Burroughs. Burroughs learned from Rider Haggard the plot motif of the unattainable
Goddess-Woman, and more practically the way to sell books by writing a series of novels
about the same characters, some linked by book-to-book cliff-hangers. Most famous for
his Tarzan yarns, Burroughs wrote three sets of planetary romances, the first set on
Barsoom (Mars), the second set in Pellucidar, the land ‘at the earth’s core’, and the third
on Venus, and also wrote The Moon Maid, set in several future epochs. Clearly a writer
for adults, with his recurrent heterosexual theme of the hero in search of his kidnapped
lady love, Burroughs’s sagas appeal to youngsters who are beginning to be curious about
sex.
Here then were the themes which were to be recycled by juvenile publishing in four
distinct formats: the dime novel; the boys’ paper; the hardback, often in series form; and
the comic.
Science fiction was part of the repertoire of boys’ thrillers (Turner 1975). Dime-novel
SF developed from the American dime novel western. Set in the Wild West, a major
series featured Frank Reade Junior with his amazing transports such as the Steam Man
and Steam Horse, and others like airships and submarines. Written in the 1880s and
1890s under the pseudonym of Noname, they were probably the work of Luis Senarens,
who, according to his entry in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, was characterised by
‘sadism, ethnic rancour, factual ignorance... On the positive side, he led the dime novel
away from eccentric inventiveness into a developmental stream that culminated in
modern Children’s SF’ (Clute and Nicholls 1993:1083).
From Frank Reade Junior’s status as boy inventor, and a rival series featuring Tom
Edison Jr in the early 1890s, Clute named this type of story an ‘Edisonade’ by analogy
with ‘Robinsonade’ (Clute and Nicholls 1993:368–370), and shows that the problem-
solving type of SF plot derives from this tradition: the archetypal myth figure of Trickster
becomes the Competent Man, in the hands of writers like Robert Heinlein. Other story-
types featuring in dime novels included the lost-race story, usually involving a hunt for
treasure, and the marvel tale of strange peoples and adventures in Antarctica, or on
other planets. The dime novel may have influenced Burroughs and Doyle (Clute and
Nicholls 1993:336).
Boys’ papers were predominantly a British phenomenon, deliberately set up to provide
a higher moral tone than the penny dreadfuls. Several of Verne’s novels were serialised
in the Boy’s Own Paper, this being often their first appearance in any English
publication. One dominant story line, an obsession of Lord Northcliffe’s, was invasion of
Britain in the near future, and it frequently appeared in the boys’ papers he published
before the First World War (Turner 1975:176— 186). Space adventures, future
catastrophe and lost-world themes also appeared (Turner 1975:187–199). Science-
fictional themes turned up in the story papers published by D.C.Thomson, with such
characters as Morgyn the Mighty and Wilson the Incredible Athlete.
In 1934 Scoops, a newspaper-style boys’ magazine devoted solely to science fiction, was
launched in Britain, combining new SF with reprints; but it only lasted for twenty
issues. To sum up, boys’ papers ‘played an important role in the history of SF...by
creating a potential readership for the SF magazines and by anticipating many Genre-SF
themes’ (Clute and Nicholls 1993:149). George Orwell’s critique ‘Boys’ weeklies’ includes
a reference to ‘Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots, helicopters and
314 SCIENCE FICTION