Strange Angel (6 page)

However, when Parsons was twelve years old, a new magazine for boys entered the market. With a garish yellow cover picturing a red-and-white planet and what appeared to be ice-skating aliens,
Amazing Stories
became the first magazine devoted solely to space-age fantasies. Its editor was Hugo Gernsback, a writer and inventor from Luxembourg who harbored deep Utopian leanings for his populist publication; the magazine's motto was “Extravagant Fiction Today ... Cold Fact Tomorrow.”
Amazing
was to publish stories of what Gernsback named “scientifiction.” “By ‘scientifiction',” he wrote in his first editorial, “I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” The most important element of the stories was not the plot or the characters but the landscape in which the story took place, the technological setting. “Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive.” wrote Gernsback. “They supply knowledge that we might not otherwise obtain—and they supply it in a very palpable form. For the best of these modern writers of scientifiction have the knack of imparting knowledge, and even inspiration, without once making us aware that we are being taught.”

What was more plausible (or ridiculous), Gernsback asked his readers, Philip Francis Nowlan's story “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” in which Anthony “Buck” Rogers was introduced into the twenty-fifth century, or W. Alexander's story “New Stomachs for Old,” which suggested that one day organ transplants might be a commonplace surgical procedure? Gernsback delighted in pointing out that Jules Verne's
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
had predicted the submarine “down to the last bolt” and that H. G. Wells had forseen the development of aerial warfare in his 1908 story, “The War in the Air.” “New inventions pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow,” even such terrifying ones as the apocalyptic bombs made from uranium in Wells' 1914 tale “The World Set Free.”

By 1928
Amazing Stories
had garnered a monthly circulation of well over 100,000 and a host of competitors had emerged:
Weird Tales, Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories,
and
Astounding Stories of Super-Science.
Initially an offshoot of the fantasy or adventure story, scientifiction had now become a distinct literary genre, albeit one which still made up only a small percentage of the pulp market and which was not taken very seriously by anyone outside its coterie of teenage admirers and a handful of adult enthusiasts.

For the most part scientifiction pulp writing paid abysmally. Between half a cent and one cent a word was the typical rate even for renowned authors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft. A 6,000-word story could bring in as little as $30. Thus quantity tended to outstrip quality. Writers came from a variety of backgrounds. Jack Williamson, who published his first story in
Amazing Stories
in 1928 at the age of twenty, had grown up on a farm in New Mexico, living in the covered wagon that had transported him and his family there, while Roger Sherman Hoar, writing scientifiction under the name Ralph Milne Farley, was a Harvard-educated Massachusetts state senator. The common factor entwining reader and writer was a sense of wonder at the possibilities of science. “In my imagination” wrote the budding scientifiction author Jack Williamson, “science had always been magic made real, the promise of unlimited wisdom and power that even I might hope to learn and use.” The young Parsons read
Amazing Stories
and the other scientifiction pulps religiously and would continue to do so throughout his life.

The most popular of the stories and articles to be found in
Amazing Stories
spoke of space flight. Although pulp writers had dreamed up huge guns, antigravity devices, and occult rays as possible ways to power their heroes across the universe, the rocket was slowly becoming identified in the minds of the pulps' readers as the tool most likely to actually get one aloft.

A Chinese bureaucrat named Wan Hu had attempted the first manned rocket flight in A.D. 1500. He built a chair balanced on two wheels, and to its base he attached forty-seven black powder rockets. Seating himself in the chair, he clasped a kite in each hand in order to sustain his flight once he was born aloft. With a glance at his assistants, Wan Hu signaled that the rockets beneath him be lit. As the fuses flamed, his chair became engulfed in smoke and fire. When the powder ignited, an explosion ripped through the air. The assistants craned their heads to the heavens, trying to see their master ascend to glory. He must have been successful, because when the smoke cleared, the chair, kites, and Wan Hu had disappeared, never to be seen again.

Few scientists tried to repeat Wan Hu's hands-on experiment, and although the rocket slowly began to appear in literature as a means of propulsion into space, it was never taken very seriously. In Cyrano de Bergerac's proto-science fiction tale, “L'Autre Monde” (“The Other World”) (1657), the hero, Cyrano himself, straps a rack of rockets to the back of a winged machine he has made. He intends that as each rocket burns out, it will ignite the next, so renewing the boost and powering him towards the moon. The invention works and he is propelled into space, but his rocket machine falls apart around him. After falling for many days, he lands in the Garden of Eden, a fate denied the unfortunate Wan Hu. The rocket was thus seen as little more than a comic prop, a synonym for the absurd and impossible, the equivalent of an intergalactic banana skin.

However, scientifiction sought to establish a sense of plausibility around the idea of space travel and rocket ships. Indeed, many future rocket scientists would admit that scientifiction—or, as it was quickly becoming known, “science fiction”—was the catalyst for their interest in the science. “More than any other nation,” writes the space historian, Frank H. Winter, “America traces its astronautical roots to a science fiction fatherhood.” Parsons joined them in being romanced into the field of space travel. But how was a teenage boy to get started on Gernsback's space quest? Where could one enroll oneself in this new technological army?

 

There was little educational guidance for a boy wishing to begin experiments in interplanetary travel in the 1920s. Rockets may have been mentioned in some of the nonfiction articles that appeared in the pulps, but this by no means made them a subject for science. Indeed, the pages of the pulps were the only avenue open for such technical articles. There were no courses taught on rocketry, and there were few science magazines willing to devote pages to its discussion. Every American may well have sung about “the rocket's red glare” in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but in the century since that poem had been written, the rocket had fallen into disuse. It had become an object of ridicule.

This reaction was not against the shock of the new. On the contrary, rockets of one kind or another had existed for a millennium. In the eleventh century
A.D
., the author Tseng Kung-Liang wrote an account of his country's use of “fire arrows” in the war against the Mongols. To power these the Chinese used a combustible mixture of charcoal, saltpeter (naturally occurring potassium nitrate formed by the decomposition of animal and vegetable matter), and sulphur, previously used in fireworks: a combination we call black powder or gunpowder. A bamboo tube was filled with this powder and either pointed in the direction of the enemy or tied to the side of traditional feathered arrows. When the tube was ignited, the arrows could fly up to 1,000 feet. They proved devastating weapons, as much for their terror-inducing capabilities as for their effectiveness in slaughter. Indeed, by the thirteenth century, reports of rockets being used as weapons were emanating from Italy, Arabia, Germany, and England, and saltpeter had become as precious as gold.

Rockets remained very much a part of the blood and turmoil of earthbound activities for centuries. They were used to devastating effect against the British cavalry by the Indian Haider Ali's thousand-strong rocketry contingent in 1788. By simultaneously exploding rockets and firing rockets directly at the British troops, the Indian soldiers caused extreme panic and horrendous damage. The rockets were primitive: often little more than small iron casings stuffed with black powder and bound to metal swords. Others were simply sharpened bamboo tubes, sometimes six feet long, filled with powder and designed to bounce along the ground towards the enemy.

The British, chastened by this unseemly defeat, developed their own rockets through the pyrotechnical genius of Sir William Congreve. He created large ironclad fire bombs, 25,000 of which were used to burn Copenhagen to the ground during the Napoleonic War, and Britain used them again against the United States in the War of 1812. By 1815, all the great armies of the world included a rocket division. But by the middle of the nineteenth century these same divisions were being disbanded. Despite centuries of use as mayhem-making machines, rockets had barely improved since the Chinese fire arrows. No scientist had managed to completely understand their workings. They were unpredictable, often misfiring and almost impossible to aim with much precision. Guns and artillery, on the other hand, were improving remarkably in terms of both range and accuracy and it was not long before the rocket went the way of the crossbow and slipped into military obsolescence. At the Centennial celebrations held for the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1848, the British turned a large number of military rockets into fireworks to light up the River Thames. The consensus was that rockets were impractical for anything more than distress signals and fireworks, and the rocket was relegated to an amusement.

Nevertheless, the rocket's scientific basics were on display to Parsons just a short walk from Orange Grove. The easy availability of legal fireworks combined with the ingenuity of the local Pasadena boys had turned the Arroyo Seco into a blasting range. In one of the more popular games, boys placed powerful firecrackers under empty tin cans, lit the fuse, and then ran for cover. Peeking over rock barricades, they watched a barrage of explosions flinging the cans into the air. The boy whose can flew highest was the winner. It was a crude but effective lesson in Newton's third law of motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

A rocket, at its most basic level, is little more than an example of this law. Chemicals are burned within an internal chamber, and the products of combustion—mostly hot gases—shoot out the only exit available to them, an opening in the back of the casing. The gases go one way and the rocket is compelled to fly in an opposite direction. With instructions most likely gained from one of the many “Build-Your-Own” kits advertised in the pages of the pulps, Parsons began to construct his first skyrockets.

In the sumptuous surroundings of his garden, Parsons, probably with the help of his indulgent grandfather, would scrape the explosive black powder out of the fireworks and cherry bombs he had collected. He would then tamp the explosive into a casing, probably fashioned out of wound paper or balsa wood. The harder the powder was compressed, Parsons would have noticed, the faster the rocket seemed to go. Attached tightly to the end of the tube was a clay nozzle, through which a paper fuse would protrude. He would tie a stick to the rocket's side and ram it into the ground, to act as a launching tower, then light the fuse. With a fizz and a roar the rocket would shoot into the sky, scorching the grass as it left, diminishing in size rapidly until a second later, its charge spent, gravity would drag the empty casing back down to earth. It seems likely, judging from his near addiction to rocket experiments in his later life, that such launchings were a frequent sight and sound on Orange Grove. The thrills of the explosion, the roaring launch, and the sight of the zooming “bird” would remain essential ingredients in Parsons' love of the science. One can only imagine the disgruntlement of the members of the genteel Valley Hunt Club next door as burning cardboard drifted down among them during their afternoon tea.

 

By 1926 Los Angeles was letting out one of the loudest hollers of the Roaring Twenties. A visiting Aldous Huxley wrote of the din of romping flappers, “barbarous music,” and the “Gargantuan profusion” to be found in the city's restaurants:

 

How Rabelais would have adored it! For a week at any rate. After that I am afraid, he would have begun to miss the conversation and the learning, which serve in his Abbey of Thelema as the accompaniment and justification of pleasure. This Western pleasure, meaty and raw, untempered by any mental sauce—would even Rabelais's unsqueamish stomach have been strong enough to digest it? I doubt it.

 

Los Angeles' population tripled to 1,470,516 in the 1920s, making it the fifth largest city in the nation. Oil had been discovered in Long Beach, twenty miles to the south of the city, turning the Port of Los Angeles into the second busiest in the country. However, the biggest success had been filmmaking. With 90 percent of the world's films now made in the Greater Los Angeles area and with over $247 million a year spent making movies, it was the biggest industry in the city. Los Angeles had become truly wealthy, and it was not shy about showing it. Sumptuous resort hotels were built, containing giant dining rooms and surrounded by lush golf courses that helped attract some of the million-and-a-half tourists that visited the city each year. The city's bigger-is-better philosophy translated itself into cultural events, too. When a production of Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
was performed in Beachwood Canyon, a cast of 3,000 actors was enrolled to act as the opposing armies in front of a crowd of some 40,000.

Sheltered from this tumult of hedonism and big business by Pasadena's lofty detachment, Parsons began attending Washington Junior High School at age twelve. A lack of school records up to this point suggests that his early schooling might have come from a tutor or governess, a form of education still fairly common among wealthy families of the time and all the more likely in Parsons' case since he seemed to suffer from a form of dyslexia. Throughout his life he would misspell words, and his handwriting in particular—the words usually printed in capitals rather than written in cursive—indicates a learning disorder. At the time dyslexia was not considered a legitimate complaint, and children who suffered from it were generally supposed to be backward or stupid. For anyone, let alone such an avid reader as Parsons, the variable grades that resulted from this learning disorder would have only fueled a dislike for establishment education.