When the Green Star Calls

Editor’s Note

The First National Bank of Harritton, Connecticut, holds in its vaults a safe deposit box registered in the name of one of the oldest and most distinguished families of the state. Upon the demise of the last surviving member of this family, pursuant to instructions written into his will, the box was opened by three senior members of the legal firm of Brinton, Brinton, and Carruthers, who discovered therein a number of manuscript journals.

These manuscripts related a narrative of marvels and adventures upon a remote world. Although told in the first person, they were of so fantastic a nature that the lawyers were reluctant to release them for publication, as the will clearly stipulated. I suspect the reason for this reluctance on the part of the lawyers was that if the documents were accepted on face value the weird and uncanny narrative might throw suspicion upon the sanity of their author, which could throw into dispute the divisions of his property as set forth in the will; but this is only a guess on my part.

It was the younger son of the senior member of the firm who brought me into the picture. I had met this young man at several science fiction conventions in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and know him as an enthusiast of fantasy in general and of my own novels and stories in particular. He persuaded his father to arrange a meeting with me at my Long Island home where the details of a peculiar arrangement were discussed and the manuscripts were given into my possession.

This young man (whom I will call Tom Anderson, although that is not his name) was well aware of my anomalous position in the genre of imaginative fiction. That is, not only am I an author, but also an editor of fantasy.

In my editorial capacity, it was thought I might well arrange the publications of the journals. Brinton, Brinton, and Carruthers had no objection to releasing the journals for publication but desired that the family name should be kept out of the picture. The family is one of the oldest in Connecticut and has given two governors and three senators to the state, and so distinguished and reputable a name, it was thought, should not be linked with novels of such extravagant imagination.

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