Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  Despite this, and despite the fact that Cutcliffe Hyne wrote a number of other quite legitimate novels of science fiction, he was best known during his own time for his remarkable tales of Captain Kettle, a tough, ruthless, Vandyke-bearded and later peg-legged sprite of a man, who began his adventures in the February 1897 Pearson’s Magazine and remained a favorite of readers on both sides of the Atlantic in dozens of stories through to The Last of Captain Kettle (Pearson’s Magazine, February 1903). So bizarre and offbeat were Captain Kettle’s exploits (conducted nobly to make enough money to see his wife and children comfortable), that the collected volumes of his adventures were rather generously listed in The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (edited by Everett F. Bleiler 1948) as fantasy.

  For the next few years both magazines would strive hard to excel in science fiction and would to a degree succeed, but their problem was compounded by the proliferation of magazines both in the United States and Europe, many of them of such substantial means that they were able to compete impressively for the better things available. Pearson’s now had an American edition, introducing it in 1898, so the influence of the fiction they printed was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. While The Strand roughly followed its British edition, the American Pearson’s was a stew of material from previous issues and new work especially written for the United States. While much of the fiction of the British edition eventually showed up in America, this was not the case with the nonfiction.

  Another situation that affected the big-circulation general magazines was the beginning of a trend toward adult, all-fiction publications. Most all-fiction magazines up to then had been slanted toward lower-income groups, teenagers, and children.

  There had been such publications previously, including the attractive, digest-size Romance, but they sold for 25 cents, too strong for the incomes of that day. England saw the introduction of a superior all-fiction magazine, Chapman’s, in 1895, running many tales of horror and the supernatural, including works of Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, E. F. Benson, Mary E. Wilkins, and Eden Phillpotts, but despite its quality it was no match for the unusual formula introduced in a peculiarly titled American magazine, The Black Cat. The first number of The Black Cat was October 1895 and its publisher was a former advertising man named Herman D. Umbstaetter, who had many novel ideas about publishing that were obviously all wrong, except that they worked.

  First, since the 10-cent magazines such as McClure’s and Munsey’s were doing so well, he would introduce a 5-cent magazine. Second, the magazine would be 100 per cent fiction, all short stories, with no serials at any time and no stories longer than 5,000 words (later the limit was stretched). Third, most of the content would be made up of stories from amateurs. The magazine in its early issues would advertise:

  $100.00—For a Ghost Story. $150.00—For a Story of Adventure. $200.00— For a Story of Mystery. $500.00—For a Detective Story. $1,000.00—For a Love Story. Stories which are tersely told . . . which are free from padding, foreign phrases, and attempted fine writing. No dialect stories, poetry, or foreign translations will be considered. Payment for accepted manuscripts will be made—not according to length, but according to the editor’s opinion of their worth. Manuscripts will be paid for on the day of acceptance.

  Continuous prize contests kept entries pouring in, and most of The Black Cat’s contents was made up of beginning writers. In later years Umbstaetter, who handled all selective functions, claimed the discovery of Jack London, Rupert Hughes, Octavus Roy Cohen, and Ellis Parker Hutler, among others. The editor preferred the off-trail, unusual yarn, and a substantial percentage of the content was of this nature. The title led people to believe that The Black Cat was a magazine of the supernatural and horror. It was not, though if the only issue one happened to pick up was the February 1896 one, five of the six stories could have been classified as fantasy. The lead story, The Mysterious Card by Cleveland Moffett, telling of an American given a card inscribed in French by an unknown woman, who finds that attempts to get the message interpreted result in the complete ruin of his life, was one of the two or three most popular stories ever run in the magazine, and Moffett went on to become a successful science and science fiction writer.

  Each issue carried a sketch of a black cat on the cover, but it was a good-natured cat, more like a well-groomed, sophisticated Walt Disney creation than something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Imitators sprang up called The Owl, The Gray Goose, The White Elephant, and Wayward Tales, which were never to be as well known or as long-lived.

  The Black Cat was published in Boston, was half-letter size, printed on coated stock, unillustrated, with text single-column across the page like a book, and ran sixty-four pages, of which at least twenty were advertising. It rarely carried more than six stories an issue. Among these were some that may be classed as science fiction, though usually the scientific premise and explanation was weak.

  Publisher Umbstaetter had a story (of rather good quality) in each of the first three issues under his own name and the first tale that could be pinpointed as science fiction was written by him in collaboration with T. F. Anderson for the April 1896 number, titled The Mystery of the Thirty Millions. It takes place seven years in the future when a Russian ship with a supermagnet almost succeeds in taking into tow an American liner with $30,000,000 in gold aboard. The same issue contained A Surgical Love Cure by James Buckham, dealing with the invention of special medical techniques for curing a universal human affliction.

  Stories of the nature of A Surgical Love Cure, a little tongue-in-cheek with ephemeral scientific base, were common in The Black Cat. Two such tales, For Fame, Money or Love? by R. Ottolengui, involving the theory of translating music into poetry, and A Hundred Thousand Dollar Trance by Eugene Shade Bisbee, of hypnotically causing a man to age fifty years in minutes, appeared in the May 1896 issue.

  A bit more tangible was The Man with the Box by George W. Tripp (July 1896), involving a machine that can turn water into any beverage desired and is capable of producing even more unusual effects.

  A highly touted sequel to The Mysterious Card, titled The Mysterious Card Unveiled (August 1896), came close to turning the two stories into science fiction with the revelation that a method had been discovered for photographing good and evil from a man’s mind, and that prints of such photographs were visible to others but not to the one photographed.

  Four of the five tales in the September 1896 issue were fantasy, with The Guardian of Mystery Island by Dr. Edmond Nolcini, employing a very effective sequence about a man-eating plant, particularly noteworthy. My Invisible Friend by Katherine Kip (February 1897) preceded H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man into print by four months; related to invisibility was Octavia Zollicoffer Bond’s A Rule That Worked Both Ways (December 1904), concerning the invention of a machine for materializing spirits from the ether and a reversal of polarization that causes the inventor gradually to disappear in full view of horrified visitors.

  The scientific detective story was part of The Black Cat’s content. One of the most ingenious was In re State vs. Forbes by Warren Earle (July 1906), in which a girl in the process of being murdered starts to telegraph for aid and is killed before she can give the name of the murderer, but under the microscope her red and white corpuscles present it in Morse code!

  Most of the authors who wrote science fiction for The Black Cat were little known then and are unknown today; but a few made modest imprints beyond its pages: Don Mark Lemon, whose The Mansion of Forgetfulness (April 1907) concerns the poignant pitfalls of a machine that can erase unpleasant memories, would later turn up in Munsey’s The All-Story Magazine and even see one novel published in Wonder Stories Quarterly as late as Winter 1931 (The Scarlet Planet). Their first publication of Harry Stephen Keeler’s tale of teaching by television, John Jone’s Dollar (August 1915), may have been the high point of The Black Cat’s science fiction program. The story was reprinted in the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (April 1927), has been anthologized, and
is today regarded as a classic. The Black Cat may even have discovered Frank Lillie Pollock (The Invisible City, September 1901).

  Another publication was to take the same all-fiction road as The Black Cat, only with an adventure slant. It was The Argosy, published by Frank A. Munsey, which was changed from a boy’s magazine to the first adventure pulp magazine in 1896, selling for only 10 cents. This change was inspired by the success of Munsey’s Magazine, which had built a phenomenal circulation of 700,000 at that price as a general magazine along the lines of McClure’s.

  The year of the change The Argosy ran Citizen 504 by C. H. Palmer, a remarkable projection of a regimented society of the future in which marriages are arranged by the government. An anti-utopian story, it was a harbinger of Dr. David H. Keller’s later Unto Us a Child is Born (Amazing Stories, July 1933), dealing with the tragic aspect of card-indexed societies.

  Before the days of international copyright Frank Munsey had serialized Andre Laurie’s popular book, The Conquest of the Moon, in which the lunar orb is drawn into the Sahara Desert by powerful magnets (Golden Argosy in seventeen weekly installments beginning November 16, 1889). Now he revived the same novel as A Month in the Moon, to run in eight monthly chapters (February to August 1897).

  His big story for 1898 was the serial publication of Frank Aubrey’s A Queen of Atlantis in seven installments beginning in February. Aubrey was a highly popular adventure and fantasy writer; his novel of a lost race on a plateau in British Guiana and the man-eating plant they worshiped, The Devil Tree of El Dorado, issued in 1897, was destined to become the classic of its type and an excellent seller. Aubrey would also gain a reputation writing science fiction novels under the pseudonym of Fenton Ash, the best known being A Trip to Mars (W. & R. Chambers, London, 1909).

  W. Bert Foster, who in later years would become popular as a Western story writer, was frequently seen with lost-race stories, not only in The Argosy, but in Pearson’s and later in The All-Story Magazine.

  The Argosy would have the distinction of being the only American magazine to run a novel by George Griffith (outside of the U.S. edition of Pearson’s Magazine), The Lake of Gold, beginning December 1902 and running for eight months. The discovery of vast deposits of gold spewed from a volcano enable England and the United States to conquer Europe and impose terms that will keep peace and make life more bearable for the masses.

  A Round Trip to the Year 2,000 by William Wallace Cook, who received his training as a writer for the dime novels, was the first of a series by him (July to November 1903) which would be reprinted as paperback books in Street & Smith’s Adventure Library in the middle twenties, selling for 15 cents and containing over three hundred pages each. A Round Trip to the Year 2,000, as its title indicated, dealt with time travel into the future; Cast Away at the Pole (1904) told of a warm land and highly advanced civilization in the Arctic; Adrift in the Unknown (1904-1905) dealt with a space voyage to the planet Mercury; Marooned in 1492 (1905) found the characters traveling into the past through the use of a drug; and The Eighth Wonder (1906—1907) saw the rotation of the earth slowed due to the building of a great electromagnet.

  Cook’s works, while easily readable, had a level of literary quality somewhere between the dime novel and the pulp story. They also had a note of flippancy, which in The Eighth Wonder took the form of converting the errors of judgment of scientist Copernicus Jones into near slapstick humor.

  This was in tune with the mood of a great deal of science fiction of that period, which was dedicated to regarding the scientist as a misguided buffoon. Such an approach was so popular in The Argosy that numerous series were run, starting in 1903; the longest-lived was that of Edgar Franklin, whose nature may be surmised by the titles: The Hawkins Pumpless Pump, The Hawkins Gasowashine, The Hawkins Anti-Fire-Fly, and The Hawkins Crook Trap. Possibly the most carefully constructed tales of this type were those of Howard R. Garis, creator of Uncle Wiggily, who wrote a “precious” man-eating plant story to end all man-eating plant stories in Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant (August 1905) and went on to write Professor Jonkin and His Busier Bees, Quick Transit by Beanstalk, Limited, and various others.

  A score of authors were contributing slapstick invention stories, among them H. D. Smiley with his Bagley’s Coagulated Cyclone and Bagley’s Rain Machine’, G. Carling with The Heppswell Smoke Controller; and O. L. Clarke with The Telephonogram.

  The vogue would spread to many magazines, slowing down only when the scientific death-dealing horrors of World War I made readers radically revise their views of the scientist as an absent-minded jackass. After World War I there were a great many works of science fiction where the scientist’s advances were viewed as transgressions of nature’s laws and the grim fate that overtook him as a result was therefore deserved and anything but funny.

  Many unkind things have been said of Frank A. Munsey, who struggled for fifteen years before he finally put his publishing company on a firm basis. It has been said that he cared nothing for art and everything for money (though he left most of his fortune to an art museum at his death). His competitors accused him of debasing the publishing industry. He was noted for his sharp dealings, not only in the game of business give and take, but in his relations with authors.

  What has not been said of him is that he never cheated his readers. To the contrary, he usually gave them double their money’s worth in quantity and more than that in entertainment. His philosophy of fiction could be summed up by his statement: “Good writing is as common as clam shells, while good stories are as rare as statesmanship.”

  He wanted stories and he got them. For only 10 cents, readers in the early years of this century could get, in The Argosy, 192 pages of close-packed fiction, unrelieved by any illustrations. In all, each issue averaged 135,000 words. The magazine was probably the first pulp in history, and its policy was purely adult adventure. Sixty or more pages of advertisements appeared monthly, printed on coated stock, front and back. The covers, usually yellow, on thick paper, were generally indicative rather than illustrative of the magazine’s contents. At its peak, in 1907, The Argosy could boast a half-million satisfied readers.

  As Munsey added magazines to his chain, many of those ran science fiction, too. The All-Story Magazine, inaugurated with its January 1905 issue, had two tales of science fiction in the first issue, When Time Slipped a Cog, a five-part serial, which found that a man apparently had lost a year of his life without remembering what had transpired; and a short story, The Great Sleep Tanks, by Margaret P. Montague, where the essence of sleep is concentrated and rented to people at night.

  Garret P. Serviss’s short novel The Moon Metal, initially published by Harper’s in hard covers in 1900, was reprinted complete in the May 1905 number. This story, of a scientist who drains an unusual metal from the moon, which replaces gold as the monetary standard, has become a standard in the field and immediately established Serviss as a major writer of science fiction. A few years later, A Columbus of Space (January to June 1909), predicting the use of atomic-powered space ships for a trip to Venus, caused some to class Serviss as the equal of Jules Verne in his ability to put a tale of believable scientific speculation together.

  The All-Story Magazine served up 192 pages of fiction for 10 cents, unillustrated on pulp paper, as did The Argosy, but its three-color covers hinted at class and sophistication and not action. It printed many more love stories than did The Argosy, and quite probably was attempting to appeal to women as well as men. Though The Argosy was heavily weighted for male interest, in practice The All-Story Magazine frequently published more imaginative and off-trail stories.

  The launching by Street & Smith of a general fiction pulp in 1904, The Popular Magazine, to compete with The Argosy, found science fiction a regular portion of that magazine’s fare, including many humorous invention stories. Its most notable achievement was the serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha: The Further History of She, beginning with its January 1905 number.

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sp; That high appeal was not maintained, for though The Popular Magazine ran as a rather thick pulp of 194 pages for 10 cents until January 1907, when the price rose to 15 cents and the pages to 224, and it published more fantasy and science fiction than most, the preponderance was undistinguished. It included tongue-in-cheek “humorous” stories of novel inventions, predominantly by the now-forgotten E. J. Appleton. It went in heavily for the scientific detective story that was frequently science fiction by courtesy, at first in a series titled “The Strange Cases of a Medical Free Lance” by W. B. Ferguson, running from January to May 1907, and in later years by the popularizers of such stories, Edwin Balmcr and Arthur B. Reeve.

  A much more significant role was played by the appearance of The Monthly Story Magazine in May 1905, which later was to become nationally renowned as The Blue Book Magazine (May 1907). The Blue Book was a peculiar combination of portraits of theatrical celebrities and general pulp fiction. Slick paper pages would appear in the front of the publication on which would be published photos of the latest productions of the nation’s stage. The rest of the magazine was a thick standard pulp. Eventually it dropped the theater section, which was common in scores of magazines of all types before World War I.

  The Blue Book presented to America one of the most promising writers ever to combine horror with science fiction: William Hope Hodgson. A well-built, handsome Englishman, Hodgson had spent eight years at sea, and most of his stories, long and short, reflect an intimate knowledge of the life and attitudes of seafaring men, superbly set to paper. Despite his obsession with seagoing backgrounds, the oceans of the world were not reflected in his works as wonderous and majestic. To the contrary, he depicted the sea as a loathsome fester from whose obscene depths any manner of foulness might arise, to threaten the soul as well as the body.