Books: Horrors in Space

GALAXY READER OF SCIENCE FICTION (566 pp.)—Edited by H. L. Gold-Crown ($3.50).

One of the great dramatic moments in literature occurs when Robinson Crusoe, walking the sands of his supposedly uninhabited island, is "exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore." What gives this episode its magnificence is not its mechanical "plot value" but its power to set the reader's imagination flaring like a torch. Even while his startled intellect searches this way and that for an explanation of the footprint, his anxious heart is oppressed with forebodings...

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