1. Maurice Barrès
2. Georg Simmel
***
Maurice Barrès (1862-1923)
French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator. Barrès was one of the major figures in the reorientation of French nationalism in the period 1890-1914.
In the 1880s he found literary success with his three Culte de moi novels, with their themes of intellectual self-discovery and cultural rebellion. Leaning towards the far-left in his youth as a Boulangist deputy, he progressively developed a theory close to Romantic nationalism and shifted to the right during the Dreyfus Affair, leading the Anti-Dreyfusards alongside Charles Maurras.
Barrès was, in short, an illiberal: His early activism united several of his literary themes: hostility to the rigid structures of bourgeois culture and education, and contempt for the parliamentary system and its leaders, whom he saw as responsible for France's decline as a culture and as a world power. (He was not, however, a monarchist.) His novels, essays, and unceasing journalistic activity were his principle contribution to the reorientation of French nationalism and to making anti-semitism and anti-parliamentarianism respectable among pre-World War I intellectual circles.
During World War I, Barrès was one of the proponents of the Union sacrée, which earned him the nickname "nightingale of bloodshed" ("rossignol des carnages"). The Canard enchaîné satirical newspaper called him the "chief of the brainwashers' tribe."
NB: In 1921, the Dadaists organized the Trial of Barrès, charged of "attentat à la sûreté de l'esprit," and sentenced him to 20 years of forced labour. This fictitious trial also marked the dissolving of Dada.
* The Dreyfus affair completed his transition to a mystical and authoritarian nationalism and linked his anti-parliamentarianism and anti-semitism with an environmental and biological determinism that was expressed in his novels Les Déracinés (1897), L'Appel au soldat, etc.
* He is considered, alongside Charles Maurras, as one of the main thinkers of ethnic nationalism at the turn of the century in France, associated with Revanchism — the desire to reconquer the Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the newly created German Empire at the end of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War.
* Influenced by Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine, he developed an organicist conception of the Nation which contrasted with the universalism of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Often credited with being the first to give nationalism a new and more exclusionary meaning, his novels and newspaper articles molded a generation of young French intellectuals to accept an instinctual and cultural nationalism that emphasized the concept of a national community based on the mythic solidarity of "the earth and the dead." According to Barrès, the People is not founded by an act of autonomy, but find its origins in the earth, history (institutions, life and material conditions) and traditions and inheritance ("the dead").
***
Georg Simmel
TK
Author of books:
On Social Differentiation (1890)
The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892-93)
Introduction to the Science of Ethics (1892-93)
Philosophie des Geldes (1900)
Soziologie (1908)
Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917)
Lebensanschauung (1918)
Showing posts with label Plutonians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plutonians. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
SF authors born 1854-63: 1858
1. John A. Hobson
2. E. Nesbit
***
John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940)
English economist, anti-imperialist, journalist. During his coverage of the Second Boer War, Hobson began to form the idea that imperialism was the direct result of the expanding forces of modern capitalism. Author of such works as Psychology of Jingoism (1901), The Crisis of Liberalism (1909), Work and Wealth, A Human Valuation (1914), Western Civilization (1915), Forced Labor (1917), Problems of a New World (1921), The Living Wage (with H.N. Brailsford, A. Creech Jones, E.F. Wise) (1926), From Capitalism to Socialism (1932), Veblen (1936), and Confessions of an Economic Heretic (1938).
Hobson's magnum opus, Imperialism (1902), argued that imperial expansion is driven by a search for new markets and investment opportunities overseas; the book influenced Lenin, Trotsky, and Hannah Arendt. Also influential on the musical artist Bright Eyes, whose song "Light Pollution" claims that "John A. Hobson was a good man/He used to loan me books and mic stands/He even got me a subscription/To the Socialist Review."
WIKIPEDIA
* As Lucian: 1920: Dips into the Near Future (Headly Brothers Publishing: London, 1918; a version was originally published in The Nation, 1917.) Charteris, who's just returned from India to England, where WWI is still going on in 1920, takes note of how Britain has changed since he's been gone. The Aged Service Act, for example, presses the elderly into military service — not as soldiers, mind you, but (once euthanized) as food. The War-Truth laboratory uses scientific means to distort history and destroy the image of German culture. Another group works to ease England's transition to an absolutist form of government. Marriage has become free-form (to boost birth-rates), while workers have become slave labor. NB: In the 2d edition (1918), the author writes a Preface explaining that "Satire seemed the only means of exposing a mind [mine?] of bottomless credulity." PS: In a 2004 scholarly essay (The Journal of Popular Culture), Jonathan Rose suggests that this novel is one of "The Invisible Sources of Nineteen Eighty-Four."
READ IT
E. Nesbit (1858-1924)
Edith Nesbit Bland. Wrote as E. Bland and E. Nesbit. British poet, journalist, one of the founders of the Fabian Society. Well-known for such children's books as The Railway Children, The Treasure Seekers, etc.
follower of William Morris, 19-year-old Nesbit met bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, though she did not immediately live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their marriage was an open one. Bland also continued an affair with Alice Hoatson which produced two children (Rosamund in 1886 and John in 1899), both of whom Nesbit raised as her own. Her own children were Paul Bland (1880-1940), to whom The Railway Children was dedicated; Iris Bland (1881-19??); and Fabian Bland (1885-1900), who died aged 15 after a tonsil operation, and to whom she dedicated Five Children And It and its sequels, as well as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels.
Nesbit and Bland were among the founders of the Fabian Society (a precursor to the Labour Party) in 1884. Their son Fabian was named after the society. They also jointly edited the Society's journal Today; Hoatson was the Society's assistant secretary. Nesbit and Bland also dallied briefly with the Social Democratic Federation, but rejected it as too radical. Nesbit was an active lecturer and prolific writer on socialism during the 1880s. Nesbit also wrote with her husband under the name "Fabian Bland,"[2] though this activity dwindled as her success as a children's author grew.
Nesbit lived from 1899 to 1920 in Well Hall House, Eltham, Kent (now in south-east Greater London). On 20 February 1917, some three years after Bland died, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, a ship's engineer on the Woolwich Ferry. She was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics.
Nesbit published approximately 40 books for children, both novels and collections of stories. Collaborating with others, she published almost as many more.
According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Nesbit was "the first modern writer for children": "(Nesbit) helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by [Lewis] Carroll, [George] MacDonald and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds to the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, previously the province of adult novels." Briggs also credits Nesbit with having invented the children's adventure story.
Among Nesbit's best-known books are The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1898) and The Wouldbegoods (1899), which both recount stories about the Bastables, a middle class family that has fallen on relatively hard times. Her children's writing also included numerous plays and collections of verse.
She created an innovative body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds. In doing so, she was a direct or indirect influence on many subsequent writers, including P. L. Travers (author of Mary Poppins), Edward Eager, Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling. C. S. Lewis wrote of her influence on his Narnia series and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician's Nephew. Michael Moorcock would go on to write a series of steampunk novels with an adult Oswald Bastable (of The Treasure Seekers) as the lead character.
RADIUM-AGE SF BY NESBIT
* "The Third Drug" (The Strand, February 1908). Short story. As "E. Bland." Set in Paris. Roger Wroxham, plagued by woman and money problems, decides to throw himself into the Seine. Attacked by apaches on his way there, he takes refuge in the establishment of an elderly doctor who dresses his wounds and gives him a sedative, Wroxham awakens to find himself tied up, with the feeling that he is at the brink of death. The doctor questions him minutely about his sensations, then gives him a second, restorative draught. The doctor explains: he is seeking a chemical that will produce a superman. Wroxham is the first to survive the first draught — he shows Wroxham a room full of corpses preserved by taxidermy — and quite possibly he will survive the third draught and become a superman. If he does not drink the third, the second draught will kill him. Wroxham has no choice and accepts the third potion, which really does turn him into a mental superman. Seeing this success, the doctor decides to try the elixirs himself, but in the last stage is unable to reach the potion and dies. Wroxham, still tied, is released by the apaches.
* The Five Senses (1909) TK
* Fear TK
* "The Pavilion" TK
* To the Adventuresome TK
* Rose Royal TK
***
2. E. Nesbit
***
John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940)
English economist, anti-imperialist, journalist. During his coverage of the Second Boer War, Hobson began to form the idea that imperialism was the direct result of the expanding forces of modern capitalism. Author of such works as Psychology of Jingoism (1901), The Crisis of Liberalism (1909), Work and Wealth, A Human Valuation (1914), Western Civilization (1915), Forced Labor (1917), Problems of a New World (1921), The Living Wage (with H.N. Brailsford, A. Creech Jones, E.F. Wise) (1926), From Capitalism to Socialism (1932), Veblen (1936), and Confessions of an Economic Heretic (1938).
Hobson's magnum opus, Imperialism (1902), argued that imperial expansion is driven by a search for new markets and investment opportunities overseas; the book influenced Lenin, Trotsky, and Hannah Arendt. Also influential on the musical artist Bright Eyes, whose song "Light Pollution" claims that "John A. Hobson was a good man/He used to loan me books and mic stands/He even got me a subscription/To the Socialist Review."
WIKIPEDIA
* As Lucian: 1920: Dips into the Near Future (Headly Brothers Publishing: London, 1918; a version was originally published in The Nation, 1917.) Charteris, who's just returned from India to England, where WWI is still going on in 1920, takes note of how Britain has changed since he's been gone. The Aged Service Act, for example, presses the elderly into military service — not as soldiers, mind you, but (once euthanized) as food. The War-Truth laboratory uses scientific means to distort history and destroy the image of German culture. Another group works to ease England's transition to an absolutist form of government. Marriage has become free-form (to boost birth-rates), while workers have become slave labor. NB: In the 2d edition (1918), the author writes a Preface explaining that "Satire seemed the only means of exposing a mind [mine?] of bottomless credulity." PS: In a 2004 scholarly essay (The Journal of Popular Culture), Jonathan Rose suggests that this novel is one of "The Invisible Sources of Nineteen Eighty-Four."
READ IT
E. Nesbit (1858-1924)
Edith Nesbit Bland. Wrote as E. Bland and E. Nesbit. British poet, journalist, one of the founders of the Fabian Society. Well-known for such children's books as The Railway Children, The Treasure Seekers, etc.
follower of William Morris, 19-year-old Nesbit met bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, though she did not immediately live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their marriage was an open one. Bland also continued an affair with Alice Hoatson which produced two children (Rosamund in 1886 and John in 1899), both of whom Nesbit raised as her own. Her own children were Paul Bland (1880-1940), to whom The Railway Children was dedicated; Iris Bland (1881-19??); and Fabian Bland (1885-1900), who died aged 15 after a tonsil operation, and to whom she dedicated Five Children And It and its sequels, as well as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels.
Nesbit and Bland were among the founders of the Fabian Society (a precursor to the Labour Party) in 1884. Their son Fabian was named after the society. They also jointly edited the Society's journal Today; Hoatson was the Society's assistant secretary. Nesbit and Bland also dallied briefly with the Social Democratic Federation, but rejected it as too radical. Nesbit was an active lecturer and prolific writer on socialism during the 1880s. Nesbit also wrote with her husband under the name "Fabian Bland,"[2] though this activity dwindled as her success as a children's author grew.
Nesbit lived from 1899 to 1920 in Well Hall House, Eltham, Kent (now in south-east Greater London). On 20 February 1917, some three years after Bland died, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, a ship's engineer on the Woolwich Ferry. She was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics.
Nesbit published approximately 40 books for children, both novels and collections of stories. Collaborating with others, she published almost as many more.
According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Nesbit was "the first modern writer for children": "(Nesbit) helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by [Lewis] Carroll, [George] MacDonald and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds to the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, previously the province of adult novels." Briggs also credits Nesbit with having invented the children's adventure story.
Among Nesbit's best-known books are The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1898) and The Wouldbegoods (1899), which both recount stories about the Bastables, a middle class family that has fallen on relatively hard times. Her children's writing also included numerous plays and collections of verse.
She created an innovative body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds. In doing so, she was a direct or indirect influence on many subsequent writers, including P. L. Travers (author of Mary Poppins), Edward Eager, Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling. C. S. Lewis wrote of her influence on his Narnia series and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician's Nephew. Michael Moorcock would go on to write a series of steampunk novels with an adult Oswald Bastable (of The Treasure Seekers) as the lead character.
RADIUM-AGE SF BY NESBIT
* "The Third Drug" (The Strand, February 1908). Short story. As "E. Bland." Set in Paris. Roger Wroxham, plagued by woman and money problems, decides to throw himself into the Seine. Attacked by apaches on his way there, he takes refuge in the establishment of an elderly doctor who dresses his wounds and gives him a sedative, Wroxham awakens to find himself tied up, with the feeling that he is at the brink of death. The doctor questions him minutely about his sensations, then gives him a second, restorative draught. The doctor explains: he is seeking a chemical that will produce a superman. Wroxham is the first to survive the first draught — he shows Wroxham a room full of corpses preserved by taxidermy — and quite possibly he will survive the third draught and become a superman. If he does not drink the third, the second draught will kill him. Wroxham has no choice and accepts the third potion, which really does turn him into a mental superman. Seeing this success, the doctor decides to try the elixirs himself, but in the last stage is unable to reach the potion and dies. Wroxham, still tied, is released by the apaches.
* The Five Senses (1909) TK
* Fear TK
* "The Pavilion" TK
* To the Adventuresome TK
* Rose Royal TK
***
Sunday, January 4, 2009
SF authors born 1854-63: 1855
1. James Barnes
***
James Barnes (1855-1936)
American writer, editor at Scribner's Magazine and Harper's Weekly. During the Spanish-American War he served in the Naval Reserve. From 1899 to 1901 he was a war correspondent for The Outlook covering the Boer War in South Africa. During WWI he was sent to France, as commander of the United States School of Aërial Photography, to organize that work at the front. Author of many books on naval topics.
WIKIPEDIA
* The Unpardonable War (Macmillan: New York, 1904). "Of routine competence, but incredible politically and militarily," opines Everett F. Bleiler, in Science-Fiction: The Early Years. Set in the near future of 1915-16. America's two major political parties have collapsed, and an incompetent and corrupt labor government has assumed power. In order to distract the populace from domestic problems, big business interests, the yellow press, and various cabinet officials collude in starting a war with Great Britain. Once this comes to pass, however, a great president surrounded by decent, competent officials takes over. America then invades Canada — the plot was starting to sound like recent history, until then, wasn't it? — and captures everything west of Montreal from the British. Great Britain then lands several hundred thousand troops in Maine, capturing everything from the Penobscot to the Kennebec. (Think Red Dawn, except Patrick Swayze is playing Johnny Tremaine, not a Wolverine.) Westland, an American scientist, develops a Zone of Force ray that detonates certain types of ammunition (it projects "intense electronic vibrations"), and an electrified river that bars the British troops from capturing Washington. "Science had rendered military advancement worthless." The war is called off, hooray! Funny meta-SF moment: "Damned trying to the nerves, this," remarks a British officer, upon hearing the electronic whistling of the Zone of Force. "Do you remember an extravagant story by a chap named Wells, entitled 'The War of the Worlds'? That confounded whistling and the echoes remind me of the 'Ulla, ulla' of the Martians."
READ IT | NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW
***
James Barnes (1855-1936)
American writer, editor at Scribner's Magazine and Harper's Weekly. During the Spanish-American War he served in the Naval Reserve. From 1899 to 1901 he was a war correspondent for The Outlook covering the Boer War in South Africa. During WWI he was sent to France, as commander of the United States School of Aërial Photography, to organize that work at the front. Author of many books on naval topics.
WIKIPEDIA
* The Unpardonable War (Macmillan: New York, 1904). "Of routine competence, but incredible politically and militarily," opines Everett F. Bleiler, in Science-Fiction: The Early Years. Set in the near future of 1915-16. America's two major political parties have collapsed, and an incompetent and corrupt labor government has assumed power. In order to distract the populace from domestic problems, big business interests, the yellow press, and various cabinet officials collude in starting a war with Great Britain. Once this comes to pass, however, a great president surrounded by decent, competent officials takes over. America then invades Canada — the plot was starting to sound like recent history, until then, wasn't it? — and captures everything west of Montreal from the British. Great Britain then lands several hundred thousand troops in Maine, capturing everything from the Penobscot to the Kennebec. (Think Red Dawn, except Patrick Swayze is playing Johnny Tremaine, not a Wolverine.) Westland, an American scientist, develops a Zone of Force ray that detonates certain types of ammunition (it projects "intense electronic vibrations"), and an electrified river that bars the British troops from capturing Washington. "Science had rendered military advancement worthless." The war is called off, hooray! Funny meta-SF moment: "Damned trying to the nerves, this," remarks a British officer, upon hearing the electronic whistling of the Zone of Force. "Do you remember an extravagant story by a chap named Wells, entitled 'The War of the Worlds'? That confounded whistling and the echoes remind me of the 'Ulla, ulla' of the Martians."
READ IT | NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW
Friday, January 2, 2009
Plutonian Generation (1854-63)
I've named this generation after one of its members: Percival Lowell, the astronomer who predicted the existence of Planet X — which was discovered in 1930, and named Pluto in part to echo P.L.'s initials — and whose theory about an ancient Martian civilization in decline proved extremely influential on Radium-Age SF.
Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation — Freud, Emil Kraepelin, Sir James Frazer, Eugen Bleuler, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Franz Boas, Émile Durkheim — were dedicated to spelunking the darkest corners of the unconscious, rationalizing the world's religions and myths, laying bare the deepest structures of society and culture. And then there's Plutonian Joseph Conrad's voyage to the Heart of Darkness... and Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer.
My friend Erik Davis tells me: "Pluto is a dark technological god of transformation. So you get the apocalyptic dimension, the sense of transformation, the 'cosmic' current." Yes, Plutonians like Rimbaud, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Arthur Edward Waite, Arthur Machen, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Reuss, Pierre Janet, Margaret Murray, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson were fascinated with occultism, metaphysics, the systematic derangement of the senses, the élan vital, the cosmic perspective, the naked lunch at the end of the fork perceived only via the phenomenological epoché. Kellogg and Post were spelunkers of humankind's intestinal underworld.
Oh, and speaking of plutonian currents and technological transformation: Nikola Tesla.
Pluto was the Roman god of precious metals, mined from the underworld. Every generation has its plutocrats, but the very names of the 1854-73 cohort's American capitalists and Wall Street journalists are iconic: Barron, Mellon, Schwab, and (Dow) Jones! Diamond Jim Brady! Not to mention Ford, Gillette, Sears, Duke, Hearst, Guggenheim, Hershey, Dayton, Maytag, Smucker, Hormel, Wrigley, and honorary Plutonians Cecil Rhodes, John Jacob Astor, and Jim Beam. A handful of Plutonians were some of the most brilliant critics of the horrors, paradoxes, and absurdities of modern capitalism, ever: Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), Georg Simmel (Philosophy of Money), muckraker Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company), and honorary Plutonian Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).
PS: The 19th-century's three most notable oddities (Ishi, The Elephant Man, and legendary fartiste Le Pétomane) are Plutonians. Sounds like the plot of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style comic...
***
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)
***
SF authors of the Plutonian Generation include:
* L. Frank Baum (The Master Key, Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz)
* K.E. Tsiolkovsky (The Call of the Cosmos, Beyond the Planet Earth)
* George Griffith (The Angel of the Revolution, A Criminal Croesus, The Great Weather Syndicate, A Honeymoon in Space, The Outlaws of the Air, The Stolen Submarine, many others)
* Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mist, "When the World Screamed")
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland, "With Her in Ourland")
* Edwin Lester Arnold (Lepidus the Centurion, Lieut. Gullivar Jones)
* Gertrude Atherton (Black Oxen)
* James Barnes (The Unpardonable War)
* H. Rider Haggard (Allan Quatermain, Ayesha, Heart of the World, King Solomon's Mines, She, When the World Shook)
* Frank Harris (Pantopia)
* George Bernard Shaw (The Apple Cart, Back to Methuselah)
* Joseph Conrad (The Inheritors, with Ford Madox Ford)
* E. Nesbit (Fear, "The Third Drug," "The Five Senses," "The Pavilion," To the Adventuresome, Rose Royal)
* Jerome K. Jerome (Diary of a Pilgrimage, "The Dancing Partner," "The New Utopia")
* John A. Hobson (1920: Dips into the Near Future)
***
Meet the Plutonians.
1854: Hertha Ayrton (Physicist, electric arc), David Buick (designed the first Buick motorcars), F. Marion Crawford (Novelist), George Eastman (inventor of the Kodak camera), Sir James Frazer (Anthropologist, The Golden Bough), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (Magician, founder of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), Henri Poincaré (Mathematician, Poincaré Conjecture), C. W. Post (invented Postum and Grape-Nuts), Arthur Rimbaud (Poet, Une Saison en Enfer), Charles Angrand (Neo-Impressionist painter), John Philip Sousa (Composer, "Stars and Stripes Forever"), Thomas A. Watson (Assistant to Alexander Graham Bell). Honorary Prometheans (1844-53): Oscar Wilde (Anglo-Irish playwright, author, dandy, decadent).
1855: Percival Lowell (Astronomer, predicted existence of Pluto), Clarence W. Barron (Wall Street Journal proprietor, 1903-28), John Browning (gun designer), Eugene V. Debs (Labor leader, ran for President five times), King Gillette (Invented safety razor), Ned Kelly (iron-clad Australian outlaw), Andrew W. Mellon (US Secretary of the Treasury, 1921-32), Evelyn De Morgan (British Pre-Raphaelite painter), Theodor Reuss (founded the Ordo Templi Orientis), James Barnes (American writer, magazine editor).
1856: Sigmund Freud (Psychiatrist), Nikola Tesla (invented alternating current), L. Frank Baum (Novelist, The Wizard of Oz), Woodrow Wilson (28th US President, 1913-21), Louis D. Brandeis (US Supreme Court Justice, 1916-39), James Buchanan Duke (American Tobacco Company), Daniel Guggenheim (Mining magnate), H. Rider Haggard (Novelist, King Solomon's Mines), Frank Harris (Anglo-Irish-American author, My Life and Loves), Elbert Hubbard (founder of Roycroft Press), Diamond Jim Brady (larger-than-life millionaire), Edward Jones (co-founder of Dow Jones, editor of Wall Street Journal), Emil Kraepelin (Psychiatrist, manic depression and schizophrenia), A. Lawrence Lowell (President, Harvard University, 1909-33), Henri Edmond Cross (Neo-Impressionist painter), Robert E. Peary (Explorer, first to reach the North Pole), Philippe Pétain (Leader of Vichy France), John Singer Sargent (American portraitist), George Bernard Shaw (Anglo-Irish dramatist and pamphleteer), Louis Sullivan (early skyscraper architect), J. J. Thomson (Physicist, discovered the electron), Booker T. Washington (Educator, Activist, Up From Slavery), Kate Douglas Wiggin (Novelist, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), Edmund Beecher Wilson (Biologist, The Cell in Development and Inheritance).
1857: Joseph Conrad (Author, Heart of Darkness), William Howard Taft (27th US President, 1909-13), Edward Barnard (self-taught astronomer), Eugen Bleuler (Psychiatrist, coined term schizophrenia), Clarence Darrow (Attorney, Scopes Monkey Trial), George Draper Dayton (founder of what is now Target Stores), Edward Elgar (Composer, "Pomp and Circumstance"), George Gissing (Novelist, New Grub Street), Milton Hershey (founder of Hershey's), Heinrich Hertz (Physicist, discoverer of electromagnetic radiation), Edwin Lester Arnold (British author, Lieut. Gullivar Jones), Gertrude Franklin Atherton (American novelist, Senator North, Black Oxen), Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian and Societ astronautics and rocket dynamics pioneer, author), George Griffith (British SF author, explorer), Robert Baden-Powell (Founder of the Boy Scout movement), James E. Keeler (Astronomer, composition of Saturn's rings), Frederick L. Maytag (founder of Maytag Corporation), Emmeline Pankhurst (Militant suffragette), Le Pétomane (legendary fartiste), Pope Pius XI, Charles Sherrington (Doctor, neurons and synapses), Frank J. Sprague (invented streetcars and express elevators), Ida M. Tarbell (Journalist, History of the Standard Oil Company), Thorstein Veblen (Economist, The Theory of the Leisure Class), Julius Wagner-Jauregg (Psychiatrist, pioneered shock therapy), Arthur Edward Waite (Paranormal, created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck)
1858: Franz Boas (father of American Anthropology), Charles Chesnutt (Novelist, The Conjure Woman), Rudolf Diesel (inventor of the Diesel Engine), Émile Durkheim (Sociologist, Rules of the Sociological Method), Eleanora Duse (most famous Italian actress of her time), Rémy de Gourmont (Poet), Benjamin Kidd (Sociologist, Social Evolution), E. (Edith) Nesbit (Novelist, The Story of the Treasure Seekers; co-founded the Fabian Society), Adolph Ochs (New York Times Publisher, 1896-1936), Giuseppe Peano (Mathematician, infinitesimal calculus), Max Planck (Physicist, originator of quantum theory), Giacomo Puccini (Composer, Madame Butterfly), Theodore Roosevelt (26th US President, 1901-09), Georg Simmel (Sociologist, Philosophy of Money), Jerome Smucker (Founder of J. M. Smucker Company), John A. Hobson (British economist, anti-imperialist).
1859: Arthur Conan Doyle (Anglo-Irish novelist, creator of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, much more), Georges Seurat (Neo-Impressionist painting pioneer), Sholem Aleichem (Author, Fiddler on the Roof), Henri Bergson (Philosopher, L'Évolution Créatrice), Billy the Kid (frontier outlaw), Walter Camp (Father of American football), Pierre Curie (Physicist, early investigator of radiation), John Dewey (Pragmatist philosopher, education reformer), Alfred Dreyfus (Dreyfus Affair scapegoat), Havelock Ellis (Biologist, Studies in the Psychology of Sex), George Ferris (inventor of the Ferris Wheel), Knut Hamsun (Norwegian novelist), A. E. Housman (Poet), Edmund Husserl (Phenomenological philosopher), Pierre Janet (Founder of Automatic Psychology), Jerome K. Jerome (Author, Three Men in a Boat), Oscar Mayer (Oscar Mayer Meats, Inc.), Maurice Prendergast (American Post-Impressionist watercolorist), Kaiser Wilhelm (last of the German emperors)
1860: Charlotte Perkins Gilman (American sociologist, novelist, utopian feminist, Women and Economics), Jane Addams (Activist), J. M. Barrie (Author, Peter Pan), Lizzie Borden (Presumed axe murderer), William Jennings Bryan (Politician, prosecutor of the Scopes Monkey Trial), Anton Chekhov (Playwright and short story writer), Charles Chree (Astronomer, geomagnetic phenomena), William K. L. Dickson (inventor, motion picture camera), Theodor Herzl (Lead Zionist), George A. Hormel (Founder of Hormel Foods Corporation), Ishi (last of an extinct tribe), Jigoro Kano (founder of Judo), Will Keith Kellogg (corn flakes and Rice Krispies), Gustav Mahler (Composer), Harriet Monroe (founder of Poetry magazine), Annie Oakley (performance artist), Lillian Russell (actress, suffragette), Elmer Sperry (gyroscopic compass), Andrew Volstead (legislated enforcement of Prohibition), Owen Wister (Author, The Virginian)
1861: Félix Fénéon (French anarchist, art critic), William Bateson (Biologist, founder of genetics), William C. Durant (founder of General Motors), Frederick Hopkins (Scientist, discovered vitamins), Victor Horta (Art Nouveau architect), James Naismith (inventor of Basketball), Frederic Remington (Sculptor), Rudolf Steiner (Philosopher, Anthroposophical Society), Rabindranath Tagore (Poet), Frederick Jackson Turner (Historian, Frontier Thesis), Alfred North Whitehead (metaphysical mathematician), William Wrigley, Jr. (chewing gum magnate)
1862: Carl Charlier (Astronomer, Motion and the Distribution of the Stars), Claude Debussy (French Impressionist composer), Robert Emden (Mathematician, stellar structure), Robert Ford (shot and killed Jesse James), O. Henry (Author), David Hilbert (Mathematician, Hilbert Space), Gustav Klimt (Painter, Founder of the Vienna Sezession), Maurice Maeterlinck (Playwright), Joseph Merrick (The Elephant Man), Arthur Schnitzler (Playwright), Charles M. Schwab (founder of Bethlehem Steel), Billy Sunday (Evangelist), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (civil rights advocate), Edvard Westermarck (Anthropologist), Edith Wharton (Novelist, The Age of Innocence), Maurice Barrès (French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator)
1863: Leo Baekeland (inventor of Velox and Bakelite), Annie Jump Cannon (Astronomer, census-taker of the sky), Franz Ferdinand (assassination touched off WWI), Henry Ford (founder of Ford Motors), David Lloyd (UK Prime Minister, 1916-22), William Randolph Hearst (newspaper magnate), Casey Jones (railroad hero), Arthur Machen (Welsh horror novelist, occultist), George Herbert Mead (Pragmatist, social behaviorist), Margaret Murray (Egyptologist, mother of Wicca), Richard F. Outcault (Cartoonist, Yellow Kid), Henry Royce (designed the first Rolls-Royce), George Santayana (Philosopher, The Realms of Being), Richard W. Sears (Sears, Roebuck founder), Jessie Willcox Smith (The Water-Babies illustrator). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: Gabriele D'Annunzio (Author, Anarchist Dictator of Fiume, 1919-20), Edvard Munch (Painter, Scream), Luis P. Senarens (SF writer).
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MORE NOTES ON THE PLUTONIANS
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854), founder of the Order; Arthur Edward Waite (1857), created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck; Arthur Machen (1863), Welsh horror novelist.
Neo-impressionists: Charles Angrand, Henri Edmond Cross, Georges Seurat, honorary Plutonian Toulouse-Lautrec.
Did you know? American capitalist and philanthropist, eccentric inventor, and Titanic victim John Jacob Astor (honorary Plutonian) wrote a Pre-Radium Age SF novel: A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (1894).
Also, speaking of the Plutonians' grasp of deep sociocultural patterns: Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), the prototypical early fictional Western, transposed the Knights of the Round Table into the American West with cowboys as knights, and tyrannical owners of cattle empires as kings.
HONORARY PLUTONIANS: From the Promethean Generation: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh. From the Anarcho-Syndicalist Generation: John Jacob Astor, 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 Toulouse-Lautrec (all 1864).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN (1844-53) GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE ANARCHO-SYMBOLIST GENERATION (1864-73): Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (all 1863)
Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation — Freud, Emil Kraepelin, Sir James Frazer, Eugen Bleuler, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Franz Boas, Émile Durkheim — were dedicated to spelunking the darkest corners of the unconscious, rationalizing the world's religions and myths, laying bare the deepest structures of society and culture. And then there's Plutonian Joseph Conrad's voyage to the Heart of Darkness... and Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer.
My friend Erik Davis tells me: "Pluto is a dark technological god of transformation. So you get the apocalyptic dimension, the sense of transformation, the 'cosmic' current." Yes, Plutonians like Rimbaud, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Arthur Edward Waite, Arthur Machen, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Reuss, Pierre Janet, Margaret Murray, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson were fascinated with occultism, metaphysics, the systematic derangement of the senses, the élan vital, the cosmic perspective, the naked lunch at the end of the fork perceived only via the phenomenological epoché. Kellogg and Post were spelunkers of humankind's intestinal underworld.
Oh, and speaking of plutonian currents and technological transformation: Nikola Tesla.
Pluto was the Roman god of precious metals, mined from the underworld. Every generation has its plutocrats, but the very names of the 1854-73 cohort's American capitalists and Wall Street journalists are iconic: Barron, Mellon, Schwab, and (Dow) Jones! Diamond Jim Brady! Not to mention Ford, Gillette, Sears, Duke, Hearst, Guggenheim, Hershey, Dayton, Maytag, Smucker, Hormel, Wrigley, and honorary Plutonians Cecil Rhodes, John Jacob Astor, and Jim Beam. A handful of Plutonians were some of the most brilliant critics of the horrors, paradoxes, and absurdities of modern capitalism, ever: Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), Georg Simmel (Philosophy of Money), muckraker Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company), and honorary Plutonian Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).
PS: The 19th-century's three most notable oddities (Ishi, The Elephant Man, and legendary fartiste Le Pétomane) are Plutonians. Sounds like the plot of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style comic...
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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)
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SF authors of the Plutonian Generation include:
* L. Frank Baum (The Master Key, Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz)
* K.E. Tsiolkovsky (The Call of the Cosmos, Beyond the Planet Earth)
* George Griffith (The Angel of the Revolution, A Criminal Croesus, The Great Weather Syndicate, A Honeymoon in Space, The Outlaws of the Air, The Stolen Submarine, many others)
* Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mist, "When the World Screamed")
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland, "With Her in Ourland")
* Edwin Lester Arnold (Lepidus the Centurion, Lieut. Gullivar Jones)
* Gertrude Atherton (Black Oxen)
* James Barnes (The Unpardonable War)
* H. Rider Haggard (Allan Quatermain, Ayesha, Heart of the World, King Solomon's Mines, She, When the World Shook)
* Frank Harris (Pantopia)
* George Bernard Shaw (The Apple Cart, Back to Methuselah)
* Joseph Conrad (The Inheritors, with Ford Madox Ford)
* E. Nesbit (Fear, "The Third Drug," "The Five Senses," "The Pavilion," To the Adventuresome, Rose Royal)
* Jerome K. Jerome (Diary of a Pilgrimage, "The Dancing Partner," "The New Utopia")
* John A. Hobson (1920: Dips into the Near Future)
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Meet the Plutonians.
1854: Hertha Ayrton (Physicist, electric arc), David Buick (designed the first Buick motorcars), F. Marion Crawford (Novelist), George Eastman (inventor of the Kodak camera), Sir James Frazer (Anthropologist, The Golden Bough), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (Magician, founder of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), Henri Poincaré (Mathematician, Poincaré Conjecture), C. W. Post (invented Postum and Grape-Nuts), Arthur Rimbaud (Poet, Une Saison en Enfer), Charles Angrand (Neo-Impressionist painter), John Philip Sousa (Composer, "Stars and Stripes Forever"), Thomas A. Watson (Assistant to Alexander Graham Bell). Honorary Prometheans (1844-53): Oscar Wilde (Anglo-Irish playwright, author, dandy, decadent).
1855: Percival Lowell (Astronomer, predicted existence of Pluto), Clarence W. Barron (Wall Street Journal proprietor, 1903-28), John Browning (gun designer), Eugene V. Debs (Labor leader, ran for President five times), King Gillette (Invented safety razor), Ned Kelly (iron-clad Australian outlaw), Andrew W. Mellon (US Secretary of the Treasury, 1921-32), Evelyn De Morgan (British Pre-Raphaelite painter), Theodor Reuss (founded the Ordo Templi Orientis), James Barnes (American writer, magazine editor).
1856: Sigmund Freud (Psychiatrist), Nikola Tesla (invented alternating current), L. Frank Baum (Novelist, The Wizard of Oz), Woodrow Wilson (28th US President, 1913-21), Louis D. Brandeis (US Supreme Court Justice, 1916-39), James Buchanan Duke (American Tobacco Company), Daniel Guggenheim (Mining magnate), H. Rider Haggard (Novelist, King Solomon's Mines), Frank Harris (Anglo-Irish-American author, My Life and Loves), Elbert Hubbard (founder of Roycroft Press), Diamond Jim Brady (larger-than-life millionaire), Edward Jones (co-founder of Dow Jones, editor of Wall Street Journal), Emil Kraepelin (Psychiatrist, manic depression and schizophrenia), A. Lawrence Lowell (President, Harvard University, 1909-33), Henri Edmond Cross (Neo-Impressionist painter), Robert E. Peary (Explorer, first to reach the North Pole), Philippe Pétain (Leader of Vichy France), John Singer Sargent (American portraitist), George Bernard Shaw (Anglo-Irish dramatist and pamphleteer), Louis Sullivan (early skyscraper architect), J. J. Thomson (Physicist, discovered the electron), Booker T. Washington (Educator, Activist, Up From Slavery), Kate Douglas Wiggin (Novelist, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), Edmund Beecher Wilson (Biologist, The Cell in Development and Inheritance).
1857: Joseph Conrad (Author, Heart of Darkness), William Howard Taft (27th US President, 1909-13), Edward Barnard (self-taught astronomer), Eugen Bleuler (Psychiatrist, coined term schizophrenia), Clarence Darrow (Attorney, Scopes Monkey Trial), George Draper Dayton (founder of what is now Target Stores), Edward Elgar (Composer, "Pomp and Circumstance"), George Gissing (Novelist, New Grub Street), Milton Hershey (founder of Hershey's), Heinrich Hertz (Physicist, discoverer of electromagnetic radiation), Edwin Lester Arnold (British author, Lieut. Gullivar Jones), Gertrude Franklin Atherton (American novelist, Senator North, Black Oxen), Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian and Societ astronautics and rocket dynamics pioneer, author), George Griffith (British SF author, explorer), Robert Baden-Powell (Founder of the Boy Scout movement), James E. Keeler (Astronomer, composition of Saturn's rings), Frederick L. Maytag (founder of Maytag Corporation), Emmeline Pankhurst (Militant suffragette), Le Pétomane (legendary fartiste), Pope Pius XI, Charles Sherrington (Doctor, neurons and synapses), Frank J. Sprague (invented streetcars and express elevators), Ida M. Tarbell (Journalist, History of the Standard Oil Company), Thorstein Veblen (Economist, The Theory of the Leisure Class), Julius Wagner-Jauregg (Psychiatrist, pioneered shock therapy), Arthur Edward Waite (Paranormal, created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck)
1858: Franz Boas (father of American Anthropology), Charles Chesnutt (Novelist, The Conjure Woman), Rudolf Diesel (inventor of the Diesel Engine), Émile Durkheim (Sociologist, Rules of the Sociological Method), Eleanora Duse (most famous Italian actress of her time), Rémy de Gourmont (Poet), Benjamin Kidd (Sociologist, Social Evolution), E. (Edith) Nesbit (Novelist, The Story of the Treasure Seekers; co-founded the Fabian Society), Adolph Ochs (New York Times Publisher, 1896-1936), Giuseppe Peano (Mathematician, infinitesimal calculus), Max Planck (Physicist, originator of quantum theory), Giacomo Puccini (Composer, Madame Butterfly), Theodore Roosevelt (26th US President, 1901-09), Georg Simmel (Sociologist, Philosophy of Money), Jerome Smucker (Founder of J. M. Smucker Company), John A. Hobson (British economist, anti-imperialist).
1859: Arthur Conan Doyle (Anglo-Irish novelist, creator of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, much more), Georges Seurat (Neo-Impressionist painting pioneer), Sholem Aleichem (Author, Fiddler on the Roof), Henri Bergson (Philosopher, L'Évolution Créatrice), Billy the Kid (frontier outlaw), Walter Camp (Father of American football), Pierre Curie (Physicist, early investigator of radiation), John Dewey (Pragmatist philosopher, education reformer), Alfred Dreyfus (Dreyfus Affair scapegoat), Havelock Ellis (Biologist, Studies in the Psychology of Sex), George Ferris (inventor of the Ferris Wheel), Knut Hamsun (Norwegian novelist), A. E. Housman (Poet), Edmund Husserl (Phenomenological philosopher), Pierre Janet (Founder of Automatic Psychology), Jerome K. Jerome (Author, Three Men in a Boat), Oscar Mayer (Oscar Mayer Meats, Inc.), Maurice Prendergast (American Post-Impressionist watercolorist), Kaiser Wilhelm (last of the German emperors)
1860: Charlotte Perkins Gilman (American sociologist, novelist, utopian feminist, Women and Economics), Jane Addams (Activist), J. M. Barrie (Author, Peter Pan), Lizzie Borden (Presumed axe murderer), William Jennings Bryan (Politician, prosecutor of the Scopes Monkey Trial), Anton Chekhov (Playwright and short story writer), Charles Chree (Astronomer, geomagnetic phenomena), William K. L. Dickson (inventor, motion picture camera), Theodor Herzl (Lead Zionist), George A. Hormel (Founder of Hormel Foods Corporation), Ishi (last of an extinct tribe), Jigoro Kano (founder of Judo), Will Keith Kellogg (corn flakes and Rice Krispies), Gustav Mahler (Composer), Harriet Monroe (founder of Poetry magazine), Annie Oakley (performance artist), Lillian Russell (actress, suffragette), Elmer Sperry (gyroscopic compass), Andrew Volstead (legislated enforcement of Prohibition), Owen Wister (Author, The Virginian)
1861: Félix Fénéon (French anarchist, art critic), William Bateson (Biologist, founder of genetics), William C. Durant (founder of General Motors), Frederick Hopkins (Scientist, discovered vitamins), Victor Horta (Art Nouveau architect), James Naismith (inventor of Basketball), Frederic Remington (Sculptor), Rudolf Steiner (Philosopher, Anthroposophical Society), Rabindranath Tagore (Poet), Frederick Jackson Turner (Historian, Frontier Thesis), Alfred North Whitehead (metaphysical mathematician), William Wrigley, Jr. (chewing gum magnate)
1862: Carl Charlier (Astronomer, Motion and the Distribution of the Stars), Claude Debussy (French Impressionist composer), Robert Emden (Mathematician, stellar structure), Robert Ford (shot and killed Jesse James), O. Henry (Author), David Hilbert (Mathematician, Hilbert Space), Gustav Klimt (Painter, Founder of the Vienna Sezession), Maurice Maeterlinck (Playwright), Joseph Merrick (The Elephant Man), Arthur Schnitzler (Playwright), Charles M. Schwab (founder of Bethlehem Steel), Billy Sunday (Evangelist), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (civil rights advocate), Edvard Westermarck (Anthropologist), Edith Wharton (Novelist, The Age of Innocence), Maurice Barrès (French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator)
1863: Leo Baekeland (inventor of Velox and Bakelite), Annie Jump Cannon (Astronomer, census-taker of the sky), Franz Ferdinand (assassination touched off WWI), Henry Ford (founder of Ford Motors), David Lloyd (UK Prime Minister, 1916-22), William Randolph Hearst (newspaper magnate), Casey Jones (railroad hero), Arthur Machen (Welsh horror novelist, occultist), George Herbert Mead (Pragmatist, social behaviorist), Margaret Murray (Egyptologist, mother of Wicca), Richard F. Outcault (Cartoonist, Yellow Kid), Henry Royce (designed the first Rolls-Royce), George Santayana (Philosopher, The Realms of Being), Richard W. Sears (Sears, Roebuck founder), Jessie Willcox Smith (The Water-Babies illustrator). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: Gabriele D'Annunzio (Author, Anarchist Dictator of Fiume, 1919-20), Edvard Munch (Painter, Scream), Luis P. Senarens (SF writer).
***
MORE NOTES ON THE PLUTONIANS
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854), founder of the Order; Arthur Edward Waite (1857), created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck; Arthur Machen (1863), Welsh horror novelist.
Neo-impressionists: Charles Angrand, Henri Edmond Cross, Georges Seurat, honorary Plutonian Toulouse-Lautrec.
Did you know? American capitalist and philanthropist, eccentric inventor, and Titanic victim John Jacob Astor (honorary Plutonian) wrote a Pre-Radium Age SF novel: A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (1894).
Also, speaking of the Plutonians' grasp of deep sociocultural patterns: Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), the prototypical early fictional Western, transposed the Knights of the Round Table into the American West with cowboys as knights, and tyrannical owners of cattle empires as kings.
HONORARY PLUTONIANS: From the Promethean Generation: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh. From the Anarcho-Syndicalist Generation: John Jacob Astor, 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 Toulouse-Lautrec (all 1864).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN (1844-53) GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE ANARCHO-SYMBOLIST GENERATION (1864-73): Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (all 1863)
Thursday, January 1, 2009
SF authors born 1854-63: 1863
1. Luis P. Senarens
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Luis P. Senarens (TK)
TK -- see Richard Bleiler, ed, Science Fiction Writers
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Luis P. Senarens (TK)
TK -- see Richard Bleiler, ed, Science Fiction Writers
SF authors born 1854-63: 1859
1. Arthur Conan Doyle
2. Jerome K. Jerome
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Arthur Conan Doyle (TK)
TK
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Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)
British journalist, actor, dramatist, essayist, humorist; very popular around the turn of the century. Co-editor of The Idler; editor of To-day. Three Men in a Boat (1889).
* "The New Utopia," in Diary of a Pilgrimage (and Six Essays) (published in London, 1891; and in New York, 1891). TK
* "The Dancing Partner" (The Idler, March 1893; and in Novel Notes, Leadenhall Press: London, 1893). Published as an untitled narrative by the character MacShaugnassy in an installment of "Novel Notes." Old Nicholas Geibel, in Germany's Black Forest, is a remarkable creator of automata. One afternoon he overhears his daughter, Olga, and some friends complaining about the bad dancing skills and generally low quality of the men at a recent ball. One of the women wishes aloud for a clockwork dancing partner. Old Geibel soon takes "Fritz," an automaton, to a dance; all are agog to see it move beautifully and make polite chit-chat. Unfortunately, a girl dancing with the automaton disturbs its speed control, and it quickly dances her to death.
2. Jerome K. Jerome
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Arthur Conan Doyle (TK)
TK
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Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)
British journalist, actor, dramatist, essayist, humorist; very popular around the turn of the century. Co-editor of The Idler; editor of To-day. Three Men in a Boat (1889).
* "The New Utopia," in Diary of a Pilgrimage (and Six Essays) (published in London, 1891; and in New York, 1891). TK
* "The Dancing Partner" (The Idler, March 1893; and in Novel Notes, Leadenhall Press: London, 1893). Published as an untitled narrative by the character MacShaugnassy in an installment of "Novel Notes." Old Nicholas Geibel, in Germany's Black Forest, is a remarkable creator of automata. One afternoon he overhears his daughter, Olga, and some friends complaining about the bad dancing skills and generally low quality of the men at a recent ball. One of the women wishes aloud for a clockwork dancing partner. Old Geibel soon takes "Fritz," an automaton, to a dance; all are agog to see it move beautifully and make polite chit-chat. Unfortunately, a girl dancing with the automaton disturbs its speed control, and it quickly dances her to death.
SF authors born 1854-63: 1857
1. Edwin Lester Arnold
2. Gertrude Franklin Atherton
3. Joseph Conrad
4. George Griffith
5. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
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Edwin Lester Arnold (1857-1935)
British author, businessman, journalist. Remembered for supernatural novel The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1890/91). Time-travel via reincarnation.
British author, son of the late Sir Edwin Arnold. After college he turned to cattle breeding in Scotland, then cultivation of unsurveyed forest in India. He then returned to England and devoted himself to literary and journalistic work.
* Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of Today (Cassell: London, 1901; Cromwell: New York, 1901). On the borderline of SF and supernatural fiction. Louis Allanby discovers an ancient Roman — Lepidus, nephew of the Emperor Vespasian — alive and well inside an ancient tomb.
* Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905), also known as Gullivar of Mars and Gulliver of Mars. Possibly an influence on ERB. Both Gullivar and Burroughs's character John Carter, first seen in A Princess of Mars (1917), are Southern United States soldiers who arrive on Mars and have numerous adventures, including falling in love with a Martian princess. The last of Arnold's novels, its lukewarm reception led him to stop writing fiction. It has since become his best known work, and is considered important in the development of 20th century science fiction. NB: Ace Books reprinted Arnold's novel in 1964, retitling it Gulliver of Mars. A more recent Bison Books edition was issued as Gullivar of Mars, adapting the Ace title to Arnold's spelling.
His image of Mars as a planet inhabited by ancient races on the verge of death is considered quaint by today's standards. Even school children would find the idea of Martians using canals as means of transportation funny. However, this was a widely held view at the turn of the last century. Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910), the famous Italian astronomer, discovered what he called canali on Mars in 1860. Percival Lowell (1855-1916), the American astronomer, wrote two books about Mars and its canals (Mars and Its Canals and Mars as the Abode of Life). Lest you think these two men were crackpots, Schiaparelli catalogued 1,200 binary stars (1877-97) and discovered the relation between the orbits of comets and meteors (1866). Lowell predicted a planet had an orbit that crossed the orbital path of Neptune. The planet Pluto was discovered fifteen years after his death. At the time Arnold's view of Mars as a dying world that could support a vanishing civilization was scientific.
In Gulliver of Mars, Arnold created a tale that owes as much to the travelogue works of the early 1800s as it does to the novels and stories of Verne and Wells. Gulliver takes great pains to describe the Martian landscape and culture in detail. The Martian population Gulliver encounters is the remains of a once great civilization that is on the decline. After describing what he finds, he participates in a very Victorian adventure that is strong on description, but weak on action. The novel is also a hybrid of science fiction and fantasy, since it has a scientific basis, but uses fantastic elements, the most obvious being the magic carpet that transports Gulliver to Mars and back again. And here lies the importance of Gulliver of Mars. Historically, it serves as a transition from the romantic adventures of the 19th century and the science fiction of the early 20th century. It is clear that Schiaparelli and Lowell put forth a vision of Mars that influenced Arnold, but did Arnold influence others? Some science fiction historians believe that the importance of Gulliver of Mars is that it influenced A Princess of Mars. Did Burroughs use Arnold as a source for his Barsoom?
FULL TEXT
READ IT
READ IT
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Gertrude Franklin Atherton (1857-1948)
US novelist with many works. San Franciscan novelist and historian. After her husband's death in 1887, she was free to pursue her writing career as a protégée of Ambrose Bierce, eventually writing 60 books and millions of words for magazines and newspapers. She's known today for her supernatural fiction, and for her "California series": novels and stories treating the social history of California. These include The Splendid, Idle Forties (1902), The Conqueror (1902, fictionalized life of Alexander Hamilton), and Black Oxen (1923). Also known as Gertrude Franklin Horn.
NNDB | Wikipedia |
* Black Oxen (Boni and Liveright: New York, 1923). A sensational, semi-autobiographical novel about Mary Ogden, a middle-aged ex-society belle who miraculously becomes young again after glandular therapy. Atherton's 1933 fiction "The Foghorn" is a psychological horror story — about a woman stifled by married life — that has been compared to The Yellow Wallpaper, and Black Oxen is also about a woman who will do whatever it takes (marry rich; undergo the Steinach treatment, meant to rejuvenate the ovaries with X-rays to gain "renewed mental vitality and neural energy") in order to lead an independent life. Despite her goal of raising money for needy European children, however, Ogden is not a particularly sympathetic character.
Somewhat dated. Method of rejuvenation based on X-radiation of gonads working well on women; psychological problems involved.
READ IT
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Joseph Conrad (TK)
TK
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George Griffith (TK)
TK
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Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (TK)
TK
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2. Gertrude Franklin Atherton
3. Joseph Conrad
4. George Griffith
5. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
***
Edwin Lester Arnold (1857-1935)
British author, businessman, journalist. Remembered for supernatural novel The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1890/91). Time-travel via reincarnation.
British author, son of the late Sir Edwin Arnold. After college he turned to cattle breeding in Scotland, then cultivation of unsurveyed forest in India. He then returned to England and devoted himself to literary and journalistic work.
* Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of Today (Cassell: London, 1901; Cromwell: New York, 1901). On the borderline of SF and supernatural fiction. Louis Allanby discovers an ancient Roman — Lepidus, nephew of the Emperor Vespasian — alive and well inside an ancient tomb.
* Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905), also known as Gullivar of Mars and Gulliver of Mars. Possibly an influence on ERB. Both Gullivar and Burroughs's character John Carter, first seen in A Princess of Mars (1917), are Southern United States soldiers who arrive on Mars and have numerous adventures, including falling in love with a Martian princess. The last of Arnold's novels, its lukewarm reception led him to stop writing fiction. It has since become his best known work, and is considered important in the development of 20th century science fiction. NB: Ace Books reprinted Arnold's novel in 1964, retitling it Gulliver of Mars. A more recent Bison Books edition was issued as Gullivar of Mars, adapting the Ace title to Arnold's spelling.
His image of Mars as a planet inhabited by ancient races on the verge of death is considered quaint by today's standards. Even school children would find the idea of Martians using canals as means of transportation funny. However, this was a widely held view at the turn of the last century. Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910), the famous Italian astronomer, discovered what he called canali on Mars in 1860. Percival Lowell (1855-1916), the American astronomer, wrote two books about Mars and its canals (Mars and Its Canals and Mars as the Abode of Life). Lest you think these two men were crackpots, Schiaparelli catalogued 1,200 binary stars (1877-97) and discovered the relation between the orbits of comets and meteors (1866). Lowell predicted a planet had an orbit that crossed the orbital path of Neptune. The planet Pluto was discovered fifteen years after his death. At the time Arnold's view of Mars as a dying world that could support a vanishing civilization was scientific.
In Gulliver of Mars, Arnold created a tale that owes as much to the travelogue works of the early 1800s as it does to the novels and stories of Verne and Wells. Gulliver takes great pains to describe the Martian landscape and culture in detail. The Martian population Gulliver encounters is the remains of a once great civilization that is on the decline. After describing what he finds, he participates in a very Victorian adventure that is strong on description, but weak on action. The novel is also a hybrid of science fiction and fantasy, since it has a scientific basis, but uses fantastic elements, the most obvious being the magic carpet that transports Gulliver to Mars and back again. And here lies the importance of Gulliver of Mars. Historically, it serves as a transition from the romantic adventures of the 19th century and the science fiction of the early 20th century. It is clear that Schiaparelli and Lowell put forth a vision of Mars that influenced Arnold, but did Arnold influence others? Some science fiction historians believe that the importance of Gulliver of Mars is that it influenced A Princess of Mars. Did Burroughs use Arnold as a source for his Barsoom?
FULL TEXT
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Gertrude Franklin Atherton (1857-1948)
US novelist with many works. San Franciscan novelist and historian. After her husband's death in 1887, she was free to pursue her writing career as a protégée of Ambrose Bierce, eventually writing 60 books and millions of words for magazines and newspapers. She's known today for her supernatural fiction, and for her "California series": novels and stories treating the social history of California. These include The Splendid, Idle Forties (1902), The Conqueror (1902, fictionalized life of Alexander Hamilton), and Black Oxen (1923). Also known as Gertrude Franklin Horn.
NNDB | Wikipedia |
* Black Oxen (Boni and Liveright: New York, 1923). A sensational, semi-autobiographical novel about Mary Ogden, a middle-aged ex-society belle who miraculously becomes young again after glandular therapy. Atherton's 1933 fiction "The Foghorn" is a psychological horror story — about a woman stifled by married life — that has been compared to The Yellow Wallpaper, and Black Oxen is also about a woman who will do whatever it takes (marry rich; undergo the Steinach treatment, meant to rejuvenate the ovaries with X-rays to gain "renewed mental vitality and neural energy") in order to lead an independent life. Despite her goal of raising money for needy European children, however, Ogden is not a particularly sympathetic character.
Somewhat dated. Method of rejuvenation based on X-radiation of gonads working well on women; psychological problems involved.
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Joseph Conrad (TK)
TK
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George Griffith (TK)
TK
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Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (TK)
TK
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Wednesday, December 31, 2008
SF authors born 1854-63: 1856
1. L. Frank Baum
2. H. Rider Haggard
3. Frank Harris
4. George Bernard Shaw
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L. (Lyman) Frank Baum (1856-1919)
American author of the Oz stories and many other children's books. More info TK.
* The Master Key: An Electric Fairy Tale (Bowen-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1901). A fantastical allegory of technology and its dangers. Rob, a scientifically minded boy, is experimenting with electric circuits when he accidentally presses the Master Key (i.e., creates a master circuit) and summons up the benevolent Demon of Electricity. ("I have often thought my existence uncalled for, since you Earth people are so stupid and ignorant that you seem unlikely ever to master the secret of electrical power.") Amusing meta-SF moment:
The Demon gives Rob various science-fictional devices — flight by anti-gravity, a food pill, a stun gun, an event recorder and playback mechanism (digital movie camera?), spectacles for discerning character, and a repulsion defense garment — from which worldwide civilization will hopefully benefit. Neither Rob nor the world is ready for these device, however, as Rob discovers in dime-novel-esque encounters with pirates, savage Africans, Turks, and Tartars. When the Demon offers him the best technology yet — an Electro-Magnetic Restorer, the wearer of which "will instantly become free from any bodily disease or pain and will enjoy perfect health and vigor"; and an Illimitable Communicator — Rob refuses them.
"I'm NOT wise enough," he concludes. "Nor is the majority of mankind wise enough to use such inventions as yours unselfishly and for the good of the world. If people were better, and every one had an equal show, it would be different."
READ IT
* Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907). The third Oz book, and the first in which we meet one of Baum's most delightful characters: "He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was round as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his head and limbs were copper, and these were jointed or hinged to his body in a peculiar way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armor worn by knights in days of old." From a printed card attached to its neck, Dorothy learns that Tiktok is a "Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking Mechanical Man Fitted with out Special Clock-Work Attachment. Things, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live." Though one of the earliest fictional appearances of true machine intelligence, Tiktok is not a free agent like his equally metallic yet nevertheless living new friend, the Tin Man, to whom he confides that "When I am wound up I do my du-ty by go-ing just as my ma-chin-er-y is made to go." NB: Baum revisited this story for the plot of his 1913 musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz. The 8th Oz book, titled Tik-Tok of Oz, was published in 1914.
* Tik-Tok of Oz (TK, 1914).
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H. Rider Haggard (TK)
TK -- see Richard Bleiler, ed., Science Fiction Writers
***
Frank Harris (TK)
TK
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George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Important Anglo-Irish playwright, essayist. Born in Dublin. Achieved fame with controversial plays that broadened English comedy considerably. Nobel Prize in 1926. Leading member of Fabian society (cofounded by E. Nesbit, who also wrote about supermen), author of works on socialism. Advocate of vegetarianism, spelling reform, unorthodox medicine. Widelty accepted during his lifetime as a remarkable wit, eccentric, crank, and egotist. Now remembered mostly for Pygmalion (1912).
More Shaw bio TK
* Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (Constable: London, 1921). A very long, seldom performed play based on Shaw's belief in a personal form of creative evolution, which is not so much Emile Bergson's philosophical thesis, as an intruitive neo-Lamarckianism. More TK 2003
Play in 5 parts
treating creative evolution. Part I has Lilith tear
herself in two: Adam and Eve. Part II has the biologist
Conrad Barnabas explain why people should live 300 years.
Part III has England governed by Chinese and African women
in 2170 A.D., and communicate by visual switchboard. Part
IV in in 3000 A.D., with people classified as primaries,
secondaries, or tertiaries according to how many centuries
they've lived. Part V is set in 32,920 A.D., and in an
epilogue, Adam, Eve, Cain and Lilith judge this future.
* The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza (TK)
2. H. Rider Haggard
3. Frank Harris
4. George Bernard Shaw
***
L. (Lyman) Frank Baum (1856-1919)
American author of the Oz stories and many other children's books. More info TK.
* The Master Key: An Electric Fairy Tale (Bowen-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1901). A fantastical allegory of technology and its dangers. Rob, a scientifically minded boy, is experimenting with electric circuits when he accidentally presses the Master Key (i.e., creates a master circuit) and summons up the benevolent Demon of Electricity. ("I have often thought my existence uncalled for, since you Earth people are so stupid and ignorant that you seem unlikely ever to master the secret of electrical power.") Amusing meta-SF moment:
"It's generally thought," [Rob] resumed, in an annoyed tone, "that Mars has inhabitants who are far in advance of ourselves in civilization. Many scientific men think the people of Mars have been trying to signal us for years, only we don`t understand their signals. And great novelists have written about the Martians and their wonderful civilization, and--"
"And they all know as much about that little planet as you do yourself," interrupted the Demon, impatiently. "The trouble with you Earth people is that you delight in guessing about what you can not know. Now I happen to know all about Mars, because I can traverse all space and have had ample leisure to investigate the different planets. Mars is not peopled at all, nor is any other of the planets you recognize in the heavens. Some contain low orders of beasts, to be sure, but Earth alone has an intelligent, thinking, reasoning population, and your scientists and novelists would do better trying to comprehend their own planet than in groping through space to unravel the mysteries of barren and unimportant worlds."
The Demon gives Rob various science-fictional devices — flight by anti-gravity, a food pill, a stun gun, an event recorder and playback mechanism (digital movie camera?), spectacles for discerning character, and a repulsion defense garment — from which worldwide civilization will hopefully benefit. Neither Rob nor the world is ready for these device, however, as Rob discovers in dime-novel-esque encounters with pirates, savage Africans, Turks, and Tartars. When the Demon offers him the best technology yet — an Electro-Magnetic Restorer, the wearer of which "will instantly become free from any bodily disease or pain and will enjoy perfect health and vigor"; and an Illimitable Communicator — Rob refuses them.
"I'm NOT wise enough," he concludes. "Nor is the majority of mankind wise enough to use such inventions as yours unselfishly and for the good of the world. If people were better, and every one had an equal show, it would be different."
READ IT
* Ozma of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907). The third Oz book, and the first in which we meet one of Baum's most delightful characters: "He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was round as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his head and limbs were copper, and these were jointed or hinged to his body in a peculiar way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armor worn by knights in days of old." From a printed card attached to its neck, Dorothy learns that Tiktok is a "Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking Mechanical Man Fitted with out Special Clock-Work Attachment. Things, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live." Though one of the earliest fictional appearances of true machine intelligence, Tiktok is not a free agent like his equally metallic yet nevertheless living new friend, the Tin Man, to whom he confides that "When I am wound up I do my du-ty by go-ing just as my ma-chin-er-y is made to go." NB: Baum revisited this story for the plot of his 1913 musical, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz. The 8th Oz book, titled Tik-Tok of Oz, was published in 1914.
* Tik-Tok of Oz (TK, 1914).
***
H. Rider Haggard (TK)
TK -- see Richard Bleiler, ed., Science Fiction Writers
***
Frank Harris (TK)
TK
***
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Important Anglo-Irish playwright, essayist. Born in Dublin. Achieved fame with controversial plays that broadened English comedy considerably. Nobel Prize in 1926. Leading member of Fabian society (cofounded by E. Nesbit, who also wrote about supermen), author of works on socialism. Advocate of vegetarianism, spelling reform, unorthodox medicine. Widelty accepted during his lifetime as a remarkable wit, eccentric, crank, and egotist. Now remembered mostly for Pygmalion (1912).
More Shaw bio TK
* Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (Constable: London, 1921). A very long, seldom performed play based on Shaw's belief in a personal form of creative evolution, which is not so much Emile Bergson's philosophical thesis, as an intruitive neo-Lamarckianism. More TK 2003
Play in 5 parts
treating creative evolution. Part I has Lilith tear
herself in two: Adam and Eve. Part II has the biologist
Conrad Barnabas explain why people should live 300 years.
Part III has England governed by Chinese and African women
in 2170 A.D., and communicate by visual switchboard. Part
IV in in 3000 A.D., with people classified as primaries,
secondaries, or tertiaries according to how many centuries
they've lived. Part V is set in 32,920 A.D., and in an
epilogue, Adam, Eve, Cain and Lilith judge this future.
* The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza (TK)
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