Help with John W. Campbell quote

I remember vaguely that John W. Campbell, when he was the editor of *Astounding *and creating the Golden Age of SF out of his head, said something like he wanted “stories that could appear as mainstream in a future magazine.”

Anybody know what this quote actually says and where he said it?

Quoted by Frederik Pohl

I want the kind of story that could be printed in a magazine of the year two thousand A.D. as a contemporary adventure story. No gee-whiz, just take the technology for granted.

Thanks. I knew I could count on Dopers.

I wonder if Campbell could have imagined that in 2015 there would be virtually no mainstream market left for short stories and science fiction would be pretty much the only genre left where an author can get a short story published.

IIRC, he’s also the one who wanted aliens who think as well as a man, but not like a man. Precious few authors have managed to meet that challenge.

Stanley Weinbaum’s * A Martian Odyssey * is, I think ,the classic example that fits the description .

There are still plenty of mainstream short story markets. There are just very few that pay anything.

But you get exposure… :rolleyes:

Isaac Asimov once said that Weinbaum was already writing Campbell stories before Campbell got in the business and that if Weinbaum hadn’t died so early, people would be talking about the Weinbaum Revolution in science fiction rather than the Campbell Revolution.

Are magazines like Granta, Ploughshares, and Tin House really part of the mainstream?

They define it. Well, along with about a hundred others. Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, n + 1, Subtropics, Conjunctions, Zoetrope, and the Reviews: Southern, Kenyon, Threepenny, Georgia, New England, Missouri, Iowa, Ontario, Virginia Quarterly, Antioch, Mississippi, Hudson, Yale, Idaho, etc.

And there are a number of high-end magazines that buy fiction: New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s.

Both the Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Award Stories are published annually.

Chronos writes:

> IIRC, he’s also the one who wanted aliens who think as well as a man, but not like
> a man.

Um, really? According to Isaac Asimov, Campbell insisted that mankind had something that made them better than any other intelligent race in the universe, and he expected this to be reflected in any story he bought for Analog. Asimov thought of this as being an extension of Campbell’s mostly suppressed racism. For this reason, Asimov just didn’t put any aliens into his stories for Campbell.

That’s also true. It’s possible that Campbell wasn’t entirely consistent in this.

Or, of course, it’s possible that I didn’t recall correctly. But there was definitely some classic SF editor who asked for that.

Being part of the mainstream means people are actually reading the stories. How many people read any of the magazines you or I listed? Granta admits its circulation is below fifty thousand. Tin House’s circulation is twelve thousand. Ploughshares says its circulation is five to ten thousand. And I chose these because these are the big names on the market. The official circulation of the Idaho Review, for example, is one thousand.

Bigger magazines like Esquire, Harpers, the New Yorker, and Playboy only publish stories by established authors. They don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts.

The claim that Campbell said that he wanted aliens that think as well or better than a man but not like a man may have originated in the introduction that Theodore Sturgeon wrote to the Strugatsky book Roadside Picnic/Tale of the Troika. I found a reference to this introduction in a Quora answer. One other source says that it was Asimov who said it. I’ve just checked my copy of the Strugatsky novel and Sturgeon indeed says that it was Campbell. But this is Sturgeon, long after hearing Campbell (or somebody) say it, quoting from his memory, so who knows if it’s an accurate quotation and who knows who originally said it.

No. I, too, have heard this quote, but can’t recall where it came from. I certainly haven’t read the Srurgeon intro to Roadside Picnic, so I’ve read it elsewhere.

Then we’re using different definitions of mainstream. In my world fiction is either genre or mainstream. Number of copies sold is irrelevant.

Remember that even in the heyday of magazines, when Fitzgerald got $5000 for a story in the Saturday Evening Post, the vast bulk of short fiction sales were to the pulps. Those often had circulations in six figures. But they were never mainstream. Conversely, the “little magazines” bought the kind of fiction that Ploughshares etc. buys today and they published much of the fiction now most famous and acclaimed despite their circulations of 1000 or less.

Yes, CalMeacham, you’ve read or heard it elsewhere, but did you read it before 1977, when that Strugatsky book was published in the U.S.? Perhaps Sturgeon misremembered where he heard it. I’ve done a lot of searching, and I can’t find anything older than that that attributes the quotation to Campbell. Can you?

Actually, yes. If I’m not mistaken, Asimov says it in his introduction to The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, the first of the Ballantine/del Rey collections devoted to retrospectives of short stories of Golden Age writers. He wrote it with respect to Tweel, the birdlike hero of Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”, an alien fulfilling Campbell’s dictum, as noted above. The book was first published in 1974.

Actually, the best example I’ve ever seen, it wasn’t even an alien at all. In the far-underappreciated short “Poppa Needs Shorts” by Walt and Leigh Richmond, the protagonist is bright (but not extraordinarily so) three-year-old who thinks very well and logically, but in ways none of the adults in the story could even begin to guess at.

It appears we are using two different definitions. To me, literary fiction - the kind of stories that are published in literary magazines - is essentially just another genre. It appeals to one group of readers the same way that science fiction or westerns or mysteries or romance does.

So I was defining mainstream not by the genre of the short story but by its impact on the overall culture of the society it exists in. By that standard John Grisham is more mainstream than Kim Stanley Robinson - for good or bad, more people are exposed to the Grisham’s work than Robinson’s. But by the same standard, Robinson is more mainstream than Ling Ma, who wrote the lead story in the current issue of Granta.

There’s also the issue of influence. Some people are just following established formulas so while they may be popular their work doesn’t move culture in new directions. Other creators may be creating more new ideas that other creators pick up and use - so their impact is greater than their own personal popularity (like the old joke about the Velvet Underground - that not a lot of people listened to the band but everyone who did went out and started their own bad). But even influence first requires exposure.