Announcing "Science Fiction of America's Gilded Age: An Anthology"

Just in time for the Christmas season, I'm happy to announce my very first anthology of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances, Science Fiction of America's Gilded Age!

Extraordinary voyages, fantastic inventions, and challenging questions about technology, race, gender, the future, and the meaning of the United States of America. The period between the Civil War and the Great War – dubbed the “Gilded Age” by Mark Twain – was the crucible of modern America and few genres were as suited to grapple with its troubles and opportunities as speculative fiction. This volume features rarely reprinted stories by such authors as Mark Twain and fellow humorist Ellis Parker Butler, pioneering feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, African American activist Sutton E. Griggs, science writer Garrett P. Serviss (the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day), Jack London, dime novelist Edward S. Ellis, and John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man to die aboard the Titanic. Science Fiction of America's Gilded Age also includes a new introduction by me, as the much more pretentious and professional-sounding C.W. Gross.

To order Science Fiction of America's Gilded Age, clicking here or on the link below will take you through my Amazon Associates store, through which your purchases will further support Voyages Extraordinaires.  If you can also share this post or the Amazon Associates link on your social networks, leave a review on Amazon, and rate Science Fiction of America's Gilded Age, that would go a long way to helping spread the word!

Thank you very much for you support of this blog for all these years and for your purchase of my new anthology. And yes, I'm already gathering stories for a companion anthology of Antebellum American Scientific Romances! 

An Experiment in Gyro-Hats

Though employed full-time as a banker and sadly shadowed in posterity, Ellis Parker Butler was one of the most prolific and popular American humourists of the early 20th century. His most famous story, Pigs is Pigs, was even adapted into a Disney animated short in 1954. 

An Experiment in Gyro-Hats was originally published in the June 1910 edition of Hampton's Magazine, illustrated by Albert Leavering. In it, an inventive hat-maker takes very seriously his profession's sacred calling to improve the conditions of men and the world at large. Specifically, creating a hat designed to steady the tipsy and staggering. 

As in most cases of  humourist writing, like Darius Green and his Flying Machine before it, there is less point in talking about how funny it is than in letting it speak for itself. The complete text of An Experiment in Gyro-Hats follows.