Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (2 page)

It would be hard to equate the value of the cooperation extended by Alden H. Norton and Leo Lucke, who preside over the ancient files of Popular Publications (who purchased the Munsey chain), which include thousands of cards from the old Munsey magazines, replete with information going back to the turn of the century. Many hours of eyestrain and discovery were spent delving into those dusty records and coming up with nuggets of information which have been passed on to the readers of this book, giving it a guarantee of authenticity it could not otherwise have claimed.

The long years that Rhea Finkelstein has persevered at casting these manuscripts into a form ready-for-publication makes her a candidate for steadfastness that has all the earmarks of dedication.

Most important, Wallace Exman, imaginative editor of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, must be singled out for the clarity with which he has grasped the intent of this and previous of my books and carried them through in a manner which involved a minimum of compromise of objectives. This is especially important to me, for though the subject matter of this book has an obvious wide appeal, its intent goes beyond supplying a few hours of pleasant entertainment and nostalgia. In a very conscious sense it has been written and edited for those men and women I have the greatest affinity for—those people whose serious interest in this field has been its bastion and whose judgment I respect—the experts and long-term advocates of science fiction and Edgar Rice Burroughs, who above all I would not want to disappoint.

September 1969

Sam Moskowitz
Newark, New Jersey

Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of the world's most famous authors, was born September 1, 1875, in Chicago. He received his early education in the public schools and spent some time in his early teens in Idaho, where he became a good horseman. Dismissed from Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, after a single term, he was sent to a military academy at Orchard Lake, Michigan. Completing his senior year, he failed to pass a test for admission to West Point and returned to Orchard Lake as "assistant commandant, tactical officer, and cavalry instructor," finally enlisting in the United States Cavalry the spring of 1896.

A release from the Cavalry was obtained by his father, who was president of the American Storage Battery Company in Chicago. He enlisted in the Army as a private instead of entering business with his father, but after a year a heart condition developed, and a discharge was arranged. His brothers set him up with a stationery store in Pocatello, Idaho, but he had to sell within a year. Three years with his father's battery business enabled him to marry, even though his salary was only twenty dollars a week.

Tiring of the business, he packed up and went west, to fail at mining with his brothers in Idaho, and then took a job as a railway cop in Salt Lake City. His wife permitted him to auction off their furniture in order to raise the money to return to Chicago. Burroughs then took a variety of selling jobs, bluffed his way into an accounting position, situated himself with Sears, Roebuck for two years, and finally went into his own mail-order business, selling aluminum pots and pans. It was during this time that he wrote courses on how to be a successful businessman.

A brother, Harry, secured a position for him placing ads in the pulp magazines for a patent-medicine cure for alcoholism called Alcola. This position lasted only two months, but it had great significance, because it acquainted Burroughs with the contents of periodicals like THE ARGOSY and THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, which published and presumably paid for fiction.

It was to these he turned in sheer and utter desperation as he failed at job after job and business venture after business venture. He had written business advice, doggerel, little stories for children (which he never tried to have published), but in concentrating on the scientific romance as in Under the Moons of Mars, he found his metier. Burroughs took pride in his work, even when he seemed to concede some of the unkind inferences of his critics.

He said repeatedly in interviews that he turned to writing only to feed his family. The facts make it difficult to argue with that assertion. A thirty-seven-year-old failure at the time he sold his first novel, penniless, with two children to support, and a third on the way, his behavior when money began to come in could have provided substance for a sermon. He purchased a fine home for his wife and children and spent virtually all of his spare time with the family, chauffeuring them around in the big automobiles he had always promised to buy when he struck it rich. His tolerance of small children as they wandered in and out of his study while he was trying to write was positively saintly. He drove a hard bargain in selling the products of his imagination, but in the incredible mass of his papers which his family opened to his biographer, Irwin Porges, it was impossible to find a hint of scandal. People who worked for him speak of him in hushed supernal whispers. His primary goal in writing appeared to be to provide security for his family. Millions of his old readers remember him with kindly nostalgia, and millions of new ones seem unable to detect the glaring flaws that the critics attributed to his work.

It is obvious that
Tarzan of the Apes
has become one of the literary treasures of America, and if one is to trust to the reality of recent events, it will be bracketed by a good many of his other works for some generations to come.

To set the tone of this book, a substantial segment from Edgar Rice Burroughs'
Under the Moons of Mars
, the landmark novel that popularized the vogue for the scientific romance, leads off this compendium.

A long prologue telling of Captain John Carter's Southern background and training, his mysterious death and entombment in a vault that could be opened
only from the inside
as told by his "friend," Edgar Rice Burroughs, is omitted. Deleted, as well, are the first two chapters telling of John Carter's return from the Civil War, and his try at prospecting for gold with another former Confederate officer. His partner is killed by Indians and John Carter takes refuge in a cave and lays down to rest. Faced by the threat of the return of the Indians and also by mysterious moaning sounds in the rear of the cave, with an effort of the will he finds his spirit separated from his body. Stepping out of the cave into the night, he sees in the spangled heavens the red dot of Mars. He thinks: "Mars, the god of war, and for me the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment." Then relates: "As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as a lodestone attracts a particle of iron.

"My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness."

At that point, the section that follows opens and we are given the fascinating background of the Martian world, a world that would engage the imagination of the author for the next thirty-eight years of his life. This can be read as a complete section in itself and the story can be found in its entirety under the title of
A Princess of Mars
.

I OPENED MY eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I.

I found myself lying prone upon a bed of yellowish, moss-like vegetation which stretched around me in all directions for interminable miles. I seemed to be lying in a deep, circular basin, along the outer verge of which I could distinguish the irregularities of low hills.

It was midday, the sun was shining full upon me and the heat of it was rather intense upon my naked body, yet no greater than would have been true under similar conditions on an Arizona desert. Here and there were slight outcroppings of quartz-bearing rock which glistened in the sunlight; and a little to my left, perhaps a hundred yards, appeared a low, walled enclosure about four feet in height. No water, and no other vegetation than the moss was in evidence, and as I was somewhat thirsty I determined to do a little exploring.

Springing to my feet I received my first Martian surprise, for the effort, which on Earth would have brought me standing upright, carried me into the Martian air to the height of about three yards. I alighted softly upon the ground, however, without appreciable shock or jar. Now commenced a series of evolutions which even then seemed ludicrous in the extreme. I found that I must learn to walk all over again, as the muscular exertion which carried me easily and safely upon Earth played strange antics with me upon Mars.

Instead of progressing in a sane and dignified manner, my attempts to walk resulted in a variety of hops which took me clear of the ground a couple of feet at each step and landed me sprawling upon my face or back at the end of each second or third hop. My muscles, perfectly attuned and accustomed to the force of gravity on Earth, played the mischief with me in attempting for the first time to cope with the lesser gravitation and lower air pressure on Mars.

I was determined, however, to explore the low structure which was the only evidence of habitation in sight, and so I hit upon the unique plan of reverting to first principles in locomotion, creeping. I did fairly well at this and in a few moments had reached the low, encircling wall of the enclosure.

There appeared to be no doors or windows upon the side nearest me, but as the wall was but about four feet high I cautiously gained my feet and peered over the top upon the strangest sight it had ever been given me to see.

The roof of the enclosure was of solid glass about four or five inches in thickness, and beneath this were several hundred large eggs, perfectly round and snowy white. The eggs were nearly uniform in size being about two and one-half feet in diameter.

Five or six had already hatched and the grotesque caricatures which sat blinking in the sunlight were enough to cause me to doubt my sanity. They seemed mostly head, with little scrawny bodies, long necks and six legs, or, as I afterward learned, two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs. Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head.

The ears, which were slightly above the eyes and closer together, were small, cup-shaped antennae, protruding not more than an inch on these young specimens. Their noses were but longitudinal slits in the center of their faces, midway between their mouths and ears.

There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color. In the adults, as I was to learn quite soon, this color deepens to an olive green and is darker in the male than in the female. Further, the heads of the adults are not so out of proportion to their bodies as in the case of the young.

The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark. The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth. These latter add a most ferocious appearance to an otherwise fearsome and terrible countenance, as the lower tusks curve upward to sharp points which end about where the eyes of earthly human beings are located. The whiteness of the teeth is not that of ivory, but of the snowiest and most gleaming of china. Against the dark background of their olive skins their tusks stand out in a most striking manner, making these weapons present a singularly formidable appearance.

Most of these details I noted later, for I was given but little time to speculate on the wonders of my new discovery. I had seen that the eggs were in the process of hatching, and as I stood watching the hideous little monsters break from their shells I failed to note the approach of a score of full-grown Martians from behind me.

Coming, as they did, over the soft and soundless moss, which covers practically the entire surface of Mars with the exception of the frozen areas at the poles and the scattered cultivated districts, they might have captured me easily, but their intentions were far more sinister. It was the rattling of the accouterments of the foremost warrior which warned me.

On such a little thing my life hung that I often marvel that I escaped so easily. Had not the rifle of the leader of the party swung from its fastenings beside his saddle in such a way as to strike against the butt of his great metal shod spear, I should have snuffed out without ever knowing that death was near me. But the little sound caused me to turn, and there upon me, not ten feet from my breast, was the point of that huge spear, a spear forty feet long, tipped with gleaming metal, and held low at the side of a mounted replica of the little devils I had been watching.

But how puny and harmless they now looked beside this huge and terrific incarnation of hate, of vengeance and of death. The man himself, for such I may call him, was fully fifteen feet in height and, on Earth, would have weighed some four hundred pounds. He sat his mount as we sit a horse, grasping the animal's barrel with his lower limbs, while the hands of his two right arms held his immense spear low at the side of his mount; his two left arms were outstretched laterally to help preserve his balance, the thing he rode having neither bridle or reins of any description for guidance.

And his mount! How can earthly words describe it! It towered ten feet at the shoulder; had four legs on either side; a broad flat tail, larger at the tip than at the root, and which it held straight out behind while running; a gaping mouth which split its head from its snout to its long, massive neck.