Black Gate

The cover of this issue gives Robert Silverberg’s byline as “Bob Silverberg,” though the Table of Contents shows “Robert Silverberg.” Bob Silverberg seems to have been given as his byline on a few stories (including his first publication), as well as some letters.

The cover is by Albert Nuetzell, showing a spaceship and some people investigating an archaeological site, presumably on another planet, complete with strange writing and an enormous stone humanoid head (click on the image at left for a bigger version). It doesn’t go with any of the stories in the magazine. Interior illustrations are by Mel Varga and by Virgil Finlay.

Norman Lobsenz’ very brief editorial is about Project Ozma, Frank Drake’s pioneering attempt to detect signals from intelligent extraterrestrials using radio. S. E. Cotts’ brief book review column, The Spectroscope, covers Benjamin Appel’s The Funhouse, Murray Leinster’s The Pirates of Zan, and Adam Lukens’ The Sea People.

The letters in “Or So You Say …” come from Jacqueline Brice, Jess Nash, Bob Adolfsen, Paul H. Taylor, Frank H. Terrell, and Dr. Raymond Wallace, none of those names familiar to me. The biggest common theme is praise for Alan Nourse’s novel Star Surgeon.

The stories are:

Novel:

Seven from the Stars, by Marion Zimmer Bradley (42,800 words)

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A bit of a change of pace here, a late ’60s issue of Galaxy. Frederik Pohl was the editor. It is billed as the “Seventeenth Anniversary Issue, and the conceit is that the contributors are all celebrating an anniversary in the field. For example, Pohl himself published a poem in an SF magazine in 1937, making this his 30^th anniversary. George O. Smith’s first story was published in 1942, so his 25^th anniversary. H. L. Gold is here as the founding editor. Fair enough. The contributor that puzzles me is Roger Zelazny. The cover says “representing his 17^th anniversary, but never explains that. This was the fifth anniversary of his first published story. Does it mean he started reading SF in 1950? I don’t know – it’s not explained at all.

The cover is by Gray Morrow, illustrating Gold’s story accurately enough. Interiors are by Gaughan, Morrow, and R. Dorfman (his or her only appearance, according to the ISFDB, in SF). Willy Ley contributes a science essay in his “For Your Information” series, which ran from 1952 through 1969. This one, “The Worst of all the Comets,” is about the great comet of 1680, which has a 574 year period, and which one writer speculated was the comet that caused the Biblical Flood (by raining water on the Earth when it passed very close). Pohl’s brief editorial is about the changes since his poem was published, in 1937.

Algis Budrys’ Galaxy Bookshelf covers Damon Knight’s anthology Worlds to Come (he objects that too many of the stories aren’t really SF), a reissue of Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (which, Budrys reminds us, is really a play), Robert A. Heinlein’s landmark collection The Past Through Tomorrow (his big Future History collection, which Budrys praises highly), and, most significantly, Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection. In the Thomas Disch piece just reprinted in Stories for Chip Disch writes of Delany telling him happily that Budrys had declared him (Delany) the best SF writer in the world. I don’t know if this is the review that prompted Delany’s happiness (apparently it was his review of Nova), but it would certainly make one happy. One quote: “The man simply operates on a plane that Robert Heinlein never dreamed of.”

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Here’s an issue from the first year of Cele Goldsmith’s tenure, and a significant month for me – I was born October 5, 1959. It has an interesting mix of authors – the first (and arguably only) SF novel by a Grand Master, a fine early story by one of my personal favorite writers in the field, and four stories by obscure names (though one of those at least is a pseudonym for a fairly well-known writer).

The cover is by Leo Summers, and depicts some sort of anti-spaceship installation hidden in a small asteroid, firing on a spaceship. Interiors are by Summers and Finlay (with one uncredited). There is a cartoon by “Frosty.”

Norman Lobsenz contributes his usual brief editorial, this one referring to Eric Frank Russell’s attack on astronomy as an “inexact science.” S. E. Cotts’ book review column, The Spectroscope, was at this time only allotted two pages. The reviews are of George O. Smith’s The Fourth R (fairly positive), Brian Aldiss’ collection No Time Like Tomorrow (very positive), and Jeff Sutton’s Bombs in Orbit (mistitled, amusingly, Bombos in Orbit in the review), not too positively.

The letter column, “… Or So You Say”, has mostly short letters, with only one name I recognized (Paul Zimmer, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s brother). The other letter writers are Edward J. Lynch (liked Silverberg’s “Collision Course”), Paul Shingleton (hated “Collision Course”, even though Bob S. is his favorite author), W. C. Brandt (loved “Collision Course”), Zimmer (seemed snarky about Doc Smith though it’s hard to say), Dave Boyer (loved stories by Sheckley and Douglas), David Locke (hated Doc Smith), Clark Peterson (is in favor of book length novels in the magazine), and Harry Thomas (defending Doc Smith from his detractors). Those who know fandom better than I remember David Locke particularly, as an active fan and letter writer, and also Shingleton and Brandt.

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