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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  In June, 1911, Munsey ordered the "class" covers taken off THE CAVALIER and colorful pulp action substituted in their place. The stories were all to be illustrated inside the magazine, with the title lettering drawn by the artists. The next month, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and THE ARGOSY received the same treatment, both on covers and inside illustrations.

  The interiors were particularly graphic and greatly enhanced the magazines. With the changed covers, the loud, familiar style of art that would become the trademark of the pulps for the next forty years emerged full-blown.

  THE CAVALIER, which had the lowest circulation (even below that of specialized THE RAILROAD MAN'S MAGAZINE), was given the standard Munsey remedy (or was it actually the Bob Davis cure?), consisting of lavishly stepping up the quantity and quality of science fiction in its pages.

  The most promising science-fiction writer on the American scene was the journalist-astronomer Garrett Putnam Serviss. Born at Sharon Springs, New York, March 24, 1851. Serviss' first love was astronomy, and he spent four years at Cornell majoring in science, graduating in 1872. Another two years at law was taken at Columbia College Law School, which he left in June, 1884, and he was admitted to the bar the same month.

  His heart was in journalism, for he went to work as a reporter on THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE. Then he shifted to THE NEW YORK SUN, where he spent ten years as night editor. He worked for Charles Dana, who liked his articles on astronomy, featuring them on the editorial page. Talks he delivered on astronomy proved so popular that he resigned from THE NEW YORK SUN and made a living at lecturing and free-lance writing.

  To capitalize on the sensation created by the serialization of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds in COSMOPOLITAN in 1897, which was syndicated by two newspapers in the United States, Serviss accepted a commission to write a sequel. The result was Edison's Conquest of Mars, which ran early in 1898 in those same newspapers that had published The War of the Worlds. Hastily written, but impressively imaginative, Serviss' effort had Thomas Alva Edison gather the great minds of the world about him, build a space ship armed with a distintegrator ray, and journey to Mars to inflict upon its evil denizens a defeat which resulted in the destruction of their ancient civilization.

  Though the bulk of his work was in popular science features, he went on to write and syndicate The Moon Metal, which enjoyed a good sale in book form and was reprinted in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. Following this with The Columbus of Space, he became an important figure in science fiction. THE SCRAP BOOK, having published The Sky Pirates, was receptive to anything new he had to offer. He sent them a novel which was to prove his masterpiece, The Second Deluge. He was mailed on April 14, 1911, a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars in payment for the novel, approximately seventy-five thousand words long. His residence was then 8 Middagh Street, Brooklyn, New York.

  Though purchased by THE SCRAP BOOK, The Second Deluge never appeared in that magazine. Readers of THE SCRAP BOOK during 1910 and 1911, finding 120 or more pages of advertising per issue, understandably might have concluded that here was one of the most successful of magazines. They were not aware that all the advertisements sold to MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE were repeated free of charge in THE SCRAP BOOK. In part this was to offset the sliding circulation of MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, and in part it was to make THE SCRAP BOOK look like a tremendously thick bargain for ten cents, and thereby help to sustain it.

  The SCRAP BOOK was scheduled to be combined with THE CAVALIER beginning with the issue of January, 1912. The new title would be THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK, with nothing but the fiction being carried over. The original concept of THE SCRAP BOOK would be discarded.

  The cover of the July, 1911, issue of THE CAVALIER illustrated The Second Deluge, and the novel was unquestionably the greatest single tale of science fiction published by the Munsey magazines up to that time, and the finest story on the theme of Noah and the Ark in a modern tense. The story involves the discovery by a scientist, Cosmo Versal, that within a year the earth will pass through a small nebula composed of water and that the condensation will leave a residual layer of liquid six miles deep around the earth. He builds a gigantic ark, in which he duplicates Noah's feat of accommodating males and females of all manner of creatures on the face of the globe.

  The deluge arrives as predicted, and the ark sets sail. The description of the world catastrophe is superb, and the handling of the interplay of human personalities is a totally unexpected "plus" for so early a period in science fiction. Added to that was the fecundity of intriguing situations the author was able to derive from the central catastrophe. Serviss' chief inspirator was Jules Verne. He had dedicated his book The Columbus of Space to that pioneer science-fiction writer, and in The Second Deluge the ark meets with a French submarine appropriately named the Jules Verne.

  The Second Deluge went into hardcovers, selling for $1.50 from McBride, Nast & Company, March, 1912. It contained four illustrations by George Varian drawn especially for the book. It would later be reprinted by AMAZING STORIES in three installments (August-October, 1926); amazing stories quarterly (Winter, 1933); and fantastic NOVELS (July, 1948). Each reprinting would contain a new set of illustrations by Frank R. Paul, Leo Morey, and Lawrence (professional name of Lawrence Sterne Stevens), respectively. Typical reactions from readers on the 1948 reprinting were: "A truly great story," "Man, oh, man. What a treat!" and "Couldn't have been better."

  The same issue of THE CAVALIER contained a short science-fiction novel by George Allan England, The Ribbon of Fate, a well-written effort in which a plot by the assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy to permit the Japanese to enter Pearl Harbor and take over Hawaii is uncovered and foiled.

  England had been turning out science fiction intermittently since 1905, and much of it was good. He was a developing writer, growing in imagination and ability with each story. The August, 1911, issue of THE CAVALIER published the first installment of a four-part novel by him titled The Elixer of Hate, which made it instantly apparent that he ranked with Serviss as one of the two modern leaders of American science fiction. The novel is a variant of the Elixer of Life theme. An old man near death, Dr. Granville Dennison, learns that a scientist living on the Mediterranean island of Cette has discovered a chemical that will prolong life. Dr. Dennison takes a draft of the potion, against the protests of its discoverer, Pagani. Within days he begins to grow younger and agrees to remain with Pagani so that observations can be made of his progress. As the years disappear, he falls in love with the scientist's niece, and then discovers to his horror that he has stepped into the quicksands of youthwardness and is rapidly becoming a boy again. Discovering that the scientist had killed eighteen people for earlier experimental work and blind with hatred because of his ironic fate, Dennison pretends to have reverted to a child's mentality. He practices archery with a boy's toy, kills Pagani with the arrow, and then commits suicide.

  The strong influences of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rapacinni's Daughter" can be found in the description of the garden and the characterization. The powerful evidence of H. G. Wells' method is present here, as it is in much of England's science fiction. There are crudities, but there are also passages of great beauty and feeling. There is the strong possibility that F. Scott Fitzgerald received inspiration from England's novel for his short masterpiece, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which was collected in his first book of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920). In Fitzgerald's story, a man is born old, almost seventy, and gradually grows younger. He marries, but continues to become even more youthful, eventually ending as a baby in a crib.

  Fitzgerald as a boy was inordinately fond of Horatio Alger and G. A. Henty, and these would inevitably lead him to the adventure pulp magazines as he grew older. His favorite writer was H. G. Wells, which would have inclined him strongly toward fantasy and science fiction.

  Some sort of a high point in the career of THE CAVALIER in its emphasis on science fiction was certainly reached with its November, 1911, issue, when renowned cover artist
Modest Stein illustrated a scene from a new four-part novel by the author of the Hawkins series, Edgar Franklin, titled The Person of the Pyramids. An ancient Egyptian mummy revived by Ludwig Schlumpf, Ph.D., develops to be a one-time king, and he finds it difficult to adjust to a world where his authority means little. There is a broad note of humor and a faint touch of satire which seem to make the story an expansion of Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy." Its appearance made a total of three out of four serials in THE CAVALIER science fiction that issue, the other two being installments of the Serviss and England stories.

  THE CAVALIER, in absorbing THE SCRAP BOOK with its issue of January, 1912, became the first weekly pulp magazine in history. Faced with two unprofitable publications, THE SCRAP BOOK and THE CAVALIER, Frank A. Munsey had superimposed a change upon them. He would see if there was room for a weekly in a field as rapidly expanding as the pulp adventure magazines.

  He was too wise to test the possibility with THE ARGOSY or THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, both of which were making money, particularly after the debacle he had created with the initially successful THE SCRAP BOOK. It was important that the experiment be made, for THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, with its twice-a-month schedule, was cutting deep into his magazines' sales because of the small amount of waiting time between serial installments. When THE CAVALIER had run Haggard's Morning Star, readers had to wait eight months to get it all. Had it appeared in THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, it would have been four months, but in a weekly it would be two months or less. No one objected to so short a wait for serials.

  Another factor that induced the change in Munsey's mind was the advent of still another pulp action magazine, ADVENTURE, issued by the Ridgway Company, publishers of EVERYBODY'S MAGAZINE. They had the money to finance a good magazine, and Erman Jesse Ridgway, having worked for Frank A. Munsey, knew a great deal about the ingredients that went into an adventure magazine. The first issue of ADVENTURE was dated November, 1910, and was edited by Duncan Norton-Taylor. It ran 192 pages, but sold for fifteen cents, five cents more than Munsey's pulps. Part of the extra revenue went back into payments for authors, and from it's earliest issues ADVENTURE used old Munsey favorites like George Allan England, William Wallace Cook, William Tillinghast Eldridge, and Frank Condon. Additionally, they had such developing talent as Talbot Mundy, Theodore Goodrich Roberts, Damon Runyon, and William Hope Hodgson. They printed little fantasy or science fiction, and what they did print was peripheral, borderline material.

  Pulp magazines could now be termed a "field."

  8. GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND AND "THE SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE"

  THE CONVERSION to weekly of THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK was also marked by a cheapening of the covers, reproductions being reduced to two colors. The spearhead story to engage the public was a new George Allan England novel that was destined to make history, Darkness and Dawn. Like many other of the fictional milestones that appeared in Munsey magazines, its writing and appearance were no accident. Robert H. Davis had helped England in the plotting. The story had been prepared well in advance, payment of five hundred dollars for fifty thousand words having been sent to England August 23, 1911.

  The plot of this story has become a standard. A secretary, Beatrice Kendrick, and her boss, a young engineer named Allan Stern, awake at some indeterminate future date in the ruins of an office high up in New York's Metropolitan Tower.

  Only the steel skeletons of a few skyscrapers still remain in a deserted city. Full-size trees now grow between the buildings. It is estimated the two have remained in a state of suspended animation for fifteen hundred years. The attempts of the new Adam and Eve to build a life for themselves and their encounters with a murderous race of blue-black distorted, misshapen creatures that may have conceivably descended from man provide danger and drama. Finally they leave the cadaverous wastes of Manhattan to try their fortunes across the river.

  The novel had all the elements of the most popular science fiction: a great catastrophe, a strange locale, love interest, undreamed-of dangers, fast action, and high escape.

  Readers of 1912 never forgot the story. A. J. Liebling, of THE NEW YORKER, more than fifty years later was haunted by the memory of England's story, which he had read serialized daily in THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL, beginning with the edition of March 4, 1912, not much more than a month after it concluded in the January 20, 1912, issue of THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK. It had been retitled The Last New Yorkers, "A Weird Story of Love and Adventure Amid the Ruins of a Fallen Metropolis," and may possibly have even been syndicated in other papers.

  Under the title of That Was New York, "To Him She Clung," Liebling told of looking up the old newspaper in the New York Library and reminisced about his feelings then and his adult interpretation now of that story at a length of twenty-six columns for the October 12, 1963, THE NEW YORKER. Sadly, for all his great allusion to scholarly research, he had not the slightest notion that The Last New Yorkers had first appeared in THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK as Darkness and Dawn, that together with two later sequels it had been published in hardcovers by Small, Maynard and Company in 1914 and seen at least three printings, or that it was reprinted complete in FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, August, 1940. (After Liebling's death, it appeared in hardcovers again from Thomas Bourgey and Company in 1965.) He was not even aware that there were probably fifty thousand people familiar with Darkness and Dawn and that there had been a dozen articles about it and thousands of references to it through the years. He was convinced he had resurrected a piece of worthwhile nostalgia that no one but him remembered.

  The appearance of Darkness and Dawn, by George Allan England, and Under the Moons of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK and THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE only a month apart ushered in a new era to science fiction, the era of the pulp scientific romance. These stories also made the Munsey pulps the major publishers and most important focus of science fiction in the world. While H. G. Wells was still turning out his scientific romances, the "better" magazines ran other stories like them. Wells had set a vogue, and when he stopped writing science fiction and decided to become a novelist, the vogue declined.

  At just about the year 1912, the impact of the advertising agencies began to force changes on the popular magazines that acted further to reduce their publication of science fiction. Earlier, COSMOPOLITAN, EVERYBODY'S, THE METROPOLITAN, HAMPTON'S MAGAZINE, and even THE RED BOOK had been "family" magazines with reading matter for everyone. Advertisers, discovering that women controlled the purse strings, allocated the lion's share of the budgets to publications that slanted toward the fair sex.

  Magazines which had been the dimensions of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC increased their size to make a more effective showcase for advertising.

  THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, COLLIER'S, LADIES' HOME JOURNAL, and WOMAN'S HOME COMPANION had always used the oversized page. Now, one by one, COSMOPOLITAN, HAMPTON'S, EVERYBODY'S, RED BOOK, THE METROPOLITAN, PEOPLE'S and others bowed to the trend. At the same time, they became more woman-oriented, and science fiction by social happenstance became segregated in the pulps.

  Usage and times frequently change the true meaning of words. The stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Allan England about Mars and the future were termed in retrospect "scientific romances," though at various periods they would also be termed "different" stories and "pseudoscientific" stories. The origin of the phrase "scientific romance" is not known. It was around for a long time before Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Allan England began writing. C. A. Hinton, M.A., used Scientific Romances as the title for a series of scientific evaluations which he began to have published in 1888 on such topics as "What Is the Fourth Dimension," "A Plane World," "A Picture of Our Universe," "Many Dimensions," and various others.

  Gustavus W. Pope, M.D., in his two-volume series, "Romance of the Planets," termed the first, Journey to Mars (G. W. Dillingham, 1894), a deliberate attempt at a "scientific romance," and it contains and anticipates most of the elements in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mar
s stories, including a red princess, sword battles, various colored races, extreme longevity, wizards, an officer from earth who is imbued with supernormal powers because of the effect of the atmosphere, flying reptiles which can be saddled to carry a man, and various other similarities.

  The science-fiction works of H. G. Wells have traditionally been called "scientific romances," so the question may reasonably be asked: "Is there a difference between the meaning of the term 'scientific romance' after 1912 that was not inherent before 1912?"

  The answer is yes.

  Webster's Comprehensive Encyclopedic Dictionary (Columbia Educational Books, 1942) defines the word "romance" as meaning: "Originally a tale in verse written in one of the Romance dialects; hence any popular epic or any fictitious and wonderful tale in prose or verse; a kind of novel dealing with extraordinary and often extravagant adventures, or picturing an almost purely imaginary state or society; tendency of mind towards the wonderful and mysterious. ..."

  That certainly would cover almost any work of science fiction, but somewhere in the last decade of the nineteenth century the emphasis on the word began to change. "Romance" and "love" became interchangeable. Previously "romance" was a gaudy synonym for "adventure." It became a precise synonym for "love," and so it remains today, regardless of dictionary definitions.

  When Bernarr McFadden issued TRUE-STORY MAGAZINE, the first issue, dated May, 1919, had the headline, "We offer $1000.00 for your Life Romance." No reader misunderstood what he meant. He did not mean one's life adventure. He meant one's love story. When several years later he issued a companion magazine titled TRUE ROMANCES, he did not mean true "adventures," nor did a single reader misinterpret his meaning. Clayton Publications released RANCH ROMANCES in the twenties, and they meant ranch love stories, not ranch "adventures."