The John W. Campbell Award For Best New Writer is being renamed. The award’s sponsor announced today that the award would be given a new name after this year’s winner, Jeannette Ng, condemned the award’s namesake for his fascist and racist beliefs during their acceptance speech at the 2019 Hugo Awards ceremony. Starting next year, the award will be called the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.
Since 1973, Dell Magazines has awarded the Campbell to the best emerging writer in the speculative fiction genre. Since its inception, winners have included such authors as C.J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, and most recently, Jeannette Ng.
In his announcement, Analog Science Fact and Fiction editor Trevor Quachri said that “Campbell’s provocative editorials and opinions on race, slavery, and other matters often reflected positions that went beyond just the mores of his time and are today at odds with modern values, including those held by the award’s many nominees, winners, and supporters.”
Past award recipients praised the move on Twitter. Kowal said that the change “makes me even more proud to be an Astounding Award Winner,” and thanked Ng for their “passionate, beautiful speech which drove this change.” John Scalzi, who earned the award in 2006, said that it’s “proof that you can change things when you speak.”
Ng themselves reminded readers of the long campaign that resulted in the change:
I am not the only one who has spoke up about this over the years. There have been petitions, letters and opinion columns before me. I stand on the shoulders of giants and I fear I am be stealing all their thunder in this. https://t.co/QYsEe22tsN
— Jeannette Ng 吳志麗 (@jeannette_ng) August 27, 2019
The award isn’t the first to shed the namesake or visage after discussion within the science fiction community. In 2015, the World Fantasy Society announced that it would change the award of the World Fantasy Award, which featured a bust of H.P. Lovecraft. That change came after author Daniel José Older spoke out about the horror author’s racist and bigoted views. Other authors, such as Nnedi Okorafor, had written about the impact that honoring such figure represented. In 2017, the organization unveiled a new award in the form of a tree, designed to represent all aspects of the fantasy genre.
I love this change. We cannot move forward as a genre if we are still clinging to past icons without acknowledging how problematic they are as times change. They might be products of their time, but we don’t have to bring them into our future. There is nothing to be gained by celebrating dead people with views that should also die, no matter how important their contributions to the genre. Their contributions do not outweigh their harm.
I can’t help but wonder what will happen when the conventional norms of today are replaced by the mores of tomorrow. Will people be so enthusiastic about abolishing history when they’re the ones being discarded?
I think it’s a good change. If the people the award is meant to honor were uneasy with the name, then it was only right to change it, and calling it the Astounding Award works well at conveying much the same idea with less baggage attached.
I suppose in a way I owe something to Campbell’s legacy; he nurtured and cultivated promising new writers including Stanley Schmidt, who chose to pay that forward when he became Analog‘s editor and cultivated promising new writers including me. On the other hand, the first story Stan bought from me, “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide” in the November ’98 Analog, was a story Campbell probably never would’ve bought, because it showed a situation where the human characters were not only immensely outpowered by the aliens they encountered, but arguably in the wrong in their interaction with the aliens. Indeed, the story generated some controversy in the letter column, with several readers reacting negatively because the humans didn’t dominate the aliens and prove themselves morally and otherwise superior. So I guess the story wasn’t Campbellian enough for them.
I like the new name. Tips its hat to the tradition without evoking the name of someone whose views were problematic even in his own time (I remember reading some of his editorials in the 1960s, and being troubled by them–my dad told me that it showed that everything adults said was not always right).
The name points our attention to the fiction presented in the magazine, and Campbell’s best accomplishments, instead of the man himself, with all his flaws.
So what’re we gonna call the Hugo? Gernsback was a shyster, didn’t pay people whose work he profited from, and was no monadnock of probity in any of today’s metrics. For that matter, how’re we gonna rename the field? The term “science fiction” was his invention as well.
For the record, I am not against renaming the award…Campbell was a pretty terrible human being. He was, however, far from the only one.
@3 – SFF should be in a state of flux. Changing the name of an award doesn’t mean that Campbell, or Lovecraft, or … will suddenly disappear from anthologies, histories, and encyclopedias / wikipedias of SFF.
@6/oldfan: I think if it’s just the first name as with the Hugo, that makes it an indirect enough reference that it’s not quite the same situation. Also, it’s a much more iconic award name — plenty of people today probably only know it as the name of the award and aren’t aware of its origin.
And it’s not about erasing or denying the person’s legacy. It’s about focusing on the good parts of their legacy and separating them from the problematical parts. A person is a complicated, imperfect entity, and many people do both good and harm in the course of their lives, so sometimes it’s better to honor the good things a person achieved than call attention to who they were.
I’ve never liked awards with long, pretentious names with specific people in them anyhow. Better to have a short descriptive title or a cute nickname with obscure origins, like the Oscar.
As for Campbell, he’s in no danger of being forgotten. We’ll always have The Thing.
@8: “And it’s not about erasing or denying the person’s legacy. It’s about focusing on the good parts of their legacy and separating them from the problematical parts.”
How does removing Campbell’s name from the award separate the ‘good’ parts of his legacy from the ‘problematical’ parts? It ensures that his name is not mentioned in the context of the award and the magazine. That rather obviously denies the parts of his legacy that the award was intended to memorialize.
@2. A very good question not enough people are asking.
@10/melendwyr: But Astounding is the good part of Campbell’s legacy. Granted, it included some of the bad parts too, but the name works as a metonym for them, and its successor Analog has largely transcended them while keeping the good.
There’s no point splitting hairs over it anyway. The people behind the award freely chose to rename it. That’s their prerogative, and they’ve already done it, which seems to end the argument.
Isn’t it about time we did something about the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, too? ;-)
I mean come on, folks, awards are silly anyway. Let’s give them the silly names they deserve.
I wonder if the other Campbell Award (the one started by, among others, James Gunn and Leon Stover) will be renamed.
@11. It is a question that is already been answered… I remember this topic came up when the discussion of removing old confederate statues was starting. First, the statues weren’t particularly old and historic; the bulk arrived in two waves after pushback against some civil rights advancement like desegregation and the statues were mass produced so of little historic value. More importantly, I can vouch that the memory of my enslaved ancestors did not rely on propagandist statues which inaccurately depicted history.
John W. Campbell’s legacy in the history of science fiction and fantasy remains and is a bit more complete because we know more about the man. Call it the Streisand Effect or, simply, we want to be more accurate about his history. Books will survive. Authors will survive. Campbell’s writings, both genius and garbage, will survive with a more critical eye examining them.
@2
This is far from a new practice. See, for example, the “Lost Cause” mythos, which had only somewhat more attachment to reality than the Cthulu mythos.
The problem with Campbell is that he was a problematic man back in the day but since then he had become a marble man. Since the marble had cracked recently it was high time to revisit this issue and I’m not a big fan of taking down statues just because they’ve suddenly become inconvenient.
@2,
Well, I plan to.
Sign of the times…
@2
Well, we can ask Campbell how he feels about being discar- oh wait, it’s happening nearly fifty years after his death.
So I would wager that those of us alive today, whose actions the “mores of tomorrow” judge harshly, will in fact have no opinion at all on “being discarded” on account of our having been dead for several decades.
I’m fine with this. It celebrates the great things that he contributed, namely his magazine and his support of new writers, while leaving behind his very troublesome personality. And no one can really dispute the latter.
Still, we need to ask ourselves, will this become a revolving door, changing the names of all the awards every couple of years as new opinions about the old take center stage? If so, we may as well just handle it proactively by naming the awards SFWA Award for best novel, WSFS Award for best novel, etc.
@@@@@ 6 There was science fiction before the name “science fiction” was devised. So it’s not like Hugo Gernsback invented the thing. H. G Wells and Mary Shelley were writing stuff that would be considered science fiction today and Gernsback hadn’t been born back then. So if they want to change the Hugo name, OK. Call it the science fiction and fantasy award or Worldcon award something. The name isn’t that important, what the award means is.
i’m ok with the name change, sounds pretty official![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
Happened fast! Probably an indication they were already talking about it internally.
While I don’t care what people call their awards, one way or the other, I think it’s an interesting problem we face in our modern sensibilities.
People in the past helped shaped our present, just as we will help shape the future. However, we know different things we do now than they did before, and our ideas of “what is right” is vastly different. I think that if we find any history person, we’re likely to find skeletons in his or her closet. The important thing, I think, is to not demonize them, but learn what we can from them, both by taking the valuable things they did to advance civilization and keeping on doing those, but take the terrible things they did to push civilization back and not do those things ourselves.
I mean, Newton believed in alchemy. Does that invalidate his contribution to science? Should be no longer measure force in newtons because of that, because it might mean that we’re endorsing a man who not only was trying to find the philosopher’s stone, but also considered a lifetime dedication to celibacy to be the most important thing he did with his life?
Ben Franklin was a figurehead in the American Enlightenment, and made numerous contributions that our modern scientists still use. But he owned slaves. So, should we change things named after him?
Heck, even NASA was built by former Nazi scientists, including Wernher von Braun, whose practices in Germany are too terrible to mention here. Does that mean that we should forget about NASA?
Things like these awards are named “in honor” of the people they’re named after, or more appropriately, to honor the great things those people did toward that field of study. But, hey, people also suck. They’re complex. Like Daniel Handler said (as Lemony Snicket): “People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.” We can eat around the gross things and get a good meal, even if at times you get a hint of anchovy on your hard boiled egg. I don’t fault some people for refusing to eat the salad, but I do fault them for expecting the rest of us to not even try.
But, yeah, it’s their award. They can call it the Super Duper Magical Rainbow Unicorn of Gravity Award for all I care.
I think it’s pretty telling that as soon as writers of the time didn’t need Campbell for their careers, they were pretty quick to talk about those awful parts of his opinions and expressed irritation at how he forced those opinions into their stories. He might have been good at identifying talent but by all accounts he didn’t treat writers well, and had no respect for their opinions or artistic integrity. Even if he wasn’t basically a white supremacist fascist, the way he treated new writers makes him a pretty problematic person to name a new writers award after.
I admire much of Campbell’s work–his early editorship of Astounding, and his often-overlooked Don A. Stuart stories–but I agree with Analog’s decision to change the name of the award.
I disagree with remarks to the effect that, in decrying Campbell’s racist views, we’re unfairly judging him by today’s standards. Judging by some of the editorials of his I’ve read, his views were backward by the standards of his own day, not just ours.
@27: Actually, even when people complained about his editorial policies and weird beliefs, they were quick to temper their criticism by stressing how he was their valued friend and mentor, despite frictions that arose. Isaac Asimov’s autobiography comes to mind as a good example. By the time he wrote it, he wasn’t dependent on anybody.
Asimov’s a good example in other ways. Such as having a very old-fashioned, even retrograde, stance towards women in society and in writing. Should we demand that the magazine bearing his name change it?
26 But, yeah, it’s their award. They can call it the Super Duper Magical Rainbow Unicorn of Gravity Award for all I care.
LOLOL Jacob, you’re a stitch!
@2: There are plenty of “conventional norms” of today that I would love to see abandoned or replaced. I have absolutely no problem with some of the cruel, barbaric, and unjust aspects of our current society and culture being discarded. In fact, I want them to be discarded.
@2: I’m sorry, I must have missed something… what history is being abolished here?
They’re changing the name of an award, in the future, not the past. History will still record it as the John W. Campbell Award up to 2019, at which point it changed. That’s the thing about history, it moves on. Like, when people decide that maaaybe it’s not such a good idea to be ‘honoring’ new writers with an award that bears the name of someone who might well have publicly written that they were better off being slaves, history records us making that decision.
@32,
Why not demand they change it? A magazine is a commercial entity. They’ve renamed more tradition-bound entities, like Calhoun College at Yale.
excellent move. What fun it will be for people to say, “I’m an Astounding nominee/winner!”
@2
nonsense. Campbell doesn’t cease to have existed. As 15 & 16 pointed out, taking down Jim-Crow-era monuments to a Confederate like Davis doesn’t remove him from history. Perhaps unfortunately. I’ll bet one could make an interesting SF story about what would happen if removing a monument actually undid the honoree’s existence.
#38 – tie it in to the Ancient Egyptian belief that the afterlife was tied into your name being still in this world and that by erasing that name in every place it existed you could erase that person even from the afterlife. There were a number of pharaohs that tried/had that tried on over the millennia.
Moderators: If—as it seems from the article—Ng’s preferred pronoun is “they”, you missed one: “thanked Ng for her…”
@40 – Fixed, thanks!
@39
fun idea, but I was thinking about how history would change if Jefferson Davis hadn’t been CSA President, or Robert E. Lee a Confederate General.
@42 Msb
If taking down statues of Jefferson Davis made it so that he wasn’t the CSA’s President, then every loyal supporter of the Union should protect those statues with their lives.
On yonder hill there stands a building
And upon the fourteenth floor
Stands a group of authors moaning
As they’ve never moaned before
Oh, No, John, No John, No, John, No.
There in a manner quite pontific
Speaks the Master from on high.
“Slaves are better off than free men,
Surely you can all see why.”
Oh, No, John, No John, No, John, No.
“There are supermen among us;
We must now discover psi,”
Says the Master; and the authors
Groan in agony and cry;
Oh, No, John, No John, No, John, No.
“Well, then,” said the Master, smiling,
Since my gospel you deny,
Would you rather sell to others,
Where the rates are not so high?”
OH NO JOHN. NO, JOHN. NO JOHN. NO.
[Randall Garrett, Oh, No, John]
Yay for the change! I hope it still comes with the tiara.