(Cover Mike Gilbert)
Science Fiction Review No: 34 - Dec 1969
Letter
Issue No. 31 - June 1969 - of SFR arrived for which many thanks. It will be some time before I can get around to reading it properly as I am one of those people for whom Finagle's Law invariably operates. I was at home for the first five weeks of my Annual Leave and nobody, but nobody, condescended to drop me a line. I have just returned from a three weeks' tour of Central Australia to find my desk piled high with assorted bumf-bills, cheques, prozines, fanzines, personal correspondence and business correspondence. And apart from anything else, I have still to transcribe the notes I made during my incursion into the Never-Never country...
Anyhow, I did skin through SFR. I was intrigued by the review by Piers Anthony of Sherbourne Press's Encounters With Aliens, in which my own "The Tie That Binds" appears. Like Mr. Anthony I was annoyed by the Preface and the Introduction, in both of which the science fictioneers are accused of being unkind to the poor, dear saucerites.
I worked off my bad temper in a short story, in which I suggested that the aliens manning and operating the UFO's realising that sightings are, these days, unavoidable, deliberately make contact with Adamski-type Earthlings, assuming rightly that nobody with the merest smattering of scientific knowledge will believe stories about Little Green Men from Mars and Beautiful Blondes from Venus...
My everloving wife/secretary said that the story stank, and almost had me believing it. Much to her surprise - and frankly, to mine - it sold promptly, to both MAN in Australia and to Analog in the U.S.A.
I now feel a certain benevolence towards the writers of the Preface and the Introduction...