قراءة كتاب Futuria Fantasia, Fall 1939
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
out that this is only one man's opinion. I have intentionally been harsh in my estimates, maybe some points are in need of qualification or elucidation, but by and large, I stand back of what I have written here. AMEN.
THE ABOVE ARTICLE IS SUBJECT TO CRITICISM—THEREFORE ANY AND ALL FANS AND AUTHORS WHO DISAGREE WILL FIND THEIR ARTICLES AGAINST THIS ONE BY A FAMOUS AUTHOR WELCOMED AND PRINTED IN THE WINTER EDITION OF FUFA!. THE WINTER EDITION WILL BE OUT DURING THE MONTH OF DECEMBER—SO CONTRIBUTIONS SHOULD BE MAILED IMMEDIATELY TO FUTURIA FANTASIA—3054-1/2 West 12th Street, Los Angeles. (EDITOR)
FUTURIA VOLUME ONE NO. THREE
FANTASIA! OUT IN DECEMBER TEN CENTS
Contributions welcomed. Short stories preferred. No personal stuff or caustic feuding. Humor wanted. Material bought but never paid for—so what can you lose? We suggest you send a quarter for the next 3 issues of Futuria Fantasia and save yourselves a nickel.
Contributing Authors/ Willy Ley, Rocklynne, Hasse, Kuttner, Ackerman, Corvais
Satan's Mistress
by Doug Rogers
She dances swathed in heated mist, before the gates of Hell.
Her gleaming naked body flees before the Demon fires,
Along the shores of molten seas—ridged high by fuming pyres.
Her hair, a liquid cape of flame, whips hot about her breasts,
A strumpet in the Devil's name, which he alone invests,
Gives power to a woman born of brimstone, steam and smoke,
Her soul, a spark in early morn, flares up to share the yoke
Of evil Mephistopheles upon his throne of death,
Unheeding shrieks and doleful pleas choked out by dying breath.
The Devil's Mistress dances down thru dungeons carved from bone,
Upon her head the sinner's crown, each jewel a sigh, a moan.
Before the wailing souls in caves, tossed down from earthly things,
To charred and cindered minds of slaves her dancing passion brings.
Then, tired of her evil joke, and laughing at her games,
She draws about her fiery cloak to vanish in the flames.
Lost Soul
by Henry Hasse
The echo of a wild and anguished cry—
A tortured voice that shrieked aloud a word,
A name, that shivered 'cross the leaden sky.
I stopped—stared 'round—I knew that voice did sound
A faint, familiar note within my brain.
I fled across that dark and desolate ground
Seeking out the direction whence it came.
Forebodingly, that voice kept echoing
Within a brain that did not seem my own ...
A vague remembrance of a recent thing
I could not grasp ... I was a lost and lone
Forsaken soul that sped I knew not where,
Wondering frightenedly what I did seek....
At last I found it, there beside a bare
And lonely road, when trembling and weak,
I gazed upon a gallows-tree where hung
A corpse, the very site of which did freeze
The blood within my veins; a corpse that swung
Grotesquely to and fro upon the breeze.
And then, through rising panic, closer still
I peered—then saw!—and knew! Again that cry
That shrieked a name—the cry that issued shrill
From my own throat, and shivered to the sky!
Was mine. The dead thing swinging there was me!
The truth about goldfish—
KUTTNER
For some time I have been wondering what the world is coming to. More than once I have got up in the middle of the nite, padded toward the bureau, and, peering into the mirror, exclaimed, "Stinky, what is the world coming to?" The responses I have thus obtained I am not at liberty to reveal; but I am coming to believe that either I have a most mysterious mirror or something is wrong somewhere. I am intrigued by my mirror.
It came into my possession under extraordinary and eerie circumstances, being borne into my bedroom one Midsummer's Eve by a procession of cats dressed oddly in bright-colored sunsuits and carrying parasols. I was asleep at the time, but awoke just as the last tail whisked out the door, and immediately I sprang out of bed and cut my left big toe rather badly on the edge of the mirror. I remember that as I first looked into the fathomless, glassy depths, a curious thot came into my mind. "What," I said to myself, "is the world coming to? And what is science-fiction coming to?"
It is quite evident that a logical and critical analysis of science-fictional trends is a desideratum today. The whole trouble, I feel, can be laid to velleity. (I have wanted to use that word for years. Unfortunately I have now forgotten exactly what it means, but one can safely attribute trouble to it. Where was I?)
Today science-fiction is split by schisms and impaled on the trylon of bad thots. The fans, I mean, not the writers. The writers have been split and impaled for years, but nothing can be done about that. In a way, it's a good thing. Look at Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, and, for that matter, the late unfortunate Tobias J. Koot.
I put flowers on his grave only yesterday. He lies at rest, tho his ghastly fate pursued him even to the grave. And I attribute Mr. Koot's fate to nothing less than the schisms of fandom. For Koot was a hard working young man, serious, earnest, with promise of becoming a first-class writer. He took life very solemnly—almost grimly. "My job," he told me once, "is to give people what they want."
"I want a drink," I said to him. "Give me one."
But Koot couldn't be turned from his rash course. He began to write science-fiction. That was where the trouble started. "Is it science?" he pondered. "Or is it fiction?" Already the cleavage—the split—had begun.
It was a matter of logical progression toward ultimate division. Koot got in the habit of typing the science into his stories with his left hand, and the fiction with his right. He began to twitch and worry. He got up nites. He was troubled, uneasy. "I have one thing left to cling to," he muttered desperately, "Fandom! I can point to that and say: It is real. It exists. It is dependable."
When fandom had its schism, Koot immediately developed a split personality. It was rather horrible. His left side—the scientific side—grew cold and hard and keen. He grew a Van Dyke on
