A.G. Birch (1883-1972)

Albert George "Al" Birch
Newspaper Reporter, Photographer, Editor, Publicity Manager, Press Agent, Advertising Man, Traveler & Explorer, Cattle Rancher
Born July 15, 1883, Washington, D.C.
Died May 11, 1972, Denver, Colorado

Albert George "Al" Birch was born on July 15, 1883, in Washington, D.C., to George Albert Birch (1846-1899), an undertaker by trade, and Fannie (Balman) Birch (1856-1905). It looks as though Albert was an only child. After his parents were gone, maybe there was nothing to hold him in the city of his birth. He traveled extensively in his young life, in Canada, California, and Colorado, among other places. He found a place to stay in Estes Park and Denver, Colorado.

Birch was the president of his senior class at Business High School in the nation's capital. Graduating in 1901, he set of on his travels. Birch worked as a newspaperman in his native city, but he began working for the Denver Post soon after his high school graduation, perhaps as early as 1902. In 1905, with three partners, he leased the Estes Park property, known, I believe, as "the English Ranch," owned by Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, 4th Earl of Dunraven (1841-1946). It looks as though cattle ranching was one of Birch's early endeavors.

A.G. Birch was not only a newspaper reporter but also a photographer, editor, and publicity manager. He participated in automobile tours, explored the Yampa River with his friends, organized a rodeo, ran the annual Denver Post Opera from 1934 to 1969, and pulled off publicity stunts, including one in which a barefoot young woman, nicknamed "the Eve of Estes" and dressed in a leopard-spot suit, was supposed to have lived as a cavewoman in the newly created Rocky Mountain National Park in 1917. It's worth noting that "The Cave Girl" and its sequel "The Cave Man" by Edgar Rice Burroughs had been published in The All-Story and All-Story Weekly in 1913 and 1917. Birch also built two houses in Estes Park, the first of which burned and the second of which is on the Colorado State Register of Historic Properties. Birch also worked in publicity in Hollywood and for the Orpheum Circuit vaudeville theater in Denver. Albert G. Birch was with the Denver Post for fifty-nine years and died on May 11, 1972, in Denver. He was eighty-nine years old.

A.G. Birch had just one story in Weird Tales. It's called "The Moon Terror," and it was the lead story in the May issue of 1923, with a conclusion in the issue of the following month. "The Moon Terror" wasn't the first serial in Weird Tales, but depending on how you define these things, it was the first novel. Reprinted in The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch (and others), it runs to 130 pages in all. Issued in 1927, The Moon Terror, published by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, almost certainly with Farnsworth Wright as the uncredited editor, was the first Weird Tales book. And so Birch had to his credit the first novel and the first illustrated story in Weird Tales, the lead story in the third issue of the magazine, and the lead story in the first Weird Tales book. Not bad for an author of just one published genre story in his whole career.

"The Moon Terror" is like a Burroughs novel in its way, but it's also a yellow peril-type story with a Fu Manchu-like mastermind named Kwo at its center. Kwo is an aspiring totalitarian ruler of Earth who uses a kind of super-science indistinguishable from magic in his plot against its peoples and nations. In Birch's story, there are elements of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (which preceded it), as well as of The Day the Earth Stood Still, "The Call of Cthulhu," Worlds in Collision, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which followed).* Like many early science fiction stories, including stories by John W. Campbell, Jr., "The Moon Terror" is more plot than real human story. Thousands of people--whole cities and regions--are swept away and destroyed in the space of a paragraph or two. You could say that it's like a disaster movie except that in a disaster movie, things happen to characters instead of to abstractions or categories. In fact, the story in a disaster movie is about human characters, who have lives and pains and relationships and speak in dialogue with each other. I had never thought about this before, but only in fiction is it possible to tell a story without characters, without people. Movies are about people.

"The Moon Terror" becomes more specific in its later chapters. There are characters after all, and they actually do things and speak to each other. Unfortunately, they're like the characters of Edgar Rice Burroughs, meaning, not recognizably human and devoid of any genuine human feeling or emotion. (Burroughs must have been a cold and unlikable person if his work is any indication.) They're more like robots--plot-robots programmed by their author to carry out his wishes. I'll point out that the period or cycle of vibrations that Kwo has figured out can be used to destroy Earth is eleven minutes and six seconds long, in other words, 666 seconds. Whether that symbolism was intentional on Birch's part, I can't say. By the way, Kwo is a homophone of the Latin word quo, meaning, "where." And it is the question, "Where is Kwo?", that takes up a good part of "The Moon Terror."

A.G. Birch's Story in Weird Tales
"The Moon Terror" (two-part serial, May and June 1923)

Further Reading

• An entry on A.G. Birch and The Moon Terror on the website Internet Archive at the following URL: https://archive.org/details/BirchA.G.TheMoonTerrorAndOtherStories1927
• An article behind a paywall, "For 59 Years, No Stunt Was too Elaborate to Draw in Readers for This Publicity Manager" by Dave Kreck in the Denver Post, October 15, 2017.
• Other items linked within the text of my entry on Albert G. Birch above.

*In The Day the Earth Stood Still: a meeting of the world's scientists and a demonstration of power made by the outsider. In "The Call of Cthulhu": the upheaval of the seabed. From Worlds in Collision: a new moon torn from the earth. And from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: the human sacrifice with the heart torn from the breast of the sacrificed.

Next: The Moon Terror book.

A photograph of "Eve of Estes," subject of a publicity stunt by Albert G. Birch of the Denver Post in 1917.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley