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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  How was this done?

  First we must credit a series of great editors. In addition to Dreiser, there were Harris Merton Lyon, drama critic and short-story writer, and Ray Long, who would become the world’s highest-paid editor for Cosmopolitan. None of these men were fired; all were lured away by other publications on the basis of their performances.

  The introduction of muckraking articles of the type that had made McClure’s famous, also played a part, but with the exposes chiefly concerning food—prices, adulteration, poisoning—something involving everyone. The magazine also started, in its January 1910 issue, exclusive serialization of The Discovery of the North Pole by Robert E. Peary, USN, with scores of excellent photographs only a short time after the accomplishment of the feat. Edmond Rostand, whose play Cyrano de Bergerac has become a classic, had written a barnyard fantasy, Chantecler, in which all the actors are dressed as domestic animals, which was then running on Broadway. Hampton’s began serialization of it in its June 1910 issue, even though Peary’s account was still running. The translation was by Gertrude Hall, and dozens of magnificent drawings by Joseph Clement Coll were published in color.

  Fiction in Hampton’s included top-grade work by Jack London, O. Henry, Rex Beach, Gouverneur Morris, Damon Runyon, Owen Johnson, P. G. Wodehouse, Rupert Hughes, and Ellis Parker Butler.

  Hampton’s Magazine was of particular interest to science fiction readers because it drew from the pulps like The Argosy, The All-Story Magazine, The Blue Book, and The Popular Magazine, two types of stories—the scientific detective and the humorous invention tale —and introduced them to the family audience. Its humorous invention stories by H. G. Bishop, Ellis Parker Butler, and Roy McCardell were among the slickest and most sophisticated of their type up to that time. Butler’s An Experiment in Gyro Hats (June 1910) would later be reprinted by Amazing Stories.

  Even more influential was the publication of The Man in the Room, The Achievements of Luther Trant, Psychological Detective, by Edwin Balmer and William B. MacHarg, the first story in a series which began in the May 1909 issue. “To make a bald statement,” the editor said, “this new detective theory is as important as Poe’s deductive theory of ratiocination.” Luther Trant trapped his criminals by the adaptation of existing experimental instruments like lie detectors, a chronoscope, galvanometer, automograph, plethysmograph, psychometer, pneumograph, spygmograph, and other devices for recording blood pressure, rate of respiration, length of time between answers to questions, pulse, respiratory changes, and other physical conditions that could indicate stress in an individual. What made these stories science fiction was that while some of the devices had been built, the theory of their use for crime detection had not been considered.

  The stories were a great success, so much so that competitor Cosmopolitan commissioned Arthur B. Reeve to write an almost identical set for them built around the character and problems of Craig Kennedy. The first of Cosmopolitan’s stories, The Case of Helen Bond, appeared in its December 1910 issue and shockingly utilized the identical device and psychological procedures of The Man in the Room. It would not have taken much more approximation to have made the story a paraphrase. Reeve went on to pick up other of the gadgets of Balmer and MacHarg in later stories, but with a little more subtlety. For a period of ten years, Arthur B. Reeve, telling the adventures of Craig Kennedy, became the most successful detective story writer in the United States, parlaying them into a score of books, three moving picture serials, and, long after his own ability to write them had departed in the thirties, selling the use of the character and his by-line to other writers.

  Edwin Balmer, who apparently made no outcry about the appropriation of his ideas by Reeve, would later become the editor of The Red Book during its most successful period, and co-author with Philip Wylie of When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, two science fiction masterpieces. Balmer was listed as a consulting editor of Hampton’s Magazine, and he may have had some influence on the periodic use of science fiction by the publication.

  The death of Hampton’s Magazine proved far more precipitous and mysterious than the swiftness of its growth. Mysterious because no one has ever bothered to explore the attendant circumstances despite a litter of startling clues of great sociological as well as economic interest. The December 1910 issue of Hampton’s Magazine contained 312 pages for 15 cents, of which about 130 were advertising. Ten months later, with its October 1911 issue, Hampton’s Magazine was released to another company after a consolidation attempt with The Columbian Magazine failed. The new company was pledged $2,600,000 by a group of investors but received only $92,000. The publication disbanded with its May 1912 issue after having gone letter-size in February 1912. Bankruptcy was filed September 12, 1913.

  All clues to the magazine’s failure warrant investigation. One of the most significant was an article in the April 1911 issue which headlined newspaper-style: “Will the Magazines Remain Free—Will They Withstand the Attacks of Wall Street and Big Politics?” The essence of the piece was that financial interests were finally taking retaliatory action for the dozen years of muckraking they had been subjected to by the magazines. This retaliation assumed two forms: Advertising from the companies controlled by the big interests was cut off from publications that persisted in the expose type of feature; and political pressure was being brought to bear for special taxes and postal discrimination against magazines that were not “literary or educational.”

  On page 789 of the June 1911 issue of Hampton’s Magazine appeared the heading “Advertisers Boycott Hampton’s.” The magazine went on to explain that the vigorous stands that the publication had taken on various subjects had led to this action.

  Readers’ letters followed asking the magazine to name the companies involved in the boycott so that a counterboycott of their products could be started by Hampton’s readers. The magazine did not choose to spell out the names involved, for this would have destroyed all hope of luring them back into the pages of the magazine again.

  A few examples of what may have caused Hampton’s distressing position were The Passing of Pills and Powders by Woods Hutchinson, A.M., M.D. (November 1910), condemning the thousands of patent medicines and drugs and Cassidy and the Food Poisoners by Cleveland Moffett (February 1911) telling of conditions of filth, adulteration, and chemically poisonous substances in the preparation of foods on the market. Included were jams, jellies, mincemeats, ketchups, canned soups, pie fillers, sauces, ice cream, soft drinks, milk and milk-based products, syrups, meat, chicken, eggs, candy, and glucose; specific company names were listed in profusion.

  The magazine industry in general at this time found itself faced with a moral dilemma and a weakness in its publishing formula. In order to bring a top-quality magazine containing the finest fiction, articles, departments, illustrations, and format to a mass audience for a price of 10 or 15 cents, a subsidy was needed in the form of advertising. During the early days of muckraking, the targets had generally been giant trusts and political figures who appeared powerless to fight back. As advertising became a reason for being of American magazines, the trusts discovered that they had financial interests in the companies that dispensed this advertising and could punish those who punished them.

  The publishers now learned they could not have it both ways. They could not excoriate those carrying the financial burden of their magazines and expect them to turn the other cheek. The purpose of spending advertising dollars was to sell more products. It was insanity to advertise such products in magazines that proclaimed them to be worthless or a menace to the public.

  The advertisers did not assume control of magazines nor did they directly censor material. Rather, magazine publishers learned to become their own censors, evaluating what editorial material might injure their advertising prospects. Some of them “puffed” products to keep advertisers happy and encourage advertising.

  Hampton’s Magazine, however, was somewhat different, in that it received a great deal of its financing, in s
mall amounts, from the readers, to whom it sold shares in the magazine in blocks as small as $50. It promoted for such monies constantly and did not operate through brokerages, but went directly to its readership. In its prospectus it stated:

  It is not surprising that newspapers and magazines which carry a heavy volume of Wall Street advertising are disposed to look with unfriendliness on “Hampton’s” plan to directly maintain a market for its own stock. . . . Its editorial policy has made enemies of many powerful men and “interests.” The magazine has been threatened. Repeated efforts have been made to frighten its stockholders. Only recently one “malefactor of great wealth” started a campaign to “cause trouble” among the stockholders.

  The magazine may well have been growing so swiftly that it was losing money on its advertising. In other words, advertisers paying rates that may have been predicated on a circulation of 200,000 were receiving 450,000 circulation at the same price before the contract expired; so despite its volume of advertising, the magazine could have been in financial difficulty.

  Hampton’s Magazine may have been an early major fatality of the new economics of mass-circulation publications, and as such deserves intensive study.

  A few items of special interest to science fiction readers concerning Hampton’s Magazine during its last days are in order. It resumed what was intended to be a new series of the Luther Trant scientific detective stories with The Daughter of a Dream by William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer (June 1911), in which the interpretation of a Freudian dream is the means of solving a problem in which a woman believed to be white proves to be part Negro, with all the tragic connotations expected in the society of that period.

  The artist Robert A. Graef—later to become famous for his work in magnificent color in Argosy-All-Story Weekly and Argosy for such popular scientific romancers as A. Merritt, Otis Adelbert Kline, Murray Leinster, Ralph Milne Farley, Austin Hall, and Ray Cummings —was an interior illustrator for Hampton’s Magazine during 1911. George Allan England, who would emerge as a giant of science fiction, was contributing fiction during 1912. It is evident that as the years progressed, many of the science fiction artists as well as writers would have to shift to the pulps for a living even though their artistic and literary talents were equal to the top markets of the day.

  As the world marked time before World War I, the magazine picture was changing. Though certain periodicals were achieving circulations of a million, they were predominantly women’s or family publications. While the children might have enjoyed science fiction, magazines were mainly bought by women and they were less than enthusiastic. In later years Cosmopolitan would have a totally inexplicable lapse and print a wild interplanetary novel like Arthur Train’s The Moon Maker as a serial beginning in December 1916; or, Everybody’s would run Victor Rousseau’s highly readable and socially significant The Messiah of the Cylinder beginning July 1917 (a creditable anticipation of the method of 1984); but Everybody’s would shortly become a pulp, so that story might have been anticipatory.

  If your name was H. G. Wells, that was still enough to get you the cover billing on the November 1922 issue of Hearst’s International for Men Like Gods, in which a group of present-day men accidentally enter a Utopian world.

  The period of H. G. Wells’ dominance of science fiction and the era of gaslight ended almost simultaneously. After 1911, nothing would come from his pen that was not more preachment than fiction, including The World Set Free (1913), with its prognostication of atomic warfare, or Men Like Gods (1922).

  The man who would replace Wells as the public’s champion of science fiction would rise out of his pulps and some of his books would become far better known to the masses than any individual work written by Wells. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who might have been able to sell to The Strand or Pearson’s fifteen years earlier, but was now as delighted to have his first novel, Under the Moons of Mars, appear with the by-line of Norman Bean in The All-Story Magazine (February to July 1912). This was the Mars that Percival Lowell, the astronomer, had intrigued the world with: a planet that achieved a civilization thousands of years before earth; a dying world that built canals to distribute its water from the polar caps; a land that was the repository of ancient knowledge and a symbol of romance.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs was also a master of characterization, which aptitude was not shared by Wells. He gave the readers supermen, true heroes with which they could identify, set against a background more colorful and enthralling than anything since the fairy tales of their youth. Wells was one of the popularizers of the ordinary man in fiction. The same year, 1912, in the October issue of The All-Story, Tarzan of the Apes would appear complete and Burroughs would be on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time.

  The great Munsey pulps of that era—The Argosy, The All-Story, The Cavalier—would follow the lead of Edgar Rice Burroughs. An entirely new type of story, the scientific romance, patterned after his Mars series, would evolve. For the next decade, Edgar Rice Burroughs would lead and names like A. Merritt, Charles B, Stilson, J. U. Giesy, Victor Rousseau, Ray Cummings, George Allan England, Francis Stevens, Austin Hall, and Homer Eon Flint would follow, to become the darlings of the pulp readers.

  It might reasonably be asked why, in a world that was progressing scientifically at an unprecedented and accelerated rate, did readers select fairy tales for grownups instead of stories with a more tangibly logical basis? The answer was World War I, where the early Verne and Wells optimism about the utopianism of science was destroyed forever. Humorous stories about crackpot inventors also stopped being funny about the same time. They still appeared in semi-technical magazines like Hugo Gernsback’s Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention, largely to lighten the publication’s serious air and partly because the publisher had a great sense of humor, but they would never again appear in issue after issue of The Argosy, The All-Story, and The Blue Book, as they had in the past.

  One author might have challenged Edgar Rice Burrough’s supremacy and for a year or two it appeared he would. That author was Arthur Conan Doyle. It came as a surprise to those who forgot that some of the earliest stories he wrote were science fiction, to see The Lost World serialized in The Strand in 1912. That well-delineated prehistoric land, the superb characterization of Professor Challenger, and the altogether outstanding sense of humor displayed, created a formidable novel. A sequel, The Poison Belt, published in The Strand in 1913, though more philosophical, was also every bit a masterpiece. There were other short stories by Doyle like The Terror of Blue John Gap (The Strand, September 1910), the discovery of a holdover from prehistoric days in a cavern beneath England, or The Horror on the Heights (Everybody’s, November 1913). Doyle was an excellent storyteller and every bit Edgar Rice Burroughs’ match at characterization. Burroughs had created Tarzan, but Doyle gave birth to Sherlock Holmes.

  The battle was never to be joined. The death of a relative in World War I turned Doyle’s mind sharply toward spiritualism and the great promise shown in The Lost World and The Poison Belt would not be fulfilled.

  Catastrophes

  A great plant that has succeeded in rendering useless all equipment motivated by electricity, blows sky high, returning power to the big cities. Such a story could scarcely have been written much earlier, for electricity, as an important form of power, was just coming into its own when George Griffith’s A Corner in Lightning was published in Pearson’s Magazine for March 1898. The story described a novel form of a possible catastrophe similar to the blackouts of major cities in recent times. Illustration was by Paul Hardy.

  The Strand Magazine

  December, 1897

  THE THAMES VALLEY CATASTROPHE

  by Grant Allen

  CHARLES Grant Blairfindie Allen was born February 24, 1848, near Kingston, Canada, to Joseph Antisell Allen, a minister of the Irish Church, and Charlotte Catherine Ann Grant, daughter of Baron de Longveil, holder of an ancient title recognized in France. As a boy, Charles lived with
his family in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was instructed by a Yale tutor.

  Abroad, he attended College Imperial at Dieppe and King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and received his B.A. degree in 1871. He married a semi-invalid and supported himself for three years by teaching at the British communities of Brighton, Cheltenham, and Reading.

  He received a most unusual appointment in 1873, as professor of mental and moral philosophy at an experimental university for Negroes at Spanish Town, Jamaica. The venture was short-lived, and when only six students enrolled in 1876, Allen returned to England.

  The West Indian sojourn was far from a total loss, for while there Allen began to reason out an evolutionary system of philosophy that was to form the basis of his first reputation. Science and philosophy were the two passions of his life, and with the severance pay he had received in Jamaica he financed publication of his first book, Physiological Esthetics (Henry S. King & Co., 1877). The book sold only three hundred copies, but some of these were purchased by readers of the caliber of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, both of whom endorsed Allen, as did most of the reviewers. This recognition paid off immediately, for Allen, who had suffered the rejection of more than one hundred popular articles on scientific subjects, began to get acceptances from publications as distinguished as Cornhill, Belgravia, and The Gentlemen’s Magazine, and he was given regular employment writing part of the contents of Sir William Hunter’s twelve-volume Imperial Gazetteer of India.