(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Chrononauts main theme)
introductions, non-podcast reads
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast.
I'm Nate and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Gretchen and JM. How are you guys doing tonight?
JM:
Yeah doing well. It'd been a little bit of a busy few weeks for me with work and other stuff and yeah finally it was starting to get warm. But now we're back down to like minus 17 Celsius, so today I woke up and I'm like oh uh the respite we were promised is not really here yet. But another couple weeks and it should be fine. Going to see a couple bands later this month Blood Incantation and I guess it'll be my second time seeing Emperor. I don't know. I don't really listen to them a lot these days, but they're an important thing in the 90s in my musical evolution I guess, so yeah it should be cool. My friend's birthday coming up so it's a bit of a celebration there as well, so yeah.
Gretchen:
I've been doing pretty good. I had my second meeting of my sci-fi book club on Wednesday and I first wasn't sure if I would be able to do it since I hadn't been feeling very well earlier this week, but powered through it. Got two people, which was nice. Same people from the first two meetings, so we have retained members, which was what I was hoping for, and that was really cool. I had a good discussion about the book and yeah the weather here seemed to be getting a lot better. It was pretty warm today, although I think that it's dropping back down to like below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, so I'm not sure if it's gonna last too long.
Nate:
Yeah well it's good to hear you're feeling better. I think we're gonna be in the 70s next week or a week or two temperature wise, that is Fahrenheit not Celsius. But yeah I know it's been doing pretty okay here. Have you guys been reading anything interesting in the last couple weeks?
JM:
I've been reading quite a bit. I probably won't remember everything, but I'll just mention or everything but I will just mention a couple of things. Recently I read "Captain Blood" by Rafael Sabatini and I really really enjoyed that. It was a lot of fun. Good adventure writing, lots of naval battles and some interesting historical stuff as it takes place in the 17th century. I realized reading this that this is pretty much the basis for every single Running Wild album since they started singing about pirates and stuff. Really really fun. Lots of humor actually, which was kind of surprising, and lots of dastardly doings from Spaniards, Frenchmen and Englishmen, so then just "Captain Blood" standing above everything with his sense of honor and everything. He doesn't really want to be a pirate, but he's just kind of dragged into it and he's the best pirate in the world, so it was a lot of fun. I had a great time with that and there's some sequels. I don't know if I'll read them. Rafael Sabatini is pretty good. I enjoyed this style because it was sort of chatty from this omniscient point of view and he kept saying things like well I don't know if I'm doing my job properly but if I am you should be kind of feeling like this. It's just cute. I enjoyed it a lot.
Also read "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M. Cain and yeah that was really good. I liked it a lot better than the movie from the 1940s with what's his name John Garfield and Lana Turner. I didn't really and I didn't think that movie was too great. I thought I saw somebody refer to it as a weaker "Double Indemnity" and that sounds just about right. The book was really good though. Pretty hardcore noir. The feeling of the Great Depression is all over this thing. It was published in 1934 or 1933 I believe and it just dirty and gritty. A couple of people meet in a rather hopeless circumstances and yeah it's just things. Everything goes wrong from there and it was pretty good.
One thing continuing my kind of noir streak I also read "Kiss Me Deadly" by Mickey Spillane, and yeah I mean Mickey Spillane as a person probably sucked. And he's pretty much epitomizes the macho really really I guess sleazy but without really going all the way. It's kind of like frustrating, but you know it's like the early 50s and I guess he can only get away with so much. But like it's really one of the other books before and his detective character is Mike Hammer and he's pretty much this like vigilante who just thinks that he can stop and beat and kick and shoot his way through everything and usually he does. But the reason I read the book, which was quite fun by the way not great but fun, the reason why I read the book is because I was really interested in seeing the film version which was made a couple years later. And the film version is really a deconstruction of all that and the people that made the film director Robert Aldrich and I can't remember the name of the screenwriter but they very obviously held Mickey Spillane's main character in contempt and they just pretty much created something really different and cool with the basic idea of the storyline. And it gets stranger and stranger the more it goes on and by the end it's almost like you're watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark or something". It's one of the most bizarre noirish kind of movies I've ever seen, maybe the most actually, and it's just I feel like reading the book first was a unique experience and and I kind of am glad I did it that way. But I'm not sure I can really recommend the book because yeah it's especially if you're a sensitive modern reader it's probably very outputting. But the movie was amazing so it's interesting, you know, kind of like a "Starship Troopers" kind of feeling. Usually people are like well if you don't respect the source material why you make the movie, but I don't know. Sometimes maybe maybe it works, you know. Maybe maybe it's okay to do that.
And the last thing I want to talk about I'll try and be brief because I've been going on but is a short story collection called "Son of the Wolf" by Jack London and this was a series of stories set in the northwest of Canada mostly about people in the late 1800s during the Klondike Gold Rush period and really really well written. Sort of uncomfortable at times because there's a lot of stuff with race relations between the white settlers and the Inuit and other native peoples and I don't know. London handles it in an interesting way. There's a lot of relationships being discussed and a lot of loneliness and desolation and a couple of the stories were really really good actually, just kind of up there among the best short stories I've read recently. The vibe was really interesting and kind of a lot of the same characters appear throughout the stories, so it's an interesting experience different than the other London short story collections I've read which tend to have different subject matter. This was all surviving in nature in minus 50 degree weather and like how are people we're going to survive and all the dogs and the men and their relationship with the native women especially and stuff like that. And yeah it's definitely a relic of its time, but I really enjoyed it. So yeah that's about it for me for now, but yeah.
Gretchen:
Well I know that last time we were recording I had been reading "Lost Illusions" by Honoré de Balzac and rereading Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness", both of which I did finish. It was really great to revisit Le Guin's work. I think that "The Dispossessed" might be my favorite of the ones that I've read by her so far, but "The Left Hand of Darkness" is just a really great work and has just really interesting ideas about nations and our relationship to home and exile and as well as very interesting things about gender. I really just love Le Guin's writing style. Just whenever I read her work it's great to read after reading Honoré de Balzac's "Lost Illusions", which I also really enjoyed. It felt really sad finishing it. I'd been about 600-700 pages, so it felt kind of like saying goodbye to people I had been spending a long time with. I did end up reading a couple of short stories in a collection of Balzacs that I had called just "The Human Comedy" I believe and those were really interesting. It was weird to read some of his more very contained works, but I think he still has like characterization both of the characters themselves and like the settings. He really excels at making you feel that you're in this time and place.
After that I also read for the second meeting of the sci-fi book club I chose "Chain-Gang All-Stars" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and he was a short story writer from UAlbany. He actually was an alumni there and I got to meet him when he was on campus once and he was really great, great to listen to him. So I chose his debut novel for the book club because I've been wanting to read it, so I was like oh make everyone else read it with me. And I thought that was a really great work. I love when sci-fi not just nonfiction but fiction in general has footnotes and he includes a lot of those because he's writing about the prison industrial complex in the US and taking like a spin on reality tv show and the prison industrial complex and I thought that it was a really a really good work. And it was really cool to talk about that with a couple of people as well.
And besides that I also have read a couple of short stories in the Galaxy collection where I found my two stories that we'll be reading for this episode and I really enjoyed the works that I've read besides the two I chose in there as well. And one of them I read from a writer that was also picked for tonight, although I did like the the story that I read in in that book a little better, but we'll get to that author soon. But yeah so that's uh mostly been what I've been reading.
Nate:
Cool. Was "A Passion in the Desert" one of the Balzac stories that were in that collection you read?
Gretchen:
I believe that is part of the collection. It's not one that I've gotten to yet. I haven't read the full collection, just sort of like the beginning couple of stories.
Nate:
Okay yeah that's definitely one of my favorites. It's really really good. Yeah but yeah I've been reading mostly short stories really. I said last time I started the collection "The Best of Fritz Leiber", which I finished. I found the stories a little bit uneven. That's not to say some were bad, but some were definitely way better than others. I think my favorite out of that collection was "A Pail of Air", which was just absolutely absolutely fantastic.
JM:
Oh yeah that's that's a really good one.
Nate:
Yeah yeah it really is and it was published in Galaxy Magazine, which we'll be talking a lot about tonight. And JM you mentioned Mickey Spillane earlier and his story that appears in there "The Night He Cried" is pretty much a riff on Mickey Spillane in a pretty hilarious way and I thought that was one of the other major highlights of that collection.
JM:
Yeah "The Night He Cried" right.
Nate:
Yeah yeah yeah.
JM:
Yeah yeah. I was gonna mention that. I was talking to Gretchen about that earlier because despite Mickey Spillane being really really popular in the 50s it's pretty obvious that a lot of people who are I guess of a more intellectual bent especially maybe of a non-conservative bent were not really fans of his. I don't know. Maybe the fact that Mickey Spillane was friends with Ayn Rand who I'm going to mention a little more this episode it's sort of a little bit telling I guess. So yeah Leiber wanted to sort of satirize him in there.
Nate:
Yeah he certainly does.
Gretchen:
Yeah but funny enough one of the stories I'd read it before but I decided to reread it from the Galaxy collection was Leiber's "Coming Attraction". Yeah that was cool. We all kind of revisited something relating to Leiber.
Nate:
Yeah definitely interesting collection of stories. It's all of his science fiction stuff, none of his sword and sorcery stuff. But yeah a really good collection. I certainly enjoyed pretty much everything in there.
Then I returned back to the "Arabian Nights" with volume five. This one has "The Ebony Horse", which is the other short story piece that we covered during episode one. And I think I misspoke last time when I said that "The City of Brass" was in volume four. As I checked the table of contents in volume six and that's where a another story "The City of Brass" appears. The thing that I read in volume four is a part of another story where a guy goes to I guess The City of Brass. I don't know if it's the same city of brass and it has a bunch of weird stuff in there, so I'm actually not sure what I read for episode one considering that was like six years ago, which is kind of crazy to say. But yeah volume five in addition to "The Ebony Horse" it has like a lot of really really really short stories. I think there's something like 80 or so in that collection. Some of the short stories are literally just like one paragraph long. And there's one really interesting part in the middle of it where a number of wise learned men question this slave woman who is more or less knowledgeable about everything under the sun. So we're basically treated to a whole natural history treatise of what was known in the world at that time from religion to astronomy to biology to you know all kinds of stuff. And it's just like a really fascinating historical look in the way that a lot of those other stories don't really touch upon of you know what was actually like known about the world.
Yeah definitely interesting stuff.
So yeah I'm about three quarters away through that volume, so I guess we'll see where the rest of it goes. But yeah that's what I've been up to since last time.
Certainly eager to get into tonight, but before we do that you can find us on all the major podcast platforms on Spotify and Apple. We post our episodes on YouTube and you can follow us on facebook.comchrononautspodcast or on twitter at @ChrononautsSF or you can visit our Blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com where we post a number of text and translations. In particular there's tons of new translations up since last time where I've been finishing up the remainder of the Spanish language stories that were published in the Argentine magazine Más Allá, which you don't have to get too ahead of ourselves we'll be talking about in depth next time. There's basically only one more story from that magazine left to be translated, which hopefully we should have up by our next episode where we're going to be talking about that in depth. So you can read pretty much almost the complete Más Allá set right now and I encourage you to do so because there's some really really cool stories in there. But you can also send us an email at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com or leave a comment on any of our platforms and we will try to get back to you in a reasonable manner.
JM:
Gretchen I was just wondering if you wanted to plug your science fiction book club a little bit on the podcast, a little more talk about it.
Gretchen:
Yeah yeah. I am now after graduating from University of Albany working at the Albany Public Library and at my branch we have started doing the sci-fi book club, which we will be doing every month. I'm really looking forward to continuing to choose some good picks. I'm hoping to kind of alternate between a more classic or an older work and a more contemporary newer work, which is why I decided on Left Hand of Darkness and then going into this very recent book by Adjei-Brenyah. Next time this month of March we're actually going to be reading "Kindred", so it'll be great to reread that one as Nate and JM know from my host choice a couple of years ago it is a favorite of mine. So I'm really looking forward to getting into that with with more people and hearing their perspectives on it.
Nate:
Nice yeah just avoid the TV show.
Gretchen:
Yes yeah yeah.
JM:
I think I think that's a really cool approach and I definitely considered following on an older work with a contemporary one on Chrononauts before and we'll probably do that some more in the future. But yeah if you're in the Albany area you know what to do right, so yeah.
(music: space signals)
Galaxy magazine background
JM:
Well now that we've got all that preliminary stuff out of the way we're going to talk about a really cool magazine today.
Nate:
Yeah and as we've talked about on Chrononauts before I think it's important to cover not only what the readers are reading and why you know like the individual stories and analyze them, but since we're a history podcast we also like to cover where the readers are reading these stories and how they're reading them. And the science fiction magazine was the backbone of the genre through most of its formative period in the 20th century and tonight we're going to be talking about and covering what is arguably the last science fiction magazine from the United States with this kind of massive influence over the genre.
We've talked about magazines specifically in previous episodes, namely in episode 15 where we covered the very very early magazines up to Amazing Stories. Then we talked about Amazing Stories generally considered to be the first science fiction magazine in the world in episode 31 and we talked about Astounding in two episodes, the early days in episode 38 and specifically the July 1939 episode of Astounding in episode 40. So if you're interested in our previous magazine dives take a look at those. We also briefly touched upon Planet Stories a couple episodes back when we talked about Leigh Brackett's "Enchantress of Venus" that we did into a full episode on Planet Stories. I think some of the stuff we talked about in that episode is going to be very very relevant to what we're going to be talking about tonight.
So between 1939 and 1950, 1950 being when Galaxy launched in 1939 being that very important influential issue of Astounding, there were quite a few major changes in the publishing industry. So in 1939 Penguin Books opened up their American arm under Ian Valentine. The first Pocket Books, which was imitated by Avon Books in 1941, came out and then the Popular Library was launched in 1942. Additionally the comic book industry massively massively begins to grow.
So yeah we're going to be taking a look at a number of books from the background piece. And since we are a history and literature podcast we encourage you to check out these books, which we'll just mention up front.
So Mike Ashley is probably the foremost scholar of the science fiction magazine.
JM:
Just an amazing amazing fountain of knowledge about the magazine culture, everything from how the magazines work but also individual stories that he thinks are worth highlighting and stuff. I mean I remember just looking through those books and writing down all the stories that looked interesting that he decided to highlight. Just like oh wow there's a lot of stuff here. He's definitely an invaluable resource.
Nate:
Yeah for sure and his book "Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970" talks about not only Galaxy in depth but pretty much the entire publishing industry during this time. We're also going to be taking a look at David L. Rosheim's "Galaxy Magazine: The Dark and the Light Years", which is pretty much a chronological list of all the stories in publication order in Galaxy, though it does contain some behind the scenes history as well. And there's also a collection of Horace Gold's editorials from Galaxy who was the first editor of the magazine which we'll be taking a look at in a bit. But yeah there's an amazing quote in the Mike Ashley book where he says "writing in the early 1950s psychiatrist Fredric Wertham remarked if I were asked to express in a single sentence what has happened mentally to many American children during the last decade I would know better formula than to say that they were conquered by Superman."
And indeed comics in the 1940s sold in huge huge numbers. By 1949 a total of 750 million total units were sold and that just sounds like an unreal number to just say out loud. So I mean these weren't just Superman comics obviously, but everything in the industry. But it's still like a staggeringly huge number.
JM:
Yeah, it really is. Yeah.
Nate:
But on top of that changes were happening in the science fiction magazine market. So in 1949, Street and Smith closed all of their pulp magazines with Astounding being the only one to survive as they wanted to move into the slicks. Likewise Howard Browne took over Amazing in January of 1950, whose reputation had been seriously hurt by the Shaver mysteries, and Browne had the idea that Amazing would be better off as a slick. Publishers were moving in general to a digest format instead of a pulp format. The digest formats were smaller and physical sized than the pulps presumably to compete with the blossoming paperback book industry.
So this is the environment that Galaxy launches in and tonight we're going to be taking a look at the magazine and six stories that appeared in it. But before we get into the weeds of the magazine itself Galaxy's first editor was Horace Gold and had his editorials in Galaxy published in a standalone book "What Will They Think of Last? SF for Fun and Profit from the Inside." Galaxy's second editor Frederik Pohl has a great memoir "The Way the Future Was: A Memoir" where he discusses Galaxy at length.
JM:
And that's an amazing memoir of that time period, just very very personal. So you're gonna have to take some of what he says with a grain of salt maybe, but at the same time it's really good to have that on the ground experience. I don't think there's anything better really for learning about what this was this was actually like. And he has a lot to say about that time in the magazine and Horace Gold and some of the people that he had to work with for better or worse.
Nate:
Yeah and he is just a really good writer in general, not only in his fiction but his nonfiction too. He just has a really good voice and he's funny and informative and yeah I mean some of these books can get a little bit dry at times, but Pohl's writing really never does.
So the first editor was Horace Gold, who was both a science fiction author who had been published in Astounding and Unknown but also an assistant editor at Stanford magazines in the early 40s reading manuscripts for Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder, and Captain Future. Gold served in world war two and suffered from PTSD stemming from an incident in the Pacific in 1945, which resulted in agoraphobia that grew increasingly severe over the years. But by the late 1940s he basically never left his apartment where he spent all this time working.
JM:
Yeah it seems like a really sad story.
Yeah it does. So in 1949 Gold was approached by a Vera Cerutti who worked for an Italian company named Edizione Mondiale who had opened offices up in New York to expand their publishing into the American market. And when he was asked what type of magazine should they launch to expand into the U.U. market Gold of course said science fiction, specifically a "place for a serious high quality science fiction magazine to attract top quality authors by paying a rate of three cents a word. In comparison to most magazines one cent per word, Astounding was more or less the leader in the field at the time and they offered three cents a word only as a bonus, not to everything they published."
Gold was particularly disillusioned with Campbell moving Astounding in the direction of dianetics and he wanted something that was more "pure" science fiction unlike the new magazine The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction founded in 1949. As Gold said "readers don't like fantasy in their sf or sf in their fantasy. A very high-grade sf magazine could fit right in between them."
So Frederik Pohl said that Gold "held a series of parties conferences and brain-picking sessions in his apartment in Stuyvesant Town, New York. He involved any number of people Theodore Sturgeon, Willy Ley, Groff Conklin, W. I. van der Poel, and Martin Gardner are the names that come to mind, but there are plenty of others myself among them and we talked and talked and hoarse listened and listened." And Pohl felt that was a long shot and a fifty-fifty chance of it ever even launching and goes on to say "Horace used the telephone as a cattle prod more efficiently than any other editor i've known. I let him prod me into sending over a few manuscripts from my vast store. He read them fast, reported fast and paid fast for the ones he bought. I began to believe the magazine was real. Then when a messenger turned up at my office the hot off the press copy of the first issue I even began to believe that it was going to be good."
So this first issue appears in October of 1950 in digest format. The cover design was less lurid than a lot of the other pulps, trying to communicate that it was a serious magazine but still science fiction. It had a white banner around the cover art with a recognizable logo, making it a much more sharply branded look than some of the pulp covers, which while they're definitely fun can be kind of all over the place with the graphic design. As I mentioned before we did talk about Planet Stories a couple episodes back in the Leigh Bracket "Enchantress of Venus" episode and JM you did a rather dramatic reading of the you'll never see it in Galaxy.
JM:
The before and after. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah right.
JM:
Is it a western? Is it a science fiction story?
Nate:
Yeah but they print that on the back of Galaxy issue number one, really trying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the field from the start. And you know I get it. I was kind of thinking about this and you know in the 90s when I was like starting to get into metal and stuff like that I was like sick of all the bands that sounded like Darkthrone and At the Gates because like everything that was coming out at the time just sounded like that. And you when you're in the time you can kind of get sick of that stuff just being turned out over and over again when you're in it. And I do find those planetary romance sci-fi western stuff now fun looking back on it 75 years later, but I can definitely see how a reader in 1950, 1948, 1949 would just get sick of that stuff being published to death. I mean even when we talked about the 1930s in our fanzine episode a lot of people were complaining about the Tom Sawyer on jupiter type stories. I mean like yeah it's fun nowadays, but when everything out there is like that you really want something different and that's basically what Galaxy is promising that you're going to get.
So L. Sprague de Camp describes Gold's personality and editing style quite succinctly saying "Gold is a zealously hardworking perfectionist. He sets an extremely high standard of literary excellence for his writers who often complain of the amount of rewriting and revision required of them."
JM:
Yeah so I thought this was interesting because Campbell would definitely try and push his writers in a certain direction in Astounding. But he was generally he was not rewriting the stories as far as I know. He said he had too much work to do for that. He would try to encourage the writers to do their own work and also try and improve their writing as he saw it and how many of them also saw it. But apparently some people were not happy with Gold's actual attempts to rewrite the stories from an ideological perspective and try to shift them more towards I guess a certain type of ideology, which maybe we'll see as the stories go on. Maybe we won't. We'll see we'll see right.
Nate:
Yeah definitely. I mean Heinlein was one of these people who was furious as Gold had more or less rewritten his novel "The Puppet Masters", which he just hated. He thought it was good the way it was and I believe the version that was published as a standalone novel is how Heinlein wanted it, not Gold's rewritten version that appeared in Galaxy. But this is just one of the many classics to appear in Galaxy during the early days. There's almost too many to name during Gold's editorship, so some of the others include "To Serve Man", by Damon Knight. Galaxy's first major story was "The Fireman" by Ray Bradbury, which formed the basis of his book "Fahrenheit 451", which ran in the February 1951 issue. Tons and tons of Fritz Leiber, including "The Big Time". A great deal of Frederik Pohl including his collaborations with C. M. Kornbluth, "Gravy Planet", which would later be titled "The Space Merchants" when it was published in book form.
JM:
Rod Serling used quite a few of these.
Nate:
Yeah he definitely did yeah both of the classic bester novels were published in Galaxy, namely "The Demolished Man" and "The Stars My Destination", despite the fact that Gold wrote in an editorial "I'm psick of psi pstories," and yet the pstuff pstill comes out of authors." I thought that was a little cute remark that he made there.
But by 1951 Galaxy's sales were well in excess of 100 000 units, far outselling Astounding. And they had a companion publication to the magazine, which was Galaxy Science Fiction Novels, that was published between 1950 and 1961 that as you can tell by the name published standalone novels with 46 entries in total. Galaxy also expanded its reach to radio with its stories being adopted by Dimension X and later they're very popular and influential X Minus One.
By the late 1950s though Gold's health starts to deteriorate, including worsening agoraphobia from his war trauma, and he found it hard to keep up with a monthly schedule. So the magazine shifts to bi-monthly. Pohl starts providing editorial assistance in mid 1959 and becomes managing editor in 1961 after Gold is forced to retire after getting into a car accident that basically made it impossible for him to work. According to Rosheim "in 1957 there were 27 sf magazines. By 1962 there were only seven." I'm assuming he's referring to United States here because obviously there's more being published worldwide.
JM:
Right into the 90s, when I was reading about this stuff for the first time you know in the early 90s people were lamenting this time period. I mean I guess from one perspective you could say well it's the whittling down getting rid of the stuff that maybe wasn't that good and getting the best ones on top, but it seemed like people appreciated the fact that there was a variety of markets that they could use and that weren't all catering necessarily towards the same kind of fence. So that Galaxy was definitely one of the survivors.
Nate:
Yeah and it survived for a couple decades longer, which we'll see.
So Pohl reshaped the magazine a bit to publish what Ashley describes as "exotic and above all different stories and ideas," giving a different character than the Gold years, but it still retained his reputation for high quality and attracted top tier talent of the field during the time including up and coming authors like Larry Niven. Zelazny's "Damnation Alley" was published during Pohl's editorship and McCaffrey, James Tiptree, Jr., Dean Koontz and while he was published previously to polls takeover of Galaxy robert silverberg was the major figure in 1960s Galaxy with Pohl purchasing basically everything that he submitted.
Pohl said of his tenure in Galaxy "I stayed with Galaxy for just about a decade. The pay was miserable. The work was never ending. It was the best job I ever had in my life."
Pohl was much less of a micromanager than Gold and didn't rewrite people's stories like Gold did, but he kept on top of his slush pile pretty aggressively and had a very quick turnaround in comparison with both Gold and Campbell with his writers. Bob Guinn the magazine's publisher acquired Galaxy in 1952 and he sold all of his magazines in 1969, causing Pohl to leave, as the new publisher Arnold Abramson wanted Pohl to work a straight nine to five schedule, which Pohl refused to do. Pohl described Guinn as saying "he was not really a publisher. He was a printing broker. Bob Guinn was an easy person to like. He had a salesman's professional affability, but he also had an innate intelligence." But conversely he says about Abramson "Galaxy didn't die. It was put to death by Arnie Abramson. As long as bob Guinn owned the magazine it paid its authors, got his copies out to his subscribers, met its obligations. Arnie Abramson simply did not perform these basic functions of a publisher."
And Pohl even remarks that at one point Hugh Hefner wanted to buy Galaxy to add to his Playboy empire, but his financial advisors talked him out of it. So who knows what would have happened in the magazine if Hefner had purchased Galaxy instead of Abramson.
But after Pohl leaves Ejler Jakobsson takes over in 1969 and lasts in the position until 1974. And after he leaves the magazine goes to four editors until its demise in 1980, namely James Baen, John J. Pierce, Hank Stine, and Floyd Kemske. 1978 was really the last year they were publishing regularly, with only three issues appearing in 1979 and one in 1980.
While the era after Pohl leaves the editor position is almost universally considered a major stepdown, it still publishes some classics including one from Pohl himself namely "Gateway", which is probably his most well-known work and one that a lot of people consider to be his best.
There was a brief revival in the 1990s with eight issues being published between 1994 and 1995 under the helm of Gold's son E. J. Gold and again in 2024 under the helm of Justin T. O'Conor Sloane, who is the great great grandson of T. O'Conor Sloane the editor of Amazing Stories between 1929 and 1938. So they just published issue number 263 in August 2024 and according to the Starship Sloane website as of January 30, 2026 they say "all material for issue number 264 has been gathered and the work begins now in putting it all together for publication. This will be a massive and exciting issue." So we'll see what holds for the future of Galaxy magazine, but it is still technically active even though the last issue that came out was about a year and a half ago. We'll see if issue 264 comes out and maybe if they're taking solicitations you can be in issue number 265.
So yeah that's basically Galaxy magazine in a nutshell and tonight we're going to be taking a look at six stories that were published between 1950 and 1970, more or less the golden years of the magazine.
JM:
Rather quite beautiful. We really have a nice 20 years worth of the classic period of the magazine going on here. We've each picked two stories and yeah it's an interesting variety of tales from a diverse kind of group of people, so I'm really looking forward to getting into talk about these. The history of the magazine itself is pretty interesting. So let's talk about our first story then, which I believe is your pick.
(music: static waves)
Katherine MacLean biography, non-spoiler discussion
Nate:
Alright, so our first story tonight appears in the first issue of Galaxy October of 1915 and it is written by Katherine MacLean who was born on January 22nd, 1925 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. But she was raised in Flushing, New York. Her father was a chemical engineer, which no doubt spawned a very early interest in her in science. Which she was always drawn to and excelled at talent-wise.
Her introduction to genre fiction was through Burroughs, namely the Tarzan novels when she was six and later "At the Earth's Core". She says that "I was ten years old and at the beach. I went into somebody's cottage and there was a pile of science fiction magazines about three feet high. I casually looked at a cover. It was a fantastic cover that said 'The Four Dimensional Cross-Section'". Which is possibly referring to "The Captured Cross-Section" by Miles J. Breuer from the February 1929 issue of Amazing Stories. Unfortunately, a lot of her interviews and reflections on the past are like decades away from these events and she seems a little bit fuzzy on the details. So it's a little bit difficult to exactly piece together what she's talking about exactly.
But she goes on to say "what was the fourth dimension? I started to read it. It was the only science fiction that I had ever read except for Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Pellucidar,' the world at the center of the earth. I was fascinated. I begged the lady of the house if I could read it. She said, oh, yes, but don't take it away. I read it and I put it back and started reading another. I read at great speed and in four hours. I had gone through a foot and a half of these magazines. I was reading at top-notch speed with rising blood pressure of excitement and interest with the universe expanding around me and the dimensions past and future and light years of distances the whole works my image of where I was was changing."
It wasn't long after that that she read and loved all the classic science fiction works from H. G. Wells. But equally influential to her was the science of life "Encyclopedia of Biology". Which caused her to contemplate a lot of things the world the universe her place in it and especially psi powers.
In high school, she worked a number of jobs. A nurses aid, a store detective, a pole store, an econ graph analysis, an antibiotic lab researcher, a food factory quality controller, an office manager, payroll bookkeeper and later a college teacher and a reporter. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Barnard College in New York and a master's in psychology. In addition to her writing work, she taught in college as an English professor. She had industrial experience in a quality-controlled biochemist position. She had experience in sterile technique and a bacteriological laboratory and hospital experience as an EKG technician.
DNA and cellular imprints on us is one of the reasons that she started writing science fiction. The idea that you know, we all evolved from single-celled life forms and that there's some kind of core structure to our molecules and our very essence of being that has been passed down through billions and billions of years. This is kind of one of the things that are involved in the story we'll be taking a look at tonight which Rossheim says is one of the few science fiction stories that really explore the subject of biology.
JM:
Yeah, so it's interesting because she does really seem to have even though the only story I had read from her before, "The Snowball Effect," is very much a sociology-based like I guess you could say soft science-based science fiction story that was published in Astounding, She really does seem to have a real interest in the hard side sciences, especially biology and we actually I mean we talked about early on how a lot of the people who were writing for Amazing for example were into the hard sciences or eventually would become so. And I guess science fiction has a reputation for being at least early on ruled by people who are perhaps more interested in that than in literature, but we haven't really seen a ton of that. And here we have somebody who really was interested in that and seems to have been I guess at least on the periphery of those fields through a lot of her young life. So it's pretty interesting to see her applying that to this story. But also commenting on it and commenting on perhaps, Nate, did you see the anecdote of her going to some kind of the science lectures and stuff like that?
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean as Rossheim says this is one of the few science fiction stories that really explore biology. And I was thinking about it. We really haven't covered a lot of stuff on Chrononauts where we deal with biological future speculation. I mean there's the stuff that was I guess you could say inspired by H. G. Wells and "Doctor Moreau" where there's like vivisection and creating creatures and stuff like that by splicing parts together, which again dates back to the "Frankenstein" story. But you know true biological speculation of what happens when you tinker with DNA or something like that or you know, I guess strange xenobiology and things like that. I mean you can definitely cite some examples of that in mainstream science fiction. But we really haven't covered a lot of those stories on Chrononauts. Even like the medically based stuff that we have covered has been that kind of like body modification stuff, you know, what happens if you splice together animals or something like that. So yeah, it's interesting that she's coming into it from that particular angle of the DNA structure itself.
So "Defense Mechanism" was her first story published in "Astounding" in 1949. However, her first work written was "Incommunicado," which she completed in 1947. But it wasn't sold and published until later in 1950.
On Horace Gold, she writes that he was "a very sweet man in the decade in which everyone was inventing a wonderful home psychotherapy system. He invented a psychotherapy system you could do over the phone. He did it to me and I did it to Lester del Rey's wife and Lester del Rey got furious. He was at the other end of the phone at his place. I just tried that everything and Evie started crying into the phone saying yes, yes. Discharging the pain of a traumatic episode. It takes a lot of pressure off your psyche. It makes you cheerful and it makes the light brighter. Lester said tell Katie 'she can't do psychotherapy over the phone. Hang up.'"
She said she was influenced by A. E. van Vogt specifically. That his background of thought was what she called it quote intensely foreign and she cites his one story "The War Against the Rull" here.
She was married three times all three of which were to science fiction authors. Her first husband was Charles Dye. Her second was David Mason and her third husband, Carl West, who she married in 1979. She wrote one of her novels "Dark Wing" also published in 1979. She won the Nebula for her novella "The Missing Man." Which she'd later expand into a novel and wrote a few dozen short stories throughout the course of her life. Her last one appearing in 1997 though her most prolific period was definitely in the 1950s.
She was the recipient of the 2011 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which is usually given to authors posthumously, but she was one of the few that it was awarded to when she was still living. And it's a cool award designed to recognize those authors that were underappreciated in their lifetime. Other recipients include Chrononauts favorites like Olaf Stapledon, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith, Judith Merril, Clare Winger Harris, and a writer we'll be talking about shortly, R. A. Lafferty. Yeah, that's right as well as many other authors we've mentioned on the podcast, but haven't covered like Stanley Weinbaum, A. Merritt, and Seabury Quinn, so she's certainly in good company there.
Around this time she gave a few interviews including a very charming interview was Samuel R. Delany at Readercon. Where he says that Sturgeon was the writer who taught him how to write science fiction. But MacLean was the writer who taught him how to write. In the same interview she also describes Theodore Sturgeon as a pan, as in a satyr, not the kitchen instrument that everybody just loses their inhibitions in Sturgeon's presence.
JM:
Yeah, well, I mean it's not really surprising. I guess we'll talk more about Sturgeon soon enough. But there's plenty of interesting stories about him and it's interesting how he's often seems to be a focal point of a lot of things. And a lot of people knew I liked him. He he's always championing other writers too. So when we talk about Lafferty soon Sturgeon will come up again. And yeah, that's he's got a story coming up in our block.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely interesting figure for sure.
Yeah, but on the nature of science fiction she says "I write about the near future because I want an excuse to read science and economics and try to find out what is going to happen next. I don't want to be surprised in the rocking chair set trembling before an alien world. I think the possibility of the human race surviving another hundred years are less than 20%. Because more and more morons are becoming armed with killing weapons."
And in response to the question of do you see science fiction primarily as a method of teaching. She says "yes, that is what it is, but that's what the kids want."
And yeah, she was a pretty voracious reader of science and nonfiction in general and she would really try her hardest to keep up on all of that stuff. Yeah, as JM, you alluded to earlier there's a really great anecdote where she was walking down Fifth Avenue and she just stumbles into an electronics convention, which I'm pretty sure was the National Convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers, which was one of the predecessor societies of the modern IEEE. Though again, she's very vague on the details and doesn't mention it. But I think it's highly likely that that's what it was. And since she's just kind of crashing this conference one of the conference organizers say something like "where's your badge? "And when she explains that she doesn't have one her name is Katherine MacLean. They're like wait, "do you mean the science fiction author?" and she was subsequently treated like a celebrity.
JM:
Yeah, *the* Katherine MacLean? You wrote that story?
Nate:
Yeah, so it's pretty funny that in that world at the time in the 50s...
JM:
It is pretty funny.
Nate:
A bunch of electrical engineers basically thought of her as a celebrity because the guy was like wow look you you wouldn't believe who just showed up at the convention here.
JM:
Yeah, that's the anecdote that I was thinking of. But also I don't know. We can we can talk about it a little bit when we start the story. But I did notice I mean she's brought up in the "Partners in Wonder" book as well and there's something in this story that I feel and I don't blame her for this some of our other writers who were perhaps not as I guess maybe not as engaged by the hard sciences like I mean as much as we like her perhaps C. L. Moore and Amelia Reynolds Long.
They seem to downplay the amount of discrimination they receive from the community and stuff like that, maybe both communities, whereas Katherine MacLean seems very aware of it. She seems to, I don’t know, “resent” is not really the right word, but she seems very quick to point it out when it happens. In this story, I feel like she’s compensating a little bit for those feelings that she’s having, not in a bad way, but you can kind of see it there a little bit in the story.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. There are definitely issues of gender addressed pretty much directly in the story, though not in ways that some later authors would address it, which I again think is an interesting thing that she brings up. But yeah, that’s pretty much all I had on her biography. She passed away kind of recently, in September of 2019. Long, productive life. Almost a hundred years old when she died. I think she was 94 or something like that. And again, yeah, her last story was from 1997, so she was writing for a fair amount of time, for sure.
JM:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I really had no idea she’d been writing that long, and she kept it up, but I didn’t know.
Yeah, I mean, her later years were infrequent with what she would write and publish. Like I said, her most prolific period was definitely in the 1950s for her fiction. But I think she really tried to keep up as much as possible. And yeah, that interview she gave at Readercon with Delany was in, was it 2011? 2012? Something like that. So she was certainly in her late 80s at the time, which is, you know, pretty impressive and cool that she was just able to get around and go to conventions. I mean, the interview itself and another one she gave at the time are a little bit rambly and kind of loose on the details of some of the stuff, but you know, you can’t really blame her for that when she’s trying to remember back on something that happened 80 years ago or so.
But yeah, so this one appeared in issue number one of “Galaxy” in October of 1950. It had pretty good company in the issue, with stories being published by Fritz Leiber. “Later Than You Think” appeared in this issue. Also a story by Theodore Sturgeon, “The Stars Are the Styx,” as well as a story by Isaac Asimov, “Darwinian Pool Room.” So the magazine was definitely off to a strong start with some of these authors.
But yeah, what do we think of this one?
JM:
I thought it was really good. To me, this was like an interestingly timeless story. It felt like it could have been written any time in the past few years and it would have been just as— it really doesn’t feel—people are always talking about old science fiction and how dated it is by this and that and the other thing, and for the most part I didn’t get that from this, especially from the story content itself. There is definitely some compensation for the fact that perhaps she has to stand strong on certain things because one of her main characters is a woman doctor, and she just very specifically needs that. It feels like she has to point out that the woman is a doctor, like, along with everybody else, right? It’s hard to explain how she does it in the story, but you could tell she feels like she’s battling against something. There’s this preconception, I guess, that while the woman is there, she must be there for some other purpose. She’s obviously not a doctor or something like that. And she feels like, yeah, she has to point out in one very clear sentence that’s not dialogue: yes, she is. And you can tell that she feels like she has to do this. It’s probably based on her own experiences.
In “Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965,” he’s got this slightly wacky theory that because there were a lot of women published in these magazines, there was like no discrimination at all. We kind of figure, well, the truth is probably in the middle, and there are some cases where it did happen definitively. And even he points out that MacLean seems to have had a number of negative experiences that colored her presentation of certain things. So it’s something you see in the story. But in another sense, I feel that this story was, yeah, very modern. I would not necessarily have guessed this was a 1950 science fiction story just by reading it the way it was. Nate, I think you pointed out it could have been on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” easily.
Nate:
Yeah, that was like the first thing that popped into my mind. I could easily picture the Enterprise crew coming to this planet, and then this thing starts to happen that happens to these people, which we’ll get into, and then they have to wrap it up by the end of this episode. She doesn’t exactly do it in the way that “Star Trek” would wrap it up here, but you know, we’ll get to that when we get to that. But yeah, it’s interesting how, I guess, it does feel decades ahead of its time. And the issues of gender that she brings in here are again interesting, in that we can spend a lot of time talking about how many women science fiction authors there were. I mean, I think if we decided to dedicate the rest of Chrononauts to women science fiction authors, we would probably never run out of titles and stories to cover.
But when you look at the electrical engineering environment, when she crashed that, most likely, Institute of Radio Engineers conference, there were almost no women in that space at all.
JM:
Right.
Nate:
I mean, you could think of like a handful, and by a handful I mean like less than five, maybe. I mean, for the most part it was overwhelmingly, almost entirely men, much more so than the author field for sure. And since she had what sounds like a pretty productive career outside of writing, especially in the biological sciences, I’d imagine she encountered a lot more discrimination in that realm than she might have in the science fiction world, right?
JM:
That’s why it made me think, again, that some of the other writers didn’t really talk about this, because they weren’t as engaged by those things—somebody like Margaret St. Clair, or yeah, like we mentioned before, C. L. Moore or Amelia Reynolds Long. They just had other interests and science fiction just happened to be what they were writing.
Gretchen:
No, I also though really enjoyed this story. Yeah, it was very clear that she had a bit more professional experience with the sciences. And I think it is interesting to see this experience along with the literary experience that she had as an English professor. I feel like it's really a mix of both of that and something that yeah you may not see in a Moore or Reynolds or even like St. Clair. But I think what's really interesting relating to these other authors is there is through the story we do have a sort of romantic element here. But I think what's interesting is that seeing that subversion from other authors that may have had this interest in romance and in sort of these more emotional genres is there's also by the end you get like a very strong sense of like horror and unease about what is happening to these characters, and I really like that MacLean here seems to be blending a couple of genres into the science fiction that we're reading. I will say I'll probably elaborate a little bit more after we go through the summary. I started at kind of anticipating a twist in what the title alludes to, "Contagion", and I think that MacLean approaches what the contagion is and both like a very literal sense and also like a more metaphorical sense.
I really like this one. I will say that some of the stories that we'll be covering here tonight I have a bit of a mixed review on some of them, but I really enjoyed this one.
Nate:
Yeah, likewise.
JM:
So next week we're going to be talking about Margaret St. Clair and in the 1940s, late, late 40s she actually wrote an article for Writer's Digest where she was talking about how science fiction is actually a good field for women to write in. But again, I think she's coming at this from a quite different angle and she was equally at home, she kind of got her start with "Weird Tales" and stuff like that and it's a very different kind of thing and again, there were certainly a lot of women writing for different fields in different genres. I think again, maybe Galaxy is a contrast to something like Astounding. I mean again, John Campbell would often point out that he would be happily publishing women and stuff like that. But then you get somebody like Leslie Stone who said that she got very flatly rejected by him and told that women couldn't write science fiction.
Nate:
Yeah, that was Margaret St. Clair's impression of "Astounding" too. Is that she said that it had the reputation of a magazine that didn't publish women. And I don't know if she was talking about Campbell's tenure or after Campbell's tenure. But she seemed to have a negative impression of "Astounding" and you know, we'll talk more about her in a little bit. But I think it was also interesting to say as you were saying Gretchen that MacLean focuses on the romantic element in this story, but Margaret St. Clair remarked that sex in general was kind of taboo in these stories in the 1950s. And that a lot of readers and publishers would kind of reject these romantic elements and stories.
Yeah, for sure. It's interesting that MacLean kind of brings it out here even though she's really not explicit about anything. It's just the fact that it is a subplot that pretty much dominates the entire story.
JM:
Right and Campbell especially had his secretary there who would deliberately remove a lot of suggestions and language that seemed inappropriate and stuff like that. Then you had the slightly spicier magazines like Planet Stories where even there a few people were writing into the letter section complaining that the stories were too spicy for them. So yeah.
Nate:
There wasn't a Spicy Science Fiction Stories magazine that I'm aware of like there was for Spicy Detective Stories, which I guess could be rather amazing to read in retrospect, but maybe that's kind of how Playboy cornered the market when they were publishing their stories.
(music: rhythmic pounding)
plot summary, spoiler discussion
Nate:
So on an earth-like planet in autumn a hunt party of the Explorer is walking down a trail when George Barton takes a shot at some duck-like bird. The party is out taking samples of animal and plant life to test for diseases. As on earth-like planets, they might be similar enough to infect but different enough to be untreatable. Another shot goes off and from the foliage a man-like creature emerges wielding a knife and a crossbow.
To their amazement, he addresses them in English saying "welcome to Minos the mayor sends his greetings from Alexandria." Alexandria is 300 miles away and in response to June Walton saying their planet isn't on the map the stranger Mead says their colony has been there for three generations. Minos has 150 people and Patrick is surprised at how varied the party is. At the mention of diseases Mead says that one the melting sickness killed everybody in the colony but the Mead family when they first arrived probably why he's surprised at the genetic variancy of the party.
Mead is quite used to primitive tech and is very impressed by the Explorer. He needs to go through several tests and a decontamination process including reactions with a Nucleocat Cureall which destroys any non-human cells. June is admiring herself in the mirror after a shower but before examining the 12 hamsters, they've exposed the samples pulled from Mead too. The crew is eager to disembark and get up the ship after a year and a half of isolation and space. Bess St. Clair thinks it looks like Winnipeg a place where i've never been to but one that Venetian Snares describes as "a freezing shithole", but maybe in comparison to being confined to a spaceship, that's not a bad thing.
Pat is introduced to the rest of the crew and they have a meal together. With the woman crowding around him a bit even June's attention is captured by him away from Max, the man she loves. Mead explains the local flora and fauna is inedible due to different molecules in the carbohydrates. And the people need to undergo some sort of test tube evolution process in order to eat.
Alexander P. Mead was a plant geneticist who adapted the colonists to Minos by extracting human cells evolving them to the point where they can digest life on Minos and then reintroducing them back into their host. It worked, at least on the Meads. The other colonists were content with home growing earth foods with hydroponics. But Alexander died before telling anybody about the process.
It's a one-way process though and Mead now can't digest earth food and he says he ate with them just out of politeness. Meanwhile, three of the hamsters are dead and the Explorer can't colonize unless they disinfect everybody on Minos. They'll need to vote on it in Alexandria, which Mead will go back with Reno Ulrich too. The dead hamster that was injected with a heaviest dose had all its hair fall out and they look almost liquidish. They can't find any trace of microorganisms and only evidence of fever in the one that survived the dose.
Max is getting jealous and June has it for Pat and she goes into the dispensary to get some drugs for headaches. She noticed that others had the same idea and there's a shortage. The Nucleocat Cureall did nothing and Pat has brought the melting sickness aboard and they're all likely infected now. With the logs of who took what from the dispensary she deduces that the women are safe and the men are likely to contract the melting sickness. Which would kill in a few hours. So how long would it be until everybody on board is dead?
She speculates it's inhibited by feminine hormones. So basically they're going to put the entire crew on HRT if they have to which I thought was an interesting thing to come up here. We'll be talking about Margaret St. Clair's "Roberta" later on. But HRT really wasn't like a thing in 1950. There was a documented case of estrogen being administered in 1949, but this really wasn't highly publicized at the time. So it's kind of interesting she's thinking about administering different hormones to people. Especially to as a creative solution to thwart the melting sickness.
So they need to not cause a panic. So they need to handle communications very carefully. Things get worse for the men fast and they need to set up life tanks to keep them in a state of suspended animation to buy them some time. Max's red cell count is in free fall and the last they heard from Reno was some crazy message. Sparks says that he was "raving about mirrors and Pat Mead's folks not being real people just carbon copies and claiming he was crazy."
June observes a leucocyte grab a red blood cell corpuscle and they figure out the melting sickness behaves like leukemia. She orders that all the men go into the tanks right away including Max. Mead wants to help but June snaps at him. Max says it's not his fault and after observing the cells they realize that Pat's evolved cells were contagious acting as normal leucocytes in whatever body they were in.
A week in the tank the men all undergo rapid transformation into Pat Mead. All the Meads are like him which is certainly why he'd be surprised at the genetic variancy of the party when they first encountered one brother. The women are very confused at this and she like can't accept it as real and thinks it's a joke when the return party from Alexandria arrives. More Pat Meads, but one girl Patricia Mead. The women plead not to let her in as presumably the melting sickness will change them all too.
Should the women leave and the men stay? The men are now adapted to Minos's flora and fauna and can't eat earth food whereas the opposite is true of the women. Most of the women beg not to be changed. Story says "Max stirred restlessly the ironic smile that made his new face his own unconsciously twisting into a grimace of pity. 'We men can't leave and you women can't stay. He said bluntly. Why not let Patricia Mead in get it over with?' Shelia said she'd rather die." But June then takes it upon herself to let Patricia in and infect all the women.
So yeah, that's "Contagion." "Star Trek: The Next Generation" would not have wrapped it up like that. I think everybody would go back to the Enterprise as normal.
JM:
So here's the plot twist for "Star Trek: TNG". The mean guy on the planet is actually the duplicate of William Riker, Thomas Riker. And at the end of the episode all the men go into stasis and they all come out looking like Riker and yeah, except Data who makes some weird comment and then that's either the end of "Star Trek: TNG" or from now on the rest of the series it's just William Riker forever.
Nate:
Probably better from then "Picard" from what I heard from.
Gretchen:
I think I would probably be more willing to watch "Picard" if that was what happened.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, but a pretty cool story. Um, she makes it tense. It's really interesting mystery to figure out, you know, what's gonna happen to these people. I mean the title of the story is "Contagion." So I think you are told pretty much right out the bat that something is going to happen when they meet up with Pat.
JM:
Yeah, and it's interesting because it's not at all what I was expecting, right? I was waiting for what's going to happen and I was I was thinking it had something to do with the planet, right? And I'm like, okay. So like what if the planet is using the means somehow and trying to get to outsider biological organisms or something like that and that it's a defensive mechanism. To coin the name of one of MacLean's other stories. I was thinking, okay, what if it's something like that? It's really interesting too because it shows how science can progress in interesting ways because the people that started the colony which was quite a long time before these people were exploring that area of space the father of all the means came up with this plan to help them to survive, right? And he was able to do it. Something that none of these people none of these new visitors possibly suspect. This guy had a really, he took a chance. It was a really dangerous crazy idea and it worked. But now it's going to be a real problem for anybody else, right?
And like also the people who are now on the planet that new visitors are never going to be able to leave. That's really sad ending too because I think it's kind of subtle. It's not overbearing, but it seems like she, that is MacLean, is emphasizing the diversity among the crew, right? And you know, it's not really gone into everybody, I think from what I remember everybody who gets a name sounds pretty Anglo-Saxon European names and stuff like that. From what I remember.
Nate:
More or less.
JM:
Yeah, seems like she's suggesting diversity among the crew. And the fact that they don't all look like muscle bound super men and women and stuff like that that makes them stronger in a way emphasizes their individualism and it's a good thing and now presumably that's not going to exist anymore. It's just happened to the men and it's going to happen to the women too. And probably again, we're in a position where although it's ends before it gets there and nothing really overtly threatening happens, but it seems like it's pretty much suggested. Well the men are probably going to be pretty happy now and the women are going to have to just fall into line and do what they're told. You get the one who is very outspokenly against this idea. It seems like everybody else is like, well, this is the only practical solution to our problem. So what else can we possibly do, right? I mean if we don't do this, we'll die. And so yeah, I don't know it's it's really interesting a really interesting conundrum that we're faced with the characters are faced with.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, it was really interesting. I read this story during a slow day at the library. So I started it and when I was reading I was like telling my co-workers about it. And I remember saying oh, I think when Pat first arrives I had this idea that maybe the contagion was not as literal as an actual contagion but Pat's effect on the crew. The impact that he has, you know, we already see everyone crowding around him because yeah he is this really godlike man that shows up. And even we get this tension between the romantic element with June and Max and maybe she's kind of falling for Pat. And so I was like, oh, maybe this is the contagion and you get to there is this literal contagion, but it still winds up being well, this is all centered on the intrusion of Pat into the lives of these crew members.
I think there is really something interesting about the way this is almost how the mentality of like this godlike, not godlike is in power, but this very handsome very beautiful man showing up and sort of ruining the lives of all these crew who end up sort of envying him and want to be like him. It kind of reminds me a bit of perhaps in effect, especially at the end, when you have all the women who particularly the one woman who was very adamant about not wanting to do it. It reminds me a bit of the "Twilight Zone" episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You." And I think that's where there is this very uncomfortable even horror like you said JM, a sort of sadness to the end of this this story.
Nate:
Yeah, I think godlike has a good word to use here in the classical sense of a god as we get all the ancient Greek imagery. He's from Minos and Alexandria is the city they're going to.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, Minos. That's what I was thinking the name of the planet and everything and yeah.
Nate:
Right. Yeah, you kind of get the sense that he's like this kind of like a Herculean figure, you know, like I carved classical statue with the big muscles and the ideal form and all that. And all the women are just fawning over him and the men are just like totally jealous of the fact that yeah, the social contagion has arrived and basically disrupted the entire society on board the ship before the biological stuff even takes place. I mean, they'd basically been in isolation for a year and a half probably getting sick of one another and here you have this gorgeous classical godlike figure coming in and just throwing the whole thing on its head. It's really interesting.
The gender factor is also interesting here in that the crew I think is more or less 50/50 between men and women.
JM:
So when all the men are sick the women are able to work around the clock and pick up the slot cutting thing and make things happen.
Nate:
Yeah, and the way she introduces the characters I think is interesting because there's a lot of named characters in the story. But a lot of them are there for like a sentence or two like a lot of them just so you really don't have any major roles. But you get the sense that you know, they're there they're doing stuff in the background like people are being busy. It's not just like we have these three main characters who are doing most of the story's action. It really feels like this is a environment society that's being affected at large and she really conveys that in an interesting way.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, it feels like a real community with these characters.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
JM:
I think that we usually imagine space exploration and we think about it now and we think about well, it's a chance to not only spread the human race around but also it's probably going to be a very diverse I guess group of different types of people on different planets and so on. And here we get this weirdly depressing idea that actually exploration of space in the future might just result in a bunch of statuesque Greek godlike men and women like flying around the galaxy basically being imperialistic and stuff like that.
I don't know, you know, it's weird too because the Mead who spends all his time on the ship. He doesn't seem like a bad person. I think she kind of feels like maybe he's a bit overbearing. But that's just because it's annoying the way everybody wants to be around him and stuff like that. She's annoyed by it. It's almost after a bit and at first she's kind of falling prey to it too. But then she comes around and it seems like all the women do eventually. But of course the men get the melting sickness. The women work to save the men and then the men are kind of like standing around. They are like, wow. This is interesting. Maybe this is kind of amazing. Hey. Like again, the men might not be too unhappy about this, right? That's it's kind of almost the idea that I'm getting from this.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean at first they feel definitely threatened by Pat's I guess projecting this air of masculinity even though he's really not like a tough guy or a jerk or anything like that. But the men are clearly very very jealous of him when he shows up at the beginning. And it's just kind of interesting how that projection of masculinity of that aura of I guess his physical body type making all the other men feel really insecure about themselves. Again, just like an interesting thing to be brought out in a Galaxy story from 1950.
JM:
Another thing I really liked about the story. It was all the descriptions of the decontamination and different things that the crew members had to go through and also mean himself and I don't know. Maybe it's something we take for granted now and stuff like that. But it just seems a lot of the time like the way some of these old stories are and some new stories, right? You get like people transporting and on and off the ship and everything like that and you don't know what weird microbes they picked up and stuff like that and here we are in this story. It sounds like a painful somewhat painful and arduous process that takes several hours and could be in decontamination for like an entire day or something like that and just trying to get all the unknown space pathogens off of you and so on right.
The way she describes it is pretty cool. You know as all these like running through all these different showers and there's computer voices yelling at you telling you what you're supposed to do and stuff like that and like it wasn't that detailed. But it was just detailed enough where I'm thinking I can imagine this scenario and it's it was pretty cool. It was pretty well done.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, like that was definitely like one of the details that made me think oh like MacLean like has a little more experience or at least has like some has put like this thought into kind of the logic of how they would handle this biological research and and this decontamination process.
Nate:
And it didn't work too. Which is the cool part because you know they had the thing called the Cure-all which in a lot of science fiction stories and even like Star Trek or whatever you get zapped by the decontamination beam or whatever and all right everything's gone and you're good to go.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
They go through all these processes and it just doesn't address the issue that they think it does. Which I guess I run it calling it the cure-all which I'm sure is what she was kind of going for.
Gretchen:
Yeah. The failsafe that doesn't actually work.
JM:
Right. Yeah, I was weirdly also reminded of our obligatory reference to "Doctor Who" in every podcast episode but I was weirdly reminded of the Tom Baker serial "The Ark in Space" where the ship is completely deserted and there's like no living human, but there's there's a mass of suspended humanoids waiting to be awakened. But the computers on the ship and everything like that are working hard to keep the environment sterile. And so there's all these areas that they go into where these voices are like this is a sterile area and like put your feet over here and like go through and the process of cryogenic suspension is completely automated and everything like that. And there's all these recorded voices and that you can interact with and stuff and yeah, there's I don't know it's cool. I always like that kind of stuff. I guess it's the part of me that's like yeah, it's the sci-fi fan that likes I guess gadgetry, but also an entire system of this is what it's going to be like in the future and this is yeah. I like I like that.
Nate:
Yeah, that's certainly one of my favorite "Doctor Who" serials of like any time of the show's run.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that's a that's a favorite for me too.
Nate:
Yeah. But I guess that's pretty much all I had on this one unless you guys had anything else. Did you want to take a quick break and talk about something a little bit dumber?
JM:
Yeah, yeah, let's take a short break and then we'll talk about a vicious nasty little joke called "The Marching Morons."
Bibliography:
Ashley, Mike - "Transformations; The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970" (2005)
Delaney, Samuel - interview with Katherine Maclean at Readercon 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9swcMDVSYpY
Gold, Horace Leonard - "What Will They Think of Last - SF for Fun and Profit From the Inside" (1976)
MacLean, Katherine - "The Expanding Mind" from "Fantastic Lives - Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers" (1981)
Pohl, Frederik - "The Way the Future Was" (1978)
Rosheim, David - "Galaxy Magazine: The Dark and the Light Years" (1986)
Schweitzer, Darrell - "An Interview with Katherine MacLean", The New York Review of Science Fiction, July 2013
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