Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (76 page)

Science fiction was not Todd Robbins' forte, but a combination of horror with levity was, and
Who Wants a Green Bottle?
(December 21), which tells of how Laird Kilgour traps the soul of his Uncle Peter in a little green bottle, the price he exacts to release him, and the consequences, is a permanent jewel in the diadem of supernatural classics.

As the year 1918 drew to a close, as if to cap off the astonishing feat of presenting a bonanza of brilliant new talent, Bob Davis dusted off his last Edgar Rice Burroughs short novel,
H. R. H. The Rider
, and ran it in three installments (December 14-28). It was smoothly written and entertaining, about a prince who changes places with a bandit and a princess who thinks she doesn't want to marry the prince. The countries are mythical, and that is as close as the novel came to being fantastic.

BLUE BOOK was the major recipient of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "largess" during the year 1918.
The Oakdale Affair
, a short novel, was published complete in the March, 1918, issue. Its opening was similar to
H. R. H. The Rider
, with which novel it was published in hardcover by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., in 1937. A daughter of a banker, who does not want to be joined in marriage to a man not of her choosing, dresses as a boy and pretends to be a bad "man" known as the Oskaloosa Kid. With a former acquaintance of Billy Byrne (the Mucker), she roams the countryside, becomes involved in a murder, and is almost lynched. This mildly entertaining tale would not have been a serious loss to ALL-STORY WEEKLY, but the three short novels that BLUE BOOK followed it with were among the finest science fiction of Burroughs' career.
The Land That Time Forgot
(title changed from
The Lost U Boat
by editor Donald Kennicott), published in the August issue, told of a German U-boat of World War I that is captured by the crew of a British tugboat and forced to put in on an unknown Pacific island, where dinosaurs still exist. And exploration northward up a river is carried forth on the island, each few miles bringing increasingly advanced human races, seven in all, from apelike, speechless primitives to those with highly advanced weapons and superior culture. The story of this adventure is put in a manuscript and cast adrift.

A sequel,
The People That Time Forgot
, in the October issue, finds the manuscript returned to civilization. A plane sent out to search for the castaways is forced down by a pterodactyl, and the pilot, Tom Billings, is thrust into this strange land. He learns that the entire evolutionary scale of man occurs in seven stages in one lifetime, as individuals move from one culture to another. The highest culture is where there is natural birth, instead of from hatching offspring eggs. At one time the evolution continued to an eighth stage, a winged race called Weiroos. This natural chain was broken by conflict between the highest wingless culture and the Weiroos as to which was the dominant species. Since only male Weiroos are born, they must steal females to mate with, hoping that someday a dual-sexed winged race will emerge.

The final novel in the trilogy appeared in December and was titled
Out of Time's Abyss
. It carries one of the characters into a city of the Weiroos, which race is far more highly developed than anything else yet seen, with a written language, credit arrangements, and various other elements related to civilization. It is discovered that eggs laid by various strata of females below the top of the evolutionary scale hatch into primitive reptilian creatures, and the chain of evolution extends through the entire life scale, not merely the humanoid.

A theory similar to that in
The Land That Time Forgot
trilogy had been included by A. Conan Doyle in his famed book,
The Lost World
, published in 1912, but the emphasis and elaboration given it by Burroughs gave him the right to call it his own.

Burroughs received one thousand dollars for each part of his trilogy, and on October 17, 1918, Ray Long asked for another series of twelve Tarzan short stories, the first six to be paid for at four hundred and fifty dollars apiece and the second six for five hundred dollars each.

The relatively better fortunes of ALL-STORY WEEKLY in 1917 had emboldened Bob Davis to make Burroughs an offer in a letter of December 6, 1917, of three thousand dollars for a Tarzan story or twenty-five hundred dollars for a tale of Mars. He rejected two days later a twenty-eight-hundred word short by Burroughs (which has never been published) titled
The Little Door
. There is some indication that the story might have had a war theme.

It seems probable that Ray Long, during this period, was using the Polaris series and other fantastic-story developments of ALL-STORY WEEKLY to convince Burroughs that Davis was developing competition to him. Burroughs submitted no first-look fiction to Davis, but maintained correspondence, sending him comprehensive diaries of family vacations. Burroughs also persistently tried to get Davis, with his newspaper connections, to use his influence to get him accredited as a war correspondent. There is evidence in the tone of Davis' letters that he was strongly against the idea, despite the urgings of Burroughs.

Besides the problem of trying to get back on some sort of working relationship with Burroughs, Davis now found THE ARGOSY moving toward increasing frequency of fantastic stories as part of its weekly program and using authors he had developed. Victor Rousseau's unusual fantasy
Fruit of the Lamp
, a four-parter (February 2-23, 1918), about a young bachelor who rubs an old lamp and gets a beautiful Jinnee, subservient to his every wish, capable of disappearing and appearing at will, and insisting upon living with him, was delightful. If this story seems similar to the popular television series
I Dream of Jeannie
, it's because they are virtually identical.

What probably hurt Davis was the purchase of the ninety-seven thousand-word novel
The Citadel of Fear
from his talented find Francis Stevens for eight hundred and fifty dollars, on February 14, 1918, by the THE ARGOSY. The novel required seven installments (September 14-October 19) to tell the bizarre adventures of superhero Colin O'Hara in dread encounter with the monstrous conjurings of the lost Mexican city of Tlapallan, repository of Aztec "science," and the defeat of a horror that might have been loosed on modern civilization. Stevens had proved that with heavy emphasis on the unknown sciences she could write a romance that was the equal of any of them.

The classified-ad line rate of THE ARGOSY and ALL-STORY WEEKLY combination went up from $1.50 to $1.75, which reflected an increase of one-sixth of the combined circulations. Which magazine had gained the most it was not possible to determine, but the reliability of the figure as an indicator of circulation could be checked against the drop of fifty cents per line in the rate for MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, which had raised its newsstand price to twenty cents in March, 1918, and undoubtedly had lost circulation as a result. It was quite probable that the combined weekly circulation of the two pulps now approached three hundred thousand.

The literary quality of ALL-STORY WEEKLY was outstanding, and the fantasy authors played a substantial part in keeping it high. Writers like A. Merritt, Francis Stevens, Todd Robbins, Ben Ames Williams, Irvin S. Cobb, Max Brand, Julian Hawthorne, A. T. Quiller-Couch, Achmed Abdullah, and Harold Lamb were stylistic achievers. The March 1, 1919, ALL-STORY WEEKLY announced the eighty-third hardcover book from its pages,
The Gods of Mars
, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, from A. C. McClurg;
Under the Moons of Mars
, under the title of
A Princess of Mars
, had appeared a year earlier from the same publisher. During 1918 fifteen novels from ALL-STORY WEEKLY had seen hardcover, and there had been a half-dozen moving pictures from its stories. The idea of promoting the number of novels that had gone into hardcover from the pages of a magazine was not new. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE ran a full-page house ad listing 20 of its own in the issue of January 7, 1915, and offered to supply them to readers. This was to counter a new policy of THE ARGOSY running a complete novel each issue as did THE POPULAR MAGAZINE.

Even more remarkable, Edward J. O'Brien's annual collection of the best twenty short stories of the year reprinted two from ALL-STORY WEEKLY for 1918—
A Simple Act of Piety
, by Achmed Abdullah, and
The Gallowsmith
, by Irvin S. Cobb. In addition, thirty-seven other short stories had rated honorable mention, more than any other all-fiction magazine in America. Among the fantasies in honorable mention were
Light
, by Achmed Abdullah;
Old Aeson
, by Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch;
Wings
, by Achmed Abdullah;
The People of the Pit
, by A. Merritt;
John Ovington Returns
, by Max Brand; and
Queer
, by Philip M. Fisher.

With the advantage of hindsight it can be said that ALL-STORY WEEKLY in 1919 got off to an auspicious start with a novel of heart and artery operations by Ben Ames Williams, appropriately titled
After His Own Heart
(January 4-25). The story was quite convincing on the scientific possibility of heart transplants, therefore prescient.

Davis brought George Allan England back with
Cursed
(January 11-February 15), a six-part novel of an inhumanly cruel sea captain cursed by the witch-woman mother of a Malayan girl he first kidnapped, then killed, who experiences a long life of tragedy culminating in seeing his grandson, whom he loves, cursed with the foul nature of his own youth. England's story was a borderline fantasy, but the announcement of a six-part novel;
The Conquest of the Moon Pool
, by A. Merritt (February 15-March 22), was one of the milestones in the history of the scientific romance, and one of the greatest chapters in ALL-STORY WEEKLY'S era.

"Do you remember
The Moon Pool
?" Davis asked.

"Foolish question No. 9,876,543, that!" he replied to his own question.

Since
The Moon Pool
's publication on June 22, 1918, A. Merritt's name had ranked second only to that of Edgar Rice Burroughs with ALL-STORY WEEKLY readers. Davis' statement that he had received hundreds of letters concerning it was borne out by his own readers' department, and the one thousand dollars paid for the hundred and twenty thousand words of the sequel was a shrewd bonanza. The cover showed a tentaclelike mass of pure energy drawing Edith (wife of the explorer Dr. David Throckmartin) into the Moon Pool and was aptly blurbed "An Amazing Sequel to an Unparalleled Adventure." At the novel's opening, Davis quite accurately enthused: "... a story so weird, so soul-stirring, and of such tense and terrible interest to every human being that even the title 'different' but weakly describes its uncanny fascination."

Three people have disappeared into the Moon Pool, and three others manage to actuate its strange mechanism to follow them into a world that is either inside the earth or in another dimension. There is action and color and drama aplenty, but the allure of the novel rests in the bizarre, poetic images it conjures up of the Shining One, the creature of pure force; Yolara, its priestess; Lugar, the inner-world Hercules; Lakla, the handmaiden to the enigmatic Silent Ones, who are the immense forces of good against the evil of the Shining One and its minions. There are races of frog men and of dwarfs, and though effectiveness of characterization and the flow of the writing are sometimes uneven in quality, the transcendental imagination of A. Merritt comes through, as do the flashes of near poetry and moments of poignancy wrung from encounters with nonhuman creatures that in a lesser hand could easily have become ludicrous. The novel, together with the original novelette, would go into hardcover in 1919 from Putnam, with a jacket and frontispiece by J. C. Coll and a dedication to Robert H. Davis which reads: "In appreciation, among many other things, for Larry O'Keefe's faith in the fairies." Fifty years later the book would still be in print and have sold a million paperbacks.

With "an actual ebullition of joy,"
The Girl in the Golden Atom
, a twenty-two thousand-word science-fiction novelette, appropriately written by a man who had worked for and was born on the same day as inventor Thomas Alva Edison (February 11), was introduced for the March 15 issue. "As a flight of pure imagination, plus a most unusual scientific knowledge, and plus again a rare power of fantasy and delicate romance, it is our firm belief that it has few equals either in modern fiction or the classics." The story had been submitted as
The Girl in the Ring
, and Davis figured it was his prerogative to change the title when he paid two hundred dollars for it on November 13, 1919.

Ray Cummings said the idea was inspired by an ad for Quaker Oats, showing an endless series of identical labels dwindling into nothingness.

Actually, the beginning of the story very closely parallels
The Diamond Lens
, by Fitz-James O'Brien (ATLANTIC MONTHLY, January, 1858), where a man sees a girl living in a drop of water on a glass slide of his microscope. In Cummings' romance, a young man sees beneath the lens of a microscope a girl in a cave within the wedding ring of his mother. The major difference in the two stories is that Cummings' hero invents a drug that shrinks him small enough to enter the microscopic world and have a series of adventures and a beautiful romance, in the best tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The reaction to the story was similar to that of Merritt's
The Moon Pool
, inspiring a sequel, of full novel length, published in six parts the issues of January 24-February 28, 1920, titled
The People of the Golden Atom
. The land in the ring is visited again, and there is much intrigue and violence, solved to some extent by the ability of the visitors to become giants at will with the use of drugs.

The submission by A. Merritt of a sixteen thousand-word novelette titled
The Ship of Ishtar
resulted in Bob Davis sending it back on February 21, 1919, with an advance of one hundred and seventy-five dollars and a request to expand it into a novel. He was tired of having to get authors to write novel-length sequels to novelettes on popular demand.