I've just finished reading the November 1948 Astounding (no, I'm not THAT far behind!) and there was much of interest, mainly by people we've never heard of since then. The stand-out story for me was 'In Hiding' by Wilmar H. Shiras, all about a 12-year-old boy who is referred to a child psychologist because he doesn't seem to quite fit in, and turns out to be a towering intellectual genius way beyond his years. It turns out to be an "atomic mutation" story, and the denouement was a bit rushed, but it was well written and engaged my interest far more than you'd expect from that description. (Though a lot of the things the child psychologist does in terms of how he handles his patient would get him struck off nowadays, if not put on a register somewhere!) 'In Hiding' was the first in a series of well-regarded stories about mutants who were benign and whose mutations didn't give their subjects uncanny powers and the desire to wear Spandex out of doors, which were eventually made into a novel, 'Children of the Atom'.

Less impressive was a 'spaceship doctor' story by J.A. Winter. But there was also a short Theodore Sturgeon piece, homely but thoughtful.

Two 'science fact' articles were amusing for getting a lot of stuff wrong - Willy Ley on supersonic flight, stating that future supersonic aircraft would all be rockets (jet engines were no more than six or seven years old at the time of publication, so why Ley couldn't see them as being capable of further development I don't know, but he dismisses them as a engineering dead end), and E.L. Locke on 'A New Natural Law' - an article about the connection between gravity and magnetism, which confuses magnetism, magnetic fields and gravity completely, putting all planetary magnetic fields down to rotation. I don't know when we found out about Mars' lack of a magnetosphere, but that rather demolishes Locke's argument.

The issue's headline story was the second part of the serialisation of A.E. van Vogt's 'The Players of Null-A'. The kindest thing I can say of it is that it read like a bad pastiche of itself.