title
and slow beginning.

Here's another good point about "Tanks." Its characters are human.
Some authors of stories of the future make their characters all
brains--cold monsters, with no humanity in them. Such a story has
neither human interest nor plausibility. The sky's the limit, I
say, for mechanical or scientific accomplishments, but human
emotions will be the same a thousand years from now. And even
supposing that they will be changed, your readers have present day
emotions. The magazine can not prosper unless those present-day
emotions are aroused and mirrored by thoroughly human characters.
The situation may be just as outre as you like--the more unusual
the better--but it is the response of normal human emotions to most
unusual situations that gives a magazine such as yours its powerful
and unique "kick."

The response of the two infantrymen in "Tanks" to the strange and
terrifying new warfare of the future exemplifies another point I
would like to make--the fact that no matter what marvels the future
may bring, the people who will live then will take them in a
matter-of-fact way. Their conversation will be cigarettes,
"sag-paste," drinks, women. References to the scientific marvels
around them will be casual and sketchy. How many million words of
an average car owner's conversation would you have to report to
give a visitor from 1700 an idea of internal combustion engines?
The author, if skillful, can convey that information in other ways.
Yet a lot of stories printed have long, stilted conversations in
which the author thinks he is conveying in an entertaining way his
foundation situation. Personally, I like a lot of physical
action--violent action preferred. This is so, probably, because I'm
a school teacher and sedentary in my habits. I have never written a
story in my life, but I'm the most voracious consumer of stories in
Chicago. I like to see the hero get into a devil of a pickle, and
to have him smash his way out. I like 'em big, tough, and kind to
their grandmothers.

It seems to me that interplanetary stories offer the best vehicle
for all the desirable qualities herein enumerated combined. There
is absolutely no restraint on the imagination, except a few known
astronomical facts--plenty of opportunity for violent and dangerous
adventures, strange and terrestrially impossible monsters. The
human actors, set down in t