ORGANIZATION
Astounding Science Fiction
The science-fiction magazine, edited by John W. Campbell from 1937 to 1971, in which nearly every canonical mid-twentieth-century American SF idea — including the Three Laws, psychohistory, and the Foundation — first appeared in print.
Astounding Science Fiction (retitled Analog Science Fact & Science Fiction in 1960) was the dominant SF magazine of the so-called Golden Age (roughly 1938–1946 under Campbell's editorship) and a continued force through the 1970s. Its pages served as the workshop in which Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, van Vogt, Leinster, Anderson, and dozens of others developed and published the ideas that shaped modern SF. More than any textbook, it is the repository of what the post-war American SF tradition thought AI and robots would be and do.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Campbell's editorial method was distinctive. He did not accept stories passively; he proposed ideas, argued with authors, demanded revisions, sometimes co-created plots. The Three Laws emerged from a Campbell-Asimov conversation in 1940. Psychohistory emerged similarly. The magazine was a collaborative medium, not a passive publication venue, and its editorial shape is audible in every author who came up through it.
The Golden Age established