Betelgeuse Bridge (The Galaxy Project)

About the Story: Tenn's second contribution to GALAXY and his first of a series dealing with interstellar racketeering, BETELGEUSE BRIDGE was first published in the April 1951 issue. Its baroque humor, Runyonesque portrait of corruption and narrative ingenuity foreshadowed Tenn's dominance of GALAXY for the next decade. Appearing in the same issue as Poul Anderson's INSIDE EARTH and Cyril Kornbluth's THE MARCHING MORONS, Horace Gold had made it an important part of his signal to the science fiction community and the general audience that his new magazine had literary ambition, social awareness and a level of technical execution more central than had ever before been known.

About the Author: "William Tenn" was the pseudonym for his science fiction used by Phillip Klass (1920-2010); he is regarded as the finest satirist in the history of the field with an ingenious command of narrative. Tenn's blend of compassion and ferocity, dark comedy and satire merged with the work of three other writers (Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley) to create the characteristic voice of the magazine. After becoming a tenured Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University in the middle '60s, Klass virtually abandoned fiction writing, publishing only three short stories in his last four and a half decades. To reflect his importance to GALAXY magazine, three other William Tenn works are included among the 23 which compose the initial issue of The Galaxy Project.

About The Galaxy Project: Horace Gold led GALAXY magazine from its first issue dated October 1950 to science fiction's most admired, widely circulated and influential magazine throughout its initial decade. Its legendary importance came from publication of full length novels, novellas and novelettes. GALAXY published nearly every giant in the science fiction field.

The Galaxy Project is a selection of the best of GALAXY with new forewords by some of today's best science fiction writers. The initial selections in alphabetical order include work by Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Phillip Klass) and Kurt Vonnegut with new Forewords by Paul di Filippo, David Drake, John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg. The Galaxy Project is committed to publishing new work in the spirit GALAXY magazine and its founding editor Horace Gold.