ISFDB
Luminist

Other reviews:¹
Graham Hall, Vector #34 (August 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
Bill, the Galactic Hero (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Harry Harrison ∗∗∗∗
The Source • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗
And Worlds Renewed • short story by George Collyn ∗∗
The Pulse of Time • short story by W. T. Webb ∗
By the Same Door • short story by Mack Reynolds ∗∗∗
Preliminary Data • short story by Michael Moorcock ∗∗
Songflower • short story by Kenneth Hoare ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by Harry Harrison
An Effective Use of Space • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Dr Peristyle • question column by Brian W. Aldiss
Story Ratings 151
Book reviews • by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin], Ron Bennett, and Hilary Bailey

_____________________

This issue sees even more of a mix of fiction types than hitherto—we have parodic comedy from Harrison, traditional SF from Collyn and Hoare, horror from Webb, and more progressive work from Aldiss and Moorcock.

Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison is the first part of the eponymous novel (the second and third parts have different titles rather than “part 2” or “part 3” for some reason), and it is initially a parody of futuristic military adventure SF (I suspect, in particular, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers²).
The story opens with our hero Bill ploughing a field with a robomule on Phigerinadon II when a military recruitment parade comes along the road. Bill follows the procession into the village and is soon manipulated into joining the army by underhand means (ego-reducing drugs dissolved in the free drinks, and hypno-coils that control his body movements). He marches away to a camp, and the next day meets his instructor:

 “I am here to break your spirit,” a voice rich with menace told them, and they looked up and shivered even more as they faced the chief demon in this particular hell.
Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang was a specialist from the tips of the angry spikes of his hair to the corrugated stamping-soles of his mirrorlike boots. He was wide-shouldered and lean-hipped, while his long arms hung, curved like those of some horrible anthropoid, the knuckles of his immense fists scarred from the breaking of thousands of teeth. It was impossible to look at this detestable form and imagine that it issued from the tender womb of a woman. He could never have been born; he must have been built to order by the government. Most terrible of all was the head. The face! The hairline was scarcely a finger’s width above the black tangle of the brows that were set like a rank growth of foliage at the rim of the black pits that concealed the eyes—visible only as baleful red gleams in the Stygian darkness. A nose, broken and crushed, squatted above the mouth that was like a knife slash in the taut belly of a corpse, while from between the lips issued the great, white fangs of the canine teeth, at least two inches long, that rested in grooves on the lower lip.  p. 10-11

The story then describes Bill’s basic training, which includes some very funny set pieces, such another recruit’s account of why humanity is at war with the Chingers, supposedly a race of seven-foot high saurian aliens (but see the later passage):

“The Chingers are the only non-human race that has been discovered in the galaxy that has gone beyond the aboriginal level, so naturally we have to wipe them out.”
“What the hell do you mean, naturally? I don’t want to wipe anyone out. I just want to go home and be a Technical Fertilizer Operator.”
“Well, I don’t mean you personally, of course—gee!”
Eager opened a fresh can of polish with purple-stained hands and dug his fingers into it. “I mean the human race, that’s just the way we do things. If we don’t wipe them out they’ll wipe us out. Of course they say that war is against their religion and they will only fight in defence, and they have never made any attacks yet. But we can’t believe them, even though it is true. They might change their religion or their minds some day, and then where would we be? The best answer is to wipe them out now.”  p. 14-15

On completion of his training, Bill is assigned to a spaceship, and he has various adventures: one of his comrades turns out to be a spy (he/it is a robot operated by a seven inch high Chinger); and then Bill experiences his first interstellar flight:

“We’re moving,” [Tembo] said positively, “and going interstellar too. They’ve turned on the star-drive.”
“You mean we are breaking through into sub-space and will soon experience the terrible wrenching at every fibre of our being?”
“No, they don’t use the old sub-space drive any more, because though a lot of ships broke through into sub-space with a fibre-wrenching jerk, none of them have yet broke back out. I read in the Trooper’s Times where some mathematician said that there had been a slight error in the equations and that time was different in sub-space, but it was different faster not different slower, so that it will be maybe forever before those ships come out.”
“Then we’re going into hyper-space?”
“No such thing.”
“Or we’re being dissolved into our component atoms and recorded in the memory of a giant computor who thinks we are somewhere else so there we are?”
“Wow!” Tembo said, his eyebrows crawling up to his hairline. “For a Zoroastrian farm boy you have some strange ideas! Have you been smoking or drinking something I don’t know about?”  p. 44

The next few chapters largely focus on a space battle with the Chingers and its aftermath; Bill is a hero during the engagement, and he later recovers from his injuries in the hospital:

[The doctor] unclipped the wires that held up Bill’s arm and began to unwind the bandages while the troopers crowded around to watch.
“How is my arm, Doc?” Bill was suddenly worried.
“Grilled like a chop. I had to cut it off.”
“Then what is this?” Bill shrieked, horrified.
“Another arm that I sewed on. There were lots of them left over after the battle. The ship had over 42 per cent casualties, and I was really cutting and chopping and sewing, I tell you.”
The last bandage fell away and the troopers ahhhed with delight.
“Say, that’s a mighty fine arm!”
“Make it do something.”
“And a damn nice seam there at the shoulder—look how neat the stitches are!”
“Plenty of muscles, too, and good and long, not like the crummy little short one he has on the other side.”
“Longer and darker—that’s a great skin colour!”
“It’s Tembo’s arm!” Bill howled. “Take it away!” He squirmed across the bed but the arm came after him. They propped him up again on the pillows.
“You’re a lucky bowb, Bill, having a good arm like that. And your buddy’s arm too.”
“We know that he wanted you to have it.”
“You’ll always have something to remember him by.”
It really wasn’t a bad arm. Bill bent it and flexed the fingers, still looking at it suspiciously. It felt all right. He reached out with it and grabbed a trooper’s arm and squeezed. He could feel the man’s bones grating together while he screamed and writhed. Then Bill looked closer at the hand and began to shout curses at the doctor.
“You stupid sawbones! You thoat doctor! Some big job—this is a right arm!”
“So it’s a right arm—so what?”
“But you cut off my left arm! Now I have two right arms . . .”
“Listen, there was a shortage of left arms. I’m no miracle worker. I do my best and all I get are complaints. Be happy I didn’t sew on a leg.” He leered evilly. “Or even better I didn’t sew on a . . .”  p. 57-58

This installment has a strong start and finish, even if the middle part is more light adventure than comedy, and it’s a very good start to the issue.

The Source by Brian W. Aldiss has a blurb (see above) which filled me with a feeling of foreboding that was subsequently borne out.
The story starts with a detachment of “Seekers”—they travel throughout the Galaxy looking for man’s greatest achievement—who have recently arrived on a ruined, primitive Earth.
One of the Seekers, Kervis, and his year wife Ysis, take a car and travel away from camp. During this Kervis starts seeing visions of Ysis as an old crone. After a few pages of this kind of thing, Kervis stops the car and gets out, sheds his clothes and wanders off alone through the undergrowth. He eventually comes upon a group of primitives who have Ysis with them, and the pair then go on until they come to a building. Here Kervis wanders through various passages, and is again separated from Ysis. He eventually comes upon what he thinks is a statue of a beast holding a woman and, when he realises the woman is real, he frees her from the beast. Kervis later experiences a mystical event.
At the end (spoiler maybe, but probably not), Kervis and Ysis return to camp, where he is relieved of his command by the other Seekers. The expedition leaves but Kervis stays behind—he has apparently fulfilled his destiny.
This is all rather baffling, and pretty boring as well.
And Worlds Renewed by George Collyn gets off to a clunky data-dump beginning despite its Ballardesque chapter titles:

The two men could not have been more different.
There was Junter Firmole—rock-hard, ruthless, intolerant, ambitious, homicidal and leading entrepreneur in an era of cut-throat trade. Perhaps to his grandchildren he would appear as white-haired, lovable and gentle. To the peoples of Humankind he was an ogre with which to frighten naughty children; a man of blood who drank his wine from a human skull.
Then there was Nefo Setiri, environmental artist—an absent-minded and obsessed visionary with as much financial acumen as a two-week-old child. Twenty years would pass before he would reach his creative peak in the formulation of the Pleasure Worlds of Ilgadin with Hi Li City—his masterpiece—at their spangled heart. At the time of which I speak he had attempted nothing greater than continental construction—the remodelling of Antarctica was his graduation test-piece at the Slade. Nor, at that time, did he seem destined for greatness, since the range of his creative imagination was so undisciplined that those patrons who had planetary commissions in their gift fought shy of his genius.
Yeman Sorl, dictator of Tramoth and first prospective patron, laughed in Setiri’s face where he would have crawled on his belly to Firmole, and the elaborate blueprints for the remodelling of the Tramoth worlds hit the dictatorial cigars for a twelve-month.

After several goes at that last sentence I’m still not sure what it means.
The story goes on to tell of Setiri’s capture by space pirates, who send him to a labour camp on a planet when he can’t pay the ransom. While he works there he takes artistic exception to the way that the planet is being reshaped and, after managing to catch the visiting Firmole’s eye, manages to convince him that he could make a better job. Setiri gets the commission:

Setiri intended a work in three textures—climate, vegetation and physical configuration. The finished work to be a range of intensity across a spectrum from limpid water-soft to sun-baked hard.
In climate the planet would shade from insufferably hot at the equator to temperately cool at the poles; with no precipitation at the former but perpetual rain at the latter.
The poles would be seas of permanent water with no island or peninsula to impinge upon their liquidity. At 10° latitude this would shade into a sheer insubstantiality of marshlands, a morass that would spread across thirty degrees of latitude. This would then give way slowly to two belts, each of twenty degrees; the first of tropical rain forest, the second of prairie grasslands. The central belt, stretching ten degrees north and south of the equator would be raw ochrous desert and each hemisphere would mirror the other.
The seas would necessarily be flat; the swamps interspersed by isolated hillocks; the forest clothing square-cut plateaux ; the prairies, rolling hills of grass ; but the desert would be a region of soaring mountains and plummeting canyons—a wasteland in all three levels.  p. 81-82

While Setiri completes the project he prevents Firmole from visiting the works by use of a force field and, when the latter later arrives at the opening ceremony, it looks as if he is going to denounce the work. However (spoiler), Firmole’s daughter approves of it and then, when a particular angle of sunlight catches the planet, Firmole sees his own face momentarily etched on the planet’s surface.
A neat ending.
The Pulse of Time by W. T. Webb opens with a cardiac consultant called Humbolt who is visited at home by a man who wants him to come to attend to his employer. Even though Humbolt isn’t told the employer’s name, or where he lives, he gets in a chauffeur driven car and goes.
When Humbolt arrives at the house of “Mr X”, he meets a very old man who, as they chat, shows him a variety of curios, culminating with (spoiler) photos of an alien visitor to Earth, etc.
This unlikely and unconvincing set up is for a striking final image:

Mr. X opened the door, entered the small room beyond it and switched on the light. On one wall Humbolt saw a clock-face rising above a cabinet made of flesh-coloured plastic. Mr. X opened the doors of the cabinet to reveal several glass globes joined together by transparent tubes. A red liquid circulated round the tubes and the globes and in and out of the clock-face. And the largest of the globes contained something that to him was horribly familiar.
“As you see,” said Mr. X. “This clock has a human heart for a mainspring. It is not keeping good time. And I would like your advice on how to correct it.”
Humbolt felt outraged. As a student he had often seen the heart of a chicken or a goat kept alive artificially. But this . . .
“You monster!” he said to Mr. X. “Don’t you realise that I am fully aware that this heart must have been cut out of a living person?”
By way of reply Mr. X opened the lapels of his dressing gown to reveal a thorax made of transparent plastic. Within it, immersed in colourless oil, a mass of machinery of alien design, worked rhythmically and constantly, like the mechanism of a clock.  p. 94

This struck me as the kind of story you might find in the Pan or Fontana series of horror anthologies.
By the Same Door by Mack Reynolds opens with a man visiting a business which provides transfers to alternative worlds. He asks to be sent to one where they openly discuss the secret perversion alluded to in many books and magazines of his world but which is never described.
The man gets his wish, and the story concludes appropriately (spoiler: the reader is still in a universe where the secret perversion is mentioned but not described).
I saw the end coming about three paragraphs ahead, but there is a neat irony to it that made me smile.

Preliminary Data by Michael Moorcock is the first of his long running ‘Jerry Cornelius’ series, and opens with Jerry and a Brahmin physicist called Professor Hira discussing, at length, the cosmology of various religions, concluding with comments on the cyclical nature of time:

“Then at the end of the manvantara the cycle repeats itself, does it? The whole of history all over again!”
“Some believe so. Others believe that the cycles vary slightly. It is basically an extension of our convictions concerning reincarnation. The strange thing is that modern physics begins to confirm these figures—in terms of the complete revolution of the galaxy and so on. I must admit that the more I read of the papers published these days, the more confused I become between what I was taught as a Hindu and what I have learned as a physicist. It requires an increasing amount of self-discipline to separate them in my mind.”
“Why do you bother?”
“My career, old man, at the University, would suffer if I let mysticism influence logic.” The Brahmin spoke with some irony and Cornelius smiled.  p. 99

There is a more of this before the story breaks and picks up with both men in bed together (possibly a first in a UK SF magazine). The men discuss a Mrs Brunner. When Cornelius later goes home to his wife Maj-Britt in Sweden, Brunner is there waiting for him. After a tense stand-off Brunner kidnaps Cornelius and Maj-Britt, and takes them to her secret cave-lab in Lapland, where they meet Professor Hira. “G-day” is discussed.
The rest of the story isn’t entirely clear—at some point Jerry undergoes a process that leaves him feeling “totally alive”, policemen turn up and the mouth of the cave, and then, in the ensuing struggle, Jerry is shot. Then he (or his spirit?) watches as Brunner give a speech to the assembled scientists about project DUEL:

“DUEL’s purpose was two-fold, as you know. The first job was to feed it the sum total of human knowledge and have it systemise and relate this knowledge into a single unified integer. This was at last achieved three days ago and I congratulate you.
“It is the second part which mystified most of you. The technical problem of how to feed this programme directly into a human brain was overcome with the help of notes donated by Doctor Leslie Baxter, the psycho-biologist. But what sort of brain could accept such a fantastic programme? That question is answered as I answer the question you have all been asking. DUEL’s ultimate use is to satisfy an aim which, whether we realised it or not, has been the ultimate aim of all human endeavour since homo sapiens first evolved. It is a simple aim and we are near achieving it. We have been working, ladies and gentlemen, to produce an all-purpose human being! A human-being equipped with total knowledge, hermaphrodite in every respect—self-fertilising and thus self-regenerating—and thus immortal, re-creating itself over and over again, retaining its knowledge and adding to it. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we are creating a being which our ancestors would have called a god!”  p. 109-110

Cornelius and Brunner are then combined by DUEL to become that god-like hermaphrodite. It gathers a huge mob of people which surges around Europe before finally rushing lemming-like into the Atlantic. Cornelius Brunner is the only survivor.
The first half of this story could have been shorter, and I didn’t understand exactly what happened after the shooting, so I found the story’s mix of the contemporary, the bizarre, and the comic only partially successful. It is notable, perhaps, as the first in the long-running series, and for its thematic experimentation and formerly taboo content (the bisexuality of Cornelius, and the hermaphrodism).

Songflower by Kenneth Hoare is marred by a couple of clumsy sentences on the first page³ but turns out to be a colourful if slight tale about a spacer who goes on a pub crawl with an alien friend. The spacer later buys a singing plant from one of the natives, who cooks him a meal first:

[The Terran] led the way through the shop, dusty despite the air conditioning, and into the room beyond. The contrast was so great that Alec drew in his breath in surprise. The walls were lined with fine scarlet fibres, shining in the light of an artificial sun, dimmed to the rich glow of an autumn evening. On the walls hung relics of many different cultures. On the carved chests that stood by the walls and on shelves by the old-fashioned electric fire, leaping and crackling with blue-white flames, stood bowls of plants.
Hundreds of exotic varieties were contained in that room, some in gastight containers to reproduce the conditions of their native planets. Some were tiny and starlike, others huge and fleshy in great stripes of contrasting colour. There were feathery water plants and spiky desert blooms. Representations of flowers in a dozen different art-forms stood or hung about the room.
“Flowers are my greatest interest,” said Fred, “but I think you will find that I do not neglect the provision of a proper cuisine.”
The change in the little Terran was very noticeable. He seemed to expand like one of his flowers in the exotic atmosphere of the room. The effect was enhanced when he shrugged off his drab street jacket and pulled on a scalloped robe designed for a Dafnian batrachian.
They sat down at a table constructed from the flat shell of some turtle-like creature. After a moment a robot appeared in answer to Ellington’s signal, carrying a tray loaded with food in each of its four hands, and proceeded to set out the food.
An hour later, Alec declined another drink. “Not another mouthful. I really couldn’t.”  p. 118

The mediocre Cover is uncredited, and there is much less Interior artwork than normal—just a single illustration by Harry Harrison. Budgetary constraints, I presume.
An Effective Use of Space by Michael Moorcock mostly discusses this issue’s contents:

We decided to run Harry Harrison’s new novel as a serial for several reasons. The main reason, of course, is that the book is as generous a piece of unpretentious entertainment as we have read for a long time. Another reason was because it fitted well into our editorial policy, illustrating how the space story can be used effectively to make a serious point in a light-hearted way.
[. . .]
Preliminary Data is something of an experiment, an example, if you like, of the anarchic approach to SF story-telling, all we ask is that you take it in the spirit the author intended and don’t take it too seriously—further episodes should fill you in.
We felt that this month was a good time, too, to begin the first of Dr. Peristyle’s columns answering readers’ queries on SF. The pungent and forthright gentleman made his debut in Vector, Journal of the BSFA, but we felt his opinions deserved a wider airing and invited him to contribute to New Worlds.

Moorcock also mentions that John Brunner’s The Whole Man (UK title Telepathist)⁴ is on the forthcoming Hugo ballot, and plugs a number of seemingly anarachic publications from Future City Press (“The issue of Amazing Rayday we have to hand at first seems to be a wild effusion of unrelated words, drawings and photographs, but a closer look shows that this publication has a hysterical logic of its own.”)

The Dr Peristyle column is uncredited, but I discovered⁵ that these were written by Brian W. Aldiss. The plan announced in the editorial is that this will alternate with the letter column (it turns out that this was the first of only three columns which would appear).
The questions get arch, eclectic answers (there is another example in the image above):

David E. Mortimer
Assuming SF is written by technically advanced countries, did the Arabs write SF or something like it when they led the world in mathematics and astronomy?
.
Interesting question. Frankly I don’t know the answer, learned though I am; I suspect it to be buried below the desert sand, so that some Abdul Anderson, some Mohammed Moorcock, is forever lost to us. But evolution rather than technology is the real power behind SF, for it provides a speculative dimension to work in. And isn’t SF essentially a city literature? Who ever wrote it in a tent?  p. 122

The Story Ratings 151 were discussed in the review of that issue.⁶
The Book reviews come from three people: Michael Moorcock, Ron Bennett, and Hilary Bailey. Moorcock opens with a useful review⁷ of The Old Die Rich by H. L. Gold:

H. L. Gold was perhaps the most incisive editor ever to produce an SF magazine, on matters of technique he knew the craft of SF writing inside out and the fact that he rewrote a considerable portion of the material published in Galaxy under his editorship earned him many writers’ gratitude rather than their chagrin. I personally know several writers who feel they owe their present knowledge of technique to Gold’s pungent comments on what he rejected and his doctoring of what he accepted. Some feel that this resulted, in the end, in a magazine that contained craftsmanly but characterless stories—stories, in fact, with too much ironed out. What is sometimes said of the last years of Galaxy under Gold’s editorship might also apply to his own work and one is inclined to feel that if he never wrote a bad story, he never wrote a brilliant one, either.  p. 124

Moorcock later adds that Gold was the master of the twist ending and one of the first modern SF writers to make it his trademark. He concludes by stating that the volume contains the “quintessence of a certain kind of slick, clever SF writing,” but that it doesn’t have the seriousness of intention that newer writers “like Aldiss, Ballard, Vonnegut—or even Moorcock” exhibit. So? Do all writers need to produce serious work?
Moorcock also reviews New Writings in SF 4 by John Carnell ( “the undemanding reader who is happy with fresh twists on old themes will find plenty worth reading”).
Ron Bennett reviews The Joyous Invasions by Theodore Sturgeon, and Hilary Bailey seems pleased enough with routine sounding stuff from John Lymington, Rick Raphael, and L. P. Davies.

This is worth getting for the first part of the Harrison novel, but the rest is middling stuff.  ●

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1. Graham Hall enjoyed Harrison’s “rollicking parody”, which he thought stands “head and shoulders above most of the SF [. . .] published in the past few years.” He adds:

Harrison proves that his faster-than-light writing pace can be adapted from the tension of Deathworld to the humorous mockery of the military-galactic novel. Such characters as Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang, the Rev. Tembo, Eager Beager and Bill himself will go down in SF’s Hall of Fame—but one word of warning: Heinlein fans—it’s illegal to assault anybody, including American SF writers inhabiting Denmark.  p. 16

The Aldiss is “a let-down” but paradoxically “worth reading”; Collyn’s story is less experimental but more to Hall’s taste; Webb’s “isn’t far from the conventional horror story”; Reynold’s vignette is infuriating but stuck in his memory.
Hall says this about the Moorcock and Hoare pieces:

I’ll steer clear of [Preliminary Data], not wishing to show my ignorance by under or overestimating it. Apart from becoming terribly confused in the first few pages, I enjoyed it. No more will I say.
The idea behind Songflower is rather good, and the vividness of the writing certainly lifts it above the normal. I have a feeling that Kenneth Hoare may be a pen-name for a more established writer.  p. 16

2. I haven’t read Starship Troopers as I didn’t get very far with Robert Heinlein in my youth. Part of this was due to my struggle with Stranger in a Strange Land (I got fed up of the lectures halfway through and gave up), and a sub-optimal sampling of his other work (Glory Road was okay, as were Double Star, Waldo & Magic Inc., etc. but nothing made me want to read further). I note on consulting my bookshelves that I also read The Best of Robert A. Heinlein but remember little of it (apart from Crooked House and Zombies).
I enjoy Heinelin’s work more nowadays, funnily enough—I’ve recently read Jonathan Hoag, The Roads Must Roll, Waldo, Goldfish Bowl, etc. and enjoyed all of them to a greater or lesser extent.

3. As for the clumsy sentences in the first page of Hoare’s Sunflower, in my opinion, “They made planetfall soon after dawn at the capital”, would be better as “They made planetfall at the capital soon after dawn.” And “As Alec walked along by his scaly green flanks, 7 was bumbling away happily to himself” should be “As Alec walked alongside 7’s scaly green flanks, [7/the alien/the creature] bumbled away happily to himself.” Both p. 114.

4. Brunner describes the genesis of The Whole Man/Telepathist in the letter column of the next issue, #154:

The review Langdon Jones gave to Telepathist is so kind I hate having to point out that there are a couple of facts he got wrong. He says: ‘The book consists of three short stories dating from 1958 to 1959’. Actually it doesn’t. There were only two Gerry Howson yarns—novelettes—published confusingly under three titles, of which the second, disapproved of by the American magazine editor, survives as the title of the American edition of this final book: The Whole Man. Of these, the first has dwindled to pp. 143-159, twenty thousand words compressed into about four. That was City of the Tiger. The other, completely rewritten, is sandwiched around it to make Book Three, ‘Mens’—except that barring p. 115 the whole of the first  seventeen chapters are original material: i.e., the first two Books and part of the third as well.  p. 127

Both of the novelettes (City of the Tiger and The Whole Man) appeared in the Carnell edited Science Fantasy (#32 & #34) and were then reprinted in the USA (in Fantastic Universe, November and December 1959; The Whole Man was retitled Curative Telepath in that latter issue).

5. David Pringle and Langdon Jones confirmed that Peristyle was Aldiss in the British Science Fiction Magazine Collectors group on Facebook, 16^th September 2019.

6. The ratings for this issue appeared in #155. The Harrison is a worthy winner, but the rest of the stories are in an odd sort of order:

7. David Pringle mentioned J. G. Ballard’s review of Gold’s book in The Guardian (21^st May 1965) in the British Science Fiction Magazine Collectors Group:

H. L. Gold’s collection of short stories is described as a how-to-do-it book for would-be science-fiction writers (a diminishing band), on the strength, one assumes, of the notes the author provides after each story rather than the stories themselves. Gold, the former editor of Galaxy, who established the brittle and atmospheric stories which were the magazine’s hall mark, was noted for his rejection slips—these brilliant and acid gems are far more worth publishing than his stories. Unluckily he is nowhere near so acerbic in assessing his own efforts.

It sounds like Ballard was on the receiving end of a few of those rejection slips. ●