There are interesting things about these people and their lives and work, and the reader will certainly learn some of them, but it's hard to maintain a sense of the shape of any single person's life.

In one attempt to do so, I discovered that the book's index isn't very good. On page 343, for example, we learn that Isaac Asimov "was promoted to an associate professorship at Boston University". That's fine, but I had forgotten that Asimov was at B.U. in the first place, since it had been mentioned pretty much only in passing over a hundred pages earlier.

There's also a problem, for me, anyway, with the writing style. I was reminded of this gem from Leonard J. Leff's Hitchcock and Selznick: "'I'm not sure that I like the fade-out of the sequence with the girl promising "the surprise of their lives!"' Selznick told Hitchcock as the director worked on the shooting script for Rebecca. 'Since she has nothing on her mind at this moment, the line seems a device simply to give us a dissolve, rather than having any point in itself.'"

That's some subtle and sophisticated advice and extremely valuable. Nevala-Lee frequently ends chapters and paragraphs with this kind of "cliffhanger" device and it gets rather tiresome pretty fast.

"And he had no way of knowing that the golden age that he had inaugurated was about to come to an end."

Almost every chapter or section ends with a thud like that.

More frustrating is a lack of information. Nevala-Lee raises questions only not to answer them. Early in the book is this bit about Campbell's first wife, Doña Stebbins: "When his mother tried to dominate Doña, as she did with most other people, Campbell put her savagely in her place".

Immediately I wondered, how? What happened? How did Campbell's mother try to dominate Doña and how did Campbell "put her savagely in her place"? (If I wanted to put someone in their place, savagely or otherwise, I'm not sure how I'd go about it.)

Alas, there is no other information. A look at the end notes doesn't even offer a source for this anecdote, let alone any further details. The question then becomes, why tell us this if you're not going to tell us anything about it?

More seriously, how much money did L. Ron Hubbard make from his various exertions? When he shifts dianetics from a kind of science to being a kind of religion, we're told that "With his newfound wealth, Hubbard purchased Saint Hill Manor, the former estate of the Maharajah of Jaipur in Sussex, England, where he took up residence in 1959". That sounds like quite a lot of money. But how much? $100,000? $1,000,000?

A bit later we get "Hubbard had sailed the Atlantic for years. … He insisted that he was no longer connected to the church—which sent him fifteen thousand dollars a week—but he was just as involved as always".

Fifteen thousand dollars a week is a lot of money. It could be really a lot, depending on how many weeks we're talking about here. Two? Twenty? Two hundred weeks? I have no idea. The end notes don't help with either of these money matters.

Inevitably the book becomes clogged with stories and incidents like this, as well as often not delivering much more than name-dropping.

For instance, in an attempt to convince us that Campbell might have been hypocritical to remark that "No woman has ever attained first-rank competence in literature in any Indo-European language", Nevala-Lee writes "But he also published such authors as Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Jane Rice, Judith Merril, Wilmar H. Shiras, Katherine MacLean, Kate Wilhelm, Pauline Ashwell, Anne McCaffrey, and Alice Bradley Sheldon, whom he knew as James Tiptree, Jr.".

That list of names doesn't actually expose Campbell as a hypocrite. Knowing that he published writing by those women doesn't mean we know how highly he esteemed their work. And the effort is weakened by including Sheldon/Tiptree. Even if Campbell had thought that James Tiptree, Jr., was the greatest writer who ever lived, this wouldn't interfere with his sexist evaluation of women writers because he would have believed Tiptree to be a man, as did everybody until years after Campbell's death.

And if Nevala-Lee ever told us anything about Campbell's professional interactions, as an editor, with any of these writers, I don't remember it.

Each chapter of this book begins with a quote and the quote for the acknowledments is the bizarre: "I knew more about Isaac Asimov that I knew about anyone else alive. What more could there be left to add?" is from an essay Martin Amis wrote about Isaac Asimov and can be found in the collection Visiting Mrs. Nabokov.

Structurally, the autobiography makes an average collection of showbiz memoirs look like Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Furthermore, and on Asimov's own admission, nothing ever happened to him. I toiled through the first volume in a mood of scandalised admiration. How could anyone dare to record a life with such fidelity to the trivial? The book reads like an outsize experiment in tedium by Andy Warhol or Yoko Ono… problems with the air-conditioning, buying a new car ("This time it was going to be a Ford"), his children's bouts of measles, a faulty incinerator in his flatblock… I went along to meet Asimov having just let In Memory Yet Green crash to the floor, and having just winched In Joy Still Felt on to the lectern. I knew more about Isaac Asimov than I knew about anyone else alive. What could there be left to add?

This particular quote, out of context and in isolation, is at best irrelevant, at worst perhaps misleading.

So Astounding is one of those "for completists only" books. It's disorganized and shapeless and worth reading for glimpses it gives you of certain times and places, fragments of cultural movements that existed then and there and an assortment of almost random information about some people who had something to do with it.

Asimov comes off as kind of an archetypal sci-fi nerd and also, sadly, a creep. Campbell was incredibly important to many writers and to the genre itself, but seems unhinged and unstable in ways that are never deeply explored. Heinlein appears to be something of a sad figure, haunted by his inability to become a father and fearful of the world in some ways, veering from left-wing politics to right-wing as he becomes more insecure about the possible ramifications of current events. Hubbard is pretty much a monster, an egomaniacal, manipulative, abusive serial prevaricator and con man. Exactly the kind of person you'd expect to start a cult…