Victorian Sci-Fi

Cafe Society
1

It occurred to me a while back that, while I like the so-called Steampunk genre, I’d never read any of the primary texts from it, just stuff ripping it off. I love Victorian sci-fi trappings, but had never read the actual books. So, thanks to the magic of Dover Thrift Editions, I’ve been plowing through these and having a ball.

I love 'em. They’re great fun. I love the elevated language, the graspings at actual science. I love the idea of people walking around on the moon in vests and top hats. They’re great stories and a lot of fun.

So far I’ve read:

The Invisible Man (H. G. Wells)

Around the World in 80 Days (Jules Verne)

First Men in the Moon (Wells)

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (R. L. Stevenson)

War of the Worlds (Wells)

The Lost World (Arthur Conan Doyle)

Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Verne)

and I’m currently on A Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs). In My stack to read are still Journey to the Center of the Earth (Verne), Dracula (Bram Stoker), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), a Cthulhu collection (H. P. Lovecraft), and The Time Machine (Wells).
(I’ve expanded a little bit beyond Victoriana, as you can see.)

I still need to get From the Earth to the Moon and The Mysterious Island (Verne). Since, with Burroughs, I’ve gone into pulp adventures as well, I also would like to get some Doc Savage and Tarzan. And whatever I can find for the character of Alain Quatermass.

It’s great fun, and I welcome any other suggestions. I had read Sherlock Holmes before (several times) and always enjoy them. (Yeah, I know that’s not sci-fi.)

As for the modern stuff, Alan Moore’s wonderful mini-series, The League of Extraodrinary Gentlemen was a big tip off on stuff to read.

This is all, in theory, source material for a role-playing game I’d like to run based on the Feng Shui system called “Steam-Fu”.

So anyway, just wanted to do a little shout out to all my Victorian homies. Even Verne, who came up with possibly the worst ending to a book since Huck Finn. I’ll pour a 40 of Absinthe on the curb for all y’all. Word, old chaps, word.

2

I recommend “The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” to help you make selections. Well-researched, informative, impartial. I never open it without finding several interesting things.

For the second time today I’ll recommend Project Gutenberg, which has several of Verne’s works, including “The Mysterious Island”. One great thing about Gutenberg is that someone liked a book so much they were willing to transcribe the whole thing without being paid! So I’ve noticed that real clunkers tend to be absent.

http://promo.net/pg/history.html

3

I presume you mean “Allan Quatermain,” not “Alain Quatermass.”

4

You must read Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy! A guy falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find a socialist utopia. A great little read.

5

Check out the sequels to The Lost World , also by Doyle:

[ul]
[li]The Poison Belt[/li][li]The Land Of Mist[/li][li]The Disintegration Machine[/li][li]When The World Screamed[/li][/ul]

Also, try Sherlock Holmes’ War Of The Worlds. Stars Holmes, Watson, & Professor Challenger.

Finally, War Of The Worlds: Global Dispatches is well worth your time.

Enjoy!

6

To which Verne book are you referring? I’ve read all the ones on your list, and I didn’t think that any of them ended particularly badly.

By the way, I think that you’re thinking of Tom Sawyer, not Huck Finn. Huck had a fairly plausible ending, I thought, but the ending of Tom came perilously close to ruining all the main characters.

7

The Verne book I’m talking about is 20,000 Leagues.

“Oh no! A whirlpool!”
[scene missing]
“Whew! Somehow we survived! I don’t know if Captian Nemo is dead. THE END!”

Huh?

And no, it’s Huck I’m talking about. The end sequence with Tom Sawyer’s entrance and the rescue of Jim is notorious for putting a damp squib on a great book.

8

I just went back and looked at the end. Apparently nemo had been mortally wounded and wanted to take take the ship with him. He sails north to the Norwegian Maelstrom and the three heros surivive by abandoning ship at the last moment.

Hell, I’m still trying to figure out mysterious island. It takes place before 20,000 leagues (during the civil war), but he dies during the book and everyone seems to know who he is, IIRC.

9

This thread was perched under Chronos’ Resolved: The Holodeck was not overused and I was compelled to remark on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode(s)

Elementary, Dear Data
12/03/88 – Stardate: 42286.3
SOS Rating: 7.1 – Tim Lynch’s Rating: none

In the guise of Sherlock Holmes, Data is faced with solving a holodeck mystery that could mean life or death for Dr. Pulaski.

Ship in a Bottle
01/23/93 – Stardate: 46424.1
SOS Rating: 8.1 – Tim Lynch’s Rating: 10.0

While running a diagnostic check on the holodeck, Barclay accidentally calls up the image of Sherlock Holmes’s archrival, Moriarity, who has long been abandoned in the holodeck memory and now proceeds to walk right out of the holodeck.

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/3098/tng-06.htm

10

I love Verne – 've got an entire bookshelf devoted to him. Most of his stuff has been translated into English, but recently it’s been hard to find – th guy wrote about 70 books or so, and most of them aren’t well known. Interestingly, there are little-known sequels to some of them. From th Earth to th Moon has as its sequel ** Around the Moon**, but few people know hat this book had its oewn sequel, The Purchase of th North Pole. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had The mysterious Island as a sequel, and there is a sequel yet to that – The cHildren of Captain Grant (AKA In Search of the Castaways) All three of these last mentioned have been filmed (two by Disney!), so you could have a Verne film marathon of connected stories.

In the 1960s Ace books published lot of translations of Verne, so scour the used book shops for them (and not just the “Fitzroy” editions – they also brought out Off on a Comet and The Purchase of the North Pole at that time). About the same time, smeone reprinted all of his works in english editions in hardcover.

If you can find them, Walter James Millr’s Anotated edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to th Moon are great – you learn how the turn-of-the-century translators butchered Verne’s work, cutting out up to a third of his material and mistranslating the rest (!)
Lovecraft is great, but it’s stretching things to call him “Victorian”.
I second The Encyclopedia of Scince Fiction as a guide, but also have a look at Sam Moskowitz’ Explorers of the Infinite – a good guide to early SF. Who would’ve thought that Edard Everett Hale (who wrote “The Man ithout a Country”) wrote the first novel about an artificial satellite (The Brick Moon)?

11

Good Book!

12

Try some more of H.G.Wells. In addition to the “TIME MACHINE” try reading “MEN LIKE GODS”, and another obscure one-“THE ONE-EYED KING”. Wells is surely underrated, and his sci-fi is interesting because he wrote at the end of the Victorian era, when many of the things that Jules Verne wrote about were becoming reality.

13

(underlining mine) I would skip that one. It was written during Doyle’s Spiritualism period. In other words, it is the literary equivalent of a John Edwards show.

Although written by modern authors. If you are still interested, you should add Christophe Priest’s The Space Machine, a mix of Wells’ The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.

For another book of the period, you might try to find Bulwer-Lytton’s (of It was a dark and stormy night… fame) The Race to Come about an underground civilization.

14

ralph 124c writes:

> Wells is surely underrated . . .

On what planet is Wells underrated? He’s always mentioned as one of the two most important writers of science fiction in the period before 1926 (when it got identified and named as a separate genre).

I know of the following pastiches of either The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds:

J. M. Dillard War of the Worlds: The Resurrection
Christopher Priest The Space Machine
George H. Smith The Second War of the Worlds
George Pal and Joe Morham Time Machine II
K. W. Jeter Morlock Night
Egon Friedell The Return of the Time Machine
Stephen Baxter The Time Ships
Ronald Wright A Scientific Romance
Manly W. Wellman and Wade Wellman Sherlock Holmes’s War of the World

CalMeacham writes:

> Lovecraft is great, but it’s stretching things to call
> him “Victorian”.

For that matter, only Verne, Bulwer-Lytton, Stevenson, and Bellamy among the people mentioned in this thread are clearly Victorian. Shelley wrote before Victoria became queen. Wells, Stoker, and Doyle wrote at the end of the Victorian period, but their careers continued well into the twentieth century. Burroughs and Lovecraft didn’t even start writing until Queen Victoria had been dead for over a decade.

15

Eggs, Tars.
Dejan Thoris (sp) and the other Martians were hatched.

So, how did Carter…well, if there isn’t…what…
Never mind.

Working on Gods of Mars at the moment.

16

Well, you gotta fertilize the egg somehow…

17

Not literally, but his style was somewhat Victorian (or at least that was his intent). He felt he was born 100 years too late.

18

You might want to check out more of the lesser-known writers of this period… some of the stuff is pretty much unobtainable, but, on the other hand, some of it is downloadable on the web. Brian Stableford’s article Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (published in Vector 130, 1986) is a good jumping off point…

… can’t find it online. Can’t find anything online; all my favourite web addresses have vanished from my brain. I blame lack of caffeine…

19

This is a recent (1970’s) pastiche by Manley Wade Wellman; very enjoyable. (Holmes has also been put together with Dracula and with Dr. Jeckyll by modern writers; don’t know if he’s ever been set upon the Invisible Man.)

I remember a great anthology of 19th century short stories called Science Fiction by Gaslight, edited by Sam Moskowitz. Fun stuff.

20

To say that Wells, Stoker, and Doyle weren’t Victorian because they continued wrirting after the death of the Queen is a most peculiar usage. Most folks would call someone whose successes came during the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain “Victorian”, regardless of when they died or ceased working.