Bang—Bang—Bang
Dear Editor:
I have read the August Astounding Stories and greatly enjoyed the fiction, but “The Readers’ Corner” gave me a good deal of amusement. Some of your readers take their fiction so seriously!
Take the “Brick or Two” from George L. Williams and Harry Heillisan, for instance. They want Astounding Stories filled with material from authors that appear in other magazines—because your readers “are used to the standards set by those publications,” etc. And again, “you should have some one who is well qualified to pass upon the science in the stories.” For the love of Pete, if people want scientific treatises, why don’t they buy books and magazines dealing with the subject? There are many on the market—serious and dull enough for anyone. But for our fiction magazines, let’s have it pure and unadulterated, the more improbably the better.
What possible difference does it make if, in a story, the moon has a crater every ten feet, or the black sky of outer space were blazing with moons and aurora borealises, or the sun were in a double eclipse!
We read stories to be amused, not for technical information, so we certainly don’t want “a scientific editorial in each issue by some ’eminent scientist.’”
As for a department in which readers could write their opinions of the stories and suggest improvements in the conduct of the magazine, what else is “The Readers’ Corner?”
Why not adopt a tolerant attitude, and instead of howling about petty faults and mistakes get a good laugh over them? As for telling writers and editors “how to do it,” we would only expose our ignorance and inability and make ourselves ridiculous.
If we think we could do so much better, let’s try it. Write a story ourselves or start running a magazine!
Astounding Stories is all right as is. We like it “different.” We want different authors from those of other magazines. What is the use of having various publications if they must all be conducted along identical lines?
Now for your writers: Mr. R.F. Starzl is easily the best. His story, “The Planet of Dread,” is full of thrills and imagination and clever situations that are well developed and surmounted. One thing that is rather remarkable in this class of story, the hero gets himself and his companion out of every difficulty by his own ingenuity. The story moves along with interest and thrills in every paragraph, and is really my ideal of a “super-scientific” yarn; i.e., not stuffed with tiresome technical data. Let’s have more from this interesting author.—C.E. Bush, Decatur, Ark.