As a bit of a relief to my readers who are no doubt weary of hearing my Jeremiads and screeds against the evils both political and philosophical which corrupt the modern world, let us turn from the disappointments of today to yesterday’s golden dreams of tomorrow, and talk about the three major science fiction writers of Campbell’s Golden Age.
The Big Three are Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and — wait for it— A.E. van Vogt.
Perhaps you have read books by the first two and never heard of the third. That is sad but not surprising. Perhaps, being a lover of triads, you thought the third Big Name of the Golden Age should be Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury.
Admired as these authors were and are, no one in the day considered them one of the Big Three. Van Vogt was, for a time, bigger than Asimov and Heinlein in popularity. I have seen articles, including the notoriously unreliable Wikipedia, list one or the other of Clarke and Bradbury as the third of the triad. It is partly to dispel the disturbing tendency toward historical revisionism that I write this article. Read the remainder of this entry »
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