In retrospect, I think that was overblown in some ways but still seems deeply true in others. Despite the existence of a “maker” movement. We’ll have to see how it all works out, but the patterns of technological development and social development seem to have turned the process of making in directions other than the big human projects of mid century. Then again, it was weird tinkerers who first gave us cars and flight. I don’t know what to make of it. Perhaps there are both trends undercutting the kind of creativity and work Campbell revered and others reinforcing them.

I dimly recall those Kipling anthologies and/or other works from SF writers of the 80s praising his work just as you describe. I suspect he still has his following but less so among younger writers. I’d be curious.

Kim is, of course, perhaps the best and certainly among the most well-done attempts to convey the alienness of a world, a culture, a people, civilization, place, along the lines you suggest. It is famously a cult favorite in the intelligence world — one sees this referred to everywhere since, I think, Allen Dulles said something about it. It should be a favorite among SF, AH, and even political thriller writers.

In SF, as I alluded to in that earlier comment, writers of all sorts have certainly done both well and poorly in creating alien cultures.

They often pretend they are alien but they are actually too human, just reflecting human traits the author doesn’t like or recognize — a common failing of Star Trek writers. I never understood why Earth humans should find it the least bit difficult to understand Romulans, Klingons, or Cardassians, save that the writers projected themselves into the future, and so Federation humans had an extraordinarily narrow moral perspective on everything.

I thought Gordon Dickson did a very good job in creating convincingly “alien” cultures by deliberately using humans who reflected specific mentalities in his Dorsai novels. I still find it interesting that he effectively projected human civilizations defined by mentality and behavior mode rather than ethnicity or culture as we would understand them today. Still never quite equalled. More alien than some SF cultures populated by non-human beings.

Frank Herbert credibly created a plausibly alien human society of the far future despite it not aiming to be alien — he just stripped away enough of the assumptions of our times. And some of the subcultures were pretty freaky.

Cordwainer Smith [can't recall his real name] was also somewhat good at this. Also, for some folks, his work will now seem alien even across a couple of generations, in addition to the alienness he built into the stories. Consider carefully the implications of “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal”.

Some of the best culture building I have seen came from CS Friedman and CJ Cherryh.

In particular, Friedman’s “In Conquest Born” posits an eternal war between two human-descended interstellar societies. One was technocracy gone mad with a soupcon of psychic power. The other was a martial society mostly of military technocrats but ruled by an isolationist warrior-caste subrace whose aesthetic and morals were sort of anti-Klingon. The warrior class as sensualist rather than moralist. It’s also brilliant characterization of the main antagonists.

CJ Cherryh’s trilogy KEsrith, Shonjir and Kutath AKA the Mri Trilogy, is perhaps the best culture-building, human fish out of water, human has to assimilate to alien values saga I ever read. I can hardly praise too highly. Of course, as human creations the Mri can’t be truly alien any more than any other such characters, but Cherryh wildly exceeds the demands of credibility with them. The story could be considered Dances with Wolves in Space, if the cultural distance between the Americans and the Sioux were multiplied a hundredfold. Also great if you like stories of wandering peoples, lost worlds, lost histories, the desperate effort to preserve culture and identity.

Star Trek novel-verse writers in the days when I read them [80s to mid-90s] were often abysmal. One effort to flesh out Vulcan culture made them seem like avatars for a sort of Jane Jacobs worship of local neighborhoods, with the Earth female protagonist at one point utterly mesmerized by the simple practice of a young Vulcan taking over the menial sweeping work of an older one while reciting a ritual phrase. It was a bit heavy handed and silly. OTOH, one TNG writer did a good job developing a culture in which everyone wore literal masks, to appear maskless was punishment or disgrace, and the maskmaker was a exalted craftsman with their own special masks as identifiers. It was quite clever stuff. I believe it was called “Masks”…

The classic examples from that world were John Ford [I know nothing else of him] who wrote “The Final Reflection”, and Diane Duane, who did “My Enemy, My Ally” and its sequels. Superseded by TV canon, but really excellent efforts to flesh out the Klingon and Romulan cultures. Ford’s Klingons, in particular, are quite different from how they evolved on TV.

All the best works are implicitly aware that as human artefacts these cultures can’t be really alien but try to construct from the elements that will seem the most alien, singly or when combined, or the most stark contrasts with the prevailing assumptions of the readers at least.

We in the modern west ought to be better at it- most of humanity through most of history including our own ancestors and probably the majority of humanity today are our aliens and we constantly and loudly proclaim in the media our inability to understand their inscrutable motives. I’m not immune either, just with different aliens.

He was at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. He would have gone to Korea, if my mother hadn’t had a SF. He wanted to go to the oil fields in Arabia, another SF.

He was and remains a total mystery to me, and I lived with him for 23 years.