The stars are the Styx_图书大全
The stars are the Styx
ISBN: 9780312944193
出版年: 1984-1
定价: 36.00
内容简介
These stories are all from Galaxy (except for the one
which was in 1[, which really is the same thing). The
birth and growth of Galaxy was the most important single
element in my science fiction career except, of course, for
my meeting in the late 30s with John Campbell.
Galaxy was Horace L. Gold s creation and for a time,
I think, his life. When word went out that he had a new
magazine, he was flooded, deluged, swamped, with manu-
scripts. He gave half of them to the late Groff Conklin
and half to me. Groff and I read them and wrote com-
ments, and then swapped our piles of paper. They then
went back to Horace, who read them all and did the final
selections. I don t know how he did it. I don t know how
he did anything in those days; he wasn t well, and he was
carrying burdens and undergoing stresses the like of which
have foundered many a well man. Yet in all the years he
ran Galaxy, he met his deadlines, he paid his writers, and
he consistently refused to buy inferior work from his
closest friends. What more could anyone want of an
editor?
(I hear a voice from the fog crying, "I damn well want
an editor who will keep his blue pencil the hell off my
story!" and it is true that from time to time he made
changes, and among these, there were alterations that
drove certain writers and a reader or two straight up the
wall. I learned, however, that if I had a certain turn of
phrase or a sequence that 1 didn t want him to mess with,
1 would write "stet" in the margin--a printer s term which
means "run it as it stands." And he never failed to respect
it.)
Horace was an editor-in-depth, by which I mean that
his concern went a good deal further than the black
marks on white paper. He eonaldered the source---con-
siderately. Just one example:
A writer, from time to time, trips up on the convolu-
tions of his own literary intestines and falls flat; can t
move, can t write. That happened to me because of the
machinations of a maverick senator. His hi-iinks struck
me in a special way. Think of Asimov s dictum that there
are three kinds of science fiction: What If--, If Only--,
and If This Goes On. My preoccupation has always been
the latter, and applied to what I saw was happening in the
