Campbell was a racist, and I believe bought into the theory that smokers smoked because their bodies were trying to prevent or fight off lung cancer. He also appeared to be a believer in psi. He attracted (and doubtless encouraged) authors who shared those beliefs. If you go back and read the stories from the 50s and 60s, the heroes were invariably heavy smokers, and many of the stories involved telepathy, telekinesis, etc. The role of women in the stories was usually secondary (and the boy got the girl in the end), although that was probably true of most scifi back then. I don't recall any stories in Analog where the hero was other than a white man.
Back in the 50s? Most people of all kinds were, either implicitly or explicitly, even those who could have known and embraced better with a bit of context improvement.
Judging the people of the past by all the biases and ingrained assumptions of their time is myopic at best and a dumb path to disregarding a lot of wonderful knowledge too.
No human is free of at least some absurd ideas, it doesn't necessarily make the rest of what they create or say worth denigrating.
I'd hate to imagine all of us in the early 21st century only being mocked because of certain absurd things we surely take for granted as truths today.
No disagreement, and I was probably racist back then. I'm just agreeing with an earlier comment that some of the 1950s authors were not "well adjusted", because I now think of racism as a sin.
I think we'll only approach an equilibrium on racism if and when we reach consensus that it's innate human nature to be prejudiced, and that what distinguishes us is whether we make an effort to counter our base impulses.
Let me join you in acknowledging that I have been racist before. (And I might be again, if I slip up.)
I definitely agree - it's better to focus on the good in people, rather than the flaws. People 75 years from now will think just as poorly of our values as people today do of the values in 1950. And the people of 1950 would no doubt have thought just as poorly of our values today!
The change of values throughout the years is not one of monotonically increasing moral rightness. Every age gets some things right, and some things wrong. So we should focus on the positive and not the negative, because that's what we would want done for us.
Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed better as satire had he not been fairly well known in scifi circles to be in fact a dirty old man.
There were some decent scifi authors at the time - not least, Ursula K LeGuin.
Ok, but "had some authors who wouldn't pass a 2025 purity test" is moving the goalposts quite a lot from "never published anything that wasn't by a White man, about a White man".
Le Guin, while a great author, was 12 when the first Susan Calvin story was published, and wouldn't be published herself until 18 years later. So she wasn't exactly being overlooked at the time.
And if you really insist on some identity politics in your science fiction, you'd do well to remember that in 1941 Asimov wasn't a White man. He was Jewish, which while not as bad as being Black had some very real consequences in 1940s America, not least being subject to a university admissions quota.
One of the most refreshing things about this part of the Foundation books was that I couldn't quite figure out who was in fact the main character.
I too eventually concluded it was Bayta since she was the one who figured out who The Mule was but the other characters contributed quite a lot.
Plus it's my belief that it was the intent of Asimov that nobody is actually a main character -- not for long anyway; I mean, people just die at the very least -- because Seldon's plan is just that big.
But yeah, Bayta was a very likeable character. One of the very few female characters that I liked from Asimov.
I knew he was behind scientology, so I wasn't too surprised there. Heinlein wasn't completely unexpected (although his gullibility with Hubbard was). I was more thinking of Asimov turning out to be a serial groper.
I read a bio of John Wyndham shortly afterwards and I was so relieved that he seems to have been one of the good ones.
Let me be crystal clear that I am NOT defending Asimov here; he used his fame and was aware that many of the women will not be believed if they spoke out -- and shamelessly took advantage of that.
Combine that with my strictly personal opinion that he could have taken much better care of his looks at least; a good barber and a dentist alone would have gone a long way so he looked a bit less unpleasant, not to mention he could have jogged once a month and still could have been in a better shape...
...but after reading stories about many other authors, well, Asimov looks like a saint in comparison.
Again, not defending the guy. And Heinlein's gullibility also starkly contrasts with his intelligent aura and writing style. Goes to show we all have blind spots, I suppose. A bro club and all that in their case, probably.
