John W. Campbell Jr., escaped from MIT and, a fine traditional sf writer himself (and for a time, as Don A. Stuart, a superb fantasist), took over the editorial chair of Astounding Science Fiction thirty years ago. In less than a couple of years he attracted to himself and the magazine (the same thing, really) a nucleus of extraordinary writers. A few had been around for a while—Simak, Leinster, Lieber; the others he discovered or invented or, it sometimes seems, manufactured. Pratt and deCamp, L. Ron Hubbard …, van Vogt, del Rey, Heinlein, Hamilton—Campbell, through these men, created what has been called a Golden Age of sf.

He was a superb and provocative teacher of science and of fiction. "Give me a story about aliens," he would challenge, "in which they think as well as a man but not like a man." He would return a story...