When Worlds Collide (1951) - Theatrical Trailer

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

Edgar Rice Burroughs, son of Maj. George Tyler Burroughs and Mary Evaline Zieger, was born in Chicago, IL on 1 Sep 1875. 

In January 1900 he married Emma Hulbert with whom he had three children: Joan, Hulbert and John Coleman. Joan Burroughs married Tarzan actor James Pierce. From 1932-1936 they were the voices of Tarzan and Jane on national radio show Tarzan. They remained married until Joan's death in 1972. Both are buried in Shelbyville, IN and their tombstones bear the inscriptions Tarzan and Jane.

Burroughs divorced Emma in 1934 and married actress Florence Gilbert Dearholt the following year. They divorced in 1942 and died in Encino, CA on 19, Mar 1950.

Aiming his work at the pulps. Burroughs wrote popular science fiction and fantasy stories involving Earth adventurers who were transported to lost islands, the earth's hollow interior (in his Pellucidar stories) and various planets — notably Barsoom (Burroughs's fictional name for Mars) and Amtor (his fictional name for Venus). Much of his work was published in the Argosy and All Story magazines.

Burroughs first story, Under the Moons of Mars, was serialized by Frank Munsey in the February-July 1912 issues of The All-Story. It was written under the name Norman Bean to protect his reputation. It inaugurated the Barsoom series. A Princess of Mars was published as a book by A.C. McClurg of Chicago in 1917.

Burroughs soon took up writing full-time and by the time the run of Under the Moons of Mars finished he had completed two novels, including Tarzan of the Apes published in October 1912.

Tarzan was a cultural sensation when introduced and Burroughs was determined to capitalize on Tarzan's popularity in every way possible. He planned to exploit Tarzan through several different media including a syndicated Tarzan comic strip, movies and merchandise. Experts in the field advised against this course of action, stating that the different media would just end up competing against each other. Burroughs went ahead, however, and proved the experts wrong — the public wanted Tarzan in whatever fashion he was offered. Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day and is a cultural icon.

In either 1915 or 1919, Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California, which he named "Tarzana." The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when Tarzana, California was formed in 1927. Also, the unincorporated community of Tarzan, Texas, was formally named in 1927 when the U.S. Postal Service accepted the name, reputedly coming from the popularity of an early Tarzan comic strip and the silent film Tarzan of the Apes (1918), starring Elmo Lincoln.

Tarzan of the Apes (1918)

Ray Cummings (1887-1957)

"Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." ~Ray Cummings

Raymond King Cummings was born in New York on 30 Aug 1887. He died in Mount Vernon, NY on 23 Jan 1957. An American author of science fiction, Cummings was rated one of the "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre".  Educated at Princeton University, he served as an assistant to Thomas Edison for five years, before embarking on a career in writing.

His debut novelette, “The Girl in the Golden Atom”, was originally published in Argosy in 1919. His first novel, "The Shadow Girl" appeared in 1921. In 1923, they were combined into the novel “The Girl in the Golden Atom” which has been reprinted numerous times, often in an abridged version.

The Girl in the Golden Atom

Hear it HERE

The original novelette finds five men at their club: The Chemist, The Doctor, The Banker, The Big Business Man and The Very Young Man (this is how Cummings refers to them throughout, though he eventually does reveal their names). By sing a super-high-powered microscope, The Chemist has discovered that there are worlds within worlds and habitated universes within the very atoms of everything that makes up our world. He has also developed chemicals that will allow him to shrink and enlarge, so he can visit the universe he has discovered within the atoms of his mother’s golden wedding ring. In other words, Cummings was there first with the idea that sparked the plots for countless comic books and movies later on.

In the first part of the original novelette, The Chemist visits the Golden Atom, falls in love with the beautiful girl he spied on there and assists her people in a war with an enemy city-state. He does this by growing to giant size and stomping on the enemy army. Since The Chemist decides not to return to his world, The Doctor, The Big Business Man and The Very Young Man eventually use the chemicals he left behind to follow him into the Golden Atom. There they find The Chemist, a revolution, excitement, danger and romance, along with a lot of shrinking to hide from enemies and growing to giant size to stomp them. (There’s a lot of stomping, both deliberate and accidental, which at times provides some rather bizarre humor.)

The first half of the book is pretty slow, where the characters walk around, look at things and talk about the history, geography and social customs of the world in which they’ve found themselves. There’s also a lot of pseudo-scientific discussion about the whole shrinking process. In the second half of the book, the revolution gets underway and the whole thing turns into a colorful, violent, fast-paced adventure that fits pretty well into the sword-and-planet sub-genre of science fiction.

As a writer of primarily science-fiction, Cummings produced some 750 novels and short stories using the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings and Gabriel Wilson. Most of his stories appeared in the pulp science-fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories and Astonishing Stories during the 1930s and 1940s. He is perhaps best remembered for his novel "The Girl in the Golden Atom" (1922), which has become a science-fiction classic. His other works include "The Man Who Mastered Time" (1924), "Explorers Into Infinity" (1927), "Beyond the Stars" (1928), "The Snow Girl" (1929), "The Sea Girl" (1930), "The Exile of Time" (1931) and "The Insect Invasion" (1932).

During the 1940s, with his fiction career in eclipse, Cummings anonymously scripted comic book stories for Timely Comics, the predecessor to Marvel Comics. He recycled the plot of "The Girl in the Golden Atom" for a two-part Captain America tale, "Princess of the Atom." (Captain America #25 & 26). He also contributed to the "Human Torch" and "Sub-Mariner," which his daughter Betty Cummings also wrote.

Erle Cox (1873-1950)

Erle Cox, son of Ross Cox and Mary Haskell, was born at Emerald Hill, Melbourne, Australia on 15 Aug 1873. In 1901 he married Mary Ellen Kilbourn with whom he had one son and two daughters. He retired due to ill health in Aug 1950 and died the following 20 Nov at his home in Elsternwick.

Cox's first published stories appeared in the Lone Hand in 1908 and 1909. In 1918 he won a Bulletin competition for a four-line epitaph on a fallen soldier. Regular contributions to The Passing Show column in the Melbourne Argus led in 1921 to a post on the editorial staff.

His main claim to fame is his novel "Out of the Silence," a classic work of science fiction. Set in rural Australia, it tells the story of a young vigneron who discovers, buried beneath his land, a huge sphere containing the culture and technology of a past civilization. Cox began to write the book about 1916 but had shaped the idea for it earlier—'pacing up and down the St. Kilda sands'. At first he was unable to find a publisher, but in 1919 the Argus printed the story in weekly installments between 19 April and 25 October. It created extraordinary interest: 'No more successful serial story has been published in Australia' claimed the Australasian in 1925, heralding its appearance in Melbourne in book form. That year it was also published in London and, in 1928, in New York. American reviewers placed it alongside the works of Jules Verne and Rider Haggard. A new edition appeared in 1932; in 1934 the Argus published a picture-strip version and 3DB broadcast the story as a 25-part serial. Two more editions were published: one in 1947 with a prologue added, and in 1974 a French translation entitled "La sphére d'or."

Frona Eunice Wait Colburn (1859-1946)

Eunice Sophronia "Frona" Smith was born in Midland, CA on 19 Aug 1859. She died in Washington, DC in 1946.

In 1875 she married John Courtland Waite with whom she had two children: Myraetta & Bessie After the death of their son Sylvester in 1880, she left her husband and began to work, getting her first job with the Santa Rosa Republican newspaper and learning the writing and publishing trade.

In 1887 she went to work for the San Francisco Examiner as one of the two female staff journalists. She soon rose to associate editor for the Overland Monthly. (Before editing for the Overland Monthly, she wrote articles for it.) 

Although most of her books fall firmly into non-fiction areas like wine tasting and history, Eunice wrote one book that is often sold as an early work of science fiction. "Yermah the Dorado" is an adventure story about a lost race, in a place that will become San Francisco 11,000 years later. She published the book originally in 1897. After seeing the effects of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake she made changes to the book. In her reprint of the book, the author called her book "Yermah the Dorado - pre-vision of what is to be".

Though sold as science fiction, there has been an argument about whether many Victorian era books meet its definition. Darko Suvin argues that the book is not science fiction because it lacks a distinct science-fiction narrative throughout the book.

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925)

Nicolas Camille Flammarion, son of x and x, was born in Montigny-le-Roi, Haute-Marne, France on 26 Feb 1842. He died in x on 3 Jun 1925. He married twice: To Sylvie Petiaux-Hugo and Gabrielle Renaudot (also a noted stronomer). with whom he had x children:

Flammarion was a prolific author of more than 50 titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science fiction novels and works on psychical research and related topics. He also published the magazine L'Astronomie starting in 1882 and maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France.

In "Real and Imaginary Worlds" (1864) and "Lumen" (1887), he describes a range of exotic species, including sentient plants which combine the processes of digestion and respiration. His psychical studies also influenced some of his science fiction, where he would write about his beliefs in a cosmic version of metempsychosis. In "Lumen", a human character meets the soul of an alien, able to cross the universe faster than light, that has been reincarnated on many different worlds, each with their own gallery of organisms and their evolutionary history. Other than that, his writing about other worlds adhered fairly closely to then current ideas in evolutionary theory and astronomy. Among other things, he believed that all planets went through more or less the same stages of development, but at different rates depending on their sizes.

The Flammarion Engraving

The Flammarion Engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Flammarion's 1888 book "L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (The Atmosphere Popular Meteorology)." 

In 1907, he wrote that he believed dwellers on Mars had tried to communicate with the Earth in the past. He also believed in 1907 that a seven-tailed comet was heading toward Earth. In 1910, for the appearance of Halley's Comet, he believed the gas from the comet’s tail "would impregnate [the Earth’s] atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet."

Quotes

"What intelligent being, what being capable of responding emotionally to a beautiful sight, can look at the jagged, silvery lunar crescent trembling in the azure sky, even through the weakest of telescopes, and not be struck by it in an intensely pleasurable way, not feel cut off from everyday life here on earth and transported toward that first stop on the celestial journeys? What thoughtful soul could look at brilliant Jupiter with its four attendant satellites, or splendid Saturn encircled by its mysterious ring, or a double star glowing scarlet and sapphire in the infinity of night, and not be filled with a sense of wonder? Yes, indeed, if humankind — from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women — if they knew what profound inner pleasure await those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace." ~ Camille Flammarion (1880)

"This end of the world will occur without noise, without revolution, without cataclysm. Just as a tree loses leaves in the autumn wind, so the earth will see in succession the falling and perishing all its children, and in this eternal winter, which will envelop it from then on, she can no longer hope for either a new sun or a new spring. She will purge herself of the history of the worlds. The millions or billions of centuries that she had seen will be like a day. It will be only a detail completely insignificant in the whole of the universe. Presently the earth is only an invisible point among all the stars, because, at this distance, it is lost through its infinite smallness in the vicinity of the sun, which itself is by far only a small star. In the future, when the end of things will arrive on this earth, the event will then pass completely unperceived in the universe. The stars will continue to shine after the extinction of our sun, as they already shone before our existence. When there will no longer be on the earth a sole concern to contemplate, the constellations will reign again in the noise as they reigned before the appearance of man on this tiny globule. There are stars whose light shone some millions of years before we arrived … The luminous rays that we receive actually then departed from their bosom before the time of the appearance of man on the earth. The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universe’s history." ~ Camille Flammarion, La Fin du Monde (The End of the World)