The Secret World: the Diary of a Lifetime of Questioning the Facts

Wisconsin: Amherst Press, 1975. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Large octavo;144 pp: illustrations; 29 cm Very Good; mild rubbing to corners and edges; pages clean, binding tight. Hardcover.

Ray Palmer and Richard S. Shaver were key figures in mid-twentieth-century American pulp science fiction, whose collaboration produced one of the strangest and most enduring mythologies in the genre’s history. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories in the 1940s, published Shaver’s sensational tales of a prehistoric subterranean civilization inhabited by “Deros” (detrimental robots) and “Teros” (integrative robots), beings supposedly responsible for much of humankind’s suffering. Shaver’s stories—beginning with “I Remember Lemuria!” (1945)—were presented as partly factual, merging paranoid cosmology, lost-race fantasy, and proto-UFO lore. Palmer’s editorial flair transformed these into a cultural phenomenon known as the “Shaver Mystery,” blurring the line between science fiction and occult revelation. Though derided by many contemporaries, their work prefigured the later contactee and conspiracy subcultures of the 1950s and stands today as a striking example of pulp fiction’s power to shape modern myth.| Fun, highly imaginative stuff. Impressive 'visualizations' of creatures inside rocks, with 'corroborating' photos. Where art meets science, and truth is highly maginative.