American writer and editor

John W. Campbell's editorship of Astounding Science Fiction, where he nurtured some of the genre’s greatest talents, helped him shape modern science fiction more than any other individual.

A devotee of the science fiction magazines from their inception, Campbell sold his first stories while still a teenager, beginning with "Invaders from the Infinite" to Amazing Stories. In the early 1930s he quickly built a reputation as E.E. "Doc" Smith’s chief rival in writing galactic epics of super-science. The climax of his popularity and fiction-writing career came with "Who Goes There?" (1938), a classic science fiction horror story about an Antarctic research station menaced by a shape-changing alien invader. The story was later filmed, without the shape-changing, as The Thing (1951), and later, also as The Thing (1982), with the basic premise restored.

In September 1937, Campbell was appointed editor of Astounding Stories, a post he would retain until his death (the magazine was retitled Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 and Analog in 1960). Campbell brought to his editorial post a wealth of ideas and a determination to raise the standards of writing and thinking in magazine science fiction. New writers were encouraged and fed with ideas, with remarkable success.

By 1939, Campbell had discovered Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and A.E. van Vogt (though the two latter writers had already been publishing for some time in other genres). L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Clifford D. Simak and Jack WIlliamson, already established science fiction writers, soon became part of Campbell’s "stable," as well, and Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore became regular contributors beginning in 1942. These were the authors at the core of Campbell’s "Golden Age of Science Fiction" — a period corresponding roughly to World War II — when Astounding Science Fiction dominated the genre in a way no magazine before or since has matched.

Between 1952 and 1964, Campbell won eight Hugo awards for Best Editor; the magazine won seven Hugo awards under his editorship. His death in 1971 was marked by an unprecedented wave of commemorative activity: two awards were founded bearing his name, and a memorial anthology was published: Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology.

Selected Bibliography:
The Planeteers (1966)
A John W. Campbell Anthology (1973)
Collected Editorials from Analog (1966)
Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology (1974)
The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1 (1986)

Film/TV Adaptations:
The Thing (1951 and 1982)

Courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Copyright © John Clute and Peter Nicholls 1993, 1999, published by Orbit, an imprint of the Time Warner Book Group UK.