This being the first issue of FuFa I feel fortunate in being able to offer a piece of scientifiction by the field's most famous fan.
THE RECORD was written first in 1929, scarcely more than a sketch, on two pages. Ackerman was thirteen. ED EARL REPP, LA author of THE RADIUM POOL, said of it: "I found it delighting and exceptionally interesting for the writing of a boy so young." Ackerman re-wrote it into a three page story, later, the present product. It has not been touched since. It is not being retouched now. Allow me to present THE RECORD as a record of how Forrie wrote, spelled and punctuated six years ago at the age of sixteen. ED.
THE RECORD
by FORREST J. ACKERMAN
For twenty years—for twenty long, horror filled, war laden years the Earth had not known peace.
Hovering over the metropolises of the world came long, lean battle projectiles, glinting silver in the sunlight or coming like gaunt mirages of grey out of the midnight sky to blast man's civilization from its cultural foundations. Man against man, ship against ship—a ceaseless and useless orgy of slaughter. Men, at their battle stations in the ships, pressed buttons, releasing radio bombs that blistered space and lifted whole cities up in shattered pieces and flung them down, grim ruins, reminders of man's ignorant hatreds and suspicions.
And gas—thick black clouds of it—billowing over the cities, seeking every possible egress, pushed forward by colossal Wind machines. But even when Victory came for the one side, often Nature, in one of her vengeful moments, would send the black gas flowing back to annihilate its senders.
Rays cut the air! Power bombs exploded incessantly! Evaporays robbed the Earth of its water—shot it up into the atmosphere and made of it a fog that condensed only after many months. And heat rays made deserts out of fertile terrain.
Rays that hypnotized caused even the strong minded to commit suicide or reveal military secrets. Rays that effected the optical nerves swept cities and left the population groping and blind, unable to find food.
It was a war that destroyed almost all of humanity. And why were they fighting? For pleasure and amusement!