The Knights of Arthur (The Galaxy Project)

Published in the January 1958 issue, THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR is one of the earlier computer satires in which the machine (like Arthur C. Clarke’s Hal in 2001 ten years later) is gifted with a human and very cranky personality. By 1958, the Horace Gold’s own personality, under the constant pressure of his agoraphobia, isolation and increasing imperiousness had sharply deteriorated and he had alienated most of his best contributors, some of whom (Isaac Asimov) refused to work with him anymore. Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine, between 1950 and 1959 apparently never left his Stuyvesant Town apartment for any reason. Gold was having ever less to do with the mechanical and repetitive aspects of editing and, probably at the best of his publisher Robert Guinn had turned over those tasks (and some of the task of selection) to Frederik Pohl who was in effect ghost-editing the magazine years before he assumed the position of editor on the masthead in 1960. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pohl became in those years one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors, even as the already dominant Robert Sheckley under Pohl’s guidance became so prolific that he developed three pseudonyms because so frequently more than one of his stories appeared in the magazine. THE KNIGHTS OF ARTHUR is a characteristic GALAXY satire of a machine pushing the borders of restraint and becoming a bully or at least something of an oppressor. (Robert Silverberg’s THE IRON CHANCELLOR, also part of The Galaxy Project is another such example.) Pohl’s pleasantly ravaged, post-apocalyptic city is more than background landscape; it is itself a character (just as New York City was essentially the protagonist of Pohl’s great novel YEARS OF THE CITY published three decades earlier). Pohl’s work was usually more inferno than comic but this novelette is managed with unaccustomed lightness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frederik Pohl (b. 1919) has been at the center of science fiction for three-quarters of a century. As an editor at GALAXY, Gold’s successor for a decade, as the editor a decade earlier of ASTONISHING and other competitors of ASTOUNDING, as the science fiction editor at Bantam Books and as an editor of the first original anthology series, STAR SCIENCE FICTION, Pohl has been perhaps more influential than any editor other than John W. Campbell. His novels and short stories alone or in collaboration since THE SPACE MERCHANTS have been at the cutting edge of the field; GATEWAY and MAN PLUS each won both Nebula and Hugo in successive years. Writers he first published or made prominent as an editor include R.A. Lafferty, Cordwainer Smith and Joanna Russ. His mainstream novel, THE YEARS OF THE CITY is probably his finest. He is a Grandmaster of the Science Fiction Writers of America. His most recent novel, published in 2011 is ALL THE LIVES HE LED.

ABOUT THE SERIES

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 Scheckley, 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.