Campbell vs Wollheim

Jacopo Zucci's "The Golden Age" (1575)

I recently returned to Robert Silverberg's essay on the "Golden Age" of SF.

It's interesting how Silverberg characterises Campbell's influence, especially how it contrasts with Wollheim's opinion. I think, though, that they're really on the same page:

I think to start with what Campbell was looking for was something along the lines of Gernsback's "SciEng Evangelism" but with the kind of near-slick writing you could find in Merritt and Moore and other greats of the 30s (taking into account that Moore was still going strong in the 40s and on into the 50s - I'm not sure why she doesn't merit a mention here, but suspect it's because Silverberg is focusing on SCI-fi, and over the years she has been classified strongly as fantasy)

But it grows evident in the later years of the 50s and on into the 60s that he was curating Astounding/Analog with a heavy hand. Even some of his "golden boys" occasionally griped that Campbell was giving them marching orders or entirely rewriting stories. And with the end of the hot part of WW2 and the opening of the cold front with the USSR, the 50s was also kind of a "golden age" of prophesies of doom - it seems inevitable that "cold hard logic" applied to predictive SF would generate an unhealthy serving of that tone.

The key is to note which of the Campbell crew were also getting accolades from Wollheim: Heinlein in particular gets comment for his upbeat, optimistic visions of interplanetary civilization.

So yeah, the 50s is a Golden Age, but I think it's also the period in which SF began to diverge into what Wollheim called the Welles vs Verne branches - enthusiastic utopianism vs scientism. This right after SFF - the larger category - had begun to diverge (partly because of the Campbell/neoFuturian movement) into clearer fantasy and "scientifiction" streams.