Photo: A City Under the Big Sky

There aren't too many people in central Montana; the city of Billings is the largest city for hundreds of kilometers around, and even just passing through can give you a sense of just how big the world can be. I took this photo looking northwest along North 27th Street toward the Rimrocks, a geological formation that helps define the sectors of the city.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Prisms of the Occupation

The way you look at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which started in New York City but have since spread to practically every major city across North America, is highly dependent on the political lens you bring to the show. Someone on the left side of the spectrum might look at it as a long-overdue action against the people who decimated the global economy and got away without punishment, as well as the governments that made that decimation possible, whereas someone on the right might see a bunch of communists or bongo-drumming protestors who need to wake up and realize it isn't the 1960s anymore. Those are, of course, lightly-sketched and pretty much stereotypical viewpoints - perspective varies from person to person, after all.

Nevertheless, I can't help but notice that sort of right-leaning view coming up again and again in media references or, more commonly, comment threads. A recent article in Gothamist quoted a post from a forum frequented by New York Police Department officers, which referred to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators as "trust-fund punks" and " trust fund bytches... [who] want to see us lose our jobs, our means for support to our families, they want to see our lives ruined..." It goes without saying that this "us vs. them" siege mentality is incredibly toxic - but that's not what I'm focused on. No, it's more the taken-for-granted assumption that OWS is shot through with rich mommy's boys and daddy's girls who Just Don't Know The Way Things Are, that they're disconnected from the Real People and are just doing this for fun.

I can admit that, for many people, it must be easy to scoff at them, to dismiss them as a lunatic fringe, to go on how they'd be better off putting all that energy into looking for a job. That might have been easier had not Wall Street wrecked the economy, created the steepest recession in eighty years, and put tens of millions of people out of work.

I was originally going to go with Toronto G20 graffiti that said "FUCK NEO-CONS," but I like the sentiment behind this sidewalk chalk on St. Clair West more.

Here's what I think - when some people dismiss the demonstrators with recourse to ideas such as that, they're doing it out of subconscious fear. After all, this isn't the way things were supposed to go. The whole basis of society was that you put your nose to the grindstone, work hard, be honest, and you will be rewarded; maybe you won't be rich, but you'll at least be comfortable. That assumption fueled American and Canadian societies through the prosperous times of the twentieth century.

But now it's under attack. Now it's groaning and buckling. Now it's seeming like people can work hard and be honest and try their best and the only reward they get is a pink slip and an underwater mortgage, while the traders and the hedge fund managers and the CEOs who risked the house on subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations are still in their shining towers raking in the megabucks... but if you don't look for it, it's easy to just see the skyscrapers instead.

I think that's part of it - a subconscious fear of what it would mean to agree with the demonstrators. To agree with them, to see the validity in what they're standing for, is to admit that the system is out of joint. That there are real problems, and that we need to confront them, and act to change the situation. That sort of change, that sort of uncertainty, is terrifying for many people. Far better to dismiss them as hippies and bored rich kids, put your nose back to the grindstone, and not think of anything aside from what's in front of you.

Not saying that everyone thinks that way, of course. But I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing was a significant part of it.

Photo: The Downtown Snowside

It's getting to be that time again; I feel a chill in the air. Summer has skittered away from Metro Vancouver, and if 2011 is anything to go by we can now look forward to another eight months of winter - grey, rainy, and dismal. If that's the case I hope the snow comes back again... it made a welcome change, a somewhat brighter day than if it had been a couple of degrees warmer and the flakes had come down as rain. Pictured is Victory Square looking toward Harbour Centre, covered in white from the snowfall Vancouver got in late November 2010.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

British Columbia's Fusion Future

Fusion power has always been the future. Usually framed as advanced, clean, and inexhaustible, it's one of those holy grails of accomplishment that scientists and engineers have been reaching for since the 1940s, and it's always twenty-five years away. It's part of the lives of every living thing on Earth - after all, the sun is essentially just a natural fusion reactor. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a common thing for projections of the future to include the perfection of fusion power in the early twenty-first century: in our actual twenty-first century research is still ongoing, with the most high-profile project being ITER over in Cadarache, France.

Yet ITER is not the only attempt to achieve economical fusion power, and as the theory goes there may be more than one road to realizing it. One such effort is underway right here in the Lower Mainland, with Burnaby-based General Fusion working towards the demonstration of a magnetized target fusion generator by 2013. If they were to be successful, it would be revolutionary - the nature of fusion power is such that it is not vulnerable to the sort of runaway chain reactions or significant releases of radioactivity that can happen when nuclear fission reactors go awry. To put it simply, if you want civilization to dramatically cut down its environmental footprint without cutting its power production and expenditure equally dramatically, fusion power is it - though, of course, Greenpeace has already come out against it.

Until very recently, General Fusion was working under the radar. That changed on Monday, when CBC News posted a story built around comments by Erich Vogt, a UBC nuclear physicist who stated that "there's a hazard, an explosive hazard" associated with General Fusion's experimental reactor - I'm not sure to what degree he believes this is possible. But it's got people more aware about the future-focused experimentation going on in Metro Vancouver, and what's going to be done about it. I just think it's great that the media is seeding fear, uncertainty, and doubt about fusion power - after all, that's totally not the sort of thing that will backfire on us down the road.

Fusion power is perfect for British Columbia! I mean, there's a fusion reactor on the flag already!

Yesterday, the CBC followed up with another story looking at the official response - Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan has stated that local officials will be monitoring future tests of the plasma injector that's at the heart of this project, and that the city's current view is that General Fusion's operations pose no risk to the surrounding areas - not just that, but the reactor is not even going to be tested in Burnaby. Taking that into consideration, though... just what is city supervision of the project going to accomplish? How many people does the City of Burnaby have on its payroll who are sufficiently familiar with the science behind magnetized target fusion to meaningfully monitor it?

My own opinion is that some people are taking this more seriously than it needs to be because it's nuclear fusion. The fact is that a fusion reactor would not act like a fission reactor because they work along different lines - otherwise, why would it have taken sixty years to get even to this level of development? Still, I'm glad to see that people don't seem to be freaking out about this. Just think what it could do for the international reputation of British Columbia if - though it's a big if - the world's first workable fusion reactor was built here.

That, of course, depends on the laws - all of which seem to have written with "nuclear power" and "nuclear fission power" being considered synonymous. The first CBC article refers to a ban on nuclear energy in British Columbia - I'm not sure where this is coming from. Having searched BC Laws, the closest candidate I can find is the province's current Clean Energy Act, which simply states that one of BC's energy objectives is "to achieve British Columbia's energy objectives without the use of nuclear power."

I wonder if that would mean solar is out of the question, too - after all, solar power wouldn't be worth anything if not for the nuclear reactions constantly happening inside of the sun.

Photo: Pigeons Wanna Ride

Even though Vancouver is something of a crow city, that doesn't mean there's no room for any other birds. On the weekend there was a large flock of pigeons hanging around the plaza outside Vancouver City Centre Station, demonstrating the usual fearlessness of passersby that city pigeons seem to have; a few of them were perched and just chilling on top of a bicycle that had been locked there.

I feel for the person who came back to a bike covered in pigeon droppings.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

To Your Scattered Panels Go: VCON 36

It's been a while since I've been able to attend a proper convention. Although my arrival time in Vancouver last year was such that I could theoretically have attended VCON 35, I didn't think it would go over particularly well when I still had to address minor issues such as, you know, finding an apartment. Aside from Fan Expo 2010, which was less a convention and more a chaotic orgy of merchandising and commercialism, the dry spell was a year and a half long. I was able to end that by attending VCON 36, the latest iteration of Vancouver's science fiction and fantasy convention, which was held between September 30th and October 2nd.

This year marked the fortieth anniversary of VCON's establishment in 1971, making it almost exactly as old as Amtrak, and yet there have only been thirty-six of them; this was explained during the Opening Ceremonies on Friday for the benefit of knownothings such as myself as being a result of some VCONs not actually being called by that name, as well as its displacement by Westercon 44 in 1991. It was held at the Sheraton Vancouver Airport Hotel in Richmond, a few minutes' walk from the Canada Line station at Richmond-Brighouse. I understand that in previous years the convention events were split between multiple hotels, but this year the con was entirely self-contained. According to an article I found about it in the Vancouver Sun, this year's attendance was in the neighborhood of seven hundred.

This hall at the eastern end of the Sheraton was the spine of VCON 36.

Among the attendees were the three guests of honour, divided into the Author, Artist, and Media categories. Originally the Author Guest of Honour was to be Gregory Benford, but apparently something came up with DARPA and he had to reschedule his appearance to next year; in his stead Larry Niven came up from Los Angeles. Jean-Pierre Normand, whose portfolio includes plenty of enchanting covers for Analog and On Spec, was the Artist Guest of Honour, and the Media Guest of Honour was Lisa Lassek, a film editor who has worked on a number of Josh Whedon projects - she was also the only one of the three I didn't encounter at some point during the weekend.

Still, that's the sort of stuff you could figure out by doing a few minutes of online research, though. What was it like - well - it felt comforting. Welcoming. Like I was surrounded by generally like-minded folks, the same way it had been at Ad Astra and Worldcon in Montreal. Like there were things I could hear there that I would have to really dig for on the internet, if they were attested online at all, such as how Larry Niven considers it a part of his job to save civilization by "keep[ing] six billion people scared" - of the threat of impacts, that is, such as the one written about in Lucifer's Hammer - and that he supports the Libertarian Party and believes that "global warming seems to be largely bullshit," comparable to the flatworm memory RNA experiments of the 1950s and 1960s... neither of which are particularly surprising when you take into account books like Oath of Fealty or Fallen Angels.

In that respect, my main interest at the con was the panels - they're the sort of thing that really keep drawing me back to conventions, the opportunity to learn new things and stumble into fresh insights that I am far too oblivious to make on my own.

Sandra Wickham, Lynda Williams, and Larry Niven at VCON 36's "Food in SF" panel.

The panels were salted throughout the weekend, with a few running even before the official Opening Ceremonies at 5 PM on Friday. There were a few throughout that looked interesting but I didn't attend, if only because it takes more than an hour to get from New Westminster to Richmond via transit and I wasn't feeling up to hanging around. Panels such as "The Rest of the World," which examined the tendency for fantasy settings to be strongly based on medieval Europe and much future-set science fiction to be "suspiciously like the United States with spaceships," and looked at the pitfalls and possibilities of setting a work outside the Western cultural sphere. It might be because it was the very first panel I attended on Saturday morning, but I feel like - and the state of my notebook suggests - I got the most out of that one.

At the "Food in SF" panel, it was established that science fictional food was "often terrifying" - but you don't need to go all the way to science fiction for that. The dude in the seat ahead of me was giving out what I later learned were Creamity Wafer Rolls, some strange Vietnamese no-expiry-date "chocolate" snack tubes that were said to taste of fiberglass. I would not be surprised if things like that, in addition to Quorn - which I seriously want to track down the next time I'm in the States for some of that sweet sweet mycoprotein goodness - end up becoming larger than we would think in our food future.

The "Worldbuilding 101" panel, which was held at 10 AM on Sunday and thus required me to leave New Westminster a little after 8, was enlightening - one of the panelists was a UBC astrophysics professor and a member of the COROT and Kepler teams. In addition to overviews of exoplanets like HD 80606 b, which has the most eccentric extrasolar planetary orbit known to exist, discussion touched upon things I hadn't considered. Such as, on a habitable planet with a high oxygen content such as the Cretaceous-era Earth in the new series Terra Nova, would it be too dangerous to use internal combustion engines? When it came to the possibilities of cross-species infections, I'd never thought about the possibility of plant pathogens being exchanged... but the danger would, theoretically, exist, and there's always the chance that an ecosystem could be decimated or wiped out by a latter-day Columbian Exchange.

One thing I found odd, and which I can't recall encountering at any other convention I've attended, was that the program grid listed a significant number of panels that only had one panelist scheduled. To me, part of the interest of panels is for multiple people up at the front to be interacting with each other and the audience; when it's just one person, it seems a lot more like a university lecture.

It was also while waiting for that "Rest of the World" panel that one of the dealer's room exhibitors, Professor Whovianart, came by and gave a few of us a personal introduction to a circa 1919 electric shock therapy device, which produced the prickly sensation you get when a fallen-asleep limb wakes up again, but over my entire upper body.

Look out! It tingles!

The dealer's room at VCON 36 was rich with options and had a great deal of variety, though the trend skewed far more sharply toward crafting and steampunk than in the Ad Astra dealer's rooms - I'm not sure whether this is because of the time that's passed, or just fan-cultural differences between Vancouver and Toronto. EDGE, publishers of the Tesseract series of Canadian sf/f anthologies, seemed to be the largest publisher in attendance. I found it strange that On Spec wasn't there, considering that it's a sponsor of the event; Neo-Opsis, however, was in from Vancouver Island.

VCON 36 was also the first con I've attended that gives out its own scrip. As I understand it, every registered member found two "VCON 36 CON CA$H" certificates in their swag bag, each worth $1 in the dealer's room, VCON merchandise table, or art show direct purchases. These are apparently also how some con volunteers were compensated for their time. The one I kept is valueless now, of course; it expired at 5 PM on the last day of the con, but I figured it would be worthwhile to keep it in my con file, next to the flyer for the Aberdeen Proving Grounds' 2011 Worldcon bid.

A convention newbie at VCON 36 would have been presented with multiple pathways to the wider world of sf/f conventioneering. The most prominent was the Spokane in 2015 table, which sought to raise awareness for Spokane, Washington's bid for the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention - as it won't be decided until LoneStarCon 3 in 2013, there's still plenty of time to figure that out. There were also flyers out advertising Rustycon 29 and ConClusion, Westercon 65, both of which will be held in Seattle in 2012. Well, SeaTac - but close enough.

Con-goers act out a scene from the Red Sonja novel The Ring of Ikribu at VCON 36's Turkey Reading.

There was a lot about VCON 36 that I know I missed out on. Taking the SkyTrain back and forth made me feel like a commuter student at university; I was around for the lectures but not any of the after-class stuff that's just as important. Despite that, though, it was still a good con. The problems I need to get over are my own, and I suppose the first steps to solving that would be buying a membership for VCON 37 and learning how to deal.

Previous Convention Reports

• Fan Expo Canada 2010 (Toronto)
  
• Ad Astra 2010 (Toronto)
  
• Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention (Montréal)
  
• Ad Astra 2009 (Toronto)
  

Photo: Freight on the Fraser

Back in Ontario, the rivers tend to be piddly little things; useful for generating hydroelectricity, but unless you're a seventeenth-century voyageur with a canoe they're not going to make your trip much faster. Out here, it's different. The Fraser River isn't the widest river around but it's still plenty big, big enough to serve as a natural highway for the industries and resource collection operations that have grown up around its shores. Here, a tugboat pulls a barge loaded down with cut lumber and a couple of trucks along the river, past the bee-youtiful north Surrey waterfront.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Acts of Minor Interviews: Adam Hyde

Ontario is on a collision course with an election. Two days from now that province will go to the polls, and the lion's share of media coverage is being heaped upon the Liberals under Dalton McGuinty and the Progressive Conservatives under Tim Who-Dat Hudak, as it's a foregone conclusion that one or the other will end up running the circus in Queen's Park, with the provincial NDP under Andrea Horwath taking what's left and the Greens vacuuming up a single-digit percentage of votes and getting nothing whatsoever to show for it.

That doesn't mean that there are only those three parties vying for Ontarians' votes, though. Just like it is in the federal landscape, and in all of the provinces I've looked at, there are a plethora of minor parties in Ontario that struggle to break past voter indifference. One of these is the Ontario Libertarian Party, which formerly described itself in its Google search summary as being inspired by Ayn Rand, but has since decided that it is a "party of monarchists and anarchists, who are united by their belief that less government is better government."

Sounds like an interesting mix there, like all that's missing for a real fun time is some die-hard republicans; small-r, though I imagine there are plenty of Republicans in the United States with whom the OLP's platform would strongly resonate. Though you may ask, why am I looking at the Libertarians at all? Aren't most of the opinions I espouse on this weblog diametrically opposite to theirs?

Well, yes, but that's beside the point. Recently, I had the opportunity to conduct an online interview with Adam Hyde, who is running on the Libertarian ticket in the riding of Niagara Falls, which takes in the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario and the towns of Fort Erie and Niagara-on-the-Lake. Regardless of what I may think, it's important for the voting public to have as much information at their fingertips as possible so that they can properly inform their vote.

This photo of Adam Hyde comes from the Ontario Libertarian Party website.

ACTS OF MINOR TREASON: Thanks for taking my questions. First off, how would you describe the Ontario Libertarian Party, and what makes you think a Libertarian MPP would be the best choice for Niagara Falls?

ADAM HYDE: I believe that we need a change from the status quo. The Ontario Libertarian Party believes in free-market competition and limited government. All you need to do is look at our deficit and it is obvious that his system is not sustainable for the future. It is well documented that allowing it to continue that will be spending 80 cents on every tax dollar just for health care.

AoMT: Why the Libertarians? How long have you considered yourself to be a libertarian?

HYDE: Like in any political party, not all Libertarians believe in the exact same principles. I am considered a left-leaning Libertarian because I do see the value of some social programs unlike other party members. I have always been very socially liberal, however I believe that Ontario and Canada lean too far to the left. When I lived in Japan, I considered myself to be left of center because Japan is too far to the right for me.

AoMT: Tell me about the experience of running as a minor party candidate. What are you doing to get your name out there?

HYDE: Fortunately, I have had some very generous donations and have been able to put up one hundred lawn signs and print six hundred flyers, and the media has given me a lot of attention.

AoMT: You mentioned hate mails - what's the response you've been getting?

HYDE: People are afraid of change and basically I receive e-mails that are threatening and full of anger. I didn’t think that as a minor party candidate, that I would receive any hate e-mail. So this means that people are thinking.

AoMT: You previously wrote that "as an MPP, [you] would like to end the near government monopoly that currently exists in Ontario on many goods and services." Can you elaborate on this?

HYDE: The lack of competition in this province means that the government is free to provide any level of service that it wishes. If we force the government to compete by allowing private companies to start up against them, we will have more choice and better service for everyone.

AoMT: You mentioned that "I have learned from my second debate, not to talk about Japan or Korea or any other country in depth." What happened to bring that up?

HYDE: Having lived in both countries, I have first hand experience of how different systems work. Japan faces many obstacles that are similar to Canada. I felt that my knowledge and experience in this field would be useful information. However, people were not impressed.

AoMT: The OLP platform rails against "free" healthcare, but OHIP is funded with business and personal taxes - is it that you'd prefer any government healthcare to be funded more directly, such as the MSP system in British Columbia? Isn't the current system more equitable in that the size of your wallet isn't a factor in how quickly you can be seen by it?

HYDE: I would like to see a system in place that is similar to Japan’s health care system. 70% of it is covered through taxation and the remaining 30% is through private companies. This takes a lot of pressure off of the public system. While most people have a health plan to make up for the 30% through their place of employment, it is illegal to refuse care to somebody who does not. Furthermore private hospitals’ profits are capped.

AoMT: The OLP platform states that "governments must be limited to protecting the liberty and property of their citizens from domestic and foreign aggressors." How does this work in the context of a subnational unit, and what would you do as an MPP in this vein?

HYDE: We believe the government should have a very limited role, which is to protect the people at any level of government.

AoMT: The stated policy of the OLP is "to provide the greatest access for the most people to the best available treatment at the lowest possible cost," and that "a Libertarian government will eliminate any requirement for government licensing of physicians, medical treatment facilities, or other medical care providers." What are your thoughts on this?

HYDE: As I said before I don’t consider myself to be a pure libertarian, so I disagree with the party on this one. I believe that there needs to be a set standard to practise medicine.

AoMT: Then I'm relieved that you, at least, aren't aiming to open the door to Dr. Nick Riviera. Now, the OLP platform claims not only that modern theories of climate change are "excuses to demand increases in government control of our lives," but implies that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas but "a natural by-product of living and breathing human beings." Even if the scientific consensus was shown to be wrong, and global warming was caused by external forces, why does that mean we have no responsibility to mitigate it? What would you do as a Libertarian MPP regarding environmental issues in Niagara Falls?

HYDE: This is another issue in which I disagree with the party. I believe that we need to fund green energy. It is VERY expensive though. We have spent $8 billion to create 20,000 green energy jobs, which works out to be $400,000 a job! In the near term, Green energy is going to hurt us, but if you look at other countries in Europe, it has been a success.

AoMT: Why are you running?

HYDE: Like many people, I am looking for change. We need to fix our economy.

The Ontario Libertarian Party was founded in 1975. For the 2011 provincial election, it is fielding fifty-one candidates across Ontario, which marks its largest showing in history - the previous record was established in 1990, when it ran forty-five candidates and captured 0.6% of the vote.

This interview has been edited.

Photo: Six Cars to Surrey

If there's any SkyTrain service that calls for regular six-car trains, it's the Expo Line over to Surrey - its trains are regularly packed no matter the time of day, and with Surrey's population set to become larger than Vancouver's in another couple of decades, the pressure on this rapid transit link isn't going to go down any time soon. In an afternoon in early September, I caught a six-car train heading south across the SkyBridge into Surrey.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

It Came From the Public Domain: The Alien Hah-Rah

This weekend marks VCON 36 here in Metro Vancouver, and so I've been giving some thought to science fiction beyond simply why my goddamn keyboard won't write brilliant and astounding stories for me. It's at conventions that you really get a sense of the genre's history, the degree to which it extends past just what you can see in the stores today. It's true that there's a lot of things that science fiction writers of the past didn't see coming, and so a lot of historical stuff feels kind of bumpy today. Truly timeless stuff doesn't get put down on every last page, after all.

While some stuff holds up so well that it never goes out of print, there's doubtless plenty of material that's just been forgotten among the reams and reams and reams of paper that represent the output of organized science fiction since Amazing Stories started up in 1926. I think I discovered one such thing, a brief piece that headed up the letter column of Wonder Stories in December 1935 - "The Alien Hah-Rah," which takes us through the plots and tropes that were already considered tired less than ten years after the genre, then known as scientifiction, launched.

I was entertained by it more than seventy-five years after it was first published, and that alone is enough for me to want to share it - to do what I can so that piece of the genre's history isn't totally forgotten. I've searched through U.S. Copyright Renewals 1950 - 1977 and cannot find it attested as having been renewed, so to the best of my knowledge the following letter is presently in the public domain. So hah-rah, and let history take it from here.

*****

"The Alien Hah-Rah," by Richard G. Kerlin
Originally printed in the letter column of Wonder Stories, December 1935

A strange communication came into my possession last year, at which time I was a member of that well-known exploration party, the Ackerman-Darrow Scientifictionic Expedition. As you know, we were then investigating the Gobi desert for those missiles resembling meteorites, of which we have so often read in your magazine. These seeming meteorites, as everyone knows, are always really hollow containers of unknown metals, and they contain either poisonous gases which kill everyone in the world, or a monster which kills everyone, or the seeds of a new life whose growth eventually dooms mankind, or, as in the majority of cases, a message written on a number of ultra-thin, indestructible, peculiar sheets of a substance which of course defies analysis.

I need not tell (but I will) how we found such a meteorite. Toiling wearily along one day, we came upon a great pile of rocks which obstructed the trail which we were following. At once we noticed the pitted surfaces of all these globular stones, which lay in heaps all around. Of course we recognized them at once for what they were: Hollow containers filled with poisonous gases, etc. (see previous paragraph) which had arrived here from outer space.

The first one that we picked up gurgled as we shook it, so, fearing that it contained some virulent liquid whose release would spell mankind's doom, we threw it away. (This missile was later found to be a coconut.) The next one, upon being shaken, responded with a faint rustle, as of manuscript pages. This we opened after an hour's application of our electro-disintegrator ray and a subsequent three-second application of our old can-opener. An old copy of WONDER STORIES fell out. (You all remember the great panic that followed our discovery, as thousands of science-fiction collectors from all over the world rushed to the Gobi desert to prospect for these meteoric missiles.) The following message was written on the edges of the pages:

To the finder of this message (it said): give this communication to the editor of WONDER STORIES. He is to blame, to a great extent, for my troubles. Here is how it all happened.

I was in the Three Hundred and Ninety-Seventh National Bank Building at three a.m., lighting the fuse to the charge I had just placed in the vault door, simply minding my own business, when a sweet odor came to my nostrils and something was clapped to my face. It was chloroform.

I came to myself in a laboratory. the mad scientist in charge of the joint noticed me and at once addressed an assistant. "Take him up there. You know where," he said significantly. I saw the assistant shudder and a look of awful horror came over his face. Reluctantly he came over and seized me (I was still groggy and weak) and marched me out of the room. As we ascended a flight of stairs, he whispered encouragingly, "Don't let this ordeal get you. He's trying to injure your mind, leaving it tortured and weak forever. When the mental damage is done, he turns his victims loose, to affect sane people by their ravings."

He shoved me into a room and locked the door upon me. I looked around for torture instruments, and saw a file of WONDER STORIES upon a long shelf. Having nothing to do, I read some of them. Then, too late, I realized! Already that insidious menace was creeping into my very brain. Plucking fingers tore at my intelligence, and it gave way. Helpless now in the influence of those stories, I read more and moer of them. I raved, I wrote fan letters, I frothed at the mouth and begged for new copies. I had become one of those pitiful science-fiction fans.

One day the Professor came in and saw the title of the story I was writing, "The Master of the Doom of the Menace of the Terror of the Horror Plague of the Curse of the Scourge of the Conqueror of the Green-Purple Peril of the Onslaught of the Malignant Invasion of the Fatal World-Wrecking Death."

"Aha!" he exclaimed. "Great! In the last stages of scientifictionitis; trying to write stories himself!"

At once I was carted out of hte room and placed in a cone-shaped contrivance. The door was sealed upon me. A terrific roar, unendurable pressure, and unconsciousness followed. I awoke to find myself on Mars.

I stepped from the ship only to be surrounded by insect-men who firmly led me into a great stone building and into a tiny room. So - they would throw me into a dungeon! I laughed, for I had read hundreds of stories about escapes from Mars, Ceres, Phobos, fire, and debts, and my experience as a safe-cracker stood me in good stead. Noticing some nitroglycerine in a cup on the table, I went to work. (Lucky, huh?) After getting everything all set to blow, I first exhausted every other possibility of escape before trying this last resort. No windows; walls four feet thick; no trapdoors in either ceiling or floor; no secret panels; no machine by which to rotate myself into the fourth, fifth, sixth, or blue dimensions; no machine enabling me to walk through walls; no contrivance to shrink me out of my difficulty; no apparatus to transport my component atoms elsewhere in the form of vibrations; no ability to yearn myself back to Earth. I turned to the door and lit a match for the fuse. Then a thought struck me - I tried the door. It opened. I left.

As I stepped out of the doorway, I instinctively struck out blindly in all directions at once to overcome the guards. Any stf. fan would have done the same. After ten minutes of furious struggling, I sank to the floor, exhausted; then I noticed that there had been no guards there at all. (What! No guards?) This made me mad, so I left the narrow corridor.

I came out into a great hall, and an insect-man greeted me nervously. "Didn't you like the room?" he clacked. "We gave you the best in the hotel." My mind, already weakened by scientifictionitis, collapsed utterly, so I sent this message which will fall on the Gobi desert, thirteen miles, seventeen feet, and nine and one-half inches from any designated point. Nuts to thee...

So ended the tragic message in the second missile in that great heap of fused meteorites (actually hollow containers, etc.). We of the Ackerman-Darrow Scientifictionic Expedition hope to send you others of these amazing messages after translation by Pretcher Flatt and verification by Prof. Crackpot, Sfn. D.