And those radio waves that can vibrate matter in a straight line! One Jackson Gee vibrates it in two straight lines. (Rather funny at that.)
And people disappear into an atom by taking pellets! They take the pellets into their system and that shrinks or expands them. How does the author calculate that in "Beyond The Vanishing Point"? The pellets must contain cannabis indica (hashish) I guess. Once upon a time I was suffering from an acute attack of colic and was obliged to use an anti-spasmodic. I took cannabis, and in the delirium that followed I shrunk small enough to walk into a mouse-hole into which I had seen a mouse disappear a few hours previous. The mouse was there and looked like an elephant. I awoke in a sweat.
Maybe all your stories won't be weird and full of monstrosities. Science is full of beauty and culture, you know.—Arthur H. Carrington, Seaside Heights Pharmacy, Seaside Heights, N. J.
Where Fantasy Meets Science Fiction
Dear Editor:
I have purchased many of the issues of your magazine, and have read everything in them, including the letter columns, with great interest. I have particularly enjoyed certain stories, such as "The Forgotten Planet," "The Jovian Jest" and "The Planet of Dread," in which genuine imaginative quality was combined with good writing. Many other tales, not so well written, I have enjoyed for their fantasy, their suggestive ideas.
In following "The Readers' Corner" I have noted the objection to so-called "impossible" stories, voiced by some of your Readers. Stories thus classified, one would infer, are tales dealing with the marvelous and the mysterious in which the author has not attempted to give a naturalistic or scientific explanation of his wonders and mysteries. In other words, he has not rendered them in terms of the test-tube. He has admitted the inexplicable, the "supernatural."
Personally, I enjoy stories of this type, as well as those that are written with the purely scientific approach. I suspect that those who condemn them are suffering from a rather amusing—and also pathetic—sort of unconscious hypocrisy. I think that people who read your magazine, as well as Science Fiction magazines in general, are people with the ingrained human love for wonder and mystery; but some of them are afraid to accept and enjoy anything—even a fairy tale—that is not couched in the diction of modern materialistic science, with a show of concern for verified credibilities. Probably, in most cases, they would like and prize the very stories that they condemn if the writer had used a different terminology, and had offered explanations that were even superficially logical according to known laws.
Please do not think that I am decrying, or even criticizing, Science Fiction. I consider it a highly important and significant branch of present-day writing, and have hopes of contributing to it myself. I am merely advocating an open attitude of mind and imagination. For those who think that the "impossible" requires justification—or cannot be justified—I would suggest that the only impossible thing is to define and delimit the impossible. In an infinite, eternal universe, there is nothing imaginable—or unimaginable—which might not happen, might not be true, somewhere or sometime. Science has discovered, and will continue to discover, an enormous amount of relative data; but there will always remain an illimitable residue of the undiscovered and the unknown. And the field for imaginative fiction, both scientific and non-scientific, is, it seems to me, wholly inexhaustible.—Clark Ashton Smith, Auburn, Cal.
Heroes Too Heroic?