ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE eFOREWORD

Barry N. Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo was in 1973 the winner of the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year; he twice won the LOCUS Award for nonfiction books of critical history and commentary on science fiction. Several short works have been final-listed for the Nebula and Hugo and Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins, the nonfiction works, were on the Hugo final ballot for Best Related Nonfiction as is his collaborative book with Mike Resnick, The Business of Science Fiction.

ABOUT THE JACKET

COVER IMAGE: “Plotting Room of Earth Center” by Ed Emshwiller

Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990) was Galaxy’s dominant artist through the 1950s. His quirky images, perspective, and off-center humor provide perhaps the best realization of the magazine’s iconoclastic, satirical vision. Emshwiller was—matched with Kelly Freas—science fiction’s signature artist through the decade and a half initiated by this color illustration. He and Carol Emshwiller, the celebrated science fiction writer, lived in Long Island during the period of his prominence in science fiction. (Nonstop Press published Emshwiller: Infinity X Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, a joint biography and collection of their work in visual and literary medium, in 2007.) In the early 70s, Emshwiller became passionately interested in avant-garde filmmaking, and that passion led him to California, where he spent his last decades deeply involved in the medium of independent film and its community. He abandoned illustration: in Carol’s words “When Ed was through with something he was really through with it.” He died of cancer in 1990. His son, Peter Emshwiller, published a fair amount of science fiction in the 80s and 90s.

eForeword

This short story, Bradbury’s second and final contribution to Horace Gold’s Galaxy, appeared in the issue of August 1951, an issue which was crucial to the history of the magazine in two other ways:

a) Galaxy’s founding publisher, World Editions, a corporation based in Italy and from the start out of touch with the nature of our domestic magazine distribution, gave up the magazine suddenly and with relief shortly before this issue was to be distributed. Whatever the Italians had thought the magazine would yield economically (Horace must have sold them a partridge and a pear tree), it certainly did not in its earliest issues, and they panicked, as publishers, those creatures of earthly delight, so often do. It appeared for a few days that the magazine would collapse, but its domestic printer, Robert Guinn, stepped into the breach and assumed for close to the next twenty years the responsibilities of a publisher. Guinn had his own rocky times toward the end of the decade as the magazine and science fiction markets collapsed, but he paid his bills and always got through, taking in a partner, Sol Cohen, for a short period in 1964, and then eventually selling the magazine in the Spring of 1969 to the Universal Publishing & Distributing Corporation which made very short work of it. Galaxy entered a slow and then rapid decline and was gone by 1980. In the confusion of changing publishers and missed signals by the distributor, the magazine was on sale only spottily, and copies were not replenished after the first batch was sold. This was probably the poorest selling issue through Gold’s reign.