In the competition for readership, the old general fiction pulp magazines were the losers. The new specialized magazines could survive with small but relatively secure audiences. And meanwhile, the once-large general audience for magazines like Argosy was being lured away, broken up, picked to pieces.
Suddenly, the position of All-Story was changed. Instead of being a lively companion to Argosy, a reinforcement of its promise of fiction that would please the whole family, All-Story was a competitor with Argosy for a declining share of the reading public. To ensure the continuation of Argosy, his oldest and most prestigious pulp magazine, publisher Munsey sacrificed his second-line general fiction title, All-Story.
In July 1920, the two magazines were merged together as Argosy All-Story Weekly. But it was essentially Argosy that continued, with the addition of a few star writers picked up from All-Story. Burroughs and Merritt would still be accepted—most of the time—but the new Argosy All-Story would not be nearly as receptive to imaginative fiction as the old All-Story had been.
What hurt was not merely that the market for SF stories was suddenly smaller. Or that the new Argosy All-Story might not quite dare to take a really far-out yarn that the old All-Story would have snatched right up. What was truly painful was that the imaginative center of things was gone, and no other pulp magazine was prepared to take up the role that All-Story had performed in the Teens.
SF was sufficiently peripheral, sufficiently unpopular, sufficiently frightening—and yes, still sufficiently unconceived as a unified category of fiction—that it would be almost ten full years after the merger of Argosy and All-Story before the first specialized pulp SF magazine would see publication. That magazine would be Astounding Stories of Super-Science, first published in December 1929.
The first new specialized pulp magazine that would regularly include SF stories among its contents was Weird Tales, founded in 1923. In addition to scientific fiction—never its chief stock in trade—Weird Tales published non-transcendent stories of the strange, bizarre and gruesome, Gothic fantasies of ghosts, vampires and werewolves, and tales of black magic and occult horror. The unifying element that held all this variety together was fear of the unknown.
The inspiration for Weird Tales came to its publisher, J.C. Henneberger, from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe entitled “Dreamland”—a Poeian invocation of the World Beyond the Hill typically filled with images of dread and death. These lines triggered Henneberger’s imagination:
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime
Out of Space—out of Time.197
It may be a sufficient indication of the nature of this moment to take note that the word that Henneberger chose to pluck from these lines to serve as the title of his magazine was weird. It was a sense of weirdness, a conviction of the fundamental fearsome black queerness of things, that was held in common by Poe the Romantic and the disoriented young materialists of the Lost Generation.
Weird Tales may be perceived as a kind of last after-shudder, the final dying tremor of the Romantic Movement. In its pages were to be found the last degenerate versions of all those Gothic stories of the past century and a half that had aimed to speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, awaken thrilling horror, and make the reader dread to look around.
At the same time, however, Weird Tales can be seen as a vehicle of transformation, a means for easing the cruel transition from the universe of God and the soul to the new universe of scientific materialism. In Weird Tales, spooks and spirits were tamed by the rule of law—scientized, regularized and dehorrified. The most prolific and popular author in Weird Tales was Seabury Quinn, at one time an editor of a trade journal for undertakers, who contributed more than ninety stories of the exploits of Jules de Grandin, an occult detective.
But by far the most significant writer for Weird Tales was H.P. Lovecraft, who himself was the living embodiment of the same contradictions of mind embraced by the magazine. Lovecraft was a reclusive nocturnal gentleman from Providence, Rhode Island, who combined old-fashioned aristocratic sentiments with a philosophy of complete scientific materialism.
More than any other writer, Lovecraft in his stories expressed the essence of the lines from Poe that first inspired Weird Tales. Fear and loathing in his fiction were attached not to the supernatural, in which Lovecraft did not believe, but to the new unknown scientific universe, so vastly beyond man’s powers of comprehension. Lovecraft’s stories are an ultimate expression of horror at that greater darkness that surrounds the flare of man’s little match flame in every direction.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 to a family of privilege that was in the process of losing its money and position. When Lovecraft was a small boy, his father went violently insane and then died in a mental institution. Howard was a mama’s boy, dressed like a girl by his mother. At the same time, she constantly told him that he was hideously ugly and refused to touch him. She would eventually die in the same mental institution as his father.
Lovecraft grew up with a highly developed sense of the weirdness of things. His lifelong favorite author, whom he discovered at the age of eight, was Edgar Allan Poe.
Lovecraft was essentially self-educated. His schooling was erratic and he never finished high school. For ten years after he dropped out, Lovecraft lounged around the house, lost in a state of complete lethargy. He and the two aunts he lived with scraped by on a small inheritance.
Even though he was penniless, Lovecraft was constitutionally incapable of even considering the possibility of holding a job. It was his conviction that a gentleman did not work for a living.
It was during this period that Lovecraft began to produce articles and then stories for his own amateur journal and the magazines of a few like-minded friends of superior taste. The chief influence on these early attempts was Poe.
Lovecraft was relatively late in finding his second great passion, Lord Dunsany, coming upon his work in 1919. But in November of that year—a mere two months after he first read Time and the Gods—Lovecraft learned that Dunsany was to deliver a lecture in Boston. The news was enough to cause Lovecraft to venture forth from Providence for the first time in three years.
The experience of seeing and hearing Dunsany had a vitalizing effect on Lovecraft, and he was inspired to dash off one story after another. During the next few years, he wrote his first effective fiction, his first stories that were not merely static black fragments. Many of these Dunsany-influenced visions of strange twilight landscapes, first published in the amateur journals, would be reprinted in early issues of Weird Tales.
In these stories of his late apprenticeship, Lovecraft evolved an appreciation of total mystery comparable to that expressed by Dr. Walter Goodwin at the outset of Merritt’s The Metal Monster, together with a theory of accessible multiple worlds not unlike the one held by Wells’s experiment-minded Utopians in Men Like Gods.
Here is how it is expressed by one character in Lovecraft’s otherwise minor 1920 story “From Beyond”:
“What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers.”198
After Lovecraft had finally found a professional place of publication for his work in the pages of Weird Tales, he began to move beyond the Dunsanian influence into new territory that was all his own. Increasingly, in his stories of the Cthulhu Mythos—his own special brand of horrified science
fiction—Lovecraft speculated about the intolerable knowledge and insupportable alienness that might flood in upon the psychic venturer when the barriers between worlds were finally breached.
Here is the opening paragraph of the pivotal story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” conceived in 1925, written in 1926, and finally published in Weird Tales in 1928:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.199
Perhaps more than any other author, the obscure H.P. Lovecraft, writing in the marginal pulp magazine Weird Tales, most nearly caught the essence of the post-World War I moment of transition. The barriers of Western perception had broken down, and now one intolerable realization after another was flooding in:
No longer would one enlightened and superior class set an example for the rest of laggard mankind to measure up to. The gradual rational perfection of society that had brought Western civilization into being was now at an end. Catastrophe had occurred. Civilization was fallen, and the soul was dead.
In the new fragmented reality of the machine barbarians, anything at all was possible. All that was required was the scientific know-how and the will.
How exhilarating! And how horrifying!
If all the old rules were off, what would become of humanity? Would mankind degenerate, or would it transcend? Would we become robots without souls, or men like gods? Or would scientific revelation of the true terrifying vistas of reality and our frightful position therein overwhelm us and drive us mad?
Other writers might express one aspect or another of this state of postwar apprehension. But H.P. Lovecraft alone was able to encompass both the promise and the terror of this special moment of the triumph of science.
It was in 1926, in the midst of this postwar period of breakdown and reorientation, that the first magazine specifically devoted to SF was born. It was neither a general fiction pulp magazine like Argosy, nor one of the new specialized pulps like Weird Tales. Amazing Stories—“The Magazine of Scientifiction”—was not a pulp at all. It was something completely new, different in appearance, format and subject from every other magazine on the newsstand.
9: Evolution or Extinction
JUST LIKE SO MANY OF THE OTHER significant occurrences in the story of science fiction, the publication of the first issue of Amazing Stories in March 1926 was a Janus-faced event, looking simultaneously back into the past and forward into the future. The advent of this self-described “new sort of magazine”200 was an indication that one major phase in the development of SF was drawing to a close and another stage about to begin.
In the Age of Technology which started around 1870, as we’ve been able to see, it became possible for the first time to frankly assert that science was transcendence in new guise. In pursuit of scientific mystery, SF in its various forms laid claim to the future and to the past, traveled to the farthest reaches of time-to-come, journeyed to other planets, ventured into the microcosm, discovered alternate worlds, and postulated a further endless multitude of systems and dimensions.
This extravagant and dubious literature-in-becoming even had the nerve to tackle the most basic questions facing contemporary Western civilization—the true nature of the relationships between man and society and between man and the universe—and to offer wholly new answers to them. But there weren’t a whole lot of people who were prepared to admire SF for this. The answers that it proposed were altogether too cold, too distant, and too disquieting.
The great disaster which was World War I made SF even less appealing to the general reading public. The Great War demonstrated that technology was now the dominant fact of Western society. But the brutality and excesses of the war were enough to scare and sicken anyone who held doubts about the value, truth and practical consequences of modern science.
Adding to the general revulsion against SF after the war was a shift that took place in the literature itself. Prior to this moment (with the stories of H.G. Wells as one notable exception), SF had always had a lingering quasi-spiritual aspect. But during the Twenties, as the representatives of spirit finally lost the power they had held over society and science stepped forward to assume control of all aspects of Western life, scientific fiction felt it only appropriate to cast off its cloak of spirit and stand revealed for what it really was—a Godless, soulless literature of complete materialism.
For those few who cherished SF, that might even be a cause for pride. But for those who didn’t it was this uncompromising unbelief which made science fiction seem truly abhorrent.
By the early Twenties, SF had become so frightening and unpopular that when a new author, a food chemist named E.E. Smith, submitted a unique novel of interstellar exploration entitled The Skylark of Space to Argosy—All-Story no longer being available as a separate place of publication—the great former editor of All-Story, Bob Davis, didn’t hesitate to reject it as too far-out for his readers, even though he personally found the story enjoyable and wrote Smith a three-page letter to say so. There was no book publisher who would touch The Skylark of Space, either. All told, Smith’s story would be rejected more than fifty times by markets high and low.
Nor was it only newcomers who were having trouble selling SF. Argosy was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ accustomed magazine market, and he ranked among its top authors. Yet in 1925, an assistant editor saw fit to reject his sixth Martian story, A Weird Adventure on Mars—a tale featuring brain transplants and jeers at organized religion. At this very moment, the editors of another pulp magazine were doing their best to persuade Burroughs to write stories for them, so he sent the novel on to them. However, they hastily rejected it, too, saying that it was “extremely easy to read”201 but declaring it “too bizarre and shocking”202 to be acceptable.
So it was that as late as the end of the first quarter of the Twentieth Century, with the Age of Technology headed toward a climax, SF literature was neither respectable nor popular. Science might well be in the driver’s seat of Western civilization now, but science fiction was generally disliked and unwelcome.
Even at this late date, SF was still more of a collection of loosely associated story types which shared a common regard for the higher powers of science than it was a unified, self-aware literature. It still had no generally recognized name or identity. It had no reliable audience. It could hardly get itself published at all.
And no wonder. All its other dubious qualities aside, it seemed that the SF stories which were being written and published at this time were lost in visions of human insignificance before the awesome uncaring power of the great cosmic machine.
By the mid-Twenties, the scattershot SF of the Age of Technology was all but completely untenable. It had to change or it would surely disappear.
Evolution or extinction . . . that was the choice.
It was at this moment that Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories made its appearance. Amazing Stories was an odd, limited and marginal publication that offered very little in the way of fiction which was truly new or different. There can be no question, however, that Amazing Stories was a major turning point in the development of science fiction.
In the pages of Amazing, SF literature at last became identified by a single name—“scientifiction.” It was provided with a history. It was defined and demonstrated. It was consolidated and unified. In Amazing, SF became conscious of itself.
The imaginative formula “scientifiction” which produced Amazing Stories was narrowly conceived and highly personal. We might even say that in a real sense it was the private dream of Amazing’s editor and publis
her, Hugo Gernsback.
We may recall that in the first issue of Amazing, Gernsback defined “scientifiction” as “the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” And in another early editorial, he would add: “If we may voice our own opinion we should say that the ideal proportion of a scientifiction story should be seventy-five per cent literature interwoven with twenty-five per cent science.”203
Strange and wonderful indeed that an explicit formulation of SF as limited and externalistic as this one by Gernsback could manage to serve as an effective summarizing principle for all the different kinds of Technological Age SF story. Yet it did.
By being concentrated in a single center like Amazing Stories, stories of scientific transcendence could at last be addressed to a restricted but enthusiastic group of readers rather than being thrown away upon a general reading audience indifferent to SF or even actively put off by it. The advent of Amazing Stories—the self-aware magazine of scientifiction—was the beginning of the segregation of SF from other kinds of story.
From this moment on—and for at least the next quarter of a century—science fiction would be published separately, written separately, and read separately from all other kinds of fiction. It would exist in a world all its own, insignificant to the outside eye, but to itself an immense self-sufficient universe.
It was as though in 1926, all of the variously limited story types that were the SF literature of the Age of Technology had gathered together, joined their individual strengths, and then out of the most unlikely materials—the man Hugo Gernsback, the name “scientifiction,” and the vehicle of Amazing Stories—made a new home for themselves, a universe that stretched to the last moment of time and to the farthest star, but was contained in a tiny dust mote.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 23
