C.S. Lewis interview with HarperOne Publisher Mark Tauber

C.S. Lewis.

The name stands alone.

Even half a century after his death, no other Christian author—except St. Paul himself—has sold more books, decade after decade.

No one expected this in 1963. At that point, Lewis was a global figure with a huge output of inspirational books as well as works of serious literary scholarship, speculative science fiction, fanciful children’s novels—and countless radio broadcasts, as well.

But his death went almost unnoticed because he passed on November 22, 1963, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the world-renowned author Aldous Huxley died. As you will read in our interview with HarperOne’s Mark Tauber, publishers never imagined that Lewis’s body of work would attract generation after generation of loyal fans.

Given his enormous audience—and unprecedented sales—Lewis’s many books remain tightly controlled by the Lewis estate. For a good many years after his death, the books fell into a tangle of publishing arrangements circling the globe. Slowly but surely, HarperOne has been consolidating that book list and, nearly every year, produces attractive new editions.

TODAY’S C.S. LEWIS NEWS IN A NUTSHELL:
Just in time for Christmas 2013 …

and, for the 50th anniversary of Lewis’s passing …
and, as the UK honors Lewis with a special memorial at Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner  …
and, as a new Lewis-Narnia movie based on The Silver Chair is freshly in the news …
for all of those reasons—HarperOne is excited about its array of C.S. Lewis editions.

ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm interviewed Senior Vice President and Publisher of HarperOne Mark Tauber about all of this news—and C.S. Lewis’s enduring popularity.

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH HARPER ONE’S MARK TAUBER
ON THE LATEST NEWS FOR C.S. LEWIS FANS

DAVID CRUMM: It’s absolutely stunning—in a world where the biggest stars are sexy singers or Hollywood heroes—to find a bespectacled Oxford professor with such a vast worldwide audience. He’s been dead half a century. He never even heard of YouTube.

MARK TAUBER: Yes, it is amazing.

DAVID: And, Lewis still is making news! To demonstrate this for our readers, let me list just a few of the magazines and newspapers with fresh Lewis stories on the day we’re doing this interview. On just one random day—there are headlines in: BBC News, Investor’s Business Daily, Tulsa World, Augusta Chronicle, National Review, Central Kentucky News and I’ll stop there but I could go on and on. The one that sticks out for me is Investor’s Business Daily. They’ve got a fresh profile of Lewis as a figure business people should know about.

MARK: (laughing) I’m laughing because, for a while, I had “C.S. Lewis” set up as a daily Google News alert—and I had to disable it because I was getting way too much stuff every day. And let’s leave the issue of the new movie aside for a moment. Even without the movie news, Lewis just keeps generating headlines.

DAVID: Why?

MARK: There are many reasons, but here’s a very important one: He was a guy who avoided what we think of today as tribalism. We publish these books and we watch closely who is buying and reading them. There is no one else I can think of who is so widely read in mainline Protestant churches, Catholic parishes, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and of course the evangelical community. He cuts across the entire Christian spectrum.

And that’s not all. There are all these other audiences he reaches: There’s the whole fantasy fan crowd for the Chronicles series. There are science fiction fans of his work in that genre. And, there still are scholars who seek out Lewis for his scholarly work. It’s not surprising that some of the best-known, most-followed Christian leaders today—people like Rick Warren and so many others—keep pointing to C.S. Lewis. Because of who he was and how he approached his work—Lewis cuts across all these lines. He didn’t dive into the the type of culture war that is so common today. He unites people.

DAVID: What would Lewis think of his ongoing success 50 years after he left the planet? Any guess?

MARK: Well, I’m not sure what he would make of it. I’m not sure how he would feel about people from very different perspectives using his stuff and claiming him as theirs. But he still is probably the most influential Christian voice of the day, certainly one of the most influential. I don’t think anyone would debate that.

DAVID: He lived in an era of “big tent” Christianity, we might say. Today we’ve got all these civil-war-style trenches dug between various Christian groups. In Lewis’s heyday—in the heyday of all the Inklings we can say, I think—Christianity was more of a single voice against secularism and various dark forces. Both Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were deeply affected by World War I and World War II. Their voices were raised, not in political partisan causes within Christianity, but on behalf of what they saw as a planet-wide wrestling between faith and forces that would destroy faith.

MARK: Here’s a good example. Mere Christianity began as a series of BBC talks between 1942 and 1944. The question everyone was asking, then, was: How do we sort out this big mess we’re in—in the middle of World War II—so his series of talks fit right into mainstream news. He was on the cover of TIME Magazine right after the war. Yes, he was speaking and writing for a big tent.

DAVID: We could keep listing examples of this. Here’s another one: In 2008, the prestigious UK newspaper, The Times, ranked all of the greatest British writers since the end of WWII and Lewis—among all writers in all genres—ranked 11th. The special honors he will receive at Westminster aren’t given lightly. Many people to this day credit Lewis as a key figure in their conversion stories.

MARK: My own story begins with growing up as an evangelical. I went to a big southern California megachurch. Now, I see a lot of the old dividing lines falling away. But I can say that Lewis was—and is—a huge source for my faith.

Now, as a publisher, I find it just crazy that Lewis’s sales have not dropped after so many years. Of course, I know that his sales always rise in a movie year. And, there’s news of a movie that’s coming—The Silver Chair—but Lewis’s sales do well with or without a movie.

Here’s a smaller example—a new one. Bible Gateway has millions of unique visitors each month and they do a series of free newsletters people can sign up to receive. We proposed a C.S. Lewis quote of the day—and they announced it in August in a blog post. In two weeks, they got 26,000 people to sign up for a daily quote from Lewis.

DAVID: Yeah. That doesn’t surprise me at all. The Twitter feed of C.S. Lewis Daily is heading toward 1 million followers.

MARK: It shows the hunger out there for Lewis. Look at the Facebook pages on Lewis. We’re seeing a big number of Likes—and the actual sharing in Facebook is in the thousands every day.

THE GREAT DIVORCE: FROM WWII TO TODAY

DAVID: Let’s talk about some of the individual books. And let’s start with one of my all-time favorites: The Great Divorce. And I’m not alone. We keep seeing news items pop up about people trying to produce stage or film productions.

The book is short. There are a number of editions floating around, these days, including a nice-looking paperback edition in that big boxed set (see top image today). But I prefer the lovely hardback edition you’re selling. I like the soft feel of the dust cover and the little bus that’s just creeping onto the front cover—understated, I would call it.

Of course, fans of this book know that’s the bus to heaven on the cover. The question in the book is: Do we even want to get on that bus? It’s a dark, fictional-fanciful book in which a lot of people who are living in this very gray world simply aren’t interested in getting on that bus. The bus is right there, available to them, but they have all these excuses for remaining in their dreary homes.

This is another end-of-WWII book for Lewis. He published it first as a series in The Guardian starting in 1944. Then, it became this book.

MARK: I think of The Great Divorce as the quintessential post-war Lewis book. The world is so dark and gray, still half in rubble, still rationing in Europe.

This may surprise you, but The Great Divorce is the third-best-selling book of all the Lewis books. The first is Mere Christianity and that is closely following by Screwtape and, then, a little further away—but better than The Four Loves and often better than The Lion, the Witch in some years—is The Great Divorce.

CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: FOLLOWING ASLAN

DAVID: Let’s talk about Aslan and The Chronicles of Narnia. I want to point out a book that I’ve enjoyed myself: A Year with Aslan, which is 365 short daily readings from The Chronicles.

I’m guessing that 2014 will be a very good year for you with Narnia books—now that a new Silver Chair movie is in the news. On the day we’re talking, I checked Google News and there are 73 current news stories about that film production getting underway.

Here’s a bit of what the LA Times said about the film news: The beloved Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis sat on bookshelves for more than half a century before it found a home on the big screen. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, its famous first installment, came out in 2005, followed in 2008 by Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010. And then—nothing. Now, it has been announced that a fourth Narnia film is on the way. The deal between C.S. Lewis Co. and Mark Gordon Co. will make the next film in the series, The Silver Chair.

MARK: They’ve been working on The Silver Chair project for a long time and they’ve finally landed that. The one that I keep hearing about is a Screwtape film. Three times over the last 10 years, we thought we were going to have a Screwtape movie—then, we keep hearing that it’s all about the scripts. I’ve heard that they just can’t settle on the right script.

DAVID: I imagine there will be some new Narnia editions coming in 2014—or whenever the movie is finished, right?

MARK: I’m sure our children’s group will be extremely involved when the film does open. Every time a new movie comes out, they do a new wave. The movies do lift all boats.

DAVID: We’ll stay tuned in 2014. For now, we’ll be recommending A Year with Aslan to readers for this holiday-shopping season.

SCREWTAPE: NOW WITH NOTES!

DAVID: OK, finally, let’s talk about The Screwtape Letters and this annotated edition that you released about a year ago. I think it’s a terrific holiday gift for that Lewis fan on readers’ lists. We’ve already discussed the popularity of the basic Screwtape book, year after year. I’ve still got my own father’s well-worn copy from the late 1950s, when the added section, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, was first bound into a single volume with the original text. I treasure that little book with Dad’s name jotted in the front and 1959, the year he bought it, in ball-point pen.

Since then, I can’t imagine how many copies I’ve bought, owned, given away—must be a couple dozen overall. So, why get a new Screwtape Letters? My argument is this: I love the feel and look of this annotated edition. Yes, I’ve got every kind of e-reader you can imagine and I read books, all the time, on everything from Kindle and iPad to my iPhone. But, there’s something about a well-made book.

I love the addition of red ink inside this book for the notes. There are a couple of hundred helpful annotations that first-time and veteran readers will find intriguing. I just think it would be a great gift to open on Christmas morning.

MARK: I agree with you that this book looks good and feels good. We chose special paper for this; and we carefully chose the red ink for the annotations in the margins. We’re also discussing an annotated Mere Christianity, so that may come down the pike later. But I am nervous about this edition. Some years ago, we published a classic-art edition of Narnia and it just didn’t work well. It sold fine, but our other editions way outsold it. I’m hoping that this annotated book does catch on.

DAVID: Well, we’re pushing it today and I agree with you: I hope it does catch some holiday-shopping buzz. I know people who already own the book and, still, I’d put this on a holiday shopping list for them.

So, before we close, what else should we say about Lewis?

MARK: I would add that we just don’t have very many public intellectuals like Lewis, anymore, and certainly not many Christian public intellectuals.

DAVID: To put that conclusion into someone else’s mouth, there’s evangelical scholar Mark Noll’s line: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there’s not much of an evangelical mind.” For years now, Noll and others have been campaigning to change that.

MARK: There are some authors out there today who claim to be public intellectuals, but Lewis filled that role in a way we just don’t see today. He was able to speak in public ways—and in public places—in clear and thought-through ways. And, he found large audiences willing to listen and to buy his books. One of the projects we’ve just approved—and it’ll come out in the next couple of years—is a book that we’ll call How to Read by C.S. Lewis. This book will pull material from the whole corpus of his work, including his letters. He was a giant, not just as a  Christian writer, but as a teacher. He had a lot to say that helps people read and write English. We see this upcoming book as a bold move to emphasize Lewis’s ongoing place in the shaping of modern media.

DAVID: Well, we wish you well with all of that. And—to our readers—stay tuned to ReadTheSpirit for more on Lewis in 2014.

WANT MORE ON C.S. LEWIS?

Buy the books! Click on any of the covers with today’s column to jump to the Amazon pages for those books. They include:

C. S. Lewis Signature Classics: Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, A Grief Observed, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and The Great Divorce (Boxed Set)

The Great Divorce (Hardback Edition)

A Year with Aslan: Daily Reflections from The Chronicles of Narnia

Screwtape Letters: The Annotated Edition

WANT MORE INSPIRING GIFT IDEAS?

If you’re holiday shopping: Please, be sure to check out our ReadTheSpirit bookstore as well!

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

AMAZING Ray Palmer, the pulp pioneer behind the flying saucer craze

“Ray Palmer gave voice to people nobody else would take seriously.”

That’s the most important line in today’s interview about the life of Ray Palmer, the truly “AMAZING” writer and publisher who whipped Americans into a post-World War II flying-saucer craze, who first published a story by teen-ager Isaac Asimov and who ultimately shaped the realms of sci-fi and fantasy that are so popular around the world today. Along the way, Ray Palmer’s talent as a pulp publisher included early promotion of Asian religious traditions, a fascination with angelic apparitions and all manner of mystical experiences in small towns and big cities coast to coast.

RAY PALMER:
Stirring America’s imagination

Ray Palmer certainly wasn’t a scholar of world religions. His Mystic magazine sometimes described India’s main religious tradition as “Hindoo.” In one of his most notorious publicity campaigns, Palmer actually claimed that the spiritual secrets of planet Earth involved a civilization hidden in caverns deep underground. Ray Palmer was as much P.T. Barnum flim flam as he was a promoter of spiritual inclusion.

Nevertheless, throughout his pulp career, Palmer regularly inspired readers in grassroots communities like South Bend, Indiana, and Pikeville, Kentucky. Farmers, school teachers, teenagers and even elderly women who regularly attended Bible study classes were moved by Ray Palmer’s mystical vision of the cosmos. We know that because many of these men, women and teens eagerly sent their mystical testimonies to Palmer, hoping that a few paragraphs of their “True Mystic Experiences” would appear in the next issue of a Ray Palmer magazine.

RAY PALMER: THE MYSTERIOUS KING OF ‘WHAT IF …’

Despite his titanic impact on American culture, Ray Palmer never became a celebrity. Few photographs of him exist. That’s mainly because he was a tiny man with a deformed back, the result of a tragic childhood accident. Yet, his disability did not prevent him from becoming an unseen media giant whose creative legacy influenced hit TV shows like the Twilight Zone, Star Trek and X-Files—and comic books, too. In 1961, DC Comics renamed the popular super hero The Atom after Ray Palmer. Palmer’s ideas live on today in  blockbuster Hollywood movies featuring comic-book superheroes and outer-space exploration.

Ray Palmer was the king of “What if …” In the 1953 debut issue of his pulp magazine, Mystic, the first feature story opened with this classic Palmer pitch: “When you read this story, you will tell yourself that it is fiction; the editors assure you that it is. But what if—it isn’t? What if, by some strange coincidence, the writer has hit upon the truth? What if, as you read, you find yourself repeating the word ‘fiction’ to yourself in order to feel reassured—because what you are reading stirs some deep conviction, coupled with dread, that it is not fiction?” Anyone who recalls Rod Serling’s 1959 debut as the host of The Twilight Zone can see the influence of Ray Palmer’s pulp fiction in full flower.

If Ray Palmer could spring back from his grave to promote his first full-scale biography, The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey, by Fred Nadis, Palmer would write (as he did in penning one advertisement for his own book on flying saucers): “At last! The authentic story of the mystery that has shaken the complacency of the world. On-the-spot answers to the top question of the century! An amazing array of factual evidence, gathered under incredible difficulties and actual risk of life, shorn of the official ‘smog’ that has hidden the truth from the very outset. An incredible array of evidence—the result of years of investigation! The Only Book That Tells The WHOLE TRUTH about …” Ray Palmer.

ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm interviews Ray Palmer’s biographer Fred Nadis …

INTERVIEW WITH BIOGRAPHER FRED NADIS
ON PULP PIONEER RAY PALMER

DAVID: Ray Palmer’s life began like the “origins” issue of a super-hero comic book. As a boy, he was playing in the street near his Milwaukee home and his foot got caught in the wheel of a truck that spun his body against the pavement. His spine was severely damaged. Then, he became the first patient in the United States to receive an experimental spinal column bone graft. That’s the stuff of comic books. But it didn’t turn out as Palmer’s family hoped.

FRED: The accident happened when he was 7—a very energetic kid with an energetic mind. He was running out in the street. When I talked with Ray Palmer’s son, he told me that the accident involved a motorized milk truck, but one that had old-fashioned spoked wheels. The boy’s foot got caught between the spokes and, before the truck could stop, he had been dragged down the street and nearly killed. He wound up spending years trying to recover and undergoing treatments. And you’re right, the doctors were not able to straighten his back. He had a hunched back all the rest of his life. He was 67 when he died in 1977.

DAVID: This is a fascinating chapter in Palmer’s story, because another person might have become an enemy of science. After all, the doctors failed him and he really did suffer under their care. Why did he remain so hopeful about the possibilities of science?

FRED: They key is that, during this period, he had nothing else to do but read. He consumed adventure stories by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote Tarzan but also the John Carter on Mars series. Ray Palmer fell in love with these narratives. He took Hugo Gernsbach seriously!

DAVID: Gernsbach is a foundational figure in what unfolds during Palmer’s life. He often is called “The Father of Science Fiction,” because in 1926 he founded Amazing Stories magazine. He’s the reason that one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction, to this day, is the “Hugo.”

FRED: Yes, Gernsbach was an early evangelist of science fiction. He wanted everyone in the country to become an inventor and he wanted to hook kids early with science fiction. Gernsbach was an editor but he also was a true believer that, together, people could create a new future for the world with this kind of education. It was this noble pursuit that caught the imagination of the young Ray Palmer as he spent those years reading one thing after another.

RAY PALMER: FROM NOBLE VISIONARY
TO THE P.T. BARNUM OF PULP

DAVID: Your biography very quickly jumps into the heart of Palmer’s career. Before age 30, Ray Palmer had become the editor of Amazing Stories. In a way, this was both Ray Palmer’s heaven—and it was a rude awakening about the nature of pulp, right? At one point, you refer to him as a “Happy Hack.”

FRED: The reality of wanting to make a living as a pulp writer and editor made him realize that he couldn’t hold purely to the Gernsbachian vision of science fiction as a noble pursuit of a better future for the world. By the time he became editor of Amazing Stories,  he had tried his hand at various genres: Westerns, true crime and other pulp formats. By the time he became editor, at age 28, he had put some of his early ideas behind him. He quickly understood that the bottom line of this business was selling magazines. His own salary was dependent on sales. So, he began to push what I would call the Edgar Rice Burroughs formula of romance, adventure and lots of action. I would describe his mid-career approach to publishing in contrast to the Verne and Wells style of trying to write as close as they could to where they thought science could go.

RAY PALMER, ISAAC ASIMOV and The Shaver Mystery

DAVID: We should make it clear for readers of this interview, though, that Ray Palmer wasn’t all hokum. He had a real passion—and a brilliant editor’s eye—for serious writers who would have their own influence on American culture. Palmer kept spinning off various pulp magazines and fan-zines. He had his fingers in a whole array of publications. Here at Read the Spirit, we recently published an interview with Aldous Huxley biographer Don Lattin, who writes about Huxley’s enormous impact on spiritual diversity in American culture. Through FATE magazine—one of Ray Palmer’s various ventures—Aldous Huxley was featured on multiple occasions. We can say that Ray Palmer played a role in helping Huxley to reach an audience of spiritual fans.

Among Palmer’s other claims to fame is spotting the talent of teen-ager Isaac Assimov.

FRED: Yes, Ray Palmer’s tenure at Amazing Stories was notable for his purchase of Isaac Asimov’s first professional story, Marooned Off Vesta. Written in 1938 while Asimov was still 18, the story was rejected by one magazine before Amazing Stories published it in the March 1939 issue.

DAVID: This is fascinating partly because, as a teenager, Asimov had a love-hate relationship with Amazing Stories. Before he was published in the magazine, Asimov had slammed Palmer’s choice of cover art in earlier issues. Palmer was famous for pushing the envelope with sexy and violent cover illustrations.

FRED: Asimov also did not like Palmer’s tendency to anti-Soviet themes. In a 1938 letter to the magazine, Asimov said: “Entirely too many stories are being printed part or all of whose theme is the reaction against some form of despotism.”

DAVID: So, in Palmer’s career we have this rather high-brow kind of exchange with Asimov and the publication of Asimov’s early work. Even though Asimov objected strenuously to some aspects of Amazing Stories, he apparently was happy to have his short stories appear in its pages.

But, we also discover in your biography that Palmer could play fast and loose with the truth. He had no qualms about publishing the notorious Shaver Mystery and related stories. These days, the Shaver controversy is long forgotten, except to die-hard sci-fi buffs. Basically, here’s what it involved: This writer named Richard Shaver, a guy with a very checkered past, burst into the pulps with a claim that an evil species of sub-human “Doros” lived in caverns beneath the Earth’s surface and would emerge to reshape our planetary future. It was pure fiction, but Palmer really pushed hard on his “What if …” publishing style and pretty much told readers that this Shaver stuff was true.

FRED: Yes, this was a tipping point in Palmer’s career—publishing Shaver’s pieces and claiming they were true. I think this started as a sales gimmick to outrage people and to see how far he could push the promotion of this Shaver Mystery. You have to remember that a lot of Palmer’s work developed through letters he received from fans. As with Asimov, Shaver had been sending Palmer letters. Of course, Shaver was different from an Asimov—and would never become that kind of author. Shaver was this working man who bounced around various places and was a science fiction fan. Eventually, Shaver began claiming that he had arcane knowledge. The first thing he claimed was that he found an alphabet from outer space, which he said was a key to languages. Another editor wanted to throw Shaver’s stuff in the garbage can, but Palmer pulled it out and said, “Let’s print it.”

DAVID: While we might question Palmer’s ethics in the way he presented the Shaver stories—there’s no question that, from a publishing point of view, this was a hit.

FRED: Readership grew as Palmer kept publishing material from Shaver. A lot of the magazine’s pure science fiction fans complained, but Palmer picked up a lot of fans who were drawn to occult and arcane ideas.

DAVID: What’s your bottom-line judgment on this portion of Palmer’s work with Shaver?

FRED: Shaver definitely had some mental illness in his life—but he also had a brilliant, creative mind. His fiction was his outlet for making sense of the world. He was trying to create a detailed vision of the cosmos, or we might say he was trying to write a Gospel, or chart a new science. In common terms, Shaver was your classic inspired crackpot. He was a visionary. Palmer realized it was good business to publish his stories.

RAY PALMER and The Flying Saucer Craze

DAVID: So, this Shaver Mystery—and all the hoopla from the rising sales to the growing controversy—sets the stage for the far more famous contribution Palmer makes to American culture: the flying saucer craze.

I’m sure our readers will be amazed to learn that our U.S. Central Intelligence Agency actually has a website dedicated to the history of UFO sightings. The CIA tells part of the story of the flying saucer craze: “The first report of a ‘flying saucer’ over the United States came on 24 June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and reputable businessman, while looking for a downed plane sighted nine disk-shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington, traveling at an estimated speed of over 1,000 mph.” What the CIA never mentions, not even in a footnote, is that Arnold’s experience would have faded into the deep dust of old trivia games—except for the super-charged work of Arnold’s co-author and promoter: Ray Palmer.

FRED: That’s right, a lot of people credit Palmer as one of the most important voices whipping up the awareness of flying saucers. It makes sense. This was a great new mystery for him! By the time Kenneth Arnold came along, the Shaver Mystery had created a lot of negative feedback. Shaver was a problematic figure.

DAVID: But not Kenneth Arnold! This is one of the most exciting sections of your book.

FRED: Arnold wasn’t a science fiction fan or an occultist. He wasn’t like Shaver. He was a former Eagle Scout, football player and Olympic-class athlete.

DAVID: Ray Palmer realized that this was a golden ticket in the pulp world. He and Curtis Fuller founded FATE magazine in 1948 mainly to showcase Arnold’s story. Top of the cover of Issue No. 1 was Arnold’s “The Truth about the Flying Saucers”—complete with a vivid, full-color illustration.

FRED: FATE magazine largely was founded because of the flying saucer phenomenon. After Arnold’s report, there were many other sightings, too. This was quite different from the Shaver Mystery. Curtis Fuller, as Palmer’s co-founder of FATE, was a no-nonsense journalist and flying enthusiast. They all were asking questions of the U.S. military about flying saucers—and they became convinced that they weren’t being told the truth. According to Palmer’s version, his other magazine publishers didn’t want him to go fully into flying saucer stories, so FATE was born.

DAVID: Did Ray Palmer believe in flying saucers? I think he knew that Shaver’s stories were pure fiction. But what about the flying saucers?

FRED: Oh, I think he definitely believed there were flying saucers. He later broke with Curtis Fuller and his wife around this question. But it’s not hard to see why Palmer would become convinced of the truth of flying saucers. There were so many sightings emerging after Arnold’s first report—and they kept coming from so many different countries—that it was hard for Palmer to believe that these sightings didn’t have substance.

RAY PALMER as SPIRITUAL SEEKER

DAVID: We’ve come full circle here from the pure love and noble hopes of science fiction—through some of Palmer’s obvious hucksterism—into this realm of Cold War flying saucers and other serious, if speculative, themes. Many of Ray Palmer’s issues were packed with mystical, spiritual stories. His magazines weren’t particularly accurate about world religions, but they certainly inspired Americans to find out more about ancient religions from around the world, as well as what sociologists today call “new religions.”

FRED: Remember that science fiction really has religious undertones. A typical science fiction story is an apocalyptic tale—the death of an old world and the birth of a new world. We can think of so many science fiction classics that are spiritual as well as scientific visions of the future.

DAVID: Would Ray Palmer object to what you just said—or applaud? I think he’s probably smile and nod in agreement.

FRED: Ray Palmer was a remarkable personality with a mind that shaped American culture in ways far beyond his own work and life. He certainly had a problematic side. We might think of him as a classic trickster figure trying to guide people, but guiding them along weird pathways. It took tremendous courage for him to announce so many controversial views over the years and then stand up to so much ridicule.

Here’s a guy who would jump into things fearlessly. While other people were still quietly discussing these ideas in private circles, Ray Palmer was splashing them across the front covers of magazines. And, it wasn’t just Ray Palmer talking to the nation. He encouraged fans to share their experiences in letters they wrote to him—and he set aside pages in every issue for their letters and stories.

Overall, his spiritual vision was remarkable! Now, talk about shamanism and yoga and mushrooms and Eastern religious traditions is everywhere you turn. But, in the era when Ray Palmer was in his prime, you didn’t find that in mainstream American media. In mid-20th-century America, these things were lumped together as occult and paranormal—and they were not fashionable.

Ray Palmer gave voice to people nobody else would take seriously.

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(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion, spirituality, interfaith news and cross-cultural issues.)

The Ray Palmer Style: From your kitchen table to the farthest realms

Ray Palmer was a master of pulp. As a writer and editor, he understood that the greatest appeal to readers lay in inviting them to step from the comfort of their homes—to experiences they could only dream about under normal circumstances. That formula later served Rod Serling in the 1959 debut of The Twilight Zone, Chris Carter in the 1993 debut of The X-Files and J.J. Abrams in the 2004 debut of LOST. Throughout his long career at the helm of various magazines, Ray Palmer’s typewriter batted out thousands of columns and he took his editing pencil to thousands more by a Who’s Who of writers.

The 1953 debut of his pocket-sized magazine, MYSTIC, opened with this signed “Editorial,” a classic Ray Palmer appeal to readers …

The other night we got up out of bed around midnight and went out into the kitchen to raid the refrigerator. Sometimes we like a glass of cold milk and perhaps a few cookies to carry us over until morning. As we sat there munching cookies, our eyes kept playing tricks on us; there seemed to be something black flitting around always just beyond the range of our vision. We couldn’t quite catch it, with just the small light on the kitchen range; so we turned on the overhead light. Then we saw it—a large bat was zipping through the house, from room to room, with soundless, seemingly effortless grace!

Each time around he’d swing past our head, almost touching us, and make us duck rather frantically. We tried hitting at him as he passed—but we might as well have tried to hit the wind. Bats have a marvelous system of radar, and every motion we made was noted instantly, and avoided.

We didn’t like the idea of a bat in the house—we were reminded of old legends, even thought of vampires—but what to do? There seemed no way of catching him. Well, we solved it very neatly—we simply opened the outside kitchen door wide and sat quietly waiting. Inevitably the bat flew through the open door and vanished into the night.

When we finished our milk, we sat there for a time, thinking. Today, in what we are pleased to call an “enlightened” age, we can regard a bat in a calm light. Just a winged animal. That is, until we begin to study him scientifically—then suddenly it strikes us that he is an animal and not a bird! An animal that flies like a bird; and as we noted, even more gracefully and easily and with the added advantage that he has a safeguard against slamming into something in flight, even though unable to see. A bird, under the same conditions, would be helpless.

‘Perhaps … there is a sensational story …’

Where did that bat come from? What happened to evolution when just this one animal took to the air in this way? Perhaps, far back in time, there is a sensational story—an alien story, to account for what we must regard as a tremendous mystery, a weird paradox, a very strange departure from the norm. Perhaps there is good reason for the superstitious horror with which most of us regard the bat. Perhaps there is a reason for the bat being an outcast among animals and birds alike. Perhaps there is a reason for its complicated, but effective, substitute for normal sight.

Did the bat come from another world; a world where there was no light to develop sight; where sight had to be replaced by the strange radar-like sense based on sound? Is this other world another world, or is it some dark, unknown place on—or in—this world? Perhaps the bat has a most tremendous story to tell—if we could only learn it!

‘Devotion to the unseen things, to the mysterious …’

This is a new magazine. Perhaps it is like the bat, flying around in a world in which ordinary sight is like blindness. It is devoted to the unseen things, to the mysterious, to the mystic, to the occult, to the unknown, to the unfound, to the unsuspected. It is at one and the same time, a search for light—and a delving into the dark. It is an effort to bring scientific common sense to bear on the mysterious—and an admission that our unreasonable superstitions may be reasonable after all.

The unknown is—unknown. Therefore it cannot be treated in a factual way. The scientific method does not apply; the only result of such application being a negative one. Our inclination, when we cannot be positive, is to be negative; so that we may not be ridiculed. A bat, says science, is harmless. Yet, somehow we fear him! And if we put our reasons into words, such as “vampire,” we are regarded with suspicion, labeled “superstitious.”

A superstition is a belief, regardless of knowledge or reason. It is a feeling we get, an acceptance due to a sense we may be unaware exists. When we see a bat, something besides reason and knowledge tells us to be afraid. What is that something?

This is a magazine of fiction. The stories you read herein are not based on reason or knowledge. They are based on stranger things. They are tales of the things of which superstition is the only historian. They are stories of the supernatural, of the weird, of the mysterious, of the unknown, of life after death, or reincarnation, of dreams; of vampires and witches and goblins and werewolves; of the soul, the subconscious mind, the unconscious mind, the superconscious mind; of spirits, ghosts, phantoms, afreets, djinns; of magic, both white and black, legerdemain, illusion; of cults and secret societies; of the good brotherhood and the brotherhood of evil; of the battle between the dark and the light, the good and the bad, the living and the dead!

‘Woven into the thread of thrills and chills’

This magazine is fiction, all of it—and yet—woven into the thread of thrills and chills, laughter and tears, excitement and adventure, mystery and yet more mystery.  You may find something significant, something profound, something that is recognized by that strange sense that asks you to accept what is beyond reason, beyond knowledge. If you do, you will be greatly rewarded. If you do not, you will certainly have the reading adventure of your life.

MYSTIC Magazine is your magazine, and it aims to please you. Let us know how we succeed!

Ray Palmer, November 1953