Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

always accompanied by a flood of new ideas and suggestions for other stories. 'No editor was ever
more helpful,' said Jack Williamson, one of his contributors. 'He read every story submitted. Those
he rejected came back with useful comments, and many a letter accepting one story also included
ideas for another.'[1] The mechanical ants in Williamson's novel, The Moon Children, were
Campbell's idea.
Isaac Asimov always remembered his first meeting with Campbell in the Seventh Avenue offices of
Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding. 'I was eighteen and had arrived with my first story
submission, my very first. He had never met me before, but he took me in, talked to me for two
hours, read the story that night and mailed the rejection the following day along with a kind, twopage
letter telling me where I had gone wrong.'[2]
Campbell was both a visionary and a realist. He believed in supernatural power and space travel
and rockets and a multiplicity of worlds, but he also fervently believed that science fiction should live
up to its name. His writing was studded with extraordinary technical detail explaining how complex
machines worked, yet his scientists were always real people with human emotions and foibles.
One of what he called his 'pet ideas' was that less than a quarter of the functioning capacity of the
brain was used. 'Could the full equipment be hooked into a functioning unit,' he wrote in Thrilling
Wonder Stories in 1937, 'the resulting intelligence should be able to conquer the world without
much difficulty.' Working on this doubtful premise, Campbell made unremitting attempts to
encompass telepathy, ESP and other odd psychic phenomena into a science he called 'psionics'.
As the reputation of Campbell's Astounding grew, new magazines appeared on the streets thick
and fast - Marvel Science Stories was out first, closely followed by Startling Stories, Dynamic
Science Stories and Fantastic Adventures. To distance his own magazine from the more garish
pulps, Campbell changed the title to Astounding Science Fiction, which he thought sounded more
dignified and more accurately reflected the content.
Campbell first met L. Ron Hubbard at about the time he took over as editor. Ron provided a typically
bombastic account of the circumstances: 'I got into science fiction and fantasy because F. Orlin
Tremaine, at the orders of the managing director of Street and Smith, brought me over and ordered
John W. Campbell Jr . . . to buy whatever I wrote, to freshen up the mag, up its circulation, and to put
in real people and real plots instead of ant men. John, although we became dear friends later,
didn't like this a bit.'[3]
Tremaine was an editorial director of Street and Smith and might well have effected the introduction
- he would certainly have known Ron, since Ron had contributed many stories to Street and Smith's
stable of adventure pulps. But it was inconceivable that Campbell would have been ordered to buy
everything Ron wrote. Campbell was an editor of total dedication and a notorious perfectionist - he
would never have relinquished his right to edit or to ask contributors for a rewrite if he thought it was
necessary. 'Those who could not meet his requirements,' said Isaac Asimov, 'could not sell to him.'
Whatever the circumstances of their meeting, it was clear that the young editor and the young writer
hit it off, for in April, 1938 Campbell wrote Ron a long, funny letter, full of friendly gobbledegook, to
chide Ron for not making contact when he was recently in New York. 'HUBBARD SNUBBARD: HUBBARD
SNUBBARD: HUBBARD SNUBBARD,' Campbell began. 'When I was a little boy, on me fodder's knee, he
says to me, says he to me (yes, I was a little boy, and I did have a fodder, and he did have a knee,
and he did say to me): "Never take offense, where offense isn't meant." So thata is data . . .'
He continued in similar vein for several pages, invited Ron to contribute some anecdotes about