Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 9 (1943-01).djvu/123



Y THIS time you've probably read The Two Moons of Tranquillia, unless you are one of those readers who spurns the conventional method of reading a magazine, and, instead, works from back-to-front. At any rate, Arthur Leo Zagat, whose last story for was published just one year ago, sent along to us the following appendage which, we think, fits in very well with his story:

Who in these dreadful days has not yearned for escape from them? What person capable of imaginative thinking at all has not imagined for himself a world free of the brutal savagery that has made of this one a horror? What parent does not lie awake in the night wondering what sort of world this small daughter or small son will face when they have grown to realization of reality?

What one of us does not cry out for some Tranquillia?

There is no Tranquillia, but if there were, if somewhere I or you could find a warp in space through which we could flee the terrible responsibilities of the terrible present, have we the right to seek that escape?

This was the question that gave Two Moons of Tranquillia birth. In Two Moons George Carson found the answer for me. When the story began writing itself I had no more foreknowledge of his decision than you who have read it, or will read it, with I hope some modicum of interest in the problem with which he was faced as well as with pleasure in the yarn itself. "Pop" Gatlin couldn't do anything else but what he did. Helen, being what she was, made an inevitable choice. I had to wait the end of the narrative to find out how George would solve his dilemma.

No, there is nothing mystic in the way Two Moons came to be written. It is the way all the hundreds of yarns that have come from my typewriter have created themselves. I find my characters among people I know, people like you, your neighbors and friends. Real people. I invent a situation for them, involve them in it, and then I sit back and watch what happens. To the persons of my stories I am demigod, creator, only in so far as I confront them with the necessity for decision and action, for all the rest I am no less aloof an observer than you, my readers.

I hope that you have enjoyed, or will enjoy, reading Two Moons of Tranquillia as much as I did setting it down for you. I sincerely hope you will agree with me that George Carson did the only right thing. Arthur Leo Zagat

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