Dear Editor:
I have read all the issues of A. S. since the date of publication and think that there is no other magazine like it on the market. I would like to offer a few suggestions contrary to most of your readers (i.e., Jack Darrow & Chas. Barret):
1.—Keep magazine in present size and price.
2.—Issue it only once a month. If it was issued semi-monthly the writers would soon run out of ideas; and the readers would get sick of it if they read it so often anyway.
3.—Keep up the style of stories now running, i.e., keep the science a little in the background. Do not let it monopolize the story.
I get other magazines that do not follow the last mentioned rule and the result is the stories are full of machines going 10,000 miles per hour, etc.; pink, black, purple and eleventeen other colored rays. As a result the stories are drier than the Sahara Desert.
The illustrations are fine (O.K.) as they are.—Walter O'Brien, 6 Hageman Pl., North Bergen, N. J.
Trial by Readers
Dear Editor:
When Astounding Stories first appeared on the newsstands, a brand new Science Fiction magazine, I was prejudiced against it as a competitor to the existing magazines—one that might carry an inferior quality of Science Fiction so closely approaching the supernatural as to practically disregard science. In a few cases, as with very good writers like A. Merritt and H. P. Lovecraft, this is permissible, but, otherwise, not at all so. In the first issue, "The Stolen Mind" seemed to bear me out, but, then, there was "Tanks." I bought the next issue—much better! And then the third showed "The Soul Master," very well written, but not quite science, as related. Yet, "Cold Light" held me on, and "Brigands of the Moon." There is no danger of my dropping off now!