Science Fiction Aficionados discussion

John W. Campbell Jr. was born today, June 8, in 1910. He is known as an editor, mostly, but he wrote one novel (The Moon is Hell!, and co-wrote another, Empire. They were both published in 1951. You may not have known that second book had much to do with Campbell, but it has an interesting, somewhat tortured history. ISFDB has it as follows:

According to a Simak interview published in Muriel R. Becker's Clifford D. Simak: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980), the first version of this novel [Empire] was written by John W. Campbell, Jr. when Campbell was "something like eighteen years old", i.e. in the late 1920s. That version remains unpublished.
After Campbell, then the editor of ''Astounding'', serialized Simak's "Cosmic Engineers" in early 1939, he gave the manuscript of ''Empire'' to Simak to see if Simak could rewrite it. Simak did rewrite the novel, but Campbell decided that the new version wasn't suitable for publication either.
In 1951 H. L. Gold, the editor of the SF magazine ''Galaxy'', was looking for material for his Galaxy Science Fiction Novel series of standalone novels. He had heard about ''Empire'' from Campbell and approached Simak to see if he could buy it. Simak asked Campbell if Campbell wanted to share the credit and the money, but Campbell refused. In the end, ''Empire'' appeared in ''Galaxy Science Fiction Novel #7'' as by Simak alone.

I think it right to credit Campbell as co-author.

My next question: are either of the novels good?

Happy Birthday, John!

Wikipedia attributes the following as novels to Campbell's credit:

Beyond the End of Space (1933)
Conquest of the Planets (1935)
The Mightiest Machine (1947) Aarn Munro #1
The Incredible Planet (1949) Aarn Munro #2
The Black Star Passes (1953) Arcot, Wade, Morey #1
Islands of Space (1956) Arcot, Wade, Morey #2
Invaders from the Infinite (1961) Arcot, Wade, Morey #3
The Ultimate Weapon (1966)

Notice the two I listed previously as Campbell novels aren't considered as such by Wikipedia. Empire is always attributed to Clifford Simak, even if Campbell wrote the entire first draft. And The Moon is Hell is considered a short story collection. But then are what Wikipedia lists as Campbell novels really novels? Beyond the End of Space (1933) is really a story that appeared over two issues of Amazing Stories magazine, the March and April 1933 issue. Conquest of the Planets (1935) similarly appeared in three issues of that same magazine, the January, February, and March 1935 to be exact.

In fact, all of Campbell's "novels" listed above first appeared as serialized stories in Amazing Stories, some of which were much later collected and placed under a single cover as a book. Are these works then story collections or novels?

Does it matter? They're all readable Campbell works, all about novel length as a whole, the most recently published four of which are available for free at Gutenberg. The others are collected as eReader fodder for virtually nothing, like 99 cents, at Amazon for one, and not hard to find if you have a mind to.

I really enjoyed his classic "Who Goes There?" which also spawned one of my favorite films.

That appears to be his most famous, iconic work. I am currently reading through his Frozen Hell, an earlier draft of Who Goes There? published in 2019 that contains the missing 3/8 of the story at the beginning that Campbell presumably decided his tale didn't need. Since the addition takes the word count up slightly over 40,000, I guess that makes the book a novel.

Campbell was most famous as an editor and for choices that helped shape the genre. But what I have discovered is that he wrote precisely 51 stories in the 1930s (counting Who Goes There? and Frozen Hell separately), only 16 of which could be properly classified as short stories. The others are novelettes, or longer. For various interesting reasons his last ten stories (two novelettes, six novellas, and two novels) were published 1949 or later, although they were all written in the 1930s. I believe due to his tremendous later influence, editorials, science articles, anthologies, etc. that his original fiction output has probably been unfairly neglected.

One of the most interesting (to me) discoveries I made about Campbell was the project called Cosmos, a collaborative science fiction work from 1933-34 that included a contribution from pretty much every prominent 1930s science fiction writer. Campbell wrote Chapter 6 of its 17 chapters: https://cosmos-serial.com/

Dan wrote: "Wikipedia attributes the following as novels to Campbell's credit:

Beyond the End of Space (1933)
Conquest of the Planets (1935)
The Mightiest Machine (1947) Aarn Munro #1
The Incredible Planet (1..."

Just because something was serialized doesn't make it a collection of shorter stories. It was common practice to take a novel and break it down into installments for magazine publication. There were two reasons for this. One was that a standard size novel would take up all or almost all of an issue, which was felt by publishers to not be a good idea. Secondly, it was hoped that if readers liked the first installment of a serial they would buy the subsequent issues to read the rest of the story

So authors would write entire novels and then break them into three to five segments typically for serialization? Sounds plausible. I'm not sure why I assumed it had to be the other way around. Maybe because I'm so familiar with what are called "fix-up novels." There's a Wikipedia entry on them, they were so common. A fix-up novel, you probably already know, was when an author would take their serialized stories and then blend them together years later, often adding linking narrative sections and deleting repetitions that explained previous segments, in order to form a cohesive novel for publishing again an already written story.

Whichever the case may be then, looking over my chronological list of Campbell's 51 fiction publications he can be said to have written the following novels:

1. Arcot, Morey, and Wade (1930-32)
Piracy Preferred, Novella
The Black Star Passes, Novella
Islands of Space, Novel
Invaders from the Infinite, Novel

2. The Mightiest Machine (1934-49)
Five serialized short stories under that title, Dec. 1934 - Apr. 1935.
The Incredible Planet, Novelette
The Interstellar Search, Novella
The Infinite Atom, Novella

3. The Machine (1935)
The Machine, Short story
The Invaders, Short story
Rebellion, Novelette

4. Penton and Blake (1936-38)
The Brain Stealers of Mars, Short story
The Double Minds, Novelette
The Immortality Seekers, Novelette
The Tenth World, Novelette
The Brain Pirates, Short story

5. Sarn (1937-38)
Out of Night, Novelette
Cloak of Aesir, Novella

6. Empire (1951) with Clifford Simak

7. Frozen Hell (2019)

Note: The stories in #4 above were written to be light-hearted stories because that's what Thrilling Wonder Stories wanted to publish. Campbell took the basic idea of the first story, "The Brain Stealers of Mars," and darkened it up adding the considerable horror elements to it, in order to then recycle it as "Who Goes There?" Campbell's most famous and well-liked work. It's hard to imagine what a light-hearted version of that tale would look like. I'll have to read it some time.

As you can see, Wikipedia (and their list of Campbell novels from #1 above) seems inaccurate:
Beyond the End of Space (1933) is a novella.
Conquest of the Planets (1935) needs a preceding "The" and is a novella.
The Mightiest Machine (1947) Aarn Munro #1
The Incredible Planet (1949) Aarn Munro #2 - This is a story collection, technically, but okay.
The Black Star Passes (1953) Arcot, Wade, Morey #1 - A fix-up merging the first two novellas of the 4-part series.
Islands of Space (1956) Arcot, Wade, Morey #2 - Part 3, a novel.
Invaders from the Infinite (1961) Arcot, Wade, Morey #3 - Part 4, a novel.
The Ultimate Weapon (1966) - I have this as "Uncertainty", a novella published in two issues of Amazing Stories in 1936. Is it really long enough to be a novel as Wikipedia has it? Let's check. Nope. Just 30,609 words long. Novels have at least 40,000. The Ultimate Weapon, 1966 edition, is a novella.

Dan wrote: "So authors would write entire novels and then break them into three to five segments typically for serialization? Sounds plausible. I'm not sure why I assumed it had to be the other way around. May..."

Actually it was the editor of the magazine that they appeared in who did the breaking down. Usually the tried to find a good cliffhanger(s) and break it there. That way you had the reader wanting to get the next issue to see what happened. Does wonders for your sales. Hugo Gernsback even made serializations out of some of Jules Verne's novels.

Dan wrote: "That appears to be his most famous, iconic work. I am currently reading through his Frozen Hell, an earlier draft of Who Goes There? published in 2019 that contains the missing 3/8 ..."

In regards Cosmos, one thing that isn't apparent from the article you linked to is that Otis Adelbert Kline's (OAK, as he was known) contribution was a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price. I can't recall which one but they used characters from either Kline's Martian or Venus series.

C. John wrote: "In regards Cosmos, one thing that isn't apparent from the article you linked to is that Otis Adelbert Kline's (OAK, as he was known) contribution was a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price. I can't recall which one but they used characters from either Kline's Martian or Venus series."

That was Chapter 8 from the January 1934 issue, provided here: https://cosmos-serial.com/cosmos-the-.... It was one of the better installments.

I like how there is a reference to one of their earlier collaborations, a story titled "Thirsty Blades". Wonderful title that! It appeared in the February 1930 issue of Weird Tales. It was billed as "a swift-moving tale of the devil-worshippers of Kurdistan, and the colossal issues that hung upon the clash of blades." Skimming the story, I am impressed at least one of the authors had clearly spent some time in the Middle East. That author knew some Arabic because he actually wrote it correctly.

I suspect that was Price. He was a student of the language after his return from World War I