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

...I can't help feeling that the best thing in these two issues is the most
informal and impromptu item, the long letter from Wynn Manners.  Normally I
disapprove of flaying even the kind of dead horses that were particularly nasty
in their vim and vigor.  But Wynn does such a splendid job of analyzing the
Pickering literary procedure that he far outshines all the frantic rebuttals to
Pickering that have bobbed up in other fanzines by fans with much more fame in
the microcosm.  The letter achieves that rarest of goals, by putting into clear
and convincing words the things that many of us must have felt subconsciously
as the real reason Pickering was so irritating, but never quite defined and
refined sufficiently to set them down on paper.

However, your fiction is continuing to improve, so the foregoing is not an
elaborate effort to break gently to you the effect that the stories made on me.
Most of the fiction in these two issues seems to be written by someone who has
the ability to write professionally and needs only a little guidance and some
more practice to reach the professional level.

Thief's Apprentice held my interest throughout, although its faults are evident
almost from the start.  I managed to overlook the flaws as I got further in it,
and by the final pages I had pretty well immersed in the general atmosphere and
began to wonder how severe the faults were.  The apprentice status of the youth
is not characterized properly.  He seems too sure of himself, too well
acquainted with the world in which he moves during most of the story, and there
is little to distinguish between his actions and those of his teacher.  The
second trouble is the fact that it's hard to keep in mind that this is supposed
to be a story about the future..  The occasional bits of business which are
impossible in today's world or in the past tend to be forgotten under the
impression given by the main course of action, which could be yesterday or a
century ago with a few trifling changes.  Aside from those troubles, Pearson
has done a good job of narrating action, and he has caught successfully the
knack of revealing something important about the situation which the reader
didn't previously know as integral parts of the plot.

Beyond Infinity is much less hectic than most round robin stories.  I suspect
that someone, somewhere along the line, did some touching up and smoothing out
to make the various sections harmonize with one another, because it would be
very difficult to determine where the authorship changed from the style or
course of events.  There are a few clumsy spots in it, where one character says
something to another character to get information across to the reader that
would never be communicated by the characters in these circumstances, because
it would be too self-evident.  And I don't like the use of "merely a mental
image" to rescue a character from apparent death; it's almost as unfair as the
old fictional gimmick of having the hero wake from the nightmare at the end of
the short story.  However, it's really wrong to nitpick under the
circumstances, because a co-authored story by non-professionals is normally
unreadable and this one is very much capable of being read with some pleasure.

The Demon Beast might benefit by some judicious cutting or by the insertion of
some subsidiary events.  It seems just a trifle too long for a straightforward
narration of one event.  But the reaction is not to be trusted, because I'm
currently in the midst of one of my spells when I can't find much pleasure in
weird-type fiction and no story of this theme could have much appeal to me
while I'm this way.  It usually takes about a year before I find myself again
able to enjoy pure fantasy and horror fiction again.  This is apparently the
fannish equivalent of a manic-depressive nature and I wish I could find out
what causes it.

I haven't the faintest idea why I like Or A Still, Still Day, but I do. Maybe
it's the sort of tale whose appeal can't be analyzed and might vanish if I
poked around too much in the mental procedures that cause this reaction.

      [pp. 48 - 50, "Your 5 Cents Worth," Letter #2, NO-EYED MONSTER #13, Winter
                                                               1967/Spring 1968]

[No one *did* do any touching-up or smoothing-out of the round robin, in point
of fact.  i wrote the first segment; John Merkel wrote the second; Charles
Pearson wrote the conclusion. -- nem 6.April.2001]

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