Marilyn J Evans' Blog

January 11, 2024

The Empty Table

My favorite Christmas movie is the 1951 film Scrooge (as it was called in England, but A Christmas Carol in the U.S.) starring the wonderful Alistair Sim. And my favorite scene, and I am not alone in this, is when Scrooge steps into the room adjacent to his bedchamber. and sees the entire room decked with greenery and a huge man dressed in a fur-trimmed robe, the Ghost of Christmas Present, enthroned upon “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” That is how Dickens describes him in the original 1843 story. A fire roars in the fireplace, and further light comes from the torch the Ghost holds that is shaped not unlike a cornucopia. This is the feast that is Christmas. And who does not try in some way to keep the feast, whatever winter holiday you celebrate?

Feasting is integral to our winter holidays, and in fact, to most celebrating of any sort. Yet in the United States, according to a November 29, 2023, report from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, in 2022, 12.8 percent of U.S. households were food insecure at least some time during the year, meaning they had difficulty providing enough food for all their members. That translates to about 44 million people, 13 million of whom are children. And why, in the richest country in the world would that be?

I just finished reading Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted. In the book, Desmond re-examines the debate about how and why poverty exists in America. The good news is, poverty can be defeated. The bad news is, the U.S. isn’t doing it–at least not very well, not as well as other developed nations. The Washington Post tells me 15 states with Republican governors have refused U.S. government funding for summer food programs for children who depend on school lunches the rest of the year to feed them. The reasons vary from, why do this when there is an obesity problem in the U.S. to “I don’t believe in welfare”. Meanwhile, children go hungry.

It has been argued that famine is not the result of lack of food but of the lack of distribution. In fact, the first food aid programs in 1939 were to help farmers during the Great Depression who could not sell their excess harvests and to get the food that would otherwise go to waste to people who were malnourished or even starving.

In my house, I have this strange idea that no one, man nor beast, should be hungry. We feed the birds, plant things that provide forage and nectar, compost our food scraps that help keep the opossum fat, donate to Harvesters, and worry over whether the little spider that lives behind the trash can in the bathroom has enough tiny bugs in the winter to get by. We take food to neighbors and gratefully receive it from them in return. Food is love, to be shared. It is also the most basic of human necessities. Droughts and floods destroy crops but not in every part of the world all at once. Those disasters can be mitigated by people of good will who recognize the need and find a way to help.

The use of food as a weapon of war, or as political leverage is beyond the bounds of human decency. People in Gaza and Ukraine should not starve. People in poor neighborhoods, urban or rural, should not go without. There is plenty of food, if only we share it, find ways to distribute it, make it available through food assistance, community gardens, donations.

Scrooge, in the end, finds his heart and learns to share the bounty of Christmas all the year. Our winter feasting may end when we decided to get back on that diet and lose a few pounds, but sharing our feast throughout the year with those who are hungry should never end.

Image: No food. By Marilyn Evans

December 10, 2023

Write What You Know and Other Bad Advice

Most books, web sites, and instructors that are trying to teach you about writing have some tired old saws that they trot out and are certain, and think you should be too, that they are the gospel for writers. Baloney, say I. Here are some of my quibbles with conventional wisdom.

Write what you know. The problem is, this implies you should write only what you have personally experienced. Agatha Christie, as far as I have been able to discern, never killed anyone. But she knew about village life so Miss Marple has all the right moves. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t personally know any elves, orcs, or dragons, but he knew a lot about ordinary folk facing extraordinary times from his experiences during World War I, and he had a deep and wide knowledge of European languages and mythologies all of which informed his writing. He did write what he knew, but in ways unrecognizable from his own personal experiences. Early on, Dick Francis wrote about the horse racing world that he knew so well, but he and his wife loved researching new and interesting worlds, and these filled his later works. I have written before about the importance of research. So the questions is, what do you know? You know what you’ve experienced yourself, what you’ve learned from many sources, what you can imagine, dream, create. But if you’re going to write something you don’t necessarily know personally, you can ground that in what you do know–family relations, small town or city life, love, unhappiness, all the rest of human experience. That grounding will make it real. And it never hurts to find a reviewer who has experience with your topic, if you can find one. But if you created the world you are writing in, you are the expert. Use your expertise to know and write about that world.

Another morsel of universal truth, get a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White and adhere to it religiously. Hogwash. The book was published in 1935 by Oliver Strunk and E. B. White who was at the time a student in Professor Strunk’s class at Cornell. That’s the E. B. White of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Problem is, writing has changed a lot since the 1930’s. There is actually a 4th edition published in 1999, and it may have been sufficiently updated to make it more relevant to today’s styles, but the best place to find guidance for how to write is from the publishers you are trying to get to publish your work. They will often cite on their submission page a reference for their preferred style. By all means, get a copy of Elements and read it, but know what you’re getting into. Be aware that times change and so do writing styles and the rules of engagement.

No head hopping. This is the idea that you have to tell the story from one person’s point of view for any given scene. It is not bad advice because it’s less confusing for the reader, but honestly if you are careful, you can tell us what more than one person is thinking in a scene if that is required to tell your story. Jane Austen was able to pull this off, but if you’re not as good a writer as she is, you might avoid, if you can, jumping from one point of view to another within a scene. Still, if it works for the story you are trying to tell, give it a shot.

A million times you will be told: show, don’t tell. Have the action tell the story, not someone telling you what happened. It’s usually good advice, but sometimes you gotta tell folks what is going on and showing them is too darned complicated. But you can tell using clever devices, like Holmes explaining things to Watson. The trusty sidekick or the Everyman who has to have things explained to him (and to us, the readers) is a common device for telling what’s going on. Yes, telling, not showing.

We’ve already discussed Don’t Kill the Dog. But sometimes you have to. You just better have a really good reason. But, you are told, kill your darlings. Killing your darlings is when you have to get rid of some part or character or line in your work that just doesn’t fit or is jarringly out of place. It might have worked at one time, or maybe you worked really hard on it and you’re really proud of it, but it sticks out like a sore thumb and detracts from the rest of the story. The thing is, you don’t necessarily have to kill your dearest. You might just need to rehome her. Write a story where she fits in, where she makes the story work around her. Or give her a makeover so she fits in as she should in your existing story. In the end, it might be that she simply won’t cooperate. Then, by all means, murder her.

There are a lot of other writing rules that might not necessarily be bad advise, but you really should think about them and challenge them if that is essential to your creative process. My point is, advice is not law. If your way of telling the story requires you to ignore, bend, break, mutilate, or otherwise commit outrage on the rules of writing, by all means, give it a try. If it’s bad or your editor becomes apoplectic, you can reconsider and rewrite. But pushing the boundaries can lead to new and innovative creations. You have my permission to push the boundaries. But maybe not your publishers’. They, for good or evil, have the last say.

November 25, 2023November 26, 2023

Keeping Heart

I had a good time at Reroll Tavern last Sunday for a novelists night. M.S. Chambers and I were the guest authors, and there were readings of works in progress by some of the attendees. I must say, these folks were impressive. I sincerely hope they continue writing and share their talent with the rest of us when they finish their works. I want to read the final products.

After my talk, one gentleman asked how do you keep from getting discouraged. My response was that I had a husband, two cats, a horse, and a garden. Also, I sew a lot. But he really deserved a better answer than that. Here is something that I hope will address his question.

If you submit, you will very likely get rejected–a lot. There are probably millions of submissions to various places every day. The chances of everything you write getting accepted the first time is minuscule. Plan for that. The story goes that Stephen King had a spike where he impaled every rejection he got. It was really, really deep in rejections early in his writing life. His wife, Tabitha, famously retrieved Carrie from the trash can. You will reject things, editors will reject things. There are reasons for this. It helps to know what those are.

You may reject something because you think it isn’t good enough or you’re sick of it or you think it’s too much trouble to fix. That’s giving up. Don’t do it. Set it aside, sure, but come back to it and make it right. Then submit it.

Editors reject things for a lot of reasons. Some you have control over. Some you don’t. If the story or book is wrong for that magazine, anthology, publisher, you’ll get rejected. Prevent that by knowing what the magazine or publisher wants before you waste their time and yours. They will clearly tell you on their website or their call for submissions what they are looking for, even sometimes what they will reject outright and what will be a hard sell. The happy accident happens when you have written a story that you like a lot and for no particular reason, then you see a call for submissions that is an exact fit. This happened with my short story, “Heart and Minds”.

Sometimes the work just isn’t good enough. You can rethink, rewrite, rework it until it is. Sometimes the market has changed. If you’re not keeping track, you may get left behind. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has changed so much in its 74 years that my husband, who subscribed for decades, no longer reads it. He’s gone elsewhere. You can too.

Some things you have no control over. Because we are all so connected by social media, television, books, movies, and in a thousand other ways, there is a zeitgeist that may inspire similar ideas in writers at the same time. When an editor gets three submissions of very similar stories, and they’ve already accepted the first one, you’ll be left in the dust, not because your story wasn’t great and a finger on the pulse of the universe, but because someone got there first. Try somewhere else. Sometimes submissions will close because there are so many that the editors have stopped accepting new ones. When a call for submissions on a theme for an anthology rejects your specially written work, let it rest a bit, reexamine it, see if it needs some tweaking to make it less specific, and send it someplace else. This happened with “Between”, a short story I wrote for an anthology but wasn’t a good fit for that group of stories. It has now been accepted by another anthology. Mind you, I rewrote it and submitted it several places until I found just the right fit.

You’ll notice a theme here: keep submitting. J. K. Rowling sent her first Harry Potter book to about a million publishers before it was accepted. Persevere. Somebody somewhere will want that story, if it’s well written and interesting.

When I worked in a research lab, sometimes our experiments would take years to get us to the point we could write up the results. Talk about delayed gratification. My way of dealing with that was to have hobbies that gave me instant gratification. I still have those hobbies.

You will get discouraged. Commiserate with family and friends and other authors, get back to work, if required, and keep submitting. You probably won’t get rich or famous, but you’ll have done something you (hopefully) love, and eventually, someday, you’ll see your name in print.

Image: Novelists Night at Reroll Tavern. By the manager, Russell.

November 17, 2023November 17, 2023

Brevity, the Soul of Wit

I just found out one of my flash fiction pieces has been accepted for publication. Mind you, it’s probably going to be a really long time before it shows up, like a year and a half or so. Still, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. The publisher is Vine Leaves Press. They electronically publish a story every day–they call them 50 Give or Take, and the stories are, you guessed it, 50 words more or less. In Novembers they publish an anthology of the stories from the past year or so. Mine apparently will show up in the 2024 anthology, but maybe not. It’s story number 1436. As of this morning they hadn’t broken 1100. I don’t mind, really. Getting published is a waiting game, decidedly not for the impatient.

I sometimes wonder why I like writing short stories and flash fiction. I suspect it’s because I’m lazy. Still, writing a good story of whatever length takes work. My novels, Beloved Lives and The Ginger Bread House (the latter currently being reviewed by a publisher), aren’t epic 100,000 word tomes. Wasting Water wasn’t even a novel. I’m suspecting Wickham’s Daughter is going to be a lot longer just because there is so much story to tell, but it’s not my usual modus operandi. The other novels still in the doodling phase of development may or may not be longish. It’s hard to tell at this stage.

The cool thing about writing short stories and flash fiction is that you are creating a little jewel, self contained and concise. The characters don’t take a lot of side streets and get lost. They go where they need to and do what they need to do. You tell their whole story in a snapshot. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a flash piece, usually less than a thousand words, shows a moment in time, a significant event contained within a careful word count where each word matters.

During this National Write a Novel in a Month November, I’ve taken a little detour from writing my current novel to jot down a flash piece that has been stirring around in my mind for more than a year. Just because flash pieces are short doesn’t mean you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them, developing them, writing, rewriting, and visiting them again and again. I am pretty lazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t work at writing when my muse pokes me. And she can be a real pain.

Now, back to the novel.

Image: Small things. By Marilyn Evans

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023

Why We Bother

Halloween is nearly here, and it’s time to evaluate this year’s harvest. And possibly think about gratitude for what the past season has brought me. Or not. Spoiler alert–it wasn’t my greatest ever harvest.

Whenever I read about someone who claims to have fed his or her whole family from a four by eight garden bed, I laugh. You have to wonder what they were eating during that time. Cherry tomatoes and turnips? Zucchini? I may not have a particularly green thumb (on occasion I’ve claimed I have a plaid thumb because my results are so wildly erratic), but I know that even with a green house and great care, you’re not going to get a whole summer’s worth, much less a whole year of food out of one four by eight bed for even a family of three.

A hunter-gatherer, depending on the climate and vegetative coverage, needs from seven to five hundred square miles to subsist. Obviously, gardening is intended to concentrate that food so you don’t have to range over miles to get your fruit and vegetables, but four by eight feet? I doubt it. Except, perhaps if you are a zucchinitarian subsisting solely on that vegetable. It is a well know fact that zucchini exist in only two states: none or too many.

My folks had a huge garden and fought off deer and other critters. They managed to grow a lot of food, but what and how much varied a lot from year to year. My garden consists of three four-by-eight beds and LOTS of pots. Even when I am able to fight off the squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, opossums, raccoons, birds, and assorted bugs, my yields can vary from so many cucumbers that I chase down people on the street and force vegetables on them, to nothing at all. One year I had so much chard that I was freezing bags of it, and the next it didn’t come up at all. This year, I only got it to grow in a planter, and it was puny at best. Also this year, I planted eggplants twice and eventually got three plants that didn’t even start blooming until late September. So far, they have produced nothing but one eggplant that is the size of a pea. After the rabbits ate the baby sunflower plants to the ground, I replanted (with sturdy fencing) and got some nice sunflowers that the birds thought were a really nice treat, thank you very much. I have enough Hungarian wax peppers that there will be a lot of goulash in my future, but the pablanos were a complete bust. So, you may ask yourself (I certainly ask myself), why bother? The supermarket is so much easier and even, one might argue, cheaper (cue the jokes about the $50 tomato).

The answers to why bother for me are as follows. 1) After three attempts, I finally got two tomato plants to survive into productivity, one of which made a few perfect, aromatic, delicious tomatoes every week or so. Those tomatoes, carefully fenced against all manner of beasts, made a salad or sandwich taste like paradise. 2) Remember Schrödinger’s potatoes–the tops of the plants were lush and green with lots of blossoms? Were there potato tubers underneath those plants or not? Until I dug up the plants, I couldn’t know. As luck would have it, I had a nice little crop of potatoes–not enough to feed a family of three or four, but enough for a few meals. That potato patch took up just about half of one four by eight bed. 3) Two pepper plants, one a Serrano and one a Hungarian wax, have made enough peppers that I’ve used them as needed, and I’m keeping the rest in the freezer for later use. 4) I harvested enough green beans, a small handful at a time, to freeze a few and to eat as a side dish from time to time. 5) The radishes never made any radishes, but the seed pods were delicious pickled. 6) The one and only little bitty cantaloupe that made it to ripeness (produced on a prodigious vine) was aromatic and richly sweet. 7) One of the four blueberry bushes made a few berries every day, and they were lovely. And the gooseberry bushes were wonderfully generous. 8) My third planting of sage produced nice perennial plants that will last me for years, the basil plants survived after the second planting, the volunteer dill was a treat, the oregano, mint, and thyme still look great, and the bay tree came back from the brink of death. There is nothing like walking out the door and gathering herbs to bring into your kitchen. And finally 9) the cucumber plants made more than I could eat, more than I could pickle, and more than I could give away. Seems like there is always one overachiever.

I’m probably not going to save any money by growing my own food, nor am I going to feed myself and others (except maybe critters) by the sweat of my brow. But being in the garden is its own reward, and its own lesson in survival, life and death, gratitude, and why everyone needs a breeding pair of pine martens–they eat squirrels.

Image: Cucumber that died of exhaustion. By Marilyn Evans

September 18, 2023

What Are Friends For?

For a while now, I’ve been a fan of Michael Brecht, one of the premier rat ticklers in the world. His lab in Berlin studies play and the brain, in part by tickling rats. When rats play with each other, whether it’s hide-and-seek or wrestling with lots of tickling, they make sounds that are the ratty equivalent of giggling. Play isn’t really well understood in humans or other animals though there is good research going on in the field by Brecht and others. What has been learned so far is that play is pretty important to health, happiness, and sanity. When you have friends and family you can play with, that’s a good thing at any stage of life.

One branch of my family is into board games. Another is all over jigsaw puzzles as a team sport. My immediate family liked card games, among other pursuits. I’m pretty sure I played enough games of Spades with my friends in the student union during undergraduate school to have earned a minor in it. That is at least one good reason to have friends: they are who we play with, and that makes us happy.

What else are friends good for? Dan Buettner, explorer and author, found that in the Blue Zones, the places on Earth where unusually large numbers of people live in good health into their 100’s, having friends is a major contributor to their longevity. Friendships with people who have similar interests and goals, and sustaining those friendships often for decades can contribute to a long and happy life.

But if happiness and longevity aren’t good enough reasons to have friends, how about mutual aid? Lifting a tree off your shed after a wind storm can be pretty daunting, but friends can literally make the load lighter. Who do you call when your car breaks down? AAA, sure, but you might also call a friend. You can hire a service for practically everything these days, but it’s nice to have a friend drop you at the airport and a friendly face greet you when you come home again. Friends help each other out, and you need never fear that you are alone in facing the world.

A friend of mine who just had some pretty major surgery is staying with us for a couple of weeks while he gets through doctor’s appointments and recovery. I can’t imagine not being with a friend or close family member under these circumstances. That’s what friends are for. And friends are for telling you when you really, really need to take a bath, or for warning you not to invest in that dodgy deal, or for begging you to get the heck out of that job before it kills you. Of course, friends can get nosy and can intrude too much, but wouldn’t you rather have an honest opinion from someone who really cares about you than a whole lot of polite indifference while you careen toward the edge of disaster?

So who are these friends, anyway? My cats like to play with me. Cat tickling can be a rather bloody affair, so instead we enjoy hide-and-go-eek and pounce-a-boo, though, like Calvin Ball, I’m not sure anyone really knows what the rules are. Doesn’t matter. They make us laugh in our own ways. And Mikey sits with me in companionable silence in the evenings and sometimes brings me mice for breakfast (though they really aren’t on my diet, I appreciate the effort). My best friend, of course, is my amazing husband, but there are many others. Some of my friends are holdovers from my working days, some I have worshiped with, some are neighbors. I have friends who live close by and others continents away.

And what do we owe our friends? I would say to advise without intrusion, suggest without dictating, watch each others backs, make each other’s bail, help hide the body…. Well, maybe not that last one. But certainly we need to care for and about our friends and to make them laugh, with or without the tickling.

Image: Jan, Chris and me, hanging in the desert. Photographer unknown.

August 30, 2023August 30, 2023

Barbenheimer and Cocaine Bears

Those who follow me regularly know I love movies. I love them so much that I am fascinated by how they are made. Best thing about getting a DVD is the bonus material on “the making of”. Though I loved everything Dick Francis wrote, I especially loved his novel Wild Horses about the madness that is making a movie.

Since I’ve been reading about how to write screen plays, I’ve seen a whole new dimension to how a movie comes into being. The amazing Blake Snyder in his series of Save the Cat! books on writing screen plays tells what a person needs to know to get the bones of a movie into writing. Sadly, Mr. Snyder died in 2009, but his books and methods are as popular as ever.

As I’ve said in this blog before, when you have a new way of seeing things, suddenly all the world is new. I’ve begun to think about all the stories that “would make a great screen play!” If only that were true.

I recently watched Cocaine Bear. It was every bit as terrible and wonderful, hilarious and disgusting as you might imagine. And, yes, I have committed Barbenheimer, not all at once like some brave souls, but about a week apart. I can’t make a stand on which one to watch first, but as it happens, I saw Oppenheimer first. It was a great movie, but only part of that had to do with the script. It was visually stunning along with sound, acting, timing, all the bits that come together to make a movie happen well when it all comes together. Barbie had a very clever script and amazing sets. I have to confess, I was slightly disappointed and can’t exactly put my finger on why–perhaps because the pacing in the middle fell apart a bit. Still, the opening sequence alone was priceless.

The tricky thing about movies is they are such a collaboration. Even with great actors, a bad director can scupper the whole thing. Bad editing, inappropriate or lifeless score and sound, lousy effects all can hurt an otherwise great movie. Mr. Snyder points to the Tomb Raider sequel as an example of a movie that just didn’t work because we couldn’t care about the main character. Everything else can be right, but a “so what?” lead in his opinion doomed the end result. The poor performance at the box office bears him out.

I’ve begun to see patterns in movies and television shows that meet the requirements for the” beats” that must come to keep the story interesting. You might suspect that would be a problem like seeing the strings making the puppets dance across the stage. Instead, it fascinates me. I suspect it’s going to make me a better author of books and stories in general. Mind you, I haven’t gotten very deep into trying to write screen plays yet, but that is coming. And hopefully this awareness will help me succeed.

I just finished Mr. Snyder’s second book, Save the Cat ! Goes to the Movies. In it he breaks down movies into 10 popular genres and describes the beats of 50 landmark movies showing how they achieved their greatness. It makes me want to sit down with my streaming services and soak myself in great film. Alas, I have a garden to tend, a blog to write now and again, and my own adventures in writing a screenplay. Wish me luck.

Image: Cloud, a cat not currently in need of saving. By Jonathan Hutchins

July 22, 2023

Where the Heck Have I Been!

People who read my blog: So, Marilyn, what have you been up to (instead of writing blog posts)?

Me: Grab a beverage, sit down. This might take a while.

First and foremost, sometimes I feel like I’ve got nothing to contribute to the world of literature at large. Other times I have lots of ideas but don’t seem to get them down and in the ether before they slide away. Either way, there can be a long pause. I apologize to my teeming masses of adoring fans.

Of course, there are other things in my life than writing blog posts. There is the eternal struggle with my garden, for example. Cloud, our opera singing cat, has taken it upon himself to keep the bunnies and chipmunks in hand (paw?) which my growing things much appreciate. At least those of the growing things that could be bothered to come out of the ground. I have discovered that our house is too cold in the winter for seeds to germinate. Maybe next year starting in February or March we’ll all snuggle together under the electric blanket. Then in the spring, out of doors it was first too cold, then too wet, then too dry, then too hot. The seeds stayed in bed. Not sure I blame them. But there is always one showoff—the cucumbers are going berserk. I have so many that pickles are inevitable. As for the rest? The tomatoes keep losing focus, the radishes have forgotten that they exist for roots, the cantaloupe and watermelon have all the vines in the world but not much else. I may have potatoes some day, but I’m afraid to look. I’ll just believe and hold out hope until I’m forced to dig them up. Schrodinger’s potatoes.

In other adventures, when I couldn’t get glasses to make things pretty and clear, cataract surgery it was. Since the worse of the two eyes is always done first, for a week or so you get to walk around switching eyes and saying, “Holy mackerel! I had no idea I have been looking through pond water!” Now I get to see without glasses for the first time since first grade, except when I want to read. Putting on glasses instead of taking them off to read is sort of weird.

And finally, what have I been writing instead of blogs? Query letters, synopses, cover letters, the things I hate most in the world. I know Stephen King says he loves all aspects of writing, but honestly, these are harder for me than anything. I’ve now sent off my father’s memoir to a publisher and The Gingerbread House, as well. I should be getting rejection letters in a few months, and then I’ll do it all over again. But now that those odious tasks are out of the way, on to the fun stuff.

First, I get to write a blog post moaning about my garden and the agony of trying to get things published. Next I’ll start working on my very first screen play, which I’m pretty pumped about. Mind you, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, but that has seldom stopped me in the past. Between the scenes, I’ve started working on a nonfiction book. I’ve written way more nonfiction than fiction, so this should be easyish. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see. After those, there is probably going to be a Gingerbread House sequel, I need to finish Wickham’s Daughter, there is still The Iliad in Space (working title), and Jocasta of Thebes hasn’t even loaded into the starting gate. If I have a great time with the screen play (I’m doing my friend, Dennis Young’s, Mercenary because the tutorials say you should never do your own adaptation first), I will go on to do a screenplay for Beloved Lives.

So that’s what I’m doing on my summer vacation. You?

Image: Cloud taking a break from bunny wrangling. By Jonathan Hutchins.

March 20, 2023March 21, 2023

1800’s Science Fiction Part II

Part II of notes from the panel Jonathan Hutchins, Rachel Ellyn, and I had the great pleasure presenting a panel at Planet Comicon Kansas City. Anyone who didn’t make it, or anyone who did and is curious about our list of works and authors and a few other fun facts, here it is!

Again, let me say, for the purposes of this panel, the 1800’s included 1800 to 1899. Some of the authors wrote into the 20th century, but we did not include these. Also, we excluded for the most part, fantasy and gothic novels. Science fiction we defined (as did Mary Shelley) stories where the action is based on scientific possibility whereas fantasy usually has some magical element. Also please not, many of these stories have elements of misogyny, racism, nationalism, and other things that were current to the time and should be read with that in mind.

1870 Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Another adventure story using advanced technologies including an electric submarine, gas-discharge lamp and a taser. It contains detailed descriptions of undersea life which would have been unknown to the readers of the day.

1870 Annie Denton Cridge “Man’s Rights; Or, How Would You Like It? Comprising Dreams”

Man’s Rights, a work of Utopian science fiction and satire, is the first known feminist utopian novel written by a woman.

In a series of dreams, the female narrator visits the planet Mars, finding a society where traditional sex roles and stereotypes are reversed. The narrator witnesses the oppression of the men and their struggle for equality. They start working towards their liberation after technological advancements free them from some of their grueling domestic chores. In the last two dreams, the narrator visits a future United States, ruled by a woman president and with an equal balance of men and women in the House and Senate. Legislators have begun to stop fining and imprisoning female prostitutes, and it is now the male clients who get arrested and sent to reformatories. A large number of women have taken up farming, and the nation has a promising economic future. The narrator concludes by asking whether this dream might not, after all, be a prophecy?

1871 George T. Chesney The Battle of Dorking First published as a magazine serial. Future war with the British navy defeated by a wonder weapon. The enemy wins and breaks up the British empire (US gets Canada). Futurism and advanced technologies.

1871Edward Bulwer-Lytton The Coming Race Subterranean super race is discovered by accident by a young traveler while visiting a deep mine. The Vril-ya use the force called Vril for destruction or healing (due to the popularity of the book, any health food or elixir was called Vril, i.e. Bovril). In the end the narrator returns to Earth and warns of the coming of this superior race.

This is the Bulwer-Lytton that the bad writing contest is named after.

1872 Samual Butler Erewhon; or, Over the Range A satire describing what at first seems a utopia, but on further examination is more like a distopia. “The Book of Machines”, a three chapter section warns that machines might become sentient and dangerous. In Erewhon, machines are not used for fear of this. This is one of the pastoral utopian stories.

1877 Verne Off on a Comet Another space travel adventure.

1880 James De Mille A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder Published and serialized posthuously and anonymously, its writing predated She and King Solomon’s Mines but is often compared to them. A lost world story with satire civilization in opposition to culture of the day. In a copper cylinder is the account of a man who, after being separated from his ship in a little row boat with boat mate, finds himself in a tropical paradise in the Anarctic.

1880 Percy Gregg Across the Zodiac; The Story of a Wrecked Record The first sword and planet fiction. Centering around the creation of a substance called “apergy”, a form of anti-gravitational energy, this details a flight to Mars taken in 1830. The planet is inhabited by small beings who, convinced that life couldn’t exist any where else apart from on their world, refuse to believe that the narrator is actually from Earth, deciding instead he is an unusually tall Martian from a remote corner of their planet. The book contains what is probably the first alien language in any work of fiction to be described with linguistic and grammatical terminology, and likely the first instance in the English language of the word “Astronaut”, the name of the narrator’s spacecraft. In 2010 a crater on Mars was named Greg in recognition of his contribution to the lore of Mars. Not an easy read for writing style, sexism and racism, not much plot, lots of political nonsense.

1883 Albert Robida The 20^th Century (This and two other novels were combined into one book, including in 1887 War in the 20^th Century, and in 1890 The 20^th Century, the Life Electric) These are fun for checking against the predicted and the real. Takes place in 1952. Predictions include the world-wide media saturation, news and entertainment merging, and advertising dominating broadcasts; the English Channel tunnel; merging and homogenizing of cultures; the dominance of multinational corporations. Unlike Verne, he proposed inventions integrated into everyday life (like Mary Webb did), and the social developments that arose from them like the social advancement of women, mass tourism, and pollution. He describes modern warfare with robotic missiles and poison gas, a flat screen television display that delivers news 24-hours a day, plays, educational courses, and teleconferences.

1886 Verne Robur the Conqueror. The Clipper of the Clouds Robur develops a heavier than air ship, the Albatross. Screw driven by electrical energy. A bit like a helicopter, downward rotors and two for push, pull actions.

1886 Robert Lewis Stevenson The Strange Cast of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Scientist experiments with splitting out his baser self with whom he has struggled all his life. When Hyde appears without the serum, large and more frequent doses are needed to remain Jekyll. Finally, a salt that is essential to the potion runs out and new batches don’t work, apparently because the original had an impurity that allowed the reaction. A “mad scientist” story.

1887 Flammarion Stories Of Infinity: Lumen; History Of A Comet; In Infinity Conversation between a spirit who travels through the universe and a man. One of the earliest works to consider the matters of relativity, alien life, and the advancement of mankind. Flammarion tended touse elaborate explanations of scientific principles and even included mathematical calculations in some of his stories

1887 W. H. Hudson A Crystal Age Pastoral utopian novel (like News from Nowhere), published anonymously originally. Man wakes up more than 100 centuries in the future. (Author also wrote the more famous Green Mansions). The people of his imagined future possess only one piece of technology, a system of “brass globes” that produces a form of ambient music. Otherwise they have no machines and only simple devices. Only the “father” and “Mother” of the commune breed; everyone else lives like siblings.

1888 Edward Bellamy Looking Backward Time travel novel with strong socialism and anti-captalism themes. Julian West, a young American, who towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself in the year 2000, and the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia with nationalization of all industry, and the use of an “industrial army” to organize production and distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under such conditions.

1889 Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Time travel. Use of future technology (1880’s) in a past time.

1890 Mary E. Bradley Lane Mizora: A Prophecy: A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of Princess Vera Zarovitch: Being a True and Faithful Account of her Journey to the Interior of the Earth, with a Careful Description of the Country and its Inhabitants, their Customs, Manners, and Government. A hollow Earth and utopian story. First serialized then published as a book, “the first portrait of an all-female, self-sufficient society,” and “the first feminist technological Utopia.” The narrator Vera is sent to Siberia and goes over a waterfall to the center of the Earth where she finds a women only culture that practice eugenics. They are Aryan and abhor dark colored skin. The futuristic technology includes “videophones” and making rain by discharging electricity into the air. Though Mizora has no domestic animals, its women eat chemically-prepared artificial meat.

1890 William Morris News From Nowhere; or, An Epic of Rest Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance Pastoral utopian novel with utopian socialism. William Guest falls asleep and finds himself in a future society.

1891 Milton Ramsey Six Thousand Years Hence Includes space travel, hollow Earth and futurism. Proposes machine translators.

1893 George Griffith The Angel or the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror Aerial battleships and surface to air missles are predicted.

1894 Flammarion Omega: The Last Days of the World Another apocalyptic story in a future with international telephone service and the European Union.

1894 John Jacob Astor IV A Journey in Other Worlds Two interesting ideas in this: Earth axis straightening to end seasons, and a voyager to Jupiter and Saturn via a vehicle powered by “apergy” (fictious anti-gravity energy seen in a previous novel) and assisted by gravity (gravity assisted acceleration). Huge dams are used to power shifting the Earth, one at Niagra Falls (actually built 23 years later) and a tidal energy plant in the Bay of Fundy (built in 1980). Also proposes using Earth’s mantle heat for power.

A portion of the story involves looking back to the year 2000. Electricity does all the work including solar energy. (First solar cell 1883, ~1% efficient, in 2000 ~11% and today greater than 32 %). An explosive no power can resist causes people to abandon war; the Great War never happens. US ends up with most of the Western hemisphere (Canada, Central America).

Description of space craft is surprisingly close in some aspects. Today, beryllium is used and the dimensions of the interior are not off much those of the Apollo modules. But the story also includes packing fishing tackle, guns and canned food cooked on an electric stove in the space craft. The space travelers collect samples by shooting them; they have explosive bullets in guns. They describe strange and unique plants and animals including dinosaur-like creatures, pneumatic powered snakes and flowers that attract pollenators by sound. The travelers eat and drink from Jupiter’s animals and streams. On Saturn, spirits of the dead dwell.

(Astor died on the Titanic and was at the time, the richest man in the world.)

1895 Robert Comie The Crack of Doom A strange group proposes blowing up the world with what might be described as an atomic bomb.

1895 H.G. Wells The Time Machine Time travel, futurism, dystopia. A future where passive race of humans serve as “livestock” for a subterranean race of humans. In one version of the novel, the traveler goes to see the time near the end of the world when all life is gone and the atmosphere barely breathable.

1895 H.G. Wells “Argonauts of the Air” Men successfully fly but die when they can’t control the plane. Omitted from collections of the author’s works after the Wright brothers’ success.

1896 H.G. Wells “The Plattner Story” An alternate universe experienced.

1896 H.G. Wells “Under the Knife” An astral trip through the solar system and universe.

1896 H.G. Wells “In the Abyss” Bathospheric encounter with deep sea bipeds and their city.

1896 Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau Organ transplantation and human and animal hybridization.

1897 H.G. Wells “The Crystal Egg” Television-like method of viewing life on Mars.

1897 Wells The Invisible Man Originally serialized then in a book. An evil genius uses alterations in optical properties of tissues through chemical and electrical means. First he makes white cloth then a white cat invisible. Griffin is an albino. Issue of retinas needing to be able to absorb light to see explained away. He is the worst of the evil geniuses in literature.

1897 Kurd Lasswitz Two Planets Describes an encounter between humans and a Martian civilization that is older and more advanced. Martians are running out of water, eating synthetic foods, traveling by rolling roads, and using space stations. The spaceships use anti-gravity, but travel realistic orbital trajectories, and use occasional mid-course corrections in traveling between Mars and the Earth; the book depicted the technically correct transit between the orbits of two planets, something poorly understood by other early science fiction writers. It influenced Walter Hohmann and Wernher von Braun. The book was not translated into English until 1971 (as Two Planets), and the translation is incomplete. Auf zwei Planeten was his most successful novel.

1898 Wells The War of the Worlds First serialised in 1897. The novel’s first appearance in hardcover was in 1898. Alien invasion. Descritions of technology that accomodates a non-bipedal alien. Poison gas and death ray.

1899 Wells When the Sleeper Wakes Originally published as a serial. Reworked and rereleased in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes. Dystopia future; a man sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed London in which he has become the richest man in the world. The main character awakes to see his dreams realised, and the future revealed to him in all its horrors and malformities.

Also, two stories by Rudyard Kipling, “.007” and “The Ship that Found Herself” suggesting machines that are self aware.