Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  But the comic field found a life-giving new formula with the introduction of the character of Superman in action comics, June, 1938, resulting in a sellout of that magazine, and in the appearance of superman quarterly magazine in May, 1939. Original scripts based on heroic figures, prefer-ably with a dash of superscience and fantasy, became the rage, and nothing could hold the lid on. The two men responsible for the creation of the Superman strip, Jerome Siegel, the writer, and Joseph Shuster, the artist, were old science-fiction fans and long-time friends of Mort Weisinger. Jerome Siegel produced in October, 1932, a crudely mimeographed magazine called simply science fic-tion. To obtain readers he exchanged advertisements with the time traveler. This magazine contained stories under various pen names by the editor, plus some cast-offs con-tributed by kindly authors. From its second issue on, it featured some professional quality cartooned illustrations by Joseph Shuster. Siegel, writing under the name of Bernard J. Kenton, had placed a story with amazing stories, Miracles on Antares. It was held for five years and then returned as no longer suitable. In informing his readers of this fact, Siegel wrote that Kenton

  "was at present working upon a scientific fiction cartoon strip with an artist of great renown." The artist was Joseph Shuster, the year was 1933, and the strip was superman. In the same undated fifth and last issue of science fiction, Mort Weisinger had a Winchellian news column under the pen name of Ian Rectez, which was a partial anagram of his name.

  For five years Siegel and Shuster tried to peddle the Superman strip, meeting rejections at every turn. Among the editors who turned it back was M. C. Gaines. He left Dell to work for National in 1938, and when action comics was projected thought it might prove suitable. Siegel and Shuster had been doing a variety of well-received originals for de-tective comics, and adventure comics, and they were avail-able and cooperative. Superman was given a chance and literally created the comic book industry as an important publishing business.

  By 1941 the various Superman comic books were selling so well that the editorial director of National Comics, Whitney Ellsworth, decided they could use another editor. Since the entire success of superman was based on a background of science fiction, Ellsworth felt Weisinger was ideally qualified. Negotiations were conducted through Leo Margulies, who wisely counseled Weisinger that comic magazines had a greater future than pulps. But almost simultaneously, Mort Weisinger received a letter from Ziff-Davis offering him the editorship of a new slick paper magazine they were planning to issue, popular photography. Weisinger was on the horns of a dilemma. The Ziff-Davis offer carried with it full editor-ship, a challenge, and prestige, but the field was unknown to him. Superman, which required a strong facility at plotting and a comprehensive background in science fiction, was right down his alley. In March, 1941, he decided to stay with superman.

  Then World War II abruptly terminated his stint at National Comics. Happily, his old friend Julius Schwartz, turned down by the army because of poor vision, was taken on as interim editor. In the armed forces, it was Sergeant Mort Weisinger who was assigned to Special Services, working at New Haven as associate editor of Yale's lively paper called the beaver. It was on the train to New York, where he wrote the script for an Army radio show, that he met a tall, attractive registered nurse, Thelma Rudnick. He proposed on the train, and they were married on September 27, 1943. They have two children, a boy and a girl.

  Following his discharge shortly before the end of the war Weisinger took a whirl at nonfiction. His talent for the offbeat and his skill at finding the unusual angle made him a winner from the start. He sold four major articles in one week, including one to coronet, a prestige market. All the research experience and familiarity with interviewing tech-niques gained on the time traveler and the science fic-tion digest paid off as Weisinger grew to become one of the nation's leading article writers, appearing in reader's digest, collier's, saturday evening post, ladies home journal, esquire, cosmopolitan, this week, holiday, redbook, and most of the rest of the galaxy of great American magazines. Eventually a paperback he wrote, 1001

  Valuable Things You Can Get Free, would go into endless editions and be used as the basis of a weekly feature in this week. Weisinger had settled down to a career of free-lancing when superman comics called up and asked when he was coming back to work. Reluctant to part with his newfound prosperity, he finally succumbed to the lure of an all-expense sojourn for himself and family to work on the plotting of a Superman movie in Hollywood as a prelude to his resuming editorial work.

  The story has often been told of the FBI's unsuccessful attempt to stop John W. Campbell from printing atomic energy stories in astounding science-fiction. The story has also been told of the successful mothballing of a Philip Wylie atomic energy story, Paradise Crater, sent to blue book during the war. To those stories may be added two about superman strips with atomic energy plots which the government stopped Mort Weisinger from printing in 1945. So he was off to a lively start. The prosperity of superman had encouraged imitators, the most popular of which was captain marvel, published by Fawcett with continuities written by Eando Binder. National Comics, before World War II, sued Fawcett to "cease and desist" from using that type of character. (Their counsel was the distinguished attorney Louis Nizer.) For nearly a decade the case dragged through the courts. As the years rolled past, many of the superman imitators disappeared, unable to sus-tain novelty and originality in their story lines. Finally Fawcett settled out of court. It was suggested that Fawcett felt the vogue had passed and there was little money to be made from captain marvel and that superman had won a pyrrhic victory. National's answer to that was Mort Weisinger. Rallying his vast background of science-fiction plotting, he began to re-shape the history of superman to make it possible for new, more fascinating adventures to occur. There was precedent. Originally, superman covered ground by tremendous leaps. When the first movie was made, it became obvious that this would make him appear like a kangaroo on the screen, so he was given the power of flight. A new generation of readers was indoctrinated with a background that lent itself to greater thrills.

  Ancient evildoers of Krypton, men with powers ap-proaching that of Superman, readers now learned, had been banished to "The Phantom Zone" from which they could be released as needed to add zest to the continuities. The "worlds of if" device was introduced. This featured things that Superman might have done and what would have hap-pened if he followed that course.

  Most sensationally popular of Weisinger's innovations in the comic was the device of time travel. This astounding new Superman talent opened another dimension of adventure, making it possible for our hero to go into the past and introduce Hercules, Samson, and Atlas into the adventures, or to reach into the future to foil a menace that would not arrive for 1,000 years.

  Frequently, associational characters built a following. This resulted in a proliferation of the Superman Group. The big gun, superman, was published eight times a year and aver-aged one million circulation. Added to this was action com-ics, featuring Supergirl; world's finest comics, where Su-perman appears with Batman, another famed adventure strip hero, whose destinies are guided by Weisinger's friend, Julius Schwartz; Jimmy Olsen, teenage pal of Superman, has his own magazine, as has Lois Lane, Superman's girl; superboy features the adventures of Superman as a boy; adventure comics has Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes. Spe-cial adventures have featured Krypto, the Super Dog. This variation on a theme has prevented youngsters from becom-ing jaded with a single character. Presiding over the entire retinue is Mort Weisinger, who directs the continuity writers (including such science-fiction veterans as Edmond Hamilton, Eando Binder, and the originator, Jerry Siegel, who is still active) into the channels he considers most appealing to his audience. Thus, in the most direct way, from origin to present-day, the Superman strips and books are the spawn of the science-fiction magazines; created by a science-fiction fan, from ideas obtained from science-fiction stories, run by a former science-fiction editor and to a great degree written by
science-fiction authors. Theoretically, popular superman should repay its debt to science fiction by a feedback system as its readers outgrow the comics. The reason this has not happened to any great degree since 1952, when science fiction went sophisticated, is because no "bridge" magazines exist to wean the jaded away from the comics and into slick science fiction. Weisinger's thrilling wonder stories, startling stories, and captain future performed that role earlier buttressed by amazing, fantastic adventures, and planet stories. Should such magazines come back on the scene, they will find Mort Weisinger with his Superman Group conscientiously continu-ing to do the spadework for them.

  7 JOHN WYNDHAM

  The entire world, except for a few fortunates, is blinded by a pyrotechnic display of green light in the sky—origin un-known. Millions of giant, walking plants—offshoot of some misguided experiment—move into cities to kill and eat the helpless masses. On the face of it, something ground out by some early science-fiction pulpster, The Revolt of the Triffids by John Wyndham was scarcely the stuff the mass readership of the January 6, 1951, issue of collier's might be expected to find as a five-part novel, illustrated in full color.

  Who was John Wyndham?

  A quick check revealed that John Wyndham had appeared for the first time in the September, 1950, amazing stories, as author of The Eternal Eve, a story of a Venusian maid so revolted by the notion of female dependence upon the male that she shot all of the opposite sex who came within rifle range of her cave hideout until the "right" one happened along. The rest of the case was quickly cracked. Howard Browne, amazing stories editor, admitted Fred Pohl was the agent. Pohl, in turn, felt it was no secret that the man behind the nom de plume John Wyndham was none other than John Beynon Harris. To most new readers who followed the story's history, as with a title change (to The Day of the Triffids) it was published in hard covers by Doubleday in 1954, appeared in paperback from Popular Library in 1952, and was evaluated for moving picture production, this merely deepened the mystery. Who was John Beynon Harris?

  The baptismal name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, improvised politically to keep all branches of the family happy after the birth of its recipient July 10, 1903, in the village of Knowle, Warwickshire, England. The father, George Beynon Harris, was a barrister at law of Welsh descent and the mother, Gertrude Parkes, was the daughter of a Birmingham ironmaster, one of the last of a then vanishing breed.

  There was one other child in the family, a brother, Vivian, who arrived two and one-half years later, so there was companionship and real friendship. Eventually, Vivian would attend The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and tread the boards for a period. While he was not lonely, in other respects John's early life was chronically unsettled.

  His parents separated when he was eight. He saw his mother primarily during school holidays and attended seven schools in all as she impulsively changed her places of res-idence. By the time he was 11, John learned that the easiest way to get along with other children, or other adults for that matter, was to pretend enthusiasm for majority interests.

  Out of school at 18, he was a farm pupil for a while, then thought he might follow his father's footsteps into law. An Oxford tutor was obtained to help him prime for entrance exams. These he failed because he spent too much time in the Science Museum at Oxford.

  A small allowance from his parents minimized the urgency of earning a livelihood, but he nevertheless attempted to make a go in advertising. This helped develop some of his writing skills, which he utilized to phrase occasional bits of fiction. Most were rejected, but a few minor pieces were published in London newspapers.

  The writing of weird fiction fascinated him and he tried a good many stories with singular lack of success. The turning point in his writing career came in 1929, when he happened to pick up a copy of the American magazine, amazing stories, which had been left in a London hotel lounge. He was fascinated by the believability of the stories and searched out others in Woolworth's for 3d each (about 7 cents), less than British juvenile paperbacks cost. The reason for the low price was that out-of-date American magazines returned to the publishers were used as ballast on ships going to England, Australia, and South Africa, which incidentally created a science-fiction audience in all of those nations. As a youngster Harris had read H. G. Wells, "with devo-tion." At 13 he had written a superscience masterpiece in-volving flying armored cars which brought down Zeppelins bombing London by firing enormous fishhooks at them.

  His first sale to a science-fiction magazine was a "slogan." The February, 1930, air wonder stories offered "One Hun-dred Dollars in Gold" to the reader who could come up with a catchy phrase that best typified its contents. The announce-ment that John Beynon Harris had won first prize with "Future Flying Fiction," as well as his letter explaining why he had selected the alliterative phrase, was published in the September, 1930, wonder stories, but it was a somewhat hollow victory since air wonder stories combined with wonder stories after its May, 1930, issue, and the slogan was never used. Greatly encouraged, nevertheless, Harris sat down to write for the science-fiction magazines in earnest. The paradoxes evidenced by Wells' The Time Machine had always fascinated him, so he wrote a story in which men of the distant future forcibly evacuated their ancestors from an earlier time period to secure a lusher planet for themselves. The working title of the story was The Refugee. It was announced as Two Worlds to Barter and published as Worlds to Barter in the May, 1931, wonder stories. Considerable controversy arose as to its plausibility, spearheaded by the teen-age Henry Kuttner, who would eventually be guilty of many blatant, perforce ingenious time travel paradoxes himself. A series of remarkable stories from Harris followed in quick succession. The first was The Lost Machine (amazing stories, April, 1932), concerning a Martian robot stranded on earth, who is so appalled by the hopelessly backward state of civilization that he commits suicide. This story was one of the earliest attempts at treating the robot sympathetically, and, in the process, offering social criticism. Eventually his ap-proach would all but replace the notion of the robot as a Frankenstein monster, as the concept was developed by John W. Campbell, Jr., Eando Binder, Lester del Rey, and Isaac Asimov. The Venus Adventure (wonder stories, May, 1932), was an interplanetary adventure that placed the stress on the sociological results of the impact of an alien environment on diverse philosophical outlooks. The Venus Adventure was remarkable even by today's standards for both content and story. Superlatives were definitely in order for Exiles on Asperus, Harris' next story, a novelette in wonder stories quarter-ly, Winter, 1933. For that year, the story can honestly be termed avant garde. Earthmen discover members of their race who have been enslaved for several generations by aliens on whose world they have crash-landed. They defeat the batlike otherworlders, but find that those born in bondage are so conditioned to their masters by religious doctrine that they will fight to the death rather than be freed. The

  "liberators" from earth have no alternative but to leave them in slav-ery. Openly in Exiles on Asperus, more subtly in certain other of his stories, Harris flays hypocrisy in religious teaching. Though his early work possesses the strong element of action then preferred by the science-fiction magazines, they are, nevertheless, grimly serious social and religious satires and turn on philosophic and psychological pivots. Harris started at a level which most of his contemporaries would never attain, either in content or style.

  Not all of Harris' stories of the 1933 and 1934 period were winners. Many had been written as early as 1931, rejected, and then accepted upon resubmission. One such story, The Moon Devils (wonder stories, April, 1934), was originally prepared as a straight weird-horror story, rejected by weird tales, and then redone as an interplanetary with a lunar locale. Somehow Harris never seemed to be able to make it as a weird story writer, one of his few stories of that type to be published. The Cathedral Crypt (marvel tales, April, 1935), involving the sealing alive in mortar by six monks of the two witnesses to their similar entombment of a nun, appeared only because it was
donated to the publica-tion. The best of his early time travel stories was Wanderers of Time, wherein four different groups of humans from progres-sively distant eras of our future assemble in a period when the ants are the supreme rulers of the earth's surface, com-manding elaborate robots to enforce their domination. The concept that man would not continue to evolve and prevail was a shocker in its day.