From: potter@csusac.ecs.csus.edu (Carl Kolchak)
Subject: Heydt Backlash (was: Shiras, continued)
Followup-To: /dev/null
Summary: 'old on, 'arf a sec, luv... <<  WARNING:  276 line essay.
Keywords: bigot, prejudice, peer adjustment
Organization: INS, Inc.
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 92 20:14:14 GMT

Dorothy Heydt wrote:

> From: cozzlab@garnet.berkeley.edu
> Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
> Subject: Shiras, continued
> Message-ID: <rvgcuINNlhf@agate.berkeley.edu>
> Date: 8 Apr 92 19:09:18 GMT
> Organization: University of California, Berkeley
> 
> In <1992Apr8.082612.15862@csusac.csus.edu> potter@csusac.ecs.csus.edu
>   (Carl Kolchak) writes:
> 
> " this one's impossible for me to believe.  John W. Campbell, Jr., 
> " was notoriously bigoted, opinionated, and bullheaded, but he was 
> " definitely not sexist!   ....
> " .... He's quite capable of having suggested that she 
> " spell her name as "Wilmar" to get her an unprejudiced reading,  ....
> 
> I met Shiras once, and now I am trying to remember if it was she who
> told me about the name change (which would sew the matter up) or whether
> I heard it elsewhere (which would leave the issue still in doubt).

   If Campbell actually said that, and it can be documented, that fact 
 needs to be part of the record.
   Even if you heard it from Shiras, it would still be in doubt, since 
 it's unlikely she was present when he read the story.  If he wrote the
 statement to her in a letter, it should be published in one of the 
 collections of his letters; please get a copy to Perry Chapdelaine.
   Please find out, and document this, before adding to the heap of crap
 that's already been laid against the memory of what may have been the 
 most influential 20th-century American SF editor.  Agreed, Campbell 
 was an opinionated boor, but it *was* possible to change his mind 
 with little effort.  All you had to do was agree with him completely,
 and he'd switch to the other viewpoint to get the argument going again.
 He regarded argument as the generator of knowledge.  Campbell loved to 
 get a flat-out, no-holds-barred fight going, so he could learn something.
 He specialized in setting people at his own throat by attacking their
 most sacred opinions; sometimes he went overboard.  Make an assertion
 that was conceptually testable, and he'd pick at it verbally until he
 was convinced of its validity.  Make an experimentally verifiable 
 assertion, and you'd get dragged out to the garage lab while he set up 
 an experiment to test it!

> " I decline to doubt that he *ever* said "couldn't believe that a woman
> " had written the thing."   Campbell didn't care *where* a good story 
> " came from, as long as it was *good*.  [etc., etc., etc.]

   If I typed in "decline to doubt," it was a typo.  Single-negative
  here; either "I decline to believe," or "I incline to doubt that...."

> Consider some of Campbell's other quirks, viz., his racial and ethnic
> prejudices that we all know about, I'm not sure your point is made.

  "That we all know about?"  Since I met JWC a number of times, and saw
  how he related to people of all colors, creeds, and sexual persuasions,
  I'd love to know what kind of prejudice I'm supposed to know about.
  I'm aware of his anti-gay attitudes, but you'd have to go pretty far
  to find some sexual, religious, or racial prejudice of his that wasn't 
  considerably more lenient and laid-back than was common at the time.
  Incidentally, after the furor over a Mack Reynolds story that was 
  purposely loaded with negative stereotypes and laden with the 
  attitude that all a male gay needed to fix him up was a shot of 
  hormones, outraged gays of all variations came thundering out of
  the closet, foaming at the mouth (remember, this was thirty years
  ago, and the political climate was *not* friendly!)...... to be met
  by Campbell's attitude of "If you don't like the story, write me a 
  better one."   Gay characters appeared after that, often in stories
  written by gays(*); but they did not appear for shock value, and were 
  simply treated as people, not outre aliens.  Campbell looked for 
  STORIES that would interest, amuse, and make people think.  Only
  rarely did his bonnet get so bee-ized that he proselytized.

  (* ..or, as Campbell referred to them, "fairies."  Often spelled 
    "fairys," since he typed fast and sloppy; he seems to have used
    the phrase "lady truck drivers" to refer to gals of the lesbian 
    persuasion, and for two years played chess at lunch with one such
    who happened to work in the same building.  She won most of the
    time, and usually won arguments with him, too; I believe she 
    intimidated him, but he certainly enjoyed her company.)

> Campbell manifested the "some-of-my-best-friends-are" syndrome, wherein
> he firmly believed that all X are Y, except for those few X whom he
> happened to know and considered exceptions to the norm!  E.g., Isaac
> Asimov, who as an ethnic Russian Jew fell into several categories
> Campbell looked down on--but not on Asimov, because he _knew_ Asimov

  Oh, really?   Then why was he buying stories from black writers, or 
  stories *about* black characters, when he didn't have to?  What was
  he doing when he encouraged writers like Weinbaum to keep typing?
  It was Mort Weisinger who advised Weinbaum to use a "less-Jewish" 
  pen name, and Campbell himself who said "Hell, use your own name.
  Your work stands on its own."
  Look up "BLACK MAN'S BURDEN" and "BORDER, NOR BREED, NOR BIRTH" 
  by Mack Reynolds.   
  Look up Eric Frank Russell's stories;  the "Men, Martians, and Machines"
  stories were loaded with inter-racial and inter-species amity, despite
  the U.S. political climate at the time.  Forty years ago, despite the 
  then-current success of Frank Yerby as a historical novelist, it was 
  *not* fashionable to print stories with sympathetic black characters.  
  Campbell got irate letters from folks who were offended that some
  of the EFR stories contained a black doctor who operated on whitefolks.
  (Campbell's response was:  "When you need an appendectomy the only
  thing that matters is the surgeon's competence, not age, sex, or 
  skin color.")

> and knew he was intelligent and had the makings of a writer in him.

  Actually, Campbell tolerated Asimov and helped him along, because he
  recognized that Asimov's tremendous drive to excel would allow him
  to overcome his one handicap (an inability to write).  Asimov proved
  that Campbell's investment of time and hassle was wise, by making an
  incontrovertibly huge contribution to 20th-century SF and popularized
  science literature.  However, even Asimov's vaunted eidetic memory was
  subject to emendation and occasional re-writing.   In the sixties, 
  Ike used to say that CAMPBELL wrote the Three Laws and *handed them to
  him*, having specifically constructed them so that they were full of 
  story-generating loop-holes.  In later decades, Campbell's contribution
  became less and less acknowledged, until Asimov remembered writing the
  laws himself......

> Campbell knew a good number of intelligent women--several of them
> wrote for him, one was married to him, others were married to his

  Two were married to him.  Donna, who remarried George O. Smith, 
  and Margaret, JWC's second wife.  Campbell was not *allowed* to 
  regard women as second-class citizens, because neither of his wives
  would have stood for it.   I once watched the second Mrs. Campbell and 
  Polly Freas (Kelly's wife) take over the lobby of a convention hotel
  and eject a bunch of beer-drunken motorcyclists who'd wandered in 
  and refused to leave.  No raised voices, no physical interaction;
  just sheer force of personality and refusal to be cowed by mere males.

> friends--but this wouldn't prevent him from thinking that somebody
> *whom he didn't know* who had just sent him in a good story *must*
> by default be male.

  *Shrug*  ..."He" is a class pronoun acceptable as a marker for any 
  human of unknown sex.  If you have a problem with it, re-write the 
  language.  
  Judy Merrill was one-half of "Cyril Judd" because Kornbluth suggested
  they flip a coin to pick the sex of their joint pseudonym.  ("GUNNER
  CADE," serialized some time around '51, if memory serves.)

> And then after he found out, well, the by-line was established already.

  JWC *picked* pseudonyms for many of his writers, male and female, for
  good reasons, and helped them generate names of their own.  Among the
  reasons for this were the trade's dislike of seeing the same writer's 
  name in the contents page more than once, and JWC's fear that his
  public wouldn't give a fair reading to SF by a woman (a fair attitude
  at the time; it was as easy for a woman to get published as for a man,
  but harder to be taken seriously.  Alice North and Catherine Moore both
  changed their names to male versions due to this; "Andre" and "C.L.")

> Getting back to Shiras, the thing I do remember her saying is that
> she wrote about the Atom Kids as if they were adults in kids' bodies,
> coping as best they could with a culture that considered them cute
> and not very bright.

  *Shrug*  again.  Since you can't describe the thought processes of an
  adult superman, you are, perforce, reduced to describing the thought 
  processes of an *immature* superman.  Presumably, they might be 
  equivalent to a human adult when very young.  This is not unique, not 
  brilliant; Olaf Stapledon used it in "ODD JOHN," and it was old then.

> If you find the Pennyfarthing edition of _CotA_, you'll find a foreword
> by Marion Zimmer Bradley describing how many young fans would say to
> Shiras (if they happened to meet her) or to anyone else who would listen,
> about how they identified with the Atom Kids,  The character's problems
> were the problems, writ large for dramatic effect, of any bright kid
> living among average people and feeling alienated because of it.  This
> includes not only me, my husband, my kids, but, I will bet, most of
> those who read this group.

  Of course.  The identification factor is effectively 100%..........
But Shiras' ending, the "all right,  you're brilliant, but now you have to
settle down and be like everyone else" attitude, looks more like attempted
self-justification, or brainwashing, to me.  It looks like the educational
attitudes of the forties, emphasizing "peer group" adjustment at all costs,
including the self-esteem and future sanity of the children involved.

I can remember, as a child, saying to a teacher "If you can find me some 
peers, I'll be happy to socialize with them.  But if you can't find me
peers, don't throw me back out there with the apes."   My propensity
for reading during recess, since the books they gave us in class were 
incredibly dull and uninformative, always resulted in physical damage and
bullying.   The only "peer group adjustment" I achieved was learning to 
use a baseball bat to compensate for my small size; but I didn't learn 
soon enough.  I still have damage to both shoulder joints, half a century
later, from having had my arms dislocated, recess after recess, by the 
schoolyard bullies.  Despite the fact that I was doing college-freshman-level
work before I got out of grade school, I was never allowed to skip a grade
because it would "impair my social development."
I've got news for them.  It didn't work.  It just wasted twelve years
of my life, and I'm still curmudgeonly and anti-social.

> Which is why the ending of _CotA_ isn't the cop-out several posters
> have said it is.  Yes, the Atom Kids have to go back down to the flats
> and rejoin the human race.  This is not a bad thing.  Because even if

Sez who?   You ever read the research reports on feral children?  If
a feral child doesn't manage language acquisition by a certain age,
he/she will never achieve it.  Who can tell what capacities and abilities
might be blunted by environmental crippling?   The longer the adolescence,
the higher the intellectual capacity of the adult.  Perhaps the New 
Humans needed to remain adolescent until age 30 and work only with 
each other to feel their way toward full use of their extended abilities.

Both Howard Fast and Poul Anderson have dealt with this concept in 
other, better-conceived and better-executed, stories.

> you were willing to postulate a genuinely new species appearing out
> of the human genepool on such short notice [calculate, if you will,
> the likelihood of a radiation dose that killed all the parents within
> two years, having first produced _dozens_ of F1 kids who all had the
> *same* mutation--enhanced intelligence--and no other somatic or genetic
> changes]....

   Shiras had enough background in genetics that we may safely assume her
  awareness of this logical flaw, but she either chose to leave it for a
  later, unwritten, story, or to ignore it.
 (( Obviously, the radiation created one or more mutated viruses which
  were chromosome-specific, and, once vectored among the research 
  personnel, made the same modification to the DNA of all concerned.
    One hopes it went on to infect the general population. ))

> ....even if you want to assume for the sake of the story that the
> Atom Kids are not human, WE ARE.  Yes, you and me and our spouses and
> kids and all the other readers of these bandwidths, we are part of the
> human race.  We happen to have one trait in common; other than that we
> are as diverse as any other segment of humanity, differing by race,
> ethnicity, religion, age, sex, sexual practices, and everything else
> you can think of.  And we are not entitled to assume, "Well, people
> who are as smart as me are human; the rest are just puppies."

No offense, but in my experience, people who spend their lives throttled 
back to low gear so they can interface and socialize with the less-fortunate
end up stressed, unhappy, suicidal, and dysfunctional.   If you're 
comfortable with the idea, more power to you.   But I doubt you've ever
met anyone who's really superior, because those folks tend to shy away
from environments like the Berkeley Experience; they don't *like* being 
out in crowds of hairless monkeys, and prefer to live far back in the 
boonies.  One I know sold his patents for a lump sum, bought a ranch in
the back hills in Idaho, and comes into town twice a year for dental work
and to pick up his back issues of the Journal of the American Mathematical
Society.  He doesn't like having people around him, because they talk at
him while he's trying to think.

> End of sermon.  / Dorothy J. Heydt / UC Berkeley

Isn't a sermon a preachment, founded in faith, attempting to sway others
to one's own viewpoint?   ...and your viewpoint is that JWC did and said
something that you can't document, at present.   When  you have evidence,
get back to us.   (Hearsay doesn't count; if Shiras, or a known-reliable
reporter wasn't present when JWC reportedly made that comment, then all
you have is an opinion, and my opinion is more valid than yours, since 
I knew the man, albeit superficially, far better than you or your contacts.)
 
Real sexism in ANALOG didn't appear until after Bova's divorce; and even
he kept it reined in, much of the time.  (Campbell would *never* have 
blazoned "Special All-Women's Issue" on the cover, but would simply have
filled the magazine with stories, articles, and editorials by women, and
waited to see if anyone noticed.)
 
Sorry if I've stomped on any Politically Correct corns, here.


Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written