"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.

Free fiction: 2 issues of "Worlds Beyond"

Scans of both in CBR format at Crosseyed Cyclops.

In bold below are the link names used in the linked post (which doesn't use useful issue names in its links).

If I have a separate post on an issue, link on issue name goes there. Links on authors fetch more of their fiction.

1. "V1 #2 download": January 1951. Among the authors: Judith Merril, Rudyard Kipling, William Tenn.
2. "V1 #3 download": February 1951. Among the authors: Jack Vance, Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, C M Kornbluth, Harry Harrison.

PS: One of the comments in Crosseyed Cyclops page linked above includes another link to December 1950 issue too. But I haven't tried downloading it yet.

Related: Fiction from Worlds Beyond.

Jack Vance's "Brain of the Galaxy" aka "The New Prime" (novelette, leadership, free): There are many value-systems to judge a leader on

There are several, but not too many, genre stories where candidates for a political office must pass some sort of test - not ballots - judged by an impartial computer. This story is of this class. Perhaps the best known example of the class is Michael Shaara's "2066 Election Day".

There is a Sanskrit phrase that succinctly summarizes the moral of this story: "Yatha raja, tatha praja". Literal translation - a population tends to reflect the attributes valued by its political leadership - is unsatisfactory, but that's the only one I can think up at the moment.

It got interesting only near end - where different threads come together in a context. Most of the earlier part is unsettling in that it comprises of short vignettes that each appear to be independent untitled stories & are all minor by themselves: a man finds himself naked in a social gathering & invents a way of evading moral police; a tribe finds its home destroyed by the enemy & extracts an equal revenge upon enemy home; a man, in adverse conditions, unsuccessfully looks for relics needed to save his lord; a competition where the most imaginative man wins; a soldier captured by enemy is subject to extreme torture. But plodding through these vignettes is worth the trouble, as the ending will show.

Quotes.

1. "Obstinacy serves no purpose unless it advances a predetermined end."

Fact sheet.

First published: Worlds Beyond, February 1951.
Download full text as part of the scans of the magazine it originally appeared in.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Jack Vance.

"Worlds Beyond", Vol 1 No 3 (February 1951) (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. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. My rating for read stories is in brackets.

1. [novelette] Jack Vance's "Brain of the Galaxy" aka "The New Prime" (A): "It was the most brutal examination system ever devised--a system in which one wrong answer meant insanity, & another might mean death!"
2. [novelette] [reprint] Halliday Sutherland's "Valley of Doom"; 1939 (where?): "The calculations of the Total State included everything--even a measured dose of beauty."
3. [ss] Lester del Rey's "The Deadliest Female" (B): "Angered or thwarted, the normal female of the species can be deadly enough, Lord knows ... & Lee was no ordinary female--in fact, she belonged to no ordinary species!"
4. [ss] H B Hickey's "Like a Bird, Like a Fish": "Against the incredible complexity of the alien ship from yesterday, Earth had only the faith of Father Vincent--& the devious simplicity of Pablo..."
5. [ss] [reprint] Lord Dunsany's "The Old Brown Coat"; 1919 (where?): "The thing was immensely valuable; but why--& how?"
6. [ss] Poul Anderson's "The Acolytes": "Beyond the green, smiling face that Nerthus showed to men was the dark other--the alien face that is death to see!"
7. [ss] [reprint] C M Kornbluth's "Forgotten Tongue" (as by Walter C Davies); 1941 (where?): "A brief, apparently meaningless message--but once you'd read it, your mind wasn't your own!"
8. [ss] Richard Matheson's "Clothes Make the Man": "Which is really the stronger--yourself, or the carefully composed image you present to the world?"
9. [ss] [reprint] C M Kornbluth's "The Rocket of 1955"; 1939 (where?).
10. [ss] Harry Harrison's "Rock Diver": "If an undersea diver's equipment failed, he still had a slim chance to live. But between Pete & the surface was the crushing weight of a half-mile of stone..."

See also.

1. Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.
2. Fiction from 1950s.

Credits: Some of the information here comes from ISFDB.