THE FANTASY FAN

                        THE FANS' OWN MAGAZINE

                      SPECIAL WEIRD POETRY NUMBER

                               Published
                                Monthly

                       Editor: Charles D. Hornig
                   (Managing Editor: Wonder Stories)

                            10 cents a copy
                            $1.00 per year

                        137 West Grand Street,
                         Elizabeth, New Jersey

                               Volume 2
                             January, 1935
                               Number 5
                             Whole No. 17

      [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
  evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]




                                FORWARD

                               by Ye Ed

                   You will notice that this is the
                     Special Weird Poetry Number.

                      The next issue will be the
                      Special Short Story Number,

and the March issue will be dedicated to Weird Tales. By the way,
F. Lee Baldwin, the author of our well-liked department, "Within the
Circle," has compiled an excellent biography of H. P. Lovecraft which
will appear in the Weird Tales number with a special wood-cut of the
famed writer by Duane W. Rimel. Coming up is also volumes of material
from Seabury Quinn, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E.
Howard, R. H. Barlow, Robert Nelson, and all your other favorite
writers.

Upon suggestions from many of our readers, we are dropping "Our Readers
Say" department with this issue. As H. Koenig points, continuous
repetition of "I liked this" and "I liked that" does not make very
interesting reading. Therefore, "Our Readers Say" will be replaced
by this "Forward" each month besides fan articles made from the most
interesting of our readers' communications.

Due to the huge influx of contributions, we find it very difficult
to oblige all of our contributors by placing their material in print
promptly. We intend to use the best material first and must ask the
patience of all those who have sent us articles. Please remember our
limited space.

       *       *       *       *       *


                          MR. KOENIG CORRECTS

I have just had an opportunity to check up on Blackwood's "The Wolves
of God," (writes H. Koenig). The book was written by Blackwood and
Wilson as I indicated in my last letter. I find, however, that the
only story credited directly to Blackwood was the last story in the
book entitled "Vengeance is Mine" and _not_ the title story. Hence,
if you should publish my earlier letter, please make the correction.
Incidentally, it may be well that Blackwood had a hand in the other
stories. But if so, the Table of Contents does not so indicate.

       *       *       *       *       *


                             A GRAND SLAM

You will remember that in our editorial for the November, 1934, number,
we stated casually that the average intelligence of the general public
was that of a moron. We have received a post-card containing the
following from "One of the 'General Public'," post-marked Newark,
N. J.:

"In recently wasting time glancing through that collection of waste
paper which you honor with the title of a magazine, I noticed that you
consider the general public--of which I am proud to be a member--a
collection of moronic individuals, and the followers of your creed of
a "higher type of intellect." I just hate to disagree with you, but if
you investigate the reason for the small number of such creatures, you
would probably find out that most asylums censor their inmate's mail.
Unfortunately, lack of space and postal laws prohibit my expressing of
my true opinion of both the (?-!--) and its readers. I challenge you to
print this."

It is easy to see that the writer of this card is "one of the general
public." Here we find the customary challenge to print it and the lack
of signature, which must denote that the writer is either ashamed or
afraid to append his name. Concerning asylums, however, we hadn't even
thought of soliciting the inmates. That's not a bad idea. We'll have to
take that point up at the next Director's Meeting. Which one are you
in?

       *       *       *       *       *


                                 DREAM

                              by R. O. P.

    Erubescent, the southern sky
    With sunset pools of flaming foam
    Like opened crucibles of Hell
    Glows redly, as a burning Rome
    Beneath its red malevolanace
    Where swooning orbs recline
    Are etched grotesque and curious trees
    With shapes of strange outline.

       *       *       *       *       *


                           WEIRD WHISPERINGS

                          by Julius Schwartz

Arthur B. Reeve, creator of the famous scientific-sleuth, Craig
Kennedy, makes his bow to _Weird Tales_ readers with a novelette in the
May issue!... Jack Binder, brother of the popular author Eando Binder,
will do most of the illustrating for _Weird_ commencing with the April
number.... C. L. Moore has pulled a "Clark Ashton Smith" and has drawn
the illustration for her forthcoming yarn in WT "Julhui".... There will
be no women on _Weird Tales'_ covers for two consecutive issues this
year, April and May!

_Dr. Death_ is the title of the latest fantasy magazine to appear on
the newsstands. It features a weird-scientific novel each month written
by "Zorro," which is the pseudonym for Harold Ward. Rounding out the
rest of the issue are three or four thrillers with a pseudo-scientific
or weird background.... Donald Wandrei's latest Ivy Frost novelette,
"They Could Not Kill Him," appears currently in _Clues_.... The April
cover of _Weird Tales_ will illustrate a scene in A. W. Bernal's
"The Man Who was Two Men," and deals with an amazing development in
radio after television.... Bernal, by the way, is a student in the
University of California, and sold his first yarn, "The Man Who Played
with Time," which appeared in March, 1932 WT at the early age of 15.

Farnsworth Wright brings up an interesting point regarding titles of
stories. Hardly a month goes by that does not bring at least one story
titled "The House of Fear," another entitled "The House of Living
Death," and another entitled "Hands of Death." The commonest title
on manuscripts submitted is "Retribution," but stories with the word
"House" in the title are almost as frequent. Of course, these titles
are changed if the story is accepted, to avoid repeating the same
title that has been used in the magazine before. "The House of the
Living Dead," by Harold Ward, appeared in WT for March, 1932. Quinn's
cover design story for the February, 1935 issue had the same title, in
manuscript, but the title was changed to "The Web of Living Death."
Harold Ward's cover design story for the March issue this year was
originally titled "Hands of Death," but this was too similar to Quinn's
tale title, "Hands of the Dead" in the current January issue, so the
title of Ward's story was changed to "Clutching Hands of Death."

       *       *       *       *       *


                   SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

                          by H. P. Lovecraft

                             Part Sixteen

                   (copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)

                 VIII. The Weird Tradition in America

The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his
art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt.
America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an
additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral
legends had already been recognized as fruitful subject-matter for
literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with
his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment
of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund
proceeded, as Paul Elmer Moore has pointed out, from the keen spiritual
and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange
and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged, the
vast and gloomy virgin forest in whose perpetual twilight all terrors
might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine
visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal
origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy
to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and
vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of
that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday;
and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life
devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed
by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural
emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for
survival--all these things conspired to produce an environment in
which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond
the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable
secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem
nightmare.

Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically
finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu.
Another school--the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and
mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical--was
represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in
American letters--the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion
of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the
old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the
daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic
malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here,
instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New
England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe
which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our
forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real
force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering
adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theater of
infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen, half-existent influences
hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding
the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded
population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most
intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the
common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value
impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake.
He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric
of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism
may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race
which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into
its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object
with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his
personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius
when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he
wishes to preach.

Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and
restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced
them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic
myths for children contained in "A Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood
Tales," and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain
strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not
meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel
"Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," which invests with a peculiar sort of
repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the
ancient Charter Street Ground. In "The Marble Faun," whose design was
sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous
background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond
the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal
veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help
being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory,
anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which caused the late
D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly
undignified manner. "Septimius Felton," a posthumous novel whose idea
was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished
"Dolliver Romance," touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less
capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called
"The Ancestral Footstep," shows what Hawthorne would have done with an
intensive treatment of an old English superstition--that of an ancient
and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they
walked--which appears incidentally in both "Septimius Felton" and "Dr.
Grimshawe's Secret."

(Mr. Lovecraft tells you more about Nathaniel Hawthorne in the next
issue. Don't miss Part Seventeen).

       *       *       *       *       *


                            THE MONSTROSITY

                          (A True Experience)

                           by Hoy Ping Pong

                  (Apologies to Kenneth B. Pritchard)

Many people have seen freaks and monsters, both in the circus and
in their nightmares, especially after a gay night, but this which
I tell of happened when I was cold sober, on a crispy winter night
in the middle of July. (Don't laugh--this might have happened in
Australia--Editor).

I had returned from a party, and to be sure, I was half lit up, for I
had dashed down several canters of buttermilk, but nevertheless, I was
cold sober when I met the great adventure! I had just about reached
home, when my sixth sense warned me that something was wrong. I looked
about.

The snow covered the ground several inches thick, but as far as I could
see, not a single footprint marred the beauty of it. I even turned to
look behind me, but could not see my own tracks. Too peaceful. I had a
grim foreboding of something evil. For want of something better to do,
I bent over and tied my shoelace. And then I saw it!

For as I bent over, I caught a glimpse of a monstrous foot protruding
from behind a nearby tree! Hastily, I assumed an innocent manner
and straightened. I must not let the Thing know I had seen it!
Nonchalantly, I lighted a Fizwig and blew smoke rings. And then it
happened!

For the monster stepped out from behind the tree and approached me! He
was the strangest thing I had ever seen! All of six foot tall, four
queer limbs protruding from his body, a round, shiny cranium perched
upon what I took to be shoulders, and a mass of hanging brown stuff
sticking to the cranium. He had on some queer dress of blue material,
with shoulder straps on each side. I mumbled in fear and awaited his
approach.

For several seconds he surveyed me, and then, much to my absolute
horror, he spoke. Spoke to me! My hair stood straight up in the air, my
eyes rolled, and I fainted at those fearful words: "I say, old chap,
could you direct me to the post office?"

       *       *       *       *       *


                          A BEAM FROM THE SKY

                          (A True Experience)

                        by Kenneth B. Pritchard

On Saturday evening, October 21, 1933, a strange thing was noted by two
friends and myself.

It was quite dark, for clouds were thick and hanging low in the sky.

From out of the east there flashed a beam as of a searchlight questing
thru the atmosphere. It shone at intervals of a few seconds. These
intervals were irregular, and sometimes the beam would last longer than
at others. Once, it lasted easily ten seconds, and probably more.

At times this light seemed a reflection from the clouds; but then
again, after the almost beam-like light had ceased, the light came
directly from the clouds seemingly from someone in or above them!

There are no really high places in my city (Pittsfield, Mass.) to shine
a light from that position.

Was it a search beam, a natural phenomena, or something from Beyond?

       *       *       *       *       *


                           WITHIN THE CIRCLE

                           by F. Lee Baldwin

"The Ghoul," British weird tale of the screen, disappeared from Los
Angeles screens the day Forrest J. Ackerman arrived there, playing no
theater during all the summer months he looked for it. The morning he
left, it came on again!

Jack Williamson is recuperating from an appendix operation and has done
no writing for quite a while. He says: "--My drugged slumbers in the
first few days after the operation bred some of the weirdest dreams
yet, and I'm anxious to get back to writing".... When in Key West last
winter, he and Edmond Hamilton had a few adventures such as capsizing a
skiff out in the Atlantic and towing it behind them as they swam back
to shore. Hamilton caught a monster jew fish.

Wright has bought "The Cyclops of Xoatl," featuring Two-Gun Bart Leslie
and his pursuit of a cannibal monster in Mexico. The tale is by
E. Hoffmann Price and Otis Adelbert Kline.... The two are now planning
a story of Burma, about leopard men.... Pierre d'Artois, Price's
veteran swordsman, is more or less a picture of his old fencing-master
of long ago during his academic days.... Price says about "Queen of the
Lilin": I ploughed through a good deal of research in order to present
Lilith authentically. A good deal of the Lilith lore had to be cut out
in the interests of brevity, which I regretted, as I felt that some of
the fans would enjoy a closer acquaintance with the fascinating Queen
of Zemargad.

R. H. Barlow is in Washington taking treatment for his eyes. He is also
taking a light art course at the Corcoran Gallery.

Alonzo Leonard, who appeared sometime ago in "Believe It Or Not"
for inventing a private language, is an authority on cults, ancient
languages, superstitions, and strange beliefs. He has compiled a set of
"books," 48 volumes, of all strange happenings and things of unusual
nature. The collection is called "Encyclopedia Satanic."




                          FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH

                          by H. P. Lovecraft

                     (Hitherto Unpublished Verses)


                             III. The Key

    I do not know what windings in the waste
    Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,
    But on my porch I trembled, white with haste
    To get inside and bolt the heavy door.
    I had the book that told the hidden way
    Across the void and through the space-hung screens
    That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,
    And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.

    At last the key was mine to those vague visions
    Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood
    Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth's precisions,
    Lurking as memories of infinitude.
    The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,
    The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.


                             V. Homecoming

    The daemon said that he would take me home
    To the pale, shadow-land I half-recalled
    As a high place of stair and terrace, walled
    With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,
    While miles below a maze of dome on dome
    And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.
    Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled
    On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.

    All this he promised, and through sunset's gate
    He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,
    And red-gold thrones of gods without a name
    Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.
    Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:
    "Here was your home," he mocked, "when you had sight!"

       *       *       *       *       *


                             LATE REVENGE

                           by Duane W. Rimel

    Spawn of the cellars, rising black,
    Midst darkened doorways, out a crack;
    To wither each bright blade of grass,
    And smother flying souls that pass.

    Spawns of the cellars; evil slime;
    Heed not their calling, lest they climb
    As rays of light upon thy face,
    And steal thy spirit's resting place.

    Wraiths of corruption, creep not in;
    For though their minds be steeped in sin,
    They hold a germ of terror yet,
    That baffles every evil met.

    Seed of the tombstone, enter now;
    Their house is darkened to the mow.
    Your chance has come to right the wrong,
    That you have waited all too long.

    Spawn of the cellars, rising fast,
    To seek the hell-hounds out at last:
    They cloudlike through the window creep,
    On those who sprawl in drunken sleep.

    Dread putrefactions, find your breed;
    That you may pay that awful deed;
    That you may spread your bloating jaws,
    And sap their entrails through your maws.

    Germ of corruption, speed ye fast.
    A thing is rising to its last;
    For greedy claws to grip around,
    And carry back to that mouldy mound.

    Spawn of the cellars, get ye back
    To gulfs of darkness where no track,
    Can trace you to that worming brood;
    Or toss your bones in darkened mood.

    Seed of the tombstone, floating black,
    Back to the cellar through that crack.
    And beings stare with sightless eyes,
    Down black steps where a brother lies.

       *       *       *       *       *


                               THE ALIEN

                         by Natalie H. Wooley

    She is like living golden flame.
    She knows not whence or why she came
        Into this world ... and yet at times
    I hear her call strange gods by name.

    There is no warmth in her embrace,
    Of human passions not a trace.
        She seems remote, a thing attuned
    To summonings from outer space.

    And on each starry, moonlit night
    She gazes long in rapt delight
        Toward the skies ... while I weep
    Lest the message come, and she take flight.

       *       *       *       *       *


                          VOICES OF THE NIGHT

                          by Robert E. Howard

                               2. Babel

    Now in the gloom the pulsing drums repeat,
    And all the night is filled with evil sound;
    I hear the throbbing of inhuman feet
    On marble stairs that silence locks around.

    I see black temples loom against the night,
    With tentacles like serpents writhed afar,
    And waving in a dusky dragon light
    Great moths whose wings unholy tapers char.

    Red memory on memory, tier on tier,
    Builds up a tower, time and space to span;
    Through world on world I rise, and sphere on sphere,
    To star-shot gulfs of lunacy and fear--
    Black screaming ages never dreamed by man.

    Was this your plan, foul spawn of cosmic mire,
    To freeze my soul to stone and icy fire,
    To carve me in the moon that all mankind
    May know its race is futile, weak and blind--
    A horror-blasted statue in the sky,
    That does not live and nevermore can die?

       *       *       *       *       *


                               FRAGMENT

                           by Robert Nelson

    With the red bewitchment of the moon canines collect
    And feast and howl o'er carrion and orts and bones
    In green and putrid grots that echo shrill sea-moans;
    And huge and hoary plantigrades on crags most high,
    Hearing the maddened carnal ravings of the hounds,
    Huddle together on the topmost frozen mounds
    To hurl immense boulders on them until all die.

       *       *       *       *       *


                            THE ELDER THING

                           by William Lumley

    Oh, have you seen the Elder Thing
      That creeps upon the hill--
    A fearsome Thing with lurid eyes
      At night when all is still;
    A horror wrought of withered moss
      And foul primordial slime,
    Wherein there fester monstrously
      The evils of all time?

    With phosphorescent glow like naught
      That Nature might devise,
    All the fell ancient lore of earth
      Gleams hellish in its eyes.
    As night by night this Elder Thing
      Upon the hill doth creep,
    Awakened by men's blasphemies
      From out its age-long sleep.

    By monolith and haunted fen
      Down to the mandrake mere
    It prowls to meet the sheeted dead
      That squeak and gibber there;
    And nameless things, not beasts nor men,
      With bat-like creatures vie,
    And loathsome reptiles writhe and hiss
     Till daybreak pales the sky.

    A thousand shapes the Things--
      A thousand shapes or none--
    All forms of Fear since Earth was born
      It mirrors as its own;
    It apes each rhythmic Elder Sign
      As it doth onward creep,
    Awakened by man's blasphemies
      From out its age-long sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *


                          THE GHOUL'S PARADE

                           by Lionel Dilbeck

    When the bells toll midnight
    And Dark Things begin to roam,
    The old house shivers, and the
    Walls begin to moan.

    The rats stop their scurrying
    And everything is quiet;
    The moon rises, softly,
    As if in fright.

    The wind howls mournfully
    Through the skeleton trees,
    And the breath of corruption
    Is borne in on the breeze.

    The corpse in the cellar
    Mouths a slobbering curse;
    On those who have slit his throat,
    And robbed him of his purse.

    The maggots swarm in his rotten flesh,
    And he howls in mad despair;
    He shrieks and moans and rages
    And tears his gristly hair.

    He rages thus each night
    From midnight until one;
    And the maggots swarm and wiggle,
    And have their hellish fun.

       *       *       *       *       *


                            THE DEAD WORLD

                        by Richard F. Searight

    I dreamed I stood atop a craggy verge
    And scanned long miles of dreary, jumbled waste
    That stretched, sharp-etched in airless, frozen surge
    Beneath the sable, star-strewn vault it faced.

    Black empty mouths of craters, grim and cold,
    Yawned bottomless, abysmal pits of slag
    Amid the desert stretching fold on fold
    To distant jagged peak and sharp-thrust crag.

    The desolation flooded through my soul--
    No living thing relieved the dismal rifts
    Of long-past cataclysms; the bleak roll
    Of upflung ridge and tangled lava drifts.

    It was as if a Titan band had played
    With this dead world when it was young and fair,
    And tired of the sport when they had made
    A ruin and a wreckage past repair.

    The cold of outer voids lay like a blight
    Of cosmic hate across the planet's face;
    And from the riven features I took flight
    To seek relief in fairer realms of space.

       *       *       *       *       *


                             A WEIRD BOOK

                           by P. J. Searles

                       "Lost Horizon" by Hilton.

Weird stories are so often bloody and gruesome that it is a delight
to find one written in an urbane and restrained style. "Lost Horizon"
tells of the stealing of a plane and its four passengers (two British
consular agents, an American absconding banker, and an American
missionary) during a tribal outbreak north of India and their
intentional removal to a remote valley in Tibet where they find a
semi-Christian and semi-Buddhist monastery, inhabited by a group of
serene men and women who have achieved an indefinitely prolonged life.

The main portion of the story concerns life in the monastery and
the attempt by its head to persuade the few prisoners to remain
there, exchanging a hurried, confused, and short life in so-called
civilization for calm, peace, and longevity in Tibet. Naturally, and
inevitably, the denouement is a tragedy, indirect, but poignant.

Mr. Hilton is an urbane satirist (if that is not a contradiction of
terms) who has produced a beautiful story, weird and unusual, but
without the so-frequent accompaniment of vampires, ghosts, or the like.
He writes delicately in a style reminiscent of Owens' "The Wind that
Tramps the World." "Lost Horizon" is not for the blood-and-thunder
reader; it has no "crashing suns," no "supernatural," no "unseen
presences," no incredible "brain surgeons," no "werewolves," but it
does have an unusual plot, weird in a faint and beautiful manner. For
the not-too-hardened it will be a pleasure.

       *       *       *       *       *


                           TRILOGY OF DEATH

                           by Robert Nelson

Death is a wheel....

Death is a wheel, grinding, rending, crushing. The little boy skipped
gayly to the grocery store for his mother. Crossing the street, he
did not see an oncoming truck. It was too late and--Death is a wheel,
grinding, rending, crushing. Death is a wheel....

Death is a dollar bill....

Death is a dollar bill. A gust of wind swept a vagrant dollar bill into
the gutter. It sped onward thru the streets. Onward to a jutting pier.
Onward it went. A man espied it. He ran for it. Stumbled. Ran on. He
came to the end of the pier. Fell into the water. But he grasped the
dollar bill. "I've got it!" he cried. And then he sank beneath the
waves. Death is a dollar bill....

Death is a dream....

Death is a dream. "Death, too, must be a dream," said the man in his
dream. "Petty hills. Endless. Light all about. Light ... gladness ...
music ... voices of women. But my throat. How tight. I am choking....
Breath, breath. My breath. Pretty hills. Endless. My breath. God, my
breath. Light ... breath ... hills ... music ... voices of women.
Breath...." Death is a dream....

       *       *       *       *       *


                 SCIENCE FICTION IN ENGLISH MAGAZINES

                             by Bob Tucker

                            (Series Eight)

British science fiction, with the death of "Scoops," has just about
gone pfft, to quote a New York columnist. The small four-cent magazines
in the field do not run enough "science" fiction to make reading them
worth your time.

The "Triumph" is still running the "Invisible Charlie" series, and they
get no better each time. The "Wizard" has come forth with the "Worms
of Doom." It's the old idea of the gent with a world-conquering mania
again. He lets loose strange worms upon the world, said worms capable
of devouring steel. Of course, they devour the most popular buildings
first of all. It's funny how the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State
Building taste better than ordinary ones.

"Amazing Stories" publishes a British Edition over there, so that
helps somewhat. When questioned, "Wonder" and "Astounding" say that
they don't publish such editions, but "Wonder" adds "as yet," so maybe
someday....

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                              AN ANECDOTE

                        by Forrest J. Ackerman

In the early days of science fiction when there were not many authors
who wrote it and Amazing was chiefly a magazine of Verne-Wells-Poe
reprints, Bob Olsen was writing and had a friend who thought he could
too. Bob had two tales published in Amazing without mentioning the
accomplishment to his friend who succeeded in having nothing accepted
(he was not writing stf). Then, with the third story, Bob's name
appeared on the cover, giving him quite a thrill. 'Stories by: H. G.
Wells, Bob Olsen, Edgar Allan Poe', it read. "Uh, what do you think
of that?" asked Bob proudly, now displaying his work, his name with
Wells and Poe. The friend sized up a moment. Then, "They've got you
just right, all right," he seemed to have to admit, Bob swelling with
pride--"half way between a live one and a dead one!"

Bob still thinks he was a little bit envious, tho.

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                             ALIER'S ALIBI

                         by Mortimer Weisinger

Years ago, when Hugo Gernsback's "Scientific Adventures of Baron
Munchhausen" were appearing serially in the Electrical Experimenter,
it occasionally transpired that an installment was omitted. At such
intervals various ingenious excuses were offered to explain the
missing chapters. Perhaps the gem of them all is the one which we are
reproducing herewith, taken from a 1915 issue.

"Baron Munchhausen, as will be noted, has failed to make his appearance
this month. Urgent wireless telegrams to his chronologist-in-chief,
the Hon. I. M. Alier, of Yankton, Mass., disclosed the fact that the
venerable old gentleman had contracted a virulent case of Atmospheris
Marsianis, which sometimes attacks Interplanetary travellers not
acclimatized to the peculiar Martian air. Mr. Alier, however, states
that Professor Flitternix, the Baron's companion, advises him that
Munchhausen will be back on the job next month. Of course we're sorry,
but what can we do?"

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                            ADVERTISEMENTS
                       Rates: one cent per word
                       Minimum Charge, 25 cents

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Back Numbers of _The Fantasy Fan_: September, 1933, out of print; Oct.,
Dec., 1933--Jan., Feb., Mar., May, June, Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec.,
1934, 10 cents each.

Nov., 1933--Apr., July, 1934, 20 cents each.

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CLARK ASHTON SMITH presents THE DOUBLE SHADOW AND OTHER FANTASIES--a
booklet containing a half-dozen imaginative and atmospheric
tales--stories of exotic beauty, horror, terror, strangeness, irony and
satire. Price: 25 cents each (coin or stamps). Also a small remainder
of EBONY AND CRYSTAL--a book of prose-poems published at $2.00, reduced
to $1.00 per copy. Everything sent postpaid. Clark Ashton Smith,
Auburn, California.

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BACK ISSUES of Weird Tales for sale, 1924-25-26 to date. State issues
wanted. D. M. Roberts, 328 W. Willow St., Syracuse, N. Y.

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Important! Many subscriptions to TFF expire this winter. Yours is
probably one of them. Don't forget to send in your new subscription if
you want TFF to continue monthly publication. Every dollar counts!

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                              Watch for a
                       Sensational Announcement
                               regarding
                           FANTASY MAGAZINE
                           in the next issue