The headline story in this 1974 issue of Galaxy is Verge Foray's "The Frontliners"; feisty female secret agents engage in interplanetary politics and secret agent stuff - but are ready to turn back to child-rearing for the good of the species at the drop of a hat. Definitely of its time. It was refreshing, then, to turn the page to Bob Shaw's short "A full member of the club". This was inspired by an observation of Bob's; he kept seeing adverts on the tv for After Eight mints, where posh people were passing around the After Eights at a dinner party. (If After Eights aren't familiar to you, think Ferraro Rocher. "With zeze chocolates you are truly spoiling us, Ambassador.")

Bob was incensed. "I can buy those sweeties in my corner shop!" he wrote. "Rich people wouldn't have those! They'd have fabulous chocolates hand-crafted by Fabergé!" And the likes of you and me wouldn't know where to buy them, either. Bob's writing style was way ahead of Foray's, too.

A couple of sound stories from Saberhagen and Utley follow, and finally some factual pieces; Jerry Pournelle on rocket science and the AAAS, and Isaac Asimov on the things the human race must do and the things we must stop doing in order to survive the next forty years. I'm sorry to report from forty years up the line that we're still doing the things we shouldn't do. By the bucketload. And to some extent, this Asimov article reads most unlike the man's usual projected persona. A bit sobering, that.

And the magazine is full of publicity and inserted squibs for the launch of the magazine "Worlds of If".

Finally, more BoSh; the second part of the serialisation of "Orbitsville".