1
" Certainly, forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties, H L Gold, Fred Phol, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and doom, and in the sixties, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it. "
― Barry N. Malzberg , Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium
5
" Modern” science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloombury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90% of the writing and editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other’s material, and so on. For a field which was conceptually based on expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular. "
― Barry N. Malzberg , Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium
6
" I stayed with him in his office for three hours, fighting from the bell. Catherine Tarrant sat at her desk in the far corner typing and making notes trying hard not to smile. A young man’s intensity can be a terrible thing to bear (for no one so much as the young man himself) and I came off the chair right away, throwing jabs, pumping and puffing, slipping the phantom punches, going in desperately under real ones.
Not interested in market conditions, no sir. I wanted to know why Analog was the restrictive right-wing, anti-literary publication that it had become. Didn’t Campbell care what all the new writers, the purveyors of street fiction and venturesome prose, thought of him? "
― Barry N. Malzberg , Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium
