Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (52 page)

What was the Blind Spot? The world conjectured, and, like the world has been since beginning, it scoffed and derided. Some there were, however, men well up in the latest discoveries of science, who did not laugh. They counseled forbearance; they would wait for the doctor and his lecture.

There was no lecture. In the teeth of our expectation came the startling word that the doctor had disappeared. Apparently when on the very verge of announcing his discovery he had been swallowed by the very force that he had loosened. There was nothing in known science, outside of optics, that could in any way be blended with the Blind Spot. There were but two solutions; either the professor had been a victim of a clever rogue, or he had been overcome by the rashness of his own wisdom. At any rate, it was known from that minute on as "THE BLIND SPOT."

Perhaps it is just as well to take up the findings of the police. The police of course eluded from the beginning any suggestion of the occult. They are material; and were convinced from the start that the case had its origin in downright villainy. Man is complex; but being so, is oft overbalanced by evil. Some genius had made a fool of the doctor.

In the first place a thorough search was made for the professor. The place at No. 288 Chatterton Place was ransacked from cellar to attic. The records were gone over and it was found that the property had for some time been vacant; that the real ownership was vested in a number of heirs scattered about the country.

The old lady had apparently been living on the place simply through sufferance. No one could find out who she was. A few tradesmen in the vicinity had sold her some scant supplies and that was all. The stress that Jerome placed upon her actions and words was given due account of. There were undoubtedly two villains; but also there were two victims. That the old lady was such as well as the professor no one has doubted. The whole secret lay in the strange gentleman with the Eastern cast and complexion. Who was Rhamda Avec?

And now comes the strangest part of the story. Ever, when we recount the tale there is something to overturn the theories of the police. It has become a sort of legend in San Francisco; one to be taken with a grain of salt, to be sure, but for all that, one at which we may well wonder. Here the supporters of the professor's philosophy hold their strongest point—if it is true. Of course we can venture no private opinion, never having witnessed. It is this:

Rhamda Avec is with us and in our city. His description and drawn likeness has been published many times. There are those who aver that they have seen him in the reality of the flesh walking through the crowds of Market Street.

He is easily distinguished, tall and distinctive, refined to an ultra degree, and with the poise and alertness of a gentleman of reliance and character. Women look twice and wonder; he is neither old nor young; when he smiles it is like youth breaking in laughter. And with him often is his beautiful companion.

Men vouch for her beauty and swear that it is of the super kind that drives to distraction. She is fire and flesh and carnal—she is superbeauty. There is allurement about her body; sylphlike, sinuous; the olive tint of her complexion, the wonderful glory of her hair and the glowing night-black of her eyes. Men pause; she is of the superlative kind that robs the reason, a supreme glory of passion and life and beauty, at whose feet fools and wise men would slavishly frolic and folly. She seldom speaks, but those who have heard her say that it is like rippling water, of gentleness and softness and of the mellow flow that comes from love and passion and from beauty.

Of course there is nothing out of the ordinary in their walking down the streets. Anybody might do that. The wonder comes in the manner in which they elude the police. They come and go in the broad, bright daylight. Hundreds have seen (hem. They make no effort at concealment nor disguise. And yet no fantoms were ever more unreal than they to those who seek them. Who are they? The officers have been summoned on many occasions; but each and every time in some manner or way they have contrived to elude them. There are some who have consigned them to the limbo of illusion. But we do not entirely agree.

In a case like this it is well to take into consideration the respectability and character of those who have witnessed. Fantoms are not corporeal; these two are flesh and blood. There is mystery about them; but they are substance, the same as we are. All the secrets of the universe have not been unriddled by any means. We believe in Dr. Holcomb; and whether it was murder or mystery, we do not think we shall solve it until we have discovered the laws and the clues that led the great doctor up to the Blind Spot.

And lastly:

If you will take the Key Route ferry some foggy morning you may see something to convince you. It must be foggy and the air must be gray and drab and somber. Take the lower deck. Perhaps you shall see nothing. If not try again; for they say you shall be rewarded. Watch the forward part of the boat; but do not leave the inner deck. The great Rhamda watching the gray swirl of the water!

He stands alone, in his hands the case of reddish leather, his feet slightly apart and his face full of a great hungry wonder. Watch his features; they are strong and aglow with a great and wondrous wisdom; mark if you see evil. And, remember. Though he is like you he is something vastly different. He is flesh and blood; but perhaps the master of one of the greatest laws that man can attain to. He is the fact and the substance that was promised, but was not delivered by the professor.

by Sam Moskowitz

ALL THE WORLD is familiar with the novel
Tarzan of the Ape
s, and literally tens of millions of the world's people recognize the name of its author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. A substantial number are aware that he wrote stories other than Tarzan, most of them science fiction with locales on Mars, Venus, the Moon, Jupiter, the interior of the Earth, and planets surrounding other stars. Very few realize that he supplanted H. G. Wells as the world's front-running science-fiction writer and outdistanced another contemporary science-fiction-master, A. Conan Doyle (
The Lost World
, 1912;
The Poison Belt
, 1913), by so great a margin in both quantity and popularity that even if Doyle had wished to enter into a deliberate competition, it is doubtful that he could have overtaken him.

Following the appearance of his first published work of fiction,
Under the Moons of Mars
, in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE (February-July, 1912), Burroughs turned the entire direction of science fiction from prophecy and sociology to romantic adventure, made the major market for such work the all-fiction pulp magazines, and became the major influence on the field through to 1934.

Edgar Rice Burroughs carried no illusion of rhetorical grandeur when he first evaluated seriously the potential of a literary career. Reasonably acquainted with the popular magazines of the day, he read their fiction, analyzed their policies, and determined that considering the type of thing he planned to write, a scientific romance, his best hope lay with the all-fiction pulps. These were magazines that carried little or no nonfiction; usually unrelieved by illustrations (because of their rough paper), they crammed page after page of solid type with adventure, human interest, and romance. The number of such magazines was increasing, but the group most likely to accept a highly fantastic romantic adventure was the Munsey pulps. Of that group, the magazine that ran such stories most regularly was THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, so that would be his target.

"I had good reason for thinking I could sell what I wrote," Edgar Rice Burroughs stated in a by-lined feature article for THE SUNDAY WORLD MAGAZINE, October 27, 1929. "I had gone thoroughly through some of the all-fiction magazines, and made up my mind that if people were paid for writing rot such as I read I could write stories just as rotten. ... I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."

The motivation for writing was not the challenge, not the subconscious love of it, but sheer, utter, and driving despair. Burroughs had missed his mark in a dozen diverse occupations in scattered areas of the country. There were two children to support, and he had already pawned the wife's jewelry and his watch. His last venture, a mail-order business, had failed miserably, and he was working out of borrowed space as an agent for a pencil-sharpener company.

It has never been made clear how many back issues of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE he had read, or whether the "rotten" stories he was referring to were science fiction.

Had he read
The Cave of the Glittering Lamps
(October, 1910-January, 1911), a five-part novel of the tunnels of a subterranean city carved out of a Persian mountain, whose golden grandeur outdated the Bible, written by a twenty-seven-year-old, Ludwig Lewisohn, then struggling to build a literary reputation? The ancient priests bent on their sacrifices to the Sun God were deliberately calculated to provide thrills and were a far cry from the scholarship of Lewisohn's translations, later books on world literature, or novels of the Jews that later brought him attention.

Burroughs' contempt for
The Monkey Man
(September, 1910-January 1911), by William Tillinghast Eldridge, a stalwart of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, would be more understandable. Eldridge had taken the potentially fascinating idea of an immensely powerful apelike man, who swung through trees, to the terror of a couple cast away on a tropical island, and reduced it to an ordinary and eminently forgettable episode. It may well be that
Tarzan of the Apes
owes its genesis as much to that poorly cast story as it docs to the legend of Romulus and Remus or to the
Jungle Books
of Rudyard Kipling, hitherto regarded as the most probable sources.

It is not as likely that his reading had extended as far back as the issues of January-June, 1909, which featured
A Columbus of Space
by the popular astronomer and journalist Garrett P. Serviss. Had he read it, he probably could not have treated with proper respect a novel written in 1908 in which atomic energy derived from uranium is used to power a space ship to Venus. But he was not likely to have scoffed at the fascinating space scenes, the exploration of Venus with its dark-side and light-side humanoid cultures, its strange monsters and lovable pets. The description of the great clouds parting once in a lifetime to reveal the face of a gigantic, merciless sun is not to be demeaned, particularly when the effect of the rays that pour down is to drive all inhabitants mad. A much more sophisticated use of the idea in
Nightfall
(ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, September, 1941) had raised Isaac Asimov to the rank of a major figure in the field of science fiction. The idea had been suggested to him by John W. Campbell, the magazine's editor (attributed to a stanza from Ralph Waldo Emerson) who
had
read
A Columbus of Space
when it was reprinted in AMAZING STORIES, August-October, 1926. In
Nightfall
, a world is hypothesized where the stars appear only once in a thousand years, and each time it happens the population is rendered insane and civilization falls. The closest similarity to this concept in a Burroughs story occurs in
The Pirates of Venus
(ARGOSY, September 17-October 22, 1932), where occasional rifts in the clouds burn up vegetation and destroy life.

Edgar Rice Burroughs had the pack-rat instinct and kept virtually every letter he ever received and carbons of those he sent in perfect order. These records show no submission or correspondence regarding the first draft of
Under the Moons of Mars
prior to August 14, 1911. It was on that date that he mailed forty-three thousand words of an unfinished manuscript titled
Dejah Thoris, Martian Princess
, to THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE at 175 Fifth Avenue, New York City. A businessman from the beginning, he asked to retain book rights if the manuscript was accepted, and requested that the story be published under the pen name of Normal Bean (which name he bracketed under his own on the letter).

Ten days later, August 24, 1911, Thomas Newell Metcalf, for years managing editor of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE under Robert H. Davis, replied asking that the story be lengthened to seventy thousand words and that the early portion be condensed to speed up the action. Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was residing at 222 W. Kinzie St., Chicago, a two-day mail trip away, must have responded almost instantly, because his reply was dated August 26, 1911, requesting rates of payment from Metcalf and informing him that his sole motive for writing the story was that he needed the money it might bring and that there was no sentiment involved, "although I became very much interested in it while writing."

It would appear highly likely that since the manuscript was submitted unfinished, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was its first and only recipient. That would indicate a remarkable market evaluation on the part of Burroughs, particularly since his initial work was science fiction. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, from its inception with the January, 1905, issue, had given science fiction a very heavy representation among the novels as well as the short stories. Burroughs writing his first story in a fantastic and imaginative format may have been no coincidence.

The average rate of pay of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was five to ten dollars per thousand words, depending upon the reputation of the author and the quality of the work, Metcalf told Burroughs in his reply of August 28, 1911. In more specific terms, it was one-half to one cent a word. The big popular magazines of the period, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, COLLIER'S, HAMPTON'S, EVERYBODY'S, and COSMOPOLITAN, paid substantially more even then. O. Henry had an agreement with Robert H. Davis to give him first look at each new short story submitted to MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE and if accepted the rate of pay was ten cents a word. Authors of fame and following like Jack London, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert W. Chambers could negotiate their own rates and frequently made far more money for magazine serialization of a novel than from book royalties. For the rest, even among the mass-circulation slicks enjoying heavy advertising revenue, a one-cent-a-word rate was acceptable and anything above that was a real marketing coup.