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Spaceways, v. 3, issue 6, whole no. 22, August 1941
21
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SPACEWAYS, 21 THE READERS ALWAYS WRITE delusion that they buy and print slop, he sent them slop, the editors saw it was slop - and shot it back with a rejection slip. Now if Mr. Snort was capable of writing an article packed with such good advice as How To Be a Hack, I don't see how he could be so wrong in evaluating the stories in TWS. They are not "slop". They are carefully plotted and neatly written. Whether one likes the TWS type of story is aside from the question; I am assuming that Mr. Snort is looking at it from the professional point of view, since he wrote a lengthy article putting forth that point of view. " TWS prints a certain type of story. Why they print that type of story is their business. If you are a reader, then you go off the deep end and yell that the stories stink if you want. That is what you pay your money for. But if you want to do business with them you develop a sympathetic appreciation of their editorial needs. This attitude is every bit as important as the advice given by Pumphandle in his article. So you study their stories, then make a sincere effort to write something fresh and original along that same line - and your chances of selling them will be a lot better than a billion to one." It happens that I like TWS. So there! I got my very first rejection slip from them. I also got my very first check from them. It seems to me that any fans who are writing would commend TWS instead of belittling the magazine. It has maintained a good wrod rate right along, and its checks come fast when they come at all. The only time I hate TWS to pieces, is when the magazine reaches me late in the mails. Joseph Golbert, 1100 Bryan St., Columbia, South Carolina, insists; Frankly, Harry, this last issue was poor. Average is about 6. If it were an ordinary fanzine it would be okay - but Spaceways! For about the first time the material in an issue is really open for criticism; severe criticism " For outside of Harry Jenkins' article, there isn't a thing in the issue that deserves more than a six. The fiction was uniformly amateurish and yawnsome, Wright's article was obvious, Acky's thing should have been preserved for one of his letters, and every department was below average. As for Mulrain - how did his thing ever manage to slip into Spaceways? There was so little to it that it wasn't even firt to be termed mediocre. It was just a nonentity. Great foo! All he says is "I like Fort", and he take s a page and a quarter to do it with. Nuts. Also horsecollar. Mr. Fort was a nut, a wack, a screwball. IT showed in everything he wrote; he would, in fact, have had to be screwy to interpret some of this data the way he did. According to Fort the earth was a giant cavern and the stars were the volcanoes. Ain't that logic for you?" Fort was this: a mentally distorted man with a superbly unique writing style, a persecution and an inferiority complex. He would have had to be off to spend most of his life collecting newspaper clippings for no other purpose than that of saying, "Hoe do you explain this?" He was a literary Peter Duncan and the weird, genuinely bizarre data he did manage to present on occasion does not excuse any of these facts," And all that Mr. Mulrain says, is : "Mr. Fort collected a lot of unusual stuff. He got murdered. His publisher got murdered. The end." Again nuts. Bob Jones, 281 14th Ave., Columbus Ohio worries: I ofttimes wonder whether or not fans are blind or have no aesthetic sense whatsoever. In Designers Wanted, Wright omitted the name of the only real science fiction artist, namely, Charles Scheeman. None of the hacks that fill the pages of Wonder, Amazing, Startling, etc can come anywhere near comparing with this master of scientific art. I mean art. His work is dignified, quiet with none of the excess machinery that the comic strip stinkers like Krupa seem to think necessary to the constitution of a science fiction picture. His human figures are human. Not the sub-atromic, jointless two fingered, expressionless boobs that clutter up the pages of Amazing. Fantastic and others of that calibre. Yes, Rogers is good but why attempt to class him with Finlay and Bok? All three illustrate different lines.. Bok the weird (his work is not short of perfection for the subject matter -- I would like to see what he would have done in the Brundage era). Finlay, the pure , beautiful fantasy (Morritt, his meat) and Rogers is
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SPACEWAYS, 21 THE READERS ALWAYS WRITE delusion that they buy and print slop, he sent them slop, the editors saw it was slop - and shot it back with a rejection slip. Now if Mr. Snort was capable of writing an article packed with such good advice as How To Be a Hack, I don't see how he could be so wrong in evaluating the stories in TWS. They are not "slop". They are carefully plotted and neatly written. Whether one likes the TWS type of story is aside from the question; I am assuming that Mr. Snort is looking at it from the professional point of view, since he wrote a lengthy article putting forth that point of view. " TWS prints a certain type of story. Why they print that type of story is their business. If you are a reader, then you go off the deep end and yell that the stories stink if you want. That is what you pay your money for. But if you want to do business with them you develop a sympathetic appreciation of their editorial needs. This attitude is every bit as important as the advice given by Pumphandle in his article. So you study their stories, then make a sincere effort to write something fresh and original along that same line - and your chances of selling them will be a lot better than a billion to one." It happens that I like TWS. So there! I got my very first rejection slip from them. I also got my very first check from them. It seems to me that any fans who are writing would commend TWS instead of belittling the magazine. It has maintained a good wrod rate right along, and its checks come fast when they come at all. The only time I hate TWS to pieces, is when the magazine reaches me late in the mails. Joseph Golbert, 1100 Bryan St., Columbia, South Carolina, insists; Frankly, Harry, this last issue was poor. Average is about 6. If it were an ordinary fanzine it would be okay - but Spaceways! For about the first time the material in an issue is really open for criticism; severe criticism " For outside of Harry Jenkins' article, there isn't a thing in the issue that deserves more than a six. The fiction was uniformly amateurish and yawnsome, Wright's article was obvious, Acky's thing should have been preserved for one of his letters, and every department was below average. As for Mulrain - how did his thing ever manage to slip into Spaceways? There was so little to it that it wasn't even firt to be termed mediocre. It was just a nonentity. Great foo! All he says is "I like Fort", and he take s a page and a quarter to do it with. Nuts. Also horsecollar. Mr. Fort was a nut, a wack, a screwball. IT showed in everything he wrote; he would, in fact, have had to be screwy to interpret some of this data the way he did. According to Fort the earth was a giant cavern and the stars were the volcanoes. Ain't that logic for you?" Fort was this: a mentally distorted man with a superbly unique writing style, a persecution and an inferiority complex. He would have had to be off to spend most of his life collecting newspaper clippings for no other purpose than that of saying, "Hoe do you explain this?" He was a literary Peter Duncan and the weird, genuinely bizarre data he did manage to present on occasion does not excuse any of these facts," And all that Mr. Mulrain says, is : "Mr. Fort collected a lot of unusual stuff. He got murdered. His publisher got murdered. The end." Again nuts. Bob Jones, 281 14th Ave., Columbus Ohio worries: I ofttimes wonder whether or not fans are blind or have no aesthetic sense whatsoever. In Designers Wanted, Wright omitted the name of the only real science fiction artist, namely, Charles Scheeman. None of the hacks that fill the pages of Wonder, Amazing, Startling, etc can come anywhere near comparing with this master of scientific art. I mean art. His work is dignified, quiet with none of the excess machinery that the comic strip stinkers like Krupa seem to think necessary to the constitution of a science fiction picture. His human figures are human. Not the sub-atromic, jointless two fingered, expressionless boobs that clutter up the pages of Amazing. Fantastic and others of that calibre. Yes, Rogers is good but why attempt to class him with Finlay and Bok? All three illustrate different lines.. Bok the weird (his work is not short of perfection for the subject matter -- I would like to see what he would have done in the Brundage era). Finlay, the pure , beautiful fantasy (Morritt, his meat) and Rogers is
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