January is Vintage Science Fiction Month, so join me for a look at a Golden-Age “quiet revolutionary.”

Obscurity isn’t what it used to be: with the internet, there is rarely such thing as a completely new find, and it’s only a matter of a few keystrokes to connect with someone who already knows all about whatever it is that you’ve just discovered. Of course, it’s true that there’s always someone smarter or more informed out there, but it’s easier than ever for hidden gems to rise to the surface where everyone can see them. I’m not sure how hidden Raymond Z. Gallun (rhymes with “balloon”) really was, or is: all I know is that I had never heard of him, or at least didn’t remember reading anything by him before discovering the “Best of” volume edited by J. J. Pierce and published by Del Rey as part of their extensive series of science fiction reprints. But even in 1978, Pierce described Gallun as neglected and underrecognized, even as some of his stories continued to be anthologized, and as Gallun had published a novel, The Eden Cycle, only a few years before. He does not seem to have had a resurgence since his death in 1994.

Nevertheless, Gallun was part of the pioneering generation of science fiction writers in the 1930s and ‘40s who helped to elevate the genre from crude, cliché-ridden pulp to the thoughtful “literature of ideas” we celebrate when looking back, and if many of his stories still have elements of pulp, I’ll hardly complain. The later stories in this book, from the ‘40s and early ‘50s, lean more toward character study, but my favorites balance the demands of the characters’ inner lives with external circumstances that push them toward decisive action. (To be fair, I’m only getting a narrow view of the man’s work—thirteen stories out of more than eighty, and he also produced a few novels which I haven’t read—so I’ll resist the urge to make sweeping judgments, even if I take Pierce’s word that this book really represents Gallun’s best.)

Going by these selections, Gallun was fascinated by the processes of life and death on a long-term cosmic scale. His vision of a dying Mars, with only a thin, cold atmosphere and marked by the ruins of a long-extinct civilization, is one he shared with many other writers of his day, influenced by the ideas of Schiaparelli and Lowell. (Amusingly, Gallun suggests in his afterword that he may have been inspired by a youthful job stoking the furnace at a hemp mill, surrounded by clouds of smoke from burning, cast-off cannabis plants.) However, spread across many of Gallun’s stories is the thought that Mars is only the latest planet in the solar system to approach its appointed end and Earth, too, will one day share such a fate.

Where Gallun stands out is the rigor with which he works out the details of his alien ecologies, whether they be based on other planets or on Earth in some future time or inaccessible place. “Davy Jones’s Ambassador” takes seriously the question of a deep underwater civilization, with Gallun’s solution being the careful breeding of specialized animals to provide food, structures, artifacts, and even electrical currents in an environment without fire. Gallun’s Mars, with its ancient ruins of an extinct, semi-insectoid race, destroyed long ago by war and/or climate change, is superficially similar to other treatments of the planet, but Gallun has little interest in Burroughs-style derring-do or Bradbury’s sense of fable; his is an anthropologist’s and ecologist’s view (the immensely satisfying “The Shadow of the Veil” is almost a sword-and-sorcery tale, told from the perspective of an alien “barbarian,” but its references to magic and gods are those of a pre-scientific being with no concept of astronomy or space travel). “Seeds of the Dusk” describes semi-intelligent plants, evolved to store oxygen in capsules and directing their own evolution for adapting to different environments, including spreading to other worlds.

The notion of intelligent life spreading seeds throughout the universe appears in metaphorical ways as well: “Godson of Almarlu,” the longest story in the book, features a long-dead civilization that once thrived on the planet which became the asteroid belt upon its disintegration. Knowing that the heavy, neutronium-cored comet that destroyed their planet would one day return to the solar system, threatening the life that they had spread to Earth in the prehistoric past, these ancients created a computer-like device to implant in one human’s mind the information necessary to build a sort of astral bridge so a small part of the planet’s population could escape to the moon (again, thought to have a thin atmosphere in those days). But while this 1936 story brings out the biggest guns—planetary destruction, cosmic forces using humanity as pawns—it also shows how Gallun’s science fiction was relatively hard, at least for its time. This is world-wrecking closer to Fred Hoyle than Edmond Hamilton. Based on knowledge of other planets as they were understood at the time, “Godson” even predicted the existence of neutron stars, as Gallun speculated that the newly-discovered element neutronium would, if concentrated, be heavy enough to disrupt the gravitational fields of planets unfortunate enough to be nearby. The mind-altering forces of the ancients and the nature of the energy they use to transport humanity to the moon are, of course, not as easy to explain, but Gallun smartly leaves such issues as mysteries.

Finally, Gallun was an important example in creating alien intelligence that was truly alien, making its different point of view a critical part of the story. His early life as a wanderer, traveling and working all over the world, surely broadened his perspective beyond the typical pulp writer of the ‘30s. Many of his aliens are sympathetic, and even when opposed to humanity, the aliens aren’t all monstrous invaders: in fact, it is often humans, continuing their manifest destiny by spreading through the solar system, that take on the role of colonizers, with the “natives” simply fighting back. (Still, Gallun wasn’t above creating alien antagonists when the story called for it: 1938’s “Hotel Cosmos” includes a particularly nasty one.) Along with Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” Gallun’s “Old Faithful” from 1934 is considered a landmark in logically developing a sympathetic alien. The title character is a Martian astronomer, living in solitude and at odds with his pragmatic, unimaginative people, who communicates with observers on Earth before deciding to take the ultimate risk to cement this long-distance friendship. The story feels like a rebuff to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds: instead of the puffs of smoke on the surface of the red planet being ominous portents of invasion, they are the sign of a kindred intelligence, with which communication, while difficult, is possible.

Speaking of Wells, Gallun’s work can be seen as a continuation of that author’s ideas on the cycles of evolution and extinction. The idea that humans are subject to the same forces as the dinosaurs and must adapt or die is Wells’s great bequest to the authors who followed him, and may in fact be the single greatest insight science fiction has to offer. But as Gallun matured and turned away from simple end-of-the-world scenarios, he realized that individuals face the same choice in microcosm. His 1951 story “The Restless Tide” makes that case directly, with a long-married couple whose lives swing between the indolent comfort of post-scarcity life on earth and the hard rigors of space colonization; neither life is satisfying for long, and it is man’s fate to always alternate between extremes. The futuristic medical and technological advances that increase the characters’ lifespans and make going to space an option mark the story as science fiction, but the central couple could just as easily be a mid-twentieth-century family deciding to leave the cozy suburbs and go back into missionary work. The story’s point is that the motivations and conflicts present are timeless and will continue for as long as there are humans.