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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  He could write both science fiction and supernatural stories with equal effectiveness, but like the later H. P. Lovecraft, he frequently supplied ingenious scientific credibility for horrors that the reader would have been willing to accept as beyond explanation. Among the stories he did for The Blue Book Magazine in 1906 and 1907 are several of his very finest, notably From the Tideless Sea (April 1906) which together with its sequel More News of the Homebird (August 1906) displayed his near-genius at being able to sustain a mounting pitch of terror for an apparently indefinite length. Like a singer who has immense power and range, he exercised this extraordinary rhetorical pitch frequently, yet so truly skilled was he that in The Voice in the Night (November 1907) he was able to employ understatement, indirection, and seeming pathos, to create one of the greatest examples of horror in science fiction ever published.

  The Blue Book was also one of the first magazines to publish science fiction by George Allan England, the young socialist who for a scant few years upon the publication of his Darkness and Dawn trilogy in Munsey’s The Cavalier (1912 and 1913) was deservedly one of the most popular and influential writers in the science fiction canon, with his wonder-filled vision of the rebuilding of civilization after universal destruction. The Time-Reflector (September 1905), like Darkness and Dawn, had stamped clearly upon it the beneficial influence of H. G. Wells’ masterpiece, The Time Machine.

  Otherwise, The Blue Book leaned heavily on the slapstick invention story, so prevalent during this period and also dabbled in detective stories dependent upon not-quite-established scientific methods of deduction.

  In historical perspective, what was happening becomes crystal clear.

  With the creation of the first pulp magazine, The Argosy, aimed primarily at adult readership, science fiction, because it lent itself to adventure, was incorporated into these predominantly male-oriented publications.

  The British pace-setters, The Strand, The Idler, and Pearson’s Magazine, despite the general appeal of much of their nonfiction and even their frequent newly written fairy tales, also strongly favored masculine fiction although, at their most objective, they became “family” magazines. The rising, big-circulation American magazines, after the first few years of McClure’s, favored the feminine slant. This was true of McClure’s, Munsey’s, and Cosmopolitan, and became increasingly so as such later great new names were added to the list: Everybody’s, The Red Book, Hampton’s Magazine, The American Magazine, Ainslee’s, Smith’s Magazine, The Metropolitan Magazine, and many others. This did not mean the abolition of science fiction. Every one of those periodicals ran science fiction at one time or another, but it was not a part of their format since it did not lend itself as readily to light romance as did other genres.

  While the leading British popular magazines, The Strand, Pearson’s, and The Idler, consistently continued to publish science fiction after the turn of the century, and while the first two enjoyed American editions, both were eventually reduced to the level of secondary publications as a result of the tide of lush and prosperous women-oriented periodicals.

  Yet, in 1900 they were still in the vanguard of major science fiction. Pearson’s opened the year with a lavish interplanetary story featured simultaneously in both their British and American editions; it was destined to become a romantically imaginative landmark. A series of six stories by George Griffith was begun in the January 1900 issue under the heading of “Stories of Other Worlds.” Rollo Lenox Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, invents the “R Force,” which counteracts gravity, and uses it to power a space ship. He marries Lila Zaidie immediately prior to his initial voyage, so they will be the first couple in history to honeymoon in space. After A Visit to the Moon (January), they explore Mars in The World of the War God (February), proceed to Venus in A Glimpse of the Sunless Star (March), continue on to Jupiter in The World of the Crystal Cities (April), and finally to the ringed planet In Saturn’s Realms (May). Up until now, each installment had been printed monthly, but the final one, titled Homeward Bound, skipped June and did not appear until July, with an editorial note that George Griffith had been delayed getting his manuscript in from Australia because of a plague. This last installment included a stop on the asteroid Ceres.

  The stories were collected with prefacing matter added to the early portion of the book and published as a novel under the intriguing and accurate title of A Honeymoon in Space (C. Arthur Pearson, London, 1901). It was also issued in paper covers.

  There was no gainsaying that Griffith was an inventive and resourceful science fiction writer. The engaging array of intelligences and monsters he discovered in his journeys, the variety of special terrains, the free play he gave to his imagination, reflected up-to-date thinking and a rebellion against confinement of ideas that would not become common for almost thirty years. His science was weak in particulars, but conceptually strong in imparting the scope of science fiction. The illustrations by Stanley Wood were numerous and, some of them, highly unusual. The book contained a frontispiece by Harold Piffard, showing Lord Redgrave toasting his bride in space, which is a masterpiece, not merely because it is skillfully drawn, but because it captures completely the dress and spirit of the nineties set into the context of the conquest of other worlds.

  Declining into near-oblivion today, the work of George Griffith was nevertheless a link in the development of science fiction. He was undeniably the most popular science fiction writer in England between 1893 and 1895. It seems very probable that he influenced the plotting of George S. du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and The Martian (1896), and he was the envy and exasperation of H. G. Wells, who highly complimented his Outlaws of the Air (1895), and may have been influenced to later write War in the Air because of it, and who once fumed because critics were always comparing him to Griffith. Wells wanted to be known as more than an entertainer.

  The gradual resolving of international copyright law was making it increasingly difficult for a British publication to throw its full muscle into an American edition. When The Strand broke the first installment of The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells in their November 1900 issue (to run through August 1901), they found it simultaneously serialized in the November 1900 Cosmopolitan. Pearson’s had no American edition at the time The War of the Worlds saw print in 1897, and Cosmopolitan had rerun it, illustrations and all.

  This time, Cosmopolitan really brought home the severity of the competition by copiously illustrating The First Men in the Moon with pictorial wash drawings by E. Hering, which, while bizarre, were nevertheless more effective than Shepperson’s for The Strand. Both artists seemed to regard the entire story as one big joke and their drawings carried an air of tongue-in-cheek.

  This was unfortunate, for The First Men in the Moon was one of Wells’ greatest stories, deadly serious in its relation of a trip to the moon in an anti-gravity globe; the discovery of a civilization built by a race of insect origin therein; and thoughtful in the final decision of the lunarites to prevent the astronauts from returning for fear of man’s warlike proclivities.

  The competitive situation sometimes worked in reverse. Pearson’s found that it could get first serial rights to H. Rider Haggard’s novel Lysbeth (which it began serializing in its November 1900 issue) in America, but couldn’t run the novel in England.

  The value of H. G. Wells as a drawing card led to his work being offered to the highest bidder. It is not known if A. P. Watt was his agent at that early period. Watt was agent for Arthur Conan Doyle, and was one of the first to understand income potentialities of a creative work if the rights were properly protected and proliferated.

  Regardless, Pearson’s managed to show up with the next novel by Wells, The Sea Lady (July to December 1901), of a mermaid who falls in love with a man, permits herself to be captured, and finally entices him to return to the sea with her and his inevitable death. The story is a novel-length parable of the destruction of our well-being and even our lives by impractical dreams.

  Again, everywhere one tu
rned it was Wells, Wells, Wells. The amazing originality and fecundity of the man’s literary talent engaged the public. The New Accelerator (The Strand, December 1901) dealt with a drug that speeded up a person’s motions to the point where everyone else seemed to be standing still; The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (The Strand, March 1902) told of a spirit that has forgotten how to make itself disappear.

  When Pearson’s got the next big Wells science fiction novel, The Food of the Gods (December 1903 to January 1904), telling of the invention of a special food which causes men to grow into giants (and inadvertently some insects and rats as well), and face a final showdown with the “little men,” it was to find that their American edition, like that of The Strand, had been outbid by Cosmopolitan, which began serialization in ten monthly installments November 1903, a month before they could schedule it!

  When Wells’ next big gun was ready, In the Days of the Comet, both The Strand and Pearson’s found themselves beaten out by a British newspaper, The Daily Chronicle (1905-1906), which was first with the story of a comet that passes so closely to the earth that an interaction of gases changes the nitrogen in the atmosphere to a new gas which completely alters human nature and creates a Utopia. Frustratingly, Cosmopolitan bought and ran the story in eight installments beginning with its January 1906 number.

  So potent must Wells have been as a circulation builder that in desperation Pearson’s began reprinting, in 1904, Wells’ stories published in The Pall Mall Budget and The Pall Mall Gazette before the big success of The Time Machine. Such famous shorts as A Moth—Genus Nova, The Diamond Maker, Aepyornis Island, The Stolen Bacillus, and The Flowering of the Strange Orchid were among those so honored. Nowhere were the stories designated as repeats, though most of them had already been collected in hard covers under the title of The Stolen Bacillus (1895).

  The Strand did manage to come up with some very powerful new Wells, most notably The Land Ironclads (December 1903), with its prophetic conquest of conventional armed forces by tanks (which they would reprint in November 1916, when tanks were introduced in World War I by the British); and The Country of the Blind (April 1904), probably the greatest single short story written by Wells, of a valley in which all men are sightless, into which intrudes an outsider, and his helplessness in attempting to use his vision to his own or the people’s advantage.

  So badly hurt by the Panic that began in October 1906 was the American edition of Pearson’s Magazine that, in its March 1908 issue, it confessed its woes in an editorial, but took courage from the fact that, though advertising in some issues had plummeted 34 per cent, its circulation had suffered relatively little. Despite its financial plight, it was able to secure first American serial rights to H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air, beginning April 1908. In England Pearson’s had lost out to Pall Mall Magazine in bidding for the same title.

  Significantly, almost as much promotion was given to the illustrations of Eric Pape for the novel (executed in both line and wash) as to the story. Eric Pape was the illustrator who aroused New England to save the old U.S. battleship Constitution when the navy was going to tow her to sea and use her as a target ship. Twenty of his illustrations were republished in the first edition of the book publication of The War in the Air, issued by Macmillan, and they displayed, from a variety of perspectives, the bombing of New York by German dirigibles and the carnage that resulted. Pall Mall also had some very effective illustrations by A. C. Michael, including one in four colors, which were used in the British book printing from George Bell and Sons, 1908. It was the era of book publishing when they didn’t try to pretend that illustrations were only for children and not for sophisticated adults.

  There were other attempts to write in the Wells vein, many of them rather good, but one and all the authors were completely overwhelmed by the greatest science fiction writer of all time, pouring out novels and short stories in a veritable lava flow heated by genius. Only an event as startling as an untold adventure of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, begun in the October 1901 issue of The Strand, even momentarily took the fiction public’s mind from Wells.

  The skilled professional J. B. Harris-Burland could come up with a ghost story inspired by the age of invention, which was at the same time true science fiction, an extraordinary literary feat accomplished in his story Lord Beden’s Motor (The Strand, December 1901) and it would be forgotten.

  A highly unusual six-story series along the lines of Robert Barr’s The Doom of London, written by Fred M. White, was published by Pearson’s Magazine, obviously intended to encourage reforms in London in particular and England in general. Each tale dealt with a different catastrophe that could strike London, as follows:

  The Four White Days (January 1903) underscored the need for better snow removal and planning as London is frozen in by a prodigious storm with no running water or transport; The Four Day’s Night (February 1901) envisaged a smog so thick that the sun never penetrated and only bombing from a dirigible cleared a hole for rays of light; The Dust of Death (April 1903) saw a scourge break out as a result of using garbage for construction fill, and the city saved by electrically killing the bacteria; A Bubble Burst (May 1903) contemplated the stock market disaster that could overtake financial interests if a faked story, in this case of an earthquake that allegedly destroys Johannesburg, South Africa, were to start a panic; The Invisible Force (June 1903) predicted disasters from digging too many subways and underground tunnels; and finally The River of Death (June 1904) forecast what would happen if London ran out of water. As can be seen, disaster and catastrophe stories with civic significance were popular.

  At times, it even appeared that the influence of The Black Cat was being transmitted to The Strand, for one story, The Microbe of Love by John George E. Leed (October 1902), of the isolation of a bacillus that causes people to get romantic stars in their eyes, was very similar to the substitution of science for magic so popular in the pussycat-dominated fashion of the short story.

  After 1905, the influence of The Strand and Pearson’s on the American scene deteriorated in the sense that while The Strand was able to maintain a circulation of 200,000 and Pearson’s for a period asserted 300,000, American periodicals had entered the golden age of the magazines. Ten-cent magazines of incredible size and quality were everywhere, supported by the advertising of what already was acknowledged to be the richest nation in the world. Circulations of up to a million were claimed, and it would not be long before the magic million-copy figure was within reach of a number of publications.

  What this meant in terms of science fiction was that it would be featured by the secondary magazines, now including The Strand and Pearson’s, and in the growing ranks of pulp magazines, The Argosy, The All-Story Magazine, The Blue Book, The Popular Magazine, and before too long, an army of others. To understand why nothing could prevail against the new group of general interest magazines, one had to see them. They were all the dimensions of the old pulp magazines (9 3/4 by 6 3/4 inches), a hundred pages of advertising was common, and the paper was coated stock.

  Even before it was purchased by William Randolph Hearst, Cosmopolitan was something to behold, with two- and three-color illustrations throughout. A typical issue might feature short stories by Maxim Gorky, W. W. Jacobs, and Bruno Lessing; poetry by Edwin Markham; and a regular column by Ambrose Bierce. Hearst’s Magazine (eventually to be combined with Cosmopolitan) would have fiction by Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Winston Churchill, and E. Phillips Oppenheim; Ainslee’s was capable of securing George Bernard Shaw; Collier’s would carry Sherlock Holmes; The Bohemian made it possible to be “in” for only 10 cents, and read some of Damon Runyon’s earliest work in the bargain; for 15 cents, one could buy The Metropolitan Magazine, which seemed, to judge by its covers, to be aimed at women, yet ran more nonfiction than fiction and with a heavy percentage of material that would distinctly interest men. Like a majority of the major magazines of that period, it featured substantial sections of photogr
aphs of female theatrical stars and a seemingly disproportionate amount of material on the stage. Perhaps this incongruity on the part of the magazines of the period may be explained by the fact that the theater was part of every major city and the stars shown could be seen at one time or another in most urban areas of the nation. The Metropolitan Magazine was one of the earliest publications to use posed photographs to illustrate articles and stories (in the manner which True Story later popularized). The excellence of this method was no better displayed than in the article The New Criminal by Broughton Brandenburg (April 1907), where the photos supplied by Lee Hamilton Keller can be characterized as nothing short of superb.

  The Metropolitan Magazine was typical of the other major publications. It would, upon occasion, use science fiction, and it would run feature science articles like The Call of Another World by Charles Farquet (August 1907), an evaluation of life on Mars with magnificent alien concepts depicted by the artist Henri Lanos.

  The Red Book, edited by Trumbell White, was a 10-cent fiction magazine on slick paper aimed at women. It was an excellent value, handsomely illustrated. One of its artists in 1906 and 1907 was Howard V. Brown, who would do the covers for Hugo Gernsback’s Science and Invention in the 1920s and for Astounding Stories in the 1930s. Its fictioneers were little known at first, but so prosperous did the magazine become that by 1915, under the editorship of Ray Long, a single issue would contain fiction by Gilbert Parker, Cyrus Townsend Brady, George Allan England, Albert Payson Terhune, Ellis Parker Butler, Octavus Roy Cohen, and Arthur Somers Roche, with illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg.

  A good number of the periodicals of that decade, which were of truly superlative quality and enjoyed mass circulation and considerable influence, receive only a sentence or two in the histories of American magazines, because there were so many of them. Such a magazine was Hampton’s Magazine. It had started in the late nineties as Broadway Magazine, then the title was changed to The New Broadway Magazine. Theodore Dreiser was its editor in 1906 and early 1907 and he ran a few stories by his friend Charles Fort, later to become famous for Lo!, Wild Talents and other similar works. It made a drive for leadership in 1907 and 1908, then changed its name to Hampton’s Broadway Magazine after its owner Benjamin Hampton in 1908, and finally to Hampton’s Magazine in February 1909. Reports state that in 1906 this magazine had a circulation of 13,000, but by 1911 it had climbed to 444,000.