Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  The biological aspects of progress always interested Edgar Rice Burroughs, particularly the possibility of creation of synthetic life, organ transplants, and crossing of species, and he would return to these themes in future works.

  The original title of The Man Without a Soul had been Number 13, and it appeared in book form from McClurg in 1929 as The Monster Men. Burroughs received from THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE $1,165 in payment for the story.

  Brain transplants were accomplished in The House of Sorcery, by Jack Harrower (author of The Brain Blight), a four-part novel which began in the same issue as The Man Without a Soul. Harrower's imagination also conceived of a means of dissolving a man's bones within his body while he still lived.

  The Warlord of Mars, the third in the series, opened in the December THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE with a cover that was unique, for while it showed a manacled Dejah Thoris, Martian princess, with a guard, it had in the background the four-armed Martian with his spear which had been used on each chapter of all three novels. It would disappear only when THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, at a later date, would cut out interior illustrations, and even then it still would be incorporated into the colored covers.

  Dejah Thoris is carried off by a Martian black man and pursued through many strange and unusual lands by John Carter to effect her rescue, accompanied by his ten-legged Martian dog, Woola. He almost succeeds in rescuing Dejah Thoris in the nation of Kaol, in whose ranks of red-skinned people he has fought off an attack of the four-armed green men. At the South Pole he enters the country of the yellow men, who possess an unusual degree of scientific achievement, including their own air-producing plant. Eventually he rescues his wife (married in Under the Moons of Mars) and her companions, Phaidor and Thuvia, and is elected Jeddak of Jeddaks, or Warlord of all Mars.

  An outline of the story fails to do justice to its high adventure, imagination, humor, and satire. Among the Burroughs fans it has generally become the favorite of the Martian series, because it presents so comprehensive a picture of the planet and its races. It ended in the March, 1914, issue of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, the last monthly number.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs had mailed The Warlord of Mars to Metcalf on July 8, 1913, under the title of The Prince of Helium. It was 57,052 words in length, and on July 16, 1913, he was paid $1,141. It was the last Burroughs story THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE bought in 1913, during which time The Return of Tarzan ran in NEW STORY MAGAZINE.

  On January 29, 1914, Metcalf wrote Burroughs offering him 2Vi cents a word for anything they took and stating that they could use fifty thousand words a month.

  Burroughs accepted the offer as far as word rate was concerned on February 3 but did not commit himself to delivering any special amount of wordage.

  THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was fighting hard to pin Burroughs down exclusively. With the Burroughs spearhead, supplemented by a great quantity of fantastic stories, it had shown such substantial gains in circulation that Frank A. Munsey had ordered an increase in the frequency of publication to weekly, following the March, 1914, issue. It is quite likely that the editors would have preferred a twice-a-month schedule to start, like THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. THE CAVALIER, as a weekly, was having a tough time establishing itself, and the prospects of a second weekly were not alluring. To this, Frank A. Munsey's answer was that THE CAVALIER had been a failing monthly made weekly as an experiment. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was a vigorous, successful monthly made weekly because the time was right. There were also intimations that THE CAVALIER might be discontinued altogether if THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE proved a money-maker on a weekly schedule. As a weekly, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE would need Burroughs more than ever.

  Burroughs, nevertheless, had been testing around trying to establish other markets, with the objective of gaining an increase in word rates and better bargaining power. Among the magazines he queried was ADVENTURE. Arthur Sullivant Hoffman had replaced Duncan Norton-Taylor as its editor in 1911, and for roughly twenty years would manage the magazine in such a manner as to make it one of the great prestige names among the pulps. Hoffman had been Theodore Dreiser's managing editor on DELINEATOR, issued by Butterick Publications, which owned the Ridgway Company, which in turn had launched ADVENTURE. In a reply to a Burroughs inquiry dated December 4, 1913, he confirmed what science-fiction readers have long surmised from circumstantial evidence, that Hoffman had a strict policy against science fiction and fantasy. "We avoid supernatural and highly improbable stories," he wrote, implying at the same time that Burroughs need not bother submitting anything of that type, and no special enthusiasm was expressed to see material of any other type.

  NEW STORY MAGAZINE was to lose the temporary advantage it had gained by the purchase of The Return of Tarzan and The Outlaw of Torn. Burroughs had completed one of his most impressive novels, The Mucker, a study of environment on character and the regeneration of an undesirable. In the story development, there were vigorous sequences at sea reminiscent of Jack London's The Sea Wolf, and an island on which lives a tribe of Japanese samurai, out of touch with the rest of the world for hundreds of years. This fine adventure story was offered to Sessions of NEW STORY MAGAZINE on October 29, 1913, and rejected December 8, 1913, and may previously have been turned down by THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. No logical explanation of why so suitable a story should have been turned down can be rationalized.

  Burroughs had completed a third Ape Man story, The Beasts of Tarzan, on February 9, 1914. When Metcalf heard of it, he sent a telegram on February 17 offering two thousand dollars. Instead of accepting, Burroughs wrote to Sessions and said he could have the third Tarzan story for the three thousand dollars previously offered. Sessions countered on February 28, 1914, with two thousand dollars, reneging on his bid made August 18. Burroughs then wrote Metcalf that he could have The Beasts of Tarzan for two thousand, five hundred dollars; Metcalf accepted it in his letter of March 3, 1914.

  This was a great coup for Metcalf and THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, because it meant they not only had ensured the cream of Burroughs' production for themselves but also had pulled him away from a direct competitor. Sessions would send letters all through 1914 asking for more Burroughs, but he had blown his golden opportunity. For Metcalf, the victory had come too late. Before the deal was closed, he had written Burroughs on February 25 and told him that there were going to be major changes at Munsey and he would be shifted from his present job.

  There was no question that the job change for Metcalf was tied in with the impending weekly publication of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, but why he should be changed when the work load would be getting greater, not smaller, was not made immediately clear.

  The heavy emphasis on science fiction and fantasy remained unchanged. Since the switch to fifteen cents, the stress in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE had been on novels, and this was primarily the case with all Munsey magazines. Still, now and then a short work of science fiction of merit appeared, and one such was The "V" Force (December, 1913), by Fred C. Smale, about a strange bar of metal from Tibet which periodically projects a force which draws life from all creatures near it, and the frantic efforts of its owners to dispose of it when it becomes evident that London is in grave danger.

  It was also easy to see the early influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes in other stories which set their locale in a strange, foreboding, or exotic clime and glorified the strength and philosophy of the primitive. J. Earl Clausen, who had authored The Black Comet, contributed a complete novel to the January, 1914, issue, in which a young sailor, Matt Durgin, shipwrecked on an arctic shore, becomes a member of a tribe of Eskimo and gradually achieves great strength and native skill. A white woman is cast ashore in another wreck. They are married Eskimo fashion; a child is born and dies. There is a return to civilization, and the girl drives him from her and he goes back to the North. Passing up an opportunity to marry a "civilized" man, she repents and returns to him. The story, called The Outsider, is an adventure and love "epic" of considerable effectiveness.

  Rex T. (Todhunter) S
tout, who would later become one of the world's leading detective-story writers as the creator of Nero Wolfe, was a regular contributor to the Munsey pulps, but his complete novel Under the Andes (February, 1914), in which the remnants of an Incan civilization are discovered in Peru, is considered by the serious collectors of old science fiction and pulp magazines to be the best of his early work. Carried four miles underground by a river, two men and a French girl discover that the Incas have lived in a subterranean world for four hundred years and have degenerated into hairy creatures only four feet high. The girl doubles as a goddess in the strange religious rites of the creatures and becomes the select of their king. There are scores of adventures (including one with a prehistoric reptile with hypnotic powers), leading to escape. The king is killed, and the girl also dies in the desperate finale of an extraordinarily vigorous and well-written fantastic adventure.

  The February issue also featured the beginning of a highly unusual fantasy serial, The Devil and Dr. Foster, by J. Earl Clausen, which ran for four installments, until the March 14 number. The efforts of Dr. Foster, a pastor, to get donations to build a new church are constantly foiled by a foundling, Ike Jackson, who has been seen with horns and hooves, seems responsible for mysterious fires, produces a salve which makes it possible to understand animals, and causes the odor of fire and brimstone to pervade the town. Things are turned right eventually, but Ike Jackson disappears, and the idea that he had supernatural powers is sustained. Despite the similarity in title to the novel by David H. Keller, M.D., The Devil and the Doctor, an ingenious work which makes the Devil out to be the good guy and God the bad guy, there is no relationship in the plots in the two stories.

  That the editors either listened carefully to the requests of their readers or planted letters pointing in the direction to coincide with their future plans was confirmed by the complete novel The Woman of the Pyramid, by Perley Poore Sheehan, which led off the March issue. A reader had enthused about that author's The Copper Princess and asked that a similar type of story be written with an Egyptian locale. A modern man in Egypt travels back in time, to find himself the object of desire of an ancient Egyptian princess. Mysticism, reincarnation, mystery, lust, and vengeance mix in generous quantities to make a thrilling offbeat novel.

  10. "THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE" AND "THE CAVALIER" COMBINE

  THE MARCH, 1914 issue of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was its last as a monthly. Frank A. Munsey had been watching the circulation figures and had decided the time was right to gamble on an increased frequency of publication.

  The Warlord of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, ended in the March, 1914, issue but the first number of ALL-STORY WEEKLY, dated March 7, 1914, would also feature a complete novelette by him, titled The Eternal Lover. The twenty-four-thousand-word story had been submitted to Metcalf as Nu of the Neocene, but he changed the title and sent a check to Burroughs at 550 "A" Avenue, Coronado, California, for six hundred dollars on January 7, 1914.

  ALL-STORY WEEKLY could scarcely have found a more effective story to attract new readership and hold the old. The Eternal Lover is the story of Nu, a prehistoric man who has been trapped in a cave and held in suspended animation for one hundred thousand years. He awakes on Tarzan's African "estate." In addition to Tarzan himself and his mate, Jane, their infant son, Korak, the Negro nursemaid, Esmeralda, and other Burroughs stalwarts make their appearance. A key character is Victoria Custer, who may be a modern reincarnation of a primitive love Nu left behind in the Neocene. Victoria is the sister of Barney Custer, of Beatrice, Nebraska, who would feature in a yet-to-be-published but previously written novel by Burroughs, The Mad King.

  The Eternal Lover is a superb story, one of Burroughs' most skillful, in which Victoria seems to "remember" Nu from a previous life and finally decides to leave civilization behind her and brave the dangers of the jungle with the man she loves. Nu has one skill which will assist them, an ability to converse with animals.

  The ALL-STORY WEEKLY was also an unquestionable bargain. The price had been cut back to ten cents for weekly publication, but the pages had been reduced only by sixteen, from 240 to 224. Fantasy lovers were given, in addition to the Burroughs story, a pleasant aperitif in the context of The Overland Eel, by Frank Condon, a short tale of a species of Chinese eel so electrically charged that it can generate enough current to propel a trolley car or kill a man.

  The ALL-STORY WEEKLY behaved like a prizefighter with a deadly right hand who forgets he has a left and keeps tossing the haymaker. There were other Burroughs manuscripts in the safe, and they were rushed into print with almost indecent frequency. "In this story," the editors said of The Mad King, "Barney Custer and his friend, Lieutenant Butzow, land plumb in the middle of a patriotic intrigue, said intrigue being entirely surrounded by the land of Lutha, which, as all regular lovers of romance know, is bounded on the north by morality, on the south by affection, on the east by fidelity, and on the west by love. It is only a little ways from Zenda and Graustark. And now you get it, don't you?"

  To dispel any possible doubts, readers were further told: "Custer, the young Nebraskan ... a beautiful princess ... a runaway horse, an automobile accident, a sick king, a political muddle, and wallops to the right and left of us, and you are shot through as vivid a tale of royal treachery as you will often get served steaming hot off the printing press."

  The Mad King had been purchased earlier than The Eternal Lover, December 3, 1913, and eight hundred and eighty dollars paid for its forty-four-thousand words. But in reserve was still another Burroughs story bought long before that, the first of the Pellucidar series, paid for at the rate of four hundred and twenty dollars for thirty-two thousand words on February 12, 1913, and titled The Inner World, but published as At the Earth's Core, a four-part serial, April 4-April 25. Readers were introduced to David Innes, heir of a wealthy mine owner, who links up with Professor Abner Perry, an inventor who has built an "iron mole" that can drill its way through the earth. Five hundred miles down, they emerge in a tropical land, heated by the core of the earth, which hangs like a molten sun at its center. They meet prehistoric monsters and primitive humans, and David Innes finds Dian the Beautiful, whose function in the story is obvious. Returning to the surface in the mole to get necessary materials to hasten the progress of the people on the interior, Innes is parted from his beloved Dian, who has fallen into the hands of an arch enemy. As he did in Under the Moons of Mars, Burroughs ended the first of the Pellucidar series as though it were the installment of a serial rather than a complete novel.

  The readers' columns of the ALL-STORY WEEKLY would have to be read to be believed. The raves about Burroughs were perpetual and were extensive enough to make for an interesting article on their own merits. Nor was there any mistaking the enthusiasm for other works of science fiction published during the same period. Perley Poore Sheehan's The Ghost Mill (April 4) was a well-handled novel about an apparent perpetual-motion machine that turns out to be a device for drawing electromagnetic power from a giant vein of iron ore. The Queen of Sheba (April 18), a complete novel by the same author, continued in the vein of his The Copper Princess, with the "possible resuscitation or reincarnation of one of the most beautiful women in the world."

  "Pseudoscientific" was the phrase used to announce False Fortunes, by Frank Conly, which started in the April 18 issue and ran in three parts through to May 2, a story in which an element, "Id," is discovered that can transmute metals at will. It turns out to have been an immensely dense metal created through an "implosion," a concept which science fiction as well as science has continued to explore. It may have been the first use of the term "pseudoscientific" in a Munsey magazine, but "pseudo-scientific fiction" was used repeatedly by H. G. Wells in letters to Arnold Bennett, years earlier.

  The May 2 issue, in which False Fortune concluded, contained a complete novel of witchcraft and a death curse for the first man who kissed the heroine or to whom she gave her love. It was titled Flaunted Legacy, and the name of its author, Paul Reg
ard, had appeared under stories previously. Paul Regard was a pen name for Perley Poore Sheehan, and there would be other fantasies under that name in the future, leading through to nine stories about Kwa of the Jungle, an imitation of Tarzan published in 1932 and 1933 in THRILLING ADVENTURES.

  The April 25, 1914, issues of both ALL-STORY WEEKLY and THE CAVALIER carried the news that the two weeklies would be combined. A blue four-page insert written by Frank A. Munsey announced that with its May 16 issue the name of ALL-STORY WEEKLY would be changed to ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY, and there was also the possibility that the name would later be simplified. Munsey quite frankly stated that the reason the magazine was called ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY instead of CAVALIER ALL-STORY was that the "All-Story" title best described the publication's contents. This led one to draw the obvious conclusion that Munsey felt that it was the title of THE CAVALIER which had held it back, not its contents.

  Reading between the lines of Bob Davis' "Heart to Heart Talks" in THE CAVALIER as he amplified upon Frank A. Munsey's merger announcement, it was obvious that the change saddened him. THE CAVALIER had been, as much as any magazine he had ever edited, his baby. In its pages he had introduced many writers destined to become famous. He had established through the readers' columns and the Cavalier Legion a close rapport with his readers. The end of THE CAVALIER was in a sense his failure as an editor.

  The magazine had crested with the conclusion of George Allan England's Darkness and Dawn trilogy, ending with the July 5, 1913, number. At a time when THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was featuring Edgar Rice Burroughs nearly every month and offering the equivalent of a science-fiction novel a month, the use of fantasy slackened in THE CAVALIER.