World Without Chance: Classic Pulp Science Fiction Stories in the Vein of Stanley G. Weinbaum. John Russell Fearn
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would have been grateful to Fearn for the help he had given him, and so, whilst dropping out of writing himself, he must have agreed that Fearn could appropriate his—as yet unpublished—pseudonym ‘Thornton Ayre’, And Geoff Medley agreed to let Fearn continue to use his (Medley’s) home address on his ‘Thornton Ayre’ mss.
For the astute Fearn had scented a golden opportunity, and hatched a cunning scheme. Whilst his agent Schwartz knew that Fearn was Polton Cross, and would keep this a secret for commercial purposes, Schwartz also believed that ‘Thornton Ayre’ was another person entirely—Frank Jones. As indeed he then actually was! But what if Fearn was to now begin secretly writing stories himself as Thornton Ayre, also in the Weinbaum style? With Schwartz believing he was still Frank Jones (the Weinbaum imitation technique would effectively disguise the fact that Fearn and not Jones was now writing the stories), Fearn reasoned that his chances of regular sales under all three names, Fearn, Cross, and Ayre, would be immeasurably increased.
How right Fearn was would soon be proved when the January 1938 Astounding Stories would carry stories under all three names—“Red Heritage” by Fearn, “Whispering Satellite” by Ayre, and “The Mental Ultimate” by Cross! (He would repeat the same trick in the May 1942 Amazing Stories, even adding a fourth story—as by Frank Jones!)
When I wrote to Julius Schwartz in 1983 (after I had discovered in The Writer that Frank Jones had been a real person), and asked him if he had known Fearn was Thornton Ayre when he began selling his stories, he confessed:
“I didn’t deduce that Thornton Ayre was Polton Cross till much later! Same goes for the SF Editors!”
John W. Campbell was certainly one of the editors to be fooled. The January 1938 issue of Gillings’ fanzine Scientifiction ran a real scoop article, “Campbell’s Plans for Astounding”, quoting from a postal interview with Campbell himself.:
“Included in the January (1938) issue will be stories by Warner Van Lorne, Clifton B. Kruse, John Russell Fearn, Thornton Ayre (the English Author, whom Campbell describes as ‘one of the best of the newer writers’), and Don A. Stuart, otherwise Campbell himself.”
On November 25th 1937 Fearn had told Gillings:
“Frank seems to be doing all right for himself. I understand that Julie highly praised his recently sold ‘Whispering Satellite’ as one of the best things he’d read. I did think it was tops myself, though confidentially how he ever manages to have such a swell slant on the Weinbaum angle will be an eternal mystery to me. His latest efforts, ‘The Minitors’ and ‘Sanctuary’, are both real pips. Certainly he no longer needs me to help him!”
Thereafter, all of Fearn’s Thornton Ayre stories would be first directed to America, and all of them would eventually sell there.
So there we have it. Frank Jones had indeed been a real person, and, coached by Fearn, he had tried writing SF in 1936 (as Briggs Mendel) and continued into 1937 (as Thornton Ayre). Then he had given up and handed his Thornton Ayre pseudonym to Fearn, who had already created his own pseudonym of Polton Cross, initially writing in the style of Weinbaum. And when Fearn began writing Ayre stories, even more blatantly in the style of Weinbaum, he was initially very successful, selling his first two stories to Astounding Stories. For his ‘Cross’ efforts, Fearn abandoned the Weinbaum slant, and instead developed a third quite distinct style of “scientific nemesis” stories, beginning with “The Mental Ultimate” (Astounding Stories, January 1938).
What happened next is best illustrated in an article Fearn wrote (as Thornton Ayre) that was published in the March 1939 first issue of Ted Carnell’s fanzine New Worlds, entitled “Concerning Webwork”:
“Some little time ago a much esteemed mutual friend Julius Schwartz paid me the compliment of calling me a webwork writer. Since then the words have stuck in my mind—and since English readers will be as much in the dark as 1 was I might as well explain that ‘webwork’ means a complicated mystery wherein all the strands are drawn together in the last chapter to form the complete whole. By accident I stumbled upon this mystic formula in ‘Locked City’ and repeated it in ‘The Secret of the Ring’ (originally called ‘The Circle of Life.’)
“Now all of this brings me to something. If webwork mystery is a new slant to science fiction—and presumably it is—what a colossal field it opens up for other writers as well. I don’t mean in webwork (I stick to that now as my personal angle) but in other slants. Consider a moment—what has SF been like up to now? I am virtually new to the game but I’ve read tons of it since being a boy.
“Here’s my reaction. It’s all been adventure. The pages of past SF reek with curly headed heroes and smooth hipped heroines. Villains have been monstrosities of other worlds. Rarely if ever was the formula altered, save for a few gems from Campbell, Smith, Keller or Taine. Yet even they—though their characters were life-like—pandered to the eternal hackwork adventure formula.
“Yes, and even Weinbaum. What are all his stories but adventure? True, they are magnificent adventure with living people—but they remain the same.
“For myself, I copied his style in my yarns ‘Penal World’ and ‘Whispering Satellite’ because, in the words of the old song, ‘It seemed the right and proper thing to do.’ Then it occurred to me, after a series of rejections, that something had gone wrong. I needed a new technique—I tried a complicated mystery ingredient added to adventure. It worked!”
These sidelights on Fearn’s writing as Ayre were further clarified when Fearn wrote an “About the Author” article to accompany his Thornton Ayre story “Face in the Sky” in the September 1939 Amazing Stories:
“…It all started about two years ago when I was getting pretty fed up with poor returns from occasional articles and short straight yarns in England. You see, the trouble over here is they don’t like anything sensational, or off the beaten track. At least, they didn’t then! But times are changed.
“As I was saying, I was getting fed up when my closest friend, the redoubtable dynamo known as Fearn, slanted my ideas towards science fiction. I’d read several odd tons of the stuff and I must confess it had appealed to me quite a lot. I thought there was nothing to lose by having a shot at it—but oh! Those first efforts were pretty awful, My brains, what there are of them, revolved around queer asteroids, men down in the sea, talking protoplasm, and other things usually associated with over-indulgence in opium or heavy cheese late at night.
“About that time Stanley G. Weinbaum was at his peak. Everybody was nuts about his particular slant and so, being a trier, I imitated his style and produced Jo, the ammonia man of the planet Jupiter. This was in the yarn ‘Penal World’ published in Astounding, in 1937. Shortly afterwards I followed it up with a similar type of yarn called ‘Whispering Satellite,’ also in Astounding. On that point my activities with Astounding terminated because everybody was going like Weinbaum and the Editor was plenty sick. Campbell wrote me an explanatory letter and suggested changes of style.
“I chewed things over. The science fiction business was getting a hold on me, and imitation would not do any longer. Why not try the other extreme and find out what had not been done? I felt I had got something there. Well, what hadn’t been done? Mystery!
“Mystery! Of course! So far as I could figure out all the yarns were more or less straight experiments, adventures, theories—or, very rarely—a detective sort of problem. But what about a real juicy mystery woven round with science? Something to explain Mars, for instance, as it had never been explained before?
“So I launched on a style which, I have since found, was unique. I unwittingly brought webwork plots into science fiction with my initial yarn in a new style—’Locked City.’ The praise for that one made me all of a benevolent glow and produced ‘Secret of the Ring’ (which I shall always privately regard as the best yarn I’ve written so far).”
Fearn’s initial stratagem to write stories as Polton Cross in imitation of Weinbaum (who had died in December 1935) would almost certainly have been suggested to him by his U.S. agent, Julius Schwartz. So when shortly thereafter ‘Thornton Ayre’ followed suit, Schwartz would have been