Harry Warner, Jr.
423 Summit Avenue
Hagerstown, Maryland, 21740

Your essay on The Gothic Impact was the most thorough treatment of the topic
I've seen in a fanzine.  Offhand I can't think of any professional place where
it would be easy to find the topic covered at this medium length, although it's
easy enough to find two-paragraph summations of the Gothic novel or one of the
long scholarly investigations into the subject.  I hope you didn't force
yourself to plow through the less savory novels in the category,  but if you
didn't, you did a skillful job of drawing from other sources, for I can't
figure out which works you've read and which you haven't, out of all those
mentiond.  //ALL EXCEPT RADCLIFFE'S AND THE MONK.  I'VE MANAGED TO GET A COPY
OF THE LATTER, FINALLY.  THE FORMER'S WORKS I DON'T CARE TO READ.//  You
probably thought that you should stop somewhere, but you could have profitably
compared the comic book with the type of literture.  The comic book at its
best, like the old EC publications, had a bit in common with the Gothic novel.

I'm in a strange position about home video recording equipment.  About five
years ago I got into a big fanzine argument with people who know much more
about electronics than I do, when I claimed that home video recorders were sure
to become reality at a fairly moderate price within a few years.  Now that I'm
being proven right on the point, I must proceed to press my luck and contradict
myself in a sense, by predicting that these machines won't be as popular or
used as frequently as mm sound tape recorders.  I base that belief on the
failure of home movies to become really popular among the rank and file of the
populace, and the likelihood that home video recorders will never be as
inexpensive to operate or as trouble-free as 8 mm cameras and projectors.  You
can buy an enormous variety of movies for home projection at about $8 to $10
for 30 minutes of projection and how many people buy them regularly?  Video
recording will probably cost about twice that much, just for the raw tape, and
won't give quite as clear and sharp a picture as 8 mm film projected to the
size of the average television screen.  Of course, this could change, if home
video recording became simpler, tape became cheaper, or some big breakthrough
were developed.  Meanwhile, I understand that some of the home video recorders
now on the market do offer stop action facilities, and some have a moving head,
others get along with an extremely rapid rate of tape transport.

I think Stephen E. Pickering says in this essay that science fiction consists
of stories about the future and that Robert Heinlein used people as characters
in his stories.  It's hard to get excited over this, but this is better at
least than yet another attack on this imaginary "anti-intellectualism" in
fandom.

Like John Robinson, Jr., I like to think about sword and sorcery on television.
There's no apparent reason why people wouldn't like it, since television
stations find it satisfactory to run over and over again such near cousins as
old Tarzan movies and those Italian epics about Hercules and other mythological
creatures in strange adventures.  All that is really needed is just one
successful sword and sorcery series on television.  Instantly you'd have a
dozen or more of them in preparation for introduction next season, just as The
Man from UNCLE produced a stupendous outbreak of secret agent series.

[pp. 35 - 37, "Your 5 Cents Worth," Letter #2, NO-EYED MONSTER #10, Winter 1966-
                                                                            67]]

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