Authors: Sam Moskowitz (ed.)
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Sci-Fi, #SF, #Magazines, #Pulps
These facts make it apparent that the sudden highlighting of the science fiction of Charles B. Stilson and Victor Rousseau, both of whom had written nothing of that type before, was anticipatory. Author after author has credited Bob Davis with supplying him with the plot outlines of stories. As other Munsey regulars who had written little previous science fiction began to specialize in it, it became evident that Davis was "inspiring" a "school" of imitators far more than had Burroughs' example. Davis' role as a creative imagination, in this light, must also be upgraded.
"DID IT EVER occur to you as a reader of fiction that most stories drop naturally into a certain classification—belong more or less to a type?" Bob Davis asked his readers in the February 19, 1916, issue. "There is the straight love story, for instance; the adventure story, the detective story, the mystery story, the pseudoscientific story, and so forth and so on. . . ." It may very well have been the first time that the term "pseudoscientific" was ever used by the editor of a national magazine as a forerunner of what we today know as science fiction. It would be seen frequently in the twenty years to follow.
Of special significance was Davis' continuance: "Yet thousands of manuscripts that do not conform to any set category are being written every day; some of them real works of genius. . . . Such a story was Irvin S. Cobb's
Fishhead
, which caused such a sensation when it was published in THE CAVALIER for January 11, 1913. . . . The editor of this magazine has taken thought that perhaps you, dear reader, would like to get off the well-worn ways occasionally; would like to see for yourself a few of the queer,
outre
, unusual, bizarre, exotic, misfit manuscripts that we get occasionally; manuscripts that are mighty good, but so 'different' that they would ordinarily never be accepted. Of course
Fishhead
is an extreme case, and I don't necessarily mean stories like that at all. The tales might be humorous, fantastic, gruesome, dramatic, or what not; but they
would
be decidedly 'different.'
"And so the die is cast. Hereafter from time to time as such stories come in and are found acceptable, we will offer them to you."
The early "different" stories were not fantasy at all. The first was titled
The Million Passing Tales
(February 26, 1916), and was written by Perley Poore Sheehan. It was an attempt to illustrate that there was a human story behind each face seen in a large city and to show the interrelationship of their lives. It was realism bordering on stream of consciousness, a story without beginning or end, slices of many lives, and it was very popular. The second "different" story,
Inside Stuff
, by A. deFord Pitney (March 25), was told from the viewpoint of a lunch-counter cockroach who spoke in the vernacular, and raises the question as lo whether or not this was the true origin of "Archie the cockroach"; the third,
The Kiss of Death
, by Laura Winthrow (April 8), expressed I lie triumphant, joyous thoughts of a woman who had poisoned her husband, whom she hated, without gathering suspicion and with no feeling of guilt; the fourth,
Blood of Sacrifice
, by Lillian B. Hunt, offered the situation of a Russian soldier who has given his blood to save the life of a woman who nursed him from death's door, but according to religious law cannot marry her now
because she is of the same blood
; the fifth,
The Savage and the Savant
, by Nalbro Bartley (May 6), tells of two brothers, one slight with a brilliant mind and the other a giant bum. The two plumb their psychological differences and finally come to terms with themselves and life. The sixth,
Every mother
, by Maude Pettus (May 13), was a Mother's Day novelette that told of the tribulations of a fisher-woman in raising her son and two daughters, one with an illegitimate child, and of the happy resolution of her problems; the seventh,
Fever-worm
, by Edwin Carlile Litsey (May 20), is a story of a Kentucky backwoodsman who falls passionately in love with the poster of a woman circus rider, to discover that she is now a faded fifty.
There was, in every one of these stories, direct or implied elements of sex, repeated almost too often to be a coincidence. When Perley Poore Sheehan returned with his second "different" story,
Those Who Walk in Darkness
, an awkward combination of realism, mawkish writing ("But I can't marry you. I can't. I
can't
. I'm a bad girl. Oh,
now
do you understand?
I'm — a — bad — girl!
") about a man who marries a streetwalker, though he knows everything about her, it was obvious that "different" might be a label for a type of story other than the fantastic. This possibility was heightened by the dedication page of
Those Who Walk in Darkness
, when it was published in hardcover by George H. Doran Co. in 1917, together with its novel-length sequel,
The Scarlet Ghost
(January 6-March 10, 1917), where the ex-streetwalker finds that she must fight the attraction she still has for men and then returns to the city to rescue a young village girl who is being tempted into a life of prostitution. The book's dedication page read: "To him who told me this history complete and inspired me to set it down, my friend and collaborator, Robert H. Davis."
It was an era when the big-circulation magazines such as COSMOPOLITAN, HEARST'S INTERNATIONAL, and RED BOOK were strongly stressing sex. Davis, in trying to build circulation and to widen his women's readership, was doing the same thing, quite deliberately and calculatingly.
In this context the timing of the scheduling of Edgar Rice Burroughs'
The Girl from Farris'
in four weekly installments beginning September 16, 1916, takes on some logic. In announcing the story, Davis said: "When a member of 'the oldest profession in the world' is loved honestly and blindingly by an honest man, you get such a story as Perley Poore Sheehan's
Those Who Walk in Darkness
, that startling 'different' story that we gave you in the June 10 number of this magazine. Then, on the other hand, when such a person loves honestly an honest and blind man, you get— . . . Well, you get the best thing, in many ways, that the creator of
Tarzan of the Apes
has ever written. And that's saying a heap, as you know mighty well!"
The Girl from Farris'
was favorably though not wildly received by the readers. They preferred more imaginative Burroughs, which they had received in fair quantity that year.
Thuvia, Maid of Mars
(April 8-22) introduced Cathoris, son of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, who is a minor superman in his own right. Thuvia had appeared as a character in his earlier books and is befriended and rescued from diverse situations by Cathoris, eventually to fall in love with him. In the process, the white race of Lothar is discovered, a race that will eventually die out because they no longer have any women. It defends itself against savages by projecting images of phantom bowmen so realistic that their attackers die from power of suggestion when struck by an imaginary arrow. Burroughs engages in a philosophical discourse in this novel as to the nature of reality. Do any of us exist, or are we products of someone's imagination? Almost by way of complicating his thesis, Burroughs has the Lotharians project a bowman who refuses to fade away after his work is done, but remains as a living man and participates in the action.
The Return of the Mucker
, the long-awaited sequel, ran five installments (June 17-July 15) and cast Billy Byrne in an essentially western-hero role, south of the border. The story proved good entertainment, and Billy Byrne clears himself of a charge waiting for him in the United States and gets his girl, but it was far below the standard of
The Mucker
.
In the same issue in which
The Return of the Mucker
began, there was a change that possibly indicated growing circulation. The type size was made smaller, but the pages were not reduced, and each page contained eight hundred instead of six hundred words, increasing the fiction content by one-third. Each issue now contained nearly one hundred thirty-five thousand words of text for ten cents. The pages were reduced on November 16 to 176. An earlier straw in the wind was the appearance of a single interior illustration for Frank Condon's short story
Footprints
in the April 15, 1916, issue. The issue of July 1 began a policy of illustrations for most of the short stories, but none were carried for the serials.
Charles B. Stilson, who had to wait several years for the publication of
Polaris of the Snows
, now found that his sequel,
Minos of Sardanes
, was rushed into print almost within months, published in three parts (August 12-26), to satisfy the demand for the Burroughs-type story. Polaris, having gone to America with his girl, learns that the Greek kingdom of Sardanes in Antarctica is doomed. The volcanoes that supply the heat that sustains the colony are to subside, so he organizes an expedition to save the land. Great inner strife occurs in Sardanes, and the young King Minos fails in saving most of his people as the high priest walks them off to extinction in the heart of the last active volcano. Polaris arrives in time to save Minos and his bride, Memene.
The early "different" stories had been offbeat but not fantastic. Often they were experimental devices for telling a story; one example,
Patched Reels
(September 23), was written like a moving-picture treatment, by reels, with appropriate flashbacks and shifts of location. Others leaned heavily on the psychological or psychiatric; Edgar Wallace's
The Devil Light
(July 22) is a special example: A German who is always aroused to suicidal frenzy by strong white lights leaps from a zeppelin that he is guiding to bomb an arms site in London when great searchlights train on him.
Stories that were truly fantastic and weird, given the appellation of "different," began to appear with
Platinum
(August 5), by Owen Oliver. Castaways on a desert island find themselves besieged by a tremendous serpent from the sea and great intelligent blobs with metallic bodies by land. The blobs can extend metal tentacles at will and have electricity and artificial light. When two of the blobs kill themselves in a fight, the tentacle of one is taken back to the United States upon the rescue of the castaways and is sold as pure platinum. It gradually changes to rotting flesh, and the story takes place in the context of a suit by the buyers to get their money back.
Twilight Zone
, by Mary Keegan, was a strange story of a woman who by a supreme effort of the will brings her dead husband to life. The doctor suspects she has abilities she will not confide, and after both she and her husband have lived meaningless lives for a year—"They were two strange friends, passing and meeting like shadows, never kissing, never touching hands"—the doctor is called and finds that the man is dead. "He wanted to go back, and I had to let him," she tells the doctor. The doctor is not satisfied. "A little longer and he would have come all the way. You were too impatient," he accuses her. If it were not almost a rewrite of Violet Hunt's masterpiece,
The Story of a Ghost
(CHAPMAN'S MAGAZINE, 1896), it could have been singled out as exceptional.
The August 19 issue, in which
Twilight Zone
appeared, was unusual in another respect. All the stories, except those serials written by men which had been carried over from the previous week, were the work of women; actually eight of ten stories and all seven poems were by women, including one bit of verse by Faith Baldwin.
The trend toward applying the term "different" to science fiction had begun, but it was a single story that solidified it, and that was
Almost Immortal
, by Austin Hall. "You have never heard of Austin Hall," Davis told his readers. "Neither had we until we read this first child of his imagination." Hall was a westerner who lived in Mendata, California, a small town not far from Fresno.
Almost Immortal
was twenty-one thousand words long, and he was paid one hundred fifty dollars for it on July 6, 1916. It was a remarkable story for the images it attempted to convey, despite the fact that the author stylistically was not polished enough to do it justice. A young man, Robinson, disappears without a trace with an old man who has hired him for a research experiment, while they are both in the same room. The research doctor is a Tibetan that ten thousand years ago discovered a scientific method of blending solids together, and, through this method, absorbs a younger man about every twenty years, constantly prolonging his life. This time he has absorbed a man whose will is greater than his own, and one of the closing scenes tells of the "fantoms" of diverse men, from every era of mankind, suddenly converging upon the essence of Azev Avec, who had dissolved and imprisoned them all, seeking to destroy him, and his will stronger than all but Robinson's, who proves his undoing. The potentialities open to the author in presenting shades from innumerable ages and climes, released in one climactic struggle, were tremendous, but not exploited by the author. Later, other writers would make better use of the possibilities.
Austin Hall was an unequivocable success with the readers. In their letters they praised him as one of the finds of the year and asked for more "different" stories like
Almost Immortal
. It can be said that Austin Hall's work was the pivot in a gradual tendency on the part of the readers and the editors to increasingly use that designation for science fiction and fantasy, and eventually only rarely on stories that were primarily experimental in technique or subject matter. In addition, a single year had seen Bob Davis add three new giants in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs: Charles B. Stilson, Victor Rousseau, and Austin Hall.
For a while it appeared that the term "different" story might spread since it was used in PEOPLE'S in April, 1917, when they announced their first Semi-Dual story in May,
The Compass in the Sky
, and used again twice in PEOPLES FAVORITE MAGAZINE for October 25, 1918, announcing George Allan England's
On the Rack of Fear
, and also used in underscoring a change of policy in the magazine. It was used in its most explicitly fantastic sense in the June, 1931, issue of MIND MAGIC MAGAZINE announcing
The Man From Ouija Land
by Ralph Milne Farley, long after Davis' tenure at Munsey and long after the Munsey magazines had given up the term.