The Lost World (1912)

Since the invention of his masterful detective, the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been synonymous with that of Sherlock Holmes. However, even in the course of writing his adventures, Conan Doyle resented the literary typcasting. Despite his best efforts - including a knighthood for writing propaganda during the Boer War - the association could not be thwarted. Conan Doyle tried to murder Holmes in 1893's The Final Problem, only to resurrect him by public demand in 1903's Adventure of the Empty House. His best efforts were not in vain, as they produced one of the great enduring classics of Scientific Romance.

Pulling together numerous strands of influences, Conan Doyle inaugurated a whole genre in speculative fiction: the lost world tale, so-named for his 1912 novel, The Lost World. Though roughly preceded by the works of Jules Verne and Sir H. Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle essentially crafted the story of the Victorian explorers heading to far-off lands where dinosaurs and other fantastic and prehistoric life still rules. Those influences were so diverse that it is difficult to know where to start.

Perhaps the first is with the inspiration for Conan Doyle's second great character after the great detective. Professor George Edward Challenger was practically everything that Holme was not. While both men were preturnaturally brilliant, Challenger was a bullish ruffian who had little patience for anybody and none whatsoever for members of the press. Short and stocky with a thick black beard, he was loud, brash, condescending and everything Conan Doyle himself secretly wished to be. In fact, the author would dress up as his character and call upon unawares friends in order to test their courtesy. The inspiration for Challenger came from one of the professors Conan Doyle suffered while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, who went by the name of William Rutherford and whose echo the fellow student Robert Louis Stevenson immediately recognized in The Lost World's protagonist.

We are introduced to Challenger and his overblown claims of a plateau in South America where dinosaurs walk the earth by the reporter Edward Dun Malone. This youthful member of the press, who Challenger sent tumbling down the stairs in a fistfight, was inspired by E.D. Morel. Morel, also a British journalist, was a tireless activist and prior to supporting the pacifist movement in WWI, joined with Roger Casement in an anti-slavery campaign against the Congo Free State.

Casement, in turn, inspired Lord John Roxton, the debonair and aristocratic gentleman hunter who accompanies the Challenger Expedition into the heart of the Amazon. After working on the issue of the Congo, Casement turned his attention to the issue of Native exploitation in Peru under the auspices of the British Peruvian Amazon Company. The incident also worked its way into The Lost World and the righteous background of Roxton. Unfortunately for Casement, these experiences soured him to the exercise of British Imperialism and he was executed in 1916 as an Irish Republican traitor to the Crown.

Thus were the characters. Next to come was the setting. For the most part, the 1905 textbook Extinct Animals by Edwin Ray Lancester provided the necessary scientific information by which Conan Doyle populated his plateau. Some illustrations were practically plagiarized for inclusion in the media of the serialized story, which had an impressive array of "journal sketches", maps and formal illustrations by Harry Rountree. Lankester didn't mind it though. On the contrary, he carried on a correspondence with Conan Doyle and suggested various beasts for him. Extinct Animals is the only source directly mentioned in The Lost World and Lankester the only academic peer who Challenger did not ruthlessly insult.

One creature not accounted for in Extinct Animals was the scientific find of the century, which turned out not to be very far from Conan Doyle's own home. In the nearby gravel pits of Piltdown, the skull of the missing link between man and ape was discovered. Piltdown Man would eventually be revealled as a fraud, of course. The fault was that he was made to resemble what scientific theory thought at the time was the course of human evolution, in which the large brain developed first, followed by the bipedal, human body.Increasing finds out of Africa showed the opposite trend, and finally radiometric dating exposed the contrived artifice of Piltdown Man. None of this was Conan Doyle's disposal, however, and Piltdown Man became the type of the ape man that menaces the expedition. In fact, some armchair Holmeses have speculated that Conan Doyle may himself have been implicated in the fraud.

The most direct inspiration, the one that touched off Conan Doyle's writing, was a set of Iguanodon tracks that had pressed themselves into the petrified clay of Sussex. While Englad was still a swampy Jurassic wetland, a herd of these earliest described dinosaured passed within miles of what would, millennia later, be Conan Doyle's estate. The mystique of these proved too much for the imaginative author. A cast of one of the prints adorned his mantle, an image of the trackway adorned the cover of the first printing of The Lost World, and a trackway of Iguanodon prints - along with their makers - were the first sign of life encountered by the Challenger expedition on reaching the plateau.

These influences together resulted in a work of first rate Scientific Romance. Unlike later Challenger Adventures, such as The Poison Belt and When the World Screamed, the science in The Lost World is top-notch based on what was known at the time. The credibility of a prehistoric Sussex populated with a mix of British and American saurians in the depths of South America was strained, of course, but in each element Conan Doyle took the considerable effort to research his subjects. Verisimulitude was added by fictionalizing the lives of Morel and Casement and the hardened culture of tropic regions they experienced. The Lost World becomes a clinic in how to write ripping good Sci-Fi.

Jules Verne pioneered this whole type of Science Fiction with his Voyages Extraordinaires, let alone the lost world tale, the purpose of which publisher Jules Hetzel described as: "To outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format...the history of the universe." The astonishing inventions of Verne, like the Nautilus and the Columbiad space gun, were little more than plot devices that permitted the story to recount these scientific facts for a hungry and literate public. The Lost World is much the same. The plateau is a plot device to recount the mysterious realms of far flung jungles and far flung antiquity, which Conan Doyle rigorously studied. Really good, really stirring, really lovable Science Fiction has rarely departed from this formula.

Celebrating Ten Years Online

While it is true that the present form of the Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age weblog is only in the midst of its second year, June 13th, 2009 marks a broader and more significant anniversary. It was ten years ago that day that we first entered the online world as a resource for fans of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances and their modern homages.

1999 was an important year for aficionados of what was then a genre of Science Fiction called "Steampunk". Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill had just published the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen miniseries, to which a bevy of keen reviewers affixed a label that had previously been limited to a handful of novels by K.W. Jeter, James Blaylock, Tim Powers, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. That same year saw the release of Wild Wild West, which whether loved or hated is still the dominant spokesmovie of the genre, and Disney's Tarzan. The following year saw publication of GURPS Steampunk, Heliograph's reprints of Space: 1889, the Secret Adventures of Jules Verne and Jack of All Trades programmes and the comic entitled Steampunk.

For myself, this new name was like a bolt from the proverbial blue. For several years, I had been developing an interest in archaic Science Fiction, beginning with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. As a Goth with a love of both Science Fiction and the science of palaeontology, The Lost World in literary and silent film forms seemed like the perfect confluence. That interest transformed into a website in 1997, which is still operating to this day. It also opened me up to this whole magnificent genre - past and present - that melded science, Science Fiction and Victorian-Edwardian aesthetics. Robots of the Victorian Era, the Gay Nineties with spaceships.

In fact, I said as much in a 2005 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune,

"Steampunk is where my being a Goth, a silent-movie fan and a sci-fi geek meet," says Cory Gross...

"People like steampunk for the same reasons people like Westerns, Jane Austen, Jack the Ripper and the Royal Family, only applied to science fiction," Gross says, adding that fans "also enjoy the heightened absurdity of Victorian social mores and technological quackery."

There was no label for it that I was aware of, however, until reviews for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen used the magic word "steampunk". The name was perfect as a teasing and pleasingly edgy-sounding play on Cyberpunk. Better yet, it provided a search term that connected me with the small pockets of fandom that existed at that time. As there was already an e-mail group devoted more to the technical, role-playing game aspects of genre found in colonial era wargamming and Forgotten Futures, I took advantage of Yahoo's Clubs system - an early form of social networking - to create Yahoo! Clubs Steampunk. It went on to become Steampunk: Victorian Adventurers in a Past that Wasn't.


Variation on logo c.1999-2001

Our first post was understated to say the least. It was a humble automated message stating "Welcome, This is the Yahoo! Message Board for Steampunk community." My own first post was a simple question:

I don't know what the general thought on the subject is, but would a Steampunk game using White Wolf's Storyteller system be a keen idea?

We did grow quickly. One of the earliest members of the group was Joshua Pfeiffer, currently of the "Steamwave" band Vernian Process (which he first started talking about in September 1999!).

Recalling the time for our tenth anniversary, he says:

It's hard to believe it has been 10 years. When I met Cory it was through a bunch of mutual interests, those being classic Goth music, Christian Theology, and Steampunk, or "Romantic Science Fiction". At the time we met there was literally like 5 websites that had any kind of coverage of Steampunk, and those were almost all just lists of books and movies. But Cory's was the only mailing list where we could all get together and talk about our obscure interests.

I remember we had "maybe" a few hundred members at one point (of course even fewer of those posted regularly), but this was years before the whole Steampunk boom took place. It was just so refreshing to find out I wasn't the only weirdo absolutely obsessed with a 19th Century that could have been...

I do miss those days when in order to be considered a "Steampunk", all that was required was that you enjoy the various forms of Steampunk fiction. Not having to swear to some manifesto of DIY, or trying to rewrite what has been established for the past 30 years or so just so that you feel more comfortable labelling yourself something.

I'm glad Cory's still doing his thing, and I hope he keeps it going for another 10 years or more.

Some of our favorite highlights through the years include:

• Hollow Earth by j_genest, part 1 and part 2.
  
• Rod Bennett getting us rolling on trying to define Steampunk, introducing his own term, Fireside Science Fiction, and suggesting that Disney really started it all.
  
• The beginning of a discourse on Steampunk vs. Pulp courtesy of sarahlegend.
  
• Populating our own Steampunk Themepark.
  
• Chris asks about Organic Steampunk.
  
• Ronald Dwyer also got us going on The Social Backdrop of Steampunk Fiction some 5 years after Rod Bennett did, demonstrating that self-definition was a perennial issue.
  
• Around the same time, Dave Woods ushered in an interesting discussion on the actual mechanics of air ships.
  
• As a harbinger of things to come, a discussion at the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 in which I wondered what this whole business about a "Steampunk movement" was.
  

Logo c.2001-2007

For fans of the genre Steampunk, it was a time like no other. The fantasy anime series Escaflowne debuted on Fox Kids in 2000. From the same year, few forget PVP's famous assessment of the video game Arcanum. In 2001 the big news was Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The comic Girl Genius joined it. Come 2002, Disney's Treasure Planet, the Escaflowne feature film and a dreadful remake of The Time Machine hit theatres. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen returned to comic shelves in 2002, to be followed by its infamous movie adaptation a year later. Mike Mignola's The Amazing Screw-On Head also arrived in 2002, to be adapted into an animated pilot in 2006 after the success of his Hellboy franchise. Disney's distribution deal with Studio Ghibli finally bore the home video release of Castle in the Sky in 2003. In short and in terms of actual media, the early years of Steampunk: Victorian Adventurers in a Past that Wasn't oversaw a veritable golden age. Could it be that we're getting nostalgic for Steampunk?

The website began soon after the club as a resource for members, listing the known books, comics, films, role-playing games and other media that would be of interest to fans of the genre. The project continued to expand into encyclopedic reams of reviews that, infamously, crashed the site whenever there was an update. Though an important part of my life during those years, the site was never a high enough priority to actually pay Geocities for sufficient bandwidth.

Once Yahoo! acquired an e-group server in 2002, it dissolved the Yahoo! Clubs brand and Steampunk was folded into Yahoo! Groups. That was not the only change to come, for as Steampunk culture changed so too did we. In June of 2007, both the group and the website were rechristened Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age.


Logo c.2007-2008

Since there seems to be some curiousity over the reasons, the first was that the sudden influx of DIY, Punk types who redefined Steampunk as a synonym for their hobby created an unhealthy, unwholesome and unfun atmosphere of elitism and smug "contempt for the common man". Sadly, as time has gone on, this jockeying for position has only continued and seems to be an indellible part of the culture.

The second reason is that up to that point, I was already beginning to chafe under the limitations that the genre imposed. The website began to feature an increasing number of articles and reviews that could not, even by the most strained definitions, be reasonably included under the heading of Steampunk. The situation only became worse when that definition was further constrained by the DIY, Punk ethos reducing it to mere fashion. Evolving into a site that was fully and openly about not only the genre of Scientific Romances but also the history and science behind them was a necessity of personal growth.


Logo c.2008

The last change came in November 2007 when the 1990's called and wanted their websites back. We joined the rising tide of Web 2.0 and began the VEx weblog. For a full two years this November, we have been providing a steady diet of articles and reviews every Tuesday and Thursday with the occassional special on the weekends. Our Voyages Extraordinaires Anthology companion weblog, posting excerpts from the best of the original Scientific Romances, is still going strong until the end of the year.

No one can say how much more we have in us as we move along at such a steady clip. However, the original Yahoo! Group remains and we cordially encourage you to join in the decade-long discussion! To the next ten!

The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919)

On the strength of the short films and other educational films that Willis O'Brien created for Thomas Edison, a producer named Herbert Dawley hired him to animate a full length dinosaur film entitled The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in 1919. The story revolved around an uncle telling his nephew and friends about the time he was out in the woods and came across a cabin in the woods occupied by the ghost of a palaeontologist. Exhorting him to look through his spyglass, the narrator sees magnificent prehistoric scenes unfold before him.

A fanciful story that certainly hearkens to Scientific Romances in a folksy way, Slumber Mountain is an early point of development in O'Brien's craft. He graduated from the charicatures of the Mannikin comedies into accurately constructed and moodily photographed models. These were built of clay and wood under the consultation of the famous palaeontologist Barnum Brown, discoverer of T-rex. The effect of the Triceratops, T-rex and Diatryma are fantastic for a film of its vintage. Rumour has it that O'Brien also played the mad, ghostly palaeontologist.

Unfortunately, the film was less than a success for him. The original 45 minutes were trimed down to 16 minutes, and though it made $100,000 dollars, O'Bie's paycheck stayed at a relatively meager sum. On top of that, Dawley tried to take credit for the animation. Years later, in a suit against O'Brien over the stop-motion animation in another, greater film, he would claim that:

An employee of mine who learned the process by working in my office has been claiming, as employees sometimes do, that he did all the work and that the idea belongs to him and that sort of thing.

In the hands of Dawley (who, among other things, even claimed that many of the dinosaur models were life sized), the leftover footage from Slumber Mountain made its way into Along the Moonbeam Trail in 1920 and the documentary Evolution in 1923. Prospects were looking down, but this film was the best thing to ever happen to O'Brien.

By 1922, Dawley's attempts at noteriety had come and gone while O'Brien was working studiously on another picture. Hollywood knew who did The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, and producer Watterson R. Rothacker hired O'Brien to do the animation for the first film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, one of the great epic adventures of the silent screen.

The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915)

Willis O'Brien is a name that goes down, rightly, in the annals of cinema history as a true special-effects pioneer. O'Bie, as he liked to be called by his friends, made many films, but is most remebered for his work in The Ghost of Slumber Mountain and his successes The Lost World, King Kong, and Mighty Joe Young.

Born in California in 1886, O'Bie held a variety of jobs and hobbies during his formative years. Two of these would stand out and foreshadow his later career: serving as a guide to palaeontologists in Creater Lake region and sculpting and illustrating. One day, while making models with his friend, an idea was born. Young O'bie recognized that he could animate the models on the same principle that cartoonists used to animate drawings: by building a model and then moving it's parts one frame of film at a time, he could give the models cinematic life. Though this process of stop-motion animation had been invented and used already - including work by the grandfather of trick photography, Georges Melies - O'Bie invented it for himself and would go on to essentially perfect the artform.

O'Bie was so certain that this art form would take off, that he went about creating a test reel to sell the idea to producers. In determining a concept for this test reel, O'Bie hit back upon his other love: prehistoric creatures and palaeontology. This crude film he produced about a fight between a cave man and a dinosaur was fraught with problems - it was less and a minute and a half long, the movements were jerky, and the models began to melt under the light - but it worked. A producer was sold on the idea and gave O'Bie $5000 dollars to make another short film. Returning to the theme of dinosaurs and cave men, he created Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915), the comedic story of Neandertal pre-nuptual dilemas. This film was later seen by Thomas Edison, who promtly bought the rights to it and hired O'bie to produce more shorts.

Morpheus Mike, another 1915 offering, used relatively crude animation to tell the story of a hobo who dreams of himself as a caveman in a prehistoric restaurant. Missing Link and Morpheus Mike, like those "Mannikin Comedies" that came after, derived their humour from largely the same source as The Flintstones. O'Bie transplanted modern tribulations and aristocratic mannerisms onto cavemen for high anachronistic effect. The following year saw Prehistoric Poultry: The Dinornis or Great Roaring Whiffenpoof, about the ecology and habits of giant primodrial fowl, and the second best of the series, R.F.D., 10,000 B.C., in which a romantic youth has his love letter switched for a crude charicature by his rival, the postman.

Palaeontologists at the Creation Museum

We can't have a Darwin Bicentennial without a brief nod to the impact of evolution and the ongoing public debate. In particular, AFP reported that Paleontologists brought to tears, laughter by Creation Museum at the close to the North American Paleontological Convention at the University of Cincinatti.

What was most interesting about this piece, and atypical for the media, is that they primarily consulted the practicing scientists in the group who were also practicing Christians. It's a nice change of pace from the way that fellows like Answers in Genesis and Richard Dawkins together exploit the media and trump up their logical fallacy of a false dilemma. False Dilemmas, which conveniently reduce our options to a mere dialectic where none may exist - for example, the statement "There are two ways of looking at the world, through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence, in other words, through reason" by Richard Dawkins from his partisan-titled series Enemies of Reason - only work in the interests of self-promoting ideologues.

Of the Creation Museum, the article states:

Its presents a literal interpretation of the Bible and argues that believing otherwise leads to moral relativism and the destruction of social values.

Creationism is a theory not supported by most mainstream Christian churches.

Lisa Park of the University of Akron cried at one point as she walked a hallway full of flashing images of war, famine and natural disasters which the museum blames on belief in evolution.

"I think it's very bad science and even worse theology -- and the theology is far more offensive to me," said Park, a professor of paleontology who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church.

"I think there's a lot of focus on fear, and I don't think that's a very Christian message... I find it a malicious manipulation of the public."

And again:

Daryl Domning, professor of anatomy at Howard University, held his chin and shook his head at several points during the tour.

"This bothers me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it's just as much a distortion and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science," he said.

The Darwin Bicentennial

2009 marks several great anniversaries in the annals of palaeontology. This is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Festivities have been planned throughout the year, some of which are in conjunction with the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature's Lost World Read 2009, as 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birth. It was also 100 years ago that Charles Dolittle Walcott discovered the famous Burgess Shale fossils, which shed so much light on the sudden diversification of multicellular life in the Cambrian period.

As if on queue, this past February saw the publication of an astounding find: the world's oldest fossils. Identified by traces of their cell membranes, fossil demosponges from Oman have pushed back life on our planet to more than 635 million years ago. LiveScience.com, AFP and Reuters all covered the story. A missing link between land mammals and their oceanic kin was announced in April. An important missing link amongst the dinosaurs was also uncovered. While the link between dinosaurs and birds is the most popular field of study, there have been other questions, like how a lineage of carnivorous dinosaurs became herbivores and grew to become some of the largest animals ever to walk the earth. That missing link was found in Argentina. Back to dinosaurs and birds, the March unveiling of a new dinosaur species from China suggests that feathers evolved earlier than previously thought. LiveScience took a new look at transitional fossils. Meanwhile, back at the Burgess Shale, a birthday present was given to it when the Smithsonian discovered a new species hiding out in its warehouses, which had been collected 100 years ago but not fully prepared and described until now: Hurdia victoria.

The origins of life weren't quite Darwin's forte: his was on the origin of the species. However, origins of a sort are ours. Through this edition of Deepest Darkest Jungle month, we will be going back in time to the origins of dinosaur cinema, in honor of Darwin and Conan Doyle, with a few other tidbits thrown in here and there.

The Future of the Earth (1918)

Consider the earth in its origin: at first, a shapeless nebula, be­coming gradually more and more condensed; next, a globe of fire, of rocks in fusion, whirling for millions of years through space, with no other object than that of forming, into a mass and cooling--an inconceivable incandescence which none of our sources of heat can suggest to us--an essential, scientific, absolute barrenness which may well have proclaimed itself irremediable and everlasting. Who would have thought that from these torrents of matter in eruption, which seemed to have destroyed forever all life or the least germ of life, there would emerge each and every form of life itself, from the greatest, the strongest, the most enduring, the most impetuous, the most abundant, down to the least visible, the most precarious, the most ephemeral, the most exiguous? Who could have dared foresee that they would give birth to what seems so utterly alien to the liquefied or viscous rocks and metals that alone formed the surface, the Aucleus, and the very entity of our globe? I mean our human intelligence and consciousness.

Is it possible to imagine a more unexpected evolution and ending? What could astonish us after so great an astonishment, and what are we not entitled to hope of a world which, after being what it was, has produced what we see and what we are? Considering that it started from a sort of negation of life, from integral barrenness, and from worse than nothing in order to end in us, where will it not end after starting from ourselves? If its birth and formation have elaborated such prodigies, what prodigies may not its existence, its indefinite prolongation, and its dissolution hold in store? There are an immeasurable distance and inconceivable trans­formations between the one frightful material of the early days and the human thought of this moment; and there will doubtless be a like distance and like transformations, as difficult to conceive, between the thought of this moment and that which will succeed it in the infinity of time.

It seems as if, in the beginning, our earth did not know what to do with its material and with its force, which inter­devoured each other. In the vast, flaming void in which it was being consumed, it had not yet the shadow of an object or an idea; to-day, it has so many that our scholars wear out their lives to no purpose in seeking them, and are overwhelmed by the number of its mysterious and in­exhaustible combinations. At that time, it disposed of but a single force, the most destructive that we know­ fire. If everything was born of fire, which itself seemed to be born only to destroy, what will not be born of that which seems to be born only to produce, beget, and multiply? If it was able to do so much with the lava and red-hot cinders, which were the only elements that it possessed, what will it not be able to do with all that it will end by possessing?

It is well, sometimes, to tell ourselves, especially in these days of distress and dis­couragement, that we are living in a world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer to its beginning than to its end. It was born but yesterday, and has only just disentangled its original chaos. It is at the starting-point of its hopes and of its experience. We believe that it is making for death, whereas all its past, on the contrary, shows that it is much mote probably making for life. In any case, as its years pass by, the quantity, and still more the quality; of the life which it engenders and maintains tend to increase and to improve. It has given us only the first-fruits of its miracles; and in all likelihood there is no more connection between what it was and what it is than there will be between what it is and what it will be. No doubt, when its greatest marvels burst into being, we shall no longer, possess the lives which we possess to-day, but we shall still be there under another form; we shall still be exiging somewhere, on its surface or in its depths, and it is not utterly improbable that one of its last prodigies will reach us in our dust, awaken us, and recall us to life, in order to impart to, us the share of happi­ness which we had not enjoyed and to teach us that we were wrong not to interest ourselves, on the further side of our graves, in the destiny of this earth of ours, whereof we had never ceased to be the immortal offspring.

The Future of the Earth by Maurice Maeterlinck, Cosmopolitan, March 1918. Illustration The Earth with the Milky Way and Moon by Wladyslaw T. Benda.