Veterans Day is tomorrow, so here’s another World War One post.
BLOOD AND IRON (1917) – Written by Robert Hobart Davis & Perley Poore Sheehan.
Dramatic diesel-punk depiction of advanced technology being used in World War One. In Germany one of the Kaiser’s scientists is experimenting with replacing lost limbs and organs with mechanical replacements.
He has been trying to create cyborgs out of maimed German soldiers from the front lines. Continue reading
Filed under Ancient Science Fiction
Balladeer’s Blog
Recent online discussions among film critics dealt with how the Jurassic Park series could be livened up.
Personally, I think it shot its bolt and should be done and left alone. Filmmakers who still want to deal in large numbers of dinosaurs should start adapting the Pellucidar novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs instead. They’re just begging for modern adaptations!
AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1914) – This tale was originally serialized in several issues of All-Story Weekly in 1914, then was assembled in novel form in 1922. American mining heir David Innes and his much older inventor friend Abner Perry test-drive Abner’s diesel-punk subterranean tunnel-drilling vehicle the Iron Mole.
The pair inadvertently drive the train engine sized vehicle to an Inner Earth realm called Pellucidar in the language of the native inhabitants. Amazed by this find, David and Abner set out on foot to explore some of the rainforest region and realize it is inhabited by thousands of dinosaur species long extinct on the Earth’s surface. Continue reading
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THE DAY OF RESIS (1897) – This sci-fi novel was written by Lillian Frances Mentor. The main character is Enola Cameron, a strong-willed 20-year-old American woman from a well to do family. She purchases a very old goatskin document describing a hidden African kingdom called On.
The goatskin also features a rough map of the route to On. Enola proclaims that men don’t have a monopoly on leading lives of adventure and names herself the commander of a co-ed expedition to find On.
The participants consist of her lady friends, mixed male and female relatives and Henry, who is in love with her. In a gross element common to a lot of stories back then, he is also her cousin. Enola boldly leads the expedition to Africa and a march to the interior.
At length the party reaches the mountain range which supposedly conceals the Kingdom of On. Enola and company manage to find the secret tunnel that leads to the enormous canyon which houses On. Continue reading
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PSI CASSIOPEIA, or STAR: A MARVELOUS HISTORY OF WORLDS IN OUTER SPACE (1854) – Written by Dr Charlemagne Ischer Defontenay, a French M.D. and author. Long before J.R.R. Tolkien churned out obsessive amounts of fine detail about his fictional Middle Earth, Defontenay produced this volume of history, poetry and drama from his fictional planets in the star system Psi Cassiopeia.
The narrator of the story is supposedly translating alien documents which he discovered in an artificial meteor that crashed in the Himalayas. The documents were from a planet called (incongruously enough) “Star.”
The system where that planet is located is a three-star system. Ruliel is the large, white star at the center, around which orbit the two lesser stars Altether (green) and Erragror (blue). The planet called Star is orbited by large planetoids/ moons named Tassul, Lessur, Rudar and Elier. Throwing all science to the winds the planet is also orbited by a small red star called Urrias.
Star and its satellites are inhabited except, of course, for Urrias. The translated documents cover a roughly 1,000 year period of events regarding these worlds. The ancient Starian humanoids formed a united world-wide culture which started as an Empire before becoming a socialist planet economically and politically. The documents also claim that their culture boasted beautiful architecture, incredible feats of engineering and awe-inspiring works of art.
At one point a plague swept the globe, reducing the proud Starian civilization to chaos. A Nihilist Cult formed as the plague kept whittling away at the population over the course of years. In the post-apocalyptic ruins the Nihilists formed a fanatical religion devoted to ending all life on Star. The zealots formed armies which exterminated millions of Starians with the intention of taking their own lives when all non-members of their cult had been wiped out. Continue reading
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WITHIN AN ACE OF THE END OF THE WORLD (1900) – Written by Robert Barr. No doubt about it, Barr was obsessed with the notion of humanity possibly bringing on its own demise through ill-considered scientific tampering. Recently Balladeer’s Blog reviewed another of his stories, The Doom of London, which mined the same creative territory.
This time around the tale is set in the “present” and the near future of 1903. In 1900 a scientist named Bonsel treats a crowd of VIPs to a lavish banquet, after which he announces that all of the food consumed was created artificially. This was done through his new process of drawing nitrogen from the atmosphere and combining it with other chemicals.
Thus the Great Food Corporation is launched, with many of the banquet’s attendees being its initial investors. The company thrives until 1903, when the Guildhall Banquet degenerates into a chaotic bacchanal and partial riot. Soon this “Guildhall Syndrome” spreads, with the most beastly aspects of human nature on display everywhere it manifests.
John Rule, a British gentleman put off by the poor taste of it all, probes deeper and determines that the scandalous orgies and accompanying violence have been caused by an atmospheric imbalance. That imbalance was caused by the Great Food Corporation’s siphoning off of too much nitrogen from Earth’s atmosphere. Continue reading
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THE DOOM OF LONDON (1892) – Written by Robert Barr. In the “far future” of the mid-Twentieth Century the narrator of this tale looks back at the catastrophe that hit London in the 1890s.
The premise is that our narrator is outraged by a piece written by a Professor Mowberry in which the professor ventures the opinion that the destruction of London was an overall beneficial event. His reasoning is that it got rid of millions of unnecessary people. Pretty callous attitude, unless you’re talking about getting rid of the Kardashians.
At any rate we readers are informed that in the mid-Twentieth Century fog has been completely done away with (?), preventing what happened to London in the 1890s from ever happening again. It turns out that what started out seeming to be nothing but the usual London fog was actually deadly gases unleashed from deep in the Earth by careless mining. Continue reading
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THE THAMES VALLEY CATASTROPHE (1884) – Written by Grant Allen. The story is presented in the form of a memoir about the destruction of London as seen from “the futuristic” 20th Century.
“Back” in 1884 a Londoner familiar with lava eruptions and flows that happened in the American West in the past tries – in what would become a trope of later disaster movies – to warn the authorities that danger lurks. Needless to say his warnings go unheeded and lava erupts in the Thames Valley. Continue reading
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THE QUEER SIDE OF THINGS (1890s) – Written by James Frank Sullivan. Straight from the Gay Nineties, it’s a selection of Sullivan’s contributions to the Strand magazine’s short fiction column The Queer Side of Things.
So, before we all find ourselves on Queer Street just because some Dick wants to arrest us for seeming as queer as a clockwork orange, here’s a snatch of J.F.’s work from The Queer Side of Things column.
OLD PROFESSOR WILLETT (December 1892) – Professor Willett announces to his family that his latest invention is going to make all of them rich but refuses to elaborate. Willett disappears after a few days without revealing any more details.
Foul play is suspected and the story’s narrator investigates. It turns out the Professor had devised a highly advanced explosive made from natural fibers. The explosive goes off with no sound and is so rapid its victims seem to simply vanish.
Willett was the first to go during an accident with his invention. Other family members have been perishing/ vanishing, too and the narrator is desperate to save his fiancée – one of the Professor’s daughters – from meeting the same fate. Continue reading
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GULLIVAR JONES ON MARS aka Lt. Gullivar Jones – His Vacation and various other titles and spellings, was published in 1905 and is one VERY odd piece of work. The author was Edwin L. Arnold, whose ineptitude made this novel very unfulfilling as he defeated his storyline at every turn. Before I get into this third and final part of my review of Gullivar Jones on Mars the links to the first two parts are below:
PART ONE – I examined the low-profile feud between fans of Edwin L. Arnold, who maintain that many elements of this novel “influenced” (to say the least) Edgar Rice Burroughs’ later stories about John Carter of Mars, and Burroughs fans. The parallels are many, and I laid them out while also pulling in Arnold’s novel Phra the Phoenician. Click HERE.
PART TWO – I reviewed the first half of Gullivar Jones on Mars, complete with what revisions I would make to correct the way Edwin L. Arnold never failed to sabotage his own work, letting intriguing concepts die on the vine or letting rising tension peter out into lame anticlimax. It’s almost comical how he did that. Click HERE.
GULLIVAR JONES ON MARS: PART THREE OF THREE
MORNING ON THE ISLE OF BEASTS – We pick up the morning after our hero, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Gullivar Jones, survived the night on the Isle of Beasts – my name for the place, since Edwin couldn’t be bothered to provide names for places or characters much of the time. Continue reading
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A VOYAGE TO THE WORLD IN THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH (1755) – This intriguing work was published in London anonymously and no author has yet been decisively identified. The novel’s narrator – who remains as anonymous as the book’s author – parties away his inheritance and then ships out for Italy.
Exploring on Mount Vesuvius our hero accidentally falls into what we readers are eventually told is just one of many holes that lead to the interior of the Earth, where another world awaits. A miraculous landing on a haystack saves the narrator’s life but he finds himself unable to move because of the greater gravity of this interior world.
A friendly inhabitant of the inner Earth applies a chemical salve to our protagonist’s body, a salve which allows him to stand up and move about in the higher gravity. A second salve massaged into the narrator’s body renders him capable of understanding and conversing in the language of Inner Earth. Continue reading
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