esp. in the early pulp era: a work of imaginative fiction; a different story n.
Obs.
Give us plenty of scientific and impossible stories…. Also give us more wild adventure.
I like the ‘impossible’ stories best because they are impossible. I think ‘The Tentacles from Below’…was the best story I ever read.
Impossible stories are the most convincing. They have to be, or editors wouldn’t buy them. It’s easy to believe in a two-fisted cowboy…. But fantasy is a different matter.
Another term often found in the readers' departments of Munsey magazines was impossible stories. That term received some use up until about 1920 when it all but disappeared…. It was awkward to state in every issue that ‘we will continue to present “different stories.”’
antedating 1913
All-Story Magazine
Last modified 2021-03-18 13:27:36
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entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries
in OED.