The Iron Chancellor

About
Galaxy
Magazine

About Science Fiction Novelettes and Novellas

About the Author

About the Author of the eForeword

About the Jacket

eForeword

The Iron Chancellor

The first issue of
Galaxy
, dated October 1950, already heralded to the highest standards of the field. The authors it published regularly contributed to the leading magazine
Astounding
, writing a kind of elegant and humanistic science fiction which although not previously unknown had always been anomalous. Its founding editor, H. L. Gold (1914–1996), was a science fiction writer of some prominence whose editorial background had been in pulp magazines and comic books; however, his ambitions were distinctly literary, and he was deliberately searching for an audience much wider and more eclectic than the perceived audience of science fiction. His goal, he stated, was a magazine whose fiction “Would read like the table of contents of a literary magazine or
The Saturday Evening Post
of the 21st century, dealing with extrapolation as if it were contemporary.” The magazine, although plagued by distribution difficulties and an Italian-based publisher (World Editions), was an immediate artistic success, and when its ownership was transferred with the issue of August 1951 to its printer Robert M. Guinn, it achieved financial stability for the remainder of the decade.

Galaxy
published every notable science fiction writer of its first decade and found in many writers who would become central figures: Robert Sheckley, James E. Gunn, Wyman Guin, and F. L. Wallace, among others.
Galaxy
revivified older writers such as Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester (whose first novel,
The Demolished Man
, was commissioned and directed page by page by Gold). John Campbell fought with
Astounding
and remained an important editor, and
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(inaugurated a year before
Galaxy
) held to high standards of literary quality while spreading its contents over two fields, but
Galaxy
was incontestably the 1950s’ flagship magazine for the acidly satiric, sometimes profoundly comic aspect of its best contributions.
Galaxy
had a lasting effect not only upon science fiction but upon literature itself. J.G. Ballard stated that he had been deeply affected by
Galaxy
. Alan Arkin, an actor who became a star after 1960 and won an Oscar in the new millennium, contributed two stories in the mid-fifties.

At this point Gold was succumbing to agoraphobia, physical ills, and overall exhaustion (some of this perhaps attributable to his active service during WWII) against which he had struggled from the outset. (There is creditable evidence that Frederik Pohl was the de facto editor during Gold’s last years.) Gold would return some submissions with notes like: “Garbage,” “Absolute Crap.” Isaac Asimov noted in his memoir “Anthony Boucher wrote rejection slips which read like acceptances. And Horace wrote notes of acceptance which felt like rejections.” Despite this, the magazine retained most of its high standard and also some of its regular contributors (William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Pohl himself). Others could no longer bear Gold’s imperiousness and abusiveness.

In the view of James E. Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longer story-form has existed since science fictions inception with the April 1926 issue of
Amazing Stories
, but
Galaxy
developed the form to a consistent level of sophistication and efficiency and published more notable stories of sub-novel length than any other magazine during the 50s…and probably in any decade.

The novella and novelette as forms make technical and conceptual demands greater, perhaps even greater than the novel, and
Galaxy
writers, under founding editor H. L. Gold’s direction, consistently excelled in these lengths. Gold’s most memorable story, “A Matter of Form” (1938) was a long novelette, and he brought practical as well as theoretical lessons to his writers, who he unleashed to develop these ideas. (John Campbell of course, had also done this in the 40s and continued in the 50s to be a directive editor.) It is not inconceivable that many or even most of the contents of the 1950’s
Galaxy
were based on ideas originated by Gold: golden technology becomes brass and jails its human victims when it runs amok—is certainly one of his most characteristic.

Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) sold his first story to
Nebula
in 1954 and two years later won the Most Promising New Author Hugo Award. He published more than a dozen novels and several hundred short stories in the genre before 1960, and then embarked upon an early retreat, returning at an entirely new level of literary accomplishment in 1962 with the famous short story “To See The Invisible Man” (published in
Galaxy
’s sister magazine
Worlds of Tomorrow
). Over the next fourteen years, Silverberg produced in science fiction an unparalleled body of work at the height of literary achievement and conceptual rigor. Forty novels and three times as many short stories plumbed every aspect of science fiction and significantly advanced it:
Born with the Dead, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Thorns, The Stochastic Man, Up The Line
, and finally
Shadrach in the Furnace
in 1976. He won every award in the field multiple times. After
Shadrach
, Silverberg went silent for two years, then returned with the long fantasy novel
Lord Valentine’s Castle
and went on to a major career in fantasy, while continuing to publish science fiction novels, three of them in collaboration with Isaac Asimov. He continued to win Hugo and Nebula Awards at the shorter lengths and published a dozen stories in
Playboy
. He has also edited notable anthologies such as
The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Legends
, and two Nebula Award annuals. A resident of California since the early seventies, Silverberg continues to write and edit prolifically. A novelette titled “The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar” appeared in 2009 in the 60th anniversary issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. Subterranean Press is publishing his science fiction short stories in several volumes.

David Drake, a veteran of the Vietnam Tank Corps, is the author of the Hammers Slammers series which over the last quarter century has become the most successful military science fiction series in the history of the genre. He has also published many bestselling fantasy novels and short stories in
Omni, Analog
, and elsewhere.

COVER IMAGE: “Relics of an Ancient Race” by Ed Emshwiller

    Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990) was
Galaxy
’s dominant artist through the 1950s. His quirky images, perspective, and off-center humor provide perhaps the best realization of the magazine’s iconoclastic, satirical vision. Emshwiller was—matched with Kelly Freas—science fiction’s signature artist through the decade and a half initiated by this color illustration. He and Carol Emshwiller, the celebrated science fiction writer, lived in Long Island during the period of his prominence in science fiction. (Nonstop Press published
Emshwiller: Infinity X Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller
, a joint biography and collection of their work in visual and literary medium, in 2007.) In the early 70s, Emshwiller became passionately interested in avant-garde filmmaking, and that passion led him to California, where he spent his last decades deeply involved in the medium of independent film and its community. He abandoned illustration: in Carol’s words “When Ed was through with something he was really through with it.” He died of cancer in 1990. His son, Peter Emshwiller, published a fair amount of science fiction in the 80s and 90s.

Robert Silverberg has been one of the most respected figures in the science fiction field since he sold his first story in 1954. The next year his first novel was published, and the year after that he won the Hugo Award for Best New Writer at the World Science Fiction Convention.

The science fiction field has changed a great deal since Silverberg entered it, and he has remained on top of it by changing also—more radically and more successfully than any other writer of his day. There have been three very different Robert Silverbergs writing science fiction, all of them the same man. Most recently—say, from the publication of
Lord Valentine’s Castle
in 1980—Silverberg has been the writer of sprawling, colorful fantasies. Highly literate and intelligent, these novels are calculated to leave readers with a good feeling. This is an amazing difference from the Silverberg of the 70s, who wrote some of the most brilliant and probing novels of the human mind, human cultures, and humanity itself ever published in the field. Silverberg’s focus was generally too tight for these novels to be called dystopian, but “bleak” is a fair (perhaps even mild) description of their spirit.

But the Robert Silverberg we have here, the Silverberg who wrote
The Iron Chancellor
, is the original model: a writer just starting out and rising immediately to the top, not only through native talent but also by the intelligent analysis of the field’s requirements and the professional execution of stories which met those requirements. Silverberg (writing to other professionals) gives his own description of his technique in the March 1961 issue of
The Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies
:

“A writer can make a great deal more money in New York than anywhere else, provided he’s the kind of writer who’ll write to editorial order.

“I am, of course.”

And:

“Since 1958 or so, 98% of my published material has been first-drafted. (And since 1958 I’ve sold 98% of the wordage I’ve offered for publication.)”

This Silverberg was omnipresent in the magazines of his day not because he wrote vast quantities of material daily, but because he wrote precisely what a particular editor was looking for. Note here that the basic requirement which every editor needs is work of publishable quality: editorial foibles and slants are secondary. Silverberg’s work was always of publishable quality straight from the typewriter.

Super-Science Fiction
(
SSF
) is not a well-known magazine today, but in the late ’50s its word rate was bettered in the field only by
Astounding
and
Galaxy
(the top markets in prestige as well as payment). Harlan Ellison, a regular in
SSF
, described its editorial requirement as “puerility,” and Algis Budrys accused W. W. Scott, the editor, of harming the field because he paid so well. Silverberg had a story in every issue of
SSF
except the second, in which he had an article. Furthermore, he had two or three stories (under various pen names) in most issues. He was making a very good living instead of complaining about the situation. I want to emphasize that these were good stories. If Scott wanted monsters (the last four issues of
SSF
had an all-monster theme), Silverberg provided horrible, ravening monsters—but there was also real tension, real characterization, and a solid structure to the stories in which those monsters appeared.

Occasionally there are aspects which might cause a reader today to blink. Silverberg wrote “The Loathsome Beasts” as Dan Malcolm for the October 1959
SSF
(one of his two stories in that issue). The story is set on a recently colonized planet, but one doesn’t have to look very hard to realize that the monsters which are horrifically crushing and dismembering the happy crowd on the beach are really giant six-legged sea turtles. After the carnage, the hero realizes that the solution is to dig up the turtles’ egg clutches and drive the species to quick extinction.