But his most powerful effect might have been on John W. Campbell's Golden Age. Indeed, Korzybski is probably the most important influence on science fiction you've never heard of. Trained as an engineer, he created a philosophy he called General Semantics not to be confused with semantics as a linguistic discipline. General Semantics was part of a much larger philosophical effort, early in the twentieth century, to create a logically ideal language and a contribution to intellectual debates about the so-called " meaning of meaning.