Science Fiction in Dialogue with The Great Depression: Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934)

• Graphic created by my father

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) confides in the introduction to his travel memoir Puzzled America (1935) that the Great Depression was inescapable: “I was a writer of tales. It might be that I should have remained just that, but there is difficulty. There are, everywhere in America, these people now out of work. There are women and children hungry and others without enough clothes.”1 Edgar Albion Lyons, in the author’s note to his science fiction novel The Chosen Race: A Novel Based on the Depression and Machine Age (1936), echoes this sentiment: “The following chapters were written during the months of 1932 when the words ‘Depression’ and ‘Unemployment’ were on everyone’s lips.”2 Magazine science fiction, with its eye towards the marvelous technological future, likewise could not escape contemporary economic, political, and societal convulsions.3 Science, “in the form of a hypothesized device or theory,” enabled exciting adventures but also the exploration of “diverse and dire social implications.”4

On May 9th, 1934, a massive two-day dust storm caused by severe drought and human-made factors, removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil. The Dust Bowl unleashed its fury. The dust clouds reached Chicago and cities in the east, blotted out the Statue of Liberty and the United States Capitol. Red snow fell in New England.5 In the September 1934 issue of Astounding, a twenty-year-old Frank K. Kelly published “Famine on Mars” (1934) about a desperate attempt to assist Martians dying of thirst and starvation after a drought. In Kelly’s vision, The Combine, Earth’s government, deliberately caused the genocide and refuses to provide assistance.6

• M. Marchioni’s interior art for “Famine on Mars” (1934)

Kelly renders a hyperviolent microcosm of Great Depression-drenched despair within an adventure story package.7 Its protagonists might attack each other with bizarre and futuristic physical and chemical weapons in a transparent space station but the real focus is on the fate of “million dark faces convulsed by the same agony and torn by the same unspent desire” for a drop to drink on the surface of Mars” (79).

The Lay of the Generic Landscape

Frank K. Kelly (1914-2010) lived a varied life. He was born in 1914 in Kansas City, MO. When he was sixteen, he published his first science fiction story–“The Light Bender” (1931)–in Wonder Stories (June 1931). 8 Of his ten published short fictions between 1931-1935, the first six appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, which at the time was overseen by managing editor David Lasser (1902-1996). Due to his efforts to “bring some realism to their fiction,.”9 Lasser is considered a  “much neglected revolutionary in science fiction” and under his tutelage the genre “started to mature.”10 Ashley describes Kelly as “the best exponent of this hard realism”11 and while his earliest stories might have lacked polish they made up for it in their bleak depiction of life in space.

After Gernsback fired Lasser in 1933, Kelly published his final four short stories with Astounding and Amazing. While Astounding Stories “was first and always a straight adventure pulp magazine” with no intention of “educating through science and shared no ideals” with Hugo Gernsback,12 the magazine experienced a revival in 1933 and sought out stories of “total originality and scope.”13 Kelly’s bleak visions found a new home.

After his brief and memorable stint as a SF author, Kelly attended college and later became a speech writer and journalist. He wrote speeches for Truman’s Presidential campaign of 1948 and various other Democratic senators in the 50s, held executive positions in the International Press Institute, elected vice president of the Ford Foundation’s anti-McCarthyism organization Fund for the Republic, co-founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and served as the senior vice president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.14

Let’s take a step back to the Great Depression and Kelly’s nightmare.

• Howard V. Brown’s cover for Astounding Stories (September 1934)

“The Combine is right” and “You are Wrong”: Institutionalized Brutality in the Age of the Machine

During the Great Depression, the American government responded with brutality towards protest. In 1932, Henry Ford ordered police to open fire on thousands of workers at his River Rouge plant in Detroit, “killing four and seriously wounding fifty others.” In another instance from 1932, American WWI veterans marched on Washington, D.C. from Portland, Oregon to demand a bonus payment planned for 1945 as immediate relief from economic hardship and unemployment. General Douglas MacArthur ordered troops to disperse the marchers with tear gas and bayonets.15

Simultaneously drawing on the rise of fascism in Europe, Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” creates an even more draconian governmental manifestation. Earth’s government, The Combine, acts as a genocidal and malevolent political entity that brainwashes its inhabitants in the name of “the brotherhood of man” (79). His use of “combine” evokes two interrelated images of monolithic and mechanical power: new 1920s harvesters pulled by tractors instead of mules and a combination of both political and economic powers.16 Like a new-fangled tractor-driven thresher, the Combine mechanizes society diminishing its human concerns. Kelly suggests the working class in this future receive numerical names while political elite received standard nomenclature.

President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”17 “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. The two main characters, NX-4 and NX-5, operate a “station” that seemed “to hang in space like a giant’s lantern” relaying messages between Earth, the moon, and Mars (72). The story starts with the Earthman NX-4, “alone, looking over the edge of the void into space” (72). He looks through the “panels of glassite” and he cannot help but sense how “glorious” it was to be “in the midst of this unstirred immensity” (72). The sense of humanity triumphant permeates. But then his eyes shift towards Mars and its shrinking icecaps. Reality returns: “Life was hard on Mars” (74). As the nature of the crisis on Mars emerges, humanity’s technological genius shifts to humanity’s genocidal brutality.

In NX-4’s interactions with co-worker NX-5 are emblematic of this shift. NX-4 has the persistent sense that NX-5 is a Martian. He reassures himself that “it made little difference” to him as he “was not one to be too scrupulous of the race prejudice that was so strong on Earth” (76). He rationalizes this difference as a product of life in space, perched in the immensity of the universe, “you saw that all men were brothers, on whatever world they might be” (76). But, moments later, when NX-5 asks “You are my friend, aren’t you?” the hollowness of NX-4 self-assurance hit home: “Yes. Of course,” he says, but admits the emptiness of words to himself (76). NX-5 confesses that he is a Martian, and again NX-4 repeats that it makes not difference to him. But it does. He’s aware of his brainwashing. The Combine taught him what to think and “The Combine is right” (77). As NX-5 describes the message he received from Mars and the man-made crisis unfolding. NX-4’s brainwashing takes over. The possibility of entendre between denizens of Earth and Martians evaporates despite earlier proclamations of equality and brotherhood. NX-5 tells NX-4 that he’ll be forced to act: “I am going to ask you will sometime forgive what I’m going to do now” (78). The Martian deploys his own thought-control abilities and NX-4 becomes a tool to save Mars.

The conflict between Earth and Mars is rooted in a Civil War twenty years earlier in which Martian colonists managed to overthrow Earth–something “The Combine has never forgotten” (78). In an act of genocidal revenge, The Combine took with them the secret of the vital water generators—only operable by their agents. These references indicate a repressive colonial relationship in which Earth maintained the political upper hand and controlled the vital infrastructure of their colony. Mars’ icecaps only produce so much water. A devastating drought hits. And here Kelly’s prose attempts to place our sympathies with the Martians: “the bottoms of the canals are just barely wet, and men kill each other gladly to lick the sweet mud where it has been damp, to eat the ground where it has turned to slime” (79). And thirst “comes on you like madness” (79). Mars waited for Earth’s citizens to rise up in support of the dead and dying: “we have waited on Mars, thinking with every new year that surely you would throw off the yoke” (79). But The Combine has always been too strong.

And so NX-5 hatches a wild plan, with NX-4 in tow, to rescue Mars.

And After the Truth Emerges…

I doubt many readers will find “Famine on Mars” an exemplar of interwar science fiction. The battle sequences feel tacked on and lacking in wonder considering the space station locale. The prose only hits at an emotional level in the short descriptions of horror on Mars. However, I’d suggest Kelly admirably attempts, if in an unpolished manner, to blend pulp action with political commentary on Great Depression, the rise of authoritarianism in Europe, the fears of unrestrained mechanized capitalism, and an uncaring government prone to violent reprisal when faced with protest. “Famine on Mars” manifests the paradigmatic clash between societal reality (the dead and dying on Mars and Earth’s role) and official propaganda promoted by the Combine (effected through brainwashing and claims to racial superiority). And placed against the interwoven historical reality of the rise of Fascism in Europe and the devastating human impact of the Great Depression, “Famine on Mars” shines.

For those expecting a rating: 3.5/5 (Good).

• Stock interior art used at the end of stories in Astounding

Notes

1. Cited and described in Laura Browder’s Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America (1998), 15.. ↩︎
2. Edgar Albion Lyons’ The Chosen Race: A Novel Based on the Depression and Machine Age (1936). ↩︎
3. See Brian Attebery’s useful summary “The magazine era: 1926-1960” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 34. He doesn’t even mention The Great Depression; There is substantial scholarship on the Gernsback era. I’ve consulted the following: Eric Leif Davin’s Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations with the Founders of Science Fiction (1999). Mike Ashley’s The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (2000); Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes’ The Gernsback Days: A study of the evolution of modern science fiction from 1911-1936 (2004); John Cheg’s Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (2012); For the basic historical background on the Great Depression I’ve consulted Jason Scott Smith’s A Concise History of the New Deal (2014). ↩︎
4. Cheg, 9. ↩︎
5. The Dust Bowl’s Wikipedia entry. ↩︎
6. You can read the story here. ↩︎
7. I’ve compiled a list of other stories and novels from era of the Great Depression that address similar socioeconomic problems. ↩︎
8. Oral history interview with Frank K. Kelly for the Truman Library. ↩︎
9. Ashley, The Time Machine, 72. ↩︎
10. Ashley, The Time Machine, 66. ↩︎
11. Ashley, The Time Machine, 75. ↩︎
12. Ashley, The Time Machines, 69; In Gernsback’s magazines, David Lasser had an important role in attempting to integrate realism. See Ch. 1 “The Age of Wonder: Gernsback, David Lasser, and Wonder Stories” in Eric Leif Davin’s Pioneers of Wonder for Lasser’s role and a wonderful interview; See John Cheg’s Astounding Wonder, 311-313 for Lasser’s labor-oriented career after he was fired. ↩︎
13. Ashley, The Time Machine, 84. ↩︎
14. Oral history interview with Frank K. Kelly ↩︎
15. These two incidents are briefly mentioned in Browder’s Rousing the Nation, 17. ↩︎
16. According to Wikipedia, “In the 1920s, Case Corporation and John Deere made combines, introducing tractor-pulled harvesters with a second engine aboard the combine to power its workings”; Kelly was a Midwesterner! ↩︎
17. Hubert Hoover’s Wikipedia entry. ↩︎

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