小说与文学2018latimes.com
约翰·W·坎贝尔：科幻黄金时代的总设计师
John W. Campbell, a chief architect of science fiction's Golden Age
导读
这是《洛杉矶时报》的一篇书评/人物报道，讲约翰·W·坎贝尔——他长期主编《Astounding》，被认为是科幻“黄金时代”的主要缔造者之一，既塑造了一代科幻写作的规范，也把自己的偏见带了进去。写作者读它，可以看清一个把关人如何用口味和退稿信左右整个类型，也能反过来检查自己笔下那些没被说出口的默认设定。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
研究目标刊物和编辑的隐性规则：坎贝尔式的编辑会用退稿信把“什么算好故事”变成一整代人的写作习惯，投稿前先摸清这些不成文的标准。
- 02
给故事一个能被一句话说清的冲突内核，并让设定经得起推敲——这是坎贝尔时代被反复强化的类型写作基本功。
- 03
警惕“默认主角”和“默认结局”：为什么主角总是同一类人、人类总赢？这些套路往往是编辑偏见被当成商业常识传下来的，写作时要有意识地识别并打破。
- 04
把把关人的评价和作品价值分开：一个编辑既能成就一个类型，也能限制它，写作者要判断哪些行业惯例是营养、哪些只是偏见。
HN 评论精选
编辑的偏见常以“读者不会接受”的商业理由进入作品，进而变成整个类型的默认设定。
文章几乎没触及坎贝尔的种族主义，只在谈到1960年代那个“愤怒的老人”时顺带提了一句。再举一例：1967年他退掉了塞缪尔·R·德拉尼的稿子，给作者经纪人的便条和电话里解释说，他觉得自己的读者没法对一个黑人主角产生共鸣。德拉尼说，那是他作为职业作家最早直接遇到的、那种滑头又始终以商业为名的美国式自由主义偏见：“坎贝尔对你明白，对我身为黑人并无意见。”（据说有一两年后他给恐怖小说作家迪恩·孔茨的信里，还一本正经地论证技术先进的黑色文明在社会上和生物学上都不可能。）不，绝无此事！他身上肯定没有一根偏见的骨头！只是作者碰巧写了个母亲来自塞内加尔、父亲来自挪威的人，而1967年美国腹地那些可怜的蒙昧读者会受不了。但坎贝尔终其一生都是种族主义者。你有没有想过，为什么“黄金时代”科幻几乎都以白人男性为主角、人类几乎总赢过外星人？部分原因就是他巨大的影响力让他的种族主义渗进了我小时候读到并喜爱的那些故事。
eesmith查看英文原文
The article barely touches on Campbell's racism, bringing it up only in the context of being an "angry old man" in the 1960s. To give another example, he rejected a story by Samuel R. Delany in 1967 - https://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html : > ... with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility. . . .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset. . . . But he was a racist all his life. You ever wonder why the 'Golden Age' SF almost all has white men as the main character, with humans almost always winning over aliens? It's in part because his big influence on SF caused his racism to permeate the stories I read and enjoyed as a kid. Here's a paraphrase from Asimov (Campbell, btw, felt that Jews were a superior species of human), quoted at https://andrewhickey.info/2017/08/09/the-prometheans-wheels-within-wheels/ : > Campbell’s racist views had a stifling effect on his writers even in the 1940s – Asimov said that one reason his stories never featured aliens was because Campbell would always insist that humans were superior to aliens, because he couldn’t cope with a worldview where white American men weren’t the best, so the left-leaning Asimov just didn’t write stories with aliens in, to avoid the problem. Heinlein's 1941 "Sixth Column" was an idea originally developed by Campbell. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein#Race : > The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to re-slant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success."
想深入了解坎贝尔的功与过，这期节目可作为延伸材料。
Extra Credit 频道的科幻史系列里有一集讲坎贝尔的影响，正面负面都讲得挺到位。
bouvin查看英文原文
Extra Credit in their series on the history of science fiction did a rather good episode on his influence, for good and for bad: https://youtu.be/Ctpvd2VvukQ
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