Page:Stirring Science Stories, February 1941.djvu/67



S YOU READERS must undoubtedly have surmised by this time, isn't really one magazine but two. A sort of Siamese twin embracing within its covers for the first time in publishing history a science-fiction magazine and a weird-fantasy magazine. You'll find in the pages preceding this department with an outstanding assortment of scientific imaginative fiction. You'll find our more modest twin in the pages following this central vortex with the finest tales of fantasy and weird imagination you can obtain anywhere.

Perhaps you are not certain of just how we draw the distinction between the one form of fantasy and the other. Let us define our fields. Science-fiction is that branch of fantasy relying for its effect on the fact that its imaginative visionings are based upon logical projections of known science. That is, these stories are not impossible, not sheer dream-stuff, but actually conceivable as things that may occur under specific conditions today, or that may have occurred in the unrecorded past.

Weird fiction, on the other hand, is the branch of fantasy that depends upon the readers' willingness to accept the factors on which the story is based may be true (but cannot now be accepted by science), or that since, at one time or another great numbers of people have accepted such things as true, there may indeed be something to them. A weird-fantasy is by no means to be considered as impossible. It requires a more open mind, a mind that is willing to concede that the very laws of the universe may not be stable and may be subject to change even as every existing thing known to science is known to be subject to steady and never-ending change. Cannot the laws of science themselves be subject also to this eternal alteration? Are they not in fact actually so subject? Do we know everything already or is it true that "the more we know the more there is to learn"?

We place therefore in the forepart of our double-magazine those stories which science is prepared to accept as probable; we place in the latter half those stories which science may someday be willing to accept but is not now prepared to do.

We feel that there is a definite place for a magazine such as ours, we feel that those readers, and there