stdesjardins

Not too much reading this week, partly because I watched through the BBC adaptations of Strong Poison and Have His Carcase -- excellent, though with less glorious dressing gown content than Ian Carmichael. And also because I was waiting for my library hold on An Academic Affair to come it, which it has, though I am now probably just saving it for upcoming travel.. But on the other hand I have some interesting stuff to report on!

The Tachypomp and Other Stories by Edward Page Mitchell. These are science fiction short stories published between 1874 and 1881 in the New York Sun, most of which were published anonymously and then forgotten until they were collected and published in 1970. They are interesting not just because they introduced a lot of now-familiar tropes in SF, but also generally ertertaining to read. They are written from a straight male perspective with fairly conventional gender roles, though midway Mitchell figures out how to write female characters who can't just be replaced by sexy lamps. Compared to later American SF

I discovered it because I've been curious for a while about the history of time travel fiction, and learned about The Clock that Ran Backward is the first known example of a backwards time travel story. The characters travel back in time to help out at the 1574 siege of Leyden, and the main thing that differentiates it from modern examples of the genre is that it has more references to Hegelian philosophy to justify the timey-wimeyness.

The title story, The Tachypomp, is the only one that was publshed non-anonymously, and I'd previously read it in the collection Fantasia Mathematica. It starts out with a lot of the narrator doing a lot of grumbling that he's not a math person, but then the plot is essentially an extended word problem/thought experiment (with shades of relativity, though this predates Einstein). I did remember the detail that the mad scientist's lodgings contained a hole that went all the way through the earth, into which he would drop unwanted creditors.

In some ways the most interesting and unique story is possibly The Senator's Daughter, written in 1879 and set in a future 1937. The last piece of period futurism I read, The Affairs of John Bolsover by Una Silberrad, suffered from having a future that was not very different from the past. This one errs in the other direction. First, in the usual way of having an excess of futuristic technology some of which is still science-ficiona. But also, you can tell that it was written before the Chinese Exclusion Act, because it's imagining a future where East Asian immigration to the US has influenced the culture to the point that one of the two major parties is the "Mongol-Vegetarians". But while the whole premise is weird, ultimately the story's sympathies are against racism, and I didn't cringe too much.