b) Regardless, and with the kind of irony to which Horace was so exquisitely attuned, this issue might have been the most crucial, the most important to date, what Malcolm Gladwell a half century later decided while considering the world in more general terms to call a “tipping point.” “A Little Journey” was little remarked upon at the time or later, but the August 1951 issue contained Wyman Guin’s sterling lead novella “Beyond Bedlam,” which was a story of the societal institutionalization of mental illness which would have been inconceivable in a science fiction market prior to its appearance (and for many years thereafter). Guin (1915–1989), a pharmaceutical executive, produced a work of bleak and stunning extrapolation: bipolar patients were compartmentalized, their dual personalities had separate lives and society was organized on craziness. There still has been nothing like this novella. In 2006 Keith Ferrell, Omni’s retired editor, a novelist and science fiction writer himself, said to me, “That guy got Prozac cold.” (Although in The Demolished Man not so many months later, Alfred Bester had his own novelistic exploration of institutionalized madness. The proximity of the two works leads to a conclusion not needing an Edmund Wilson to deduce: Gold was almost certainly the originating force for both works. Galaxy, the Journal of Psychiatry, they called it.) “Beyond Bedlam” had an explosive impact; it was perhaps the very first work which clearly would not have existed outside of the magazine. Guin never got near it again; the rest of his career in science fiction consisted of six short stories (all but one published in Galaxy) and a murky novel, The Standing Joy, which came and went overnight in 1969. The novella was the first work published under his name; the pseudonymous Norman Menasco had published a short story, “Trigger Tide,” in the November 1950 Astounding. (David Drake, a co-introducer, thinks highly of that story. At the ages of 12, 40, and 62 I found it unreadable every time.) Horace devoted most of his editorial in that August 1951 issue to the author’s and his own struggles with this story; it went through innumerable drafts before it came out at a level, Gold promised the reader, which blazed the page.

“A Little Journey” and the other writers in that issue (Frank Robinson, Katherine MacLean, Lester del Rey, Sylvia Jacobs) would necessarily have been diminished by the lead story, but at the time, the Bradbury story was a coup, and it is still something of a surprise to this series, 60 years later. It is one of the least known of the stories coming from Bradbury’s major period (1946–1953) and in its audacity and focused religiosity (disguised as sentimentality but this is not a sentimental story) it is in a quiet way flabbergasting. Bradbury was at or near his peak in 1951. The Martian Chronicles had been published to enormous mainstream attention the previous year, and his work was appearing regularly in Martha Foley’s Year’s Best Short Stories and Doubleday’s O. Henry Prize Stories edited by Herschell Brickell. The stories reprinted in these anthologies had originated in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar or Redbook, but they were nonetheless (like the famous stories of that period by Truman Capote) lyrical borderline fantasy, and Bradbury was the first writer with unambiguous credentials from science fiction to break through to these literary markets. He was regarded at that time as the field’s first true emissary to the fictional mainstream, and it was many years before he had any company. (Judith Merril in 1955 and Theodore Sturgeon in 1961 had stories from Fantasy and Science Fiction in the Foley volume.)