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Wings Over Tomorrow: The Collected Science Fiction of Philip Francis Nowlan

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Finally somebody has reprinted the original Buck Rogers stories as they originally appeared. The short biographical information at the start of this compilation is very interesting, bringing Philip Francis Nowlan out of semi-obscurity and into the cultural limelight he deserves. It's a pity he did not write more stories.

It's good of Wildside to provide an anthology of the science fiction of Philip Francis Nowlan; he's nearly forgotten today apart from his association with the Buck Rogers franchise. Nowlan was an odd duck to be writing science fiction, because these six stories reveal him to have been a religious fanatic of a particularly nasty variety, a type of fanatic who would be expected to be repelled by, rather than becoming a writer of, science fiction. However, the last two tales in the collection, dating from the end of his life, show that he had solved his religious hangups with the aid of some handy pseudoscience.

The first two entries are short novels that introduce the character of Tony Rogers, a 20th Century scientist carried by suspended animation into the 25th Century, where the hardy remnants of a long-conquered North American population are on the verge of rising up against their conquerors, the Air Lords of Han, who have ruled the world with their super science for centuries. These pulp tales from August 1928 and March 1929 are mainly concerned with Rogers' successful introduction of World War I military tactics into the "Second American Revolution." The Han are exterminated to the last man and girl (children are never mentioned or seen on either side), and are suggested to have been the soulless result of soulless extraterrestrials forcibly mating with Tibetans. A third short novel, from September 1929, brought more of the same, with the earth invaded by hordes of Venusians, fleeing some cataclysm. Although the Venusians cannot endure sunlight, and prefer to live underground deep within the Amazon jungles, so that they could easily coexist peacefully with humans, they are nevertheless exterminated to the last man and girl (again children never appear or are mentioned). Are they soulless? You be the judge: "These people of Venus did not belong on earth.... Perhaps, having had the effrontery to transgress some fundamental propriety of the Universe, it was ordained that they should destroy themselves in that accomplishment [of interplanetary travel]." Again, the main emphasis of the story is on the military tactics used against the Venusians.

Nowlan being hired by the Dille newspaper syndicate, to write the daily comic strip adventures of "Buck" Rogers, a character very loosely based on Tony Rogers, put an end to his magazine publications apart from a short and initially light-hearted time-travel romp, from 1934, in which a scientist and his airheaded female relative ("What does this lever do?") are thrown back to the days of the French and Indian Wars. Again, the author's main interest is in the tactical situations presented in this early form of guerrilla warfare. By this time both Nowlan and inept artist Dick Calkins had been largely replaced on the Buck Rogers strips, although their signatures continued to appear for years to come. Nowlan probably continued for a while to work on the radio series, but left the Syndicate entirely in 1939. In 1940 appeared two new short novels, "The Prince of Mars Returns," and "Space Guards."

The Martian tale is a throwback to Edgar Rice Burroughs of 1912; like all of Nowlan's pulp fiction up to, but not including, his final tale, it is written in that typically archaic expository style found in magazine fiction circa 1880 - 1900. But it shows two important evolutions:
first, the Martians are human, descendants of Atlantean refugees of ancient times, so they don't have to be exterminated. Instead, our hero merely has to overthrow a would-be dictator clearly suggested by Hitler and Mussolini--- and he kills the baddy with his bare hands, averting a bloody revolution. For the first time, also, Nowlan's hero shows mercy and kindness--- Martian wars are generally fought by trained apes riding trained dogs, who do battle for the love of their trainers, having no possible stake in the political conflicts that the wars presumably settle. Our hero goes after the dictator nearly single-handed, precisely, he tells us, to avoid a war and the many blameless ape and dog casualties that would otherwise result.

Nowlan's final story (he died of a stroke in 1940 at the age of 52) carries the Martian idea further. All the intelligent inhabitants of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are descendants of the same root race. Members of an interplanetary police force, the Space Guard, are
attempting to round up an outlaw couple and recover the priceless mineral they stole from a lunar base. Nowlan reuses ideas and gadgets from most of his earlier stories here, even when it makes no sense to do so. For example daily life in the outlaw stronghold as described in detail is just like that of the effete Han warlords in their mainly-underground cities--- yet the Han cities had been in existence for centuries, while the outlaw stronghold has existed for no more than a year! The story moves faster than any of Nowlan's other fiction, showing that his years of writing radio scripts and comic strip continuity had not left him unaffected.

Nowlan is a very minor figure in the history of science fiction, and an appreciation of just how minor he is, is afforded by the realization that the particular 1928 issue of AMAZING STORIES that carried the first installment of "Armageddon--- 2419 AD" also contained the first installment of E. E. Smith's novel THE SKYLARK OF SPACE. Smith's mindbending INTERSTELLAR adventure put all the space-operatic INTERPLANETARY adventures of the 1920s and 1930s very far into the shade. By 1940 the type of space opera that Nowlan had just arrived at was already obsolete by more than a decade; only a single new pulp, PLANET STORIES, existed to continue publication of such tales as Nowlan was only just beginning to write.

If Nowlan had never existed it seems unlikely that the history of magazine and book science fiction would have been very different. What Nowlan did was, through the medium of newspaper comic strips and radio, to bring to the great unwashed and semi-literate masses the gadgets and themes of late 1920s pulp science fiction. Rayguns and flying belts and space ships and futuristic cities were first encountered by the general public only as filtered through the modest talents and limited abilities of Nowlan and artist Dick Calkins.

This edition has a number of glitches caused by scanning the pulp text pages and not proofreading before publication; the garbled words are not too frequent, but much more annoying is the fact that nobody bothered to control the scanner's often random paragraph versus chapter formatting decisions, so that slight breaks within a chapter are treated as if they were new chapters, resulting in a pretty large waste of page space. I haven't seen such defects in more recent Wildside publications (this one is from 2005).