The Critics’ Corner

Reminiscences of Invisibility

by Bertil Falk

To the question where he got the idea for “Our Love Will Never Die,” Bertil responds:

I don’t remember, but I think that I wrote it for a short story collection of mine that was published in 1999, but it may have been written earlier.

My first encounter with an invisible man happened when I was about nine years old. In 1942, I found a back issue of Jules Verne magasinet 41 (1941) where Den osynlige Robin Hoods återkomst by Eando Binder, actually Otto Binder, was published.

I don’t know the title of the English original, but the Swedish title means “The Return of the Invisible Robin Hood,” implying that this was not the first story about him.

Otto Binder was one of the four main people who opened up the world of science fiction and sense of wonder for me. The other three were Edmond Hamilton and his Captain Future stories, and the creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and the illustrator Joe Shuster.

Much later I met and interviewed all four of them. They were very modest and fine persons. Now I am off the subject, but maybe that first invisible experience lingered in my memory.