Williamson and Clarke and so on. But Astounding chose its figures well - correctly, I'd even say - and tells a clear story of when science fiction realized it had a Golden Age and made as much of it as it could.