SOURCE: Aldiss, Brian W. “Campbell's Soup.” In The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy, pp. 145-49. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Aldiss evaluates John W. Campbell's great contribution to science fiction literature.

Setting nostalgia aside, what was achieved by Astounding Science Fiction under the editorship of John Wood Campbell? Campbell edited this famous magazine from May 1938, when he took full charge, until he died in July 1971, at the age of sixty-one. It was a long tenure. Many of us still think of those years, particularly the magazine's rich decades of the 1940s and 1950s, as “Campbell's years”.

The situation must be faced, that the stories in which we gloried in our youth become tarnished on a disillusioned re-reading, many years later. The revelations in the stories are now part of our world-outlook; that they have become incorporated in, have formed, our way of life...