Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 67 — page 155: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION The pattern of the search is vast, and it goes on today. It will probably go on for a long, long time, but one thing is certain: there can be no more interesting search than that of investigating ourselves.. _ It is a search every intel- ligent person must be inter- ested in, and this book, to them, will provide some of the most interesting reading they have ever known. MAN AGAINST NATURE, edited by Charles Neider, published also by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., at 21s., is a giant book of forty-five true, eye-witness stories by the world’s greatest explorers, pioneers and ad- venturers. This is another of those books which, while factually true, read better than most fiction. It is the accounts of how men and women faced and struggled with an environ- ment which too many of us have forgotten. It is our own environment, unshielded, savage, ruthless as only nature can be. Our primitive an- cestors fought it all the time, fought and won, and it is only when reading such ac- counts as these that the realisation of how far we are removed from our own world is brought home to us. 154 There is Louis Slotin’s fight to the death with the effects of the nuclear radiation which he himself had released—a horrifyingcontemporarystory. There is Cousteau’s report on deep sea diving—in effect a report on a new world. There are the reports of Thor Heyerdahl and Albert Schweitzer, and men who have conquered mountains, fought wild animals, braved Arctic blizzards and killed whales. And these stories are true. Too often the incidents in science fiction stories are dismissed with a contemp- tuous reference to their being too fantastic to be real. I wish that such people would read this book. Then they would discover that the human body is capable of far greater exertion, courage, and dogged stubbornness than it is given credit for. As a record of factual accomplishments it is beaten only by its entertain- ment value. THERE JS LIFE ON MARS, by The Earl Nelson, F.R.A.S., F.R.G.S., F.R.S.A., published by T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1 Doughty Street, London W.C.1, at 12s. 6d., is a book which has brought the latest information science has ‘dis- covered about the red planet comicloooks.com