Sam Moskowitz (ed) by Under the Moons of Mars

Author:Under the Moons of Mars
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-07T14:29:51+00:00

THE DISCOVERY OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS

ALL THE WORLD is familiar with the novel Tarzan of the Apes, and literally tens of millions of the world’s people recognize the name of its author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. A substantial number are aware that he wrote stories other than Tarzan, most of them science fiction with locales on Mars, Venus, the Moon, Jupiter, the interior of the Earth, and planets surrounding other stars. Very few realize that he supplanted H. G. Wells as the world’s front-running science-fiction writer and outdistanced another contemporary science-fiction-master, A. Conan Doyle (The Lost World, 1912; The Poison Belt, 1913), by so great a margin in both quantity and popularity that even if Doyle had wished to enter into a deliberate competition, it is doubtful that he could have overtaken him.

Following the appearance of his first published work of fiction, Under the Moons of Mars, in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE (February-July, 1912), Burroughs turned the entire direction of science fiction from prophecy and sociology to romantic adventure, made the major market for such work the all-fiction pulp magazines, and became the major influence on the field through to 1934.

Edgar Rice Burroughs carried no illusion of rhetorical grandeur when he first evaluated seriously the potential of a literary career. Reasonably acquainted with the popular magazines of the day, he read their fiction, analyzed their policies, and determined that considering the type of thing he planned to write, a scientific romance, his best hope lay with the allfiction pulps. These were magazines that carried little or no nonfiction; usually unrelieved by illustrations (because of their rough paper), they

crammed page after page of solid type with adventure, human interest, and romance. The number of such magazines was increasing, but the group most likely to accept a highly fantastic romantic adventure was the Munsey pulps. Of that group, the magazine that ran such stories most regularly was THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, SO that would be his target.

“I had good reason for thinking I could sell what I wrote,” Edgar Rice Burroughs stated in a bylined feature article for THE SUNDAY WORLD MAGAZINE, October 27, 1929. “1 had gone thoroughly through some of the all-fiction magazines, and made up my mind that if people were paid for writing rot such as I read I could write stories just as rotten. … 1 knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

The motivation for writing was not the challenge, not the subconscious love of it, but sheer, utter, and driving despair. Burroughs had missed his mark in a dozen diverse occupations in scattered areas of the country. There were two children to support, and he had already pawned the wife’s jewelry and his watch. His last venture, a mail-order business, had failed miserably, and he was working out of borrowed space as an agent for a pencil-sharpener company.

It has never been made clear how many back issues of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE he had read, or whether the “rotten” stories he was referring to were science fiction.

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