Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (59 page)

Since June, 1890, a monthly magazine, SHORT STORIES, had engaged a select clientele, translating stories from other languages and reprinting old classics. It had always published many new stories, but in recent years was greatly increasing the ratio. Doubleday purchased the magazine in 1910 and converted it into a 160-page pulp in direct competition to the other adventure magazines in the field. SHORT STORIES had never printed a great deal of science fiction, but it did run some. It reprinted
The Purple Pileus
, by H. G. Wells, in its issue of March, 1908, telling of a harried, henpecked man who eats a fungus which changes his entire character and life. October of the same year saw a new story,
The Gyroscope
, by Percival Landon, of a mammoth gyroscope that goes awry and creates havoc. Its editor, Harry Peyton Steger, was regarded by Bob Davis as one of the magazine field's finest. He died in 1912 and his seat was taken by Harry Maul, who converted the publication into a man's adventure magazine.

Against existing and new competition, THE CAVALIER was having great difficulty getting its circulation above seventy-five thousand. The question was, could H. Rider Haggard do for it what he had done for THE POPULAR MAGAZINE?

When purchasing
Ayesha
for publication in 1905, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE had implied that they had to outbid several other publications to get it. THE CAVALIER'S price for the ninety thousand-word
Morning Star
, which they ran as an eight-part serial (November, 1909-June, 1910), seems quite moderate. It was purchased from Haggard's London agent, A. P. Watt & Son, on September 15, 1909, for eight hundred dollars, or less than one cent per word. THE CAVALIER bought first American serial rights only, United Kingdom serial rights going to THE CHRISTIAN WORLD NEWS OF THE WEEK, who published it in twenty-one installments, October 21, 1909-March 10, 1910.

THE CAVALIER rushed the novel into print almost instantly, probably because the American hardcover edition from Longmans, Green & Co., New York, was scheduled for May 27, 1910. Undoubtedly, for this reason, there was no lead time for fanfare, no special covers or promotions. The novel was included as would be any other novel. During the period of its appearance it was the policy of THE CAVALIER not to run story titles on the cover.

Morning Star
, as a favorite of Haggard fans, is an excellent story of action and intrigue set against the background of ancient Egypt. A princess of Egypt, raised by Asti, a woman with magical powers, does not want to marry the Pharaoh. The Egyptians believed that everyone had a spiritual double, which they called a Ka, which could take that person's form but was capable of living without a body. The Ka of the Egyptian princess marries the Pharaoh for her and does him in. In the process, the princess is rescued from the Nile by a ship rowed by ghosts, and they are aided by the wondrous harp of Kepher, god of the desert people. It sounds like an unlikely grab bag, but it is told well.

There was virtually no effect upon the magazine's circulation as a result of the Haggard novel. The story had not been "merchandised."

An unusual fact about a short science-fiction novel that appeared in the January, 1910, issue of THE CAVALIER has never been called to the attention of the reading public. That novel,
The Wizard of the Peak
, by Thomas E. Grant, of Estes Park, Colorado, was almost a paragraph-by-paragraph, character-by-character paraphrase of Garrett P. Serviss'
The Moon Metal
.
The Wizard of the Peak
is built around the situation of the world running out of coal and all industry collapsing as a result, to be temporarily saved by a mad scientist who can extract power from the air. He holds the world in his thrall until his secret is duplicated, then disappears, to be seen again and again in the vicinity of his power plants in different parts of the world. The last scene is a confrontation with the young scientist who upended him; the madman literally fades away into the air; there follows a great explosion of one of his plants, resulting in his image being permanently engraved on the side of the mountain.

Since THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE had reprinted
The Moon Metal
as recently as 1905, it is strange that it wasn't spotted by the editors, though it undoubtedly was later called to their attention by the readers. At that time there were no readers' departments, so no record of the reaction was made in print. It was the only story by Grant published by a Munsey magazine, and they paid him 175 dollars for it.

Throughout 1910 and most of 1911, THE CAVALIER indulged itself in a series of "humorous" science fiction about impractical inventors whose ideas backfire. Edgar Franklin was present with his Hawkins stories, possibly the longest series ever to run in science fiction. They were popular at first, and then after scores of episodes, hooted and reviled by Munsey readers. Burke Jenkins wrote a series of his own for THE CAVALIER, about Mr. Wimple, who invents a "woundless rifle," a fog piercer, a wonder plant that grows instant mangoes, and a method for slowing down the frantic pace of "modern" 1910 life. There were numerous humorous "solos" by others, but with acute circulation trouble, the magazine needed something calculated to bring in more customers than these slapstick shorts were capable of attracting.

All of Munsey's magazines were experiencing serious declines in circulation. THE ARGOSY had dropped below four hundred thousand copies and would eventually fall to three hundred thousand. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, from a peak of three hundred thousand, was down to close to two hundred thousand and would drop another twenty-five thousand. THE CAVALIER had never seen one hundred thousand and through most of its life would never go much over seventy-five thousand. Even the big-time slick, MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE itself, from a height of seven hundred thousand was down close to four hundred thousand.

In June, 1911, Munsey ordered the "class" covers taken off THE CAVALIER and colorful pulp action substituted in their place. The stories were all to be illustrated inside the magazine, with the title lettering drawn by the artists. The next month, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and THE ARGOSY received the same treatment, both on covers and inside illustrations.

The interiors were particularly graphic and greatly enhanced the magazines. With the changed covers, the loud, familiar style of art that would become the trademark of the pulps for the next forty years emerged full-blown.

THE CAVALIER, which had the lowest circulation (even below that of specialized THE RAILROAD MAN'S MAGAZINE), was given the standard Munsey remedy (or was it actually the Bob Davis cure?), consisting of lavishly stepping up the quantity and quality of science fiction in its pages.

The most promising science-fiction writer on the American scene was the journalist-astronomer Garrett Putnam Serviss. Born at Sharon Springs, New York, March 24, 1851. Serviss' first love was astronomy, and he spent four years at Cornell majoring in science, graduating in 1872. Another two years at law was taken at Columbia College Law School, which he left in June, 1884, and he was admitted to the bar the same month.

His heart was in journalism, for he went to work as a reporter on THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE. Then he shifted to THE NEW YORK SUN, where he spent ten years as night editor. He worked for Charles Dana, who liked his articles on astronomy, featuring them on the editorial page. Talks he delivered on astronomy proved so popular that he resigned from THE NEW YORK SUN and made a living at lecturing and free-lance writing.

To capitalize on the sensation created by the serialization of H. G. Wells'
The War of the Worlds
in COSMOPOLITAN in 1897, which was syndicated by two newspapers in the United States, Serviss accepted a commission to write a sequel. The result was
Edison's Conquest of Mars
, which ran early in 1898 in those same newspapers that had published
The War of the Worlds
. Hastily written, but impressively imaginative, Serviss' effort had Thomas Alva Edison gather the great minds of the world about him, build a space ship armed with a distintegrator ray, and journey to Mars to inflict upon its evil denizens a defeat which resulted in the destruction of their ancient civilization.

Though the bulk of his work was in popular science features, he went on to write and syndicate
The Moon Metal
, which enjoyed a good sale in book form and was reprinted in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. Following this with
The Columbus of Space
, he became an important figure in science fiction. THE SCRAP BOOK, having published
The Sky Pirates
, was receptive to anything new he had to offer. He sent them a novel which was to prove his masterpiece,
The Second Deluge
. He was mailed on April 14, 1911, a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars in payment for the novel, approximately seventy-five thousand words long. His residence was then 8 Middagh Street, Brooklyn, New York.

Though purchased by THE SCRAP BOOK,
The Second Deluge
never appeared in that magazine. Readers of THE SCRAP BOOK during 1910 and 1911, finding 120 or more pages of advertising per issue, understandably might have concluded that here was one of the most successful of magazines. They were not aware that
all
the advertisements sold to MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE were repeated
free of charge
in THE SCRAP BOOK. In part this was to offset the sliding circulation of MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, and in part it was to make THE SCRAP BOOK look like a tremendously thick bargain for ten cents, and thereby help to sustain it.

The SCRAP BOOK was scheduled to be combined with THE CAVALIER beginning with the issue of January, 1912. The new title would be THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK, with nothing but the fiction being carried over. The original concept of THE SCRAP BOOK would be discarded.

The cover of the July, 1911, issue of THE CAVALIER illustrated
The Second Deluge
, and the novel was unquestionably the greatest single tale of science fiction published by the Munsey magazines up to that time, and the finest story on the theme of Noah and the Ark in a modern tense. The story involves the discovery by a scientist, Cosmo Versal, that within a year the earth will pass through a small nebula composed of water and that the condensation will leave a residual layer of liquid six miles deep around the earth. He builds a gigantic ark, in which he duplicates Noah's feat of accommodating males and females of all manner of creatures on the face of the globe.

The deluge arrives as predicted, and the ark sets sail. The description of the world catastrophe is superb, and the handling of the interplay of human personalities is a totally unexpected "plus" for so early a period in science fiction. Added to that was the fecundity of intriguing situations the author was able to derive from the central catastrophe. Serviss' chief inspirator was Jules Verne. He had dedicated his book
The Columbus of Space
to that pioneer science-fiction writer, and in
The Second Deluge
the ark meets with a French submarine appropriately named the Jules Verne.

The Second Deluge
went into hardcovers, selling for $1.50 from McBride, Nast & Company, March, 1912. It contained four illustrations by George Varian drawn especially for the book. It would later be reprinted by AMAZING STORIES in three installments (August-October, 1926); amazing stories quarterly (Winter, 1933); and fantastic NOVELS (July, 1948). Each reprinting would contain a new set of illustrations by Frank R. Paul, Leo Morey, and Lawrence (professional name of Lawrence Sterne Stevens), respectively. Typical reactions from readers on the 1948 reprinting were: "A truly great story," "Man, oh, man. What a treat!" and "Couldn't have been better."

The same issue of THE CAVALIER contained a short science-fiction novel by George Allan England,
The Ribbon of Fate
, a well-written effort in which a plot by the assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy to permit the Japanese to enter Pearl Harbor and take over Hawaii is uncovered and foiled.

England had been turning out science fiction intermittently since 1905, and much of it was good. He was a developing writer, growing in imagination and ability with each story. The August, 1911, issue of THE CAVALIER published the first installment of a four-part novel by him titled
The Elixer of Hate
, which made it instantly apparent that he ranked with Serviss as one of the two modern leaders of American science fiction. The novel is a variant of the Elixer of Life theme. An old man near death, Dr. Granville Dennison, learns that a scientist living on the Mediterranean island of Cette has discovered a chemical that will prolong life. Dr. Dennison takes a draft of the potion, against the protests of its discoverer, Pagani. Within days he begins to grow younger and agrees to remain with Pagani so that observations can be made of his progress. As the years disappear, he falls in love with the scientist's niece, and then discovers to his horror that he has stepped into the quicksands of youthwardness and is rapidly becoming a boy again. Discovering that the scientist had killed eighteen people for earlier experimental work and blind with hatred because of his ironic fate, Dennison pretends to have reverted to a child's mentality. He practices archery with a boy's toy, kills Pagani with the arrow, and then commits suicide.

The strong influences of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rapacinni's Daughter" can be found in the description of the garden and the characterization. The powerful evidence of H. G. Wells' method is present here, as it is in much of England's science fiction. There are crudities, but there are also passages of great beauty and feeling. There is the strong possibility that F. Scott Fitzgerald received inspiration from England's novel for his short masterpiece, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which was collected in his first book of short stories,
Flappers and Philosophers
(1920). In Fitzgerald's story, a man is born old, almost seventy, and gradually grows younger. He marries, but continues to become even more youthful, eventually ending as a baby in a crib.

Fitzgerald as a boy was inordinately fond of Horatio Alger and G. A. Henty, and these would inevitably lead him to the adventure pulp magazines as he grew older. His favorite writer was H. G. Wells, which would have inclined him strongly toward fantasy and science fiction.