Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  While the science-fiction magazines fascinated him, he felt that an esprit de corps was lacking. This same feeling was held by others. A Chicago science-fiction fan, Walter Dennis, together with Raymond A. Palmer of Milwaukee (who had not yet cracked the professional science-fiction market), helped to organize the Science Correspondence Club in 1929. This was intended to further the discussion of science through correspondence among interested science-fiction readers, par-ticularly authors. The first issue of a mimeographed bulletin called the comet (later cosmology) from this club was dated May, 1930. Allen Glasser corresponded with Walter Dennis about the Science Correspondence Club and decided to form a similar organization, which he called The Scienceers. The charter meeting, attended by four, was held in the Bronx on Decem-ber 11, 1929. The first elected president of The Scienceers was Warren Fitzgerald, a Negro professional, about thirty years of age, at whose home in Harlem meetings were held. Weisinger joined immediately upon hearing of the group and became one of the most active members, serving as treasurer and pressing for the publication of a club bulletin.

  This materialized as the planet (first issue dated July, 1930), with Glasser as editor and Weisinger as associate editor. While the Science Correspondence Club's comet was mainly a sophomoric rehash of fundamental science, The Scienceers' planet, in a sprightly fashion, placed more em-phasis on science fiction, the planet (which lasted six is-sues) was actually the first of the science-fiction fan maga-zines, which today number perhaps 300.

  The club received a publicity break when Allen Glasser won a $20 third prize in science wonder quarterly's competition, "What I Have Done To Spread Science Fic-tion." His prize-winning entry, which appeared in the Spring, 1930, issue described the club and attracted inquiries from many parts of the country (the founding of two other chap-ters was attempted), and was responsible for the valuable addition to the club roster of Julius Schwartz, a noted collec-tor of science fiction. Schwartz formed a friendship with Mort Weisinger which was to become lifelong.

  Hugo Gernsback, publisher of wonder stories and science wonder quarterly, became interested in the group and made arrangements for a meeting to be held at New York's Ameri-can Museum of Natural History. He sent to that meeting his editor, David Lasser, who had just formed The American Interplanetary Society, which then seemed even more crack-pot and far out than a literary discussion group on science fiction. For that matter, the first issue of the bulletin of the american interplanetary society (June, 1930), was a four-page mimeographed affair, even less pretentious than The Scienceers' planet. Lasser exerted considerable pressure on The Scienceers to merge with The American Interplanetary Society. Only the older Warren Fitzgerald joined. When the other Scienceers members appeared reluctant, payment for rental of the hall failed to materialize from wonder stories. The club broke apart in violent disagreement as to whether they should foot the obligation. In retrospect, of course, a merger with The American Interplanetary Society, which has since become The American Rocket Society, the world's most respected civilian rocket group and publisher of astronautics, a mag-azine almost as impressive in size as good housekeeping, would scarcely have been called a sad fate.

  While notices of The Scienceers had appeared every Fri-day in the now defunct new york world, Glasser and Weisinger yearned for greater recognition. One day they called up the bronx home news (now combined with the new york post) and informed the editor that the great British savant, Sir Edgar Ray Merritt, was to speak before the next meeting of the Scienceers, the only American speaking engagement he had agreed to. The name had been cobbled together from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Cummings, and A. Merritt, but the bronx home news didn't know that, and the paper ran fourteen column-inches about the glories of The Scienceers and their distinguished guest speaker.

  This tomfoolery was a prelude to more constructive things. Prominent readers, writers, and collectors of science fiction received a circular announcing the monthly publication of the time traveler, the first fan magazine devoted entirely to science fiction and intended to fill the void left by the planet's demise. Allen Glasser and Julius Schwartz held top editorial posts, but Mort Weisinger, as associate editor, was one of the publication's mainstays. He attempted the first history of science fiction on record, beginning in the February, 1932, issue of the time traveler with Part II (the mystery of what happened to Part I has never been ex-plained), and creditably carried through as far as Jules Verne, where he terminated it after eight published install-ments. Winchell-type reporting was introduced to science fiction by Weisinger with his lively news column, "Out of the Ether," which reflected a wide correspondence with popular contemporary science-fiction writers.

  The arrival in New York of Conrad H. Ruppert, a young printer from Angola, Indiana, who enjoyed the enviable dis-tinction of having won a $50 second prize in the "What I Have Done to Spread Science Fiction" contest with his sug-gestion of "Science Fiction Week," offered an opportunity to broaden the time traveler's horizons. He agreed to set up in type and print the periodical for nothing more than the cost of paper. This offer he implemented with action, and the March, 1932, issue was turned out on a printing press. Weisinger saw other potentialities in the printing press. Taking the best of his handwritten manuscripts, The Price of Peace, he sneaked into his father's factory after hours and used an office typewriter to put it into proper form for submission. He gained moral support from Dr. Robert B. Dow, a professor of English at New York University, who made some minor corrections and suggested that the story might be salable. He had been anticipated. When Ruppert, as Solar Publica-tions, turned the first of a series of pamphlets off the press, the title read The Cavemen of Venus by Allen Glasser. Weisinger's The Price of Peace followed it a few months later. In this tale, an American scientist announces he has discovered a green ray which will cause an atomic explosion. A number of U.S. naval vessels disintegrate in a great billow of smoke as the world watches. Major wars end out of fear of the "ultimate" weapon. But the entire test had been a hoax, believed only because of the scientist's reputation.

  Encouraged by the friendly comments of those who paid the full retail price of six cents in stamps for the pamphlet, Weisinger took the story over to amazing stories editor, T. O'Conor Sloane, who accepted it and published it in the November, 1933, issue. The $25 Weisinger got for the story was invested in a second-hand typewriter and thus began a career.

  But Allen Glasser again had beaten Weisinger to the punch in this official contest between them by placing a short story, Across the Ages, in which a man imagines himself back in Rome during a New York heat wave, in the August-September, 1933, amazing stories. When the story ap-peared, readers protested to Editor Sloane about the very close similarity between Glasser's story and The Heat Wave by Marion Ryan and Robert Ord, which had appeared in the April, 1929, issue of munsey's magazine. A careful check of the two stories indicates that very few changes were made in Glasser's story.

  Sloane was fit to be tied. He had just been through apolo-gizing in print to A. Merritt (amazing stories, June, 1933) for "many similarities in descriptions, characterization and situations" in the story Beyond the Veil of Time by B. H. Barney, published in the Fall-Winter, 1932, issue of amazing stories quarterly, to those in two of Merritt's books, The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss. Sloane was at the moment involved in the very embarrass-ing situation of having published in his February, 1933, issue a story called The Ho-Ming Gland by Malcolm R. Afford, which was identical with The Gland Men of the Island by the same author published by wonder stories two years earlier in its January, 1931, number. It developed that Afford had first sent the story to Sloane more than four years before. When after a year it did not appear, he mailed a copy to wonder stories, who accepted and published it. Characteris-tically, Sloane had just gotten around to pulling it out of inventory. This latest situation with Glasser, following on the heels of the others, was just too much. Any of Glasser's friends with professional aspirations were not welcome.

  This made final
a split that had begun earlier when Weis-inger, Schwartz, Ruppert, Maurice Ingher, and Forrest J. Ackerman had formed a corporation for the publication of science fiction digest, a semiprofessional magazine along the lines of the time traveler. Publication of the new magazine began with its September, 1932, issue. The Octo-ber, 1932, issue incorporated the time traveler but with-out Glasser. the science fiction digest (later called fantasy maga-zine) was a remarkable publication. Until its demise with the January, 1937, number, its pages comprised a virtual ency-clopedia of information concerning the science-fiction world: news, biography, bibliography, criticism, exposes, as well as pastiches, poetry, and fiction. Professionals contributed fiction gratis, much of which later found its way into the newsstand magazines. Its most impressive achievement was assembling a round-robin story titled Cosmos, each part complete in itself, written by eighteen authors and running 5,000 to 10,000 words an installment. The contributors read like a "Who's Who" of the period, including A. Merritt, E. E. Smith, John W. Campbell, Ralph Milne Farley, Otis Adelbert Kline, Da-vid H. Keller, Edmond Hamilton, Raymond A. Palmer, Ar-thur J. Burks, Eando Binder, P. Schuyler Miller, Francis Flagg, Bob Olsen, L. A. Eshbach, Abner J. Gelula, J. Harvey Haggard, E. Hoffman Price and Rae Winters (a pen name of Palmer's). The key idea man of the publication was Weisinger. He gathered much of the hot news and showed considerable skill at interviews of well-known authors, editors, and artists. As a by-product of this labor of love, he uncovered numerous pen names of well-known authors and used this material as the basis of the article "Why They Use Pen Names," published in the November, 1934, author & journalist. Willard E. Hawkins, the publisher, while sympathetic to science fiction, as an occasional writer himself, was unable to pay Weisinger for the article, but offered free advertising space in exchange. Weisinger suggested to Julius Schwartz that they seize the offer to create and promote The Solar Sales Service, a literary agency specializing in the placement of fantasy. Their "stable" of authors grew as that advertisement got results, including Earl and Otto Binder, the two brothers who then cooperatively wrote under the name of Eando Binder, J. Harvey Haggard, H. P. Lovecraft, Ralph Milne Farley, Da-vid H. Keller, Henry Hasse, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, and Edmond Hamilton. Several of the stories they received were rejects which the author had been unable to sell. For these, the ingenious agents resorted to the technique of chang-ing the titles and retyping the first few pages, then resubmit-ting them. The results were creditable. Their most outstanding achievement was handling the out-put of the brilliant young science-fiction star, Stanley G. Weinbaum. They sold Weinbaum consistently to the leading market of the day, astounding stories. Their adroitness with that talented author, who was to leave his mark on an entire generation of writers, attracted other high caliber clients, including John Taine (the science-fiction pen name of Eric Temple Bell, well known as a mathematician and histo-rian of mathematics) whose Twelve Eighty Seven they placed in astounding stories.

  Added to his editorial experience of working on the planet, the time traveler, and science fiction digest, Weisinger also had background as editor of New York Uni-versity's daily newspaper and the nyu medley, the institu-tion's magazine. Editing as a career now interested him. He was also steadily making sales to professional magazines including The Prenatal Plagiarism (wonder stories, Janu-ary, 1935), about a present-day author ruined by pre-publication of his novel before his birth; and Pigments Is Pigments (wonder stories, March, 1935), built around the use of a drug that can turn a white man's skin black over-night.

  But Weisinger was not primarily interested in becoming a fiction writer, though he qualified for the American Fiction Guild, where eligibility required the sale of 100,000 words of fiction, and became its secretary. One evening, at a meeting, he heard that one of the editors of Standard Magazines had quit. Editorial director at Standard was a former literary agent named Leo Margulies, who guided the destiny of between forty and fifty pulp magazines. Weisinger had previ-ously entered a contest sponsored by popular detective, one of Margulies' brood, which paid five cents a word for each word short of 1,000 in which a good whodunit could be written. He made a favorable impression on Margulies by compressing a salesworthy plot into 500 words for a story called Rope Enough. When he approached Margulies at a meeting and asked for the job, he got it, at $15 a week. At the age of twenty, Mort Weisinger was on his way.

  Now fate played a hand. Hugo Gernsback's wonder sto-ries, which had survived six years of the worst depression in the nation's history, could no longer pay its way. Standard Magazines purchased it early in 1936.

  Weisinger was the logical man to edit the publication, except that Standard Magazines had a policy that every story had to be approved by three editors. A limited pool of harried and overworked men were cumulatively editing over forty magazines and none of them knew anything of science fiction except Weisinger. They tended to OK anything he wanted without even giving it a reading. Thus Weisinger "beat the system" and became editor of the magazine in fact as well as theory. Because of tough competition in adult science fiction from astounding stories, Margulies and pub-lisher Ned Pines decided to aim for the teenage market. They changed the title to thrilling wonder stories (Standard Magazines were trademarked as the "Thrilling" group), and established a policy of action covers, preferably with a mon-ster involved. So frequent and varied were the monsters on thrilling wonder stories covers, and so bulging their eyes, that the term Bug Eyed Monster (BEM) originated and was fostered in that publication. Despite the raucousness of the covers and the juvenile slant, Weisinger, through his knowledge of the field, managed to retain the magazine's readers by securing authors of considerable appeal. From the pages of science fiction digest he reprinted two A. Merritt stories that had never previously appeared in a professional magazine. He secured original stories from Otis Adelbert Kline, who had achieved a sub-stantial following for his imitations of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Posthumously, works of Stanley G. Weinbaum were run, and John W. Campbell became a regular contributor.

  Until then, editing a science-fiction magazine had consisted of reading the manuscripts that were submitted and picking the best. Weisinger switched to feeding authors ideas and ordering a story of predetermined length built around an agreed-upon theme. Serials were out of the question for the bi-monthly thrilling wonder stories, so authors were en-couraged to write series using proven popular characters. Henry Kuttner, who had hitherto written only weird stories, was induced to try science fiction and was given the idea for a group of stories on the theme of a Hollywood on the Moon; Eando Binder enthralled readers with the adventures of Anton York, an immortal man, at the same time that he was building a reputation for the nom de plume of Gordon A. Giles for a sequence of interplanetary adventures, the "via" stories; John W. Campbell used a light touch in popu-larizing Penton and Blake, who cavorted around the solar system because they were wanted by the authorities on Earth; a wild animal hunter for earth zoos, Gerry Carlyle, provided an excellent base for an interplanetary series by Arthur K. Barnes; and Ray Cummings revived "Tubby," a paunchy character he had popularized fifteen years earlier, who dreams wild scientific adventures.

  Weisinger found that discovering a good cover situation in a story was not always possible; so his policy was to give a provocative idea to an artist and then have the author write a story around the artwork. This was to become a common practice.

  Anticipating teachers' reservations about their students reading anything as garish as thrilling wonder stories, Mort Weisinger bluffed the educators into a state of open-mouthed bafflement by featuring, on the same cover as Dream Dust of Mars by Manly Wade Wellman, an article by Sir James Jeans on Giant and Dwarf Stars (February, 1938). Along with Hollywood on the Moon by Henry Kuttner, young readers were initiated into the mysteries of Eclipses of the Sun by no less an authority than Sir Arthur Eddington (April, 1938).

  By mid-1938 thrilling wonder stories' sales were en-couraging enough to warrant either more frequent (monthly) publication or a companion magazine. The p
ublishers decided on a companion to be titled startling stories, a title Weisinger had created in his short story Thompson's Time Traveling Theory (fantasy magazine, January, 1937).

  Remembering the popularity of the complete novels in the old amazing stories quarterly, Weisinger instituted the same policy for the new magazine, leading off its first, Janu-ary, 1939, issue with The Black Flame, a previously unpub-lished work by Stanley G. Weinbaum. The new magazine was an instant success, frequently outselling thrilling wonder stories.

  When Weisinger took his editorial post with Standard, he sold his interest in the Solar Sales Service to Julius Schwartz, who was still editing fantasy magazine. Busi-ness forced Conrad H. Ruppert to cease gratuitous printing of the publication, and after a switch to another printer for a few issues, the magazine quit publication with the January, 1937, number. The science-fiction fan world collapsed into dwindling juvenile pockets of interest with the removal of this central focus.

  But Weisinger played a major role in reviving science-fiction fandom in late 1938 when he made appearances at local and regional meetings, and most particularly when he decided to review science-fiction fan magazines, giving prices and addresses, as a regular column in startling stories. He also gave major support to The First World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York in 1939, by con-tributing publicity, money, auction material, and program talent, and by bringing Leo Margulies and a dozen big-name authors to the affair with him. It paid off when time and the new yorker gave major write-ups to the event. It was at this convention that Margulies went into a huddle with Weisin-ger in back of the hall and conceived captain future, a quarterly based on the adventures of that heroic character. Weisinger also developed new writers by conducting an Amateur Story Contest. His most notable find was Alfred Bester, who was to become internationally known for his The Demolished Man. Bester's first story, The Broken Axiom, a tale of the possibility of two objects simultaneously occupying the same space, appeared in the April, 1939, thrilling wonder stories. Another accomplishment was convincing the sons of Edgar Rice Burroughs, John and Hulbert, to write The Man Without a World (June, 1939) one of the earlier tales of the thousand-year spaceship and the first of a number of stories they did for him. He was also responsible for introducing Alex Schomburg, master of the air brush, to science-fiction illustrating. From 1939 to 1941, while Weisinger was performing a yeoman editorial job for Standard, comic books had mushroomed into a publishing phenomenon. From the first of the "modern" comic books, funnies on parade, published in 1933 by M. C. Gaines of Dell, until 1939, growth in this field had been of only modest proportions. Most comic magazines were reprints of nationally syndicated strips until the appear-ance of detective comics, dated January, 1937, by the National Company, which had entered the comic magazine business in 1934. Historians tend to lose perspective of why original comic features came into existence in the comic magazines. It was not out of any desire to be creative but because most of the obtainable worthwhile syndicated daily and Sunday strips were contracted for. As the field broadened, it became increasingly difficult to obtain suitable reprints.