It was then under the editorship of Raymond A. Palmer, a four-foot-tall hunchback with a most lively and unorthodox mind. In later years, he created, virtually single-handed, the flying saucer craze and he took to publishing magazines on pseudoscience. He died in 1977 at the age of sixty-seven. I never met him in person, but he was the first editor

Some felt I had joined Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt as the three-legged stool on which science fiction now rested. As it happened, A. E. van Vogt virtually ceased writing in 1950, perhaps because he grew increasingly interested in Hubbard’s dianetics. In 1946, however, a British writer, Arthur C. Clarke, began to write for ASF, and he, like

Campbell, on the other hand, grew tired of super-science and moved in other directions. In 1936 and 1937, he wrote an eighteen-part series for Astounding on the latest developments in solar system science. This was one of the first ventures of a science fiction writer into the realm of straightforward science.