John Wood Campbell
Published: 2016-07-31
Total Pages: 92
Get eBook
The star Mira was unpredictably variable. Sometimes it was blazing, brilliant and hot. Other times it was oddly dim, cool, shedding little warmth on its many planets. Gresth Gkae, leader of the Mirans, was seeking a better star, one to which his "people" could migrate. That star had to be steady, reliable, with a good planetary system. And in his astronomical searching, he found Sol. With hundreds of ships, each larger than whole Terrestrial spaceports, and traveling faster than the speed of light, the Mirans set out to move in to Solar regions and take over. And on Earth there was nothing which would be capable of beating off this incredible armada-until Buck Kendall stumbled upon THE ULTIMATE WEAPON.John Wood Campbell, Jr. (June 8, 1910 - July 11, 1971) was an important science fiction editor and writer. As a writer he was first influential under his own name as a writer of super-science space opera and then under the name Don A. Stuart, a pseudonym he used for moodier, less pulpish stories. However, Campbell's primary influence on the genre was as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a post that he held from late 1937 until his death. In that role he is generally credited with helping to create the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, which is often held to have started with the July 1939 issue of Astounding. Isaac Asimov called Campbell "the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely." At the time of his sudden and unexpected death after 34 years at the helm of Astounding, however, his quirky personality and occasionally eccentric editorial demands had alienated a number of his most illustrious writers such as Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein to the point that they no longer submitted works to him.