SF authors born 1874-83: 1875d

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

For all other Radium-Age SF authors born in 1875, click here.

Post 3 of 3 about Burroughs: VENUSIAN SERIES and other Radium-Age SF.
For BARSOOM series, click here.
For PELLUCIDAR series, click here.


VENUSIAN/CARSON NAPIER SERIES

The last major series in Burroughs's career.

* Pirates of Venus (Burroughs, 1934; Argosy, September 17, 1932—TK). 1st of the Venusian series. The novel is set on a fictional version of planet Venus called Amtor that has similarities to Barsoom, Burroughs's fictionalized version of planet Mars.

* Lost on Venus (Argosy, March 1933; Burroughs, 1935).

NB: Carson of Venus (1939); Escape on Venus (1946); "The Wizard of Venus" (1970)


OTHER SF (RADIUM-AGE ONLY)


* The Return of Tarzan (Chicago: McClurg, 1915). The first of some 23 sequels to Tarzan of the Apes (1914; All-Story, October 1912), is a Lost World narrative. The ape man, feeling rootless in the wake of his noble sacrifice of his prospects of wedding Jane Porter, leaves America for Europe to visit his friend Paul d'Arnot. On the ship he becomes embroiled in the affairs of Countess Olga de Coude, her husband, Count Raoul de Coude, and two shady characters attempting to prey on them, Nikolas Rokoff and his henchman Alexis Paulvitch. Rokoff, it turns out, is also the countess's brother. Tarzan thwarts the villains' scheme, making them his deadly enemies. Later, in France, Rockoff tries time and again to eliminate the ape man, finally engineering a duel between him and the count by making it appear that he is the countess's lover. Tarzan deliberately refuses to defend himself in the duel, even offering the Count his own weapon after the latter fails to kill him with his own, a grand gesture that convinces his antagonist of his innocence. In return, Count Raoul finds him a job as a special agent in Algeria for the ministry of war. A sequence of adventures among the local Arabs ensues, including another brush with Rokoff. Afterward Tarzan sails for Cape Town and strikes up a shipboard acquaintance with Hazel Strong, a friend of Jane's. But Rokoff and Paulovitch are also aboard, and manage to ambush him and throw him overboard. Tarzan manages to swim to shore, and finds himself in the coastal jungle where he was brought up by the apes. He soon rescues and befriends a native warrior, Busuli of the Waziri, and is adopted into the Waziri tribe. After defeating a raid on their village by ivory raiders he becomes their chief. The Waziri know of a lost city deep in the jungle, from which they have obtained their golden ornaments. Tarzan has them take him there, but is captured by its inhabitants, a race of beast-like men, and condemned to be sacrificed to their sun god. To his surprise, the priestess to perform the sacrifice is a beautiful woman, who speaks the ape language he learned as a child. She tells him she is La, high priestess of the lost city of Opar. When the ceremony is fortuitously interrupted, she hides him and promises to lead him to freedom. But the ape man escapes on his own, locates the treasure chamber, and manages to rejoin the Waziri. Meanwhile, Hazel Strong has reached Cape Town, where she encounters Jane, and her father Professor Porter, together with Jane's fiancé, Tarzan's cousin William Cecil Clayton. They are all invited on a cruise up the west coast of Africa aboard the Lady Alice, the yacht of Lord Tennington, another friend. Rokoff, now using the alias of M. Thuran, ingratiates himself with the party and is also invited along. The Lady Alice breaks down and sinks, forcing the passengers and crew into the lifeboats. The one containing Jane, Clayton and "Thuran" is separated from the others and suffers terrible privations. Coincidentally, the boat finally makes shore in the same general area that Tarzan did. The three construct a rude shelter and eke out an existence of near starvation for some weeks until Jane and Clayton are surprised in the forest by a lion. Clayton loses Jane's respect by cowering in fear before the beast instead of defending her. But they are not attacked, and discover the lion dead, speared by an unknown hand. Their hidden savior is in fact Tarzan, who leaves without revealing himself. Later Jane is kidnapped and taken to Opar by a party of beast-men pursuing Tarzan. The ape man tracks them and manages to save her from being sacrificed by La. La is crushed by Tarzan's rejection of her for Jane. Escaping Opar, Tarzan returns with Jane to the coast, happy in the discovery that she loves him and is free to marry him. They find Clayton, abandoned by "Thuran" and dying of a fever. In his last moments he atones to Jane by revealing Tarzan's true identity as Lord Greystoke, having previously discovered the truth but concealed it. Tarzan and Jane make their way up the coast to the former's boyhood cabin, where they encounter the remainder of the castaways of the Lady Alice, safe and sound after having been recovered by Tarzan's friend D'Arnot in another ship. "Thuran" is exposed as Rokoff and arrested. Tarzan weds Jane and Tennington weds Hazel in a double ceremony performed by Professor Porter, who had been ordained a minister in his youth. Then they all set sail for civilization, taking along the treasure Tarzan had found in Opar.
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* Tarzan the Terrible (Chicago: McClurg, 1921; TK). A Lost World narrative concerning the land of Pal-u-don, in which dinosaurs survive and men have prehensile tails. In the previous novel, during the early days of World War I, Tarzan discovered that his wife Jane was not killed in a fire set by German troops, but was in fact alive. In this novel two months have gone by and Tarzan is continuing to search for Jane. He has tracked her to a hidden valley called Pal-ul-don, which means "Land of Men." In Pal-ul-don Tarzan finds a real Jurassic Park filled with dinosaurs, notably the savage Triceratops-like Gryfs, which unlike their prehistoric counterparts are carnivorous. The lost valley is also home to two different races of tailed human-looking creatures, the Ho-don (hairless and white skinned) and the Waz-don (hairy and black-skinned). Tarzan befriends Ta-son, a Ho-don warrior, and Om-at, the Waz-don chief of the tribe of Kor-ul-ja. In this new world he becomes a captive but so impresses his captors with his accomplishments and skills that they name him Tarzan-Jad-Guru (Tarzan the Terrible), which is the name of the novel. Jane is also being held captive in Pal-ul-don, having been brought there by her German captor, who has since become dependent on her due to his own lack of jungle survival skills. She becomes a pawn in a religious power struggle that consumes much of the novel. With the aid of his native allies, Tarzan continues to pursue his beloved to rescue her and set things to right, going through an extended series of fights and escapes to do so. In the end success seems beyond even his ability to achieve, until in the final chapter he and Jane are saved by their son Korak, who has been searching for Tarzan just as Tarzan has been searching for Jane.
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* Tarzan and the Ant Men (Chicago: McClurg, 1924; TK). Knee-high humans live in underground, anthill-like cities. Tarzan is shrunk by glandular massage and enslaved in one such city. arzan, the king of the jungle, enters an isolated country called Minuni, inhabited by a people four times smaller than himself. The Minunians live in magnificent city-states which frequently wage war against each other. Tarzan befriends the king, Adendrohahkis, and the prince, Komodoflorensal, of one such city-state, called Trohanadalmakus, and joins them in war against the onslaught of the army of Veltopismakus, their warlike neighbours. Tarzan is captured on the battle-ground and taken prisoner by the Veltopismakusians. The Veltopismakusian scientist Zoanthrohago conducts an experiment reducing Tarzan to the size of a Minunian, and the ape-man is imprisoned and enslaved among other Trohanadalmakusian prisoners of war. He meets, though, Komodoflorensal in the dungeons of Veltopismakus, and together they are able to make a daring escape. *** Burrough's view on what is a natural relationship between the sexes is neatly illustrated by a secondary narrative thread in the novel, that one about the Alali or Zertalacolols, an ape-like matriarchal people living in the thorny forests which isolate Minuni from the rest of the worlds. When the enslaved and persecuted Alali males see that Tarzan is a male too and yet stronger and more formidable than any Alali female, they go to war against the females, and by killing or maiming several of them, subjugate them. When Tarzan, towards the end of the novel, meets the Alali again, the females are submissive and obedient to their mates and actually prefer it that way. The Minunian city states and their politics are strongly reminiscent of those of Barsoom. They also share the Barsoomian philosophy of perpetual war as a good and commendable state, as illustrated by the words of Gefasto, the Commander in Chief of the Veltopismakusian armed forces:

We must have war. As we have found that there is no enduring happiness in peace or virtue, let us have a little war and a little sin. A pudding that is all of one ingredient is nauseating—it must be seasoned, it must be spiced, and before we can enjoy the eating of it to the fullest we must be forced to strive for it. War and work, the two most distasteful things in the world, are, nevertheless, the most essential to the happiness and the existence of a people. Peace reduces the necessity for labor, and induces slothfulness. War compels labor, that her ravages may be effaced. Peace turns us into fat worms. War makes men of us.

To people outside the ranks of Tarzan fans, Tarzan and the Ant Men is probably best known as the book read by Harper Lee's young protagonist Jean Louise ("Scout") Finch in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

* The Land That Time Forgot (Chicago: McClurg, 1924; composed of "The Land That Time Forgot," Blue Book, August 1918; "The People That Time Forgot," Blue Book, October 1918; and "Out of Time's Abyss," Blue Book, December 1918). The first of Burroughs's two best books. Imaginative redirection of the old biological saw that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. On Caspak, an unknown island, evolution is an individual matter: An entity may start life as a primitive egg, then become a lizard, then a small mammal, then an ape man, and eventually a Homo sapiens. NB: Homo sapiens might not be the high point of evolution. There is a race of cruel but civilized winged men on Caspak. Also: Novel is grounded in the extreme jingoism of World War I.
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* The Moon Maid (Chicago: McClurg, 1926; "The Moon Maid" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, June 22-July 20, 1923; "The Moon Men" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, February 21-March 15, 1925; "The Red Hawk" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, April 20-May 14, 1925). Considered the second of Burroughs's two best books. Begins in the near future and extends to the 25th century. In "The Moon Maid," a crash-landing crew of astronauts from Earth discovers that the lunar interior is populated by city-states that are losing their independence to the Kalkars, a race of aggressive, brutal, stupid louts — Burroughs's notion of Russian Communists. The Kalkars, led by a renegade Earthman, conquer the earth. "The Moon Men," first written in 1919 and concerned with a future Russian occupation of America (the original Red Dawn), is set in the ruins of Chicago; it describes an abortive revolt against the Kalkars. In "The Red Hawk," Earthmen have reverted to nomadic tribesmen who press on to final victory against the Kalkars in the ruins of Los Angeles.
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* Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men (McClurg: Chicago, 1929). Published first in All-Story (November 1913), as A Man without a Soul. The perils of godless science and muscle-building. Professor Maxon (a reference to Bierce's Moxon?) of Cornell, who has long been experimenting with artificial life, takes his beautiful daughter Virginia on a voyage around the world. However, he interrupts their vacation to set up a small laboratory and factory on an island near Borneo. He hires Dr. Von Horn (a scoundrel) as an assistant, and begins manufacturing gigantic, muscle-bound, stupid artificial men. (Hello, Rocky Horror Picture Show.) The Borneo Malay rajah lusts for Virginia; so does Dr. von Horn; so does Budrudeen, the factory foreman. Maxon, who has gone mad, and enforces discipline among his creations with a bullwhip, intends to marry Virginia to the perfect man that he intends to create. Number Thirteen (he calls himself Bulun) emerges from the tank, as perfect a specimen of Anglo-Saxon manhood as maiden could want. Highly intelligent, a true gentleman; he and Virginia have feelings for one another, but she doesn't know he's artificial, and her aversion to artificial men makes him feel inadequate. She's kidnapped by the rajah, Bulun rescues her, lots of action. Then Maxon's Chinese cook reveals that Bulun is a shipwrecked amnesiac whom he (Ling) sneaked into Number Thirteen's tank. Virginia and Bulun get married, and then he recalls that his father is a millionaire contractor. Happy ending.
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SF authors born 1874-83: 1875c

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

For all other Radium-Age SF authors born in 1875, click here.

Post 2 of 3 about Burroughs: PELLUCIDAR SERIES.
For BARSOOM series, click here.
For VENUSIAN series and other Radium-Age SF by Burroughs, click here.

THE PELLUCIDAR/DAVID INNES SERIES (RADIUM-AGE ONLY)

* At the Earth's Core (Chicago: McClurg, 1922; All-Story, April 4-25, 1914). 1st of Pellucidar series. Based on the crank-science concept of Symmes's Hole, the theory that the earth is a hollow sphere, with large openings at the poles that permit entry into a habitable interior world along the inner surface of the sphere. In this novel, a mechanical mole escapes control and tunnels through the earth's crust, carrying two men into a strange, primitive world. The humans are primitive; there are paleontological survivals; and large, highly intelligent, civilized reptiles with hypnotic powers, who keep humans as slaves and for food. There are six sequels.
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* Pellucidar (Chicago: McClurg, 1923; All-Story Cavalier, May 1, 1915 — TK). 2nd of the Pellucidar series. David Innes and his captive, a member of the reptilian Mahar master race of the interior world of Pellucidar, return from the surface world in the Iron Mole invented by his friend and companion in adventure Abner Perry. Emerging in Pellucidar at an unknown location, David frees his captive. He names the place Greenwich and uses the technology he has brought to begin the systematic exploration and mapping of the unknown land while searching for his lost companions, Abner, Ghak, and Dian the Beautiful. He soon encounters and befriends a new ally, Ja the Mezop of the island country of Anoroc; later he finds Abner, from whom he learns that in his absence the human revolt against the Mahars has not been going well. In a parlay with the Mahars David bargains for information of his love Dian and his enemy Hooja the Sly One, which his foes agree to supply in return for the book containing the Great Secret of Mahar reproduction that David stole and hid in the previous novel. David undertakes to recover it, only to find that Hooja has been there before him and claimed Dian as his own reward of the Mahars! Now he has to track down and defeat the sly one before resuming the human war of independence. Ultimately this is accomplished, and with the aid of the resources David has brought from the surface world he and Abner succeed in building a confederacy of human tribes into an "Empire of Pellucidar" that wipes out the Mahar cities and establishes a new human civilization in their place.
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* Tanar of Pellucidar (Metropolitan Books, 1930; Blue Book, March 1929-TK). 3rd of the Pellucidar series. The author’s friend Jason Gridley is experimenting with a new radio frequency he dubs the Gridley Wave, via which he picks up a transmission sent by scientist Abner Perry, from the interior world of Pellucidar at the Earth's core, a realm discovered by the latter and his friend David Innes many years before. There Innes and Perry have established an Empire of Pellucidar, actually a confederation of tribes, and attempted with mixed success to modernize the stone-age natives. Lately things have not gone well, and Innes is currently held captive in an enemy realm. Perry transmits a lengthy account of how this has come about, as reported by Innes’ native comrade in arms Tanar, and appeals for aid from the outer world. Tanar’s narrative comprises the bulk of the novel. Innes had led an army to the relief of the member tribe of Thuria and the remnants of the Empire’s former foes, the reptilian Mahars. Both had been attacked by a previously unknown people, the Korsars (corsairs), the scourge of the internal seas. These, it is eventually learned, are the descendants of outer world Moorish pirates who had penetrated Pellucidar centuries before through a natural polar opening connecting the outer and inner worlds. The empire’s forces succeed in repulsing the Korsars, but the raiders retain as hostage Tanar, son of Innes’ ally Ghak of Sari. They hope to trade him for the secret of the empire’s superior weaponry. Leaving his forces to construct ships to counter the enemy fleet, Innes and his comrade Ja of Anoroc set out alone to rescue Tanar, guided by their own prisoner, the Korsar Fitt. On the enemy flagship Tanar is interrogated by the Cid, leader of the Korsars, and his ugly henchman Bohar the Bloody. The young warrior also encounters Stellara, supposedly the Cid’s daughter, who attempts to intercede on behalf of Tanar and his fellow captives. A storm destroys the ship, and the crew takes to the lifeboats, leaving Tanar and Stellara adrift on the wreckage. Stellara confides to him that she is not really a Korsar, as her mother Allara was stolen by the Cid from the native island of Amiocap and she bears a birthmark proving she is actually the daughter of Fedol, her mother’s former mate. Eventually the derelict ship drifts to Amiocap itself, but the island’s suspicious inhabitants take the two for Korsar spies and imprison them in the village of Lar. Escaping, they by chance encounter Fedol, who recognizes Stellara by her birthmark and gives them refuge in his own village of Peraht. But Bohar’s group of Korsars attacks Peraht and kidnaps Stellara, while Tanar falls prey to the Coripies, a cannibalistic subterranean race. Escaping again, Tanar kills Bohar and frees Stellara, to whom he avows his love. Their joy is shortlived, as she is then abducted by Jude of the nearby island of Hime, who had shared Tanar’s captivity among the Coripies. Tanar pursues them to Hime, where they are overtaken by Bohar’s crew. Seeing Tanar with Gura, a girl of Hime who has developed a crush on him, Stellara rejects him and reassumes her former role among the Korsars. Tanar and Gura are taken in chains across the ocean to the Korsar city. There Tanar finds himself a fellow prisoner with David Innes and Ja of Anoroc, whose quest to succor him has miscarried. The three feign acquiescence to the Cid’s demand they manufacture modern firearms for him, and so are given greater liberty. Meanwhile Gura has discovered that Stellara, despite her jealous anger, still loves Tanar, and lets Tanar know. The party plans its escape and flees north with the reconciled Stellara. After confirming the existence of the polar opening they turn south again, bound for Sari, only to encounter a large party of pursuing Korsars, at which they split up in an attempt to ensure some at least can carry word back to the empire. Stellara, Tanar and Innes are recaptured, and the latter two each confined solitarily in lightless, snake-infested cells. Tanar, in his cell, eventually locates the opening through which the snakes enter, widens it, and achieves freedom. He locates Stellara in a heated faceoff with Bulf, the Korsar to whom the Cid has promised her; she swears to kill him and herself both rather than submit. Tanar intervenes and dispatches Bulf. He and his lover then leave the city in Korsar guise, and after many perils return to Sari, where they find Ja and Gura to have arrived safely as well. After hearing the complete transmission, Jason Gridley pledges to lead an expedition to Pellucidar through the polar opening and rescue David Innes, thus setting the stage for the sequel Tarzan at the Earth's Core, a cross-over novel linking Burroughs’ Pellucidar and Tarzan series.
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* Tarzan at the Earth's Core (1929; Metropolitan Books, 1930). In response to a radio plea from Abner Perry, a scientist who with his friend David Innes has discovered the interior world of Pellucidar at the Earth's core, Jason Gridley launches an expedition to rescue Innes from the Korsars (corsairs), the scourge of the internal seas. He enlists Tarzan, and a fabulous airship is constructed to penetrate Pellucidar via the natural polar opening connecting the outer and inner worlds. In Pellucidar Tarzan and Gridley are each separated from the main force of the expedition and must struggle for survival against the prehistoric creatures and peoples of the inner world. Gridley wins the love of the native cave-woman Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram. Eventually everyone is reunited, and the party succeeds in rescuing Innes. As Tarzan and the others prepare to return home, Gridley decides to stay to search for Frederich Wilhelm Eric von Mendeldorf und von Horst, one last member of the expedition who remains lost.
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NB: Back to the Stone Age (1937), Land of Terror (1944), Savage Pellucidar (1963)

SF authors born 1874-83: 1875b

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

For all other Radium-Age SF authors born in 1875, click here.

Post 1 of 3 about Burroughs: BARSOOM SERIES.
For PELLUCIDAR series, click here.
For VENUSIAN series and other Radium-Age SF by Burroughs, click here.

***

Burroughs is a science fiction writer in externals only, not in inner essence. Most of his work is really a fantasy of eroticism and power.... Science per se plays little part in the work of Burroughs, and it is safe to say that he knew and cared little about it... The Martian novels, even if one admits as much poetic license as is necessary for creating a story, are closer to occultism than to science, and the paleontology of The Land That Time Forgot involves more fangs than facts. Where inventions or scientific discoveries enter Burroughs' fiction, they are usually thin-air results, rather than processes, and usually are simply symbolic mechanisms for abuse of power... [Still, many] scientists, engineers, and writers have stated that the Martian novels of Burroughs first stimulated them to look further into science, even thought they soon discarded Barsoom and the sexual-sword antics of John Carter... He was among the first to place adventure stories on other planets, and his technique of associating action with elements of environment and his concept of erratic, structured decadence (swords versus ray guns) have had wide diffusion in both science fiction and high fantasy. — Brian Stableford, Science Fiction Writers, 2d ed., edited by Richard Bleiler.

Burroughs was born in Chicago, the son of a businessman. He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and then the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, and failing the entrance exam for West Point, he ended up as an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus found ineligible for a commission, he was discharged in 1897. He held a series of short-term jobs (gold miner, policeman, storekeeper), spent time drifting and working on an Idaho ranch, married in 1900. By 1911, after years of low-wage jobs, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. He began reading pulp fiction magazines and later claimed "although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."

His first novel, Under the Moons of Mars, was serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1912; it was published pseudonymously, as Norman Bean. Burroughs took up writing full-time. Tarzan of the Apes, which was published from October 1912, and appeared in hardcover in 1914, would be his most successful series — a cultural sensation, in fact.

Burroughs wrote popular science fiction and fantasy stories involving Earthly adventurers transported to various planets (notably Barsoom, Burroughs' fictional name for Mars, and Amtor, his fictional name for Venus), lost islands, and into the interior of the hollow earth in his Pellucidar stories, as well as westerns and historical romances.

In 1923 Burroughs set up his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and began printing his own books through the 1930s. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor he was a resident of Hawaii and, despite being in his late sixties, he became a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, spending four years in the Pacific theater. After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Encino, California, where he died in 1950. The towns of Tarzana, California and Tarzan, Texas were named after Tarzan. The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in Burroughs' honor.

***

THE BARSOOM/JOHN CARTER SERIES (RADIUM-AGE ONLY)

* A Princess of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1917; serialized in All-Story, February-July 1912, as Under the Moons of Mars). 1st of the Martian series. Attracted little attention, when first published, until the success of Tarzan of the Apes. It's a historical romance set on another planet. John Carter, a Virginia gentleman trapped in a cave by southwestern Indians after the Civil War, is transported to Mars (a fictionalization of the planet described by Percival Lowell's books and articles: Once a wet world with continents and oceans, Barsoom's seas gradually dried up. Abandoned cities line the former coastlands. Barsoomians distribute scarce water supplies via a worldwide system of canals, controlled by quarreling city-states which have grown up at the junctures of the canals. The thinning Martian atmosphere is artificially replenished from an "atmosphere plant" on whose smooth functioning all life on the planet is dependent.) Thanks to his terrestrial strength, Carter is a mighty figure on the Red Planet, a fairy-tale world in which he battles multi-armed foes, wins a princess, and then apparently dies in a heroic effort to repair the planetary air-conditioning plant. The dominant culture of Barsoom is that of the humanoid Red Martians, who are organized into a system of major imperial city-states such as Helium, Ptarth and Zodanga — which control the planet-wide canals, as well as other, more isolated city-states in the hinterlands. Some of these are effectively lost cities, permitting Burroughs to utilize Barsoom as a stage for the same kind of lost race yarns he favored in earthly settings. The Red people are the interbred descendants of the ancient Yellow Martians, White Martians, and Black Martians, remnants of whom continue to persist in isolated areas of the planet, particularly its poles. All of these races resemble Homo sapiens in almost every respect except for their mode of reproduction and extended lifespans. The humanoid Martians are harassed and preyed upon by the semi-nomadic Green Martians, a separate species with four arms and tusks who stand approximately four meters tall. The Green Martians are organized into loose hordes ranging over the dead sea bottoms, each horde taking its name from that of a dead city in its territory, such as Thark and Warhoon. Barsoomians generally display warlike and honor-bound characteristics. The technology of the tales runs the gamut from dueling sabers to "radium pistols" and aircraft, with the discovery of powerful ancient devices or research into the development of new ones often forming plot devices. The natives also eschew clothing other than jewelry and ubiquitous leather harnesses, which are designed to hold everything from the weaponry of a warrior to pouches containing toiletries and other useful items; the only instances where Barsoomians habitually wear clothing is for need of warmth, such as for travel in the northern polar regions. In addition to the naturally occurring races of Barsoom, Burroughs described the Hormads, artificial men created by the scientist Ras Thavas as slaves, workers, warriors, etc. in giant vats at his laboratory in the Toonolian Marsh in Synthetic Men of Mars and John Carter and the Giant of Mars. Although the Hormads were generally recognizable as humanoid, the process was far from perfect, and generated monstrosities. NB: A Princess of Mars was possibly the first fiction of the 20th century to feature a constructed language; although Barsoomian was not particularly developed, it added verisimilitude to the narrative. Possibly influenced by Edwin Lester Arnold's novel Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905), also known as Gullivar of Mars.
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* The Gods of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1918; All-Story, January-May 1913). 2nd of the Martian series; many consider the first three books of the Martian series to be a trilogy. At the end of the first book, A Princess of Mars, John Carter is unwillingly transported back to Earth. The Gods of Mars begins with his arrival back on Barsoom after a 10-year hiatus, separated from his wife Dejah Thoris, his unborn child, and the Red Martian people of the nation of Helium, whom he has adopted as his own. Unfortunately, Carter materializes in the one place on Barsoom from which nobody is allowed to depart: the Valley Dor, which is the Barsoomian heaven. A party of Green Martians arrives by boat on the River Iss, and is ambushed by a previously unknown Barsoomian species, the Plant Men. Carter comes to the aid of the Green Martians, and the lone survivor of the attack is his good friend Tars Tarkas, the Jeddak (roughly equivalent to king) of Thark. Tarkas has taken the pilgrimage to the Valley Dor to search for Carter, who disappeared 10 years earlier while saving Barsoom. Carter and Tarkas discover that the Therns, a white-skinned race of self-proclaimed gods who rule the Valley Dor, have for eons deceived the Barsoomians of the outer world by disseminating the myth that the pilgrimage to the Valley Dor was a journey to paradise. But many of the pilgrims are actually killed by plant men or the white apes of Barsoom upon their arrival in Dor. Those that escape the beasts are captured by the Therns and kept as slaves. Carter and Tarkas rescue Thuvia, a slave girl, and try to escape the Therns. They capitalize on the confusion caused by an attack by the Black Pirates of Barsoom upon the Therns, but are separated during their escape: Tarkas and Thuvia hijack an unoccupied Black Pirate flier, and Carter fights his way aboard a manned flier, killing all but one of the Pirates, and rescuing a captive Thern princess. Carter, talking with the captured Pirate Xodar, discovers that the Black Pirates, or "First Born," also think of themselves as gods, and prey upon the Therns as the Therns prey upon the races of the outer world. He also finds that the captive Thern is Phaidor, daughter of the "Holy Hekkador" (high priest) of the Therns. When their flier is surprised and recaptured by the First Born, they are taken to the land of the First Born, which is built around the underground sea of Omean, which is turn lies directly below the lost sea of Korus, located in the Valley Dor. The land of the First Born is literally underneath the land of the Holy Therns, and both are located at the South Pole of Barsoom. Carter is taken before Issus, the goddess of Barsoom. Issus in an ancient, evil woman who has manipulated her own people, the Therns, and the rest of Barsoom into maintaining an hierarchy with the First Born on top. Issus sets the policies of the Therns through secret communications with them. The Therns, thinking they are receiving the divine communications of their goddess, do not realize that they are the dupes of the First Born, their hereditary enemies. Issus takes Phaidor into her service as a handmaiden for one Martian year. After a year of slavery, handmaidens are sacrificed in the arena at the monthly games of Issus. Carter is taken to prison, and Xodar is to be treated as his slave as punishment for being defeated by Carter. However, Carter treats him with honor, thus winning a friend. In prison, they meet a young Red Martian captive from Carter’s home country of Helium. Soon thereafter, Carter and the youth are taken to the monthly games of Issus. Carter goes on a rampage and leads a revolt of the prisoners/gladiators. Carter and the youth escape the arena via underground tunnels, and cleverly give themselves up to guards unacquainted with the revolt to be returned to their prison island. Upon hearing the story of the revolt, Xodar is able to reject the notion of Issus’ divinity. Carter, Xodar and the youth hijack a flier and succeed in a mad escape. Soon after, Carter discovers that the youth is actually his son, Carthoris, whom Carter has never met. Their stolen flier is damaged in the escape and must be abandoned, so the three land in unknown territory. They soon encounter Thuvia, the former slave of the Therns, who escaped with Tars Tarkas. She describes the capture of Tarkas by the green warriors of the Southern Warhoons. Carter goes alone to rescue Tarkas, but is discovered. After being chased, some mounts collapse, and Thuvia is sent on alone mounted while the men stay for a last stand against the Warhoons. They are rescued by the timely appearance of the Heliumetic navy. Commanding one of the warships is Carter’s old friend, Kantos Kan. But the fleet is commanded by Zat Arras, the Jed (roughly equivalent to lord) of the somewhat hostile client state of Zodanga (which was conquered by Carter and Tarkas in A Princess of Mars). There is suspicion that Carter has returned from Dor, which is punishable by death, and Zat Arras is threatening, and perhaps ambitious himself. It seems that Tardos Mors, the Jeddak of Helium, and Mors Kajak, the Jed of Hastor (the grandfather and father, respectively, of Dejah Thoris) are absent from Helium because they led fleets in search of Carter, and are now years overdue. Finally, Carter receives the news that his beloved Dejah Thoris is missing, and is thought to have taken the pilgrimage to the Valley Dor to find him. Upon returning to Helium, Carter is tried for heresy by a rigged jury of hostile Zodangans, led by Zat Arras. But the masses of Helium will not stand for it. As a compromise to avoid civil war, the judgment of Carter is deferred for a year. Then Sola, the daughter of Tarkas, arrives. She had taken the pilgrimage with Dejah Thoris, and they had been captured by the Black Pirates; Sola escaped. Carter realizes that Dejah Thoris will be selected as a handmaiden of Issus, and thus will have only a year to live. He and his comrades begin a campaign to take a fleet to the land of the First Born to rescue her. They uncover evidence that Thern spies are monitoring them, and then Carter is kidnapped by the Zodangans. Carter refuses Zat Arras’ offer of freedom in exchange for endorsing Zat Arras as Jeddak of all Helium, and is imprisoned. After half a year in a dungeon, Carter wins his freedom through a ruse, and the mission to the land of the First Born is launched, with secretly raised troop levies, ships, and many troops from their Green Martian ally, Tars Tarkas. Upon approaching the South Pole, a fleet of Therns challenges Carter’s fleet. Then behind Carter’s fleet arrives a fleet led by the Zodangan, Zat Arras. And finally, a fleet of First Born arrives. The rescue mission for the rescue of Dejah Thoris is in dire straits. Wherever possible, Carter maneuvers Therns and First Born to engage in combat, since they are hereditary enemies. Then the Heliumetic crews of the Zodangan fleet mutiny to support Carter, thus negating that threat. Carter takes his remaining fleet with Tharkian troops to the underground sea of Omean, to attack the First Born and rescue his princess. The combined Heliumites and Tharks surprise the First Born and soundly defeat them. Issus is shown to be a fraud in front of her nobles, and they lynch her. But Carter is too late to save Dejah Thoris. The fiendishly clever Issus locked Dejah Thoris, Thuvia, and Phaidor, each of whom loves John Carter, in a room of the Temple of the Sun. Each room of this revolving temple opens only once a year, and they are imprisoned with insufficient food to last the year. Carter is able to talk to Dejah Thoris through the doorway bars, and slip them sufficient food supplements to last them the year, but the room cannot be opened. Just before the room is closed, Phaidor proclaims that if Carter will not love her, he will not be allowed to love another. She strikes at Dejah Thoris with a dagger, and the last thing Carter sees through the narrow crack is Thuvia lunging in front of the dagger. He hears a scream, but the door is closed, and he is unable to see who was struck by the dagger.
READ IT

* The Warlord of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1918; All-Story, December 1913-March 1914). 3rd of the Martian series. Still attempting to regain his wife, John Carter travels to the North Pole of Mars, where he finds another hidden culture. Carter is proclaimed warlord, or emperor, of Mars. This novel continues where the previous one in the series abruptly ended. John Carter discovers that a First Born knows the secret of the Temple of the Sun and he and the Holy Hekkador Matai Shang want to rescue the Holy Thern's daughter who is imprisoned with Dejah Thoris and another Barsoomian princess, Thuvia of Ptarth. John Carter follows them in the hope to liberate his beloved wife. His antagonists manage to stay ahead of him and flee to the north, taking the three previously imprisoned women along. No ordeal can detain John Carter from his quest to be reunited with his wife. He follows them untiring into the undiscovered north polar regions where he discovers more fantastic creatures and ancient mysterious Martian races.
READ IT

* Thuvia, Maid of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1920; All-Story, April 1916—TK). 4th of the Martian series. In this novel the focus shifts from John Carter, Warlord of Mars, and Dejah Thoris of Helium, protagonists of the first three books in the series, to their son, Carthoris, prince of Helium, and Thuvia, princess of Ptarth. Helium and Ptarth are both prominent Barsoomian city state/empires, and both Carthoris and Thuvia were secondary characters in the previous two books. Carthoris is madly in love with Thuvia. This love was foreshadowed at the end of the previous novel. Unfortunately Thuvia is promised to Kulan Tith, Jeddak of Kaol. On Barsoom nothing can come break an engagement between man and woman except death, although the new suitor may not cause that death. Thus it is that Thuvia will have none of him. This situation leaves Carthoris in a predicament. As Thuvia suffers the common Burroughsian heroine's fate of being kidnapped and in need of rescue, Carthoris' goal is abetted by circumstances. Thus he sets out to find the love of his life. His craft is sabotaged and he finds himself deep in the undiscovered south of Barsoom, in the ruins of ancient Aaanthor. Thuvia's kidnappers, the Dusar, have taken her there as well and Carthoris is just in time to spot Thuvia and her kidnappers under assault by a green man of the hordes of Torquas. Carthoris leaps to her rescue in the style of his father. The rescue takes Cathorsis and his love to ancient Lothar, home of an ancient fair human race gifted with the ability to create lifelike phantasms from pure thought. They use large numbers of phantom bowmen sided with Banths (Barsoomian lions) to defend themselves from the hordes of Torquas. The kidnapping of Thuvia is done in such a way that Carthoris is blamed. This ignites a war between the red nations of Barsoom. Will Carthoris be back in time with Thuvia to stop the war from breaking loose? Will Carthoris' love ever be answered by the promised Thuvia?

* The Chessmen of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1922; Argosy All-Story Weekly, February-March 1922). 5th of Martian series. Bodiless human heads with hypnotic ability and a chess-like game (Jetan) played with living pieces who fight to the death. The Chessmen of Mars introduces the Kaldanes of the region Bantoom, whose form is almost all head but for six vestigial legs and a pair of Chelae, and whose racial goal is to evolve even further towards pure intellect and away from bodily existence. In order to function in the physical realm, they have bred the Rykors, a complementary species composed of a body similar to that of a perfect specimen of Red Martian but lacking a head; when the Kaldane places itself upon the shoulders of the Rykor, a bundle of tentacles connects with the Rykor's spinal cord, allowing the brain of the Kaldane to interface with the body of the Rykor. Should the Rykor become damaged or die, the Kaldane merely climbs upon another as an earthling might change a horse.
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* The Master Mind of Mars, (Chicago: McClurg, 1928; Amazing Stories Annual, July 15, 1927). Fantastic organ transplants. 6th of the Martian series. In this novel Burroughs shifts the focus of the series for the second time, the first having been from early protagonists John Carter and Dejah Thoris to their children after the third book. Now he moves to a completely unrelated hero, Ulysses Paxton, an Earthman like Carter who like him is sent to Mars by astral projection. On Mars, Paxton is taken in by elderly mad scientist Ras Thavas, the "Master Mind" of the title, who educates him in the ways of Barsoom and bestows on him the Martian name Vad Varo. Ras has perfected techniques of transplanting brains, which he uses to provide rich elderly Martians with youthful new bodies for a profit. Distrustful of his fellow Martians, he trains Paxton as his assistant to perform the same operation on him. But Paxton has fallen in love with Valla Dia, one of Ras' young victims, whose body has been swapped for that of the hag Xaxa, Jeddara (empress) of the city-state of Phundahl. He refuses to operate on Ras until his mentor promises to restore her to her rightful body. A quest for that body ensues, in which Paxton is aided by others of Ras' experimental victims, and in the end he attains the hand of his Valla Dia, who in a happy plot twist turns out to be a princess.
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* A Fighting Man of Mars (Metropolitan Books, 1931; Blue Book, April-September, 1930). 7th of the Martian series. The story is relayed back to earth via the Gridley Wave, a sort of super radio frequency previously introduced in Tanar of Pellucidar, the third of Burrough's Pellucidar novels, which thus provides a link between the two series. The story-teller is Ulysses Paxton, protagonist of the previous novel, The Master Mind of Mars, but this story is not about him; rather, it is the tale of Tan Hadron of Hastor, a lowly, poor padwar (a low-ranking officer) who is in love with the beautiful, haughty Sanoma Tora, daughter of Tor Hatan, a minor but rich noble. As he is only a padwar, Sanoma spurns him. Then Sanoma Tora is kidnapped, and Tan Hadron crosses Barsoom searching for her. He encounters some of Burroughs's most ferocious beasts — huge, many-armed, flesh-eating white apes, gigantic spiders, and the insane cannibals of U-Gor. He also meets the mad scientist Phor Tak, who cackles "Heigh-oo!" and is crazed with the desire for revenge. Hadron rescues an escaped slave, Tavia, from a band of six-limbed green Tharks. Tavia is an atypical Burroughs heroine; depicted as self-reliant and competent with weapons, witty and intelligent. With the addition of Nur An, a disaffected Jaharian warrior, and another escaped woman slave, Phao, Hadron's quest becomes more collaborative than Burroughs' usual, although Tavia, in an unsurprising plot development, is revealed to be a princess at the end.
READ IT

NB: Swords of Mars (1936), Synthetic Men of Mars (1940), Llana of Gathol (1948), John Carter of Mars (1964).

SF authors born 1874-83: 1878

1. Jean de La Hire

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Jean de la Hire (1878-1956)

Adolphe d'Espie de La Hire, better known as Jean de La Hire (1878-1956), was a prolific writer of popular adventure series and a pioneer of science fiction with La Roue Fulgurante [The Fiery Wheel] (1908)a proto-space opera. His Le Corsaire Sous-Marin [The Undersea Corsair] (1912-13), was inspired by Jules Verne; Joe Rollon (1919) developed his own take on H. G. Wells' Invisible Man. Alongside the Nyctalope, La Hire created Les Grandes Aventures d'un Boy Scout (1926) in which boy scout Franc-Hardi visits underground realms and other planets.

* Le Mystère des XV (1911, later translated into English as The Nyctalope on Mars). Crime fighter Léo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, is an indomitable Doc Savage-style action hero gifted with night vision. (Nyctalopia is a medical condition diagnosed in antiquity, in which one sees perfectly in the dark.) He also has an artificial heart, which he gained after being tortured and nearly assassinated, and which prevents him from aging. In this, the first of a series of adventures published through the mid-1940s, the Nyctalope battles Oxus (pictured at left), leader of the sinister Society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars... then allies himself with Oxus and the planet's good inhabitants in order to defeat H. G. Wells' evil Martians. Then he gets married. Phew! In subsequent SF adventures, the Nyctalope will travel to the planet Rhea, where he'll end a war between the day- and night-siders; discover a lost civilization of Amazons in Tibet; and have himself cryopreserved so that, 170 years later, he can defeat an enemy who has also been frozen (hello, Demolition Man and Austin Powers). The exploits of this pioneering pulp superhero were originally serialized in French newspapers.
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* Jean de La Hire, Le Mystère des XV (1911, later translated into English as The Nyctalope on Mars). See De La Hire entry.
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* Jean de La Hire, Lucifer (1921-22). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Le Roi de la Nuit (1923). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, L'Amazone du Mont Everest (1925). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, L'Antéchrist (1927). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Titania (1929). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Belzébuth (1930). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Gorillard (1932). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, L'Assassinat du Nyctalope (1933). See De La Hire entry. Origin story! How he got his artificial heart.

* Jean de La Hire, Les Mystères de Lyon (1933). See De La Hire entry. Origin story! How he got his artificial heart.

* MORE POST-RADIUM-AGE NYCTALOPE STORIES, TOO

EXCERPT FROM TK:

Leo Saint-Clair alias the Nyctalope! Who in the world does not know that name and its reputation? Officially sanctioned, but free to act on his own initiative, he had organized, at his own expense, an expedition that had forced the surrender of the last dissident warlords in Southern Morocco. He had discovered and rescued the King of Spain, who had been abducted and imprisoned by a gang of terrorists.

In China, accompanied by 30 volunteers, he had captured and killed a triumvirate of brilliant but insane masterminds who had been planning to turn their vast Asiatic empire into an hellish anarchist’s haven, subject only to their bloody and barbaric whims. For these deeds, and others no less peremptory, he was famous throughout the world – but he was more famous still because he merited the strange title of
Nyctalope.

He was of medium height, slim and muscular, wiry and athletic–a complete and consummate athlete. His face and profile were Gallic, but without a moustache, like a clean-shaven Vercingetorix. His features were handsome and clean-cut and his expression virile. He had incomparable eyes, which were most often brown, but sometimes green and sometimes yellow. In poor light, the irises of these eyes dilated, for Leo Saint-Clair could see in complete darkness, not as well as in sunlight, but as well as any man might in the evening twilight on the Algerian coast in summer, when a clear sky surrounds the Moon and the swarming stars — well enough to read, without difficulty, the printed text of a newspaper. In semi-darkness, Saint-Clair could see much better, with a more precise perception of details, than in the light of noon. For this man, therefore, darkness did not exist, so long as he had is eyes open. It was largely to this nyctalopic faculty that Saint-Clair owed his success in his mad enterprises – in which it had amused him, more than once, to risk his life.

Psychonaut Generation (1874-83)

Psychonauts!

Expatriates, strangers in a strange land, emigrés and internal exiles. Intrepid adventurers of the outer world like Howard Carter, Shackleton, and Jack London, plus honorary Psychonaut Jean Piccard, the extreme balloonist. Inner-trippers, investigators, theorists, promoters, and debunkers of psychological, psychic, esoteric, spiritual, "paranormal," and other unexplained phenomena: Jung, Houdini, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, Peter D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Fort. Plus honorary Psychonauts Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca) and William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader).

Scientists who grappled with invisible forces, the unseen and unseeable: Einstein (relativity), Marconi (radio), Maurice de Broglie, Max von Laue, Charles Glover Barkla (X-rays), Francis W. Aston (the mass spectograph), Hans Geiger, Victor Francis Hess, and Frederick Soddy (radiation, radioactivity), Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner (nuclear fission), plus honorary Psychonauts Hans Berger (electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (infrared spectroscopy), and Karl Schwarzschild (black holes).

One also thinks of avant-garde litterateurs like Kafka (and honorary Psychonaut Max Brod), James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Apollinaire, and intrepid painters like Picasso and Braque, Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Klee, Malevich, Wyndham Lewis, and Umberto Boccioni. SF authors of the 1874-83 cohort were also explorers of the unknown, the fantastic, the dark and invisible, the newly elastic nature of time and space, a universe that got stranger the closer you studied it.

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I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)

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SF writers of this generation include:
* Edgar Rice Burroughs (SF includes Barsoom series, Pellucidar series, The Land That Time Forgot, The Moon Maid, some of the Tarzan books)
* E. R. Eddison (not everyone agrees that The Worm Ouroboros is SF)
* Sax Rohmer (Grey Face, She Who Sleeps, The Day the World Ended)
* Jack London (SF includes The Iron Heel, The Scarlet Plague)
* E.M. Forster ("The Machine Stops")
* Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Aelita, The Death Box)
* John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell) (Green Fire, The Iron Star, The Purple Sapphire, Quayle's Invention)
* Reginald Glossop (The Orphan of Space)
* George Allan England (The Air Trust, Darkness and Dawn, The Flying Legion, Out of the Abyss, The People of the Abyss)
* William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland, The Night Land)
* David Lindsay (Sphinx)
* Maurice Renard (The Hands of Orlac, New Bodies for Old)
* S. Fowler Wright (The Amphibians, Dawn, Deluge, The New Gods Lead, The World Below)
* Charles Fort (A Radical Corpuscle)
* Victor Rousseau (pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emanuel) (The Messiah of the Cylinder, "Draft of Eternity")
* Joseph Bushnell Ames (The Bladed Barrier)
* Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine
* Edwin Balmer (Flying Death, co-authored When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide)
* Perley Poore Sheehan (The Copper Princess, The Ghost-Mill, co-author of Blood and Iron).
* Jean de La Hire (Nyctalope) -- TK
* David H. Keller -- TK
* Guillaume Apollinaire ("Remote Projection," "The Disappearance of Honore Subrac")
* John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain — SF?, The Moon Endureth — SF?)

NOTE: G.K. Chesterton is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist. But A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool), J. D. Beresford (Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder), and Luis P. Senarens ("Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al) are honorary Psychonauts.

PS: Mata Hari, Zapata, Atatürk. Something very SF about those names, isn't there?

***

Meet the Psychonauts.

1874: Charles A. Beard (Historian, The Rise of American Civilization), Howard Carter (Archaeologist, Tutankhamun's Tomb), Winston Churchill (WWII Prime Minister of England), Clarence Day (Author, Life with Father), Charles Fort (Scientist, prophet of the Unexplained), Robert Frost (Poet, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening), Gustav Holst (Composer, The Planets), Herbert Hoover (31st US President, 1929-33), Harry Houdini (best-known magician and debunker), Charles Ives (Composer), James L. Kraft (inventor of processed cheese), Guglielmo Marconi (Scientist, inventor of the radio), W. Somerset Maugham (Novelist, Of Human Bondage), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Novelist, Anne of Green Gables), John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Built Rockefeller Center), Arnold Schoenberg (Composer), Ernest Shackleton (Antarctic explorer), Honus Wagner, Thomas J. Watson (Founder of IBM), Chaim Weizmann (First President of Israel). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: G. K. Chesterton (Author, The Man Who Was Thursday), Amy Lowell (Poet, What's O'Clock), Gertrude Stein (avant-garde writer, saloniste).

1875: Albert I (King of Belgium, 1909-34), Maurice de Broglie (Physicist, X-ray spectroscopy), John Buchan (Author, The Thirty-Nine Steps), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Novelist, Tarzan), Walter P. Chrysler (Founder of Chrysler Corporation), Aleister Crowley (Wickedest man in the world), D. W. Griffith (Film Director, The Birth of a Nation), Masujiro Hashimoto (Founder of Nissan Motor Co.), Carl Jung (Psychiatrist, inventor of the collective unconscious), Thomas Mann (Novelist, Buddenbrooks), Maurice Ravel (Composer), Rainer Maria Rilke (Poet, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus), Albert Schweitzer (Humanitarian and theologian), Edgar Wallace (highly prolific English novelist), Perley Poore Sheehan (American pulp writer, screenwriter).

1876: Sherwood Anderson (Author, The Triumph of the Egg), Constantin Brancusi (Sculptor), Mata Hari (Spy), Max Jacob (Poet), Jack London (Novelist), Pope Pius XII (signed treaty with Hitler).

1877: Francis W. Aston (Chemist, invented the mass spectograph), Charles Glover Barkla (Physicist, X-Ray scattering), Edgar Cayce (performed "paranormal" readings), Charles Coburn (Actor), Frederick G. Cottrell (Inventor, Electrostatic precipitator), Raoul Dufy (French Fauvist painter), Isadora Duncan (Mother of modern dance), G. I. Gurdjieff (Esoteric philosopher, The Fourth Way), Hermann Hesse (Author), Henry Norris Russell (Giant stars and dwarfs), Frederick Soddy (Investigated radioactivity, isotopes), Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein's lover).

1878: Jean de La Hire (French SF author), Ernst F. W. Alexanderson (Inventor, developed radio and television at GE and RCA), Lionel Barrymore (Actor), Martin Buber (Philosopher), Harry Carey, Sr. (Actor), Louis Chevrolet, André Citroën, George M. Cohan (Composer, "Yankee Doodle Dandy"), Glenn Curtiss (American aviation pioneer), Alfred Döblin (Novelist, Berlin Alexanderplatz), Jack Johnson (first black heavyweight champion), Kazimir Malevich (Painter, Founder of Suprematist school), Don Marquis (archy and mehitabel), Lise Meitner (Physicist, discovered Nuclear Fission), Peter D. Ouspensky (Esoteric philosopher, Tertium Organum), Joseph Bushnell Ames (American novelist), Reza Shah Pahlavi (Shah of Iran, 1925-41), Carl Sandburg (Illinois poet, Lincoln biographer), Upton Sinclair (Novelist), Stalin (brutal dictator, Soviet Union), Joel Stebbins (Astronomer, photoelectric photometry), Pancho Villa (Revolutionary, invaded United States), John Watson (Psychologist, founder of Behaviorism).

1879: Ethel Barrymore (Actor), James Branch Cabell (Novelist, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice), Albert Einstein (Physicist, Theory of relativity), E. M. Forster (Author), Sydney Greenstreet (Actor), Otto Hahn (Chemist, demonstrated fission), Joe Hill (Labor leader), Paul Klee (German-Swiss abstract painter), Max von Laue (Physicist, diffraction of X-rays on crystals), Vachel Lindsay (Poet), Mabel Dodge Luhan (Author), H. B. Reese (peanut butter cups), Will Rogers (cowboy, humorist), Margaret Sanger (birth control advocate), Edward Steichen (Photo-Secessionist), Wallace Stevens (Poet), Leon Trotsky (Bolshevik exile murdered by Stalin), Emiliano Zapata (Mexican patriot, revolutionary), Victor Rousseau Emanuel (British pulp author).

1880: Guillaume Apollinaire (Poet), Alexander Blok (Russian Silver Age poet), W. C. Fields (Comic), David H. Keller (SF writer), John Oliver La Gorce (Antarctica explorer, National Geographic editor), Albert Wallace Hull (Physicist, inventor of the magnetron tube), Helen Keller (deaf and blind activist), Douglas MacArthur, Joe May (Film Director), H. L. Mencken (Critic), Tom Mix (silent movie cowboy), Robert Musil (Novelist, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), Sean O'Casey (Playwright), Mack Sennett (Film/TV Producer), Oswald Spengler (Historian, The Decline of the West), Lytton Strachey (Author, Eminent Victorians), Carl Van Vechten (Novelist, Patron of the Harlem Renaissance), Leonard Woolf (British memoirist, husband of Virginia), Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine).

1881: Franklin Pierce Adams (Columnist), Kemal Atatürk (President of Turkey, 1923-38), Bela Bartok (Hungarian composer), Padraic Colum (Novelist), Clinton Davisson (Physicist, diffraction of electrons), Cecil B. DeMille (pioneering film director), Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin), Pope John XXIII (Roman Catholic Pontiff, 1958-63), Pablo Picasso (abstract painter and sculptor, late anarcho-symbolist), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (father of modern social anthropology), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Philosopher), P. G. Wodehouse (Author).

1882: Ion Antonescu (Pro-Nazi dictator of Romania), Harold D. Babcock (Astronomer, solar radiation), John Barrymore (Actor), Noah Beery, Sr. (Actor), Umberto Boccioni (Italian Futurist painter and sculptor), Max Born (pioneer of quantum mechanics), Georges Braque (Artist, co-Founded Cubism), Tod Browning (Film Director), Arthur Eddington (Astronomer, Eddington luminosity), E. R. Eddison (Novelist, The Worm Ouroboros), Felix Frankfurter (US Supreme Court Justice, 1939-62), Hans Geiger (Physicist, co-Inventor of the Geiger Counter), Eric Gill (Typographer), Robert Goddard (father of modern rocketry), Samuel Goldwyn (Film/TV Producer), Edward Hopper (Painter), James Joyce (Author), Rockwell Kent (Painter), Inayat Khan (founder of Universal Sufism), Fiorello LaGuardia (New York City Mayor, 1934-45), Wyndham Lewis (Painter, Vorticist movement), Bela Lugosi (Actor), Jacques Maritain (Philosopher), A. A. Milne (Author), George Jean Nathan (Author, Editor: American Mercury), Franklin D. Roosevelt (US President during WWII), Igor Stravinsky (Composer), Virginia Woolf (novelist).

1883: Karl Jaspers (Existential philosopher), Franz Kafka (Expressionist novelist), Anton Webern (Expressionist composer), Sax Rohmer (British/American author), Coco Chanel (Fashion Designer), Wild Bill Donovan (founded the OSS), Max Eastman (socialist writer, later embraced McCarthyism), Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (Actor), Faisal I (King of Iraq, 1921-33), Victor Fleming (Film Director), Khalil Gibran (Poet, The Prophet), Rube Goldberg (Cartoonist, designer of impossible contraptions), Jaroslav Hasek (Author, The Good Soldier Svejk), Victor Francis Hess (Physicist, proved cosmic origin of radiation), John Maynard Keynes (Economist), Frank King (Cartoonist, Gasoline Alley), Frank Mars (invented Milky Way and Snickers bars), Edgard Varèse (Composer, Poème électronique), Edwin Balmer (American author). Honorary New Kids: Lon Chaney (Actor), Walter Gropius (Architect, founder of the Bauhaus school), William Carlos Williams (Poet), Benito Mussolini (Fascist dictator of Italy).

HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes) (all born 1873). Also: A. Merritt (SF writer), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Max Brod (Novelist, Kafka's literary executor), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess) (all born 1884).

PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW KIDS: Lon Chaney, Walter Gropius, William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini (all 1883).

PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS; G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874)

SF authors born 1874-83: 1883

1. Edwin Balmer
2. Sax Rohmer
3. John Taine (Eric Temple Bell)
4. Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

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Edwin Balmer (1883-1959)

Edwin Balmer (Chicago) was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was editor of Red Book (1927-49). He wrote many short stories and plays and also wrote for motion pictures.

In addition to other novels, together with author Philip Gordon Wylie, he wrote the catastrophe novels When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide. Balmer also helped create (with artist Marvin Bradley) the syndicated comic strip Speed Spaulding, partially based on the Worlds Collide series, which ran from 1938 through 1941 in the comic book Famous Funnies.

* Flying Death (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1927)
BUY IT

* Co-authored When Worlds Collide (1934)

* Co-authored After Worlds Collide (1935)

TK

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Sax Rohmer (1883-1959)

Author of the Fu Manchu thrillers. More TK.

* The Day the World Ended (Cassell: London, 1930; Doubleday, Doran, for the Crime Club: Garden City, NY, 1930). Originally in Colliers (May 4—July 20, 1929). Three men — Lonergan, of the American secret service; Gaston Max, a top French police detective; and Brian Woodville, British journalist and soldier of fortune — are on the track of the beautiful, enigmatic Me. Yburg. Because she seems to be connected to strange events: radio silence in the USA, man-bats and vampirism in the Black Forest; the sudden death of every human and animal in a small French village. They track her to a haunted German castle patrolled by seven-foot-tall armored giants, who turn out to be androids. More TK.


* More TK

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John Taine (Eric Temple Bell) (1883-1960)

Eric Temple Bell (Scotland) was a mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the U.S. for most of his life. He published his non-fiction under his given name and his fiction as John Taine.

He was influenced by a mathematician of rare distinction, E.M. Langley, and later became a research mathematician. He went to the US in 1902. Bell attended Stanford University and Columbia University (where he was a student of Cassius Jackson Keyser [note below] and was on the faculty first at the University of Washington and later at the California Institute of Technology. He did research in number theory; see in particular Bell series. He attempted — not altogether successfully — to make the traditional umbral calculus (understood at that time to be the same thing as the "symbolic method" of Blissard) logically rigorous. He also did much work using generating functions, treated as formal power series, without concern for convergence. He is the eponym of the Bell polynomials and the Bell numbers of combinatorics. In 1924 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis.

NB: Keyser was one of the first Americans to appreciate the new directions in the foundation of mathematics, heralded by the work of Europeans such as Dedekind, Georg Cantor, Peano, Henri Poincare, Hilbert, Zermelo, Bertrand Russell, and A. N. Whitehead. He was also one of the first to appreciate the mathematical and philosophical importance of his fellow American Charles Peirce. Alfred Korzybski, founder of general semantics, named Keyser as a major influence. While at Columbia, Keyser supervised only three PhDs, but they all proved quite consequential: Eric Temple Bell, the logician Emil Post, and Edward Kasner.

In the early 1920's, Bell wrote several long poems. He also wrote several science fiction novels, which independently invented some of the earliest devices and ideas of science fiction [according to his biographers; this may be an exaggeration]. Only The Purple Sapphire was published at the time, under the pseudonym John Taine; this was before Hugo Gernsback and the genre publication of science fiction. His novels were published later, both in book form and serialized in the magazines.

RADIUM-AGE SF NOVELS

* The Purple Sapphire (Dutton, 1924). Adventure in the depths of Tibet in the search for the sapphire. Is this SF?

* Quayle's Invention (Dutton, 1927). Process for electrically precipitating gold from sea-water, and the subsequent intrigue.

* Green Fire (Dutton, 1928). Taine's variation on the mad scientist theme — the story of the terrible days in the summer of 1990. It has been produced as a play. The novel concerns two corporations competing to develop the power of atomic energy. Independent Laboratories, is working for the advancement of mankind, and Consolidated Power, is working for personal gain. Nature goes berserk, and James Ferguson, the leader of Independent discovers that Jevic, the Director of Consolidated has achieved his goal. Nebulae in space are marked with a greenish glow and then are obliterated. MacRobert, who has previously refused offers from either corporation is placed in charge of Independent. He disposes of Jevic in time to end the destruction.

* The Iron Star (Dutton, 1930). An immense metallic meteorite causes hallucinations; long exposure reverses evolution in the individual — turning man into ape. (Hello, Altered States.) The novel concerns an African expedition. Swain, a member of the expedition, becomes demented and attempts to exterminate a peculiar species of African ape. The other members of the expedition are befriended by an intelligent ape called the Captain. The expedition discover that the apes are in fact humans that have evolved in reverse due to exposure to a meteor and that the Captain was once human.

* The Crystal Horde ("White Lily," Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1930). Magnificent science-horror type, though science is somewhat dated.

* The Time Stream (Wonder Stories, December 1931-?). It was first published in book form in 1946 by The Buffalo Book Company in an edition of 2,000 copies of which only 500 were ever bound. The novel was originally serialized in four parts in the magazine Wonder Stories beginning in December 1931. It is supposedly the first novel to see time as a flowing stream. The novel concerns time travel and links the world Eos at the beginning of the universe with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Bleiler says: "High class but involved."

* Seeds of Life (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1931). It was first published in 1951 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 2,991 copies. The novel concerns who creates a superman using radiation.

* Before the Dawn (Williams Wilkins, Baltimore: 1934). A time-viewing device graphically portrays Earth in the saurian age, ending with a fight of the giants.

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Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (TK)

TK

SF authors born 1874-83: 1882

1. E.R. Eddison

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E.R. Eddison (TK)

TK

SF authors born 1874-83: 1880

1. Guillaume Apollinaire
2. Bertram Atkey
3. Reginald Glossop
4. David H. Keller

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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)


PORTRAIT OF APOLLINAIRE BY ROUSSEAU


Controversial and brilliant French art critic, also highly respected for his tales of sophisticated cruelty and the macabre. He had some sf themes in two stories.

A French poet, writer, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother.

Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917, later used as the basis for an opera in 1947).

Apollinaire was one of the most popular members of the artistic community of Montparnasse in Paris. His friends and collaborators during that period included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Marie Laurencin, André Breton, André Derain, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp. In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the cubist movement.

On September 7, 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa, but released him a week later. Apollinaire then implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning in the art theft, but he was also exonerated.

He fought in World War I and, in 1916, received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple. He wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he coined the word surrealism in the program notes for Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie's ballet Parade, first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes. Apollinaire's status as a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the Marquis de Sade, whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, "The freest spirit that ever existed."

The war-weakened Apollinaire died of influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was interred in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. In 1913, Apollinaire published the essay Les Peintres cubistes on the cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.

In 1907, Apollinaire wrote the well-known erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods (Les Onze Mille Verges). Officially banned in France until 1970, various printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel. Another erotic novel attributed to him was The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt. The book was made into a movie in 1987.

Shortly after his death, Calligrammes, a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect), was published.

Poetry

* Le bestiaire ou le cortège d’Orphée, 1911
* Alcools, 1913
* Vitam impendere amori', 1917
* Calligrammes, poèmes de la paix et de la guerre 1913-1916, 1918 (published shortly after Apollinaire's death)
* Il y a..., 1925
* Ombre de mon amour, poems addressed to Louise de Coligny-Châtillon, 1947
* Poèmes secrets à Madeleine, pirated edition, 1949
* Le Guetteur mélancolique, previously unpublished works, 1952
* Poèmes à Lou, 1955
* Soldes, previously unpublished works, 1985
* Et moi aussi je suis peintre, album of drawings for Calligrammes, from a private collection, published 2006

Prose

* Mirely ou le Petit Trou pas cher, 1900
* "Que faire?",
* Les Onze Mille Verges ou les amours d'un hospodar, 1907
* L'enchanteur pourrissant, 1909
* L'Hérèsiarque et Cie (short story collection), 1910
* Les exploits d’un jeune Don Juan, 1911
* La Rome des Borgia, 1914
* La Fin de Babylone - L'Histoire romanesque 1/3, 1914
* Les Trois Don Juan - L'Histoire romanesque 2/3, 1915
* Le poète assassiné, 1916
* La femme assise, 1920
* Les Épingles (short story collection), 1928

Plays and screenplays

* Les Mamelles de Tirésias, play, 1917
* La Bréhatine, screenplay (collaboration with André Billy), 1917
* Couleurs du temps, 1918
* Casanova, published 1952

Articles, essays, etc.

* Le Théâtre Italien, illustrated encyclopedia, 1910
* Pages d'histoire, chronique des grands siècles de France, chronicles, 1912
* Méditations esthétiques. Les peintres cubistes, 1913
* La Peinture moderne, 1913
* L'Antitradition futuriste, manifeste synthèse, 1913
* Case d'Armons, 1915
* L'esprit nouveau et les poètes, 1918
* Le Flâneur des Deux Rives, chronicles, 1918


* "Remote Projection" (L'heresiarque et Cie, 1910; translated as The Heresiarch and Co.). TK

* "The Disappearance of Honore Subrac" (L'heresiarque et Cie, 1910; translated as The Heresiarch and Co.). TK

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Bertram Atkey (TK)

British writer

The Strange Case of Alan Moraine — possible influence on Black Sabbath's "Iron Man"? Hm.


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Reginald Glossop (TK)

TK

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David H. Keller (TK)

TK