Alien Universe

by Don Lincoln

  The radio show was short, only 60 minutes, but the newscast style gave verisimilitude to the tale. People believed it and there was some panic, although there is some modern debate as to the degree of the actual alarm. There were some twelve thousand newspaper articles over the next month on the impact of the broadcast. It could be that the country was primed for tales of battle and destruction. A front page article in the October 31 late edition of the New York Times was headlined Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact. As a contrast, the article immediately to the right of it was titled Ousted Jews Find Refuge in Poland after Border Stay. Hitler and the Nazis were beginning their move. The Anschluss, which annexed Austria to Germany, had occurred in March 1938. The occupation of the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia had taken place in early October 1938, after Western powers abandoned the country. The war drums were beating, and a full-scale invasion of the United States didn’t seem as ridiculous as it might today.

  The War of the Worlds was also dramatized in a 1953 movie, in which the Martians had landed in southern California, and their technology had evolved to be able to resist an atomic detonation. The story is similar to the original book, and the Martians again died due to fatal susceptibility to Earth microbes. It was the most economically successful science fiction movie of the year and won three Academy Awards, including one for special effects. The 1953 version appeared right after the UFO frenzy of the late 1940s and during a period of popularity of movies involving flying saucers, space, and Aliens. The movie provided fodder for multiple screenplays, most recently Steven Spielberg’s successful 2005 version.

  Into its second century, The War of the Worlds persists in popularity less for its depiction of Martians than for its drama and its portrayal of mankind’s response to adversity. The story is timeless, but it has surfaced to popular approval at times when it resonated with the public.

  Barsoom

  If The War of the Worlds told us about Aliens, it told us but little. For most of the book, the invaders were faceless enemies, ensconced inside their craft as they ravaged the countryside. The walking tripods, with their powerful ray guns, can be seen as a metaphor for the later Panzers and Stukas of the Nazi blitzkrieg or the more recent “shock and awe” of American escapades in Iraq. Faceless, mechanized, enemies went where they wanted with near impunity. The tripods could have been replaced by robots.

  For a different vision of Martians, we need to turn to another author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was born in Chicago and spent some time in the U.S. army in Arizona. After a medical discharge, he drifted for some years, doing menial jobs. The year 1911 found him working as a pencil sharpener salesman. It was then that he began to write. His first story was Under the Moons of Mars and was serialized in The All-Story, a monthly pulp magazine. This story was retitled A Princess of Mars when it appeared several years later in book form. As his Mars story was coming out, Burroughs also wrote the first of the Tarzan series, published in the same periodical. Burroughs eventually wrote about seventy books and pioneered the idea of exposing his stories across many media outlets, from books, to serializations, to comics and movies. The public couldn’t get enough of Tarzan, and it’s a story we still know today.

  However it was in A Princess of Mars that he wrote of life on our sister planet. He eventually was credited with eleven books in the Barsoom series, with some others written by his son. While these books were never intended to be taken seriously, they were written as if they were totally true stories. The hero, John Carter, was introduced as Burroughs’s family friend, and supposedly had given the manuscript to Burroughs with instructions not to publish it for 21 years.

  The story went something like this. John Carter was a captain who fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. He was a strapping man, 6’2” and every bit the iconic hero. He reveals in the book that he has no memory of childhood, always having been 30 years old. People have grown old around him, yet he never ages.

  Carter was mustered out of the Confederate army and joined forces with a military buddy and began prospecting for gold in the part of the country that later became Arizona. After striking it rich, he and his companion were attacked by Apache Indians, and his friend was killed. Carter retreated into a cave, where he was overcome by fumes and apparently died. And then the fun began.

  Carter awoke in Barsoom, which is the native term for the Red Planet. Burroughs’s Barsoom will be familiar to those who recall Percival Lowell’s Mars. A million years ago, Barsoom was a lush place, covered with oceans. However, in the intervening years, the water evaporated, lost to space. Barsoom was a dying planet, dry and sandy. The residents worked feverishly to build canals to bring water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial regions, trying desperately to keep alive.

  The residents of Barsoom were not only humanoid but very much like Homo sapiens, except for being oviparous. They had navels—in spite of laying eggs—and breasts, assuring the eye-catching covers that were typical of the pulp serials at the time. They lived at least 1,000 years, although it is possible that they lived longer. Their culture required that when Martians reached that age, they travel down the River Iss. This trip nominally brought them to paradise, although, as we will see, the trip was considerably less pleasant than that.

  Martians came in different colors and with different temperaments. They were red, green, yellow, white, and black, and their politics were generally either theocratic or dynastic. Red Martians dominated Barsoom, although this doesn’t mean they had a single, global government. Instead, they were organized into several competing city-states, with the polity Helium being of particular import in the first book. Red Martians were highly civilized, with a strict code of honor. They respected personal property, formed families and strong alliances. Their technology was advanced (especially compared with Burroughs’s Earth) and included flying machines, both civilian and heavily armed warcraft. Barsoomian scientists had mastered genetic engineering, medical transplant techniques, faxes, and television and had incorporated radium into their long-distance weaponry. Radium was discovered in 1898 and first extracted in metallic form in 1910, so this was cutting-edge stuff.

  Red Martians were bred as a hardy race that would help them survive the increasingly dry conditions of Barsoom. They were a mixture of the Yellow, White, and Black Martians, all of whom had nearly died out. While the Martians had mastered advanced technology, they preferred to fight hand to hand with swords and comparable weapons. This makes the descriptions of the battles exciting and vivid.

  Green Martians can be visualized as barbarians. The males are 15 feet tall and the females are 12 feet tall and appear to be the outcome of a genetic experiment gone awry. They were nomadic and warlike. Any enemy captured by a Green Martian was tortured, frequently to death. Rising in the social structure always involved battle, and becoming a leader of the various warring tribes could only be attained by winning mortal combat. There was no family structure in Green Martian civilization; allegiance was only to the tribe.

  Yellow Martians lived in a few small and domed cities near the North Pole. They were exceptionally cruel and used a tractor beam to pull down aircraft so they could enslave the crew. They show up rarely in the series.

  White Martians were once the master race of Barsoom. They were once thought to be extinct, but various isolated populations were revealed over the course of the eleven books. One population called the Lotharians had evolved to be reclusive intellectuals who lived separately from all other Martians and spent their time debating philosophy. Another group called the Therns inhabited the Valley Dor, which was the terminus of the River Iss. The valley was actually populated by vicious creatures controlled by the Thern. These creatures typically killed Barsoomians taking their journey to paradise and ate their flesh.

  Black Martians inhabited a hidden fortress near the South Pole. They called themselves “the First Born” and considered themselves to be unique among the Martians. They sometimes raided the Thern, but t
hey don’t show up often in the series.

  The plot of Barsoom tales are hardly complex. A male hero, noble and brave, is forced to travel to a faraway place to rescue a woman he loves. The woman has been captured by a powerful man who desires her both sexually and as a means to make political gains. Along the way, the hero encounters many adventures: battles, captures, escapes; action is the norm and subtlety rare.

  Burroughs’s Barsoom stories had many themes that would have resonated with his early twentieth-century readers. A civilized, European/American hero enters a barbaric world, which could easily be related to Kipling’s stories of West Asia or tales of the conquest of Africa or the American West. By 1912, the era of frontiers was fading, and Americans were beginning to romanticize their history. The term “spaghetti western” was more than half a century in the future, but Burroughs’s readers would have appreciated Clint Eastwood movies, with a flawed, but fundamentally brave and noble protagonist, a distinctly evil villain, and a brave, but vulnerable, heroine. A lawless world, inhabited by hard men, and a hero who must live by the local rules to survive; the Man with No Name or John Carter of Mars, the tale is a familiar one.

  Another dominant theme in the Barsoom tales is the one of race, which was certainly one to which the readers would be receptive. Just fifty years after the American Civil War, the bulk of readers would have had no difficulty accepting the concept of superior and barbaric races. The era of European colonialism was waning and underwent dramatic change in the aftermath of World War I, which would begin just two years after Under the Moons of Mars was published. The Barsoom series was published through 1943, so it is natural that a series in which differently colored Martians were featured so prominently, each with their own characteristic racial identity, would resonate with Americans who were wrestling with their own racial difficulties.

  Burroughs’s Barsoom series had an indirect impact on the public’s view of Aliens. It never received the publicity of Wells’s work, but it was a tremendous influence on subsequent science fiction writers. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and many other famous science fiction authors grew up reading of Barsoom. James Cameron has stated in interviews that his highly successful Avatar movie was inspired by Burroughs. The popularity of the Tarzan comic strips led to a short spate of Barsoom-oriented comics in the Sunday papers in the early 1940s. And, of course, the 2012 release of John Carter, a big budget. picture bankrolled by the Disney Company, has introduced a whole new generation of viewers to Barsoom. The commercial success of this movie was disappointing to the film’s producers, but it is possible that Burroughs’s impact on the public might increase.

  The Pulps

  Science fiction has gone through many phases over the years. From the 1920s through the late 1940s, the most common form of science fiction was in magazines. As we have seen, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first novel was in serialized form. However, the magazine in which he published it was not a science fiction magazine. The first magazine devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories, had its initial publication in April 1926 and was edited by Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback’s contribution to science fiction has been acknowledged through lending his name to the prestigious Hugo Awards, established in 1953.

  Amazing Stories was published, with some interruptions, for about 80 years. Shortly after the magazine was started, the readership soared to 100,000, although by 1938, it was down to only 15,000. Over the decades, the periodical went through many editors, many publishers, and many visions. Even though it is now acknowledged as the first science fiction magazine (indeed before the term science fiction was even coined), Amazing Stories was soon eclipsed as the leading periodical in the genre.

  If Amazing Stories was the vanguard of the science fiction revolution, the flagship was Astounding Stories of Super Science, which began operations in 1929 and continues today. The name of the magazine underwent many changes over the years and is now Analog: Science Fiction and Fact. Fans refer to the magazine as simply Analog. The onset of John Campbell’s tenure as editor in late 1937 is considered to be the start of the golden age of science fiction, a period that ran until the mid-1950s, at which time Campbell’s strong personality alienated some of his best writers, and they started publishing in other magazines. Plus, as we will see, the science fiction environment changed in the early 1950s.

  Still, Analog introduced to its readers fledgling authors who became some of the most famous writers of science fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard (later the founder of Scientology), Clifford Simak, L. Sprague de Camp, and Henry Kuttner (one of my favorites) and his wife, C. L. Moore. Other new authors who grew to greatness in its pages were Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt, and Robert A. Heinlein.

  The pulps were not held in high regard by the parents of the magazines’ many adolescent readers. Known for lurid covers that frequently featured brass-bikini-clad women in imminent danger of being eaten by a monster or an Alien of one kind or another, the pulps led many a parent to make a disparaging remark about the quality of the literature. While some pulps did try other cover art, including some that was a bit more serious, those issues inevitably sold much more poorly than the ones that showed a lot of skin. Then, as now, sex sells, and sex and danger sell even better.

  Amazing Stories and Analog were by no means the only science fiction magazines out there. Over the years (and especially in the 1930s and 1940s), more than a hundred different magazines were published in this genre and that doesn’t include their cousin pulps, the horror magazines.

  However, while the pulp magazines were very popular among the diehard science fiction audience, they were not considered serious literature and had a relatively small direct impact on the public. Serious people did serious things and certainly didn’t spend their time reading spectacular hoo-hah, although many budding scientists certainly enjoyed the pulps when they were young.

  Flash and Buck

  In order to make a greater impact on the public, science fiction writers had to exploit other media. The big ones in the period of 1920 to 1940 were newspapers, radio, and newsreels. Among the first forays of science fiction into these venues were Buck Rogers and subsequently Flash Gordon.

  Buck Rogers was introduced in Armageddon 2419 A.D., published in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. The story was translated into a syndicated comic strip in January 1929 as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D., by pure coincidence, the same month that Tarzan began as a newspaper comic. While the original Buck Rogers article told the tale of warfare on postapocalyptic Earth, the stories expanded over time. By the 1930s, short films were made, including one for the 1933–1934 World’s Fair called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: An Interplanetary Battle with the Tiger Men of Mars. Serialization was soon to follow.

  If Buck Rogers was the first in this genre, Flash Gordon led the way into the world of Aliens. Flash Gordon was introduced to the public as a hero in a science fiction comic strip that began in January 1934. The comic was inspired by the earlier and successful Buck Rogers strip and was intended to compete directly with it. When the Earth was bombarded by meteors, Flash Gordon and his companions Dale Arden and Doctor Hans Zarkov set out to investigate. Zarkov invented a rocket that allowed them to head into space to determine the meteor’s origin. Originally Zarkov kidnapped Flash and Dale, but Flash quickly became the leader.

  The meteors originated from the planet Mongo, which was led by the despotic and cruel Ming the Merciless. Ming, although an alien, was essentially human with flamboyant dress and classical Persian (Iranian) features of dark skin and a dark and neatly trimmed beard. Fans of the original Star Trek series would recognize Ming as looking like the classic (i.e., original series) Klingon. While Ming the Merciless is the most famous enemy of Flash Gordon, the three companions travelled Mongo for years, encountering the Shark Men, the Hawk Men, and the Lion Men.

  Flash Gordon was also serialized on radio in April 1935 in The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon, which was an adaptation of the comi
c strip. Three film serials were created starring Buster Crabbe: Flash Gordon (1936), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940).

  In the 1930s and even later, movie serials were short films, perhaps 10 minutes long, that told a piece of the story and ended with a cliffhanger. The following week would show the next installment of the story. Moviegoers would attend a movie and see a couple short films, including newsreels, followed by the week’s main attraction or maybe a double feature. In a world in which there was no television, people would go to the movies for entertainment. Even if they weren’t interested in Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, they would see the serial. Through these newspaper comics, film serials, and radio shows, science fiction was being introduced to the general public.

  The 1930s were a dark time for the world. The stock market crash of 1929 had signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. This was followed by a decade of war. Times were harsh, and the movies of the time were used for escape. Science fiction was pure escape, adventures without any real connection to the real world.

  Aliens and the Iron Curtain

  During World War II, people were focused more on defeating the Germans and Japanese than they were questions of outer space. Some people’s priorities remained unchanged, as then-radar instructor and eventually leading science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke bemoaned the failure to ship his beloved issue of Analog (then Astounding Stories) from the United States to Britain, “owing to the war, regular supplies of Astounding Stories had been cut off by the British authorities, who foolishly imagined that there were better uses for shipping space.”