Husbands & Wives-Part Two

I remember a TV show from a long time ago called Connections. The host was James Burke. In a goodnatured way, he followed ideas and developments through history like a detective following the clues of a crime. And like a detective story, Connections very often has a surprise ending. One difference is that the viewer arrives at that feeling of pleasure that comes with recognition of something that was previously unrecognized. Connections is a pleasing and edifying kind of show, the kind of thing we were promised when TV began. And James Burke is a good host. You wish that you could have him with you on every trip you make. Burke is a really common name, but Mr. Burke is Irish, and I like to think of him as a distant relative of my own family, which also includes people named Burke.

Connections.

I started this series in May by writing about Charles Fort, then John W. Campbell, Jr. There were connections between them. Charles Fort didn't know that of course. Campbell's career as a writer and editor came in a post-Fort world.

When you read and write about Campbell, it doesn't take long before you're onto the problem of wacky ideas he held and wacky people with whom he associated himself. Those ideas include Dianetics. Those people include L. Ron Hubbard.

Campbell and Hubbard were like planets around whom lesser bodies orbited. In looking into these two men, I discovered Joseph A. Winter. And in looking into Dr. Winter, I discovered his sister, Margaret Winter Kearney. Better known as Peg, she was, as it turns out, the second wife of John W. Campbell, Jr.

The Internet didn't seem to have made that discovery or to have made the connection between Peg Campbell and Joseph Winter. I thought I was onto something. It turns out I wasn't. In fact, others had made the discovery before I had and they had written about it before I did. One of those people was Alec Nevala-Lee, author of a recent book, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Reading that book was the next link in the connected lives and ideas that have led me to what I write about today and will in the next few parts of this series.

Marriages of course are connections made between men and women. Marriage is not exactly a theme in Mr. Nevala-Lee's book, but it's a theme that arises from the things about which he writes. These connections--these marriages--are a little tangled. It's easy to lose track of them and the people who engaged in them. But I'll give it a go, beginning with Campbell and his wives.

To be continued . . .

There is sometimes a fine line between futurism and science fiction. James Burke is not in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Apparently he is an author of nonfiction only and not at all of fiction, let alone science fiction. And yet he has speculated about the future and about the effects that science and technology, more essentially change, have had and will have on humanity. I have never seen the show, but he was a presenter on the BBC television program Tomorrow's World from 1965 to 1971. Here he is on the cover of Tomorrow's World Vol. 2 (1973), an image that could easily have appeared on the cover of a science fiction novel of that period.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley