Florence McLandburgh's The Automaton Ear

"Seeing is believing." Taken broadly, that old axiom articulates the virtues and limitations of empiricism. The "sight" is the information that can be gleaned through the use of the physical senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. A functional empiricism underlies two of the most important ventures in democratic society: science and justice.

In justice, it is the requirements of physical evidence and reliable, corroborated witnesses. It is also implicit to the principles of legal impartiality, presumption of innocence, and trial by jury, which together signify the importance of sufficient evidence adjudicated objectively. Looked at this way, it is easy to see how the concept of "social justice" is increasingly antithetical to actual justice... Under "social justice," guilt is presumed on the basis of assigned group identity (which is itself guilty of collective group crimes) and emotion supplants evidence in the court of public opinion.

In science, only what can be observed about the physical universe is what can be taken as valid information about it. Of course there are more ways than science to perceive insights about the experience of existence - such as aesthetics, ethics, and religion - but science deals with a particularly narrow subject matter, being the physical universe. Many of the same processes are at work in science as in the processes of justice. Physical evidence is an obvious requirement, as are multiple independent researchers to corroborate findings. The trial by jury becomes the peer reviewed scientific journal, where findings must first pass the editorial board whereupon they are published for the rigorous dispute of the scientific community. At all points, objectivity is desired and the transparency of the Scientific Method encourages multiple researchers to check up on each other's work.

To carry on its experiments, science has produced ever more elaborate tools to increase the scope of the physical senses. What is the telescope, after all, but a giant eye that allows one to see further (and in more spectra) than the normal, unaided eye? The connection between time and space creates the mind-rattling conundrum that what we see through a telescope is not what is happening right now, but rather, is a glimpse into the past. All those beautiful images brought to us by the Hubble Space Telescope are actually images of things that happened millions, even billions, of years ago... However long it took the light from those nebulae to reach us here on Earth. Where our telescopes read a barren rocky exoplanet 500 million light years away, it may, at this very moment, be teeming with its own brand of dinosaur that we won't see for another half-a-billion years.

Now what if we could do that for sound?

In a sense we already do. The first thing an alien civilization is going to hear from us are the first  radio broadcasts from a century ago. This was illustrated dramatically in the beginning of the 1997 film Contact. Florence McLandburgh wondered this same question quite early on in the history of Scientific Romances. Her 1873 short story The Automaton Ear sticks closer to home in its depiction of a scientist who builds an elaborate ear trumpet designed to amplify the faint vibrations of terrestrial events millennia ago.

However, despite this entire preamble, the subject of The Automaton Ear is not the device itself nor its cultural and scientific ramifications. Instead, it is a character study of scientific monomania. It is the autobiography of a mad scientist.

Most Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances begin with an outside observer being inducted into the mysteries of the scientist or explorer. The archetype is Professor Arronax, Conseil, and Ned Land being taken aboard Captain Nemo's submarine. Passepartout was the entry point into Phileas Fogg's trip around the world, and Ned Malone was the entry point into Professor Challenger's lost world. The scientist or explorer is almost always the Other who dominates the story told by a narrator. Only in a handful of rare circumstances, like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, is the scientist themselves the narrator.

I would imagine that, in most cases, this literary device exists to build a sense of intrigue as the mystery of the scientist and their invention unfolds. More likely than not, there is also an underpinning of writers recognizing that it is easier to write about a genius than to pretend to be one. The greatest flaw that writers of geniuses fall into is sub-genius characterizations who tend to come off as undeservedly egotistical Mary Sues.  It's difficult to pass off a character as the most brilliant poet or scientist or whatever, if the writer is clearly not. 

McLandburgh bypasses this problem by setting out to examine the deleterious effects of monomania on her inventors' mind. It is less about the ways and means of the invention itself than on the obsession that drives him to madness.

The Automaton Ear was first published in Scribner's Monthly in May 1873, then again in Florence McLandburgh's only published book, The Automaton Ear and Other Sketches, in 1876.  It appears here as it did in Scribner's. Click on the image, and then right-click and tap "Open image in new tab," to see a larger version.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race

To be pitied is the writer whose satire of Utopian fantasies is mistaken for the actual thing. Even more to be pitied are the people who take his Utopian vision and make it a key belief in their esoteric religion. Such is the case of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1871 novel The Coming Race was not only one of the most popular novels of the 19th century but whose story of a technologically-superior subterranean civilization inspired theosophists and Nazi occultists. 

It wasn't for any lack of trying on Bulwer-Lytton's part. In a friendly letter he explicitly wrote "I don't think people have caught or are likely to catch the leading idea of the book, which is this: - Assuming that all the ideas of philosophical reformers could be united and practically realised, the result would be firstly, a race that must be fatal to ourselves; our society could not amalgamate with it; it would be deadly to us, not from its vices but from its virtues. Secondly, the realisation of these ideas would produce a society which we should find extremely dull, and in which the current equality would prohibit all greatness."  Nevertheless, his underground civilization of Vril-ya captured imaginations in the 19th century with its possibilities. Those who wished for a mere interesting Scientific Romance were rewarded, as were those "philosophical reformers" who considered that incompatibility with modern society as a good thing. Then there were those who took things a little too far.

Illustration from The Coming Race depicting the
underground society and its winged citizens, the Vril-ya.

Lillie Devereux Blake's A Divided Republic

There are a handful of good reasons to read the utopian ideals of the past. One might simply be the aesthetics of Victorian retro-futurism, seeing how people of the 19th century actually did envision the things we take for granted today: our televisions, computers, the Internet, mass transit, and so forth. Sometimes it is to play a little game of what they got right and what they got wrong. But deeper than that, they are an opportunity to understand the "interior world" of different philosophies and worldviews... To understand not only their ambitions for people and society, but what they think of people and society in general. Nested into utopian fantasies are theses on human nature, human failing, and human interaction.

It is one thing to analyze failed Victorian worldviews through Victorian fiction... It is another to analyze worldviews that are still carried with us today, worldviews which never left or which get perennially resurrected. This is even more pertinent when the worldview is not simply a failed worldview of the past, but a worldview that is currently failing us today. And that is what brings us to Lillie Devereux Blake's A Divided Republic. 

Published in two parts in the February and March 1887 issues of The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health magazine (which is interesting enough in itself) and eventually reprinted in her 1892 anthology A Daring Experiment and Other Stories, A Divided Republic argues for women's suffrage by proposing that women simply up and leave. En masse, the ladyfolk of the Eastern United States migrate to the territories of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. In return, the men from those territories are shipped back East. Left to their own devices, male society rapidly deteriorates until they literally beg to get the women back. 

At the root of Blake's thought experiment is the idea of what we would today recognize as "identity politics." This philosophy, which has regained considerable traction in the last decade, fundamentally rejects the idea of individual personhood and dignity. In its place, identity politics holds as axiomatic truth that individuals are reducible to actors on behalf of identity collectives. As actors for identity collectives, individuals work to reinforce structures that maintain power for the collective. In this worldview, there is no such concept of human rights because there is no such concept as human beings. Rather, identity collectives are conceived of having or lacking "privileges" which are exercised by the collective as a collective. 

Though self-evidently wrong, more serious and considered forms of identity politics manage to focus on identity collectives that may actually give shape to behaviour, like religion and philosophy, political affiliation, or nationality. Less well-considered forms will at least base identity on tangible assets like economic class or ethnicity. The worst and most self-evidently false forms of identity politics focus on crude physical attributes, namely race, gender, and sexuality. These physical attributes are believed to form coherent blocks of political interest, usually in dialectic opposition to collectives with other attributes, i.e.: Men vs. Other (Women, Trans, Nonbinary), White vs. Other ("People of Colour"), Straight vs. Other (LGBTQ2+AA), Cis vs. Other (Trans, Nonbinary, etc.).

In what way are they self-evidently wrong? For the simple fact that people are individuals and never, in the entire history of humankind, have skin colour, genitals, or where people stick those genitals ever formed a coherent block of political interest. For the approximately 8,000 years that "white people" have existed, they have always been divided by ethnicity, nationality, economic class, political affiliation, philosophy, and religion, not to mention the naked interests of personal self-preservation. In the entire 19th century, there were approximately 7 years, added together, where there wasn't being a war being fought somewhere in Europe. Mark Twain once quipped that no one has spilled more French blood than other Frenchmen. For thousands of years prior to the arrival of Europeans to the shores of Africa or the Americas, Indigenous people fought with each other. Many of those resumed in terrifying ethnic conflicts after Europeans pulled out, such as the Rwandan Genocide. The Spanish were only able to conquer the Aztecs because they were assisted by other Indigenous nations who were sick of the Aztecs' bullshit. The evil of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade would have been impossible without the crucial first step of African peoples being captured and sold by other Africans. In the United States, slavery was abolished after 1.8 million "white people" fought a civil war against 750,000 other "white people." The term "People of Colour" is especially bizarre, as though Zulu and Japanese and Pakistani and Apache are all the same thing. These truths are so self-evident that even proponents of identity politics themselves realize it, inventing concepts like intersectionality theory. By admitting that people are shaped by a nearly infinite variety of intersecting identity vectors, it becomes apparent that the ultimate end of intersectionality theory is individualism. Everyone is different, and the only way to deal with individual people is as individuals. Intersectionality theory is a tacit admission that identity politics doesn't work as a model of reality. Identity politics is racism rebranded as "social justice," and the only antidote to racism is individualism, not more racism.

That "white people" and "People of Colour" and men and women and gay people and straight people and cis people and trans people fall everywhere across the political, religious, ethnic, national, and economic spectrum is distinctly highlighted by a story like A Divided Republic. Blake's story hinges first on the notion that women, as an identity collective, would just all agree to leave as one united body of coherent political interest. That simply would not happen. Gender does not form coherent blocks of political interest, especially where it would come to completely abandoning husbands, fathers, children, and alcohol. According to a 2013 survey, only 23% of American women identified as feminists (with 8% identifying as anti-feminists), even though 82% believe in equality of the sexes. One of the most shocking outcomes of the 2016 US election is that 42% of women voted for Donald Trump, which rises to 62% for "white" women without a college education.

Blake goes on to portray life in the respective republics. The male republic is, of course, every crude stereotype of men. It is a brutish, careless, reckless, vice-riddled society deprived of its civilizing members. By contrast, the female republic's greatest problem is boredom. A society composed entirely of women would be far too civilized... Without a need for police, courts, and jails (and saloons), the female republic could turn its attention fully to the moral, physical, and intellectual perfection of its members. The type of culture described briefly by Blake was given a fuller treatment in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 novel Herland, where it was also granted more of a critique (albeit possibly unintentionally). Perfection is dull and eventually the women are excited to hear that the men are willing to make every concession just to get the women back. It would be unthinkable that women might have conflict between themselves, because that would imply that women are individuals with their own personalities, ambitions, and problems apart of the interests of the collective. It was also unthinkable that amidst architecture, engineering, and mountaineering, one of the things they might also pick up now that there are no men to stop them is alcohol. 

A Divided Republic is a short story... this critique is almost as long as the story itself... so one cannot reasonably expect Blake to give more nuanced portrayals of the benefits and challenges of her two republics. Yet when forced by brevity to distill her idea down to its most basic form, it is this: the essential characteristic of women as an identity collective is morality and the essential characteristic of men as an identity collective is barbarism, and therefore men need women to civilize them, and therefore men owe women the vote and the veto over men's lives. The idea that women are inherently more moral, more pure, more honest, and more civilized still permeates identity politics to this day, along with the patronizing idea that women are also weaker, more naive, more vulnerable, and less capable of managing their own affairs, thus requiring the paternalistic involvement of the State in every aspect of their lives in order to keep them safe. What they need to be kept safe from, of course, is men, who should apparently be packed with a WHMIS label. 

Of course women were rightly entitled to the vote and to full legal equality. But that entitlement was not owed on the grounds that women as an identity collective are just better than men. They were rightly entitled to it because they are human beings, fellow individuals who are no better and no worse than men. Unfortunately, despite a brief flirtation with a properly ordered idea of social justice rooted in individual dignity -  "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." - the kind of identity politics expressed in A Divided Republic have taken hold again.

Without further ado, A Divided Republic by Lillie Devereux Blake, as it appeared in The Phrenological Journal... 

  

Clement Fezandié's Through the Earth, Parts III and IV

The bold experiment of drilling a tunnel through the earth complete, parts III and IV of Clement Fezandié's Through the Earth follow young William Swindon's experiences as he makes the perilous first voyage. In a footnote, the author assures us that his text has been double-checked for accuracy by a professor of Applied Mechanics, and what he describes is a fairly accurate impression of artificial weightlessness created through extended freefall. It's much the same process used by NASA to train astronauts, though in the real-world case it is induced by plummeting a special airplane into freefall. It is also how space shuttles and other bodies achieve orbit. Technically they are constantly falling towards the earth, but the earth curves away beneath them before they can land. 

These chapters appear as they originally did in the March and April 1898 editions of St. Nicholas Magazine, with illustrations of William A. Mackay. After the serial completed, Fezandié and St. Nicholas Magazine's parent company, The Century Co., republished it as a book with some additional chapters of background and incident. 

Clement Fezandié's Through the Earth, Parts I and II

What would be the most efficient way to pass from one side of the earth to the other? That's the old trick of the two dimensional map: you'd think it would be a straight line, but on a globe that translates into the curved line of airline flight paths. In the 19th century, there was no expedient way to circumnavigate the globe. Jules Verne showed that it could theoretically be done in 80 days, but the average traveler would be spending many more months at it. 

But what if you could just go through the earth?  

That is the question being broached by Clement Fezandié in this four-part serial that was published in the January-April 1898 volumes of St. Nicholas Magazine. The first two parts, presented here as they originally appeared, with illustrations by William A. Mackay (more famous for his role in developing ship camouflage for the US Navy), focus on the theory and construction of a tube from New York to Australia through the earth's core, and how people and freight may be moved along such a hazardous route.

Click on each page to see a larger version, and join us again next week for parts III and IV! 

Free Book Offer - Death of a Bounty Hunter - A Supernatural Steampunk Western

"I’m in this story, but it’s not about me. It’s about a bounty hunter who comes face-to-face with something we all do: guilt and shame, and the desire to run from them. Not because we're cowards, but because sometimes we just can't stomach ourselves. The Gatling guns, the Occult, the paranormal, and even the demon spawn—all those things are just along for the ride."

From the authors of the Amazon Top Selling time travel novel Timeslingers comes, Death of a Bounty Hunter. Blending paranormal, steampunk, and western genres, Death of a Bounty Hunter creates something altogether different.

To celebrate their new release, Jay Sherer and Nathan Scheck are offering the Kindle e-book version of Death of a Bounty Hunter for free on the next four consecutive Fridays (or discounted to $0.99 every other day). All they’re asking for in exchange for a complimentary copy of the novel is an Amazon review. No obligation, but that’s what they’re hoping you would do after reading it! 

From the Authors:

As Pinkerton Agent Geraldine Abernathy might say, “We live in strange times.” And due to the stay-at-home orders that most of us still face, Nathan and I felt like it was time to give you something to show that we’re all in this together. 

That’s why we chose to release Death of a Bounty Hunter early and at a steep discount (and if you download it on 04/17/2020, free!). 

We hope you love it. If you do, we would appreciate it if you’d consider doing the following (all optional—the choice is yours—but both are incredibly helpful to us): 

• Share the ebook with a friend: www.deathofabountyhunter.com.
• Write a review on Amazon. 

That’s it! Stay at home, read Death of a Bounty Hunter, and hang in there! We’ll all get through this together! 

Sincerely,
Jay Sherer and Nathan Scheck

Early Canadian Futurism: Tisab Ting, The Storm of '92, and The Dominion in 1983

Unlike its neighbour to the south, Canada has no strong history of Scientific Romances. It has only really been in the last 40 years that the Dominion has developed a strong voice in Science Fiction as a whole. Even then, amidst the Robert J. Sawyers, A.E. van Voghts and William Gibsons, there is still plenty of ambivalence towards the genre. The great dame of Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood, still seems undecided on whether to allow her works to stoop to being called SF. 

The oddity of our lack of Scientific Romances comes into sharper focus when considering that Canada is, truly and uniquely, an invention of the Victorian Era. From earlier historic roots among Indigenous peoples, fur traders, and early French and British settlers, the Dominion of Canada as a single political institution began life with Confederation in 1867, when the independent colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia unified. In 1870, the Hudson's Bay Company sold its vast western holdings to the fledgling nation, all of which became the North-West Territories. Other colonies joined later, and other provinces were carved out of the NWT. Perhaps the most influential member was British Columbia. It joined Confederation in 1871 by the promise that within a decade, a Transcontinental Railway would be built connecting the Pacific coast to the Atlantic.

Not only is Canada a product of the Victorian Era, but it is even more so a product of the Steam Age. Perhaps no country on earth owes as much of its existence to the construction of a single railway. The driving of the last spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia, in 1885 linked Vancouver to the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway at a distance of some 5000 kilometres, allowing for the fast movement of immigrants, troops, and tourists through the rugged Canadian northwoods and beyond. Thanks to Canadian Pacific Railway's fleet of Royal Mail Steamers, the well-heeled could travel from England to Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand by way of Canada, journeying halfway across the world without ever leaving the British Empire.    

Imperial pride reflects in two of the earliest Canadian futurist tales... The only three early Canadian futurist tales to speak of. The Dominion in 1983, The Storm of '92, and Tisab Ting; or, The Electrical Kiss share the same essential conceit of showing the status of Canada in the decades hence. Published in 1883, 1889, and 1896 respectively, all dared to make technological and political predictions while imposing Victorian attitudes upon the 20th century.

Announcing "Science Fiction of Antebellum America: An Anthology"

With the world under quarantine thanks to the Spanish Flu Covid-19, it seems a good time to offer a literary respite through the publication of my second anthology of 19th century science fiction. I am hereby announcing Science Fiction of Antebellum America: An Anthology!

Science fiction and the United States of America were created together. The same Enlightenment ideals that gave rise to the United States also gave birth to science fiction, and the genre developed along with the country. Pioneering authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fitz-James O’Brien, and Washington Irving experimented with this new kind of story to capture the fears and ambitions of a new country, a new frontier, and a new era in human history. This companion volume to Science Fiction of America’s Gilded Age collects the earliest satires, hoaxes, macabre tales, lost world fantasies and fairy tales that established the genre of science fiction in the heady days between the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Science Fiction of Antebellum America also includes a new introduction by yours truly.

To order Science Fiction of Antebellum America, click here. My first book, Science Fiction of America's Gilded Age, is also still available. If you would be willing to share this post on your social networks, leave a review on Amazon, and rate Science Fiction of Antebellum America, 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!

P.S.: I'm always one step ahead with these... Later this year I'll be releasing an anthology on science fiction of the British Empire! 

Edward S. Ellis' The Steam Man of the Prairies

The 1860's were a crucial period in American history. Perhaps the most crucial, in fact.

The American Civil War began in 1861, lasting to 1865. Over two million troops from the North and up to one million troops from the South clashed over very different interpretations of individual liberty and the meaning of a "United States." The catalyst for the American Civil War was the question of slavery, and the means to fight it was mass industrialized slaughter. In its terrible wake, 365,000 soldiers of the Union and 290,000 soldiers of the Confederacy lay dead, leaving behind a specter that still haunts the United States to this day. It also left Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, with the dubious distinction of being the first US President to be assassinated. Nevertheless the United States emerged from the violence wounded but whole. The question of slavery was emphatically answered with freedom's ring and the terrible machinery of warfare could be now turned to America's economic ascendancy on the world stage.

The Homestead Act of 1862 and completion of the Transcontinental Railway in 1869 brought a massive influx of newcomers to the prairies. The number of people living on farms doubled from 10 million to 22 million between 1860 and 1880, rising to 31 million by 1905. The rising number of settlers, mountain men, industrial magnates, and tourists also created a crisis on the frontier. In 1864, Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, a piece of federal legislation designating the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia as a California state park. This is turn laid the groundwork for the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the first national park in the United States and the world. Yellowstone was itself only half-believed rumours through the 1860's, and it was in 1869 that Major John Wesley Powell conducted his unbelievable expedition into the Grand Canyon. These ventures only nominally protected these irreplaceable parcels of  land from exploitation. 1862 also saw a gold rush in Montana... Not as iconic as the California Gold Rush of 1849 or Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, it was still this gold rush that, in part, inspired one of the first true American science fiction novels: The Huge Hunter; or, The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis.
  

Mark Twain's From the 'London Times' of 1904

Mark Twain was fascinated by technology and industry, but rarely delved into the genre of Scientific Romance. I suspect there is a correlation between those two facts. After all, Twain was a satirist driven by his intolerance of what he deemed foolishness and hypocrisy. Being fascinated by technology, it would have been beyond him to really give it a good go the way he did to the institutions of society.

In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Twain takes the starch out of genius inventors, though one feels he's really poking at the genre of Scientific Romance itself and the airship created by the inventor serves mainly as a plot device. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the American author has a go at Mediaeval romances by allowing his protagonist to introduce modernity at Camelot. Even in the industrial carnage of its conclusion, one never quite feels that Twain is turning on industrialization. Throughout his travelogues like Innocents Abroad, he has sometimes shockingly cruel things to say about non-industrialized cultures. For his part, Twain had several patents to his name, including the elastic bra strap. Even the financial failure of his Paige typesetting machine seemed not to dull his overall enthusiasm for technology.

This love affair comes out in his 1898 short story From the 'London Times' of 1904. Its scant 4000 words are divided into three chapters, of which the first two concern themselves with a device called the "telelectroscope." It is this part that interests modern readers the most, because it essentially predicted the Internet. Twain plays it remarkably straight in doing so, with hardly a joke to speak of. His satirist mind comes to play in the third chapter, which savages one of his favourite targets - the French - over the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. One of the greatest miscarriages of justice in modern legal history, the Dreyfus Affair violently divided French society at the turn of the century and could not escape Twain's notice either.

The concept of the telelectroscope first entered public consciousness in 1878, hot on the heels of Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 patent for the telephone. French writer Louis Figuier was taken in by an anonymous hoax article in the New York Sun describing a telephone-like invention by an unnamed "eminent scientist" that amounted to a videophone or, in modern parlance, a webcam. Figuier ascribed this invention to Bell, and while Bell was working on an optics-related project, it was not a telelectroscope. The actual invention was the photophone, which used optical cable to transmit communication via modulated light beams... Essentially, the precursor to fibre-optics.    

Nevertheless, the telelectroscope was a fascinating idea and savants took to it. Most notably, Jan Szczepanik and Ludwig Kleiberg filed a British patent for such a device in 1898, though there has been considerable debate over whether the device ever actually existed. It was from here that Mark Twain took notice and wrote his fictional story about Szczepanik and the invention.

Before continuing, it is worth reading Twain's own story, as originally published in the November 1898 edition of The Century Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version...

Twain was forced to declare bankruptcy after the failure of the Paige typesetter, necessitating a world speaking tour to pay off his debts. He had been in Paris in 1894 when the Dreyfus Affair broke out, and was living in Vienna in 1898 when he wrote From the 'London Times' of 1904. This gave him a ringside seat for a bizarre, often unfathomable, intersection of race, politics, nationalism, and injustice at the fin de siècle. 

The Dreyfus Affair is complex (and warrants its own lengthy Wikipedia article) but revolved around Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jewish captain in the French military who was accused, tried, and found guilty of treason with the Prussians by a military tribunal. While serving out his sentence on Devil's Island in French Guiana, new evidence came to light that Dreyfus was innocent. To protect its reputation, the military tribunal acquitted the guilty party, removed the officers who began uncovering the conspiracy, and levied new charges against Dreyfus using falsified documents. By the time of Dreyfus' second trial in 1899, a civil trial, France was deeply divided between the pro-justice Dreyfusards and the pro-nationalistic Anti-Dreyfusards. Émile Zola came out in support of Dreyfus, and even did jail time for his scathing critique J'accuse! (trans: I Accuse!) which pointed the finger at not only the military and political authorities in general, but specifically named names. Jules Verne began as an Anti-Dreyfusard, but in the process of writing his novel The Kip Brothers (1902) touching on the themes of the case, converted to a Dreyfusard. Georges Méliès was a Dreyfusard as well, and broke out as a filmmaker with his 1899 series of vignettes on the case.

Mark Twain already held a fairly dim view of the French. "France has neither winter nor summer nor morals," he wrote in his Notebook, "--apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country." Also "In certain public indecencies the difference between a dog & a Frenchman is not perceptible." He was quoted as saying "There is nothing lower than the human race except the French." And those were just some of the lighter remarks. The Dreyfus Affair did nothing to endear him to the nation.

Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem by Sutton E. Griggs

Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem, written in 1899 by Rev. Sutton E. Griggs, is a fascinating, prescient novella. In it, two men vie for control of a shadowy organization of African-American militants. One is the privileged mulatto Bernard Belgrave who advocates for full-out race war with European-Americans. The other is the self-made, full-blooded Belton Piedmont, who advocates for racial integration. The premise of a shadowy, militant African-American "empire within an empire" might seem like an ethnic peril novel except that Griggs was himself an African-American minister and social activist reflecting on the political forces in tension within African-American communities in the thirty years since the American Civil War. In that it is fascinating. It is prescient in how these forces are still at play in African-American communities today.

Despite being the greatest moral accomplishment in American history, and the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin becoming the best-selling novel of the 19th century, the abolition of slavery did not immediately translate to full material equality for African-Americans. Poverty was the main inhibitor to equality, with up to 80% of African-American farmers eking out a living as sharecroppers. Violence was also an effective tool.

The Ku Klux Klan, White League, Red Shirts, and independent actors emerged as domestic terrorists using violence and intimidation to suppress African-American voters. Between 1890 and 1910, Democrat legislators throughout the 11 former Confederate states passed Jim Crow Laws mandating poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements that effectively disenfranchised the majority of African-Americans, most of whom still lived in the South. Many counties, and some whole states, lacked a single registered African-American voter. Being ineligible for the vote eliminated these African-Americans from serving in public office. They became, for all intents and purposes, politically invisible. This in turn made them vulnerable to regionally-instituted segregationist laws and continued white supremacist violence.

The response to this violence and disenfranchisement among African-Americans and their allies was varied. The Exodus of 1879 lead 40,000 people to simply up and leave the South for Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado to forge a new life. It was also common for African-Americans to band together for protection into "Union Leagues" organized by the Republican Party. Contrary to its reputation today, the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln and spearheads of the abolitionist and integrationist movement through the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. In fact, the Republicans became increasingly under the control of African-American factions, with its white supremacists defecting to the segregationist Democratic Party. The modern Republican party was a product of the 1960's "Southern Strategy," when the Republican Party sought to win over white Democrat voters in the South, and the 1980's "Moral Majority."

An 1879 Harper's Weekly illustration of
"Exodusters" on their way to Kansas. 

Illustration of the 1876 "Colored National Convention" held in Nashville.

Education was a key component in African-American emancipation. The creation of secondary and post-secondary schools became a priority of Northern churches and the federal government. Whereas only 22 African-Americans had graduated college prior to the Civil War, the number doubled to 44 in the 1860's, and rose again to 313 in the 1870's, 738 in the 1880's, and 1126 in the 1890's. Whereas the average US worker made $200-$400 annually in 1910, college-educated African-Americans were making approximately $15,000, using their wealth and education to improve their communities.

These realities are all expressed through Imperium in Imperio, as a pair of educated African-Americans struggle for the heart and future of their people through a conspiracy shaped by violence and political disenfranchisement.

Sultana's Dream, a Muslim feminist utopia

It is not without truth, or reason, that Science Fiction has traditionally been a Western-dominated and male-dominated genre. Scientific Romances grew out of the intersection between scientific investigation, technological invention, and colonial exploitation, as the most educated classes in Western society attempted to grapple with the challenges and opportunities of the Industrial Revolution. Voices of the colonized and those with less opportunity tended to be more marginal.

Many of these cultures were not experiencing the full brunt of the Industrial Revolution as such. For example, Canada does not have an especially strong tradition of Scientific Romances because it was, for most of the country through most of the 19th century, a wilderness colonial hinterland sparsely populated with farmers, trappers, and indigenous peoples. The colonized were also less likely to be writing, especially in English, especially in a genre that required a reasonable amount of technological, scientific, and cultural knowledge. An average indigenous person in a colonized nation would be unlikely, through no fault of their own, to have the same resources and opportunities available to them as a Jules Verne would, who could access information about the entire world through the library in Amiens.      

But some people are not average. The short story Sultana's Dream has a unique place in the canon of the genre, as a Scientific Romance written by a Bengali Muslim woman. Published in 1905, feminist and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain used the medium of Scientific Romance to postulate a reversal of fortune for women in her society, turning the tables on the men and hypothesizing a female-run utopia.

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! 

Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Written in 1820 before Halloween as we know it even existed, the best known and loved of Washington Irving's stories has become a Halloween classic... Perhaps even the Halloween classic. This status is no doubt due as much to Walt Disney's classic animated version appearing on televisions throughout the United States and Canada as to the qualities of Irving's writing itself. Nevertheless, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving taps into a primal vein. Published alongside his other most famous story Rip Van Winkle in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Irving adapts an archetypal European myth into the colonial milieu, itself a period of primal myth-making for American culture. Against the backdrop of autumn in New York and the American Revolution comes this potent story of ghostly pursuit. You have George Washington, Paul Revere, Ben Franklin, Betsy Ross... and the Headless Horseman.

Many North American tall tales have their roots in European legends and ghost stories. A particularly horrific one is known as the "Wild Hunt": those dark, moonlit nights when a phantasmagorical troupe of spectral huntsmen charge through forest roads astride their night-mares, cursing, killing or carrying off any mortal in their path. A popular modern American version of it is the song "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend," written by Stan Jones while he worked for the US National Parks Service in Death Valley. The better-known American take on the Wild Hunt is, of course, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The Headless Horseman pursuing Ichabod Crane by John Quidor, 1858.

William Hope Hodgson's The Voice in the Night

There are a few things that we, the ordinary creatures of the world, share our planet with that seem like they should be from another. Echinoderms are one such group: unlike most animals, which have bilateral symmetry (an even number of appendages and orifices, such that each half is a mirror image of the other), the group composed of starfish, brittlestars, sand dollars, sea lilies, and sea urchins have radial symmetry... A bizarrely alien odd-numbered arrangement of limbs. Another is fungus. 

Though superficially similar to plants, they lack the common decency to be plants. Instead, they occupy their own niche, mainly revolving around the consumption of decaying matter. While many types are a food source, their instrumental role in the cycle of decomposition gives them a disquieting association with rot and corruption. For many people, they are an allergen, and some varieties are outright toxic. Altogether they are revolting organisms. 

Those attributes make fungus a prime candidate for stories of horror. Bram Stoker describes the boxes Dracula brings with him aboard the doomed ship Demeter not so much being filled with earth as with mould. H.P. Lovecraft said of his Dunwich that "it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries." Some storytellers have taken it a step further, from fungus being a symbol of corruption and decay to being the active agents of it. William Hope Hodgson accomplished this in his disquieting story The Voice in the Night, originally published in Blue Book Magazine in November 1907. 

Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time

Really good dinosaur books are few and far between. Despite the best efforts of pretty well every Science Fiction author at one time or another, one could likely count the most memorable attempts on one hand. Jurassic Park would enter most people's minds these days, though more by reputation of the film series than from having read Michael Crichton's novel for themselves. The unparalleled classic is, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, published in 1912. His copious literary talent and careful attention to detail made this relatively late entry into the field of Scientific Romances a genre archetype of its own: the "lost world" story. More recently than The Lost World is another lost world story of a type, taking place in the Victorian Era and standing towards the head of the list of great dinosaur stories. This is Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time by James Gurney, published in 1992.

Image: James Gurney.

The irony behind Dinotopia's success is that Gurney is no Science Fiction author. Asked in interview about how deep an influence Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir H. Rider Haggard exerted on his series, he said that they didn't really. His main influences were the journals of actual explorers and scientists like Darwin, Wallace, and Burton. It's not altogether uncommon that truly excellent examples of modern Scientific Romances come from people completely outside of any "scene" or "fandom" dedicated to it. Its success no doubt owes as much or more to the dinosaur fever of the early Nineties - Jurassic Park would be released to theatres the following year, in 1993 - as its Victorian Scientific Romance setting.   

Rather than a Science Fiction author, Gurney is a painter. The origins of Dinotopia find themselves in a collection of unique paintings by Gurney, showing dinosaurs and humans living alongside each other. Unlike countless scenes of antagonism between dinosaurs and cavemen, these paintings depicted idyllic scenes of parades processing past Greco-Roman columns. The idea of elevating these paintings to a narrative, to tell the story behind them and the kind of world they take place in, came to Gurney and the result is a work capturing the very essence of Scientific Romances.

Image: James Gurney.

Or, if we are to believe the prologue, Gurney was merely the recipient of a sketchbook once belonging to Arthur Denison, a naturalist who set sail on an exploratory voyage in 1862. His ship encountered a ferocious storm and was destroyed, pitching himself and his son Will on the shores of an uncharted island teeming with living dinosaurs. More astonishing than this, as though it could get more astonishing, is that these dinosaurs are highly intelligent, rational and wise beings who have taught generations of humans to live in harmony with them and with one another.

Image: James Gurney.

Æpyornis Island by H.G. Wells

One of H.G. Wells' earliest short stories, Æpyornis Island is atypically lighthearted for the cynical English leftist. Not long after its publication in 1894, Wells would content himself far more with destroying humanity, vivisecting animals, and outlining his models for oppressive, totalitarian, utopian regimes. Originally published in the Pall Mall Budget and later included in the 1895 anthology The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, Æpyornis Island draws influence from Daniel Defoe by way of Jules Verne in a mostly comic tale.

The story is a reminiscence of a fossil collector named Butcher, who is familiar to the nameless narrator by having sued his former employer for four years wages. It seems he was trapped on a deserted island during those four years while carrying out an expedition on behalf of his employer. Due to the hardships and peculiar incidents of his abandonment, he naturally felt he was owed his wages. After all, he never would have been in so unique a situation if not for his employer. If only the employer realized what treasure Butcher had in his possession, the four years of accrued wages would have been a small price to pay. 

That treasure, unique in all the world, were the earthly remains of the world's last Æpyornis, the Elephant Bird of Madagascar, recently deceased.

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.

J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan

The character of Peter Pan was first developed by J.M. Barrie in his 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird. In this semi-autobiographical tale, the narrator tells his young ward David about a week-old infant named Peter who overhears his parents discussing their future hopes for his adult life. This all sounds rather dreadful to him, so Peter absconds to Kensington Gardens where he encounters the various fairy folk who make this London park their home. These few chapters in The Little White Bird inspired Barrie to write a full theatrical play entitled Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up in 1904. The chapters in Little White Bird were slightly rewritten and published as the book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in 1906. 

Though published to capitalize on the success of the play, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is not a prequel to Peter Pan. Rather, it is a first draft of sorts. Barrie would revisit many of the themes and situations in that short story, not the least of which being the flying boy who refuses to grow up. Kensington Gardens would become Neverland, though Peter does allude to having spent some time in the Gardens when he first decided not to age. Maimie, the girl who develops an affection for Peter, becomes Wendy. Finally, in 1911, Barrie rewrote his play as a novel. Peter and Wendy became the definitive literary version of the story that has inspired countless adaptations on stage and screen since.

Disney's Song of the South and its Sources

It would be an understatement to say that Disney's Song of the South is a controversial film. How controversial is, however, largely proportional to the number of people who have not actually seen it. Upon its release in 1946, the film became a Disney staple and its animated cast - Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear - became company icons. That lasted until 1986, when Song of the South had its last theatrical re-release. It became a touchstone for protest over the conditions and representation of African-Americans, and despite one of Disney's best loved theme park attractions being based on it, Song of the South was pulled from distribution in the United States. For 20 years interested parties have had to be motivated to seek out bootlegged European releases, but its wide availability in the age of the Internet has done nothing to diminish its reputation as either one of the best or one of the worst Disney films, depending on who you talk to.

Song of the South was based was based, in spots, on the "Uncle Remus" stories transcribed by Joel Chandler Harris through the 1880's and 90's. Three animated segments in the film adapt stories pulled from Harris' anthology of African-American folk tales, linked by a live-action narrative penned by Dalton S. Raymond, Morton Grant, and Maurice Rapf. Some unspecified problem has beset the family of little Johnny (played by Bobby Driscoll, Disney's first contract child actor and voice of Peter Pan), causing a rift between his mother and father. The implication is that the problems stem from anti-segregationist editorials penned by Johnny's father for the family newspaper. He and mother (Ruth Warrick) are left in the care of grandmother (Lucile Watson) on the old plantation. Problems with his family and with local bullies leads Johnny to Uncle Remus (James Baskett), the elder storyteller and kindly father figure of the plantation's African-American ex-slave community. Remus guides Johnny through his troubles by way of stories about wily Brer Rabbit. It is these live-action segments that fuel most of the controversy, for portraying the complicated era of the Reconstruction with all the pleasantry and frivolity of a Disney movie.

The biggest fault of Song of the South is being a consummate Disney movie. It has real heart, and compelling characters, and good music, and fun animated sequences. Even in a culture that has not legally been able to watch it for 30 years, its essence still endures in Splash Mountain, one of the most popular Disney theme park attractions of all time. The animated sequences are as good as the best cartoons from Disney's wartime era. The controversial live-action sequences don't quite have the same scope as a comparable classic like Gone With the Wind (1939) but it still carries that same sense of Southern charm, quaintness, and moments of grandeur. Ruth Warrick is resplendent in her gorgeous period dress, doing a slightly softer Vivien Leigh. Hattie McDaniel reprises basically the same character from Gone With the Wind, and like always it is fun to watch. It is a pity that James Baskett's wonderful performance as Uncle Remus is locked away in the Disney vault though. In 1948, Baskett received an Honorary Academy Award for his kindly, paternal, sympathetic portrayal of Uncle Remus defined by his own quiet strength of character, becoming the first African-American male to receive an Oscar (the first African-American was Hattie McDaniel, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1939 for Gone With the Wind). It was especially ironic given that Baskett could not even attend Song of the South's premiere in racially segregated Georgia.

Though the African-American characters portrayed by Baskett, McDaniel, and Glenn Leedy are friendly, positive, and full of song - acting as the well-adjusted foils to the broken family of the white plantation owners - Disney nevertheless “Disneyfies” a difficult time in American history, in the immediate wake of the American Civil War, when African-Americans were technically free but had nowhere to go, dealing with the intergenerational trauma of slavery while racism was still rampant. It is offensive exactly because it is so inoffensive. The NAACP even said as much... In a press release following the film's debut, NAACP executive secretary Walter Francis White admitted (emphasis mine):

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People recognizes in 'Song of the South' remarkable artistic merit in the music and in the combination of living actors and the cartoon technique. It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, 'Song of the South' unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts. 

It was this same time period that Joel Chandler Harris came into when he set about to transcribe and preserve the folk tales of African-American former slaves. Born in 1845 in Georgia to an unwed Irish immigrant mother and a father who fled immediately after his birth, 16-year old Harris took up work in a print shop on the Turnwold Plantation. During his time on the plantation, he became immersed in the lives of African-American slaves, feeling less self-conscious around them on account of his Irish heritage (including a shock of red hair) and illegitimate birth. The Uncle Remus character he later invented was a composite of several storytellers he knew, and Uncle Remus’ stories were those he heard around the evening fire. After the American Civil War, Harris moved from newspaper to newspaper, becoming a valued humourist and political commentator while promoting the vision of racial reconciliation in the “New South.” Eventually he set upon the task of transcribing the folktales he heard at Turnwold as a document of past times.

Like the movie based on them, Harris' writings are controversial. Some see his transcriptions as preserving an important part of America's cultural history, while others see him as having appropriated African-American culture. Some see his simulated slave dialect as a significant linguistic artifact, while others see it as demeaning. Some see the Uncle Remus character as a crude stereotype, others point out that according to slave narratives such personalities did exist. Harris was, on the one hand, a progressive advocate of racial reconciliation and African-American rights, and on the other he was paternalistic with a ingrained sense of nostalgia about the Antebellum South. He had even interpreted Uncle Tom's Cabin, an avowed abolitionist novel, as "a wonderful defense of slavery." In short, it may just be that in a country still dealing with the intergenerational trauma of slavery 150 years later, it is simply impossible to write about it without courting controversy.

So, let's write about it...