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Damon Knight was 28 when he wrote this story, and it appeared in GALAXY's eighth issue (May 1951). The early maturity displayed is stunning. GALAXY from the beginning met the terms of its publicity: it was to be an entirely new kind of science fiction magazine. Knight's tortured cyborgs in ASK ME ANYTHING—the amputated brains of children placed in metallic contraptions designed for combat and killing—have a horrifying validity. There
...Tenn's second contribution to GALAXY and his first of a series dealing with interstellar racketeering, BETELGEUSE BRIDGE was first published in the April 1951 issue. Its baroque humor, Runyonesque portrait of corruption and narrative ingenuity foreshadowed Tenn's dominance of GALAXY for the next decade. Appearing in the same issue as Poul Anderson's INSIDE EARTH and Cyril Kornbluth's THE MARCHING MORONS, Horace Gold had made it an important part
...COMMAND PERFORMANCE (November 1952) was Miller's second and final contribution to GALAXY and appeared less than two years after his first sale, SECRET OF THE DEATH DOME, to AMAZING STORIES. An uncomfortable speculation on the true nature and penalty of telepathy, it shows his characteristic thoroughness and depth and is in fact a story whose central theme (and conclusion) were appropriated in the decades to come by many writers. Its female protagonist,
...In CONDITIONALLY HUMAN (February 1952), gene-alteration raises animal intelligence to near human levels, posing ethical and emotional questions for those involved in the animals' care. Miller handles the story's horrifying implications with prescient force and cool detachment. He had only been writing for publication for a little over a year when this story appeared GALAXY, and this, the first of his two contributions to the magazine, showed that
...THE FLAT-EYED MONSTER (August 1955) is exemplary of the story of distorted or skewed perspective which fascinated Horace Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine. Call these "reversals" in which the use of uncommon perspective skews the material under observation into a new formulation. Here, the "alien" is human, the "predicament" is one which the aliens face in his presence and the mysterious, alien forces exerted by the protagonist are as seemingly
...6) Four In One
As Frederik Pohl noted in an essay decades after this story was published, much of GALAXY's contents contained stories which were not really about their nominal subject. As editor of GALAXY magazine, Horace Gold's editorial interest was always tilted toward satire and social commentary, which in the main interested him far more than technological extrapolation. These interests put his magazine at the outset in a different place than John W. Campbell's
...Appearing in the second issue of Galaxy dated November 1950, Honeymoon in Hell showcased the magazine’s distinctive identity as opposed to other publications of its time—darker, more socially aware, sometimes sexually frank in ways that were shocking for the era....
Published in the January 1958 issue, THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR is one of the earlier computer satires in which the machine (like Arthur C. Clarke's Hal in 2001 ten years later) is gifted with a human and very cranky personality. By 1958, the Horace Gold's own personality, under the constant pressure of his agoraphobia, isolation and increasing imperiousness had sharply deteriorated and he had alienated most of his best contributors, some of whom (Isaac
...10) A Little Journey
In this short science fiction story by the acclaimed author of Fahrenheit 451, an elderly woman in search of enlightenment buys a ticket on a rocket.
“A Little Journey” (August 1951) marks Bradbury’s final contribution to the editorial decade of Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy magazine. Like The Martian Chronicles and “The Fireman,” the story demonstrates
...11) Lucy
Co-Winner (with Robert Walton's VIENNA STATION) of the first Galaxy Project Long Story Contest, Forest's novelette is (as Judge Robert Silverberg writes) a rigorously worked novelette in the grand tradition "which would have delighted Galaxy's great editor Horace Gold". Humanity has dispersed throughout the cosmos in post-apocalyptic space flight; the colony on the planet Faela has terraformed the planet unsuccessfully, an indigenous biological
...Published more than 60 years ago, this dark and prescient story of a future devolved to idiocy remains one of the most frightening visions to have emerged from the science fiction of that decade. Envisioning a future United States overwhelmed by a citizenry of low IQ (a consequence of the overbreeding of the stupid) Kornbluth was in fact writing of an observed present. The steady, inexorable descent of human intelligence obsessed Kornbluth, was
...13) The Midas Plague
Although the three part serial beginning in the June 1952 issue in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth had established Frederik Pohl as a formidable contributor, this novelette in the April 1954 issue was his first solo contribution and marked him as an important addition to the growing roster of social satirists enlisted by Horace Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine. The audacious and patchwork concept underlying this story (the richer you are
...14) Natural State
Published in the January 1954 issue, this novella was Knight's longest contribution to the magazine. Dealing with a familiar extrapolation—a future population divided between a mutually antagonistic farm society of exiles and a technologically advanced city—the novella incorporates sophisticated biology (living weapons) and complicated politics (the reality of the ideological differences is linked not only to the misapplication of biology
...Horace Gold's editorial persona at GALAXY magazine was devoted to the proposition that the only way to tell the truth was through the back door and in costume; PARTY OF THE TWO PARTS (August 1954) is the most savage meditation on and destruction of pornography and its industry which had been published at the time it appeared, but William Tenn made sure that it was so funny that it could slide by as wicked comedy. By mid-1954 Philip Klass, the purveyor
...16) Skulking Permit
Like William Tenn's TIME IN ADVANCE, Sheckley's SKULKING PERMIT (December 1954) is a meditation on penology and the entirety of the criminal justice system, framed as lighthearted satirical science fiction. The furthest human colony of the far-flung Terran Empire is subject—as are all the colonies—to periodic inspection by Headquarters, and Sheckley's settlers are prepared to show that they, no less than their Terran ancestors and overlords,
...17) Time In Advance
Originally published in the August 1956 issue of GALAXY, this novelette shows William Tenn (pseudonym for Phillip Klass) at the peak of his career in science fiction. Sardonic, profoundly disillusioned and fashioned in the form of a classic deductive mystery, the work was enormously influential and its central plot premise has been appropriated by others over many decades. Original to science fiction—perhaps to the entire body of literature—is
...In an afterword to this story when it was reprinted over a decade ago in his three volume complete works, Phillip Klass (who used the pseudonym "William Tenn" for his science fiction) noted that he had been paid originally $790 for this 23,000 word novella which was, before he sold BERNIE THE FAUST for $5000 to Playboy a few years later, the largest amount he had ever received for a single work. Such was the science fiction market in the 50's (and
...Frederik Pohl had become a powerful presence in GALAXY immediately upon the appearance (beginning in the issue of June 1952) of the famous three part serial GRAVY PLANET in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth and that presence was magnified with the publication of THE MIDAS PLAGUE in April 1954 and the second three part Kornbluth collaboration, GLADIATOR AT LAW, beginning two months later...but it was with this story that Pohl established himself
...20) Vienna Station
In a mechanicized future Earth is controlled and dominated by competing O'Neill colonies, circling a submissive society and struggling for complete control. The Vienna Station, one of those competitors, is in the hands of Masters who will use a reconstituted Mozart, a broadcast premiere of a new Concerto to the billions and an intricate plan of espionage to crush all opposition...but the cloned Mozart, an orchestral cellist Drusilla and renegade
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