Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 2 (1923-02).djvu/80



HEN one is looking at things—whether it be the Woolworth Building, a June bug, or a dish of ham and eggs—one's viewpoint "matters enormously," as our friend Ruggles used to say. We have here a letter from a correspondent is San Francisco, who, after some rapturous comment on the glorious summer weather there (all Californians talk that way, of course), puts this snappy question to us: "Does sunny weather in December sound like fiction to you in the East?"

The "East"! And only this morning we heard from a friend in New York who congratulated us on trying to publish a magazine "way out there in the wooly West." It all depends, you see, on where you're standing. When you look at a housefly with your unaided eye it seems merely a harmless insect, but a powerful microscope reveals a hideous monster. A mountain never seems as big when you stand at its base as it does when you see it five miles away.

From a geologic viewpoint, man has lived on this planet only a few seconds; but, measured by time as we compute it, he has been her for hundreds of thousands of years. All of which brings us, in a roundabout fashion, to what we really started out to say: Why is it that the industrious writers, who keep writing stories for WEIRD TALES, choose almost every subject save that of prehistoric man?

Here, it seems to us, is an unexplored field that should yield rich returns to the author of weird fiction. It's a field, too, where he may give his imagination a free rein and let it run riot. He can say practically anything he pleases about our ancestors who lived half a million years ago, and nobody can dispute him. He needn't watch his step for fear somebody will trip him up. No matter who he is, he knows as much about his subject as anybody else. All that any of us know about our prehistoric forbears could be neatly contained in a thin volume; and what we don't know about them would, if printed, fill a library.

Life probably was exciting in those distant days, ages ago, but quite likely the people who lived then thought it very ordinary. Now, however, looking at it from our modern civilization, it seems weird and strange and full of fascination. Again, it is a matter of viewpoint.

We offer the idea for what it is worth; and we hope that pretty soon some of our earnest contributors will be sending us stories about "The Man Who Lived in a Tree," or "the Ape Girl," or "The Six-Hundred-Foot Lizard."

E seemed to have stirred something when we dwelt, in these columns, on that extraordinary story, "The Transparent Ghost;" and now we shall probably stir up something else by starting the story in this issue of WEIRD TALES. At any rate, the story is started—and will be finished. Like an alarm clock, a story such as this has got to keep going until it runs down and stops with a gasp that seems to say: "I'm out of breath and can't go on."

If we were to print all the letters that were written to us concerning "the Transparent Ghost" we should need half the pages in this magazine; and so the best we can do is to publish only a few of them and submit brief comments on the rest. This huge mass of letters presents an interesting diversity of opinion. Some of the gravely inform us that the author's note (printed verbatim in the November Eyrie) contains a dozen misspelled words. Others hold that the manuscript should be carefully edited, the spelling patched up