Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo, Tpi’s Reading Diary
Mathew Wuertz, Black Gate

Fiction:
World Without Children • novella by Damon Knight ♥
A Pail of Air • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥♥♥+
With These Hands • novelette by C. M. Kornbluth ♥♥♥
Winner Lose All • short story by Jack Vance ♥♥
Not a Creature Was Stirring • short story by Dean Evans ♥
Pillar to Post • novelette by John Wyndham ♥

Non-fiction:
Season’s Greetings To Our Readers • cover by Ed Emshwiller
Interior artwork • Ed Emshwiller, Karl Rogers, Thorne, David Stone, Richard Powers
Fore and Aft • editorial by H. L. Gold
Galaxy’s 5 Star Shelf • book reviews by Groff Conklin and Robert A. Heinlein
Next Month’s Contents Page

This issue of Galaxy was published several months after the last one I read (the April issue) and, on the face of it, looks promising. First of all it has a stellar line up of writers which includes only one name that I don’t recognise (Dean Evans). Secondly, this self-contained issue of Galaxy was published between Heinlein’s serial The Puppet Masters and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Finally, it is that rarest of things, an SF magazine with a Xmas cover.
I don’t know if you have ever searched through Galactic Central or ISFDB for these covers but it may surprise you to find there are actually very few of them.¹ Why this is I am not sure—it seems like an editorial no-brainer to slap a Xmas cover on your seasonal issue and include a suitably festive (or unfestive) story.²
This SF Xmas cover is the earliest example I could find. Season’s Greetings To Our Readers was the first of eight that Emsh would do featuring a four-armed Santa, the start of a Galaxy tradition that would persist through most of the fifties and early-sixties.

The first story is World Without Children by Damon Knight, which was his fourth piece for Galaxy that year. It is set in a future where humanity has a considerably extended life span but:

The last recorded birth had been two hundred years ago.
That child—who had also been the last to wear a snowsuit, the last to cut his finger playing with knives, and the last to learn about women—had now reached he physiological age of twenty-five years, and looked even younger owing to his excellent condition. His name was George Miller; he had been a great curiosity in his day and a good many people still referred to him as The Child. p.6

At a party he gets together with three others, one of whom tells them that the human race is now nine-tenths sterile and the situation is deteriorating. As the government’s prohibition against new births will take too long to overturn, the four agree to continue illegally and in secret.
The rest of the story is a rather formulaic resistance vs. Government adventure although it does have some interesting touches: it is mostly set in Venice, and the sexual mores of this future society are quite permissive. These latter include mention of ‘G-string parties’ and the like, and there is also this when George and one of the other characters hide out in ‘vice house’:

The suite was eminently comfortable: three bedrooms, two baths, living room, game room, and even a tiny gymnasium; but Art grumbled. “Dammit, George, I suppose I shouldn’t complain when you’ve just saved my neck, but I can’t see your sense of humor. Anyway, what are these people going to think when I keep staying here but don’t have any women up?”
“Probably think we’re queer,” George suggested. Then, as Art seemed about to explode, he added hastily. “It’ll be good for you, Art—teach you humility and not condemning your fellow man and so forth. Anyhow, you’ve got to admit it’s safe.” p.26

Overall this would have probably been an OK effort if it wasn’t fatally undermined by a deux ex machina ending (albeit one with its roots planted at the start of the story in the character of Joe, a young man who supposedly has three hundred years’ worth of amnesia).³ An interesting result of this ending is that (spoiler) George finds out that an older woman he has had the hots for throughout the story is a mother, at which point his ardour cools to almost glacial levels….

A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber was a story that I vaguely remembered liking in The Best of Fritz Leiber (Sphere, 1974) where I first read it in the late seventies, and it didn’t disappoint.⁴ It starts with this:

Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I’d just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.
You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady’s face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I’d never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn’t, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you? p.57

This science fictional tall tale goes on to tell about a family that have survived the capture of the Earth by a ‘dark star’ that has dragged the planet out of the solar system. Away from the sun the planet has frozen, including the atmosphere.
While their methods of survival are scientifically unlikely, the combination of folksy recollection and catastrophic events works quite well, and it is definitely a different kind of story than that normally found in the SF magazines of the time.

With These Hands by C. M. Kornbluth is about a sculptor called Halvorsen in a future where artists like him have been largely replaced by the Esthetikon, a machine that cheaply produces algorithmically adjusted sculptures out of plastic.
Halvorsen manages to make ends meet by obtaining the odd commission from rich sponsors and by running art classes. This is where a young woman called Lucy enters his life. During their initial conversation he collapses from malnutrition and she fetches a doctor, and later food. At a subsequent art class she brings an astronaut called Malone to look at his work, and the rivalry and differing world views between the two men are laid bare:

“There’s some art, Malone. My students—a couple of them in the still-life class—are quite good. There are more across the country. Art for occupational therapy, or a hobby, or something to do with the hands. There’s trade in their work. They sell them to each other, they give them to their friends, they hang them on their walls. There are even some sculptors like that. Sculpture is prescribed by doctors. The occupational therapists say it’s even better than drawing and painting, so some of these people work in plasticene and soft stone, and some of them get to be good.”
“Maybe so. I’m an engineer, Halvorsen. We glory in doing things the easy way. Doing things the easy way got me to Mars and Venus and it’s going to get me to Ganymede. You’re doing things the hard way, and your inefficiency has no place in this world. Look at you! You’ve lost a fingertip— some accident, I suppose.”
“I never noticed—” said Lucy, and then let out a faint, “Oh!”
Halvorsen curled the middle finger of his left hand into the palm, where he usually carried it to hide the missing first joint.
“Yes,” he said softly. “An accident.” ‘
“Accidents are a sign of inadequate mastery of material and equipment,” said Malone sententiously. “While you stick to your methods and I stick to mine, you can’t compete with me.”
His tone made it clear that he was talking about more than engineering. p.84

At this point I was expecting a relationship to start between Halvorsen and Lucy, but (spoiler) Kornbluth subverts this expectation with, as I commented in his story The Mindworm (Worlds Beyond, December 1950), an apparent knowledge of relationships beyond his years:

The farce was beginning again. But this time he dreaded it.
It would not be the first time that a lonesome, discontented girl chose to see him as a combination of romantic rebel and lost pup, with the consequences you’d expect.
He knew from books, experience and Labuerre’s conversation in the old days that there was nothing novel about the comedy—that there had even been artists, lots of them, who had counted on endless repetitions of it for their livelihood.
The girl drops in with groceries and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl admires this little thing or that after payday and buys it and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl brings her friends to take lessons
or make little purchases and the artist is pleasantly surprised. The girl may be seduced by the artist or vice versa, which shortens the comedy, or they get married, which lengthens it somewhat.
It had been three years since Halvorsen had last played out the farce with a manic-depressive divorcee from Elmira: three years during which he had crossed the mid-point between thirty and forty; three more years to get beaten down by being unwanted and working too much and eating too little. p.86

He rebuffs Lucy’s help and instead enters a radiation zone in Copenhagen, risking his life to view a piece of sculpture. After this the story proceeds to a rather pat ending but is otherwise a convincing and rather well done story about the threat of artistic extinction in a world of ever more capable technology.
I note in passing that there was an extended section involving a potter at the start of Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons.

Winner Lose All by Jack Vance is an account of a spaceship that arrives at an undiscovered planet at the same time as an alien life-form:

The unigen was an intelligent organism, though its characteristics included neither form nor structure. Its components were mobile nodes of a luminous substance which was neither matter nor yet energy. There were millions of nodes and each was connected with every other node by tendrils similar to the lines of force in macroid space.
The unigen might be compared to a great brain, the nodes corresponding to the gray cells, the lines of force to the nerve tissue. It might appear as a bright sphere, or it might disperse its nodes at light speed to all corners of the universe. p.95

The conflict between human and alien plays out to the point that (spoiler) both the humans and the visiting alien life-form concede and leave the planet. They leave behind another alien spieces that completes its life-cycle.
It is hard to believe this flat (the human characters are two-dimensional at best) piece is by the same author who produced The Loom of Darkness a.k.a. Liane the Wayfarer in the previous year’s Worlds Beyond (December 1950).

Not a Creature Was Stirring by Dean Evans is the first SF story of around a dozen that Evans (real name George Kull) would publish over the next couple of years.⁵ It is a particularly bleak story that occurs shortly before Xmas, and concerns a miner in Nevada who comes up from an extended period underground. He goes into town where, unbeknownst to him, the Reds have used a secret weapon that has killed everyone in the town and probably the country. They are frozen in position but show no signs of decay since the attack three weeks previously. He variously proceeds to get drunk, play roulette with the dead guests, etc.
This has a particularly clumsy info dump at the beginning and goes on for far too long, but one or two of the scenes involving the miner interacting with the dead invoke a glimmer of interest and the last few paragraphs provide a cheeringly bleak and seasonal ending.

The final story in this issue is the tedious Pillar to Post by John Wyndham. This involves a man called Terence Molton, who is a double foot/leg amputee as a result of standing on a mine. After overdoing his painkilling ‘dope’ he finds himself in another person’s body in the future. While he is there he is looked after by a woman called Clytassamine and is told that he will return to his own body once the original occupant, Hymorell, builds another transference machine in his time.
Until that happens Molton is taught the language and he and Clytassamine talk. A lot. Unfortunately these endless conversations are that pretentious, cod-philosophical drivel you get in too many SF stories when people in the far future discuss the human race:

There was so much I wanted to know. “What happened to my world?” I asked her later. “It seemed pretty well headed for disaster, as I saw it. I suppose it nearly wiped itself out in some vast and destructive global war?”
“It just died, the same as all the early civilizations. Nothing spectacular.”
I thought of my world, its intricacies and complexities, the mastery of distance and speed, the progress of science.
“Just died?” I repeated. “It can’t have. There must have been something that broke it up.”
“Oh, no. The passion for order is a manifestation of the deep desire for security. The desire is natural, but the attainment is fatal. There was the means to produce a static world, which was achieved. When the need for adaptation arose, it found itself unable to adapt. It inertly died of discouragement. That happened to many primitive peoples before.”
She had no reason to lie, but it was hard to believe.
“We hoped for so much,” I protested. “Everything was opening before us. We were learning. We were going to reach out to other planets and beyond.”
“Ingenious you certainly were, but each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. And you were a greedy, childishly aggressive people. You developed science without developing philosophy. Philosophy without science is fruitless speculation, likely to degenerate into superstition and ignorant quibbling. But science without philosophy is equally fruitless research that leads to pedantry, stasis, dogma.” p.148

The final section finds Molton back in his own body in front of a primitive version of the transference machine, and there follows half a dozen pages or so where the story perks up as he and Hymorell engage in a duel of wits as they swap back and forth between each other’s bodies.

Emsh contributes the best of Interior artwork (and also contributes under the pseudonym Ed Alexander for the Leiber story) although David Stone runs him a close second.⁶ Powers’ work was surprisingly disappointing, looking a bit smudged to be honest.
Horace Gold’s editorial, Fore and Aft, contains the news that Galaxy is under new ownership and makes reassuring noises about profitability, standards only being changed in the direction of improvement, etc., before going on to tout Knight’s novella, next issue’s serial The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, and a new science column by Willy Ley.⁷ He then goes on to provide six months’ worth of story ratings. If these are in order of preference Cyril Korntbluth’s The Marching Morons was the least liked story in the April issue, and Isaac Asimov’s Tyrann the least liked serial. (A better man than me would be able to restrain himself from saying, ‘I told you so.’) Gold also mentions that he was apprehensive about the response that Edgar Pangborn’s Angel’s Egg and Wyman Guin’s Beyond Bedlam would receive, and concludes by boasting about the fact that 95% of the first year’s contents will shortly be reprinted in hard covers.
Galaxy’s 5 Star Shelf is by Groff Conklin and Robert A. Heinlein this issue, the latter reviewing one of the three books covered, Space Medicine: The Human Factor in Flights Beyond the Earth by John P. Marbarger.

An OK issue, but not as good as I had been expecting.

1. Galactic Central put together a few pages of fiction magazine Xmas covers. As you can see there are very few SF ones amongst them. There are a few more he could have added (my list includes Astounding, January 1954, ’55, ’56, ’58, ’59 and ’77; Galaxy, December 1951, ’53, 54, 59 and ’60, January 1956, ’57, and ’58, and November/December 1994; F&SF, January 1960, ’62, ’81 and ’91; Science Fiction Monthly, November 1974, ’75. There is also a Xmas cover on the news magazine SF Chronicle 1998).
2. If an atheist like me can cope with this Christian/mercantile festival I’m sure others can.
3. I don’t think I’m being overly hard on Knight’s story. It was only reprinted by Gold and also took some time to come out in one of the writer’s own collections. Its publication history is on ISFDB.
4. I remember reading somewhere that the cover for The Best of Fritz Leiber was actually produced for The Best of A. E. van Vogt (illustrating the story The Cataaaaa) but that they were swapped. The Leiber and van Vogt books at ISFDB.
5. ‘Dean Evans’ ISFDB page. George Kull is mentioned in the Chapter 20 footnotes (#8) of C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary by Mark Rich. This is from Pohl’s account (in an interview with Damon Knight) of the financial troubles he got into when running his agency (by paying writers for their work before selling it to a publisher): “There was as fellow named George Kull in California…who wrote pretty good light mysteries, but he wrote them in enormous volume, and I couldn’t sell them as fast as he wrote them. He was starving to death, and he was into me for like three thousand dollars when I wrote him off.” p.408
   Kull is identified as Evans just after this passage.
6. One of Emsh’s illustrations for Damon Knight’s World Without Children:David Stone’s illustrations for Dean Evan’s Not a Creature Was Stirring:
7. The publisher had changed on the November issue contents page to Galaxy Publishing Corporation from World Editions Inc.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary
Matthew Wuertz: Black Gate

Fiction:
Nice Girl with Five Husbands • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥
Inside Earth • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥
Betelgeuse Bridge • short story by William Tenn ♥♥
I, the Unspeakable • novelette by Walt Sheldon ♥♥♥
Field Study • short story by Peter Phillips ♥
The Marching Morons • novelette by C. M. Kornbluth

Non-fiction:
Inside Earth • cover by David Stone
Interior artwork • by Phil Bard, David Stone, James Vincent, Louis Marchetti, Don Sibley
Treasurer’s Report • editorial by H. L. Gold
Galaxy’s Five-Star Shelf • book reviews by Groff Conklin

Around the time this issue was published (give or take a month or two) the two new magazines on the stands, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, had both published seven issues: Galaxy had started a year after F&SF and had been both a bigger magazine and monthly throughout; F&SF would not go monthly for another year and a half. If I had to pick a favourite at this point I think I’d say that F&SF is the more interesting magazine, although it isn’t exactly comparing like with like.¹ And it may not be that way for much longer: the upcoming contents tables for Galaxy look very promising.

This issue is the first of the non-serial issues promised last month, and leads off with Nice Girl with Five Husbands by Fritz Leiber. A man is swept a hundred years into the future by ‘time-winds,’ where he meets a woman who has five husbands and a number of co-wives. He goes with her to their house to have lunch with them and their many children. He learns more about this strange future before the time-winds return him to the present. This is a rather inconsequential non-story, but perhaps it is notable for its early use of group marriage as a theme.

The first of the novelettes is Inside Earth by Poul Anderson. This gets off to an interesting start with the description of the surgical body modifications an alien spy has undergone in order to spy on Earth. Unfortunately this is then followed by a meeting with the General, which is a turgid data dump about a fairly daft idea: fomenting a revolution on Earth against the Empire so humanity is unified enough to join as a full member. This turns out to be pretty much the same combination of Planet Stories pulp, better writing, and social insight as his simultaneously published story Interloper in F&SF (April 1951).
The spy later lands on Earth and assesses people’s feelings about the Empire. Shortly afterwards he gets a job in a steel mill (no TTIP sending all those blue-collar jobs off-planet in the future then). He eventually makes contact with the resistance and after a year or so manages to get on a ship to their secret headquarters, which is on a dark and cold planet:

We were in a narrow valley between sheer, ragged cliffs that soared crazily into a murky sky. The sun was low, a smouldering disc of dull red like curdling blood; its sullen light glimmered on the undying snow and ice and seemed only to make the land darker. Stars glittered here and there in the dusky heavens, hard and bright and cruel, almost, as in space.
Dark sky, dark land, dark world, with the sheer terrible mountains climbing gauntly for the upper gloom, crags and glaciers like fangs against the dizzy cliffs, with the great shadows marching across the bloody snow toward us. p.40

After more psychological screening, and subterfuge, the story proceeds to a fairly predictable end.
I noted the following in the story, and wondered if Gold was inserting this kind of stuff to make the magazine seem more ‘adult’ or whether it came from writer:

Mentally, I shrugged. My stay in New Chicago had pretty well convinced me that all Earthling females were sluts. And what of it? p.32

William Tenn’s contribution to this issue is the first of a number of stories by this writer that would appear in Galaxy. At this point in his career Tenn (the pseudonym of Philip Klass) had published around a dozen stories in various SF magazines (including four in Astounding). This pattern would continue until 1954 when the bulk of his subsequent output would appear in Galaxy.²
Betelgeuse Bridge is about an advertising man hired to sell the arrival on Earth of two snail-like aliens to the general public. After this has been successfully managed they casually mention that they have revitalisers, machines which extend their lifespans. In due course they agree to provide these to humanity for all the radioactive material on the planet.
This is a straightforward tale but is written in a fairly light and breezy tone that perhaps, at the time, gave it the appearance of something more modern and sophisticated.

Walt Sheldon contributed A Rope for Lucifer, a tall tale that I liked, to a recent issue of F&SF (Winter-Spring 1950), so I was hopeful that I, the Unspeakable would be of an equivalent standard.
It starts with our unnamed narrator being woken by his brightening glow-light from a dream he has been having about a woman encouraging him to commit a nonconformity in his future conformist state. Once he fully wakes we get a data dump about his life: he has been allocated a new name (not stated) which has cost him his job and the opportunity to mate, and turned him into an ‘non-productive.’
The dream woman has told him how he can change his name.
He subsequently goes to Govpub and talks to the cybs and then to a human assistant called Lara. He finds out that the head of Opsych may be able to change his name for him but Lara tells him he will have to get a travel permit to get to Centre One:

“Do you think it’ll be hard to get a travel permit?”
“Not impossible. My guess is that you’ll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough.”
I sighed. “I know. It’s that way everywhere in Northern. Our motto ought to be, ‘Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?’ ” p.90

Their laughter is cut off as they arrive back at her desk to find two menacing looking Deacons scowling at them.
He manages to navigate the bureaucratic process required to obtain a travel permit and then boards a flight to Centre. He sees two prisoners on the flight and has a disturbing conversation with one of the accompanying Deacons in the washroom. He finds out that the prisoners have met illegally and will be tortured to obtain information about other non-conforms.
At Centre One he is given the runaround:

The rat race was on.
I found General Administration. They sent me to Activity Control. Activity Control said they couldn’t do a thing until I was registered. I went to Registration. Registration said oh, no, I shouldn’t have been sent there—although they’d try to direct me to the proper office if I got an okay from Investigation and Security. I. & S. said the regulation I quoted had been amended and I would have to have the amendment first and I could find that in Records. Records sent me back to the first place to get a Search Permit.
And so on. p.94

At the end of day he goes to one of the parks for some fresh air and falls asleep. He is woken by shooting and sees the two prisoners from the flight, naked and running towards him pursued by the Deacons. He fights the Deacons to disrupt their pursuit, and is eventually stunned into unconsciousness. After being tortured he comes around to find the Chief of Opsych telling him he can sort everything out but needs to know who sent him on his quest to change his name. The Chief doesn’t believe the answer about the dream woman and gives him an hour to tell the truth.
The story finishes with a rather corny ending (spoiler): he is rescued by the couple he helped and ends up on a ship to Mars. He finds out the resistance had arranged for his new name hoping he would ‘infract’ (non-conform) and be exiled. The resistance plan on starting again on Mars and need his expertise to build rockets. Lara turns out to be the woman in his dreams, and his name is revealed… Love.
Notwithstanding the ending I found this a lively and interesting story about life in a totalitarian state. It is quite adult in its approach: early on he is refused his twenty minutes in the mating booths on account of his name, and there is also some explicit description in the torture scenes. This is the best story in the issue and worth having a look at.³

Field Study by Peter Phillips starts with an accountant having trouble with his wife as he spends too much time at work. This is not helped when he is given a new case to investigate about a doctor who dispenses miracle cures. The authorities are having a problem dealing with him as he makes no promises about the results and only takes money in a roundabout way. The accountant’s investigation develops to the point where the he discovers the doctor is an alien who has taken control of a human body, but is about to leave the host. Before the alien leaves he helps the accountant track down his wife to a nightclub and sort out his marital problems. These various elements don’t really cohere and the story is overlong.
Peter Phillips was the second British writer to appear in Galaxy after John Christopher.

Finally we come to the last story in the issue, The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth. This tells of a future where the vast majority of the human race have an IQ of 45 and society is kept functioning by a smaller elite group who have multiple jobs. It starts with a potter in his studio:

The buyer from Marshall Fields was turning over a black-glazed one liter carafe, nodding approval with his massive, handsome head. “This is real pretty,” he told Hawkins and his own secretary, Gomez-Laplace. “This has got lots of what ya call real est’etic principles. Yeah, it is real pretty.”
“How much?” the secretary asked the potter.
“Seven-fifty each in dozen lots,” said Hawkins. “I ran up fifteen dozen last month.”
“They are real est’etic,” repeated the buyer from Fields. “I will take them all.”
“I don’t think we can do that, doctor,” said the secretary. “They’d cost us $1,350. That would leave only $532 in our quarter’s budget. And we still have to run down to East Liverpool to pick up some cheap dinner sets.”
“Dinner sets?” asked the buyer, his big face full of wonder.
“Dinner sets. The department’s been out of them for two months now. Mr. Garvy-Seabright got pretty nasty about it yesterday. Remember?” p.130

Obviously, the boss is one of the people with an IQ of 45. The secretary and Hawkins finalise the deal, briefly discussing one or two other elite matters.
The next section has Hawkins leaving the studio. He is short of metal oxides so decides to go prospecting in a nearby field that he hopes may be an abandoned cemetery full of bronze caskets that have oxidised. Following his discovery of a tomb there follows a lengthy section that has a data dump about “Honest” John Barlow, a real estate dealer who was accidentally put into suspended animation hundreds of years previously and, with the knowledge of the time, could not be revived.
Hawkins eventually breaks him into his coffin and injects Barlow with saline to bring him around:

In an hour Barlow’s chest began to pump.
In another hour, he rasped, “Did it work?”
“Did it!” muttered Hawkins.
Barlow opened his eyes and stirred, looked down, turned his hands before his eyes—“I’ll sue!” he screamed. “My clothes! My fingernails!” A horrid suspicion came over his face and he clapped his hands to his hairless scalp. “My hair!” he wailed. “I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got! That release won’t mean a damned thing in court—I didn’t sign away my hair and clothes and fingernails!”
“They’ll grow back,” said Hawkins casually. “Also your epidermis. Those parts of you weren’t alive, you know, so they weren’t preserved like the rest of you. I’m afraid the clothes are gone, though.” p.134

This whole Rip Van Winkle section sits somewhere between the ludicrous and the surreal.
After this exhumation the story proper gets going with Hawkins calling Central and passing Barlow to the psychist Tinny-Pete. Hawkins thinks that Barlow may be able to help with ‘The Problem.’ Tinny-Pete arrives in a wild looking car with kilograms of chrome and a speedo that shows a top speed of 250 kph. Once going it makes a lot of noise and flames, and there is wind-rush even though the windows are closed. Barlow soon realises it isn’t actually going that quickly. He listens briefly to an inane radio show with odd catch-phrases like ‘Would you buy that for a quarter?’ that have the audience shrieking with laughter. Between this and the sexually explicit billboard signs beside the road he begins to form an idea of what this future is like.
Once in the city he breaks free from his handler, obtains food and drink, and looks at the strange shops and film posters for movies like Babies are Terrible and Don’t Have Children. He picks up a racing paper and cannot make any sense of the erratic performance of the horses.
At this point Tinny-Pete reappears and takes him to see a hawk-faced man, who finishes a garbled speech to Barlow with the nub of the matter:

“We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!” p.145

He goes on to tell Barlow that the average IQ is now 45 and a corporation started by three million geneticists are the ones who keep society functioning. When Barlow asks him why they didn’t just let the morons go to hell he is told that the corporation tried that once and it was quickly followed by hunger, famine, plague, anarchy and war:

“Five billion corpses mean about five hundred million tons of rotting flesh.”
Barlow had another idea. “Why don’t you sterilize them?”
“Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done.” p.146

Barlow tells them about lemmings in Norway jumping off cliffs, and states he has a plan for instilling that urge in the morons. For this he’ll need publicity and power, and insists on being made world dictator. He is taken to Polar headquarters, but only after exhibiting some racist behaviour to the hawk-faced man who has been explaining matters to him and whose name turns out to be Ngana. After Barlow has cowed the World Congress into agreeing to his demands, proproganda to get the morons on Venus-bound spaceships is rolled out through the media. This is ominous as the only previous spaceflight crashed on the moon.
The story then switches to a woman called Mrs Garvy, who is being indoctrinated by the media into emigrating to Venus. In this section Kornbluth takes side swipes at TV, radio, advertising and Freudian psychiatry. Garvy eventually goes on a trip to a tropical paradise that is supposedly Venus. Meanwhile, the politicians are playing the envy card and suggesting that each evacuated city be torn down and used for the steel for the spaceships to move the next city to Venus:

A forest of spaceships began to blossom in the desert. They weren’t very good space ships, but they didn’t have to be.
A team at the Pole worked at Barlow’s direction on a mail setup. There would have to be letters to and from Venus to keep the slightest taint of suspicion from arising. Luckily Barlow remembered that the problem had been solved once before—by Hitler. Relatives of persons incinerated in the furnaces of Lublin or Majdanek continued to get cheery postal cards. p.156

Needless to say (spoiler), Barlow is the last one put on a spaceship and he dies as it goes into orbit.
I didn’t like this story when I read it 45 years ago and I don’t like it any better now. Apart from mechanical considerations, such as a structure and tone that are all over the place, I think it is an object lesson in how satire can easily cross a line to become something much more mean-spirited and poisonous. The explicit eugenics theme so soon after the Holocaust is particularly unpleasant, never mind the fact that the ‘science’ it is based on is wrong. Even if the science had been correct, it is chilling the way this piece equates ‘stupid people’ with ‘bad people,’ and suggests they are only fit for liquidation.
The other thing that makes this story particularly problematical for me is the way it appears to be have been absorbed by the SF field—at best as a clear-eyed view of how stupid people hold back the human race, and at worst as some sort of manifesto. This may have been typical of the superior ‘Fans are Slans’ mindset of the time.^{4, 5}

The artwork for this issue includes a bland cover for Inside Earth by David Stone. The internal art includes work that looks like it could have appeared in a 1930’s Amazing Stories (James Vincent) and some that is quite modern looking (Louis Marchetti).⁶
Treasurer’s Report, the editorial by Horace Gold, is pretty much as described. Gold mentions ‘an alarming tidal flood of rising costs’ before announcing a price rise next issue (from 25 to 35 cents, although this is from a filler advertisement later on in the magazine). He says the decision is not set in stone but that a lower price will mean lower story rates, a lower quality cover and paper stock, line rather than half-tone engraving, ‘making [Galaxy] merely another science fiction magazine.’
At the end he briefly mentions next month’s serial, Mars Child by C. M. Kornbluth & Judith Merril, which will appear under the ‘Cyril Judd’ byline which ‘was chosen for wieldiness, not secrecy.’ At least the magazine will save some money on ink….
Galaxy’s Five-Star Shelf by Groff Conklin has recommendations for John W. Campbell’s The Moon is Hell (two long stories, the title story is original), and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (in which he highlights the, at the time, little known Robbie (Strange Playfellow) from Super Science Stories, September 1940). He is more conflicted about Martin Greenberg’s anthology Journey to Infinity:

Anyone who is familiar with the rich store of science fiction in this particular field will feel a very definite sense of dissatisfaction with this slim collection. At least ten or a dozen more tales come to mind which would have greatly enriched and varied the picture of man’s possible pasts and futures.
Where, for example, is a chapter from the greatest of all histories of tomorrow, Robert Heinlein’s? (It is possible, of course, that Heinlein would not let any be used, since his “history” is already being published in several volumes by another publisher.) Or where is the essential “Baldy” story, from Lewis Padgett’s excellent postatomic-war series? Or one of Simak’s “City” tales?
Despite too skeletal a form, Journey to Infinity is a good buy for anyone who likes top-grade science fiction. p.61

He finishes with a short mention for Arthur C. Clarke’s Galaxy-novel, Prelude to Space.⁷

A poor to OK issue for me but one that will rate better for those that think the Kornbluth story a ‘classic.’

1. If you strip out Galaxy’s two mediocre serials then it and F&SF have published approximately the same wordage of short fiction. For me the notable short fiction in Galaxy so far has been:
   The Stars Are the Styx • Theodore Sturgeon, October 1950
   Coming Attraction • Fritz Leiber, November 1950
   Rule of Three • Theodore Sturgeon, January 1951
   The Fireman • Ray Bradbury, February 1951
   Out of the remaining 32 stories I would rate 4 as ‘good.’
   As for F&SF, the notable short fiction is:
   The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out • by Reginald Bretnor, Winter-Spring 1950
   The Exiles • (reprint) Ray Bradbury, Winter-Spring 1950
   Born of Man and Woman • Richard Matheson, Summer 1950
   Built Up Logically • (reprint) Howard Schoenfeld, Fall 1950
   The Listening Child • Margaret St. Clair, December 1950
   The Wondersmith • (reprint) Fitz-James O’Brien, December 1950
   No-Sided Professor • (reprint) Martin Gardner, February 1951
   Barney • Will Stanton, February 1951
   The Railway Carriage • (reprint) F. Tennyson Jesse, February 1951
   The Other End • (reprint) R. Ellis Roberts, February 1951
   Of the remaining 71 stories I would rate 24 as ‘good.’
   If you strip out the reprints from the notable F&SF stories the magazines are comparable, but there is a huge difference in the quality of the rest of the material. Part of this will be due to other reprints, and the fact that fantasy and horror does not date as badly as SF. I may also have a bias to the more literary stories in F&SF. However, I am not sure that these factors explain the huge variation. Maybe Boucher & McComas were simply producing (as of April 1951) the better magazine.
2. William Tenn contributes an excellent and very quotable memoir in Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. I’ll limit myself to a specific quote about Betelgeuse Bridge:
   I doubt that The Demolished Man or The Space Merchants or More Than Human would quite have come to pass without Galaxy. I know that I might never have written “Betelgeuse Bridge” if it had not been for the magazine and the milieu that Horace Gold created. It’s my kind of story and my kind of idea—it was the first conscious effort in what I call my “Here Comes Civilization” series—but it needed a context where it could fit comfortably. Horace gave me that. How, I still don’t quite know, with all of his damaging phone calls, compulsive overediting, quixotic rejections, and prying and puttering into my work.
   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. p.37
   William Tenn at Galactic Central and ISFDB.
3. Apart from the two titles mentioned above, every other SF story that Sheldon published appeared in magazines other than the ‘big three’ of Astounding, F&SF and Galaxy. I find it hard to believe that none of these thirty or so other stories were of an equivalent standard. There is information about this writer here and at Galactic Central and ISFDB.
4. I am informed that All the Right People by D. West (Foundation #21, 1981), is a good example of an article that expresses horror at the prominence of The Marching Morons and the way it was embraced by fandom and others. I don’t have a copy of this yet but you don’t have to look that hard to find similarly exasperated critiques of the story on the internet, e.g. There are no Marching Morons, P. Z. Myers.
   There are also introductions to the story like these from Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories #13, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, 1985:
   Here is the bitter, funny and tragic Cyril Kornbluth again with this fascinating and deeply flawed story. It is his most famous work, has been reprinted at least a dozen times within the genre, and was chosen by The Science Fiction Writers of America for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1973). I’m not sure it belongs in this book because this series is dedicated to the best of the past, not the most famous. The central premise of “The Marching Morons” is that intelligence is genetically inherited. That the intelligentsia should have lots of children for this reason is at least dubious. What does the popularity of this story tell us about the attitudes of the sf community?—Martin Greenberg, p.48
   My own feeling is that Cyril was venting his personal spleen against the Universe in this story. He was a child prodigy, who was always getting in trouble with other children (and with adults, too) because his quick wit and quick tongue could expose stupidity and wound in so doing. This is not very uncommon among science fiction writers and many had unhappy childhoods as a result.
   As a matter of fact, I had a certain amount of trouble myself but I was luckier than most. In the first place, I enjoyed being smart and actually liked the dullards about me because they made me feel so much better about being smart.
   Second, I quickly learned to make some of my funny remarks at my own expense (I owe that to Jack Benny) and found out that, in those circumstances, I would be forgiven everything else.
   Cyril, however, was deeply unhappy at being in a world that was not designed for him and he never did learn to de-fang his wit. “The Marching Morons” is the way he views humanity and almost anyone with intelligence will find himself sympathizing with Cyril at odd times. Whenever Janet and I encounter some example of overweening stupidity in others that needlessly complicates our lives, we sigh and say, “It’s the marching morons” and it helps us survive.—Isaac Asimov, p.48-49
   I’ve seen this glib ‘It’s the marching morons’ comment all over the place and understand why people say this when they encounter a particularly egregious form of stupidity. But don’t they realise what this really means ‘These are genetically stupid people that should be liquidated’?
5. On the other side of the fence, Fred Pohl wrote this about The Marching Morons in the introduction to The Best of C. M. Kornbluth:
   Once, I think while he was still in Chicago, possibly even earlier, Cyril mentioned to me that he had thought of writing a story about medical instruments of the future coming back to the present. Years later, when Horace Gold was badgering Cyril for stories for Galaxy and Cyril complained that he couldn’t think of anything he felt like writing at that moment, I reminded him of the notion. A week later he had written “The Little Black Bag” (which, as it happened, ap­peared in John Campbell’s Astounding instead of Horace Gold’s Gal­axy anyway). I think “The Little Black Bag” is my very favorite of Cyril’s stories. It has been reprinted endlessly and adapted for TV by Rod Serling, and I think it will go on for a long time. In it there is a throwaway scene about the human population of the future, ludicrous dummies all, and I thought they were interesting enough to deserve a story of their own. I told that to Cyril. He poured himself another shot of Hiram Walker’s Imperial—or vanilla extract, or elixir of terpin hydrate or whatever we were drinking that night—and pursed his lips. He could see doing that, he said. Maybe bring a man from the present into the future for contrast; but how could he get the man from the present there? “Steal,” I advised him.
   In the old, bad sf film Just Imagine the comedian, El Brendel, had gone from 1930 to 1980 simply by being hit by lightning and paralyzed for fifty years. If you’re writing farce, I said, why worry about inviting time machines? So Cyril went away, and came back with a man who had been paralyzed by a malfunction of the anesthesia systems in his dentist’s office and woke up in the future; he called the story “The Marching Morons.”
   I have seen the criticism directed against “The Marching Morons,” including a quite recent article that points out it is bad genetics (the plot implies that the tendency of lower-class families to be larger than upper-class ones is selective breeding for dumbness). True. But I have also had grown men say to me, with tears in their eyes, that “The Marching Morons” was the best story of any kind they had ever read, and that it had changed their lives. What the story warns against is not the degradation of the human germ plasm, but the degradation of human life, by cheapening values and substituting what is meretricious for what is true.
6. The old fashioned looking illustration by James Vincent p.76-77:
   The modern looking illustration by Louis Marchetti p.80-81:The dodgy advert on the back cover:
7. Galaxy printed a series of novels in magazine format, to the ire of John Campbell at Astounding/Street & Smith. See the review of the February 1951 issue of Galaxy. There is also this in Fantasy Times #129, 1^st May 1951.

ISFDB link:

Other reviews:
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary
Matthew Wuertz: Black Gate

Fiction:
The Wind Between the Worlds • novelette by Lester del Rey
The Other Now • short story by Murray Leinster ♥♥
Good Night, Mr. James • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ♥
Socrates • short story by John Christopher ♥♥
Tyrann (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Isaac Asimov

Non-fiction:
The Wind Between the Worlds • cover by Don Sibley
Interior artwork • Don Sibley, Phil Bard, Peter Burchard, John Bunch
Consensus • editorial by H. L. Gold
Missiles Over the Sea • essay by Willy Ley
Next Month’s Contents Page

After last month’s issue I was hopeful that this might have signalled a sea-change in the general quality of the fiction in Galaxy but it was not to be. This is probably one of the poorest issues yet, so let me be as brief as I can.

The Wind Between the Worlds by Lester del Rey starts off with Vic and Pat, male and female matter transmission engineers on a repair job. After a page of them we the get a two and a half page data dump about the discovery of matter transmission and a subsequent contact with, and admission to, a Galactic Council of many alien worlds. Shortly after we rejoin Vic and Pat, one of the transmitters gets stuck open and the Earth’s air starts vanishing. This is a difficult problem to sort:

Continuous transmittal had never been used, to her knowledge; there was no certainty about what would happen. Once started, no outside force could stop a transmitter; the send and stop controls were synchronous, both tapped from a single crystal, and only that proper complex waveform could cut it off. It now existed as a space-strain, and the Plathgolians believed that this would spread, since the outer edges transmitted before matter could reach the center, setting up an unbalanced resonance that would make the force field grow larger and larger. Eventually, it might spread far beyond the whole building. p.14

Del Rey subsequently runs through a number of contrived situations until, I guess, he got tired of typing or had produced enough to fill the hole that Horace Gold had in this issue or whatever: they drive tanks into the storm force winds at the transmitter but cannot reach the jammed portal, bombs are dropped, trips to alien worlds are undertaken, Vic and Pat get together romantically, etc. Eventually (spoiler) they link a whole lot of transmitters round in a loop.
Although this is all cheerily enough done, not for one moment does this feel like anything other than a potboiler written to pay the bills, which is fine, but at almost forty pages he more than outstays his welcome.¹ I note in passing a couple of cultural changes: when the bureaucrat in charge of the matter transmitter answers the videophone he has a bottle of liquor on his desk; when Vic suffers from tiredness during the emergency he resorts to Benzedrine to keep himself awake.

The Other Now by Murray Leinster is about Jimmy, who has lost his wife in a car accident. One night as he enters his house there is a slight dislocation and it seems to him that he has to open the door twice. Later there are other phenomena: he finds cigarette stubs in an ashtray—of the kind his wife used to smoke, and there is a recent diary entry by her that he reads but which later disappears. As you have probably guessed this is a story of two parallel worlds temporarily merging and ends up having the twists you would expect. It is competently done.

The other novelette in this issue is Good Night, Mr. James by Clifford D. Simak. This starts with a man waking up not knowing who he is or how he got there. After a slow couple of pages he eventually remembers who he is and what he is supposed to be doing:

The puudly had escaped and that was why he was here, hiding on the front lawn of some unsuspecting and sleeping citizen, equipped with a gun and a determination to use it, ready to match his wits and the quickness of brain and muscle against the most bloodthirsty, hate-filled thing yet found in the Galaxy. p.68

Despite hunting something that sounds like a child’s toy he eventually finds the ‘puddly’ in a zoo and kills it. Before it dies the creature reveals to him that he is a ‘duplicate’ person who will be disposed of when he returns to ‘his’ house. He returns there to assesses the situation nevertheless, and there is a twist ending and a subsequent twist beyond that.
All the ‘duplicate’ stuff is completely unconvincing—as if you could just bring another human being into the world and snuff them out when you were finished with them.

I have a bit of a soft spot for John Christopher so I probably scored Socrates higher than I should have given it has a contrived end and a horrific, off-putting beginning:

I heard the squeals from the direction of the caretaker’s cottage. I’m fond of animals and hate to hear them in pain, so I walked through the gate into the cottage yard. What I saw horrified me.
Jennings, the caretaker, was holding a young puppy in his hand and beating its head against the stone wall. At his feet were three dead puppies, and as I came through the gate he tossed a fourth among them, and picked up the last squirming remnant of the litter. p.84

The narrator senses potential in this unusual dog, one of a litter that has been inadvertently exposed to X-rays, and offers to buy him. Jennings agrees but later reneges on the deal when he learns of Socrates’ intelligence. Later, the dog is used by Jennings in a music hall act. Once the narrator tracks down Socrates it regularly leaves Jennings and comes to the narrator who learns it can speak. The narrator reads to it between efforts at convincing him to leave the abusive Jennings.
It all comes to a rather pat ending (spoiler) with a drunk Jennings at a raging waterfall. I liked the middle section, which references Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius, but it is really one of those creaky stories you can find in earlier issues of New Worlds magazine. I think Christopher was probably Galaxy’s first UK contributor and the British voice is quite distinctive.

Tyrann by Isaac Asimov comes to a conclusion in this issue, thank Ghod. The first couple of chapters drag as they organise themselves to go to the rebel planet and subsequently depart. The pace is not helped by snippets of cosmology and sexual tension like this:

Approximately 95% of habitable planets in the Galaxy circled stars of spectral types F or G; diameter from 750 to 1500 thousand miles, surface temperature from five to ten thousand centigrade. Earth’s sun was G-0, Rhodia’s F-8, Lingane’s G-2, as was that of Nephelos. F-2 was a little warm, but not too warm. p.117

Her dress was a smooth, unfigured white which folded in a smooth drape that fled before the wind. The semi-transparent sleeves whipped back against her arms, turning them to silver.
For a moment, Biron melted dangerously. He wanted to return quickly; to run, leap into the ship, grasp her so that his fingers would leave bruises on her shoulders; feel his lips meet hers— p.120

They eventually arrive at an oxygen bearing planet where they go down to the surface. Here there is some physical and info-dump/talking head action. Eventually (spoiler) the Tyranni Commissioner Aratap turns up and there is an interestingly gruesome scene where The Autarch/Jonti is killed:

But the Autarch’s right shoulder and half his chest had been blasted away. Grotesquely, the forearm dangled freely from its magnetized sheath. Fingers, wrist and elbow ended in black ruin. For a long moment, it seemed that the Autarch’s eyes flickered as his body remained in crazy balance, and then they were glazed and he dropped and was a charred remnant upon the floor.
Artemisia buried her face against Biron’s chest. Biron forced himself to look once, firmly and without flinching, at the body of his father’s murderer, then turned his eyes away. Hinrik, from a distant corner of the room, mumbled and giggled to himself.
Only Aratap was calm. He said, “Remove the body.”
They did so, flaring the floor with a soft heat-ray for a few moments to remove the blood. Only a few scattered char-marks were left. p.140

There is more shuffling of characters after this but the only thing of interest in the last part is that Hinrik explains he has the missing document mentioned earlier:

And with Rhodia’s sun bright on the visiplate, Hinrik began with those words that were older, far older, than the civilization of any of the planets in the Galaxy save one: “ ‘We, the people of the United States’—but substitute the United Galaxy—‘in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America . . .’ ” p.160

The idea that a set of principles on a piece of paper could bring down a galactic empire probably wasn’t as parochial or ridiculous in 1950’s American as it is now.²

As for the non-fiction this issue, the cover by Don Sibley is quite bland, and of the interior artwork my favourites are by Phil Bard.³
The editorial by Horace Gold, Consensus, is quite an interesting one as he gives a breakdown on what active fans versus the more general readership want from the magazine, noting that policies have historically been influenced by the former group. The characteristics of the magazine they agree on include the size (90%+, ‘the pulp format is a relic of the 1920s and should properly be displayed alongside illuminated manuscripts’), articles (87%, every other issue 79%), editorials (‘all but 0.03% and myself for’), serials (no percentage but Gold will run a ‘complete stories issue’ between them); the divergences are on letters (83% want no letter department, ‘this is not minimizing the value of fandom,’ ‘letters of special interest will be discussed editorially’), story ratings (wanted by fans and writers, and to keep the latter group happy he will rate them in editorials twice a year with his comments), fan coverage (‘almost a 100% of the vote was against’). He finishes with a note about the introduction of halftone reproduction of photographs and wash drawings.
The other piece of non-fiction in this issue (Groff Conklin is ill) is Missiles Over the Sea by Willy Ley, which is an article that uses a film called The Flying Missile to discuss missile technology, in particular a US development of the German V1 rocket called the ‘Loon,’ which is capable of submarine launch. These military technology articles, while interesting, seem a bit at odds with the rest of the magazine.

An issue to miss, even if you have started the serial.

1. Needless to say The Wind Between the Worlds was anthologised once in 1954 and never again seen except in author collections.
2. This ‘missing document’ sub-plot is probably the one that was foisted on Asimov by Gold:
   Galaxy asked me for a story and I wrote one Called “Darwinian Poolroom”.” It appeared in the October 1950 issue, its very first. It was a very weak effort, but the magazine wanted more stories. In the second issue, a stronger story appeared, which I called “Green Patches,” but the title was changed by the editor to “Misbegotten Missionary,” which I disliked.
   Then Galaxy serialzed my novel The Stars, Like Dust—, which the editor retitled Tyrann, something I disliked even more. What’s more the editor made me insert a subplot that I disapproved of, and when I wanted to take it out prior to book publication, Brad [Doubleday editor, Walter I. Bradbury] decided he liked it and insisted that it stay. Because of this I have never liked the novel as much as I might have. Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov: A Memoir, Chapter 62: Horace Leonard Gold.
3. Phil Bard’s artwork:

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary
Matthew Wuertz: Black Gate

Fiction:
The Fireman • novella by Ray Bradbury ♥♥♥♥♥
…and It Comes Out Here • short story by Lester del Rey ♥
The Protector • short story by Betsy Curtis
Second Childhood • short story by Clifford D. Simak ♥♥
Two Weeks in August • short story by Frank M. Robinson ♥♥♥
Tyrann (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Isaac Asimov ♥

Non-fiction:
The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in a Desert Sandstorm • cover by Chesley Bonestell
Interior artwork • Karl Rogers, Don Sibley, David Stone, Don Hunter, Elizabeth MacIntyre, John Bunch
Yardstick for Science Fiction • editorial by H. L. Gold
Galaxy’s Five-Star Shelf • book reviews by Groff Conklin

Ray Bradbury’s novella in this issue, The Fireman, is the work that was subsequently expanded into the well-known novel Fahrenheit 451. The story of Guy Montag, a fireman in the future whose job it is to burn books rather than to put out house fires, is probably too well known to need recounting here. What is probably less well known is that this excellent novella is, in my opinion, far superior to the book.
There are several reasons for this (multiple spoilers). Unlike the book, which starts with quotable ‘It was a pleasure to burn’ section and then goes on to detail Montag’s relationship with Clarisse that starts his awakening process, the novella begins about twenty five pages into the novel where Montag is in the fire station asking about the origins of firemen. His ambivalence about the job is already beginning to show, and this is the scene where he tellingly uses the phrase ‘Once upon a time.’ Starting at this point, and condensing the relationship with Clarisse into a later flashback (and Montag’s wife’s attempted suicide in the book into a sentence in the novella) gets the story off to a much faster start.
At the beginning of this fire station scene jet-planes on war-alert scream overhead, so from the get-go the war threat is prominent and it is repeated often enough to give the novella version a pervasive sense of imminent doom.
It is also easier to see in the novella what Bradbury is taking aim at in these works. In general this is 1950’s American society, but in particular there are repeated attacks on radio and TV, and the intellectual dumbing down in the population and contingent threat to books that Bradbury thought resulted. He also sets his sights on barbiturates (Montag’s wife’s sleeping pill use/attempted suicide) and on juvenile joy-riding (Montag only just escapes being a road fatality when he is on the run and, in the novella, Clarisse’s death is attributed to an automobile). There are other scenes where the vacuous social intercourse of the time is shown, and there is a lament for the various aspects of American life that have disappeared (porches, walking—Montag is stopped by the police for this).
In the novella all this and more is compressed into the first thirty-five pages making it a very intense read. It almost becomes overwhelming when this is followed by the fire team arriving at Montag’s house to burn both it and his collection of books:

“Was it my wife called you, or one of her friends?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Was it my wife?”
Leahy nodded. “But her friends turned in an alarm earlier. I let it ride. One way or the other, you’d have got it. That was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy, Montag. Very silly. Come on, now.”
“I think not,” said Montag.
He twitched the fire-trigger in his hand. Leahy glanced at Montag’s fingers and saw what he intended before Montag himself had even considered it. In that instant, Montag was stunned by the thought of murder, for murder is always a new thing, and Montag knew nothing of murder; he knew only burning and burning things that people said were evil.
“I know what’s really wrong with the world,” said Montag.
“Look here, Montag—” cried Leahy.
And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering thing, all aflame, writhing on the grass as Montag shot three more blazing pulses of liquid fire over him. There was a hissing and bubbling like a snail upon which salt has been poured. There was a sound like spittle on a red-hot stove. Montag shut his eyes and yelled and tried to get his hands to his ears to cut away the sounds. Leahy twisted in upon himself like a ridiculous black wax doll and lay silent. p.40-41

The rest of the piece is gripping if not quite so intense. In this last section I also noticed that a couple of passages that particularly struck me are rewritten in the novel and not necessarily, I think, to their benefit. Dig out your novel version, find these two passages, and contrast and compare.¹ The first is from when Montag is hiding at Faber’s house and they are watching the deployment of the Electric Hound; the second is from the moment the city is bombed:

Montag watched the scene with a solid fascination, not wanting to move, ever. If he wished, he could linger here, in comfort, and follow the entire hunt on through its quick phases, down alleys, up streets, across empty running avenues, with the sky finally lightening with dawn, up other alleys to burned houses, and so on to this place here, this house, with Faber and himself seated at their leisure, smoking idly, drinking good wine, while the Electric Hound sniffed down the fatal paths, whirring and pausing with finality right outside that door there.
Then, if he wished, Montag could rise, walk to the door, keep one eye on the t-v screen, open the door, look out, look back, and see himself, dramatized, described, made over, standing there, limned in the bright television screen, from outside, a drama to be watched objectively, and he would catch himself, an instant before oblivion, being killed for the benefit of a million televiewers who had been wakened from their sleeps a few minutes ago by the frantic beepbeeping of their receivers to watch the big game, the big hunt, the Scoop! p.48

Montag saw the screen go dark in Mildred’s face, and heard her screaming, because in the next millionth part of time left, she would see her own face reflected there, hungry and alone, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it would be such a wildly empty face that she would at last recognize it, and stare at the ceiling almost with welcome as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal and people down into the cellar, there to dispose of them in its unreasonable way. p.58

I think there is simplicity perhaps even rawness in the novella version that I prefer.
The last point I would make is that it was quite a surprise to discover such a significantly different—and better—version of such a well-known work. That said, I checked the publication history of the novella version and found that it lay unreprinted for almost thirty years, and it was fifty-five before it appeared in one of Bradbury’s own collections.² Now you know why I read SF magazines. Unmissable.

The rest of the fiction pales by comparison. … and It Comes Out Here by Lester del Rey is a time loop story about a man going back in time to take himself to the future. There he steals a revolutionary power source and goes back to the past. I rather lost track and interest by the end, but suspect there is a chicken and egg problem in there somewhere.
The Protector by Betsy Curtis is about an alien race called the Anestha who feel no pain so, obviously, the narrator takes one of them back to Earth to be a boxer. The pair subsequently hear of the Anestha dying out and so return to the planet to find they are being used as slave labour and consequently dying from work related accidents. This is all told in an irritatingly slangy style. This is from when the manager meets his fighter Pierre’s sister:

She is a cute trick with lots of yumph showing through the molla. She stands kind of slumped, though, and a few of the flowers in her shiny black hair are pretty mashed.
“’Smatter, Jennel?” I says. “You look kind of dragged out for a dame whose brother comes home practically a champeen. Katweela flowers go on strike?” I says, just trying to make talk. p.79

It has a weak ending as well.
Second Childhood by Clifford D. Simak is an odd piece that probably ends up in the interesting failure box. It is about a man who is over five thousand years old and who petitions the Council to help him die. He states that the weight of all his memories has become unbearable. When they decline he settles on another idea: he will regress to childhood to wipe away all the memories, and proceeds to get an oversize house built and provisioned with all the toys of his youth.
On a rational level none of this convinces, not the weight of accumulated memories causing his ennui, not the belief in his regression to childhood removing those memories. However, in the final section, when he does regress to childhood and later the council introduces a huge mother-android, it does have a compelling dream logic that makes this of some interest.
Two Weeks in August by Frank M. Robinson starts by describing an irritating office type:

What kind of guy was he? Well if you came down to the office one day proud as Punch because of something little Johnny or Josephine had said, it was a sure cinch that McCleary would horn in with something his little Louie had spouted off that morning. At any rate, when McCleary got through, you felt like taking Johnny to the doctor to find out what made him subnormal.
Or maybe you happened to buy a new Super-eight that week and were bragging about the mileage, the terrific pickup, and how quickly she responded to the wheel. Leave it to McCleary to give a quick rundown on his own car that would make you feel like selling yours for junk at the nearest scrap heap.
Well, you see what I mean. p.102-103

So one of the guys in the office pretends he is going to Mars on holiday to get one over on McCleary. Once they are all back in the office after the holiday period (spoiler) McCleary regales them with stories about his holiday on Mars and the matching photographs. A pleasant if minor piece of wish-fufillment.

Tyrann by Isaac Asimov carries on as it did in the first part, the only difference being my increasing weariness with it. Biron, Artemesia and Gillbret escape from Rhodia on a Tyranni cruiser and stay in orbit a couple of days before landing and getting provisions. The time in orbit gives Biron and Arta a chance to moon over and/or irritate each other:

It occurred to her, at that moment, that Biron, though young and therefore rather unreasonable in some of his viewpoints, was at least large and well-muscled, which was convenient. It had been foolish of her to snap at him. Quite pleasant looking, too. p.112

The trip, he decided, could be quite wonderful if she would only learn to behave herself. The trouble was that no one had ever controlled her properly, that was all. Certainly not her father. She’d become too used to having her own way. If she’d been born a commoner, she would have been a very lovely creature. p.128

Pages and pages later the sexual tension is excruciatingly resolved:

They were closer to one another. He could have reached out and touched her, held her in his arms, kissed her.
And he did so.
It was a complete non sequitur.
Nothing, it seemed to Biron, had led to it. One moment they were discussing Jumps and gravity and Gillbret, and the next she was soft and silky in his arms and soft and silky on his lips.
His first impulse was to say he was sorry, to go through all the silly motions of apology, but when he drew away, and would have spoken, she still made no attempt at escape but rested her head in the crook of his left arm. Her eyes remained closed.
So he said nothing at all and kissed her again, slowly and thoroughly. p.139

Later there is much talk about a planet that has started a rebellion. Gillbret thinks the Autarch of Ligane may be involved, so they make the jump there. Biron recognises the Autarch as Jonti—the plot thickens! After various recriminations they discuss the possible location of the rebellion planet:

If such a situation is to remain possible, there is only one place in the Sector where such a planet can exist.”
“And where is that?”
“You do not find the solution obvious? Doesn’t it seem inevitable that the world could exist only within the Nebula itself?”
“Inside the Nebula!”
Gillbret said, “Great Galaxy, of course!” p.153

Needless to say Brion and Arta subsequently fall out, so brace yourself for more teenage angst in part three.

As for the non-fiction, Chesley Bonestell follows his cover for the December issue of F&SF with Galaxy’s best one yet. The internal artwork is competent enough if a little old fashioned looking. None of it grabbed me except perhaps the last couple by Karl Rogers for The Fireman.³
Yardstick for Science Fiction by H. L. Gold is an editorial of two parts. In the first he succumbs to some pre-story submission fluffing from a writer:

Galaxy is naive enough to believe in the publishing platitudes of good characterization, believable situations, credible conflict, all of which have been talked up for years while the opposite was used.
Whether Galaxy really does use them can be attested to by a letter from an author whose name would be instantly recognized: “. . . I opened the first issue with interest but without any special expectation, one way or the other. I recognized your name on the masthead . . . and I was impressed with both the ambitious format and the table of contents names. Then I read it, almost at one sitting—and realized I was reading the first fully adult science fiction magazine I had ever held in my hands!” p.2

In the second part he launches into an astonishing public attack on Street & Smith/Astounding:

Galaxy buys only first magazine publication rights. We retain no other rights at all, whether radio, pocketbook, anthologization, or any other sort. We demand not a single cent of the payment for the resale of any Galaxy story!
[…]
Galaxy does not use fictitious excuses to deprive writers of this income, such as regarding them as business infants who must be protected against their inclination to give their work away for nothing—while demanding a share of resale price.
Because of our higher rates and refusal to cut in on earnings that are not ethically a magazine publisher’s, Galaxy is, as a natural consequence, getting the finest science fiction stories. Also as a consequence, apparently, Needle by Hal Clement will not be the current Galaxy Science Fiction Novel, though announced last month. A fraction of the book first appeared in another magazine, and since it is that publisher’s policy to retain reprint rights, it has been refused us, despite the wishes of the author and the publishers of the clothbound edition.
Hal Clement has thus suffered a serious financial loss—a guarantee of almost the original price of the story, and royalties that could very possibly make it much more—through having his interests “protected.”
It is dubious protection that can cancel a sale for an author and yet often involve a demand for a substantial part of the payment. p.12

I agree with Gold but am surprised he decided to pick a fight about it in public.⁴ Hal Clement subsequently sold Campbell Iceworld, which would be serialised in Astounding (October-December 1951).
Galaxy’s Five-Star Shelf by Groff Conklin is another very short book review column (two and a half pages). One of the four books he reviews is Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, of which he says this:

Though conceived as a book for “adolescents,” and first published, in a shorter version, in Boy’s Life, this book is also one of the best of the month’s output in science fiction for adults.p.99

The whole book is a very effective antidote to the complex and often bloody tales of intergalactic and interplanetary wars which seem to be the stock in trade of too many modern science fiction writers.p.100

The latter comment could be about today’s books.

Highly recommended for the Ray Bradbury novella.

1. Here are the book quotes. From p.130 of the 1980 Panther edition of Fahrenheit 451:
   He watched the scene, fascinated, not wanting to move. It seemed so remote and no part of him; it was a play apart and separate, wondrous to watch, not without its strange pleasure. That’s all for me, you thought, that’s all taking place just for me, by God.
   If he wished, he could linger here, in comfort, and follow the entire hunt on through its swift phases, down alleys, across streets, over empty running avenues, crossing lots and playgrounds, with pauses here or there for the necessary commercials, up other alleys to the burning house of Mr. and Mrs. Black, and so on finally to this house with Faber and himself seated, drinking, while the Electric Hound snuffed down the last trail, silent as a drift of death itself, skidding to a halt outside that window there. Then, if he wished, Montag might rise, walk to the window, keep one eye on the TV screen, open the window, lean out, look back, and see himself dramatized, described, made over, standing there, limned in the bright small television screen from outside, a drama to be watched objectively, knowing that in other parlours he was large as life, in full colour, dimensionally perfect! and if he kept his eye peeled quickly he would see himself, an instant before oblivion, being punctured for the benefit of how many civilian parlour-sitters who had been wakened from sleep a few minutes ago by the frantic sirening of their living room walls to come watch the big game, the hunt, the one-man carnival.
   From p.153 of the 1980 Panther edition:
   Montag, falling flat, going down, saw or felt, or imagined he saw or felt the walls go dark in Millie’s face, heard her screaming, because in the millionth part of time left, she saw her own face reflected there, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it was such a wildly empty face, all by itself in the room, touching nothing, starved and eating of itself, that at last she recognized it as her own and looked quickly up at the ceiling as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal, plaster, and wood, to meet other people in the hives below, all on their quick way down to the cellar where the explosion rid itself of them in its own unreasonable way.
2. The Fireman’s ISFDB page. There is other interesting material on Wikipedia.
3. Karl Rogers’ illustrations for The Fireman:
4. It was pointed out to me elsewhere this may have been Gold’s medication and PTSD talking. Campbell had his say in James V. Taurasi’s  news fanzine Fantasy Times.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary
Matthew Wuertz: Black Gate

Fiction:
Tyrann (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Isaac Asimov ♥♥
Dark Interlude • short story by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds ♥
Rule of Three • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon ♥♥♥+
Made to Measure • novelette by William Campbell Gault ♥♥
Susceptibility • short story by John D. MacDonald ♥♥
The Reluctant Heroes • novelette by Frank M. Robinson ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Tyrann • cover by John Bunch
Interior artwork • John Bunch, David Maus, Karl Rogers, L. Woromay, James Vincent, Don Sibley
Old Business and New • editorial by H. L. Gold
Galaxy’s 5 Star Shelf • book reviews by Groff Conklin
Next Month’s Contents Page

The issue leads off with the first part of a serial, Tyrann by Isaac Asimov, which was later issued in book form as The Stars Like Dust. This must have been a major coup for Galaxy at the time as Isaac Asimov was by now the author of Nightfall, a string of ‘Robot’ stories, and had just finished his ‘Foundation’ series with …And Now You Don’t a year earlier in Astounding. Unfortunately, what he provides here is, at best, a very average 1940’s potboiler.
This story feels almost Van Vogtian to start: the main character Brion wakes up in his room on a far-future Earth to find the lights and ventilation inoperative and a door that won’t open. He then finds a radiation bomb in the closet. A colleague called Jonti and the college superintendent manage to break open the door before the bomb explodes. Jonti then takes Biron aside to tell him that his father, The Rancher of Widemos, has been taken prisoner and executed by the rulers of the Nebular worlds, the Tyranni. He cautions him not to go home but to go to see Hinrik of Rhodia, the governor of his home planet, to intercede on his behalf.
Brion then travels incognito on a ship home but is arrested on arrival. Subsequently he is interrogated by the Tyranni Commissioner Aratap, who later releases him to make his way to Hinrik. While at the governor’s house he also meets his daughter Artemisia and her uncle Gillbret. After some more plot development, these two enlist Brion to help them escape from Rhodia by piloting a spaceship for them.
As well as this narrative there is also a sub-plot that involves Jonti, another character called Rizzett, and an ancient Earth document that will supposedly enable the Nebular worlds to free themselves from the yoke of Tyranni rule.
As you can probably tell from the synopsis above, there is lots of SF furniture here but no redeeming central concept like the psychohistory of Foundation or the three laws of robotics. What we are left with is a mundane plot and a lot of Asimov’s weaknesses, like his clunky hard to remember names, leaden prose and one dimensional characters: Hinrik the governor is a bit of a wimp, Uncle Gillbret is slightly effete and finds everything ‘amusing’; Brion and Artemisia, meanwhile, carry on like two hormonally poisoned teenagers.
All that said, this first part moves along well enough and there is enough going on to keep your attention but I’m not sure this level of writing will keep me interested over the length of a novel.

The first item of the short fiction is Dark Interlude, a collaboration by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds. This starts with a man speaking to the local sheriff about a time traveller that has arrived from the future and who has married his sister. The narrative then alternates between the brother’s account of what has occurred and sections describing the time-traveller meeting the sister. This is unexceptional stuff until (spoiler) the most ghastly ending. The brother explains to the sheriff:

“I got to asking him some questions about things in his time and after a while I asked him how they got along on race problems and he acted puzzled and then said he remembered something about races from history he’d studied, but that there weren’t any races then.“
“He said that by his time—starting after the war of something-or-other, I forget its name—all the races had blended into one. That the whites and the yellows had mostly killed one another off and that Africa had dominated the world for a while, and then all the races had begun to blend into one by colonization and intermarriage and that by his time the process was complete. I just stared at him and asked him, ‘You mean you got nigger blood in you?’ and he said, just like it didn’t mean anything, ‘At least one-fourth.’ “ p.73

The brother then gets his gun and kills the time-traveller for defiling his sister, and the sheriff’s equally racist response is followed by the statement that he’ll manage to hush it up.
I thought this a rather crude attempt to examine an unpleasant subject because all it does is shove your nose in it. Presumably this was published by Gold to signal that Galaxy would be willing to use fiction that examined the most difficult of social issues.

The first of the three novelettes is, fittingly, Rule of Three, Theodore Sturgeon’s second appearance in four issues. This starts with three aliens investigating Earth and finding humanity infected with the Pa’ak virus. This causes mental instability, and may spill out into the Galaxy as humanity starts travelling in space. Each of the aliens is a triad and they subsequently break into three threes to investigate humanity and work out a way of curing it of the virus.
From there it becomes a story of the fragments trying desperately to regroup after their investigation.¹ In the course of this the life stories of several humans are told: a psychologist meets his ex-wife; a bass-player refuses to work with an admiring piano-playing colleague due to the suicide of a childhood friend caused by gossip about homosexuality; one of the alien fragments saves the psychologist’s female co-worker from being raped by a man she meets at a party.
The story is a little messy to be honest, but the impressive aspects of this are the well realised characters—compare these to the ones in Asimov’s serial for instance—and the inclusion of previously taboo subjects. To that latter point, the attempted rape scene must have come as something of a shock for 1950’s readers (and it was a bit of a shock for me as I hadn’t been expecting it):

She leaned away from him with her head averted, swung her handbag back and up at his face. He caught her wrist deftly and turned it behind her.
“Don’t,” she gasped. “Don’t . . .”
“You’ve made your little protest like a real lady, honey, so it’s on the record. Now save us some time and trouble. Let’s get to it.”
She kicked him. He gasped but stood solidly. There was a sharp click behind her. “Hear that?” he said. “That’s my switch-blade. Push a button and zip!— seven inches of nice sharp steel. Now don’t you move or make a sound, sweetheart, and this’ll be fun for both of us.”
Locking her against him with his left arm, he reached slowly up under the hem of her short jacket. She felt the knife against her back. It slipped coldly between her skin and the back of her low-cut dress. “Don’t you move,” he said again. The knife turned, sawed a little, and the back strap of her brassiere parted. The knife was removed; she heard it click again. He dropped it into his jacket pocket. “Now,” he breathed, “doesn’t that feel better, lamb-pie?”
She filled her lungs to scream, and instantly his hard hand was clamped over her mouth. It was a big hand, and the palm was artfully placed so that she couldn’t get her mouth open wide enough to use her teeth on it. “Let’s not wrestle,” he said, his voice really gentle, pleading. “It just doesn’t make sense. I’d as soon kill you as not—you know that.” She stood trembling violently, her eyes rolled up almost out of sight. Her mouth sagged open when he kissed it. p.88-89

I wouldn’t rate this quite as highly as The Stars Are the Styx but is the best story in the issue.

After these two stories I approached the next with some trepidation, wondering if Gold had put together a proto-Dangerous Visions taboo-busting issue. However, Made to Measure by William Campbell Gault is more conventional stuff. This novelette is a rather ridiculous story about a scientist who decides he can build himself a better wife than the one he has and so he takes the current one back to the ‘Domestic Center’:

He took the superpike almost all the way to the Center. There were bright cards on posts every few hundred feet:
IT’S NOT TOO LATE
TO GET A MATE
THE GIRLS ARE GREAT
AT THE DOMESTIC CENTER
He pulled into the sweeping circular drive at the huge group of buildings. A troupe of singing girls came out, dressed in majorette costumes, opened the door, helped him out, parked the car, escorted him into the lavish reception room. Music came from somewhere, soft and moody. There were murals all over the walls, every one romantic. A dispensing machine held engagement and wedding rings with a series of finger-holes on the left side for matching sizes. p.125-126

I should add that this quote is actually from the end of the story and it is one of the few occasions I thought that this may be satirical. I don’t think it is—the actual story appears to be far more straightforward.
After having returned his wife our driven young man proceeds to build his cybernetic wife. Needless to say, after she starts accompanying him into social situations she needs to be tweaked away from perfection after a couple of encounters where she is too tactless, too intelligent, etc. Ultimately, he gives her self-volition, and then the obvious happens. Despite how all this sounds it is as readable and well executed as you would expect from a future Edgar winner.²

The next story is by John D. MacDonald, the writer who would later be best known for his ‘Travis McGee’ mystery novels which started appearing in the sixties. Before then he produced a fair amount of SF, including three novels. Susceptibility is about a Praecursor sent to a colony planet where they do not seem to be using the facilities that have been provided. He soon finds the colonists have gone back to a more simple lifestyle. The woman temporarily in charge of administration takes him to the one centre that is being used. There they see obese people who want for nothing: he later finds it is their penal centre/prison. He ends up staying with her. A minor but quite well done piece.

The Reluctant Heroes by Frank M. Robinson is the third of the novelettes. This one is about a moon base crew coming up to their rotation day, when everyone apart from one crew member heads back to Earth. Chapman was the stopover from the first team who stayed on to show the second the ropes so, having spent twice as long on the Moon as the others in the base, he can’t wait to get home. He has rebuffed advances from those in charge to stay beyond his three years for yet another eighteen month tour. However Dahl, the proposed stopover, tells him he doesn’t want to stay….
These events are bookended by the interview of a young man who has been selected to go to Venus.

There is less non-fiction this month than previously. Horace Gold’s editorial Old Business and New discusses the changes the readers have voted for: 50% more illustrations, shorter book reviews, articles skipped every other month, short editorials discussing matters germane to the magazine (presumably a backlash against Campbell’s editorials in Astounding), the next month’s contents page. It also has some puffery:

This issue, for example, is better, in my opinion, than any of the previous three . . . better in editorial balance, art, and layout, a direct result of close and sympathetic collaboration between editor and reader.
The maintenance of this level is not easy, of course. Any number of usable stories come in that don’t have the strong characterization, the human conflict, the psychological suspense that are coming to be identified with Galaxy Science Fiction, and must thus be rejected. Others have those qualities and not freshness of theme. The right blend was a rarity to begin with, but it is becoming less so as authors with integrity recognize the objective—stories with believable characters, human motivations against a background of shrewd speculation. Appearing in Galaxy, in other words, is a distinction that authors are willing to work hard to achieve. The result is progressively better issues.

It finishes by mentioning a major 25,000 word novella by Ray Bradbury, The Fireman, appearing in the next issue.

The cover for this issue is better than previous efforts but a bit grey looking. The increase in interior illustrations is noticeable: there are a dozen and a half illustrations in this issue of which two-thirds are spread over two pages; they are competent if unexceptionable stuff.
The final items of non-fiction are a short Galaxy’s 5 Star Shelf by Groff Conklin, and Next Month’s Contents Page, which turned out to be only partially correct (although Gold does say ‘all bets are off’ about the short fiction and articles due to the length of the Asimov serial and the Bradbury novella).

Overall, an interesting issue if not a particularly good one.

1. The reunification of the three aliens is a precursor to Baby is Three, which would appear in Galaxy’s October 1952 issue. By the way, I had vaguely thought that Sturgeon’s work was, by this time, appearing more or less exclusively in Astounding and Galaxy but between The Rule of Three and Baby is Three there were eight stories that appeared in secondary markets: “Shadow, Shadow, on the Wall …” (Imagination, February 1951), Special Aptitude (Other Worlds, March 1951), Make Room for Me! (Fantastic Adventures, May 1951), The Traveling Crag (Fantastic Adventures, July 1951), Excalibur and the Atom (Fantastic Adventures, August 1951), The Incubi of Parallel X (Planet Stories, September 1951), Never Underestimate… (If, March 1952), The Sex Opposite (Fantastic, Fall 1952).
   According to the story notes for Rule of Three in the North Atlantic Books collection Baby is Three, edited by Paul Williams, Sturgeon wrote this about Make Room for Me in an unposted letter: “Horace liked [Rule of Three] but wants a rewrite. He’s right, damn him. He’s also very impressed with the other one [Make Room for Me] I told you about—the one I wrote with someone else—particularly since it has a New Year’s Eve sequence and is ideal for his December issue. So I’ve got to rewrite that one too. The way I hope to handle it is this: Tomorrow I’ll stay home and work all day, finishing the 9000-worder. (Tonight, by the way, I’m lecturing at CCNY.) Friday evening I’ve got a dianetic emergency to handle—his third session, which I think will straighten him out. Saturday I’ll work on the 13,000-word one. After that I hope to be able to see you, if I can’t snatch a couple of hours between times.” Presumably Gold later passed on Make Room for Me.
2. Gault produced around two dozen SF stories, mostly for the pulps. His Wikipedia entry indicates that he was a writer who was much better known for his sports and crime stories, particularly for the former where he was considered ‘one of the best in the field.’ There is a Wikipedia quote from Damon Knight that partially sums up how I feel about his story in this issue: ‘I liked the characterization in those stories; I liked the description; I liked the fist fights; I liked the love interest. I like everything about them, except what they were all about.’

ISFDB listing

Other Reviews:
Matthew Wuertz: Black Gate
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary

Second Night of Summer • novelette by James H. Schmitz ♥♥♥
Judas Ram • short story by Sam Merwin, Jr. ♥
Jaywalker • short story by Ross Rocklynne
A Stone and a Spear • novelette by Raymond F. Jones ♥♥
The Waker Dreams • short story by Richard Matheson
Time Quarry (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Clifford D. Simak

Second Night of Summer • cover by Don Hunter
Interior artwork • by Don Hunter, James Vincent, Don Sibley, John Bunch, Paul Pierre, David Stone
Let’s Talk It Over • editorial by H. L. Gold
Galaxy’s Five Star Shelf • book reviews by Groff Conklin
Twenty-Foot Miss • essay by Willy Ley
Next Month’s Contents

I didn’t like Don Hunter’s cover for the first issue of Galaxy and I like this one even less. Not only is it as flat as its predecessor but it has badly drawn figures—look at the the faces of both of them, or the arms of the old lady. The dopey looking dinosaur at the back doesn’t help either. Hunter’s internal illustrations are better, i.e. they are OK, as are the rest; the best are by James Vincent.

The fiction opens with Second Night of Summer by James H. Schmitz. This was the third of his ‘Agent Vega’ stories, the first two of which had appeared in Astounding.¹
The story itself concerns the colony planet of Noorhut, where strange blue lights have been appearing at night. After an initial section about this phenomenon the story cuts to Grimp, one of the colony children who is on the road waiting for ‘Grandma’ to arrive. She is ostensibly a travelling saleswoman, and her trailer is pulled by a rhinocerine ‘pony’—essentially a small armour-plated dinosaur. Unfortunately he meets a policeman, one of his many cousins, who has orders from the Guardian to stop her entering the community due to the upset the nocturnal lights has caused. After discussing—and disagreeing—on this, the talk turns to other matters. This section reminded me a little of Michael G. Coney:

“Some people,” Grimp said idly, staring down the valley road to the point where it turned into the woods, “would sneak after a person for days who’s caught a big werret, hoping he’d be dumb enough to go back to that pool.”
The policeman flushed and dabbed the handkerchief gingerly at his nose.
“Some people would even sit in a haystack and use spyglasses, even when the hay made them sneeze like crazy,” continued Grimp quietly.
The policeman’s flush deepened. He sneezed.
“But a person isn’t that dumb,” said Grimp. “Not when he knows there’s anyway two werrets there six inches bigger than the one he caught.” p.9

What neither of these two knows is that the blue lights are the prelude to an alien invasion that will have horrific consequences for the planet if it succeeds, and that Grandma isn’t who she seems:

She belonged to a powerful human organization whose activities extended throughout most of those sections of the Galaxy where Terra’s original colonies, and their branch-colonies, and branches of the branches, had grown down the centuries into new and independent civilizations. The role of the organization was that of watchdog for the safety of all, without regard for the often conflicting rulings and aims of individual governments; and sometimes that wider view made it necessary to take some very grim risks locally. Unfortunately, this was one of the times. p.17

If Grandma and her (talking) rhinocerine fail to prevent the invasion by the alien Halpa, there are eight spaceships in orbit that will incinerate the planet.

Judas Ram by Sam Merwin, Jr. is the first of three short stories and it is not an entirely successful mix of melodramatic adult relationships and an alien program to capture humans for breeding. The story starts with Roger and one of his three female mates arguing in the alien ‘cage’ they are kept in, a house with three wings.² At the end of this section is the inference that the aliens are controlling their sexual urges:

He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening face. He said, “So it’s going to be you again, Dana. You’ll be the first to come back for a second run.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the tight-fitting tubular gown. “If I could do anything about it . . .”
“But you can’t,” he told her. ‘‘They’re too clever.”
“Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?” she asked cynically. “If you did, I wish you hadn’t. You haven’t asked about your son.”
“I don’t even want to think about him,” said Tennant. “Let’s get on with it.” He could sense the restless stirring of the woman within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted within them by their captors. They walked toward the house. p.34

Later, after Roger has been with Dana and also had a meal with the three women, he is sent for by Opal, one of the aliens. It takes him back to Earth to help capture another male.
The next section finds him back at his marital home with his wife and her new partner, Cass. After his eighteen-month absence much melodrama ensues. Roger subsequently attempts to draw Cass to the alien gateway, but as they are travelling there he realises his wife’s new partner is going to try and kill him. Roger tries to use this fact to his advantage against Opal as they arrive at the gateway.
None of this is very convincing but the story is perhaps notable for its early adult take on human sexual mores, and the use of the word ‘bastard’ twice on page forty-five.
Jaywalker by Ross Rocklynne follows the domestic melodrama of the last story with… more domestic melodrama. Not a very good example of magazine construction.
This one reads like a 1950’s idea of a 2050’s womens’ magazine story. It focuses on Marcia, who is married to a spaceship captain. They are going through a rough patch so to get his attention she boards one of his flights but using someone else’s medical validation. A medical examination is required as free-fall with certain medical conditions can be fatal:

“Apparently some instinctual part of the mind reacts as if there were a violent emergency, when no emergency is recognized by the reasoning part of the mind. There are sudden floods of adrenalin; the 17-kesteroids begin spastic secretions; the—well, it varies in individuals. But it’s pretty well established that the results can be fatal. It kills men with prostate trouble—sometimes. It kills women in menopause—often. It kills women in the early stages of pregnancy—always.” p.59

Marcia is pregnant, needless to say, and is informed of these perils after she reveals her identity and condition to Sue the stewardess. Her husband is informed and returns to the cockpit to perform calculations to spin up the ship to provide artificial gravity. Meanwhile, Marcia spends her time being jealous of Sue and listening to her info-dumps:

“But I haven’t told you the toughest part of it yet,” Miss Eagen went on inexorably. “A ship as massive as this, spinning on its long axis, is a pretty fair gyroscope. It doesn’t want to turn. Any force that tries to make it turn is resisted at right angles to the force applied. When that force is applied momentarily from jets, as they swing into position and away again, the firing formulas get—well, complex. And the ship’s course and landing approach are completely new. Instead of letting the ship fall to the Moon, turning over and approaching tail-first with the main jets as brakes, Captain McHenry is going to have to start the spin first and go almost the whole way nose-first. He’ll come up on the Moon obliquely, pass it, stop the spin, turn over once to check the speed of the ship, and once again to put the tail down when the Moon’s gravity begins to draw us in. There’ll be two short periods of free-fall there, but they won’t be long enough to bother you much. And if we can do all that with the fuel we’ve got, it will be a miracle. A miracle from the brain of Captain McHenry.” p.60

With passages like this, and its idiot The Cold Equations passenger, this should really have been an Astounding story.
Finally, there is no explanation as to why they didn’t heavily sedate her instead of putting themselves in jeopardy: not as exciting I suspect.³
The third short story is The Waker Dreams by Richard Matheson. A man is woken from sleep in the far-future to go and battle aliens that would otherwise destroy the machinery of his city. After a briefing, and accompanied by his own personal nurse in case he is stung by the aliens, he sets off to do battle. Three-quarters of the way through (spoiler) it turns out that this is only a dream induced by a doctor: the only way the future state can get people to maintain the city is if they disguise routine activities such as rust-removal in drug-induced adventures.
The first section is told in the second person, which adds nothing to what is an unconvincing ‘then I woke up and found it was all a dream’ story.

The other novelette is A Stone and a Spear by Raymond F. Jones. This story has a Dr Curtis Johnson visiting Dr Dell, an old colleague from his bio-weapons team who has become a fruit and vegetable farmer for pacifist reasons. When Curtis and his wife arrive they meet a cadaverous retainer called Brown and there are other unusual signs, odd-coloured soil, etc. When Curtis and Dell talk later on, the latter refuses to come back to the team and describes his work at the farm. He goes to bed early as he is feeling unwell and later that night collapses, letting Curtis know he has more to tell him. He sends Curtis for help.
On the back road out of the farm Curtis comes to a building and is detained by a strange group of men. It materialises (spoiler) that they are scientists from a catastrophic future who have been sent back to alter the past by changing the nature of mankind:

“We operate hundreds of gardens and farms such as Dell’s. We work through the fertilizing compounds we supply to these farms. These compounds contain chemicals that eventually lodge in the cells of those who eat the produce. They take up stations within the brain cells and change the man—or destroy him.”
“Certain cells of the brain are responsible for specific characteristics. Ways of altering these cells were found by introducing minute quantities of specific radioactive materials which could be incorporated into vegetable foods. During the Third War wholesale insanity was produced in entire populations by similar methods. Here, we are using it to accomplish humane purposes.” p.81

Of course the plot of this story is a little ridiculous, and for most of its length it felt as if it was going to be a ‘null points’ rating. What saves it from this is a particular bleakness of vision about the thinly disguised Cold War arms race depicted in the story and its ultimate result. This is evident from the very start of the story with an explanation of the title:

“That crack about the weapons after the next war. He—whoever it was—said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one of us could have said it.” p.68

The last of the fiction, and taking up quite a chunk of the magazine, is Time Quarry, the serial by Clifford D. Simak.⁴ Although I was reasonably entertained by the first couple of parts, the synopsis shows how ridiculous the plot is although, I admit, this can be said for a lot of magazine serial synopses.
In this final part, our hero spends a decade in the twentieth century, then goes to the future for a chat with the megalomaniac Trevor (more a name for an accountant than a villain, but perhaps it was strange and exotic in the early 1950s) before being knocked unconscious/killed for the third time. There is the a lot more talk about the human/android conflict until Sutton eventually leaves to write his book about Destiny.
Not only does this novel not bear rereading nowadays, I doubt that much was thought of this when it was originally published.

The non-fiction is the usual triptych of editorial, book review and science column. Horace Gold’s editorial, Let’s Talk It Over, reports on sell-out sales and also on the reader’s yeas and nays from their letters. This seems a strange way for this particular editor to put a magazine together—one would have thought that he had as strong a view on this as he did on the fiction. One reader comment concerning the cover artwork made me smile though: ‘One lone and evidently lonely man wanted nudes. Outvoted.’
Galaxy’s Five Star Shelf by Groff Conklin is short but informative. Amongst other things it includes a recommendation of Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+:

I admit that I approached the book with some trepidation, fearing that the writing and the concepts would be so amateur and so hoary with age that it would be unreadable. True enough, the plot is old-hat and the style is awkward—and even so “Ralph” is thoroughly delightful.
It is more like the last of the Jules Verne novels than the first of the modern period of science fiction, and in that lies its greatest merit, I believe. It has the genuine charm of a sound, workmanlike antique, plus the often astonishing survival value of successful prophecy. You will not be disappointed with this tale. p.64

It also entertainingly ridicules Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, #9 on the October 8^th, 1950 New York Times’ list of best sellers:

The spice in Scully’s barbecue is an analysis of what he believes to be the saucers’ motive power, which turns out to be interplanetary magnetism. This is the product of a new science which has learned how to cut the magnetic lines of force holding the planets and the Sun in position and “thus” (says Scully) makes possible travel in space at speeds as high as 282,000 miles per second—and the back of the Scully hand to Dr. Einstein. p.64

Twenty-Foot Miss by Willy Ley is another warmongering article, this time on mines, shells, missiles and the different type of proximity fuzes in them.

In conclusion, a fairly mediocre issue, and more evidence to support the proposition that Galaxy got off to a slow start as a magazine.

1. ‘Agents of Vega’ at ISFDB.
2. I wonder if Kurt Vonnegut read this before writing Slaughterhouse Five.
3. The other option would be for Captain McHenry to put his pregnant wife out the airlock and take up with Sue the stewardess, but that is probably the misogynist in me talking.
4. Time Quarry had its book publication as Time and Again, 1951. The book version has a slightly different ending.

Other Reviews:
Matthew Wuertz: Black Gate
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary

Fiction:
Honeymoon in Hell • novelette by Fredric Brown
Misbegotten Missionary • short story by Isaac Asimov ♥♥♥
Transfer Point • novelette by Anthony Boucher ♥♥
Coming Attraction • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥♥♥♥
To Serve Man • short story by Damon Knight ♥
Time Quarry (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Clifford D. Simak ♥♥

Non-fiction
It’s All Yours • editorial by H. L. Gold
Interior Artwork • Don Sibley, Don King, Paul Pierre, Paul Callé, David Stone
Lands of Yesterday • essay by L. Sprague de Camp
Galaxy’s Five Star Shelf • book review by Groff Conklin
Flying Saucer Contest

This second issue of Galaxy has a much better cover than the first, this time from Don Sibley. Illustrating the Frederic Brown story, it shows an attractive female astronaut caulking a shelter on the moon. A future B&Q advertisement if you will (US: Home Depot). More seriously, note the difference from other covers of the time, the woman has the task in hand while the man is in the background: no damsel being menaced by bug eyed monsters here. The interior artwork is unexceptionable, but one or two illustrations show some promise.

Gold’s editorial is rather surprising. He says that whatever the readers want the magazine to be it will become: size, design, contents, artwork, etc.¹ I’m not sure that mob rule is the best way to run a magazine, and it is hard to reconcile this with the control Gold exercised over the fiction.

Honeymoon in Hell by Fredric Brown leads off the fiction and this novelette, the first of two, starts with no male babies being born on Earth during a period where the Cold War is in danger of turning hot. The powers that be and their cybernetic machines (computers) decide this phenomenon must be caused by an alien ray coming from the moon—well, you would, wouldn’t you? Enter our 27 year-old ex-rocket pilot protagonist who is told he must fly to the moon to conceive a baby with a Russian pilot to prove this theory. Apart from this cringe inducing plot there is also some toe-curlingly bad writing and naive politics in this. An example of the former:

He bit her shoulder gently, snorting away the scented short hair. “Dammed right we will, you gorgeous, wonderful, brainy creature.”²

A couple of cybernetic plot twists later, all is well and they end up together. This is so bad in places that it is probably worth reading.

Misbegotten Missionary by Isaac Asimov (a variant of Green Patches) is a solid enough story, albeit with a gimmicky ending, about an alien from a planet where all life is interconnected smuggling itself aboard a spaceship to attempt to do the same to the life of Earth.

The second novelette, Transfer Point by Anthony Boucher, tells of two survivors of a future apocalypse where the air is poisoned: subsequently yellow-hoop aliens arrive. The male of the two reads stories in ancient pulps: Galaxy and the coyly titled Surprising. These are completely prescient about what is happening to them. They escape back in time. No prizes for guessing what he takes up as an occupation. OK, I guess, but far-fetched. It is also rather cliquey in its in-crowd references, which no doubt made it wildly popular with fans of the time.

The highlight of this issue is Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber. This is a pretty impressive story about an Englishman in a nuked future USA. He becomes in involved with a masked woman after men in a car try to rip her dress off with car mounted hooks. It is a vivid and nightmarish look at what American society has become. I would imagine this was way, way ahead of its time and unpublishable in Astounding. It still has an edge even now.

The last of the short fiction is To Serve Man by Damon Knight. Probably too well known to require description: a race of seemingly benevolent aliens appear on Earth. The half dozen pages of narrative are a set up for a joke punch line, and not a very good one at that, although I may have felt differently when I was 12. However, given the extensive reprinting of this and its (to me, perplexing) retro Hugo award, one man’s weak joke is obviously another’s mordant wit.

The non-fiction this issue includes Lands of Yesterday by L. Sprague de Camp. I found this article about palaeontology rather dry, and a few weeks later can remember nothing at all about it. Galaxy’s Five Star Shelf by Groff Conklin leads off with a review of The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon. Conklin mentions it has been reworked from its magazine appearance, and then takes to task a couple of other books that haven’t been. The Flying Saucer Contest page is reprinted from last issue.

In the second instalment of Time Quarry by Clifford D. Simak, our hero Sutton gets killed, is resurrected, and generally time-travels around trying to find out more about the book he is going to write. There is also a hand-waving description of ‘Destiny’, and how it is a part of all life but suppressed in humans. I am not sure I actually know what is going on now but it is an OK enough read if you stop thinking.

To summarise, two issues in and I am still not impressed. With the notable exception so far of the Sturgeon and Leiber stories, I suspect the rest is largely interchangeable with what was being published elsewhere at the time. Looking forward, it seems I may be in for a few issues like these before this second Golden Age gets going.

1. “In that first issue I invited the readers to tell me what they wanted, saying, “What you want goes.” The results were a surprise, and made me change direction in several instances. Among other things, I had thought I wanted a letter column. The readers didn’t. We drew six thousand letters, and something like eighty-five percent of them said no letter column. A lot of people simply wouldn’t believe that this was so; I was accused of doctoring the figures. Actually, I missed the column. I like letters from readers. They are the first thing I read in other magazines. What the readers wanted was editorials. I didn’t want to write them, but the readers insisted, so I did. And they wanted a science department, and that was how Willy’s For Your Information came to be. It turned out the readers also wanted book reviews, but not the incisive, in-depth sort of essays that critics like to write. What they wanted was a shopping list: what’s worth buying and what isn’t. Groff Conklin found that a strain, but he went along with it.” Horace Gold, Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, ed. Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander p.7
2. What concerns me about this quote is that surely the shorter hair is, the harder it is to snort away? But I digress…

Other Reviews:
Matthew Wuertz: Black Gate.
Lähettänyt Tpi Klo: Tpi’s Reading Diary

Fiction:
Time Quarry (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Clifford D. Simak ♥♥
Third from the Sun • short story by Richard Matheson ♥
The Stars Are the Styx • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon ♥♥♥♥
Later Than You Think • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥♥
Contagion • novelette by Katherine MacLean ♥♥
The Last Martian • short story by Fredric Brown ♥
Darwinian Pool Room • short story by Isaac Asimov ♥

Non-ficiton:
The Hunting Asteroid scene of Time Quarry • cover by David Stone
Interior artwork • by David Stone, Paul Callé, Paul Pierre
For Adults Only • editorial by H. L. Gold
Flying Saucers: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? • essay by Willy Ley
Flying Saucer Contest
Galaxy’s Five Star Shelf • reviews by Groff Conklin
Forecast
You’ll Never See It in Galaxy • essay by H. L. Gold

Galaxy is considered one of if not the major SF title of the 1950s, and it appeared about a year after The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction made its debut. Unlike F&SF it contained SF only, and also departed from pulp format and production in that it was a digest, a format that hadn’t yet caught on. Galaxy used slick cover stock, and offset printing for its interior.¹
Surprisingly, given this emphasis on production values, the first issue has quite a poor cover by David Stone. It is a very flat muddy looking affair that, according to the editorial,² was probably an overreaction to many previous embarrassing SF magazine covers. The interior artwork looks fairly run of the mill as well, but it is hard to tell as I was reading this issue from a not particularly good scan.

The fiction begins with Clifford Simak’s serial Time Quarry.³ In the first part of this serial alone we have androids, robots, duelling, a man from the future, a protagonist who returns from space in a ship that could not have physically made the journey—and who seems to have another person in his head—and an enigmatic and unapproachable alien race. The only thing missing here is the kitchen sink. To give it some credit it does move along but as it does this by continuously adding plot devices, I suspect the whole overburdened structure will come crashing down at some point.

The short fiction leads off with Richard Matheson’s Third From the Sun, whose title telegraphs the end of a story that tells of two families boarding a spacecraft to leave their planet for another. Surely this particular twist ending was old hat in the SF magazines by 1940 never mind 1950?

This type of gimmick or twist ending is also apparent in two of the three other short stories. Fritz Leiber’s Later Than You Think sets up a double twist in its conversation about a lost race that sounds very much like humanity, and Frederic Brown’s The Last Martian⁴ has a newspaper reporter checking out a story about a man claiming to be what the title suggests—and who has woken up in a human body. If I never read another ‘Silly Season’ journalist SF story it will be too soon.

The final short story isn’t really one: Isaac Asimov’s Darwinian Pool Room is a scientists’ conversation about Genesis/the creation of the universe, which stops at the end of their lunchtimes and, one suspects, at the beginning of the Good Doctor’s.

In amongst the fiction there is a short article by Willy Ley about flying saucers that categorises the different types of encounters, followed by a naff competition to provide an over-arching explanation for these phenomena. There are some major prizes though: all expenses paid trips to Mt Wilson observatory, marine laboratories, atomic energy centres, trips in helicopters, dirigibles, sky-writing planes and in submarines—the list goes on and on.⁵
While we are on the non-fiction, Horace Gold’s editorial is unremittingly dull: half the editorial is about the cover, the type of engraving used to produce it and the cover stock; and the rest is puff about the contents.
Galaxy’s Five Star Shelf is a book review column where Groff Conklin covers a trio of anthologies, a H. G. Wells omnibus and another couple of novels, including Judith Merril’s post-holocaust novel—viewed from a domestic perspective—Shadow on the Hearth, which sounds promising.

The first of the two novelettes is Katherine MacLean’s Contagion. This tells of a spaceship landing on an alien planet to discover a primitive human settlement where all the men, and women, are alike. The women on the ship are strongly attracted to the alien men, one of whom comes aboard the ship and infects the shipboard men with a ‘melting sickness’. Much unconvincing biological hocus-pocus later all is resolved. An OK read as long as you don’t think too much about what is going on.

The second novelette and final piece of fiction is the Sturgeon, and it is an issue saver. The Stars Are The Styx tells of the selection, training and dispatch of what are effectively starship pilots to go ‘Out’. Based on Curbstone, an Earth-orbit space station, it is narrated by the Senior Release Officer, who makes the final decision about who can go ‘Out’, and who is at the centre of the five-way relationship difficulties that are the story: most ships go ‘Out’ crewed by couples who get married as part of the process.
I found this story striking for several reasons other than its quality: first, it seems way ahead of its time; second, it feels like you can draw a straight line from this story to the early work of Zelazny and Varley; finally, Curbstone struck me as the progenitor of Fred Pohl’s Gateway.

To conclude, I felt that this issue was a very weak start to the magazine’s run. This opinion, however, is at odds with a couple of people who I have spoken to, and who insist Galaxy was a very big deal from the first issue.⁶  I don’t think the evidence in this first issue supports that but have a number of theories why this may have seemed so.
First, it was the first major magazine (except maybe F&SF) to appear in almost a decade.⁷
Second, the magazine’s appearance, and that of a well-paying second market apart from Astounding, probably looms larger in the minds of writers who were there at the time and who were tiring of Campbell (anecdotal evidence suggests that he was becoming increasingly dogmatic, and the appearance of the Dianetics article convinced some that he had finally lost the plot).⁸ Gold also paid significantly more than the competition, at least until they caught up, and his irritating editorial habits (as compared with Campbell’s) were not yet manifest.⁹
Third, there was the physical appearance of the magazine. With its expensive glossy cover stock and interior paper I suspect it must have looked like the future to readers of pulp magazines.
Finally, it subsequently produced so much major fiction between 1951 and 1953 (and beyond) that this has probably been conflated with the magazine’s first issue (or as we shall perhaps see, issues).

It will be interesting to see how future numbers measure up.

1. The quality of the design and production was important to Gold and to the art directors.
   “I asked for (…) really good quality paper and printing, CromeKote covers…” Horace Gold, Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, ed. Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander p.5
   “During the first dozen years of its existence, Galaxy was expensively printed by offset on high-quality paper. The combination made much possible: soft shades of gray. Halftones. Type laid over the art, art integrated with the text. Galaxy’s two principal art directors, W. I. Van der Poel and Sam Ruvidich, understood the possibilities and exploited them well—beautifully, in fact. Frederik Pohl, ibid. p.xii
   “We borrowed Harry and Evelyn Harrison’s apartment, spread all these layouts over the walls, invited a bunch of editors, artists, writers, and fans, and had a secret ballot of which title, layout, and lettering they liked best. (We must have invited a couple of hundred people who trudged through the apartment before they voted. They all agreed that Galaxy and the inverted-L layout were their own personal favourites, but they didn’t think anyone else would like them.” Horace Gold, ibid. p.6
2. “The cover, by David Stone, is the resolution of several personal conflicts. Long a science fiction fan, Stone is also an excellent artist who was weary of tearing covers off magazines to avoid embarrassment. His cover, he resolved, would not have to be hidden from either parents or friends. Having suffered thus ourselves, we agreed, and no reader will be ashamed to carry Galaxy.”  Horace Gold in his Editorial, p.2
3. From the Forecast on p.107: “Time Quarry will be published next year by Simon & Schuster in exactly the same form in which it appears in Galaxy, with minor editing differences. Our policy will continue to be to publish all book-length novels complete.” How strange, given Gold’s widespread meddling with material submitted to him, that he left the novel length work largely unscathed. In any event, the book form of the novel, Time and Again, had a plot point in the final chapter that was different from the serial.
4. The Brown and the MacLean stories were selected for the Everett F. Bleiler & T. E. Dikty Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1951. The Sturgeon story wasn’t, nor did it appear in a later ‘Best Of the Year’ from Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, The Great SF Stories 12.
5. “In that first issue, he [Willy Ley] was fielding a contest that had been imposed on me—something like “Are Flying Saucers Real?” He wrote a noncommittal article. I cut it down drastically before I printed it. He couldn’t understand why I had done that after paying him for all of it, but I wanted as little as possible to do with flying saucers.” Horace Gold, Ibid. p.7
6. Although Mike Ashley in Transformations, p.29, states: “Galaxy‘s first major story was The Fireman by Ray Bradbury (…) in the February 1951 issue.”
7. “[The appearance of a new magazine] was an uncommon event in those days. New science-fiction magazines were rarer than quintuplets—there had been only one significant other in the better part of a decade—so the first appearance of Galaxy prompted both hope and doubt.” Frederik Pohl, Ibid. p.ix
8. “All this could have not happened at a better time, for in 1950 Campbell began to push the pseudoscience of “dianetics.” I disapproved of that so strongly that I wished to distance myself from Campbell. I did not stop selling to him, but welcomed the chance to sell to others.” Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov, Chapter 62. He also adds that Darwinian Pool Room was “a very weak effort.”
9. For chapter and verse on how infuriating an editor Gold could be, see the writer introductions to the stories in Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, ed. Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander