Complicating the decision is the fact that running the ship without a built-in brain is virtually impossible - the ship has been designed to be extremely delicate to handle, even to the point of having artificial crises pop up just to keep the crew on their toes! Now the remaining four have to decide whether to turn back or not. Two of the tending crew are murdered in the process. One by one, the three brains go nuts and either commit suicide or have to be shut down. The humans are all genetic duplicates (with full memories, natch) of actual people, and their main job is to tend the ship-controlling disembodied human brains of “defectives” that have been integrated and trained for the task since birth (a la McCaffrey’s The Ship who Sang or Niven’s recent series starring Eric the Cyborg). On board are six normal human crew, two thousand frozen and dehydrated people, and a thousand embryos. Here’s the premise:Ī giant sphere of a ship, the Earthling, is headed out of the solar system toward Tau Ceti. I was dreading it last month, and my dread was well-founded. The creator of Dune and other lesser titles dominates the current issue: a full 119 pages are devoted to this short novel. I’m quite looking forward to it, and clearly Pohl is, too.Īnd after reading this month’s issue, boy can I see why… In any event, Pohl undercuts his own assertion by trumpeting next month’s issue, which will feature nothing but alumni from the early days of the magazine. Certainly nothing so avant-garde as what we’re seeing from the “New Wave” mags in the UK. The magazine still looks largely the same, there’s still a Willy Ley article in the middle, and the contents still feel roughly within the same milieu: a bit “softer” than the nuts and bolts in Analog, a little meatier than the often light fare of F&SF. Now, in the editorial for this month’s issue, Pohl notes that Galaxy has evolved with the times and is a different magazine from the one that debuted with an October 1950 cover date. If Analog (ne Astounding) is representative of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and Fantasy and Science Fiction represents the literary fringes of the genre, then Galaxy is emblematic of Science Fiction’s Silver Age. Gold and the last five years with Fred Pohl as editor.
Galaxy has now finished 15 years of publication, two thirds of it under the tenure of H.
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