Exiles of the Dawn World

Nelson S. Bond’s “Exiles of the Dawn World” (Action Stories, December 1940) was a Cavemen & Dinosaurs spectacular published by Fiction House. Combining the two elements of prehistoric humans and dinosaurs was common in Pulps and comics after 1912. Fiction House had their share in their comic book line in Jumbo Comics, Jungle Comics and Planet Comics. They also published the Space Opera Pulp  Planet Stories. This is worth mentioning because as Will Murray explains in Odyssey #11, 1981:

Exiles of the Dawn by Nelson Bond, was one of the few science fiction stories the magazine published. It is probable  that this story was purchased for the newly founded Planet Stories and transferred here to attract readers to both magazines. Nelson S. Bond frequently contributed to the science fiction pulps of the forties.

Nelson Slade Bond (1908-2006) was a big writer in the Slicks but he also liked to write Science Fiction. Much of his SF appeared in the prestigious Blue Book. He had an arrangement with Dorothy McIlwraith to continue his Lancelot Biggs series in Weird Tales, taking it away from Ray A. Palmer’s Fantastic Adventures. McIlwraith wanted to transform Weird Tales into more of a soft SF Pulp as it made its way after Farnsworth Wright. This would not prove successful in the long run.

“Exiles of the Dawn World” has the usual Bond style, a little tongue-in-cheek, never too serious. It starts with stage magician and ghostbreaker, Jeff McClary, joining up with newspaper reporter, Beth Anderson, to look into a haunted house. This quickly proves to be a dud, as a mad scientist has been secretly working in the basement. Professor Von Torp is a cliche mad genius, who has been working on a time machine. At gun point he forces the two intruders into the device, then gets pulled in himself.

All three end up in a swamp about one million years in the past. Von Torp insists that before they leave the swamp, filled with leeches, that they assemble a cairn of stones to mark the spot where the time machine delivered them. He plans to enslave a tribe of cavemen and build another machine. He demands that Jeff and Beth be his absolute slaves. They refuse.

After the cairn is built, the trio are attacked by a prehistoric rhino. While climbing into the trees to escape, Von Torp shoved Beth aside, making her fall. Jeff has to do some brave stuff to save her. The couple leave the swamp and Von Torp. They encounter a tribe of primitive men. They are taken to their village of caves. When Beth pulls off her nylons the cavemen freak out and want to burn her at the stake. They think she is a snake because she is shedding her skin. Jeff saves her by using his magic tricks, making fiery snakes fire out of the flames. He then pretends to kill the serpents, winning him the name Snake-Killer.

Jeff and Beth spend two months with the cavefolk, helping them with their future knowledge. Jeff makes twenty crossbows, then shows the cavemen they can kill predators. The cavemen wipe out a pack of dire wolves. This wins Snake-Killer more status in the tribe. He uses that power to get the cavemen to find the stone cairn in the swamp. They also come across Von Torp, who hasn’t been idle. He has taken over several tribes of the cavefolk’s enemy, the Neanderthalers. Von Torp demands Jeff return to be his slave, and Beth to be his bride. Jeff chases the man off but knows he will attack in his own time.

That time ends up being twelve o’clock in the afternoon one day. The Neanderthals are amassed in an army of two hundred. Another dozen are riding on the backs of Tyrannosaurus rexes. The cavemen and their crossbows are powerless to penetrate the thick hide of the T. rexes. Jeff has to think quickly. He tries a ballista-sized bow he created but this does not stop the beasts. He has to think of something else. Then he decides to shoot all the riders off the dinosaurs. This does not stop them. He twigs it with thinking of fire arrows. He shows the men how to light and shoot these.

The fire arrows work, driving the killer dinos back against Von Torp’s Neanderthals. Soon the cavemen are mopping up the survivors but Jeff has gone off alone to kill Von Torp. But he isn’t alone. Beth comes with him. The two rivals meet in the swamp and have a brutal fight, using fists and branches and stones. (Unlike most mad scientists, Von Torp is buff.)  Jeff defeats the mad man but collapses. Von Torp escapes. When Jeff wakes from a faint he finds himself back in modern times. His assistant, Lafferty, has fixed the machine and pulled the couple out. He wants to know where the three have been, but Jeff brushes that off. He wants Lafferty to go buy a wedding ring. Jeff turns to Beth to ask her if that is what she wants. Yes, she will marry the Snake-Killer.

There is a lot to unpack here. First off, Von Torp does not waste a page explaining how his machine works, the way any respectable mad man would in an Amazing Stories tale. Bond assumes you are familiar with time travel, doesn’t spend much time worrying about it. He does on two occasions tell us that the historical record is erroneous. He has humans and dinosaurs together, a very obvious anachronism but he also has humans more developed than they should be. He uses current ideas on Neanderthals and humans being at war.

On the story side, Bond does not kill Von Torp but leaves him in the past. This suggests the possibility of a sequel. I don’t believe one was ever written for Action Stories or any other magazine. Bond did write another time travel novel, Exiles of Time (Blue Book, May 1940). That one has a comet devastating the Earth and time travel being a means of escape. It is not a sequel. Bond’s inspiration is fairly obvious: Wells’s “The Time Machine” (1896), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), and strongest of all, Edgar Rice Burroughs. When David Innes and Abner Perry arrive in Pellucidar in At the Earth’s Core (1914), they are attacked by a giant sloth then captured by monkeymen. Bond uses this same story arc. His cavemen feel much like ERB’s cave dwellers though Jeff doesn’t have to fight for his mate in Burroughs style.

Conclusion

At the beginning I said “Exiles of the Dawn World” was the only SF story Action Stories used. This is true but it wasn’t the only fantastical story they published. They also had “Menace of Mastodon Valley” (Action Stories, September 1926) by Kenneth Gilbert, a strange Northern and lost world tale. Depending on your definition of Science Fiction, this one might squeak in. Action Stories also had “Death Is My Domain: A Novelet of Tomorrow’s Skyways” by Joel Townsley Rogers in Action Stories, Winter 1943. (Thanks, Lee.)

Adventure Pulps did not often use actual Science Fiction since their audiences usually preferred them to stay in their lane. There are exceptions, of course, like “Menace of Mastodon Valley”. Another was Arthur J. Burks’s “Borderland” from Thrilling Adventures, December 1934. That one has another mad scientist who creates giant lizards that go on a rampage. Like the Gilbert story, it borrows from SF but tries to stay close to home. There are no inter-dimensional aliens or space-faring ooze monsters. Just an ordinary crazy man making giant lizards. It’s a low-level SF experience.

Most Pulp chains had at least one fantastic magazine, whether it was Science Fiction or Horror. As with “Exiles of the Dawn World”, the Pulp publishers wanted to grab as many different kinds of readers as possible, especially in the 1930s when Pulps tended to branch off into specialization. Back in the 1910s and 1920s, the Soft Weeklies like Argosy and All-Story were generalized publications with Romance, Western, Horror, Science Fiction, Adventure and just about anything, all appearing together. The 1930s saw this trend die away to be replaced by Action Stories, Western Story, Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Each genre had its own separate title. There was even enough room for extra specialization like Ranch Romance, which combined two genres, with the hope of catching both mom and dad.

I am always on the look-out for a fantastic tale that has snuck into the party uninvited…

Next time…Cavemen & Dinosaurs in the Comics!