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Venus, v. 1, issue 1, June 1944
Page 3
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-3- OUR FAINT BRAYS FROM A TIED JACKASS DEPARTMENT bob Tucker's "Dressed-Up Westerns" [image of cowboy riding a spaceship with words and cartoonist name - By Joe] How often have you heard that, put forward by this or that opponent of science fiction as literature? "Science Fiction Yarns, "they claim cynically, "are nothing but westerns transferred to Mars, or the interstellar distances." Supposedly, the horse becomes a rocketship, the six-gun an atom pistol and Montana Mike becomes Phobos Pete, et. al. This humble one, heretofore sitting silently and happily on the sidelines, wishes to insert a timid fout into the fray. I'd like to tell of an instance where such a thing happened --- in reverse. Last summer I wrote a Martian adventure yarn. It was strikingly putrid, as Martian Adventure yarns go. I must have been thinking of something else at the time. It ran about 4000 words and detailed the adventures of Phobos Pete, who worked for a diamond mining company on Mars. In the course of events, a female outlaw killed a man and stole a huge diamond from him, and was in turn captured by our hero, Phobos Pete. He slings the gal into his sand sled and starts back to civilization with her and the diamond. He doesn't get there with either of them. The girl tricks him, steals back the gem, throws him out of the sled and takes off. Meanwhile, our poor hero, marooned on the desert, is about to be devoured by a horrible monster. You guessed the ending, of course. The girl returns in time to run down the monster. My agent lost no time in returning the yarn, explaining how corny it was. "It's nothing but a dressed-up western," he complained, so I filed it away in a drawer full of similar stock. A couple of weeks went by before the obvious struck me between the eyes. Now the agent has a western yarn he is confident of selling. I eliminated the sand sled and the monster, changed the action from Mars to Oklahoma---nearby Arkansas has a diamond mine---Phobos Pete became Arkansas Al, a lawman on the trail of the stolen gem. Presto! Science Fiction into western. Let the cynics sneer!
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-3- OUR FAINT BRAYS FROM A TIED JACKASS DEPARTMENT bob Tucker's "Dressed-Up Westerns" [image of cowboy riding a spaceship with words and cartoonist name - By Joe] How often have you heard that, put forward by this or that opponent of science fiction as literature? "Science Fiction Yarns, "they claim cynically, "are nothing but westerns transferred to Mars, or the interstellar distances." Supposedly, the horse becomes a rocketship, the six-gun an atom pistol and Montana Mike becomes Phobos Pete, et. al. This humble one, heretofore sitting silently and happily on the sidelines, wishes to insert a timid fout into the fray. I'd like to tell of an instance where such a thing happened --- in reverse. Last summer I wrote a Martian adventure yarn. It was strikingly putrid, as Martian Adventure yarns go. I must have been thinking of something else at the time. It ran about 4000 words and detailed the adventures of Phobos Pete, who worked for a diamond mining company on Mars. In the course of events, a female outlaw killed a man and stole a huge diamond from him, and was in turn captured by our hero, Phobos Pete. He slings the gal into his sand sled and starts back to civilization with her and the diamond. He doesn't get there with either of them. The girl tricks him, steals back the gem, throws him out of the sled and takes off. Meanwhile, our poor hero, marooned on the desert, is about to be devoured by a horrible monster. You guessed the ending, of course. The girl returns in time to run down the monster. My agent lost no time in returning the yarn, explaining how corny it was. "It's nothing but a dressed-up western," he complained, so I filed it away in a drawer full of similar stock. A couple of weeks went by before the obvious struck me between the eyes. Now the agent has a western yarn he is confident of selling. I eliminated the sand sled and the monster, changed the action from Mars to Oklahoma---nearby Arkansas has a diamond mine---Phobos Pete became Arkansas Al, a lawman on the trail of the stolen gem. Presto! Science Fiction into western. Let the cynics sneer!
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