YOUR 5 CENTS WORTH
by The Readers
Harry Warner, Jr.
423 Summit Avenue
Hagarstown, Maryland, 21740
"Train of Thought" has several things to its credit. The narrative style is
good, it's fiction about fans that couldn't possibly exist without the
peculiarities of fandom (in contrast to an occasional mundane story that is
given fans as characters), and it isn't too obviously a reworking of an old
theme. There are two aspects of the story that could be repaired, however.
One sounds trivial but bothered me all the way through: the name of the
character Blok. I kept expecting our own Bloch to be tied in somehow with this
Blok and my intentness on this prevented the actual events from making the
proper effect. The other trouble is the choice of a book as the theme of the
story. Unless memory has deserted me altogether, The Martian Chronicles
consists almost entirely of a collection of short stories that had been
published separately with great success before they were glued together for the
book. This accounts for the contradictory factors in several stories about
early flights to Mars and also makes it improbable that things would have
occurred as the story describes, with all those elements of the book already
widely known and quite famous.
John Robinson's summary of the Cordwainer Smith stories is the best thing I've
seen in recent fanzines about this writer... It hooks in oddly with the letter
from Pete Fortin, incidentally, that Cordwainer should not seek to have his
main fields of activity tied in with this sideline of science fiction
authorship, while Pete seems to feel that it's the non-successful writers who
should hide in the shadows. I suspect that Pete is extremely young himself and
is trying to convince himself that he's really and truly past the adolescent
stage, rather than concerned about the activities of fans. I can see nothing
shameful about preserving adolescent traits all through life. Adolescence
might very possibly be the best period of life, when sexual urges are spanking
new, there's no need to waste time earning a living, health and reflexes are
about as good as they'll ever be for the most of us, and every adolescent has
the right to hope that he won't bog down into the grown-up condition that Pete
seems to idolize just now...
On the flip side, I am fascinated by the No-Eyed Monster comic strip or
whatever generic term happens to fit this collection of drawings. I am not
quite sure whether this is absolutely inspired creativity that will be
appreciated fully two centuries from now, or just doodling that happens to
strike a responsive element somewhere in my subconscious. Whatever the true
merits, I find it in some ways the most fascinating new thing to come up in a
fanzine for months and months, and I hope they never find this letter if I
finally go off the deep end and they come to investigate my recent thinking
before deciding if I should be committed permanently or just temporarily to the
booby hatch...
[pp. 41 - 41, Letter 1, "Your 5 Cents Worth," NO-EYED MONSTER #7, Summer 1966]
Updated June 26, 2001. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.