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 are complete unknowns. I am a reader of whim. I will choose whether to reread certain stories that I’ve previously covered. Serialized novels will only be reviewed after I complete the entire work and posted as separate reviews. Why Galaxy, you might ask?
First, I can’t escape the pull of 1950s science fiction focused on social commentary and soft science. Second, I am obsessed with 50s American politics during a time of affluence, the rise of TV and mass culture, and the looming terror of the Cold War. Third, there are a legion of well-known 50s authors I’ve yet to address in any substantial manner on the site who appeared behinds its illustrious covers. Fourth, H. L. Gold was interested in all different types of stories.
As SF Encyclopedia explains, Galaxy was an “immediate success” in part because “Astounding was at this time following John W Campbell Jr’s new-found obsession with Dianetics and was otherwise more oriented towards technology.” Gold’s interests, on the other hand, “were comparatively free-ranging: he was interested in psychology, sociology and satire and other humor, and the magazine reflected this.”
I hope you enjoy this series! Feel free to join.
Up Next: the November 1950 issue.
David Stone’s cover for Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
You can read the entire issue here.
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.
Richard Matheson’s “Third From the Sun” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good): Previously reviewed a decade ago here. As I’ve enjoyed a lot of Matheson I’ve covered as of late, I decided to reread this one.
A brief distillation of dread, a “normal” American family (father, wife, children) and their neighbors plot radical action. Told with crisp lines of dialogue–“‘What time is it?’ she asked, ‘About five.’ ‘We’d better get ready.’ ‘Yes, we’d better.’ They made no move” (61)–Matheson embodies the existential anguish of looming annihilation. While the exact nature isn’t spelled out, it’s not hard to infer the following passage is a reference to nuclear war: “In a few years […] the whole planet would go up with a blinding flash. This was the only way out. Escaping, starting all over again” (62). As the family gets ready and interacts with their co-conspirators on the day of action, Matheson conveys the strangeness of it all by making everyday behaviors points of epistemological immensity. For example, as the family leaves their house and pauses on the porch for the final time, the husband asks “should we lock the door?” (64). She can only respond by smiling “helplessly” and running her hand through her hair, “Does it matter”?” (64).
Unfortunately, the twist is spelled out in the title. But unlike other twist stories, Matheson creates real import with the suggestions that this has all happened before. Despite its tantalizing allure and well-crafted moments, I’d still rank this among Matheson’s middling works. It’s no “Pattern for Survival” (1955) or “Dance of the Dead” (1955).
It’s the second best short fiction in the magazine. Recommended. But then again, I’m a complete sucker for nuclear dread short stories!
Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): A preliminary thought: was Frederik Pohl thinking of this story when he wrote Gateway (1975)? Pohl was a religious reader of SF and took over Galaxy after Gold’s tenure.
The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. They will “appear” in 6000 years and connect to each other (and back to Earth) via a web of “force-beams in the form of a tremendous sphere” by which, like “the synaptic paths of a giant brain, “matter will be transmitted instantly” (74). There’s a catch. Only 54% of the crews will survive the voyage. Some will “appear” in conjunction with other pieces of matter and explode, others will be unable to connect force-beams, some crewmen might go insane before the process completes, etc.
The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk. Like Charon guiding the boat across the River Styx taking the dead to the “Other Side” (72), he passes humans along the voyage–unable to take it himself. He’s caught in-between both worlds. Unable to return home. Unable to climb into the spacecraft and make the dash for greatness across the universe. He wants to make connections with those on the stations. But he knows that he might be sending them to their deaths. He watches young love, unable to participate, yearning for a touch. The story transpires within the interior thoughts of everyone involved: those taking the steps towards certification, others trying to make a final decision to head off or return to earth, or those who would make the decision if they found someone to make it with them. You could easily imagine this story shorn of its 50s descriptors and redrafted for the New Wave.
Often stories that touch on the longue durée suggest that a moment of far future technological triumph, think a generation ship story in which arrival is hundreds of years away, will trap society in stasis. Sturgeon follows this pattern: “And all Earth is in a state of arrested development because of Curbstone. Everything is held in check” (85). I don’t buy it. 6000 years is an inconceivable length of time! I imagine that humans will more likely ignore something that seems too distant to be relevant (I mean, we’re experiencing Global Warming now but….). Rather than a “realistic” imagining of future tech, “The Stars Are the Styx” operates best as a rumination on the drive to escape, to achieve, to control, to transcend death, and the struggling souls navigating those contingencies. And here Sturgeon triumphs.
This would be a masterpiece if Sturgeon tightened it up a bit. Recommended.
Fritz Leiber’s “Later Than You Think” (1950), 3/5 (Average): The Explorer, returning from a voyage to space, rushes to discuss a recent discovery on Earth with the Archeologist. But this is a very different Earth. Everything gleams with “radiation from some luminous material impregnating the walls and floors” (108). The Archaeologist discovered a time-capsule of artifacts from an earlier civilization that possibly destroyed itself with “atomic energy, out of control” (111). At the revelation, the Explorer’s excitement turns to anguish. He wanted to learn about a species that succeeded! One that successfully survived and strived and aspired and wasn’t prone to the misuse of technology that “outstripped their psychology” (112). Instead, both the present and the past seem obsessed with the idea that “others, greater than themselves, had prospered before them and then died, leaving them to rebuilt a civilization from ruins” (112). The past seems too similar to the present.
Like the Matheson and Asimov in the same issue, Leiber attempts to speculate on the “metaphoric aftershocks” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the global mind. The twist, silly perhaps, is designed to make us think about the impact of the Cold War decisions–that could be apocalyptic–we might make. But Leiber seems to suggest there’s a destructive heart beating within all highly sentient beings that we cannot escape. Devolution will occur. We will make a fatal error.
Minor Leiber. It’s not bad. It’s not good.
Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good): I’ve read three of MacLean’s fictions– Missing Man (1975), “Echo” (1970), and “Interbalance” (1960)–and enjoyed elements of each. A bunch of her short stories–either ghost-written for her husband or under her own name–appeared in Galaxy under Gold’s stewardship. I look forward to this project as an excuse to finally read them!
“Contagion” (1950) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. There’s good reason: “the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat” (116). The galaxy seems strewn with vanished colonies and the “corpses of ships” which had “touched on some plague planet” (116).
Unlike other contact stories, the MacLean focuses in extra-ordinary detail on the nature of the medical contraptions, medications and medication dispensaries, and decontamination systems that seem to fill-up all available space within the Explorer. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. He’s put through the gamut of medical analysis and invited to visit with the crew. The women, in particular, are obsessed with his physique and pioneer spirit. But there’s a catch, obviously.
If you’re writing about the male gaze re-imagined and critiqued by female authors, put this one on your list. If you’re interested in medical SF, put this one on your list. It’s almost surreal in the strange crisis that transfix the psyche and body–male and female–as the nature of the titular contagion becomes apparent.
Fredric Brown’s “The Last Martian” (1950), 2.75/5 (Below Average): Brown ranks among the authors I mentioned above that I have yet to address in a substantial manner. I’ve only read and reviewed The Light in the Sky Are Stars (1953), a slick 1950s vision of the fanatical men and women who take America by the scruff of the neck and yank it, without letting the law get in the way, towards space and the deep beyond.
A newspaperman learns about a potential story: There’s a guy down in a nearby bar “who claims to be from Mars” (145). He heads over to investigate! Maybe he’ll need to call the police. Over the course of far too many beers, the man reveals incredibly specific details about life on Mars and a catastrophe that ravished society. He simultaneously remembers the life of the man whose body he supposedly inhabits. Is he insane? Did he catch some fragment of Martian intelligence? There’s a twist of course.
“The Last Martian” is polished but doesn’t register as more than minor and forgettable magazine filler.
Isaac Asimov’s “Darwinian Pool Room” (1950), 2/5 (Bad): Mercifully the shortest story in the magazine, Asimov’s “Darwinian Pool Room” imagines a group of academics in Dr. Trotter’s laboratory ruminating on the nature of evolution. The state of a pool table after a game finishes–balls in pockets–and the challenges recreating the game from its ending state serves as the dominate metaphor around which the discusses revolves.
Asimov seems to want to say something about rapid evolutionary transformation/extinction as connected human discoveries in hydrogen weapons and computing. Instead, I couldn’t help but imagine the story as a clichéd manifestation of bored, mostly drunk, graduate students babbling about a vast range of topics all dolled up with pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo. I would know, I remember those conversations with a combination of cringe, intellectual jealousy, and growing nostalgia (how I want to be a graduate student early in my degree again!). Regardless, it fits Gold’s remit to focus on idea-heavy stories that don’t always defer to action.
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 
I remember liking the Simak, although it’s uncharacteristic for him with how action-heavy and hardboiled it is. The story to have the longest lasting impact here is “Third from the Sun,” which got turned into a classic Twilight Zone episode, although weirdly enough Rod Serling adapted it and not Matheson. I also wanna reread “The Stars Are the Styx” at some point, although as you mentioned I recall it being a bit too long (it’s almost a novella). I know I’ve read “Contagion” at least twice, because of this issue and also its appearance in The Future Is Female!, although of the ’50s MacLean stories I’ve read it might be my least favorite (MacLean was very good at this time). I actually don’t remember the Leiber at all, which sounds about right. I love Leiber, as you know, but this one has nothing on stories of his that would appear in Galaxy over the next few years.
This is a pretty good issue of SF from the time, all told. Even the worst stories are short and inoffensive. Over the next five years or so Galaxy would have some of the best individual issues of science fiction ever put to paper, but, we’re not quite there yet.
Thanks for stopping by. Always appreciated! I thought about whether to give my thoughts on each serialized section of the novel or at the end. I decided on the latter. I rather it just be a distinct post. But my general impression is a positive one although the story is all over the place in the first section. I’ve had the paperback version for almost two decades waiting to be read.
I could not push out from my mind the sense of introspective waiting that Pohl’s Gateway (1975) conveyed while reading “The Stars Are the Styx.” In both works, survival is far from a guarantee. In both instances, people make all different types of excuses not to go or to wait or to lie to themselves about their reasons to delay. But yeah, Sturgeon’s story is far too long and some sections are repetitive (he explains the entire system of spaceships creating the network at least three times). And I wanted Sturgeon to indicate that maybe two guys paired off for the voyage (but he had to say “brothers”). Considering it’s Sturgeon… alas. Maybe an editorial addition!
The MacLean works on the weirdness factor and its unusual fixation on the medical contraptions that first contact might require. It doesn’t entirely work. I literally forgot the Leiber between finishing reading it and writing the review one day later. I had to look over my annotations to re-remind myself.
I look forward to issue 2!
Returning to Leiber, the next issue contains one of his masterpieces — “Coming Attraction” (1950). I’ve already read it but I think I’ll give it a reread. I gave it a 5/5 the first time around. I am NOT going to reread the Damon Knight “classic” though — “To Serve Man” (1950). A serious “meh” on that one. He wrote so much better.
Can’t go wrong with ’50s Galaxy, particularly the first five years. They were my gateway into classic science fiction, and a big impetus for Galactic Journey.
Have fun!
I’ve read some great stories from those years but in a piecemeal sense. I agree with you. I’m already deliberating about which ones I should reread. As I mentioned to Brian, next issue I’m definitely rereading Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” and not Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” (which I classify as massively overrated).
Any memories of this issue?
Other than its one-liner gimmick ending, there’s nothing to ‘To Serve Man’ — in every sense, since Knight fortunately kept the story short.
It was, though, ideal fodder for an episode of The Twilight Zone or for conversations about ‘did you ever read that SF story where…’ as it’s so easily recapped. And that’s why we still know about it, for better and worse.
It’s like certain Poe or O. Henry stories in that respect, I guess. So good for Knight.
The gimmick/last line twist story, the bane of my existence… there were two in this issue alone. The Matheson works. The Leiber did not.
Not without reviewing it—it was 25 years ago for real me and 20 years ago for Journey me. I promise I will point out favorites as we encounter them, though, and the context therefore. I grew up with the 1952 Best Of volume, so 1951-2 will be particularly memorable.
And anything by Bob Sheckley 🙂 Also the Willy Ley articles. And wait until you get to the editorial talking about how Don Ameche is such an old actor!
I enjoy Sheckley as well. Unless an editorial jumps out, I probably won’t cover them (especially the science ones ewwwww). I thought Gold’s editorial announcing his new magazine was humorous — the appeal to “mature” SF with all the implications about his rivals…
Contagion is terrific – and I agree that the Asimov is very weak (I’ve been in many late night bull-sessions but I’ve never discovered through conversational reasoning an existential threat – maybe Asimov had better conversation-mates). Glad to see Galaxy reviews – it had some excellent stories and I cut my SF teeth on the “Galaxy Reader” anthologies
Is “Contagion” your favorite MacLean? As of now I think her novel Missing Man (1975) has the crown — I also really enjoyed “Interbalance” (1960) in F&SF.
The next issue contains two stories I’ve already covered on the site. Decisions about rereading beckon!
“The Snowball Effect” is probably my favorite of hers.
As it’s in Galaxy, I’ll get to it eventually! (this series might take a while… but then again, my generation ship series started in 2019).
I read “Third from the Sun” about 3-4 months ago and was struck by the dread that permeated it. My boomer parents will occasionally talk about living under the threat of nuclear war, and a massive one at that and I thought that the story captured what they imagined it would be like, but I also felt like it was missing something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The Twilight Zone episode is excellent and I think a part of it is the production.
From your description he Asimov story sounds like Asimov was trying to write up some discussion he had in grad school (I certainly had some galaxy brain science discussions in grad school), but make it educational for the non-scientists. But most people, even science fiction fans, aren’t that interested in it and certainly not as much as the scientists studying it.
The threat of nuclear war was in the background of life in those days (I was born in the 1960s), and popped up in surprising places (even a TV sitcom like Night Court might suddenly mention nuclear dread).
If I were born a bit earlier in the 80s I wonder if I would remember ramping tensions under Reagan… fortunately, a child of the late late 80s. Hah.
Oh, that’s really interesting. I’m old enough to vaguely remember Gorbachev, but not any of his predecessors, so any of those references would have gone over my head at the time. Now I’m going to keep an eye out for nuclear war jokes in old sitcoms.
I liked “Third From the Sun” more than I did when I read it first in 2015. I, too, thought it was a bit too insubstantial. And, well, I think the spaceship’s lack of security is worth not thinking about… haha.
One would expect the security to be tighter on the eve of war…if the guard survives the war, I don’t think his military career is going to go very far.
Yeah, let’s invite our friends and the all run up an unguarded ramp to an experimental spaceship — bound to work!
I’ll note that the Book Review column in that issue also covers a Judith Merril novel I’ve never even seen (no US re-edition until 2008!) set in Westchester County in the aftermath of an atomic strike on NYC (but which was adapted for television as “Atomic Attack” … see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3HOaU9E5U ).
Yeah, I have a 1st edition copy of Shadow on a Hearth (1950). A scan of my copy: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2021/09/19/updates-recent-science-fiction-purchases-no-cclxxx-brian-w-aldiss-judith-merril-brian-m-stableford-and-chad-oliver/
I apparently acquired it in 2021 — I have yet to read it. A lot of scholarship on nuclear-themed novels covers it — I really should.
Sounds like a daunting task but worthwhile goal. Good luck!
Thank you! I’ll make sure to link the issues so that you can track down some of the best stories to read. A hard hitter and personal favorite will be in the next issue — Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950).
I will gladly join the reading of Galaxy management if it can be done in a glacial speed, like an issue per month or even two. I’m interested in older SF, already started with Asimov’s presents collections and adding Galaxy seems like a right move
I am not the most systematic of readers. I can’t promise for how long or how fast my project will go. I have, of course, read many stories from Galaxy in the past but via collections or a theme that I was exploring instead of the entire issue.
@JB –
A worthwhile project.
One thing about that October 1961 handover from Gold to Frederik Pohl —
From well before Gold officially stepped down as Galaxy’s editor, Pohl had a hand there editorially due to Gold’s problems with agoraphobia (he couldn’t leave his apartment) and then other ailments. So, while the masthead change officially happened in October 1961, that only clarified the effective reality, that Pohl was by then already running Galaxy. (And a bunch of familiar names from the then-SF community who’d showed up for the Friday night card games at Gold’s apartment had been pitching in, like Budrys as a slush pile editor)
Pohl took de facto charge of the magazine somewhere in1959-60, though I’ll look at his The Way The Future Was when I’ve a chance — I don’t have it at hand where I am — to see what that says. But one can reliably presume that: –
[1] When Pohl’s attempt to run an SF literary agency collapsed (badly) in the early 1950s, he’d already represented a number of sf writers who’d sold to Galaxy — as forex, in 1951 when Asimov’s novel, The Stars Like Dust appeared there as Tyrann — and while by then he was selling a substantial number of the stories he himself was writing alone or with Kornbluth (e.g. The Space Merchants) to Galaxy, he’d have needed to supplement his income. Hence, he’d naturally have been a fit for Gold’s editorial assistant.
[2] And we know that he was, because as early as 1955, when, for instance, Cordwainer Smith’s story The Game of Rat and Dragon was published in Galaxy, Pohl would have been at least in part responsible for that. (Pohl was effectively the only person who’d noticed Smith’s first story, Scanners Live in Vain at the time of its publication). Likewise, the increasing appearance in latter 1950s Galaxy of a California author like Jack Vance seems more likely to have been Pohl’s doing than Gold’s.
[3] Finally in 1958-59, when the American News Company was bought and its distribution channel went away, most of the SF magazine market collapsed. At that point, Pohl would have needed a way to survive economically and, with Gold’s increasing ailments and his inability to keep running Galaxy, he naturally would have advantage of the chance to step in at that time.
Hello Mark,
Thanks for stopping by and for the historical reminder. I definitely know about the history of Galaxy, the exchange from Pohl to Gold, and the nature of the magazine market in the late 50s — I’ve undertaken an immense history of SF reading project behind the scenes for the last four or so years. I’ve read all the Ashley volumes, multiple histories of individual authors (Pohl included, lots of info about his editing legacy), many volumes on the origins of genre, 50s/60s/70s SF, etc. I think it’s easiest to simply end my project with the official takeover. I’ll make note in those later posts Pohl’s increasing role. Who knows, the Pohl editorship is obviously worth exploring in a more systematic manner as well!
I was recently reading about Gold and his Great Depression jobs…. he was a strong swimmer and was paid to be “rescued” by lifeguards in order to inflate their rates of rescue so they wouldn’t be fired. He then had to rescue one of the lifeguards! (or so he says). Gold is a super interesting character and I feel for him and his increasing PTSD symptoms over the course of the period.
I figured you’d know some or all this stuff, but for the benefit of readers here who didn’t I would put it on record.
JB: Who knows, the Pohl editorship is obviously worth exploring in a more systematic manner as well!
I dunno. Galaxy’s primarily significant years are October 1950-October 1961 and examining Pohl’s role just within that context might arguably be more useful historiography-wise because: –
[1] Pohl lived long enough, died relatively recently, and wrote enough about his own experiences so most people who know anything — critics and historians of the field, anyway — have some idea about the scope of his contributions;
[2] Whereas there’s much about how 1950s-era Galaxy worked that we’ve a less completely examined picture of; and, nonetheless, we can look back now and say this was the most significant era of American science fiction in terms of making it something worthwhile (okay, by building on whatever Campbell’s 1940s-era ASF had achieved) and, moreover, fairly astute professional figures like Silverberg and Budrys who were present then have also gone on record and stated that was their opinion of the era, too.
[3] Then, too, it’s in the context of 1950s-era Galaxy that Pohl becomes Pohl, by publishing things like The Space Merchants and learning to be an editor under Gold. Sure, Pohl’s 1960s-era of full control of Galaxy — and If and Worlds of Tomorrow — were significant, to the extent that one can argue he was the most important SF magazine editor on the 1960s. But if he was, so what? Firstly, one can quibble with that assessment by pointing to Moorcock’s eruption at New Worlds across the Atlantic as more influential, since it showed there was a different way of doing things than the then-current American way; and, secondly, the 1960s was a different time and no one SF magazine (and editor) could ever again have the primacy that Campbell’s 1940s-era ASF or 1950s-era Galaxy had had.
[4] Finally, let me put a little devil in your mind (if it’s not there already). This website of yours has long been a hobby project of yours and if you want to keep it purely that, that makes all the sense in the world.
Still, if Alec Neva-Lee could get a book like Astounding out of Campbell and his scene, someone somewhere might get a book out of a historical consideration of the 1950s Galaxy scene, which had far more literary significance.
If it happened to be you, it mightn’t get you out of teaching high school (that’s what you’re doing now, right?) — it almost certainly won’t — but it could be a material product from all your work on this blog since 2010. It would, too, be an interesting bigger-picture project to focus on for a historian, as opposed to the alternative, which would seem to be to continue finding lesser-known writers that you haven’t already written about in the last fifteen years.
Forgive me being presumptuous. This is just a blue-sky idea, based on my being suddenly struck by the notion that there’s probably a book about this scene that someone should write and it’s not me. But I’d definitely pay to read it.
Me too. JB, you may or may not be aware that there is already a book on GALAXY. Unfortunately it’s terrible. Title is GALAXY: THE DARK AND LIGHT YEARS, and Advent published it, and it was so lackluster I can’t get motivated to get out of my chair and look at it to remind me of the author’s name.
I was also going to mention GALAXY: THE DARK AND LIGHT YEARS – “recommend” would be far too strong a word.
You might find “Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction” useful as that includes lengthy essays by each of the contributors about their history with the magazine and Gold. The first third of the book covers up to the start of Pohl’s editorship:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?15016
Anyway, given the sheer number of anthologies and collections I’ve read over the years I’ve always estimated I’ve read about 50% of the 50s Galaxy output. So I look forward to my baffled recollections and interesting examples of writers cross-pollinating.
What is wrong with the book both you and John mentioned? I’ll check out the anthology you mentioned. As you can probably tell from my more detailed reviews, I am interested in breaking free from an author-focused lens (a LOT of SF scholarship) and look instead at the impact of larger historical trends. But it’s always good to know more about all elements.
Yeah, I have reviewed quite a few stories in the magazines already. But… I still think it’s a worthwhile enterprise.
What’s wrong with it? I don’t know it. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Feckless, inane, insubstantial. Maybe those words are too strong, but my annoyance at the book–coming as it did from the publishers of Knight and Blish–was considerable. It was a run-through of the magazine, as you are doing, but without benefit of significant research or insight, on the level of the least interesting fanzine commentary. I seem to have suited action to words–I did look for it but couldn’t find it and have a dim recollection that maybe I got rid of it because it wasn’t worth the space it was taking up.
It’s basically a dutiful chronical, plodding through every issue and describing every story, with no critical attention, just maybe a sentence of appreciation at the end of each of these summary paragraphs.
If every copy of Galaxy were lost it would be the equivalent of a mild travelog – then this, then that, and I thought he was a nice man, and this wasn’t such a nice inn, sometimes the weather was good, sometimes the weather was bad, a little about the roads and trains he travelled, and so on and so on.
But over 150 pages one demands more insights than that.
Of course a dive into absolute madness in your project would be to identify the number of times authors restored their original texts when republishing their stories after Gold had had his way them.
William Tenn: “It was awful to be treated like an instrument when you were a distinctive person and a writer of some stature; it was so awful to find a paragraph of Horace’s private musing in the middle of one of my stories that I swore (falsely) never to send him a manuscript again; it was so awful for Ted Sturgeon to find his sentences in “Baby Is Three” changed about and their rhythm destroyed that he began writing “stet” in the margin of every single page in indelible pencil; it was awful, humiliating, aesthetically painful beyond belief….Before Galaxy I wrote science fiction. After Galaxy I wrote only my kind of science fiction. And for that, I must admit, the responsibility lies with one of the most irritating and aggravating men I’ve ever known. From deep within his editorial cave, Horace Gold somehow changed me. I believe he changed us all.”
Mark: Thank you again for all your comments. I didn’t miss this one I was just thinking about how best to answer. The thing about writing history is that you need to be able to say something new and original that adds to the field, else it’s armchair history writing or popular writing and not something that I want to do.
The Simak article I wrote is the type of scholarship I prefer: specific, focused, and detailed analysis with a new argument (in that case, how Simak was in dialogue with third-party politics in the Midwest). I am not interested in bigger-picture historical projects that survey a magazine or a decade. The bigger projects that might interest me would be thematically focused and cover a decade or two (organized labor, impact of TV in the 50s, Counterculture, etc.). Maybe, after I finish my Galaxy read-through, a bigger thematic project idea will come to mind. We shall see!
“It would, too, be an interesting bigger-picture project to focus on for a historian, as opposed to the alternative, which would seem to be to continue finding lesser-known writers that you haven’t already written about in the last fifteen years.”
As for this comment, what? I dunno Mark… think about the vibe I might be getting from it. There is a ton of value in exploring what others tend to ignore.
Regardless, I am flattered that you desire a book from yours truly!
Excited to see where this goes, particularly because I do find this era fascinating but don’t want to trawl through the individual issues myself haha. I’m sure this will cover some things I’ve read already, so mostly interested in things like the Maclean that I haven’t hunted down yet.
Both Contagion and Snowball Effect are on Project Gutenberg
at this link https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/34332
No worries. I fixed the duplications. I also make sure to link the online scan of the magazine in the review just in case readers would prefer to read them in their original context (me!).
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I’m very excited to see this series! I’m still hoping to finish my series of reviews of Amazing/Fantastic under Cele Goldsmith Lalli’s editorship. Matthew Wuertz started a series on Galaxy for Black Gate a few years ago, but he’s only made it to — oh, 1955 or so? I haven’t seen one of his for a while. There was also a book, can’t remember the author, that did cover every issue, that I wasn’t very impressed with his takes on the stories. But your viewpoint will be very welcome!
I do have that issue, but I haven’t reviewed it. (Though I did read the Simak serial in order to compare it to the book.) I think your takes are pretty much correct, though I might rank “Contagion” just a bit higher. The suggestion that “The Stars are the Styx” influenced Pohl when writing Gateway (and “The Merchants of Venus”) is brilliant! I bet you are right — and I hadn’t ever thought of that.
“Coming Attraction” is indeed one of the greatest SF stories of all time. And “To Serve Man”? — I remember how infuriated I was when it was given the Retro-Hugo (pretty much my Exhibit A in the case against the Retro-Hugos.) I propose renaming the award the “Best Twilight Zone Episode Award”, because it was clear that most of the voters hadn’t read any of the stories and were voting based on memories of that episode.
The book I mentioned about Galaxy is the one John Boston and Matthew Davis mentioned, and I agree with both their takes on it.