When first this story appeared, its publishers, Street & Smith, of New York, gave it a tremendous boost throughout their chain of magazines, describing it as “the greatest imaginative yarn of two decades” and forecasting that it would “go down in history along with H. Casually but devastatingly, he said, “I think we’re property.” And that is the plot of Sinister Barrier. Charles Fort gave me what might well be the answer to both these questions. The first of these three, a San Franciscan lover of long-distance debate, asked, “Since everyone wants peace, why don’t we get it?” The second, a bellicose Iowan, demanded, “If there are extra-terrestrial races further advanced than ourselves, why haven’t they visited us already?” Until I encountered the third, Charles Fort, it didn’t occur to me that perhaps we had been visited and were still being visited, without being aware of it. They formed an unholy trinity out of whom was born Sinister Barrier’s religion of damnation. A thousand more were given me by adventurers hardier than myself people who have explored farther and more daringly into forbidden acres where only one law operates: that curiosity kills the cat.ĭespite my possession of a highly suggestive mountain of evidence, none of it jelled into a story until three Americans came at me, not together, yet with cumulative effect.
I have them in the form of a thousand press clippings snatched from half a hundred newspapers in the Old World and the New. It derives its fantastic atmosphere only from the q ueerne ss, the eccentricity, the complete inexplicability-so far as dogmatic science is concerned-of the established facts which gave it birth. Sinister Barrier is as true a story as it is possible to concoct while presenting believe-it-or-not truths in the guise of entertainment.
But I regard it as a sort of fact-fiction solely because I do sincerely believe that if ever a story was based upon facts it is this one.
Some may regard it as fantasy because it is placed in the future and depicts certain developments likely in times to come. It would be idle to pretend and dishonest to suggest that Sinister Barrier is anything other than fiction.
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