Science fiction in the 1950s was so clean you could eat a food pill off of it, despite a few stories by the likes of Theodore Sturgeon and Philip José Farmer. Fortunately for Beacon, sleaze books didn't require actual depictions of sex, which were forbidden, but sexual situations of a seamy nature that could be taken - or twisted - by their staff of copywriters and cover artists. That can be the only explanation for their first Galaxy Selected Novel to be Odd John, a reprint of Olaf Stapledon's 1935 ode to "homo superior" - a term coined in the book. John the superman has no use for human morality. The back cover takes the offstage hints and makes them explicit. "[I]s the difference in Odd John's seduction of his own mother - his bold experiments with male love - his complete power over women...?" The front cover, by paperback pro Robert Stanley, makes the fleshy woman both nude and imperiled by an equally nude John. "He had to be stopped, for all women were his playthings and all men his pawns." Those who eagerly entered the book found dense prose a long, long way from Orrie Hitt's. Bizarrely, Odd John had already been a Galaxy Novel back in late 1951 or early 1952. None of the blurbing material for that edition contains a hint of sex, sexual situations, or women.

 

The next two in the series were also reprints, but the fourth was a PBO that starts out as it if were the script for a thousand porn flicks: the beautiful freshman approaches the professor. "I'll do anything to pass the course, Mr. Forrester!" she vowed. "Anything!" The Greek Gods have returned to Earth, you see, and she is a follower of Venus, the Goddess of Love, and he a teacher who is in thrall to Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom. So he turns her down. The book is full of such teases, alongside the nude goddesses. Perhaps the most flagrant passage is: "I wanna go to the orgy, the boy kept saying. "I want to go to the orgy." "Next year," his mother told him. "Next year, child, when you're six." Pagan Passions - for once a supremely accurate title - was the product of two young and prolific pros, Randall Garrett and Larry M. Harris. (They normally wrote together under the pseudonym Mark Phillips; Mark is Harris' middle name. After 1963 Harris began using Lawrence M. Janifer for all his science fiction work.) Harris would go on to write erotica under various other pseudonyms as well as some of the first true science fiction sex works in titles like You Sane Men (Bloodworld).

 

Another reprint followed, Virgin Planet, written by Poul Anderson for Avalon Books. Imagine Poul Anderson writing anything that would qualify as sleaze: suspension of disbelief fails. Finally, in 1960, Beacon published two originals that truly dealt with sex, Flesh and A Woman a Day, both by Philip José Farmer, followed in 1961 by The Male Response, a PBO by British writer Brian Aldiss, which gets listed in the ISFDB as "non-genre."

 

1960 was an especially bad year for writers in the field. The magazine market, which essentially was the market, had nearly dried up. Trained all their careers to write short fiction, writers now had to try to sell novel-length works to publishers who were not set up to handle more than a handful of science fiction books, and reserved those spots for writers who already had made names for themselves. New imprints appeared, to be sure. Avalon Books had started their science fiction hardback line in 1956, but paid $300 for a novel, a half cent a word. When Gold started Galaxy he paid 3 cents a word. This was not progress. Beacon probably paid more and surely rewarded prolificness. If Orrie Hitt could write eight novels a year for them, science fiction writers could undoubtedly grind them out equally fast. Pulp writers had. Old line science fiction writers like Gardner F. Fox would by the end of the 60s be cranking out sexploitation novels by the score. Rather incredibly, his was the hand behind series starring The Lady from L.U.S.T., Cherry Delight: The Sexecutioner, and possibly others. Why Beacon didn't go down this route is explained by only one fact: Horace Gold still ran things.

 

The evidence comes from Farmer himself. In 1960 he was among six dozen major names in the field whose responses to a questionnaire would be published under the collective title of Who Killed Science Fiction?

 

I used to buy Galaxy even when it was noticeably on the decline through sheer loyalty to science fiction. I thought I should support science fiction. But now I don’t even do that. It hurts me not to buy one; I feel like a traitor. But why buy a magazine I will throw down in disgust, half read? Is it because Gold can’t get good stories? Is the type he has been printing the best he can secure? I don’t think so. He shies away from good meaty stories with valid science fiction backgrounds. I know because of personal experience. Mine and several other writers. And the curious thing is that while Gold won’t buy these strong and original stories for his own magazine, he is eager to purchase them for Galaxy-Beacon Press, the pocketbook outfit for which he is consulting editor.

 

In reality, only four of the eleven Beacon Galaxy Novels were original and none are thought of today as strong. They all would be totally forgotten if Flesh hadn't appeared in an expanded 1968 edition with a paragraph by paragraph rewrite and stronger plot and characters. Nor could Farmer know in 1960 that the next year Gold, already plagued by health issues and letting Frederik Pohl do more of the work, would be hit by a car and retire from editing entirely. That the Beacon series ended in 1961 is probably directly related. (Pohl revived Galaxy and If, the latter winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine three years in a row, from 1966-1968, again a future no one would have predicted. Pohl resigned in 1969 when Guinn sold the magazines out from underneath him. The buyer was Universal Publishing and Distribution Corporation. Yes, the successor company to UPD, which published Beacon.)

 

The last Beacon Galaxy was #312, Sin in Space, a reprint of the same 10-year-old story Dell had issued as Outpost Mars. The novel was by "Cyril Judd," a joint pseudonym for C. M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril, from early in their careers, the one and only Galaxy Novel to have originally appeared in Galaxy magazine. The closing of the line must have taken Beacon entirely by surprise. No book ever appeared in the next Galaxy Novel slot, #319. Or #326. Or #333, 340, 347, 354, 361, 368, 375, 382, 389, or 396. Not until B403, Lusting Women by Jon Balmer, did Beacon return to issuing consecutively numbered books, lacunae that must drive collectors insane. Worse, though the last two Galaxy Beacons are copyright 1961, the numbering puts them in the middle of dozens of 1960 books. What happened at the end? All is darkness.

 

A footnote, though not a mere footnote. The realization that Cyril Judd hid a male/female writing team raises the now ever-more-pertinent issue of women in science fiction. Galaxy Novels are another prominent example - matching that of the seminal hardback publisher of f&sf, Gnome Press - of a science fiction line of the 1950s not publishing a single book with a recognizably female name on the cover. C. L. Moore, the author of Galaxy Novel #31, Shambleau, was a woman and well-known as such inside the field. She and husband Henry Kuttner wrote as Lewis Padgett, the purported author of Galaxy Novel #17, Well of the Worlds. That's it: two of the first 35, 3 of the total 46. The percentage is representative of the time; women wrote about that proportion of the field. The use of ambiguous or male names is also typical but not necessarily telling.

 

A fascinating and unanswerable question is whether any women would have been asked to contribute to the Beacon Galaxy line if it had contributed. It's hard to imagine Horace Gold doing so. Beacon wouldn't have minded. Many of its titles were lesbiania with women granted billing as the author, such as the now well-regarded Kay Addams, who turned out to be a pseudonym of Orrie Hitt's. Yet just a few titles before Odd John, Beacon published Odd Girl, "The Revealing Story of Life and Love Among Warped Woman," as by Artemis Smith, now known to be the pseudonym of the early gay activist Annselm Morpurgo. (Maybe they hoped that some buyers would think Odd John was a sequel.)  Erolie Dern wrote for Beacon as Peggy Gaddis and Joan Sherman, producing more standard heterosexual sleaze. Many other female names appear. For another comparison, Avalon published 58 titles from 1956-1961. Two were by one woman, Joan Carol Holly, billed as J. Hunter Holly. Little wonder that people keep insisting that the field excluded or downplayed women as writers.

 

Galaxy Novels are a slice of the reality of science fiction publishing in the 1950s, a mixture of famous names, tentative tyros, hack work, and cobwebbed classics, reflecting tensions in a field striving for respectability but knowing that gosh-wow sold better. You might compare them to a contemporary 1950s Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, which reads differently than the memory of a continuous stream of golden oldies. As digests, they inevitably were a sideline to where the publishing industry was heading; the mass market paperback crushed all competitors. We don’t know what a successful all-original line of mass market paperback originals would have done for the field, but the point is that no one thought to sink their money into a proposition that crazy. Nobody sees the future; least of all science fiction writers.