The Third Galaxy Reader

Galaxy Reader #3

by H.L. Gold

15 exciting stories about the world of Outer Space:
Limiting Factor by Theodore R. Cogswell
Protection by Robert Sheckley
The Vilbar Party by Evelyn E. Smith
End As a World by F.L. Wallace
Time in the Round by Fritz Lieber
Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper by Avram Davidson
A Wind is Rising by Finn O'Donnevan
Ideas Die Hard by Isaac Asimov
Dead Ringer by Lester del Rey
The Haunted Corpse by Frederik Pohl
The Model of a Judge by William Morrison
Man In the Jar by Damon Knight
Volpla by Wyman Guin
Honorable Opponent by Clifford D. Simak
The Game of Rat & Dragon by Cordwainer Smith

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies, Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Horace Leonard Gold was a science fiction writer and editor most noted for bringing an innovative and fresh approach to science fiction while he was the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, and also wrote briefly for DC Comics. Born in Canada, Gold moved to the United States at the age of two. He also published under the pseudonyms Clyde Crane Campbell, Dudley Dell, Christopher Grimm, and Leigh Keith.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good anthology of stories that originally appeared in issues of Galaxy Magazine from 1953-1957, selected by the magazine's editor himself. My favorites were stories by Frederik Pohl, Theodore R. Cogswell, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, and Evelyn E. Smith, with the top nod going to The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith.

[Elizabeth Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very fun example of "vintage" sci-fi, and I enjoyed most of the stories inside. You have to get used to the storytelling style and cadence (it's a 60-year old book after all) but I think it's worth a read.

"Limiting Factor" by Theodore R. Cogswell is almost an early X-Men story, about superpowered humans and the cost of abandoning humanity.

"Protection" by Robert Scheckley is about a guardian angel of sorts, and is a little silly, but it had one of the best endings in the book.

"The Vilbar Party" by Evelyn E. Smith was just adorable, it turns the trope of "a strange alien visitor among humans" on its head. I didn't expect the main character to have the opinion he had by the end of the book, which is another reason why I liked it.

"End as a World" by F. L. Wallace is an End of the World story, but not in the way you think.

"Time in the Round" by Fritz Leiber has an odd tone, it's got a straightforward style that could work as a young adult story, but enough violence to make it an adult story. I think it's about how no matter how hard you try some people just aren't going to turn out peaceful, and while that's not necessarily good, it can be useful.

"Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" by Avram Davidson had a good concept, but it just draaaaaaagged and dragged. The ending wasn't particularly satisfying either, unfortunately. It was about a dentist, so I'll leave it at that.

"The Wind is Rising" by Finn O'Donnevan was bleak in places, but a really exciting "danger on an alien planet" story. I loved all the details about the world, and the ships, and the alien creatures they dealt with. It was probably one of the most interesting stories in the book.

"Ideas Die Hard" by Isaac Asimov is an example of how Asimov stories are hit-or-miss with me. I didn't connect with any of the characters, and I thought the ending was a bit predictable. However, this story was written in the 1950s, so it's probably RESPONSIBLE for me thinking it's predictable. Asimov was groundbreaking, a lot of his story ideas paved the way for the stories that came after. I didn't love the story, but technically there's nothing wrong with it.

"Dead Ringer" by Lester Del Rey had a twist ending that I didn't see coming, though when it happened it wasn't that surprising. He set up the pieces for it ahead of time, for sure. It definitely makes me wonder what happened next.

Frederik Pohl's "The Haunted Corpse" is another one that felt a little predictable, but it's probably one of the groundbreaking stories that set up the "body switching" trope for all the stories that came after.

"The Model of a Judge" by William Morrison was a slow burn of a story, very introspective, and spent the entire story giving you all the exposition you'd need for the ending. That being said, it was also one of my favorite endings in the book.

"Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight felt almost like a noir thriller in places, and I really liked the tone of the writing. I thought the ending was a little bit of a letdown, it's supposed to be a twist but it's not that shocking a reveal. It was still an interesting story though.

Wyman Guin's "Volpla" was a fun story, but it's one of those ones where you're supposed to hate the main character, so I spent the whole story being annoyed by him. I did enjoy the description of the little mutants though, and their treehouses in the woods.

"Honorable Opponent" by Clifford D. Simak was puzzling, I mean I understand the ending, but it felt like a lot of build up to a pretty obvious answer. You'd think the people involved would've figured it out before now, if there were other alien races who'd experienced the same thing. But that's probably the point: nobody wanted to give away the secret.

Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" was a great story to end the book. It's another one that spends the entire story setting up a quick battle and the resolution at the end, but the details are interesting and the characters all felt very real to me. I don't want to give away my favorite little plot point, but seeing as how this was written in the 1950s, it's interesting to see that some of the predilections of today's internet go way, way back.

[Joe Santoro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short story collection is a veritable who's who of early sci-fi.. Asimov, Davidson, Simak, Pohl, Del Rey and several others. Somewhat unlike the future volume I have, this one really focused on shorter stories...it's 233 pages contain 15 different ones, as the cover says.

It contains a couple real classics that I've read else where..Limiting Factor by Theodore Cogswell, and Game of Cat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith, which is a believe in the Sci Fi Hall of Fame collection.

Of those I hadn't seen before, most were near future/first contact type stories, but with a wide variety of themes... from dentists saving us from alien invasion to playing chess with the aliens... definitely an excellent collection.

My favorite, though was Volpla by Wyman Guin... its the first I've read from him, and it was very interesting. The main character is expirementing with evolution, and manages to create a race of flying, intelligent mammals, in the hopes of getting them into the wild without anyone knowing and passing them off as aliens. The bits that don't go as planned are very logical and thought provoking... great stuff! One of these days I really should hunt down some actual Galaxy magazines... I suspect it would be well worth the effort!

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 3 out of 5]

These Galaxy Readers are always a bit of a mixed bag. They tend to be fun glimpse into the world of Golden Age SF short fiction, but they rarely include stories that make a big impact on me or stick around in the ol' memory bank for too long. You read these compilations of stories published in Galaxy Science Fiction to get a feel for where some of the genre's stars came from and what the overall vibe of the period was like, not for its great concepts or prose or anything like that. Still, I had a decent time with this book, and in case you're looking to hear some story-by-story thoughts from someone who read a lot of science fiction both vintage and contemporary, you're in luck...

--The collection starts with "Limiting Factor" by Theodore R. Cogswell. A lot of SF from the 50s/early-60s deals with telepathic or otherwise mentally-imbued people, and this story is no exception. The main character is one of this special class who is recalled from his normal life and his relationship to hop on a ship filled with telepaths which is set to leave Earth behind and go colonize its own world. But on the way, they hit a wrinkle in the form of a super-evolved telepath of a different species who shows them a planet inhabited by monkey-like sapients who were culturally and evolutionary ravaged by the telepaths of their species striking out on their own. Earth's elite assume that these devolved people are what the untelepathic folks caste turned into, but then we find out they're actually the telepaths because there's a much tighter limiting factor to biological potential than there is technological, and the normals discovered high technology and won the race for supremacy. I like the way this inverts some of the normal assumptions of stories like this and looks at society from a wider viewpoint than usual. Now, it does that in the grinning-and-nudging way that clever 50s stories do so it feels a bit dated, and the prose is average, but as a whole it's at least a little above average. 7.25/10.
--"Protection" by Robert Sheckley is as offbeat as his tales usually are. This one's about a mysterious interdimensional entity which attaches itself to a man and offers him protection by warning him of where physical accidents could take place, what geopolitical situations to stay away from, and more. The problem? Apparently being protected invites more bad things to happen to you, and the MC's life gradually gets more and more risky until he forsakes protection and is killed by an alien for sneezing, or something like that. It's kind of cute structurally, but I don't see a great reason why this story had to exist; 6.75/10.
--Evelyn E. Smith tackles an intergalactic professor exchange program in "The Vilbar Party," where an alien academic gets transferred to Earth and learns to live outside his comfort zone a little bit. The resolution says good things about this individual and our race as a whole, but it's not really exceeding any expectations, and it's pretty forgettable; I don't remember the details and it hasn't been that long. While you could bludgeon yourself into thinking it's important, I'll only give it a 6.75/10.
--I never like stories about the world ending, and "End As a World" by F. L. Wallace is no exception. The whole world seems to know that humanity is going to end in this one, but the kid who's the protagonist doesn't seem to want to do anything about it, and then the world ends and another begins. Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I thought it was completely pointless. 5/10.
--I go back and forth on Fritz Leiber, but I don't think "Time in the Round" is a high point in his career. It's set in this kind of utopia where war doesn't seem to be around anymore which somehow outputs this one murderous child who's kind of like a mini-Hitler. He sneaks into a theater which serves as a window into another period of time and then savages from that other time break through like in Laumer's *The Great Time Machine Hoax* and then he helps beat them back. Potential extrapolations about how technology and society impacts children and their capacity for violence are all interesting, but it didn't focus on any of those concepts enough and I wasn't really all that engaged in the story; I didn't even care to find out what happened to the main character. 6/10.
--"Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" by Avram Davidson is one of my favorites in this collection. It's more or less about the American Dental Association finding out about an alien invasion by receiving a hidden letter from a high-profile member, the titular Goldpepper, which says that a race of old and toothless blue-mouthed aliens are trying to invade Earth. Once the Association discovers that they're deathly allergic to flourine and live in California, they realize they can do some things about this... the whole thing is pretty much characters around a desk discussing things, but it's all fun and clever. I would totally like to read more about this situation, but Davidson knows where to cut the story short and leave us invested in a very atypical SF story. Clever and cute; 8/10.
--"A Wind is Rising" by Finn O'Donnevan (AKA Robert Sheckley) is even more typical Galaxy Magazine fare; it's about a human operation on a planet with extreme wind speeds when one of the operatives gets caught out in a moderate storm and must try and use his wits to survive being tossed around like a leaf in a tornado. The kicker comes after he's saved himself and the aliens confirm that this is the slow season, and that they're soon going to migrate because the *real* storms are coming... if you like reading about human tenacity coming in handy in extraplanetary environments, this is the story for you, but otherwise, it's just kinda solid. 7/10.
--I've been reading more Asimov lately, and I'm starting to think he's more of a social science fiction writer than people give him credit for. While his Robot novels focus on the psychology of entire planets at one time, "Ideas Die Hard" exhibits the minds of several astronauts who are strapped into a spaceship with no one else for company who, after a few struggles, see that the moon is just a canvas prop; apparently, they never went to space, and the whole "mission" was just an excuse to examine how the men react to being stuck in space with very little contact with anyone else. It was a psychological test, and the musings afterwards about how hard a time one of the man has admitting that the moon isn't really fake shows how hard ideas must die to fall... it's interesting and worth a 7.25/10, but it's not getting more because, sadly, it's not the most memorable...
--"Dead Ringer" (ala Lester del Rey) is the first story about corpses here; or perhaps, the lack thereof. The main character is a journalist convinced that a man he's always known, Harding, is eternal, or at least very long lived, and he winds up grave-digging to dig up another eternal's corpse and eventually he finds out that he's harboring the alien creatures he's convinced are invading. It's not a bad story by any means, but it just didn't stick with me. Maybe because of the stories it's caught between? Nah, just not too memorable... 6/10.
--"The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl is the second corpse-enamored story; specifically, it about a scientist who creates a way to possess other peoples' bodies, and as one could expect, he doesn't exactly use it for good. The main character is a military officer who visits the facility to see what's all been done and he's a little amazed, although his life is thrust into danger once an altercation breaks out around the machine at the end of the story and the inventor of the machine ends up running off in a younger body after destroying his machine and distracting the main character with an Army comrade of his. The ending is pretty good, but the rest of the story just isn't memorable and it kind of felt like fluff; also, the main character's motivations seem a bit all over the board and it's hard to tell if he's really respectable or a megalomaniac. Either way, this story only gets a 7/10.
--While one story was about the ADA, William Morrison's "The Model of a Judge" is about a cake-judging contest in space - on a space station, I think? - judged by a genetically engineered and uplifted alien carnivore. This carnivore can use his senses to pick up on a lot of things about the entrants, and it's pretty interesting, and while the end is a little flaccid (he chooses this one finalist after hearing everything with his super-hearing because of something to do with his idea of human nature, but exactly what about it speaks to him isn't clear or convincing), it's still an interesting and kind of out-of-pocket story. 7.5/10.
--"Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight is about a rich guy on vacation to an alien world tricking a hotel busboy who's descended from an ancient race into getting trapped in a jar so he can sell him or dissect him or... something. It's pretty satisfying when the alien is able to kill the man because his physiology is a little more flexible than the trapper was led to believe. I mean, it's only really clever in that pat-yourself-on-the-back cleverness which marks some 50s short stories, but that's still clever, and I liked the mind games and the exo-anthropology sitting in the background, so all in all it was a success. Probably 7.25/10.
--"Volpla" by Wymain Guin is supposed to be one big joke, but it didn't really joke for me... the main character is this random guy who's looking forward to having this little primate-esque race he generated in his lab be released upon mankind as a joke to make them think they've been invaded by aliens or something, but then he gets really upset when his family finds them and start playing around with them and it kind of lost me from there. For being the longest tale in this story, it sure didn't feel like much happened during it, and I felt pretty left out of the joke... 6/10.
--Simak's "Honorable Opponent" was the penultimate story, and as Simak stories tend to do, it put a kind of comfortable cushion around the whole "alien invasion" trope by making the aliens who disintegrate all their opposition return all the ships and men they destroyed to the humans after they win the war because war is just a big game to be played with transporters to them. Doesn't sound like that bad of a race, actually... the story had Simak's typical charm and optimism-tinted view, and I don't say that as an insult; it was plenty nice to read, and there were some clever hints laid if you want to catch what's in the spoiler tag before it happens. But besides a clever little 50s puzzle, this also doesn't change too much... 7/10.
--Finally, we get the most significant story to be printed in this collection: Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon," part of his Instrumentality of Mankind universe. It seems like it's more recent than the other stories collected (even if it's not) because it doesn't have this "gotcha" at the end of the story, but rather introduces unfamiliar terms to you and rolls them into the story gradually (i.e. the partner-pilots being cats.) It's hard for me to explain, but there's this way of revealing concepts that's cleaner and more convincing in these stories, like a New Wave story or something. Regardless of that elevated literary sense, this is a fun little tale of battle with dimensional beings and has a nice cast of characters who get at least the minimum level of development over its runtime. It's just most interesting in this case as a foil to the style of the other Galaxy-era stories present, and it's something worth exploring; as a story of itself, it gets 7.75/10.

While there were a few winners in this collection (thanks Davidson, Morrison and Smith), the vast majority weren't that special. I don't like saying that about fiction, and it's not that these all seem hopelessly tied to a formula because they were all written for the same magazine/editor (there is a decent variety of different traits, even if the pretty regular length of the stories does make the reading experience feel a bit staler than in collections with short, mid-sized, and long stories); they're just not all original or well-written. Still, it's a fine collection with a couple classics, and I think it's worth to pick up a Galaxy Reader or two if you want to explore the different areas of the field. For now, this book only gets a 6.5/10, but the reading experience was better than your average 6.5/10; if you read it, let me know what you think. Otherwise, thanks for reading, and here's wishing you slightly more luck than I had next time you journey to a galaxy far, far away...

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic shortform post-WWII science fiction. The themes are war as a constant, the hostility of space, and the oddly resilient human race. These are not the most imaginative stories, but they are inventive. Here you can see early work by the masters who dominated the genre in the 1960s, and the later work from the stalwarts of the Campbell school of the 1930s.

These stories are as comfortable as an old shoe without growing stale. I return to reread these every couple of years when I feel the need for undemanding material and these tales always seem fresh.

[Andrewcharles420 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't consider any stories to stand out too much, though I still like Fritz Leiber's writing (and really don't like Asimov). It was worth reading to the end as last few stories were much better than the first.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dated collection of science fiction shorts by established writers in the genre.

[Luigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conspiracy theorists will love this. Is the moon really there?

[Bart Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic collection of 1950s-era Sci-Fi featuring Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Fritz Leiber, and lesser-known writers of the period. Simply, a fun read.