H. L. Gold (ed), page 1
GALAXY Reader
OF
Science Fiction
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BT
H. L Gold
Editor of Galaxy Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction Novels
CROWN PUBLISHERS. INC. NEW YORK
copyright, 1952, by crown publishers, inc. library of congress catalog card number: 52-5675
ACKNO WLED GMENTS
Copyright, 1950, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.: honeymoon in hell, Fredric Brown; third from the sun, Richard Matheson; the last martian, Fredric Brown; the vvaker dreams, Richard Matheson—reprinted by courtesy of Harry Altshuler and the authors, coming attraction, Fritz Leiber; the reluctant heroes, Frank M. Robinson—reprinted by courtesy of Frederilc Pohl and the authors, judas ram, Sam Merwin—reprinted by courtesy of Otis Kline Associates and the author, jaywalker, Ross Rocklynne—reprinted by courtesy of Scott Meredith, the stars are the styx, Theodore Sturgeon—reprinted by courtesy of the author.
Copyright, 1951, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.: rule of three, Theodore Sturgeon; beyond bedlam, Wyman Guin; the pilot and the bushman—reprinted by courtesy of the authors, venus is a man’s world, William Tenn; hostess, Isaac Asimov; betelgeuse bridge, William Tenn; cabin boy, Damon Knight( field study, Peter Phillips; good night, mr. james, Clifford D. Simak; syndrome johnny, Charles Dye; ask me anything, Damon Knight; second childhood, Clifford D. Simak; don‘t live in the past, Damon Knight; the biography project, Pnriiey Dell— reprinted by courtesy of Frederik Pohl and the authors, inside earth, ..’oul Anderson; man of destiny, John Christopher—reprinted by courtesy of Scott Meredith and the authors. i, the unspeakable, Walt Sheldon; made to measure, William Campbell Gault; dark interlude, Mack Reynolds and Fredric Brown—reprinted by courtesy of Harry Altshuler and the authors, susceptibility and common denominator, John D. MacDonald—reprinted by courtesy of Sydney A. Sanders and the author, if you was a moklin and the other now, Murray Leinster—reprinted by courtesy of Otis Kline Associates and the author. a little journey, Ray Bradbury —reprinted by courtesy of Harold Matson and the author.
Reprinted by special arrangement with Galaxy Publishing Corp.
printed in the united states of america
PERSONAL ACCOUNT
It doesn’t seem very long ago that detective stories became legitimate when Roosevelt declared in an interview that he read them for relaxation. Those of us who were then reading and writing science fiction were envious. We hoped something similar would happen to our favorite form of literature, but we didn’t really expect it.
There was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, of course, which appeared around that time and was a huge hit; we were able to explain to the uninitiated that we read and wrote stories like that. But the gap between Huxley and magazine fiction was too great. I remember being backed into describing the plot of a story I was working on then: “Well, there are giant brains sealed in glassite capsules in the polar ice. They belong to extraterrestrials, who have no bodies, just brains, and they know everything that happened on earth because they’re immortal—” The experience inhibited me so badly that I never wrote the story.
As you can see, plotting science fiction was wonderfully simple in those naive days. You just took some recent discovery—or theory, hypothesis, or cockeyed guess made by anybody who could be called a scientist—and, with no need for characterization, interpersonal conflict, psychological suspense, reader identification, and no editorial demand for these essential ingredients of any good story, you applied the premise to as much of the cosmos as possible, and drew as blatant a conclusion as your unfettered (or unhinged) mind could devise.
Suppose we start with a typical example. In 1929 some Penicillium notatum, the green mold found on bread after several days, landed in a germ culture and was observed to have left a circle of dead bacteria around it. Had a science fiction writer learned of the incident, he would have had everybody eating moldy bread by law, all disease wiped out, and all of us living forever as a result. He’d have included a noble collegiate, a pure flapper and a wicked cartel, naturally, to supply action.
It would have been an embarrassingly awkward story—but I still wish it had been written. If it had, some biochemist might have become inter
ested in checking sources and pushing the experiment … and we might have had penicillin fifteen years and thousands of lost lives before we actually did.
Don’t assume from this example that I think the value of science fiction is the instigation or promotion of discoveries. When that happens, it’s in the nature of a bonus, but the criterion is still stimulating entertainment.
A lot has happened to science fiction since the wild era when no author could get up from his typewriter without having knocked off at least some part of the solar system’s population.
Craftsmanship had to enter the field. There are only so many basic categories; when they have been done over and over, especially with primal motivations and masses of people instead of individuals and their infinitely varied problems and conflicts, the result must be ultimate stasis.
Those writers who could not learn to construct a real story had to drop out, for their stuff inevitably was too similar to things that had been done before, by others and even by themselves. Meeting them now, I find it saddening to hear their puzzled or hostile remarks about science fiction. Many of them understand it less than if they had never written any at all. Yet these were the writers I enormously admired in my youth. With good reason, too; they explored the dangerous blind alleys that we can now avoid only because these early searchers unwittingly showed us they led nowhere.
As an editor, I wince at the preposterously heroic, cloyingly coy or gaggingly slapstick material they sporadically send in, and I always dread the painful job of writing letters of rejection to them. Also as an editor, though, I fully appreciate the contribution they made.
The average age of science fiction writers, which was unbelievably low when Roosevelt made his historic declaration, has gone up steadily ever since. Even adding in the ages of the remaining contemporaries of Verne and Wells, it couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four. I sold my first story at twenty, but others had broken in at seventeen and eighteen … and one girl was only fourteen when she started a very successful series! Higher average age does not automatically mean better stories, but it does when tied to greater writing experience, stiffer competition and more exacting editorial demands.
Someone is sure to ask what the average age is now. About thirty-two, I’d say. The new talent coming in is still considerably under twenty-five, as it should be, but that’s more than balanced by the older writers who are still very active at thirty-five to sixty-five.
The new writers have some enviable advantages—generally better scientific training, more markets, higher rates, and they can start at a higher literary level because of the sounder stories they were raised on. The real potential talents, that is. Those who insist on writing with no aptitude still equal any past monstrosity.
A ghastly thought occurred to me: if editors of the early science fiction magazines had to buy what they did buy, what were the stones like that they rejected? I wonder if anyone else then had an experience like mine:
When I was about eighteen, I kept bringing stories to a wonderful old editor named Dr. T. O’Connor Sloane, and he, instead of talking about them, always managed to get off onto Icelandic literature, the fascination of mathematics (a specialty of his, not mine), and other subjects that may not have been evasions, but were just as good. One story I gave him, however, got him dangerously excited for a man of eighty-two. It was about mining on Venus and I’d manfully exposed the dirty rats who savagely exploited both native labor and prisoners exiled to that miserably hot, rainy planet. Dr. Sloane exclaimed it was too good for his pulp magazine and brought both me and the manuscript up to the Delineator, which was owned by the same company. The story came back to me with a printed rejection slip. Not long after, the Delineator folded. I immediately saw the connection, but I was more concerned with selling the story. Dr. Sloane, though, went on maintaining that it was too good and steadfastly refused to buy it.
If that experience is typical, it explains a good deal about the dreadfulness of that paleolithic science fiction. (I don’t know how much better my own story was, because it somehow got lost.)
Were I an envious man, which I am, I would resent the break that authors have today in rates and markets. There were very few science fiction magazines, their rates ranging from microscopic fractions of a cent payable upon lawsuit to just enough to starve on. Hardly any book publishers brought out science fiction books. No anthologies, no pocketbooks, no TV, radio or movie resale.
Good God, no wonder a depression was going on!
When Galaxy Science Fiction came into the field in 1950, the vigor of its editorial policy was fortified by a policy of higher rates and better terms for authors. The result was that the best writers were attracted to Galaxy and the best material was offered to it.
Authors have to earn their higher rates and ownership of subsidiary rights. Crashing Galaxy is no cinch, as the stories in this anthology, with their fine ideas, sharp characterization and shrewd craftsmanship, more than adequately prove.
No doubt there is a lesson to be derived from this. Writing science fiction in the early days was easier, but the pay was poor. Writing for Galaxy is much harder, but the pay is highly rewarding both in amount and prestige.
I guess it balances out. Either way, writing—especially the writing
Fellow named Michelangelo put it best when he said.: “Only work can eliminate the traces of work.” That monumentally powerful sentence, containing eight simple words, ought to haunt every writer all his life.
The number of people to whom I owe gratitude is pleasantly long and has long been pleasant. Among them are Robert Guinn, prince of publishers ; Robert Simon, a bookman with a kindly ear; my wife Evelyn, who, besides being the most beautiful woman in science fiction, is perceptive, intelligent and systematic, all of which perfectly balances my own inclinations toward disorganization and leaping in front of angels; my mother and the memory of my father, without whom I probably would not have been born and reared; my son Eugene, aged ten, who was never—believe me, never—short of suggestions; authors and agents, both those who have sold to Galaxy and those who have not, because it may be possible to publish a superior magazine without them, but I haven’t figured out how.
And most important of all—so essential, in fact, that a publication of any kind, superior or otherwise, is unthinkable otherwise—you who have bought the book you are holding and perhaps the magazine as well, or soon will, now that you have been introduced to it.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to hang onto your lapel so long. I just thought you’d be interested in knowing a bit about one practitioner’s personal history in science fiction.
Don’t let me keep you from reading and enjoying these stories collected from Galaxy Science Fiction’s exciting first year of life.
H. L. Gold
New York City January, 1952
CONTENTS
PERSONAL ACCOUNT H. L. Gold v
PART I IT HAPPENED TOMORROW
HONEYMOON IN HELL Fredric Brown 3
COMING ATTRACTION Fritz Leiber 30
RULE OF THREE Theodore Sturgeon 40
THIRD FROM THE SUN Richard Matheson 69
THE LAST MARTIAN Fredric Brown 75
PART II SOONER THAN YOU THINK
JAYWALKER Ross Rocklynne 84
THE RELUCTANT HEROES Frank M. Robinson 95
A LITTLE JOURNEY Ray Bradbury 110
VENUS IS A MAN’S WORLD William Tenn 115
PART III THE WORLDS WE MADE
BEYOND BEDLAM Wyman Guin 134
THE STARS ARE THE STYX Theodore Sturgeon 178
INSIDE EARTH Poul Anderson 210
I, THE UNSPEAKABLE Walt Sheldon 245
PART IV AREN’T YOU AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL?
THE PILOT AND THE BUSHMAN Sylvia Jacobs 272
JUDAS RAM Sam Merwin 291
HOSTESS Isaac Asimov 305
BETELGEUSE BRIDGE William Tenn 337
CABIN BOY Damon Knight 350
FIELD STUDY Peter Phillips 371
ix
GOOD NIGHT, MR. JAMES SYNDROME JOHNNY MADE TO MEASURE
Clifford D. Simak 388
Charles Dye 403
William Campbell Gault 414
PART VI NOT AROUND THE CORNER
ASK ME ANYTHING IF YOU WAS A MO KLIN MAN OF DESTINY SUSCEPTIBILITY
Damon Knight 432
Murray Leinster 453
John Christopher 469
John D. MacDonald 475
PART VII THE END OF HISTORY AND BEYOND
THE WAKER DREAMS COMMON DENOMINATOR SECOND CHILDHOOD
Richard Matheson 486
John D. MacDonald 497
Clifford D. Simak 504
PART VIII ABOUT TIME
DON’T LIVE IN THE PAST THE BIOGRAPHY PROJECT DARK INTERLUDE
THE OTHER NOW
Damon Knight 520
Dudley Dell 549
Mack Reynolds and
Fredric Brown 551
Murray Leinster 557
PART I
It Happened Tomorrow
In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain remarks acidly that it’s easier to predict the far future than the happenings of the next day. It’s also safer, he adds—one’s audience won’t be around to find out whether the prediction was right or wrong.
True enough, but not entirely for his satirical reasons. The far future consists of broad lines of development, as all history does: political, economic, social, cultural. We can’t be sure which lines the future will follow, but, basing our extrapolation on the past and present, we can see any number of probable lines. Since science fiction is the examination of probabilities and not certainties, accuracy is not particularly important. Seeing what may happen is.
However, science fiction ignores no challenges, including the next day’s possible developments.
All the stories in this section could happen at any time, including today.
“Honeymoon in Hell,” for example, is perfectly possible with only a slight technological advance over present cybernetics equipment. If it comes to that, we can’t even be sure that the advance hasn’t already been made, because such apparatus is under tight security control.
“Coming Attraction” calls for the precipitation of a situation that could take place right now. It could, but I doubt if it will. At least, I hope it won’t.
“Rule of Three”—maybe, if such things exist. See the note referring to “Hostess,” by Isaac Asimov, in Part IV.
“Third from the Sun” and “The Last Martian” are also good examples of what could be happening somewhere at this moment.
Could happen, mind you, not is or will. If you’re looking for prophecy, what you want is an astrology book, a political column, a racing tip sheet. They’re not often right, but they sound as if they are. These stories are pure speculation—with high entertainment value.
FREDRIC BROWN
Honeymoon in Hell
On September 16th in the year 1962, things were going along about the same as usual, only a little worse. The cold war that had been waxing and waning between the United States and the Eastern Alliance—Russia, China, and their lesser satellites—was warmer than it had ever been. War, hot war, seemed not only inevitable but extremely imminent.
The race for the Moon was an immediate cause. Each nation had landed a few men on it and each claimed it. Each had found that rockets sent from Earth were inadequate to permit establishment of a permanent base upon the Moon, and that only establishment of a permanent base, in force, would determine possession. And so each nation (for convenience we’ll call the Eastern Alliance a nation, although it was not exactly that) was engaged in rushing construction of a space station to be placed in an orbit around Earth.
With such an intermediate step in space, reaching the Moon with large rockets would be practicable and construction of armed bases, heavily garrisoned, would be comparatively simple. Whoever got there first could not only claim possession, but could implement the claim. Military secrecy on both sides kept from the public just how near to completion each space base was, but it was generally—and correctly—believed that the issue would be determined within a year, two years at the outside.
Neither nation could afford to let the other control the Moon. That much had become obvious even to those who were trying desperately to maintain peace.
On September 17th, 1962, a statistician in the birth record department of New York City (his name was Wilbur Evans, but that doesn’t matter) noticed that out of 813 births reported the previous day, 657 had been girls and only 156 boys.
He knew that, statistically, this was practically impossible. In a small city where there are only, say, ten births a day, it is quite possible—and not at all alarming—that on any one given day, 90% or.even 100%, of the births may be of the same sex. But out of so large a figure as 813, so high a ratio as 657 to 156 is alarming.
