Stan's editing philosophy continued the best of Campbell's.

So seeing them in these pages was a tour through many significant conversations and interactions I've had in my own life.Īnd on being a science fiction writer myself, Nevala-Lee's book also tapped into another profound wellspring of my career: I've been published in Analog 17 times (15 stories and 2 nonfiction articles - one story acquired by Trevor Quachri, all the rest by Stan Schmidt), and am a card-carrying member (well, pin-affixed) of the Analog Mafia. Clarke, Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg, Sam Delany (I first heard about him from his mother Ruth, in the mid-1960s, in the George Bruce Branch Library in Harlem where she worked as a librarian and I as a clerk), Ray Bradbury, David Kyle, Barry Malzberg, Greg Benford, Joe Haldeman, Janet (Jeppson) Asimov, and many others. And, as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1998-2001, and as a science fiction writer myself, I also knew or still know many of the secondary players in Astounding, including Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. It was a collection of essays (I contributed one) of which I was the Editor, and I didn't have to work very hard to get Asimov to write the Preface: we already knew each other (I'd sent him my analysis of the Foundation trilogy published a few years earlier in Media and Methods - here's his postcard response - and he quickly accepted Humanity Press's not overly generous offer of $100 to write the Preface for the Popper volume). In contrast, I knew and worked with Isaac Asimov, the high point of which was getting him to write a Preface for my first published book, In Pursuit of Truth: Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper in 1982. I knew neither Gernsback or Campbell in person, or by any means other than their published writing.

It's no surprise (at least to me) that Astounding had much more of an impact on me - a transformative impact - than The Perversity of Things. (The runners-up are The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction by Grant Wythoff and Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield, though I read those two on paper.) Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, I bookmarked it ten times more than any other book I've read in the past few years. As one indication of how important I found Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding: John W.

One of the joys of reading on a Kindle (or, in my case, a Kindle app) is the ease of bookmarking.

Alec nevala lee astounding