Radium-Age Science Fiction

Space Battles

2009-02-27T20:39:00.000-08:00

Star Trek (May 8)

Psychic Abilities, Telepathy

2009-02-27T20:35:00.000-08:00

2009 movies:

* Push (Feb. 6). What's it about? Teens with mental superpowers (like telekinesis and clairvoyance) flee from a secret organization that wants to exploit them. Luckily, they wind up in Hong Kong, where cool fight scenes just naturally happen.

* Race To Witch Mountain (March 13). What's it about? A reboot of the classic old series, where a cab-driver (The Rock) picks up two telekinetic kids who have to get back to their spaceship before the government (and a Master Chief-looking guy) hunt them down.

* Knowing (March 20). What's it about? Nic Cage is a guy whose son digs up a time capsule that includes some mysterious numbers which some kid wrote down in the 1950s. They predict every disaster that's ever happened — including some doozies that are on the way.

Paranormal abilities, functions: Hypnotism and mesmerism fantastically considered; psychic vampirism; creation by thought power; psychometry; telepathy, mind reading; telekinesis, teleportation; will control of others; clairvoyance; sympathetic relations; movement in astral body; ability to transform body; psychic battles

PRE-RADIUM AGE

* Anne Adolph, Arqtiq: A Atory of the Marvels of the North Pole (Self-published; Hanford, Calif., 1899). Lost race of telepathic people who love at the North Pole; all turns out to be a dream.

Future-Prediction

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A 1958 time capsule containing a cryptic message about the coming apocalypse sends a concerned father on a race to prevent the horrific events from unfolding as predicted in Knowing, a March 2009 sci-fi thriller directed by Alex Proyas ('Dark City') and starring Nicolas Cage. As the final date on the list of seemingly random numbers draws near, Professor Koestler — who discovers that they aren't random at all, but an encoded message containing the precise dates, death tolls, and coordinates of every major disaster since the time capsule was buried — enters into a frantic race against time to prevent destruction on a global scale, in the process realizing that in order to save millions of lives, he may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

PRE-RADIUM AGE

* Robert Grimshaw, Fifty Years Hence, Or What May Be In 1943: A Prophecy Supposed to Be Based on Scientific Deduction By an Improved Graphical Method (Practical Publishing Co.; New York, 1892). See Bleiler.

NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13)

* William Edward Bradden Holt-White, The Man Who Dreamed Right (Everett and Co.; London, 1910). Insignificant Londoner Harry Mymms — a Wellsian small man — discovers that he can accurately predict the future via lucid dreaming. He wins money gambling on sporting events, but worries that doing so is immoral, and confides in an opportunistic, politically connected clergyman. Soon, he's sought after by newspaper magnates, bankers, and politicians; he's kidnapped and rescued, treated like a freak, used like a tool. The Germans capture him, then a benevolent-seeming but ogre-ish Teddy Roosevelt tries to bully him into making predictions for the USA. Mymms becomes a casus belli, since no nation wants any other nation to have him; war is about to break out. The nations appeal to Mymms to dream what will happen as a result of the ongoing negotiations. He dreams of... his own death.

THE TEENS (1914-23)

* David Lindsay, Sphinx (John Long: London, 1923). See Lindsay entry.

THE TWENTIES (1924-33)

Amazing Stories

2009-02-01T13:58:00.000-08:00

Amazing Stories was an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Before Amazing, science fiction stories had made regular appearances in other magazines, including some published by Gernsback, but Amazing helped define and launch a new genre of pulp fiction.

Amazing Stories was influential simply by being the first of its kind. In the words of science fiction writer and critic Damon Knight, the magazine was "a snag in the stream of history, from which a V-shape spread out in dozens and then in hundreds of altered lives." Many early fans of the field began to communicate with each other through the letter column, and to publish fanzines — amateur fan publications that helped establish connections among fans across the country. Many of these fans in turn became successful writers; and the existence of an organized science fiction fandom, and of writers such as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, who came to writing directly from fandom, can be dated to the creation of Amazing Stories.

After the first few years, when there was little or no competition, Amazing Stories never again led the field in the eyes of critics or fans. Despite its long history, the magazine rarely contributed much to science fiction beyond the initial creation of the genre, though Gernsback himself is commemorated in the name "Hugo", the World Science Fiction Society's annually presented Science Fiction Achievement Awards. Gernsback has also been called the "Father of Science Fiction" for his role in creating Amazing Stories.

I'm only interested in AS through the end of 1933. Which is when the Radium Age ends.

# 1926: Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug; Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec
# 1927: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug; Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec
# 1928: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug; Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec
# 1929: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug; Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec
# 1930: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug; Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec
# 1931: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug; Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec
# 1932: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug; Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec
# 1933: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; Jun; Jul; Aug/Sep; Oct; Nov; Dec

***

By the end of the 19th century, stories centered on scientific inventions, and stories set in the future, were appearing regularly in popular fiction magazines. The market for short stories lent itself to tales of invention in the tradition of Jules Verne. Magazines such as Munsey's Magazine and The Argosy, launched in 1889 and 1896 respectively, carried a few science fiction stories each year. Some upmarket "slick" magazines such as McClure's, which paid well and were aimed at a more literary audience, also carried scientific stories, but by the early years of the 20th century, science fiction (though it was not yet called that) was appearing more often in the pulp magazines than in the slicks.

In 1908, Hugo Gernsback published the first issue of Modern Electrics, a magazine aimed at the scientific hobbyist. It was an immediate success, and Gernsback began to include articles on imaginative uses of science, such as "Wireless on Saturn" (December 1908). In April 1911, Gernsback began the serialization of his science fiction novel, Ralph 124C 41+, but in 1913 he sold his interest in the magazine to his partner and launched a new magazine, Electrical Experimenter, which soon began to publish scientific fiction. In 1920 Gernsback retitled the magazine Science and Invention, and through the early 1920s he published much scientific fiction in its pages, along with non-fiction scientific articles.

Gernsback had started another magazine called Practical Electrics in 1921. In 1924, he changed its name to The Experimenter, and sent a letter to 25,000 people to gauge interest in the possibility of a magazine devoted to scientific fiction; in his words, "the response was such that the idea was given up for two years." However, in 1926 he decided to go ahead, and ceased publication of The Experimenter to make room in his publishing schedule for a new magazine. The editor of The Experimenter, T. O'Conor Sloane, became the editor of Amazing Stories. The first issue appeared on 10 March 1926, with a cover date of April 1926.

Gernsback's editorial in the first issue asserted that "Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading — they are also always instructive". He had always believed that "scientifiction," as he called these stories, had educational power, but he now understood that the fiction had to entertain as well as to instruct. His continued belief in the instructional value of science fiction was not in keeping with the general attitude of the public towards pulp magazines, which was that they were "trash."

The first issue of Amazing contained only reprints, beginning with a serialization of Off on a Comet, by Jules Verne. In keeping with Gernsback's new approach, this was one of Verne's least scientifically plausible novels. Also included were H. G. Wells's "The New Accelerator," and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"; Gernsback put the names of all three authors on the cover. He also reprinted three more recent stories. Two came from his own magazine, Science and Invention; these were "The Man from the Atom" by G. Peyton Wertenbacker and "The Thing from—'Outside'" by George Allan England. The third was Austin Hall's "The Man Who Saved the Earth", which had appeared in All-Story Weekly.

A letter column, titled "Discussions", soon appeared, and became a regular feature with the January 1927 issue. Many science fiction readers were isolated in small communities, knowing nobody else who liked the same fiction. Gernsback's habit of publishing the full address of all his correspondents meant that the letter column allowed fans to correspond with each other directly. Science fiction fandom traces its beginnings to the letter column in Amazing and its competitors, and one historian of the field, author Lester del Rey, has commented that the introduction of this letter column "may have been one of the most important events in the history of science fiction."

***

For the first year, Amazing contained primarily reprinted material. It was proving difficult to attract new, high-quality material, and Gernsback's slowness at paying his authors did not help. Writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, and Murray Leinster all avoided Amazing because Gernsback took so long to pay for the stories he printed. The slow payments were probably known to many of the other active pulp writers, which would have further limited the volume of submissions. New writers did appear, but the quality of their stories was often weak.

Gernsback discovered that the audience he had attracted was less interested in scientific invention stories than in fantastical adventures. A. Merritt's The Moon Pool, which began serialization in May 1927, was an early success; there was little or no scientific basis to the story, but it was very popular with Amazing's readers. The covers, all of which were painted by Paul, were garish and juvenile, leading some readers to complain. Raymond Palmer, later to become an editor of the magazine, wrote that a friend of his was forced to stop buying Amazing "by reason of his parents' dislike of the cover illustrations". Gernsback experimented with a more sober cover for the September 1928 issue, but it sold poorly, and so the lurid covers continued. The combination of poor quality fiction with garish artwork has led some critics to comment that Gernsback created a "ghetto" for science fiction, though it has also been argued that the creation of a specialized market allowed science fiction to develop and mature as a genre.

Among the regular writers for Amazing by the end of the 1920s were several who were influential and popular at the time, such as David H. Keller and Stanton Coblentz, and some who would continue to be successful for much longer, most notably Edward E. Smith and Jack Williamson. Smith's The Skylark of Space, which had been written between 1915 and 1920, was a seminal space opera which found no ready market when Argosy stopped printing science fiction. When Smith saw a copy of the April 1927 issue of Amazing, he submitted it to Sloane, and it appeared in the August–October 1928 issues. It was such a success that Sloane requested a sequel before the second installment had been published. It was also in the August 1928 issue that "Armageddon – 2419 AD", by Philip Francis Nowlan, appeared; this was the first appearance of Buck Rogers in print.

***

Amazing was an immediate success and soon reached a very respectable circulation of 100,000. Gernsback saw there was an enthusiastic readership for "scientifiction" (the term "science fiction" had not yet been coined), and in 1927 he issued Amazing Stories Annual. The annual sold out, and in January 1928, Gernsback launched a quarterly magazine, Amazing Stories Quarterly, as a regular companion to Amazing.

Gernsback was slow to pay his authors and creditors; the extent of his investments limited his liquidity. On 20 February 1929 his printer and paper supplier opened bankruptcy proceedings against him. It has been suggested that Bernarr Macfadden, another magazine publisher, maneuvered to force the bankruptcy because Gernsback would not sell his titles to Macfadden, but this is unproven. Experimenter Publishing was declared bankrupt in days; Amazing survived with its existing staff, but Hugo and his brother, Sidney, were forced out as directors. Arthur H. Lynch took over as editor-in-chief, though Sloane continued to have effective control of the magazine's contents. The receivers, Irving Trust, soon sold the magazine to B.A. Mackinnon, and in August 1931, Amazing was acquired by Teck Publications, a subsidiary of Bernarr Macfadden's Macfadden Publishing. Macfadden's deep pockets helped insulate Amazing from the financial strain caused by the Great Depression. The schedule of Amazing Stories Quarterly began to slip, but Amazing did not miss an issue in the early 1930s. However, it became unprofitable to publish over the next few years. Circulation dropped to little more than 25,000 in 1934, and in October 1935 it switched to a bimonthly schedule.

***

Writers whose first story was published in the magazine include Howard Fast, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Thomas M. Disch. Overall, though, Amazing itself was rarely an influential magazine within the genre. Some critics have commented that by "ghettoizing" science fiction, Gernsback in fact did harm to its literary growth, but this viewpoint has been countered by the argument that science fiction needed an independent market in which to develop if it were to reach its potential.

SF authors born 1834-43: 1835

2009-01-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

1. Samuel Butler

***

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

Butler is not a Radium-Age SF author. But he wrote two influential pre-Radium-Age SF novels.

Butler was an iconoclastic Victorian author who published a variety of works, including the Utopian satire Erewhon and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, his two best-known works, but also extending to examinations of Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey which remain in use to this day.

His influence on literature, such as it was, came through The Way of All Flesh, which Butler completed in the 1880s but left unpublished in order to protect his family. And yet the novel, “begun in 1870 and not touched after 1885, was so modern when it was published in 1903, that it may be said to have started a new school,” particularly in the use of psychoanalytical modes of thought in fiction, which “his treatment of Ernest Pontifex [the hero of Butler's novel] foreshadows.”

Whether in his satire and fiction, his studies on the evidences of Christianity, his works on evolutionary thought or in his miscellaneous other writings, however, a consistent theme runs through Butler's work, stemming largely from his personal struggle with the stifling of his own nature by his parents, which led him on to seek more general principles of growth, development and purpose: “What concerned him was to establish his nature, his aspirations and their fulfillment upon a philosophic basis, to identify them with the nature, the aspirations, the fulfillment of all humanity – and more than that – with the fulfillment of the universe . . . His struggle became generalized, symbolic, tremendous.” The form that this search took was principally philosophic and – given the interests of the day – biological: “Satirist, novelist, artist and critic that he was, he was primarily a philosopher,” and in particular a philosopher who sought the biological foundations for his work: “His biology was a bridge to a philosophy of life which sought a scientific basis for religion and endowed a naturalistically conceived universe with a soul.” Indeed, “philosophical writer” was ultimately the self-description Butler himself chose as most fitting to his work.

* Erewhon, or Over the Range was published anonymously in 1872. The title is also the name of a country, supposedly discovered by the protagonist. In the novel, it is not revealed in which part of the world Erewhon is, but it is clear that it is a fictional country. Butler meant the title to be read as the word Nowhere backwards, even though the letters "h" and "w" are transposed. It is likely that he did this to protect himself from accusations of being unpatriotic, although Erewhon is obviously a satire of Victorian society. The greater part of the book consists of a description of Erewhon. The nature of this nation is intended to be ambiguous. At first glance, Erewhon appears to be a utopia, yet it soon becomes clear that this is far from the case. Yet for all the failings of Erewhon, it is also clearly not a dystopia, such as that depicted by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a satirical utopia, Erewhon has sometimes been compared to Gulliver's Travels; the image of utopia in this latter case also bears strong parallels with the self-view of the British Empire at the time. Erewhon satirizes various aspects of Victorian society, including criminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism. For example, according to Erewhonian law, offenders are treated as if they were ill whilst ill people are looked upon as criminals. Another feature of Erewhon is the absence of machines; this is due to the widely shared perception by the Erewhonians that they are potentially dangerous. Butler was the first to write about the possibility that machines might develop consciousness by Darwinian Selection. ** The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze used ideas from Butler's book at various points in the development of his philosophy of difference. In Difference and Repetition (1968), he refers to what he calls "Ideas" as "erewhons." "Ideas are not concepts," he explains, but rather "a form of eternally positive differential multiplicity, distinguished from the identity of concepts." "Erewhon" refers to the "nomadic distributions" that pertain to simulacra, which "are not universals like the categories, nor are they the hic et nunc or now here, the diversity to which categories apply in representation." "Erewhon," in this reading, is "not only a disguised no-where but a rearranged now-here." In his collaboration with Félix Guattari, Anti-Œdipus (1972), Deleuze draws on Butler's "The Book of the Machines" to "go beyond" the "usual polemic between vitalism and mechanism" as it relates to their concept of "desiring-machines."

* Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later (Richards, 1901). Sequel, not considered to be as good.

SF authors born 1874-83: 1875d

2009-01-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

For all other Radium-Age SF authors born in 1875, click here.

Post 3 of 3 about Burroughs: VENUSIAN SERIES and other Radium-Age SF.
For BARSOOM series, click here.
For PELLUCIDAR series, click here.

VENUSIAN/CARSON NAPIER SERIES

The last major series in Burroughs's career.

* Pirates of Venus (Burroughs, 1934; Argosy, September 17, 1932—TK). 1st of the Venusian series. The novel is set on a fictional version of planet Venus called Amtor that has similarities to Barsoom, Burroughs's fictionalized version of planet Mars.

* Lost on Venus (Argosy, March 1933; Burroughs, 1935).

NB: Carson of Venus (1939); Escape on Venus (1946); "The Wizard of Venus" (1970)

OTHER SF (RADIUM-AGE ONLY)

* The Return of Tarzan (Chicago: McClurg, 1915). The first of some 23 sequels to Tarzan of the Apes (1914; All-Story, October 1912), is a Lost World narrative. The ape man, feeling rootless in the wake of his noble sacrifice of his prospects of wedding Jane Porter, leaves America for Europe to visit his friend Paul d'Arnot. On the ship he becomes embroiled in the affairs of Countess Olga de Coude, her husband, Count Raoul de Coude, and two shady characters attempting to prey on them, Nikolas Rokoff and his henchman Alexis Paulvitch. Rokoff, it turns out, is also the countess's brother. Tarzan thwarts the villains' scheme, making them his deadly enemies. Later, in France, Rockoff tries time and again to eliminate the ape man, finally engineering a duel between him and the count by making it appear that he is the countess's lover. Tarzan deliberately refuses to defend himself in the duel, even offering the Count his own weapon after the latter fails to kill him with his own, a grand gesture that convinces his antagonist of his innocence. In return, Count Raoul finds him a job as a special agent in Algeria for the ministry of war. A sequence of adventures among the local Arabs ensues, including another brush with Rokoff. Afterward Tarzan sails for Cape Town and strikes up a shipboard acquaintance with Hazel Strong, a friend of Jane's. But Rokoff and Paulovitch are also aboard, and manage to ambush him and throw him overboard. Tarzan manages to swim to shore, and finds himself in the coastal jungle where he was brought up by the apes. He soon rescues and befriends a native warrior, Busuli of the Waziri, and is adopted into the Waziri tribe. After defeating a raid on their village by ivory raiders he becomes their chief. The Waziri know of a lost city deep in the jungle, from which they have obtained their golden ornaments. Tarzan has them take him there, but is captured by its inhabitants, a race of beast-like men, and condemned to be sacrificed to their sun god. To his surprise, the priestess to perform the sacrifice is a beautiful woman, who speaks the ape language he learned as a child. She tells him she is La, high priestess of the lost city of Opar. When the ceremony is fortuitously interrupted, she hides him and promises to lead him to freedom. But the ape man escapes on his own, locates the treasure chamber, and manages to rejoin the Waziri. Meanwhile, Hazel Strong has reached Cape Town, where she encounters Jane, and her father Professor Porter, together with Jane's fiancé, Tarzan's cousin William Cecil Clayton. They are all invited on a cruise up the west coast of Africa aboard the Lady Alice, the yacht of Lord Tennington, another friend. Rokoff, now using the alias of M. Thuran, ingratiates himself with the party and is also invited along. The Lady Alice breaks down and sinks, forcing the passengers and crew into the lifeboats. The one containing Jane, Clayton and "Thuran" is separated from the others and suffers terrible privations. Coincidentally, the boat finally makes shore in the same general area that Tarzan did. The three construct a rude shelter and eke out an existence of near starvation for some weeks until Jane and Clayton are surprised in the forest by a lion. Clayton loses Jane's respect by cowering in fear before the beast instead of defending her. But they are not attacked, and discover the lion dead, speared by an unknown hand. Their hidden savior is in fact Tarzan, who leaves without revealing himself. Later Jane is kidnapped and taken to Opar by a party of beast-men pursuing Tarzan. The ape man tracks them and manages to save her from being sacrificed by La. La is crushed by Tarzan's rejection of her for Jane. Escaping Opar, Tarzan returns with Jane to the coast, happy in the discovery that she loves him and is free to marry him. They find Clayton, abandoned by "Thuran" and dying of a fever. In his last moments he atones to Jane by revealing Tarzan's true identity as Lord Greystoke, having previously discovered the truth but concealed it. Tarzan and Jane make their way up the coast to the former's boyhood cabin, where they encounter the remainder of the castaways of the Lady Alice, safe and sound after having been recovered by Tarzan's friend D'Arnot in another ship. "Thuran" is exposed as Rokoff and arrested. Tarzan weds Jane and Tennington weds Hazel in a double ceremony performed by Professor Porter, who had been ordained a minister in his youth. Then they all set sail for civilization, taking along the treasure Tarzan had found in Opar.
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* Tarzan the Terrible (Chicago: McClurg, 1921; TK). A Lost World narrative concerning the land of Pal-u-don, in which dinosaurs survive and men have prehensile tails. In the previous novel, during the early days of World War I, Tarzan discovered that his wife Jane was not killed in a fire set by German troops, but was in fact alive. In this novel two months have gone by and Tarzan is continuing to search for Jane. He has tracked her to a hidden valley called Pal-ul-don, which means "Land of Men." In Pal-ul-don Tarzan finds a real Jurassic Park filled with dinosaurs, notably the savage Triceratops-like Gryfs, which unlike their prehistoric counterparts are carnivorous. The lost valley is also home to two different races of tailed human-looking creatures, the Ho-don (hairless and white skinned) and the Waz-don (hairy and black-skinned). Tarzan befriends Ta-son, a Ho-don warrior, and Om-at, the Waz-don chief of the tribe of Kor-ul-ja. In this new world he becomes a captive but so impresses his captors with his accomplishments and skills that they name him Tarzan-Jad-Guru (Tarzan the Terrible), which is the name of the novel. Jane is also being held captive in Pal-ul-don, having been brought there by her German captor, who has since become dependent on her due to his own lack of jungle survival skills. She becomes a pawn in a religious power struggle that consumes much of the novel. With the aid of his native allies, Tarzan continues to pursue his beloved to rescue her and set things to right, going through an extended series of fights and escapes to do so. In the end success seems beyond even his ability to achieve, until in the final chapter he and Jane are saved by their son Korak, who has been searching for Tarzan just as Tarzan has been searching for Jane.
READ IT

* Tarzan and the Ant Men (Chicago: McClurg, 1924; TK). Knee-high humans live in underground, anthill-like cities. Tarzan is shrunk by glandular massage and enslaved in one such city. arzan, the king of the jungle, enters an isolated country called Minuni, inhabited by a people four times smaller than himself. The Minunians live in magnificent city-states which frequently wage war against each other. Tarzan befriends the king, Adendrohahkis, and the prince, Komodoflorensal, of one such city-state, called Trohanadalmakus, and joins them in war against the onslaught of the army of Veltopismakus, their warlike neighbours. Tarzan is captured on the battle-ground and taken prisoner by the Veltopismakusians. The Veltopismakusian scientist Zoanthrohago conducts an experiment reducing Tarzan to the size of a Minunian, and the ape-man is imprisoned and enslaved among other Trohanadalmakusian prisoners of war. He meets, though, Komodoflorensal in the dungeons of Veltopismakus, and together they are able to make a daring escape. *** Burrough's view on what is a natural relationship between the sexes is neatly illustrated by a secondary narrative thread in the novel, that one about the Alali or Zertalacolols, an ape-like matriarchal people living in the thorny forests which isolate Minuni from the rest of the worlds. When the enslaved and persecuted Alali males see that Tarzan is a male too and yet stronger and more formidable than any Alali female, they go to war against the females, and by killing or maiming several of them, subjugate them. When Tarzan, towards the end of the novel, meets the Alali again, the females are submissive and obedient to their mates and actually prefer it that way. The Minunian city states and their politics are strongly reminiscent of those of Barsoom. They also share the Barsoomian philosophy of perpetual war as a good and commendable state, as illustrated by the words of Gefasto, the Commander in Chief of the Veltopismakusian armed forces:

We must have war. As we have found that there is no enduring happiness in peace or virtue, let us have a little war and a little sin. A pudding that is all of one ingredient is nauseating—it must be seasoned, it must be spiced, and before we can enjoy the eating of it to the fullest we must be forced to strive for it. War and work, the two most distasteful things in the world, are, nevertheless, the most essential to the happiness and the existence of a people. Peace reduces the necessity for labor, and induces slothfulness. War compels labor, that her ravages may be effaced. Peace turns us into fat worms. War makes men of us.

To people outside the ranks of Tarzan fans, Tarzan and the Ant Men is probably best known as the book read by Harper Lee's young protagonist Jean Louise ("Scout") Finch in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

* The Land That Time Forgot (Chicago: McClurg, 1924; composed of "The Land That Time Forgot," Blue Book, August 1918; "The People That Time Forgot," Blue Book, October 1918; and "Out of Time's Abyss," Blue Book, December 1918). The first of Burroughs's two best books. Imaginative redirection of the old biological saw that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. On Caspak, an unknown island, evolution is an individual matter: An entity may start life as a primitive egg, then become a lizard, then a small mammal, then an ape man, and eventually a Homo sapiens. NB: Homo sapiens might not be the high point of evolution. There is a race of cruel but civilized winged men on Caspak. Also: Novel is grounded in the extreme jingoism of World War I.
READ IT

* The Moon Maid (Chicago: McClurg, 1926; "The Moon Maid" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, June 22-July 20, 1923; "The Moon Men" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, February 21-March 15, 1925; "The Red Hawk" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, April 20-May 14, 1925). Considered the second of Burroughs's two best books. Begins in the near future and extends to the 25th century. In "The Moon Maid," a crash-landing crew of astronauts from Earth discovers that the lunar interior is populated by city-states that are losing their independence to the Kalkars, a race of aggressive, brutal, stupid louts — Burroughs's notion of Russian Communists. The Kalkars, led by a renegade Earthman, conquer the earth. "The Moon Men," first written in 1919 and concerned with a future Russian occupation of America (the original Red Dawn), is set in the ruins of Chicago; it describes an abortive revolt against the Kalkars. In "The Red Hawk," Earthmen have reverted to nomadic tribesmen who press on to final victory against the Kalkars in the ruins of Los Angeles.
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* Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men (McClurg: Chicago, 1929). Published first in All-Story (November 1913), as A Man without a Soul. The perils of godless science and muscle-building. Professor Maxon (a reference to Bierce's Moxon?) of Cornell, who has long been experimenting with artificial life, takes his beautiful daughter Virginia on a voyage around the world. However, he interrupts their vacation to set up a small laboratory and factory on an island near Borneo. He hires Dr. Von Horn (a scoundrel) as an assistant, and begins manufacturing gigantic, muscle-bound, stupid artificial men. (Hello, Rocky Horror Picture Show.) The Borneo Malay rajah lusts for Virginia; so does Dr. von Horn; so does Budrudeen, the factory foreman. Maxon, who has gone mad, and enforces discipline among his creations with a bullwhip, intends to marry Virginia to the perfect man that he intends to create. Number Thirteen (he calls himself Bulun) emerges from the tank, as perfect a specimen of Anglo-Saxon manhood as maiden could want. Highly intelligent, a true gentleman; he and Virginia have feelings for one another, but she doesn't know he's artificial, and her aversion to artificial men makes him feel inadequate. She's kidnapped by the rajah, Bulun rescues her, lots of action. Then Maxon's Chinese cook reveals that Bulun is a shipwrecked amnesiac whom he (Ling) sneaked into Number Thirteen's tank. Virginia and Bulun get married, and then he recalls that his father is a millionaire contractor. Happy ending.
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SF authors born 1874-83: 1875c

2009-01-22T11:33:00.000-08:00

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

For all other Radium-Age SF authors born in 1875, click here.

Post 2 of 3 about Burroughs: PELLUCIDAR SERIES.
For BARSOOM series, click here.
For VENUSIAN series and other Radium-Age SF by Burroughs, click here.

THE PELLUCIDAR/DAVID INNES SERIES (RADIUM-AGE ONLY)

* At the Earth's Core (Chicago: McClurg, 1922; All-Story, April 4-25, 1914). 1st of Pellucidar series. Based on the crank-science concept of Symmes's Hole, the theory that the earth is a hollow sphere, with large openings at the poles that permit entry into a habitable interior world along the inner surface of the sphere. In this novel, a mechanical mole escapes control and tunnels through the earth's crust, carrying two men into a strange, primitive world. The humans are primitive; there are paleontological survivals; and large, highly intelligent, civilized reptiles with hypnotic powers, who keep humans as slaves and for food. There are six sequels.
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* Pellucidar (Chicago: McClurg, 1923; All-Story Cavalier, May 1, 1915 — TK). 2nd of the Pellucidar series. David Innes and his captive, a member of the reptilian Mahar master race of the interior world of Pellucidar, return from the surface world in the Iron Mole invented by his friend and companion in adventure Abner Perry. Emerging in Pellucidar at an unknown location, David frees his captive. He names the place Greenwich and uses the technology he has brought to begin the systematic exploration and mapping of the unknown land while searching for his lost companions, Abner, Ghak, and Dian the Beautiful. He soon encounters and befriends a new ally, Ja the Mezop of the island country of Anoroc; later he finds Abner, from whom he learns that in his absence the human revolt against the Mahars has not been going well. In a parlay with the Mahars David bargains for information of his love Dian and his enemy Hooja the Sly One, which his foes agree to supply in return for the book containing the Great Secret of Mahar reproduction that David stole and hid in the previous novel. David undertakes to recover it, only to find that Hooja has been there before him and claimed Dian as his own reward of the Mahars! Now he has to track down and defeat the sly one before resuming the human war of independence. Ultimately this is accomplished, and with the aid of the resources David has brought from the surface world he and Abner succeed in building a confederacy of human tribes into an "Empire of Pellucidar" that wipes out the Mahar cities and establishes a new human civilization in their place.
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* Tanar of Pellucidar (Metropolitan Books, 1930; Blue Book, March 1929-TK). 3rd of the Pellucidar series. The author’s friend Jason Gridley is experimenting with a new radio frequency he dubs the Gridley Wave, via which he picks up a transmission sent by scientist Abner Perry, from the interior world of Pellucidar at the Earth's core, a realm discovered by the latter and his friend David Innes many years before. There Innes and Perry have established an Empire of Pellucidar, actually a confederation of tribes, and attempted with mixed success to modernize the stone-age natives. Lately things have not gone well, and Innes is currently held captive in an enemy realm. Perry transmits a lengthy account of how this has come about, as reported by Innes’ native comrade in arms Tanar, and appeals for aid from the outer world. Tanar’s narrative comprises the bulk of the novel. Innes had led an army to the relief of the member tribe of Thuria and the remnants of the Empire’s former foes, the reptilian Mahars. Both had been attacked by a previously unknown people, the Korsars (corsairs), the scourge of the internal seas. These, it is eventually learned, are the descendants of outer world Moorish pirates who had penetrated Pellucidar centuries before through a natural polar opening connecting the outer and inner worlds. The empire’s forces succeed in repulsing the Korsars, but the raiders retain as hostage Tanar, son of Innes’ ally Ghak of Sari. They hope to trade him for the secret of the empire’s superior weaponry. Leaving his forces to construct ships to counter the enemy fleet, Innes and his comrade Ja of Anoroc set out alone to rescue Tanar, guided by their own prisoner, the Korsar Fitt. On the enemy flagship Tanar is interrogated by the Cid, leader of the Korsars, and his ugly henchman Bohar the Bloody. The young warrior also encounters Stellara, supposedly the Cid’s daughter, who attempts to intercede on behalf of Tanar and his fellow captives. A storm destroys the ship, and the crew takes to the lifeboats, leaving Tanar and Stellara adrift on the wreckage. Stellara confides to him that she is not really a Korsar, as her mother Allara was stolen by the Cid from the native island of Amiocap and she bears a birthmark proving she is actually the daughter of Fedol, her mother’s former mate. Eventually the derelict ship drifts to Amiocap itself, but the island’s suspicious inhabitants take the two for Korsar spies and imprison them in the village of Lar. Escaping, they by chance encounter Fedol, who recognizes Stellara by her birthmark and gives them refuge in his own village of Peraht. But Bohar’s group of Korsars attacks Peraht and kidnaps Stellara, while Tanar falls prey to the Coripies, a cannibalistic subterranean race. Escaping again, Tanar kills Bohar and frees Stellara, to whom he avows his love. Their joy is shortlived, as she is then abducted by Jude of the nearby island of Hime, who had shared Tanar’s captivity among the Coripies. Tanar pursues them to Hime, where they are overtaken by Bohar’s crew. Seeing Tanar with Gura, a girl of Hime who has developed a crush on him, Stellara rejects him and reassumes her former role among the Korsars. Tanar and Gura are taken in chains across the ocean to the Korsar city. There Tanar finds himself a fellow prisoner with David Innes and Ja of Anoroc, whose quest to succor him has miscarried. The three feign acquiescence to the Cid’s demand they manufacture modern firearms for him, and so are given greater liberty. Meanwhile Gura has discovered that Stellara, despite her jealous anger, still loves Tanar, and lets Tanar know. The party plans its escape and flees north with the reconciled Stellara. After confirming the existence of the polar opening they turn south again, bound for Sari, only to encounter a large party of pursuing Korsars, at which they split up in an attempt to ensure some at least can carry word back to the empire. Stellara, Tanar and Innes are recaptured, and the latter two each confined solitarily in lightless, snake-infested cells. Tanar, in his cell, eventually locates the opening through which the snakes enter, widens it, and achieves freedom. He locates Stellara in a heated faceoff with Bulf, the Korsar to whom the Cid has promised her; she swears to kill him and herself both rather than submit. Tanar intervenes and dispatches Bulf. He and his lover then leave the city in Korsar guise, and after many perils return to Sari, where they find Ja and Gura to have arrived safely as well. After hearing the complete transmission, Jason Gridley pledges to lead an expedition to Pellucidar through the polar opening and rescue David Innes, thus setting the stage for the sequel Tarzan at the Earth's Core, a cross-over novel linking Burroughs’ Pellucidar and Tarzan series.
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* Tarzan at the Earth's Core (1929; Metropolitan Books, 1930). In response to a radio plea from Abner Perry, a scientist who with his friend David Innes has discovered the interior world of Pellucidar at the Earth's core, Jason Gridley launches an expedition to rescue Innes from the Korsars (corsairs), the scourge of the internal seas. He enlists Tarzan, and a fabulous airship is constructed to penetrate Pellucidar via the natural polar opening connecting the outer and inner worlds. In Pellucidar Tarzan and Gridley are each separated from the main force of the expedition and must struggle for survival against the prehistoric creatures and peoples of the inner world. Gridley wins the love of the native cave-woman Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram. Eventually everyone is reunited, and the party succeeds in rescuing Innes. As Tarzan and the others prepare to return home, Gridley decides to stay to search for Frederich Wilhelm Eric von Mendeldorf und von Horst, one last member of the expedition who remains lost.
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NB: Back to the Stone Age (1937), Land of Terror (1944), Savage Pellucidar (1963)

SF authors born 1874-83: 1875b

2009-01-22T05:38:00.000-08:00

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

For all other Radium-Age SF authors born in 1875, click here.

Post 1 of 3 about Burroughs: BARSOOM SERIES.
For PELLUCIDAR series, click here.
For VENUSIAN series and other Radium-Age SF by Burroughs, click here.

***

Burroughs is a science fiction writer in externals only, not in inner essence. Most of his work is really a fantasy of eroticism and power.... Science per se plays little part in the work of Burroughs, and it is safe to say that he knew and cared little about it... The Martian novels, even if one admits as much poetic license as is necessary for creating a story, are closer to occultism than to science, and the paleontology of The Land That Time Forgot involves more fangs than facts. Where inventions or scientific discoveries enter Burroughs' fiction, they are usually thin-air results, rather than processes, and usually are simply symbolic mechanisms for abuse of power... [Still, many] scientists, engineers, and writers have stated that the Martian novels of Burroughs first stimulated them to look further into science, even thought they soon discarded Barsoom and the sexual-sword antics of John Carter... He was among the first to place adventure stories on other planets, and his technique of associating action with elements of environment and his concept of erratic, structured decadence (swords versus ray guns) have had wide diffusion in both science fiction and high fantasy. — Brian Stableford, Science Fiction Writers, 2d ed., edited by Richard Bleiler.

Burroughs was born in Chicago, the son of a businessman. He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and then the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, and failing the entrance exam for West Point, he ended up as an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus found ineligible for a commission, he was discharged in 1897. He held a series of short-term jobs (gold miner, policeman, storekeeper), spent time drifting and working on an Idaho ranch, married in 1900. By 1911, after years of low-wage jobs, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. He began reading pulp fiction magazines and later claimed "although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."

His first novel, Under the Moons of Mars, was serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1912; it was published pseudonymously, as Norman Bean. Burroughs took up writing full-time. Tarzan of the Apes, which was published from October 1912, and appeared in hardcover in 1914, would be his most successful series — a cultural sensation, in fact.

Burroughs wrote popular science fiction and fantasy stories involving Earthly adventurers transported to various planets (notably Barsoom, Burroughs' fictional name for Mars, and Amtor, his fictional name for Venus), lost islands, and into the interior of the hollow earth in his Pellucidar stories, as well as westerns and historical romances.

In 1923 Burroughs set up his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and began printing his own books through the 1930s. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor he was a resident of Hawaii and, despite being in his late sixties, he became a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, spending four years in the Pacific theater. After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Encino, California, where he died in 1950. The towns of Tarzana, California and Tarzan, Texas were named after Tarzan. The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in Burroughs' honor.

***

THE BARSOOM/JOHN CARTER SERIES (RADIUM-AGE ONLY)

* A Princess of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1917; serialized in All-Story, February-July 1912, as Under the Moons of Mars). 1st of the Martian series. Attracted little attention, when first published, until the success of Tarzan of the Apes. It's a historical romance set on another planet. John Carter, a Virginia gentleman trapped in a cave by southwestern Indians after the Civil War, is transported to Mars (a fictionalization of the planet described by Percival Lowell's books and articles: Once a wet world with continents and oceans, Barsoom's seas gradually dried up. Abandoned cities line the former coastlands. Barsoomians distribute scarce water supplies via a worldwide system of canals, controlled by quarreling city-states which have grown up at the junctures of the canals. The thinning Martian atmosphere is artificially replenished from an "atmosphere plant" on whose smooth functioning all life on the planet is dependent.) Thanks to his terrestrial strength, Carter is a mighty figure on the Red Planet, a fairy-tale world in which he battles multi-armed foes, wins a princess, and then apparently dies in a heroic effort to repair the planetary air-conditioning plant. The dominant culture of Barsoom is that of the humanoid Red Martians, who are organized into a system of major imperial city-states such as Helium, Ptarth and Zodanga — which control the planet-wide canals, as well as other, more isolated city-states in the hinterlands. Some of these are effectively lost cities, permitting Burroughs to utilize Barsoom as a stage for the same kind of lost race yarns he favored in earthly settings. The Red people are the interbred descendants of the ancient Yellow Martians, White Martians, and Black Martians, remnants of whom continue to persist in isolated areas of the planet, particularly its poles. All of these races resemble Homo sapiens in almost every respect except for their mode of reproduction and extended lifespans. The humanoid Martians are harassed and preyed upon by the semi-nomadic Green Martians, a separate species with four arms and tusks who stand approximately four meters tall. The Green Martians are organized into loose hordes ranging over the dead sea bottoms, each horde taking its name from that of a dead city in its territory, such as Thark and Warhoon. Barsoomians generally display warlike and honor-bound characteristics. The technology of the tales runs the gamut from dueling sabers to "radium pistols" and aircraft, with the discovery of powerful ancient devices or research into the development of new ones often forming plot devices. The natives also eschew clothing other than jewelry and ubiquitous leather harnesses, which are designed to hold everything from the weaponry of a warrior to pouches containing toiletries and other useful items; the only instances where Barsoomians habitually wear clothing is for need of warmth, such as for travel in the northern polar regions. In addition to the naturally occurring races of Barsoom, Burroughs described the Hormads, artificial men created by the scientist Ras Thavas as slaves, workers, warriors, etc. in giant vats at his laboratory in the Toonolian Marsh in Synthetic Men of Mars and John Carter and the Giant of Mars. Although the Hormads were generally recognizable as humanoid, the process was far from perfect, and generated monstrosities. NB: A Princess of Mars was possibly the first fiction of the 20th century to feature a constructed language; although Barsoomian was not particularly developed, it added verisimilitude to the narrative. Possibly influenced by Edwin Lester Arnold's novel Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905), also known as Gullivar of Mars.
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* The Gods of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1918; All-Story, January-May 1913). 2nd of the Martian series; many consider the first three books of the Martian series to be a trilogy. At the end of the first book, A Princess of Mars, John Carter is unwillingly transported back to Earth. The Gods of Mars begins with his arrival back on Barsoom after a 10-year hiatus, separated from his wife Dejah Thoris, his unborn child, and the Red Martian people of the nation of Helium, whom he has adopted as his own. Unfortunately, Carter materializes in the one place on Barsoom from which nobody is allowed to depart: the Valley Dor, which is the Barsoomian heaven. A party of Green Martians arrives by boat on the River Iss, and is ambushed by a previously unknown Barsoomian species, the Plant Men. Carter comes to the aid of the Green Martians, and the lone survivor of the attack is his good friend Tars Tarkas, the Jeddak (roughly equivalent to king) of Thark. Tarkas has taken the pilgrimage to the Valley Dor to search for Carter, who disappeared 10 years earlier while saving Barsoom. Carter and Tarkas discover that the Therns, a white-skinned race of self-proclaimed gods who rule the Valley Dor, have for eons deceived the Barsoomians of the outer world by disseminating the myth that the pilgrimage to the Valley Dor was a journey to paradise. But many of the pilgrims are actually killed by plant men or the white apes of Barsoom upon their arrival in Dor. Those that escape the beasts are captured by the Therns and kept as slaves. Carter and Tarkas rescue Thuvia, a slave girl, and try to escape the Therns. They capitalize on the confusion caused by an attack by the Black Pirates of Barsoom upon the Therns, but are separated during their escape: Tarkas and Thuvia hijack an unoccupied Black Pirate flier, and Carter fights his way aboard a manned flier, killing all but one of the Pirates, and rescuing a captive Thern princess. Carter, talking with the captured Pirate Xodar, discovers that the Black Pirates, or "First Born," also think of themselves as gods, and prey upon the Therns as the Therns prey upon the races of the outer world. He also finds that the captive Thern is Phaidor, daughter of the "Holy Hekkador" (high priest) of the Therns. When their flier is surprised and recaptured by the First Born, they are taken to the land of the First Born, which is built around the underground sea of Omean, which is turn lies directly below the lost sea of Korus, located in the Valley Dor. The land of the First Born is literally underneath the land of the Holy Therns, and both are located at the South Pole of Barsoom. Carter is taken before Issus, the goddess of Barsoom. Issus in an ancient, evil woman who has manipulated her own people, the Therns, and the rest of Barsoom into maintaining an hierarchy with the First Born on top. Issus sets the policies of the Therns through secret communications with them. The Therns, thinking they are receiving the divine communications of their goddess, do not realize that they are the dupes of the First Born, their hereditary enemies. Issus takes Phaidor into her service as a handmaiden for one Martian year. After a year of slavery, handmaidens are sacrificed in the arena at the monthly games of Issus. Carter is taken to prison, and Xodar is to be treated as his slave as punishment for being defeated by Carter. However, Carter treats him with honor, thus winning a friend. In prison, they meet a young Red Martian captive from Carter’s home country of Helium. Soon thereafter, Carter and the youth are taken to the monthly games of Issus. Carter goes on a rampage and leads a revolt of the prisoners/gladiators. Carter and the youth escape the arena via underground tunnels, and cleverly give themselves up to guards unacquainted with the revolt to be returned to their prison island. Upon hearing the story of the revolt, Xodar is able to reject the notion of Issus’ divinity. Carter, Xodar and the youth hijack a flier and succeed in a mad escape. Soon after, Carter discovers that the youth is actually his son, Carthoris, whom Carter has never met. Their stolen flier is damaged in the escape and must be abandoned, so the three land in unknown territory. They soon encounter Thuvia, the former slave of the Therns, who escaped with Tars Tarkas. She describes the capture of Tarkas by the green warriors of the Southern Warhoons. Carter goes alone to rescue Tarkas, but is discovered. After being chased, some mounts collapse, and Thuvia is sent on alone mounted while the men stay for a last stand against the Warhoons. They are rescued by the timely appearance of the Heliumetic navy. Commanding one of the warships is Carter’s old friend, Kantos Kan. But the fleet is commanded by Zat Arras, the Jed (roughly equivalent to lord) of the somewhat hostile client state of Zodanga (which was conquered by Carter and Tarkas in A Princess of Mars). There is suspicion that Carter has returned from Dor, which is punishable by death, and Zat Arras is threatening, and perhaps ambitious himself. It seems that Tardos Mors, the Jeddak of Helium, and Mors Kajak, the Jed of Hastor (the grandfather and father, respectively, of Dejah Thoris) are absent from Helium because they led fleets in search of Carter, and are now years overdue. Finally, Carter receives the news that his beloved Dejah Thoris is missing, and is thought to have taken the pilgrimage to the Valley Dor to find him. Upon returning to Helium, Carter is tried for heresy by a rigged jury of hostile Zodangans, led by Zat Arras. But the masses of Helium will not stand for it. As a compromise to avoid civil war, the judgment of Carter is deferred for a year. Then Sola, the daughter of Tarkas, arrives. She had taken the pilgrimage with Dejah Thoris, and they had been captured by the Black Pirates; Sola escaped. Carter realizes that Dejah Thoris will be selected as a handmaiden of Issus, and thus will have only a year to live. He and his comrades begin a campaign to take a fleet to the land of the First Born to rescue her. They uncover evidence that Thern spies are monitoring them, and then Carter is kidnapped by the Zodangans. Carter refuses Zat Arras’ offer of freedom in exchange for endorsing Zat Arras as Jeddak of all Helium, and is imprisoned. After half a year in a dungeon, Carter wins his freedom through a ruse, and the mission to the land of the First Born is launched, with secretly raised troop levies, ships, and many troops from their Green Martian ally, Tars Tarkas. Upon approaching the South Pole, a fleet of Therns challenges Carter’s fleet. Then behind Carter’s fleet arrives a fleet led by the Zodangan, Zat Arras. And finally, a fleet of First Born arrives. The rescue mission for the rescue of Dejah Thoris is in dire straits. Wherever possible, Carter maneuvers Therns and First Born to engage in combat, since they are hereditary enemies. Then the Heliumetic crews of the Zodangan fleet mutiny to support Carter, thus negating that threat. Carter takes his remaining fleet with Tharkian troops to the underground sea of Omean, to attack the First Born and rescue his princess. The combined Heliumites and Tharks surprise the First Born and soundly defeat them. Issus is shown to be a fraud in front of her nobles, and they lynch her. But Carter is too late to save Dejah Thoris. The fiendishly clever Issus locked Dejah Thoris, Thuvia, and Phaidor, each of whom loves John Carter, in a room of the Temple of the Sun. Each room of this revolving temple opens only once a year, and they are imprisoned with insufficient food to last the year. Carter is able to talk to Dejah Thoris through the doorway bars, and slip them sufficient food supplements to last them the year, but the room cannot be opened. Just before the room is closed, Phaidor proclaims that if Carter will not love her, he will not be allowed to love another. She strikes at Dejah Thoris with a dagger, and the last thing Carter sees through the narrow crack is Thuvia lunging in front of the dagger. He hears a scream, but the door is closed, and he is unable to see who was struck by the dagger.
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* The Warlord of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1918; All-Story, December 1913-March 1914). 3rd of the Martian series. Still attempting to regain his wife, John Carter travels to the North Pole of Mars, where he finds another hidden culture. Carter is proclaimed warlord, or emperor, of Mars. This novel continues where the previous one in the series abruptly ended. John Carter discovers that a First Born knows the secret of the Temple of the Sun and he and the Holy Hekkador Matai Shang want to rescue the Holy Thern's daughter who is imprisoned with Dejah Thoris and another Barsoomian princess, Thuvia of Ptarth. John Carter follows them in the hope to liberate his beloved wife. His antagonists manage to stay ahead of him and flee to the north, taking the three previously imprisoned women along. No ordeal can detain John Carter from his quest to be reunited with his wife. He follows them untiring into the undiscovered north polar regions where he discovers more fantastic creatures and ancient mysterious Martian races.
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* Thuvia, Maid of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1920; All-Story, April 1916—TK). 4th of the Martian series. In this novel the focus shifts from John Carter, Warlord of Mars, and Dejah Thoris of Helium, protagonists of the first three books in the series, to their son, Carthoris, prince of Helium, and Thuvia, princess of Ptarth. Helium and Ptarth are both prominent Barsoomian city state/empires, and both Carthoris and Thuvia were secondary characters in the previous two books. Carthoris is madly in love with Thuvia. This love was foreshadowed at the end of the previous novel. Unfortunately Thuvia is promised to Kulan Tith, Jeddak of Kaol. On Barsoom nothing can come break an engagement between man and woman except death, although the new suitor may not cause that death. Thus it is that Thuvia will have none of him. This situation leaves Carthoris in a predicament. As Thuvia suffers the common Burroughsian heroine's fate of being kidnapped and in need of rescue, Carthoris' goal is abetted by circumstances. Thus he sets out to find the love of his life. His craft is sabotaged and he finds himself deep in the undiscovered south of Barsoom, in the ruins of ancient Aaanthor. Thuvia's kidnappers, the Dusar, have taken her there as well and Carthoris is just in time to spot Thuvia and her kidnappers under assault by a green man of the hordes of Torquas. Carthoris leaps to her rescue in the style of his father. The rescue takes Cathorsis and his love to ancient Lothar, home of an ancient fair human race gifted with the ability to create lifelike phantasms from pure thought. They use large numbers of phantom bowmen sided with Banths (Barsoomian lions) to defend themselves from the hordes of Torquas. The kidnapping of Thuvia is done in such a way that Carthoris is blamed. This ignites a war between the red nations of Barsoom. Will Carthoris be back in time with Thuvia to stop the war from breaking loose? Will Carthoris' love ever be answered by the promised Thuvia?

* The Chessmen of Mars (Chicago: McClurg, 1922; Argosy All-Story Weekly, February-March 1922). 5th of Martian series. Bodiless human heads with hypnotic ability and a chess-like game (Jetan) played with living pieces who fight to the death. The Chessmen of Mars introduces the Kaldanes of the region Bantoom, whose form is almost all head but for six vestigial legs and a pair of Chelae, and whose racial goal is to evolve even further towards pure intellect and away from bodily existence. In order to function in the physical realm, they have bred the Rykors, a complementary species composed of a body similar to that of a perfect specimen of Red Martian but lacking a head; when the Kaldane places itself upon the shoulders of the Rykor, a bundle of tentacles connects with the Rykor's spinal cord, allowing the brain of the Kaldane to interface with the body of the Rykor. Should the Rykor become damaged or die, the Kaldane merely climbs upon another as an earthling might change a horse.
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* The Master Mind of Mars, (Chicago: McClurg, 1928; Amazing Stories Annual, July 15, 1927). Fantastic organ transplants. 6th of the Martian series. In this novel Burroughs shifts the focus of the series for the second time, the first having been from early protagonists John Carter and Dejah Thoris to their children after the third book. Now he moves to a completely unrelated hero, Ulysses Paxton, an Earthman like Carter who like him is sent to Mars by astral projection. On Mars, Paxton is taken in by elderly mad scientist Ras Thavas, the "Master Mind" of the title, who educates him in the ways of Barsoom and bestows on him the Martian name Vad Varo. Ras has perfected techniques of transplanting brains, which he uses to provide rich elderly Martians with youthful new bodies for a profit. Distrustful of his fellow Martians, he trains Paxton as his assistant to perform the same operation on him. But Paxton has fallen in love with Valla Dia, one of Ras' young victims, whose body has been swapped for that of the hag Xaxa, Jeddara (empress) of the city-state of Phundahl. He refuses to operate on Ras until his mentor promises to restore her to her rightful body. A quest for that body ensues, in which Paxton is aided by others of Ras' experimental victims, and in the end he attains the hand of his Valla Dia, who in a happy plot twist turns out to be a princess.
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* A Fighting Man of Mars (Metropolitan Books, 1931; Blue Book, April-September, 1930). 7th of the Martian series. The story is relayed back to earth via the Gridley Wave, a sort of super radio frequency previously introduced in Tanar of Pellucidar, the third of Burrough's Pellucidar novels, which thus provides a link between the two series. The story-teller is Ulysses Paxton, protagonist of the previous novel, The Master Mind of Mars, but this story is not about him; rather, it is the tale of Tan Hadron of Hastor, a lowly, poor padwar (a low-ranking officer) who is in love with the beautiful, haughty Sanoma Tora, daughter of Tor Hatan, a minor but rich noble. As he is only a padwar, Sanoma spurns him. Then Sanoma Tora is kidnapped, and Tan Hadron crosses Barsoom searching for her. He encounters some of Burroughs's most ferocious beasts — huge, many-armed, flesh-eating white apes, gigantic spiders, and the insane cannibals of U-Gor. He also meets the mad scientist Phor Tak, who cackles "Heigh-oo!" and is crazed with the desire for revenge. Hadron rescues an escaped slave, Tavia, from a band of six-limbed green Tharks. Tavia is an atypical Burroughs heroine; depicted as self-reliant and competent with weapons, witty and intelligent. With the addition of Nur An, a disaffected Jaharian warrior, and another escaped woman slave, Phao, Hadron's quest becomes more collaborative than Burroughs' usual, although Tavia, in an unsurprising plot development, is revealed to be a princess at the end.
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NB: Swords of Mars (1936), Synthetic Men of Mars (1940), Llana of Gathol (1948), John Carter of Mars (1964).

Anarchists & Anarchism

2009-01-21T08:33:00.000-08:00

Taoism, which developed in Ancient China, has been embraced by some anarchists as a source of anarchistic attitudes. Similarly, in the West, anarchistic tendencies can be traced to the philosophers of Ancient Greece, such as Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy, and Aristippus, who said that the wise should not give up their liberty to the state. Later movements – such as the Free Spirit in the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists, the Diggers and the Levellers — have also expounded ideas that have been interpreted as anarchist.

The usage of the words "anarchia" and "anarchos", both meaning "without ruler", can be traced back to Homer's Iliad and Herodotus's Histories. The first known political usage of the word anarchy appears in the play Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus, dated at 467 BC. There, Antigone openly refuses to abide by the rulers' decree to leave her brother Polyneices' body unburied, as punishment for his participation in the attack on Thebes, saying that "even if no one else is willing to share in burying him I will bury him alone and risk the peril of burying my own brother. Nor am I ashamed to act in defiant opposition to the rulers of the city (ekhous apiston tênd anarkhian polei)".

Ancient Greece also saw the first Western instance of anarchism as a philosophical ideal. The Cynics Diogenes of Sinope and Crates of Thebes are both supposed to have advocated anarchistic forms of society, although little remains of their writings. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, who was much influenced by the Cynics, described his vision of a utopian society around 300 BC. Zeno's Republic advocates a form of anarchism in which there are no need for state structures. Zeno was, according to Kropotkin, "[t]he best exponent of Anarchist philosophy in ancient Greece". As summarized by Kropotkin, Zeno "repudiated the omnipotence of the state, its intervention and regimentation, and proclaimed the sovereignty of the moral law of the individual". Within Greek philosophy, Zeno's vision of a free community without government is opposed to the state-Utopia of Plato's Republic. Zeno argued that although the necessary instinct of self-preservation leads humans to egotism, nature has supplied a corrective to it by providing man with another instinct – sociability. Like many modern anarchists, he believed that if people follow their instincts, they will have no need of law courts or police, no temples and no public worship, and use no money (free gifts taking the place of the exchanges). Zeno's beliefs have only reached us as fragmentary quotations.

Anarchism is usually considered to be a radical left-wing ideology, and much of anarchist economics and anarchist legal philosophy reflect anti-authoritarian interpretations of communism, collectivism, syndicalism or participatory economics; however, anarchism has always included an individualist strain, including those who support capitalism (for example anarcho-capitalists, agorists, and other free-market anarchists) or similar market-oriented economic structures; for example, mutualists. Others, such as panarchists and anarchists without adjectives, neither advocate nor object to any particular form of organization as long as it is not compulsory. Some anarchist schools of thought differ fundamentally, supporting anything from extreme individualism to complete collectivism. However, the central tendency of anarchism is represented by communist anarchism, with anarcho-individualism being a philosophical/literary anarchist phenomenon rather than a social movement. Some anarchists fundamentally oppose all forms of coercion, while others have supported the use of some coercive measures, including violent revolution and terrorism, on the path to anarchy.

Peter Kropotkin wrote that it was William Godwin, in "his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (2 vols., 1793), who was the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his remarkable work." Godwin advocated the abolition of government through a gradual process of reform and enlightenment and is therefore regarded as one of the founders of "philosophical anarchism."

There were a variety of anarchist currents during the French Revolution, with some revolutionaries using the term "anarchiste" in a positive light as early as September 1793. The Enragés opposed revolutionary government as a contradiction in terms. Denouncing the Jacobin dictatorship, Jean Varlet wrote in 1794 that "government and revolution are incompatible, unless the people wishes to set its constituted authorities in permanent insurrection against itself." In his "Manifesto of the Equals," Sylvain Marechal looked forward to the disappearance, once and for all, of "the revolting distinction between rich and poor, of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed."

In 1825 in the United States, Josiah Warren participated in a communitarian experiment headed by Robert Owen called New Harmony, which failed in a few years amidst much internal conflict. In 1827, as New Harmony disintegrated, he returned to Cincinnati. As Kenneth Rexroth wrote, "almost all critics of New Harmony have said that what it lacked was strong leadership, discipline, and commitment – strong government. Warren came to exactly the opposite conclusion." Warren blamed the community's failure on a lack of individual sovereignty. He proceeded to organise experimental anarchist communities at Utopia and Modern Times.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is regarded as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, a label he adopted in his groundbreaking work What is Property?, published in 1840. It is for this reason that some claim Proudhon as the founder of modern anarchist theory. He developed the theory of spontaneous order in society, where organization emerges without a central coordinator imposing its own idea of order against the wills of individuals acting in their own interests; his famous quote on the matter is, "Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order." In What is Property? Proudhon answers with the famous accusation "Property is theft." In this work, he opposed the institution of decreed "property" (propriété), where owners have complete rights to "use and abuse" their property as they wish. He contrasted this with what he called "possession," or limited ownership of resources and goods only while in more or less continuous use. Later, however, Proudhon added that "Property is Liberty," and argued that it was a bulwark against state power. Proudhon's ideas were influential within French working class movements, and his followers were active in the Revolution of 1848 in France as well as the Paris Commune of 1871.

Social anarchism is one of two different broad categories of anarchism, the other category being individualist anarchism. The term social anarchism is often used to identify communitarian forms of anarchism that emphasize cooperation and mutual aid. Social anarchism includes anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism, Libertarian socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, social ecology and sometimes mutualism. Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity, free association, voluntary contract, federation, and credit and currency reform. According to Greene, in the mutualist system each worker would receive "just and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost being exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without profit or discount."Mutualism has been retrospectively characterized as being ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism. Proudhon first characterized his goal as a "third form of society, the synthesis of communism and property."

Individualist anarchism comprises several traditions which hold that "individual conscience and the pursuit of self-interest should not be constrained by any collective body or public authority." Individualist anarchism is supportive of property being held privately, unlike the social/socialist/collectivist/communitarian wing which advocates common ownership. Liberals were often labeled "anarchists" by monarchists, even though they did not call for the abolition of hierarchy. Still, they did promote the idea of human equality, individual rights, and the responsibility of the people to judge their governments, which provided a groundwork for the development of anarchist thought. As American political society developed along the liberal model, anarchist thoughts were expressed in the writings of Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience). Like him, some classic liberals who become radicals are considered part of the libertarian socialist tradition. Individualists, taking much from the writings of Max Stirner, among others, demanded the utmost respect for the liberty of the individual.

Later in the 19th century, Anarchist communist theorists like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin built on the Marxist critique of capitalism and synthesized it with their own critique of the state, emphasizing the importance of a communal perspective to maintain individual liberty in a social context. Mikhail Bakunin saw a need to defend the working class against oppression and overthrow the ruling class as a means to dissolve the state. Collectivist anarchism is a revolutionary form of anarchism, commonly associated with Mikhail Bakunin and Johann Most. It is a specific tendency, not to be confused with the broad category sometimes called collectivist or communitarian anarchism. Unlike mutualists, collectivist anarchists oppose all private ownership of the means of production, instead advocating that ownership be collectivized. This was to be initiated by small cohesive group through acts of violence, or "propaganda by the deed," which would inspire the workers as a whole to revolt and forcibly collectivize the means of production.

Anarchist communists propose that the freest form of social organisation would be a society composed of self-governing communes with collective use of the means of production, organized by direct democracy, and related to other communes through federation. However, some anarchist communists oppose the majoritarian nature of direct democracy, feeling that it can impede individual liberty and favor consensus democracy. In anarchist communism, as money would be abolished, individuals would not receive direct compensation for labour (through sharing of profits or payment) but would have free access to the resources and surplus of the commune. According to anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin and later Murray Bookchin, the members of such a society would spontaneously perform all necessary labour because they would recognize the benefits of communal enterprise and mutual aid. Peter Kropotkin's anarchist communism developed from his study of zoology and evolution in which he concluded that co-operation far surpasses competition in its importance to the survival of species. He published these conclusions and his critiques of the then emerging ideas of Social Darwinism in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902).

Some revolutionaries of this time encouraged acts of violence such as sabotage or even assassination of heads of state to further spark a revolution. However, these actions were regarded by many anarchists as counter-productive or ineffective. In the late 19th century, anarcho-syndicalism developed as the industrialized form of libertarian communism, emphasizing industrial actions, especially the general strike, as the primary strategy to achieve anarchist revolution, and "build the new society in the shell of the old."

Through the 20th century, anarchists were actively involved in the labour and feminist movements, and later in the fight against fascism. The influence of this on anarchist thought is apparent, as most of the traditional anarchist philosophies emphasize the economic implications of anarchism or arrive at anarchism from economic arguments. Anarchists played a role in many of the labour movements, uprisings, and revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the Russian Revolution (1917). In the United States, many new immigrants were anarchists; an especially notable group was the large number of Jewish immigrants who had left Russia and Eastern Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These groups were disrupted by the Red Scare of 1919.

One of the earliest and best-known proponents of "egoist" anarchism was Max Stirner, who wrote The Ego and Its Own (1844), a founding text of the philosophy. Stirner's philosophy was an "egoist" form of individualist anarchism according to which the only limitation on the rights of the individual is his power to obtain what he desires, taking no notice of God, state, or moral rules. To Stirner, rights were spooks in the mind, and he held that society does not exist but "the individuals are its reality" – he supported property by force of might rather than moral right. Stirner preached self-assertion and foresaw "associations of egoists" where respect for ruthlessness drew people together. In Russia, individualist anarchism inspired by Stirner combined with an appreciation for Friedrich Nietzsche attracted a small following of bohemian artists and intellectuals such as Lev Chernyi, as well as a few lone wolves who found self-expression in crime and violence. They rejected organizing, believing that only unorganized individuals were safe from coercion and domination, believing this kept them true to the ideals of anarchism. This type of individualist anarchism inspired anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman.

In Europe, in the first quarter of the 20th century, anarchist movements achieved relative, if short-lived, successes and were violently repressed by states. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, the conflict between anarchism and the state was eclipsed by the one among liberal democracy, fascism and communism, which ended with the defeat of fascism in World War II.

In the early 20th century, anarcho-syndicalism arose as a distinct school of thought within anarchism. With greater focus on the labour movement than previous forms of anarchism, syndicalism posits radical trade unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a new society, democratically self-managed by the workers. Anarcho-syndicalists seek to abolish the wage system and private ownership of the means of production, which they believe lead to class divisions. Important principles include workers' solidarity, direct action (such as general strikes and workplace recuperations), and workers' self-management. This is compatible with other branches of anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalists often subscribe to anarchist communist or collectivist anarchist economic systems. Its advocates propose labour organization as a means to create the foundations of a non-hierarchical anarchist society within the current system and bring about social revolution. An early leading anarcho-syndicalist thinker was Rudolf Rocker, whose 1938 pamphlet Anarchosyndicalism outlined a view of the movement's origin, aims and importance to the future of labour.

Black Flag: Though used earlier, it first became associated with anarchism in the 1880s. The French anarchist paper, Le Drapeau Noir ("The Black Flag"), which existed until 1882, is one of the first published references to use black as an anarchist color. Black International was the name of a London anarchist group founded in July 1881. Louise Michel, participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, flew the black flag on March 9, 1883, during A demonstration of the unemployed in Paris, France. An open air meeting of the unemployed was broken up by the police and around 500 demonstrators, with Michel at the front carrying a black flag and shouting "Bread, work, or lead!" marched off towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The crowd pillaged three baker's shops before the police attacked. Michel was arrested and sentenced to six years solitary confinement. Public pressure soon forced the granting of an amnesty.

The black flag soon made its way to America. On November 27, 1884, the black flag was displayed in Chicago at an Anarchist demonstration. According to the English-language newspaper of the Chicago anarchists, it was "the fearful symbol of hunger, misery and death." In the Russian Revolution of 1917, Nestor Makhno's anarchist forces were known collectively as the Black Army. They fought under a black flag with some success until they were crushed by the Red Army (see Black Guards). Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary in the 1910s, used a black flag with a skull and crossbones and the Blessed Virgin Mary on it. The flag's slogan was "Tierra y Libertad" ("Land and Liberty"). In 1925, Japanese anarchists formed the Black Youth League, which had branches in the then-colonial Taiwan.

Ideal societies, anarchist (Bleiler): PRO 433-489-505-628-790-1101-1316-1543-2344 and CON 184-230-642-1485-2463

200a-423-487-548-637-661-701-709-830-895-929-931-1153-1350-1448-1723-1796-1848a-1894-2016-2037-2144-2192-2231-2392-2395-2449

Anarchists overthrow Russian government: 2192

Anarchists work in invisible city: 1796

Radium-Age SF themes to explore

2009-01-21T07:46:00.000-08:00

* AFTER-DEATH EXPERIENCES. Bleiler 101, 206, 284, 708, 769, 775a, 910, 985, 1124, 1785c, 1786c, 1858, 1925, 2026, 2328a, 2328d

* AIR BATTLES

* ALCHEMY, TRANSMUTATION OF METALS (See Bleiler)

* ALIEN INTELLIGENCE, HUMANOIDS, SPACE SPIRITS (see Bleiler)

* ANARCHISTS & ANARCHISM

* ANTIGRAVITY

* APOCALYPSE, POST-APOCALYPSE, CATASTROPHE

* FUTURE HISTORY

* GNOSTIC HORROR

* HOMO SUPERIOR/ACCELERATED EVOLUTION

* INTERPLANETARY VOYAGE

* LOST WORLDS & RACES

* MAD SCIENTISTS, PEACE VIGILANTES, SCIENTIFIC EXTORITIONISTS

* PAEDOCRACY/AGED PUT TO DEATH

* ROBOTS, ANDROIDS, CYBORGS

* SWORD/SANDAL

* TELEPATHY

* TIME TRAVEL/SLEEPER AWAKES/SUSPENDED ANIMATION

SF authors born 1884-93: 1889

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1. Miles J. Breuer

***

Miles J. Breuer (1889-1947)

US medical doctor, born in Chicago of Czechoslovak descent. In the SF field he is noted for his exceptionally fine short stories in the early 1930s.

Miles John Breuer, a U.S. doctor by trade, is better known to science fiction aficionadoes as a writer for many pulp magazines, including Amazing Stories and Argosy. His best known works are his story "The Gostak and the Doshes," and his collaborative work with Jack Williamson, including The Birth of a New Republic.

John Clute described his work as crudely written, but intelligent and noted for new ideas.

* "The Man with the Strange Head" (Amazing Stories, January 1927). First appearance in Amazing Stories.

Notable stories include:

* "The Appendix and the Spectacles" (Amazing Stories, December 1928)
* "The Gostak and the Doshes" (Amazing Stories, March 1930)
* "The Fitzgerald Contraction" (Science Wonder, January 1930)

His most famous work:

* Paradise and Iron (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930)

Collaborations:

* "A Baby on Neptune" (Amazing Stories, December 1929) with Clare W. Harris
* "The Girl from Mars" (SF Series No. 1, 1929) with Jack Williamson
* "The Birth of a New Republic" (1931, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1930) with Jack Williamson

Also:
* Rays and Men (1929)
* The Captured Cross-Section (1929)
* Buried Treasure (1929)
* The Book of Worlds (1929)
* The Hungry Guinea Pig (1930)
* The Driving Power (1930)
* The Time Valve (1930)
* The Inferiority Complex (1930)
* A Problem in Communication (1930)
* The Demons of Rhadi-Mu (1931)
* On Board the Martian Liner (1931)
* The Time Flight (1931)
* The Einstein See-Saw (1932) [as by Miles J. Breuer ]
* Mechanocracy (1932)
* The Perfect Planet (1932)
* The Finger of the Past (1932)
* The Strength of the Week (1933)

SF authors born 1904-13: 1911

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1. Otto Binder

***

Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1974)

Otto Binder was born on August 26, 1911 in Bessemer, Michigan, the youngest of six children born into a family who had emigrated from Austria a year earlier. The family settled in Chicago in 1922, during a period rich with science fiction, which enthralled Otto and his brother Earl. The two began writing in partnership, and sold their first story, "The First Martian" to Amazing Stories in 1930; it saw publication in 1932 under the pen-name "Eando Binder" ("E" and "O" Binder).

Not earning enough to live on, Binder and his brother "worked at many jobs" in addition to their writing work, Earl ultimately finding work at an iron works, after which Otto took over "most of the writing," although keeping the nom de plume for his science fiction writings throughout his life. In 1935, Binder was hired by author Otis Adelbert Kline "as an agent in charge of his New York literary office," although business was bad enough that "they called it quits two years later." At the same time, however, Binder was writing for Mort Weisinger (then editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Ray Palmer (editor of Amazing), for whom he created the Adam Link series, and particularly the short story "I, Robot" which inspired Isaac Asimov's positronic robot Robbie.

Binder is best known for his comic book work, an area he entered in 1939 thanks to another brother, Jack, who moved to New York to "join the Harry "A" Chesler shop as an artist." Shortly thereafter, (in 1940) Fawcett Comics began its comics line, and Binder started writing features including Captain Venture, Golden Arrow, Bulletman and El Carim. Binder is best known for his 12-year stint on Fawcett Comics's Captain Marvel (1941 to 1953), writing "986 stories... out of 1,743 - over half the entire Marvel Family saga." During this time, he co-created, with Marc Swayze and C. C. Beck, such characters as Mary Marvel, Uncle Dudley, Mr. Tawky Tawny, Black Adam, and Mr. Mind, as well as Dr. Sivana's four children: the evil teens Thaddeus Sivana Jr. and daughter Georgia, as well as the disappointingly good and kind Beautia and Magnificus.

Binder also wrote and created characters for other publishers, including Timely Comics (the fledgling Marvel Comics), for whom "he [co-]created Captain Wonder, The Young Allies, Tommy Tyme and Miss America," (a female version of Captain America) and also wrote for Captain America, the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, Destroyer, Whizzer, All-Winners Squad and others. For Quality Comics, Binder co-created Kid Eternity, and wrote for Blackhawk, Doll Man, Uncle Sam and the Black Condor, and for MLJ Comics (subsequently known as Archie Comics), he wrote for Steel Sterling, The Shield, The Hangman and The Black Hood. Binder also produced work for Gold Key.

In 1948, Binder began working for National Periodical Publications (DC Comics), swiftly creating "Merry, Girl of 1,000 Gimmicks in the Star-Spangled Kid strip", whose place Merry soon took in Star-Spangled Comics, before moving on to his best-known DC work on the Superman titles. In addition to writing the first Legion of Super-Heroes story, Binder "introduced Jimmy Olsen's signal-watch in the pages of the first issue of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. In issue 31 Binder also introduced Jimmy's Elastic Lad identity. He also wrote the first tales featuring the supporting Superman characters Lucy Lane, Beppo, the Super Monkey, Titano, the Super Ape and "most important of all - Supergirl" with artist Al Plastino.[2] He also created Brainiac, the Phantom Zone -- highlighted regularly on the Smallville television show -- and Krypto the Superdog, recently featured in an animated series of the same name.

Bridwell credits Binder as creating the first "Imaginary Tale, for Lois Lane," and of writing "most of the early" Bizarro stories including (at least) the first Tales of the Bizarro World feature. Binder also scripted the "classic [storyline] "Superman's Return to Krypton."

SF authors born 1884-1893: 1893

2009-01-20T20:26:00.000-08:00

1. Eimar O'Duffy

***

Eimar O'Duffy

Eimar O'Duffy was an Irish satirist, poet, playwright, and novelist, and was the author of the Cuanduine trilogy and Life and Money.

British engineer C. H. Douglas (1879–1952) launched the Social Credit movement when he wrote a book by that name in 1924. According to Douglas, the true purpose of production is consumption, and production must serve the genuine, freely expressed interests of consumers. Each citizen is to have a beneficial, not direct, inheritance in the communal capital conferred by complete and dynamic access to the fruits of industry assured by the National Dividend and Compensated Price. The concept of economic democracy through Social Credit had immediate appeal in literary circles. Names associated with Social Credit include Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Eimar O'Duffy, Sybil Thorndyke, Bonamy Dobrée, Eric de Maré and the American publisher James Laughlin. In 1933 O'Duffy published Asses in Clover, a science fiction fantasy exploration of Social Credit themes. His Social Credit economics book Life and Money: Being a Critical Examination of the Principles and Practice of Orthodox Economics with A Practical Scheme to End the Muddle it has made of our Civilisation, was endorsed by Douglas.

Eimar O'Duffy's Aloysius O'Kennedy (or Cuanduine) sequence "makes satirical points about contemporary civilization... by assessing modern life through the eyes of characters who are, or claim to be, figures of Irish legend. The second volume mounts its comparatively sustained satire through its heroes' voyage to a utopia where everything is, not unusually, inverted. The third, set like the first in Ireland after 1950, musters the forces of legend to defeat US capitalism in the form of the egregious King Goshawk." (Encyclopedia of SF)

* King Goshawk and the Birds (1926)

* The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1929)

* Asses in Clover (1933)

Utopias, Dystopias

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Note that Brooks Landon, in "Science Fiction After 1900" says: "The positivism and optimism of science fiction writing in the 1920s and 1930s has been tempered, if not supplanted, by questioning and frequently apocalyptic pessimism in the years following World War II." (xiii-xiv) Huh?

Amis writes that stories of the future which take as their theme changes in the political and economic realm, with science and technology reduced to background detail, are typically rh most interesting -- but they can barely be called science fiction.

Kingsley Amis is dismissive of "nearly all early-modern science fiction, that written btween, say, 1910 and 1940." He doesn't think it's written well, too lugubrious. How much does Amis despise the 1910-40 period? As of 1940, he writes, "Sensationalism began to diminish, some degree of literacy made its appearance, and the admonitory utopia, virtually the leading form of contemporary science fiction, came into being again after something like twenty years." Since 1920, that is, no admonitory utopias?

Amis notes that no positive utopias are to be found in his day; "modern visionaries in general seem to have lost interest in any kind of social change..." (95) He is in favor of utopian literature as diagnositic and admonitory, but seems sad that no one now offers other possible worlds.

Amis writes about the "comic inferno" -- a mode of writing clearly older than SF.

Satirical dystopias ridicule dominant notions -- pride in a mounting material standard of living, belief that such progress can be continued indefinitely, feeling that the accumulation of possessions is both the preorgative and evidence of merit.

The first known use of the term dystopia appeared in a speech before the British Parliament by Greg Webber and John Stuart Mill[2] in 1868. In that speech, Mill said, "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favor is too bad to be practicable".[3] His knowledge of Greek suggests that he was referring to a bad place, rather than simply the opposite of Utopia. The Greek prefix "dys" ("δυσ-") signifies "ill", "bad" or "abnormal"; Greek "topos" ("τόπος") meaning "place"; and Greek "ou-" ("ου") meaning "not". Thus, dystopia refers to an imagined place where almost everything is bad, perhaps a play on the term utopia that was coined by Thomas More.

* James Harrington - The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)
* Samuel Hartlib - A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641)
* Sir Thomas More - Utopia (1516)
* Francesco Patrizi - La Città felice (1553)
* Thomas Spence - A Description of Spensonia (1794)

* Tommaso Campanella, City of the Sun (1602)

* Johannes Valentinus Andreae, Christianopolis (1619)

* Sir Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1626)

PRE-RADIUM-AGE

* Anonymous, Equality: or, a History of Lithconia (Liberal Union, Phialdelphia, 1837). Originally: "The Temple of Reason," Deist [weekly newspaper], May 15, 1802. Considered to be the first American Utopia. The author is not known, but could be Dr. James Reynolds, who was a zealous liberal crusader (per Bleiler).

* Étienne Cabet, Voyages en Icarie (1840). Étienne Cabet's work caused a group of followers to leave France in 1848 and come to the United States to found a series of utopian settlements in Texas, Illinois, Iowa, California, and elsewhere. These groups lived in communal settings and lasted until 1898.

* Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range was published anonymously in 1872. See Butler entry.

* Louisa May Alcott, "Transcendental Wild Oats" (1873) — DYSTOPIA

* Anonymous, The Great Romance (1881)

* Anna Bowman Dodd, The Republic of the Future (1887) — DYSTOPIA

* Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888)

* James De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) — DYSTOPIA

* Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, New Amazonia (1889)

* Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's Column (1890) — DYSTOPIA

* Byron A. Brooks, Earth Revisited (1893)

* Walter Browne, 2894 (1894)

* Alexander Craig, Ionia (1898)

* Anna Adolph, Arqtiq (1899)

* Samuel Butler, Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later (Richards, 1901). See Butler entry.

* Castello Holford - Aristopia (1895)
* Albert Waldo Howard - The Milltillionaire (c. 1895)
* William Dean Howells - the Altrurian trilogy
o A Traveler from Altruria (1894)
o Letters of an Altrurian Traveler (1904)
o Through the Eye of the Needle (1907)
* Marie Howland - Papa's Own Girl (1874)
* W. H. Hudson - A Crystal Age (1887)

* Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant - Unveiling a Parallel (1893)
* Mary Lane - Mizora (1880–81)

* John McCoy - A Prophetic Romance (1896)
* John Macnie - The Diothas (1883)

* William Morris – News from Nowhere (1890)
* Henry Olerich - A Cityless and Countryless World

# Plato's Republic (400 BC) was, at least on one level, a description of a political utopia ruled by an elite of philosopher kings, conceived by Plato. (Compare to his Laws, discussing laws for a real city.)
# The City of God (written 413–426) by Augustine of Hippo, describes an ideal city, the "eternal" Jerusalem, the archetype of all Christian utopias.
# Utopia (1516) by Thomas More a Gutenberg text of the book
# Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (Beschreibung des Staates Christenstadt) (1619) by Johann Valentin Andreæ, describes a Christian utopia inhabited by a community of scholar-artisans and run as a democracy.
# The City of the Sun (1623) by Tommaso Campanella depicts a theocratic and communist society.
# The New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon.
# Zwaanendael Colony (1631) by Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy in Delaware.
# News from Nowhere by William Morris (1892), Shows "Nowhere", a place without politics, a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.[4]
# Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900 (1890) by Lady Florence Dixie. The female protagonist poses as a man, Hector l'Estrange, is elected to the House of Commons, and wins women the vote. The book ends in the year 1999, with a description of a prosperous and peaceful Britain governed by women.[5]
# H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) is half fiction and half philosophical debate.

* Bradford C. Peck - The World a Department Store
* Bolesław Prus – Pharaoh (1895)

* Addison Peale Russell - Sub-Coelum (1893)
* Solomon Schindler - Young West (1894)

H.G. Wells, First Men in the Moon (1901) -- last good Wells, except Food?

The novel can be read as a dystopia -- insect-like Selenites in their hive-like society. Very much a eugencist caste society.

Has been called the first alien dystopia. Said to have launched the SF subgenre depicting intelligent social insects.

The Martians of The War of the Worlds and the Selenites of The First Men in the Moon live in dystopian societies?

The last of Wells's dystopian novels? His dystopian writings (Time Machine, and A Story of the Days to Come, e.g.) influenced Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell. Zamyatin would claim that it was in the writings of Wells that the history of the utopian/dystopian literary tradition merged or fused with that of science fiction.

1904-13

Hastings, George Gordon. THE FIRST AMERICAN KING. 1904
London, New York: The Smart Set Publishing Company, 1904. Octavo, pp. [1-4] 1-354 [355-356: ads], original pictorial tan cloth, front panel stamped in gray, black, red, gold and blind, spine panel stamped in gray, black, red and gold. First edition. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 1059. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 404. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 30. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 535. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, pp. 131-32. Bleiler (1978), p. 95. Reginald 06899. Smith, American Fiction, 1901-1925 H-355. Binding slightly leaned, front hinge a bit tender, a very good copy. (#114891)

1905 Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail" -- story
in "McClure's Magazine."
The sequel, "As Easy as A.B.C." (1912) has a future world dominated by an
international airship service, and a neatly-constructed world, down to
convincing details of engineering, clothing, and slang in 2000 A.D.

With the Night Mail is a glimpse of the year 2000, in which flying has become so important that the A.B.C. (Aerial Board of Control) rules the world. A sequel, As Easy as A.B.C. (1912), shows the A.B.C. ruthlessly trying tomaintain law and order.

HG Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905) -- first lame Wells
-- socialist world-state? His book A Modern Utopia expressed a desire for a society that was run and organised by humanistic and well-educated people. Wells, who was extremely critical of the role that privilege and hereditary factors in capitalist society and in his utopia, people gain power as a result of their intelligence and training. Called the first of Wells's utopian novels -- his previous were dystopian.

Aldiss: "The last of the great utopias and the first to realize that from now on, with improved communications, no island or continent was big enough to hold a perfect state -- it must be the whole world or nothing."

Amis: It is both satire and warning (unlike his previous works). This and his later works "give a soporific whiff of left-wing crankiness."

The Utopian Samurai of this book -- and Men Like Gods -- live in a society not all that different from the Selenites. This book makes Wells the target of later anti-utopians attacks.

But note that this book is not unambiguously utopian -- it contains a strong anti-utopian element. It is a meta-utopia, an account of a dialogue bwteen utopian and dystopian imaginations. An inconclusive consideration of utopian and anti-utopian philosophies -- like Le Guin's The Dispossesed. Wells criticizes the rationalist in ethics and politics, the utopian who sees everything in black and white. He criticizes Utopian rationalists for demanding a language without ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae -- precursor to Zamyatin. Zamyatin inherits the anti-utopian ideas from A Modern Utopia -- emphasis on the Heraclitean principle of change as law of life; emphasis on the irrational character o fthe world generally.

Even if tempted by utopianism, Wells -- here, as elsewhere -- remains skeptical about utopianism in politics and wary of its pitfalls.

HG Wells, In the Days of the Comet (1906)
resorted to changing human nature by means of personality-improving gases shed by a comet's tail, as the most plausible way to usher in his Utopia of universal free love. A fantastic tale of the world's beauty and unity after the Great Change occurs.
A comet rushes toward the earth, a deadly, glowing orb that soon fills the sky and promises doom. But mankind is too busy hating, stealing, scheming, and killing to care. As luminous green trails of cosmic dust and vapor stream across the heavens, blood flows beneath: nations wage all-out war, bitter strikes erupt, and jealous lovers plot revenge and murder. The earth slips past the comet by the narrowest of margins, but all succumb to the gases in its tail. When mankind wakes up, everyone is completely and profoundly different. In the Days of the Comet is H. G. Wells's classic tale of the last days of the old earth and the extraterrestrial Change that becomes the salvation of the human race. An ill-fated romance between Willie Leadford and Nettie Stuart unfolds in a world buried in misery and bent on its own destruction. After the earth passes through the comet's tail, suffering, pettiness, and injustice melt away. Willie, Nettie, and everyone around them are reborn. They now see themselves and their world in a dramatically new and wonderful way.

H.G. Wells, The War in the Air, 1908
Notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts -- the use of the airplane for warfare and the coming of WWI.

Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908)
Influenced Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Aldiss -- London's place in the history of SF is secured by this dystopian takle of future dictatorship. Alas, he says, The Iron Heel is hard to take today. "Its honest sympathies with the poor and the oppressed are never in doubt, but they come clothed in cliches, with alternate spates of denunciation and sentimentality."

A dystopian novel of the (then) near future, covers the years 1912-32, during which the Oligarchy (or Iron Heel) arose in the US. The Oligarchy -- the largest monopoly trusts (or robber barons) -- reduce farmers to serfdom and bankrupt the middle class. (The Progressive Era led to a breakup of trusts, notably the Sherman Antitrust Act applied to Standard Oil in 1911). A First Revolt is described, the narrator is a member of the resistance -- and a forthcoming Second Revolt hinted at. Caste society -- in which the Oligarchs are the inner circle, the Mercenaries (a military caste) the second circle, well-paid labor in essential industries a third, and a serf-like labor caste in the outer ring.

In 1984, the Oligarchy complete a wonder-city -- to be lived in, but also admired and appreciated -- called Asgard. Slave-like proles live there and build public works. But London less interested in technological changes than sociopolitical -- belief in the historical materialism of Marxism.

Although the narrator predicts that the Second Revolt will succeed, the Oligarchy maintain power for three centuries -- we learn, from the future scholar who annotates the text -- until a revolution ushers in the Brotherhood of Man.

MADE INTO A 1998 MOVIE "Zheleznaya pyata oligarkhii" (d. Aleksandr Bashirov), starring himself as Nikolai Petrovich.
Also known as: Oligarkian rautainen korko Finland
Tallone di ferro dell'oligarchia, Il Italy
The Iron Heel of Oligarchy International (English title)

E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909).
Novella? Really a long story.

In a 1947 preface, Forster wrote that the novella was a reaction to "one of the earlier heavens of H.G. Wells" -- i.e, to a socialist world-state. No doubt reference to Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes, a magazine serial from 1899. He changed it again in 1910 and 1921 editions.

Forster is credited with the concepts of the fully automated apartment, machines that supply every need, and television (cinematophote).

Most of the human population lives below ground -- each one isolated omto a cell with all bodily needs met by the omnipotent global Machine. Travel is permitted but unpopular. The population communcates through a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine, with which they conduct theior only activity -- sharing ideas and knowledge.

The two main characters, Vashtin and her son Kuno. Vashti is content to produce and endlessly discuss secondhand ideas. Kuno, a sensualist and revel tells Vashti of his disenchantment with the sanitized, mechanized world. He tells her that he's visited the surface of the planet -- despite the life support apparatus supposedly required to endure the toxic surface air. He saw other humans living outside the Machine. But he was recaptured by the Machine, and threatened with expulsion.

Then the life support apparatus required to visit the wouter world is abolished. Second, a kind of religion is established in which the Machine is the object of worship -- those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as "unmechanical" and threatened with expulsion.''

Then defects begin to appear in the Machine. Knowledge of how to repair the Machine has been lost. Finally, the Machine collapses, bringing civilization as it's known to an end. Before they perish, Vashti realizes that man and his connection to the natural world are what matter, not the comforts of life within the Machine. Hopefully the few surface-dwellers (precursors of Logan's Run) will carry on.

Clarke, Francis H. MORGAN ROCKEFELLER'S WILL: A ROMANCE OF 1991-2. (1909)
Portland, Oregon: Clarke-Cree Publishing Co., 1909.By 1990 Morgan Rockefeller owned everything in the United States. Upon his death he bequeathed his fortune - except a million dollars for his missing niece - to the United States Government to be held in trust for the American people. The book describes the "establishment of a new government controlled by a new fraternal order, Reapers of the World, in part organized by the niece. A kind of cooperative socialism is developed, and the utopian millennium is reached by the year 2000." - Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 44. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 427. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985,

HG Wells, The Sleeper Awakes (1910), rewritten version of When The Sleeper Wakes (1899)

Dystopian novel in which a man sleeps for 2 centuries, waking up in a transformed London -- in which, thanks to compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world. He was a socialist and futurist (like Wells), but he awakes to see his dreams realized in a dystopian manner.

The capitalists who run this world hope he'll play along with them, continue to let them run the world using his money. But Sleeper Graham has other ideas and becomes a Socialist messiah to the oppressed.

In 1897 a Victorian gentleman falls into a sleep from which he cannot be waked. During his two centuries of slumber he becomes the Sleeper, the most well known and powerful person in the world. All property is bequeathed to the Sleeper to be administered by a Council on his behalf. The common people, increasingly oppressed, view the Sleeper as a mythical liberator whose awakening will free them from misery.

He discovers that he is legal owner and master of the world. But a rebellious figure seeks to overthrow this established order. Agents of the rebel liberate Graham.

The Sleeper awakes in 2100 to a futuristic London adorned with wondrous technological trappings yet staggering under social injustice and escalating unrest. His awakening sends shock waves throughout London, from the highest meetings of the Council to the workers laboring in factories in the bowels of the city. Daring rescues and villainous treachery abound as workers and capitalists fight desperately for control of the Sleeper.

Robert Heinlein was impressed by this book.

The revolt takes place. Graham is hailed as the savior of the people. He is nominally restored to his rightful place as master of the world -- but then he learns that the people are suffering as badly under the new revolutionary regime as they did before. Graham travels through London in disguise. London is portrayed as a dehumanized, industrialized quagmire caught in perpetual darkness. The lower classes slave away in factories and go to cheap amusements.

Graham oversees a worker's revolution, which -- as the book closes, seems about to triumph.

* Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain (1911) — 1st of trilogy?

Brinsmade, Herman Hine. UTOPIA ACHIEVED: A NOVEL OF THE FUTURE. 1912
New York: Broadway Publishing Co., [1912].
First edition. Reform novel. Single tax brings eutopia. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 268. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 095. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 25. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 145. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 151. Bleiler (1978), p.

When William Came NOVEL 1913 H. H. Munro (SAKI)
TK -- alternate history
What we find frightening about this novel is the very premise: England has been subjugated and annexed! by Germany . . . When William Came, written before World War I, is a grim tale of a then-fictional war between Britain and Germany. Saki's biting wit is aimed squarely at British politics in this thinly veiled story -- he, like many others, could see war approaching, and who would want to see a conflict of such proportion?
this one is set in 1913 and the ‘William’ of the title is that old bogeyman ‘Kaiser Bill’. For some reason, at the height of Britain’s power, the fear of invasion was common at that time. (See ‘The Riddle of the Sands’, ‘The Battle of Dorking’, ‘Spies of the Kaiser’ or even ‘The War of the Worlds’)

Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroïden-Roman. (1913)
Benjamin's 1933(?) essay "Experience and Poverty" calls for owning up tot the impoverishment of experience -- and even professing it -- in order to begin from the beginning, make do with little. He says approvingly that Brecht, Loos, Le Corbusier, Scheerbart, and Klee had taken leave of "the traditional image of humanity -- ceremonious, noble, decked out with all the sacrificial offerings of the past." Forget the great traditions of huimanism and idealism, forget renewing experience (cf Adorno's Jargon of Authenticity). The appropriate response to the poverty of experience is collaborating in the worl of destruction -- be as barbaric as the fascists, but for a good cause. [Like his friend Bataille?] This is Benjamin as a radical antihumanist. The "destructive character" he hails in this essay turns everything into rubble. McCole says that Benjamin here attempts to steal the idea of the decline of experience from cultural conservatives, the energies of barbarism from fascists. (Dialectic of Enlightenment -- this is the era when certain radicals do borrow from reactionaries; Bloch.)

Writing during WWI Bennjamin seems to welcome war -- like HG Wells -- as chance to clear the decks. (In "Experience and Poverty.") Cluttered and smothered interiors had ruined the middle class; and the propertyless ahd suffered in those days. Like Brecht, Benjamin wanted to "erase the traces." He valued those who were recording this newly devalued, technologized, impoverished experience Klee, Loos, and the utopians Scheerbart and Micky Mouse. By all of these the brutality and dynamism of contemporary techmology was used, abused, mocked, and harnessed."

In July 1919, Benjamin was translating Baudelaire -- wrote a review of Lesabéndio, by a utopian writer newly introduced to him by Scholem. He was introduced to Bloch by Hugo Ball. He read, worked on a review of Bloch's Geist der Utopie. He planned a book on "true politics" -- it was to include a philosophical critique of Lesabéndio. Part of the book became his essay "Critique of Violence." This is Benjamin at his most interesting.

John McCole's book Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition suggests that Benjamin liked the architecture of Loos not because he saw in it a model of rationalization and efficiency but because it was the constructive anticipaton of a form of social practice that breaks with bourgeois society. (Loos's refusal of ornament seemed to resonate with Benajmain's belief that the collective -- because it was injured by the poverty of experience -- demanded parsimony in architecture.) Anyway, he was interested in visionary -- not practical -- architecture. "Through all his engagements with technology, his most lasting yet elusive affinity may have been with the works of the utopian visionary Paul Scheerbart. Benjamin was devoted to Scheerbart's novels since WWI years. Lesabéndio portrays the asteroid utopia of the planet Palls, an anarchic society without property or institutions. Its inhabitants live in a throughly transformed relationshp to nature: their natural needs are met through adaptation to their environment, yet they continue to pursue technological projects meant to embellish rather than exploit the planet. Scheerbart's purpose, as Benjamin saw it, was to disabuse people of the "base and vulgar opinion that they are called on to 'exploit' the forces of nature" and to portray a world in which technology woulf liberate both humanity and, "fraternally," the rest of creation along with it. In Scheerbart's "utopia of the body .. the earth and huanity together form a single body [Leib]." Benjamin also prized the resolute refusal of interiority and psychological complication in Scheerbart's characters. As he explained in "Eperience and Poverty," this was what had led Scheerbart to champion the new glass aarchitecture -- the transparency of glass made it the enemt o secrecy and privacy and this the antidote to the suffocating complaications of the bourgeois interior. Verne simply transported ordinary bourgeous characters into outer space; Scherrbart was interested in the deeper question of hwo technology would transform the vwry basis of human nature.

Note that Benjamin wrote a critique of Lesabendio under the title "The True Politician"; it has been lost.

1917: Benjamin maries Dora Pollak (Scholem gives Benjamin a copy of the utopian novel Lesabendio for a wedding present). [Scheerbart, Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroidroman]
Benjamin thinks he must become a professor, but doesn’t really want to write a second dissertation; also knows that -- as the editors of Volume 1 of Benjamin’s selected writings put it -- “From his first encounter with the academic world, Benjamin had foreseen that the individualist tendencies of his own thought would work against his establishment within the realm of institutionalized philosophy.” [cf. what Howe says about the PhD program.] He feels that Heidegger is just a kiss-ass to Husserl. They return to March and, for the first time, seek work. They finally move into Benjamin’s parents’ house. Benjamin had read Sorel’s Reflections on Violence while in Switzerland; now he began working on the political issues [anarchistic] raised by that book: wrote “Critique of Violence.” Supposedly also writing a philosophical critique of the utopian novel Lesabendio that will provide a developed position on [contemporary] politics! He’s also reading Bloch. So: anarchist, nihilist, utopian. Also writing a preface to the Baudelaire translation on the theoretical problems confronted by the translator. [Note that Benjamin’s encounter with Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroidroman helps inoculate him against the Marxist aesthetic notion, derived from Engels’ comments on Balzac, that only great Realist art has an ecstatic cognitive power, that Realist art is the only cognitive activity outside of Marxist philosophy able to escape the alienated vision of reality that is inseparable from any class society. Benjamin does subscribe to what Schaeffer calls the speculative theory of Art, in this Marxist form, but he will insist that modernist art, not Realist art, has this power -- hence his interest in Baudelaire, the Symbolists, the Surrealists.]
1919:Benjamin in Switzerland, reading Nietzsche and working on his doctoral thesis, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, “a pointer to the true nature of romanticism,” as he described it in a letter. It was, in fact, an attempt to work out a theory of criticism -- he was opposed to what he called “the current corrupt and directionless practice of art criticism…” -- it aimed at “authentic criticism.” Received his doctoral degree in 1919. [Note that he must be studying what Schaeffer calls the speculative theory of Art: he’s studying the German romantic notion of Art as a medium of communication with the Infinite, which infected romanticism, Baudelaire, Symbolism, avant-garde, etc.]
Benjamin comes to know Hugo Ball and his wife, Emmy Hennings, who live in Bern. Benjamin becomes influenced by Dadaism -- note that it’s Ball’s anarchistic, political Dadaism, not the kind that influenced Breton. Ball introduced Benjamin to Bloch, who had also studied with Simmel. Benjamin awarded his doctorate from university in Bern, thinks about moving to Palestine. Instead of looking for work as a professor, gets back to work on Baudelaire translations. Reading Lesabendio and Sorel.
This is the making of Benjamin as a philosopher -- this combination of analyzing romanticist art criticism, studying under Simmel, getting to know Ball and Bloch, translating Baudelaire, studying anarchism and science fiction utopianism and Nietzsche on his own time. Adorno would suggest that Benjamin’s remarkable clarity and power of thought came from the dialectical tension within everything he wrote, between extremely personal experiences and gestures toward the ineffable absolute. Pensky writes, “Thus, one might say that the characteristic infusion of fragments of concrete experience into the articulation of metaphysical conception was itself an essential methodological component of a consistent line of attack in Benjamin’s critical thinking. The tension produced by such juxtapositions could explore the real with a messianic interest, without betraying its commitment to the things themselves, and produce images whose transcendent force would be contained within their absolute historical concreteness and graphicness.” [undoubtedly picked this method up, not just from his melancholy, but from Nietzsche and Baudelaire.] In the liberated fragment of everyday life, Benjamin finds clues as to the meaning of everything. Pensky writes that “The maintained tension between historical object and messianic futurity, between subjective concentration and objective revelation, is in essence a tension arising from the possibility of meaning; better, it is a productive tension maintained at the moment of dialectical suspension in which the necessity and impossibility of meaning are held frozen for the contemplating subject.” Pensky connects this to Benjamin’s melancholia. He reads melancholia as “a way of seeing,” one operating in “the space that separates Benjamin’s ‘messianic’ and ‘materialistic’ gaze” -- i.e., melancholy is a middle way of seeing [a hangover vision, a dialectical optic] that sees in both modes simultaneously, holographically. The person who sees in this fashion is drawn more and more into the world of the everyday, precisely to the degree that the normal and ordinary come to seem more and more puzzling and symbolic. Adorno saw what Pensky calls the “productive contradiction” in Benjamin’s critical mode: Benjamin’s dialectics at a standstill, his way of seeing in everyday items both their natural form and their historically constructed form, was painful. Pensky: “Misery, the absence of meaning, of a stable identity, of the image of harmony and completion, is the force that drives the contemplative mind onward, but also is the price paid by the human being.” Benjamin had a talent for contradictory thinking, this cannot be separated from his melancholia. [note that this is the problem of the engaged ironist.]
Note that Benjamin believed in an originary dimension of lost, destroyed, or withheld meaning -- this is the source of his fertile critical mode, seeking clues to this dimension in fragments -- but also the source of his mournfulness, misery, and despair.

1914-23

H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914).

An invention accelerates the process of radioactive decay. Producing bombs that continue to explode for days, weeks, months. Prefigure the development of atomic bomb. (Scientists at the time were aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years.)

Leó Szilárd (Hungarian: Szilárd Leó, February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-German-American physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project. He acknowledged that Wells's book inspired his theory. Wells's bombs weren't prophetic at an engineering level — once a bomb explodes, it can't keep exploding. But!

After the war, mankind begins to lapse into barbarism -- but an inspired group of world leaders meet and create a one-world government.

* Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915) - 2d of trilogy?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)

Utopian novel written by noted feminist. An isolated society of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis. Idwal social order, free of war, conflict, or domination. (Appeared in serialized form; not published as a book until 1979.) Gilman's book suggests that gender is a social construct. The women are stronger than the men, wiser.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland" is a lost-world fantasy in the Haggardian tradition with a decided twist: It functions primarily as a discourse on the supposed but not necessarily actual differences between the two sexes, and as a feminist screed in the utopian genre. Written in 1915, the novel was initially serialized in the pages of Gilman's own monthly magazine, "The Forerunner," a publication whose main agenda was to further Gilman's ideas of feminism and socialism. We are introduced to three very different types of men at the beginning of this story: Terry, a chauvinist kind of man's man with decidedly old-fashioned ideas concerning "women's place"; Jeff, a Galahad type of dreamy idealist, who's fond of putting women on top of proverbial pedestals; and our narrator, Vandyck, a level-headed sociologist. The three discover a land of some 12,000 square miles on a plateau in some unnamed part of the world...a plateau that is inhabited by nothing but--you guessed it--females. The 3 million females in what Vandyck refers to as Herland have, for the last 2,000 years, been cut off from civilization and have been reproducing parthenogenetically; virgin births that come when the women turn 25 or so, and that always result in baby girls. These miracle births are perhaps the most fantasy-oriented aspect of Gilman's tale; an aspect that might have helped secure its pride of place in Cawthorn and Moorcock's excellent overview volume "Fantasy: The 100 Best Books." Our three men, after spending many months of learning the language of Herland (an education not easily accomplished, unlike in many other lost-world adventures where explorers, less realistically, seem to pick up a new tongue in a matter of days) and getting acclimatized, are given a tour of the land, and Gilman shows us how well the women work together, how they have raised childbearing and motherhood to a religion of sorts, and how far advanced their methods of agriculture and education have become. It is a true utopia, with all its inhabitants happy and healthy and well cared for. The men perceive this land in conformity with their various temperaments; not too surprisingly, Terry has the roughest time here. But even he is forced to admit that Herland's accomplishments have outstripped ours in many regards, after initially thinking that no "civilization" could possibly exist without men.

Simply written by its author, with many touches of humor and (at a mere 146 pages) short enough to never wear out its welcome, despite the occasional didactic tone, "Herland" is a winning read indeed. Even in these more enlightened and more PC times, when American women have the right to vote, can hold any job a man can (even president, perhaps?), and earn almost 75% of what a man earns (OK, guess we still have a way to go!), this book serves as a good reminder that sexism is such an easy trap to fall into. I would like to especially recommend this particular Pantheon edition of "Herland" because of the wonderful 20-page introduction to the book written by Ann J. Lane, who discusses not only Gilman's life, but the history of the utopian novel in general, and "Herland"'s position therein. Modern-day readers might find this intro very helpful. And speaking of the modern-day reader, if there was one problem this reader had with Gilman's novel, it was one dealing with the question of sex. Is it reasonable to expect 3 million women trapped on a plateau NOT to resort to lesbianism after so many centuries? The gals seem completely chaste in Herland, and even after Terry, Jeff and Van take three of the Herland women as wives, their brides still insist that sex is only for procreation purposes (which brings to mind the old saying "There goes paradise!"). But here's what I had a real problem with: Van, amazingly enough, is just fine with this, claiming that he'd rather have a virtually sexless marriage with his wonderful Herland bride than be married to a fully active partner back home! Forget about those virgin births...THIS is the biggest fantasy aspect of "Herland"!

* Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland (1916) — 3d of trilogy?

1917 Victor Rousseau's novel "The Messiah of the Cylinder" is an
end-of-the Earth dystopia through the viewpoint an awakening man from the
present in a Socialist future. Widely viewed as a dark parody of H. G. Wells'
"When the Sleeper Wakes."
Victor Rousseau, "The Messiah of the Cylinder" (1917)

1918 Gregory Owen's novel "Meccania"
Meccania is a reference to Gregory Owen's Meccania, the Super-State (1918). Meccania is the ultimate in totalitarian dystopias, a state completely regimented and controlled by the government. For a Big Brother-ruled England, Meccania would be a natural enemy.

Brussof, Valery [Yakovlevich]. THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS AND OTHER STORIES 1918
... With an Introductory Essay by Stephen Graham. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1918. Octavo, pp. [i-iv] v-xiii [xiv-xvi] [1] 2-162 [163: printer's imprint] [164: blank], original green cloth, front and rear panels ruled in blind, spine panel stamped in gold, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. First edition in English. Mixed issue; full cloth (as per Locke's second issue), fore-edge untrimmed (as per Locke's first issue). The title novella, a fine anti-utopian fiction, is generally acknowledged to be the author's best fictional work. "A very unusual impressionistic story, with an atmosphere like that in the work of Luis Borges." - Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 287. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 46. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 42. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 146. Survey of Science Fiction

* Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921) — DYSTOPIA. See Zamyatin entry.

Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922)
Ray Cummings (Raymond King Cummings) was an author of science fiction, rated one of the "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre"[1]. He was born August 30, 1887 in New York and died January 23, 1957 in Mount Vernon.
Cummings worked with Thomas Edison as a personal assistant and technical writer from 1914 to 1919. His most highly regarded work was the novel The Girl in the Golden Atom published in 1922. His career resulted in some 750 novels and short stories, using also the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings, and Gabriel Wilson.
A classic work of science fiction, this novel was one of the first to explore the world of the atom. The Girl in the Golden Atom is the story of a young chemist who finds a hidden atomic world within his mother’s wedding ring. Under a microscope, he sees within the ring a beautiful young woman sitting before a cave. Enchanted by her, he shrinks himself so that he can join her world.
Having worked for Thomas Alva Edison, Ray Cummings (1887–1957) was inspired by science’s possibilities and began to write science fiction. The Girl in the Golden Atom was enormously successful at its publication in 1923, and Cummings went on to write an equally successful sequel, The People of the Golden Atom. Both volumes are featured in this Bison Books edition, along with a new introduction by Jack Williamson.

HG Wells, Men Like Gods (1923).
Aldiss -- a Mr. Barnstaple drives his car into the 4th dimension, and there finds a utopia of beautiful and powerful (and frequently nude) people. With him is a diverse group of his contemporaries who do their best to wreck the utopia. Barnstaple defeats them with utopian aid. Wells's fantasy device the 4th dimension, iserves merely to lead us to his utopia. Burroughs's Pellucidar, on the other hanf, is the whole story -- it's all about how to get there and what happens there.

Wells's is a seriois tale, whose main aim is to discuss entertainingly the ways in which man might improve himself and his lot. Aldiss says Burroughs's Pellucidar is better. Burroughs is fun to read; Wells gives off that whiff of what Amis called left-wing crankiness. Burroughs teaches us to wonder -- a religious state, blanketing out criticism. Wells is teaching us to think.
Aldiss uses this book as an example of the poles of modern fantasy -- thinking pole at one end (Swift to Wells) and dreaming pole at the other (no great figures).

Socialist world-state? Not a SF novel? Zamyatin says it's the one and only literary utopia written by Wells -- but Z does not consider it a SF novel. Its topical journalism, propaganda for the world state.
The hero of the novel, Mr. Barnstaple, is a depressive journalist in the newspaper "The Liberal." At the beginning of the story, Mr. Barnstaple, as well as a few other Englishmen, are accidentally transported to the parallel world of Utopia. Utopia is like an advanced Earth, although it had been quite similar to Earth in the past in a period known to Utopians as the "Days of Confusion." Utopia is a utopian world: it has a utopian socialist world government, advanced science, and even pathogens have been eliminated and predators are almost tamed. Barnstaple is confounded and confused by the utopian attitudes: "where is your government ?" he asks. "our government is in our education" is the answer (see Plato). Barnstaple gradually loses his Victorian English narcissism. For instance, Wells makes comments on personal responsibility when Barnstaple sees a person slaving over a rose garden at high altitude and asks "why don't you hire a gardner?" the answer is "the working class has vanished from utopia years ago! He who loves the rose must then serve that rose." Barnstaple is changed by those experiences and he loses his Eurocentric view of the world and starts to really get the idea of the place. As this conversion starts to take place utopians start to get sick.
This, however, means that the newly arrived Earthlings pose a grave threat to Utopians, as the latter's immune system has become weak; and the Earthlings have to be quarantined until a solution is found. They resent this isolation and some of them plot to take over Utopia; they are actively opposed by Mr. Barnstaple, who has to escape from the quarantine castle, just as superior Utopian technology finally destroys the Earthling revolt. Finally, the Utopians find a way to send back Mr. Barnstaple, and the story ends as he goes back to Earth.
The novel was considered by several contemporaries to be a weakly plotted story in which Wells's utopian enthusiasm overtook his skills as a writer of scientific romances (his own term for what is nowadays commonly called science fiction). The novel was yet another vehicle for Wells to propagate the so-called 'wellsian utopia', his ideas of a possible better future society, which he has described in several other works, notably in his A Modern Utopia (1905). In literary history, the novel's notable role was to provoke Aldous Huxley into writing Brave New World (1932), his parody and criticism of wellsian utopian ideas.

Muriel Jaeger, The Question Mark (1923)
– a dystopian novel.
Utopian-religious novel of a future England.

1924-33

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We. (1924)
Written 1920-21. Published in English in 1924?? Possibly influenced by Jerome K Jerome. Not published in Russian, except in samizdat, until 1988. Written in response to the author's personal experiences with the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, his life in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond and work in the Tyne shipyards at nearby Wallsend during the First World War. It was on Tyneside that he observed the rationalization of labour on a large scale. The story is told by the protagonist, "D-503", in his diary, which details both his work as a mathematician and his misadventures with a resistance group called the Mephi. D-503 lives in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, where everything is organized according to primitive mathematics. Sleep times are measured out for each day and each individual is given a certain number of other people to have intercourse with based on a system of pink coupons and scheduling.
Full text: http://crispytomato.net/zamyatin_we.txt
We is a futuristic dystopian satire, generally considered to be the grandfather of the genre (but see The Iron Heel). It takes the totalitarian and conformative aspects of modern industrial society to an extreme conclusion, depicting a state that believes that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizens' lives should be controlled with mathematical precision based on the system of industrial efficiency created by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Among many other literary innovations, Zamyatin's futuristic vision includes houses, and indeed everything else, made of glass or other transparent materials, so that everyone is constantly visible.
George Orwell believed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) "must be partly derived from" We.[11] However, in a 1962 letter, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We.[12] Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it.[14] Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel."

Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1925).
Note the importance of Gernsback. (Book published in 1925 – first serialized in 1911.) Ralph 124C 41+, by Hugo Gernsback, is an early science fiction novel, written as a twelve-part serial in Modern Electrics magazine beginning in April 1911. It was later compiled into a novel/book form in 1925. It was hugely influential at the time, and filled with new ideas. The plot, characters, and writing strike most modern readers as shallow and old-fashioned. The title itself is a play on words meaning "one to foresee for one."
Gernsback first popularized the term “science fiction” – his magazines noted for imaginative fertility and adventurousness, but not sober and realistic approach. No intellectual sophistication.
Gernsback’s book gives us the sub-Atlantic tube, hypnobioscope, personalized news, and machine translation
Widely acclaimed upon its initial appearance in 1911 as a serial in Gernsback's magazine, MODERN ELECTRICS, this interplanetary novel by "the father of modern science fiction" is virtually unreadable today. However, historically, its impact and the prominence of its author in the SF field, elevates it to cornerstone status in the SF genre. "The literary treatment is on a very low level, but Ralph 124C41+ is renowned for its many highly imaginative technological projections. These include clear descriptions of radar, book and newspaper microfilms and microfiches, television, plant hormones, wireless transmission of power.etc."
By the year 2660, science has transformed and conquered the world, rescuing humanity from itself. Spectacular inventions from the farthest reaches of space and deep beneath the earth are available to meet every need, providing antidotes to individual troubles and social ills. Inventors are highly prized and respected, and they are jealously protected and lavishly cared for by world governments. That support and acclaim, however—as the most brilliant of scientists, Ralph 124C 41+, discovers—is not without its price.
This visionary novel of the twenty-seventh century was written by Hugo Gernsback (1887–1964), founder of the influential magazine Amazing Stories. Marvelously prophetic and creative, Ralph 124C 41+ celebrates technological advances and entrances readers with an exuberant, unforgettable vision of what our world might become. This commemorative edition makes this landmark tale widely available for the first time in decades and features the prized Frank R. Paul illustrations from the rare first edition, a list of inventions and technological devices, and Hugo Gernsback's prefaces to the first and second editions.
he titular protagonist saves the life of the heroine by directing energy remotely at an approaching avalanche. As the novel goes on, he describes the technological wonders of the modern world, frequently using the infamous phrase "As you know..." The hero finally rescues the heroine by travelling into space on his own rocketship to rescue her from the villain's clutches.
Some successful predictions from this novel include television, remote-control power transmission, televised phone calls, transcontinental air service, solar energy in practical use, sound movies, synthetic milk and foods, artificial cloth, voiceprinting, tape recorders, and spaceflight. It also contains "...the first accurate description of radar, complete with diagram...", according to Arthur C. Clarke i
The main character in the book is named Ralph, and his love interest is Alice. They don't go to the moon, but they do fly towards Venus and Mars. This story was written over 40 years before The Honeymooners ever aired on television. It is not known if the creators of The Honeymooners took any inspiration from this story.
            Nearly every science fiction fan knows the name Hugo Gernsback, even if only because the annual science fiction achievement awards, the Hugos, are named in his honor.   The traditional view of Gernsback, as the "Father of Science Fiction" was promulgated by the late SF historian Sam Moskowitz. While it is true that Gernsback founded Amazing in 1926 and coined the term "science fiction" (as well as the earlier scientifiction), his actual long term editorial effect on the genre is open to question. Gernsback viewed science fiction as a means of inspiring future generations of scientists (which it eventually did do), but at the expense of plot and character. Gernsback's best known work of science fiction, Ralph 124C 41+, illustrates the drawbacks of Gernsback's view of science fiction perfectly.
            The novel's tone is set in the opening pages. Each time Gernsback mentions a new device, he stops to explain what it does and the theory behind how it works. It is quite possible that Ralph 124C 41+ introduces more gadgets faster than any other science fiction novel written before or since. However, one of the things which sets Gernsback's books apart from the voyages extraordinaires of Jules Verne is that Verne would have incorporated a couple of Gernsback's ideas into the plot of his story and examined their effect on the society which the changes were introduced into.   Gernsback seems to fling his ideas out just to see if any of his predictions will occur.
            While Verne's characters frequently were stiff, Gernsback's characters have less dimension than the pages the novel is printed on. What characterization does occur is laughable, as is Gernsback's take on society. His world of the twenty-seventh century seems particularly naive, with a nebulous world government (which seems to have done away with actual surnames). Scientists are held in the awe reserved today for athletes or film stars, with the entire world knowing when Ralph 124C 41+ is going to perform important experiments as well as giving him a standing ovation (via Telephot) when he saves a young woman in Switzerland who nobody had ever heard of before (but who, of course, will become Ralph's romantic interest).
            The best thing that can be said for Gernsback's writing style is that he was in desperate need of an editor and an English grammar. His prose is repetitive and basic. Although straightfoward, it is not easy to read because of the number of digressions which Gernsback throws in. Among other things, Gernsback's writing in Ralph 124C 41+ seems to adhere to all of the negative stereotypes which have been associated with science fiction since Gernsback coined the term.
            Ralph 124C 41+ has frequently been called a classic. What it really is, however, is an oddity. The worst science fiction published in the 1990s is centuries beyond Gernsback as far as plot, writing style and characterization is concerned.   While the novel is a goldmine for technological speculation, Gernsback could simply have written up a list of gadgets with a brief description of each and come away with something as readable with as much plot and character as he weaves into Ralph 124C 41+.    While Gernsback may have been instrumental in some aspects of the establishment of science fiction (the first magazine devoted to it, the name, and supporting early fandom), the field has moved far beyond Gernsback's vision and talents in the 73 years since this book was originally published.

Burroughs, The Moon Maid., 1926
It was written in three parts, Part 1 was begun in June 1922 under the title The Moon Maid, Part 2 was begun in 1919 under the title Under the Red Flag, later retitled The Moon Men, Part 3 was titled the The Red Hawk. The book version was first published by A. C. McClurg on 1926. [NOTE SIMILARITY TO L RON HUBBARD]
The Moon Maid has a remarkable history. It consists of three consecutive novellas. The second was actually written first, in the spring of 1919, shortly after the Bolshevik revolution.
Burroughs titled this story “Under the Red Flag.” Set a century or two in America ’s future, it told the tale of Julian James, born in a Bolshevik dystopia and living in the 31st Commune of the Chicago Soviet. Lantski Petrov is president of the United States , and Otto Bergst is the new commander of the Red Guard at Chicago .
As a piece of anti-Communist fiction, “Under the Red Flag” predated Rand ’s We the Living by 17 years and Orwell’s Animal Farm by almost three decades. But in 1919, no one would publish it. The story was rejected 11 times by periodicals as varied as the Saturday Evening Post and the Argosy All-Story line of pulp magazines, which had already published Burroughs’ enormously popular A Princess of Mars (1912), Tarzan of the Apes (1912), and At the Earth’s Core (1913), among others.
The unpublished story was filed away, but not for long. Burroughs was a businessman, and he decided he had to salvage something from his time spent writing “Under the Red Flag.” During a single day in 1922, he rewrote the yarn. It was still set in the 22nd Century, but the Bolsheviks were turned into Kalkars, a brutish, mongrel breed of lunar invaders. President Petrov became Jarth, Jemadar of the United Teivos of America. Commander Bergst of Chicago ’s Red Guard was transformed into Brother-General Or-tis, the new Commandant of Chicago. And James Julian, the story’s tragic lead character, morphed into Julian the Ninth, one in a long line of Julian family heroes. Burroughs re-titled the story “The Moon Men” and cleverly made it a sequel to an as-yet-unwritten story.
Within months, Burroughs penned “The Moon Maid,” the first third of what was becoming a multi-generational narrative. This segment takes place 100 years before “The Moon Men.” It’s the story of Julian the Fifth, whose unfortunate spaceship crashes on the Moon. His subsequent adventures in a world beneath the lunar surface launch a chain of events leading to the Kalkar invasion of Earth.
“The Moon Maid” quickly sold to Argosy All-Story Weekly, which serialized it in spring of 1923. All-Story had no choice now but to publish its “sequel,” the rewritten “Under the Red Flag,” in February and March 1925.
Finally, there remained for Burroughs the task of satisfactorily concluding the Julian family saga. Six months after publishing “The Moon Men,” All-Story Weekly serialized his “The Red Hawk,” the final piece of the chronicle. Jumping 300 years beyond “The Moon Men,” it describes Julian the Twentieth’s role in the revolt that ends Kalkar tyranny on Earth. All three stories were collected in book form as the novel The Moon Maid in 1926.

Belloc, Hilaire. BUT SOFT- WE ARE OBSERVED!. 1928
London: Arrowsmith, [1928]. Octavo, pp. [1-6] 7-312, illustrations by G. K. Chesterton [?] Published later in the U.S. as SHADOWED! (1929). "A satire on parliamentary government: the communists and anarchists of 1979 prove to be no different from the old parties.

Buck Rogers strip debuts -- 1929
– it’s based on the central character of Philip Francis Nowlan's novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

Bradford, Columbus. TERRANIA OR THE FEMINIZATION OF THE WORLD. 1930
Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, [1930]. "Women lead the way to utopia. First female president of Terrania, the 'Federation of the World.'" - Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 24. "Eutopia ruled by women." - Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 188. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 254. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 090.

Insatiability (Polish: Nienasycenie), Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. 1930
is the only major novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. It was written in 1927 and first published in 1930.
AN EXPERIMENTAL EPIC IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD, BUT ALSO ONE OF THE MOST INSPIRING AND DEVASTATINGLY CREATIVE NOVELS EVER WRITTEN. REGULARLY MENTIONED IN ALL-TIME GREATEST 20TH CENTURY NOVELS LISTS, THE BOOK HAS AN EPIC SCOPE ALLIED WITH A KEEN SENSE OF DETAIL.
It combines chaotic action with deep philosophical and political discussion and predicts many of the events and political outcomes of the subsequent years, specifically, the invasion of Poland and the subsequent foreign domination and mind control exerted, first by the Germans, and then by the Soviet Union on Polish life and art.
Czesław Miłosz frames the first chapter of his book, The Captive Mind, around a discussion of Insatiability, specifically the "Murti-Bing" pill, which allows artists to contentedly conform to the demands of the equivalent of Socialist Realism.
The novel was translated into English in 1977 by Louis Iribarne.
Also author of "Nikotina" (1932). Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz aka Witkacy (1885-1939) experimented with a number of drugs and hallucinogens, in his artworks where he meticulously noted what he had ingested in the process of execution, in his "soirees" which included theatrics, psychodramas and scurrilous comedy, and on his own. A brilliant polymath who was also neurotic and depressed, he was a highly gifted artist, dramatist and novelist who also wrote philosophical treatises. His works have become more relevant in a postmodern world than they ever were in his life and his complexities and insights appreciated by a larger public. This work was written at the same time of his masterpiece novel Insatiability (Nienasycenie), which he interweaves as a point of principle, baring his own addictions to alcohol and cigarettes, and espousing the use of "whiter" drugs, but later declaring their insidiousness as well. Since mankind is already hopelessly removed from metaphysical sensations which are the source of true being, we are in a futile conflict of seeking transcendence. Art as a meaningful discourse and act of revelation is over. Therefore "there is in man a certain insatiability caused by existence itself, a primordial insatiability, associated with the very fact of the unavoidable existence of individuality, an insatiability that I call metaphysical and that, if it is not eradicated by excessive satiation of real-life feelings, by work, by the exercise of power, by creativity, etc., can be appeased solely with the aid of narcotics." (from "Nikotina"). Rare and significant document of this pioneer of the broken heart and the human condition. Bookseller Inventory # 1221

Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, 1933
The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. It is not a novel, but rather a fictional history book or chronicle, similar in style to Star Maker and Last and First Men, both by Olaf Stapledon.
Wells' book also shared with Stapledon's an understanding of the change wrought in the nature of war by the development of air power; both writers included harrowing depictions of cities destroyed in aerial bombardments, which proved an all too accurate prediction of what was to happen in the actual second World War.
Wells creates a framing device by claiming that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106, and wrote down what he could remember of it.
The book is dominated by Wells's belief in a world state as the solution to mankind's problems. Wells successfully predicted the Second World War, although he envisaged it dragging on into the 1960s, being finally ended only by a devastating plague that almost destroys civilization. Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship - 'The Dictatorship of the Air' (a term obviously modeled on 'The Dictatorship of the proletariat') - arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship finds it necessary to kill political opponents, the condemned persons are given a chance to emulate the ancient philosophers Socrates and Seneca and take a poison tablet in a congenial environment of their choice.
Eventually, after a century of re-shaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state "withers away" as was predicted by Friedrich Engels in his 1877 work Anti-Duhring. The last part of the book is a detailed description of the Utopian world which emerges, in some ways reminiscent of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.
While written as a future history, seen in retrospect it can be considered as an alternate history diverging from ours in late 1933 or early 1934, the Point of divergence being FDR's failure to implement the New Deal and revive the US economy (and also Hitler's failure to revive the German economy by re-armament). Instead, the worldwide economic crisis continues for three decades, concurrently with the war. The war is prosecuted by countries already on the verge of collapse and ends, not with any side's victory, but with everybody's total collapse and disintegration (also of countries which were not involved in the fighting). There follows the complete collapse of Capitalism and the emergence of the above-mentioned new order.
Wells's book can be credited with an accurate prediction of the submarine launched ballistic missile, which was to assume a crucial role in the Cold War period. Though the warheads of what he termed "air torpedoes" were envisaged as chemical rather than nuclear, Wells fully grasped - two decades ahead of the military planners - the strategic implications of combining submarines with weapons of mass destruction.
Wells's "Air and Sea Control", the association of pilots and technicians which controls the world's communications and eventually develops into a world government, seems a clear literary descendant of an institution called the Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) in the short stories "With the Night Mail" and "Easy as A.B.C.", by Rudyard Kipling, with which Wells was certainly familiar. The Kipling stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world where airships are commonly used both for freight and passenger service, as well as for preventing civil unrest using powerful sonic weapons:

MOVIE:
Things to Come (1936) (novel "The Shape of Things to Come")
The Shape of Things to Come (1979)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. (1932)
Aldiss: not just one major change in Huxley's future civilization, but several tht interact -- the extra-uterin production of babies, the cloning methods of obtaining identical people, the disappearane of Christianity, and so on.

Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. In Brave New World Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning.
Reacting in part against a popular series of pamphlets – starting with Daedalus: or, Science and the Future, in which the author (Brian Stableford Haldane) Argued that by the end of the century social life would be altered beyond recognition, entirely for the better due to the advancement of biological science. There was a flow of ideas from futurologial speculations into speculative fiction, which helped keep Brititsh science fiction intellectually serious.
Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was one source for the novel.
Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering [sorta], and sleep-learning that combine to change society.
Contrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. Huxley wrote the book in the 1920s, thirty years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. However, Mendel's work with inheritance patterns in peas had been re-discovered in 1900 and the eugenics movement, based on Darwinian selection, was well established. Huxley's family included a number of prominent biologists including Thomas Huxley, half-brother and Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley, and brother Julian Huxley who was a biologist and involved in the eugenics movement. In light of this, the fact that Huxley emphasizes conditioning over breeding is notable (see nature versus nurture). As the science writer Matt Ridley put it, Brave New World describes an "environmental not a genetic hell." Human embryos and fetuses are conditioned via a carefully designed regimen of chemical (such as exposure to hormones and toxins), thermal (exposure to intense heat or cold, as one's future career would dictate) and other environmental stimuli, although there is an element of selective breeding as well.
Brave New World was inspired by the H. G. Wells' Utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells' optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia" (see dystopia), somewhat influenced by Wells' own The Sleeper Awakes and the works of D. H. Lawrence. Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, completed ten years before in 1921, has been suggested as an influence, but Huxley stated that he had not known of the book at the time.[1]
Huxley visited the newly-opened and technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond plant, part of Imperial Chemical Industries, or ICI, Billingham and gives a fine and detailed account of the processes he saw. The introduction to the most recent print of Brave New World states that Huxley was inspired to write the classic novel by this Billingham visit.
An early trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Not only was Huxley outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity, and inward-looking nature of many Americans,[2] he also found a book by Henry Ford on the boat to America. There was a fear of Americanization in Europe, so to see America firsthand, as well as read the ideas and plans of one of its foremost citizens, spurred Huxley to write Brave New World with America in mind. The "feelies" are his response to the "talkie" motion pictures, and the sex-hormone chewing gum is parody of the ubiquitous chewing gum, which was something of a symbol of America at that time. In an article in the May 4, 1935 issue of Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton explained that Huxley was revolting against the "Age of Utopias" - a time, mostly before World War I, inspired by what H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were writing about socialism and a World State.
Huxley gives us feelies, scent-organ, artifical womb, Centrifgual Bumle-Puppy, and hypnopaedia (sleep-learning)

Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2106. It is not a novel, but rather a fictional history book or chronicle, similar in style to Star Maker and Last and First Men, both by Olaf Stapledon.
Wells' book also shared with Stapledon's an understanding of the change wrought in the nature of war by the development of air power; both writers included harrowing depictions of cities destroyed in aerial bombardments, which proved an all too accurate prediction of what was to happen in the actual second World War.
Wells creates a framing device by claiming that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent diplomat, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2106, and wrote down what he could remember of it.
The book is dominated by Wells's belief in a world state as the solution to mankind's problems. Wells successfully predicted the Second World War, although he envisaged it dragging on into the 1960s, being finally ended only by a devastating plague that almost destroys civilization. Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship - 'The Dictatorship of the Air' (a term obviously modeled on 'The Dictatorship of the proletariat') - arising from the controllers of the world's surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia. When the dictatorship finds it necessary to kill political opponents, the condemned persons are given a chance to emulate the ancient philosophers Socrates and Seneca and take a poison tablet in a congenial environment of their choice.
Eventually, after a century of re-shaping humanity, the dictatorship is overthrown in a completely bloodless coup, the former rulers are sent into a very honourable retirement, and the world state "withers away" as was predicted by Friedrich Engels in his 1877 work Anti-Duhring. The last part of the book is a detailed description of the Utopian world which emerges, in some ways reminiscent of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.
While written as a future history, seen in retrospect it can be considered as an alternate history diverging from ours in late 1933 or early 1934, the Point of divergence being FDR's failure to implement the New Deal and revive the US economy (and also Hitler's failure to revive the German economy by re-armament). Instead, the worldwide economic crisis continues for three decades, concurrently with the war. The war is prosecuted by countries already on the verge of collapse and ends, not with any side's victory, but with everybody's total collapse and disintegration (also of countries which were not involved in the fighting). There follows the complete collapse of Capitalism and the emergence of the above-mentioned new order.
Wells's book can be credited with an accurate prediction of the submarine launched ballistic missile, which was to assume a crucial role in the Cold War period. Though the warheads of what he termed "air torpedoes" were envisaged as chemical rather than nuclear, Wells fully grasped - two decades ahead of the military planners - the strategic implications of combining submarines with weapons of mass destruction.
Wells's "Air and Sea Control", the association of pilots and technicians which controls the world's communications and eventually develops into a world government, seems a clear literary descendant of an institution called the Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) in the short stories "With the Night Mail" and "Easy as A.B.C.", by Rudyard Kipling, with which Wells was certainly familiar. The Kipling stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world where airships are commonly used both for freight and passenger service, as well as for preventing civil unrest using powerful sonic weapons.

* James Hilton - Lost Horizon (1933)

SF authors born 1894-1903: 1903

2009-01-13T05:40:00.000-08:00

1. George Orwell
2. John Wyndham

***

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Not a Radium-Age SF author.

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author. His work is marked by a profound consciousness of social injustice, an intense dislike of totalitarianism, and a passion for clarity in language.

Considered "perhaps the 20th century’s best chronicler of English culture",[2] he wrote works in many different genres including fiction, polemics, journalism, memoir and critical essays. His most famous works are two novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

* Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harcourt, 1949) is a classic dystopian novel by English author George Orwell. It is set in the eponymous year and focuses on a repressive, totalitarian regime. The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of falsifying records and political literature, thus effectively perpetuating propaganda, who grows disillusioned with his meagre existence and so begins a rebellion against the system. The novel has become famous for its portrayal of surveillance and society's increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. Since its publication the terms Big Brother and Orwellian have entered the popular vernacular.

***

John Wyndham (1903-1969)

John Wyndham was the pen name used by the often post-apocalyptic British (Golden Age) science fiction writer John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. Early in his career, Wyndham used various other combinations of his names, such as "John Beynon" or "Lucas Parkes."

During WWII Wyndham served first as a censor in the Ministry of Information, then entered the army to serve as a Corporal cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals. He participated in the Normandy landings, although was not involved in the first days of the landings. After the war Wyndham altered his writing style and by 1951, using the "John Wyndham" pen name for the first time, wrote the novel The Day of the Triffids. People were allowed to assume that it was a first novel from a previously unknown writer. The book proved to be an enormous success and established Wyndham as an important exponent of science fiction.

Radium-Age SF:

* "The Lost Machine" (Amazing Stories, TK 1932). The Lost Machine is the posthumous history of an artificial intelligence's experiences on the barbaric planet Earth in the primitive times of the early 20th Century. One of Wyndham's most anthologized works, which was published first in Amazing Stories, it is a predecessor to Isaac Asimov's robot tales. Its narrator is a machine from Mars, lost on the third planet, the earth. "I know what it is to be an intelligent machine in a world of madness," the visitor concludes before dissolving itself.

Other SF (incomplete list):

* "The Man from Beyond" (1934). The Man From Beyond sees a human desperately attempting to convince the people of Venus to have nothing to do with their neighbours in space as they are without hope of redemption.

* The Secret People (1935). Set in 1964, The Secret People takes us to a place intruders never leave. After Mark Sunnet's rocket plane crashes in the Sahara Desert, which is being turned into a "New Sea" by France and Italy in a monumental feat of engineering, he and his girlfriend Margaret find themselves prisoners of a people determined to keep their existence secret. These short-statured people (who resemble white pygmies) dwell in an underground network of vast caves and are, on the face of it, mired in primitivism. The caves are lit by luminous globes of unknown power, suggesting that this civilization was once highly developed technologically but is now long past its time of glory. While Margaret and her cat become a focus of worship, Mark is thrown in with the other prisoners. These are people of various nationalities who were unfortunate enough to stray into the pygmies' domain over the years — destined to live out their lives subsisting on the fungus of giant mushrooms which grow in the caves. While many are slumped in apathy, some of the captives have preserved their sanity by working on an escape tunnel. The rising water levels have heightened the sense of urgency. The "submerged nation" theme was derived from Wells's The Time Machine (1895).

* Planet Plane (also known as Stowaway to Mars, 1936). Written by a young, pre-Triffids Wyndham under the name John Beynon, this is a less well developed effort that nonetheless shows his talent. The plot is standard, with an attractive female stowaway joining an all-male crew on a race to be the first nation to land on Mars, but it's graced with original details and intelligent epithets such as "Mind is the control of brain by memory," and the fast-paced plot keeps you reading. The most interesting elements are the Martian landscape, the rusty berserk Martian robots, and the sad remains of the Martian people whose cities are like a series of empty rooms. When the story turns into a space romance, you understand why the stowaway had to be female.

* The Day of the Triffids (Michael Joseph, 1951). Although Wyndham had already written other novels, this was the first that he had written under this name and it appeared to be by a new author. It was this novel which established him as an important writer, and remains his best known. The Day of the Triffids was cited by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the thirteen best science-fiction horror novels. Arthur C. Clarke called it an "immortal story". In his book Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss coined the term cosy catastrophe to describe the subgenre of post-war apocalyptic fiction in which society is destroyed save for a handful of survivors, who are able to enjoy a relatively comfortable existence. He specifically singled out The Day of the Triffids as an example of this genre.

* The Kraken Wakes (Michael Joseph, 1953; published in the United States as Out of the Deeps).

* The Chrysalids (Michael Joseph, 1955; published in the United States as Re-Birth). Homo Superior novel.

* The Midwich Cuckoos (Ballantine, 1957). Filmed twice as Village of the Damned.

SF authors born 1904-13: 1910

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1. John W. Campbell Jr.

***

John W. Campbell Jr. (1910-1971)

American SF editor and author.

To get a sense of the discourse surrounding the so-called Golden Age of SF and what preceded it, read anything written about Campbell.

Campbell attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he befriended Norbert Wiener, one of the godfathers of computers. He began writing science fiction at age 18. By the time he was 21 he was a well-known pulp writer of super-science space opera but had been dismissed by MIT: he had failed German. He then spent one year at Duke University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1932. Asimov notes Campbell's presence at Duke and speculates that Duke was "best known in my youth for the work of Joseph B. Rhine on extrasensory perception, and that may have influenced Campbell's later views on the subject."

The 1940s saw a great wave of science fiction writers, the first to grow up reading the pulps and then writing stories of their own. "Astounding was at the heart of this explosion of writers, and John W. Campbell, Jr. was the heart of Astounding." Effective October 1937 Campbell took over Astounding; he remained there until his death. With the March 1938 issue he changed the title from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction. He made the magazine the leader in the field, with its zenith probably being in the early 1940s. He introduced Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey, Sturgeon, and van Vogt to SF.

Campbell had strong ideas about what made good science fiction and he wasn't afraid to make writers do it his way. According to Theodore Sturgeon, "Writers who always sold their stories to editors were suddenly faced with an editor who sold stories to them instead ... and could he sell!" In particular, Campbell stressed scientific plausibility, telling writers, "If you can't make 'em possible, make 'em logical. If you can't research it, extrapolate it!" Those who could adapt did -- Jack Williamson is one who made the leap easily, and his classic 1938 serial The Legion of Space was only one highlight. Meanwhile, Campbell was always hunting for new writers who would do the stories he wanted. The summer of 1939 was the watershed moment. The July issue featured "Black Destroyer" by A.E. van Vogt as well as "Trends", the first Astounding story by a skinny Brooklyn kid named Isaac Asimov. The August issue included "Life-Line", Robert Heinlein's first story, and September served up "The Ether Breathers" from new writer Theodore Sturgeon.

Other magazines began to emulate what was happening in Astounding while Campbell preached his approach to science fiction through the editorial columns. Over the next decade, he would shape the careers of every major SF writer except Ray Bradbury. "Before Campbell, magazine science fiction was brash, exciting, violent, and so lurid that most of it is unreadable today." — Chris Aylott, Space.com "The genre was bug-eyed monsters, exploding galaxies, stories written like engineering diagrams, and the occasional Wellsian or Stapledonian meditation. Campbell didn't change all of this, but by 1949, the excesses were toned down, the science made more sense, and sometimes even style would grace the printed page."

CAMPBELL'S RADIUM-AGE SF

* "When the Atoms Failed" (Amazing Stories, January 1930). Campbell started out as a writer, making his debut in 1930 — while a student at MIT — with the short story, "When the Atoms Failed". He was only 20 at the time, but before long he was second only to E. E. "Doc" Smith as a smasher of galaxies.

* "Piracy Preferred" (Amazing Stories, June 1930). The first of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).

* "Solarite" (Amazing Stories, November 1930). The 2nd of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).

* "The Black Star Passes" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1930). The 3rd of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).

* "Islands of Space" (Amazing Stories Qaurterly, Spring 1931). The 4th of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).

* "Invaders from the Infinite" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1932). The 5th of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).

POST-RADIUM-AGE SF (not a complete list):

Campbell later changed his writing style and gained new popularity as "Don A. Stuart" in Astounding Stories. "It is rather ironical that Campbell made his name as a writer with the heavy-science type of story, a class of writing which he made obsolete by his stories under the "Don A. Stuart" byline and by his editorship of Astounding/Amazing." — Bleiler

* "Who Goes There?" (Astounding Stories, August 1938) — written as Don A. Stuart. Later the basis of the film The Thing.

* The Black Star Passes (Fantasy, Reading, 1953). The first of a science fiction trilogy dubbed the Arcot-Morey-Wade series after its central characters. The twenty-second century, viewed from 1930: giant propeller-driven aircraft carrying two thousand passengers across the country at 500-plus miles an hour, progressing to molecular-motion drives run by solar heat, to interplanetary voyages and war with Venus, to an "invasion" by a rogue star crossing the solar system. The Black Star Passes was originally published in Amazing Stories as three shorter stories: "Piracy Preferred", "Solarite", and "The Black Star Passes", and the book is divided into these sections. Richard Arcot is the nation's leading physicist, only recently supplanting his father, also a great scientist-inventor. Robert Morey, a brilliant mathematician who complements Arcot's genius, is the son of a transcontinental airline owner and Arcot's best friend. Wade is a chemistry genius who turns to air piracy in the first section of the book. Cured of his mental imbalance, he teams up with Arcot and Morey on their adventures.
READ IT

Partisan generation (1904-13)

2009-01-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

A version of this post originally appeared at the Boston Globe blog Brainiac, on 4/28/08.

I've decided to call those Americans born between 1904 and 1913 "Partisans" after Partisan Review, a journal founded in 1934 in New York by William Phillips (b. 1907) and Philip Rahv (1908). In '38, Partisan Review was relaunched by Rahv, Phillips, and three other members of their generational cohort: Dwight Macdonald (1906), F.W. Dupee (1904), and George L.K. Morris (1905). It became the most influential literary-political journal of both the prewar anti-Stalinist Left (a.k.a. the New York Intellectuals), and the postwar era's chastened liberals and early neoconservatives.

***

I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)

***

Older Partisans came of age at the height of the Roaring Twenties, a period of economic prosperity; laissez faire capitalism had found its true home in America. Thanks to rapid urbanization, for the first time in American history, the population of cities surpassed the population of rural areas. Nothing seemed impossible: television, talking pictures, nonstop transatlantic flights, new land-speed records, frozen food, color cartoons, long-playing records. Prohibition gave rise to speakeasies, which gave rise to the Jazz Age.

Younger Partisans, however, became adults just as the US stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression began. Communists forecast the Death of Capitalism, while Roosevelt's New Deal used government spending — on programs including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps — to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism. The Social Security Act of 1935 was the beginning of a permanent, expanding national program. Organized labor began unionizing the mass production industries, with great success.

Meanwhile, young Americans enlisted to fight on the side of the socialists, communists, liberals, and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. As Continental Europe succumbed to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, European artists and intellectuals fled to America. Two years after Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 touched off World War II, and just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America abandoned neutrality. By the end of the Thirties (1943), the US was ready for war.

Thanks to the Partisans, the Thirties and Forties were a kind of apex not only for American intellectual life, but for American pop culture. Most of Hollywood's golden-age directors (of noir, screwball comedies, and more), a number of whom were refugees from WWII Europe, are Partisans. So are everybody's favorite silver-screen apemen and wolfmen, private eyes and fast-talking dames, dancing scarecrows and yodeling cowboys, not to mention most of the actors who would portray villains on the 1960s Batman show. Plus: The early New Yorker's greatest writers and cartoonists.

Radical politics and an autonomous, experimental, American modernist art were only two of the many possibilities championed by members of this generation. Not only were they Abstract Expressionists and New York Intellectuals, the Partisans were pioneers of big band swing, the Dixieland revival, and the Delta blues;; as well as structuralist anthropology and literary theory. Within the Partisan cohort we find the inventors of the atom bomb, the Skinner box, LSD, Scientology, the instant photo, and the perfect popcorn. We also find the creators of such iconic pop culture characters as Daffy Duck, Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Shrek, and the Grinch.

***

Radium-Age SF writers from this generation include:

* John W. Campbell Jr. ("The Black Star Passes," "Invaders from the Infinite," became the most influential Golden-Age SF editor)
* Jack Williamson ("The Metal Man," The Girl from Mars)
* Robert E. Howard ("Skull-Face," "The Moon of Skulls")
* Eando Binder (Earl Andrew Binder & Otto Oscar Binder, "The First Martian").

NB: Edmond Hamilton is an honorary Hardboiled.

Golden-Age ONLY SF writers from this generation include:

* Lester Dent (Doc Savage series starts in '33), Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Fredric Brown, Jack Finney, Nelson S. Bond, Ross Rocklynne, Clifford D. Simak, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, A.E. van Vogt, A. Bertram Chandler, Eric Frank Russell, Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, Anthem), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Hergé (The Shooting Star), Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes), Louis L'Amour (The Haunted Mesa), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), B.F. Skinner (Walden Two). Honorary Partisan SF writer: George Orwell (1984). Other Partisans include Joseph Campbell, Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Buster Crabbe, without all of whom no Star Wars.

PS: Al Capp's "The Time Capsule," a genuine SF adventure starring Li'l Abner, appeared in Satellite (August 1957).

PS: William S. Burroughs and Donald A. Wollheim, who would push Golden Age SF — by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip José Farmer — into strange new territories, and who decisively influenced the following (postmodern) generation of SF authors, were born immediately after the Partisan cohort, in 1914. Doesn't that seem to prove the usefulness of my periodization scheme?

***

Meet the Partisans.

1904: S. J. Perelman, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Isamu Noguchi, Glenn Miller, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Russel Wright, Coleman Hawkins, Ray Bolger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Meyer Schapiro, B. F. Skinner, Joseph Campbell, Clifford D. Simak, Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Fats Waller, Peter Arno, F.W. Dupee, Johnny Weissmuller, George Stevens, Ralph Bellamy, Tricky Sam Nanton, Phil Harris, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Montgomery, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Elsewhere: Cary Grant, Deng Xiaoping, John Gielgud, Edgar G. Ulmer, Greer Garson, Cecil Beaton, George Balanchine, Willem de Kooning, Ernst Mayr, Pablo Neruda, Earl Andrew Binder (American SF writer). Honorary Hardboileds: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton (SF author).

1905: Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman, John O'Hara, Henry Fonda, Eddie Anderson, Bob Wills, Arthur Crudup, Ernie Bushmiller, Howard Hughes, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Robert Penn Warren, Eddie Condon, Diana Trilling, Agnes de Mille, Kenneth Rexroth, Friz Freleng, Barnett Newman, Lois Mailou Jones, Anna May Wong, Myrna Loy, Arthur Lake, Clara Bow, Joseph Cotten, Thelma Ritter. Elsewhere: Ayn Rand, Greta Garbo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Otto Preminger, Robert Donat, Ray Milland, Christian Dior, Maria von Trapp, Albert Speer, Elias Canetti, Anthony Powell, Eric Frank Russell.

1906: Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, Anthony Mann, Clifford Odets, Carol Reed, Ed Gein, Grace Hopper, William Bendix, Janet Gaynor, Bugsy Siegel, Janet Gaynor, John Carradine, Josephine Baker, Estée Lauder, Fredric Brown, Louise Brooks, Wild Bill Davison, Nelson Goodman, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Eddie Albert, Lou Costello, Robert E. Howard (SF & Fantasy writer), Lon Chaney, Jr., Satchel Paige, Ozzie Nelson, Victoria Spivey. Elsewhere: Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Aristotle Onassis, Billy Wilder, Roberto Rossellini, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Becker, Albert Hofmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Madeleine Carroll, Henny Youngman, Adolf Eichmann, Kurt Godel, T. H. White, John Betjeman, Imam Hassan al Banna, Luchino Visconti, Leonid Brezhnev.

1907: William Phillips, Barbara Stanwyck, Rachel Carson, Cab Calloway, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, James A. Michener, Rosalind Russell, Jessamyn West, Cesar Romero, Buster Crabbe, Robert A. Heinlein, Sunnyland Slim, Milton Caniff, William Shawn, Orville Redenbacher, Gene Autry, William Steig, Burgess Meredith, L. Sprague de Camp, Jimmie Foxx, Charles Alston, Don the Beachcomber. Elsewhere: W.H. Auden, Hergé, Frida Kahlo, Mircea Eliade, Jean Hippolyte, Baldur von Schirach, Laurence Olivier, René Char, Fay Wray, Maurice Blanchot, Run Run Shaw, Astrid Lindgren, Jacques Tati, Jacques Barzun, Peggy Ashcroft.

1908: Philip Rahv, Bette Davis, Richard Wright, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jack Williamson (SF writer), Edward R. Murrow, Louis L'Amour, Theodore Roethke, Buddy Ebsen, Lee Krasner, Carole Lombard, Lionel Hampton, William Maxwell, Ethel Merman, C. Vann Woodward, Nelson S. Bond, Joseph Mitchell, Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, Abraham Maslow, Joseph McCarthy, Mel Blanc, Tex Avery, Milton Berle, Leon "Chu" Berry, Thurgood Marshall. Elsewhere: Arthur Adamov, Anna Magnani, Rex Harrison, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David Lean, Edward Teller, Daisy and Violet Hilton, Michael Redgrave, Ian Fleming, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Claude Lévi-Strauss.

1909: Clement Greenberg, Benny Goodman, James Agee, Lester Young, Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Eudora Welty, Herschel Evans, Barry Goldwater, Bukka White, Gene Krupa, Ann Sothern, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Alex Raymond, Dean Rusk, Art Tatum, Hugh Beaumont, Wallace Stegner, John Fante, Edwin H. Land, Moon Mullican, Mother Maybelle Carter, Burl Ives, Leo Fender, Al Capp (US cartoonist Alfred Gerald Caplin, Li'l Abner), Kay Thompson, Eve Arden, Vivian Vance. Elsewhere: Simone Weil, Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Lowry, Albert R. Broccoli, Eugène Ionesco, Elia Kazan, Errol Flynn, Stanislaw Ulam, Carmen Miranda, James Mason, Jessica Tandy, Colonel Tom Parker, Michael Rennie, Francis Bacon, Victor Borge.

1910: Lionel Abel, Paul Bowles, Howlin' Wolf, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Louis Prima, Shep Fields, Franz Kline, Wright Morris, Big Joe Turner, Fritz Lieber, Paul Sweezy, Russell Lynes, Dizzy Dean, Joan Bennett, John W. Campbell Jr., Charles Olson, Spade Cooley, Dorothea Tanning, Gloria Stuart, Mae Clarke, Mary Wickes, Scatman Crothers, Artie Shaw, T-Bone Walker, E.G. Marshall, William Hanna, John H. Hammond. Elsewhere: Jean Genet, A.J. Ayer, Akira Kurosawa, Diana Mitford, Eero Saarinen, Django Reinhardt, David Niven, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Mother Teresa.

1911: Robert Johnson, Tennessee Williams, Paul Goodman, Louise Bourgeois, Buck Clayton, Ronald Reagan, Babe Zaharias, Ginger Rogers, Elizabeth Bishop, Martin Denny, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hugh Marlowe, L. Ron Hubbard, Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Sullivan, Kenneth Patchen, Roy Rogers, John Sturges, Butterfly McQueen, C. L. Moore, Roy Eldridge, Lee Falk, Jack Finney, Jean Harlow, Phil Silvers, Joseph Barbera, Jack Ruby, Hubert H. Humphrey, Vincent Price, Spike Jones, Bernard Herrmann, Mitch Miller, LaVerne Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Romare Bearden, Ruth Hussey, Lee J. Cobb, Kenneth Patchen, Nicholas Ray, Robert Taylor, Otto Oscar Binder (American SF author). Elsewhere: Emil Cioran, Josef Mengele, Flann O'Brien, J.L. Austin, Czeslaw Milosz, Mervyn Peake, Hume Cronyn, Marshall McLuhan, William Golding, Nino Rota.

1912: Woody Guthrie, Mary McCarthy, Jackson Pollock, Milton Friedman, Gene Kelly, Samuel Fuller, John Cheever, Don Siegel, Julia Child, Studs Terkel, Doris Wishman, Charles Addams, Teddy Wilson, Chuck Jones, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Tuchman, John Cage, Lightnin' Hopkins, Pat Nixon, Bayard Rustin, Karl Malden, Archibald Cox, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Perry Como, Jay Silverheels, Art Linkletter, Minnie Pearl, Gordon Parks, Richard Brooks. Elsewhere: Michelangelo Antonioni, Northrop Frye, Kim Philby, Jacques Ellul, José Ferrer, Eva Braun, Pierre Boulle, Lawrence Durrell, Wernher von Braun, Sonja Henie, Kim Il-sung, A. E. van Vogt, Alan Turing, Pope John Paul I, Franz Jakubowski.

1913: Muddy Waters, Delmore Schwartz, Rosa Parks, William Barrett, Richard Nixon, Frank Tashlin, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Hoffa, Bob Crosby, Jimmy Preston, Lloyd Bridges, Ross Rocklynne, Loretta Young, Jim Backus, William Casey, Richard Helms, Walt Kelly, Frankie Laine, Oleg Cassini, Tyrone Power, Woody Herman, William Reddington Hewlett, David Packard, Dorothy Kilgallen, Red Skelton, W. Mark Felt (Deep Throat), Frances Farmer, John M. Mitchell, Mickey Cohen, Stanley Kramer, Robert Capa, John Garfield, Mary Martin, Victor Mature. Elsewhere: Albert Camus, Anthony Quayle, Max Kaminsky, Philip Guston, Mary Leakey, Paul Ricoeur, Robertson Davies, Menachem Begin, Peter Cushing, Trevor Howard, Vivien Leigh, Benjamin Britten, Hedy Lamarr, Stewart Granger, Lucien Goldmann. Honorary New Gods: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.

***

HONORARY PARTISANS: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903). Daniel J. Boorstin, Howard Fast, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortazar, Dylan Thomas (all 1914).

PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali.

PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW GODS: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.

Pre-Radium-Age SF authors

2009-01-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

1. Edgar Allan Poe
2. Mary Shelley
3. Jules Verne

***

Edgar Allan Poe (TK)

TK -- see Richard Bleiler, ed., Science Fiction Writers

***

Mary Shelley (TK)

TK -- see Richard Bleiler, ed., Science Fiction Writers

***

Jules Verne (TK)

TK -- see Richard Bleiler, ed., Science Fiction Writers

***

Caodaism

2009-01-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

Cao Dai, a then 30-year-old Vietnamese religion and anticolonialist movement lampooned in Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955), offers some insight into the cultural context of Radium-Age SF.

Notes that follow are based on an essay in Cabinet #30.

In 1848, two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, ages 10 and 8, began communicating with spirits — via rapping sounds — in Hydesville, NY. By midcentury, they were a sensation; New Yorkers visited them to hear the ghosts rapping. A craze for seances spread from the US to Scotland, then England, then the continent. From 1853-55, Victor Hugo — then in exile, on the English island of Jersey — conducted scores of seances, with the spirits of Jesus, Dante, Shakespeare, Moses, Moliere, Racine, even the "living phantasm" of Napoleon III. Not long after that, the French began their rule of l'Indochine française. Communicating with spirits spread to Vietnam; in 1923, when a long-lost seance notebook of Hugo's came to light, the news inspired a group of Vietnamese civil servants to conduct a seance.

The members of the Pho loan group, as they were later called, encountered a spirit later identified as "Jade Emperor, Supreme Deity, alias Cao-Dai, religious teacher of the Southern Quarter." Five years earlier, a spirit called Cao Dai — the term used to designate God in Chinese transations of Protestant scripture — had also appeared to Ngo Minh Chieu, the governor of an island in the Gulf of Siam. Cao Dai had revealed a sign to him: an eye surrounded by rays. (A Masonic symbol that would have been familiar to French-educated Vietnamese officials.)

In 1924, Chieu shared his revelations with the Pho loan group, and together they communicated with Lao-Tzu, Li Po, Joan of Arc, Pasteur, Descartes, Lenin, and Victor Hugo. Western figures, in other words, associated with the ongoing Enlightenment movement, but also Eastern sages and poets.

Writing from the afterlife, Victor Hugo sent a message (in alexandrines) about chemistry: "Yes, it's this kind of gas, which they call hydrogen./More or less dense, which makes the healthiest part,/When they say that the Spirit of God swam above the waters,/It's in that sense that the word must be understood." Hugo, it seems, was rationalizing Biblical passages in terms of modern chemistry; the Spirit of God was a lighter-than-air gas! Note that another spiritist work also concerns itself with chemistry: Occult Chemistry: Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds (1908), by the Theosophists Annie Besant (a Promethean) and C.W. Leadbeater.

Joan of Arc was France's best-loved resistance fighter; Hugo was a famous Frenchman vehemently opposed to Napoleon III's empire, which had grown to encompass Vietnam.

Caodaism was officially founded in 1926. The spirits appointed Victor Hugo head of Caodaism's Overseas Mission. By 1928, there were some 200,000 members. By the early 1930s, there were between 500,000 and 1 million Caodaists, as much as a fourth of the population of South Vietnam. Today, there are about 2 million Caodaists in Vietnam, and perhaps 20,000 in the US.

SF authors born 1874-83: 1878

2009-01-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

1. Jean de La Hire

***

Jean de la Hire (1878-1956)

Adolphe d'Espie de La Hire, better known as Jean de La Hire (1878-1956), was a prolific writer of popular adventure series and a pioneer of science fiction with La Roue Fulgurante [The Fiery Wheel] (1908)a proto-space opera. His Le Corsaire Sous-Marin [The Undersea Corsair] (1912-13), was inspired by Jules Verne; Joe Rollon (1919) developed his own take on H. G. Wells' Invisible Man. Alongside the Nyctalope, La Hire created Les Grandes Aventures d'un Boy Scout (1926) in which boy scout Franc-Hardi visits underground realms and other planets.

* Le Mystère des XV (1911, later translated into English as The Nyctalope on Mars). Crime fighter Léo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, is an indomitable Doc Savage-style action hero gifted with night vision. (Nyctalopia is a medical condition diagnosed in antiquity, in which one sees perfectly in the dark.) He also has an artificial heart, which he gained after being tortured and nearly assassinated, and which prevents him from aging. In this, the first of a series of adventures published through the mid-1940s, the Nyctalope battles Oxus (pictured at left), leader of the sinister Society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars... then allies himself with Oxus and the planet's good inhabitants in order to defeat H. G. Wells' evil Martians. Then he gets married. Phew! In subsequent SF adventures, the Nyctalope will travel to the planet Rhea, where he'll end a war between the day- and night-siders; discover a lost civilization of Amazons in Tibet; and have himself cryopreserved so that, 170 years later, he can defeat an enemy who has also been frozen (hello, Demolition Man and Austin Powers). The exploits of this pioneering pulp superhero were originally serialized in French newspapers.
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* Jean de La Hire, Le Mystère des XV (1911, later translated into English as The Nyctalope on Mars). See De La Hire entry.
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* Jean de La Hire, Lucifer (1921-22). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Le Roi de la Nuit (1923). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, L'Amazone du Mont Everest (1925). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, L'Antéchrist (1927). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Titania (1929). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Belzébuth (1930). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, Gorillard (1932). See De La Hire entry.

* Jean de La Hire, L'Assassinat du Nyctalope (1933). See De La Hire entry. Origin story! How he got his artificial heart.

* Jean de La Hire, Les Mystères de Lyon (1933). See De La Hire entry. Origin story! How he got his artificial heart.

* MORE POST-RADIUM-AGE NYCTALOPE STORIES, TOO

EXCERPT FROM TK:

Leo Saint-Clair alias the Nyctalope! Who in the world does not know that name and its reputation? Officially sanctioned, but free to act on his own initiative, he had organized, at his own expense, an expedition that had forced the surrender of the last dissident warlords in Southern Morocco. He had discovered and rescued the King of Spain, who had been abducted and imprisoned by a gang of terrorists.

In China, accompanied by 30 volunteers, he had captured and killed a triumvirate of brilliant but insane masterminds who had been planning to turn their vast Asiatic empire into an hellish anarchist’s haven, subject only to their bloody and barbaric whims. For these deeds, and others no less peremptory, he was famous throughout the world – but he was more famous still because he merited the strange title of
Nyctalope.

He was of medium height, slim and muscular, wiry and athletic–a complete and consummate athlete. His face and profile were Gallic, but without a moustache, like a clean-shaven Vercingetorix. His features were handsome and clean-cut and his expression virile. He had incomparable eyes, which were most often brown, but sometimes green and sometimes yellow. In poor light, the irises of these eyes dilated, for Leo Saint-Clair could see in complete darkness, not as well as in sunlight, but as well as any man might in the evening twilight on the Algerian coast in summer, when a clear sky surrounds the Moon and the swarming stars — well enough to read, without difficulty, the printed text of a newspaper. In semi-darkness, Saint-Clair could see much better, with a more precise perception of details, than in the light of noon. For this man, therefore, darkness did not exist, so long as he had is eyes open. It was largely to this nyctalopic faculty that Saint-Clair owed his success in his mad enterprises – in which it had amused him, more than once, to risk his life.

Top 10 Radium-Age SF Book Covers

2009-01-09T05:28:00.000-08:00

A version of this post originally appeared at io9, on 12/15/08.

Some of the most gorgeous, evocative, and strange science fiction art you've ever seen comes from the covers of novels written between 1904-33, in SF's Radium Age.

I can't afford first editions of Radium-Age SF novels, but I've managed to collect images of their dustjackets and "boards" (as bookbinders call the paper- or cloth-covered stiff cardboard forming a book's covers). The following 10 SF novels boast the most thrilling and evocative cover (board or dustjacket) illustrations and design from 1904-33.

Radium-Age SF's Top Ten Book Covers

1. Norman Matson's Doctor Fogg (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929). A shy and retiring Chicago scientist manages to communicate with an advanced alien civilization, whose scientific secrets he refuses to share with Earth's flawed political powers; and he accidentally "broadcasts" a gorgeous naked blonde alien with whom he falls in love. What does the fun dustjacket illustration have to do with it? Nothing! But I love the speeding meteors, which converge cozily at the center of the image; the void of space absolutely chock-full of stars and planets; the awkwardness of the gentleman at top right compared with the insouciance of the woman beneath. I also admire the crimson-orange/navy blue/silver color scheme. Making the characters' hair, the men's neckties, the woman's dress the same color as the slightly italicized title? An inspired decision. NB: The board illustration is also super-cool: it's a silver planetoid with the title inside.

2. Karel Čapek's Krakatit (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1925). An English translation of the Czech author's 1924 novel. A scientist discovers the most powerful explosive ever, but he refuses to share it with (see above) Earth's flawed political powers. The Art Deco jacket design captures both the excitement and terror of such a discovery. The stylish typeface says, "Not to worry, the future is awesome!" But K. Romney Towndrow's artwork — an explosion rending the very planet in half — says, "Yes, worry." Still, this is a satire, so we're not encouraged to take things too seriously; the illustration kinda reminds us of limelights in a canyon of skyscrapers. It's as though we were approaching a 1925 Hollywood movie opening. (Perhaps Marion Fairfax's The Lost World.) Fun facts: The book was adapted as a 1947 movie (d. Otakar Vávra) and a 1960 opera (Václav Kašlík); both are supposed to be tremendous. The 1925 US edition of Krakatit has a more restrained, but still fun, jacket.

3. Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1917). I'm not impressed with the original book jacket illustrations for Burroughs's Barsoom series. Sure, they feature lone heroes confronting hordes of alien warriors, not to mention half-naked damsels menaced by multi-limbed aliens, but... Frank Frazetta's later work on the same titles demonstrates just how tame the original jacket illustrations were. They make the swords-and-sandals-in-space genre feel middlebrow and uplifting, which is precisely what we hi-lobrows do not enjoy. Peel away the Barsoomian jackets, though, and you'll often find more compelling boards underneath. A Princess of Mars was Burroughs's first published story — it was serialized in 1912, under a pseudonym — and everything great about his writing is captured here. That Arts & Crafts typeface, so pseudo-medieval and chivalrous! That red planet, so mysterious and alluring! Stop the world, Edgar, I want to get off.

4. L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz (Reilly & Britton, Chicago, 1914). Illustrated — like 39 of the 40 canonical Oz editions — by John R. Neill, Baum's picaresque concerns the efforts of the Shaggy Man (a proto-hippie who disdains all possessions except his Love Magnet) to rescue his brother from the Nome King. Tik-Tok, a copper-bodied clockwork man, first appeared in Ozma of Oz (1907), then starred in a 1913 stage musical. In this book, despite Neill's sweet, startling dustjacket illustration, Tik-Tok is (as ever) an emotionless though fiercely loyal servant. Exactly like Karel Čapek's flesh-and-blood "robots." Fun fact: Though often described as the first robot to appear in modern literature (if you don't count living-metal creatures, like the golden maidservants who attend Hephaestus in The Iliad, that is), Tik-Tok was preceded by Edward S. Ellis's Steam Man of the Prairies in 1868, among others.

5. Rudyard Kipling, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909). This SF novella by Kipling — best known for The Jungle Book, Kim, and the Just-So Stories — first appeared in McClure's magazine in 1905. In 2000, lighter-than-air craft traverse the globe; the plot follows a mail dirigible on its adventures. Never Kippled? This ain't the place to start. However, Kipling did get so excited by his own nerdy vision that the book's appendices include ersatz instructions to aviators, not to mention advertisements for imaginary dirigible and aeronautical products. Detailed illustrations and pictorial endpapers make this a gorgeous production, indeed. "A beautiful object, most strange and peculiarly inspiring," writes one rare bookseller, of the 1909 Night Mail. The same could be said of the gilt-and-silver zeppelin that materializes — Millennium Falcon-like — from the star-spangled indigo depths of the book's cloth-covered boards. Wow!

6. Olaf Stapledon's Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, 1935). Perhaps my favorite Argonaut Folly fiction, Odd John concerns the efforts of an international band of teenage and twentysomething "supernormals" (or "wide-awakes") to form an island colony, where they can devote themselves to "world-building" ("individualistic communism," not to mention the founding of a new mutant species) and "intelligent worship." The jacket illustration captures Stapledon's notion of the titular John: half-child and half-philosopher, ruthless but not malicious, "a creature which appeared as urchin but also as sage, as imp but also as infant deity," a fallen angel with a face that is "half monkey, half gargoyle, yet wholly urchin, with its huge cat's eyes, its flat little nose, its teasing lips." Cue David Bowie: "Look at your children/See their faces in golden rays/Don't kid yourself they belong to you/They're the start of a coming race." Homo Superior, that is.

7. E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922). More admired than read, Ouroboros is a linguistically adventurous saga recounting the infinite war between the king of Witchland and the lords of Demonland... on the planet Mercury. Call it Nietzschean SF: somewhere out there, the author would have us believe, another world is possible, one in which the self-overcoming values and worldview of Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, and Scandinavian Vikings will never be corrupted. (As Lord Juss puts it: "For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.") The end of Eddison's novel is also its beginning, hence the title and Keith Henderson's heavy-metal jacket illustration — a snake devouring itself tail-first. Like they so often do in medieval engravings, Celtic sculptures, Egyptian scrolls, Aztec glyphs, and on Agent Scully's lower back. Wish I could afford a 1st edition.

8. George Babcock, Yezad: A Romance of the Unknown (Bridgeport, Conn. & New York: Co-Operative Publishing Co., Inc., 1922). Almost as much as I love the Satan-vs.-Martians jacket illustration ("from painting by the author"), I love the novel's description: "Highly eccentric romance of reincarnation, which includes an account of the colonization of the Moon by near-perfect humans of Mars and the unhappy circumstances of the descent of our ancestors to Earth." Mars, it seems, was once a technologically advanced utopia. Then, 20 million years ago, it lost its atmosphere, so the Martians relocated — but, in doing so, degenerated into our beast-like ancestors. (Isn't this the plot of Jack Kirby's The Eternals? And Scientology?) As for the devil on the dustjacket, the occult point of Babcock's novel is to inform us that we are divided creatures, within whom Bonality and Malality (good and bad aspects) struggle. Moral: Don't let Malality triumph, or it might break Martian-filled eggs with its pitchfork.

9. Harold Steele Mackaye, The Panchronicon (Scribner, New York, 1904). I'm informed that The Panchronicon concerns a pair of New Hampshire spinsters who are given the opportunity to travel through time via a solar-powered airship-thing from the 27th-century. See, first you fly the Panchronicon to the North Pole; then you orbit the Earth widdershins (anti-sunwise, like Christopher Reeve does in the 1978 Superman); and presto, you're in 16th-century England, where you're able to disprove the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory. Meanwhile, your drunken shipmate, Copernicus Droop, can attempt to patent the phonograph and the bicycle. Sounds fun... but as you've perhaps intuited, I'm not convinced that the book is actually worth the effort of reading. Still, the cover board illustration is awesome. If this is what 27th-century time-travel technology looks like — part houseboat from Arthur Ransome's Big Six, part Terry Gilliam machine, part Owlship — then western civilization is inarguably headed in the best of all possible directions. Sign me up.

10. E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1923). "Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity," writes Brian Stableford, in Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, "this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue." Eight thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads, devices which permit us to move through time and space — at the cost of a certain amount of agency. If one of these devices should go awry, a "clockwork man" might appear in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village, behaving strangely. Worse, like the titular character in Philip K. Dick's 1969 story "The Electric Ant," the clockwork man might tinker with his own mechanism. Bad idea! NB: This book is extremely rare; I've never seen a copy for under $500... and that's without the dustjacket. The illustration is like a Bildungsroman cover re-jiggered by Hannah Höch. Cool.

SF authors born 1844-53: 1852

2009-01-08T12:25:00.000-08:00

1. E.P. Mitchell

***

E.P. Mitchell (1852-1927)

* "The Man Without A Body"

* "The Ablest Man in the World" (New York Sun, May 4, 1879). Fisher, a wealthy American traveler, is mistaken for a doctor and taken to the bedside of Baron Savitch, a Russian who is in great pain. In agony, the Baron begs Fisher to unscrew the silver plate in the top of his head, which Fisher begins to do — but just then, the Baron's private doctor, Dr. Rapperschwyll, rushes in and expels Fisher rudely. Upon investigation, Fisher discovers that the Baron is a remarkable genius, the secret mastermind who has been running the Russian empire, where he has produced startling reforms. Fisher then forces Rapperschwyll to confess that he designed a small logical engine far superior to Babbage's calculating machine, and inserted it into the head of Baron Savitch, until that point a congenital idiot. Worried that Savitch (whom we'd now call a cyborg) will become a new Napoleon, Fisher gets him drunk, unscrews his head, and disposes of the logic machine.

* "The Story of the Deluge" -- influenced Serviss

* TK

SF authors born 1844-53: 1847

2009-01-08T07:17:00.000-08:00

1. Bram Stoker

***

Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

In Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker's Fiction (2002), Carol A. Senf makes the point that it isn't just religious artifacts that help defeat vampires (and Gothic, inscrutable, supernatural forces, generally) in Dracula and Stoker's other work (if so, his work would be pure Fantasy) — it's also modern science and technology.

Bette B. Roberts notes: Like other so-called Gothic writers of the late Victorian period — Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), H.G. Wells (The Island of Dr. Moreau) — Stoker is responding to his era's anxieties, not only about the past (previous Gothic novels took place in medieval settings, and featured supernatural events — ghosts, etc.), but the present and future. Late Victorian cultural phenomena — sexual repression, loss of religious faith and moral absolutes, scientific and psychological research, imperialism — animate these novels. Dracula emphasizes the conflict between Enlightenment types (modern Mina the technology-user and independent thinker, Harker, the scientist-doctor-lawyer Van Helsing) who believe that the world is systematic and subject to both reason and human control, and individuals (Dracula, unmodern, dreamy Lucy — the sleepwalker), whose very existence embodies mysteries and the total lack of human control over a powerful and overwhelming universe.

Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik note: Serious Gothic writing deliberately exploits the reader's fear of the "Other" encroaching upon the apparent safety of the post-Enlightenment world and the stability of the post-Enlightenment subject. The boundaries between settled dichotomies become permeable: the quick/the dead, eros/thanatos, pain/pleasure, "real"/"unreal," "natural"/"supernatural," material/transcendent, man/machine, human/vampire, "masculine"/"feminine."

Best known today as the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker also wrote several other works, including The Jewel of Seven Stars, Lady Athlyne, and The Lair of the White Worm. In his exploration of supernatural subjects, such as vampirism, he is clearly a Gothic writer. The fantastic elements of his novels seem very much at odds with the world of science. Stoker, nonetheless, draws upon a large body of scientific theory and technological innovation throughout his writings. This book studies his blending of Gothic subjects with emerging discoveries in science and technology. The volume begins with an overview of Stoker's familiarity with scientific and technical developments. It then examines the role of science and technology in his various works, which demonstrate his familiarity with civil engineering, anthropology, physics, chemistry, and archaeology. While many of his writings seem to offer a rather uncritical celebration of science and its applications, some works, such as The Jewel of Seven Stars, reveal what happens when science oversteps its bounds. Stoker emerges as an early writer of science fiction whose work thoughtfully considers the place of science in society.

* The Jewel of the Seven Stars — reservations about science, popular Egyptology, the power of the natural world

* The Snake's Pass, The Mystery of the Sea, Lady Athlyne, The Lady of the Shroud, The Lair of the White Worm — technological salvation

MORE TK

Promethean generation (1844-53)

2009-01-08T05:54:00.000-08:00

"There are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity — who would themselves not so long before have been burned as wizards." So opines Van Helsing, in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Like other Gothic novelists of the 1844-53 cohort (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, honorary member Oscar Wilde), Stoker recognized that the post-Enlightenment world of the late 19th century, with its settled dichotomies — "real"/"unreal," "natural"/"supernatural," material/transcendent — was an all-too unstable one. He exploited contemporary readers' inchoate anxieties about the dialectic of Enlightenment: the over-reaching of scientists and psychologists into dangerous areas of knowledge, modern man's irrational faith that the world is systematic and subject to both reason and human control. Call such anxieties, and this generation: Promethean.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a son of the Titans, who created mankind out of clay, and was punished for stealing fire (understood metaphorically to mean: forbidden knowledge of writing, medicine, science, mathematics, agriculture; or any advanced technology) from Zeus. Because of his defiance and daring (metaphorically, for example in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: the triumph of intellect over tyrannical church, monarchy, patriarchy), mankind is punished: In Hesiod's version of the story, Zeus requires mankind to labor in order to survive. Hesiod also claims that after Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora to Prometheus' brother Epimetheus, bearing a box (the original technological "black box"?) full of "evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death."

The defiance and daring of this generation, their scorn for religious, political, and sociocultural tyranny, not to mention the "proper" limits of knowledge, knew no limits. Two of the greatest Prometheans — inventors Edison and Westinghouse — made stealing the fire from the gods not a metaphor but a reality. Nietzsche declared that God was dead; Lautréamont's fictional character, Maldoror, has forsaken God and mankind. Parnell led the movement for Irish self-government; Annie Besant was a women's rights activist, and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule. Anarchists Albert and Lucy Parsons helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). The Decadents — in France, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and in England, Oscar Wilde — declared themselves to be "against nature." The James-Younger gang were guerrilla fighters turned outlaw; the anarchistic playwright Strindberg's first play was titled The Outlaw.

Other members of this generation — Zeus-like — reacted violently against the Promethean tendencies of the era: Tsar Alexander III was a particularly retrograde monarch. Max Nordau's Degeneration was an influential attack on so-called degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of various social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization. The term "comstockery," meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality", is named after a Promethean; while Carrie Nation claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars.

Like the mother of modern SF, Mary Shelley, who subtitled Frankenstein (1818), "The Modern Prometheus," SF writers of the 1844-53 cohort question whether it's wise for humankind to approach ever more closely the omniscience and omnipotence of God or Nature. Their fictions mirror contemporary anxieties about whether modern science and technology, from the actual (electrical devices) to the merely possible (robots), will ultimately prove helpful or harmful.

***

I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)

***

Promethean SF writers:

* Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
* Bram Stoker (Dracula)
* Robert Grant (All the King's Men: A Tale of To-Morrow — with coauthors)
* Julian Hawthorne ("June, 1993," The Cosmic Courtship)
* Godfrey Sweven (Riallaro, Limanora)
* Garrett P. Serviss (A Columbus of Space, The Second Deluge)
* Anatole France ("Through the Horn or the Ivory Gate," The White Stone)
* George Haven Putnam (published Radium-Age SF; wrote The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy)
* E.P. Mitchell ("The Man Without A Body," "The Ablest Man in the World," "The Story of the Deluge")

***

1844: Friedrich Nietzsche (Philosopher, incredibly influential on subsequent generations), Paul Verlaine (Poet, leader of symbolist poetry movement), Abdu'l-Bahá (Baha'i leader), Karl Benz (invented the automobile), Sarah Bernhardt (French theatre actress, international sensation), Anthony Comstock (New York Society for the Suppression of Vice), Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (painted dogs playing poker), Anatole France (French novelist), Henry J. Heinz (founder of Heinz Foods), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Poet), Henri Rousseau (French painter of the exotic), Aaron Montgomery Ward (founded Montgomery Ward), Cole Younger (the brains of the James-Younger Gang). Honorary members of preceding generation: TBD

1845: Tsar Alexander III (Tsar of Russia, 1881-94), Georg Cantor (Mathematician, founder of set theory), Walter Crane (British children's illustrator), Ludwig II (Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, 1864-86), Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (Physicist, discovered X-Rays)

1846: Comte de Lautréamont (Poet, Les Chants de Maldoror was a major influence on the Surrealists and Situationists), George Westinghouse (Inventor, Edison's chief rival), Charles Stewart Parnell (Irish Nationalist leader), F. H. Bradley (Philosopher, Appearance and Reality), Buffalo Bill (Wild West showman), Jack Daniel (Moonshine magnate), Karl Faberge (Maker of jewelry and gem eggs), Julian Hawthorne (Author), Godfrey Sweven (Author), Kate Greenaway (British illustrator), Wilhelm Maybach (designed the Mercedes), Carrie Nation (Temperance crusader), Henryk Sienkiewicz (Author, Quo Vadis?)

1847: Thomas Edison (Inventor, major influence on SF), Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor of the telephone), Bram Stoker (Author, Dracula), Annie Besant (Theosophist & Social Activist; her brother-in-law, Walter, wrote SF), John Bates Clark (Economist, Philosophy of Wealth), Adolph Coors (Founder of Coors Brewery), Galileo Ferraris (Physicist, invented the induction motor), Jesse James (Bank robber, with James Gang), Joseph Pulitzer (Pulitzer Prize), Albert Pinkham Ryder (idyllic American painter), Paul von Hindenburg (Namesake of doomed zeppelin)

1848: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Decadent author, À Rebours), Brooks Adams (Historian, The Law of Civilization and Decay), Arthur Balfour (UK Prime Minister, 1902-05), Wyatt Earp (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), Paul Gauguin (French post-impressionist painter), Joel Chandler Harris (Novelist, Uncle Remus), Albert Parsons (Anarchist, Haymarket Martyr), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Leading 19th c. American sculptor), Louis Comfort Tiffany (Stained glassmaker, jewelry designer)

1849: Max Nordau (Zionist and cultural critic, Degeneration), Ivan Pavlov (Scientist, studied conditioned reflexes), Jacob A. Riis (Journalist, How the Other Half Lives), Charles F. Brush (Inventor, electrical pioneer), Luther Burbank (Botanist and plant breeder), Frances Hodgson Burnett (Novelist, Little Lord Fauntleroy), John Ambrose Fleming (Engineer, invented the vacuum tube), Henry Clay Frick (Robber baron, Johnstown flood), Sarah Orne Jewett (Author), Emma Lazarus (Poet), William Osler (Doctor, father of psychosomatic medicine), James Whitcomb Riley (Poet), August Strindberg (Playwright), Alfred von Tirpitz (German admiral, pushed U-boats), John William Waterhouse (British Pre-Raphaelite painter)

1850: Robert Louis Stevenson (Novelist, Treasure Island), Ferdinand Braun (Physicist, early developer of radio), St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (Missionaries of the Sacred Heart), Pat Garrett (Killed Billy the Kid), Eugen Goldstein (Physicist, cathode rays), Samuel Gompers (First President of the AFL), Lafcadio Hearn (Author), Henry Cabot Lodge (US Senator from Massachusetts, 1893-1924), Tomas Masaryk (Czech President 1920-35), Guy de Maupassant (French short story writer), Octave Mirbeau (Novelist, Le Jardin des supplices), Charles Richet
Scientist, studied anaphylaxis and ectoplasm), Augusto Righi (Physicist, electromagnetic waves)

1851: Kate Chopin (Novelist), Garrett P. Serviss (Astronomy popularizer, SF author), Melvil Dewey (Creator of Dewey Decimal System), Charles Dow (Journalist, Dow of Dow Jones), Ferdinand Foch (Allied Supreme Commander WWI), Ernest Howard Griffiths (Physicist, The Thermal Measurement of Energy), Charles Hires (Root beer), Doc Holliday (Wyatt Earp's reliable friend)

1852: Henri Becquerel (Physicist, discoverer of radioactivity), Lady Gregory (Playwright), Edwin Abbey (American artist in London), Herbert Henry Asquith (UK Prime Minister 1908-16), Antoni Gaudi (Architect), Robert Grant (Novelist, Unleavened Bread), Calamity Jane (Performance Artist, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show), John Harvey Kellogg (Doctor, Battle Creek Sanitarium), Emperor Meiji (Emperor of Japan, 1867-1912), Albert A. Michelson (Physicist, calculated the speed of light), F. W. Woolworth (Five and dime magnate), E.P. Mitchell (newspaper editor, SF writer)

1853: Henri Alexandre Deslandres (Astronomer, spectroheliograph), Hendrik Lorentz (Physicist, theory of EM radiation), Bat Masterson (frontier peace officer), Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (Physicist, discovered superconductivity), Lucy Parsons (Anarchist labor organizer), Howard Pyle (Art Nouveau children's book illustrator), Elihu Thomson (Inventor, electric welding and A/C motors). Honorary Plutonians: Cecil Rhodes (De Beers), possibly Vincent van Gogh (Post- or Neo-Impressionist painter).

***

HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854). Not sure about 1834-43 generation yet.

PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE 1834-43 GENERATION: TBD

PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PLUTONIAN (1854-63) GENERATION: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh.

SF authors born 1834-43: 1838

2009-01-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

Note: Influential SF authors born in the Thirties are included on this blog, but they're rarely, if ever, Radium-Age authors themselves.

1. Edwin Abbott Abbott
2. Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

***

Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838-1926)

English clergyman, educator, theologian, and Shakespearean scholar. Best known as the author of the mathematical satire and religious allegory Flatland (1884).

Dr. Abbott's liberal inclinations in theology were prominent both in his educational views and in his books. His Shakespearian Grammar (1870) is a permanent contribution to English philology. In 1885 he published a life of Francis Bacon. His theological writings include three anonymously published religious romances - Philochristus (1878), Onesimus (1882), and Sitanus (1906). Other works, too.

* Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (A Square: Flatland, Seely & Co., London, 1884).

The story is about a two-dimensional world referred to as Flatland. The unnamed narrator, a humble square (the social caste of gentlemen and professionals), guides us through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. The Square has a dream about a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland), and attempts to convince the realm's ignorant monarch of a second dimension, but finds that it is essentially impossible to make him see outside of his eternally straight line.

The narrator is then visited by a three-dimensional sphere, which he cannot comprehend until he sees Spaceland for himself. This sphere, who remains nameless, visits Flatland at the turn of each millennium to introduce a new apostle to the idea of a third dimension in the hopes of eventually educating the population of Flatland of the existence of Spaceland. From the safety of Spaceland, they are able to observe the leaders of Flatland secretly acknowledging the existence of the sphere and prescribing the silencing of anyone found preaching the truth of Spaceland and the third dimension. After this proclamation is made, many witnesses are massacred or imprisoned (according to caste).

After the Square's mind is opened to new dimensions, he tries to convince the Sphere of the theoretical possibility of the existence of a fourth (and fifth, and sixth ...) spatial dimension. Offended by this presumption and incapable of comprehending other dimensions, the Sphere returns his student to Flatland in disgrace.

He then has a dream in which the Sphere visits him again, this time to introduce him to Pointland. The point (sole inhabitant, monarch, and universe in one) perceives any attempt at communicating with him as simply being a thought originating in his own mind (cf. Solipsism).

The Square recognizes the connection between the ignorance of the monarchs of Pointland and Lineland with his own (and the Sphere's) previous ignorance of the existence of other dimensions.

Once returned to Flatland, the Square finds it difficult to convince anyone of Spaceland's existence, especially after official decrees are announced - anyone preaching the lies of three dimensions will be imprisoned (or executed, depending on caste). Eventually the Square himself is imprisoned for just this reason.

In the book, men are portrayed as polygons whose social class is directly proportional to the number of sides they have; therefore, triangles, having only three sides, are at the bottom of the social ladder and are considered generally unintelligent, while the Priests are composed of multi-sided polygons whose shapes approximate a circle, which is considered to be the "perfect" shape. On the other hand, the female population is comprised only of lines, who are required by law to sway back and forth and sound a "peace-cry" as they walk, because when a line is coming towards an observer in a 2-D world, it appears merely as a point. The Square talks of accounts where men have been killed (both by accident and on purpose) by being stabbed by women. This explains the need for separate doors for women and men in buildings. Also, colors in Flatland were banned, when lower classes painted themselves to appear to be higher ordered.

In the world of Flatland, classes are distinguished using the "Art of Feeling" and the "Art of Sight Recognition". Feeling, practised by the lower classes and women, determines the configuration of a person by feeling one of their angles. The "Art of Sight Recognition", practised by the upper classes, is aided by "Fog", which allows an observer to determine the depth of an object. With this, polygons with sharp angles relative to the observer will fade out more rapidly than polygons with more gradual angles. The population of Flatland can "evolve" through the Law of Nature, which states: "a male child shall have one more side than his father, so that each generation shall rise (as a rule) one step in the scale of development and nobility. Thus the son of a Square is a Pentagon; the son of a Pentagon, a Hexagon; and so on."

This rule is not the case when dealing with isosceles triangles (Soldiers and Workmen), for their evolution occurs through eventually achieving the status of an equilateral triangle, removing them from serfdom. The smallest angle of an isosceles triangle gains thirty minutes (half a degree) each generation. Additionally, the rule does not seem to apply to many-sided polygons; the sons of several hundred-sided polygons will often develop fifty or more sides more than their parents.

In the book, the three-dimensional Sphere has the ability to stand inches away from a Flatlander and observe them without being seen, can remove Flatland objects from closed containers and teleport them via the third dimension without traversing the space in between, and is capable of seeing and touching the inside and outside of everything in the two-dimensional universe; at one point, the Sphere gently pokes the narrator's intestines and launches him into three dimensions as proof of his powers.

As a satire, Flatland offered pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. However, the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions; in a foreword to one of the many publications of the novella, noted science writer Isaac Asimov described Flatland as "The best introduction one can find into the manner of perceiving dimensions."[citation needed] As such, the novella is still popular amongst mathematics, physics and computer science students.

Several films have been made from the story, including a feature film in 2007 called Flatland. Other efforts have been short or experimental films, including one narrated by Dudley Moore and a short film with Martin Sheen titled Flatland: The Movie.

With the advent of modern science fiction from the 1950s to present day, Abbott's Flatland has seen a revival in popularity, especially among science fiction and cyberpunk fans. While not, strictly speaking, science fiction (it could more accurately be called "math fiction"), Flatland has often been categorized as such. Many works have have been inspired by the novella, including novel sequels, short films, and a feature film called Flatland.

***

Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889)

French poet, essayist, fiction writer. A member of the Breton nobility, descended from last Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. One of the founders of the Symbolist movement in France; pionner on women's rights.

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889), pioneer of the Symbolist Movement, is known for his proto-science fiction works Axel (1885) and L'Eve Future (1886) and his "Cruel Tales" collected in The Scaffold. He also chronicled the colorful adventures of Doctor Bonhomet collected in The Vampire Soul. Poet Paul Verlaine called Villiers' works a "genial melange of irony, metaphysics and terror" and translator Brian Stableford dubs it "a bizarre literary landmark."

* Tomorrow's Eve (L'Eve future, 1886; full periodical publication in La vie moderne, 1884). The novel credited with popularizing the word "android." A philosophical novel using materials of science mythically to consider questions of personality and identity; in his preface, the author makes it clear that he is not writing about the living Edison, but the myth of Edison as the great magician of science. Edison is visited in Menlo, NJ, by a young Englishman, Lord Cecil Ewald, who is near-suicidal because although he lusts after his voluptuous mistress, Alicia Clary, he cannot tolerate her banal, vulgar personality. Edison provides Ewald with an android (French andreide) that will be a perfect reproduction of Alicia, but will have a more pleasing personality. Edison demonstrates Hadaly, an android he invented after realizing that men are attracted to artificial aspects of women — false breasts and hips, wigs and dentures — so why not go all the way artificial? (Hadaly is constructed of artificial flesh over a metal skeleton, and she runs on electric batteries.) Edison lures Alicia to his lab, hypnotizes her, then remodels Hadaly to look exactly like her. (Hello, Stepford Wives.) Here, things get confusing. Ewald confuses Hadaly for the real Alicia; Hadaly is activated by the submerged personality of the clairvoyant wife of a friend of his; Hadaly tells Ewald she is actually a free-floating spirit who used Edison to construct a body for her — but he wonders whether Edison programmed her to say so. (Hello, Philip K. Dick!) When Hadaly is accidentally destroyed, Ewald misses not her body but her personality. Everett F. Bleieler writes: "A remarkable work that deserves more attention than it has received... it is undoubtedly to be ranked in quality and thought-provoking power with Frankenstein, Erewhon, and We."

SF authors born 1844-53: 1850

2009-01-07T05:53:00.000-08:00

1. Edward Bellamy
2. Guy de Maupassant

***

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898)

Edward Bellamy was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, set in the year 2000. Edward Bellamy was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. His father was Rufus King Bellamy, a Baptist minister and a descendant of Joseph Bellamy (an American Congregationalist pastor and a leading preacher, author, educator and theologian in New England in the second half of the Eighteenth century). He studied law, but left the practice and worked briefly in the newspaper industry in New York and in Springfield, Massachusetts. He left journalism and devoted himself to literature, writing both short stories and novels. He was the cousin of Francis Bellamy, most famous for creating the Pledge of Allegiance.

His books include Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), Miss Ludington's Sister (1884), The Duke of Stockbridge (1900), and the utopian novels Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), and its sequel, Equality (1897).

According to Erich Fromm, Looking Backward is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America." It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. In the book Looking Backward an upper class man from 1887 awakens in 2000 from a hypnotic trance to find himself in a socialist utopia. It influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement." Several "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up all over the United States for discussing and propagating the book's ideas. This political movement came to be known as Nationalism. His novel also inspired several utopian communities.

Bellamy owes many aspects of his philosophy to a previous reformer and author, Laurence Gronlund, who published his treatise The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism in 1884. A short story, "The Parable of the Water-Tank," from the book Equality, published in 1897, was popular with a number of early American socialists. Less successful than its prequel, Equality continues the story of Julian West as he adjusts to life in the future. Several hundred additional utopian novels were published in the US from 1889 to 1900, due in part to the book's popularity.

READ BELLAMY

* Looking Backward (Ticknor, Boston, 1888). A magically preserved survivor of the 19th century converses with dwellers in the communistic utopia of the year 2000.

The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up more than a century later. He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts) but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the U.S.A. has been transformed into a socialist utopia. This book outlines Bellamy's complex thoughts about improving the future.

The young man readily finds a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age, including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous delivery of goods from stores to homes. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45. The productive capacity of America is commonly owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion about an issue and Leete explains it.

Although Bellamy's novel did not discuss technology in detail, commentators frequently compare Looking Backward with actual social and technological developments. For example, Julian West is taken to a store which (with its descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste in a similar way to the consumers' cooperatives of his own day based on the Rochdale Principles of 1844) somewhat resembles a modern warehouse club. He additionally introduces the concept of credit cards in chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25, and 26 (though their description more closely resembles modern day debit cards). Bellamy also predicts classical music and sermons being available in the home through cable "telephone."

Though Bellamy tended to stress the independence of his work, Looking Backward shares relationships and resemblances with several earlier works — most notably, the anonymous The Great Romance (1881), John Macnie's The Diothas (1883), Lawrence Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), and August Bebel's Woman in the Past, Present, and Future (1886). Critic R. L. Shurter has gone as far as to argue that "Looking Backward is actually a fictionalized version of The Cooperative Commonwealth and little more."

The success of Looking Backward provoked a spate of sequels, parodies, satires, and skeptical dystopian responses. A partial list includes:

* Looking Further Forward: An Answer to "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy (1890), by Richard C. Michaelis
* Looking Backward and What I Saw (1890), by W. W. Satterlee
* Looking Further Backward (1890), by Arthur Dudley Vinton
* Speaking of Ellen (1890), by Linn Boyd Porter
* Looking Beyond (1891), by Ludwig A. Geissler
* Mr. East's Experiences in Mr. Bellamy's World (1891), by Conrad Wilbrandt
* Looking Within: The Misleading Tendencies of "Looking Backward" Made Manifest (1893), by J. W. Roberts
* Young West: A Sequel to Edward Bellamy's Celebrated Novel "Looking Backward" (1894), by Solomon Schindler
* Looking Forward (1906), by Harry W. Hillman.

The result was a "battle of the books" that lasted through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. William Morris's 1890 utopia News from Nowhere was partly written in reaction to Bellamy's utopia, which Morris did not find congenial.

Beyond the purely literary sphere, Bellamy's descriptions of utopian urban planning had a practical influence on Ebenezer Howard's founding of the garden city movement in England, and on the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles.

During the Great Strikes of 1877, Eugene V. Debs opposed the strikes and argued that there was no essential necessity for the conflict between capital and labor. However, Debs was influenced by Bellamy's book to turn to a more socialist direction. He soon helped to form the American Railway Union. With supporters from the Knights of Labor and from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike in June 1894. This came to be known as the Pullman Strike.

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***

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

A popular 19th-century French writer considered one of the fathers of the modern short story.

Pre-Radium-Age

* "Le Horla" (1887, translated into English, 1890.) An inspiration for Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. The narrator, an independently wealthy gentleman, waves at a Brazilian steamer on the Seine. He (and some of his servants) are afflicted with feelings of malaise, culminating in sleeplessness, nightmares, and general inanition. There are discussions about the unseen world and a striking example of post-hypnotic suggestion. The narrator concludes that the human will is not integral, but may easily be shattered or manipulated by outside forces. The sense of an invisible being grows, and the narrator observes that something is drinking the water and milk from his bedside table while he sleeps. Gradually the invisible being seizes the narrator's will, controlling his actions and preventing him from leaving his house. Learning that in Brazil there is a plague of disorders like his, the narrator draws the conclusion that the being came to him from the Brazilian ship on the Seine. He speculates that the invisible beings are not an incubus (i.e., which would make this a Fantasy tale) but a new race of creatures destined to supplant man on earth. The narrator burns down his house, but gets the uncanny feeling that the horla is still with him... and the only way out is suicide. NB: The term "horla," which echoes "hors la," is usually taken to mean something "outside" in the sense of being beyond our senses.

The Sleeper Awakes, Suspended Animation, Time Travel

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Pre-Radium-Age

* Julian Hawthorne, "June, 1993" (Cosmopolitan, February 1893). See Hawthorne entry.

1904-13

* TK

1914-23

* TK

1924-33

* William Salisbury, The Squareheads, The Story of a Socialized State: A Futuristic Novel (The Independent Publishing Co.: New Rochelle, NY, 1929). Norman Thraley, a stunt aviator experimenting with a rocket-propelled plane loses consciousness and wakes up in 2330. He has been in a coma for over 400 years. America is now the utopian/dystopian society of Usofmera, where everything is "four-square" — literally. Trees, fruit, architeture, even humans are cubic. Everyone walks in lock-step, the majority is always right. The state provides exactly the same food and housing for all. Etcetera. (See description in Science-Fiction: The Early Years.) More TK.

* John Lionel Tayler, The Last of My Race: A Dream of the Future (London, 1924). The narrator, a medical man of the 20th century, wakes up in the year 302,930. He is encouraged to write down his activities and sensations — then notices that the seeming humans who attend to his wants are perfect automatons. So are the flowers in the garden, and a tortoise that creeps about. (Hello, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?...) He also notices that the house — modeled after a 20th century home — is a sort of living organism that is aware of his thoughts and moods and responds to them. A superman — so evolved that the narrator can hardly bear his presence — pays him a call. He explains that 20th-century mankind (Homo ignorans) became extinct because his brain grew so large that his giant head prevented its passage through the birth canal. We learn all about the evolution of superior forms of mankind; very proto-Stapledon.

* John Bertin, Brood of Helios (Weird Stories, May 1932). Time trave to four million years in the future.

SF authors born 1844-53: 1846

2009-01-07T05:00:00.001-08:00

1. Julian Hawthorne
2. Godfrey Sweven

***

Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934)

Julian is the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the giants of 19th century literature. He was a journalist, (not particularly talented) writer of sensational fiction, and social studies. After the turn of the century he became entangled in fraudulent ventures and served a prison term.

NB: Nathaniel Hawthorne was a prolific author of supernatural and SF fiction, including such classics as "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "The New Adam and Eve," "The Artist of the Beautiful," "Rappaccini's Daughter."

Pre-Radium-Age SF:

* "An Automatic Enigma" (Belgravia, May 1878). Borderline SF, a reworking of "The Headless Horseman." In 1873, in a small American town, local beauty Nellie and visiting Ned are attracted to each other. But Nellie accuses Ned of being too much like an automaton, they quarrel, and he leaves town. Some months later, the famous Dutch Automaton comes to town, and performs human-like feats on stage... including tossing a bouquet to Nellie. Later, when Nellie is out with her new suitor, the automaton assaults him and kidnaps Nellie. We're led to suspect that the automaton was really Ned in disguise.

* "June, 1993" (Cosmopolitan, February 1893). A reworking of "Rip Van Winkle." The narrator, who has been reading accounts of sleepers who have awakened in future utopias, has fallen into a long slumber out of boredom, and does not awaken until 1993. The central fact of future life is the flying machine, which has revolutionized society: the American population commutes from far-flung, mostly self-sufficient homesteads; there are only four major cities, no villages or towns, and various pleasure-centers; national governments and boundaries have ceased to exist, and the races have mixed. Unusual in postulating future social evolution on the basis of technology, rather than evoking politics or economics.

* "The Electrical Engineer's Story," Six Cent Sam's (The Price-McGill Co.: St. Paul, 1893).

* "My Own Story," Six Cent Sam's (The Price-McGill Co.: St. Paul, 1893).

1904-13

* Hawthorne edited the 10-volume The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories (The Review of Reviews Co.: New York, 1909). Sensational fiction of various sorts, much translated from roughly contemporary Continental sources. The Modern French volume includes Guy de Maupassant's classic SF and horror tale, "The Horla."

1914-23

* The Cosmic Courtship (All-Story, November 24—15 December, 1917). An example of mixed Fantasy and SF. In 2001, Manhattan has grown enormously, with huge skyscrapers and individual flying machines. Women have equal rights. Miriam Mayne answers a psychic message and meets Mary Faust, an expert in interplanetary communication and matter transmission. Miriam's etheric body (or something like that) is accidentally projected to Saturn, while her unconscious body remains behind; her fiance, Jack Paladin, follows her on the one-way voyage. Adventures ensue.

****

Godfrey Sweven (1846-1935)

Godfrey Sweven — pseudonym of John Macmillan Brown — was a Scotland-born New Zealand educator, historian, administrator.

Pre-Radium-Age

* Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles (Putnam: New York, 1901). The first part of a long description of ideal societies, in this volume mostly satirical of aspects of modern civilization and humanity in general. Not strongly science fictional — would be considered a utopia, not SF. But needed for full comprehension of the second volume. More TK.

* Limanora: The Island of Progress (Putnam: New York, 1903). Second volume. An extraordinarily detailed survey of an ideal society based on individual and cultural perfectibility, with a total faith in scientific progress and a complete orientation toward the future. Everett Bleiler says: "Limanora is one of the great master-works of science-fiction. It is not easy reading and is very long, but in imagination and profundity (whether one agrees with it or not) it overshadows similar works and is probably the greatest of all early utopian novels."

1904-13

SF authors born 1844-53: 1844

2009-01-07T04:45:00.001-08:00

1. G.H.P. (George Haven Putnam)

***

G.H.P. (George Haven Putnam) (1844-1930)

American publisher. Head of major publishing company, George P. Putnam's Sons. Important advocate of international copyright. Author of Memories of a Publisher (1865-1915) (1916), and wrote the now forgotten children's classic The Little Gingerbread Man (1901).

* The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy (Putnam: New York, 1894). The narrator's eighth and ninth children are twins, so — after experimenting with steam, compressed air, and electricity as power sources — he designs and builds a clockwork "artificial mother." It works beautifully, making soothing noises and rocking objects in its arms. While his wife is out, the narrator gives the twins to the artificial mother, which handles them nicely. But his wife returns, becomes upset at what she sees, and tries to take the babies away. The clockwork device fights back, begins to self-destruct. But: It was all a dream.

SF authors born 1834-43: 1842

2009-01-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

Note: Influential SF authors born in the Thirties are included on this blog, but they're rarely, if ever, Radium-Age authors themselves.

1. Ambrose Bierce

***

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short-story writer and satirist. Today, he is best known for his short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and his satirical dictionary, The Devil's Dictionary.

In 1887, he published a column called The Prattle and became one of the first regular columnists and editorialists to be employed on William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, eventually becoming one of the most prominent and influential among the writers and journalists of the West Coast. He remained associated with Hearst Newspapers until 1906.

He wrote realistically of the things he had seen in the war in such stories as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "Killed at Resaca," and "Chickamauga". Bierce was considered a master of "Pure" English by his contemporaries, and virtually everything that came from his pen was notable for its judicious wording and economy of style. In addition to his ghost and war stories, he published several volumes of poetry and verse. His Fantastic Fables anticipated the ironic style of grotesquerie that turned into a genre in the 20th century.

One of Bierce's most famous works is his much-quoted book, The Devil's Dictionary, originally an occasional newspaper item which was first published in book form in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book. It consists of satirical definitions of English words which lampoon cant and political double-talk.

In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain a firsthand perspective on that country's ongoing revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, the elderly writer disappeared without a trace.

* "Moxon's Master," in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. 3: Can Such Things Be? (Walter Neale: Washington, 1909). One of two SF stories added to the enlarged edition of Bierce's 1893 story collection. The narrator visits his friend, Moxon, in San Jose. They discuss the nature of life and the properties of mechanism — specifically, what it what it is to be "thinking" and "intelligent" — while in the background there is a complex by-play with something in the next room. The narrator leaves, then returns to the house and heads toward the machine room, where he finds Moxon playing a chess game with an automaton. Moxon wins the game, and the automaton kills him in an apparent fit of rage. The narrator later questions whether what he saw was real, although he does not directly deny it. This sequence of events is usually interpreted as a story about a vicious robot that murdered its inventor; Bleiler, however, thinks it's more likely to be a murder mystery in which the young man was skillfully misled by the killers.
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Bierce books:

* The Fiend's Delight (1873)
* Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874)
* The Dance of Death (with Thomas A. Harcourt and William Rulofson, as William Herman) (1877)
* Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also known as In the Midst of Life) (1891)
* Black Beetles in Amber (1892)
* The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter (1892)
* Can Such Things Be? (1893)
* Fantastic Fables (1899)
* The shadow on the dial, and other essays (1909)
* The Devil's Dictionary (1911) (first published in book form as The Cynic's Wordbook, 1906)
* Collected Works (1909)
* Write It Right (1909)
* A Horseman in the Sky, A Watcher by the Dead, The Man and the Snake (1920)??
* A Vision of Doom: Poems by Ambrose Bierce (1980)

Humanoid Robots, Androids, Cyborgs

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During science fiction's Radium Age (1904-33), writers dreamed up mechanical and quasi-organic humanoids so compelling that they continue to haunt today's scifi, forcing us to ask what it means to be human.

Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don't forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or "robots" (a term introduced in 1921) that might free us from the burden of labor... or else run amuck and destroy/enslave us. Before Yul Brynner, Daryl Hannah, and Brent Spiner played troubled biomechs, replicants, and skin-jobs in Westworld, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: TNG, SF novels and stories published from 1904-33 asked what, exactly, distinguishes an "android" - a term, meaning "human-like," first popularized in an 1886 French SF novel - from one of us? And before the Six Million Dollar Man, the Terminator, and the Borg popularized the obscure 1960s notion of the "cyborg," PGA SF authors had already inserted human brains into machines, and vice versa, creating existential crises of every variety for their characters.

Here's a list - in no particular order - of 10 of the most compelling and uncanny robot, android, and cyborg-oriented novels, stories, and plays that were published in the decades immediately before SF's so-called Golden Age. There's a more complete list at the end, too. A version of this post originally appeared at io9.com.

1) L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907). The third Oz book, and the first in which we meet one of Baum's most delightful characters: "He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was round as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his head and limbs were copper, and these were jointed or hinged to his body in a peculiar way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armor worn by knights in days of old." From a printed card attached to its neck, Dorothy learns that Tiktok is a "Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking Mechanical Man Fitted with out Special Clock-Work Attachment. Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live." Though one of the earliest fictional appearances of true machine intelligence, Tiktok (above, with Nome King) is not a free agent like his (equally metallic, yet living) new friend, the Tin Man, to whom he confides that "When I am wound up I do my du-ty by go-ing just as my ma-chin-er-y is made to go." Fun fact: Baum revisited this story for his 1913 musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, in which Tiktok sings: "Always work and never play!/Don't demand a cent of pay!"
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2) Karel Čapek, R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots (1921 premiere as R.U.R.: Rossumovi univerzální roboti; in translation, 1923). This surreal morality play takes place in the 1960s or so, and it's set in the factory of a (USA?) manufacturing concern that has shipped hundreds of thousands of "Robots" - biological humanoids designed for cheap labor - around the world. (We'd call Čapek's Robots "androids," now; see Spock-like sketch of one from the '22 New York production, at left.) The Robots, which have a limited life span, are supposedly soulless. Not so, claims Helena Glory, a liberal activist who marries the factory's GM (who envisions a utopia in which humans won't have to do any work). At Helena's urging, R.U.R.'s scientists develop Robots tricked out with extra humanity... at which point they rise up and exterminate humankind. In an epilogue, Alquist, R.U.R.'s construction engineer and the last surviving human, give his blessing to two new-model Robots, Primus and Helena, who have discovered love. Warning them to avoid the sins that destroyed his own species, Alquist sends them forth to be fruitful and multiply. Fun fact: The term robot, coined by Čapek's brother, Josef, comes from the Czech for "serf labor."
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3) Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1926; in translation, 1927). Set in a dystopian city-state, this Expressionist novel asks us to imagine a perverse synthesis of the era's seminal dichotomy: Henry Adams's dynamo-vs.-virgin question. Metropolis's Pharaonic master, Joh Fredersen, deplores those weaknesses that make his dehumanized laborers (they wear standard uniforms, and answer to numbers) inferior to machines. So he orders the mad inventor-magician, Rotwang, to build him "machine men." Instead, Rotwang constructs an alluring female-shaped machine whom he names Parody, or Futura: "The being was, indubitably, a woman... But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver." After rendering Futura's face in the exact likeness of Maria (a flesh-and-blood woman who is both the conscience of the rebellious workers and the object of Fredersen's pinko son's affection), the villainous technocrats program their synthetic Virgin/Dynamo to act as an agent provocateuse. The workers revolt, and Futura/Maria is destroyed. But in the end, the Virgin (sentimental religiosity) triumphs over the Dynamo (technology-driven development). Hooray? Fun fact: Von Harbou and her husband, film director Fritz Lang, developed the scenario for Metropolis, then she wrote the novelization while he directed the brilliant 1927 movie.
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4) Frigyes Karinthy, Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver's Fifth Voyage (Utazás Faremidóba; Gulliver ötödik útj, 1916; in translation, 1965). It's 1914, and Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver is eager to go to sea again. He signs on as a surgeon on a British ship, only to be torpedoed in the Baltic, then picked up by a UFO and transported to Faremido, a planet ruled by intelligent machine-folk. They regard organic life as a loathsome disease of matter, so they're tickled about the Great War, which looks likely to exterminate humankind. Agreeing that the Faremidoans (whose society is peaceful, and whose fa-re-mi-do language is musical) are superior beings, Gulliver accepts an injection of their own brain-matter - quicksilver and minerals - into his head. Now a proto-cyborg himself, Gulliver is sent back to England, where he finds it difficult to adjust to the irrational horrors of everyday life. Fun fact: The sequel to this Hungarian novella is Capillária (1921), in which Gulliver gains insight into sexual politics when he visits a submarine civilization whose women dominate and eat their menfolk. Also see Karinthy's recently reissued autobiographical novel, A Journey Round My Skull.
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5) S. Fowler Wright, "Automata: I-III" (Weird Tales, September 1929). The first episode of this three-part series - by the British author of The Amphibians, Deluge, and Dawn - is set in the present or near future. Addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the distinguished scientist Dr. Tilwin announces that humankind's prerogatives will soon be taken over by machines, which are already superior to us in certain ways. Intelligent machines are omnipresent in the second episode, set at some point after the 20th century. By this time, human procreation has almost stopped (Wright, a would-be Wellsian social prophet, was a fierce critic of birth control) and children are increasingly rare. In the final episode, one of the last humans on Earth is drawing a picture - one of the few tasks that machines can't perform, because it requires imagination. Alas, because he doesn't properly finish his assignment, he is condemned to be executed. Fun facts: Robots didn't come hardwired with systems of ethics until Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell made it so in the '40s. Also, Wright translated Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio.
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6) Jean de La Hire, The Nyctalope on Mars (Le Mystère des XV, 1911). Léo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, is an indomitable Doc Savage-style crimefighter gifted with night vision. As we learn somewhat late in the series, he's also equipped with an artificial heart, which he gained after being tortured and nearly assassinated, and which prevents him from aging. In this, the first of a series of exploits published through the mid-1940s, the Nyctalope - pictured at left, in a different adventure - battles Oxus, leader of the sinister Society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars. Later, however, he allies himself with Oxus and the planet's benign inhabitants in order to defeat H. G. Wells' evil Martians. Then he gets married. Phew! In subsequent SF adventures, the Nyctalope will travel to the planet Rhea, where he'll end a war between the day- and night-siders; discover a lost civilization of Amazons in Tibet; and have himself cryopreserved so that, 170 years later, he can defeat an enemy who has also been frozen (hello, Demolition Man and Austin Powers). A pioneering pulp superhero and cyborg. Fun fact: Nyctalopia is a real medical condition that causes you to see poorly - or well - in the dark.
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7) Sax Rohmer, The Day the World Ended (London and New York, 1930). Three international crimefighters - Lonergan, an American secret service agent; Gaston Max, a dandified French police detective; and Brian Woodville, an English journalist - are investigating a series of strange events: radio silence in the USA, reports of man-bats in the Black Forest, the sudden death of everyone in a French village. It turns out that Anubis, a dwarfish evil genius, is plotting to establish a utopian society populated by surgically altered and highly conditioned humans (i.e., androids). How? By destroying the rest of the Earth's population with a sonic weapon. The trio infiltrate Anubis's German castle, populated by 7-foot-tall guards and "soulless" houris - hello, Westworld and Stepford Wives - and call in an air strike. Fun fact: Rohmer was best known for his (racist) thrillers about Dr. Fu Manchu.
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8) Neil R. Jones, "The Jameson Satellite" (Amazing Stories, July 1931). In 1958, Professor Jameson arranges for his body to be cryopreserved - in a rocket orbiting the Earth - after he's dead. Forty million years later, a crew hailing from the planet Zor, whose inhabitants had "built their own mechanical bodies, and by operation upon one another had removed their brains to the metal heads from which they directed the functions and movements of their inorganic anatomies," discover the satellite. The Zoromes transfer Jameson's brain into a machine body, then take him to visit the lifeless Earth, an experience that nearly drives him mad, until he realizes that "He could be immortal if he wished! It would be an immortality of never-ending adventures in the vast, endless Universe among the galaxy of stars and planets." Indeed, Jones would publish 21 more "Professor Jameson" stories; cover illustration for 2d installment, at left. Fun fact: Isaac Asimov claimed the Zoromes, who are thoroughly objective, gave him his "feeling for benevolent robots who could serve man with decency."
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9) Gaston Leroux, The Machine to Kill (1924 as Le machine à assassiner; 1935 translation). France's top police detective, Lebouc, is on the trail of a human-looking mechanical man (pictured at left) whose skull houses the brain of Benedict Masson, a guillotined murderer. Animated with radioactive serum, the cyborg - named Gabriel by its creator, a clockwork expert named Norbert - has carried off Norbert's daughter, Christine. She's the one who witnessed Benedict burying a corpse in his basement... so does Gabriel/Benedict want revenge? And what's with the Hindu vampire cult that kidnaps Christine - did they commit the murders for which Benedict died? G/B is captured by Lebouc, but escapes and rescues Christine from the cultists before destroying itself by leaping into a river. The End? No! Christine, who has fallen in love with the cyborg, reassembles G/B's remains, and prepares to reanimate it... only to discover that her husband has destroyed its brain. Fun fact: Leroux is best known for his 1910 horror tale, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, on which the movies and Broadway show are based.
READ IT (FRENCH) | MORE LEROUX

10) W.K. Mashburn, "Sola" (Weird Tales, April 1930). Though he despises women and can't stand their company, Dr. Franz Dietrich desires them sexually. So he invents a flesh-like substance, which a sculptor helps him shape into a gorgeous female android. Having wired Sola with complex responses - the apparatus is supposed to react in particular ways, immediately upon perceiving his telepathically projected emotions - the mad scientist invites a group of colleagues over to dinner. Growing tipsy, Dietrich flies into an embarrassed fury, because he thinks Sola is unresponsive, and tries to destroy it. But his colleagues - and eventually, the entire town - pitch in to raise his self-esteem by treating Sola as a member of the community. Oh wait, I'm thinking of Lars and the Real Girl. What actually happens is that Sola's emotion receptors are activated by the professor's rage, and his own creation crushes him to death. A classic example of what McLuhan - in The Mechanical Bride (1951) - would call "the curious fusion of sex, technology, and death."

Pre-Radium Age

NINETEENTH CENTURY

* E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (1814) - lifelike clockwork
* Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) - human, assembled and reanimated
* Edgar Allan Poe, "Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836) - Poe disputes machine intelligence
* Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man That Was Used Up" (1843) - human, artificial body
* Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844) - mechanical butterfly
* Herman Melville, "The Bell Tower" (1855) - automaton bell-ringer comes to life?
* Edward S. Ellis, The Steam Man of the Prairies (1865) - man-shaped engine
* H. D. Jenkins, "The Automaton of Dobello" (1872) - 14th-century automaton as ghost
* Julian Hawthorne, "An Automatic Enigma" (Belgravia, May 1878). Borderline SF, a reworking of "The Headless Horseman." Human disguised as automaton? See Hawthorne entry.
* E.P. Mitchell, "The Ablest Man in the World" (New York Sun, May 4, 1879). Babbage's analytical engine in head; first cyborg? See Mitchell entry.
* Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann (1881) - lifelike clockwork
* Don Quichotte, "The Artificial Man: A Semi-Scientific Story" (The Argonaut, August 16, 1884). The narrator meets a sickly, elderly-looking man who claims to be an 18-year-old artificial human being. He was reared, he says, in a bell jar and is nourished by chemicals inserted into his stomach. To prove his claim, he lifts off the top of his head and removes his brain. The artificial man claims he is the first step in the evolution of man into a superior type.
* Luis Senarens, Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885) - electricity-powered mecha?
* Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve (L'Ève future, 1886; full periodical publication in La vie moderne, 1884) — the novel credited with popularizing the word "android." See Villiers de l'Isle-Adam entry.
* Howard Fielding, "Automatic Bridget" (Manhattan Therapeutic Co.: New York, c. 1889). An advertising booklet for a laxative sold by Manhattan Therapeutic Co. One of the humorous sketches concerns a con man who discovers a dead inventor's automatic housemaid, a woman-shaped steam apparatus with three legs and long powerful arm-like appendages. The con man floats a stock company, but his stockholders insist that he turn on the machine... which proceeds to run amok, smashing things and killing people.
* Cyrus Cole, The Auroraphone (Charles H. Kerr: Chicago, 1890). Friends sightseeing in the Rockies come across the invention of a French scientist that transmits Morse code messages purportedly from Saturn. The Saturnian transmits his planet's cosmic perspective and utopian social order, and mentions that they possess "dummies," or human-formed robots manufactured to do grunt work. But now the dummies are in revolt! Communication ceases. Ten years later, the friends return to the Rockies and reconnect with Saturn, where it turns out that the dummies were incapable of defending against aerial attacks, and lost the war. They've been discontinued, and Saturnians do their own work again.
* William Douglas O'Connor, "The Brazen Android" (w. 1857, p. The Atlantic Monthly, April 1891). Steam-powered mecha? First steampunk?
* Jerome K. Jerome, "The Dancing Partner" (The Idler, March 1893; and in Novel Notes, Leadenhall Press: London, 1893). See Jerome entry.
* M.L. Campbell, "The Automatic Maid-of-All-Work" (Canadian Magazine, July 1893). Since Mrs. Matheson, the narrator, has difficulty keeping domestic servants, her husband invents a maid-of-all-work. The result is a creature with windmill-like arms, a face with numbered buttons, and an electric battery for power. It functions well enough, though ruthlessly — knocking people out of it way, dumping them out of bed, and so forth. When its controls are improperly set, the machine runs amok and damages the household.
* G.H.P., The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy (Putnam: New York, 1894). See G.H.P. entry.
* Elizabeth Bellamy, "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (The Black Cat, December 1899). A cautionary, humorous story in which an inventor creates Electric-Automatic Household Beneficent Geniuses, humaniform devices that perform household activities. They operate by means of springs and weighted wheels and are powered by electric batteries in their heads. When the narrator's son sets the controls for two robots to sweep the floor at the same time, the household is wrecked.
* Gustave Le Rouge & Gustave Guitton, La Conspiration des Milliardaires (The Billionaire's Conspiracy, 1899-1900). American billionaire William Boltyn uses Thomas Edison's "Metal Men" and the power of mediums to try to become master of the world. See Le Rouge entry.
* Harle Oren Cummins, "The Man Who Made a Man," in Welsh Rarebit Tales (The Mutual Book Co.: Boston, 1902). A knockoff Frankenstein tale, in which Professor Holbrok is believed to be a murderer, because a corpse was found in his lab. His assistant claims that Holbrok had discovered how to make artificial flesh and bone, constructed a man, and tried to animate it with electricity — but to no avail.

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13):

* L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907). See Baum entry; also see above.
* H.P. Fitzgerald Marriott, The Iron Detective of Germany: A Comedy of the Near Future (1908)
* Ambrose Bierce, "Moxon's Master" in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. 3: Can Such Things Be? (Walter Neale: Washington, 1909). See Bierce entry.
* Henry A. Hering, "Mr. Broadbent's Information" (Pearson's Magazine, March 1909).
* Charles Hannan, The Electric Man: Being the One-Act Version of the Successful Three-Act Farcical Comedy of the Same Name (Samuel French: London and New York, 1910). Drawing-room farce in which Walter Everest is bequeathed — in his father's will — an electrically operated mechanical (clockwork?) man, which his father (an inventor) has instructed him how to assemble. Everest builds the man, whom he names Cyril, in his exact own likeness. Mistaken-identity comedy ensues. The automaton is incapable of speech, and both clumsy and destructive. It runs down spectacularly.
* Jean de La Hire, Le Mystère des XV (1911, later translated into English as The Nyctalope on Mars). See De La Hire entry; also see above.
* Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Monster Men (McClurg: Chicago, 1929). Published first in All-Story (November 1913), as A Man without a Soul. Androids! See Burroughs entry.
READ IT

THE TEENS (1914-23):

* L. Frank Baum, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). See Baum entry.
* Frigyes Karinthy, Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver's Fifth Voyage (1916 — or 1917? — novella, translated from Hungarian in 1966). See Karinthy entry.
* Perley Poore Sheehan & Robert H. Davis, Blood and Iron (The Strand Magazine, October 1917). See Sheehan entry.
* Jean de La Hire, Lucifer (1921-22). See De La Hire entry.
* Jean de La Hire, Le Roi de la Nuit (1923). See De La Hire entry.
* E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (1923)
* Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama (Doubleday, Page: Garden City, N.Y., 1923. Trans. from Czech by Paul Selver.) See Čapek entry.
* E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (Heinemann: London, 1923; Doubleday, Page: Garden City, NY, 1923). Edward Vincent Odle (1890-1942) edited The Argosy from 1926-38. "Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity," writes Brian Stableford, in Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, "this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue." Eight thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads, devices which permit us to move through time and space — at the cost of a certain amount of agency. If one of these devices should go awry, a "clockwork man" (perhaps what we'd now call a cyborg) might appear in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village, performing brilliantly at the sport but speaking and behaving strangely. Worse, like the titular character in Philip K. Dick's 1969 story "The Electric Ant," the clockwork man might attempt to tinker with his own mechanism. Bleiler writes: "Exactly what Odle had in mind is not clear, and interpretations of his book vary. For some the book is warning against the activities of science; for others, a speculation on the nature of man, perhaps striking on the same ideas that Wells hit in Men Like Gods.... Interesting in idea, but without Wells's literary skill." Also perhaps a meditation on the coming race of homo superior; it's been suggested that J.D. Beresford, who knew Odle, was an influence. Like Wells, Odle is not as misanthropic as many British writers of this period; he wonders eloquently if the amorality of reason and the bestiality of human nature can be overcome by the force for good that also exists in humanity. Stableford: "One of the most thoughtful scientific romances of the period. The moral of the story is presented a little obliquely, with a scrupulously polite lack of stridency, but this is still one of the most eloquent pleas for the rejection of the 'rational' future and the conservation of the humanity of man."

THE TWENTIES (1924-33):

* Gaston Leroux, Le machine à assassiner (The Machine to Kill, 1924). Cyborg? See Leroux entry.
* John Lionel Tayler, The Last of My Race: A Dream of the Future (London, 1924). The narrator, a medical man of the 20th century, wakes up in the year 302,930. He is encouraged to write down his activities and sensations — then notices that the seeming humans who attend to his wants are perfect automatons. So are the flowers in the garden, and a tortoise that creeps about. (Hello, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?...) He also notices that the house — modeled after a 20th century home — is a sort of living organism that is aware of his thoughts and moods and responds to them. A superman — so evolved that the narrator can hardly bear his presence — pays him a call. He explains that 20th-century mankind (Homo ignorans) became extinct because his brain grew so large that his giant head prevented its passage through the birth canal. We learn all about the evolution of superior forms of mankind; very proto-Stapledon.
* Maurice Renard & Albert Jean, Le singe (1925). Translated as Blind Circle (Dutton: New York, 1928). See Renard entry.
* Jean de La Hire, L'Amazone du Mont Everest (1925). See De La Hire entry.
* Ivan Narodny, The Skygirl, A Mimodrama: In Three Acts on A Star Prologue and Epilogue on the Earth (The Britons Publishing Co.: New York and London, 1925). Symbolic science-fantasy play based on a Futurist aesthetic. Bleiler says the play is "badly paced, ill developed, partly extraneous, and at times self-contradictory." On the star (planet?) Astralea, mankind (with two exceptions) is extinct, and the population consists of what we've since come to call cyborgs: mixtures of flesh, mechanical aids, and exotic sensory equipment who are incubated in laboratories. These creatures are rougly humanoid in appearance, but with strange protruding sense organs and physical conformations in the Futurist mode. The only real humans on the planet are the old crone Luna and her beautiful daughter Helia (the Skygirl), upon the latter of whom two cyborg scientists plan to model their latest invention, real women — because cyborgs lust for real women. Just then, Russian refugee poet-scientist Savva Struve — who has been observing the Skygirl, from Mongolia, via trance-states and a "telebioscope" — travels to Astralea by meteor. He and Helia fall in love, and are sentenced to death. But Luna deactivates the cyborgs.
* Maurice Renard & Albert Jean, Blind Circle (1925)
* Edmond Hamilton, Across Space (Weird Tales, September-November 1926). Androids. See Hamilton entry.
* Edmond Hamilton, The Metal Giants (1926). A computer brain who runs on atomic power creates an army of 300-foot-tall robots.
* Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (Readers Library: London, 1927). Translated from 1926 German edition. Reissued in 1934 with stills from the movie. See Von Harbou entry.
* Jean de La Hire, L'Antéchrist (1927). See De La Hire entry.
* David H. Keller, "The Psychophonic Nurse" (1928)
* Edmond Hamilton, The Comet Doom (1928). Edmond Hamilton presented space explorers with a mixture of organic and machine parts in his novel The Comet Doom in 1928. He later featured the talking, living brain of an old scientist, Simon Wright, floating around in a transparent case, in all the adventures of his famous hero, Captain Future
* Amelia Reynolds Long, "The Twin Soul" (Weird Tales, March 1928)
* Francis Flagg, The Chemical Brain (Weird Tales, January 1929). Out-of-work mechanic John Lester is hired by Captain Rowan, who offers him a job assembling a mechanical device. Lester moves into Rowan's establishment and begins constructing a mechanical man to his employer's specifications; it's metal, except for a gelatin brain. When Lester finishes the mechanical man (a cyborg?), Rowan drops dead of excitement — at which point, supposedly, his mind transfers itself into the robot. Which runs amok, killing Rowan's business partner — with whom Rowan had been furious.
* Jean de La Hire, Titania (1929). See De La Hire entry.
* Stephen Leacock, The Iron Man and the Tin Woman with Other Such Futurities: A Book of Little Sketches of To-Day and To-Morrow (John Lane: London, 1929). See Leacock entry.
* William Salisbury, The Squareheads, The Story of a Socialized State: A Futuristic Novel (The Independent Publishing Co.: New Rochelle, NY, 1929). Norman Thraley, a stunt aviator experimenting with a rocket-propelled plane loses consciousness and wakes up in 2330. He has been in a coma for over 400 years. America is now the utopian/dystopian society of Usofmera, where everything is "four-square" — literally. Trees, fruit, architeture, even humans are cubic. Everyone walks in lock-step, the majority is always right. The state provides exactly the same food and housing for all. Etcetera. (See description in Science-Fiction: The Early Years.) Thraley is sentenced to death — by giant robot! A giant robot wrestler that tosses victims to their death! But, as in so many sleeper-awakes narratives, he is rescued by the underground.
* S. Fowler Wright, "Automata" (Weird Tales, September 1929). See Wright entry.
* Jean de La Hire, Belzébuth (1930). See De La Hire entry.
* Sax Rohmer, The Day the World Ended (Cassell: London, 1930; Doubleday, Doran, for the Crime Club: Garden City, NY, 1930). Originally in Colliers (May 4—July 20, 1929). Androids! From the author of the Fu Manchu thrillers. See Rohmer entry.
* Otis Adelbert Kline, The Prince of Peril: The Weird Adventures of Zinlo, Man of Three Worlds Upon the Mysterious Planet of Venus (McClurg: Chicago, 1930). See Kline entry.
* Ainslee Jenkins, "Men of Steel" (Weird Tales, December 1930). In the Mohave Desert, mad scientist Ared Hazzard conducts nefarious experiments in a castle-like structure. These include mechanical men. The narrator and his girlfriend are captured, and Hazzard plans to transfer their psyches (more or less intact) into the robots. But he fails. Amateurish, pseudo-Gothic.
* W.K. Mashburn, "Sola" (Weird Tales, April 1930). See above.
* The "Professor Jameson" series by Neil R. Jones (early 1930s) featured human and alien minds preserved in robot bodies. The first installment of Jones' most popular creation, "The Jameson Satellite", appeared in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. See above.
* Abner J. Gelula, "Automaton" (1931)
* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) - maybe
* Jean de La Hire, Gorillard (1932) See De La Hire entry.
* John Wyndham, "The Lost Machine" (1932). See Wyndham entry.
* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932). Not exactly androids, but worth mentioning that Huxley, the brother and half-brother of two outstanding biologists, and grandson of Thomas Henry "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley, portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. The novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering (sorta), and sleep-learning that combine to change society. Huxley was reacting against a popular interwar pamphlet series arguing that by the end of the century social life would be altered beyond recognition, entirely for the better due to the advancement of biological science. Contrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. Huxley wrote the book in the 1920s, thirty years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. However, Mendel's work with inheritance patterns in peas had been re-discovered in 1900 and the eugenics movement, based on Darwinian selection, was well established. Huxley's family included a number of prominent biologists including Thomas Huxley, half-brother and Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley, and brother Julian Huxley who was a biologist and involved in the eugenics movement. In light of this, the fact that Huxley emphasizes conditioning over breeding is notable (see nature versus nurture). As the science writer Matt Ridley put it, Brave New World describes an "environmental not a genetic hell." Human embryos and fetuses are conditioned via a carefully designed regimen of chemical (such as exposure to hormones and toxins), thermal (exposure to intense heat or cold, as one's future career would dictate) and other environmental stimuli, although there is an element of selective breeding as well.
* David H. Keller, Revolt of the Pedestrians (1932). Human cyborgs revolt.
* Neil R. Jones, "The Planet of the Double Sun" (Amazing Stories, February 1932; Amazing Stories, November 1962 - reprint; Ace Books collection #1, 1967)
* Neil R. Jones, "The Return of the Tripeds" (Amazing Stories, May 1932; Ace Books collection #1, 1967)
* Jean de La Hire, L'Assassinat du Nyctalope (1933). See De La Hire entry. Origin story! How he got his artificial heart.
* Jean de La Hire, Les Mystères de Lyon (1933). See De La Hire entry. Origin story! How he got his artificial heart.
* Neil R. Jones, "Into the Hydrosphere" (Amazing Stories, October 1933; Ace Books collection #2, 1967)
* Neil R. Jones, "Time's Mausoleum" (Amazing Stories, December 1933; Ace Books collection #2, 1967)
* J. Storer Clouston, Button Brains (1933)

PLUS:
* Harl Vincent, "Rex" (1934)
* A. Merritt, "The Last Poet and the Robots" (1934)

Anarcho-Symbolist theorists (1864-73)

2009-01-06T10:26:00.001-08:00

1. Arthur Fisher Bentley

***

Arthur Fisher Bentley (1870-1957)

Academic, journalist, political activist, independent scholar. Worked with John Dewey on the foundations of logic and communications theory. Known in American political science as the pioneer figure in the study of group behavior, of "pressure groups" and "interest group activity."

* Bentley was convinced that the activity of human beings in groups is the fundamental datum available to describe and understand the social behavior of people. His early book, The Process of Government, was his attempt to fashion a tool for analysis of human behavior in strictly empirical, descriptive terms.

* Bentley sought to reject all reliance on ideas, ideals, concepts, and what he derisively called "mind stuff." What groups were, what they did, what they sought, were to be found in observation and description, with no anticipatory conceptual framework or limiting paradigm to bias the observation and so distort the description. "Bentleyan" came to mean descriptive of activity, free of "mind stuff" but with purposes and goals contained in the activity and stated in the description. "The Augean stables of classical and post-Machiavellian political theory were to be cleaned of their noetic dross and concern with 'human nature,'" writes Leo Weinstein in his entry on Bentley in The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth Century Political Thinkers. "Thereafter, group activity in all its overlapping and intersecting phases would allow an anoetic description, free of mind stuff — the complete and true science of humans."

***

New Kids theorists (1884-93)

2009-01-06T07:52:00.000-08:00

1. David Ben Gurion
2. Ernst Bloch

***
David Ben Gurion (1886-1973)

Born in Plonsk, Poland, Ben Gurion would eventually become the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gurion's passion for Zionism, the movement he helped found, culminated in his instrumental role in the founding of the state of Israel. After leading Israel to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Ben Gurion helped build the state institutions and oversaw the absorption of vast numbers of Jews from all over the world.

In 1935 Ben Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Ben Gurion instigated a policy of restraint ("Havlagah") in which the Haganah and other Jewish groups did not retaliate for Arab attacks against Jewish civilians, concentrating only on self-defence. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and Ben Gurion supported this policy.

Ben Gurion played a major role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting Palestinian exodus.

* Ben Gurion was a labor Zionist — in his view, exile had distorted Jewish society, primarily by preventing Jews from engaging in productive labor. Only a state sustained by a population of productive Jewish citizens held out any hope of Jewish survival. Only a Zionist socialist ethos could instil a level of altruism sufficient to build a Jewish economy and polity in Palestine. Like H.G. Wells, for example, he believed that a capitalist economy would not induce an adequate degree of cooperation or dedication. He wanted to condition Jews to the virtues of work and to alienate them from the idea of exploiting others. A Jewish state with a dominant working class would create an exemplary society which would serve as a model of equity and justice to the world.

* After the establishment of Israel in May 1948, Ben Gurion extolled the virtues of statehood. Israel's highly divergent population adhered to values inimial to the ethos of a modern state, he believed, and Israelis had to learn not to subvert the authoritative exercise of state power. A new national ideology which prepared Jews for self-government had to be formulated.

***

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)

Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.

After finishing his doctorate in 1909 (in Munich), he went to work with Georg Simmel, the famous sociologist and exponent of "life philosophy" in Berlin. Then he moved to Heidelberg where he established a close friendship with the already prominent aesthetician, and future Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukács (1885), who introduced him to the intellectual circle around Max Weber.

Like all members of the New Kids cohort, he grew up in an era of "romantic anti-capitalism," and tended to be nostalgic for a golden age — in the mythical past, in fairy tales, in childhood itself. Bloch transformed this backward-looking nostalgia, however, into a forward-looking utopian vision.

* WWI created the conditions for Bloch's unique eschatological reading of Marx, which he then fused with elements of neo-Kantianism, "life philosopy," and an "authentic expressionist impulse" to produce his first great work, The Spirit of Utopia (1918). This book set the stage for Bloch's later attempts to ground the concept of utopia in the unfinished character of reality as such and to forward a dynamic vision of nature as a set of unrealized potentialities which could become purposive if humanity decided to make them so.

* Ultimately, Bloch would fashion an ontology in which Being would be seen not as a static or finished entity but rather as inherently retaining an unexplored horizon that constantly projects a utopian novum. Thus, whether consciously or unconsciously, human existence is understood as necessarily manifesting "anticipatory" qualities that point to a utopia which does "not yet" exist, but which nevertheless stands open to realization.

* Bloch's encyclopedic masterpiece, The Principle of Hope (1959), would analyze such anticipatory utopian projections in the realms of religion, art, and philosophy, as well as the daydreams and manifold occurrences of everyday life. Marx appears as just one example of utopian thinkers stretching back to medieval mystics, neo-platonists, and the thinkers of antiquity. From such a (cosmic?) perspective, people are seen as anthropologically motivated by a complex of instinctual drives which bring about a hope of the best world and a sense of frustration or Angst at not attaining it.

* Bloch was primarily concerned with analyzing the concept of utopia and calling for further experimental thinking. His works lack specifics regarding how the utopian order might be brought about, what institutions are necessary to ensure its liberating character, or even what socio-cutural relations should inform it. (For Russell Jacoby, this is precisely the strength of Bloch's work.) In other words, though he was a socialist, Bloch's philosophy need not lead to any particular form of socialist politics.

* For Bloch, past periods of history are not dead time but rather the repository of unresolved contradictions which can reassert themselves for good or ill. (This is a terrific reason to study history, by the way.) He produced an all-encompassing and experimental philosophical standpoint which speaks to humanity's best hopes for the future even while holding on to the most progressive unrealized possibilities of the past.

Author of, among other books:
Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918)
Spuren (1930)
Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Inheritance of our Time, 1935) — a study of Nazism
Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1954-59, 3 vols.)

Plutonian theorists (1854-63)

2009-01-06T07:31:00.000-08:00

1. Maurice Barrès
2. Georg Simmel

***
Maurice Barrès (1862-1923)

French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator. Barrès was one of the major figures in the reorientation of French nationalism in the period 1890-1914.

In the 1880s he found literary success with his three Culte de moi novels, with their themes of intellectual self-discovery and cultural rebellion. Leaning towards the far-left in his youth as a Boulangist deputy, he progressively developed a theory close to Romantic nationalism and shifted to the right during the Dreyfus Affair, leading the Anti-Dreyfusards alongside Charles Maurras.

Barrès was, in short, an illiberal: His early activism united several of his literary themes: hostility to the rigid structures of bourgeois culture and education, and contempt for the parliamentary system and its leaders, whom he saw as responsible for France's decline as a culture and as a world power. (He was not, however, a monarchist.) His novels, essays, and unceasing journalistic activity were his principle contribution to the reorientation of French nationalism and to making anti-semitism and anti-parliamentarianism respectable among pre-World War I intellectual circles.

During World War I, Barrès was one of the proponents of the Union sacrée, which earned him the nickname "nightingale of bloodshed" ("rossignol des carnages"). The Canard enchaîné satirical newspaper called him the "chief of the brainwashers' tribe."

NB: In 1921, the Dadaists organized the Trial of Barrès, charged of "attentat à la sûreté de l'esprit," and sentenced him to 20 years of forced labour. This fictitious trial also marked the dissolving of Dada.

* The Dreyfus affair completed his transition to a mystical and authoritarian nationalism and linked his anti-parliamentarianism and anti-semitism with an environmental and biological determinism that was expressed in his novels Les Déracinés (1897), L'Appel au soldat, etc.

* He is considered, alongside Charles Maurras, as one of the main thinkers of ethnic nationalism at the turn of the century in France, associated with Revanchism — the desire to reconquer the Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the newly created German Empire at the end of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War.

* Influenced by Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine, he developed an organicist conception of the Nation which contrasted with the universalism of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Often credited with being the first to give nationalism a new and more exclusionary meaning, his novels and newspaper articles molded a generation of young French intellectuals to accept an instinctual and cultural nationalism that emphasized the concept of a national community based on the mythic solidarity of "the earth and the dead." According to Barrès, the People is not founded by an act of autonomy, but find its origins in the earth, history (institutions, life and material conditions) and traditions and inheritance ("the dead").

***

Georg Simmel

TK

Author of books:
On Social Differentiation (1890)
The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892-93)
Introduction to the Science of Ethics (1892-93)
Philosophie des Geldes (1900)
Soziologie (1908)
Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917)
Lebensanschauung (1918)

Psychonaut theorists (1874-83)

2009-01-06T07:13:00.000-08:00

1. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

***

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)

Ottoman soldier and statesman. The first national leader to check by force of arms the apparently irresistible expansion of the Great Powers in to the Middle East. Founded upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a new nation state, the republic of Turkey. Transformed Anatolian Turkish society from its fundamentally religious frame into an essentially secular structure.

* Reconstructed the state as a republic for which he aimed to create, especially through education, an appropriate citizenry. (Without first changing the individual, true development of society is impossible.) He introduced no wholly novel ideas; his originality lay rather in the reinterpretation of familiar concepts. He sought to establish an inherently capitalist nation based upon the principle of popular sovereignty, whose moral substance would be a conscious synthesis of native and universal elements.

* He was determined to cultivate the principle of rational enquiry as the ultimate arbiter in society. His view of the intellectual history of Islam — over the centuries Muslims' gradual retreat from rationalism to blind acquiescence in theology had rendered them defenceless and submissive — strengthened his conviction that the weight of rigid orthodoxy must be lifted from Turkish society. Not merely for the sake of the people but for that of Islam itself, which he felt needed cleansing of its irrational and inflexible accretions. He envisaged a secular society where the existence of Islam would be dependent upon the voluntary adherence of the individual Muslim.

* Central to his concept of "contemporaneity" (the rationalist essence of civilization — contemporary civilization being equivalent but not identical to civilization in Western Europe) was the recognition of the multiplicity of its origins. Contemporaneity, fostering the integrative tendency of contemporary world civilization, involves a break with the past; nationalism, with its self-assertive tendency, serves as a counterbalance, providing a continuity with the past beneath even the most drastic social reforms. Note, though, that his conception of nationhood is one founded upon the prerequisites of common polity, vocabulary, territory, ancestry, history, morality — no matter where they might actually live at the moment.

***

Hardboiled theorists (1894-1903)

2009-01-06T06:56:00.000-08:00

1. T.W. Adorno

***

T.W. Adorno (1903-69)

Born in Frankfurt, Germany. Began teaching at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, and became associated with the Marxist-oriented Institute of Social Research (later dubbed the Frankfurt School). Emigrated to England upon Hitler's rise to power, then joined the Institute for Social Research in exile at Columbia University in New York. When the institute broke up in the early 1940s, Adorno followed its director, Max Horkheimer, to California. In the early 1950s, he returned with Horkheimer to Germany, to reestablish the Institute in Frankfurt. He engaged primarily in cultural criticism and studies of philosophy and aesthetics, in the last decade of his life.

SF vision: "Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars..." (Minima Moralia)

* Marxian critique of mass culture (as an instrument of ideological manipulation and social control in democratic, fascist, and communist societies, as a system of products that idealize the existing society and suggest that happiness can be found through conformity to its institutions and way of life)

* Mandarin, aestheticist critique of the degradation of culture (industrial-style preconceived formulas and codes, quantitative approach to quality)

* Pessimistic analysis of fascist tendencies, the decline of the individual, the integration of the working class as a conservative force in the capitalist system, and antisemitism

* Theory of the dialectic of enlightenment (domination of nature, technology and "instrumental reason," the near-totalitarian power of society over the individual); resistance to positivism in the social sciences

* Championing of modernist avant-garde art (vs. realist art, and political modernism); negative dialectics (a non-totalizing, ever-unsettling approach to criticism and philosophy)

***

TK

Gnostic Horror

2009-01-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

Pre-Lovecraftian tales in which the protagonist discovers that the world as we know it is not as it seems, that we're surrounded by ancient, alien, advanced intelligences who watch us, control us, destroy us... that sort of thing.

HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND
NIGHTLAND

1904-13

1914-23

* A. Merritt, "The People of the Pit" (All-Story, January 5, 1918). See Merritt entry.

* A. Merritt, "The Moon Pool" (All-Story, June 22, 1918). See Merritt entry.

1924-33

Future Histories

2009-01-05T10:23:00.000-08:00

As defined by Everett F. Bleiler: Fairly extensive summaries of historical events in our future but in the past for the story's narrator or interlocutor.

1904-1913

* James B. Alexander, The Lunarian Professor and His Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars Together With An Account of the Cruise of the Sally Ann (No publisher cited: Minneapolis, 1909). See Alexander entry.

1914-23

1924-33

SF authors born 1824-33: 1831

2009-01-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

1. James B. Alexander

***

James B. Alexander (1831-?)

American writer, from Minnesota.

* The Lunarian Professor and His Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars Together With An Account of the Cruise of the Sally Ann (No publisher cited: Minneapolis, 1909). The narrator (Minnesota, circa 1892) meets a Lunarian — humanoid, with a large round head and eyes, plus six wings and six limbs — who has come to Earth via a kind of antigravity device. He describes life on the Moon (or rather, inside it), an advanced social-insect-like civilization. The Lunarians are altruistic and cooperative; all instinctively work, and the government provides them with all the necessities of life. Seems like a rip-off of Wells's First Men in the Moon. But Alexander's novel is also an imaginative (proto-Stapledonian) future history of the human race: By 1925, the Lunarian informs the narrator, the US will have adopted free silver and the single tax; cities will have spread enormously, and people will live in huge almost autonomous housing complexes [like PKD's con-apts]; and women's rights will have been granted, and the state will provide child-care. By 2000, the British Empire will have lost India; the US will have expanded to include the entire English-speaking world except England and Scotland; war will have been abolished, and a world government established; amazing flying machines, solar power, and synthetic food will have been invented. But that's just the beginning: By 2100, the Lunarians will have introduced a third, neuter sex to humankind; and by the 100th millennium, humans will have evolved into foetus-like creatured fed by machines through the umbilical cord. PS: We also learn that Martians are giant, semi-aquatic, intelligent starfish.

Mad Scientists, Peace Vigilantes, and Scientific Extortionists

2009-01-05T09:58:00.000-08:00

The latter two types were identified by Everett F. Bleiler, in Science-Fiction: The Early Years.

1,19,84a,194,195,223,224,239,335,337,365a,371,391,394,414a,414b,
414d,414f,414g,425,438,441,497,598,600,637, 643,651, 660,678
and a lot more

1904-13

* William Livingston Alden, "'Wagnerium'" (London Magazine, November 1906). See Alden entry.

* William Livingston Alden, "The Earthquake" (Pearson's Magazine, October 1907). See Alden entry.

1914-23

1924-33

SF authors born 1834-43: 1837

2009-01-05T09:39:00.000-08:00

Note: Influential SF authors born in the Thirties are included on this blog, but they're rarely, if ever, Radium-Age authors themselves.

1. William Livingston Alden
2. William Dean Howells

***

William Livingston Alden (1837-1908)

American writer. From 1893 resident in Great Britain. Author of humorous and general fiction. Historically important for establishing canoeing as a popular sport. He was in his mid-60s when he wrote a couple of Radium-Age SF stories.
NYT OBIT

* "'Wagnerium'" (London Magazine, November 1906). The 7th story about Professor Van Wagener, an eccentric scientist who invents improbable devices that cause problems once manufactured. Like L. Frank Baum's The Master Key (1901), these stories indicate an unease with the accelerated pace of technological change. In "Professor Van Wagener's Eye" (1895), the protagonist attaches electric lights to his maid, his cat, and finally inserts one into his eye; in "The Fatal Fishing Line" (1895), he devises a method for shocking fish when they are hooked, but ends up hooking himself to the wife of a neighbor; in "A Scientific Balloon," he invents an aluminum balloon [almost a lead zeppelin!] that doesn't release gas, ever, and so almost transports himself to his death in the upper atmosphere; in "A Flying March" (1896) and "Van Wagener's Flying Cat" he attaches small personal zeppelins to himself and his cat. In this story, the last of the series, we learn that radium and radioactivity were discovered not by Marie Curie — who was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in 1903 for her theory of radioactivity (a term coined by her), and the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium) — but by Van Wagener. Nearly 30 years earlier, it seems, he showed the narrator a glowing substance that he kept in a leaden bowl — wagnerium, or what would later be named radium. Poor Van Wagener glowed in the dark, emitted abnormal heat, and finally exploded along with his laboratory, in what may be the first atomic explosion in SF.

* "The Earthquake" (Pearson's Magazine, October 1907). The eccentric inventor Collins has built a 45-foot-high conical structure in his backyward that permits him to store gravity, like electricity. While attempting to draw the moon itself down from the sky, he may or may not cause the San Francisco earthquake of '07. Black humor, same conceit as Alden's 1897 story "A Volcanic Valve," in which Krakatoa's deadly eruption is caused by the tinkering of an unnamed scientist who thinks he can create the world's largest steam-power plant.

***

William Dean Howells (TK)

Note among other things that Howells was a Bellamyite. TK

* Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance (Harper: New York and London, 1907). Some authorities consider it SF.

Antigravity, Flying Cities

2009-01-05T06:22:00.000-08:00

Air islands, flying cities: 1225, 1442, 1519, 1764b, 2030, 2149

Flying culture: 809, 1065, 1316, 1417, 1422, 2030, 2086

Flying saucers: 88, 439, 861, 1003

1904-13

* Fenton Ash, The Radium Seekers: Or, the Wonderful Black Nugget (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons: London, 1905).

* Fenton Ash, A Son of the Stars (Young England, vol. 29, 1907-08, exact date not known).

1914-23

1924-33

SF authors born 1824-33: 1830

2009-01-05T06:02:00.000-08:00

1. Fenton Ash

***

Fenton Ash (pseudonym of Francis Harry Atkins) (1840-1927)

British author, writer of juvenile fiction. Also wrote as Frank Aubrey.

* The Radium Seekers: Or, the Wonderful Black Nugget (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons: London, 1905). Wilfrid Moray, the adopted son of a noted scientist, demonstrates to his friend Harry a metallic substance that has more lift than any gas. (One wonders: Has he found a chunk of Cavorite?) Supposedly it's a form of radium extracted from a large black nugget from South America; when strips of the metal (Moradium) are placed inside his coat, Wilfrid can fly. With a certain Dr. Vivian, the two attempt to locate more of the substance in Brazil... but they are attacked by submen, gigantic poisonous snakes, tree-climbing wolves, flying serpents (they turn out to be mechanical), and human-headed bird creatures (they turn out to be humans in flying costumes that utilize Moradium). They are befriended by Lyondrah, a mysterious elderly man living in the jungle. They discover a lost world, and futhermore discover that Lyondrah is the king of a city-state there... and Wilfrid is his son.

* A Son of the Stars (Young England, vol. 29, 1907-08, exact date not known). Bruce and Maurice, two young English boys herding sheep in Australia, rescue Prince Milona (Son of the Stars) from drowning. Milona had accompanied his father, King Amando, on an interplanetary flight from Mars. The boys accompany Milona home on his spaceship, the Ramaylia, built of a metal that attracts and repels forces, creating in effect antigravity. (Cavorite? Moradium? No: solaynium.) Mars has an advanced civilization and advanced technology, including individual flying apparatuses and electric rayguns. The boys help foil a plot against Amando by another Martian scientist-king, Faronda; and they prevent another scientist-king, Zandalla, from building a titanic airship of his own. They're sent home with riches, as a reward.

* A Trip to Mars (W. and R. Chambers: London and Edinburgh, 1909). Set on a South Sea island and Mars. While visiting an island with their scientist-guardian, Mr. Armeath, young Jack and Gerald witness an enormous, egg-shaped, semitransparent and luminous object hit the water. They rescue King Ivanta, of Mars, from drowning; and he takes them home with him, as a reward. The spaceship ("Aerostat"), we discover, is a gigantic living-machine, made of metal that allows sunlight to enter and warm the interior, complete with plant and animal life. (Hello, Silent Running and Sunshine.) As in A Son of the Stars, the boys are embroiled in political intrigue on Mars. Peace is restored after a huge air battle.

Apocalypses, Post-Apocalypses

2009-01-05T05:46:00.000-08:00

Also see my post (originally from io9) on the Radium Age's Top Ten Apocalypses. Numbers in brackets, below, indicate the novel's ranking on my Top Ten list.

1904-13

* Gabriel Tarde, Underground Man (1904 as Fragment d'histoire future; 1905 in English)
* George Long, Valhalla: A Novel (1906)
* Van Tassel Sutphen, The Doomsman (1906)
* H.G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet (1906)
* H.G. Wells, The War in the Air (1908)
* James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (1908)
* George Barr McCutcheon, Her Weight in Gold (1911; novella: The Wrath of the Dead)
* William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land: A Love Tale (1912) [#2]
* Garrett P. Serviss, The Second Deluge (New York: McBride, Nast, 1912). Serialized in Cavalier Magazine, July 1911 to January 1912.
* Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt: Being an account of another adventure of Prof. George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Prof. Summerlee, and Mr. E.D. Malone, the discoverers of "The Lost World" (1913) [#7]
* J.D. Beresford, Goslings (1913, pub. in US as A World of Women)

1914-23

* H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914) [#10]
* George Allan England, Darkness and Dawn (1914)
* Herbert Gubbins, The Elixir of Life, or 2905 A.D.: A Novel of the Far Future (1914)
* Jack London, The Scarlet Plague (1915) [#8]
* Edward Shanks, People of the Ruins (1920) [#9]
* Maurice LeBlanc, The Tremendous Event (1920 as Le Formidable Evenement; 1922 in English)
* W.E.B. Du Bois, ""The Comet," 1920
* John Ernest Bechdolt, The Torch (Argosy, January 24, 1920).
* Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1922 as Továrna na absolutno; in English in 1927) [#4]
* Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage (1922)
* Ella Scrysmour, The Perfect World: A Romance of Strange People and Strange Places (1922)
* C.F. Ramuz, The Triumph of Death (1922 as Presence de la Mort; in English, 1946; pub. in US as The End of All Men)
* J.J. Connington, Nordenholt's Million (1923)
* P. Anderson Graham, The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923)

1924-33

* H.M. Egbert, Draught of Eternity (1924)
* Martin Hussingtree, Konyetz (1924)
* V.T. Murray, The Rule of the Beasts (1925)
* Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Maid (Chicago: McClurg, 1926; "The Moon Maid" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, June 22-July 20, 1923; "The Moon Men" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, February 21-March 15, 1925; "The Red Hawk" was serialized in Argosy All-Story, April 20-May 14, 1925) [#5]
* Edgar Wallace, The Day of Uniting (1926)
* Shaw Desmond, Ragnarok: The Armageddon of the Gods (1926)
* C.E. Jacomb, And A New Earth: A Romance (1926)
* S. Fowler Wright, Deluge: A Romance (1927)
* Charles J. Finger, The Spreading Stain: A Tale for Boys and Men with Boys' Hearts (1927)
* Pierrepont B. Noyes, The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (1927)
* Philip Francis Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (August 1928, novella in Amazing Stories)
* J.W. Chancellor, Through the Visograph (1928)
* Paul Creswick, The Turning Wheel (1928)
* S. Fowler Wright, Dawn (1929)
* Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930) [#1]
* Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930)
* F. Wright Moxley, Red Snow (1930)
* Thomas Alva Stubbins, The Story of the Tomb of Gold (1932)
* Philip Gordon Wylie & Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide (1933) [#6]
* John Collier, Tom's A-Cold (1933, pub. in US as Full Circle)
* Helen Simpson, The Woman on the Beast: Viewed from Three Angles (1933)
* Neil Bell, The Lord of Life (1933)
* H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933)

PLUS

* M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901) [#3]

* Karel Čapek, War with the Newts (1936)

Air Battles

2009-01-05T05:36:00.000-08:00

Too many to mention! A favorite topic of the Radium Age.

Bleiler 81, 82, 96a, 118, 151, 156, 258, 305, 306, 310, 334a, 337, 472, 531, 586, 679, 787, 835, 879, 895, 929, 930, 931, 949, 996, 997, 1003, 1005, 1009 1072, 1091, 1119, 1241, 1270, 1308, 1389, 1422, 1472, 1582, 1607, 1707b, 1840, 1841, 1842, 1839-42, 1843, 1879, 1884, 1889, 1998, 2029, 2076, 2209, 2238, 2270, 2332, 2333, 2336d, 2339

Note that Orville and Wilbur Wright are members of the Anarcho-Symbolist (1864-73) generation; and Lindbergh is a member of the Hardboiled (1894-1903) generation.

1904-13

* Fenton Ash, A Son of the Stars (Young England, vol. 29, 1907-08, exact date not known). See Fenton Ash entry.

* A Trip to Mars (W. and R. Chambers: London and Edinburgh, 1909). Set on a South Sea island and Mars.

1914-23

Many more TK

1924-33

SF authors born 1864-73: 1867

2009-01-05T04:55:00.000-08:00

1. A.E. (George William Russell)
2. E.F. Benson
3. Gustave Le Rouge

***

A.E. (George William Russell, 1867-1935)

George William Russell, who wrote under the pseudonym Æ (sometimes written AE or A.E.), was an Irish nationalist, writer, editor, critic, poet, and painter. He was also a mystical writer, and centre of a group of followers of theosophy in Dublin, for many years.

Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh. His family moved to Dublin when he was eleven. He was educated at Rathmines School and the Metropolitan School of Art, where he began a lifelong friendship with William Butler Yeats. He started working as a draper’s clerk. Then worked many years for the Irish Agricultural Organization Society (IAOS), an agricultural co-operative movement founded by Horace Plunkett in 1894. The two came together in 1897 when the co-operative movement was eight years old. Plunkett needed an able organiser and W. B. Yeats suggested Russell, who became Assistant Secretary of the IAOS.

He was an able lieutenant and traveled extensively throughout Ireland as a spokesman for the society, mainly responsible for developing the credit societies and establishing co-operative banks in the south and west of the country whose numbers rose to 234 by 1910. The pair made a good team each gaining much from the association with the other.

Russell was editor from 1905-1923 of The Irish Homestead, the journal of the IAOS, and infused it with vitality that made it famous half the world over. His gifts as a writer and publicist gained him a wide influence in the cause of agricultural co-operation. He was also editor of the The Irish Statesman from 15 September 1923 until 12 April 1930. He used the pseudonym "AE", or more properly, "Æ". This derived from an earlier Æ'on signifying the lifelong quest of man, subsequently shortened.

His first book of poems, Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894), established him in what was known as the Irish Literary Revival, where Æ met the young James Joyce in 1902, and introduced him to other Irish literary figures, including William Butler Yeats, to whom he was close. He appears as a character in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Joyce's Ulysses, where he dismisses Stephen's theories on Shakespeare. His collected poems appeared in 1913, with a second edition in 1926.

His house in Rathgar Avenue in Dublin became a meeting-place at the time for everyone interested in the economic and artistic future of Ireland. His interests were wide-ranging, he became a theosophist and wrote extensively on politics and economics, while continuing to paint and write poetry. Æ claimed to be a clairvoyant, able to view various kinds of spiritual beings, which he illustrated in paintings and drawings. The keynote of his work may be found in a motto from the Bhagavadgita prefixed to one of his earlier poems "I am Beauty itself among beautiful things."

* THE AVATARS: A FUTURIST FANTASY. London: The Macmillan Company, 1933. "set in a future Ireland, [AE's mystical] agenda comes to life in the form of two supernal beings who hauntingly invoke a vision of a world less abandoned to materialism, and thus draw the protagonists to "the margin of the Great Deep", as Monk Gibbon puts it..." (Encyclopedia of SF)

***

E.F. Benson (1867-1942)

British writer, son of (later) Archbishop of Canterbury. Important Edwardian writer of supernatural fiction.

* "The Superannuation Department A.D. 1945" (Windsor Magazine, January 1906). Because of overpopulation, since 1925 the government has systematically weeded out the old and useless. When an older individual's value to society is questioned, the bureau sends him a Superannuation Form. It asks: Are you useful (productive)? Are you beautiful? Are you morally better than you were a year ago? Are you contributing to happiness in other ways? Are you likely to be an object of beauty? Are you happy? Those who fail to answer affirmatively, and convincingly, are euthanized. Hello, Wild in the Streets and Logan's Run... and also Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), the former professor who chooses euthanasia in Soylent Green.

* "'And the Dead Spake—'" (George H. Doran: New York, 1923). Story issued, with "The Horror Horn" in a 1923 edition. During WWI, the surgeon and research psychologist Sir James Horton is working on a needle and amplifying apparatus that will "read" the brain's grooves and notches, thereby retrieving memories.

* "The Horror Horn" (Munsey's Magazine, November 1922). Story issued, with "'And the Dead Spake—'" in a 1923 edition. An Englishman recalls seeing the abominable snowman on a Swiss mountain known as the Horror Horn, some 20 years earlier; he reports that they are quasi-human. Then, he gets chased down the same mountain by a pair of the creatures.

***

Gustave Le Rouge (1867-1938)

A prolific French writer who embodied the evolution of modern SF at the beginning of the 20th century, by moving it away from the juvenile adventures of Jules Verne and incorporating real people into his stories, thereby bridging the gap between Vernian and Wellsian science fiction.

Le Rouge burst onto the literary scene with La Conspiration des Milliardaires (The Billionaires' Conspiracy, 1899-1900), co-written with Gustave Guitton, in which American billionaire William Boltyn uses Thomas Edison's "Metal Men" and the power of mediums to try to become master of the world. Le Rouge and Guitton produced two more novels in the same vein, La princesse des airs (The Princess of the Skies, 1902) and Le sous-marin Jules Verne (The Submarine Jules Verne, 1903).

After they quarreled and went their separate ways, Le Rouge continued to produce solo fiction such as L'Espionne du Grand Lama (1906), which introduced a Lost World inhabited by prehistoric creatures and La Reine des Éléphants (The Queen of Elephants, 1906), which featured a society of intelligent elephants.

Le Rouge's masterpiece was Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars (1908) and its sequel, La Guerre des Vampires (1909), a Martian Odyssey in which French engineer Robert Darvel is dispatched to Mars by the psychic powers of Hindu Brahmins. On the Red Planet, Darvel runs afoul of hostile, bat-winged, blood-sucking natives, a once-powerful civilization now ruled by the Great Brain. The entity eventually sends Darvel back to Earth, unfortunately with some of the vampires. The second volume deals with the war of the vampires back on Earth. Planetary romance blends with "cosmic horror" as the characters switch from swashbuckling he-men to helpless bundles of gibbering terror.

Le Rouge's classic mad scientist/conspiracy saga is Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornelius (1912-13). Cornelius Kramm and his brother, Fritz, rule an international criminal empire called the Red Hand. Cornelius is a brilliant cosmetic surgeon nicknamed the "Sculptor of Human Flesh" for his ability to alter people's likenesses. The Red Hand's growing, global, evil influence eventually causes the creation of an alliance of heroes, led by Dr. Prosper Bondonnat, billionaire William Dorgan and Lord Burydan, who band together to fight and, ultimately, defeat them.

***

Paedocracy (Rule by Youth)

2009-01-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

Bleiler 176, 1378, 1475, 2203, 2444c

1906

* E.F. Benson, "The Superannuation Department A.D. 1945" (Windsor Magazine, January 1906). See E.F. Benson post.

1904-13

1914-23

* Lucian, 1920: Dips into the Near Future (Headly Brothers Publishing: London, 1918; a version was originally published in The Nation, 1917.) See John A. Hobson post.
READ IT

1924-33

SF authors born 1864-73: 1868

2009-01-05T02:21:00.000-08:00

1. John Stewart Barney
2. W.E.B. Du Bois
3. Gaston Leroux

***

John Stewart Barney (1868-1925)

* L.P.M.: The End of the Great War (Putnam: New York, 1915). John Fulton Edestone (Everett F. Bleiler speculates the name is a portmanteau word for Edison and Firestone) is a millionaire industrialist who has discovered the secret of antigravity: changing the electric charge of atomic particles.

"I have invented an instrument," continued Edestone, "which I call a Deionizer. With this, so far as regards any phenomena of which we are conscious, I am able to change the electrical condition of an object, provided this object is insulated from electrical contact with the earth. That is, I can change it from the so-called minus condition, which is attracted by the earth, to the plus condition, which being the same condition as the earth, is therefore not attracted by it. The object in that state can be said to have no weight, although frankly for some reason which I have not yet discovered it does not lose its inertia against motion in any direction relative to the earth."

Edestone feels strongly about the loss of life in the European war, and incorporates his antigravity device into a thousand-foot-long aerial dreadnought — the Little Peace Maker — capable of traveling 150 mph. German agents work against him, as he campaigns for peace in London; when the Kaiser attempts to steal the L.P.M., Edestone uses it to sink the German fleet, destroy ammunition dumps, and shell Berlin. Now de facto master of the world, Edestone forces the warring nations to disarm. The world — including its religions, economies, and ethnic populations — will from now on be governed rationally by a Board of Directors, with Edestone its chairman.

Gratuitous racism: "I am an American and I am proud of it," says Edestone. "Not because of the great power and wealth of my country, nor of its hundred and odd millions of people made up of the nations of the earth, the sweepings of Europe, the overflow of Asia, and the bag of the slave-hunter of Africa, which centuries will amalgamate into a _cafe au lait_ conglomerate, but because I am proud of that small group of Anglo-Saxons who, under the influence of the free air of our great country, have developed such strength that they have up to this time put the stamp of England upon all who have come in contact with them."

READ IT

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W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Mass., to a domestic and an itinerant mulatto barber of French extraction. Scholarships from Congregational churches sent him to Fisk University in Nashville, and in 1890 he was the first African American to earn a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard. He wrote a dozen monographs in urban sociology, history, politics, and cultural anthropology, in addition to five novels and three autobiographies. He was the architect of civil rights in the US, founder of the Niagara Movement in 1905 and a co-founder of the NAACP in 1910. Later, he was an architect of pan-Africanism. He was among the first American intellectuals to assert that hyphenated Americans were not cultural contradictions but the embodiment of an enriching diversity.

Du Bois led the way, along with anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits, in recovering the major lost civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa, in books such as The Negro and Black Folk Then and Now. Also known for the elitist 1903 "Talented Tenth" essay. In his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line.

* "The Comet" (Darkwater, Harcourt Brace: New York, 1920). Du Bois' 1920 essay and fiction collection, Darkwater, included a melodramatic SF story, "The Comet." It displays DuBois's view of race as a social construct, a pathological and absurd creation of social forces — and offers a prophetic, if illusive, humanist vision of the world freed from the "veil" (his term) of race. Jim Davis, an African-American bank flunky, is sent to its deepest, flooded vault on an unpleasant errand — while the Earth is passing through the tail of a comet. He ascends again to discover that everyone in New York is dead:

In the great stone doorway a hundred men and women and children lay crushed and twisted and jammed, forced into that great, gaping doorway like refuse in a can — as if in one wild, frantic rush to safety, they had rushed and ground themselves to death.

Jim meets Julia, a wealthy young white woman who'd been shut up in her darkroom when the comet's poison gases swept over the planet:

Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet. She stared at him. Of all the sorts of men she had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him. Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought.

Together, they search the city — including Harlem — for their loved ones, but to no avail. Julia panics:

For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger, — with a man alien in blood and culture— unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was awful! She must escape — she must fly; he must not see her again. Who knew what awful thoughts—

They flee the city together, though. Inchoate utopian fancies, of a truly multiracial society, of which they'd be the Adam and Eve, begin to stir in their fancies:

All nature slept until — until, and quick with the same startling thought, they looked into each other's eyes — he, ashen, and she, crimson, with unspoken thought. To both, the vision of a mighty beauty — of vast, unspoken things, swelled in their souls; but they put it away.

That night — it's a fast-paced tale — Julia has a vision:

She was no mere woman. She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor. She was primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life. She looked upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong, vigorous manhood — his sorrow and sacrifice. She saw him glorified. He was no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be.

Even as wealthy white Julia becomes primal, impoverished black Jim becomes royal, in a vision of his own:

Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord.

And then, just as they're about to consummate their new relationship, Julia's father and fiancé return from out of town, along with a crowd of other whites, and "rescue" her; it turns out that only New York was affected by the comet. "Well, what do you think of that?" cried a bystander; "of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger!"

Du Bois' story suggests that more radical measures than piecemeal reform and reluctant gradualism are needed to make America an authentic multicultural democracy.
READ IT

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Gaston Leroux (1868-1927)

Gaston Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction. In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, 1910).

His most important journalism came when he began working as an international correspondent for the Paris newspaper Le Matin. In 1905 he was present at and covered the Russian Revolution. Leroux's contribution to French detective fiction is considered a parallel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's in the United Kingdom and Edgar Allan Poe's in America.

* Le machine à assassiner (The Machine to Kill, 1924). Benedict Masson has been arrested, tried, and guillotined for a series of torture murders; Christine Norbert caught him burying a corpse in his cellar. Christine's father, a neglected horological genius, has created an artificial mechanical man (dubbed Gabriel) that can pass for a human. His nephew, Jacques Cotentin, a brilliant young surgeon, has equipped it with neural channels and a radioactive serum that will keep it alive. All that is needed is a brain... which is obtained from the guillotined Masson. As the story opens, the automaton has kidnapped Christine; everyone assumes that Masson, now alive in Gabriel, is seeking revenge. It turns out, however, that Masson (who is unable to speak) wants Christine to help him demonstrate his innocence. Sadistic crimes like those for which Masson was executed continue, and the police decide the automaton is committing them.

SF authors born 1884-93: 1885

2009-01-05T02:08:00.000-08:00

1. F. Britten Austin

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F. Britten Austin (TK)

TK

* Battlewrack

* By the Aero-Mail

* On the Borderland

* The War-God Walks Again

TK

SF authors born 1884-1893: 1891

2009-01-05T02:06:00.000-08:00

1. Otis Adelbert Kline

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Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)

American writer, literary agent. Frequent contributor to pulp magazines. Popular for shoddy knockoffs of Edgar Rice Burroughs' sword-and-raygun romances.

* "The Malignant Entity" (Weird Tales, May-June-July 1924). TK

* TK

* The Prince of Peril: The Weird Adventures of Zinlo, Man of Three Worlds Upon the Mysterious Planet of Venus (McClurg: Chicago, 1930). The second story in Kline's Venus series. The protagonist is a Martian, who has previously occupied the body of an Earthman, and who is now translated to Venus in the body of Prince Zinlo. A wicked nobleman is trying to assassinate Zinlo, who is crown prince. (Ripoff of Anthony Hope's 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda?)

* TK

SF authors born 1864-73: 1869

2009-01-05T01:38:00.000-08:00

1. Stephen Leacock
2. Booth Tarkington

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Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)

English-born Canadian economist, humorist. Taught at McGill. Leacock was both a social conservative and a partisan Conservative. He opposed women's rights (including the right to vote), and disliked non-Anglo-Saxon immigration. He was, however, a supporter of social welfare legislation. He was a staunch champion of the British Empire, and went on lecture tours to further the cause.

Early in his career Leacock turned to fiction, humour, and short reports to supplement (and ultimately exceed) his regular income. His stories, first published in magazines in Canada and the United States and later in novel form, became extremely popular around the world. It was said in 1911 that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada. Also, between the years 1915 and 1925, Leacock was the most popular humourist in the English-speaking world.

1914-23

* The Hohenzollerns in America: With the Bolsheviks and Berlin and Other Impossibilities (John Lane: London, 1919). TK

* Nonsense Novels (John Lane: London and New York, 1920). TK

* Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels (John Lane: London, 1920). TK

* "The Iron Man and the Tin Woman," in The Iron Man and the Tin Woman with Other Such Futurities: A Book of Little Sketches of To-Day and To-Morrow (John Lane: London, 1929). Sketches. Two human-formed robots, one male and one female, carry on a programmed courthip via battery-powered phonograph mechanisms and perforated tapes. The robots, however, are operating as proxies for two human lovers, as a jeu d'esprit.

* Other stories in The Iron Man and the Tin Woman with Other Such Futurities: A Book of Little Sketches of To-Day and To-Morrow (John Lane: London, 1929) TK.

***

Booth Tarkington (TK)

TK

SF authors born 1864-73: 1871

2009-01-05T01:32:00.000-08:00

1. Samuel Hopkins Adams

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Samuel Hopkins Adams (TK)

The Flying Death

TK