process of becoming, but a more exact fulfillment of being, will guarantee success. The ideology of formula fiction, this is to argue, should be thought in relation to the narrative form of ideology, for if Frank Merriwell embodies the ideal of American 'individualism,' then 'America,' likewise, fleshes out the narrative grammar of adventure.
Above all, it was 'adventure' and 'action' that the pulp magazines promised their readers, beginning with Frank Munsey's Argosy (1896). And it was the pulps that produced the typology through which formula fiction has been displayed and consumed. In the 1920s and the 1930s, the expansion of the pulps — numbering over 200 during the Great Depression — particularized 'adventure' to the point where, for instance, one could read not just War Stories or even Navy Stories, but, more exactly, Submarine Stories and Zeppelin Stories. Street and Smith published the first truly popular specialized pulp, Detective Story Magazine, in 1915, and it was detective fiction, science fiction, and the Western that claimed the most attention from both editors and readers. The serialized novels from these magazines established generic formulas; the pulp industry produced, as Marx would say, 'not just an object for the subject, but a subject for the object'; and the subject produced was a new male readership. To oversimplify, we can claim that while the most popular fiction of the 1850s was written and read by women (under the auspices of male publishers), by the 1950s much of the most popular fiction, such as Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled detective novels and Max Brand's Westerns, was written and read by men. The modern emphasis on fiction's mass distribution — marked by publishing's involvement with Marshall Field and with Sears, by Robert de Graft's invention of Pocket Books (1939), by the emergence of mail- order book clubs — includes an attempt to masculinize the reading process. As Charles Madison explains in his history of publishing, the distribution of paperbacks to the armed forces during World War II developed 'millions of readers who previously had seldom looked into a book.' Thus, the masculine/feminine opposition that had long encoded the distinction between high and mass culture began to blur, and the hypermasculinity of the adventure hero looks not least like a compensatory reaction to this shift in literary consumption. -359-
Just as the character of the adventure hero, always on trial, resists all change, so too the adventure formula resists modernity, providing an alternative experience to what Thorstein Veblen described, in 1904, as 'the cultural incidence of the machine process' — 'the disciplinary effect' of the 'movement for standardization and mechanical equivalence' and the insistence on 'matter-of-fact habits of thought.' At the same time, that alternative, to the degree that it repeats a standardized formula, perpetuates this 'disciplinary effect'; like any commodity, it creates only illusory difference; and it invites the reader to submit, like the author, to the prescriptions of (the very rhythm of) the productive apparatus. Nonetheless, formula fiction is not reducible to its formula, and reading science fiction, detective fiction, and the Western amounts to encountering a perpetual renegotiation of 'adventure' and 'modernization' (which is to say: 'adventure' and its own mode of production).
In modern science fiction, the confrontation between 'adventure' and 'modernization,' heroic stasis and modern progress, appears as a bifurcation within the industry itself: one strain of the genre emphasizes 'adventure,' most simply represented by the Flash Gordon film serials (1936, 1938, 1939), based on the popular comic strip; the other emphasizes invention or 'hard science,' initially represented by Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41 + (1911), a novel serialized in his own publication, Modern Electrics, the country's first radio magazine. Gernsback's hero displays his technological genius in the act of saving a village girl from multiple crises, finally bringing her home to New York and the 650-foot, round glass tower that is his home. The novel takes as its task the presentation of a future metropolis and the careful description of future inventions, but this 'Romance of the Year 2660' remains an adventure. The hero's genius — symbolized by the tower, technology's own phallus rising above New York — is inspired by the vulnerability of woman, the given, without which the narrative could neither begin nor end. And this point complicates the typical charge against science fiction, the claim that it promotes an unexamined and untenable myth of technological progress, as Lewis Mumford has argued. For that myth of progress inhabits a structural stasis: the stereotypical gender code makes science make sense, providing it with its very reason to be. Indeed, a second glance at the - 360- genre's modern history suggests that science fiction just as assiduously perpetuates a myth of no progress; it guarantees the stability of certain social relations despite technological advance; and in this sense it typically naturalizes the technologies of gender, sexuality, and race, by casting these human constructions outside the realm of the properly technological and historical.
Tracing the nineteenth-century foundations of science fiction means looking away from America, to the work of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, and yet a few American texts also opened up some basic avenues of enquiry. Edward Ellis's Steam-Man of the Plains (1868), a dime novel, initiates a fascination with the technological elimination of human labor that attains its most complete expression in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (1950) and his three 'laws of robotics,' which adjudicate relations between the human and the technological. Edgar Allan Poe's Balloon Hoax (1844) and Hans Pfaal (1835) inaugurate an emphasis on travel that, in E. E. Smith's Skylark series, beginning with The Skylark of Space (1928), becomes intergallactic, providing writers with a new realm of exploration, made limitless with Asimov's invention of 'hyper-spatial' travel in the 1940s. And Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) introduces time travel as a means of highlighting the effects of technology. In L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fail (1941), Twain's dystopian vision becomes utopian: the American hero finds himself transported from Mussolini's Rome to Justinian's Rome, where, with the reinvention of the semaphore telegraph and the printing press, he both prevents the Western Interregnum and establishes social justice. De Camp never addresses the absence of such technological resolution to the modern Western crisis, his hero remains in the safety of the past, but his novel exemplifies science fiction's increasing tendency, in the 1930s and 1940s, to address contemporary crisis explicitly before displacing it, spatially or chronologically, and providing its readers with the pleasure of scientific resolution. The splitting of the atom in 1938 realized many of the achievements and anxieties science fiction had been predicting for years, and it made the earth itself the most obvious new stage for adventure. By the 1950s, science fiction films take the 1950s as their very point of departure, developing a variety of monsters released or -361- created by atomic explosion, notably The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them! , where ants appear as the first of Hollywood's giant insects.
In contrast, the first chapter of Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Princess of Mars (1912), serialized the same year as his Tarzan of the Apes, tries to compensate for American history: John Carter, a Virginian who fought in the Civil War and then found himself a captain 'in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed,' has ventured West and become a wildly successful prospector in Arizona, where his partner is attacked by Apaches, from whom Carter himself takes refuge in a cave. By means of psychic projection, he ends up on Mars, this planet of war becoming, as it were, the new locus of American 'adventure' — American adventures, both military and economic, having all but played themselves out within the continental United States. His strength and prowess enable him to resolve the conflict between the red and green races of Mars, to liberate the greenmen from their despotic ruler, and to defend the princess he loves from repeated assault; he thus reclaims, beyond the closing Western frontier, the chivalry of the Southerner. The logic of empire that underlies Burroughs's Martian novels (eleven in all, concluding in 1942) more obviously informs his Pellucidar series, beginning with At the Earth's Core (1914) and Pellucidar (1915), in which David Innes brings both American technology and the American political system to the primitive peoples residing in the Earth's hollow center. If H. G. Wells, during Africa's partition, tried to give his readers some sense of the horror of being colonized in The War of the Worlds (1898), then Burroughs, in contrast, insisted on the heroics of colonial subjection.
It is, of course, a racist axiom that makes this heroism possible, rendering global conflict as a Social Darwinist battle of races, and insisting on the priority of the body to the point where, despite any technological marvel, the first and final sign of superiority is always physical. The warlord John Carter is 6 feet, 2 inches tall, 'broad of shoulder and narrow of hip,' and David Innes, American emperor of Pellucidar, is a comparable physical specimen (as is, of course, Tarzan, that noble savage whose nobility derives from his aristocratic parentage). More obviously, it is the ethnographic and biological attention to the creatures of Mars and Pellucidar that grounds Bur- 362- Bur-'s fiction in the body, and in racial history: the red and green races of Mars can be traced back to one 'very dark, almost black' race, and one 'reddish yellow race.' And in all Burroughs's work, it is the threat of interracial abduction that emerges as the most heinous crime that his heroes must prevent: Carter must save the red, almost humanoid Martian princess from the sexual assault of a bestial green jeddack. That the popularity of Burroughs's first novels occurred between the extraordinary success of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman
