Seekers of Tomorrow (16 page)

Ancient evildoers of Krypton, men with powers ap-proaching that of Superman, readers now learned, had been banished to "The Phantom Zone" from which they could be released as needed to add zest to the continuities. The "worlds of if" device was introduced. This featured things that Superman
might
have done and what would have hap-pened if he followed that course.

Most sensationally popular of Weisinger's innovations in the comic was the device of time travel. This astounding new Superman talent opened another dimension of adventure, making it possible for our hero to go into the past and introduce Hercules, Samson, and Atlas into the adventures, or to reach into the future to foil a menace that would not arrive for 1,000 years.

Frequently, associational characters built a following. This resulted in a proliferation of the Superman Group. The big gun, superman, was published eight times a year and aver-aged one million circulation. Added to this was action com-ics, featuring Supergirl; world's finest comics, where Su-perman appears with Batman, another famed adventure strip hero, whose destinies are guided by Weisinger's friend, Julius Schwartz; Jimmy Olsen, teenage pal of Superman, has his own magazine, as has Lois Lane, Superman's girl; superboy features the adventures of Superman as a boy; adventure comics has Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes. Spe-cial adventures have featured Krypto, the Super Dog. This variation on a theme has prevented youngsters from becom-ing jaded with a single character. Presiding over the entire retinue is Mort Weisinger, who directs the continuity writers (including such science-fiction veterans as Edmond Hamilton, Eando Binder, and the originator, Jerry Siegel, who is still active) into the channels he considers most appealing to his audience. Thus, in the most direct way, from origin to present-day, the Superman strips and books are the spawn of the science-fiction magazines; created by a science-fiction fan, from ideas obtained from science-fiction stories, run by a former science-fiction editor and to a great degree written by science-fiction authors. Theoretically, popular superman should repay its debt to science fiction by a feedback system as its readers outgrow the comics. The reason this has not happened to any great degree since 1952, when science fiction went sophisticated, is because no "bridge" magazines exist to wean the jaded away from the comics and into slick science fiction. Weisinger's thrilling wonder stories, startling stories, and captain future performed that role earlier buttressed by amazing, fantastic adventures, and planet stories. Should such magazines come back on the scene, they will find Mort Weisinger with his Superman Group conscientiously continu-ing to do the spadework for them.

The entire world, except for a few fortunates, is blinded by a pyrotechnic display of green light in the sky—origin un-known. Millions of giant, walking plants—offshoot of some misguided experiment—move into cities to kill and eat the helpless masses. On the face of it, something ground out by some early science-fiction pulpster,
The Revolt of the Triffids
by John Wyndham was scarcely the stuff the mass readership of the January 6, 1951, issue of collier's might be expected to find as a five-part novel, illustrated in full color.

Who was John Wyndham?

A quick check revealed that John Wyndham had appeared for the first time in the September, 1950, amazing stories, as author of
The Eternal Eve,
a story of a Venusian maid so revolted by the notion of female dependence upon the male that she shot all of the opposite sex who came within rifle range of her cave hideout until the "right" one happened along. The rest of the case was quickly cracked. Howard Browne, amazing stories editor, admitted Fred Pohl was the agent. Pohl, in turn, felt it was no secret that the man behind the nom de plume John Wyndham was none other than John Beynon Harris. To most new readers who followed the story's history, as with a title change (to
The Day of the Triffids)
it was published in hard covers by Doubleday in 1954, appeared in paperback from Popular Library in 1952, and was evaluated for moving picture production, this merely deepened the mystery. Who was John Beynon Harris?

The baptismal name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, improvised politically to keep all branches of the family happy after the birth of its recipient July 10, 1903, in the village of Knowle, Warwickshire, England. The father, George Beynon Harris, was a barrister at law of Welsh descent and the mother, Gertrude Parkes, was the daughter of a Birmingham ironmaster, one of the last of a then vanishing breed.

There was one other child in the family, a brother, Vivian, who arrived two and one-half years later, so there was companionship and real friendship. Eventually, Vivian would attend The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and tread the boards for a period. While he was not lonely, in other respects John's early life was chronically unsettled.

His parents separated when he was eight. He saw his mother primarily during school holidays and attended seven schools in all as she impulsively changed her places of res-idence. By the time he was 11, John learned that the easiest way to get along with other children, or other adults for that matter, was to pretend enthusiasm for majority interests.

Out of school at 18, he was a farm pupil for a while, then thought he might follow his father's footsteps into law. An Oxford tutor was obtained to help him prime for entrance exams. These he failed because he spent too much time in the Science Museum at Oxford.

A small allowance from his parents minimized the urgency of earning a livelihood, but he nevertheless attempted to make a go in advertising. This helped develop some of his writing skills, which he utilized to phrase occasional bits of fiction. Most were rejected, but a few minor pieces were published in London newspapers.

The writing of weird fiction fascinated him and he tried a good many stories with singular lack of success. The turning point in his writing career came in 1929, when he happened to pick up a copy of the American magazine, amazing stories, which had been left in a London hotel lounge. He was fascinated by the believability of the stories and searched out others in Woolworth's for 3d each (about 7 cents), less than British juvenile paperbacks cost. The reason for the low price was that out-of-date American magazines returned to the publishers were used as ballast on ships going to England, Australia, and South Africa, which incidentally created a science-fiction audience in all of those nations. As a youngster Harris had read H. G. Wells, "with devo-tion." At 13 he had written a superscience masterpiece in-volving flying armored cars which brought down Zeppelins bombing London by firing enormous fishhooks at them.

His first sale to a science-fiction magazine was a "slogan." The February, 1930, air wonder stories offered "One Hun-dred Dollars in Gold" to the reader who could come up with a catchy phrase that best typified its contents. The announce-ment that John Beynon Harris had won first prize with "Future Flying Fiction," as well as his letter explaining why he had selected the alliterative phrase, was published in the September, 1930, wonder stories, but it was a somewhat hollow victory since air wonder stories combined with wonder stories after its May, 1930, issue, and the slogan was never used. Greatly encouraged, nevertheless, Harris sat down to write for the science-fiction magazines in earnest. The paradoxes evidenced by Wells'
The Time Machine
had always fascinated him, so he wrote a story in which men of the distant future forcibly evacuated their ancestors from an earlier time period to secure a lusher planet for themselves. The working title of the story was
The Refugee.
It was announced as
Two
Worlds to Barter
and published as
Worlds to Barter
in the May, 1931, wonder stories. Considerable controversy arose as to its plausibility, spearheaded by the teen-age Henry Kuttner, who would eventually be guilty of many blatant, perforce ingenious time travel paradoxes himself. A series of remarkable stories from Harris followed in quick succession. The first was
The Lost
Machine
(amazing stories, April, 1932), concerning a Martian robot stranded on earth, who is so appalled by the hopelessly backward state of civilization that he commits suicide. This story was one of the earliest attempts at treating the robot sympathetically, and, in the process, offering social criticism. Eventually his ap-proach would all but replace the notion of the robot as a Frankenstein monster, as the concept was developed by John W. Campbell, Jr., Eando Binder, Lester del Rey, and Isaac Asimov.
The Venus Adventure
(wonder stories, May, 1932), was an interplanetary adventure that placed the stress on the sociological results of the impact of an alien environment on diverse philosophical outlooks.
The Venus Adventure
was remarkable even by today's standards for both content and story. Superlatives were definitely in order for
Exiles on Asperus,
Harris' next story, a novelette in wonder stories quarter-ly, Winter, 1933. For that year, the story can honestly be termed
avant garde.
Earthmen discover members of their race who have been enslaved for several generations by aliens on whose world they have crash-landed. They defeat the batlike otherworlders, but find that those born in bondage are so conditioned to their masters by religious doctrine that they will fight to the death rather than be freed. The

"liberators" from earth have no alternative but to leave them in slav-ery. Openly in
Exiles on Asperus,
more subtly in certain other of his stories, Harris flays hypocrisy in religious teaching. Though his early work possesses the strong element of action then preferred by the science-fiction magazines, they are, nevertheless, grimly serious social and religious satires and turn on philosophic and psychological pivots. Harris started at a level which most of his contemporaries would never attain, either in content or style.

Not all of Harris' stories of the 1933 and 1934 period were winners. Many had been written as early as 1931, rejected, and then accepted upon resubmission. One such story,
The Moon Devils
(wonder stories, April, 1934), was originally prepared as a straight weird-horror story, rejected by weird tales, and then redone as an interplanetary with a lunar locale. Somehow Harris never seemed to be able to make it as a weird story writer, one of his few stories of that type to be published. The Cathedral Crypt (marvel tales, April, 1935), involving the sealing alive in mortar by six monks of the two witnesses to their similar entombment of a nun, appeared only because it was
donated
to the publica-tion. The best of his early time travel stories was
Wanderers of Time,
wherein four different groups of humans from progres-sively distant eras of our future assemble in a period when the ants are the supreme rulers of the earth's surface, com-manding elaborate robots to enforce their domination. The concept that man would not continue to evolve and prevail was a shocker in its day.

The first phase of Harris' American writing career ended on a high note with
The Man From Beyond,
the cover story of the September, 1934, wonder stories. In this story, centaurlike Venusians discover that a specimen they have found in a lost valley, and subsequently caged in a zoo, is actually an intelligent mammal from Earth. The transition of this man's bitterness at the mercenary kinsmen who deliber-ately abandoned him on an unexplored world, to grief when he learns that he has been in suspended animation for millions of years and that Earth is no more, is played out with skill and poignant delicacy. The departure from the American scene was brought about by Harris' decision to test his ability in the novel. Upon finishing a long effort under the working title of
Sub-Sahara,
he felt the theme was too elementary for the American market. It dealt with a future where the Sahara is being flooded by water pumped from the Mediterranean. A rocket plane with a man and a woman aboard suffers a power failure over the new project and is sucked into gigantic underground caverns by a whirlpool. There, a semicivilized pygmy race fights to seal off the waters that threaten them with extinction, while at the same time they hold in bondage nearly 1500 men who have blundered through the years into their realm from the surface. In addition to high literary technical skills, a remarkable sense of pace and a storyteller's instinct were evident in Harris' narrative flow.

The novel was submitted to the passing show, a magazine which hoped to become the British equivalent of the Saturday evening post. It had already published
When Worlds Collide
by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, as well as
The Pirates of Venus
and
Lost on Venus
by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Harris' novel was just their cup of tea and they accepted it, changed the title to
The Secret People,
and ran it as a nine-part serial beginning in July, 1935, illustrated by an extraordinarily talented artist named Fortunino Matania. That was credentials enough for the book publisher Newnes of London, who put the novel into hard covers the same year. The story was then serialized by the toronto star weekly. British readers who had followed John Beynon Harris in the American magazines were puzzled by the byline, which read merely "John Beynon." When Harris had origin-ally submitted stories to American magazines, he intended to use the name John Beynon, but the editors had run his last name. He had always felt that Harris was too common a name in Britain and that John Beynon would have a more literary ring. Emboldened by his literary achievement, Harris broadened his endeavors and got Newnes to publish
Foul Play Suspected,
a detective novel, in 1935.

Then he set to work on an interplanetary epic,
Stowaway to Mars,
a penetrating philosophical documentary of a space race to Mars, and probably the first important science-fiction work to see the Russians as major contestants. Martian ro-bots similar to the one in
The Lost Machine
are encountered by the earthmen; they turn the earthships back because of the danger of mutual bacterial contamination.
Stowaway to Mars
was also serialized in passing show, beginning in May, 1936. It was even more popular than
The Secret People
and it was immediately rushed into hard covers as
The Planet Plane
by Newnes, and a year later reprinted in a popular science weekly, modern wonder, beginning in the issue of May 22, 1937, under the title of
The Space Ma-chine.
For no apparent reason, the editors of modern won-der changed one of the girls in the story to a boy, only to encounter an irresolvable dilemma as they moved into the final installment, which forced them to call upon the author to write a new ending to take care of the situation.