The Conversion of the Professor by George Chetwyn Griffith

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well — that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time.

This quote by the Edwardian Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton nicely articulates the central problem in George Chetwyn Griffith's The Conversion of the Professor: A Tale of the Fourth Dimension. Published in the May 1899 edition of Pearson's Magazine, the author of A Honeymoon in Space and The Angel of the Revolution introduces us to a British high society melodrama. Poor Miss Idris Lincoln, B.Sc. wishes to marry Mr. Frederick Herne, a solid, good, and faithful man though not of Miss Lincoln's intellectual caste. Standing between them is her father Professor Lincoln, who is taken with near-religious fervor for eugenic ideas. Humane entreaties of romantic passion hold no sway over the man of genius who adheres to the laws of natural selection as he understands them.

When not occupied with family drama, the esteemed professor's attentions are consumed by calculations which may open up to him the mysteries of the Fourth Dimension, that great unknown beyond our three dimensions. These explorations are oddly mystical... They are opened up not by a machine of some devising, but through symbols and sigils and equations. But by whatever means he achieves the Fourth Dimension, what he learns there will transform his life and the lives of everyone around him.

The full text of The Conversion of the Professor follows, as it was published in Pearson's Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.    

Master of the Octopus by Edward Olin Weeks

The inventive genius of the 19th century must, of course, contend with the rapacious interests of 19th century robber-barons. In The Master of the Octopus, published in the October 1899 Pearson's Magazine,  Edward Olin Weeks describes the tragic encounter between the two over a perpetual light machine. Click on the pages for a larger version.

The Tables Turned by E.E. Kellett

It can be a hard afterlife out there for a ghost. A proper appointment to a lucrative position can be difficult to come by, especially in a skeptical age. That is where the narrator of our story The Tables Turned comes in. His job is placing ghosts with needful clients... Though it isn't without its challenges. One customer can't seem to keep his house haunted, and the reasons why become apparent with the tragedy of the most recent applicant to the position.

Written by E.E. Kellett, The Tables Turned appeared in the January 1903 edition of Pearson's Magazine. Click on the page for a larger version.

Announcing "Science Fiction of the Gay Nineties: An Anthology - 1890-1910"

 The latest in my series of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances has been released!

To the generation that came of age during the horrors of the World Wars, the Turn of the Century took on a nostalgic life of its own. 

Strolling ladies with bustles, parasols, and feathered hats. Men in dapper suits, straw boaters, and handlebar moustaches. Barbershop quartets singing “Sweet Adeline” and “In the Good Old Summertime.” Penny-farthing bicycles weaving between horse-drawn trolleys and newfangled horseless carriages. Thomas Edison’s latest invention. The town marching band playing in the park bandstand. Colourful Queen Anne homes accented with gingerbread trim. Gibson Girls staring indolently from the pages of Life and Harper’s. Casey at the bat. Ice wagons and ice boxes and ice cream parlours. Dime novels and dime stores. Vaudeville shows. Ragtime music. Silent movies. Party-line telephones. Suffragettes in green and purple sashes. Old fashioned rowboat dates. Gaslit evenings on Main Street. These happy days of youth before The Great War, The Spanish Flu, The Roaring Twenties, and The Great Depression were the “Gay Nineties.”

The real 1890’s and 1900’s were an era of change and a cornucopia of invention, which lead inevitably to fictional tales of scientific discovery and technological progress in the popular magazines of the era. This volume reprints the lost science fiction of Pearson’s, The Century, The Black Cat, and Cosmopolitan, featuring over a dozen tales by such celebrated authors as Mark Twain, Ellis Parker Butler, Herbert Quick, and George Chetwyn Griffith.

To order Science Fiction of the Gay Nineties: An Anthology - 1890-1910, visit Amazon or click on the image above. If you can also share this post or the link on your social networks, leave a review on Amazon, and rate Science Fiction of the Gay Nineties, 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.

The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis

The Monster of Lake LaMetrie is an early Weird Western tale and one of the earliest extant examples of truly Weird Fiction applied to the Western, rather than "merely" inputting a scientific or supernatural concept. Published in Pearson's Magazine in September 1899, this short story by Wardon Allan Curtis, it is subtitled as Being the narration of James McLennegan, M.D., Ph.D. and is framed as the extracts from a diary sent to Professor Wilhelm G. Breyfogle, University of Taychobera, from McLennegan by way of Captain Arthur W. Fairchild of the US Army. 

McLennegan, being a scientist and having heard of strange occurrences in Lake LaMetrie, takes trip up to these high Wyoming regions with his constitutionally ill friend Edward Framingham. On McLennegan's part, the appeal is a phenomenon of bubbling and broiling at intervals in the lake's middle, after which are found odd specimens of plant and animal washed ashore. The plants are those that might only be found today in coal fossil deposits. The fish populating the lake are bony ganoid types long-extinct. Framingham, an intelligent and astute person with a scientific mind, is admittedly more interested in the fishing and the rarefied air in which he hopes to find relief from his dyspepsia.

There is little rest to be had after McLennegan makes his great discovery. A flitting at his elbow causes him to lash out with his machete, nearly severing the head of a massive Elasmosaurus. It rose, he believes, during the particularly violent flooding and broiling of the night before and confirms for him the suspicion that the lake is somehow connected to the primordial interior of the earth. Nevertheless, he now has one dead Elasmosaurus in danger of lashing out in its death throes, so he removes it brain for study.

The shock comes when he finds the beast still alive days later. It is lying on the beach where he dissected it, but it is still breathing and, furthermore, the wound in its head is healing. So durable and primitive is this marine reptile's physiology that it may very well survive the removal of its brain! Another happenstance pulls this experiment into Frankenstein territories: Framingham, overcome with his worst bout of fever yet, attempts to kill himself with a slash across the neck. He only partially succeeds, for his body will die but his brain lives yet. Given a living Elasmosaur body without a brain and a man's brain with a dying body, McLennegan does the only logical thing.

What follows is a brief but surreal exploration of Victorian anxieties about evolution and the distance between the human intellect and bestial instinct. The Monster of Lake LaMetrie is also a provocative metaphor for the uncivilized character of Western expansionism. Though the Wild West was not so wild as legend makes out - the most deaths any one town saw during the whole settlement era was five, and the year of the Gunfight at the OK Corral was Tombstone's bloodiest ever with a deathtoll of three - it was still a rough and unforgiving existence. It could take the brightest minds and, as though transplanting them into a prehistoric monster, preoccupy them with the basest needs of survival. That is until the civilizing powers of the government and the military pacify the landscape.

Without further ado, Wardon Allan Curtis' The Monster of Lake LaMetrie as it appeared in Pearson's Magazine... Click on each page for a larger version.