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The moment I looked at the contents page of the November 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction I knew something very strange was going on. I was a sophomore in high school and I had been reading Astounding since the beginning of that year. It was a small, neat-looking magazine, unlike all the other science fiction magazines of the time, which were shaggy, uncouth-looking pulps. And the fiction in Astounding was a cut above what the other magazines were publishing, too—sleek, complex stories, some of them going right over my barely adolescent head, but obviously better material than the competitors