Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (60 page)

Some sort of a high point in the career of THE CAVALIER in its emphasis on science fiction was certainly reached with its November, 1911, issue, when renowned cover artist Modest Stein illustrated a scene from a new four-part novel by the author of the Hawkins series, Edgar Franklin, titled
The Person of the Pyramids
. An ancient Egyptian mummy revived by Ludwig Schlumpf, Ph.D., develops to be a one-time king, and he finds it difficult to adjust to a world where his authority means little. There is a broad note of humor and a faint touch of satire which seem to make the story an expansion of Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy." Its appearance made a total of three out of four serials in THE CAVALIER science fiction that issue, the other two being installments of the Serviss and England stories.

THE CAVALIER, in absorbing THE SCRAP BOOK with its issue of January, 1912, became the first weekly pulp magazine in history. Faced with two unprofitable publications, THE SCRAP BOOK and THE CAVALIER, Frank A. Munsey had superimposed a change upon them. He would see if there was room for a
weekly
in a field as rapidly expanding as the pulp adventure magazines.

He was too wise to test the possibility with THE ARGOSY or THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, both of which were making money, particularly after the debacle he had created with the initially successful THE SCRAP BOOK. It was important that the experiment be made, for THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, with its twice-a-month schedule, was cutting deep into his magazines' sales because of the small amount of waiting time between serial installments. When THE CAVALIER had run Haggard's
Morning Star
, readers had to wait eight months to get it all. Had it appeared in THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, it would have been four months, but in a weekly it would be two months or less. No one objected to so short a wait for serials.

Another factor that induced the change in Munsey's mind was the advent of still another pulp action magazine, ADVENTURE, issued by the Ridgway Company, publishers of EVERYBODY'S MAGAZINE. They had the money to finance a good magazine, and Erman Jesse Ridgway, having worked for Frank A. Munsey, knew a great deal about the ingredients that went into an adventure magazine. The first issue of ADVENTURE was dated November, 1910, and was edited by Duncan Norton-Taylor. It ran 192 pages, but sold for fifteen cents, five cents more than Munsey's pulps. Part of the extra revenue went back into payments for authors, and from it's earliest issues ADVENTURE used old Munsey favorites like George Allan England, William Wallace Cook, William Tillinghast Eldridge, and Frank Condon. Additionally, they had such developing talent as Talbot Mundy, Theodore Goodrich Roberts, Damon Runyon, and William Hope Hodgson. They printed little fantasy or science fiction, and what they did print was peripheral, borderline material.

Pulp magazines could now be termed a "field."

THE CONVERSION to weekly of THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK was also marked by a cheapening of the covers, reproductions being reduced to two colors. The spearhead story to engage the public was a new George Allan England novel that was destined to make history,
Darkness and Dawn
. Like many other of the fictional milestones that appeared in Munsey magazines, its writing and appearance were no accident. Robert H. Davis had helped England in the plotting. The story had been prepared well in advance, payment of five hundred dollars for fifty thousand words having been sent to England August 23, 1911.

The plot of this story has become a standard. A secretary, Beatrice Kendrick, and her boss, a young engineer named Allan Stern, awake at some indeterminate future date in the ruins of an office high up in New York's Metropolitan Tower.

Only the steel skeletons of a few skyscrapers still remain in a deserted city. Full-size trees now grow between the buildings. It is estimated the two have remained in a state of suspended animation for fifteen hundred years. The attempts of the new Adam and Eve to build a life for themselves and their encounters with a murderous race of blue-black distorted, misshapen creatures that may have conceivably descended from man provide danger and drama. Finally they leave the cadaverous wastes of Manhattan to try their fortunes across the river.

The novel had all the elements of the most popular science fiction: a great catastrophe, a strange locale, love interest, undreamed-of dangers, fast action, and high escape.

Readers of 1912 never forgot the story. A. J. Liebling, of THE NEW YORKER, more than fifty years later was haunted by the memory of England's story, which he had read serialized daily in THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL, beginning with the edition of March 4, 1912, not much more than a month after it concluded in the January 20, 1912, issue of THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK. It had been retitled
The Last New Yorkers
, "A Weird Story of Love and Adventure Amid the Ruins of a Fallen Metropolis," and may possibly have even been syndicated in other papers.

Under the title of
That Was New York
, "To Him She Clung," Liebling told of looking up the old newspaper in the New York Library and reminisced about his feelings then and his adult interpretation now of that story at a length of twenty-six columns for the October 12, 1963, THE NEW YORKER. Sadly, for all his great allusion to scholarly research, he had not the slightest notion that
The Last New Yorkers
had first appeared in THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK as
Darkness and Dawn
, that together with two later sequels it had been published in hardcovers by Small, Maynard and Company in 1914 and seen at least three printings, or that it was reprinted complete in FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, August, 1940. (After Liebling's death, it appeared in hardcovers again from Thomas Bourgey and Company in 1965.) He was not even aware that there were probably fifty thousand people familiar with
Darkness and Dawn
and that there had been a dozen articles about it and thousands of references to it through the years. He was convinced he had resurrected a piece of worthwhile nostalgia that no one but him remembered.

The appearance of
Darkness and Dawn
, by George Allan England, and
Under the Moons of Mars
, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in THE CAVALIER AND THE SCRAP BOOK and THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE only a month apart ushered in a new era to science fiction, the era of the pulp scientific romance. These stories also made the Munsey pulps the major publishers and most important focus of science fiction in the world. While H. G. Wells was still turning out his scientific romances, the "better" magazines ran other stories like them. Wells had set a vogue, and when he stopped writing science fiction and decided to become a novelist, the vogue declined.

At just about the year 1912, the impact of the advertising agencies began to force changes on the popular magazines that acted further to reduce their publication of science fiction. Earlier, COSMOPOLITAN, EVERYBODY'S, THE METROPOLITAN, HAMPTON'S MAGAZINE, and even THE RED BOOK had been "family" magazines with reading matter for everyone. Advertisers, discovering that women controlled the purse strings, allocated the lion's share of the budgets to publications that slanted toward the fair sex.

Magazines which had been the dimensions of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC increased their size to make a more effective showcase for advertising.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, COLLIER'S, LADIES' HOME JOURNAL, and WOMAN'S HOME COMPANION had always used the oversized page. Now, one by one, COSMOPOLITAN, HAMPTON'S, EVERYBODY'S, RED BOOK, THE METROPOLITAN, PEOPLE'S and others bowed to the trend. At the same time, they became more woman-oriented, and science fiction by social happenstance became segregated in the pulps.

Usage and times frequently change the true meaning of words. The stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Allan England about Mars and the future were termed in retrospect "scientific romances," though at various periods they would also be termed "different" stories and "pseudoscientific" stories. The origin of the phrase "scientific romance" is not known. It was around for a long time before Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Allan England began writing. C. A. Hinton, M.A., used
Scientific Romances
as the title for a series of scientific evaluations which he began to have published in 1888 on such topics as "What Is the Fourth Dimension," "A Plane World," "A Picture of Our Universe," "Many Dimensions," and various others.

Gustavus W. Pope, M.D., in his two-volume series, "Romance of the Planets," termed the first,
Journey to Mars
(G. W. Dillingham, 1894), a deliberate attempt at a "scientific romance," and it contains and anticipates most of the elements in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars stories, including a red princess, sword battles, various colored races, extreme longevity, wizards, an officer from earth who is imbued with supernormal powers because of the effect of the atmosphere, flying reptiles which can be saddled to carry a man, and various other similarities.

The science-fiction works of H. G. Wells have traditionally been called "scientific romances," so the question may reasonably be asked: "Is there a difference between the meaning of the term 'scientific romance' after 1912 that was not inherent before 1912?"

The answer is yes.

Webster's Comprehensive Encyclopedic Dictionary (Columbia Educational Books, 1942) defines the word "romance" as meaning: "Originally a tale in verse written in one of the Romance dialects; hence any popular epic or any fictitious and wonderful tale in prose or verse; a kind of novel dealing with extraordinary and often extravagant adventures, or picturing an almost purely imaginary state or society; tendency of mind towards the wonderful and mysterious. ..."

That certainly would cover almost any work of science fiction, but somewhere in the last decade of the nineteenth century the emphasis on the word began to change. "Romance" and "love" became interchangeable. Previously "romance" was a gaudy synonym for "adventure." It became a precise synonym for "love," and so it remains today, regardless of dictionary definitions.

When Bernarr McFadden issued TRUE-STORY MAGAZINE, the first issue, dated May, 1919, had the headline, "We offer $1000.00 for your Life Romance." No reader misunderstood what he meant. He did not mean one's life adventure. He meant one's love story. When several years later he issued a companion magazine titled TRUE ROMANCES, he did not mean true "adventures," nor did a single reader misinterpret his meaning. Clayton Publications released RANCH ROMANCES in the twenties, and they meant ranch love stories, not ranch "adventures."

The term "scientific romance" when applied to novels like
Under the Moons of Mars
or
Darkness and Dawn
meant science-fiction love stories. The love or romantic element is an integral part of the story, but the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl formula is forwarded on a Jetstream of adventure and action, against immensely colorful backgrounds like the dry ocean beds of Mars or the unknown world of the future.

The novels of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the scientific vein have always had a preponderantly male audience. Since most science fiction is in the tradition of those two great writers, this fact is generally true for the entire literary history of science fiction. One great exception was Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose novels always enjoyed a substantial female following.

Jules Verne placed his stress on technical plausibility, travel, and action. There was little of a romantic interest in his stories. Garrett P. Serviss was in the Jules Verne tradition. His finest work,
The Second Deluge
, contains virtually no love interest, and where it appears in his other stories it assumes a minor place. Gustavus W. Pope, M.D., in
Journey to Mars
, added not only the romantic element but also more imaginative situations to what he admired in Verne. He therefore becomes much more a predecessor of Edgar Rice Burroughs than does Garrett P. Serviss, who immediately preceded him.

Some of H. G. Wells' stories anticipated the scientific romance that the Munsey magazines were to popularize, most notably
The Time Machine
. The debt George Allan England's
Darkness and Dawn
owes to it is obvious. In England's story there is a locale set in the future. We find a degenerate race of cannibalistic subhumans, as were the Morlocks in
The Time Machine
. There is the beginning of a love story in
The Time Machine
, but it is not fully developed. The love story in
Darkness and Dawn
is the story. As has been stated, it is Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of Eden all over again.

What Edgar Rice Burroughs had to offer in
Under the Moons of Mars
was a degree of originality in his approach, and an imagination so inventive of alien objects, backgrounds, and philosophies that it transcended even works of such able writers as Serviss and England. They strove for verisimilitude, he strove for escape. As a storyteller he may very well have been a genius. Acknowledging everything that he might have picked up from others in the course of his prior reading, he nevertheless was an original. He
created
a school of science-fiction writing. Both Serviss and England
followed
another school of writing, though the latter, in Darkness and Dawn and the two sequels to follow, was ably making a transition to the scientific romance.

This is not to say that the scientific romance of the Burroughs school was a better type of science fiction. It was a
different
type that appealed to a much wider audience at the time of its appearance and therefore broadened the base of interest in the science fiction derived from Verne and Wells. It was story for the sake of the story and did not intend to educate or to preach.

The discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the transition of George Allan England into a writer of enthralling fantastic romances occurred just when THE CAVALIER, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, and THE ARGOSY were in trouble. Infusions of science fiction must always have been circulation boosters, otherwise they would not have been so common in Munsey magazines, and Robert Davis would not have spent time working on way-out plots with able authors.