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
Showing posts with label Eighteen-Forties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eighteen-Forties. Show all posts
Thursday, January 8, 2009
SF authors born 1844-53: 1847
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
***
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)
"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.
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.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
SF authors born 1844-53: 1850
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.
READ IT
***
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.
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.
READ IT
***
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.
SF authors born 1844-53: 1846
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
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
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.
***
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.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
SF authors born 1844-53: 1851
1. Garrett P. Serviss
***
Garrett P. Serviss (1851-1929)
— James L. Campbell Sr., Science Fiction Writers, 2d ed., ed. Bleiler.
Serviss's elaborate public lectures (mid-1890s on) on astronomy, geology, cosmology, and archaeology — sponsored by Andrew Carnegie — were called the Urania Lectures. His popular-science books include: Astronomy with an Opera-Glass (1888), Wonders of the Lunar World (1892), Other Worlds (1901), The Moon (1907), and Einstein's Theory of Relativity (ca. 1923 -- it grew out of his assignment to write captions and to edit the 1923 silent film of that title).
* Edison's Conquest of Mars (Los Angeles: Carcosa House, 1947). Not technically a Radium-Age SF novel: serialized in the New York Evening Journal, January 12 — February 10, 1898. To capitalize on the success of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which was serialized in Pearson's Magazine late in 1897, Serviss — whose Urania Lectures were popular with the public — was commissioned to write a realistic space-story thriller. Edison's Conquest is a kind of sequel to War of the Worlds, in which America leads a preemptive strike on Mars, to forestall a predicted second invasion. Though episodic and poorly written, its verisimilitude — the ever-practical and inventive Thomas Edison, an exemplar of turn-of-the-century American technological know-how and organizational genius, equips the invasion with 100 spaceships powered by electrical attraction and repulsion; thousands of pistol- and cannon-like "disintegrator" guns (which destroy an object by increasing its molecular vibration); and sealed space suits (a literary first?) to enable American scientists- and technicians-turned-soldier to survive in an atmospheric vacuum — was impressive. The novel, perhaps the first to depict a battle waged by spaceships flying in an airless void, "introduced many of the rituals, set pieces [e.g., a World Congress bickers about the invasion's details; Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany is particularly childish] and expected actions [exploration, fighting] now common to the interplanetary war subgenre," according to Science Fiction Writers. Also: We discover that the Moon was formerly inhabited by giants; Martians are bred as soldiers, scientists, and scholars; Percival Lowell was right about the polar ice caps and canals; and (SPOILER) it was Martians who built Egypt's pyramids (and the Sphinx, a likeness of a Martian) 9,000 years ago!
* The Moon Metal (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900). Not considered one of Serviss's major novels. Nor is it a Radium-Age novel, so forget it.
* "The Sky Pirate." Serialized in Scrap Book, 7-8, April-September 1909. (No book edition.) TK
* A Columbus of Space (New York: D. Appleton, 1911). Serialized in All-Story Weekly, January to June 1909. Serviss's second major novel, which (like Edison's Conquest) lacks in characterization and (unlike Edison's Conquest) verisimilitude. Also an interplanetary voyage — set in New York and on Venus at the turn of the century. Edmund Stonewall and three companions travel to Venus in a homemade spacecraft powered by atomic energy. A Stone Age humanoid [resembles a Wampa, from George Lucas's ice planet of Hoth] society lives underground on the dark side of Venus, and an advanced human society (sun-worshipping, blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan types) lives on its light side. Both races of Venusians communicate via telepathy. When a cloud shield protecting the light side of the planet from ultraviolet rays parts, the advanced civilization goes mad and destroys itself.
* The Second Deluge (New York: McBride, Nast, 1912). Serialized in Cavalier Magazine, July 1911 to January 1912. Serviss's last important novel, and his best, is an updated version of Noah and the flood. From 1876-92, Serviss was an editor at the New York Sun, where he worked with E.P. Mitchell, and early American SF writer whose 4/28/75 story "The Story of the Deluge" influenced the planning and conception of this novel. (Mark Twain's Letters from Earth also an influence.) A thrilling adventure story about an apocalyptic flood, followed by a post-apocalyptic tale describing a new human beginning based on scientific planning, eugenics, and reason — except it doesn't work out that way, exactly. Cosmo Versal braves ridicule in building an ark, survives, the flood, and searches for survivors. Complacent scientists, scheming public officials, and capitalist robber barons are satirized.
* "The Moon Maiden." Serialized in Argosy, 79, May 1915. (No book edition.) TK
***
Garrett P. Serviss (1851-1929)
Editor, author, popular public lecturer, world traveler, and cofounder of the American Astronomical Society, Garrett Putnam Serviss was one of the most important science fiction novelists in America before World War I.
— James L. Campbell Sr., Science Fiction Writers, 2d ed., ed. Bleiler.
Serviss's elaborate public lectures (mid-1890s on) on astronomy, geology, cosmology, and archaeology — sponsored by Andrew Carnegie — were called the Urania Lectures. His popular-science books include: Astronomy with an Opera-Glass (1888), Wonders of the Lunar World (1892), Other Worlds (1901), The Moon (1907), and Einstein's Theory of Relativity (ca. 1923 -- it grew out of his assignment to write captions and to edit the 1923 silent film of that title).
* Edison's Conquest of Mars (Los Angeles: Carcosa House, 1947). Not technically a Radium-Age SF novel: serialized in the New York Evening Journal, January 12 — February 10, 1898. To capitalize on the success of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which was serialized in Pearson's Magazine late in 1897, Serviss — whose Urania Lectures were popular with the public — was commissioned to write a realistic space-story thriller. Edison's Conquest is a kind of sequel to War of the Worlds, in which America leads a preemptive strike on Mars, to forestall a predicted second invasion. Though episodic and poorly written, its verisimilitude — the ever-practical and inventive Thomas Edison, an exemplar of turn-of-the-century American technological know-how and organizational genius, equips the invasion with 100 spaceships powered by electrical attraction and repulsion; thousands of pistol- and cannon-like "disintegrator" guns (which destroy an object by increasing its molecular vibration); and sealed space suits (a literary first?) to enable American scientists- and technicians-turned-soldier to survive in an atmospheric vacuum — was impressive. The novel, perhaps the first to depict a battle waged by spaceships flying in an airless void, "introduced many of the rituals, set pieces [e.g., a World Congress bickers about the invasion's details; Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany is particularly childish] and expected actions [exploration, fighting] now common to the interplanetary war subgenre," according to Science Fiction Writers. Also: We discover that the Moon was formerly inhabited by giants; Martians are bred as soldiers, scientists, and scholars; Percival Lowell was right about the polar ice caps and canals; and (SPOILER) it was Martians who built Egypt's pyramids (and the Sphinx, a likeness of a Martian) 9,000 years ago!
* The Moon Metal (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900). Not considered one of Serviss's major novels. Nor is it a Radium-Age novel, so forget it.
* "The Sky Pirate." Serialized in Scrap Book, 7-8, April-September 1909. (No book edition.) TK
* A Columbus of Space (New York: D. Appleton, 1911). Serialized in All-Story Weekly, January to June 1909. Serviss's second major novel, which (like Edison's Conquest) lacks in characterization and (unlike Edison's Conquest) verisimilitude. Also an interplanetary voyage — set in New York and on Venus at the turn of the century. Edmund Stonewall and three companions travel to Venus in a homemade spacecraft powered by atomic energy. A Stone Age humanoid [resembles a Wampa, from George Lucas's ice planet of Hoth] society lives underground on the dark side of Venus, and an advanced human society (sun-worshipping, blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan types) lives on its light side. Both races of Venusians communicate via telepathy. When a cloud shield protecting the light side of the planet from ultraviolet rays parts, the advanced civilization goes mad and destroys itself.
* The Second Deluge (New York: McBride, Nast, 1912). Serialized in Cavalier Magazine, July 1911 to January 1912. Serviss's last important novel, and his best, is an updated version of Noah and the flood. From 1876-92, Serviss was an editor at the New York Sun, where he worked with E.P. Mitchell, and early American SF writer whose 4/28/75 story "The Story of the Deluge" influenced the planning and conception of this novel. (Mark Twain's Letters from Earth also an influence.) A thrilling adventure story about an apocalyptic flood, followed by a post-apocalyptic tale describing a new human beginning based on scientific planning, eugenics, and reason — except it doesn't work out that way, exactly. Cosmo Versal braves ridicule in building an ark, survives, the flood, and searches for survivors. Complacent scientists, scheming public officials, and capitalist robber barons are satirized.
* "The Moon Maiden." Serialized in Argosy, 79, May 1915. (No book edition.) TK
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