interplanetary rockets’ which he considered new plot ideas; Frank Richards’s riposte
corrected him by pointing out the work of Verne, and Verne’s predecessors (Orwell 1940/
1970:460–493).
Turning now to the conventional hardback format, we find as yet no classic authors,
but the genre was paid some significant attention by Edward Stratemeyer, who
published two important series of juvenile SF, the Great Marvel and the Tom Swift series
(Fortune Magazine 1934/1969:41–61; Donelson 1978). Stratemeyer supplied synopses
and then published novels by a stable of writers under his house names. Roy
Rockwood’s Great Marvel series, the first six written by Howard Garis, describe the
adventures of two boys with a professor who invents spaceships and other futuristic
travelling devices. Titles included Through Space to Mars (1910).
Much better known, and commercially very successful, was the Tom Swift series
written by ‘Victor Appleton’ (mostly by Garis) from 1910 to 1941, in which a boy
inventor realises the potential of, and copes with the problems caused by, his futuristic
inventions, such as a giant magnet. A second series about Tom Swift Jr, written by
‘Victor Appleton II’ and including off-planet adventures, ran from 1954 to 1971, and two
more series have appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. They are fast paced and addictive,
packed with science and pseudo-science, and promote an optimistic view of technology
and atomic power. The plots generally involve criminals or spies trying to steal Tom’s
latest invention. Reading Tom Swift was thus a formative experience for thousands of
teenagers who took their ideas about science and science fiction from the series. There
was some stereotyping of female characters and foreigners, although it seems to have
been well-intentioned.
In Britain, Dr Gordon Stables, a stalwart adventure story-writer in the Ballantyne
tradition, and regular contributor to the Boy’s Own Paper, wrote several Vernean yarns:
The Cruise of the Crystal Boat (1891), The City at the Pole (1906), and a future-war novel
The Meteor Flag of England (1905). Throughout the first part of the twentieth century SF
juveniles continued to be published in the Burroughs and Verne traditions, featuring
survivors from Atlantis, lost worlds, and super-criminals. The Burroughsian yarns of
American Carl Claudy are especially remembered: two youths under the patronage of an
eccentric scientist have rather frightening adventures in stories with such titles as The
Mystery Men of Mars (1933).
The ‘mad scientist’ motif also turns up in several fantasies of the period with SF
overtones. In Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1929) the doctor is brought to the
moon by a giant moth. The journey was airless but the moon has an atmosphere to
which the Doctor and his friends adapt, enjoying the release from earth gravity. The
doctor learns to communicate with the moon plants, and finds that moon life is a utopia
where vegetable and animal life live in harmony, supervised by the one moon man. The
moon people plan to keep the doctor with them for ever, and as originally written Dolittle
was intended to stay on the moon, but Lofting’s public would not allow him to ‘kill off’
the doctor, so he returned in a sequel.
Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestarwm books are classics of nonsense humour.
Their science-fictional content deserves a mention, as humour is otherwise distinctly
lacking in the genre. Hunter wrote The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestarwm
in 1933, following it with Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt (1937); there was then
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