At this point Gold was succumbing to agoraphobia, physical ills, and overall exhaustion (some of this perhaps attributable to his active service during WWII) against which he had struggled from the outset. (There is creditable evidence that Frederik Pohl was the de facto editor during Gold’s last years.) Gold would return some submissions with notes like: “Garbage,” “Absolute Crap.” Isaac Asimov noted in his memoir “Anthony Boucher wrote rejection slips which read like acceptances. And Horace wrote notes of acceptance which felt like rejections.” Despite this, the magazine retained most of its high standard and also some of its regular contributors (William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Pohl himself). Others could no longer bear Gold’s imperiousness and abusiveness.

ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS

In the view of James E. Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longer story-form has existed since science fictions inception with the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, but Galaxy developed the form to a consistent level of sophistication and efficiency and published more notable stories of sub-novel length than any other magazine during the 50s…and probably in any decade.

The novella and novelette as forms make technical and conceptual demands greater, perhaps even greater than the novel, and Galaxy writers, under founding editor H. L. Gold’s direction, consistently excelled in these lengths. Gold’s most memorable story, “A Matter of Form” (1938) was a long novelette, and he brought practical as well as theoretical lessons to his writers, who he unleashed to develop these ideas. (John Campbell of course, had also done this in the 40s and continued in the 50s to be a directive editor.) It is not inconceivable that many or even most of the contents of the 1950’s Galaxy were based on ideas originated by Gold: golden technology becomes brass and jails its human victims when it runs amok—is certainly one of his most characteristic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ray Bradbury (b. 1920) first published a short story as a teenager in Amazing Stories in collaboration with Henry Haase. He was a founding member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, the oldest fan organization and one still in existence. Ten years later he had become perhaps the most prominent science fiction author as well as the first science fiction author who had made a significant impact in the mainstream. His short stories, appearing in Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and literary quarterlies, were taken up in the late 1940s by both the Foley and O. Henry Best Short Story annuals, and with The Martian Chronicles, a collection disguised as a novel and published by Doubleday in 1950, he became famous. Two years later, Ballantine published Fahrenheit 451 (an extension of his Galaxy novella “The Fireman”) which has sold millions of copies and is part of most high schools’ curricula. Francois Truffaut adopted it for a famous film fifteen years later. The collections The Illustrated Man and A Medicine Melancholy appeared later in the decade and extended his reputation. Bradbury received the National Medal in Literature from President Bush in the early new millennium and was shortly thereafter given a special award by the Pulitzer Prize Committee.