Over the years since 1965, Algis Budrys has emerged as the leading critic of mod­ern speculative fiction: insightful, eclectic, and notoriously uninhibited. Benchmarks collects the material that started it all: 54 Galaxy Bookshelf book-review columns Budrys created for the now-vanished Galaxy Magazine. Written for what was then the world’s leading SF periodical, these legendary summations and summary judgments coincided with the period when newsstand-borne science fiction and fantasy were evolving from pulp toward literature. Budrys’ Galaxy reviews trace an incisive, sometimes wickedly acerbic path through that sparsely charted literary territory.