Palos of the Dog Star Pack Trilogy

Vol. 1 Palos of the Dog Star Pack

Vol. 2 The Mouthpiece of Zitu

Vol. 3 Jason, Son of Jason

J. U. Giesy

Introduction by Sam Moskowitz

(from Under the Moons of Mars 1970 ed. Moskowitz)

Palos of the Dog Star Pack and its two sequels, by J. U. Giesy (James Ullrich Giesy), are unquestionably among the most appreciated novels in the Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition to appear. What is distinctive about Giesy is the flavor of the occult that permeates so much of his work, despite the fact that he was a medical doctor and a man of science. Giesy’s friend and literary collaborator, Junius B. Smith, a practicing attorney, had a fellowship in the American Academy of Astrologians and worked toward having astrology accepted as a true science.

J. U. Giesy was born “near” Chillicothe, Ohio, August 6, 1877. At the age of thirteen he moved with his family to Salt Lake City, where he was to spend most of his life. He graduated from the Starling Medical College, Columbus, Ohio, in 1898 and spent his internship in Salt Lake City. During World War I he was a captain in the medical corps, and after the war was a major in the medical reserve. He trained six hundred men a year during World War I as an officer at Plattsburg Training Camp, Salt Lake City, a camp which he organized in 1916.

Love came to him in 1904, and he was married December of that year in San Francisco to Juliet Galena Conwell and enjoyed a fine lifelong relationship with his wife. He was a member of the American College of Physical Therapy and an associate editor on the staff of California and Western Medicine, as well as serving as one of the editors of Archives of Physical Therapy X-Ray and Radium.

Though he began to write in 1910, his first sale was a collaboration done in 1911 with Junius B. Smith, then practicing in Salt Lake City. Smith claimed that his grandfather was a brother of the Joseph Smith who founded the Mormon church. The early Semi-Dual stories of the collaboration were mailed from Dr. Giesy’s offices at 714 Kearns Building, Salt Lake City, and the usual rate of payment was about two cents a word.

Giesy expressed a touch of impish humor in a series of short stories concerning Xenophon Xerxes Zapt, who invents devices for exploding dynamite at a distance, for antigravity, and for invisibility and manages to involve a delightfully corruptible Irish cop in each of them. The Wicked Flea (Weird Tales, October, 1925) was the last in this series, where Zapt greatly enlarges an objectionable insect.

As early as 1927 J. U. Giesy published a hardcover western, The Valley of Suspicion, from Garden City Publishing Company. In his later years he turned entirely to westerns under the pen name of Charles Dustin: Hardboiled Tenderfoot, Bronco Men, and Riders of the Desert Trail, all appearing from The Dodge Publishing Company in the early 1940’s.

The line of demarcation between fantasy and science fiction and even between the supernatural and science fiction was not as sharply drawn before 1920 as it is today. J. U. Giesy, who wrote detective novels in which knowledge of the occult was used to solve crimes, did not hesitate to employ a similar device for space travel in Palos of the Dog Star Pack. The occult serves as a means of getting to another world, and the spiritualistic concept that the “soul” or intelligence lives free of the body plays an integral role, yet this novel and the two sequels that it inspired were clearly science fiction in their delineation of the action and romance on a planet around a star many light years from earth. The early chapters of Palos of the Dog Star Pack presented here, in consequence, offer the reader an utterly strange and unfamiliar literary mood.

-Sam

Sam Moskowitz in his “Under the Moons of Mars” anthology, stated that such was the popularity of the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1910’s that the editors of All-Story Weekly encouraged their authors to write imitation Burroughs stories. Amongst such stories Moskowitz talks about Palos of the Dog Star Pack by J. U. Geisy, an established writer for All-Story, best known for the long series of novellas and novels about the pychic and detective, Semi-Dual, written in collaboration with Junnus B. Smith.

Palos is deeply indebted to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian stories, but where John Carter projects himself body and all to Mars, Geisy’s Jason Croft only projects his spirit. Finding a body so he can have a physical presence on Palos is one of the many challenges Croft has to overcome.

Palos is a richly imagined world with an extensive history and politics, where events derive from the forces of history. It has a well detailed culture and mythology. It is both “in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ and uniquely it’s own created world as richly and fully detailed as anything Burroughs ever conceived.

-Ed

Palos of The Dog Star Pack

All-Story Weekly beginning July 18, 1918 (5 parts)

The story of Jason Croft, a young American, an occultist, who astro-projects himself to an earth-like planet orbiting the distant star, Sirius, (the Dog Star, hence the title). There he finds a iron-age civilization and the most beautiful women of two worlds. A women he instantly recognizes as his soul twin. But she’s about to be parceled off to a degenerate king in a desperate attempt to prevent a war. Can Jason Croft save her from a fate - literally - worse than ;death and save her world from war?

The Mouthpiece of Zitu

All-Story Weekly beginning July 5, 1919 (5 parts)

A sequel appeared the next year beginning with the July 5th, 1919 issue of All-Story Weekly , again running for five installments. In all three serials the story opens and closes with narration from a director of a Mental Hospital, an unknown named western state, presumably, Utah. In the first the doctor had treated Croft when his housekeeper thought he had collapsed into a trance. Palos ends with Croft allowing his earthly body to die so he could live forever on Palos. The second serial opens when a new patient at the hospital opens his eyes and addressed the doctor by name. It is Croft returned to Earth to research a solution to new problems facing his new world. He has possessed the body of a dying addict to gain a physical presence on Earth.

Croft had defeated his enemies in the first book by building a number of machines familiar on Earth but unknown on Palos - like Cars, rifles and so on. His enemies have recovered and are inciting a third nation into war against Croft’s adopted county. He needs now to invent more gadget to defeat them, principally an aeroplane.

Jason, Son of Jason

Argosy-All-Story Weekly beginning April 16, 1921 (5 parts)

In the third and final novel, Giesy pushes the story yet further with Croft introducing yet more modern devices into this iron-age world. His enemies, reduced to a crazed frenzy. have kidnaped his wife and child (the Jason of the title) and demand that he turn over the plans for all his inventions.

 Virgil Finlay

Table of Contents

Palos of the Dog Star Pack Trilogy

Introduction by Sam Moskowitz

Palos of The Dog Star Pack

The Mouthpiece of Zitu

Jason, Son of Jason