Rocket Ship Galileo

Robert Heinlein Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
I loathed Stranger in a Strange Land with such force as to inspire the promise that I would never read another Heinlein, but Alec Nevala-Lee's history of Astounding has given me cause to lift this embargo, because I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed those I read before I came to the aforementioned four-hundred pages of egocentric shite. So here we are again.

Rocket Ship Galileo may be among the squarest tales ever told - pipe-smoking scientist helps three rocket crazy young lads to build a spacecraft by which they fly to the moon, with all the science done right, equations and calculations described in detail, and no agricultural language or references to beastly habits. It's almost a variation on the lunar expeditions of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells as they would have been serialised for fifties America by the guy who wrote Biggles, but - as I now remember why the man had such a reputation - Heinlein not only makes it work, but it's positively gripping. He ticks every last box on the John W. Campbell checklist - five page lectures about sub-atomic particles, plot elements hung upon obscure features of trigonometry, lengthy discussions of structural integrity whilst our three smart young lads address everyone as sir and behave unlike teenagers have ever behaved in the real world - and yet Rocket Ship Galileo dazzles, page after page, somehow swanning around like a jaunty insurance salesman with pipe clenched firmly in its wry grin without a predictable sentence or narrative twist in sight.

I still don't know how he came to write Stranger, and there's no way I'm touching anything written later, but I'm glad I got over the hump. I'm already looking forward to the other two I picked up at the same time as this one.

Astounding

Alec Nevala-Lee Astounding (2018)
In addition to being a biography of John W. Campbell, Nevala-Lee's account also serves as a potted history of Astounding magazine and the birth of modern science-fiction - all three being inextricably knotted together. Obviously Astounding wasn't the only digest, but once Gernsback had left the table, it was the one with the widest influence which gave us the greatest authors of the form, notably Asimov, Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt and others.

As with Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Campbell's impetus was futurism and invention at least as much or arguably more so than it was literary. He was an ideas man more than a writer, and so as editor of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, he farmed his ideas out to those he trusted to do a better job, usually preferring to focus on columns and editorials covering technological advances and innovations of the day and what he hoped would come next. Science-fiction was still burning off the energy of the nineteenth century discovery of progress as something which might be observed within a single human lifespan and the idea that we might actively direct where it was headed. Evolutionary theory had inevitably inspired the notion of supermen, and Campbell and Hubbard in particular were keen to lead the way in this respect.

The success of Astounding and of its greatest writers probably accounts for why science-fiction has become synonymous with film and television more so than with the written word, which is a shame in my view, but was most likely inevitable. More surprising is just how much of Astounding has extended itself into the present, notably the first science-fiction fan clubs of the thirties and forties foreshadowing the worst aspects of today's social media, and of course Hubbard's pseudo-religion which might arguably serve as a metaphor for much of the wider capitalist society it inhabits - which is depressing given that the Dianetics from which it was born didn't seem entirely without merit.

Anyway, as you may be aware, Campbell seems to have been a fairly unpleasant character, and Nevala-Lee does an exceptional job of balancing the myth against the reality, unflinching in describing the man's worst qualities without presenting an impediment to appreciation of what he got right, even where it was for the wrong reasons. Honestly, no-one comes out of this saga smelling of roses, although I'm left considerably more sympathetic towards Robert Heinlein - providing I don't have to read Stranger ever again; but it's a story which really needs telling given the generally unreliable testimony of science-fiction enthusiasts, because it's worth remembering that this terrible man nevertheless had great ideas, and - while we're here - L. Ron Hubbard really knew his way around a typewriter, seeing as we've apparently forgotten that detail as well*.

Astounding is surprisingly exciting, weirdly depressing, and yet fascinating; and it also explains why I've never yet fully enjoyed an issue of Analog, which was successor to Astounding and always felt as though there was something unpleasant lurking at its conservative little heart.

*: Curiously it turns out that Hubbard never particularly cared for science-fiction, which possibly explains that ropey story about Xenu and reincarnated aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. His favourite genre, so it turns out, involved pirates and the high seas. It's a shame no-one told Tom King before he sat down to write Rorschach.