SCIENCE EICTICN PARADE "SmIU Qait i* '58!" *****____ __________ ***** Number Five Second Quarter, 1957 Tj&E TENTH ANNUAL SCIENCE FICTION CONFERENCE WESTERC ON A july 4, 5, 6, 7 ' 1957 knickerbocker hotel, hollywood a most unusual and interesting C ON MEMBERSHIP FOR ALL FOUR DAYS ONLY $1.CO ANNUAL SCIENCE FICTION FERENC E -7/ESTERC tier r ATLIKE INOSAUR 3y Harry Warner, Jr. Once we owned a cat who liked to catch birds. The cat knew that we did not approve of this bird-killing habit, and obviously understood why it was scolded when caught in the act. Perversely, every so often the cat would creep up to the house with a crumpled, dead bird in its mouth and gingerly deposit the bird where the family would notice it. Then the cat would crouch cringingly, know­ ing that a scolding or whipping would result, yet always hopeful that the fam­ ily's moral foundations might magically change and bestow praise on the cat for the destruction of another bird. Ray Palmer somehow reminds me of that cat. Sci­ ence fiction in pulp magazines was never a particularly beautiful winged creat­ ure. But he first dragged it down in the late 1930’s, when he assumed command of Amazing Stories. He accepted the scoldings of fandom and continued to engage in a series of commercialized massacres of the literary flights of science fic­ tion, through the long series of new titles, new policies, new sensations, and new inanities that have characterized his magazines for nearly two decades. And each time he scored a direct hit on some healthy section of science fiction's life, he inevitably hauled the bloody corpse up to fandom, and proudly laid it there to await a reaction, knowing in advance what fandom would say, acting hurt and injured himself when his latest kill was not acclaimed. Now, this is very puzzling. Ray Palmer was not.alone in seeking to produce magazines that would appeal to the lowest intelligence quotient among pulp magazine readers. Thrilling Wonder Stories attempted to do the same thing, simultaneously with his assumption of command at Amazing Stories. A host of imitators appeared only a few months later. Planet Stories has become the symbol of this entire school of editorial thinking. But Ray Palmer was alone in his frantic, ceaseless eff­ orts to impress upon his readers that he was Doing Good. He was developing new writers to replace the tired, worn-out authors in the field. He was creating a gigantic new market for great science fiction stories, by providing stories on which new readers in the field could grow up. He obviously had the fans’ inter­ est at heart, because he was an old-time fan himself, He harped upon those themes so loudly, so incessantly that I got the firm impression that there was some submerged morsel of the Ray Palmer personality which didn't approve of Ray Palmer as a whole, and the majority of Ray Palmer’s personality was aiming those proclamations at that dissatisfied minority area of Ray Palmer, to permit bet­ ter sleep at nights. i Of course, Ray Palmer wasn t alone in one respect,One chap­ ter of his scriptures was based on the theory £hat fans were not representative of science fiction readers as a whole, and to follow their likings would be commercial suicide. That was exactly the theory that John W. Campbell, Jr. ex­ pressed in print so frequently, in those days. The difference between the two men was that Campbell failed to let his theorizing guide his editorial policy. Events proved the truth: that the quality prozines like Astounding and Galaxy , which the active fans like the best, are the ones' that survive the .commercial storms in the pulp market. By 1957, it's easy to see that Palmer’s frantic claims for the worthiness of his actions were totally unfounded. He didn’t create a vast new reservoir of science fiction writers. I can think of no important sci­ ence fiction author who is active today who cut his creative teeth in the Pal­ mer magazines. He didn’t train millions of people to like the quality types of science fiction through apprenticeship with his action stories. This was .always the most absurd phase of the Palmer doctrines. To say that reading Shaver for a (3) THE CATLIKE DINOSAUR (concluded) few years is a necessary preliminary to reading Stapledon is equivalent to claiming that one must learn to enjoy black jellybeans as a youth in order to appreciate the delights of caviar as an adult. The-better-grade science fiction magazines aren’t selling today in anything approaching the quantities that they would enjoy, if the youngsters of the 1940’s had dutifully graduated to Astounding and Galaxy after learning to love science fiction in Amazing. The one unsolved mystery, after twenty years, is; What makes Palmer continue to nuzzle up to fans and expect affectinn for the commercialism and worsening of tho field of science fiction? The most astonish­ ing manifestation of his continued courtship of fandom came when he mailed out free copies of his latest publication, accompanied by a long, mimeographed letter, seek­ ing support. I don’t pretend to know how many persons were on this mailing list,but I hardly think that it would be possible to obtain more than a couple of thousand names and addresses of science fiction readers. If Palmer expected the phenomenally high response to this mail order promotion of 50%, he could hike his circulation on­ ly a thousand copies, a mere drop in the bucket compared with the circulation re­ quired to produce a paying newsstand pulp magazine. Fandom has reacted more violent­ ly toward Palmer than toward the other low-quality science fiction publications in the past. I think that’s explainable through the healthier atmosphere that prevailed in most of the other magazines. The famous Sgt. Saturn, for example, treated his readers as a bunch of juvenile nitwits, which in essence they were. Other magazines simply ballyhooed their contents as exciting action stories, an honest procedure, and some of them are mentioned occasionally with affection in today’s fanzines for that very reason. Whatever charge may be made against Palmer, he is consistent.At a time when the entire pulp magazine field is dwindling, because the juveniles are turning to television screens and Confidential, he continues to try to make money with the same kind of science fiction pulps that he was publishing fifteen years ago. His magazines get smaller and smaller, the titles change more and more fre­ quently, his editorial discussions of what RAP is doing for science fiction become more and more repetitious. I’m starting to feel for him much the same semi­ affection that I’d feel if someone discovered a living, breathing dinosaur in somo remote corner of the world. -HW BRITISH PROZINES.........................................................................By Roger Horrocks................................................ Authentic, No.79,April. A carbon copy of the BRE Galaxy in size, layout, style—even the back cover ads are the same] This particular issue started off well with an imag- initive novelet,’’Assassin For Hire” by Philip High. Part 2 of Doug West’s serial, ’’Dead Weight”,(Orient vs Occident 120 years hence) was greatly improved. Usual shorts (by Lloyd, Bentley, Kippax and Chandler) rounded off the ish which averaged 7,8 on the Sneary scale. Nebula, No.20, March. Illos in this issue were the best for some time. (Gad, that chap Thompson must be either a syndicate or an octopus!) Enjoyed all the short stories (Tubb, Ashcroft, Schneider and Temple) and, as usual, the features were excellent. Unfortunately this issue was marred by a 50-pagc ’’novel” named "Beacon Green” (F.Gr. Layer) which included interstellar flight, BEMs, menaced worlds and just about eve-ry- thing else. Boring and positively dull.(Interesting, it seems that Authentic gets the better novelets and Nebula the better short stories...) I also disliked the cheap newsprint used by Nebula. 7.7 (continued:bottom of page 6) (4) PROZINES ON PARAJE. Conducted by George W. Fields This column will review only those stories rating 8 to 10, with the exception of serials, and particularly disappointing efforts. Please write the editor immed­ iately if you would like to review any magazine (by story) other than Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and Fantasy & Science Fiction. -GwF Rebuttal to the Riled Reader Redd Boggs: It's no mystery to me why the characterization is poor in mysteries. The good mystery story has good characterization which only says that they’re aren’t many of these around. In Asimov's novel the characters were not only of limited appeal, but very nearly impressionless. This is not true of most Asimov. If ”clever”, Redd, is exemplified by "Asimov moves the USUAL mystery plot to a morc-pr-less STANDARD sf setting and examines the changes of course wrought by the setting", you'd better consult a good dictionary on the word "clever". You gave precisely the reason the novel rated so low. I can see the book jacket now: "The Naked Sun" by Isaac Asimov, A Usual and Standard Science Fiction Mystery. ^on’t make me laugh. Asimov is one of my favorite novelists, but this doesn't rate anything but a way to link "Caves" with a new string of novels. I hope they improve. In the meantime, pull your own leg, mine is tired. Eva Firestone: Explain yourself. What is actually wrong with a well-written soap­ box-space-opera? You neglected to define "space opera" and you did not explain why "Stars" was such.