[July 10, 1961] The Last Straw (Campbell's wrong-headed rant in the August 1961 Analog)

[galacticjourney]

Has John W. Campbell lost his mind?

Twenty years ago, Campbell mentored some of science fiction's greats. His magazine, Astounding (now Analog), featured the most mature stories in the genre. He himself wrote some fine fiction.

What the hell happened? Now, in his dotage, he's used his editorial section to plump the fringiest pseudosciences: reactionless space drives, psionic circuits with no physical components, the assertion that the human form is the most perfect possible. The world hasn't seen an embarrassing decline like this since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle started chasing fairies.

But this month, Campbell has gone too far. This month, he replaced Analog's science-fact column with a rant on the space race, a full twenty pages of complete poppycock, so completely wrong in every way that I simply cannot let it lie.

(see the rest at Galactic Journey!)

Comments

[elf]

I've taken the liberty of cropping down the rant to remove the whitespace so it's more readable:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29915252/6108rant-cropped.pdf

I could also tweak the images in photoshop and OCR it to get a text/word version, if that turns out to be useful, but that's a lot of work for this kind of images - I'm willing but only if people would like it.

(Haven't read it yet; have a game starting in a few minutes.)

[galacticjourney]

Thank you! I have replaced my original copy. I can always use help like this. It all takes much longer than you'd think.

[elf]

I know how long it can take if you don't have the good tools (Acrobat Pro) and aren't familiar with them; for me, it's literally less than two minutes to do that kind of cropping.

Getting text from the images would probably take a couple of hours - it's fun work for me, but I'm not sure how useful it'd be.

[galacticjourney]

Not useful at all!

Can you message me at galacticjourneys@gmail.com? We can discuss working together.

Thanks so much for your help.

[elf]

Prepped for text conversion: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29915252/Pie%20in%20the%20Sky%20article.pdf

A quick pass of OCR says this would need to be retyped instead of converted & proofed, but this version might be easier to read.