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Galaxy Science Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 5A, February 1954
British edition of this magazine. mostly reprints the September 1953 US publication. Stories here include "The Touch of Your Hand" by Theodore Sturgeon and "Worrywart" by Clifford D. Simak.
Paperback
Published February 1, 1954
About the author
H.L. Gold
385 books13 followersHorace Leonard Gold was a science fiction writer and editor most noted for bringing an innovative and fresh approach to science fiction while he was the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, and also wrote briefly for DC Comics. Born in Canada, Gold moved to the United States at the age of two. He also published under the pseudonyms Clyde Crane Campbell, Dudley Dell, Christopher Grimm, and Leigh Keith.
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August 26, 2023
CONTENTS
●Fiction:
•"Beep" - James Blish
•"The Boys from Vespis" - Arthur Sellings
•"Pet Farm" - Roger Dee
•"Inanimate Objection" - H. Chandler Elliott
•"Project Hush" - William Tenn
•"The Passenger" - Kenneth Harmon
•"Two Timer" - Fredric Brown
▪︎"Men Like Mules" - J. T. M'Intosh
●Non-fiction:
•"For Your Information: 'Hints to Archeologists'" - Willy Ley
•"Editor's Page: 'Help Wanted!'" - H. L. Gold
•"Galaxy's Five Star Shelf" - Groff Conklin
Eight stories plus various features was a lot for one issue. Actually it is nine stories; the Fredric Brown item combines two unrelated vignettes, a speciality of Brown's, who the editorial introduction to the entry refers to as the "Old Vignette Master."
The title of the two combined short items is "Two Timer," which to me implies that both of these have something to do with time. And the first part does: "Experiment" is a witty time travel paradox tale. "Sentry" is a sort of Twilight Zone episode well before that show existed. Each of these is about one page long.
William Tenn's story "Project Hush" is also short. The United States Army plans the first manned trip to the Moon. This is considered to be the most secret of government projects. The trip goes well, but the Army crew is greeted with a surprise. This is not much more than an anecdote, but I think that it is funny.
"The Boys from Vespis" by Arthur Sellings is similar, not at all in content but somewhat in intent. At a time when interstellar travel is routine, Earth is visited by a ship from Vespis. The crew, all extraordinarily handsome men, mix with the people in a small Earth town. These visitors are all very nice folks but they bring a problem to part of the town; the Earth women in the town are so attracted to the Vespians that the men of the town can't possibly compete. But there is a solution. This seems to me to be very much a precursor to a later Sellings tale "Blank Form" (Galaxy July, 1958). (Nothing to do with either of those stories, but I remember liking Sellings' 1962 novel Telepath very much when it was first published; I wonder if I still would.)
There is one more predominantly light story in this issue, "Inanimate Objection" by H. Chandler Elliott. Two young psychiatrists are assigned to work with an inpatient, a 57 year old retired army major who firmly believes "that what we call inanimate objects have a will of their own." They think at first that the patient is "as psychotic as a jaybird." (An aside: the major's initial evaluation notes that he has a wife who says she is 35 years old, who I don't think is ever mentioned again.) As things happen in the life of one of those psychiatrists, the patient's belief seems increasingly reasonable. For one example, that psychiatrist trips due to a series of small accidents and drops the two bags of groceries he is carrying: "The door had closed decisively on a bag of eggs; a small sack of flour, disgorging at one corner, smirked raffishly against a sofa-leg."
One of the short stories in the magazine is very different in tone. In "The Passenger" by Kenneth Harmon, a young woman is returning to Earth in a spaceship after working for five years trying to teach "grubby little miners' kids" on a distant planet. Another being on the ship contacts the woman telepathically and invites her to join him in his room on the ship. In my last review on Goodreads of an issue of Galaxy, I noted of one story: This is a sort of science fiction tale, I suppose, but I think that most readers would place it primarily in a different genre. "The Passenger" is also in that genre. The science fiction and fantasy website ISFDb does not list any other stories in this field by Mr. Harmon.
Three men and a high-functioning robot come to the bleak planet Falak in "Pet Farm" by Roger Dee. There are humans still living on the planet, although it had long been under the control of an alien race, the Hymenops, known as the Bees. The remaining humans all appear to be young, no more than twenty-five, Piles of bones show that all the older people are dead, having died at ten year intervals. But there are other beings on Falak, which have some power over humans. "Pet Farm" is part of a three-story series by Dee about this ship and its efforts to help those humans who survived life under the Hymenops.
For no particular reason, I thought that "Men Like Mules" by J. T. M'Intosh would be about humans used as beasts of burden. Not even close - it just meant people as stubborn as mules. (By the way, it seems incredibly unlikely to me that millennia in the future people on other planets will be saying that someone is "as stubborn as a mule.") The story is narrated by the captain of a group of spaceships sent to Earth to evacuate the few thousand people left there before the weakened sun dies totally. The problem is that almost all the people of Earth refuse to leave. The remaining population of the Earth has plans to stay alive even after the sun expires. But the people who have come to carry out the evacuation are under orders to remove everybody still living on Earth. The captain and his lieutenant, who is also his sister, both fall in love with Earth people and those relationships do not go entirely smoothly. This seems to me to be a story with few surprises, and most of those involve the romantic relationships rather than the main plot. Also, humanity does not seem to have changed in any way over the centuries.
I didn't much like the longest story in this issue, "Beep" by James Blish, but it is still well regarded. This begins as a spy story, in which a part of the central government of Earth - and, consequently, of the galaxy - seems to have some amazing source of knowledge of events throughout the many worlds, although there is still no known way that someone could immediately know what is happening lightyears away. A young woman news reporter comes to the head of the appropriate government agency and says that she has learned how the government stays apprised of all developments; she knows that there is a device called a Dirac communicator which allows for instantaneous transmission, even at interstellar distances. She is correct, but she actually has even more knowledge that she does not immediately reveal.
This is evidently one of the first stories to seriously conjecture about such a device. Later author Ursula Le Guin used such a device in her stories; she called it an "ansible," and other authors adopted that terminology. Blish later expanded "Beep" into a novel, The Quincunx of Time, which I have not read.
"Beep" explains the physics behind the Dirac communicator at considerable length. Here is a small section of that:
"...things are different in physics now than they used to be in the Twentieth Century. In those days, it was always presupposed that physics was limitless - the classic statement was made by Weyl, who said that, 'It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content.' We know now that that's not so, except in a remote, associational sort of way. Nowadays, physics is a defined and self-limited science; its scope is still prodigious, but we can no longer think of it as endless.
"This is better established in particle physics than in any other branch of the science. Half of the trouble physicists of the last century had with Euclidean geometry - and hence the reason why they evolved so many recomplicated theories of relativity - is that it's a geometry of lines, and thus can be subdivided infinitely. When Cantor proved that there really is an infinity, at least mathematically speaking, that seemed to clinch the case for the possibility of a really infinite physical universe, too."
Well, if you say so.
This goes on much further, and I was totally lost. But then it turns out that all this is just the tip of an iceberg, and that the Dirac communicator has more - and even less plausible - features. And speaking of implausible, there is a not remotely believable sort of impersonation at the heart of the story.
Not, as I said already, a story that I enjoyed, even if it did become (almost) famous.
H. L. Gold's editorial, "Help Wanted!," is a typical Gold comic essay. This follows up an earlier editorial which stated that everyone accumulates all sorts of stuff - "paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, string, glue, coat hangers and such" - but nobody ever actually buys those things. This is funny, even if the opposite of my personal experience. I wouldn't be surprised if Avram Davidson took Gold's hypothesis as one of the starting points of his Hugo-winning short story, "Or All the Seas with Oysters" (Galaxy Science Fiction, May, 1958).
Willy Ley's "For Your Information" science column in this issue is titled "Hints to Future Archeologists." Ley explains two issues that may puzzle scientists of the distant future. The first is a line of large metal spheres buried in England. These were projectiles fired while testing a "super-mortar' in the 1850s that was never used in combat. The other item is unusual steel pipes in the ocean, part of a French experiment with "a novel form of 'steam' engine" from the early 1900s. As usual, Ley also answers readers' questions, one of which dealt with global warming melting polar ice, which Ley did not see as a serious threat.
Groff Conklin's "Galaxy's Five Star Shelf" book review column is unusually interesting. Among the books he reviews is a "Best of the Year" type of anthology, Prize Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, which he praises. Conklin rather more than praises two of the novels that he discusses, Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. He loves them both, not surprising since they are both excellent and still well-known.
Interior artwork is by Ed Emshwiller (using the name Emsh), Sanford Kossin, Dick Francis, Connell, and David Stone. Some of this is pretty good. Francis has a female nude, not common in 1950s science fiction periodicals. Connell has a striking Virgil Finlay-ish picture illustrating "The Passenger"; the young woman shown reminds me of the actress Ann Sheridan. The cover by Emshwiller is titled "Spaceship Hydroponics Room"; it is competent but unexciting.
I don't love any of the fiction in this issue. The only story that I strongly dislike is "Beep," which is certainly the one that is best remembered.
●Fiction:
•"Beep" - James Blish
•"The Boys from Vespis" - Arthur Sellings
•"Pet Farm" - Roger Dee
•"Inanimate Objection" - H. Chandler Elliott
•"Project Hush" - William Tenn
•"The Passenger" - Kenneth Harmon
•"Two Timer" - Fredric Brown
▪︎"Men Like Mules" - J. T. M'Intosh
●Non-fiction:
•"For Your Information: 'Hints to Archeologists'" - Willy Ley
•"Editor's Page: 'Help Wanted!'" - H. L. Gold
•"Galaxy's Five Star Shelf" - Groff Conklin
Eight stories plus various features was a lot for one issue. Actually it is nine stories; the Fredric Brown item combines two unrelated vignettes, a speciality of Brown's, who the editorial introduction to the entry refers to as the "Old Vignette Master."
The title of the two combined short items is "Two Timer," which to me implies that both of these have something to do with time. And the first part does: "Experiment" is a witty time travel paradox tale. "Sentry" is a sort of Twilight Zone episode well before that show existed. Each of these is about one page long.
William Tenn's story "Project Hush" is also short. The United States Army plans the first manned trip to the Moon. This is considered to be the most secret of government projects. The trip goes well, but the Army crew is greeted with a surprise. This is not much more than an anecdote, but I think that it is funny.
"The Boys from Vespis" by Arthur Sellings is similar, not at all in content but somewhat in intent. At a time when interstellar travel is routine, Earth is visited by a ship from Vespis. The crew, all extraordinarily handsome men, mix with the people in a small Earth town. These visitors are all very nice folks but they bring a problem to part of the town; the Earth women in the town are so attracted to the Vespians that the men of the town can't possibly compete. But there is a solution. This seems to me to be very much a precursor to a later Sellings tale "Blank Form" (Galaxy July, 1958). (Nothing to do with either of those stories, but I remember liking Sellings' 1962 novel Telepath very much when it was first published; I wonder if I still would.)
There is one more predominantly light story in this issue, "Inanimate Objection" by H. Chandler Elliott. Two young psychiatrists are assigned to work with an inpatient, a 57 year old retired army major who firmly believes "that what we call inanimate objects have a will of their own." They think at first that the patient is "as psychotic as a jaybird." (An aside: the major's initial evaluation notes that he has a wife who says she is 35 years old, who I don't think is ever mentioned again.) As things happen in the life of one of those psychiatrists, the patient's belief seems increasingly reasonable. For one example, that psychiatrist trips due to a series of small accidents and drops the two bags of groceries he is carrying: "The door had closed decisively on a bag of eggs; a small sack of flour, disgorging at one corner, smirked raffishly against a sofa-leg."
One of the short stories in the magazine is very different in tone. In "The Passenger" by Kenneth Harmon, a young woman is returning to Earth in a spaceship after working for five years trying to teach "grubby little miners' kids" on a distant planet. Another being on the ship contacts the woman telepathically and invites her to join him in his room on the ship. In my last review on Goodreads of an issue of Galaxy, I noted of one story: This is a sort of science fiction tale, I suppose, but I think that most readers would place it primarily in a different genre. "The Passenger" is also in that genre. The science fiction and fantasy website ISFDb does not list any other stories in this field by Mr. Harmon.
Three men and a high-functioning robot come to the bleak planet Falak in "Pet Farm" by Roger Dee. There are humans still living on the planet, although it had long been under the control of an alien race, the Hymenops, known as the Bees. The remaining humans all appear to be young, no more than twenty-five, Piles of bones show that all the older people are dead, having died at ten year intervals. But there are other beings on Falak, which have some power over humans. "Pet Farm" is part of a three-story series by Dee about this ship and its efforts to help those humans who survived life under the Hymenops.
For no particular reason, I thought that "Men Like Mules" by J. T. M'Intosh would be about humans used as beasts of burden. Not even close - it just meant people as stubborn as mules. (By the way, it seems incredibly unlikely to me that millennia in the future people on other planets will be saying that someone is "as stubborn as a mule.") The story is narrated by the captain of a group of spaceships sent to Earth to evacuate the few thousand people left there before the weakened sun dies totally. The problem is that almost all the people of Earth refuse to leave. The remaining population of the Earth has plans to stay alive even after the sun expires. But the people who have come to carry out the evacuation are under orders to remove everybody still living on Earth. The captain and his lieutenant, who is also his sister, both fall in love with Earth people and those relationships do not go entirely smoothly. This seems to me to be a story with few surprises, and most of those involve the romantic relationships rather than the main plot. Also, humanity does not seem to have changed in any way over the centuries.
I didn't much like the longest story in this issue, "Beep" by James Blish, but it is still well regarded. This begins as a spy story, in which a part of the central government of Earth - and, consequently, of the galaxy - seems to have some amazing source of knowledge of events throughout the many worlds, although there is still no known way that someone could immediately know what is happening lightyears away. A young woman news reporter comes to the head of the appropriate government agency and says that she has learned how the government stays apprised of all developments; she knows that there is a device called a Dirac communicator which allows for instantaneous transmission, even at interstellar distances. She is correct, but she actually has even more knowledge that she does not immediately reveal.
This is evidently one of the first stories to seriously conjecture about such a device. Later author Ursula Le Guin used such a device in her stories; she called it an "ansible," and other authors adopted that terminology. Blish later expanded "Beep" into a novel, The Quincunx of Time, which I have not read.
"Beep" explains the physics behind the Dirac communicator at considerable length. Here is a small section of that:
"...things are different in physics now than they used to be in the Twentieth Century. In those days, it was always presupposed that physics was limitless - the classic statement was made by Weyl, who said that, 'It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content.' We know now that that's not so, except in a remote, associational sort of way. Nowadays, physics is a defined and self-limited science; its scope is still prodigious, but we can no longer think of it as endless.
"This is better established in particle physics than in any other branch of the science. Half of the trouble physicists of the last century had with Euclidean geometry - and hence the reason why they evolved so many recomplicated theories of relativity - is that it's a geometry of lines, and thus can be subdivided infinitely. When Cantor proved that there really is an infinity, at least mathematically speaking, that seemed to clinch the case for the possibility of a really infinite physical universe, too."
Well, if you say so.
This goes on much further, and I was totally lost. But then it turns out that all this is just the tip of an iceberg, and that the Dirac communicator has more - and even less plausible - features. And speaking of implausible, there is a not remotely believable sort of impersonation at the heart of the story.
Not, as I said already, a story that I enjoyed, even if it did become (almost) famous.
H. L. Gold's editorial, "Help Wanted!," is a typical Gold comic essay. This follows up an earlier editorial which stated that everyone accumulates all sorts of stuff - "paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, string, glue, coat hangers and such" - but nobody ever actually buys those things. This is funny, even if the opposite of my personal experience. I wouldn't be surprised if Avram Davidson took Gold's hypothesis as one of the starting points of his Hugo-winning short story, "Or All the Seas with Oysters" (Galaxy Science Fiction, May, 1958).
Willy Ley's "For Your Information" science column in this issue is titled "Hints to Future Archeologists." Ley explains two issues that may puzzle scientists of the distant future. The first is a line of large metal spheres buried in England. These were projectiles fired while testing a "super-mortar' in the 1850s that was never used in combat. The other item is unusual steel pipes in the ocean, part of a French experiment with "a novel form of 'steam' engine" from the early 1900s. As usual, Ley also answers readers' questions, one of which dealt with global warming melting polar ice, which Ley did not see as a serious threat.
Groff Conklin's "Galaxy's Five Star Shelf" book review column is unusually interesting. Among the books he reviews is a "Best of the Year" type of anthology, Prize Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, which he praises. Conklin rather more than praises two of the novels that he discusses, Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. He loves them both, not surprising since they are both excellent and still well-known.
Interior artwork is by Ed Emshwiller (using the name Emsh), Sanford Kossin, Dick Francis, Connell, and David Stone. Some of this is pretty good. Francis has a female nude, not common in 1950s science fiction periodicals. Connell has a striking Virgil Finlay-ish picture illustrating "The Passenger"; the young woman shown reminds me of the actress Ann Sheridan. The cover by Emshwiller is titled "Spaceship Hydroponics Room"; it is competent but unexciting.
I don't love any of the fiction in this issue. The only story that I strongly dislike is "Beep," which is certainly the one that is best remembered.
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