John W. Campbell and his Los Alamos Subscribers

Cafe Society
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I ran across one other potential reference - in August 1945, Campbell was interviewed by the New Yorker magazine about the atomic bomb and related subjects 1945 Cassandra | The New Yorker

The interview starts:

““Astounding” has for the past 10 years or so predicted atomic bombs and using them to liven up its stories. The magazine got a notice of censorship on atomic energy, but Mr. Campbell wrote back that atomic bombs had been their stock in trade for years and it would look suspicious if they suddenly dropped the subject. The Army thought so, too. Mr. Campbell, a physicist and a former M. I. T. student, would like his publication to be taken seriously. His magazine is currently featuring a series of stories on post-atomic-bomb-war conditions. He discussed the next war and made some dire predictions.”

Unfortunately, I don’t have a subscription to the magazine so I can’t see the rest of the interview, but it certainly seems like a place Campbell would have boasted of his readership at Los Alamos or Oakridge if it were true.

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I’ve got the article, a very short one. Campbell talks about the horrors of atomic war. He doesn’t even mention the “Deadline” investigation. There’s nothing useful there.

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Sorry it wasn’t more helpful.

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Well, it forced me to dig it out of an old folder and move it into a current working one, along with other old stuff, so in fact it was helpful in a sidewards way.

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Yeah, it’s 20/20 hindsight. Look it was in the middle of WordWarFreakenTwo. Scientists and techs and experts and soldiers were being shipped willynilly everywhere for thousands of Top Secret projects.

Yes, the Project as a whole was pretty big. But the Project was also split over a dozen+ sites.

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I found the source for the detail about Campbell (not Cartmill’s) subscriber pinboard with a cluster of pins identifying Oak Ridge (not Los Alamos) as a peculiar hotspot. It comes from page 113 of SF historian David A. Kyle’s 1976 book, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction. I have an interlibrary loan order in for the book, but the relevant portion is excerpted on page 17 of Andrew May’s Rockets and Ray Guns, which discusses the Astounding investigation:

The FBI agent in Campbell’s office suggested national security was being betrayed, but he was convinced finally that atom bombs and nuclear energy were commonplace themes; he then proposed that such story material be eliminated. That, Campbell explained, would be suspiciously obvious and the FBI left, if not happy, at least reassured. “What I didn’t show him,” said Campbell, “was my circulation map with its cluster of pins for subscribers at a little place in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” Like a Geiger counter, Astounding and Campbell had pinpointed the hidden heart of the Manhattan Project through the scientists and technicians who read that provocative and prophetic magazine.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

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Let me, as a moderator, officially welcome you to the board, @professed . You might see some jokes about zombies, since the thread you bumped was last active nearly a decade ago, but I want to reassure you that that is allowed here, so long as the bump adds substantive new information. Which you certainly did. I also invite you to have a look around: The sort of person who would research this is likely to also be the sort to feel at home here.

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Thank you, @Chronos, for the kind and personalized introduction! I happen to be working on a book for which I needed to run down a citation for this little factoid, which led me to both the source and this thread simultaneously. That said, you still have my personality type pegged. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: I will definitely be taking a look around.

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Thank you!

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I have the book, and I can confirm that what you quoted was there. The quote you gave came directly from Kyle’s book.

And welcome to the Dope.

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I have Kyle’s book. He was in the innermost in-group of fans and writers and editors in those early days. He knew everyone and appeared everywhere. Almost certainly he would have heard the Campbell story, which as everybody notes Campbell repeated regularly.

A 1976 mention would be the earliest found in print, so that’s a good find. Whether Kyle’s memory was accurate is a question, however. I read thousands of words by Kyle when I was doing the bibliography of Gnome Press, which he co-founded. I seldom cited him because his stories contradicted facts that could be corroborated.

You might think that Alec Nevala-Lee’s gigantic biography of Campbell would settle it. But he calls the story a legend and footnotes Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, by Mark Brake and Neil Hook, which refers to a set of “bright-red” pins around Santa Fe. Los Alamos is also attached to the story in Meltdown: Stories of nuclear disaster and the human cost of going critical, by Joel Levy and in The New Quantum Universe, by Anthony J. G. Hey and Patrick Walters, e.g.

I believe Campbell told the story about the FBI agents’ visit. That could have shut down the magazine and was of gigantic interest to the community. He was a natural story-teller and also a bore who liked to make himself the center of attention. I also believe he embellished the story every time he told it. Can I push that further to say that he changed the location to Oak Ridge at times, when challenged on Los Alamos? Seems possible. I also mentioned Hanford in my OP (original post). But almost all the references I’ve found mention New Mexico. And Kyle’s book was pretty obscure. I’d be amazed if a bunch of writers independently discovered it.

Thanks for the discovery, though. As I implied above, no amount of research ever seems to be enough. A great quote always lies just over the work horizon.

If you need info on other aspects of sf history, I have stacks of nonfiction about the field and I may be able to help. You can message me by clicking on my avatar and clicking the “Message box” in the pop up.

Footnote: I thought I had discovered something when searching fanac.org, a rival site to efanzines.com mentioned above. A 2018 issue of THE MT VOID, the fanzine of the Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society, published endlessly by BNFs (Big Name Fans) Mark and Evelyn Leeper, had this comment on an article: “I heard this story attributed to John W. Campbell years ago. It is probably just an urban legend.” What article? This post on the “‘Straight Dope’s’ bulletin board”. The world is a closed circle. And as we all know, a circle has no end.

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@Voyager Thank you so much! This is great to know, and I appreciate the warm greeting.

@Exapno_Mapcase This is so helpful, thank you! Fortunately, for my purposes, it’s okay if this turns out to be an urban legend, so long as I label it clearly as such. My book isn’t on science fiction history per se, but a university press book on media distribution, wherein I’m making the point that distribution necessarily involves collecting data on people that may have ramifications beyond getting them their magazine. There are more important (and more thoroughly vetted) examples, like the creation of lists of US citizens who ostensibly had communist leanings based on the mail they received.

The Campbell story is more of a fun, illustrative anecdote to lead into the higher-stakes stuff. Even so, I want to be sure I’m presenting it a way that’s not misleading, which means establishing as well as possible how truthful it is and presenting that level of confidence transparently. In that spirit, I really appreciate the additional sources (Different Engines, Meltdown, The New Quantum Universe, Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding).

By analogy, Langdon Winner, drawing on Robert Caro’s biography, gives a famous account of NYC city planner Robert Moses strategically placing low overpasses to block buses, and their lower-income riders, from accessing the beach. The story has been disputed over the years, but Winner’s article is still widely read because it illustrates a true principle. I think the pinboard story can do the same thing, but if it’s an urban legend I need to present it as such and not invite a bunch of unnecessary critiques. If I’m calling it an urban legend, though, I need to establish that, too. Hence how grateful I am for the additional sources and context that you’ve shared. I will definitely message you, as I’d love to drop an acknowledgement into the book for the way you’ve shared sources and lent your expertise here.

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@Exapno_Mapcase Hmm, I don’t see the message box or another way to message you over the forum. Possibly, I haven’t been around or posted enough to attain trusted status on the forum software.

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Try clicking on the three bars at the top on the right (the “hamburger menu”) - third item down is “my messages”.

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Thank you, @Andy_L! “My Messages” doesn’t appear when I expand the hamburger menu. And when I tried to share a screenshot just now, it said that I’ve not yet earned sufficient user privileges to upload images, so it looks like I am indeed still limited to newbie user functionality. :joy:

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Keep posting and soon all powers will be yours

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Muhahaha! Thank you.

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Your messages can also be found in the menu that appears if you click on
your avatar in the top right of your screen. (It’s the envelope icon :envelope: )
You can message someone by clicking on their avatar and clicking
the “:envelope: Message” button.

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Also, nobody can actually upload images here. You need to save the
image on an external image hosting site (eg imgur or bbimg) and post
a link to it here.

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Nobody here has sufficient privileges for that. If you want to share images here, you need to host it somewhere else and then post a link to it.