was obliged to use an
anti-spasmodic. I took cannabis, and in the delirium that
followed I shrunk small enough to walk into a mouse-hole
into which I had seen a mouse disappear a few hours
previous. The mouse was there and looked like an elephant. I
awoke in a sweat.

Maybe all your stories won't be weird and full of
monstrosities. Science is full of beauty and culture, you
know.--Arthur H. Carrington, Seaside Heights Pharmacy,
Seaside Heights, N. J.

_Where Fantasy Meets Science Fiction_

Dear Editor:

I have purchased many of the issues of your magazine, and
have read everything in them, including the letter columns,
with great interest. I have particularly enjoyed certain
stories, such as "The Forgotten Planet," "The Jovian Jest"
and "The Planet of Dread," in which genuine imaginative
quality was combined with good writing. Many other tales,
not so well written, I have enjoyed for their fantasy, their
suggestive ideas.

In following "The Readers' Corner" I have noted the
objection to so-called "impossible" stories, voiced by some
of your Readers. Stories thus classified, one would infer,
are tales dealing with the marvelous and the mysterious in
which the author has not attempted to give a naturalistic or
scientific explanation of his wonders and mysteries. In
other words, he has not rendered them in terms of the
test-tube. He has admitted the inexplicable, the
"supernatural."

Personally, I enjoy stories of this type, as well as those
that are written with the purely scientific approach. I
suspect that those who condemn them are suffering from a
rather amusing--and also pathetic--sort of unconscious
hypocrisy. I think that people who read your magazine, as
well as Science Fiction magazines in general, are people
with the ingrained human love for wonder and mystery; but
some of them are afraid to accept and enjoy anything--even a
fairy tale--that is not couched in the diction of modern
materialistic science, with a show of concern for verified
credibilities. Probably, in most cases, they would like and
prize the very stories that they condemn if the writer had
used a different terminology, and had offered explanations
that were even superficially logical according to known
laws.

Please do