On this last day of 2024, it might be fun to look back and forwards at the same time. Tomorrow 2025 begins. (And sorry, no flying cars, personal robots or aliens from other worlds.) Let’s drop back a hundred years and see what the year 1925 was like for fans of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.
Welcome to the Roaring Twenties. Prohibition reigns in America. Calvin Coolidge is President of the USA. The New Yorker publishes its first issue. The Scopes Monkey trial is followed by The Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of Evolution in school. The Chrysler Corporation becomes a car maker. The famous dog sled race to Nome, Alaska brings much needed vaccine. The Klu Klux Klan marches openly in Washington. The Pittsburgh Pirates win the World Series. New York City surpasses London as the largest city in the world.
It can be hard to imagine 1925 as a fan. Pulps are dominated by the soft weeklies like Argosy, though Weird Tales has been going for two years. There are no Science Fiction Pulps. No Doc Savage, The Shadow or The Spider. Movies are silent. No television, but commercial Radio is five years old but none of the great programs exist yet. (19% of Americans had radios, about five million.) In the mundane world, the bestsellers include The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Trial by Franz Kafka and Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. Most of the important Science Fiction novels are being written in France and Russia. In America, Hugo Gernsback’s awful “Ralph 124 C41+” appears in hard cover.
In Fantasy, there is Doctor Doolittle’s Zoo by Hugh Lofting and The Lost King of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson. J. R. R. Tolkien is busy becoming the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. C. S. Lewis was an undergraduate there too. They would meet in 1926 at Merton College.
Of the greats of the past, Arthur Conan Doyle is fully committed to speaking to the dead by 1925. His work is entirely articles on Spiritualism. He’s not quite done with Sherlock or Challenger yet but soon. He might not even have cared that his novel The Lost World (1912) gave us animated dinosaurs! H. G. Wells is finished with “cheap fiction”. His old stories appear in several collections though. H. Rider Haggard dies.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is probably the most popular writer of the fantastic. This was not a great year him though. The Moon Men in Argosy All-Story Weekly and its sequel “The Red Hawk”. Also popular is The Radio Beasts by Ralph Milne Farley in Argosy All-Story Weekly. A. Merritt took the year off.
Hugo Gernsback will publish the first issue of Amazing Stories next year but he was trying things out with SF stories in Science and Invention with the fourteen part serial Tarrano the Conqueror, July 1925-August 1926 by Ray Cummings.
In Weird Tales there were some landmark stories such as “The Festival” (January 1925) and “The Unnameable” (July 1925) by H. P. Lovecraft, “The Werewolf of Ponkert” by H. Warner Munn (July 1925) and the first Jules de Grandin story, “Horror on the Links” (October 1925) by Seabury Quinn. Robert E. Howard appears for the first time with “Spear and Fang” (July 1925). That July issue was a stunner!
In the theaters, there were some classic silent films: The Lost World, The Phantom of the Opera and The Monster. Sound is two years away and Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein are six years away. King Kong is eight. Two of these are very important films. The Lost World is the great-granddaddy of One Million Years BC and Jurassic Park. Lon Chaney’s performance as Eric the Phantom is so powerful it is one of the few silent films to become iconic in later years. That mask reveal still works today even without singing.
There are no comic books. In the newspapers, there is one comic strip of note, “Little Nemo in Slumberland” by Winsor McCay. The first American comic book is Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, reprinting comic strips in 1933. Action Comics, featuring Superman, is thirteen years away. Even the glorious comic strip Buck Rogers is still four years away. Prince Valiant, Tarzan, Mandrake, The Phantom, Flash Gordon, all to come…
Some important births include Katherine MacLean, J. T. McIntosh, Harry Harrison, Keith Laumer and Brian W. Aldiss. These babies will all grow up to make contributions to SF/F/H. They will grow up in a very different world than 1925.
Conclusion
I know back in the 1970s I used to bemoan the dearth of good fantastic material. I did not realize that my comic books, television shows, movies and toys were actually a vast surplus that sat atop decades of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. Of course, this was before home video, streaming, the Internet. There was lots but I had no access to it. I had to make due with Island at the Top of the World, At the Earth’s Core, DC’s Tarzan, The Warlord and Beowulf Dragonslayer. Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan, on TV: Star Trek reruns, Space 1999, Kolchak the Night Stalker, The Man From Atlantis and Planet of the Apes figurines. I see now that there was plenty. When I look at the year 1925, I shiver. There was so little. Some books in the library, occasional stories in Weeklies and the odd silent film and comic strip. Weird Tales must have been such an oasis for fans of the fantastic. This look back has given me a new perspective on how important Weird Tales was to its readers in the early years.
A Look Forward: 2025
RAGE m a c h i n e Books offers some new anthologies: Swords of Fire 4 but first in our Space Opera series: Ships of Steel.
G. W. Thomas has a collection of Young Arthan stories called The Beacon House as well as Bearshirt: The City of the Forlorn. Early in 2025 there will be a new free Arthan story called “Green With Envy”. But first the sister collection to Strange Detectives: Strange Adventures out in January. Also in the wings: Monster II, a micro-fiction collection and more Sword & Sorcery projects.
Jack Mackenzie will be following up Madame Murder with a fourth Wild Inc. novel called Go Johnny Goh. He also has a number of collections: The Cryo Game (Science Fiction) and two collections of the Sirtago & Poet stories.
Thanks to all the readers who have enjoyed our books in 2024. Here’s to a 2025 filled with new projects.
Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror from RAGE m a c h i n e
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