Magazine Review: Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950) (Simak, Sturgeon, MacLean, Matheson, Leiber, Brown, Asimov)
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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