Ona hot summer day in 1990, I saw the box at the back of a garage sale. The old man who owned the hundreds of books in it had died that spring. He was a pure, devoted geek with active subscriptions to the incredible science fiction digests of the 1940’s and 50’s. I pulled out dusty copies of Fantastic Tales and Out of This World Adventures.

At 10 cents a book, I bought as many as my chore allowance and arms could handle. I poured through the stories of new planets, where we should have been by now, 40 years after the first man in space and 30 years since we landed on the moon.