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AIRLORDS of HAN
By PHILIP FRANCIS NOWLAN
Illustrated by FRANK R. PAUL
Copyright, 1927, by E. P. Co., Inc.
Introduction by Sam Moskowitz
Of all the stories selected for reprinting by AMAZING STORIES, none have received the acclamation of Armageddon-2419, the first Buck Rogers story published in the April, 1961, 35th Anniversary issue. Readers were amazed by the terse writing, the superb knowledge of military tactics, the brilliant prophecies of rocket guns, walkie talkies, jet planes, infra-red ray sights and many other devices which have become part and parcel of modern warfare.
The Airlords of Han, sequel to Armageddon-2419, is in every meaning of the phrase, a command performance for the readers of AMAZING STORIES. While many other stories may have received greater publicity through the years and other authors achieved more meaningful fame, Philip Francis Nowlan's work has not been unknown to prime movers in the field. At the time of Nowlan's sudden death from a stroke in 1940, John W. Campbell, Jr., who read the "Buck" Rogers stories when they first appeared and was at that very time scheduling the last story the man was ever to write, said: "The quality of Nowlan's written science-fiction was certainly exceptionally high--even ten years ago, when the magazine science-fiction was only starting, the work Phil Nowlan did was of a grade that would have been acceptable and well rated against the much more highly evolved work of today. He had, then, developed one of the concepts that has only recently been generally recognized and used; the realization that the thought-patterns of the people of the future will necessarily be as different from the everyday thought-matrices of our present as their background must differ from ours."
The Airlords of Han will prove a delight to the readers. Hugo Gernsback when "blurbing" it in 1929 said: "Mr. Nowlan has quite outdone himself. In our humb