Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (64 page)

There was no question that Street & Smith was the big pulp competition for Munsey. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE was, at least temporarily, the circulation leader; THE PEOPLE'S MAGAZINE was holding its own; NEW STORY MAGAZINE was featuring the same fantastic and off-trail stories which had previously been primarily a specialty of the Munsey pulps; and now coming up very strong in circulation was TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE. The TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE had begun publication with its March 1, 1910, issue, with a format 10% inches high by eight inches wide, thirty-six pages for five cents, with the slogan of "Tops Everything for Boys."

At first it did not worry Munsey, because its format was identical with that of the dime novels, many of which were still published at that date, and in appearance and policy it was aimed at the early teenagers. The cover boasted that it was "Edited by Burt L. Standish," author of the immensely popular Frank Merriwell series.

Actually, it was not started with the idea of continuing. The post office had been threatening to cancel the second-class mailing privilege for dime novels for a long time. They contended that even though these were dated and issued on a weekly schedule, they were
books
and not magazines, because they contained only a single complete novel. Street & Smith decided to issue a magazine identical in format and price with the dime novels, with contents made up of a selection of novelettes, short stories, and a serial. If the post office accepted it, they intended to add a few short features to the back of every dime novel they published and in that manner get around any future possibility of being closed down by a technicality. Gilbert Patten, who wrote the Frank Merriwell series under the name of Burt L. Standish, had offered to edit the magazine, suggesting that his name would give it a connotation of respectability. He conceived the title of TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE and wrote a number of stories for it about a college hero named Cliff Sterling, under the pen name of Julian St. Dare. He edited the first four numbers, and the magazine, instead of collapsing as expected, began to sell.

Through office politics, Harry Thomas, a Street & Smith editor, secured control of the magazine and with its November 1, 1910, issue had it converted into a semi-monthly 192-page pulp selling for ten cents—a direct competition to the Munsey magazines for their younger group of readers. By 1913 the magazine appeared three times a month, featuring Jack London, Gilbert Patten, F. Britton Austin, J. S. Fletcher, Bertram Atkey, Octavus Roy Cohen, A. Conan Doyle, William Wallace Cook, Ellis Parker Butler, Johnston McClulley, W. Bert Foster, and many other good authors. The slant was to the high teens, and it went in heavy for sports stories and light on science fiction, though a series of scientific detective stories by Michael White, featuring the dauntless Proteus Raymond, was extremely imaginative, even involving atomic energy in one story.

It is quite possible that the tendency of the competition gradually to increase frequency of publication was at least in part prompted by the example of THE CAVALIER, which appeared on the newsstand each Saturday, so that the working man who was committed to a five-and-one-half-or 6-day work week could treat himself to weekend entertainment for only ten cents after he cashed his paycheck.

Following the publication of
The Afterglow
, by George Allan England, THE CAVALIER appeared to slow down on the quantity and quality of its science fiction. Perhaps it was a difficult job to get enough for a weekly, but more probably it was the result of the great wordage of science fiction featured by THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, depleting the available supply. During 1913 THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE ran fourteen stories of science fiction in twelve issues, eleven of them novels, and only two of the novels not completed within the calendar year. The wordage encompassed by these stories was somewhere close to 550,000, or almost equivalent to the total wordage of twelve issues of some of today's science-fiction magazines.

THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE in February, 1913, featured the highly off-trail fantasy
The Second Man
, by Lee Robinet, a novel in which Ken-more, an American, enters the Canadian forests, to find a segment where a man and a woman are reenacting the legend of Adam and Eve, with a young girl who calls herself Lilith living with them. The animals of the forest seem to be subservient to the will of the somewhat sinister "Adam," and the attempts of Kenmore to fathom this strange situation end with his breaking the hold of Adam on Eve and Lilith. The result is a memorable fantasy, published in hardcovers as
The Forest Maiden
by Browne & Howell Co., Chicago, in 1914 and selling for $1.25. Veteran fantasy collectors had suspected that Lee Robinet was a pen name, and that it had previously appeared and would again as the author of other non-fantasies, including
In-Bad Man
and
The Bad Man
. Robinet was unusual inasmuch as he was the pen name of a pen name. Lee Robinet stories were submitted by Robert Ames Bennet, author of one of the most widely sought-after lost-race novels,
Thyra — A Romance of the Polar Pit
, published in book form by Holt, New York, in 1901. In that novel, survivors of a Norse party have endured in a great arctic abyss in which also survives a monstrous reptile of the dinosaur period, as well as a subhuman race of men. Less well known is his
The Bowl of Baal
, a four-part novel in NEW STORY MAGAZINE, November, 1916-February, 1917. The plot is virtually identical with
Thyra
, except for the locale. An air pilot discovers an unknown city in Arabia, near to which lives a prehistoric lizard that, true to science-fiction tradition, must be dispatched.

Robert Ames Bennet was the pen name of F. G. Browne, of 315 Keystone Avenue, River Forest, Illinois, and he was paid five hundred dollars for the seventy-thousand-word novel
The Second Man
on October 30, 1912. The question is raised as to whether there was a further connection between him and the Browne of Browne & Howell, who published
The Second Man
in book form.

The Brain Blight
, a ninety-thousand-word novel by Jack Harrower, of the discovery of a South American plant that can cause death, mental befuddlement, and loss of will, was printed complete in the March, 1913, issue, and the same issue began a three-part novel,
Siren's Island
, by J. Earl Clausen, in which a bona-fide siren capable of wondrous miracles is discovered on an island in the Aegean Sea and is brought back to civilization, miracles and all.

J. Earl Clausen appeared in June with a complete eighty-four-thousand-word novel titled The Black Comet, based on the time-worn but well-handled theme of a comet on apparent collision course with the earth and its effect on the structure of civilization.
The Mastodon-Milk-Man
, a three-part novel by C. McLean Savage, which began in the same issue, was an early superman story where unusual physical strength is obtained by drinking the milk of a mastodon frozen for ages in the ice.

June also contained the short story
Spawn of Infinitude
, by Edward S. Pilsworth, telling of a meteor which strikes the earth, bringing with it spores that grow into tentacled, man-eating plants which are eventually destroyed by an avalanche of snow.

Without break THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE continued to feed its readers fantasies—Perley Poore Sheehan, former editor of THE SCRAP BOOK, contributing the sixty-eight-thousand-word
The Copper Princess
complete in the September issue. The mummy of a beautiful Inca princess is brought back to life by the electrical invention of a woman scientist, Marie Pavlovna. It was not too many years since Marie Curie had discovered radium, so it was no longer incredible that a woman might make an important scientific discovery. The girl falls in love with the man she first sees upon awakening and, after a series of adventures, is mortally wounded while killing his enemy with her bare hands. At the end of the story she is again returned to her mummy case as he first saw her. Many of the elements of the scientific romance are found in this tale, but what is lacking is a truly imaginative and colorful background setting.

The October THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE contained a short science fantasy of a type that would not become popular for another thirty years, of an old man who had an electrical device for killing flies and a great imagination for storytelling. It was titled
To Slay at Will
, by J. Klinck, but took a distinct second place to "All-Story Table-Talk" in the same issue. "Mr. Burroughs was in town the other day and we had meals together,
et cetera
," it started, "and discussed the general condition of literature and the particular state of affairs in the Burroughs Factory. The outlook is very bright for all Mr. Burroughs' friends, because there are several good stories already under way in the foundry and all hands are working overtime."

Then the announcement was made that
A Man Without a Soul
, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, would be published complete in the November issue.

The examination of all evidence strongly suggests that there never was any lunch or dinner with the editors of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and Edgar Rice Burroughs. There is no record of such in the comprehensive correspondence of the author, and he would apparently not meet any of them until the middle of 1914, when Bob Davis would pay his expenses to come to New York for a discussion.

The announcement appears to have been a bit of poetic license, but the Burroughs stories being readied for publication did exist. Of special interest in the readers' department of that issue was "A Martian Glossary," supplied by Edgar Rice Burroughs, of the proper names and common nouns of his Martian stories. It would contain definitions of the following type: "Thark—a Martian city; also a Martian horde"; "Jeddak—an emperor"; "Thoat—a green Martian horse."

The editor said he was presenting the glossary in anticipation of a third novel in the Martian series to start soon.

"Edgar Rice Burroughs'
A Man Without a Soul
—A Story Like Tarzan," blazoned the cover of the November the all-story magazine. The plot had elements that could have made it an extremely powerful novel, but it appeared hastily written. A professor, seeking to make synthetic men, has created twelve which are human parodies and distortions. A thirteenth appears perfect in body and leads the escape of the other "monsters" and then engages in a series of Tarzan-like adventures in the tropics. Despite all his noble attributes, the question of whether he is truly a human arises, the urgency for an answer intensified by a romance that has developed between him and a girl. Eventually, experiment Number 13 turns out to have been a real human with a lapse of memory substituted for a laboratory experiment. The twelve artificial men are killed off in a series of wild adventures.

The biological aspects of progress always interested Edgar Rice Burroughs, particularly the possibility of creation of synthetic life, organ transplants, and crossing of species, and he would return to these themes in future works.

The original title of
The Man Without a Soul
had been
Number 13
, and it appeared in book form from McClurg in 1929 as
The Monster Men
. Burroughs received from THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE $1,165 in payment for the story.

Brain transplants were accomplished in
The House of Sorcery
, by Jack Harrower (author of
The Brain Blight
), a four-part novel which began in the same issue as The Man Without a Soul. Harrower's imagination also conceived of a means of dissolving a man's bones within his body while he still lived.

The Warlord of Mars
, the third in the series, opened in the December THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE with a cover that was unique, for while it showed a manacled Dejah Thoris, Martian princess, with a guard, it had in the background the four-armed Martian with his spear which had been used on each chapter of all three novels. It would disappear only when THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, at a later date, would cut out interior illustrations, and even then it still would be incorporated into the colored covers.

Dejah Thoris is carried off by a Martian black man and pursued through many strange and unusual lands by John Carter to effect her rescue, accompanied by his ten-legged Martian dog, Woola. He almost succeeds in rescuing Dejah Thoris in the nation of Kaol, in whose ranks of red-skinned people he has fought off an attack of the four-armed green men. At the South Pole he enters the country of the yellow men, who possess an unusual degree of scientific achievement, including their own air-producing plant. Eventually he rescues his wife (married in
Under the Moons of Mars
) and her companions, Phaidor and Thuvia, and is elected Jeddak of Jeddaks, or Warlord of all Mars.

An outline of the story fails to do justice to its high adventure, imagination, humor, and satire. Among the Burroughs fans it has generally become the favorite of the Martian series, because it presents so comprehensive a picture of the planet and its races. It ended in the March, 1914, issue of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, the last monthly number.

Edgar Rice Burroughs had mailed
The Warlord of Mars
to Metcalf on July 8, 1913, under the title of
The Prince of Helium
. It was 57,052 words in length, and on July 16, 1913, he was paid $1,141. It was the last Burroughs story THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE bought in 1913, during which time
The Return of Tarzan
ran in NEW STORY MAGAZINE.

On January 29, 1914, Metcalf wrote Burroughs offering him 2Vi cents a word for anything they took and stating that they could use fifty thousand words a month.

Burroughs accepted the offer as far as word rate was concerned on February 3 but did not commit himself to delivering any special amount of wordage.

THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was fighting hard to pin Burroughs down exclusively. With the Burroughs spearhead, supplemented by a great quantity of fantastic stories, it had shown such substantial gains in circulation that Frank A. Munsey had ordered an increase in the frequency of publication to
weekly
, following the March, 1914, issue. It is quite likely that the editors would have preferred a twice-a-month schedule to start, like THE POPULAR MAGAZINE. THE CAVALIER, as a weekly, was having a tough time establishing itself, and the prospects of a second weekly were not alluring. To this, Frank A. Munsey's answer was that THE CAVALIER had been a failing monthly made weekly as an experiment. THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE was a vigorous, successful monthly made weekly because the time was right. There were also intimations that THE CAVALIER might be discontinued altogether if THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE proved a money-maker on a weekly schedule. As a weekly, THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE would need Burroughs more than ever.