A fair amount of to-do has been generated over the reviewing policy of the Rd. We wish to clarify certain issues and to make what we hope is a definite statement concerning that policy.
Firstly, our reviews are done by volunteers. We let anyone do them who will remain fairly consistent within the limits he himself sets up. There is no "editorial policy" with respect to the reviews, we ask only that the reviewer be honest on a subjective basis. In other words call a spade a spade, and if you like it, say so. If you don't like the magazine in question, say that too.
Our idea has always been to get as many reviewers as possible so that an adequate cross-section of opinion could be obtained. While this is fine in theory, it has not always been practical. Sometimes we just couldn't find anyone to do the reviewing, and the burden then rested with one or two people.
Mr. Browne's attack on David G. Spencer is rather pointless, in view of the fact that he didn't even bother to read the material. This letter from Mr. Browne is liberally sprinkled with multi-ordinal emotional content terms such as reckless, superficial, calumny, infantile, unreasoning, etc. Mr. Browne states, "If Mr. Spencer ... has reasonable qualifications to act as critic, beyond his ability to read without moving his lips, why not list them?" According to our understanding of the phrase this comes awfully close to calumny itself.
However Mr. Browne has come up with this deathless set of prose "Reason is largely wasted on the unreasoning ..." so we guess there is just no point in trying to be reasonable here. For his information, though, we virtually have been on our hands and knees before the Little Men asking, "Is there anyone here who likes Amazing Stories? Will you please step forward and do the review? We haven't had any takers yet, Mr. Browne.
Data entry and page scans provided by Judy Bemis
Data entry by Judy Bemis
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