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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  One of the great magazine successes of World War I was POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE, which featured marvelous covers of speculative invention and imaginative handling of contents, under the editorial direction of Waldemar Kaempffert. For ALL-STORY WEEKLY it was a scoop to run The Diminishing Draft by him in the February 9 issue, a well-thought-out story of a man who stumbles upon a chemical which will reduce living things to a fraction of their size, and who then restores them with a saline solution. Actually, Kaempffert had been a Munsey contributor before he became POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE'S editor, with a forty-three thousand-word novel, Terror, serialized in four parts in THE SCRAP BOOK, December, 1908-March, 1909.

  Irvin S. Cobb, now in even far greater demand than the days when he had written Fishhead for THE CAVALIER, produced for friend Bob Davis The Gallowsmith, another masterful tale of horror, telling of a professional hangman and the psychology of the grotesque death that came to him. So exalted was Cobb at the time that Davis ran a photograph of him on the cover and had the text of the story set straight across the page like a book to differentiate it from the standard two-column format of the magazine.

  In the March 9 issue Davis was able to introduce another discovery, a "different" complete novel titled The Planeteer, by an unknown named Homer Eon Flint. A resident of San Jose, California, Flint had submitted the novel as The Danger Doctor and had been paid three hundred dollars for its thirty-nine thousand words on October 25, 1917. The earth of the twenty-third century is so overpopulated it cannot feed the masses. By upsetting the gravitational balance of the solar system with a planetoid dislodged from orbit, the earth is shifted to the vicinity of Jupiter, which planet, already inhabited by semihuman creatures, serves as the bread-, basket for the food-shy billions. It was a cosmic concept, and the readers loved it.

  Julian Hawthorne, who had been so inept at his interplanetary romance, The Cosmic Courtship, returned with power, skill, and authenticity in Absolute Evil (April 13), a fine supernatural story of the girl descendant of a New England witch who fights and destroys a clergyman who has, through the black arts, learned to transform himself into a wolf.

  The true format of the scientific romance reappeared with Draft of Eternity, a four-part novel by Victor Rousseau (June 1-22, 1918). The novel had a marvelous title, a superb cover, and an imaginative situation where a drug carries the physician of a private hospital and his Hindu friend one thousand years into the future, when the nation has lapsed back into savagery amid the ruins of its civilization, which rests layer upon layer atop old Manhattan. The whites of this period are slaves who labor in the depths of the city. There are good characterizations and some taut situations, but the story is carelessly written and plotted and disappointingly slapdash in organization. The readers, hungry for the unusual, found virtually no fault, and it would be reprinted in hardcover by John Long, London, as The Draught of Eternity in 1924, under the pen name of H. M. Egbert.

  The June 22 issue, which carried the conclusion of Draft of Eternity, featured a "different" novelette by A. Merritt that was to make science-fiction history. It was The Moon Pool, and the author had received two hundred dollars for its seventeen thousand words on March 21, 1918. The readers had never experienced such word magic as Merritt's description of the strange pool on a Pacific island, from whose depths emerged an entity of pure energy, carrying the wife of an explorer through the "gateway" that led to an underground or extradimensional civilization. Not since Edgar Rice Burroughs' Under the Moons of Mars had there been such a demand for a sequel. Davis had another winner!

  There was more than one arrow in his quiver. In his campaign to create substitutes for Edgar Rice Burroughs, he had turned to J. U. Giesy, who was perennially popular with his Semi-Dual occult detective stories but had previously shown that he could do effective science fiction of the routine variety. The result was the first of a new trilogy, a novel with the intriguing title of Palos of the Dog Star Pack, which opened the issue of July 13 as a five-part serial concluded August 10. Davis had gotten a bargain, paying but five hundred dollars for the seventy-seven thousand words. The hero, Jason Croft, is able to project his astral body to the planet of Palos, which revolves around the great star Sirius. He takes possession of the powerful body of Jason of Nodhur, a handsome but feeble-minded youth, at the moment of death, and sets out to win the hand of Naia, princess of Tamarizia. His knowledge of earthly science results in both the creation of weapons of destruction and the advancement of the peoples of Palos. The story was fascinating and well told, in the precise tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series.

  Max Brand, who today is remembered as one of the world's great western-story writers, revealed a phase of his personality that enabled him to write fantasy either horrifying or poignant. John Ovington Returns (June 8), a six-thousand-worder for which he received forty dollars, told of a man who returned to claim the incarnation of his love after three generations. Devil Ritter (July 13) was a novelette thirty-one thousand five hundred words in length that brought him three hundred dollars. The character, Devil Ritter, finds in a woman a mind that can transmit to him, like a radio, all its impressions from anywhere in the world. The eerie coalition of talents results in great evil.

  "Because of what we have said, don't run away with the idea that it is 'one of those impossible stories,' " Bob Davis wrote in announcing The Labyrinth, a novel-length contribution by Francis Stevens, whose discovery he had made with The Nightmare a year past. His statement seemed to codify the term "impossible" stories for science fiction, which was to vie with "pseudoscientific" and "different" as proper terminology. The Labyrinth, while not technically a fantasy, was strange enough to be classified as one. A group of people find that a pavilion in a governor's garden opens beneath them, dropping them into a complex maze of elaborate tunnels and doors, all adorned with cryptic messages contrived by the original builder to wreak psychological vengeance on an enemy. The story was extremely well handled.

  Several other shorts by Francis Stevens were superbly done. Friend Island (September 7) takes place in the future, when women are the dominant sex, and one is shipwrecked on an island that is alive, with a man who hurts the feelings of that island with his uncouth language. Behind the Curtain (September 21) tells of a collector whose artifacts include the sarcophagus of a beautiful Egyptian princess. He replaces her with the body of his young wife, poisons the man she loves, and then awakes to find with gratitude that it is all a dream and decides that he will let his wife have her freedom and enjoy the rest of his days in the quiet company of his Egyptian princess.

  In the October 12 issue Davis was able to present his readers with a sequel to The Planeteer. He had changed the title of the forty-two thousand word short novel for which he had paid three hundred fifty dollars from When the Earth Froze to King of Conserve Island and had run it complete. He rated Homer Eon Flint against Edward Bellamy as "an equally clever sociologist with a vastly more brilliant imagination," and regarded it as more than an action story, staling: "If you are of a philosophic mind, read it for the gems of thought it contains." Homer Eon

  Flint was not a good writer, but he had ideas galore, and King of Conserve Island was actually a Utopia with enough action to keep it moving. The main plot involved a future monarch of earth attempting to gain control by force over the planet Jupiter, and a device of a space-fleet officer which cuts off all heat from the sun, freezing everyone until the king abdicates. The story is jammed with imaginative descriptions of the life and technology of those worlds of the future, which is its main point of interest and undoubtedly why Davis published it.

  A more surprising anti-Utopia followed from Todd Robbins, Safe and Sane, a three-part novel in the issues October 26-November 9, billed as "The Strangest Story of the Decade." In the world of 1950, there are so many millionaires that they make up the middle class. They have it in for the geniuses and inventors who have made them so comfortable that they are bored, and they form a Millionaires' League, dedicated to killing off the gifte
d. The story ends as a dream and with the message that man is loved more for his foibles than for his strengths and that the criterion of worth should not be solely ability.

  Science fiction was not Todd Robbins' forte, but a combination of horror with levity was, and Who Wants a Green Bottle? (December 21), which tells of how Laird Kilgour traps the soul of his Uncle Peter in a little green bottle, the price he exacts to release him, and the consequences, is a permanent jewel in the diadem of supernatural classics.

  As the year 1918 drew to a close, as if to cap off the astonishing feat of presenting a bonanza of brilliant new talent, Bob Davis dusted off his last Edgar Rice Burroughs short novel, H. R. H. The Rider, and ran it in three installments (December 14-28). It was smoothly written and entertaining, about a prince who changes places with a bandit and a princess who thinks she doesn't want to marry the prince. The countries are mythical, and that is as close as the novel came to being fantastic.

  17. GOLDEN AGE OF THE SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

  BLUE BOOK was the major recipient of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "largess" during the year 1918. The Oakdale Affair, a short novel, was published complete in the March, 1918, issue. Its opening was similar to H. R. H. The Rider, with which novel it was published in hardcover by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., in 1937. A daughter of a banker, who does not want to be joined in marriage to a man not of her choosing, dresses as a boy and pretends to be a bad "man" known as the Oskaloosa Kid. With a former acquaintance of Billy Byrne (the Mucker), she roams the countryside, becomes involved in a murder, and is almost lynched. This mildly entertaining tale would not have been a serious loss to ALL-STORY WEEKLY, but the three short novels that BLUE BOOK followed it with were among the finest science fiction of Burroughs' career. The Land That Time Forgot (title changed from The Lost U Boat by editor Donald Kennicott), published in the August issue, told of a German U-boat of World War I that is captured by the crew of a British tugboat and forced to put in on an unknown Pacific island, where dinosaurs still exist. And exploration northward up a river is carried forth on the island, each few miles bringing increasingly advanced human races, seven in all, from apelike, speechless primitives to those with highly advanced weapons and superior culture. The story of this adventure is put in a manuscript and cast adrift.

  A sequel, The People That Time Forgot, in the October issue, finds the manuscript returned to civilization. A plane sent out to search for the castaways is forced down by a pterodactyl, and the pilot, Tom Billings, is thrust into this strange land. He learns that the entire evolutionary scale of man occurs in seven stages in one lifetime, as individuals move from one culture to another. The highest culture is where there is natural birth, instead of from hatching offspring eggs. At one time the evolution continued to an eighth stage, a winged race called Weiroos. This natural chain was broken by conflict between the highest wingless culture and the Weiroos as to which was the dominant species. Since only male Weiroos are born, they must steal females to mate with, hoping that someday a dual-sexed winged race will emerge.

  The final novel in the trilogy appeared in December and was titled Out of Time's Abyss. It carries one of the characters into a city of the Weiroos, which race is far more highly developed than anything else yet seen, with a written language, credit arrangements, and various other elements related to civilization. It is discovered that eggs laid by various strata of females below the top of the evolutionary scale hatch into primitive reptilian creatures, and the chain of evolution extends through the entire life scale, not merely the humanoid.

  A theory similar to that in The Land That Time Forgot trilogy had been included by A. Conan Doyle in his famed book, The Lost World, published in 1912, but the emphasis and elaboration given it by Burroughs gave him the right to call it his own.

  Burroughs received one thousand dollars for each part of his trilogy, and on October 17, 1918, Ray Long asked for another series of twelve Tarzan short stories, the first six to be paid for at four hundred and fifty dollars apiece and the second six for five hundred dollars each.

  The relatively better fortunes of ALL-STORY WEEKLY in 1917 had emboldened Bob Davis to make Burroughs an offer in a letter of December 6, 1917, of three thousand dollars for a Tarzan story or twenty-five hundred dollars for a tale of Mars. He rejected two days later a twenty-eight-hundred word short by Burroughs (which has never been published) titled The Little Door. There is some indication that the story might have had a war theme.

  It seems probable that Ray Long, during this period, was using the Polaris series and other fantastic-story developments of ALL-STORY WEEKLY to convince Burroughs that Davis was developing competition to him. Burroughs submitted no first-look fiction to Davis, but maintained correspondence, sending him comprehensive diaries of family vacations. Burroughs also persistently tried to get Davis, with his newspaper connections, to use his influence to get him accredited as a war correspondent. There is evidence in the tone of Davis' letters that he was strongly against the idea, despite the urgings of Burroughs.

  Besides the problem of trying to get back on some sort of working relationship with Burroughs, Davis now found THE ARGOSY moving toward increasing frequency of fantastic stories as part of its weekly program and using authors he had developed. Victor Rousseau's unusual fantasy Fruit of the Lamp, a four-parter (February 2-23, 1918), about a young bachelor who rubs an old lamp and gets a beautiful Jinnee, subservient to his every wish, capable of disappearing and appearing at will, and insisting upon living with him, was delightful. If this story seems similar to the popular television series I Dream of Jeannie, it's because they are virtually identical.

  What probably hurt Davis was the purchase of the ninety-seven thousand-word novel The Citadel of Fear from his talented find Francis Stevens for eight hundred and fifty dollars, on February 14, 1918, by the THE ARGOSY. The novel required seven installments (September 14-October 19) to tell the bizarre adventures of superhero Colin O'Hara in dread encounter with the monstrous conjurings of the lost Mexican city of Tlapallan, repository of Aztec "science," and the defeat of a horror that might have been loosed on modern civilization. Stevens had proved that with heavy emphasis on the unknown sciences she could write a romance that was the equal of any of them.

  The classified-ad line rate of THE ARGOSY and ALL-STORY WEEKLY combination went up from $1.50 to $1.75, which reflected an increase of one-sixth of the combined circulations. Which magazine had gained the most it was not possible to determine, but the reliability of the figure as an indicator of circulation could be checked against the drop of fifty cents per line in the rate for MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, which had raised its newsstand price to twenty cents in March, 1918, and undoubtedly had lost circulation as a result. It was quite probable that the combined weekly circulation of the two pulps now approached three hundred thousand.

  The literary quality of ALL-STORY WEEKLY was outstanding, and the fantasy authors played a substantial part in keeping it high. Writers like A. Merritt, Francis Stevens, Todd Robbins, Ben Ames Williams, Irvin S. Cobb, Max Brand, Julian Hawthorne, A. T. Quiller-Couch, Achmed Abdullah, and Harold Lamb were stylistic achievers. The March 1, 1919, ALL-STORY WEEKLY announced the eighty-third hardcover book from its pages, The Gods of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, from A. C. McClurg; Under the Moons of Mars, under the title of A Princess of Mars, had appeared a year earlier from the same publisher. During 1918 fifteen novels from ALL-STORY WEEKLY had seen hardcover, and there had been a half-dozen moving pictures from its stories. The idea of promoting the number of novels that had gone into hardcover from the pages of a magazine was not new. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE ran a full-page house ad listing 20 of its own in the issue of January 7, 1915, and offered to supply them to readers. This was to counter a new policy of THE ARGOSY running a complete novel each issue as did THE POPULAR MAGAZINE.

  Even more remarkable, Edward J. O'Brien's annual collection of the best twenty short stories of the year reprinted two from ALL-STORY WEEKLY for 1918—A Simple Act of Piety, by Achmed Abdullah, and The Ga
llowsmith, by Irvin S. Cobb. In addition, thirty-seven other short stories had rated honorable mention, more than any other all-fiction magazine in America. Among the fantasies in honorable mention were Light, by Achmed Abdullah; Old Aeson, by Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch; Wings, by Achmed Abdullah; The People of the Pit, by A. Merritt; John Ovington Returns, by Max Brand; and Queer, by Philip M. Fisher.

  With the advantage of hindsight it can be said that ALL-STORY WEEKLY in 1919 got off to an auspicious start with a novel of heart and artery operations by Ben Ames Williams, appropriately titled After His Own Heart (January 4-25). The story was quite convincing on the scientific possibility of heart transplants, therefore prescient.

  Davis brought George Allan England back with Cursed (January 11-February 15), a six-part novel of an inhumanly cruel sea captain cursed by the witch-woman mother of a Malayan girl he first kidnapped, then killed, who experiences a long life of tragedy culminating in seeing his grandson, whom he loves, cursed with the foul nature of his own youth. England's story was a borderline fantasy, but the announcement of a six-part novel; The Conquest of the Moon Pool, by A. Merritt (February 15-March 22), was one of the milestones in the history of the scientific romance, and one of the greatest chapters in ALL-STORY WEEKLY'S era.