------FADEAWAY #38 is a fanzine devoted to science fiction and related fields of interest, and is produced by Robert Jennings, 29 Whiting Rd., Oxford, MA 01540-2035, email [email protected]. Copies are available for a letter of comment, or a print fanzine in trade, or by subscription at a cost of $20.00 for six issues. Letters of comment are much preferred. Any person who has not previously received a copy of this fanzine may receive a sample copy of the current issue for free by sending me your name and address. Publication is bi-monthly. This is the December-January 2013-2014 issue ______

THIS HAS BEEN a buzz-saw summer and fall season for me. I feel like the White Rabbit from “Alice In Wonderland”. I’ve been running since June with a thousand and one things to do, trying to catch up, and not coming close to catching up on anything. I was set up at a local indoor flea market for three months, which involved a lot of merchandise stocking, plus having to spend all day Sat and Sun there. Sales were good for a while, then the bottom dropped out in October. Plus the guy running the place wanted me to cut back on my space. The problem was that I had to rent a cargo van to move the eight foot tables along with the boxes of comics, records, science fiction books and the rest of it from my warehouse into the building back in July. He wanted me to cut back the equivalent of two tables worth of space. This meant I would have to rent a cargo van again just to move the two long tables back to my warehouse. I decided that it made just as much sense to break down the entire display and close out the space, especially after the poor October sales. It costs the same to rent a cargo van no matter how much stuff I was moving, so I closed down everything and I will no longer do the flea market. This should, in theory anyway, free up a little more time to at least get caught up somewhat on all the fanac and other stuff I need to do. We shall see. I owe letters to a lot of people and I’ve got a pile of fanzines I haven’t commented on yet. If you fall into one of those categories, please accept my apologies. I am trying to catch up, I just haven’t made a whole lot of progress. Meanwhile, biz wise, I’m spending a lot of time listing the new hoard of merchandise I accumulated earlier this year that made it necessary to rent additional warehouse space. This takes up plenty of time, and I feel I need to devote at least a few hours every day to this task, because it sure isn’t going to sell itself. Then, just to again forcibly demonstrate the principle that nature abhors a vacuum, a friend in the radio club who had been doing a mail order music and video business shifted his career and became a real estate broker; a very successful one. So, guess who wound up with all his merchandise? This acquisition also came with eight wooden shelving units that proved to be very useful. I haven’t even begun sorting out the video and CD material yet. I’m still working on books, comics, and graphic novels, but now that I’m not scrambling to stock the flea market with new displays every week, and spending all my weekends manning the flea market space, I expect I’ll get around to it soon enuf. Yet more reasons why I’ll never be able to retire and “take life easy:” as many of my friends have done. Apparently nature also abhors the idea of me not working hard the rest of my life.

SPECIAL CONGRATULATIONS and a big shout-out to John. V. Cody, our cover artist for this issue (who also did the header illo for the letter column, and the closing illo there too) on celebrating his 91st birthday this November. John has spent a life time doing cartooning and artwork, and is still producing art. His illos have been part of this fanzine for many issues now and I have a small stack that will show up in future issues as well. There is his cartoon self-portrait over there. Keep on having fun and keep on drawing John!

CONTINUEING ANGST & ANGRISH Fanzine editors get it from all quarters. I no longer get sticky quarters taped to the bottom of letters, but I get the equivalent thru emails and letters from readers. I get a lot of advice and editorial suggestions. Cut back on the letters column, no wait, why did you cut the letters column back so much, it should be longer, why did you run such a long article written by yourself, or, how come

2 there was no main feature article written by you in this issue, or why don’t you have more science fiction focused material, hey, you’re too focused on science fiction/fantasy try something else more often; or how about more cartoons, or wait, you’re running too many cartoons, how about more photos, what! why are you running so many photos and on and on. The flow new stops and there is something in every issue that wanna-be editors would have changed if only they had been in charge. It’s good that people are responding to this little publication. Reader response and reaction is the primary reason I keep turning issues of this zine out. God knows its an expensive hobby, and it’s about to become even more expensive come the beginning of January of next year, as the Post Office has decided to kick up the cost of first class postage yet again. This means that since copies of this fanzine go out 1st class that the cost of sending out copies of the zine will go up considerably. This means, realistically, that either I have to cut back the page count to get under the new rate ceiling, or reduce the type size, or cut even more people off the mailing list. In the past the number of people receiving printed copies of this little publication was quite large and growing every single issue. This past year I have taken an axe to the mailing list. Well, maybe not an axe, but certainly a surgical scalpel, pruning away those people who never bother to respond to the material I send them. The mailing list has gone from large, to manageable, and in the immediate future it is going to go down from manageable to quite reasonable as other individuals are dropped. I intend to continue sending out about a dozen sample issues to prospective new readers every issue, but those people who do not respond in the acceptable fashion---letters of comment, a print fanzine in return trade, articles/artwork that can be published here, or cash for subscriptions, are going to be dumped. Every time I do something like this I get plaintive cries from people who have been booted off the list, along with the usual excuses. And I’m sure I am going to receive some anguished emails. ‘Hey pal, I sent you a copy of my four page apazine back in 2011 so why are you not sending me copies of Fadeaway anymore? or, doesn’t that-post card I sent you from Borneo in the winter of 2010 count as a current LOC? Sorry, but I need more. You don’t have to send me a LOC every issue, but regular contact is necessary. Write some comments every now and then. If you publish a fanzine and we are supposed to be trading, then how about sending me a copy when you run off the latest issue. Send in some artwork or an article that I can use in up coming issues. If you can’t do any of this, then subscribe. The subscription rate is $20 for six issues, and subscribing relieves you of the obligation to write LOCs or send fanzines in trade. But if you want to continue receiving copies of this fanzine in the future you are going to have to do one of those things, otherwise your name will be dropped from the list of those receiving copies. Meanwhile, have a happy holiday season!

3

THE TYLER RIFLE; or,

How I Built A Prop Replica of Dominic Flandry’s Rifle

by

Jefferson Swacaffer

In 1966, Ace Science Fiction published Poul Anderson;s “Ensign Flandry”. This is the first, in terms of internal chronology of the stories and books about Dominic Flandry, a space-going hero and rogue, who passes thru rollicking adventures in the service of the Terran Empire. It is a very gripping saga, and frankly, some very tough reading. The climax of the series is “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows”, which is just about the most tragic SF novel you will ever find. Poul Anderson does horrible things to his protagonist. It’s hard to read. “Ensign Flandry” is a lot lighter and more upbeat. It has its tough bits, but fewer, and it has more joys and jollities. The cover art is by Michael Whelan, and, when one can draw one’s eyes away from the tiger-stripped furry lady, one can’t help but notice that Flandry is depicted holding a BFG---A Big Frickin’ Gun! That gun, that rifle, always caught my attention. I liked the look of it. I wanted one. So…I built it. It’s only a static prop. Well, not wholly static. The trigger moves and when you pull it, a mechanism goes “click”. And the shoulder strap can be lengthened or shortened. Digression: in the 1980s, I began writing my own science fiction series, the “Concordat of Archive” novels. One of these—the third—was “The Universal Prey”, published in 1985 by Avon Books. I admit freely and with no shame that I was heavily inspired by Poul Anderson’s Flandry cycle, and that my books were somewhat derivative of them. Not too awfully much, I hope. I did my due diligence and changed the details to produce a kind of spurious originality. In “The Universal Prey”, a bloke named James Tyler is sent out into the hinterlands to assassinate someone who well deserved it. I’ve never read Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness, nor seen “Apocalypse Now”, but I’m told there are parallels. For what it’s worth, I stole the name ‘James Tyler’ from the luteist and musicologist who founded the Long Early Music Group. (The Concordat novels always had a soft Elizabethan underpinning to soften the setting’s hard Stalinist edges). James Tyler carried a little pistol, a big pistol, and a honking great rifle. In my mind, it was the rifle from the Whelan cover art to “Ensign Flandry”. In the book, it is indicated to be a “Magnetic Accelerator Rifle”, which is a variant of the “Gauss Rifle” from the role-playing game Traveller, by Game Designers Workshop. (The Concordat novels are heavily Traveller-inspired and bear a notice indicating GDW’s kind permission for the use of certain ideas and terms borrowed from the game). A bit earlier, in the late summer and early falls of 1984, I began to build the prop rifle. The first step was to get a chunk of two-by-eight lumber and pencil out the shape of the stock. I used my Dad’s saber-saw to cut it. At this point, it’s perfectly flat. Now for some chisel work. So there I was---one of those moments you never forget---watching the Reagan-Mondale Presidential Debate on TV, tapping away with mallet and chisel, the living-room floor absolutely awash in little curling wood chips, rounding out the shape of the stock. Every so often I’d point the thing at the TV and go “Ker- pow!” (In the interests of bipartisanship, I will not mention which man was my target.) Pretty decent results. Until the grip broke off. Hmph. So I used screws, glue, and screw-on metal straps to repair the grip.

4 I cut out a large open bay where the trigger would go, in order to drop in the entire trigger (“click”) mechanism from some other toy gun. Then I fixed flat polystyrene plates over this, to restore a look of wholeness. More properly, I should have used a chisel to hollow out a recess in the solid wood, but I’m just not that skillful. The barrel is a length of PVC irrigation pipe. The fore-most extension of the barrel is the barrel from the same toy pistol from which I abstracted the firing (“click”) mechanism. This silly little triangular forward “bipod” at the front of the barrel is made of “Plastruct” H-Beams. (This, with the PVC Pipe barrel, allows me to say, in hideous truth, that the creation of this rifle makes me an H-Beam Piper). Plastruct is the brand-name of a series of extruded styrene parts which, at the time, could be found in several hobby stores. They’re still around, at Plastruct.com. The two “telescopic sights” are the hilarity of any serious rifle maker. Two sights? In series? What’s this? You look thru one, which lines up with the other. And this is supposed to produce the effect of telescopic sights? How? Absurd. But, y’know, it kinda looks good. The tubes are small copper plumbing pipes. A lot of the parts are just glued together. But that doesn’t provide enough structural integrity. I went to George Popa, a local prop-maker, and craved his advice. He said, “There is a little device which was known to the Ancient Romans. I recommend it. It’s called ‘The Screw’”. So, for instance, the bipod parts are screwed to the barrel, and the barrel is screwed to the stock. Then it’s to the scrap bin for random plastic parts to glue on, hither and yon, to give that roughened “Star Wars” kind of craggy surface. In the day, such parts were called “Nurnies”. I learned another lesson here. I was using slow- curing “Sixty Minute” epoxy to hold the pieces in place. This is awful. The stuff cures slowly! It doesn’t simply stay in place. It oozes. When fresh, it oozes like Maple Syrup. After half an hour, it oozes like honey. Even after a full hour, it still oozes, like tree sap. I spent hours pushing it back into position with pieces of cardboard for towels. Today, I know to use quick-setting Epoxy, or, even better, twin-agent epoxy putty. This is lovely stuff. It comes in parallel strips of blue and yellow. You knead it together, and, as the substances merge, it turns green. It works very much like ABC (already-been-chewed) chewing gum. Like chewing gum, it hardens when you leave it alone. But faster. It sets up, hard as styrene or PVC, in about ten minutes. And it holds stuff together. I love this stuff, and use it for all kinds of home repair. If the readership (anyone who gets this far) takes away nothing else from my story, take note of blue-yellow

5 kneadable epoxy putty. I cut up sections of an old rubber bath mat for the grip and the underside of the stock, where the shooter’s forward hand would go. Finally, a few coats of black spray-paint. This was when I learned that spray-paint, the kind I was using, doesn’t dry when sprayed on rubber, such as the sections of bath mat. The paint was still wet a day later, and still gummy five days later. It finally did dry. I added a final two coats of matte-finish Varathane spray varnish for surface protection and the right texture. Two screw-eyes were added at a later time, so it can be hang from a wall. The photograph is of me, some time in 1985, on the campus of San Diego State University, specifically at the Art Building, posing menacingly by the elevator. Today, it would be beyond the bounds of insanity to take a replica firearm onto a major university campus, but those were gentler times, before “zero tolerance” and before bans on toy firearms had become cultural standards. I went on to make more toy rifles, always timing the construction to coincide with the Presidential Election Debates. I’ve made a weird gizmoid Sci-Fi rifle that makes wobbly noises and looks like an electronics assembly line turned into out. And I made “Hofenfriedberger” a big-game rifle, and a “.750 Nitro Express”, or so it is claimed. But of them all, my favorite is still the one based on the cover of “Ensign Flandry”. In some honor, I ought to call it the Flandry Rifle, or even the Whelan Rifle, but it gives my ego comfort to allude to it as The Tyler Rifle.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Jefferson P. Swycaffer is akin to Kipling’s giddy harumfrodite—a fan and a professional too. With nine paperback science fiction and fantasy novels published (and now long out of print), he still plays with Legos, scratch-builds model spacecraft, plays Dungeons and Dragons, and reads X-Men comics. Peter Pan knew what he was talking about! Jefferson is active in local science fiction convention organizing, and is an energetic “furry”. He has a large stockpile of unpublished novels which will, eventually be e-published, but when that may be, no one can say, for one of the few collectors’ items Jefferson does not have is the classical “round tuit.”

6

YESTERDAY’S WORLD OF

TOMORROW

The title of this article is a direct swipe from long-time science fiction editor Robert Lowndes. He used this as the title for some of his editorials for Science Fiction Stories and Future back in the late 1950s. I have always liked the title and the concept. For about forty years or so I have been toying with the idea of doing a similar feature using the exact same title if possible. Time marches on. SF Stories, Future, SF Quarterly, all the magazines Lawndes edited are long gone, and alas, so is Bob Lowndes him- self. I don’t know if he would have approved of me using his title and his idea, but I’ve decided to do it anyway. The title should be self explanatory.

by

Robert Jennings

MIRACLE SCIENCE AND FANTASY STORIES Vol 1 #2; June-July 1931—Harold Hersey publisher, Douglas Dold editor

In the annals of science fiction magazine where presumably science fiction fans were forced to publishing, Miracle Science and Fantasy is one of the be more frugal with their dimes and quarters does not most difficult titles for a collector to locate. The fact really explain this situation. that it came out in 1931, the heart of the Depression,

7 signed up to receive my copy went out of business. I began to wonder if the trade paperback had actually been printed, or if it had all just been a series of false rumors. However, it turns out that the issue was reprinted, and I did get a copy, finally. And finally I got around to reading it and digesting the contents. Miracle Science had a short, but eventual life, mostly owing to the eventful lives of the people involved in producing the magazine. Miracle Science and Fantasy was originally published by Good Story Magazine in 1931. Good Story Magazine was a company headed by Harold Hersey, using money mostly fronted by a different major magazine publisher. Miracle Science was edited by Douglas M. Dodd, a legally blind person, assisted by his brother, Elliott Dodd, who was an art-deco style artist who, in addition to doing the covers and all the interior artwork for the magazine, also assisted his brother in his editorial duties, and who also wrote at least one novelette for the magazine. Publisher Harold Hersey always said that the magazine was profitable, but only two issues of Miracle Science were produced, because editor Douglas M. Dodd died in the spring of 1931. The story of this short lived magazine starts with Harold Hersey, the publisher. Many fans today As a dedicated science fiction collector, I was have a hazy view of Hersey as a braggart and a small- on the look-out for copies of this magazine for years. time unsuccessful publisher whose escapades in the Only two issues were produced, and altho copies of pulp magazine market most often met with dismal many other early science fiction and fantasy mags, failure. including Weird Tales, Astounding, Amazing and Actually Harold Hersey was not a minor Science Wonder Stories show up on a fairly regular personality and contrary to most modern sentiment, he basis, Miracle Science does not, and has not in the was also not particularly unsuccessful in the pulp past fifty plus years that I’ve been looking. On very magazine business either. He is remembered mainly rare occasios a copy would appear on a list among science fiction fans because he was the somewhere, but the price would be astronomical. original editor of The Thrill Book, a short lived Street Back in the late 1970s I saw a beat up copy listed for & Smith pulp magazine from 1919. This publication $125. I passed that one by. I have never seen a copy has achieved near legendary status thru the years as at any science fiction convention I have ever attended. being the first attempt at a commercial science fiction I had begun to despair of ever actually owning periodical. This supposition was enhanced by the fact a copy of either issue of this publication when that copies of the magazine are extraordinarily rare Adventure House announced a few years ago that they (due to limited distribution), but mainly because of a were going to reprint the second issue of the magazine long interview with Hersey printed in a special issue in affordable trade paperback format. I immediately of the fanzine Golden Atom back in 1955. signed up for a copy. In that write-up Hersey managed to portray Unfortunately things sometimes do not run himself in a brighter light than he deserved, and also smoothly at Adventure House, a small company gave the impression that Thrill Book was an devoted to reprinting different pulp magazine issues, experimental science fiction magazine, when in fact it and there were delays getting this project finished up. was not. It was an experimental adventure pulp with a Deadlines were missed. Diamond Comics, after strong emphasis on weird and supernatural fiction. several missed deadlines, decided to delete the slot He was fired by S&S after eight issues from their active orders catalog. The store where I because he had bought a lot of poetry and fiction for

8 the magazine that he had written himself. This was in judgment. First, he assumed that the golden boom absolutely contrary to S&S’s then-current policies, period of the twenties when almost every pulp sold and head of production Henry William Ralston fired thru at phenomenal levels, was never going to change, him when he learned about it. After he was gone the and he also decided that what the public really wanted new editor, Ronald Oliphant, bought some interesting science fiction adventure novels and horror short stories. The magazine sold poorly even in the limited test distribution markets and S&S killed it without a second thot after sixteen issues in late 1919. Hersey had started out as a poet and actually would have preferred to be a successful published poet, except that the public at large didn’t regard him as being much better than the dozens of other competent but undistinguished poets from the early decades of the twentieth century. He corresponded with and worked with such luminaries as Ezra Pound, Arthur Moss, Margaret Sanger, T. Atkinson Johnson and others. After service in the Army information office during World War I he took the editorial position with Street and Smith. After losing the editorship of Thrill Book he landed as an editor with Clayton Publications and helped develop some of their specialty pulps, including the enormously successful Ranch Romances, a blend of hard western action and romance. He soon rose to become executive editor for the Clayton chain. He worked next for the MacFadden publishing empire, making the move because MacFadden paid their editors better money. Witnessing the success of popular pulp magazines helped him decide to strike out into the pulp biz on his own, beginning about 1928 using front money supplied by a magazine distributor. He had some initial success in the days when the public appetite for pulp magazines seemed virtually unlimited. He produced titles such as Dragnet, Sky Birds, and Underworld Magazine. One of the things that people today pick up on was that he adopted a clever and memorable logo for his company which was posted prominently in the upper left corner of each magazine’s front cover, an old Indian good luck symbol—a swastika. This was before the Nazis came was specialty pulps devoted to specific themes. There into power and ruined that symbol forever. was some justification for this, of course. There was a In 1929 some internal dispute took place and market for specialty pulps like Amazing Stories, Sport Hersey was forced out of the company. Eventually Stories, Love Stories, Sea Stories, Air Trails and A.A. Wyn gained control and changed the name to Ranch Romances, as well as war combat and (for Ace Magazines. Hersey didn’t lose any time starting awhile at least), Ghost Stories which sold very well, at a brand new enterprise: Good Story Magazine least during the 1920s. Company, using money supplied by his old boss From this he assumed that specialty pulps Bernarr MacFadden. aimed at niche markets were the way to go. What he The problems with Heresy’s publishing did not count on was the Great Depression, which did empire were that a lot of his early pulps were a lot of damage to the magazine publishing market, or indifferently edited. He also made some serious errors the fact that radio and movies were going to severely

9 cut into the markets for printed material across the board. He made some good choices for pulp mags aimed at popular trends of the day, including the

publication of Gangster Stories, Speakeasy Stories, Gangland and Racketeer Stories, magazines that glorified criminals and painted a violent picture of their adventures, often with the implication that these murdering thugs were just misunderstood hard guys. These magazines were enormously popular for awhile, but got him into serious trouble with local authorities, particular in New York City and the northeast where censorship because a very real threat for his publishing empire. The gangster fad faded in the early 1930s when the public got fed up with crime as the FBI and local law enforcement agencies began to clean up the rackets. Instead of jumping over to pulps featuring stalwart law enforcement officers, he kept trying to promote the crime pulps until they fizzled out. Meanwhile he had made some other really bad decisions, including buying the once popular Ghost Stories title just in time for the magazines to have virtually run its course, and he watched it die a slow and steady death under his control. He produced a run of other magazines aimed at very limited markets, and they flopped miserably. Titles such as Fire Fighters, Murder Stories, and Thrills of the Jungle might have been successful if they had been launched in the 1920s before the Depression hit, but

10 after the economic landscape changed there was no who provides an excellent website titled “Field Guide room for them at all. On the other hand, it is difficult to Wild Western Pulp Artists”. Don’t be put off by to understand why he could ever had thot that titles the name, this site provides extensive history and such as Zeppelin Stories or Prison Stories would ever biological info on hundreds of artists who illustrated have sold well to anybody. Those pulps are now the pulp magazines of yesteryear. This is a treasure enormously rare and valuable because nobody bought trove of information invaluable to anyone interested in the things. the history and development of the American pulp He correctly assumed that the flat magazine magazine. The photo of Elliot Dold is also taken from format, roughly 8x11” printed on semi-slick paper, the this site. The URL for “Field Guide…” is same format that True Magazine, Ghost Stories, True http://www.pulpartists.com/index.html. Confessions and the movie fan magazines used, was Douglas Dold was born in 1888, Elliot was going to be the wave of the future. Unfortunately it born in 1889. Their father was a prominent wasn’t the wave of the future for all-fiction magazines psychiatrist in charge of the River Crest Sanitarium at in the 1930s when he was running his enterprises. Astoria, Queens, NY. The family occupied private After WWII this format, particularly favored by the quarters within the facility. In September 1902 their so-called men’s magazines, swept the pulp style mags mother died at the young age of thirty-six. She had off the newsstands, but it was too late to do Hersey’s been active in the Southern Women’s Educational companies any good. Alliance, which led her husband to become a staunch Hersey seemed to always have some sort of patron after her death, eventually serving on the interest in science fiction. While working for Clayton Advisory Committee. he had suggested that the company start a magazine In 1909 after both brothers had graduated high devoted to fantastic future fiction, but Clayton wasn’t school they embarked on a grand tour of Europe. On interested. After Miracle Science Hersey brought out returning Douglas entered Columbia University with Flash Gordon Adventure Magazine, in 1936, a one the intent of becoming a physician. Elliott enrolled in issue experiment that is very rare now, so it is also not The College of William & Mary at Williamsburg, Va, surprising that his last real pulp effort would have where he became interested in art, providing cartoons been the science fiction magazine Comet Stories. and illustrations for the school yearbook. After That was also his last effort at publishing graduating in 1913 he returned to live with his fiction magazines, in either pulp or flat format. After widowed father and brother at the Astoria sanitarium. Comet bit the dust he got a job as executive editor of He entered Columbia intending to follow the medical the Hardy-Kelley Group (the H-K in the Comet profession, but he also attended art classes at the Art publishing info), an outfit that produced digest sized Students League. (and smaller) saddle stitched cartoon and novelty When World War I broke out in 1914, the books. He was also employed by Charlton Serbian Council in New York City happened to be a Publications as the editor of Hit Parader Magazine, a professor at Columbia University. He organized a monthly fan publication with photos and articles along volunteer unit of twenty students for the Sanitary with the lyrics to popular songs of the days. He also Commission of the American Red Cross, intended to handled a companion magazine, Country Song be sent to Serbia to help eradicate an outbreak of Roundup that appeared on a more erratic schedule. typhus which had killed almost one-third of the army. There may have been a connection between Charlton Money was raised for medical equipment and Publications and H-K, but I have not been able to transportation, including twenty-five automobiles for decipher it. This was to be Hersey’s final job. He ambulance use. was still the editor of Hit Parader when he died in In June 1915 both Dold brothers volunteered 1956 at age 63. for the Serbian Relief Expedition. Douglas had just Back when Hersey started Good Story graduated from Columbia medical school. When the Magazine he pulled some people from his past work expedition arrived in Serbia the Bulgarian Army had in the magazine field along with him. One of those already taken over the country. The brothers decided people was Douglas Dold, and his younger brother to join the remnants of the Serbian army. A later New Elliott Dold. Hersey had known the Dold brothers York Times article reported that they narrowly missed from his editorial stint at Clayton. being captured as the rapidly depleting Serbian forces The story of the brothers Dold is involved and retreated, before being captured in the fighting just fascinating. I am indebted for much of the biological before the surrender of Nish. After that they information about the Dold family to Dave Saunders performed medical relief work with the Bulgarian

11 Army. They were stationed near Nish where Dr. William Elliott Dold, college photo Douglas Dold was in charge of a medical clinic for Bosnian refugees. In 1920 Douglas married a 23 year clothing In December 1915 the compound was buyer for a New York store. Douglas and new wife attacked and Douglas sustained injuries that blinded Catherine moved to Queens. Unable to practice him. It is unknown whether he suffered from fire medicine, Douglas took to writing fiction for the pulp blast, shrapnel, or mustard gas. A blind doctor was a magazines. He sold to Adventure, All-Story, Argosy, useless doctor so far as the Bulgarians were and Illustrated Novels, among others. He applied for concerned, so he was released by the Bulgarian Army and got a job as an editor with the Clayton chain for emergency medical treatment. His brother Elliott despite his legal blindness. After he began an editor was also released to escort his blinded brother home. he hired his brother Elliott to paint covers and provide They returned to the United States in late December interior illos for many of the Clayton mags, 1915. particularly their westerns and their high-adventure Technically speaking the brothers were not titles. war veterans, since they had been part of a Red Cross Hersey wrote about Douglas and Elliott Dold medical volunteer effort. When the US entered the in his pivotal 1937 book “Pulpwood Editor”--- war a couple of years later both brothers registered The adventure periodical Danger Trail is with selective service. Elliott was age thirty-two at important to be because of its editor, the this point, and was not called up. His brother was blind Douglas Dold, who had lost his sight listed as 5-G because of “defective vision”. in the World War. So far as I know, this is David Saunders makes the point in his write- the one and only instance where a blind man edited a fiction periodical. up that Douglas Dold may have been legally blind, but Traveler, author, student, man of the world likely was not completely blind. He noted that a and a splendid friend, his death removed one British soldier who had a mental breakdown and was of the few men gifted with knowledge, cared for at the River Crest Sanitarium was escorted experience and bubbling energy required back to England (where he was to receive farther for this job. We hired an assistant treatment) by Douglas Dold, a task that would not to read manuscripts and proofs out loud have been entrusted to a totally sightless individual. to him. He gathered a clever group of contributors about him. His brother, Elliott Dold, the artist, and Charles Wrenn did most of the covers and illustrations as I recall. Mr. Clayton, the publisher, and I gave him rope enough to hang an ordinary editor – but not this extraordinary one. If anything the magazine was a bit too well done for the curious newsstand public that supports pulps.

12 particular time. The cover features what appears to be a rocket ship made of glass, with a girder gridwork and the insides composed of glowing red vacuum tubes. No human beings are present. The ship seems to be flying over a volcanic landscape of an asteroid or small planetoid below. The cover is not credited on the contents page as being linking with any story, but it is clear that the cover is a symbolic tie-in with “Revolt On Inferno”, a “novel length” story by Victor Rousseau in this issue. The cover also features a diagonal red stripe in the upper left hand corner. Many other Hersey titles used the same gimmick. This was probably an attempt to attract reader attention on newsstands crowded with dozens of other fiction magazines, however not all the Good Story magazines utilized the stripe. The magazine is 128 pages long, with a type- face size that is generally larger than most pulp magazines of the era used. The lead story is titled “The Bowl of Death” and is credited to Elliott Dold, who also provided the illos for the story. This is essentially a lost race adventure. An American flyer, Roger Dale, flying an airplane for the Mexican rebel forces is caught by the Federal air force, sustaining machine gun damage. He manages Hersey thot highly of Elliott Dold’s strong art to escape his pursuers by flying over a trackless waste deco style black and white work. In 1923 Hersey of desert, and lands his plane near a towering series of printed a volume of his poetry titled “Night” which is red cliffs. He is completely lost, with a leg wound, no remembered today primarily because of the forty-five water, and no hope of finding his way out of the pictures Elliott Dold did to illustrate the poems, many unknown region. with strong fantasy overtones. A small rockslide reveals an opening on the When Hersey started his new company, both cliff above him. He manages to climb up to discover Dold brothers came with him, Douglas as an editor for a tunnel in the rock, ingots of gold, the mummified the new Miracle Science and Fantasy, Elliott as the remains of an armor clad conquistador, and a tunnel primary artist for that magazine. The Dolds, filled with poisonous snakes, vicious rats and very particularly Douglas, were essential to the formation large spiders. When he pushes onward he comes out and the continuation of this new science-fantasy into a hidden valley, a red hued valley caused by the publication. And, when Douglas Dold died suddenly, rays of the setting sun and the red sandstone rocks that the magazine abruptly folded. form the mountains around the valley. According to SF writer Murray Leinster, The land is inhabited by giant nearly albino Dodd’s house caught on fire in the early months of wolves, monstrous spiders, monstrous blood thirsty 1931, and the New York fire department while bats, and a beautiful girl fleeing for her life from responding to the alarm sprayed Dodd with icy water. brutish man beasts following her. The girl turns out He caught pneumonia and died shortly thereafter in (as you might expect) to be the priestess of a tribe May. In the days before sulfa drugs and modern made up from the union of ancient Aztecs and Spanish antibiotics, pneumonia was a major killing disease. It adventurers. She speaks a very antique form of is not know whether his wife Catherine survived this classical Spanish, which Roger is able to understand. disaster or not. His project, Miracle Science and Named Xalia, her people, the true Mictli, have lived in Fantasy Stories was cancelled. the valley for hundreds of years, amid the caves and It is worth taking a look at this second issue of structures of a hidden Aztec treasure city. the magazine to see how it stacked up against the Along the way the pure bred harmonious other science fiction periodicals on the market at this mixture of white Spaniards and noble Aztecs was

13 diverted so that there are now two races, of which she defying the Sacred Law, many of the people ate the Xalia, is the last, while the bestial remnants, strong in Peyotl cactus raw, which brought an ancient curse numbers despite their low intelligence and soft, almost upon them and caused their degeneration into the slug-like flesh, are known as Metzli, led by a almost sub-human Metzli. lecherous evil leader named Romero who lusts after What is interesting, to me anyway, is that this the beautiful princess and vows to have her. story was published in 1931, well before the public These more or less conventional lost race was much aware of peyote or its narcotic nature. The trapping are covered with a long, interesting, involved author is very conversant with the use of the cactus history of the region and its people that is told during drug in ancient (and modern) native American interludes in a series of action sequences as the story religious rites, and outlines the then-current progresses. In order to provide more of a feel of government feelings about the use of this substance. plausibility to the background, the author tells the Not specifically covered, altho hinted at, is the entire story using the first person tense. In addition, fact that taking the peyote buttons directly, or drinking the author uses footnotes and scientific cross a broth made by cooking the things is so foul tasting references to explain directly to the reader some of the that almost everyone who takes the stuff becomes fantastic things he encounters, trying to demonstrate violently nauseated and vomits convulsively well they are entirely possible and not beyond the realm of before any hallucinatory effects come into play. What belief (if you choose believe the foot notes anyway). Dolt does say is that toasting the peyote in that One of the pivotal parts of this set-up, is that mysterious “sacred fire” somehow negates any the people of his hidden valley got their religion the poisonous effects of the material so that it had been old fashion way; divine revelations thru hallucinatory used beneficially for generations by the people of the drugs. The ancient people used the sacred peyote valley until the Crimson Flame was extinguished. In buttons, toasted in a sacred volcanic fire, to help addition the flame treated peyote could apparently be preserve the purity of the race and the religion. The used somewhat frequently. In real life raw or boiled sacred Nahuati Peyotl was roasted in the “Eternal peyote liquid can only be used to create hallucinations Crimson Flower of Flame” from the altar of in human beings about once a month. Quetzlcoatl. But the flame went out long ago, and

14

This is a fast moving and well written story, mysterious geyser erupts boiling liquid that contains gigantic spiders, albino wolves and monster blood some kind of dissolved mineral material that settles on sucking bats aside. The descriptions of the ancient the bodies and coats them with a clear iridescent, valley, and the bowl of death itself, where the dead almost glassy covering that preserves each body bodies of the civilization are arranged on tier after tier perfectly. The bowl of death was also used as an around a volcanic geyser are quite graphic. The execution chamber and Romero plans on executing

15 the beautiful Xalia, the last remaining Mictli, along and the government unexpectedly granted her passage with the outsider if she does not surrender herself to on the prison ship to visit him. him. There is an ulterior reason for granting this There are twists and turns within the plot that request. It turns out that our hero is also an inventor keep the story moving at a very rapid pace. The final of no mean talent. He has developed a remarkable epilog, relating the return to civilization of the pair is a device that can instantly crease a zone of almost bit corny, but otherwise this is a strong, well crafted absolute zero temperature. He had intended to use story that easily stands the test of time. this machine to battle the forces of the tyrant on Earth, I have to wonder after reading this whether but he was captured, and the machine is now on board Elliott Dold was the actual author. I mention this the space ship. Danvril and the tyrant Yoska want this because editor Douglas Dolt had written pulp stories weapon, so Danvril offers Evans freedom for himself in the past, and indeed Douglas Dold had a long story and his men if he will reveal the secrets of the device. (billed as a serial) in the first issue of the magazine, Failure to do so means that Danvril will take the whereas so far as anybody can determine, this is the lovely Ottili in marriage by force. Faced with this one and only piece of fiction that Elliott Dold ever had threat, Donald caves in and agrees. published anywhere. It seems likely to me that the The space ship lands on Inferno and the new primary writing on this piece was done by Douglas, convicts (and the readers) are exposed to some of the who submitted the story under his brother’s name to harsh conditions and the vicious attacks of marauding perhaps avoid a potential conflict with readers and monsters, demonstrating that the planet easily lives up other writers who might resent editors selling to its hellish reputation. Needless to say the vile themselves material they had written. A possible flaw Danvril breaks his word the minute the sub-zero in this idea is that Douglas could just as easily have machine’s powers are demonstrated, but our hero has used a pen name instead of that of his brother. managed to secretly disengage the mechanism so it Perhaps the story was a collaborative effort between cannot function, and only he knows how to make it the two of them. But in any case, Elliott Dold gets the work again. Thru a series of fast action sequences official writing credit. Donald manages to link up with his friends. They The second story in the issue is billed as a manage to take over the transport ship, and hold off novel length epic, but the word-count as published the guards, planning a return to Earth, but things go hardly qualifies as a novel. “Revolt On Inferno” by wrong, they are captured, they escape, they are Victor Rousseau uses stronger science fiction themes. attacked, Danvril is captured, Ottili is kidnapped… Planet Earth is ruled by a dictator named Yoska who Well, you get the idea. It’s an action packed series of rules with an iron hand. Donald Evans and a group of events that sees the good guys winning for a few fifty conspirators had planned a revolution, but all the rounds, then the bad guys respond and the good guys members of the movement are captured and they are are on the defensive again. all on board a space ship bound for the planet Inferno, A key ingredient in all this action is the fact a world beyond the orbit of Pluto, where the light of that Donald has managed to capture, and use, some of the distant sun is no brighter than that of any other the Jetta tubes, which spray out a vapor that causes star. However the planet has an atmosphere, and instant paralysis. Without an antidote, any ample water, along with hellish heat, provided by immobilized victim dies in a short period of time. volcanoes. Nothing grows on Inferno. Sub-planet Finally the good guys take over the eruptions randomly spurt boiling mud and steam along internment station, but Danvril, with Ottili as hostage, with noxious gases over the surface. In addition, the along with a few of his trusted cronies escape to the waters and boiling hot ooze are filled with vicious luxury domed city over in the center of the continent. malevolent creatures. Rebels are sent to this world to Donald and his staunch ally Egli follow in a defective die, and most do. But some individuals manage to airplane, which crashes before it reaches the domed survive. sanctuary. Donald and Egli survive horrendous The bad guy in the piece is Danvril a slimy, storms, finally meeting up with desperate convict treacherous government official who commands the rebels who are preparing to attach the city. It turns space ship Planetaria transporting Evans and his out that the artificial sun that provides light for the friends out to the prison world. Along with the fifty- domed sanctuary goes out for one hour on a set one males, there is also one woman, Ottili, beloved of schedule. They plan to launch an attack during the Donald Evans, and naturally, the woman that Danvril next spell of darkness to either win or die. Donald and wants to marry. Ottili’s brother was sent to Inferno

16 This is a story that was entertaining, yet which also had some problems. I am a firm believer in the premise that when you read a piece of fiction, you have to buy the bit; that you need to allow the writer to establish whatever his premise is, the basic set-up, and then judge the story on the basis of what he accomplishes within his own established perimeters. At first glance “Revolt On Inferno: would appear to be straight early 1930s style space opera, a standard valiant rebels against the malicious overlords adventure set on an alien world. Our hero Donald Evans, a man of courage and resourcefulness, is equal to the task. But he gets a lot of help from Rousseau, who unfortunately creates his scientific backgrounds and gimmicks on the fly. As the story progresses, he often manages to violate his own set-ups in ways that are both aggravating and patently unbelievable. That sub-zero weapon is a good example. In the beginning Rousseau tells us thru Donald that “the machine is effective over an area of something like a hundred and fifty square miles. That is absolute. Egli, with their hand held jetta tube weapons decide to Outside that area there is a death zone twice a large, join and lead the attack. though within this fringe it is possible to counteract I’ll spare you the details. The action is fast the action of the cold.” The operator himself is safe and furious. Defeat seems inevitable, until a support within this circle of extreme refrigeration. Later, it beam propping up the artificial sun inside the domed develops that what the machine actually produces is a city is destroyed and the heroes manage to triumph. concentrated ray, not an area zone effect at all. The Altho we are sure that the good guys are going to win ray carries frozen death up to forty-five miles away in out in the end, it’s a touch and go situation all the way a test to the very last page, with plenty of action and plenty It would also be interesting to know what kind of suspense. of “atomic engines” the space ship Planetaria is using.

17 Apparently in Rousseau’s universe, all you have to do irritating. It is obvious that Rousseau turned this piece is step on the gas and your space ship zips along way out as a first draft without bothering to do any faster than the speed of light. The trip from Earth to revisions or rewrites. Inferno only takes three and a half days, total. That’s In addition to the plot irregularities, he moving, brother, and Rousseau doesn’t even offer a sometimes resorts to a series of long, on-running courtesy pseudo-science explanation of how a prime sentences joined by the word ‘and’ repeatedly. You law of science can be so easily broken. will find no yets, buts, fors, becauses, throughs, or any More aggravating is the information about other word to connect sentence parts besides the word Inferno itself and how the forces of the tyrant Yoska and. And, those disjointed sentences run on, and on, operate. We are told that Inferno is a small planet, and on. Early on in the adventure this becomes smaller than Mercury, located well beyond the orbit of noticeable. Shortly after that the situation becomes a Pluto, a world that only circles the sun once every low level irritation that interfered with my enjoyment thirty thousand years. Yet the artificial sun that of the story. supplies the domed government sanctuary city is All this could have been avoided if Rousseau lighted (and presumably powered), by a beam of light had bothered to plot his story in advance, or if he had collected on planet Earth in the Rocky Mountains, and bothered to do a second draft and smooth out the beamed, via some unknown method, across the vast writing kinks. Clearly, he did not bother. If he had reaches of space, so precisely that it hits the globe on used a story breakdown or outline he might have at top of an isochromin shaft in the wilds of Infero’s least avoided the most glaring scientific and plot backlands. In addition, this magical beam of inconsistencies. These problems, particularly the light/energy is interrupted for one hour on a lengthy scientific fluffs and inconsistencies present real but predictable schedule, due to the passage of the obstacles to the enjoyment of this adventure. In the planet Jupiter across the path of the beam producing early days of science fiction, when many of the an eclipse that cuts off the beam. readers prided themselves on being interested in I’m not well versed in either astronomy or science, and versed in the basics of both physical physics, but these two premises are so stupid and so science and astronomy, this would have been unbelievable I almost dropped the book when I read extremely noticeable. This is one of the reasons long the paragraphs discussing them. This is beyond time science fiction fans like Robert Lowndes and ridiculous; the concepts are ludicrous. Everett F. Bleiler dismissed most of the science fiction Rousseau violates many of his other premises in this magazine as inferior to the stories being as the story develops. He makes a point early in the presented by its competitors. story, reinforced several times, that the glass-like Victor Rousseau was a long time pulp material isochromin is absolutely indestructible. It magazine writer who made his mark in the first third withstands extreme collisions, heat, massive of the twentieth century. Born in London England in explosions, even designator ray guns. Yet at the 1879 as Avigdor Rousseau Emanuel, he came to the critical point of Evan’s assault on the domed United States in 1901 and became a reporter for the sanctuary, the isochromin shaft supporting the New York World. Later he worked as an editor at artificial sun is shattered, the sun comes crashing Harper’s Magazine. He wrote fiction for the down and goes out, which allows the rebels to win magazines of the day, alternating his time between the their battle. So much for the indestructible material. UK, Canada and the United States. His best markets There are other minor take-backs and were in the US, so he spent more and more of his time inconsistencies thruout the story. Nothing grows on here. super hot Inferno, yet the rag-tag group of rebels Altho he wrote all kinds of fiction, including Donald and Egli encounter have managed to survive detective and western stories, he is primarily despite “the extreme cold”. If nothing grows on remembered for his weird fantasies and science fiction Inferno, what do the denizens of the planet eat to tales. He was a regular contributor to All-Story, survive? If all the monsters were flesh eating Argosy, Weird Tales and other top pulp magazines of carnivores, there would rapidly be no animal life left the teens and twenties. His best known novel was at all. “The Messiah of the Cylinder” published in 1917 as a The story is fast moving, and the characters, serial in Everybody’s Magazine, and immediately undeveloped tho their personalities might be, move issued as a novel. Much of his output was not turned along at a gratifying pace, but I found the numerous into hardbacks during his lifetime, but he always minor and major story glitches to be sometimes

18 Second Self—The bio-Biography of Victor Rousseau” was published in 2011 by The Spectre Library. This book includes a previously lost Dr. Ivan Brodsky story along with a biography of Rousseau. I have not read this book myself, but it presumably covers his writing career after 1941. Rousseau died in 1960 at age 80. The third and final story in this issue is titled “Fish-Men of Arctica”, by John Miller Gregory. John Miller Gregory is a name nobody from then to now knows much about. It is tempting to believe that this was a pseudonym, but someone has traced a writer by this name and he is barely mentioned in some science fiction research circles, so he apparently was a real person. This story is clumsily written with all the trappings of an unpolished amateur. The phrasing is stilted, the conversations labored and the premise itself is extremely difficult to accept. We learn that our hero, Jim Fentress, an explorer, is planning an expedition (by submarine!) to the arctic ocean. We also learn that the moon is becoming much larger seemed able to find markets for his writing, including because it is apparently swinging closer to Earth. Jim turning out at least one screen play. encounters a mysterious man who tells him about a By the late 1920s and early 1930s the science legend among the arctic natives that the moon was fiction magazines were appearing, and Rousseau ripped from the northern part of the planet eons ago, followed the market. Unfortunately his best work was and that the great sun god Surt may, in his due time, produced in his earlier years. His habits of writing decide to allow Luna to return to its birth place. That fast first draft fiction with action packed story plots time is right now. gained him continued sales, but he was being rapidly I believe I mentioned before that I am a firm outclassed by other writers who were willing to craft believer in giving an author a chance to develop his their science fiction stories more carefully. He premise, and then judge him on how well he handles contributed to both issues of Miracle Science. In the the set-up. It took a lot of suspension of belief on my first issue he had another “novel length” story titled part to buy this whole bit. I have to say that within the “Outlaws of the Sun”. perimeters of the concept the writer does a crummy After Miracle Science folded he sold more job of developing his story. space opera adventures, long on action, notable short For example, a beautiful young musical stage on science, to Astounding editor Harry Bates while star named Hope Wilkins who he met while delivering Astounding was still a Clayton title. He also placed a a lecture before leaving on his journey, asks to couple of later stories with Thrilling Wonder. During accompany him, and when Jim refuses, she manages this same period he became a regular writer for the to stow away on the submarine. She reveals that her Spicy line of pulps producing five thousand word uncle, a wealthy noted astronomer and his pal, a sexed up stories under the pen names of Lew Merrill wizard of physics, have discovered that heretofore and Clive Trent. He became one of their most prolific unknown undersea arctic dwellers are using some authors, particularly for their weird menace title. The super magnetic ray to pull the moon back into the Spicy titles seemed to have become his primary arctic ocean. We are told that this will mean source of income until they vanished in the paper destruction and disaster for the rest of the planet, but shortage of WWII. His last piece of fantastic fiction the arctic peoples will survive just fine. In fact, they was written in 1941 and appeared in the February will prosper with the return of the satellite to its 1942 of Spicy Mystery Stories. rightful resting place from past epochs since the ocean Interest in Victor Rousseau’s writing has been waters will overrun almost all the continental land rekindled with the new century. Many of his early masses on the planet. weird and science fiction stories have now been After a radio conversation with the elderly collected and issued by small press publishers. “His scientist, Jim is persuaded to head his sub in to a

19 hidden cove along the Connecticut shores were he and might expect, the air is dank, damp, and oppressive to his crew swap over to a different submarine, supplied the surface dwellers. by the scientist, and their new mission is to hot tail it The fish people have telepathy tubes so they up to the arctic and thwart the aquatic race which is can communicate with the two humans. The entire somehow yanking the moon out of its orbit. city including the interior of buildings is lighted by Thereafter the story becomes a strange some strange diffused but bright golden light that adventure yarn, more fantasy than science. As the emulates from everything. No explanation for this, or submarine moves into arctic waters it encounters and much of anything else is offered. The pair are brought is snared by a strange purple ray beamed from the before the king of the fish folk, who makes them bottom of the ocean that drags their sub down into the welcome. Immediately the son of the king of the depths, more than fifteen miles deep. Luckily the new aquarians turns a lustful eye on Hope. Jim is naturally super-sub can withstand the incredible pressure at concerned, but the real power behind the throne is a those depths. wizarded gnome-like fishman known as Ektom. Then things take a left turn as the sub Ektom claims to have lived for seventy encounters a region at the bottom of the sea where the thousand years or so, and relates the mythology of water pressure is suddenly said to be very low. The Suth the sun god and the history of these strange water is clear and semi-lighted in some unknown way. people. He is the guy who is pulling the moon out of Strange aquamen are seen swimming near the its orbit. His intention is to destroy the upper human submarine’s glass observation window. Jim and Hope civilization so the fish people can reclaim the surface decide to don diving suits, (along with the new for their own. portable “Momson submarine lung” to provide fresh There are numerous side bars that don’t make air) then venture out to meet the fish men. a lot of sense. The two surface people are taken to They are escorted to an airlock, whereupon Ektom’s palace where they are given free reign to do they enter a magnificent domed underwater city, anything, even stay and survive after the moon apparently composed mostly of gold, a city filled with destroys the surface world. Left to their own they air, not water. It turns out the fish people can breathe encounter a strange, exotic and incredibly beautiful either air or water equally well, but choose to live in girl named Lora. the air within their magnificent futuristic city. As you There are other devices in Ektom’s workshop,

20 including a mirror that can steal souls and reduces the As it stands this is a disappointing story. And body as a sort of semi-zombie state, altho this process yet, when compared to the material that was being is never clarified. After a deadly encounter with the produced in the other three science fiction magazines lecherous Prince, Lora helps Jim and Hope locate the of the era it compares well. The writing is every bit as mystery machine that is pulling the moon out of its bad as some of the stuff being printed in Wonder orbit. It only operates at certain times, and the author Stories, Astounding, or Amazing during the same time tosses off some reference to radioactive salts as being period. This is a clear example of where some sort of the power source. None of the devices or editorial amending would have helped immensely. If circumstances in this tale are explained except in the nothing else rounding out some of the more most trivial terms, and often not at all. Radioactivity incongruitous plot corners and dialog between apparently sounded mysterious and scientific enuf so characters would have been a life saver. It would Gregory drops the term randomly into several appear that Douglas Dolt did very little actual editing paragraphs as the story unfolds. of the manuscripts he received, or perhaps he was In a series of absolutely unbelievable events satisfied with this piece of fiction in it’s original form. Jim whacks the ray machine, then he and Hope grab There are some other interesting things to be old Ektom and along with Lora decide to make a gleaned from looking over this issue. For whatever break for their submarine. Nobody bothers to stop reason there is no editorial, also no articles, book them even tho they are hauling the squirming body of reviews, filler bits, and being only the second issue, the city’s revered high priest along with them. no letter column either. But there is a note at the end When they return to the sub, nobody there of the third and last story inviting readers to send in appears to have noticed or worried that the their opinions and suggestions. Of course since there protagonists of the story have been gone a couple of was no third issue, a letter column never appeared. days. The sub casts off and makes a mad dash for the The advertising in the magazine is exactly the surface. Ektom, ever vengeful and malicious, declares sort of conglomeration that could be found in any that Jim has blown it, that in whacking the machine, other pulp magazine of the period. But there is an Jim actually pushed the lever that turned the purple interesting line under every page and column of ads, ray machine on at full power. The moon will soon asking readers to please mention “Man Story come crashing down to destroy the surface world and Magazine” when they answer the ads. nothing can be done about it. That was unusual. Man Stories was not a Everybody is really really sad when they hear Hersey title. It was a 64 page pulp produced out of this news, and when the sub reaches the surface, the Chicago with the cover price of a nickel, a steep moon looks enormous in size. Clearly Luna will discount below the usual magazine cover prices of ten, smash down in mere hours, and the world will be twenty, or twenty-five cents. The name of the destroyed. Ektom makes a break for freedom across publisher was Metropolitan. Eight monthly issues the ice, but apparently gets caught in a closing ice froe were published under the title Man Stories from Oct (it’s hard to be sure), and then, guess what, the purple 1930 thru July 1931, when the title was abruptly ray stops. How did that happen you might ask? There changed to Popular Fiction. That lasted nine issues, is no explanation at all. The ray simply stops, the then the titled changed in January 1933 to Nickel moon recedes, and Jim asks Hope to be his blushing Detective. The publishing company was now listed as bride. The End. Nickel Publications. After six issues of that title the This could have been an interesting adventure, magazine became Strange Detective Stories in but despite some bright spots, it is spoiled by inept November 1933, with 132 pages and a fifteen-cent writing and virtually no attention being paid to some cover price. After four issues it dropped dead. I’ve of the pertinent details that might have held the plot never seen Man Stories, Popular Fiction or Nickel together. The dialog between characters is Detective, but the issues of Strange Detective Stories particularly wooden. Stilted wording mixed with are quite good, featuring excellent lead novels by what might have been slang of the period make this Frederick C. Painton and stories by Robert E. Howard, clunky in the extreme. Logic and attention to realistic among others. plot sequences are not really present here. With a It is difficult to understand what possible better writer who had a better command of the connection there could have been between Miracle techniques of story telling this could have been a Science and Man Stories, under any of its worthwhile tale, but unfortunately Mr. Gregory did incarnations. Perhaps the owners of Man Stories not have those skills. either owned or were directly connected with a

21 national distributor. Linking the ads to a series of have seen Hersey thru his other crisis points, and if magazines all distributed by the same outfit would not, the title, once established, could certainly have have helped level out some of the expenses producing been sold to another publisher even if Hersey’s pulp and getting Hersey’s titles onto the newsstands. It publishing enterprises had floundered. would be interesting to know the real story here, but at After Miracle Science folded William Elliott this point in time the riddle is not likely to be solved. Dold continued to be involved with the science fiction How does this magazine stack up all total? I scene. He contributed a number of illustrations to the enjoyed the stories in this particular issue, despite pages of Astounding, and was well regarded by the some problems with plotting and especially with the science fiction fans of the day. After his widowed clumsy writing in the third novelette. Yet compared father retired and moved to Charlottesville, VA, to the other science fiction magazines produced during Elliott went along with him as his caretaker. This cut this same period it holds up very well. It is easy to down on his involvement with magazine illustration. hammer at some of the plot flaws and inconsistencies His last published work was to provide the cover art in the science, and clearly some of the original readers for the July 1941 issue of Cosmic Stories, for which of the book did. On the other hand the plots and the he likely received no money at all. (The history of overall quality of the stories was equal to and in many Cosmic Stories was covered in a previous installment cases superior to the material being offered by its of this series back in Fadeaway #24). Dold’s father competitors. died of a heart attack at age eighty-six in November of The main problem, in my opinion, is that this 1942. Elliot died in Charlottesville in 1957 at age issue, and likely the first issue as well, are offering sixty-eight. readers a safe and sustained style of fiction based on This issue of Miracle Science and Fantasy is what Hersey and Dold believed was the crux of worth reading, not just from a historic standpoint, but science fiction. Lost race stories, super science because most of the fiction is still enjoyable. If only thrillers on distant planets, fiction with not much circumstances had been different, if Douglas Dold had science, but lots of action, this was the kind of not died, I think Miracle Science would have loomed material that comprised the bulk of science fiction large as a significant factor in the history of our from the teens thru the twenties. literature. But the past cannot be changed. The But the field was changing rapidly. Once magazine vanished after only two issues. Miracle science fiction magazines began publishing regularly Science and Fantasy became a footnote in the history the writers and the readers began exploring a far wider and development of science fiction literature, an range of subject material; new worlds, new concepts, interesting publication whose potential was never real science, speculation of the most extreme sort that fulfilled. would have completely astonished the editors and writers even ten years previously. The literature of both science fiction and fantasy was evolving. The two issues of Miracle Science represented the old school of science fiction writing. My own belief is that if Douglas Dold had not died this magazine would have continued, and it would have blossomed out, becoming a strong competitor in the emerging science fiction market. Every indication is that Douglas Dold was an intelligent man and certainly a canny editor who would have checked his competition and then demanded writers keep up with and exceed the expanding frontiers of this fascinating new genre. Whether Harold Hersey himself could have continued publishing the magazine remains to be seen. He had problems with potential censorship due to his gangster pulps, but, if Miracle Science was profitable, as he always claimed, it is likely he could have carried it along, and that the magazine might have even survived. Money earned from Miracle Science might

22 READER REACTION

Frank Mazzarella; 23 Cooledge St.; Leominster, MA 01453

Unbelievable! A magazine appearing in my mailbox, gratis, free, for nothing, containing a little bit of all the things that make my nerd life tingle with joy, and it gets better each issue. First, David Williams on Roger Ebert was fun and informative and gave props to a little known side of Ebert. Never a big fan of his film criticism, I still watched the show in its infancy on PBS along with "This Old House" each week. We did not have cable and the local PBS was high class and my wife and I watched all the time. My father lived upstairs, where he fell in love with "Nature" shows and English comedies. So Ebert was well known to me but his fanzine side was not. There is a great podcast on Boing Boing called Gweek. Boing Boing is an old fanzine that made the switch to the internet and has really done well. "Gweek" is it's podcast wherein the editor of Boing interviews two well known techno/scifi/geek/nerds and inquires about what they are reading and watching. Check out this episode, http://boingboing.net/2013/07/24/gweek-104-andy-ihnatko-and-jo.html#more-243816, where Joshua Glenn, is a Boston- based writer, publisher, and semi-otician, talks about sorting through the pulp magazine collection that Roger Ebert left behind. http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/the-fan-rogers-passion-for-pulp-lit. Trust me. This podcast is like a audio fanzine and is loaded with the kind of stuff we all love. There is much discussion about The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication, by Fredric Wertham M.D and some sci fi reviews and other goodies on this session. I also loved David Williams story about how he entered the world the world of scifi through an Arthur C. Clarke paperback left behind by a roommate. My favorite stories are those about how one got into comic books, or scifi or OTR, etc. Pierre Comtois is the author of two incredible works about the history of Marvel Comics in the 1960's and another about the 1970's. Both books are published by Tomorrow publishing the company that puts out Alter Ego and other great titles. Pierre has a web page which he uses to tell a wonderful tale of his childhood and comic books....http://bypierrecomtois.webs.com/...he grew up in Lowell, Ma and there were quite a few great stores to pick up comics and horror mags and sci fi paperbacks. I enjoyed his memories so much that I went out and bought "River Muse" Tales of Lowell and the Merrimack Valley”. Comtois expands upon the aforesaid memories of childhood comic collecting and writes a beautiful essay concerning the roots of his obsession. His essay is only one of many local writings, but the rest are also surprisingly good and I guess the hometown of Jack Kerouac inspires its citizenry to write. Dwight Decker on Captain Future was a great article. Andy Hooper's article about "One Meatball" was informative and I went to youtube and listened to each and every version of the song. Great song, great history. Dick Tracy is a great comic strip and I did buy one volume of the IDW series and I hope to free up some cash to buy some more. Bob, you already got me hooked on Little Orphan Annie reprints and now Dick Tracy. Annie is still my favorite. Your review of "Nancy" was fun. John Stanley provided me with some of my best comic reading experience when I was a child and i still get a kick out of "Little Lulu" and own most of the reprints. Anything by Stanley is on my list of things that make me happy. Last, the letters, as usual are charming and filled with suggestions for reading and listening and all things nerdy and wonderful. Talk about cartoons and OTR and horror and sci fi paperbacks never gets tiresome. I love each and every letter this issue. Where else can we discuss Sgt Preston but in your zine? One of my favorite radio shows and the premiums that went with the show are among the most original. There is mention of pulp writers and heroes and Rocky and Bullwinkle and mowing the lawn and that incredible art work by Steve Stiles and all Carroll, Cepeda, Alexis G and Schirmeister. All in black and white for free. Anyone want to mention boy books such as Rick Brant or the old movie serials? I would love to read it. Fadeaway has become my most looked forward to mail. When I see that tall manila envelope towering over my other mail, my blood begins to thin and a tingle runs through my body. I rip open the envelope and read the contents much too quickly. But after a day or two I enjoy reading them again.

Joy V. Smith; 404 East Beacon Rd.; Lakeland, FL 33805

Enjoyed the articles on John W. Campbell and the Marx Brothers. Thanks for sharing their history! I have “John W. Campbell: Collected Editorials from Analog” btw. I subscribed to Analog years ago, but didn’t renew not long after he was gone, as I recall. Thank you for all the illustrations also; they really enhance the article. Re: letters: Wow! I didn’t realize Steve Stiles worked on Xenozoic Tales! I went right to my collection, and there he is! I’ve culled most of my comic collection, but kept those and a few others. Must reread them one of these days. And his poster was fun. I’d love to see some Doc Savage and The Shadow comics. . ///You can see the new Shadow Comics by going to a comic store and checking the racks. That's assuming there is still a comics store in your area, of course. Dynamite Comics is putting out the new Shadow series (several of them, actually). The art and stories have been good, altho I personally do not agree with the new expansion of the Shadow's powers. I am not so sure Campbell's editorials would age very well over the years. Many of the ones I recall were quite topical, addressing some newly discovered speculation about developing scientific knowledge or society's reaction current and future to the march of science. They were often a lightning rod specifically intended to spark letter column comments, and succeeded very well in that respect. But I don't think that type of material would age very well, especially not multiple decades later.///

Lloyd Penney; 1706-24 Eva Rd.; Etobicoke, ON; CANADA M9C 2B2

This morning I had made plans for the day, and these days, as I am at home frantically job hunting, I take the time each day to write at least one letter of comment, and next up was Fadeaway 36. As you can see below, I got started on this issue, wrote another start to this letter, and today…Fadeaway 37 arrived in the mail. Sorry to make it so late, but now here is the opportunity to write a long loc on two issues. 36…I quite agree with you, Steve Stiles fully deserved to be on that Hugo ballot, and he fully deserved to win it. But, he came in fifth place out of fine nominees. I still believe in the fan Hugos, but I think we have aged out of the fan Hugo demographic. We’re not the cool kinds anymore. Today’s cool kinds have blogs and vlogs and podcasts, doing their

24 best to promote science fiction in their own newer ways. We may get some Hugo notice in the future if we move to those electronic forms. Recently, Chris Garcia started writing for SF Signal…I think he’s starting to make his own move. You never really know where we all come from. Before he passed away, I found Roger Ebert on Facebook, and sent him a note saying my own interests were in fanzines these days, and that I’d very much like to see his old zines, if they were still around. I never got a response, but I’d like to think that he got a little old-fashioned egoboo over being remembered for something few know about today. Wonder if I could do the same thing for Gene Simmons? Milt Stevens, now that you have mentioned kittens in leather…well, I am not going to Google it up; there’s probably already a handful of websites about it. Sure hope I am wrong, but the wrong word in the Google text box can take you to some shocking sites. Milt also mentions Ovaltine, and we’ve seen it in stores here. I know of six or seven comic shops in Toronto, and I used to know of a lot more of them when advertising for conventions was done mostly through flyers on the comic shops counter. Today, it’s mostly done thru social media, but flyers can still get the job done. I’ve joined a couple of Twilight Zone groups on Facebook, and we’ve got out favorites, and our memories, and our regrets that TZ creators like Richard Matheson have passed away. Serling’s personal story was of great interest, and his daughter Anne has written a book on her father. Anne Serling was a guest of honour at a recent convention in Rochester, New York, so she’s willing to travel to promote the book, and tell us more about her dad. An excerpt from the book in a fanzine like this one would be a fair read, and promotion for the book. Brad Foster’s loc…I had my own detached retina crisis about seven years ago. By coincidence I was working for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind at the time, and they gave me lots of information about the operation I would have to have. It was difficult to get through, and I actually woke up in the middle of the operation, but it was done and done well, and I have both eyes. Brad will attest to trying to see through the operated eye, and not being to do so because it was nearly empty of the vitreous liquid inside. Eventually, the liquid replenishes, but we found out the hard way we need it to see and focus. 37…A short time ago I saw a film about John W. Campbell and his importance in the SF field, and I realized that I’d never seen a picture of Campbell before. Here it is again in John Purcell’s article. I remember hating the Marx Brothers movies any time they came up on any of the Buffalo television stations I grew up with. I found them slow, clunky, and horribly staged, as if the entire casts were setting up Groucho or Chico for yet another one-liner…which indeed they were. Perhaps I warmed up to Groucho in his later years; I seem to recall him on the Mike Douglas Show, perhaps a day or two after Moe Howard. Some more about the Twilight Zone…some may know that another TZ movie is being planned. The director will be Joseph Kosinski, and the producer is none other than Leonard diCaprio. I liked the original movie, and hope they can surpass it. The letter col…I am not sure if I can loc a blog, seeing as how often the usual blog changes or is updated. That’s why I really can’t loc Nilini Haynes’ Dark Matter blog, which started off life as a fanzine. I have set up a couple of Powerpoint presentations in my office life, but for the most part, they were simple and short. More than 60 slides can be a bit much for businessmen who are still fidgety little boys at heart. 350 slides? I will pass.

///The Marx Brothers movies are not for everyone, however there is a lot of variety thru the years. The earliest movies are different from the middle group and even more different from the later bunch. Anybody expecting a linear beginning-middle-end story plot from most of those flicks is going to be disappointed. Efforts to offer

25 individual showcases for each brother's unique talents can also be disconcerting, but most people find them a fun view, offering lots of chaotic humor and clear escapism. I don't think most of the Hugo Awards have any relevance to anything any more. They are strictly publicity gimmicks and the person who does the best job of promoting his/her efforts gets the award. Taral Wayne noted in a recent issue of his Broken Toys fanzine that this time round commercial artists who create jewelry and crafts, offered for sale, were posted in the best artist category. So far as I am concerned the whole spirit of the awards has been usurped. I am amazed that Toronto has six or seven comic book stores still left. You are bucking the trend in your part of the world. Not only are there damn few comic stores left in New England, there are also almost no comic conventions left. There are one or two major events that call themselves comic conventions, but they are actually media shows, where faded TV and movie stars appear in great number offering autographs and pics of themselves for money. The program schedule revolves around movies, TV programs, FX info, nostalgia panels, with precious little time devoted to actual comic book related anything. Several other people went into shock when they read the part of Louis Desy's article about using 350 power point slides. I spoke with Louis a few days ago and he mentioned that his 350 slide PowerPoint presentation was integrated into a realistic war game simulation that extended over an eight hour period. This makes a lot more sense. I wish he had mentioned that in his original article.///

Jefferson P. Swycaffer; PO Box 15373; San Diego, CA 92175

Great new issue of Fadeaway! The Marx Brothers article was seriously remarkable and great and fun. An awful lot of stuff there I had never known. I've heard one or two episodes of the radio version of "You Bet Your Life," and certainly enjoyed them. And the movies are very much the cat's pajamas. This was a really fun bit of show-biz history. You and Wayne Boenig really knocked this one out of the park! John Purcell's article on John Campbell was also a good one. Informative and fun. Fadeaway is so much more than just a fanzine: you're running a serious history magazine here! Jeff Redman's cover is lovely. Sensuous, pushing the boundaries of sexual. Luscious curves everywhere, not only in the figures, but in the rocks and clouds. Even the stars are sensual! I'm guessing this was originally in color; it certainly deserves to be! I love the moral ambiguity of Dan Carroll's back cover: is this an advance scout of a raiding party, looking down upon the camp that will soon be plundered? Or is he a sentry, taking a moment to survey the camp that is in his care? Lovely "radium rifle!" I want one! Since last ish, I have seen "Ben Hur." Just one of those things I had never managed to catch in years and years of watching TV. Not many people today, I trow, have read the book before having seen the film! Definitely a great production, and quite true to the book. A few changes, but very faithful to the spirit and feel of the book.

26 Bought (from a cheapie rack) "John Carter" and "Great and Powerful Oz." Quite good movies! They deserved more success and acclaim than they received. Yes, both had a tendency to contradict the source material, and purists had good reason to gripe (a little.) But there were also a lot of faithful bits. The two movies were visually very beautiful -- and in remarkably different ways. John Carter used the natural outdoors beauty of Utah, modified by computer into the sea- floors of old Barsoom; Oz used computers to create a colorful candy-land more akin to the sets of the 1939 classic. I've also completed my collection of the Fu Manchu Omnibus books, collecting all of the novels and several of the stories too. Recently stumbled onto Ben Aaronivich, who writes "urban fantasy" novels which are dismayingly like what I'm trying to write these days! And just bounced off the Clive James translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. By and large, such translations should not attempt to rhyme. English just isn't made to rhyme the way Italian is. James moves from Alighierian tercets to English quatrains, allowing more latitude, but it still comes off as clunky, forced, awkward, and angular. Just picked up a collection of Old Time Radio recordings of "Bold Venture," with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Some very nice stuff! A cross between hard-boiled detective stuff and Casablanca. Good to listen to while driving!

///Glad to hear you finally got around to seeing ”Ben Hur” the movie. “John Carter” was not bad, but I have heard absolutely nothing good about “The Great & Powerful Oz”. Yours has been the only kind word. In view of the unrelenting dumping I think I’ll give that one a pass. The main problem with the “John Carter” movie was that the expectations for the production were impossibly high (Disney had an option on the book since the mid 1970s and only got around to making the actual movie forty plus years later), plus they spend buckets of buckos doing 3-D effects when the movie would have done just fine without that stuff. By the time the film hit the theaters the expenses had grown exponentially

27 to the point that it was almost impossible for the film to ever break even in world-wide theatrical release, much less show any kind of profit. I’m sure that they’ll make a few pennies down the line as video sales and TV station rentals pour money into the company coffers, but the public now perceives the film as a financial boondoggle and a failure. I have always had a problem getting into the “Devine Comedy”. I’ve never been able to plow thru it, or even part way thru it. My hat (if I wore one) would be off to you for actually reading that epic in any form. I also agree with you about trying to turn classic poems from other languages into rhyming English. Some foreign words that may rhyme in the original simply do not translate into words that mean the same or even come close to rhyming in English. My major complaints in this area are the efforts to translate the “Iliad” and “The Odyssey” including the Latin retellings by Virgil. I happen to be perfectly comfortable with the eight beat to a line measure of classic Greek poetry, but 90% of English poets/translators/classic professors sure aren’t, and the efforts to try and stay true to the original are generally pathetic. “Bold Venture” was an excellent series. It was actually owned/produced/acted in by Bogart and Bacall. It was syndicated nationwide in the early fifties and did very well for a long time, but by the late 50s radio drama was losing ground steadily to DJs and rock music, not to mention television. I think they did well with the production profit wise, and luckily almost all the transcription disks have survived so fans can enjoy the series today. Would that more of the old radio series had survived.///

Milt Stevens; 6325 Keystone St.; Simi Valley, CA 93063 [email protected]

John Purcell’s article in Fadeaway #37 made me aware that I didn’t know much about John Campbell as a writer. I knew he was a science fiction writer who specialized in big bangs before there was a theory for it, but that was about it. I mostly liked the SF that was written after Campbell became an editor, so I’ve never gotten around to the fiction Campbell wrote. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to know everything. I learned that was impractical. When I was a teenager I decided I’d settle for knowing everything about science fiction. After more than 50 years of working at it, I still haven’t managed it. I only got around to reading Olaf Stapleton in the last year. I’d already read most of the works of E. E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and Jack Williamson. It is possible there is just too much SF in existence. With over 1000 new SF or fantasy novels published every year, future fans are going to have to specialize in one sub-genre. As the literary flood continues, sub-genres will become narrower and narrower. Someone will undoubtedly write an article titled “The Incredible Shrinking Sub-Genre.” When I was a kid I didn’t like the Marx Brothers. I think I started enjoying their work about the time I entered college. Maybe it took that long for me to develop an appreciation for sarcasm. There are other cases where my opinions on humor didn’t change. I disliked the Three Stooges when I was a child, and I still dislike them. Ditto for Jerry Lewis. It was the Marx Brothers movies that attracted my favorable attention. I had seen some installments of You Bet Your Life on television when I was a child, but I only remember it as a concept without content. I learned a number of things from your article. I learned that Mary Livingston was their cousin. I learned that Gummo’s given name was Milton. I can certainly understand why he made the change. I’ve read elsewhere that George Bernard Shaw was a close friend to the extent he would drop in for a visit any time he was in town. After Shaw had appeared in the L’il Abner comic strip, I suppose he might show up anywhere. I’d also read about the Marx Brothers doing what amounted to comedy research. They would test their comedy routines on live audiences before putting them it movies. That might be an interesting idea for a PhD dissertation in psychology. Who laughs at what and why?

///John Campbell Jr. as a writer is certainly worth checking out. I find some of his writing style to be a bit clunky, even for the time period, but his story telling ability is excellent. It always seemed odd to me that despite what I regard as his own clumsy phrasing and stilted writing style, that as an editor he insisted authors who sold to him provide polished well structured prose, and comfortable, believable dialog in any stories he accepted. Yeah, I wanted to be the world’s expert on science fiction literature myself, but sometime in my early college years it occurred to me that it was almost impossible to keep up with the flow of new material, let alone trying to read and digest all the stuff that had gone before. Plus, as the decade (the 60s) wore on, more and more of what I used to call stone-age science fiction (stories published pre-1910) were being unearthed. Reading it all was clearly a hopeless task so I just decided to read what I found interesting. It took me another ten or so years before I finally got around to enforcing my ‘100 page rule’. I’m always willing to give a novel a fair chance, but if the book hasn’t seriously grabbed my interest after a hundred pages (or close unto that number), then I stop and move on to something else. This has saved me many hours of wasted effort, altho I suppose it means I’ll never get to sit on the panel discussing the worst science fiction novels ever printed at Deep South Con (should I ever decide to actually attend a DSC, of course).

28 I don’t know that the SF/fantasy field will becomes increasingly fragmentized so far as the readers go. I think there will always be preferences, same as always. For a long time now there have been people who preferred to mainly read HPLovecraft type fantasy, or sword and sorcery like Conan, or space opera, or end of civilization tales or whatever. But I think even the most ardent followers of steam-punk probably read other stories as well. The closest to a self-imposed ghetto in the literature I can think of right now is probably the field of romantic fantasy, an area primarily catering to women. But I think some of the followers of this sub-genre also read other SF/fantasy stories, and there are some members of the male gender who will read even the most smaltzy romantic fantasy if reviews/word of mouth carries the news about an interesting story plot or strikingly stand out characters. I believe there have already been a bunch of dissertations about humor, the whys and wherefores of it. Humor is so personal and so wide-ranging that it seems to me pinning down the exact workings of the matter would be close to impossible. Part of the appeal of the Marx Brothers as a comedy team was that they were clearly having a lot of fun and they clearly had little or no respect for the authority figures or institutions that formed the backdrop to the stories in the films. Irreverent is too broad a term but it’s about the best I can come up with. Young people trying to understand the social/economic order and trying to determine their place in the structure tend to be the people who find the Marx Brothers most interesting. Groucho went beyond the scope of the brothers as a team. I think the fact that he was able to play his character almost forever had a lot to do with his continuing success on and off screen. Being a master of the ad lib and the lightning quip certainly didn’t hurt either.///

Bill Plott, 190 Crestview Circle, Montevallo, AL 35115

Another interesting zine with Fadeaway #37. As always, the illos are good, but I especially enjoyed Robert Cepeda’s blond joke cartoon. My former daughter-in-law could tell them on herself and her hirsute sisters with great delivery, a rare quality for someone who is supposed to be dumb and offended. John Purcell’s piece on Campbell was very interesting. I’m not sure I realized he had written quite that much fiction before becoming the major SF editor. Coincidentally, I bought my first magazine since getting back into fandom – indeed first in many, many years – recently. It was a copy of Analog. I found it not a great deal different than when I used to buy it. There was a nice assortment of fiction, fact, reviews, etc. Two of the stories by Mark Niemann-Ross and Linda Nagata were particularly good. Some others left me doing my right brain scratch over left brain science. I always enjoyed scanning the science fact but usually found myself totally lost about halfway through the article. That has not changed, but the overall quality of the magazine remains high and I’m pleased at that. The Marx Brothers piece made great reading while I was having to kill time waiting for my wife in a doctor’s office. I did not realize that Groucho was a prolific writer. I mean I assumed he wrote scripts, vaudeville routines, jokes, etc., but I was not aware of all of the magazine and book work. Just shows a whole different side of his overall brilliance. And thanks for the lengthy discourse on “I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while” legend. That story is like a great athletic event that people claim to have witnessed: so many claim it that not even a small state much less an arena could have held all of the claimants. By the same token, I’ve encountered a number of people who claimed to have witnessed the utterance of that line on the TV show. As one of your sources noted, the censors would have nailed that line long before it got on the air. The cutting room floor, so to speak, explanations makes the most sense. Brief comments this time but always appreciate the work you put into Fadeaway.

///I have pretty much the same experience you have with the science articles in most SF mags. Sometimes I can follow all the way thru and get the gist of the article, but more often things get very technical and I get lost. Math and I have never been on friendly terms, and it seems that quite a lot of advanced science, at least the kind of speculative material that gets written up in the SF mags involves mathematics to a considerable degree. Of all the science articles published in all the science fiction mags over the years, I believe I learned the most from the Willy Ley pieces. Asimov was sometimes understandable, but in hindsight I realize now that I was considerably more interested in the personal comments and recollections he started each column off with.///

29

Ray Palm; Boxholder; PO Box 2; Plattsburgh, NY 12901-0002

It took a while but a new edition of my zine is on its way via snail mail. I have the opposite problem that you have with your zine: too little content. Since my zine is a one person operation – and I have other creative interests that keep me busy – each edition is short with long gaps between publication. ThanX for "Fadeaway" #37. I'm not a big fan of either old time radio or the Marx Brothers but the article about how Groucho and his brothers left their "Marx" on radio did draw me in. But have to disagree with one point: it was stated "Skidoo" was not one of Groucho's best movies. Well, that depends how you define "best." I'm a fan of what are called "good-bad" movies, i.e., films so bad and inept that they're enjoyable. The classic example of good-bad is "Plan 9 From Outer Space." How could anyone think a movie about dosing people with LSD could be a great comedy? Who gave the green light to "Skidoo?" Obviously someone who was dropping more than money, if you know what I mean. I hate musicals and why I hate them is best summed up by Carol Channing singing the "Skidoo" theme song. But LSD shouldn't be blamed for all bad movies. During a certain time period in Hollywood cinema I used to comment that a bad film was a "coke movie" - apparently conceived under the influence of cocaine, apparently approved under the influence of cocaine, apparently produced under the influence of cocaine, and only enjoyed by people burnt out from cocaine. Among what I call "coke" movies are "Modern Problems" (Chevy Chase) and "Neighbors" (John Belushi), a couple of alleged "comedies." I'm not saying that cocaine was definitely involved in either one but it's easy to infer such drug abuse behind the scenes when you watch the final product. Whatever was responsible for such films (and they're NOT good-bad) did lead to abusing the viewers. I also enjoyed John Purcell's article, "All This And Super Science, Too!" I have a couple of old "Amazing Stories" and it's interesting to see what was accepted as science back in those days. I remember one story about the hero traveling to another planet via a propeller-driven craft that flew through the ether. When arrived on another world he found a utopian society albeit one based on socialistic/communistic principles. Now I can see why some early SF writers got in trouble during the Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism. Have you seen writer Mark Waid's online open letter to young freelancers about the problems with certain editors at the Big Two Comic companies? For example, a corporate type decides to change a story at the last moment and the writer or artist is required to do the revisions before the deadline but WITHOUT additional payment. But from what I've read before about the comic book industry this stuff isn't anything new. The spirit of Mort Weisinger lives on. One story on the Web is a corporate type said that Batman never sits down (?) and so he must never been drawn sitting down. Maybe LSD or cocaine is making a big comeback but not in Hollywood...

///I am not a fan of the “movies-so-bad-they’re-good” film philosophy. Movies may have unique interesting aspects or historical relevance, but they are either good, bad, or mediocre. Plenty of bad and mediocre cinema has been produced over the years, and “Skidoo” definitely falls into the bad category, sliding easily into the ‘truly awful’ realm in my opinion. The film was supposed to be a comedy, a hep send-up/statement about the youth counter-culture of the 1960s, but it fails miserably in most fronts. There were some humorous bits scattered thruout the script, but they are few and far between. Big name stars were hired to lend their names and talents to the production, but most are simply wasted on trivial fluff that any decent nobody could have performed, mouthing dialog and acting in a plot that makes not much sense anyway you look at it. I don’t know if LSD was really used by anybody in the film, but it sure seems as tho noted director Otto Preminger had lost his marbles. Nothing else would seem to explain his creation of this bizarre and stupid movie. I remember seeing “Plan 9 From Outer Space” in military theater when I was in the army in the late sixties. The price of the ticket was thirty-five cents, and after seeing that film I felt I had been badly cheated. I’ve read Mark Waid’s letter to free-lance comic writers. It’s easy to zero in on the stories of abuse to newer comic writers, but his basic points--be dependable, turn in your work on time, always try to produce your very best work no matter what the project is, and try to be a stand-up guy for the people that are paying for your talents are all true. That certainly doesn’t mean you have to knuckle under to a lot of malicious crap. There have always been editors and companies who have been happy to dump on their contributors, but these people often find themselves on the receiving end when the balance of universal karma asserts itself. Not many people are interested or willing to work for a jerk. The ones who eventually gravitate to that kind of personality are often people with very limited talents. Science fiction has always been fond of utopian themes. The genre has always been fond of disstopia themes as well. A lot of the early stone age science fiction featured modern people encountering a utopian civilization with marvelous scientific of metaphysical creations. This allowed the author to combine mind-

30 boggling pseudo-science with social contrasts and thinly disguised preaching about the evils of modern human society. The literature back then was also populated by numerous lost race stories which sometimes fell into the same category, but often those tales features societies with flaws or weaknesses, or just bad rulers and blood thirsty rebel movements. In the climax the volcano erupts and the lost civilization is wiped out. Modern SF still uses updated versions of these classic story plots.///

Dwight R. Decker; 2902 King Arthur Ct.; Northlake, IL 60l64 [email protected]

Fadeaway #37 just turned up in my mailbox, so here’s an LOC to keep ‘em coming. Several people in the letter column were kind enough to mention my article on Edmond Hamilton and the moons of Pluto in the previous issue. It was a fun piece to write because the story was still playing out in real time while I was writing it. There was some Election Night drama in waiting to see whether the International Astronomical Union would approve names for the moons that would match Hamilton’s of 1941. And thanks to Fadeaway’s relentless bimonthly schedule, we were able to include the final decision on the names in the article within a remarkably short time after it was announced. There’s no real occult mystery involved, of course. The story here is simply that Hamilton shrewdly guessed that if Pluto had moons, they would be given names that continued the theme established by the planet’s name and derived from classical Underworld mythology. That being the case, the names Charon, Styx, and Cerberus naturally followed. Then, after Hamilton was dead and Captain Future was pretty much forgotten by the world at large, Pluto was found to have moons and they were given names relating to Hades that matched the ones Hamilton used. It was part coincidence and part sharp thinking on Hamilton’s part. It was a leap to assume Pluto had moons at all in 1941, since it was not known to have any until 1978. Of course, Pluto was still thought to be a body of some size in 1941, although it was so far out that it was hard to be certain. Estimates I’ve found from around then put it in the Mars to Earth range, so moons would hardly be out of the question. In the years that followed, every new measurement that refined the size of Pluto a little more made it ever smaller (to the point that astronomers made a joke that if the trend continued, Pluto would soon cease to exist entirely), and eventually it was found to be even smaller than Earth’s moon. It didn’t seem likely that such a small planet would have a moon at all, let alone several, so it was a surprise when Pluto’s moon Charon was discovered. George Phillies mentioned the mystery of Jonathan Swift describing Mars as having two small moons in his book Gulliver's Travels (1726) nearly a century and a half before their actual discovery. It's fun to speculate that the existence of the Martian moons was known to some inner circle and Swift had access to secret information, but as Phillies points out, the telescopes of Swift’s time simply weren’t up to spotting Phobos and Deimos. Their discovery came about some 150 years later using one of the largest and most advanced telescopes of the era at the US Naval Observatory, at a time when Mars was unusually close to Earth. It's more likely that Swift’s remarkably accurate description was the result of a lucky guess combined with solid reasoning. Moons of significant size at a significant distance from the planet would have already been discovered, so any moons that did exist would have to be very small and very close, and Swift postulated them accordingly. I’ve also read that he probably based the idea of Mars having two moons on simple mathematical progression: Earth had one moon and Jupiter had four then known, so Mars in between would have two. Swift was (presumably) making it all up, of course, and probably would have been more astonished than anyone had he found out he had accidentally scored a direct hit. Though it does seem a little odd that he would be so accurate… In any event, Swift’s lucky guess has earned him a place in astronomical nomenclature. When I was researching the Hamilton article, I looked up the International Astronomical Union (the organization in charge of naming things Out There) and found that the theme for naming features on the Martian moon Phobos is: “Deceased scientists involved with the discovery, dynamics, or properties of the Martian satellites, and people and places from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.”

31 In commenting that Captain Future stories got things more wrong than right in astronomy, Milt Stevens says the Great Red Spot on Jupiter was described as a burning lake in Captain Future and the Space Emperor. Hamilton may have simply been following the best scientific knowledge of the time there. I just ran across a science article about Jupiter by Willy Ley in the September, 1942 issue of Amazing Stories, in which Ley states: “there exists no other explanation for the Red Spot than a volcanic glow.” We now know the Red Spot is an enormous storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere that has persisted for centuries, but three- quarters of a centuries ago, when Jupiter was just a blurry blob in a telescope eyepiece, it was hard to be certain about anything. Captain Future is pretty much forgotten now, but perhaps not entirely. The roommates on the TV show The Big Bang Theory have a poster-sized reproduction of the cover of the first issue of Captain Future hanging on the wall by their front door. Jefferson Swycaffer mentions the novel Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace. That reminds me of a scene in the 1985 Canadian filming of Anne of Green Gables in which the teacher catches Anne surreptitiously reading a copy of Ben-Hur hidden behind her geometry book in class, and Anne protests that she just wanted to see how the chariot race came out. It seems reasonable, since the chariot race was certainly a major part of the 1959 Charlton Heston movie version, and you would think it must have taken up a good portion of the novel. It’s easy to accept the idea that Anne would be agog turning the pages while her teacher droned on about angles and theorems. I was a little shocked when I came across the novel a while back and discovered how short the chariot race episode actually is. Anne could have easily read it in a minute or two. I suspect the makers of the Anne of Green Gables film had the Heston movie in mind and didn’t think to look at the novel itself; it seems to be somebody‘s attempt to add period flavor to Anne, since Wallace’s novel would have been more or less contemporary with the time, and the incident in geometry class isn’t in the Lucy Maud Montgomery book. In the article on John Campbell, there’s a reproduction of an issue of Amazing Stories (June, 1930, I presume), and I noticed one of the authors listed on the cover is A. Hyatt Verrill. That name has always stuck in my mind as being just plain cool, a distinctive name for an author. Certainly his authentic background as an explorer and archaeologist in places like Central and South America could only help as a writer of adventure stories. What other writers could only imagine, he had actually lived. Curiously, in his science column in the December, 1964 issue of Galaxy, Willy Ley mentions Verrill, but only in his scientific capacity with not even a whisper of his career as a science fiction writer: “Prof. Addison Emery Verrill of Yale University, and his son, Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, who explored the West Indies early in this century, succeeded in re-discovering Solenodon paradoxus in Santo Domingo in 1907” (the Latin is for a rare shrew-like animal thought to be extinct and now probably is). I could go on — it does seem as though every issue of Fadeaway is filled with interesting things that provoke thought and comment — but this is perhaps enough for now.

///There are people who regard Jonathan Swift’s projections about the moons of Mars to be well beyond mere guesses. There is a whole sub-grouping of people in the mystic/paranormal community who believe that Swift had advance knowledge, from the ancient Martians themselves perhaps, which is why he was able to be so remarkably accurate in his comments about the two very dissimilar moons around Mars. I believe Edmond Hamilton keep a weather eye out for popular science material in the newspapers and popular press. Most science fiction writers did, if only to generate new story ideas. The SF magazines all had science columns and science mini-info bits sprinkled thru their pages, on the assumption that most of their readers were deeply interested in advancements in scientific knowledge. Your mention of his citing the then current best theory about the red spot on Jupiter is par for the course. It’s easy for readers dozens of years after a story was written to sniff with distain about the inaccuracies of a particular story, but it’s almost impossible to accurately predict the future of science and technology. Nobody ever believed, for example, that high speed computers with enormous memory capacity would become so cheap and small that most of the population would have one, or that they would be as common as household radios around the world. This is one of the reason older science fiction sometimes dates badly. Good stories,

32 well written, can surmount the challenge for interested readers, but the general population tends to scoff at older SF in print or especially in movies and brush it off as stupid. It is still impossible to predict the future, which I think is probably a good thing. A. Hyatt Verrill was a remarkable personality. In addition to books about biology, botany, mechanics, history, geology, astronomy and a myriad of other subjects, he wrote many science fiction stories for the early magazines. I personally remember him primarily as a writer of generally excellent juvenile series books. He wrote the Radio Detectives and the Deep Sea Divers series which were both kept in print for decades under a variety of publishers. Some enterprising collector is making a whole series of Verrill’s out of print material available thru Lulu.com, the print to order publisher. So far five volumes of his stories from the early pulps (primarily Amazing Stories) have been made available. I have been tempted to buy a few of those, however with (still) about two hundred unread books in my Must Read Now stack, I don’t think I’m going to snag them right away. Some of his writing is available thru Project Guttenberg as well. I’m not real fond of reading books or long fiction sitting in front of a computer screen, but some items are listed there from mag issues I don’t happen to have, so I may get around to make the exception in the future.///

Joseph T. Major; 14009 Christy Ave.; Louisville, KY 40204-2040 jtmajor@iglou,com

“All This and Super Science, Too!”; this shows one contribution to the origins of science fiction, in the adventure story. Arcot, Wade, and Morey were adventurers in the nineteenth-century dime-novel yellow backed novel tradition, with a gloss of scientific discussion and doubletalk. Their ancestors would be people like Leo Vincey, setting out to discover the mystery of his long line of ancestors, and so on all the way back to the narrator of Lucian of Samasta’s “A True Story”--- which involved flights into space! Purcell does the good work of pointing out the core values of the series, one that get ignored in the furor over contemporary beliefs, or the simplistic nature of the “science” used therein. The hero who spot-welds another bus bar is responding to a problem with an application of intelligence and effort, in a self-reliant fashion. Instead of the modern protagonist, who knows her vampire true wuv will rescue her. “You Bet Your Life”—I am a little surprised that you and Wayne didn’t go on to mentioned “Deputy Seraph”, seeing as you extended your discussion of the program from its radio version to its television one, not to mention Groucho’s subsequent television career. It’s even covered in “The Unknown Marx Brothers”. You mention Chico’s constant financial problems. In 1959, after appearing together in “The Incredible Jewel Robbery”, an episode of the “General Electric Theater” anthology series, they began planning a regular show. Harpo and Chico would be two junior angels trying to ‘earn their wings’. Grouch would appear occasionally, as their supervisor. Their method would be to possess the bodies of various humans encountering insuperable problems, enabling the problems to turn out well and everyone be happy. Since this was a comedy series, often the proposed solutions would go wrong. The method described would make appearances by the brothers themselves possible. In the surviving footage, Chico’s poor state of health was obvious, and Harp did not look much better. (Recall, Chico died in 1961 and Harpo in 1964). Groucho would appear only every third episode, usually trying to get the other two out of the predicaments they got themselves into. The surviving footage also shows what we would accept in the way of special effects back then. This is on the same level with George Reeves jumping out the window to be Superman flying away; the brothers bouncing on what are clearly mattresses with cotton webbing, supposed to be clouds. Or, Groucho asking for a telephone, having one appear in his hand, and making a Groucho-type crack about how that happens---with a very obvious cut, during which he moved slightly. The show did not go into product for the same reason that Billy Wilder’s proposed movie, “A Day at the UN” never got out of development. Chico was in such poor health that the producers could not get insurance, much less rely on his surviving until the next shooting. You mention the “Jack Benny Show” episode. It is particularly amusing to watch the internal struggle Benny has between his greed and his vanity as he tries to decide whether to admit the truth about his age. There is a connection, too. The Marx Brothers had introduced Benny Kubelsky to Sadye Marcks before they became Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, it should be noted. I’ve seen comments both ways on whether or not she was related to the brothers.

33 Never Saw Ben-Hur the movie, you say incredulously to Jefferson P, Swycaffer (now there’s a name to conjure with). Which one? There are versions from 1907, and 1925, and an animated direct-to-video one in 2003, along with a miniseries in 3020. However I suspect you are thinking of the 1959 movie that starred John Carter. Really. Under his professional name of “Charlton Heston”. The “Best Fan Artist” Hugo seems to be going increasingly to professional artists who do stuff about sci-fi and fantasy. Just as the “Best Fan Writer” Hugo is going to professional writers who have blogs where they opine about the state of sci-fi and fantasy. Yes, I meant to put it that way.

///The problem with doing an article like the one on Groucho Marx and his radio program(s) is that there is usually a lot more information than can be comfortably assessed and included in any single article. The focus of the article was primarily on the “You Bet Your Life” show and the other attempts to land radio programs during the days of network programming. While I agree that the mis-adventures of the other Marx brothers trying to get television and movie work is interesting, this, along with a lot of similar side-bar material had to be ignored to concentrate on the central theme of the write-up. After all, entire books have been written about the Marx Brothers both as a team and separately. My focus with the article was Groucho and “You Bet Your Life”. I agree with you concerning the pro artists/writers and the Hugos. As I said in the letter column, I think the Hugo Awards have finally and forever lost any relevance to the fannish community. The majority of people who buy membership in the Worldcon and are eligible to vote in all the categories have no contact with or knowledge of fanzines, fan clubs, fan activities or anything else connected with SF fandom. As I mentioned, the clearest evidence of this is the large number of votes that get cast for favorite movie, or television awards, or for best novel of the year. Compared with the dramatically small number of votes that even cast in the fan awards, it’s pretty clear that the overwhelming majority of convention members know nothing about fandom. Other folks in the past have compared some of the early science fiction magazine adventures to the dime novel heroes of a previous generation. But there are some major differences. In the dime novels or nickel weeklies, any scientific gadgets the young heroes encountered or used were strictly adjuncts, supplements to the unfolding fast action adventure. Science fiction stories, including the most hackneyed space opera, makes science a central part of the story plot. Despite the oft-repeated comparison H.L. Gold made in his ads for Galaxy Magazine between bad science fiction and stereotypical western thrillers, there are major difference between science fiction and almost anything else. In addition science fiction writing, the style, the delivery, the themes, all changed and evolved very rapidly as soon as the magazines gained sufficient readerships to support themselves. The science fiction stories printed in 1929 and 1930 were already outdated by 1933, and the material that saw print in 1933 was quaint by 1939. I think good editors and dedicated fans helped speed this process along, but the writers learned to change their story telling style as well. Jack Williamson, in his autobiographical recollections, mentioned that he had to constantly strive to update and adapt his story telling talents to keep up with what the field was producing, and what the editors were willing to buy over the years. The dime novel/nickel weekly thrillers added more characterization, and sometimes more plot detail between 1860 and 1915, but beyond that, the basic story frame and focus did not change.///

George Phillies; 48 Hancock Hill Dr.; Worcester, MA 01609

As always, you assemble an excellent issue of Fadeaway. The history of Campbell’s science-fiction writing was extremely interesting. I think I have read most of his novels and stories, though contrary to some of my students not at the time they first came out.

34 I met Campbell in the 1960s. He spoke at the MIT Science Fiction Society. He told the story of his World War II encounter with the FBI over his magazine’s story on atomic bombs. Most readers familiar with the Smythe report would say that the Sixa atomic bomb as described was not vaguely similar to reality. In fact, it included a key design feature that I do not recall ever encountering in the books I read on the atomic bomb in the 1950s, namely the Sixa atomic bomb had an initiator that dumped a large number of neutrons into the uranium over a very short period of time. Without the initiator, it would be very difficult indeed to persuade an atomic bomb actually to blow up and do anything impressive. I would infer that the actual issue was not the Campbell described atomic bombs, but that the particular story included a highly sensitive design feature that did not become known to the public until far later. Astounding also had a science fiction story in which the villains blackmailed the good guys by taking several large drums of lithium hydride and placing them in front of the exhaust nozzles of their atomic rocket. The villains made clear that if the heroes attempted to attack the villains inside the rocket, they would fire up the engines and the stream of neutrons and such not from the rocket would initiate a fission-fusion reaction in the lithium hydride. Now, the interesting part of this was the story was published in 1943. It was a decade later that Teller was looking for scheme to store hydrogen and so far as can be told blundered into the use of lithium hydride in hydrogen bombs. The exact history is that the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s. However, that bomb used liquid hydrogen and liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel, meaning that the bomb needed to store extremely large quantities of cryogenic hydrogen for a prolonged period of time. That is not extremely convenient for a weapon that must be flown over large distances. There were also claims that that hydrogen bomb could not possibly be delivered other than by oxcart, which is basically not a true statement. The device weighed slightly more than 50 tons, but there had been no

35 engineering effort to minimize its weight, not to mention that there were bunches of design features that were more related to measuring what happened if the bomb went off rather than to make the thing go Kerblammo! In period, the ultimate in super-heavy-bombers, the B-36, could carry a 39 ton bomb. The English also had a design for a bomber with a 100-ton bomb load. It is very hard to believe that between telling the aeronautical engineers that we need a larger payload, and telling the bomb designers that we need to optimize the weight, for example by eliminating the reinforced concrete pad on which the bomb appears to have been resting, that we could not have been able to combine a hydrogen bomb of this type with the bomber that could have delivered it to its target. However, Teller started wandering around Los Alamos asking people if they had any clever ways to store hydrogen. Ulam mentioned the use of metal hydrides. On one hand, you had the extreme weight of the extra metal on top of the hydrogen, but on the other hand the density of hydrogen in the device could be made quite large. At some point, Teller made a connection to lithium hydride being usable in the sense that the lithium will fission when illuminated with neutrons, yielding large amounts of energy not to mention perhaps more neutrons. One of my MIT classmates confirmed that Teller did not know about the Astounding short story that used his invention, 10 years before he made it. The assumption was made by Teller that only one of the two lithium isotopes was usable for this purpose, so the government bought up all of the lithium in the United States, ran it through an isotopic purification apparatus, and resold the other isotope on to the general market. The purity of the isolated usable isotope was only about 30 or 50%. However, every analytical chemistry professor in the United States suddenly ran into the bizarre difficulty that the atomic weight of lithium had just changed by a great deal, namely the isotopic composition of the lithium salts used in the teaching labs had suddenly been changed. One of the senior analytical chemists at Michigan, 35 years ago, remarked that he had not only worked out what the issue was, but had inferred what was going on. As it turned out, the purification effort was mostly a waste of money, because both isotopes work perfectly well under these conditions. The people doing the test discovered this the hard way, namely they detonated the bomb, and they got a vastly higher yield they had expected. Returning to Campbell, there was a historical fixation on highly conductive busbars for shipping power around. The phrase busbar sounds extremely impressive, especially to people who know rather little about electricity. If Campbell rejected a story from Analog, he was famous for giving extremely detailed, extremely powerful, extremely effective critiques of the rejected work. On the other hand, if your story was accepted, you might receive next to no comments from the editor. Larry Niven remarked on one occasion that one of his great regrets was that none of the stories he had sent to Analog had been rejected. As a result he never really had the benefit of Campbell’s great wisdom as an editor.

///I never had the opportunity to meet John Campbell myself. In his later years he was obsessed with the idea that science fiction predicted advancements in science and even economics. One of his favorite themes was the atomic bomb story in Astounding that the FBI was so concerned about. It makes a good story, but he may have exaggerated or changed a few of the details over the years to make a better presentation. I think Campbell actually believed that science would continue to expand and open entirely new fields of knowledge as the years progressed, so that in a hundred years, maybe even less, the advancement in the total scientific knowledge would be equivalent to the knowledge gap between twentieth century science and the alchemists of the middle ages. I think that is one of the reasons he was so interested in things like psionics, faster than light space drives, anti-gravity and all the other little quirks and oddball ideas that found their way into his editorials and into the kinds of stories he chose for Astounding/Analog. So far as he was concerned, the horizon was limitless, the fields we knew nothing about that were waiting to be explored were limitless, and would change everything we currently knew about the universe, possibly within the next few decades. He was right on some of that anyway—nobody could have predicted all the rapid changes in engineering that turned scientific principles into things like midget computers, medical advancements, communications and electronics. But I don’t think we will see anything quite on the order he envisioned about radical changes in basic scientific knowledge. Hard to believe the US Military was seriously considering trying to find a way to fly the atomic bomb along with its cement casing for those early aerial attacks. Of course the scientists and technicians back then were working in what was essentially a totally new area. Theories aside, it must have been quite satisfying to actually realize that that monster contraption would go off as an explosion and create as much blast damage as it actually did. After the initial successes, refining the process becomes more an engineering accomplishment than a theoretical one, altho as you indicated, there were still lots of things to be discovered and figured out along the way to the hydrogen bomb.///

36

Ed Meskys; 3111 Hidden Pond Dr. #205; Raleigh, NC 27613 [email protected]

Just finished reading #37, which I greatly enjoyed. I believe I read the whole thing, but my computer occasionally had trouble following the column jumps. It would get into some sort of loop and read the same chunk of text over and over again. It might also have skipped some parts. I started reading SF (aside from comics, radio, and TV) in December 1950, with “Pebble in the Sky” from my HS library. That year I read all ten SF books the library had, and then in the summer I found 200 titles in my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. That summer I read five books a week. I started the Lensmen series early in 1953, and had read three when I had major eye problems and could read nothing for several months. I somehow never got around to finishing the series, until this summer when I read all six volumes. The National Library Service for the Blind two recently reissued volumes, called Chronicles of the Lensmen, vol 1 and 2. Reading all in a short period, I noticed Smith's improvement in style. Also, he became more humane with time. In the early volumes both humans and BEMs destroyed whole worlds, killing billions, with no regrets. I own copies of two of Kyle's Lensmen books, and have to find the third and send them off to be made accessible. If I send a book to BookShare, a non-profit which prepares TXT copies of books for reading impaired persons to access on a computer or portable device like the SONY Reader. They guillotine the book and feed it thru an OCR system. They say they scanned a whole Harry Potter book in ten minutes. I did read Vortex Blaster way back then. Anyhow, during my initial binge of reading SF I read some or all of the JWC space operas. I only remember one tiny snippet six decades later. They use a tractor and a repeller beam on the same world or sun, and that flips them into another dimension. Anyhow, I was very glad to read this survey. Thank you for that marvelous tale of the lives of the Marx Brothers. Enjoyed the letters too. I wish you could add a "WAHF" list at the end when you have to reduce the lettercol. I cannot remember whether I actually wrote a letter on 36 and you had to cut it, or I never got to doing it. I do remember wanting to comment on Dick Tracey. Some of the villains had stfinal gadgets. I stopped reading him in the newspapers around 1970 when he was unconscious on an ice flow in a river, and he drifted there without waking for several weeks. I had listened to Sergeant Preston on the radio, but do not remember the premiums. During WWII, if I remember, a breakfast cereal sponsored Hop Harrigan, and you could send away for a map of a Pacific island. You needed to get two copies of the same map, and attach them to make a double sized island. You also got two inch models of various military aircraft, in plain gray plastic. I do not remember whether these came in the box or had to be sent away for. Captain Midnight had a different decoder badge each year, and you could also send away for an Ovaltine shake-up mug. Lone Ranger had a ring with an atomic bomb, which you could open up and see the flashes of a spintarascope inside. Sky king had some sort of pins or badges with secret words on their backs, which I never bothered with. Superman had a spaceship, about 3 or 4 inches long, with a big propeller on the back, and it came with an 8 inch long twisted spiral launching rod. The propeller had a small hole which fit over the rod, and when you pushed on it the propeller spun and pushed the spaceship along. I forget which kids radio program of this period had a toy parachute and some sort of launcher. I do not think I had gotten it. In the story line our hero was trapped high up in a building, and shot the parachute, with a message, out a hole in the wall. A laborer near the building saw it, and watched it fall for several installments, and kept referring to it as a "pappashoot."

Rich Dengrove; 2651 Arlington Dr. #302; Alexandria, VA 22306

I have Fadeaway #37, and a bunch of comments. I hope I make it in time for your letters column in #38. I could do it if I resembled any of the heroes in John Purcell’s “All This And Super Science, Too!. “ Of course, that’s not the way science works: a few men, like Wade, Arcot and Morey, inventing a bright new future in a vacuum. We are not even apprised that scientists discovered any of the principles their future miracles are based on. Of course, in the

37 real world, discoveries come about because we stand on the shoulders of giants. However, that doesn’t work in regular literature where the audience can only keep track of a few names. There, you can at least fake it with a few impressive sounding names from fake and real history. In pulp, which John Campbell, Jr. was writing, you couldn’t do that at all. His mostly young male audience would be frustrated because he had tossed cold water on their wish dreams, where they built science from the bottom up. The article on John Campbell, Jr. reminded me of my boyhood and I give it several stars. However, the issue’s piéce de resistance was “‘You Bet Your Life’,” by you and Wayne Boenig. So the Marx brothers started out as singers and musicians, and only later found out they were born comedians. No way you could point to their later success from music. Reality is so enigmatic that most origins cannot be guessed. Could I have guessed when I was twenty I would have become a librarian in a small library in a Federal agency. Probably not. Also, guessing what went on behind the scenes, at the time, would also be in an enigma inside a puzzle. Possibly maybe even for the people there. For instance, Groucho once claimed that Margaret Dumont didn’t just project ladylike innocence; she actually was so innocent Groucho’s remarks went above her head. I suspect, though, like a number of older women I used to meet, it was a pose she felt obliged to take. On the other hand, while it was their image that the Marx Brothers got the message, the Marx Brothers often did not get it. Only Groucho could make the transition from popularity in the movies and vaudeville to popularity on radio. And, thence, on television. Of course, knowing our audience is difficult. I have never been able to do it. Talk of Aristotle certainly doesn’t knock ‘em dead. However, the audience always knew when they were being entertained, and neither the real world nor the salt of the earth would entertain them. For instance, so much for random members of the audience ad lib-ing on the Groucho quiz show. Guedel, who produced it, made certain the contestants were interesting characters whom Groucho could bounce his humor off of. Is this false? Phony? Not to Groucho, Guedel or the audience. Guedel knew his audience. Groucho did too to some extent. However, there was one thing he didn’t know – when to quit. If, in the ‘70s, he knew he wasn’t able to do the job of Groucho, which he had a decade or two before, he should have quit. And unless Groucho had Alzheimers, he knew. He should have disappointed Fleming, who wanted wealth and fame on Groucho’s coat tails, pretty girl or no. In the Reader Reaction, I have three comments for Jefferson Swycaffer. Let’s start with Sax Rohmer. While Groucho didn’t know when to quit show biz, Rohmer knew when to quit Doctor Fu Manchu. However, he did not quit before the first novel I was thinking of, The Yellow Claw, 1915. I was wrong about that. However, Sax had dispensed with Fu Manchu there. The über villain was a Chinese criminal mind, named Mr. King, who never makes an appearance. Thus, he wasn’t the interesting character. Who was was an agent of the French Sureté, named Gaston Max, who ran rings around his English colleagues. However, I was right about the next novel I was thinking of, Dope, 1919. It was, in fact, a post- Manchu novel, It concerned a heroin ring of mostly Caucasians. However, one character is a Chinese mastermind called Sin Sin. He turns out not to be evil, though, but merely trying to give a Chinaman – albeit, himself – a chance. I confess all these attempts to extricate himself from Fu Manchu came to naught. Around 1930, finances forced Rohmer to return to Fu Manchu. Another comment I had for Jefferson concerned the reader rather than the reading matter. He was thinking of getting a tablet computer to e-read comics. I have heard the iPad is a good way to do that, but I bet he can get a tablet computer that does the same job cheaper. Yet a third comment for Jefferson concerned not reading matter or reading, but people. You, the editor, wonders who, in the old days, felt secure enough to be among the privileged, and not have to take ethnic abuse. I doubt anyone. I think every group had its negative stereotypes of other groups. Of course, they had positive stereotypes for themselves. Now I have a comment for George Phillies. He wonders how, in Gulliver’s Travels, 1735, Jonathan Swift knew Mars had two Moons. I have no know idea. It seems, though, it was popular that Mars had two Moons. In “Micromegas,” 1750, Voltaire had Mars with two Moons. A Kindermann, in a 1744 novel, had Mars with one Moon, which, he claimed, astronomers of his era had evidence for. His astronauts take a sort of balloon to Mars to find out. With the Moons of Mars, I guess I have surfed your fanzine sufficiently, Bob. And I have given you my observations on all knowing adolescent wish dreams and my knowledge about post-Fu Manchus. I look forward to your next Fadeaway. I hope there are many more before they, as it were, fade away.

///I don’t think the Arcot, Morey and Wade stories assumed they were working in a vacuum, but you do make an excellent point. Campbell, thru his characters, obviously postulated the concept of breakthrough genius which is able to leap-frog over the scientific advances and knowledge of the day and develop brand new concepts which can become practical reality without bothering with all the in-between steps of testing, justifying or even of working out the engineering principles needed to turn their ideas

38 into hard machinery capable of astonishing things. In some respects this is the kind of Concept Devices already enjoined by the dime novel and juvenile series book heroes of the day and before. Frank Reade Jr. and Tom Swift accomplished similar things, just not on such a grand inter-galactic scale. The dime novel/boys’ series book concept in turn was built on the incredible burst of creative invention and engineering which swept the United States after the Civil War, as championed in the public eye by people such as Thomas Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, Faraday and others who were discovering brand new ideas and turning them into marvelous new inventions in an never ending stream. It caught the public’s imagination, and it certainly spilled over into popular literature. I think Groucho Marx did know when to quit. He was cutting back on his public appearances and preparing for semi-retirement when he met Ms Fleming. The remarkable success of the double record concert LP set “An Evening with Groucho”, along with the sudden popularity of the Marx Brothers movies among the college age crowd allowed her to manipulate Groucho and push him back onto center stage thru a harrowing cross-country series of engagements and concerts that, as I mentioned in the article, would have been a torturous schedule for a man half his age in prime physical health. It was too much for Groucho. His health was failing and so was his mental capacity, which I believe made it even easier for Ms. Fleming to control him. I suspect you are correct that each ethnic/religious, and racial sub-group has their own derogatory stereotypes they cheerfully apply to other peoples. However, the literature, and the public entertainment of the past days, including vaudeville, stage plays, movies, early radio, all used a focal point of the pure WASP. So when little snide or condescending remarks were made it appears (to me anyway) that almost everybody else on the planet who didn’t happen to be white-anglo-saxon-protestants were automatically viewed as inferiors, and the same criteria often applied to economic differences as well. It’s a bit chilling in this modern day to realize how common as well as how casually blatant these attitudes were in past decades. As I said last issue, there is still plenty of room for improvement in the areas of tolerance and understanding within American society, but even a courtesy view of past entertainment, either in print or on film, suggests we have made remarkable process over the past hundred years.///

Sheryl Birkhead; 255-0 Jonnie Ct.; Gaithersburg, MD 20882

Fadeaway 37: The cover illo reminds me of a ‘Mr. and Mrs. World’ competition with all the double muscling! Brad’s illo on page two reminds me to keep thinking ghood thots that his recovery from eye surgery (and subsequent) is going/has gone well! Campbell: what about Tom Swift? Um, not that they are related, just that I wonder if both are being read…and add Feghoots to that list. Somewhere in the various bookcases and file cabinets I think I have most (all?) of the Feghoot books—ghreat stuff. The Marx Brothers piece made me feel a bit more informed than I thought I was; in that quite a few of the movies and the names are familiar to me. I had not realized the closeness of Grouch’s death with that of Elvis Presley. I do have to admit that I specifically recall hearing of Elvis’ death but only vaguely about Groucho’s. I am not surprised (disappointed—yes) at some of the Hugo nominees in the fanartist category. I wondered if it might be necessary to define artist—but heck, singing, acting, you name it—all hit the definition. The fact that I have a very narrow definition when applying it to fanartist is my “problem”. I also wondered why a filker hasn’t made it onto the ballot yet…and do categories need to be set up to (potentially?) cover all possible areas? Sculpture, jewelry, textiles/costumes; --(fill in the blank and continue the list as you think of different categories I have missed)—are all types

39 of art and if the creator is a fan, then… Traditionally the fanartist has been a contributor to printed media, but times are changing. Steve Stiles brings up the factor of exposure and that is a big factor. These days that exposure comes via conventions and the internet. I may not like it and they may not be the venues I would choose but…progress? The most beautifully done fanart, even if done frequently needs an audience if a Hugo nomination is a possible goal. Let me do a bit of quick research as to how many nomination votes were needed to make the ballot in the fanart category this year. Data provided by http:www.lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards/statistics.pdf Best Fan Artist (293 ballots) 49 Brad W. Foster (16.72%) 40 Steve Stiles (13.65%) 32 Spring Schoenhuth (10.92%) 29 Maurine Starkey (9.90%) 28 Galen Dara (9.56%) Once you get this relatively small number of ballots to pass the 5% rule, the masses step in and---well, take a look at the number of votes just for first place. Note two things; the number of ballots that nominated (293) and the number that voted (947)—Fen: if you are eligible to nominate, please do so and use up all the blanks you can (end of non-commercial message). Best Fan Artist Award (947 ballots counted) 1st place—Galen Dara 256 278 279 341 377 Brad W. Foster 184 199 200 225 326 Steve Stiles 156 175 175 205 Spring Schoenhuth 124 154 155 No Award 120 122 Maurine Starkey 107 For interest, just go look at all the statically activity that goes on with the “Australian Ballot” to get the final ranking---it boggles the mind. I have enough time with a simple majority! The N3F was the first SFish group I belonged to—perhaps, aside from conventions (if they count), the only one. After reading Ted White’s column I found about fandom and went in search, and found the N3F fairly easily. I was a member for some years (I think about 5 or so) and always enjoyed the group. I am never quite sure why I read some of the comments about the group that I did. For me as a new fan (but in training as a reader for quite a few years) it was very helpful. I was totally lost at first, not even able to read new zines since I had no ideas what the patois was, the N3F helped me to get a copy of “The Neo-Fan’s Guide” so I could at least decipher the language.

///The actual Hugo voting info you provided is depressing as hell. I again say that I don’t think any of the Hugos related to fandom are relevant at any level any more.///

Brad W Foster; PO Box 165246; Irving, TX 75016 [email protected]

Damn, I've had this copy of FADEAWAY #378 now for over a month and a half, way too long to hold off doing a loc. I kept putting it aside until I was able to do up a new Zero Hero, but then things got in the way, and kept having to put to one side again and again... Anyway, hoping this might get to you before you've already completed #38! I know there is absolutely no requirement that I do up a new Zero toon each time, but some sort of artistic ADH I guess- once I do a couple of things like this, I feel compelled that I have to continue the series! I was finally able to get both a good idea (I hope) and the time to do up the attached piece on "The Bullet". Plus, already have another one blocked out. So, just maybe, after this one is used, I'll be able to send another in a bit more timely manner. We shall see! As for this issue, good articles, but found the Marx brothers piece, concentrating as it did on Groucho's career after the movies, into radio and television, to be the most engrossing. Have read much on their movies, and was lucky enough to come across a copy of the "Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel" book years ago. But had never read this much, and this much detail, about all of that up to the end. Plus, all of the side comments during the article about the other radio programs, about all the material that was written, broadcast, and never heard again, it just makes me glad so much of the modern world is recorded and preserved in some way. (Even if we do have to take the time to move all that material over to the "latest and greatest" recording medium every couple of years.) Loved the Cepeda 'toon---finally, a truly clever response to the mountain of dumb blonde jokes! I hope Steve does do more illustrative work in the coming year (while, of course, continuing his great cartoons too!) He is multi-talented on many creative levels, and would be good to see more of his work, however he feels he wants to do it. I'd also recommend anyone who has not already friended Steve on Facebook to do so, he is always posting new

40 stuff there as well. A volcano of material, makes me feel I need to get back to my drawing board--- if only I didn't have to check FB one-more-time! Oh, and speaking of Stiles toons: At first I thought that maybe his cartoon on page 39 with the four robots might have had the caption get lost between drawing and publication. But, on further consideration, I now see that it is actually a clever illustration to go with the Marx brothers piece. Four robots, with one who has turned and is walking away from the others. Clearly, this is meant to signify the moment that Zeppo decided to leave the act. Damn subtle, Stiles!

OUR ESTEEMED ART STAFF & WHERE THEIR WORK MAY BE FOUND HEREIN:

John V. Cody---Pages 1, 2, 22, 40 Robert Cepeda---Pages 3, 26 Brad W. Foster---Page 39 Alexis Gilliland---Pages 24, 28, 30, 31, 36, 38 Jose Sanchez---Pages 33, 35, 37 Marc Schirmeister---Pages 25, 34

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