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Worlds of If Science Fiction ? Vol. 12, No. 2, May 1962. Edited by Frederik Pohl. Digest Productions Corporation, New York, May 1962 ? 35¢ cover price. Condition: Very Good. Digest-format pictorial cover, 7½" × 5½", with monochrome interior illustrations. Cover with light tanning and fading only ? honest wear for a 63-year-old digest magazine. Slight curl near spine, as commonly found in copies of this era; flat and stable otherwise. Staples intact with no stress marks noted. Pages clean and unmarked with light uniform age-toning. No subscription label, address stamp, date, or name written on cover. A sound and presentable copy.(see photos) Publication / Contents Notes Vol. 12, No. 2, May 1962; published by Digest Productions Corporation, New York; edited by Frederik Pohl; cover art by Dember; interior illustrations by Gaughan, Dyas, and Burns. Contents: "The 64-Square Madhouse" (novella) by Fritz Leiber; "Retief of the Red-Tape Mountain" (novelette) by Keith Laumer; "Death and Taxes" (novelette) by H. A. Hartzell; "The Spy" by Theodore L. Thomas; "Misrule" by Robert Scott; "Deadly Game" by Edward Wellen; "The Hoplite" by Richard Sheridan; "Gramp" by Charles V. De Vet; "The Expendables" by Jim Harmon. Special features: "Editorial: Jots and Tittles"; "Science Feature: ?And Beside Those Bombs?"; "The Other IF" by Theodore Sturgeon; "Hue and Cry." Frederik Pohl assumed the editorship of If in November 1961 ? this issue is among his earliest as editor, just six months into his tenure, before he transformed the magazine into a Hugo Award?winning publication. This is a particularly strong issue anchored by two notable works. Fritz Leiber's "The 64-Square Madhouse" is a celebrated novella about a chess-playing computer that learns from its opponents ? a machine not perfect, capable of being tricked, capable of making mistakes, and capable of learning ? widely regarded as one of the finest science fiction stories ever written about artificial intelligence and chess, and later collected in numerous anthologies. Keith Laumer's "Retief of the Red-Tape Mountain" is an entry in his beloved Retief series of diplomatic satires, featuring Vice-Consul Retief navigating the absurdities of interplanetary bureaucracy across eight settler worlds. The issue also features an essay by Theodore Sturgeon and interior art by Jack Gaughan, one of the defining illustrators of 1960s science fiction. A strong early Frederik Pohl?edited issue of If, anchored by Fritz Leiber's celebrated chess-computer novella "The 64-Square Madhouse" and Keith Laumer's satirical Retief novelette ? with additional fiction by Theodore L. Thomas, Edward Wellen, Charles V. De Vet, and Jim Harmon, and an essay by Theodore Sturgeon. If achieved its greatest success under Pohl, winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Magazine three years running from 1966 to 1968; this May 1962 issue captures the magazine at the very beginning of that transformation. A clean and presentable copy of a significant digest with no address labels or ownership markings ? increasingly rare for subscription-era magazines.
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