Galaxy Science Fiction
World Editions hired as editor H. L. Gold, who rapidly made Galaxy the leading science fiction magazine of its time, focusing on stories about social issues rather than technology.
Gold published many notable stories during his tenure, including Ray Bradbury's "The Fireman", later expanded as Fahrenheit 451; Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters; and Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man.
Under Pohl Galaxy had continued success, regularly publishing fiction by writers such as Cordwainer Smith, Jack Vance, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Silverberg.
According to sf historian and critic Mike Ashley, its success was the main reason for a subsequent flood of new releases: 22 more science fiction magazines appeared by 1954, when the market dipped again as a side effect of US Senate hearings into the putative connection between comic books and juvenile delinquency.
[notes 3] The head of the French office of World Editions came to the United States to find out what the problem was, and recommended that the magazine be sold to the two Americans, for $3,000—a very low price.
It was only after the sale was complete that the sabotaged distribution came to light; World Editions wanted to buy back the magazine, but Guinn quoted a price four times as high as he had paid.
Pohl was in Rio de Janeiro at a World Science Fiction Symposium when the sale went through; he heard the news when he returned to the Galaxy office afterwards and within a few days decided to resign.
The magazine was profitable for UPD, but the financial pressure on the parent company took its toll and Baen left in late 1977 to work for Ace Books—the October issue was his last.
Rights to the title were transferred to a new company, Galaxy Magazine, Inc., owned by Vincent McCaffrey, proprietor of Avenue Victor Hugo, a second-hand book store in Boston; UPD retained a ten percent interest in order to receive income from future sales to pay off their debts.
[52] Groff Conklin began a book review column, called "Galaxy's Five Star Shelf", in the first issue;[notes 8][53] Floyd Gale took it over with the November 1955 issue—Gale was in fact Gold's brother, using a slightly modified surname.
[55] The first six issues contained stories by well-known authors, including some that became highly regarded such as Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction", Damon Knight's "To Serve Man", and Ray Bradbury's "The Fireman", later expanded as Fahrenheit 451.
[61] Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants followed a few months later, serialized as Gravy Planet; Brian Aldiss, in his critical genre study Trillion Year Spree, calls it "one of the most famous books in SF".
[43] Gold published a wide range of material, and Galaxy became known for irony and satire; the work of authors able to adopt the wry style he favored, such as Knight and Robert Sheckley, appeared regularly in the magazine[43] and were obvious commentaries on contemporary society.
[66] In 1953, with McCarthyism at its height, Gold refused to publish "The Liberation of Earth", a story by William Tenn satirizing both the Russian and American sides in the Korean War.
Tenn quotes Gold, an ex-radical, as saying the idea made him "sweat green", though the year before he had published Isaac Asimov's "The Martian Way", a thinly veiled anti-McCarthy story.
[67][68] L. Sprague de Camp commented that Gold "sets an extremely high standard of literary excellence for his writers", and observed that he often demanded multiple revisions and rewrites.
[notes 11][61][76] Gold was agoraphobic and rarely left his apartment, but writers often visited him,[51] and he held regular parties and weekly poker games; in addition to the members of the science fiction community, the avant-garde composer John Cage often attended.
They refused, but shortly afterwards Pohl and Lester del Rey agreed to let Gold take their recently completed novel Preferred Risk and publish it as the winner under the pseudonym Edson McCann.
[81] Through the 1950s, Galaxy's contributors routinely dominated the Hugo ballots, but neither the magazine nor the fiction it published won many awards, despite what sf historian Donald Lawler describes as its "deserved reputation for excellence".
[8] After several years of being shut out of the Hugos, Galaxy published two works in 1958 that won the honor: Fritz Leiber's novel The Big Time and Avram Davidson's short story "Or All the Seas with Oysters".
Galaxy stories from this era that won awards include Vance's The Dragon Masters and "The Last Castle"; Clifford Simak's Way Station, serialized as Here Gather the Stars; Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Ticktockman" and "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World"; and Silverberg's "Nightwings".
Gold's difficult editorial personality had driven away some of his contributors, but Pohl, who had worked as an agent in the 1950s, was a central figure in the sf community and was able to attract submissions from the star writers of his day.
[89] Pohl said that he tried to "cover the full spectrum of science fiction", however, unlike Gold's "specialist magazine" of the 1950s; his Galaxy published both Sheckley's "Mindswap" and Herbert's "Do I Wake or Dream?"
[91] Jakobsson did not manage to give Galaxy a new and distinctive character: "Sunpot" lasted only four issues, Sturgeon's reviews were undistinguished, and many of the new authors he published have been, in the words of Mike Ashley, "mercifully unknown ever since".
[92] Jakobsson's successor, James Baen, was able to publish some high-quality fiction, including material by Roger Zelazny, John Varley, Larry Niven, and Pohl, whose novel, Gateway, won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
[94] Galaxy's deterioration was largely due to the financial troubles of the publisher, Arnold Abramson, who reduced the pay rate (at a time of high inflation) to a penny a word.
[101][103] Isaac Asimov, in his memoirs, recalled being deeply impressed by the first issue of Galaxy, and that many fans, including himself, believed that the magazine became the field's leader almost immediately.
[95][106] Pohl stated in 1965 that almost every major science fiction writer whose career began after 1950 primarily wrote for Galaxy, and that others closely imitated Gold's magazine.
"[2] Science fiction author Brian Stableford argues that Galaxy quickly usurped Astounding's position as "pioneer of hardcore sf's progress" because it "embraced and gleefully pursued a new series of challenges to moral orthodoxy.
SF authors and historians Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove summarize Galaxy's history by saying that it lasted for "thirty mainly glorious years":[108] it "brought into the sunlight a number of excellent satirists, comedians and ironists"[109] and, through the influence of its reduced focus on technology, played an important role in attracting women to write science fiction.
