Authors: David Standish
Tags: #Gnostic Dementia, #Mythology, #Alternative History, #v.5, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (37 page)
BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Burroughs would live until 1950, but for all practical purposes his writing career sputtered to an end right here. He would continue to write the occasional Tarzan novel or stray short story, but never again at the manic pace he had maintained since 1911. The marriage to Florence ended in March 1941 when she and the children sailed back to California; they were divorced and she remarried not long afterward. Depressed, turning even more to the bottle, he gained a reprieve of sorts when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—soon he had gotten himself a gig as a war correspondent, and spent the war years reporting from all over the Pacific. After the war he moved back to the L.A. area, but his health was so shattered by angina, Parkinson’s, and arteriosclerosis that from 1947 on, when he bought his first television set, he spent much of his time in front of it watching sports. In 1948 he experienced severe painful angina. As the Hillman site puts it, “When the nitro-glycerine doesn’t work he turns to bourbon. Over the coming months there is a reliance on bourbon for all ills.” He spent much of 1949 rereading all his books—”to see what I had said and how I’d said it.” He died March 19, 1950, after breakfast in bed, while reading the Sunday comics. Shortly before his death he said, “If there is a hereafter, I want to travel through space to visit the other planets”—a dreamy kid to the very end.
Burroughs’s final (and forgettable) tales of Pellucidar were published in the early 1940s, in a sci-fi pulp magazine called
Amazing Stories,
then newly under the editorship of Ray Palmer—who in 1945 began using his magazine to create a major league flap about the hollow earth that came to be known as “The Shaver Mystery.”
Amazing Stories,
then newly under the editorship of Ray Palmer—who in 1945 began using his magazine to create a major league flap about the hollow earth that came to be known as “The Shaver Mystery.”
These Ace paperbacks from the 1960s of the Pellucidar series, published decades after they were written, are tangible examples of its continuing appeal. (© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)
The so-called Shaver Mystery was kicked off with “I Remember Lemuria” in this March 1945 issue of
Amazing Stories
.
Amazing Stories
.
8
THE HOLLOW EARTH LIVES: EVIL NAZIS, FLYING SAUCERS, SUPERMAN, NEW AGE UTOPIAS
IN THE EARLY 1940S
,
Amazing Stories
had an energetic new editor. Ray Palmer was a gnomish young man slightly over four feet tall, and he had been hired in 1939 to breathe life into a magazine that had been launched in April 1926 as the first all–science fiction magazine by Hugo Gernsback, the pioneering editor who coined the term. But by the time Palmer took over, the magazine was moribund, sluggish editorially, circulation dropping.
,
Amazing Stories
had an energetic new editor. Ray Palmer was a gnomish young man slightly over four feet tall, and he had been hired in 1939 to breathe life into a magazine that had been launched in April 1926 as the first all–science fiction magazine by Hugo Gernsback, the pioneering editor who coined the term. But by the time Palmer took over, the magazine was moribund, sluggish editorially, circulation dropping.
Palmer was a fan of the
biff! zap! pow!
space opera branch of science fiction—as embodied by Burroughs, the elder statesman of the form—and began filling the magazine with such stuff. It didn’t earn him any critical praise. About the same time,
Astounding Science Fiction,
which had been around since 1930, had become a more highbrow competitor, and the young writers published regularly there (including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon) became the now-legendary icons whose work began the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, while most writers of the boisterous trash in
Amazing Stories
are long forgotten. But Palmer’s gambit of appealing to a younger, less sophisticated audience paid off in sales—and with the Shaver Mystery, circulation, well, skyrocketed.
biff! zap! pow!
space opera branch of science fiction—as embodied by Burroughs, the elder statesman of the form—and began filling the magazine with such stuff. It didn’t earn him any critical praise. About the same time,
Astounding Science Fiction,
which had been around since 1930, had become a more highbrow competitor, and the young writers published regularly there (including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon) became the now-legendary icons whose work began the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, while most writers of the boisterous trash in
Amazing Stories
are long forgotten. But Palmer’s gambit of appealing to a younger, less sophisticated audience paid off in sales—and with the Shaver Mystery, circulation, well, skyrocketed.
As Palmer later told it, it all started
when one day a letter came in giving the details of an ‘ancient alphabet’ that ‘should not be lost to the world.’ It was opened by my managing editor, Howard Browne, who read it with the typical orthodox attitude, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket with the comment “The world is full of crackpots.” … I retrieved the letter from the wastebasket, examined the alphabet, and made a few casual experiments. I went about the office to those who were familiar with other languages than English, and came up with a few more interesting results. That was Enough. I published the letter in
Amazing Stories
.
64
The letter, appearing in the December 1943 issue, was from Richard S. Shaver. In it he—with some help from Palmer—claimed that the ancient alphabet he had discovered embedded in many English words was “definite proof of the Atlantean legend … suggesting the god legends have a base in some wiser race than modern man.” And this race, of course, had lived inside the hollow earth.
To Palmer’s considerable surprise, the letter drew a huge response from readers; and Shaver followed up with a 10,000-word manuscript titled “A Warning for Man”—which became, after Palmer got done rewriting and embellishing it, the 31,000-word “I Remember Lemuria!” This first Shaver Mystery story, detailing Shaver’s “actual” experiences with remnants of an advanced subterranean race, ran in the March 1945 issue of
Amazing Stories.
The press run of 125,000 sold out. Shaver had other manuscripts on hand. Drastically rewritten by Palmer, “Thought Records of Lemuria” ran in the next issue—which sold 200,000 copies, according to Palmer, at any rate. Actual circulation numbers were never released. Letters poured in by the thousands—50,000 in response to the first piece, Palmer said—nearly all testifying to similar experiences of encounters with bizarre beings living in vast labyrinthine caves. Related as
true
experiences, it should be emphasized. Palmer’s Shaver stories had struck some strange unexpected chord, and Palmer cheerfully played chorus after chorus. Nearly every issue of
Amazing Stories
for the next two years featured a Shaver story, peaking with an all-Shaver issue in June 1947.
Amazing Stories.
The press run of 125,000 sold out. Shaver had other manuscripts on hand. Drastically rewritten by Palmer, “Thought Records of Lemuria” ran in the next issue—which sold 200,000 copies, according to Palmer, at any rate. Actual circulation numbers were never released. Letters poured in by the thousands—50,000 in response to the first piece, Palmer said—nearly all testifying to similar experiences of encounters with bizarre beings living in vast labyrinthine caves. Related as
true
experiences, it should be emphasized. Palmer’s Shaver stories had struck some strange unexpected chord, and Palmer cheerfully played chorus after chorus. Nearly every issue of
Amazing Stories
for the next two years featured a Shaver story, peaking with an all-Shaver issue in June 1947.
Dennis Crenshaw, who for some years has produced
The Hollow Earth Insider,
both as a print and more recently an online journal, provides a good short summary of Shaver’s claims:
The Hollow Earth Insider,
both as a print and more recently an online journal, provides a good short summary of Shaver’s claims:
Over 12,000 years ago a race known as the Titan-Altans came from a distant planet and settled on earth. They first settled on the continent of Atlantis and their culture spread all across the new planet. These extraterrestrial aliens communicated by thought transference and had spaceships that could travel at the speed of light. They also understood genetics far beyond our knowledge today and constructed “robot races” to do their dirty work. One of these “robot races” are our ancestors…. They also created fabulous machines that could have taken care of their every want and need. Then their top scientists discovered the sun and its harsh radioactive rays was causing them to age. They began to construct huge cave-cities underground, using existing caverns when possible and then using huge machines to excavate even larger ones. Over a long period of time these cavern realms grew until they covered twice as much area as the exterior lands. However, moving underground didn’t help. The whole planet was contaminated and Titans were only living for a few hundred years. The decision was to abandon the planet. According to Shaver their population was “more than fifty million” … and “There wasn’t enough spacecraft to transport all the Titans…. So many of the robots were left behind to fend for themselves; those who became our ancestors returned to the surface, adjusting to the sun’s radiation, and after many generations forgot about the caves beneath them.” But many other robots remained in the cavern cities…. Although they survived and reproduced, most of them degenerated into a race of psychotic dwarfs Shaver called
dero
, short for
detrimental robots
. There were others in the caves who managed to stave off the mental and physical deterioration of the
dero
, and did all they could to defeat them; they were the
tero
(integrative robots). However the deros were in control of all the wonderful machines left behind by the departing Titans and they used them to cause trouble for the humans on the exterior of the planet, everything from train, plane and car accidents to stubbing toes and misplaced house keys, according to Shaver, was the fault of the deros.
65
While Palmer was in this chiefly to sell magazines, poor Shaver was apparently deeply sincere about it all. He believed he was telling the truth. He had been born in 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, and had a history of mental illness. As a young man in the Philadelphia area he had worked as a meat cutter, and assistant to a tree surgeon. By 1929 he was in Detroit, studying art at the Wicker School of Art, and working as a nude model there to help pay tuition. For a time during Prohibition he’d also supplemented his income by making a little bathtub gin—but then practically everybody was doing it. In 1930 he joined the communist John Reed Club (named for the radical American journalist); by 1932 he was working in an automobile factory as a spot welder on an assembly line, and in 1933 he married and had a daughter. But in 1934 his brother died suddenly, and Shaver took it very badly. Six months later he was institutionalized for insanity at the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan at the request of his wife; according to the physician’s certificate he claimed “people are watching him, following him around,” and “physicians are trying to poison” him. An article by Doug Skinner in the June 2005 issue of
Fate
magazine adds:
Fate
magazine adds:
He insisted that a demon called Max had killed his brother, and was now after him as well. He must have responded to treatment, since he was released to visit his parents for Christmas in 1936. It was there that he learned of another tragedy: Sophie [his wife] had been killed, electrocuted when she moved a heater in the bathtub. Her family took custody of their daughter. Shaver did not return to Ypsilanti. He was certain now that devils were persecuting him. Over the next few years, he wandered aimlessly and compulsively, trying to shake off the creatures that he believed had killed his wife and brother. He often reminisced about this period later, but his accounts are confused and contradictory; he confessed that he had trouble separating reality from dreams and visions. He tried to stow away in a ship to England; he was imprisoned a few times; he was tormented by giant spiders; he returned to a mental hospital at some point. Max was always after him.
A few samples of Shaver Mystery cover stories that ran in several magazines during the 1940s and early 1950s.
It is a sad story, and Palmer exploited him to the hilt. Once his association with Palmer began in 1943, Shaver continued to add writings to the Shaver Mystery until he died of a heart attack in 1975.
It was of course a dark paranoid sci-fi recasting of ancient ideas about evil spirits, goblins, and things that go bump in the night. In these modern times, they were transformed into rays from weird machines created by aliens from outer space. Scary old wine in new bottles.
BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
2.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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