Kay Tarrant
(???? -- March 1, 1980)
Kay (Catherine until at least 1943) Tarrant is a somewhat enigmatic figure who seems to have had a substantial indirect influence on SF, but whose role has been consistently misinterpreted by fannish (and pro) legend.
Tarrant was John W. Campbell's assistant editor at ASF. She stayed in the background: Campbell selected the fiction and the art and was the visible leader, while she oversaw production, proofreading, copyediting, and the like.
Legend, promoted for example by Robert A. Heinlein (as a partial explanation of his falling-out with JWC and ASF), held that Kay Tarrant was a prude who scrubbed anything remotely risque from Astounding and could even overrule Campbell on this. This was accompanied by stories of contributors trying to slip things past her, making it sound like was a widespread game. The best-known said one writer managed to use the term "ball-bearing mousetrap" to refer to a tomcat. – However, while this claim can be found in fanzines at least as early as 1960s, and some later iterations even correctly identified George O. Smith, they ignore that in his "Rat Race" (Astounding August 1947) the joke was out in the open, explained immediately, so editors could hardly miss it:
"(…) This is better than the original ball-bearing mousetrap.” "What?” Peter grinned. "The tomcat,” he said.
This old-maidish impression of Tarrant does not bear close examination. Alec Nevala-Lee in his excellent history Astounding says
she occasionally took it on herself to remove bad language from stories — and her prudish reputation also provided Campbell with a convenient excuse whenever a writer objected to any changes. Throughout their partnership, she saw "Campbell," as she always called him, as an oversize boy who would never get the magazine out on his own, and in all the anecdotes from those years, she was the unacknowledged presence in the room, seated a few feet away from the editor and the authors whom he was transforming into his kind of writer.
But her "prudishness" seems to have been entirely professional. A few years before her death, she told a group of writers:
"Personally, I don't give a f*** what you write, but we have teenagers who read the magazine."
She probably deserves to be remembered as Campbell's partner (albeit junior partner) in shaping modern SF.
| Person | ????—1980 |
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