Sin In Space, Cyril Judd (1961), is a spiced-up version of Outpost Mars. The Male Response, Brian Aldiss (1961), is another book which I think was original to the Beacon series.

It was later published as The Undercover Aliens. Van Vogt (1960), was a revised version of The House That Stood Still from 1950. I have both versions, so I could do this one. It has also been published as a novel with the titles The Day of Timestop and Timestop!. I’ve not found a copy of the original novel yet.Ī Woman a Day, Philip José Farmer (1960), was an expansion of ‘Moth and Rust’, originally published in Startling Stories in 1953.

The Sex War, Sam Merwin, Jr (1960), was an expanded version of ‘The White Widows’, originally published in Startling Stories in 1953. Virgin Planet, Poul Anderson (1960), was a spiced-up version of a novel of the same title published the year before.įlesh, Philip José Farmer (1960), probably didn’t need any sexual content adding. Pagan Passions, Laurence Janifer and Randall Garrett (1959), was, as far as I can determine, original to the Beacon series. I’ve yet to find a copy of the original novel. The Beacon version had added sexual content. Troubled Star, George O Smith (1959), was originally published under the same title as a serial in Startling Stories in 1953, and later as a novel in 1957. I have the Beacon one but not the original. This was a spiced-up version of Jones’s novel The Secret People. As far as I’m aware, both editions were identical – i.e., the Beacon one was not “edited”. This had already been published by Galaxy in 1952. To date, I’ve not really got started on it, for a couple of reasons: one, some of the original novels are difficult to find and two, given the Beacon books’ cover art, I’ve always felt they’re a little too embarrassing to read during my daily commute. I had the vague idea of reading them and the novels on which each one was based, and then comparing the two. I’ve subsequently picked up (most of) the others in the series at various conventions. It made for a somewhat bizarre reading experience – I blogged about it here. I first came across these books when I learnt of The Mating Cry, a variant of one of my favourite sf novels, AE van Vogt’s The Undercover Aliens. As a result, the Galaxy novels issued by Beacon were “edited” to add sexual content. After 35 issues, the novel series was sold to Beacon Books, who were known for publishing mildly pornographic romance paperbacks. Back in the 1950s, Galaxy Science Fiction began a series of reprint paperback novels which they gave away with issues of the magazine.

Sin in Space by Cyril Judd