When I was about 13, I received a wondrous legacy from an older relative; a huge steamer trunk packed with old pulp science fiction magazines from the 1950's. It took me the better part of a year to plow through all of it, but plow I did, acquiring a taste for the social satire of Frederick Pohl, the sharp irony of Robert Sheckley, the lean and pointed prose of Jerry Sohl. Today, those names mean little outside of certain tight circles, but these were among the writers that set me on the path to my here-and-now. Yet, of all the writers I met inside that life-changing trunk, no name sticks in my memory in the same way as Richard S. Shaver.

In that mountain of pulp, there were only a couple of his stories, which in fact weren't very good. More fascinating was the firestorm of controversy that raged in the letters pages of Amazing Stories (a magazine title later licensed by Steven Spielberg for his television series) surrounding Shaver's claims that his works were not fiction at all. They were, he claimed, the true account of his own relationship with the Teros and the Deros, two strange races of humanoids who lived in caverns far beneath the earth, and communicated their story to him via powerful telepathic beams.

Reading those letters pages of long ago, I learned that a good many SF and fantasy fans are outraged when science fiction is linked with supposedly 'factual' accounts of preternatural occurrence. Many think that the slightest association between "cheap pseudo-science," and the literature that can claim such lights as Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut, robs the genre of its dignity.

For the past year, we've been treated to a strange instance of crude science fiction posing as fact with the Fox broadcast of Alien Autopsy, a transparent hoax perpetrated by British video producer Ray Santilli and his German partner Volker Spielberg. Fox continues to rebroadcast the tabloid-TV documentary, never addressing the critics who have demolished its credibility.. Fox must be well aware that they are participating in a hoax, but should their failure to "own up" be regarded as a breach of a trusted bond between audience and programmer? Or is their continued offering of this bogus show as a "documentary" just a harmless prank on the True Believers -- or even an experiment in meta-fiction? I wonder about these things so you won't have to.

Every one of our readers must have seen NBC's mysterious promotional ads for Dark Skies, which first appeared during the NBA Finals, and have peppered the networks' airways throughout the summer. Just a couple of things are clear from these teasers: that it's a science fiction show debuting on September 21 (it will debut soon thereafter on the UK's Channel 4), and that it involves an alien invasion.

The truth, however, is stranger.

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