Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 Read Online Free PDF

had some shots of the earthquake and a warning about boiling your water if you lived in the affected states. The President’s widow was shown visiting the last President’s widow to get some pointers for the funeral. Then there was an interview with an executive of the time-trip company. “Business is phenomenal,” he said. “Time-tripping will be the nation’s number one growth industry next year.” The reporter asked him if his company would soon be offering something besides the end-of-the-world trip. “Later on, we hope to,” the executive said. “We plan to apply for Congressional approval soon. But meanwhile the demand for our present offering is running very high. You can’t imagine. Of course, you have to expect apocalyptic stuff to attain immense popularity in times like these.” The reporter said, “What do you mean, times like these?” but as the time-trip man started to reply, he was interrupted by the commercial. Mike shut off the set. Nick discovered that he was extremely depressed. He decided that it was because so many of his friends had made the journey, and he had thought he and Jane were the only ones who had. He found himself standing next to Marcia and tried to describe the way the crab had moved, but Marcia only shrugged. No one was talking about time-trips now. The party had moved beyond that point. Nick and Jane left quite early and went right to sleep, without making love. The next morning the Sunday paper wasn’t delivered because of the Bridge Authority strike, and the radio said that the mutant amoebas were proving harder to eradicate than originally anticipated. They were spreading into Lake Superior and everyone in the region would have to boil all their drinking water. Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.
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Barry N. Malzberg won the very first Campbell Memorial Award, and is a multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 books.
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    Views expressed by guest or resident columnists are entirely their own.
     
    FROM THE HEART’S BASEMENT
    by Barry Malzberg
     
    The Sine Curve
    I gave a brief eulogy at Robert Sheckley’s funeral (12/12/05); and concluded, after a quick precis of that anguished, thoughtful, scattered, thoughtless life and its wreckage: “But this can be said: he was the best-loved writer of the best-loved magazine through the run of science fiction’s best-loved decade. That isn’t bad.” Of course his four children (from three marriages) might have had something to say on the question of “best-loved.”
    But that is another essay in another time. There is much to be written on Old Sheck, who was also, probably, best-loved and imitated by plagiarists, influences and derivatives to a degree which would have infuriated him if he were not, ultimately, so detached and emotionally repressed. The “another essay in another time” of which I am thinking is The Fifties , a summary of that decade I wrote in 1978 for the Analog Yearbook and which has probably gotten around more than any other segment of my short nonfiction. I was perhaps the first to argue that our field’s most visionary, inventive, signatory period was that decade, that in the 1950s science fiction had become at its peak and in the collective work at its strongest an instrument of beauty and precision, the flame that cuts, knife that burns. The magazine editors were shaping science fiction then, the book market was almost entirely derivative and Gold, Boucher, McComas, Shaw, Mines, and Merwin knew in their various ways what they were doing and what they wanted. Campbell had