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The fiction section ("The Writer's Corner") at GalaxyOnline.com, under the editorial helm of short-story writer Rick Wilber, recently joined the ranks of professional web magazines. It features three strong reprints by Robert Silverberg, Robert Heinlein, and Jack McDevitt, as well as a new piece by Orson Scott Card. Other magazines would do well to take note of the insightful author commentaries.

The website's format, unlike some of its competitors, is user-friendly and unpretentious. The one drawback is the lack of eye-catching graphics, but then most readers pick up their fiction to read it.

"The Green Hills of Earth," one of Heinlein's more clever and more anthologized works, presents the story behind the legend of Rhysling, the infamous cosmic-trotting troubadour, in pseudo-documentary fashion. Rhysling is a dreamer who scribbles down lyrics and punches the keys of his accordion instead of attending to his duties, which gets him into trouble. As his lyrics gain fame, ship captains allow him to stowaway on their ships flitting around the system. Finally, as his fame wanes, a young captain refuses Rhysling passage back home to Earth. Rhysling gets off on a technicality and proves himself an invaluable asset, giving hope to shiftless bums everywhere that they, too, can be heroes. The only short-coming of this early masterpiece of SF is that the story's minor conflict lags somewhat due to the powerful mechanism through which this tale must be told, making up for any loss of story conflict.

Robert Silverberg's "Amanda and the Alien" has unusually vivid characterization. Amanda is a sassy teenage California girl who immediately sees through the disguise of an escaped and dangerous alien and cons it back to her home. Her boyfriend had left her high and dry on the very weekend Amanda had planned to spend alone with him since her family were off vacationing. Despite some longish dialogues and exposition, Silverberg deftly defines more of the alienness of our world than that of the alien's incessant hunger to consume life.

Jack McDevitt leaps into highly stylistic form and eerie mood in "The Fort Moxie Branch":

"A few minutes into the blackout, the window in the single dormer at the top of Will Potter's house began to glow. I watched it from across Route 11, through a screen of box elders, and through the snow which had been falling all afternoon and which was now getting heavier. It was smeary and insubstantial, not the way a bedroom light would look, but as though something luminous floated in the dark interior."

Trent Walters co-edits Mythic Circle, is a 1999 graduate of Clarion West, is working on a book of interviews with science fiction writers.