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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 7, Summer 1945

Page 137

FANTASY COMMENTATOR    137
vicious storm, the young naval officer who is hero of the tale is forced over 30, the forbidden line. Since even an accidental crossing of this line is punishable by disgrace---or even death---he has nothing to lose, and therefore continues on Eastward. The remainder of the tale is fascinating: he lands in England, finding there a wild, wooded country infested with lions and tigers, with man living in camps and villages little better than those of savages. Here he meets the titular queen of the realm, and rescues her from danger amid the usual vivid array of Burroughs adventures; finally he penetrates to the continent of Europe just at the time that it is invaded by an Asiatic horde under the Yellow Emperor. Ultimate victory against great odds is given the young officer who returns to America not in disgrace by in triumph, having once more opened the rest of the world to civilization. Why this Burroughs tale was never put in book form is hard to imagine.
    Ray Cummings also utilized a future locale in his Man Who Mastered Time (1929), which is a story of time-travelling: and while Tarrano the Conqueror has scenes laid in the future, it (like the author's Sea Girl) is really little more than tale of interplanetary warfare.
    Jack London wrote The Scarlet Plague (1915), wherein an aged man tells the boys of a crude village in the 21st century of the days when America was a great nation, and explains how all civilization the world boasted crumbled when the Great Plague swept over it sixty years before. H. G. Wells plunges far into the future in his famous Time Machine (1895), a novel that should be quite familiar to everyone. William Richard Twiford tolls of a future war and a great socialistic state in Sown in the Darkness, A.D. 2000 (1941); and a picture of a downtrodden mankind trying to cast off the burden of class subjugation is vividly done in Thomas Temple Hoyne's Intrigue on the Upper Level (1934), whose action takes place in the year 2050. In Red Snow (1930) F. Wright Moxley gives the sad picture of humanity's end through a peculiar red mist cast from the heavens that causes universal sterility. Reversing this phenomenon, Tiffany Thayer ends civilization in his Dr. Arnoldi (1934) by covering every inch of the world's surface with wriggling, living humanity---for in the days he describes man can no longer be killed, even if cut to bits, as each separate portion continues to live. Mark Powell Hyde wrote a very interesting juvenile novel, The Strange Inventor (1927) which is adult in treatment; after giving an account of time-travelling into the past Hyde sends his youthful hero the very far future. 
    In 1922 Ella Scrymsour wrote The Perfect World, a novel having almost everything for which the most rabid fantasy enthusiast could wish. Yet crowded as are its episodes and complex as is its plot it reads well---and where usually overabundance of plot-material ruins a tale here it services only to make it better. Beginning with discovery of a lost race in the bowels of the earth, we are told of the destruction of our world and humanity's migration to the planet Jupiter. There it is discovered that God supposedly created two Gardens of Eden---into earth's sin was brought; but to Jupiter's, never. Yet in underground coverns there lurk worshipper's of ancient pagan gods. This novel is one that never should be passed by...
    There are many more that might be describes, but to keep this article within manageable bounds I shall mention but one other in this first section: The World Below (1929), S. Fowlder Wright's powerful fantasy of the future. Here, by scientific means, a man is cast far ahead into future time; he meets strange adventures in the world of that day, and finally plunging beneath its surface into subterranean caves comes upon a mighty race of physical and mental giants. Philosophy is cleverly mingled with high adventure in this tale, whose magnificent scope compares favorably with that of Stapledon's Last and First Men.   Indeed, these two novels are probably the most impressive so far noted.

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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 137 vicious storm, the young naval officer who is hero of the tale is forced over 30, the forbidden line. Since even an accidental crossing of this line is punishable by disgrace---or even death---he has nothing to lose, and therefore continues on Eastward. The remainder of the tale is fascinating: he lands in England, finding there a wild, wooded country infested with lions and tigers, with man living in camps and villages little better than those of savages. Here he meets the titular queen of the realm, and rescues her from danger amid the usual vivid array of Burroughs adventures; finally he penetrates to the continent of Europe just at the time that it is invaded by an Asiatic horde under the Yellow Emperor. Ultimate victory against great odds is given the young officer who returns to America not in disgrace by in triumph, having once more opened the rest of the world to civilization. Why this Burroughs tale was never put in book form is hard to imagine. Ray Cummings also utilized a future locale in his Man Who Mastered Time (1929), which is a story of time-travelling: and while Tarrano the Conqueror has scenes laid in the future, it (like the author's Sea Girl) is really little more than tale of interplanetary warfare. Jack London wrote The Scarlet Plague (1915), wherein an aged man tells the boys of a crude village in the 21st century of the days when America was a great nation, and explains how all civilization the world boasted crumbled when the Great Plague swept over it sixty years before. H. G. Wells plunges far into the future in his famous Time Machine (1895), a novel that should be quite familiar to everyone. William Richard Twiford tolls of a future war and a great socialistic state in Sown in the Darkness, A.D. 2000 (1941); and a picture of a downtrodden mankind trying to cast off the burden of class subjugation is vividly done in Thomas Temple Hoyne's Intrigue on the Upper Level (1934), whose action takes place in the year 2050. In Red Snow (1930) F. Wright Moxley gives the sad picture of humanity's end through a peculiar red mist cast from the heavens that causes universal sterility. Reversing this phenomenon, Tiffany Thayer ends civilization in his Dr. Arnoldi (1934) by covering every inch of the world's surface with wriggling, living humanity---for in the days he describes man can no longer be killed, even if cut to bits, as each separate portion continues to live. Mark Powell Hyde wrote a very interesting juvenile novel, The Strange Inventor (1927) which is adult in treatment; after giving an account of time-travelling into the past Hyde sends his youthful hero the very far future. In 1922 Ella Scrymsour wrote The Perfect World, a novel having almost everything for which the most rabid fantasy enthusiast could wish. Yet crowded as are its episodes and complex as is its plot it reads well---and where usually overabundance of plot-material ruins a tale here it services only to make it better. Beginning with discovery of a lost race in the bowels of the earth, we are told of the destruction of our world and humanity's migration to the planet Jupiter. There it is discovered that God supposedly created two Gardens of Eden---into earth's sin was brought; but to Jupiter's, never. Yet in underground coverns there lurk worshipper's of ancient pagan gods. This novel is one that never should be passed by... There are many more that might be describes, but to keep this article within manageable bounds I shall mention but one other in this first section: The World Below (1929), S. Fowlder Wright's powerful fantasy of the future. Here, by scientific means, a man is cast far ahead into future time; he meets strange adventures in the world of that day, and finally plunging beneath its surface into subterranean caves comes upon a mighty race of physical and mental giants. Philosophy is cleverly mingled with high adventure in this tale, whose magnificent scope compares favorably with that of Stapledon's Last and First Men. Indeed, these two novels are probably the most impressive so far noted.