by Ray Bradbury
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
FUTURIA FANTASIA
Summer 1939
Vol.1 No.1
Ray D. Bradbury editor
GREETINGS! AT LONG LAST--FUTURIA FANTASIA!
The best laid plans of men, it seems, are destined for detours orpermanent and disappointing annihilation upon the road toaccomplishment. It was this way with Futuria Fantasia, planned forpublication last summer. Piles of archaic tomes towered on all sides ofthe editorial desk. When the door to the office was opened unexpectedlya white gusher of manuscripts and relatives spewed out. More than onceYe Editor was suffocated unto death by the musty volumes that poured infrom all over Los Angeles. And then--someone turned off the financialfaucet--leaving us all soaped up, but with no water! And so, into aninforced hibernation went FuFa. The manuscripts became intimateacquaintances with all of the spiders in the family vaults--even thewriters could be seen lounging around in their caskets waiting forTechnocracy and their thirty doubloons every Thursday to come rollingin.
But recently, awakening from the profound inactivity of spring fever,your editor became interested in Technocracy. The more he heard aboutit, the more he wanted everyone else to hear. So, turning the revolvingdoor on his crypt, he reached over and shook T. B. Yerke out of hisstupor and begged him to write an article, The Revolt Of The Scientists,which appears herein. Not content with this he engaged Ron Reynolds, newfan author who first appeared in Tucker's D'JOURNAL, to whip up a storyabout the Technate and its effect upon the hack writer in the comingdecades. And Ackerman is here! Science Fiction's finest fan and friendhas turned in an interesting yarn that he wrote at the gentle age ofsixteen, some few years past. But best of all--there is nothing humorousin the issue by the editor himself--which should cause huge, gratefulsighs of relief from Maine to Miske and back! Bradbury just has a poem,and a serious one at that.
And so--here it is, for ten cents, out every other decade or so--FuturiaFantasia--... hypoed into Life mainly because of the crying need formore staunch Technocrats, mainly because of the New York Convention,(with which it doesn't deal at all in subject matter ... but does sowhole-heartedly in spirit and thought), and mainly because it's been ahelluva long time since a large size mag came from our LASFL way, wherethe natives are all sitting around and dreaming of the New York CanyonKiddies and praying, atheistically of course, that in the near futurethey may wind up in Manhatten behind the pool-ball-perisphere--and Idon't mean the one numbered _eight_. None of the expectant tripstershave ever seen New Yawk before and have already chewed their fingernailsdown to the shoulder in exstatic anticipation.
I hope you like this brain-child, spawned from the womb of a year longinanimation. If you do like it, how about a letter sent to the editorialoffices of F.F., at 1841 South Manhatten Place, Los Angeles, California?Appoint yourself as A-l mourner and critic and pound away at the mag. Itwill be appreciated. And if you have a dime in your pocket that hasn'thad a breath of air in a few days just drop that in, too. This is onlythe first issue of FuFa ... if it succeeds there will be more, betterissues coming up. And your co-operation is needed.
GOOD LUCK TO THE NEW YORK SCIENTI-FAN CONVENTION--!!
I'LL MEET YOU IN MANHATTEN--!
Ray D. Bradbury,
editor