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.
***
Showing posts with label Eighteen-Sixties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eighteen-Sixties. Show all posts
Monday, January 5, 2009
SF authors born 1864-73: 1868
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.
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
***
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:
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:
Together, they search the city — including Harlem — for their loved ones, but to no avail. Julia panics:
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:
That night — it's a fast-paced tale — Julia has a vision:
Even as wealthy white Julia becomes primal, impoverished black Jim becomes royal, in a vision of his own:
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
***
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.
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
***
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
***
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 1864-73: 1869
1. Stephen Leacock
2. Booth Tarkington
***
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
2. Booth Tarkington
***
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
1. Samuel Hopkins Adams
***
Samuel Hopkins Adams (TK)
The Flying Death
TK
***
Samuel Hopkins Adams (TK)
The Flying Death
TK
SF authors born 1864-73: 1872
1. Ludwig Anton
2. Howard R. Garis
***
Ludwig Anton (1872-?)
* Interplanetary Bridges (Brücken über den Weltraum, Holzwarth, Düsseldorf, 1922) (Trans — K. Schmidt) (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Winter 1933). One of the foreign works imported by H. Gernsback. Pioneer flight to Venus.
***
Howard R. Garis (1873-1962)
Howard Roger Garis (Amherst, Massachusetts) was an American author, best known for a series of books, published under his own name, that featured the character of Uncle Wiggily Longears, an engaging elderly rabbit. Garis also wrote many books for the Stratemeyer Syndicate under various pseudonyms. As Victor Appleton, he wrote about the enterprising Tom Swift; as Laura Lee Hope, he is generally credited with writing volumes 4–28 and 41 of the Bobbsey Twins; as Clarence Young, the Motor Boys series; as Lester Chadwick, the Great Marvel series and books featuring Baseball Joe; and as Marion Davidson, a number of books including several featuring the Camp Fire Girls.
His son, Roger Garis, penned a biography of the writing Garis family My Father Was Uncle Wiggily (McGraw-Hill, 1966). Forty years later, Howard Garis' granddaughter Leslie Garis wrote a more revealing memoir, The House of Happy Endings (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007).
As Victor Appleton, Garis wrote the first 35 Tom Swift stories for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. The first series was launched in 1910 and ran into the late 1930s, over 14 million copies being sold by Grosset & Dunlap Publishers (New York).
Tom Swift is the young protagonist in several series of juvenile adventure novels which began in the early twentieth century and continues to the present. Each such series stars a hero named Tom Swift who is a genius inventor and whose breakthroughs in technology (especially transport technology) drive the plots of the novels, placing them in a genre sometimes called "invention fiction" or "Edisonade". Some of the later heroes might be considered the same character after a rebooted continuity, but in at least one series, Tom Swift was identified as a relative of the original Tom Swift. The first books were outlined by Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate, written by ghostwriters and all credited to the house name of Victor Appleton.
The locale is the little town of Shopton in upstate New York, near Lake Carlopa. In comparison to son Tom Jr., Tom Sr.'s aerial, mechanical, and electrical inventions are closer to the real world state-of-the-art at the time of their writing. While some of Tom Sr.'s inventions are not well-founded in a scientific sense, others elaborated developments in the news and in popular magazines aimed at young science and invention enthusiasts. Presenting themselves as a forecast of future possibilities, they now and then hit close to the mark. Some predicted inventions that came true include "photo telephones", vertical takeoff aircraft, aerial warships, giant cannons, and "wizard" cameras. However some other devices, such as magnetic silencers for motors, have not appeared yet.
Tom's adventures are also more closely tied to events and public issues of the time than are the later series. Tom used his Electric Runabout to avert a run on a bank. During the Great War, Tom was secretly working on his War Tank and could not enlist, leading to fears that he was a slacker. Several of his inventions related to the war. He was called Tom Swift Senior after Tom Swift Junior appeared in the subsequent series.
Several researchers and authors (most notably John Dizer) have noted a parallel between Tom Swift's early career and that of real-life aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss.
Books in the original Tom Swift series
1. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle; or, Fun and Adventure on the Road, 1910. Tom purchased a very expensive motorcycle from a nearby town. The model year would have been 1909 or 1910. Tom tweaked the sprocket ratios, spark levers and overall performance of his machine by 15%, as well as increasing its range. Barton Swift, Tom's father, was working on a new turbine design, which would increase performance of motors. Turbines are used all over the world today in the same way. About the same time Barton Swift was working on this design, Nikola Tesla was working to patent his own model - the bladeless turbine, which may have been the basis for Barton's work.
READ IT
2. Tom Swift and His Motor Boat; or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa, 1910. Tom purchased a used two-cylinder "family cruiser" lake boat at auction with the intention of customizing it. The model he purchased would have been from between the years 1900-1910 and was twenty-one feet in length. Among his modifications were: ignition system, water pump, oil system, spark plugs, and fuel tank. In the end, the cruiser's two-cycle engine was able to outpace the three-cylinder engine of his nemesis, Andy Foger. Barton Smith, Tom's father, was perfecting his latest invention: an electric gyroscope to be used in airplanes.
READ IT
3. Tom Swift and His Airship; or, The Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud, 1910. Tom Swift, and his friend (John Sharp - aeronaut extraordinaire), designed and built the Red Cloud: an airship that was half blimp/dirigible and half airplane. In fact, it had two wings (like the WWI biplanes) extending out from a spacious gondola which sat beneath the rather voluminous gas-filled balloon. It was fast, achieving over 80mph if pressed, and could stay in the air for two weeks at a time, if Tom wanted. Perhaps the most fantastic element of the craft was the gondola, which was luxuriously appointed with multiple rooms; e.g., a kitchen, an engine room, and a first-rate observation room from which Tom would steer the ship, while looking out the surrounding windows. Barton Smith, Tom's father, is nearing completion of a submarine design that promises to be the most advanced in the world.
READ IT
4. Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat; or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure, 1910. Barton Smith, Tom's father, has designed an innovative submarine - The Advance - that can outperform anything even the government has in its arsenal. At 100ft from nose to stern, and 20ft at the beam, the submarine has a triple layered hull (which can handle depths of more than three miles). It runs normally on gasoline, but also has the advantage of a hydrodynamic drive for auxiliary and silent propulsion. The craft is armed with electric cannons both at the rear and fore of the ship as well as a ram on the prow, should it come to the worst. There are many rooms, both luxurious and well-appointed, including a lounge, bedrooms, and, of course, an airlock through which the crew can exit when exploring the ocean floor in their specially designed deep-water diving suits.
READ IT
5. Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout; or, The Speediest Car on the Road, 1910. Tom Swift invents a ground-breaking, powerful new rechargeable battery with half the recharge time (allowing Tom to leave other battery-powered race cars far behind while at the track). More importantly, Tom has taken electric vehicles to a whole new level with his convertible sports car, both with the inclusion of his revolutionary battery, but in other wonderful design features as well. His custom vehicle was designed from the ground up for performance and speed, with a top rate of 100mph and a range of 400 miles (on a single charge). Even almost 100 years later, electric cars can't match what Tom designed in his spare time. His aerodynamic convertible was painted a glossy purple that was sure not to be overlooked when barreling down the speedway.
READ IT
6. Tom Swift and His Wireless Message; or, The Castaways of Earthquake Island, 1911. The island is not entirely uninhabited, as the survivors of a shipwreck are also stranded on the island. Both groups quickly come upon each other, and working together, they are able to survive as Tom Swift builds a spark gap transmitter radio from salvaged parts. Tom Swift used the older and more established CQD distress call, which had been in use since 1904. The newer SOS distress call was adopted two years prior the timeframe of the story, in 1908. In contrast, in 1912 when the Titanic sank, the wireless operator transmitted their distress in both CQD and SOS formats.
READ IT
7. Tom Swift Among the Diamond Makers; or, The Secret of Phantom Mountain, 1911. Although the story still revolves around invention, Tom did not have any part in the invention. In this story, the major invention, and plot device, is a diamond-making machine, utilizing the power of harnessed lightning. Unfortunately for Tom and friends, they were never able to get close enough to the machinery to determine the secret to making diamonds.
READ IT
8. Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice; or, The Wreck of the Airship, 1911. Another story where no major invention is produced by Tom. He did create a special new lifting gas for his airship, needed to overcome the atmospheric problems they may encounter in the arctic north. As a side-invention, Tom has been working on a new electric rifle, but it is not properly introduced in this story.
READ IT
9. Tom Swift and His Sky Racer; or, The Quickest Flight on Record, 1911. Tom's Sky Racer, known as the Humming-Bird, is a two-seater monoplane, like his previous monoplane the Butterfly. However, the Sky Racer, is smaller and faster - making it ideal for air racing. It uses a single gasoline, air-cooled engine, which can attain air speeds of well over 100mph with a minimum thrust of 1000lbs at 2000rpms. Tom also invented an automated stabilizing unit which allowed the Sky Racer to handle adverse weather conditions without loss of control. The Sky Racer's design was compared to that of the Blériot_XI and the Antoinette VII, however its wings were patterned after that of the hummingbird, rather than standard rectangular wings.
READ IT
10. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; or, Daring Adventures on Elephant Island, 1911. Tom builds two major inventions in this volume. The first is a replacement airship, known as The Black Hawk. This new airship is to replace The Red Cloud, which was destroyed during his adventures in Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice. This airship is of the same general construction as The Red Cloud, but is smaller and more maneuverable.
Of foremost notice is Tom's invention of the electric rifle, a gun which fires bolts of electricity. The electric rifle can be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality; it is capable of shooting through solid walls without leaving a hole, as well as powerful enough to kill a rampaging whale, as in their steamer trek to Africa. With the electric rifle, Tom and friends not only bring down elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffalo, but also manage to save their lives multiple times in pitched battle with the red pygmies. In addition to its more "military" like features, the electric rifle has the capability of discharging a globe of light that was described as being able to maintain itself, like ball lightning, making hunting at night much safer in the dark of Africa. In appearance, the rifle looked very much like its contemporary conventional cousins. Sixty years later, the Taser was invented by Jack Cover and marketed by Taser International. The trademark is an acronym for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle. The middle initial is gratuitous, as Tom's full name is unknown.
READ IT
11. Tom Swift in the City of Gold; or, Marvelous Adventures Underground, 1912. Tom continues to improve on his airship designs, which are combined bi-plane and dirigibles. This time, a much smaller version of the Blackhawk is designed, with many of the same features.
READ IT
12. Tom Swift and His Air Glider; or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure, 1912. While testing out one of his many airships, Tom needs to make emergency landing for repairs. He complains of the poor quality platinum used for his magneto, and is overheard by an escaped Russian exile. The man tells Tom of a secret platinum mine, deep in Siberia. The man also explains that his brother is still in exile, and will be more useful in locating the mine. Tom organizes an expedition to save the exile and find the platinum mine. Note that the Russian revolutionaries in the book are referred to as the Nihilist movement. However, given the time in which the book takes place, the author would more likely have been referring to Bolsheviks. For this adventure, Tom needs to build the Vulture, a special glider that can withstand the high-velocity winds in the vicinity of the mine. Also, to transport the glider and his friends over the Atlantic, across Europe, and into Siberia, Tom builds his largest airship yet, the Falcon.
READ IT
13. Tom Swift in Captivity; or, A Daring Escape by Airship, 1912. Inventions are not a major part of the story. Prior to the story opening, Tom has already built The Lark, a new version of his sky racer, The Hummingbird. This is a more traditional prop job than his previous airships. In the background is mentioned that Tom is also working on a new "silent airship". Tom's electric rifle also makes a regular appearance in this adventure.
READ IT
14. Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera; or, Thrilling Adventures While Taking Moving Pictures, 1912. Mentioned in a previous volume, Tom continues to work on his noiseless airship. When Tom finally takes up Mr. Periods proposal, a new motion picture camera must be designed and built. This is a wonderful camera that can run on battery power or from a dynamo, being fully automatic. It can also be operated by a hand-crank. Built especially for this trip is a new airship, The Flyer. With a longer range, and accommodations for long-term trips, this is probably the biggest airship Tom has built to date.
READ IT
15. Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight; or, On the Border for Uncle Sam, 1912. In previous volumes, but only mentioned peripherally, Tom has been working on a noiseless airship. These are basically modifications to the engine: a new muffler and sparking device. Built for use in this adventure is Tom's giant searchlight, as the title of the story suggests. A device utilizing a mixed electrical current, the searchlight can be seen for miles and miles, and is used specifically to search for smugglers during the night.
READ IT
16. Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon; or, The Longest Shots on Record, 1913. The cannon Tom invents is the largest gun to date. Measuring 100 feet in length, it has a 30 inch caliber, and Tom estimates he can launch a 2 ton projectile 30 miles.
READ IT
17. Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone; or, The Picture That Saved a Fortune, 1914. The photo telephone is a modification to normal telephones. A third wire is used to transmit the image, which is displayed on charged selenium plates. The image is not a live video image, but rather a static one-time image, a photograph, used mainly for identification of the remote end. The plates can be reused, or can be developed to produce a permanent copy. A side-improvement to the whole system is done when Tom attaches a phonograph cylinder recorder to the telephone system, preserving not only a visual image but an audio recording.
READ IT
18. Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship; or, The Naval Terror of the Seas, 1915. Tom creates two new inventions for this story: a huge airship for military use, and a method of dealing with recoil on the weapons to be used.
Image of a Zeppelin in flight.
The airship is built on a similar model as the German-built zeppelins. These are huge craft, Tom's measuring at 600 feet in length and 60 feet in diameter. It is built of a semi-rigid airbag with several separated gas compartments, which would permit lift even if one or more of the gas compartments was damaged. Three cabins are hung below the airship: at the front is the pilot house, in the middle is the general quarters, and at the rear is the engine. A non-flammable gas is used for lift, and a single gas-powered engine provides forward momentum. Storage batteries, coupled with an electric motor, are used as backup power in the event of main engine failure. Tom hoped to sell this to the United States government, with an eye on the hostilities occurring in Europe at the time of the story. Secondary to the airship, Tom needs to conceive of a way to neutralize recoil from the guns which he plans to mount: two 4-inch cannon, and several unspecified machine-guns. When fired, the cannon would generate enough recoil to rip the ship apart, but Tom is inspired by Ned's observation of how an automatic door closer operates. Tom's invention is similar to the recoil system used in the French 75mm field gun.
READ IT
19. Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel; or, The Hidden City of the Andes, 1916. Early in the book, Tom is working a new gyroscope, but events soon overtake that project, and Tom puts that aside for the time being. In Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon, Tom has developed a new propellant to launch the projectiles from his giant cannon, and when Mr. Titus requests Tom's help, Tom begins to develop a new blasting powder. Ultimately Tom finds a suitable solution which can blast through heavy rock with ease. While on the job site, several blasts into the mountain, the rock changes into an even harder substance. Tom needs to modify his formula from a "quick burn" into a "slow burn" blast; rather than blasting the rock via concussion alone, the new formula first builds high pressure in the fissures of the rock, before the concussion splits the rock.
READ IT
20. Tom Swift In the Land of Wonders; or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold, 1917. Professor Bumper, introduced in the previous volume, is on the trail of another lost city, this time the lost city of Kurzon, somewhere deep in Honduras. The Professor has come into some documents which he thinks will help him locate the city, and the documents make mention of a huge idol made of solid gold. Professor Bumper would very much like Tom Swift to accompany the expedition.Inventions take a back-seat in this story. Prior to Professor Bumper's arrival, Tom Swift is working on a new gyroscope, which was also briefly introduced in the previous volume. In Europe, World War I continues to rage, and several European governments have expressed an interest in Tom Swift's new gyroscope, as safety devices for use in the aerial aspect of the war. When envy drives Tom to join the expedition, Tom hands the gyroscope project over to his father, Barton Swift, and it is not heard of for the rest of the story.
READ IT
21. Tom Swift and His War Tank; or, Doing His Bit for Uncle Sam, 1918. When the United States joins in The Great War, it seems that everyone has war fever. A military base close to Shopton is training soldiers in the art of trench warfare, while pilots are learning aerial combat. Ned Newton has quit his job to sell liberty bonds full-time. Many of the young men have enlisted, or even hoping for the draft. Everyone seems to be doing their bit, except for Tom Swift, which raises many concerns that Tom is a slacker. Tom does not let his country down; the reason he appears to be idle is that he has secretly been developing a new tank for use in combat. The project is so secret that Tom does not even let his close friends know, which causes the concerns being raised about Tom's patriotism. Even though the development is in secret, that does not stop German nationals from trying to steal his tank. Tanks are a new wartime technology, and the British army has deployed them for use on the western front. Tom's tank is bigger, and able to travel at twice the speed of current models, with a max of 12 miles per hour. At the expense of limited firepower with four unspecified machine guns, the tank has heavier armor plating than the British tanks. Tom further refines the tank with an innovative built-in bridging mechanism, which will allow the tank to roll over wider trenches than the existing models.
READ IT
22. Tom Swift and His Air Scout; or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky, 1919. World War I still rages on in Europe, and Tom Swift is still inventing wartime technology, but inspiration comes in the form of infatuation: while taking Mary Nestor for a brief flight, he is unable to communicate due to the noise of the engine, which sets Tom onto the track of developing a totally silent airship. While Mary Nestor was the spark, Tom intends to offer this to the United States government for use on the western front. While this is still a germ of an idea, Tom is approached by Mr. Gale and Mr. Ware, representatives of the Universal Flying Machine Company, a competing airship manufacturer. Tom is offered a lucrative salary to join the firm, but Tom is disinterested in the money. Tom's refusal infuriates the men, and events are set in motion, which include the (accidental) kidnapping of Mr. Nestor, Mary's father. Tom builds a special silencer for airship engines. The silencer consists of several components: a new type of propeller, retooling the engine compression, but most importantly, a new type of muffler. The muffler system is simply described as a series of baffles. The end result is an airship which produces no discernible noise, to be used on scouting missions in the war.
READ IT
23. Tom Swift and His Undersea Search; or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic, 1920. A Mr. Dixwell Hardley approaches Tom with a proposition to help recover sunken treasure. Mr. Hardley was onboard a ship which was carrying gold to help finance an illegal revolution. When the ship sank, Mr. Hardley overheard the captain recording the coordinates. Now he wants Tom's help to recover the gold, under the guise of both financing the expedition as well as rewarding Tom with a portion of the recovered treasure. Unfortunately for Tom, after agreeing to the expedition, he learns that Mr. Hardley is a con-artist, who recently scammed someone out of the oil well rights. Making matters worse, the victim is Barton Keith, a relative of Mary Nestor. Rather than cancel the expedition, Tom decides to carry on in the hopes of restoring Mr. Keith's claims to the oil wells. Invention is almost irrelevant to this story. Tom retrofits his submarine, which he built in Volume #4. The redesign makes use of electric and gasoline powered engines. The hull is doubly-strengthened, as the sunken ship is at a greater depth. An exterior version of the great searchlight is affixed to the newly-remodeled submarine; and finally, newly strengthened diving suits and a special type of diving bell have been built for the expedition.
READ IT
24. Tom Swift Among the Fire Fighters; or, Battling with Flames in the Air, 1921. While Tom and Ned Newton are reviewing financial records, a fire breaks out at the fireworks factory in town. Assisting the firemen, they rescue Josephus Baxter, Mr. Baxter is developing a new dye formula, and has hired out laboratory space at the factory. During the mayhem created by the fire and the rescue, Mr. Baxter looses the formula, but he is positive that the owners of the factory have stolen it. Tom feels pity on the man, and allows him use of the labs at the Swift Construction Company. While observing the blaze, Tom wonders that there is not a more efficient way to fight fire, especially having troubles with multi-storied buildings or skyscrapers. These thoughts lead him to develop a new fire suppressant chemical, and an air-borne system to deliver the new chemicals to the upper stories of skyscrapers. The bulk of inventions are centered around various chemical compounds which will be used to suppress fire. Tom has several iterations of a promising chemical, which basically delivers carbon dioxide into the blaze in such quantity as to suffocate the fire in a very short period of time. The formula is contained in special carboys which Tom terms grenades, designed to be dropped (either manually or automatically) from the air. When the formula is considered ideal, the next step will be to develop a delivery system using airships. A four-passenger airship is built, with sufficient storage to carry an unspecified amount of the fire-fighting grenades. To aid in dropping grenades, Tom builds a bomb sight, which, when mechanically adjusted for altitude, air speed, wind, and the weight of the grenades, will permit accurate placement of the grenades over the target.
READ IT
25. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive; or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails, 1922. ichard Bartholomew, president of the Hendrickton and Pas Alos Railroad Company (H&PA) is under pressure to save his company from bankruptcy. If Mr. Bartholomew cannot come up with a means to compete with the Hendrickton & Western railroad, the H&PA will be doomed to failure. Mr. Bartholomew has contracted The Swift Construction Company to build a new electric locomotive which can travel at 2 miles per minute (120 MPH, 193 Km/h). The catch is that the owner of the competing H&W railway, Montagne Lewis, is dishonest and will stop at nothing to prevent Mr. Bartholomew from succeeding. Hired thugs are under orders to destroy Tom's developments. Tom, and his friends Ned Newton and Mr. Damon, have several life-threatening encounters with these hired gunmen. Tom must build a locomotive engine to compete with the best engines of the time, an engine under the patent of Jandel. The result is the Hercules 0001, an electric locomotive measuring 90 feet long, 14 feet tall and weighing almost 275 tons. The engine is powered by a pantograph connection to dual overhead caternary lines providing 3,000 volts DC. The engine is laid out with two non-driven trucks of four wheels on either end, and 12 driving wheels of 70 inch diameter. The layout of the driving wheels is never explicitly mentioned, but the configuration would be either 4-12-4 or 4-6-0+0-6-4 (see Whyte notation). Each axle is independently powered. The output of the engine is estimated at 4400 horsepower. Tom is able to achieve the target specs of 120 MPH on straight tracks, for passenger transport; for hauling freight up a 2% incline, he is able to achieve 45 MPH.
READ IT
26. Tom Swift and His Flying Boat; or, Castaways of the Giant Iceberg, 1923
27. Tom Swift and His Great Oil Gusher; or, The Treasure of Goby Farm, 1924
28. Tom Swift and His Chest of Secrets; or, Tracing the Stolen Inventions, 1925
29. Tom Swift and His Airline Express; or, From Ocean to Ocean by Daylight, 1926
30. Tom Swift Circling the Globe; or, The Daring Cruise of the Air Monarch, 1927
31. Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures; or, The Greatest Invention on Record, 1928
32. Tom Swift and His House on Wheels; or, A Trip around the Mountain of Mystery, 1929
33. Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible; or, Adventures Over the Forest of Fire, 1930
34. Tom Swift and His Sky Train; or, Overland Through the Clouds, 1931
35. Tom Swift and His Giant Magnet; or, Bringing Up the Lost Submarine, 1932
36. Tom Swift and His Television Detector; or, Trailing the Secret Plotters, 1933 [not by Garis?]
2. Howard R. Garis
***
Ludwig Anton (1872-?)
* Interplanetary Bridges (Brücken über den Weltraum, Holzwarth, Düsseldorf, 1922) (Trans — K. Schmidt) (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Winter 1933). One of the foreign works imported by H. Gernsback. Pioneer flight to Venus.
***
Howard R. Garis (1873-1962)
Howard Roger Garis (Amherst, Massachusetts) was an American author, best known for a series of books, published under his own name, that featured the character of Uncle Wiggily Longears, an engaging elderly rabbit. Garis also wrote many books for the Stratemeyer Syndicate under various pseudonyms. As Victor Appleton, he wrote about the enterprising Tom Swift; as Laura Lee Hope, he is generally credited with writing volumes 4–28 and 41 of the Bobbsey Twins; as Clarence Young, the Motor Boys series; as Lester Chadwick, the Great Marvel series and books featuring Baseball Joe; and as Marion Davidson, a number of books including several featuring the Camp Fire Girls.
His son, Roger Garis, penned a biography of the writing Garis family My Father Was Uncle Wiggily (McGraw-Hill, 1966). Forty years later, Howard Garis' granddaughter Leslie Garis wrote a more revealing memoir, The House of Happy Endings (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007).
As Victor Appleton, Garis wrote the first 35 Tom Swift stories for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. The first series was launched in 1910 and ran into the late 1930s, over 14 million copies being sold by Grosset & Dunlap Publishers (New York).
Tom Swift is the young protagonist in several series of juvenile adventure novels which began in the early twentieth century and continues to the present. Each such series stars a hero named Tom Swift who is a genius inventor and whose breakthroughs in technology (especially transport technology) drive the plots of the novels, placing them in a genre sometimes called "invention fiction" or "Edisonade". Some of the later heroes might be considered the same character after a rebooted continuity, but in at least one series, Tom Swift was identified as a relative of the original Tom Swift. The first books were outlined by Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate, written by ghostwriters and all credited to the house name of Victor Appleton.
The locale is the little town of Shopton in upstate New York, near Lake Carlopa. In comparison to son Tom Jr., Tom Sr.'s aerial, mechanical, and electrical inventions are closer to the real world state-of-the-art at the time of their writing. While some of Tom Sr.'s inventions are not well-founded in a scientific sense, others elaborated developments in the news and in popular magazines aimed at young science and invention enthusiasts. Presenting themselves as a forecast of future possibilities, they now and then hit close to the mark. Some predicted inventions that came true include "photo telephones", vertical takeoff aircraft, aerial warships, giant cannons, and "wizard" cameras. However some other devices, such as magnetic silencers for motors, have not appeared yet.
Tom's adventures are also more closely tied to events and public issues of the time than are the later series. Tom used his Electric Runabout to avert a run on a bank. During the Great War, Tom was secretly working on his War Tank and could not enlist, leading to fears that he was a slacker. Several of his inventions related to the war. He was called Tom Swift Senior after Tom Swift Junior appeared in the subsequent series.
Several researchers and authors (most notably John Dizer) have noted a parallel between Tom Swift's early career and that of real-life aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss.
Books in the original Tom Swift series
1. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle; or, Fun and Adventure on the Road, 1910. Tom purchased a very expensive motorcycle from a nearby town. The model year would have been 1909 or 1910. Tom tweaked the sprocket ratios, spark levers and overall performance of his machine by 15%, as well as increasing its range. Barton Swift, Tom's father, was working on a new turbine design, which would increase performance of motors. Turbines are used all over the world today in the same way. About the same time Barton Swift was working on this design, Nikola Tesla was working to patent his own model - the bladeless turbine, which may have been the basis for Barton's work.
READ IT
2. Tom Swift and His Motor Boat; or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa, 1910. Tom purchased a used two-cylinder "family cruiser" lake boat at auction with the intention of customizing it. The model he purchased would have been from between the years 1900-1910 and was twenty-one feet in length. Among his modifications were: ignition system, water pump, oil system, spark plugs, and fuel tank. In the end, the cruiser's two-cycle engine was able to outpace the three-cylinder engine of his nemesis, Andy Foger. Barton Smith, Tom's father, was perfecting his latest invention: an electric gyroscope to be used in airplanes.
READ IT
3. Tom Swift and His Airship; or, The Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud, 1910. Tom Swift, and his friend (John Sharp - aeronaut extraordinaire), designed and built the Red Cloud: an airship that was half blimp/dirigible and half airplane. In fact, it had two wings (like the WWI biplanes) extending out from a spacious gondola which sat beneath the rather voluminous gas-filled balloon. It was fast, achieving over 80mph if pressed, and could stay in the air for two weeks at a time, if Tom wanted. Perhaps the most fantastic element of the craft was the gondola, which was luxuriously appointed with multiple rooms; e.g., a kitchen, an engine room, and a first-rate observation room from which Tom would steer the ship, while looking out the surrounding windows. Barton Smith, Tom's father, is nearing completion of a submarine design that promises to be the most advanced in the world.
READ IT
4. Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat; or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure, 1910. Barton Smith, Tom's father, has designed an innovative submarine - The Advance - that can outperform anything even the government has in its arsenal. At 100ft from nose to stern, and 20ft at the beam, the submarine has a triple layered hull (which can handle depths of more than three miles). It runs normally on gasoline, but also has the advantage of a hydrodynamic drive for auxiliary and silent propulsion. The craft is armed with electric cannons both at the rear and fore of the ship as well as a ram on the prow, should it come to the worst. There are many rooms, both luxurious and well-appointed, including a lounge, bedrooms, and, of course, an airlock through which the crew can exit when exploring the ocean floor in their specially designed deep-water diving suits.
READ IT
5. Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout; or, The Speediest Car on the Road, 1910. Tom Swift invents a ground-breaking, powerful new rechargeable battery with half the recharge time (allowing Tom to leave other battery-powered race cars far behind while at the track). More importantly, Tom has taken electric vehicles to a whole new level with his convertible sports car, both with the inclusion of his revolutionary battery, but in other wonderful design features as well. His custom vehicle was designed from the ground up for performance and speed, with a top rate of 100mph and a range of 400 miles (on a single charge). Even almost 100 years later, electric cars can't match what Tom designed in his spare time. His aerodynamic convertible was painted a glossy purple that was sure not to be overlooked when barreling down the speedway.
READ IT
6. Tom Swift and His Wireless Message; or, The Castaways of Earthquake Island, 1911. The island is not entirely uninhabited, as the survivors of a shipwreck are also stranded on the island. Both groups quickly come upon each other, and working together, they are able to survive as Tom Swift builds a spark gap transmitter radio from salvaged parts. Tom Swift used the older and more established CQD distress call, which had been in use since 1904. The newer SOS distress call was adopted two years prior the timeframe of the story, in 1908. In contrast, in 1912 when the Titanic sank, the wireless operator transmitted their distress in both CQD and SOS formats.
READ IT
7. Tom Swift Among the Diamond Makers; or, The Secret of Phantom Mountain, 1911. Although the story still revolves around invention, Tom did not have any part in the invention. In this story, the major invention, and plot device, is a diamond-making machine, utilizing the power of harnessed lightning. Unfortunately for Tom and friends, they were never able to get close enough to the machinery to determine the secret to making diamonds.
READ IT
8. Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice; or, The Wreck of the Airship, 1911. Another story where no major invention is produced by Tom. He did create a special new lifting gas for his airship, needed to overcome the atmospheric problems they may encounter in the arctic north. As a side-invention, Tom has been working on a new electric rifle, but it is not properly introduced in this story.
READ IT
9. Tom Swift and His Sky Racer; or, The Quickest Flight on Record, 1911. Tom's Sky Racer, known as the Humming-Bird, is a two-seater monoplane, like his previous monoplane the Butterfly. However, the Sky Racer, is smaller and faster - making it ideal for air racing. It uses a single gasoline, air-cooled engine, which can attain air speeds of well over 100mph with a minimum thrust of 1000lbs at 2000rpms. Tom also invented an automated stabilizing unit which allowed the Sky Racer to handle adverse weather conditions without loss of control. The Sky Racer's design was compared to that of the Blériot_XI and the Antoinette VII, however its wings were patterned after that of the hummingbird, rather than standard rectangular wings.
READ IT
10. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; or, Daring Adventures on Elephant Island, 1911. Tom builds two major inventions in this volume. The first is a replacement airship, known as The Black Hawk. This new airship is to replace The Red Cloud, which was destroyed during his adventures in Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice. This airship is of the same general construction as The Red Cloud, but is smaller and more maneuverable.
Of foremost notice is Tom's invention of the electric rifle, a gun which fires bolts of electricity. The electric rifle can be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality; it is capable of shooting through solid walls without leaving a hole, as well as powerful enough to kill a rampaging whale, as in their steamer trek to Africa. With the electric rifle, Tom and friends not only bring down elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffalo, but also manage to save their lives multiple times in pitched battle with the red pygmies. In addition to its more "military" like features, the electric rifle has the capability of discharging a globe of light that was described as being able to maintain itself, like ball lightning, making hunting at night much safer in the dark of Africa. In appearance, the rifle looked very much like its contemporary conventional cousins. Sixty years later, the Taser was invented by Jack Cover and marketed by Taser International. The trademark is an acronym for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle. The middle initial is gratuitous, as Tom's full name is unknown.
READ IT
11. Tom Swift in the City of Gold; or, Marvelous Adventures Underground, 1912. Tom continues to improve on his airship designs, which are combined bi-plane and dirigibles. This time, a much smaller version of the Blackhawk is designed, with many of the same features.
READ IT
12. Tom Swift and His Air Glider; or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure, 1912. While testing out one of his many airships, Tom needs to make emergency landing for repairs. He complains of the poor quality platinum used for his magneto, and is overheard by an escaped Russian exile. The man tells Tom of a secret platinum mine, deep in Siberia. The man also explains that his brother is still in exile, and will be more useful in locating the mine. Tom organizes an expedition to save the exile and find the platinum mine. Note that the Russian revolutionaries in the book are referred to as the Nihilist movement. However, given the time in which the book takes place, the author would more likely have been referring to Bolsheviks. For this adventure, Tom needs to build the Vulture, a special glider that can withstand the high-velocity winds in the vicinity of the mine. Also, to transport the glider and his friends over the Atlantic, across Europe, and into Siberia, Tom builds his largest airship yet, the Falcon.
READ IT
13. Tom Swift in Captivity; or, A Daring Escape by Airship, 1912. Inventions are not a major part of the story. Prior to the story opening, Tom has already built The Lark, a new version of his sky racer, The Hummingbird. This is a more traditional prop job than his previous airships. In the background is mentioned that Tom is also working on a new "silent airship". Tom's electric rifle also makes a regular appearance in this adventure.
READ IT
14. Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera; or, Thrilling Adventures While Taking Moving Pictures, 1912. Mentioned in a previous volume, Tom continues to work on his noiseless airship. When Tom finally takes up Mr. Periods proposal, a new motion picture camera must be designed and built. This is a wonderful camera that can run on battery power or from a dynamo, being fully automatic. It can also be operated by a hand-crank. Built especially for this trip is a new airship, The Flyer. With a longer range, and accommodations for long-term trips, this is probably the biggest airship Tom has built to date.
READ IT
15. Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight; or, On the Border for Uncle Sam, 1912. In previous volumes, but only mentioned peripherally, Tom has been working on a noiseless airship. These are basically modifications to the engine: a new muffler and sparking device. Built for use in this adventure is Tom's giant searchlight, as the title of the story suggests. A device utilizing a mixed electrical current, the searchlight can be seen for miles and miles, and is used specifically to search for smugglers during the night.
READ IT
16. Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon; or, The Longest Shots on Record, 1913. The cannon Tom invents is the largest gun to date. Measuring 100 feet in length, it has a 30 inch caliber, and Tom estimates he can launch a 2 ton projectile 30 miles.
READ IT
17. Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone; or, The Picture That Saved a Fortune, 1914. The photo telephone is a modification to normal telephones. A third wire is used to transmit the image, which is displayed on charged selenium plates. The image is not a live video image, but rather a static one-time image, a photograph, used mainly for identification of the remote end. The plates can be reused, or can be developed to produce a permanent copy. A side-improvement to the whole system is done when Tom attaches a phonograph cylinder recorder to the telephone system, preserving not only a visual image but an audio recording.
READ IT
18. Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship; or, The Naval Terror of the Seas, 1915. Tom creates two new inventions for this story: a huge airship for military use, and a method of dealing with recoil on the weapons to be used.
Image of a Zeppelin in flight.
The airship is built on a similar model as the German-built zeppelins. These are huge craft, Tom's measuring at 600 feet in length and 60 feet in diameter. It is built of a semi-rigid airbag with several separated gas compartments, which would permit lift even if one or more of the gas compartments was damaged. Three cabins are hung below the airship: at the front is the pilot house, in the middle is the general quarters, and at the rear is the engine. A non-flammable gas is used for lift, and a single gas-powered engine provides forward momentum. Storage batteries, coupled with an electric motor, are used as backup power in the event of main engine failure. Tom hoped to sell this to the United States government, with an eye on the hostilities occurring in Europe at the time of the story. Secondary to the airship, Tom needs to conceive of a way to neutralize recoil from the guns which he plans to mount: two 4-inch cannon, and several unspecified machine-guns. When fired, the cannon would generate enough recoil to rip the ship apart, but Tom is inspired by Ned's observation of how an automatic door closer operates. Tom's invention is similar to the recoil system used in the French 75mm field gun.
READ IT
19. Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel; or, The Hidden City of the Andes, 1916. Early in the book, Tom is working a new gyroscope, but events soon overtake that project, and Tom puts that aside for the time being. In Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon, Tom has developed a new propellant to launch the projectiles from his giant cannon, and when Mr. Titus requests Tom's help, Tom begins to develop a new blasting powder. Ultimately Tom finds a suitable solution which can blast through heavy rock with ease. While on the job site, several blasts into the mountain, the rock changes into an even harder substance. Tom needs to modify his formula from a "quick burn" into a "slow burn" blast; rather than blasting the rock via concussion alone, the new formula first builds high pressure in the fissures of the rock, before the concussion splits the rock.
READ IT
20. Tom Swift In the Land of Wonders; or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold, 1917. Professor Bumper, introduced in the previous volume, is on the trail of another lost city, this time the lost city of Kurzon, somewhere deep in Honduras. The Professor has come into some documents which he thinks will help him locate the city, and the documents make mention of a huge idol made of solid gold. Professor Bumper would very much like Tom Swift to accompany the expedition.Inventions take a back-seat in this story. Prior to Professor Bumper's arrival, Tom Swift is working on a new gyroscope, which was also briefly introduced in the previous volume. In Europe, World War I continues to rage, and several European governments have expressed an interest in Tom Swift's new gyroscope, as safety devices for use in the aerial aspect of the war. When envy drives Tom to join the expedition, Tom hands the gyroscope project over to his father, Barton Swift, and it is not heard of for the rest of the story.
READ IT
21. Tom Swift and His War Tank; or, Doing His Bit for Uncle Sam, 1918. When the United States joins in The Great War, it seems that everyone has war fever. A military base close to Shopton is training soldiers in the art of trench warfare, while pilots are learning aerial combat. Ned Newton has quit his job to sell liberty bonds full-time. Many of the young men have enlisted, or even hoping for the draft. Everyone seems to be doing their bit, except for Tom Swift, which raises many concerns that Tom is a slacker. Tom does not let his country down; the reason he appears to be idle is that he has secretly been developing a new tank for use in combat. The project is so secret that Tom does not even let his close friends know, which causes the concerns being raised about Tom's patriotism. Even though the development is in secret, that does not stop German nationals from trying to steal his tank. Tanks are a new wartime technology, and the British army has deployed them for use on the western front. Tom's tank is bigger, and able to travel at twice the speed of current models, with a max of 12 miles per hour. At the expense of limited firepower with four unspecified machine guns, the tank has heavier armor plating than the British tanks. Tom further refines the tank with an innovative built-in bridging mechanism, which will allow the tank to roll over wider trenches than the existing models.
READ IT
22. Tom Swift and His Air Scout; or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky, 1919. World War I still rages on in Europe, and Tom Swift is still inventing wartime technology, but inspiration comes in the form of infatuation: while taking Mary Nestor for a brief flight, he is unable to communicate due to the noise of the engine, which sets Tom onto the track of developing a totally silent airship. While Mary Nestor was the spark, Tom intends to offer this to the United States government for use on the western front. While this is still a germ of an idea, Tom is approached by Mr. Gale and Mr. Ware, representatives of the Universal Flying Machine Company, a competing airship manufacturer. Tom is offered a lucrative salary to join the firm, but Tom is disinterested in the money. Tom's refusal infuriates the men, and events are set in motion, which include the (accidental) kidnapping of Mr. Nestor, Mary's father. Tom builds a special silencer for airship engines. The silencer consists of several components: a new type of propeller, retooling the engine compression, but most importantly, a new type of muffler. The muffler system is simply described as a series of baffles. The end result is an airship which produces no discernible noise, to be used on scouting missions in the war.
READ IT
23. Tom Swift and His Undersea Search; or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic, 1920. A Mr. Dixwell Hardley approaches Tom with a proposition to help recover sunken treasure. Mr. Hardley was onboard a ship which was carrying gold to help finance an illegal revolution. When the ship sank, Mr. Hardley overheard the captain recording the coordinates. Now he wants Tom's help to recover the gold, under the guise of both financing the expedition as well as rewarding Tom with a portion of the recovered treasure. Unfortunately for Tom, after agreeing to the expedition, he learns that Mr. Hardley is a con-artist, who recently scammed someone out of the oil well rights. Making matters worse, the victim is Barton Keith, a relative of Mary Nestor. Rather than cancel the expedition, Tom decides to carry on in the hopes of restoring Mr. Keith's claims to the oil wells. Invention is almost irrelevant to this story. Tom retrofits his submarine, which he built in Volume #4. The redesign makes use of electric and gasoline powered engines. The hull is doubly-strengthened, as the sunken ship is at a greater depth. An exterior version of the great searchlight is affixed to the newly-remodeled submarine; and finally, newly strengthened diving suits and a special type of diving bell have been built for the expedition.
READ IT
24. Tom Swift Among the Fire Fighters; or, Battling with Flames in the Air, 1921. While Tom and Ned Newton are reviewing financial records, a fire breaks out at the fireworks factory in town. Assisting the firemen, they rescue Josephus Baxter, Mr. Baxter is developing a new dye formula, and has hired out laboratory space at the factory. During the mayhem created by the fire and the rescue, Mr. Baxter looses the formula, but he is positive that the owners of the factory have stolen it. Tom feels pity on the man, and allows him use of the labs at the Swift Construction Company. While observing the blaze, Tom wonders that there is not a more efficient way to fight fire, especially having troubles with multi-storied buildings or skyscrapers. These thoughts lead him to develop a new fire suppressant chemical, and an air-borne system to deliver the new chemicals to the upper stories of skyscrapers. The bulk of inventions are centered around various chemical compounds which will be used to suppress fire. Tom has several iterations of a promising chemical, which basically delivers carbon dioxide into the blaze in such quantity as to suffocate the fire in a very short period of time. The formula is contained in special carboys which Tom terms grenades, designed to be dropped (either manually or automatically) from the air. When the formula is considered ideal, the next step will be to develop a delivery system using airships. A four-passenger airship is built, with sufficient storage to carry an unspecified amount of the fire-fighting grenades. To aid in dropping grenades, Tom builds a bomb sight, which, when mechanically adjusted for altitude, air speed, wind, and the weight of the grenades, will permit accurate placement of the grenades over the target.
READ IT
25. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive; or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails, 1922. ichard Bartholomew, president of the Hendrickton and Pas Alos Railroad Company (H&PA) is under pressure to save his company from bankruptcy. If Mr. Bartholomew cannot come up with a means to compete with the Hendrickton & Western railroad, the H&PA will be doomed to failure. Mr. Bartholomew has contracted The Swift Construction Company to build a new electric locomotive which can travel at 2 miles per minute (120 MPH, 193 Km/h). The catch is that the owner of the competing H&W railway, Montagne Lewis, is dishonest and will stop at nothing to prevent Mr. Bartholomew from succeeding. Hired thugs are under orders to destroy Tom's developments. Tom, and his friends Ned Newton and Mr. Damon, have several life-threatening encounters with these hired gunmen. Tom must build a locomotive engine to compete with the best engines of the time, an engine under the patent of Jandel. The result is the Hercules 0001, an electric locomotive measuring 90 feet long, 14 feet tall and weighing almost 275 tons. The engine is powered by a pantograph connection to dual overhead caternary lines providing 3,000 volts DC. The engine is laid out with two non-driven trucks of four wheels on either end, and 12 driving wheels of 70 inch diameter. The layout of the driving wheels is never explicitly mentioned, but the configuration would be either 4-12-4 or 4-6-0+0-6-4 (see Whyte notation). Each axle is independently powered. The output of the engine is estimated at 4400 horsepower. Tom is able to achieve the target specs of 120 MPH on straight tracks, for passenger transport; for hauling freight up a 2% incline, he is able to achieve 45 MPH.
READ IT
26. Tom Swift and His Flying Boat; or, Castaways of the Giant Iceberg, 1923
27. Tom Swift and His Great Oil Gusher; or, The Treasure of Goby Farm, 1924
28. Tom Swift and His Chest of Secrets; or, Tracing the Stolen Inventions, 1925
29. Tom Swift and His Airline Express; or, From Ocean to Ocean by Daylight, 1926
30. Tom Swift Circling the Globe; or, The Daring Cruise of the Air Monarch, 1927
31. Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures; or, The Greatest Invention on Record, 1928
32. Tom Swift and His House on Wheels; or, A Trip around the Mountain of Mystery, 1929
33. Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible; or, Adventures Over the Forest of Fire, 1930
34. Tom Swift and His Sky Train; or, Overland Through the Clouds, 1931
35. Tom Swift and His Giant Magnet; or, Bringing Up the Lost Submarine, 1932
36. Tom Swift and His Television Detector; or, Trailing the Secret Plotters, 1933 [not by Garis?]
SF authors born 1864-73: 1864
1. Maurice Leblanc
***
Maurice Leblanc (TK)
The Three Eyes
The Tremendous Event
TK
***
Maurice Leblanc (TK)
The Three Eyes
The Tremendous Event
TK
Friday, January 2, 2009
Anarcho-Symbolist Generation (1864-73)
Neither Anarchism nor Symbolism was invented by this generation. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the first person ever to call himself an anarchist, died just as the earliest members of this generation were being born. And the original French Symbolist litterateurs (Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, Paul Adam, Alfred Vallette, Félix Fénéon) as well as other pioneers of the movement (Jean Moréas, Gustave Kahn), were all older, too. But in this generation, these unrelated movements were synthesized.
Notable anarchist members of this generation — including Mahatma Gandhi, Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Gaetano Bresci, Rudolf Rocker, Leon Czolgosz, Shūsui Kōtoku, Émile Henry, Sante Geronimo Caserio, Michele Angiolillo, Luigi Lucheni, Alexandros Schinas, and Ricardo Flores Magón, plus honorary Anarcho-Symbolist Gabriele D'Annunzio — ranged from (often violent) radicals to reformers, and from staunch individualists to anarcho-syndicalists to anarcho-communists. But they tended to agree that human beings are capable of rationally governing themselves in a peaceful, cooperative, productive manner — and that government, exploitative owners of the means of production, despotic teachers, and domineering parents are all part of the problem.
If anarchism was the ne plus ultra of Enlightenment political tendencies, the late-Romantic literary movement known as Symbolism was a quasi-occult mode of knowledge deliberately opposed to the positivism of the period. In his 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced French Symbolism — Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé — to the English-speaking world, Arthur Symons calls symbolism "a form of expression... for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness." And in a 1900 essay, William Butler Yeats derided the realist trend ("scientific movement") in literature and praised instead the symbolist tendency, because it "call[s] down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions." The artist, in this philosophy, is a hierophant communing with the occult truths hidden by the "veil" (a favorite term of Symbolists) called reality.
Notable Symbolists of the 1864-73 cohort include: Symons, Yeats, Paul Valéry, Henri de Régnier, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, John Gray, Ernest Dowson, Zinaida Gippius, André Gide, Tadeusz Miciński, and Valery Bryusov. Plus: Edvard Munch.
I thought I'd coined the term "Anarcho-Symbolist" (a play on anarcho-syndicalism), only to discover that I must have encountered it first in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, which describes the heyday (1885-1918) of the 1864-73 cohort. Shattuck employs the term to describe certain proto-Situationist tendencies originating in fin de siècle and early 20th-century Paris, where outsider anti-political and literary anarchists and nihilists declared that "the style of one's life and one's art took precedence over their content, the act of rebellion over the cause." The French Symbolists Mallarmé and Verlaine, for example, were attracted to anarchism, not so much as a political movement but as a style-of-life insurrection.
At the dawn of the 20th century, some members of this generation fiercely desired to rewrite the unwritten political, economic, and cultural rules that governed everyday life; other members, however, desired just as vehemently to defend the status quo. In SF written by members of this cohort, we find these contradictory tendencies — subversive and reactionary, if you will — cheek by jowl. Often in the very same works.
***
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)
***
Science-Fiction authors:
* Gustave Le Rouge (La Conspiration des Milliardaires, Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, La Guerre des Vampires)
* Maurice Leblanc (The Three Eyes, The Tremendous Event)
* M.P. Shiel (The Purple Cloud, "The Future Day")
* W.E.B. DuBois ("The Comet")
* Gaston Leroux (The Machine to Kill)
* Rudyard Kipling (With the Night Mail, A Diversity of Creatures, "as Easy as A.B.C.")
* H.G. Wells (Radium-Age SF includes: The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, Men Like Gods)
* Archibald Marshall (Upsidonia)
* H.H. Munro (Saki) (The Chronicles of Clovis, When William Came)
* Howard R. Garis (wrote Tom Swift series as Victor Appleton)
* Samuel Hopkins Adams (The Flying Death)
* Alfred Jarry ("How to Construct a Time Machine")
* Hilaire Belloc (Mr. Petre, But Soft — We Are Observed!)
* Ford Madox Ford (The Inheritors, with Joseph Conrad)
* Booth Tarkington ("The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis")
* John Stewart Barney (L.P.M.: The End of the Great War)
* Stephen Leacock ("The Iron Man and the Tin Woman," The Hohenzollerns in America)
* A.E. (George William Russell, The Avatars)
* Robert W. Chambers (Police!!!)
Note: J. D. Beresford (1874, Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder)is an honorary Psychonaut; so is Luis P. Senarens (1863, "Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al).
PLUS
* G.K. Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill); Chesterton (1874) is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist
***
Meet the Anarcho-Symbolists.
1864: Henri de Régnier (one of the foremost French symbolists in the early 20th century), George Washington Carver (Inventor), Camille Claudel (French sculptor, mistress of Rodin), Thomas Dixon (Author, The Clansman), Maurice Leblanc (Novelist, creator of Arsène Lupin), Walther Nernst (Chemist, Third Law of Thermodynamics), Alfred Stieglitz (Photo-Secessionist), Richard Strauss (Composer, Also sprach Zarathustra), Miguel de Unamuno (Philosopher), Frank Wedekind (German expressionist playwright avant la lettre). Honorary Plutonians: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
1865: Irving Babbitt (Philosopher), King George V (King of England, 1910-1936), Frederic W. Goudy (designer of Garamond and Goudy fonts), Warren G. Harding (29th US President, 1921-23), Rudyard Kipling (Author, The Jungle Book), Jean Sibelius (Composer, The Swan of Tuonela), Arthur Symons (English symbolist poet), William Butler Yeats (Anglo-Irish symbolist), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (one of the earliest and most eminent ideologues of Russian Symbolism), M. P. Shiel (author, SF, decadent), Robert W. Chambers (American author, best-known for fantasy).
1866: H. G. Wells (Author, The War of the Worlds), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Russian symbolist), Sun Yat-sen (President of China, 1911-12), Beatrix Potter (Author-Artist),Wassily Kandinsky (Abstractionist and theorist), Erik Satie (Composer), Lincoln Steffens (early muckraking journalist), Butch Cassidy (train and bank robber), Ramsay MacDonald (first Labour Prime Minister of UK), Matthew Henson (Explorer, possibly first to reach North Pole), Voltairine de Cleyre (Anarchist without an adjective, author of The Gods and the People, The Worm Turns, Anarchism, Direct Action), Benedetto Croce (Italian anti-Catholic and anti-Communist philosopher, multi-volume Philosophy of the Spirit), Anne Sullivan (Educator, The Miracle Worker), George Barr McCutcheon (Novelist, Brewster's Millions), Ernest W. Brown (Astronomer, Tables of the Motion of the Moon), Sophonisba Breckinridge (Suffragette and abolitionist), Aby Warburg (Scholar), John Gray (English symbolist translator), Archibald Marshall (English novelist, publisher).
1867: Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico, 1864-67), Frank Lloyd Wright (America's most famous architect), Luigi Pirandello (Playwright), A.E. (George William Russell, Irish nationalist, writer, poet, painter), Gustave Le Rouge (French SF author), Cy Young (Baseball pitcher), Marie Curie (early nuclear chemist), Arturo Toscanini (virtuoso conductor), Molly Brown (Activist, unsinkable), Ernest Dowson (English Decadent poet), Edith Hamilton (Educator, The Greek Way), Carl Laemmle (Film/TV Producer), J. P. Morgan, Jr. (banking magnate), Arthur Rackham (British Golden Age children's book illustrator), Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Toyota Industries Corporation), Laura Ingalls Wilder (Author, Little House on the Prairie), Wilbur Wright (co-inventor of the airplane), Ernest Dowson (English symbolist and decadent).
1868: W. E. B. Du Bois (American philosopher, sociologist, prophetic Marxist, architect of civil rights and Black Pride), Dietrich Eckart (Nazi intellectual), Harvey Firestone (rubber tire baron), Gaston Leroux (French mystery, SF author), Alfred Fowler (Astronomer, celestial spectroscopy), Stefan George (Poet), Maxim Gorky (Playwright), George Ellery Hale (Astronomer), Felix Hoffmann (Chemist, aspirin and heroin), Scott Joplin (the King of Ragtime), Robert A. Millikan (Physicist, determined the charge of an electron), Tsar Nicholas II (last of the Russian Tsars), Eleanor H. Porter (Novelist, Pollyanna), Theodore W. Richards (Chemist, proved existence of isotopes), Edmond Rostand (Playwright, Cyrano de Bergerac), The Sundance Kid (Criminal), John Townsend (Mathematician, electron's charge), John Stewart Barney (minor SF author).
1869: Mahatma Gandhi (Activist, proselytizer of nonviolence, spiritual leader, anarchist), Emma Goldman (Anarchist and feminist libertarian), Zinaida Gippius (Russian symbolist), Neville Chamberlain (architect of appeasement), Herbert Croly (Author, The Promise of American Life), André Gide (Author, symbolist, Le Voyage d'Urien), Bill Haywood (Labor leader, Industrial Workers of the World), Typhoid Mary (notorious typhoid carrier), Stephen Leacock (Canadian political economist, humorist), Edgar Lee Masters (Poet), Henri Matisse (free, expressive French painter), Ernest Fox Nichols (Physicist, infrared radiation), Edwin Arlington Robinson (Poet), Booth Tarkington (Novelist, The Magnificent Ambersons), Gaetano Bresci (Italian-American anarchist, assassin of Italian King Umberto I).
1870: Alexander Berkman (Russian-American anarchist, A.B.C. of Anarchism, attempted to assassinate Frick), Gustav Landauer (German Anarchist), Arthur Fisher Bentley (American jounralist, activist, scholar, pioneer in the study of group behavior), Alfred Adler (founder of Individual Psychology), Pierre Louÿs (French poet), Bernard M. Baruch (coined the term Cold War), (Joseph) Hilaire (Pierre Rene) Belloc (Author, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts), A. P. Giannini (founder of Bank of America), Lenin (revolutionary leader of Soviet Union), Adolf Loos (Architect, Ornament and Crime), Maria Montessori (founder of Montessori Education Method), H. H. Munro (Saki) (Novelist), Frank Norris (Novelist, The Octopus), Maxfield Parrish (American book and magazine illustrator), Jean Perrin (Physicist, verified atomic nature of matter).
1871: Paul Valéry (last of the French Symbolists), Samuel Hopkins Adams (Journalist, "The Great American Fraud"), Shūsui Kōtoku (Japanese anarchist), Giacomo Balla (Italian futurist painter), Stephen Crane (Novelist, The Red Badge of Courage), Theodore Dreiser (Novelist), Rosa Luxemburg (co-founder, Communist Party of Germany), Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Rasputin (Russia's Greatest Love Machine), Georges Rouault (Expressionist painter of clowns, Christs), Michele Angiolillo (Italian anarchist, assassinated Spanish Prime minister Cánovas), Ernest Rutherford (Father of Nuclear Physics), Frank Schlesinger (Astronomer, stellar parallaxes), John Millington Synge (Playwright, The Playboy of the Western World), Orville Wright (co-inventor of the airplane).
1872: Aubrey Beardsley (leading English illustrator, decadent), Max Beerbohm (English critic, parodist, caricaturist, decadent), Émile Henry (French anarchist, detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare), Charles Greeley Abbot (Astronomer, solar energy), Roald Amundsen (Explorer, first to reach South Pole), Ma Barker (Criminal), L. L. Bean (Founder of L. L. Bean, Inc.), Léon Blum (thrice Prime Minister of France), Calvin Coolidge (30th US President, 1923-29), Willem de Sitter (Astronomer, expanding space), William Duddell (Physicist, electronic music), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Poet), Zane Grey (Novelist, Riders of the Purple Sage), Learned Hand (influential American justice), Marcel Mauss (Sociologist, The Gift), Piet Mondrian (Dutch abstract painter), John Cowper Powys (Novelist), Bertrand Russell (Philosopher, Mathematician, Atheist, Social Critic), William Monroe Trotter (Activist), Howard R. Garis (Novelist, Uncle Wiggily and Tom Swift series).
1873: Alfred Jarry (Playwright, inventor of the pseudoscience 'Pataphysics), Tadeusz Miciński (influential Polish symbolist, gnostic, a forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism), Valery Bryusov (Russian symbolist), Rudolf Rocker (anarchist without adjectives), Enrico Caruso (operatic tenor nonpareil), Max Adler (Austro-Marxist philosopher), Sante Geronimo Caserio (Italian anarchist, assassin of Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Third Republic), Willa Cather (Novelist), Colette (Novelist), Leon Czolgosz (Anarchist, President McKinley's assassin), Walter de la Mare (Poet), Ford Madox Ford (Novelist, The Good Soldier), Arthur O. Lovejoy (Historian, The Great Chain of Being), Ricardo Flores Magón (Anarchist, agitator behind Mexican revolution), G. E. Moore (Philosopher, Principia Ethica), William Morris (Founder, William Morris Agency), Luigi Lucheni (Italian anarchist, killed Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress consort of Austria and Queen consort of Hungary), Condé Nast (Founder of Condé Nast Publications), Emily Post (Columnist), Alexandros Schinas (Greek anarchist, exact birthdate unknown, assassinated King George I of Greec), Sergei Rachmaninov (Composer), Eliel Saarinen (Finnish-American art nouveau architect), Alfred E. Smith (twice Governor of New York), Charles Walgreen (founder of Walgreen Co.), Robert Wiene (Film Director, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Adolph Zukor (founder of Paramount Pictures). Honorary Psychonauts: J.D. Beresford (British SF author), Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader).
***
HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (1863); G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PLUTONIANS: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes).
Notable anarchist members of this generation — including Mahatma Gandhi, Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Gaetano Bresci, Rudolf Rocker, Leon Czolgosz, Shūsui Kōtoku, Émile Henry, Sante Geronimo Caserio, Michele Angiolillo, Luigi Lucheni, Alexandros Schinas, and Ricardo Flores Magón, plus honorary Anarcho-Symbolist Gabriele D'Annunzio — ranged from (often violent) radicals to reformers, and from staunch individualists to anarcho-syndicalists to anarcho-communists. But they tended to agree that human beings are capable of rationally governing themselves in a peaceful, cooperative, productive manner — and that government, exploitative owners of the means of production, despotic teachers, and domineering parents are all part of the problem.
If anarchism was the ne plus ultra of Enlightenment political tendencies, the late-Romantic literary movement known as Symbolism was a quasi-occult mode of knowledge deliberately opposed to the positivism of the period. In his 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced French Symbolism — Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé — to the English-speaking world, Arthur Symons calls symbolism "a form of expression... for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness." And in a 1900 essay, William Butler Yeats derided the realist trend ("scientific movement") in literature and praised instead the symbolist tendency, because it "call[s] down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions." The artist, in this philosophy, is a hierophant communing with the occult truths hidden by the "veil" (a favorite term of Symbolists) called reality.
Notable Symbolists of the 1864-73 cohort include: Symons, Yeats, Paul Valéry, Henri de Régnier, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, John Gray, Ernest Dowson, Zinaida Gippius, André Gide, Tadeusz Miciński, and Valery Bryusov. Plus: Edvard Munch.
I thought I'd coined the term "Anarcho-Symbolist" (a play on anarcho-syndicalism), only to discover that I must have encountered it first in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, which describes the heyday (1885-1918) of the 1864-73 cohort. Shattuck employs the term to describe certain proto-Situationist tendencies originating in fin de siècle and early 20th-century Paris, where outsider anti-political and literary anarchists and nihilists declared that "the style of one's life and one's art took precedence over their content, the act of rebellion over the cause." The French Symbolists Mallarmé and Verlaine, for example, were attracted to anarchism, not so much as a political movement but as a style-of-life insurrection.
At the dawn of the 20th century, some members of this generation fiercely desired to rewrite the unwritten political, economic, and cultural rules that governed everyday life; other members, however, desired just as vehemently to defend the status quo. In SF written by members of this cohort, we find these contradictory tendencies — subversive and reactionary, if you will — cheek by jowl. Often in the very same works.
***
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)
***
Science-Fiction authors:
* Gustave Le Rouge (La Conspiration des Milliardaires, Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, La Guerre des Vampires)
* Maurice Leblanc (The Three Eyes, The Tremendous Event)
* M.P. Shiel (The Purple Cloud, "The Future Day")
* W.E.B. DuBois ("The Comet")
* Gaston Leroux (The Machine to Kill)
* Rudyard Kipling (With the Night Mail, A Diversity of Creatures, "as Easy as A.B.C.")
* H.G. Wells (Radium-Age SF includes: The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, Men Like Gods)
* Archibald Marshall (Upsidonia)
* H.H. Munro (Saki) (The Chronicles of Clovis, When William Came)
* Howard R. Garis (wrote Tom Swift series as Victor Appleton)
* Samuel Hopkins Adams (The Flying Death)
* Alfred Jarry ("How to Construct a Time Machine")
* Hilaire Belloc (Mr. Petre, But Soft — We Are Observed!)
* Ford Madox Ford (The Inheritors, with Joseph Conrad)
* Booth Tarkington ("The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis")
* John Stewart Barney (L.P.M.: The End of the Great War)
* Stephen Leacock ("The Iron Man and the Tin Woman," The Hohenzollerns in America)
* A.E. (George William Russell, The Avatars)
* Robert W. Chambers (Police!!!)
Note: J. D. Beresford (1874, Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder)is an honorary Psychonaut; so is Luis P. Senarens (1863, "Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al).
PLUS
* G.K. Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill); Chesterton (1874) is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist
***
Meet the Anarcho-Symbolists.
1864: Henri de Régnier (one of the foremost French symbolists in the early 20th century), George Washington Carver (Inventor), Camille Claudel (French sculptor, mistress of Rodin), Thomas Dixon (Author, The Clansman), Maurice Leblanc (Novelist, creator of Arsène Lupin), Walther Nernst (Chemist, Third Law of Thermodynamics), Alfred Stieglitz (Photo-Secessionist), Richard Strauss (Composer, Also sprach Zarathustra), Miguel de Unamuno (Philosopher), Frank Wedekind (German expressionist playwright avant la lettre). Honorary Plutonians: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
1865: Irving Babbitt (Philosopher), King George V (King of England, 1910-1936), Frederic W. Goudy (designer of Garamond and Goudy fonts), Warren G. Harding (29th US President, 1921-23), Rudyard Kipling (Author, The Jungle Book), Jean Sibelius (Composer, The Swan of Tuonela), Arthur Symons (English symbolist poet), William Butler Yeats (Anglo-Irish symbolist), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (one of the earliest and most eminent ideologues of Russian Symbolism), M. P. Shiel (author, SF, decadent), Robert W. Chambers (American author, best-known for fantasy).
1866: H. G. Wells (Author, The War of the Worlds), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Russian symbolist), Sun Yat-sen (President of China, 1911-12), Beatrix Potter (Author-Artist),Wassily Kandinsky (Abstractionist and theorist), Erik Satie (Composer), Lincoln Steffens (early muckraking journalist), Butch Cassidy (train and bank robber), Ramsay MacDonald (first Labour Prime Minister of UK), Matthew Henson (Explorer, possibly first to reach North Pole), Voltairine de Cleyre (Anarchist without an adjective, author of The Gods and the People, The Worm Turns, Anarchism, Direct Action), Benedetto Croce (Italian anti-Catholic and anti-Communist philosopher, multi-volume Philosophy of the Spirit), Anne Sullivan (Educator, The Miracle Worker), George Barr McCutcheon (Novelist, Brewster's Millions), Ernest W. Brown (Astronomer, Tables of the Motion of the Moon), Sophonisba Breckinridge (Suffragette and abolitionist), Aby Warburg (Scholar), John Gray (English symbolist translator), Archibald Marshall (English novelist, publisher).
1867: Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico, 1864-67), Frank Lloyd Wright (America's most famous architect), Luigi Pirandello (Playwright), A.E. (George William Russell, Irish nationalist, writer, poet, painter), Gustave Le Rouge (French SF author), Cy Young (Baseball pitcher), Marie Curie (early nuclear chemist), Arturo Toscanini (virtuoso conductor), Molly Brown (Activist, unsinkable), Ernest Dowson (English Decadent poet), Edith Hamilton (Educator, The Greek Way), Carl Laemmle (Film/TV Producer), J. P. Morgan, Jr. (banking magnate), Arthur Rackham (British Golden Age children's book illustrator), Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Toyota Industries Corporation), Laura Ingalls Wilder (Author, Little House on the Prairie), Wilbur Wright (co-inventor of the airplane), Ernest Dowson (English symbolist and decadent).
1868: W. E. B. Du Bois (American philosopher, sociologist, prophetic Marxist, architect of civil rights and Black Pride), Dietrich Eckart (Nazi intellectual), Harvey Firestone (rubber tire baron), Gaston Leroux (French mystery, SF author), Alfred Fowler (Astronomer, celestial spectroscopy), Stefan George (Poet), Maxim Gorky (Playwright), George Ellery Hale (Astronomer), Felix Hoffmann (Chemist, aspirin and heroin), Scott Joplin (the King of Ragtime), Robert A. Millikan (Physicist, determined the charge of an electron), Tsar Nicholas II (last of the Russian Tsars), Eleanor H. Porter (Novelist, Pollyanna), Theodore W. Richards (Chemist, proved existence of isotopes), Edmond Rostand (Playwright, Cyrano de Bergerac), The Sundance Kid (Criminal), John Townsend (Mathematician, electron's charge), John Stewart Barney (minor SF author).
1869: Mahatma Gandhi (Activist, proselytizer of nonviolence, spiritual leader, anarchist), Emma Goldman (Anarchist and feminist libertarian), Zinaida Gippius (Russian symbolist), Neville Chamberlain (architect of appeasement), Herbert Croly (Author, The Promise of American Life), André Gide (Author, symbolist, Le Voyage d'Urien), Bill Haywood (Labor leader, Industrial Workers of the World), Typhoid Mary (notorious typhoid carrier), Stephen Leacock (Canadian political economist, humorist), Edgar Lee Masters (Poet), Henri Matisse (free, expressive French painter), Ernest Fox Nichols (Physicist, infrared radiation), Edwin Arlington Robinson (Poet), Booth Tarkington (Novelist, The Magnificent Ambersons), Gaetano Bresci (Italian-American anarchist, assassin of Italian King Umberto I).
1870: Alexander Berkman (Russian-American anarchist, A.B.C. of Anarchism, attempted to assassinate Frick), Gustav Landauer (German Anarchist), Arthur Fisher Bentley (American jounralist, activist, scholar, pioneer in the study of group behavior), Alfred Adler (founder of Individual Psychology), Pierre Louÿs (French poet), Bernard M. Baruch (coined the term Cold War), (Joseph) Hilaire (Pierre Rene) Belloc (Author, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts), A. P. Giannini (founder of Bank of America), Lenin (revolutionary leader of Soviet Union), Adolf Loos (Architect, Ornament and Crime), Maria Montessori (founder of Montessori Education Method), H. H. Munro (Saki) (Novelist), Frank Norris (Novelist, The Octopus), Maxfield Parrish (American book and magazine illustrator), Jean Perrin (Physicist, verified atomic nature of matter).
1871: Paul Valéry (last of the French Symbolists), Samuel Hopkins Adams (Journalist, "The Great American Fraud"), Shūsui Kōtoku (Japanese anarchist), Giacomo Balla (Italian futurist painter), Stephen Crane (Novelist, The Red Badge of Courage), Theodore Dreiser (Novelist), Rosa Luxemburg (co-founder, Communist Party of Germany), Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Rasputin (Russia's Greatest Love Machine), Georges Rouault (Expressionist painter of clowns, Christs), Michele Angiolillo (Italian anarchist, assassinated Spanish Prime minister Cánovas), Ernest Rutherford (Father of Nuclear Physics), Frank Schlesinger (Astronomer, stellar parallaxes), John Millington Synge (Playwright, The Playboy of the Western World), Orville Wright (co-inventor of the airplane).
1872: Aubrey Beardsley (leading English illustrator, decadent), Max Beerbohm (English critic, parodist, caricaturist, decadent), Émile Henry (French anarchist, detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare), Charles Greeley Abbot (Astronomer, solar energy), Roald Amundsen (Explorer, first to reach South Pole), Ma Barker (Criminal), L. L. Bean (Founder of L. L. Bean, Inc.), Léon Blum (thrice Prime Minister of France), Calvin Coolidge (30th US President, 1923-29), Willem de Sitter (Astronomer, expanding space), William Duddell (Physicist, electronic music), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Poet), Zane Grey (Novelist, Riders of the Purple Sage), Learned Hand (influential American justice), Marcel Mauss (Sociologist, The Gift), Piet Mondrian (Dutch abstract painter), John Cowper Powys (Novelist), Bertrand Russell (Philosopher, Mathematician, Atheist, Social Critic), William Monroe Trotter (Activist), Howard R. Garis (Novelist, Uncle Wiggily and Tom Swift series).
1873: Alfred Jarry (Playwright, inventor of the pseudoscience 'Pataphysics), Tadeusz Miciński (influential Polish symbolist, gnostic, a forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism), Valery Bryusov (Russian symbolist), Rudolf Rocker (anarchist without adjectives), Enrico Caruso (operatic tenor nonpareil), Max Adler (Austro-Marxist philosopher), Sante Geronimo Caserio (Italian anarchist, assassin of Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Third Republic), Willa Cather (Novelist), Colette (Novelist), Leon Czolgosz (Anarchist, President McKinley's assassin), Walter de la Mare (Poet), Ford Madox Ford (Novelist, The Good Soldier), Arthur O. Lovejoy (Historian, The Great Chain of Being), Ricardo Flores Magón (Anarchist, agitator behind Mexican revolution), G. E. Moore (Philosopher, Principia Ethica), William Morris (Founder, William Morris Agency), Luigi Lucheni (Italian anarchist, killed Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress consort of Austria and Queen consort of Hungary), Condé Nast (Founder of Condé Nast Publications), Emily Post (Columnist), Alexandros Schinas (Greek anarchist, exact birthdate unknown, assassinated King George I of Greec), Sergei Rachmaninov (Composer), Eliel Saarinen (Finnish-American art nouveau architect), Alfred E. Smith (twice Governor of New York), Charles Walgreen (founder of Walgreen Co.), Robert Wiene (Film Director, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Adolph Zukor (founder of Paramount Pictures). Honorary Psychonauts: J.D. Beresford (British SF author), Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader).
***
HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (1863); G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PLUTONIANS: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes).
Thursday, January 1, 2009
SF authors born 1864-73: 1873
1. J. D. Beresford
2. Ford Madox Ford
3. Alfred Jarry
***
J. D. Beresford (1873-1947)
John Davys Beresford was an English writer, now remembered for his early science fiction and some short stories in the horror story and ghost story genres. His father was a clergyman in Castor, now in Cambridgeshire near Peterborough. He was affected by infantile paralysis, which left him partially disabled. After training to become an architect, he became a professional writer, first as a dramatist, and journalist. He combined a prominent place in Edwardian literary London with time spent in the provinces, in particular Cornwall where D. H. Lawrence had an extended stay in his Porthcothan cottage. Elisabeth Beresford, children's writer and creator of The Wombles, is his daughter.
British author. Journalist. During World War I in difficulties for pacifist views. Also wrote a considerable amount of fantastic fiction.
* The Hampdenshire Wonder (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1911; George H. Doran: New York, 1917, as The Wonder). It is one of the first novels to involve a wunderkind. The child in it is named Victor Stott and he is the son of a famous cricket player. This origin is perhaps a reference to H. G. Wells' father. The novel concerns his progress from infant to almost preternaturally brilliant child. The character's intelligence is vaguely more like the children in the much later Childhood's End than like traditional stories of child prodigies. Also Victor Stott is subtly deformed to allow for his powerful brain. One prominent, and unpleasant, character is the local minister. As J.D. Beresford's father was a minister, and Beresford was himself partially disabled, some see autobiographical aspects to the story. What is more concrete is that the story of Christian Friedrich Heinecken was an inspiration for the story. Whether the biography of that child prodigy was accurate or not "the Lubeck prodigy" is mentioned in the work. Also, in the original version, the ideas of Henri Bergson on evolution are also significant.
Bleiler: Irony against church, state, and humanity in general. The first important novel about a superman, and in many respects still the best. The story is told through a journalist who chances upon the phenomenon of Victor Stott, one of the most remarkable mentalities in the literature. Victor Stott is the son of Ginger Stott, a former cricketer of great prowess, whom the narrator knows. The narrator first meets Victor on a train when the child is only a year old, and even at this age it is obvious that the child, though refusing to speak, is highly intelligent. It also has the ability to disturb ordinary humans with its heavy, percing glance. The larger part of the book, however, deals with Victor Stott at about age five. Challis, the local squire, who is an anthropologist of note, befriends the Stotts and, recognizing Victor's unusual abilities, offers him the use of his library. In a matter of days the child absorbs the sum total of human knowledge and has reached integrations far beyond what ordinary men can achieve.
There are, however, great problems associated with Victor. Though unbelievably intelligent, he is inhuman and alien in emotional development, and in some respects is more helpless than an ordinary child — despite the power of his glance. As intellect, he challenges the authority of religion in the form of the local clergyman, who declares a vendetta against him. And as intellect, the child is helpless against the village idiot. Challis tries to protect Victor, though even he cannot totally accept him. As a rule Victor does not speak to humans, but on one occasion, after he first went through Challis's library, he explained the nature of the universe and existence to Challis, who has never recovered from the shock, since it destroyed his own intellectual position. Victor Stott does not live long, though. His corpse is found in a stream. While the official verdict is accidental death, it is obviously murder. Beresford does not make an accusation, but he hints that the vicious curate killed the child out of religious fanatacism. "An excellent psychological study of the impact of the utterly-beyond on normal man, with a mild semi-allegorical note."
Called one of the first novels to feature a wunderkind. Note that W.H. Rhodes' The Telescopic Eye (1876) introduced a child with telescopic vision. Later novels about non-tyhreateninf superhuman children include J.A. Mitchell's Drowsy (1917) and Wilmar H. Shiras's Children of the Atom (1953).
The child, Victor Stott, is the son of a once-famous cricket player. (Wells's father was a cricket player.)
The preternaturally brilliant child -- not a child prodigy, but like the children in Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End. He is deformed -- huge head.
More paranoid accounts of homo superior include: Georges Lebas's Jean Arog, le premier surhomme (1921); Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930); Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1936), A.E. van Vogt's Slan (1940).
Victor is a giant-headed genius, but physically weak and awkward Has the ability to memorize and synthesize vast amounts of knowledge and information. Once he has access to a huge ibrary, he forms theories of human progress and argues philosophical points that others can barely grasp.
* The Goslings (Heinemann: London, 1913; The Macaulay Company: New York, 1913, as A World of Women). TK
* Revolution: A Novel (W. Collins: London, 1921. Putnam: New York, 1921, as Revolution: A Story of the Near Future in England). TK
* Signs and Wonders (Golden Cockerel Press: Waltham Saint Laurence, Berks., 1921. Putnam: New York, 1921). TK
***
Ford Madox Ford (TK)
TK
***
Alfred Jarry (1873-1907)
Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side. Best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which is often cited as a forerunner to the surrealist theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, Jarry also wrote plays, novels, poetry, essays and speculative journalism. His texts present some pioneering work in the field of absurdist literature.
At 17 Jarry passed his baccalauréat and moved to Paris to prepare for admission to the École Normale Supérieure. Though he was not admitted, he soon gained attention for his original poems and prose-poems. A collection of his work, Les minutes de sable mémorial, was published in 1893.
When he was drafted into the army in 1894, his gift for turning notions upside down defeated attempts to instill military discipline. The sight of the small man in a uniform much too large for his less than 5-foot frame—the army did not issue uniforms small enough—was so disruptively funny that he was excused from parades and marching drills. Eventually the army discharged him for medical reasons. His military experience eventually inspired the novel, Days and Nights.
Jarry returned to Paris and applied himself to drinking, writing, and the company of friends who appreciated his witty, sweet-tempered, and unpredictable conversation. This period is marked by his intense involvement with Remy de Gourmont in the publication of L'Ymagier, a luxuriously produced "art" magazine devoted to the symbolic analysis of medieval and popular prints. Symbolism as an art movement was in full swing at this time and L'Ymagier provided a nexus for many of its key contributors. Jarry's play Caesar Antichrist (1895) drew on this movement for material. This is a work that bridges the gap between serious symbolic meaning and the type of critical absurdity with which Jarry would soon become associated. Using the biblical Book of Revelation as a point of departure, Caesar Antichrist presents a parallel world of extreme formal symbolism in which Christ is resurrected not as an agent of spirituality but as an agent of the Roman Empire that seeks to dominate spirituality. It is a unique narrative that effectively links the domination of the soul to contemporaneous advances in the field of Egyptology such as the 1894 excavation of the Narmer Palette, an ancient artifact used for situating the rebus within hermeneutics.
The spring of 1896 saw the publication, in Paul Fort's review Le Livre d'art, of Jarry's 5-act play Ubu Roi — a rewritten and expanded version of play he'd written as a schoolboy about one of his teachers. Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe produced the play at his Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. On opening night (10 December 1896), with traditionalists and the avant-garde in the audience, King Ubu (played by Firmin Gémier) stepped forward and intoned the opening word, "Merdre!" A quarter of an hour of pandemonium ensued: outraged cries, booing, and whistling by the offended parties, countered by cheers and applause by the more forward-thinking contingent. Such interruptions continued through the evening. At the time, only the dress rehearsal and opening night performance were held, and the play was not revived until 1907.
The play brought fame to the 23-year-old Jarry, and he immersed himself in the fiction he had created. Gémier had modeled his portrayal of Ubu on Jarry's own staccato, nasal vocal delivery, which emphasized each syllable (even the silent ones). From then on, Jarry would always speak in this style. He adopted Ubu's ridiculous and pedantic figures of speech; for example, he referred to himself using the royal we, and called the wind "that which blows" and the bicycle he rode everywhere "that which rolls."
Jarry moved into a flat which the landlord had created through the unusual expedient of subdividing a larger flat by means of a horizontal rather than a vertical partition. The diminutive Jarry could just manage to stand up in the place, but guests had to bend or crouch. Jarry also took to carrying a loaded pistol. In response to a neighbor's complaint that his target shooting endangered her children, he replied, "If that should ever happen, ma-da-me, we should ourselves be happy to get new ones with you" (though he was not at all inclined to engage with females in the manner implied).
Living in worsening poverty, neglecting his health, and drinking excessively, Jarry went on to write what is often cited as the first cyborg sex novel, Le Surmâle (1902, The Supermale), which is partly a satire on the Symbolist ideal of self-transcendence.
Unpublished until after his death, his fiction Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician (Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien) describes the exploits and teachings of a sort of antiphilosopher who, born at age 63, travels through a hallucinatory Paris in a sieve and subscribes to the tenets of 'pataphysics. 'Pataphysics deals with "the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". In 'pataphysics, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event.
Jarry once wrote, expressing some of the bizarre logic of 'pataphysics, "If you let a coin fall and it falls, the next time it is just by an infinite coincidence that it will fall again the same way; hundreds of other coins on other hands will follow this pattern in an infinitely unimaginable fashion".
In his final years, he was a legendary and heroic figure to some of the young writers and artists in Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, and Max Jacob sought him out in his truncated apartment. After his death, Pablo Picasso, fascinated with Jarry, acquired his pistol and wore it on his nocturnal expeditions in Paris, and later bought many of his manuscripts as well as executing a fine drawing of him.
Jarry lived in his 'pataphysical world until his death in Paris on 1 November 1907 of tuberculosis, aggravated by drug and alcohol use. It is recorded that his last request was for a toothpick. He was interred in the Cimetière de Bagneux, near Paris.
2. Ford Madox Ford
3. Alfred Jarry
***
J. D. Beresford (1873-1947)
John Davys Beresford was an English writer, now remembered for his early science fiction and some short stories in the horror story and ghost story genres. His father was a clergyman in Castor, now in Cambridgeshire near Peterborough. He was affected by infantile paralysis, which left him partially disabled. After training to become an architect, he became a professional writer, first as a dramatist, and journalist. He combined a prominent place in Edwardian literary London with time spent in the provinces, in particular Cornwall where D. H. Lawrence had an extended stay in his Porthcothan cottage. Elisabeth Beresford, children's writer and creator of The Wombles, is his daughter.
British author. Journalist. During World War I in difficulties for pacifist views. Also wrote a considerable amount of fantastic fiction.
* The Hampdenshire Wonder (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1911; George H. Doran: New York, 1917, as The Wonder). It is one of the first novels to involve a wunderkind. The child in it is named Victor Stott and he is the son of a famous cricket player. This origin is perhaps a reference to H. G. Wells' father. The novel concerns his progress from infant to almost preternaturally brilliant child. The character's intelligence is vaguely more like the children in the much later Childhood's End than like traditional stories of child prodigies. Also Victor Stott is subtly deformed to allow for his powerful brain. One prominent, and unpleasant, character is the local minister. As J.D. Beresford's father was a minister, and Beresford was himself partially disabled, some see autobiographical aspects to the story. What is more concrete is that the story of Christian Friedrich Heinecken was an inspiration for the story. Whether the biography of that child prodigy was accurate or not "the Lubeck prodigy" is mentioned in the work. Also, in the original version, the ideas of Henri Bergson on evolution are also significant.
Bleiler: Irony against church, state, and humanity in general. The first important novel about a superman, and in many respects still the best. The story is told through a journalist who chances upon the phenomenon of Victor Stott, one of the most remarkable mentalities in the literature. Victor Stott is the son of Ginger Stott, a former cricketer of great prowess, whom the narrator knows. The narrator first meets Victor on a train when the child is only a year old, and even at this age it is obvious that the child, though refusing to speak, is highly intelligent. It also has the ability to disturb ordinary humans with its heavy, percing glance. The larger part of the book, however, deals with Victor Stott at about age five. Challis, the local squire, who is an anthropologist of note, befriends the Stotts and, recognizing Victor's unusual abilities, offers him the use of his library. In a matter of days the child absorbs the sum total of human knowledge and has reached integrations far beyond what ordinary men can achieve.
There are, however, great problems associated with Victor. Though unbelievably intelligent, he is inhuman and alien in emotional development, and in some respects is more helpless than an ordinary child — despite the power of his glance. As intellect, he challenges the authority of religion in the form of the local clergyman, who declares a vendetta against him. And as intellect, the child is helpless against the village idiot. Challis tries to protect Victor, though even he cannot totally accept him. As a rule Victor does not speak to humans, but on one occasion, after he first went through Challis's library, he explained the nature of the universe and existence to Challis, who has never recovered from the shock, since it destroyed his own intellectual position. Victor Stott does not live long, though. His corpse is found in a stream. While the official verdict is accidental death, it is obviously murder. Beresford does not make an accusation, but he hints that the vicious curate killed the child out of religious fanatacism. "An excellent psychological study of the impact of the utterly-beyond on normal man, with a mild semi-allegorical note."
Called one of the first novels to feature a wunderkind. Note that W.H. Rhodes' The Telescopic Eye (1876) introduced a child with telescopic vision. Later novels about non-tyhreateninf superhuman children include J.A. Mitchell's Drowsy (1917) and Wilmar H. Shiras's Children of the Atom (1953).
The child, Victor Stott, is the son of a once-famous cricket player. (Wells's father was a cricket player.)
The preternaturally brilliant child -- not a child prodigy, but like the children in Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End. He is deformed -- huge head.
More paranoid accounts of homo superior include: Georges Lebas's Jean Arog, le premier surhomme (1921); Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930); Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1936), A.E. van Vogt's Slan (1940).
Victor is a giant-headed genius, but physically weak and awkward Has the ability to memorize and synthesize vast amounts of knowledge and information. Once he has access to a huge ibrary, he forms theories of human progress and argues philosophical points that others can barely grasp.
* The Goslings (Heinemann: London, 1913; The Macaulay Company: New York, 1913, as A World of Women). TK
* Revolution: A Novel (W. Collins: London, 1921. Putnam: New York, 1921, as Revolution: A Story of the Near Future in England). TK
* Signs and Wonders (Golden Cockerel Press: Waltham Saint Laurence, Berks., 1921. Putnam: New York, 1921). TK
***
Ford Madox Ford (TK)
TK
***
Alfred Jarry (1873-1907)
Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side. Best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which is often cited as a forerunner to the surrealist theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, Jarry also wrote plays, novels, poetry, essays and speculative journalism. His texts present some pioneering work in the field of absurdist literature.
At 17 Jarry passed his baccalauréat and moved to Paris to prepare for admission to the École Normale Supérieure. Though he was not admitted, he soon gained attention for his original poems and prose-poems. A collection of his work, Les minutes de sable mémorial, was published in 1893.
When he was drafted into the army in 1894, his gift for turning notions upside down defeated attempts to instill military discipline. The sight of the small man in a uniform much too large for his less than 5-foot frame—the army did not issue uniforms small enough—was so disruptively funny that he was excused from parades and marching drills. Eventually the army discharged him for medical reasons. His military experience eventually inspired the novel, Days and Nights.
Jarry returned to Paris and applied himself to drinking, writing, and the company of friends who appreciated his witty, sweet-tempered, and unpredictable conversation. This period is marked by his intense involvement with Remy de Gourmont in the publication of L'Ymagier, a luxuriously produced "art" magazine devoted to the symbolic analysis of medieval and popular prints. Symbolism as an art movement was in full swing at this time and L'Ymagier provided a nexus for many of its key contributors. Jarry's play Caesar Antichrist (1895) drew on this movement for material. This is a work that bridges the gap between serious symbolic meaning and the type of critical absurdity with which Jarry would soon become associated. Using the biblical Book of Revelation as a point of departure, Caesar Antichrist presents a parallel world of extreme formal symbolism in which Christ is resurrected not as an agent of spirituality but as an agent of the Roman Empire that seeks to dominate spirituality. It is a unique narrative that effectively links the domination of the soul to contemporaneous advances in the field of Egyptology such as the 1894 excavation of the Narmer Palette, an ancient artifact used for situating the rebus within hermeneutics.
The spring of 1896 saw the publication, in Paul Fort's review Le Livre d'art, of Jarry's 5-act play Ubu Roi — a rewritten and expanded version of play he'd written as a schoolboy about one of his teachers. Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe produced the play at his Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. On opening night (10 December 1896), with traditionalists and the avant-garde in the audience, King Ubu (played by Firmin Gémier) stepped forward and intoned the opening word, "Merdre!" A quarter of an hour of pandemonium ensued: outraged cries, booing, and whistling by the offended parties, countered by cheers and applause by the more forward-thinking contingent. Such interruptions continued through the evening. At the time, only the dress rehearsal and opening night performance were held, and the play was not revived until 1907.
The play brought fame to the 23-year-old Jarry, and he immersed himself in the fiction he had created. Gémier had modeled his portrayal of Ubu on Jarry's own staccato, nasal vocal delivery, which emphasized each syllable (even the silent ones). From then on, Jarry would always speak in this style. He adopted Ubu's ridiculous and pedantic figures of speech; for example, he referred to himself using the royal we, and called the wind "that which blows" and the bicycle he rode everywhere "that which rolls."
Jarry moved into a flat which the landlord had created through the unusual expedient of subdividing a larger flat by means of a horizontal rather than a vertical partition. The diminutive Jarry could just manage to stand up in the place, but guests had to bend or crouch. Jarry also took to carrying a loaded pistol. In response to a neighbor's complaint that his target shooting endangered her children, he replied, "If that should ever happen, ma-da-me, we should ourselves be happy to get new ones with you" (though he was not at all inclined to engage with females in the manner implied).
Living in worsening poverty, neglecting his health, and drinking excessively, Jarry went on to write what is often cited as the first cyborg sex novel, Le Surmâle (1902, The Supermale), which is partly a satire on the Symbolist ideal of self-transcendence.
Unpublished until after his death, his fiction Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician (Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien) describes the exploits and teachings of a sort of antiphilosopher who, born at age 63, travels through a hallucinatory Paris in a sieve and subscribes to the tenets of 'pataphysics. 'Pataphysics deals with "the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". In 'pataphysics, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event.
Jarry once wrote, expressing some of the bizarre logic of 'pataphysics, "If you let a coin fall and it falls, the next time it is just by an infinite coincidence that it will fall again the same way; hundreds of other coins on other hands will follow this pattern in an infinitely unimaginable fashion".
In his final years, he was a legendary and heroic figure to some of the young writers and artists in Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, and Max Jacob sought him out in his truncated apartment. After his death, Pablo Picasso, fascinated with Jarry, acquired his pistol and wore it on his nocturnal expeditions in Paris, and later bought many of his manuscripts as well as executing a fine drawing of him.
Jarry lived in his 'pataphysical world until his death in Paris on 1 November 1907 of tuberculosis, aggravated by drug and alcohol use. It is recorded that his last request was for a toothpick. He was interred in the Cimetière de Bagneux, near Paris.
SF authors born 1864-73: 1870
1. Hilaire Belloc
2. H.H. Munro
***
Hilaire Belloc (TK)
TK
***
H.H. Munro (Saki) (TK)
TK
2. H.H. Munro
***
Hilaire Belloc (TK)
TK
***
H.H. Munro (Saki) (TK)
TK
SF authors born 1864-73: 1866
1. Archibald Marshall
2. H.G. Wells
***
Archibald Marshall (TK)
TK
***
H.G. Wells (TK)
Wells devoted himself to matching his fabulous contributions to science fiction, universal history, Fabian propaganda, and opinionated sociology with a passionate, troubled advocacy of peace brought about through world government.
More bio TK
* 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.
TK
2. H.G. Wells
***
Archibald Marshall (TK)
TK
***
H.G. Wells (TK)
Wells devoted himself to matching his fabulous contributions to science fiction, universal history, Fabian propaganda, and opinionated sociology with a passionate, troubled advocacy of peace brought about through world government.
More bio TK
* 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.
TK
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
SF authors born 1864-73: 1865
1. Robert W. Chambers
2. Rudyard Kipling
3. M.P. Shiel
***
Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933)
Educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,and then entered the Art Students' League at around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow student. Chambers studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and at Académie Julian, in Paris from 1886 to 1893, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. On his return to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue magazines. Then, for reasons unclear, he devoted his time to writing, producing his first novel, In the Quarter (written in 1887 in Munich). His most famous, and perhaps most meritorious, effort is The King in Yellow (1895), a collection of weird short stories, connected by the theme of the fictitious drama The King in Yellow, which drives those who read it insane.
According to some estimates, Chambers was one of the most successful literary careers of his period, his later novels selling well and a handful achieving best-seller status. Many of his works were also serialized in magazines. After 1924 he devoted himself solely to writing historical fiction. By the time of his death he had published 72 books of all kinds — fantasy, biography, historical novels, and sports, and also plays and verse. His technique was to work on three or four books at one time. H. P. Lovecraft said of Chambers in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans - equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them." Frederic Taber Cooper commented, "So much of Mr Chambers's work exasperates, because we feel that he might so easily have made it better."
SF BY CHAMBERS
* The Green Mouse (1910 -- story or novel?) concerns a man named Destyn, who has invented a machine which takes advantage of a new invention, the wireless telegraph, by intercepting the subconscious personalities of a man and a woman and contacting them. The result is ordinary romance, but the manner in which it is achieved is definitely fantastic.
* Police!!! (Appleton, 1915). Six stories: "The Third Eye," "The Immortal," "The Ladies of the Lake," "One Over," "Un peu d'Amour," "The Eggs of the Silver Moon." Bleiler says: "SF hilariously funny and beautifully written."
***
Rudyard Kipling (TK)
TK
***
M.P. Shiel (TK)
TK
2. Rudyard Kipling
3. M.P. Shiel
***
Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933)
Educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,and then entered the Art Students' League at around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow student. Chambers studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and at Académie Julian, in Paris from 1886 to 1893, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. On his return to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue magazines. Then, for reasons unclear, he devoted his time to writing, producing his first novel, In the Quarter (written in 1887 in Munich). His most famous, and perhaps most meritorious, effort is The King in Yellow (1895), a collection of weird short stories, connected by the theme of the fictitious drama The King in Yellow, which drives those who read it insane.
According to some estimates, Chambers was one of the most successful literary careers of his period, his later novels selling well and a handful achieving best-seller status. Many of his works were also serialized in magazines. After 1924 he devoted himself solely to writing historical fiction. By the time of his death he had published 72 books of all kinds — fantasy, biography, historical novels, and sports, and also plays and verse. His technique was to work on three or four books at one time. H. P. Lovecraft said of Chambers in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans - equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them." Frederic Taber Cooper commented, "So much of Mr Chambers's work exasperates, because we feel that he might so easily have made it better."
SF BY CHAMBERS
* The Green Mouse (1910 -- story or novel?) concerns a man named Destyn, who has invented a machine which takes advantage of a new invention, the wireless telegraph, by intercepting the subconscious personalities of a man and a woman and contacting them. The result is ordinary romance, but the manner in which it is achieved is definitely fantastic.
* Police!!! (Appleton, 1915). Six stories: "The Third Eye," "The Immortal," "The Ladies of the Lake," "One Over," "Un peu d'Amour," "The Eggs of the Silver Moon." Bleiler says: "SF hilariously funny and beautifully written."
***
Rudyard Kipling (TK)
TK
***
M.P. Shiel (TK)
TK
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