Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/64

 

OLLECTIONS of weird stories are well-known and appear fairly often from book publishers. Ghost stories are the rule in these collections and the modern type of story is rare. The average weird anthology contains the tried-and-true old timers, Poe, deMaupassant, Bierce, and others of the Nineteenth Century. Such books as do contain modern fantasy seek it among the "accepted" writers—the book writers who dabble in fantasy once in a while accompanied by the ohs and ahs of their select little groups of literateurs. When such a man turns out a weird yarn, he exhibits it as a charming little freak, a grotesque to be held up by the tail and exclaimed at by admiring circles of well-mannered literary clubs. And someday to appear in a select volume of weird stories, nestling between Poe and others.

The writer who writes weird fiction because that is his main interest in life and the type of fiction he esteems above anything else, rarely gets a tumble. The pulp magazines are his field, in them he sets forth his masterpieces of imaginative concepts, in their pages and among their readers he reaps his reward. His stories are read by audiences of hundreds of thousands, his name is known whereever people of an imaginative turn of mind reside. But the books know him not. For the elite publishers of book anthologies and the doubly elite compilers of such anthologies, appearance in pulp magazine selling to the great anonymous American public constitutes little of interest or worth. Stories published in magazines with newstandnewsstand [sic] circulation, gaudy covers, illustrations (!), and a price on the cover within the reach of anyone's pocket, just couldn't possibly be good. At any rate, they were scarcely worth noting when compiling an anthology of fantasy fiction.

S FOR science-fiction in book anthologies? Horrors! Never! Even if H. G. Wells did write several books filled with his science short stories and even if those books were great successes, science-fiction is something for book anthologists to avoid. Novels of this type are permissable but not so short story collections. Yet there are millions of Americans who know that science-fiction short stories are not only good reading and enjoyable literature but that very often they can qualify as true literature by their wealth of ideas, visions, thoughts, scenes and brilliance worthy of the very highest traditions of the imaginative short story. But the Literati could never be persuaded of that. Look, they scream in scorn, look at where these stories are published! Magazines on public newsstands! Dreadful! Bright covers—Ghastly! Illustrations—Poor taste! Captions, introductory lines—Incredible! And the titles of these magazines—Shocking! Read such stuff to find good writing? It could not be.

So, while the weird tale once in a while succeeds in crashing the pages of books, science-fiction tales are rigidly excluded.

That is why this writer and many others were very excited when they first heard that a book was being compiled to consist of short stories of every type taken exclusively from the pages of the fantasy magazines. Furthermore, the book would contain science-fiction too—such stories as might properly belong in a book. Happily we thought of the many magnificent tales and writers that might be included. There seemed hosts of them—all the way back to 1926 and from all the magazines—short stories remembered by thousands across many years. Surely such stories would warrant inclusion? We thought of John W. Campbell, David H. Keller, Stanton A. Coblentz, G. Peyton Wertenbaker, Homer Eon Flint, Clare Winger Harris, Don A. Stuart, Charles Cloukey, Ray Cummings, C. L. Moore, Harl 