BEYOND MARS is one of the rarest Sunday adventure strips. Created in 1952 it only appeared in a single newspaper, the New York Sunday News—an attempt to boost circulation at the time when television was just starting to hurt Sunday newspaper sales. Collected here is the complete series—all one hundred sixty-one strips from 1952 to 1955—in its original
color!
When “Retro” Was Followed by “Rocket” by BRUCE CANWELL At the dawn of the 20th Century science fiction did not exist as either a label or a literary form. The 19th Century “scientific romances” of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells were in print, ready to serve as the core around which a genre could coalesce, yet the century was a dozen years old before Edgar Rice Burroughs transported both John Carter and his eager readers to Barsoom, and it was 1926 before Hugo Gernsback coined the term “scientifiction.” One hundred years later, 21st Century Americans live in a Tofflerian world of Future Shock: moon landings are the stuff of history, a permanent space station orbits overhead and access to a worldwide computer web is constantly at hand, with all the media saturation and instantaneous global communication it makes possible. By 2001 (itself a science fictional year, thanks to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick) SF had grown into a sturdy branch on the tree of Fiction, progressing from its so-called Golden Age through movements such as New Wave, cyberpunk, and slipstream. It had become integrally woven into the fabric of popular culture’s publishing, movie making, and television production; its flourishing helped shape the dreams of a generation. As the title of late author Thomas M. Disch’s study observed, it became The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. The early 1950s—as distant from the start of the 20th Century as it was from the 21st—saw a small number of hard-core science fiction fans scattered throughout the then-forty-eight states. They were grossly outnumbered: most Americans, when they thought about it at all, dismissed SF as simple-minded “Buck Rogers stuff.” The 1951 World Science Fiction Convention in New Orleans attracted fewer than two hundred attendees; the “Worldcon” of 1952 set the record for the decade, as eight hundred seventy persons registered to attend the event at Chicago’s Morrison Hotel. Television screens were filled with the “sci-fi thud and blunder” of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Captain Video. George Pal was at the forefront of science fictional cinema with Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide. The Michael Rennie/Patricia Neal Day the Earth Stood Still was a Cold War parable wrapped in space traveler’s clothing, and Howard Hawks adapted John W. Campbell’s story “Who Goes There?” for the big screen, scaring the pants off filmgoers with The Thing from Another World. Still, each serious attempt at SF movie making was thematically lumped in with such less-ambitious fare as Two Lost Worlds, Flight
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ABOVE: Seetee Shock, Simon and Schuster, 1950. Seetee Ship, Gnome Press, 1951.
FEBRUARY 17, 1952 PAGE 17
FEBRUARY 24, 1952 PAGE 18
MARCH 2, 1952 PAGE 19
MARCH 9, 1952 PAGE 20
MARCH 16, 1952 PAGE 21
MARCH 23, 1952 PAGE 22
MARCH 30, 1952 PAGE 23