Disney's Mark Twain Riverboat and the Rivers of America

The Mississippi River is one of the great rivers of the world. Counting in its entire drainage basin, the Mississippi and its tributaries drain 31 states and the southernmost part of two Canadian provinces. It straddles the Rocky Mountains to the West and Appalachian Mountains to the East. It is the fourth longest and ninth largest river in the world. The Mississippi is the central artery of American industry, controlling it meant victory for the Union and defeat for the Confederates, it demarcates Country music from Western music, and the settlements along its ever advancing delta gave birth to Jazz. Sooner rather than later, the living river might bypass New Orleans and Baton Rouge altogether, rerouting its primary outflow to the Atchafalaya River. It already would be, if not for the engineering marvels placed by the US government attempting to bend nature to its will. Great industrial barges ply the urbanized riverscape today, but in Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and wherever Imagineers have transplanted the American frontier, the romance of the river's old steamboat days are perpetually rekindled.

A tributary of the Mississippi or Disneyland?

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.

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! 

Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad

Undoubtedly the most famous of Mark Twain's works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These two novels show Twain at the peak of satirical and storytelling prowess, using an identical cast of characters to tell widely divergent stories.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, follows the life of the miscreant of the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, along the shores of the mighty Mississippi River. In this otherwise sleepy town, the eponymous character gets into mischief and becomes embroiled in a murder plot. In the process, he comes to represent everything about rural life in America... The bygone age when children were allowed to explore, get dirty, hurt themselves, and run free on the wild outskirts of the village, fettered only by their own imaginations. This life, lived as recently as 30 years ago, seems to have dissipated under the weight of electronic devices and helicopter parents. To call it a "simpler time" would be a misnomer. Sawyer and his ladyfriend Becky Thatcher do find themselves chased through caverns by a murderer after all. It was a more fearless time, and thus seems more simple. Getting scuffed up was part of childhood. 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn followed in 1885. The Gilded Age romps of Sawyer, for as much murder and mayhem as they involved, were traded in for a sincere examination of life in the American South with all its harsh, squalid, unromantic realities. Quite early on, for instance, the reader is revolted by the horrible situation that the return of Huck's father puts him in. A barbaric man, he punishes the boy for "putting on airs" by being taught to read and proceeds to try and weasel Huck's trustfund (a legacy of the reward in the previous novel) as his "right" he is justly owed. No wonder Huck fakes his death and runs off with Jim, the escaped slave. As an unlearned, rural vagabond, Huck becomes Twain's "wild man" voice of satirical innocence.

Through the eyes of two social outsiders – Huck Finn and the escaped slave Jim – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores not only the Mississippi’s shoreline but the American zeitgeist in a manner that is still shockingly relevant today. Huck and Jim are left to navigate the eternally turbulent waters where morality, race, politics, religion, economics, slavery, and the lingering fallout of the Civil War intersect. In American literature and the American mind, geography and psychology blend together. Pursuit of the frontier drove Americans westward and skyward, hitching up Conestoga wagons and revving up Harley-Davidsons, and in doing so shaped who Americans are. The fundamental form of American literature is the road trip… The Grapes of Wrath, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas… and the first truly American novel is a trip on one of America’s first natural roads. Twain’s Mississippi is a geographic artery reaching into America’s metaphorical heart. Where it flows is sometimes quite ugly, and needs airing out. 

A further ten years later, Twain took a true flight of fancy with Tom Sawyer Abroad. Rather than reflecting on the realities of life in America, he instead wrote up a parody of Vernian Scientific Romances and dime novel Edisonades. The author takes Tom, Huck and Jim and throws them in with a mad inventor who takes them aloft in his dirigible. One can tell from this short novella and its follow-up Tom Sawyer, Detective that the gas had gone out of Sawyer and Finn for their author. Nevertheless, it does provide him with a few good moments of good-natured fun to poke at the genre.

Will Vinton's The Adventures of Mark Twain

Because of the media savvy of most citizens in the West, thanks to growing up, as we have, with a constant glut of cinematic cliches, it is often easy to accurately assume what a film is going to be like. If we are told, for example, that it is a children's film, then we will often rightly figure on something happy and trite and sugary in its sweetness, and just about as filling as candy. If we can see that it is done in a medium such as Claymation, we may jump to that assumption right away. Now and then, however, we may find our assumption to be altogether mistaken. Indeed, we may find what is ostensibly considered a children's movie that shocks us, not from any snide cynicism or brutality that has come to pass for kids' entertainment, but rather by its profound intelligence and sensitivity. Such is the case with the Claymation animated feature The Adventures of Mark Twain.

Carousel Guest Blog - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

As some may have noticed, I messed up the new schedule and posted two weeks in a row, the last time being last week. In lieu of what should have been today's post, I humbly present a guest post I wrote for Carousel, the official blog of Skyhorse Publishing. They were kind enough to invite me to write a piece on their recent republication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Follow this link to read the article!