Astounding, a mighty work of scholarship from sci-fi novelist and essayist Alec Nevala-Lee, charts the adolescence and maturation of a future-focused literary genre — and looks at four of its most seminal practitioners, who hoped they were accomplishing something greater and more elemental than merely entertaining readers.

Of the four 20th-century men in Astounding's subtitle, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein remain rightly famous as prolific creators of wildly imaginative, sometimes-prophetic stories and novels. L. Ron Hubbard is rightly infamous as the comically self-aggrandizing founder of Scientology. John W. Campbell Jr. is relatively obscure, even among people who read science fiction and identify as fans.

Astounding, by Alec Nevala-Lee (HarperCollins)

Nevala-Lee packs a lot of story into his 500-plus pages. He economically makes the case that it was Campbell who was most directly responsible for ushering in sci-fi's late-1930s-to-early-1950s golden age and whose shadow looms longest over the 20th century.

As the longtime editor of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, which he ran from 1938 until his death in 1971, he shaped the careers of the writers who would imagine a world not yet seen. He made his ambitions for the magazine known long before he changed its title to Analog Science Fiction & Science Fact, the better to inform readers that he wasn't just out to amuse them. Campbell's "ultimate goal was to turn his writers and readers into a new kind of human being, exemplified by 'the competent man,' who would lead in turn to the superman," as Nevala-Lee observes.

Campbell frequently fed his writers ideas, then sent them off to nurture his concepts into stories. The notion of "an exclusive society of geniuses" that would emerge to save humanity from itself, or to advance it to its next phase, was one that cropped up again and again in Astounding's pages.

L. Sprague de Camp (left), Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein in 1944. (John Seltzer and Geo Rule / HarperCollins)

But while Asimov and Heinlein remained tethered to objective reality, burnishing their craft and finding acclaim — Heinlein scored a coup by placing his 1947 story "The Green Hills of Earth" in the mainstream Saturday Evening Post rather than in Astounding or one of its pulp competitors; while Asimov, after earning a doctorate in biochemistry, would publish a staggering 400 books — Hubbard and Campbell appeared genuinely to be seeking the key to human survival.

Hubbard, a committed fabulist whose bio-embellishing began with a claim that he'd been breaking horses since he was 3 years old, had never been especially interested in sci-fi. But Campbell warmed to his pitch for "a new mental therapy that would turn psychology into an exact science" in the years after World War II.

The Hubbard-Campbell business relationship would quickly founder, but not before Campbell served as Hubbard's editor on Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the pseudo-scientific self-help book that was still the subject of TV commercials decades after its initial publication.

During World War II, Campbell thought that science fiction was destined to rise to the occasion of saving humanity by suggesting how much more we could become. His most successful provocation had been the 1943 publication of "Deadline," a story about the then-top-secret atomic bomb for which Campbell had supplied author Clive Cartmill with technical details of how such a weapon might work. (He'd gathered this information from publicly available sources.) Campbell published the story fully intending to have the FBI knock on his door, thus proving his suspicion correct.

John W. Campbell in 1942. (Leslyn Randazzo)

When that happened, Campbell was emboldened, believing that only mastery of the human mind could rescue his species (or its successor) from the bomb. But science fiction was only able to predict the doomsday weapon, not stop it. And the zeal with which Campbell pushed unproven science drove his best writers away from him.

Drawing heavily from correspondence passed among his four subjects, Nevala-Lee spins a vivid account of their rivalries, frustrations and health problems. Their foibles, too: Quite apart from his by-his-own account adventurous sex life, Asimov was an unapologetic groper, taking advantage of his celebrity with the fans who flocked to him at conventions. Hubbard was a cruel and physically abusive husband who shared with Heinlein a McCarthy-like zeal for pursuing suspected communists. Campbell was as open racist.

Nevala-Lee's admiration for his subjects is reflected in the depth of his scholarship, not in any disingenuous attempt to rehabilitate their reputations for contemporary standards.

Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Astounding. (Brian Kinyon / HarperCollins)

Above all, Astounding documents the progression of science fiction from a niche form to one that would in the latter third of the century become fully naturalized in mainstream thought. As Heinlein wrote to a friend after World War II, when he was trying to break out of the pulps: "I can satisfy my itch to preach and propagandize, reach a bigger audience, and make some dinero." What else has any writer ever wanted?

Chris Klimek is an editor at Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine and a frequent guest on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.

Astounding

John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

Alec Nevala-Lee

(Dey St., $28.99)