[thulldud]

I got interested in this thing by John W. Campbell of the old “Analogue” days and before.

There was a story published in Analog when John W. Campbell was editor, in the form of a letter to an editor in the future, in which the writer showed that WWII never happened because all the principal names in the stories were obviously selected for their symbolic meaning — and they couldn't have been referring to real people.

"Letter from a Higher Critic", Stewart Robb (this is from memory, hafta look it up.)

The last line was the joke. After all this discourse about the meaning of names like "Roosevelt", "Churchill", and "Stalin", the "writer" then signed his own name, "Frazer Boughton".

There musta been more than a couple coffee stains generated by that one.

[Little Bill]

John probably wrote that one himself. He had a way of making people think in his editorials. Even though he kind of bounced from belief to belief in his personal life, his question everything editorial stance and supposedly outrageous views on issues made the Magazine Interesting.

Aside from that I liked Space Operas, man against the Universe as opposed to those socialist Galaxy types, LOL.