"Worlds Beyond", Vol 1 No 1 (December 1950) (ed Damon Knight) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package, or as a standalone copy.

At least some of the stories are reprints.

Table of contents. 

Links on author or year fetch more matching fiction.

1. [novelette] [reprint] William F Temple's "The Smile of the Sphinx": "What do cats do with their spare time? ... Rule the world, perhaps?"
2. [ss] Mack Reynolds & Fredric Brown's "Six-legged Svengali": "All the explorer had to do was prove that he was smarter than a mud turtle--but on Venus that's not so easy!"
3. [ss] Philip Wylie's "An Epistle to the Thessalonions": "He was incredible; ominous; indubitable; a giant one thousand miles high!"
4. [ss] Larry Shaw's "Simworthy's Circus": "It was the genuine article--the real, 100-proof, universal elixir of love. Just the same, applied to the ugliest human in the universe, it produced some pretty dubious results..."
5. [ss] [reprint] Graham Greene's "The End of the Party"; The London Mercury, January 1932: "The adult world is a tissue of lies, as any child knows. But what adult knows the dark truths of a child's world?"
6. [ss] John D MacDonald's "The Big Contest": "Now, forty years after the contest, we can figure out a few things about the little guy who won it. He had a terrible task here on this Earth; he must have been very lonely..."
7. [ss] [reprint] Franz Kafka's "The Hunter Gracchus": '"Even if all the people were commanded to help me, every door would remain shut, everybody would take to bed & draw the bedclothes over his head, the whole earth would become an inn for the night."'
8. [ss] C M Kornbluth's "The Mindworm": "You might think of him as an ascetic, for he lived on nothing more substantial than human emotion. Or you might call him a sadist, for the deaths of other men were his life. The coal-town Slavs he despised had another, simpler name for him; & a very simple, very ancient remedy for the terror he brought."
9. [ss] Battell Loomis' "Invasion Squad": "They were three casual travelers from Somewhere, en route to Somewhere Else. We're lucky to have this brief record of their stop-over, for it's doubtful that they'll ever return..."
10. [ss] [reprint] William Seabrook's "Wow": '"Abolish language," said the vizier, "& man will return to primal simplicity & happiness." ...'
11. [ss] Jack Vance's "The Loom of Darkness": "An old, an ageless tale: the story of a golden woman & a golden tapestry, & of the slender threads of darkness that bound them eternally together..."
    
    There is an editor's note on the back cover, along with an ad for author's well known novel "The Dying Earth", that says this story is "one episode" from "The Dying Earth".

See also.

1. Fiction from Worlds Beyond.
2. Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.
3. Fiction from 1950s.