My connection with these books, then, has simply been that of an editor. My publisher, Mr. Donald A. Wollheim, quite naturally assumes me to have written them myself, despite my protestations. But since I am not permitted to attach the name of the actual author to these fictions, there was nothing else to do but attach my own. This afterword is by way of acknowledging credit where credit is due.
In assembling the manuscripts for publication, I have found the chief difficulty one of length. The journals simply run on and on, forming one continuous story. This factor alone, by the way, nearly convinces me of the veracity of the narrative, for in real life adventures do not come to a neat and final conclusion at the termination of sixty thousand words. The interminable structure of the story, however, presents considerable hazards to the unfortunate reader. In the present book, for instance, the narrative ends at a point of high suspense and leaves the central problems of the plot completely unresolved. In the parlance of the old movie adventure serials I loved in my youth, you might call this ending a cliff-hanger to end all cliff-hangers.
But I have no other recourse than to end the story at this point, for sixty thousand words is sixty thousand words, and I have neither the permission of the author’s estate nor any personal inclination to tamper drastically with the literary work of another man.
For the unfortunate reader, thus left hanging, as it were, I believe I can offer some slight amelioration of his uncomfortable position. While I have yet to penetrate very deeply into the unpublished portions of the narrative—which is in longhand, by the way, and has to be laboriously and slowly rendered into typescript—and while I myself do not as yet know how the story ends, it should be quite obvious that Karn escapes from the predicaments in which we left him a few pages ago, else we should never have had these journals to read. And, since the various adventures of Zarqa the Kalood and of Prince Janchan of Phaolon happened “offstage,” as it were, and without the participation or witness of Karn, the narrator, it becomes perfectly obvious that at some future point in the unpublished portion of these journals he rejoined his friends, whom we last saw flying off on the skysled, leaving him behind. If he is not to rejoin them at a future point in the narrative, how, then, could he possibly have learned of the adventures which befell them after they became separated?
But I’m afraid this is all that can at present be conjectured concerning the remainder of the story. There are many projects, both authorial and editorial, which are clamoring for my immediate attention. And it will be some time before I have sufficient leisure to begin my explorations of the unpublished remainder of the journals.
We shall have to wait and see how the story ends, you and I.
—LIN CARTER
Hollis, Long Island, New York