Red vs Blue science fiction

I found the following nugget on Tumblr while looking at some images.  This perfectly encapsulates why science fiction, which had been tremendously popular with mainstream audiences, suddenly became a nerdy ghetto in the 50s and 60s.  I'm not sure exactly who to pin the blame on, Asimov, Campbell, or someone else, but most likely it was beyond the means of any one person anyway.  L. Sprague de Camp is exactly the kind of person who emerged in the "blue" science fiction movement, who tut-tutted the popular red science fiction, and therefore is at the very least a highly visible symptom of the problem.

If you’re a fan of John Carter of Mars, you should read L. Sprague de Camp’s very humorous take on the world, Sir Harold of Zodanga. It shows what a “scientifically accurate” Barsoom would really be like (also, read his Planet Krishna books, which are humorous spoofs of Barsoom too - de Camp had a wonderful sense of humor).  

It may actually have my favorite characterization of John Carter of Mars, who was always just an alpha male man of action hero. In L. Sprague de Camp’s take, John Carter is actually despised, not admired, by the conservative Barsoomian elite and upper classes (with the obvious exception of Dejah Thoris) because of his Yankee notions of equality and egalitarianism, and what’s more, yes, even though John Carter is good at swordfighting, his greatest skill is actually his aptitude as a diplomat and politician, able to make allies out of enemies who had been feuding for generations.  

Okay, sure, he makes John Carter a blowhard who loves to brag about his swordfighting skills (ever notice that the stories where John Carter fights a hundred men in an arena or something tend to be his first person accounts of what happened? Imagine someone told that to you at a bar, would you believe them?) but overall, he was portrayed as a reform minded egalitarian who was a tremendously skilled at diplomacy and peacemaking. 

How exactly anyone at all saw that as more attractive and interesting than Edgar Rice Burroughs himself, I do not understand.  As an aside, do not expect to find de Camp humorous, unless sly, snarky, cowardly, self-congratulatory passive-aggressive insults are funny to you.

Some more, from Infogalactic, which certainly highlights this bitter, butthurt, beta attitude of de Camp, which permeates his work.

De Camp began his education at the Trinity School in New York, then spent ten years attending the Snyder School in North Carolina, a military-style institution. His stay at the Snyder School was an attempt by his parents, who were heavy-handed disciplinarians, to cure him of intellectual arrogance and lack of discipline. He was awkward and thin, an ineffective fighter, and suffered from bullying by his classmates. His experiences at the school taught him to develop a detached, analytical style considered cold by all but his closest friends, though he could, like his father, be disarming and funny in social situations. He would later recall these challenging childhood experiences in the semi-autobiographical story, Judgment Day (1955).

Sigh.  Never-healed scars mar his work decades later.  That intellectual arrogance was never cured, although maybe the lack of discipline was.

De Camp was a materialist who wrote works examining society, history, technology and myth. He published numerous short stories, novels, non-fiction works and poems during his long career. 

De Camp had the mind of an educator, and a common theme in many of his works is a corrective impulse regarding similar previous works by other authors. A highly rational and logical thinker, he was frequently disturbed by what he regarded as logical lapses and absurdities in others' writings. Some, like Asimov, felt de Camp's conscientiousness about facts limited the scope of his stories; de Camp was reluctant to use technological or scientific concepts (i.e., hyperspace or faster-than-light travel) if he did not think them possible. Thus, his response to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was to write a similar time travel novel (Lest Darkness Fall) in which the method of time travel was rationalized and the hero's technical expertise both set at a believable level and constrained by the technological limitations of the age. 

In like fashion, he reimagined space opera and planetary romance in his "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, and the prehistoric precursor civilizations characteristic of much heroic fantasy in his "Pusadian series". When he was not debunking literary conventions he was often explaining them. For example, in the "Harold Shea" stories co-written with his longtime friend Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956), the magical premises of some bodies of myths and legends were accepted but examined and elucidated in terms of their own systems of inherent logic. The imaginative civilizations in The Compleat Enchanter, for example, are built upon a cultural and technological reality based on scientific formulas. Characters may be transported to these different worlds, but the magic contained within those worlds is only feasible to the extent that it coincides with the technology of the day (i.e., the combustion engine). De Camp's explanatory tendency also carried over into his non-fictional writings, including advice to science fiction writers on handling the different states of languages in future worlds.

Again; I struggle to find how anyone who isn't a bitter, butthurt beta would ever find those premises more interesting than the works that he's "correcting."