At the beginning of the year I said that I would be covering one short story or novella from Galaxy each month—but I said nothing about serials. The truth is that Galaxy was, alongside Astounding/Analog, the most consistent market for serialized novels and novellas at the time, so it would feel wrong to never acknowledge that part of the magazine’s history. As such we’re getting a novella and a serial from Galaxy this month; that they’re both from authors I admire probably helps.

Last month I covered a horror story by the crime/mystery author Dorothy Salisbury Davis, which gave me the idea of finding more SFF by people who normally write crime/mystery, which while also a genre that has a history in pulp magazines, is “realistic” fiction rather than SFF. One curiosity that struck me ever since I saw it years ago was the fantasy story “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler, which marked one of only two times he appeared in an SFF magazine. Someone who wrote a good deal more SFF than Chandler would be John D. MacDonald, who wrote prolifically for the genre magazines in the late ’40s and early ’50s before shifting to crime fiction and making a killing on that. So for this month’s complete novel we’ve got the early MacDonald novel Wine of the Dreamers. Rounding out the novel-length stuff is a relatively obscure standalone SF novel by Roger Zelazny, who nowadays is more known for his fantasy.

For the women we have two people who are a few generations apart and coming from different continents, but who still, each in her own way, have come to write science fiction. Kate Wilhelm is actually a bit hard to find in magazines after the late ’60s, once she found her voice as a writer, but the September 2001 issue of F&SF was a special issue dedicated to Wilhelm, complete with a new novella. As for the Greek writer Eugenia Triantafyllou, I picked just about the newest story I reasonably could’ve (an unofficial rule of mine is that a story must be at least a year old for me to consider it for review), with “Loneliness Universe” being a finalist in this year’s Hugos. I’m voting in the Hugos, by the way.

That makes one story from the 1930s, two from the 1950s, two from the 1970s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.

For the serial:

1. The Dream Millennium by James White. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. I’ve been meaning to read more James White, and thankfully several of his novels first appeared as serials. White first appeared in the UK, in New Worlds, before eventually finding some success in the US as well. Along with Bob Shaw he was one of the few Irish SF writers to appear regularly on both sides of the Atlantic back in those days.
2. Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. Zelazny is one of the most influential SFF writers of all time, his mark being apparent on the likes of George R. R. Martin and (God help us) Neil Gaiman; and yet despite a couple generations of writers (especially those of fantasy) owing a debt to Zelazny, much of his work remains obscure or simply out of print, including this standalone novel.

For the novellas:

1. “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” by Kate Wilhelm. From the September 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s easy to forget this, but Wilhelm started in the ’50s, only that she flew under the radar for about a decade. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, though, Wilhelm seemed to metamorphize almost overnight into one of the most acclaimed SF authors from the late ’60s until her death in 2018. She was married to Damon Knight.
2. “The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the September 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Sturgeon is one of my favorite authors, especially of short fiction. Sturgeon had started to write professionally with “mainstream” fiction, although this went nowhere and he quickly pivoted to SFF, much to our benefit. His productivity was peaks and valleys so that he was writing either a lot or nothing at all. He was most consistently productive in the ’50s.

For the short stories:

1. “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the May-June 2024 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novelette. Triantafyllou was born and raised in Greece, and continues to live abroad, but writes her fiction in English. She made her debut back in 2017, and has yet to write her first novel, although maybe she just much prefers writing short fiction.
2. “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler. From the November 1939 issue of Unknown. Possibly the most acclaimed crime writer of the 20th century, seriously only rivaled by Agatha Christie, Chandler’s known for his series of novels starring Philip Marlowe. Chandler famously didn’t start writing crime fiction until he was in his forties, and didn’t write his first novel until he was pushing fifty.

For the complete novel:

1. Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald. From the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Fans of crime fiction would know MacDonald for his prolific (21 novels over a span of as many years) Travis McGee series, as well as the standalone novel Cape Fear (first titled The Executioners, but then retitled after the 1962 film adaptation), but he also wrote a good deal of science fiction in the late ’40s and early ’50s. It’s not unusual for authors to cut their teeth on working with one genre before moving to greener pastures, so that much like how Elmore Leonard started with Westerns before moving to crime fiction, the same happened with MacDonald. Wine of the Dreamers was either MacDonald’s first or second novel, it’s hard to say.

Won’t you read with me?