All this was commendable, but was there anything in that record which qualified Horace Gold to make sf over in a new and better form? If so, it is hard to identify the diagnostic symptom; yet that's what he did. He wasn't scientifically trained. His own writing was best where it had least to do with science fiction. But he had two traits that served him well. For one, he had a mind that retained everything; for another, he had persistence that moved mountains. Horace Gold's chosen weapon was the telephone. There are few writers active in sf in the decade of the '50s who do not remember the phone ringing at any hour, at all hours, and Horace's voice picking up a month-old conversation about writing a story or revising one without missing a beat.
His new magazine was called Galaxy. It began with a burst of bombastic promises about a new kind of science fiction. The funny thing was that it made them good. In its first years it published any number of wise and witty and wonderful stories—by Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Robert A. Heinlein (wooed away from Astounding), Clifford D. Simak (coaxed out of semi-retirement), and countless others. Very few of those writers set out to write for 8
Galaxy. Even fewer intended to write the stories they ultimately published. Mountie-like, Horace Gold tracked them down wherever they hid and made them stand and deliver. I mean no denigration of him when I say that he himself suggested relatively few stories to his writers. (There are exceptions, including one of the most successful of my own.) But Horace's talent was not tutorial. It was obstetrical. When he came at you with those forceps, the story got born. Nearly every one of those early stories has appeared in the best sf anthologies, some of them a dozen times and more; a publisher offered a not-so-small fortune, not long ago, for the privilege of reprinting all those issues verbatim; and that's what Horace Gold did, all by himself.
And uptown at the offices of The Magazine of Fantasy, Tony Boucher and his sidekick, J. Francis McComas, were doing something rather similar with a quite different list of writers. Their notion was that it was possible to merge the two previously disparate streams of science fiction: the literary-humanist tradition (the novels of Wells, Olaf Staple-don, S. Fowler Wright, and others) and the gimmicky, highflying, innovative, adventurous sf of the pulps. They made it happen. They broadened the universe of discourse for sf writers to include everything there is. Nothing was off limits. No concept could not be explored.
If this seems like a small tiling, consider what the world was like in those days of the early '50s. It was the Joe McCarthy era in the United States. Dissent was penalized. Careers were being blasted. In those years, when senators and Presidents headed for the storm cellar, when journalists and statesmen guarded their tongues, science fiction was the home of free speech—almost the only public forum there was, for some people, in some ways. One still meets graying ministers and scientists who remember those 1950s issues of Galaxy and F6-SF with eternal gratitude, for letting them think about the unthinkable when it was costly to speak out loud.
But that Camelot ended, too, with a whimper. All golden ages come to an end. Pericles met the Peloponnesian War; the Caesars lost out to Alaric and the barbarians. What defeated that golden age of science fiction was a stock manipulation.
It was one of those front-office things we have seen before, but on a heroic and catastrophic scale. Magazine publishers do not deliver their publications to your local newsstand themselves. They employ intricate chains of distributors and wholesalers to do the job. Until the mid-1950s there were two major channels for national distribution: the collective resources of a dozen independents and their wholesalers on the one hand, and on the other the massive, ancient American News Company with its countless subsidiaries.
In the mid-1950s a stock investor looked upon the American News balance sheet and found it good. Over the decades it had acquired vast equities in restaurants and warehouses and real estate, and all of those assets had been bought when the world was young and prices were low. You could buy up the stock, he mused, and sell off all the assets, and close up the company, and come out with a ruddy fortune. And so he did. ANC was liquidated, and dealt the magazine business in general a blow from which it has never recovered —as anyone can see who has tried to buy a copy of Look or Collier's lately.
So science-fiction magazines were done in, most of them. There were 37 titles at the peak of the boom in the 1950s; at last count, there were perhaps half a dozen struggling to stay alive. There's still plenty of science fiction—in books. But the magazines are only a shadow . ..
It could be different. A new publisher to take a chance. Another Campbell, or a latter-day Gold. Some bright new ideas, and some bright new writers to make them real ... But that's another story, and a different Golden Age!
Rafferty's Reasons
I wrote this story twice—once when I was in my early 20s, when it went the rounds of the magazines without connecting, and again 10 or 15 years later, when I came across the yellowed sheets and decided I knew what I had done wrong the first time, and could do it right the second. When I finished it I was quite pleased with it. It happened that that same day I finished another story with which I was not very pleased at all. I sent both of them to my favorite editor, with a note saying, "You'll like one of these, I'm sure, but the other I have doubts about and I won't be disappointed if you reject it." By return mail came a manuscript, a check and a letter saying, "Boy, were you right!" Only he bought the wrong one.
It was the year of the projects, and nearly Election time. Vote for Mudgins! screamed the posters. He put us back to work!
Even Rafferty was back at work, taken off the technological dole, and he sat there in his boss's office, looking at him and hating him. Fat old John Girty, his boss. A Mudgins man from the old Fifth Precinct days, a man with the lowest phase number in the state.
"Riffraff!" Girty stormed. "A good job is wasted on a bum like you. You wish you were back on relief!"
Rafferty only nodded, his face full of misery, his heart black murder.
"Mark my words, you'll wreck the whole project!" Girty said ominously. "And when the Projects go, the Machine will come back."
Rafferty nodded again. He wasn't listening, although he appeared to be. He was watching his hand on the desk. The hand was moving, crawling slowly over the chipped plastic top like a thick-legged spider. It was crawling toward a letter opener.
"Take warning, Rafferty," said Girty. "You're a troublemaker. Thank heaven I've got a few loyal workers in the Project, to tell me about skunks like you! Don't let me hear about any complaints from you again. If you don't like your job, you can quit." Of course, he couldn't, and Girty knew it. But it was a way to end the conversation, and he turned and stalked out of the room.
Rafferty sat there, watching his hand, but it was only a hand again. His hand, weak and helpless like himself; and the letter opener was only a letter opener. He got up after a while and leaned absently against the hooded computer that could have unemployed them all—if it weren't for Mudgins and his New Way. You couldn't say he was thinking, exactly, although there was a lot to think about in the silent computer under its sealed plastic cover. But he couldn't be doing that.