Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (75 page)

The United States had entered World War I April 6, 1917, and ALL-STORY WEEKLY'S policy of running nothing on the war had abruptly changed. Four pages of martial poems under the heading of "Red, White, and Blue" preceded the fiction of the May 19, 1917, issue. The note of war bugles sounded through poem after poem, culminating in the issue of August 4, 1917, when
every story in the issue was a war story
, including Perley Poore Sheehan, Louis Tracy, George Allan England, and Henry Leverage, as well as Sheehan coming back for seconds under the pen name of Paul Regard.

The classified-advertising rates in ALL-STORY WEEKLY rose from sixty cents to seventy-five cents a line with an announcement in the June 9, 1917, issue, an increase of twenty-five per cent. Since the rates of the other magazines in the Munsey group did not advance, this must be translated into a comparable gain in circulation. As it moved into mid-1917, ALL-STORY WEEKLY must have attained a circulation of at least one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly, with a possibility of a maximum up to one hundred fifty thousand. By cutting out the leading between lines, the wordage was increased by twenty-five thousand with the June 30, 1917, number, with no change in price, raising average fiction content to one hundred sixty thousand words an issue. The wordage dropped back to one hundred and thirty-five thousand words by restoring the leading with August 11, with no explanation of either change ever given.

The classified-advertising line rate of ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and THE ARGOSY was combined at $1.50 for appearance in both magazines. Previously it had been $1.30 for THE ARGOSY and seventy-live cents for ALL-STORY WEEKLY. The reason for the combination rate was quick in coming. With the issue of October 6, 1917, THE ARGOSY was made a weekly with 192 pages, sixteen more than ALL-STORY WEEKLY for ten cents, with the same general content. If ALL-STORY WEEKLY had been an experimental publication calculated to determine whether a weekly all-fiction pulp magazine was feasible, it had succeeded. THE ARGOSY undoubtedly still had the larger circulation, but now it was in direct competition with ALL-STORY WEEKLY and a better buy for the money. The major difference in content was that THE ARGOSY ran no "different" stories, no Edgar Rice Burroughs, and for the past two years had run very little science fiction. The most notable they did print was
Who Is Charles Avison?
(April, 1916), by a man with an "obvious" pseudonym, Edison Tesla Marshall. It was a remarkable story, perhaps the first on the twin-worlds theme, of there being another earth with identical history and inhabitants never seen because it is in perpetual eclipse of the sun. Two Charles Avisons set out in space ships, but the movement of a comet forces one to crash on his earth and the other to land while they are burying his duplicate. Edgar Wallace, who was a contributor to the Munsey magazines at the time of publication, may very well have received from it his inspiration for his short novel
Planetoid 127
(Readers Library, 1929), which has an identical theme. After a few more stories, Marshall dropped the use of the middle name and went on to literary acclaim with historical novels as Edison Marshall.

THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, when created in 1905, was an alternative to increasing the publication frequency of THE ARGOSY as an answer to the competition of other all-fiction pulps. It proved to be a sound concept, and it prospered. THE CAVALIER was an attempt to establish a
third
monthly with a related policy by Munsey, and it failed. THE CAVALIER, then tried as a weekly, proved that a small but dependable audience would support such frequency, and the combination with THE ALL-STORY showed that an exceptional magazine could be profitable as a weekly.

Now with THE ARGOSY also a weekly, Munsey published eight to ten issues a month. It must have been obvious to Bob Davis that THE ARGOSY was now his
major
competition, rather than THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, ADVENTURE, THE BLUE BOOK, PEOPLE'S, or SHORT STORIES.

Except for a nonfantasy short novel in the drawer, Davis had no Edgar Rice Burroughs to employ as his standard solution to a tough competitive situation. His campaign to develop a new group of fantasy writers in place of Burroughs was well under way before. THE ARGOSY was made a weekly, and was gaining momentum now. A. Merritt, the daydreaming associate editor of THE AMERICAN WEEKLY, had submitted a short story which Davis was aware had literary quality far beyond almost anything he had ever run. "The author has painted scenes and persons not of this earth—a powerful pageant of horrors which, fortunately, are fictitious," he blurbed in his announcement for the "different" story,
People of the Pit
, which opened the year in the January 5, 1918, issue. An Alaskan explorer discovers a seemingly bottomless staircase which leads into the depths of an extinct volcano, where a race of sluglike creatures, with the power to float in air, worships an ancient God that no longer exists. The account of the explorer's imprisonment, escape, and climb back up the endless staircase to freedom and death is a masterpiece of the genre and made a greater impact than almost any other short work of science fiction the magazine had ever run. It had been a good buy at sixty dollars for its sixty-five hundred words.

One of the great magazine successes of World War I was POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE, which featured marvelous covers of speculative invention and imaginative handling of contents, under the editorial direction of Waldemar Kaempffert. For ALL-STORY WEEKLY it was a scoop to run
The Diminishing Draft
by him in the February 9 issue, a well-thought-out story of a man who stumbles upon a chemical which will reduce living things to a fraction of their size, and who then restores them with a saline solution. Actually, Kaempffert had been a Munsey contributor before he became POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE'S editor, with a forty-three thousand-word novel,
Terror
, serialized in four parts in THE SCRAP BOOK, December, 1908-March, 1909.

Irvin S. Cobb, now in even far greater demand than the days when he had written
Fishhead
for THE CAVALIER, produced for friend Bob Davis
The Gallowsmith
, another masterful tale of horror, telling of a professional hangman and the psychology of the grotesque death that came to him. So exalted was Cobb at the time that Davis ran a photograph of him on the cover and had the text of the story set straight across the page like a book to differentiate it from the standard two-column format of the magazine.

In the March 9 issue Davis was able to introduce another discovery, a "different" complete novel titled
The Planeteer
, by an unknown named Homer Eon Flint. A resident of San Jose, California, Flint had submitted the novel as
The Danger Doctor
and had been paid three hundred dollars for its thirty-nine thousand words on October 25, 1917. The earth of the twenty-third century is so overpopulated it cannot feed the masses. By upsetting the gravitational balance of the solar system with a planetoid dislodged from orbit, the earth is shifted to the vicinity of Jupiter, which planet, already inhabited by semihuman creatures, serves as the bread-, basket for the food-shy billions. It was a cosmic concept, and the readers loved it.

Julian Hawthorne, who had been so inept at his interplanetary romance,
The Cosmic Courtship
, returned with power, skill, and authenticity in
Absolute Evil
(April 13), a fine supernatural story of the girl descendant of a New England witch who fights and destroys a clergyman who has, through the black arts, learned to transform himself into a wolf.

The true format of the scientific romance reappeared with
Draft of Eternity
, a four-part novel by Victor Rousseau (June 1-22, 1918). The novel had a marvelous title, a superb cover, and an imaginative situation where a drug carries the physician of a private hospital and his Hindu friend one thousand years into the future, when the nation has lapsed back into savagery amid the ruins of its civilization, which rests layer upon layer atop old Manhattan. The whites of this period are slaves who labor in the depths of the city. There are good characterizations and some taut situations, but the story is carelessly written and plotted and disappointingly slapdash in organization. The readers, hungry for the unusual, found virtually no fault, and it would be reprinted in hardcover by John Long, London, as
The Draught of Eternity
in 1924, under the pen name of H. M. Egbert.

The June 22 issue, which carried the conclusion of
Draft of Eternity
, featured a "different" novelette by A. Merritt that was to make science-fiction history. It was
The Moon Pool
, and the author had received two hundred dollars for its seventeen thousand words on March 21, 1918. The readers had never experienced such word magic as Merritt's description of the strange pool on a Pacific island, from whose depths emerged an entity of pure energy, carrying the wife of an explorer through the "gateway" that led to an underground or extradimensional civilization. Not since Edgar Rice Burroughs'
Under the Moons of Mars
had there been such a demand for a sequel. Davis had another winner!

There was more than one arrow in his quiver. In his campaign to create substitutes for Edgar Rice Burroughs, he had turned to J. U. Giesy, who was perennially popular with his Semi-Dual occult detective stories but had previously shown that he could do effective science fiction of the routine variety. The result was the first of a new trilogy, a novel with the intriguing title of
Palos of the Dog Star Pack
, which opened the issue of July 13 as a five-part serial concluded August 10. Davis had gotten a bargain, paying but five hundred dollars for the seventy-seven thousand words. The hero, Jason Croft, is able to project his astral body to the planet of Palos, which revolves around the great star Sirius. He takes possession of the powerful body of Jason of Nodhur, a handsome but feeble-minded youth, at the moment of death, and sets out to win the hand of Naia, princess of Tamarizia. His knowledge of earthly science results in both the creation of weapons of destruction and the advancement of the peoples of Palos. The story was fascinating and well told, in the precise tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series.

Max Brand, who today is remembered as one of the world's great western-story writers, revealed a phase of his personality that enabled him to write fantasy either horrifying or poignant.
John Ovington Returns
(June 8), a six-thousand-worder for which he received forty dollars, told of a man who returned to claim the incarnation of his love after three generations.
Devil Ritter
(July 13) was a novelette thirty-one thousand five hundred words in length that brought him three hundred dollars. The character, Devil Ritter, finds in a woman a mind that can transmit to him, like a radio, all its impressions from anywhere in the world. The eerie coalition of talents results in great evil.

"Because of what we have said, don't run away with the idea that it is 'one of those impossible stories,' " Bob Davis wrote in announcing
The Labyrinth
, a novel-length contribution by Francis Stevens, whose discovery he had made with The Nightmare a year past. His statement seemed to codify the term "impossible" stories for science fiction, which was to vie with "pseudoscientific" and "different" as proper terminology.
The Labyrinth
, while not technically a fantasy, was strange enough to be classified as one. A group of people find that a pavilion in a governor's garden opens beneath them, dropping them into a complex maze of elaborate tunnels and doors, all adorned with cryptic messages contrived by the original builder to wreak psychological vengeance on an enemy. The story was extremely well handled.

Several other shorts by Francis Stevens were superbly done.
Friend Island
(September 7) takes place in the future, when women are the dominant sex, and one is shipwrecked on an island that is alive, with a man who hurts the feelings of that island with his uncouth language.
Behind the Curtain
(September 21) tells of a collector whose artifacts include the sarcophagus of a beautiful Egyptian princess. He replaces her with the body of his young wife, poisons the man she loves, and then awakes to find with gratitude that it is all a dream and decides that he will let his wife have her freedom and enjoy the rest of his days in the quiet company of his Egyptian princess.

In the October 12 issue Davis was able to present his readers with a sequel to
The Planeteer
. He had changed the title of the forty-two thousand word short novel for which he had paid three hundred fifty dollars from
When the Earth Froze
to
King of Conserve Island
and had run it complete. He rated Homer Eon Flint against Edward Bellamy as "an equally clever sociologist with a vastly more brilliant imagination," and regarded it as more than an action story, staling: "If you are of a philosophic mind, read it for the gems of thought it contains." Homer Eon

Flint was not a good writer, but he had ideas galore, and
King of Conserve Island
was actually a Utopia with enough action to keep it moving. The main plot involved a future monarch of earth attempting to gain control by force over the planet Jupiter, and a device of a space-fleet officer which cuts off all heat from the sun, freezing everyone until the king abdicates. The story is jammed with imaginative descriptions of the life and technology of those worlds of the future, which is its main point of interest and undoubtedly why Davis published it.

A more surprising anti-Utopia followed from Todd Robbins,
Safe and Sane
, a three-part novel in the issues October 26-November 9, billed as "The Strangest Story of the Decade." In the world of 1950, there are so many millionaires that they make up the middle class. They have it in for the geniuses and inventors who have made them so comfortable that they are bored, and they form a Millionaires' League, dedicated to killing off the gifted. The story ends as a dream and with the message that man is loved more for his foibles than for his strengths and that the criterion of worth should not be solely ability.