Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 53 — page 108: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Just what you’ve been wanting! Instructions on— How to Make a Bug-Eyed Monster ! Ts leering, salivating bug- eyed monster has been a constant ingredient of science fiction since its inception— much to the shame of the authors, the detriment of the genre, and the anguish of the serious reader. The only thing in common about these di- verse monstrosities is that none of them could possibly exist. If that is science fiction, then somebody has been bark- ing up the wrong tree—and that somebody is your Editor. He believes that science fiction by definition, must deal with possibilities and, preferably, probabilities. But, realising that monsters of some kind are likely to be met with on other worlds, he has asked me to write an article on the biological limitations of mon- sters. In other words, I am to supply creational biue-prints for BEMS! Let us first consider what the limitations are. Take size to start with. I would say that not a single living biologist disagrees with the idea that animals are as big as they are by FRANK WILSON, B.Sc. because they couldn’t be any bigger—or smaller. Since we’re a homocentric lot, we'll con- sider the case of the average man. He is said to be about six feet tall. Let us accept that figure and then try to turn our average man into a giant— sixty feet tall. We’ve made him ten times as high, ten times as broad and ten times as thick from front to back. And that’s about all we have increased ten times. His weight will be one thous- and times as great as it was— in the region of eighty tons! Big, husky, tough guy? Friends, he would be a weak- ling. He couldn’t even stand up without dislocating his shoulders, breaking his neck, back and thighs. Dear God, what have we done to our average man! Well, we’ve upped his linear dimensions by a factor of ten and we’ve increased his weight by a factor of one thousand. But we’ve done something else. We have enlarged the cross-sectional area of his bones by a factor of one 107 connicloooks.com