Preliminary Note: I plan on reading all 116 issues of the influential, and iconic, SF magazine Galaxy under H. L. Gold’s editorship (October 1950-October 1961) in chronological order. How long this project will take or how seriously/systematically I will take it remain complete unknowns.
See my inaugural post in this series for my reasoning behind selecting Galaxy under H. L. Gold.
Previously: the October 1950 issue.
Up Next: the December 1950 issue.
Let’s get to the stories. We have the first Galaxy masterpiece!
Don Sibley’s cover for Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950)
You can read the entire issue here.
Fredric Brown’s “Honeymoon in Hell” (1950), 3/5 (Average): The year is 1962. The Cold War heats up. The race for a permanent presence on the Moon takes center stage. Each side “had landed a few men” and claimed it as their own (4). Each side races to construct a space station in orbit to facilitate the construction of a permanent base on the moon. But there’s another worrying world-wide trend–a massive gender imbalance in new births! Not enough boys! Riots. Cults. What’s the plan?
Capt. Raymond F. Carmody, retired from the space service (at age 27) after a successful flight to the Moon, steps into the ring. Resisting an administrative role in the service, he’d chosen a new career: cybernetics, “the science of electronic calculating machines” (9). In his new position, he had access to a powerful computer called Junior, built in 1958, tasked with issues of national security. Alone with the machine, he feeds Junior the data. Junior doesn’t have an answer. But Junior does offer a rare extrapolation that Carmody will be married on the morrow.
And a meeting with the President reveals the nature of the plan to birth a male child on the moon to avoid whatever on Earth is causing the problem! He’ll be legally married before they head to the moon and divorced if the pairing doesn’t work out. The catch? His wife will be Russian and their honeymoon will be Hell Crater.1 The “lucky” woman? Anna Borisovna is also a pilot of “experimental rockets on short-range flights” (16). Alcohol included as “icebreaker” for a “happy honeymoon” (19). The twelve day stay will be “plenty of time to get off before the Lunar night” (18) (Brown certainly intends the pun). And then the story morphs, abruptly, into a first contact story. Or does it?
This is an odd story. At its core it’s about a man and a woman (and mortal enemies) who go to the moon to have sex. But it’s the 50s. They need to be married! And all the references to the act are double entendres. As the ridiculousness fades, Brown settles on a rather enlightened position considering the Cold War terror of the moment–détente with the Soviets, politics and all, remains possible (under some circumstances). The story implies that Carmody falls head-over-heels for Anna due to the similarities of their careers and status as intellectual equals despite their divergent politics. Don Sibley’s issue cover shows her abilities under stressful circumstances. Carmody’s even willing to head to the Soviet Union to be with her! Love trumps all message aside, I am not convinced by the reading experience. Brown relays the strange events that transpire on Mars, and almost all of Carmody and Anna’s interactions, after they occur. It weakens the effect.
Somewhat recommended.
Isaac Asimov’s “Misbegotten Missionary” (variant title: “Green Patches”) (1950), 3/5 (Average): “Misbegotten Missionary” begins from the perspective of an alien entity that slipped onboard a human ship after its barrier faltered for a moment. The alien utterly believes that it is a superior “unified organism” (34) over the “life fragments” that populate the ship (34). Fanatical in its mindset, the shape-shifting alien wants to convert the entire vessel to its ways–without their consent. Slowly the nature of its own world, the purpose of the human vessel, and the fate of a past voyage become clear.
While not a miserable entry in his canon, I am starting to dread the Asimov stories in Galaxy and struggle to write coherently about them. And there’s a serialized novel on the horizon that I haven’t read yet and thus cannot skip– The Stars, Like Dust (1951). While far superior to “Darwinian Pool Room” (1950), “Misbegotten Missionary” defeats its initial success with a laborious exposition of what happened before. I appreciated the Asimov’s attempt to convey alienness of the entity’s perspective. Maybe if you’re interested in the evolution of Asimov’s attempts to write about entire planets as alien consciousness this is worth tracking down.
I reviewed this in 2021 and completely forgot. I was even more cruel in the earlier review!
Anthony Boucher’s “Transfer Point” (1950), 3/5 (Average): Three survivors retreat beneath the Earth’s surface after two apocalyptic events–the release of a new element (agnoton) and an attack by mysterious “yellow bands” (are they light-like? It’s not entirely clear. It’s pulpy on purpose). The scientist Kirth-Labbery constructed the self-sufficient retreat due to his allergies (!). His daughter Lavra spends her time eating fruit grown in the hydroponics bay. And Vyrko, a self-described intellectual poet, observes and writes about the end of the world, pines after his lost love, and reads historical pulp science fiction –including Damon Knight’s “Not with a Bang” (1950) and Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941). He notices that only one author seems to predict correctly what will happen. And also strange narrative parallels with himself…
I’m a sucker for metafictional science fiction that contains references and quotations from other authors both real and invented. Boucher’s “Transfer Point” serves as a recursive commentary on the nature of genre and its favorite tropes (last man and woman as Adam and Eve, time travel, etc.). Behind the tale’s ultra-pulpy exterior and sappy silliness, Boucher jabs (gently and with a smile) at science fiction’s Campbellian delusion of future prediction. Despite its moments, Boucher can’t approach the heights of Richard Matheson’s “Patterns of Survival” (1955), a far more complex commentary on the power of science fiction.
Somewhat recommended.
Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I reviewed this story in 2013. I’ve decided to reread it and modify my earlier review.
In Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s influential The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949), a blueprint of the “new liberal self-image,” he describes the post-WWII period as an “age of anxiety” in which “Western man” is “tense, uncertain, adrift.”2 Channeling this sentiment, branded as an “American brand of misery” (83), Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. “H-Bomb scars” tunnel faces (78). The Empire State Building thrusts out of “Inferno like a mangled finger” (77). In a disturbed attempt to maintain control, a new “puritanical morality” (80) replete with “anti-sex songs” (78) and required masks to cover female faces takes hold. A sinister media landscape manifests the corruption within. Billboards promote “hysterical slogans” in which “the very letters of the advertiser’s alphabet have begin to crawl with sex” (78). New TV gadgets facilitate touch and pseudo-connection (80). Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.
Wysten Turner, the British narrator, gets caught up in the disturbing changes that have swept the US. He rescues a masked woman from a car driven by youths replete with hooks designed to snag the dresses of passing women. She embodies loneliness and despair. And he wants to help. Soon he finds himself unable to identify the new erotic and violent rituals of control and release. The games layer on themselves. Our narrator, also manipulated, flees in shame when the bizarre tableau’s true nature is unmasked.
Leiber doles out fascinating and punchy commentary on the anxieties of the modern world. A disturbed, erotic, creepy, and hyper-violent exploration of that reflexive Cold War tendency to equate the inability to control and triumph abroad as caused by internal crisis within society as a whole. A brilliant satire of late 40s/early 50s American Cold War culture.
Highly recommended.
Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good): I reviewed this story in 2023. I decided not to reread it. I’ve reproduced the review below.
The Kanamit, pig-like humanoid aliens, arrive on Earth with a promise to assist humanity that appears to have zero caveats. Their similarity to a human food animal creates a disquieting horror: “when a think with the countenance of a fiend comes from the stars and offers a gift, you are disinclined to accept” (91). The Kanama proclaim that they want “to bring you the peace and plenty which we ourselves enjoy, and which we have in the past brought to other races throughout the galaxy” (92). They introduce fantastic power sources, anti-nuclear explosion shields, and technology to exponentially enhance agricultural productivity. Soon there are no “more standing armies, no more shortages, and no unemployment” (98). But no one can decode their language. And when someone finally figures it out, it will be too late.
I don’t completely understand why “To Serve Man” is one of Knight’s best-known short fictions. It won the 2001 Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story. I would have voted for Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950) from the list of nominees! That said, “To Serve Man” is an effective twist-ending story that plays with our expectations but doesn’t have the reflective or incisive impact of Knight’s best — for example “The Enemy” (1958), “You’re Another” (1955), or even “Time Enough” (1960) in Far Out (1961). I’m probably in the minority in this view.
Somewhat recommended.
Clifford D. Simak’s Time Quarry (variant title: Time and Again) (1950). Serialized over three issues. I will post an individual review after I complete the serialization.
Notes
- Brown adheres to the theory that the Moon is covered with deep dust. He claims that Hell Crater is a bit more solid than other points. Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust (1961) is another example. ↩︎
- See Ch. 1 of K. A. Courdileone’s Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (2005) for a discussion of Schlesinger. ↩︎
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 
To this day, the description of the girl’s face as she is unmasked stays with me. It’s a chilling, brilliant story.
I am with you on this point! I had forgotten how brilliant the short story was. I’m glad this project encouraged me to reread it. I’m a sucker for all those internal crisis in the heart of modern humanity-style 1950s stories.
“To Serve Man” is so famous, surely, because it was made into a Twilight Zone episode (which was parodied many time (including on the Simpsons)). Agree that the Leiber is wonderful, and deeply creepy. Am I remembering correctly the the Lunar honeymooners play chess with each other?
I would not doubt that Twilight Zone had a massive influence on the lasting popularity of the story. My comment “I don’t completely understand why” is more about its qualities as a story.
Stories with an easy-to-describe twist probably make for well-remembered stories (and for stories that can be adapted for TV).
Knight certainly tried again with “Idiot Stick” (1958). Only rarely does a “twist” ending work in my view. There are exceptions of course!
Again this feels like an issue where the stories are mostly ones that the authors had sitting on their shelves, collecting dust. Mostly. “Coming Attraction” is a story I’ve always appreciated more than I actually enjoy, but then it is such a cold-blooded story by design. Since I’ve started reading a lot of old-school crime fiction lately I’ve also found it easier to see where Leiber’s coming from with the grimy and somewhat hallucinatory atmosphere, and also how “Coming Attraction” is absolutely proto-cyberpunk.
The grit, smoke, ruins, scarred faces, and hyper-violent feel is absolutely redolent of crime fiction (and, as I know so much more about it and certainly came to mind after reading it, film noir adaptations of crime stories). It’s punchy and to the point. Loved it.
I’m not sold on “proto-cyberpunk” as a designator.
The Leiber in the previous issue felt like something he had hanging around and “Coming Attraction” a real story for a top-tier magazine. Same thing with the Asimov. Despite my annoyance with some of his fiction, this one was much better than “Darwinian Pool Room.”
Leiber did write an early technological Singularity story, too, btw (The Creature from the Cleveland Depths)
I remember really really enjoying that one too. I read it in his collection The Night of the Wolf two years ago: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?44656
I waited too long to review it and something else came up…
I read it in a collection with Leiber’s short novel “You’re All Alone” I think
Can’t say I know anything about that one. I looked it up on isfdb.org and goodness it had a rather complex textual history — various 40k and 75k word versions, others written in parallel: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?11452
It’s a creepy story about someone finding out that the world is mostly clockwork, and that if he moves out of the pattern, the pattern continues as if he was there – and he’s not the only one who knows…
Sounds very interesting!
I do strongly recommend you read Leiber’s “You’re All Alone”, though I prefer the longer novel version, The Sinful Ones. I wrote about that novel, and the shorter version, and the publication history, here: https://rrhorton.blogspot.com/2019/12/birthday-review-sinful-onesyoure-all.html
I think eventually Leiber will get careful reconsideration, and his reputation — already in good shape — will only rise. His reception has been complicated by the varied nature of his work — “Coming Attraction”, after all, is not very much like the Fafhrd stories! His alcoholism, which led to some gaps in his career I think, is also an issue. But his best work is tremendous, and even his more commercial stuff — basically, the Fafhrd/Grey Mouser stories — are quite good.
I liked “Misbegotten Missionary” a fair bit when I first read it, age 12 or so, in one of Asimov’s collections under his preferred title (“Green Patches”.) I haven’t reread it in a while — quite possibly I would re-evaluate it to more or less track your review. As a 12 year old I would have been wowed by the new to me concept, and by Asimov’s attempt at describe real alienness, and I’d probably have tolerated the excess explanation.
“Time Quarry” aka Time and Again is pretty good Simak, though not great. I don’t think you’ll regret reading it.
Hello Rich,
Sorry about the comment glitches. I don’t think I have a copy of the novel version. I’ll check out your review. Thank you! Considering I just posted another entry in my generation ship series, I’ve been eyeing reading Leiber’s take on the trope — “Ship of Shadows” (1969).
You’ll see the Simak review after I finish the three volumes. I think I’ll post it as a separate review. Or maybe just in short book review form in the third issue review… haven’t decided. But yes, I’m mostly on board so far.
Haven’t read any of these stories apart from “To Serve Man”, which I agree is pretty flimsy and far from his best work. I have never really dug into any of Lieber’s sf work, may need to rectify that (I recall a teenage period where I made an effort to get into the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, to no avail).
Asimov’s (and to a certain extent Heinlein’s) ability to stay in print and continue to be regarded as “greats” of the genre continues to baffle me. I won’t dispute their historical significance but as I get older I find that whenever I return to their work I find their weaknesses insufferable – with Asimov it’s the overall clunkiness of his prose and plotting, even when he had the germ of an interesting idea it is more often than not marred by his significant weaknesses as a writer and stylist. There were so many others from his generation that could write circles around him, but if I stop in at a random bookstore it’s Asimov that has multiple copies of nice, new editions of his books on the shelves, while so many of his contemporaneous betters are not present at all.
I’ve read both Asimov and RAH in the early 1990s (my ‘golden age of SF is 12’) and I mostly enjoyed both of them, more than say Leiber or Simak.
Yeah, I place Leiber and Simak above both. I read tons of Asimov and Heinlein in my late teens (when I started reading SF).
I liked Leiber’s fantasy but not SF and I love Simak’s City, but think that some of his other novels are weaker. With RAH I loved his concise style (I speak mainly about works up the the mid-60s) and even his preaching – it hit me exactly in the period of teen rebelions and as it bwas so different from the USSR norms I knew before… Now, with a greater experience, I bunch of problems in all older SFF authors but at the same time, one shouldn’t judge people from other times…
Part of why I enjoy Simak is because I can write about him. I’m not on the hunt for the best science fiction reading experience. I, of course, find great SF along the journey.
I can’t remember if I referenced my article or not but it does represent why I read so much Simak last year (both good and bad short stories primarily): https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2024/09/13/exploration-log-5-we-must-start-over-again-and-find-some-other-way-of-life-the-role-of-organized-labor-in-the-1940s-and-50s-science-fiction-of-clifford-d-simak/
No, I haven’t read it yet, thanks! I’ve read a recent piece on Simak you posted this year IIRC
I’d love to know your thoughts on the Leiber! I also bounced off the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories — you’re not alone there.
Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950) I’ve read it a few years back in the Hall of Fame of SF and more recently while reading Hugo nominee stories (incl. Retro) chronologically. For me, the story wasn’t that great, its prose I guess uneven… maybe the problem is more with my English than my understanding of the Cold War culture
Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” (1950) again, read twice, the first time I was angry that what is essentially a punchline story won a (Retro)Hugo. Recently, I re-read it and saw that there is more than just a punch line, even if for the 1951 Hugo I prefer Born of Man and Woman
I adored the prose in the Leiber — as Brian implied earlier, it’s similar to that of contemporary crime fiction. It’s noir. It’s direct. It doesn’t waste a word. A searing punch of a short story…
I definitely agree that “Coming Attraction” is magnificent. One of the truly great SF short stories. And the final unmasking is creepy and powerful. (Among Leiber’s many talents is a great ability for creepiness (often erotically linked.))
I had actually forgotten that I’d written an essay for SF Site about the 2001 Retro Hugos. (It’s here https://www.sfsite.com/columns/rich101.htm). That was before the final ballot appeared.
Here’s what I wrote about the eventual award:
My nominations went to the Leiber, the MacDonald (which I recently read in the original Thrilling Wonder Stories issue), and three Bradbury pieces (“There Will Come Soft Rains” ,”Ylla”, and “Usher II”). The actual nominations went to the two SF Hall of Fame stories, “Coming Attraction” and “Born of Man and Woman”, as well as to three rather frivolous pieces, “To Serve Man”, “The Gnurrs Come From the Voodvork Out”, and “A Subway Named Mobius”. While this isn’t a bad nomination list, it does have a dreadful, disgraceful, lack. Where is Bradbury? My best guess is that he had so many fine stories that the votes were split. Secondarily, many people might not have realized which stories from The Martian Chronicles were eligible, and indeed, may not have regarded those stories as separate stories. At any rate, it’s a terrible shame. That said, my vote, as I always intended, will go to “Coming Attraction”, which, it seems to me, should be the overwhelming winner. (The other four stories rank more or less even with me — I suppose the Knight, because the joke is a really neat joke, goes second on my ballot [in retrospect, it should have been third behind “Born of Man and Woman”].)
The actual Retro Hugo went to “To Serve Man”. Truly, this award is shocking. It may be unfair of me to suggest this, but I would hope that Damon Knight, with his outstanding critical sense, at least considered refusing it. “To Serve Man” is a fun, biting (pun intended), story. But it’s a trifle [also a pun, not intended!]. “Coming Attraction” is a masterpiece, and it’s a story that says something. Something besides “It’s a cookbook”, for crissake. I am forced to the conclusion that “To Serve Man” won not for Best Short Story, but for Best Twilight Zone Episode — a clear example of what can go wrong with an award like the Retro Hugo — where a story can benefit from a years later TV adaptation.
Leiber has the problem where he might actually be too versatile. It’s easy enough to believe that the guy who wrote “Coming Attraction” also wrote “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” but it’s less so to believe he also wrote The Big Time, and the Fafhrd-Mouser stories, and also some pretty good horror that doesn’t quite belong with his fantasy or SF writing.
How would that be a problem? I think that shows immense and fascinating adaptability and openness to genre. I think a bigger issue is when the reluctance to repeat oneself utterly prevents the publication of works that are at all similar. I think this speaks to my desire for someone like Suzy McKee Charnas to publish more SF because I liked Walk to the End of the World so much. Haha.