Significance of the Study
Philip Francis Nowlan was an American science fiction author, best known as the creator of Buck Rogers.
While attending the University of Pennsylvania, Nowlan was a member of The Mask and Wig Club, holding significant roles in the annual productions between 1907 and 1909. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania he worked as a newspaper columnist. He married, moved to the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd and created and wrote the Buck Rogers comic strip, illustrated by Dick Calkins. He remained a writer on the strip until 1939. The character Buck Rogers first appeared in Nowlan’s 1928 novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. as Anthony Rogers. The comic strip ran for over forty years and spun off a radio series, a 1939 movie serial, and two television series.
Nowlan also wrote several other novellas for the science fiction magazines as well as the posthumously published mystery, The Girl from Nowhere.
An Unexpected Tale
Science fiction existed before the 1929 debut of the newspaper strip “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” But “Buck Rogers” popularized it and quickly became a multimedia marketing juggernaut, setting the public’s perception of science fiction for decades to come: “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.” So it is fascinating to read Philip Francis Nowlan’s 1928 novel, “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” which introduced the world to displaced World War I aviator Anthony Rogers and his futuristic wife, Wilma Deering. From reading reprints of the newspaper strip, listening to the radio show, and viewing the various movies and TV shows it inspired, you’d expect a space opera saga. What you get is hard military science fiction that morphs into Burroughsian planetary romance (even though the story takes place entirely in North America) before ending on a note straight out of Robert Howard’s “Children of the Night” tales. “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” is definitely a product of its time.
The Story
While searching a Pennsylvania mine for radioactive ores in 1927, former World War I fighter ace Anthony “Tony” Rogers is trapped by a cave-in and succumbs to the radioactive gasses that drew him there in the first place. He is revived by fresh air admitted by another collapse and emerges to find the suburban Pennsylvania landscape is now primeval forest. After living off the land for several weeks, he rescues a green-clad figure being pursued by a trio of thugs armed with what today would be called grenade launchers. The figure, girl-soldier Wilma Deering, takes him back to the mobile headquarters of her “gang” for interrogation and debriefing. Centuries ago, the Han established a global hegemony with their super-science, and Americans have survived as nomadic guerrilla units organized around mob-style “bosses.” Rogers rises in the ranks not by reminding the gangs of their democratic past but by using his practical combat expertise to demonstrate how their existing weaponry can used to defeat the dreaded Han airships, which emerge periodically from the invaders’ fifteen domed cities to hunt the Americans like animals. Rogers persuades the gangs to unite and attack the Han now, before the enemy becomes aware of the Americans’ growing technological and military sophistication.
Nowlan wastes little time on character development. For most of the book, the Han are faceless mooks and American troops exist only to sacrifice themselves heroically at Anthony Rogers’ command. Ultimately the reader gets to know the Big Bad, San-Lan, better than Tony Rogers himself. On the other hand, Nowlan spends whole chapters lovingly describing arcane military hardware and futuristic air and land battles. But the book is short, and he manages to keep the story moving despite the digressions. The tone of the story shifts three-quarters of the way through when Rogers gets captured by the Han and the reader finally gets to meet them face-to-face.
Other reviewers have made much of how Nowlan anticipated such things as the bazooka, guided missiles, and jet aircraft. What strikes me is how uncomfortably close to home his description of decadent Han society hits; although he didn’t intend it, Nowlan could easily have been writing a critique of 21st century American culture. Despite their undeniable artistry, intelligence, and technical prowess the Han are soulless beings living only for personal pleasure and instant gratification. Their advanced technology makes it rarely necessary for them to leave their luxurious condominiums, which are equipped with wall-sized screens on all sides that enable them to beguile their time with endless movies, chat and the city’s intranet. Food, clothing, and other necessities are paid for via electronic funds transfer and are delivered to their apartments. Actual personal contact with another human being is necessary only when one wants to satisfy one’s sexual lusts. “Marriage” is a convenience for men, easily dissolved once they tire of their current favorite. Women, meanwhile, are mercenary seductresses always looking out for a better-heeled catch who can pay for their retirement. Children are turned over to a state daycare/education system as soon as possible so that they don’t distract adults from their pastimes. Since no one’s well-being matters but his own, the typical Han tends to be shallow, cruel and manipulative. They’re a nation of self-centered couch potatoes. The people who have lived under Han domination think genocide is too good for them. Sound familiar?
Is the book racist? No. The Han are the hated invaders, true, but they are not denigrated for any supposed racial failings. They’re not inferior, just not as physically fit and desperate as the feral Americans. They could easily have been Russians or Martians without changing the story. The contrast with depictions of Chinese in Sax Romer’s Fu Manchu novels from the same era is instructional. Ironically, Nowlan’s epilogue hints that the Han may not have been fully human after all, but some sort of alien hybrid. When American diplomats reach China, they learn that the Chinese themselves were overwhelmed by the invaders, who emerged from a meteor crater ready to rumble.
Applicability to Role-playing
“Armageddon 2419 A.D.” is a brutal battlefield epic that would seem to be a fit for gritty military RPGs such as Twilight 2000, Combat!, and the like. It presents a world where war is waged by awesomely destructive long-range weaponry but final victory achieved by savage hand-to-hand fighting. There are certainly plenty of gee-whiz set pieces and gadgetry to steal for a pulp sci-fi game, but the book’s outlook is rather grim, in contrast to the rollicking adventurous tone of the newspaper strip that evolved from it (or of TSR’s Buck Rogers Adventure Game that was based on the comics). Buck Rogers may be a larger than life action paragon, but in Tony Rogers’ reality trying to be a hero will get you wounded, captured, or worse.
Conclusion
Part of the fun of reading vintage science fiction is discovering what the author did and didn’t foresee. Nowlan’s gadgetry remains highly improbable but those 1930s visions of jumping belts, rocket pistols, and ethereal labyrinthine alien cities have stuck in popular culture. His depiction of post-apocalyptic North America jives with Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us.” And his account of a decadent high-tech society holds up a mirror to our own.
Literature Review
This is the original ‘Buck Rogers’ SF classic. Thrill to the adventures of Anthony “Buck” Rogers, one of the most celebrated characters in the history of science fiction. Famed in comic strips, television, in movies, and even radio, this is the first novel to introduce Buck Rogers to the reading public. In Armageddon – 2419 A.D., Buck, a victim of accidental suspended animation, awakens five hundred years later to discover America groaning under the tyranny of the villainous Han, ruling from the safety of their armored machine-cities. Falling in love with one of America’s new warrior-women, Wilma Deering, Rogers soon become a central figure in using new-fangled scientific weapons – disintegrators, jumping belts, inertron, and paralysis rays – to revolt against the Han. ‘Nuff said. Adventure awaits!!!!!
In August 1928, Philip Francis Nowlan published a short story called “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” in the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. Six months later, in March of 1929, he published a sequel, “The Airlords of Han”. The hero of both of these novellas was a man named Anthony Rogers. The tale told in this pair of stories begins with Rogers being overcome by a mysterious gas while inspecting a mine. The gas puts him into a coma from which he does not awake until five hundred years later. He finds himself in a world of advanced technology and amazing adventure.
The popularity of the two stories caught the attention of John F. Dille. Dille teamed up the author, Philip Nowlan, with cartoonist Richard ‘Dick’ Calkins within the syndication framework of the the John F. Dille Company to continue the tale in graphic form as a newspaper cartoon series for a mass audience.
It was in connection with the organization of this team effort that the name of the hero was changed from “Anthony Rogers” to the snappier, “Buck Rogers”.
Nowlan’s, Dille’s and Calkin’s efforts combined to produce what was to become an important part of American pop culture. The comic strip itself ran for 38 years. In addition to this long-running comic strip, Buck Rogers was popularized in books, a television serial and a computer game. The Buck Rogers theme gave rise to emulations such as Flash Gordon and other swashbuckling space heros.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, the Buck Rogers comic strip series was carried by the Worcester Evening Gazette, appearing six days a week – Monday to Saturday. These Buck Rogers comic strips were collected by Roland N. Anderson (1916-1982) while working as a paperboy. He was able to assemble an almost complete collection of the series from its start in the Evening Gazette on February 4, 1929 until March 25, 1933. During this more than four year period 1302 daily strips were created by the Dille Company and Roland missed getting hold of only four of the strips published in the Evening Gazette – numbers 100, 1033, 1052 and 1129. Publication in the Evening Gazette, however, had began exactly four weeks after the official start of the series on January 7, 1929, so the series in the Evening Gazette was continuously behind other newspapers. In an effort to catch up a bit, the Evening Gazette skipped strips 667 to 672, publishing strip 666 on Saturday, March 21, 1931 and then strip 673 on Monday, March 23, 1931. Additionally, the Evening Gazette wasn’t published on the Fourth of July national holidays and the Gazette skipped strips scheduled to be published on those dates to avoid falling further behind. Occasionally, when Roland was unable to obtain a certain strip, the night editorial staff helped him, providing the missing strip either from some reserve or the strip as published in the Boston Herald. This was the case on July 4, 1931 as the strip included here originated from that source. The strips from the Boston Herald can be identified by the deviant type in the titling. Titles were set locally at the newspapers, only the images were provided by the Dille Company.
Literature Sample:
CHAPTER IV
A Han Air Raid
THERE was a girl in Wilma’s camp named Gerdi Mann, with whom Bill Hearn was desperately in love, and the four of us used to go around a lot together. Gerdi was a distinct type. Whereas Wilma had the usual dark brown hair and hazel eyes that marked nearly every member of the community, Gerdi had red hair, blue eyes and very fair skin. She has been dead many years now, but I remember her vividly because she was a throwback in physical appearance to a certain 20th Century type which I have found very rare among modern Americans; also because the four of us were engaged one day in a discussion of this very point, when I obtained my first experience of a Han air raid.
We were sitting high on the side of a hill overlooking the valley that teemed with human activity, invisible beneath its blanket of foliage.
The other three, who knew of the Irish but vaguely and indefinitely, as a race on the other side of the globe, which, like ourselves, had succeeded in maintaining a precarious and fugitive existence in rebellion against the Mongolian domination of the earth, were listening with interest to my theory that Gerdi’s ancestors of several hundred years ago must have been Irish. I explained that Gerdi was an Irish type, evidently a throwback, and that her surname might well have been McMann, or McMahan, and still more anciently “mac Mathghamhain.” They were interested too in my surmise that “Gerdi” was the same name as that which had been “Gerty” or “Gertrude” in the 20th Century.
In the middle of our discussion, we were startled by an alarm rocket that burst high in the air, far to the north, spreading a pall of red smoke that drifted like a cloud. It was followed by others at scattered points in the northern sky.
“A Han raid!” Bill exclaimed in amazement. “The first in seven years!”
“Maybe it’s just one of their ships off its course,” I ventured.
“No,” said Wilma in some agitation. “That would be green rockets. Red means only one thing, Tony. They’re sweeping the countryside with their dis beams. Can you see anything, Bill?”
“We had better get under cover,” Gerdi said nervously. “The four of us are bunched here in the open. For all we know they may be twelve miles up, out of sight, yet looking at us with a projecto’.”
Bill had been sweeping the horizon hastily with his glass, but apparently saw nothing.
“We had better scatter, at that,” he said finally. “It’s orders, you know. See!” He pointed to the valley.
Here and there a tiny human figure shot for a moment above the foliage of the treetops.
“That’s bad,” Wilma commented, as she counted the jumpers. “No less than fifteen people visible, and all clearly radiating from a central point. Do they want to give away our location?”
The standard orders covering air raids were that the population was to scatter individually. There should be no grouping, or even pairing, in view of the destructiveness of the disintegrator rays. Experience of generations had proved that if this were done, and everybody remained hidden beneath the tree screens, the Hans would have to sweep mile after mile of territory, foot by foot, to catch more than a small percentage of the community.
Gerdi, however, refused to leave Bill, and Wilma developed an equal obstinacy against quitting my side. I was inexperienced at this sort of thing, she explained, quite ignoring the fact that she was too; she was only thirteen or fourteen years old at the time of the last air raid.
However, since I could not argue her out of it, we leaped together about a quarter of a mile to the right, while Bill and Gerdi disappeared down the hillside among the trees.
Wilma and I both wanted a point of vantage from which we might overlook the valley and the sky to the north, and we found it near the top of the ridge, where, protected from visibility by thick branches, we could look out between the tree trunks, and get a good view of the valley.
No more rockets went up. Except for a few of those warning red clouds, drifting lazily in a blue sky, there was no visible indication of man’s past or present existence anywhere in the sky or on the ground.
Then Wilma gripped my arm and pointed. I saw it; away off in the distance; looking like a phantom dirigible airship, in its coat of low-visibility paint, a bare spectre.
“Seven thousand feet up,” Wilma whispered, crouching close to me. “Watch.”
The ship was about the same shape as the great dirigibles of the 20th Century that I had seen, but without the suspended control car, engines, propellors, rudders or elevating planes. As it loomed rapidly nearer, I saw that it was wider and somewhat flatter than I had supposed.
Now I could see the repellor rays that held the ship aloft, like searchlight beams faintly visible in the bright daylight (and still faintly visible to the human eye at night). Actually, I had been informed by my instructors, there were two rays; the visible one generated by the ship’s apparatus, and directed toward the ground as a beam of “carrier” impulses; and the true repellor ray, the complement of the other in one sense, induced by the action of the “carrier” and reacting in a concentrating upward direction from the mass of the earth, becoming successively electronic, atomic and finally molecular, in its nature, according to various ratios of distance between earth mass and “carrier” source, until, in the last analysis, the ship itself actually is supported on an upward rushing column of air, much like a ball continuously supported on a fountain jet.
The raider neared with incredible speed. Its rays were both slanted astern at a sharp angle, so that it slid forward with tremendous momentum.
The ship was operating two disintegrator rays, though only in a casual, intermittent fashion. But whenever they flashed downward with blinding brilliancy, forest, rocks and ground melted instantaneously into nothing, where they played upon them.
When later I inspected the scars left by these rays I found them some five feet deep and thirty feet wide, the exposed surfaces being lava-like in texture, but of a pale, iridescent, greenish hue.
No systematic use of the rays was made by the ship, however, until it reached a point over the center of the valley—the center of the community’s activities. There it came to a sudden stop by shooting its repellor beams sharply forward and easing them back gradually to the vertical, holding the ship floating and motionless. Then the work of destruction began systematically.
Back and forth traveled the destroying rays, ploughing parallel furrows from hillside to hillside. We gasped in dismay, Wilma and I, as time after time we saw it plough through sections where we knew camps or plants were located.
“This is awful,” she moaned, a terrified question in her eyes. “How could they know the location so exactly, Tony? Did you see? They were never in doubt. They stalled at a predetermined spot—and—and it was exactly the right spot.”
We did not talk of what might happen if the rays were turned in our direction. We both knew. We would simply disintegrate in a split second into mere scattered electronic vibrations. Strangely enough, it was this self-reliant girl of the 25th Century, who clung to me, a relatively primitive man of the 20th, less familiar than she with the thought of this terrifying possibility, for moral support.
We knew that many of our companions must have been whisked into absolute non-existence before our eyes in these few moments. The whole thing paralyzed us into mental and physical immobility for I do not know how long.
It couldn’t have been long, however, for the rays had not ploughed more than thirty of their twenty-foot furrows or so across the valley, when I regained control of myself, and brought Wilma to herself by shaking her roughly.
“How far will this rocket gun shoot, Wilma?” I demanded, drawing my pistol.
“It depends on your rocket, Tony. It will take even the longest range rocket, but you could shoot more accurately from a longer tube. But why? You couldn’t penetrate the shell of that ship with rocket force, even if you could reach it.”
I fumbled clumsily with my rocket pouch, for I was excited. I had an idea I wanted to try; a “hunch” I called it, forgetting that Wilma could not understand my ancient slang. But finally, with her help, I selected the longest range explosive rocket in my pouch, and fitted it to my pistol.
“It won’t carry seven thousand feet, Tony,” Wilma objected. But I took aim carefully. It was another thought that I had in my mind. The supporting repellor ray, I had been told, became molecular in character at what was called a logarithmic level of five (below that it was a purely electronic “flow” or pulsation between the source of the “carrier” and the average mass of the earth). Below that level if I could project my explosive bullet into this stream where it began to carry material substance upward, might it not rise with the air column, gathering speed and hitting the ship with enough impact to carry it through the shell? It was worth trying anyhow. Wilma became greatly excited, too, when she grasped the nature of my inspiration.
Feverishly I looked around for some formation of branches against which I could rest the pistol, for I had to aim most carefully. At last I found one. Patiently I sighted on the hulk of the ship far above us, aiming at the far side of it, at such an angle as would, so far as I could estimate, bring my bullet path through the forward repellor beam. At last the sights wavered across the point I sought and I pressed the button gently.
For a moment we gazed breathlessly.
Suddenly the ship swung bow down, as on a pivot, and swayed like a pendulum. Wilma screamed in her excitement.
“Oh, Tony, you hit it! You hit it! Do it again; bring it down!”
We had only one more rocket of extreme range between us, and we dropped it three times in our excitement in inserting it in my gun. Then, forcing myself to be calm by sheer will power, while Wilma stuffed her little fist into her mouth to keep from shrieking, I sighted carefully again and fired. In a flash, Wilma had grasped the hope that this discovery of mine might lead to the end of the Han domination.
The elapsed time of the rocket’s invisible flight seemed an age.
Then we saw the ship falling. It seemed to plunge lazily, but actually it fell with terrific acceleration, turning end over end, its disintegrator rays, out of control, describing vast, wild arcs, and once cutting a gash through the forest less than two hundred feet from where we stood.
The crash with which the heavy craft hit the ground reverberated from the hills—the momentum of eighteen or twenty thousand tons, in a sheer drop of seven thousand feet. A mangled mass of metal, it buried itself in the ground, with poetic justice, in the middle of the smoking, semi-molten field of destruction it had been so deliberately ploughing.
The silence, the vacuity of the landscape, was oppressive, as the last echoes died away.
Then far down the hillside, a single figure leaped exultantly above the foliage screen. And in the distance another, and another.
In a moment the sky was punctured by signal rockets. One after another the little red puffs became drifting clouds.
“Scatter! Scatter!” Wilma exclaimed. “In half an hour there’ll be an entire Han fleet here from Nu-yok, and another from Bah-flo. They’ll get this instantly on their recordographs and location finders. They’ll blast the whole valley and the country for miles beyond. Come, Tony. There’s no time for the gang to rally. See the signals. We’ve got to jump. Oh, I’m so proud of you!”
Over the ridge we went, in long leaps toward the east, the country of the Delawares.
From time to time signal rockets puffed in the sky. Most of them were the “red warnings,” the “scatter” signals. But from certain of the others, which Wilma identified as Wyoming rockets, she gathered that whoever was in command (we did not know whether the Boss was alive or not) was ordering an ultimate rally toward the south, and so we changed our course.
It was a great pity, I thought, that the clan had not been equipped throughout its membership with ultrophones, but Wilma explained to me, that not enough of these had been built for distribution as yet, although general distribution had been contemplated within a couple of months.
We traveled far before nightfall overtook us, trying only to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the valley.
When gathering dusk made jumping too dangerous, we sought a comfortable spot beneath the trees, and consumed part of our emergency rations. It was the first time I had tasted the stuff—a highly nutritive synthetic substance called “concentro,” which was, however, a bit bitter and unpalatable. But as only a mouthful or so was needed, it did not matter.
Neither of us had a cloak, but we were both thoroughly tired and happy, so we curled up together for warmth. I remember Wilma making some sleepy remark about our mating, as she cuddled up, as though the matter were all settled, and my surprise at my own instant acceptance of the idea, for I had not consciously thought of her that way before. But we both fell asleep at once.
In the morning we found little time for love making. The practical problem facing us was too great. Wilma felt that the Wyoming plan must be to rally in the Susquanna territory, but she had her doubts about the wisdom of this plan. In my elation at my success in bringing down the Han ship, and my newly found interest in my charming companion, who was, from my viewpoint of another century, at once more highly civilized and yet more primitive than myself, I had forgotten the ominous fact that the Han ship I had destroyed must have known the exact location of the Wyoming Works.
This meant, to Wilma’s logical mind, either that the Hans had perfected new instruments as yet unknown to us, or that somewhere, among the Wyomings or some other nearby gang, there were traitors so degraded as to commit that unthinkable act of trafficking in information with the Hans. In either contingency, she argued, other Han raids would follow, and since the Susquannas had a highly developed organization and more than usually productive plants, the next raid might be expected to strike them.
But at any rate it was clearly our business to get in touch with the other fugitives as quickly as possible, so in spite of muscles that were sore from the excessive leaping of the day before, we continued on our way.
We traveled for only a couple of hours when we saw a multi-colored rocket in the sky, some ten miles ahead of us.
“Bear to the left, Tony,” Wilma said, “and listen for the whistle.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Haven’t they given you the rocket code yet?” she replied. “That’s what the green, followed by yellow and purple means; to concentrate five miles east of the rocket position. You know the rocket position itself might draw a play of disintegrator beams.”
It did not take us long to reach the neighborhood of the indicated rallying, though we were now traveling beneath the trees, with but an occasional leap to a top branch to see if any more rocket smoke was floating above. And soon we heard a distant whistle.
We found about half the Gang already there, in a spot where the trees met high above a little stream. The Big Boss and Raid Bosses were busy reorganizing the remnants.
We reported to Boss Hart at once. He was silent, but interested, when he heard our story.
“You two stick close to me,” he said, adding grimly, “I’m going back to the valley at once with a hundred picked men, and I’ll need you.”
References
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