The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction (anthology, 2010)

This is an anthology from Fall River Press (the publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, I think) collecting "classic" (i.e., public domain) stories of the apocalypse, ranging from Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" (1816) to H. P. Lovecraft's short story "Nyarlathotep" (1920). I picked it up because I wanted to read the Robert Cromie novel The Crack of Doom (1895), and this was its most accessible contemporary reprinting. Several years later, I've finally gotten around to reading the rest of the book. I reread short stories I'd previously read, but not novels: this means I skipped rereading Crack of Doom as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913).

I taught a class on apocalyptic fiction many years ago; an idea that I discussed in that class in the context of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine is that the concept of an apocalypse (in the nonreligious sense) is dependent on a certain understanding of time, one that didn't really emerge until the 1800s. I think in our present moment, apocalyptic narratives usually emerge from an awareness of how societies change: we know we might destroy it, be it from bombs or medicine gone wrong or environmental collapse or whatever. (Isaac Asimov discusses this in his essay "Social Science Fiction," arguing you can only get science fiction once it's clear that societies can evolve and change in fundamental ways quite quickly; he blames the double whammy of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.)  

The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction
compiled by Michael Kelahan

Collection published: 2010
Contents originally published: 1816-1920
Acquired: January 2019
Read: June 2025

But before the idea that we could destroy society emerged, there was a different one that runs across the stories presented in this book: the idea of deep time, that human existence is only a very recent thing across the span of the Earth and the universe, and thus we have no reason to think it will last. We have a lot of natural disasters here: humanity undone by comets, or the sun going dark, or the sun expanding, or what have you. Once you understand how small humanity is on the scale of all time, then you also have no reason to think it will last.

Many of the stories here are good examples of what Isaac Asimov could call technology-dominant (or gadget) stories: they're not concerned with character or even society (as later apocalyptic fiction usually is), but more the mechanics of it. What would happen if the sun overheated the Earth? How could a comet wipe everything out? This means that many of the stories are technically interesting, noteworthy for what they represent in a shift in how humans understand time... but not actually all that good. This is definitely the space that George Griffith's "A Corner in Lightning" (1898) is in, for example. (Which is a little disappointing, in that while Griffith wasn't a great writer, he was usually a more interesting one than he is here.)

That said, even some of these are good to read: Robert Duncan Milne's "Into the Sun" (1882) is kind of technical, but visceral, chronicling the Earth growing so hot no one will live. His sequel story, "Plucked from the Burning" (1882), reminded me a bit of On the Beach in its tour through a destroyed familiar landscape. I don't think "The Star" (1897) is H. G. Wells's best work, but you know of course it's well thought out; similarly, Grant Allen's talent for landscape description serves him well in "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" (1897).

Still, there are some highlights, particularly where you see the way science fiction will go coming into existence. In what's kind of a side comment in Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn discusses how initially, sf has what she calls "the incredible invention story" (Asimov's gadget story), but that it "permits only one level of emotional response, that of ritualized amazement or ritualized horror." Later, sf moves into what she calls "the completed future," where instead of showing the transition from the present moment, the reader is immersed in a world unfamiliar to them (p. xiv). The best stories here are of this type, placing the reader in the postapocalyptic future and letting them build the picture themselves. 

These ones feel particularly modern, and I suppose it's not a coincidence that they're all written by authors who have significance outside of proto-sf. For example, I really enjoyed Ambrose Bierce's "For the Ahkoond" (1888, I think; Kelahan doesn't give an original publication date for it), told as a report from a forty-sixth-century archaeologist exploring a North America devastated by a New Ice Age. Along similar lines, Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (1912) is evocative, and inventive in how it has someone who did live through the apocalypse try to tell its story to someone born after it, who thus has no frame of reference for what the world used to be like. (It reminded me a lot of Wells's The War in the Air [1908]; surely London read it, though he was doing similar work already in The Iron Heel [1908].)

I also really like E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909). I'd read it before of course, but I'd forgotten how clever it was, Forster showing us the darkness of this future by telling the story from the perspective of someone who doesn't see how dark it all is. A lot of his contemporaries would have done a lot worse; it's probably not a coincidence that he was a king of modernism. I think a lot of ink has been spilled about the relationship between sf and realism (including by me, in my never-finished book), but I wonder if there's more to be done about modernism and sf. (It's probably been done; I should ask my colleague Cari Hovanec.)

Anyway, some duds—it would be hard to imagine a collection of pre-1900 sf that wouldn't have at least a few—but a good sampling of what was going on in the genre we know so well today before it was the genre we know so well today.

Review: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle

So, I read for my Ph.D. exams many years ago now, from summer 2012 to January 2013. But because of the sheer amount of reading I did during that time, I fell hugely behind on my book-blogging, ending up in a hole it took me several years to get out of. Over five years, actually! Though from August 2015 to May 2017 I slowly reviewed most of the books I had missed during that time, the part of the "To review" pile still remaining were those books I read for my exams. Well, no more! With today's review, I finally slay that beast. All 103 complete books that I read for my exams have been reviewed! It's surely a bit belated to be writing up the last of your Ph.D. exam books after the end of the first year of your first full-time academic gig, but oh well. Five years is better than never!

Mass market paperback, 289 pages
Published 1976 (contents: 1891-92)

Reread January 2013

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle

There's a lot to like in Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; what particularly piques my academic interest, however, is the vision of Sherlock Holmes. There are a lot of good stories here, but when I teach Holmes, I usually stick to three different stories from this volume, because between "A Scandal in Bohemia," "A Case of Identity," and "The Five Orange Pips," I think you get the whole Holmesian theory of vision in theory and in practice.

For my purposes it actually makes the most sense to handle these stories in reverse order. My scholarly interest is in "scientific sight," in the way that scientific reasoning is often figured as a literal visual power. Doyle makes the connection between Holmes's vision and science its most explicit in "The Five Orange Pips," where Holmes compares himself to the paleontologist Cuvier: "As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents, should be able to accurately state all the other results which the reason alone can attain to" (108). Holmes utilizes inductive reasoning (I think; I always get these things confused), moving from a part of the system to understanding the whole of the system, through observation and reason. Like Cuvier, he is a scientist.

Holmes sort of undersells himself there, though, because part of his prowess is that he observes the right thing, picking up on the little details that no one else notices. Holmes might be like Cuvier in that he can go from single bone to whole dinosaur, but the problem of other people isn't that they can't perform that inductive logic, it's that they don't even see the bone to perform induction on it! In "A Case of Identity," Watson complains that Holmes sees what is "quite invisible," but Holmes rebuts him: "Not invisible, but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. [...] Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method [...]. Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details" (61). Holmes then proceeds to enumerate a number of details of sleeves, nose, boots, and gloves that allowed him to induce (deduce?) a whole range of truths about the client.

Oddly, Holmes's ability to observe probably reaches its apex in the very first Sherlock Holmes short story, "A Scandal in Bohemia." To a degree, everything after this is anticlimax. But then, Watson does tell us from the story's first line that it is an unusual case for Holmes. Why Doyle started Holmes's (short form) adventures with an exceptional one I don't know, but it makes for one of the best Holmes stories in terms of entertainment, but also in terms of my interests. Again, the story emphasizes the distinctions between Watson's sight and Holmes's: both see, but only Holmes observes (4).

In this story, we're told that Holmes feels no emotions in this "cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind" and that he is the "most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen" (1). For Holmes, emotions "were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained observer to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results" (1). Holmes does not experience emotion in his observations because, like a scientist, he must remain objective in his work. But unlike (say) Star Trek's Mister Spock, he understands the emotions that he observes, and accounts for them in his reasoning.

However, something I often see in stories of scientific observation is that the keenest observers are able to observe the observations of others. I have a whole article in the Gaskell Journal actually, as regards Wives and Daughters, called "Observing Observation." That happens in "A Scandal in Bohemia": at the climax of the story, Holmes figures out where the incriminating photograph is by faking a fire and making Irene Adler look to where the photograph is hidden; he observes her observations: "The smoke and the shouting were enough to shake nerves of steel. She responded beautifully" (21).

But! It turns out that she was aware that Holmes was watching her, but he was unaware of this. In her letter to Holmes at the story's end, she tells him, "I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I really was an object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes" (24). That is to say, Irene Adler was observing Holmes's observations of her observations! So she ends up winning, and Holmes is awed by her.

At the beginning of the story, like I said, Watson claims that Holmes experiences no emotion. But something I've noticed throughout my reading of stories about observation, is not only are keenest observers able to observe observation itself, but that there is a correlation between this and emotion; my Gaskell Journal article ends with the claim that "to observe others carefully is to love them." Watson claims that Holmes knows no emotion, but we know by the story's end that this is untrue. If to observe others carefully is to love them, then to observe others' observations is the highest form of love, and that is why for Holmes, Irene Adler will always be "the woman" (25).

Review: When the World Screamed & Other Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Trade paperback, 233 pages
Published 1990 (contents: 1926-29)

Acquired September 2014
Read October 2014

Professor Challenger Adventures, Volume II: When the World Screamed & Other Stories
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

There are a lot of editions of various combinations of the Professor Challenger stories, but this 1990 edition from Chronicle Books collects all the ones that weren't in the Penguin Classics version of The Lost World and Other Thrilling Tales, which is exactly what I needed. (As far as I can tell, there are no scholarly editions of the later Challenger stories.) I read them in publication order, not the random order they're printed in here, so that's the order I'll tackle them in.

The Land of Mist is the last Challenger novel. Amusingly, it begins with a disavowal of all previous Challenger stories (or maybe just The Poison Belt: "The great Professor Challenger has been-- very improperly and imperfectly-- used in fiction. A daring author placed him in impossible and romantic situations in order to see how he would react to them." Challenger brought a libel action against the perpetrator, but exactly who that perpetrator might be doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as both previous Challenger tales were supposedly written by the reporter Edward Malone (Land of Mist is in the third person), who here is on sufficiently good terms with Challenger as to be marrying his daughter!

But all that's sort of to the side, as The Land of Mist is just a terrible story. Written ten years after The Poison Belt-- an interregnum in which the Great War transpired-- the book is largely driven by Doyle's spiritualist beliefs, and it's less about Challenger than the most tediously dull and sanctimonious spiritualists you ever met. There might be some others who are fakes, but these ones, honest guv, they're the real deal. You can tell this because they're poor and virtuous. This goes on for almost 200 pages, and Doyle even includes an appendix citing his sources because it's all true. The only thing worse than plunging Challenger into this mess would be using Sherlock Holmes, so I guess we can be thankful that Doyle still had some sense and never went that far.

The other two tales are short stories, "When the World Screamed" and "The Disintegration Machine." (One of them mentions that Mrs. Challenger is alive, and she was dead in The Land of Mist, so I think Doyle retconned his retcon!) These are both pretty dull sf stories Isaac Asimov would call Stage Two, technology dominant; they'd fit right into an American sf magazine from the Golden Age, in that both focus on explicating some kind of technological idea (the Earth screams when you drill into it, you can disintegrate and reintegrate people) without actually telling a story around it or doing anything interesting at all.

Next Week: Fifty years after The Lost World, the world has changed and it's a Dinosaur Summer!

Review: The Lost World and Other Thrilling Tales by Arthur Conan Doyle

Trade paperback, 349 pages
Published 2001 (contents: 1910-13)

Acquired and read August 2014

The Lost World and Other Thrilling Tales
by Arthur Conan Doyle

I felt like I should reread The Lost World, having last read it as a child-- assuming I did read it and not some Great Illustrated Classics edition-- given it dealt with a scientist character just after the Victorian era. This book seems like it should be exciting, but it felt like one of the duller Jules Verne translations to me: Doyle mostly just wants to prove he did his research. Challenger himself is always entertaining; the minutiae of entering an inaccessible plateau less so. This is one of those books I wanted to like more than I did, though I suppose we must give it credit for being an early example of the literary dinosaur.

This volume contains three other stories. The first is the short Challenger novel The Poison Belt, which feels like Doyle's take on The Purple Cloud, In the Days of the Comet, or other similar turn-of-the-century apocalypses. Basically everyone except Challenger and his pals are killed by toxic gases (luckily, Challenger deduces their existence just before the Earth encounters some)... but then it turns out they were all just asleep. Admittedly, some cities do burn down, and humanity resolves to be better as it rebuilds, but it still feels an awful cop-out. It's nowhere near as good as the tales it's aping.

Finally there are two non-Challenger sf tales by Doyle, of which I have no memory, except that one involves an airplane. Take that as you will.

Next Week: Professor Challenger returns in When the World Screamed & Other Stories!

Review: The Doings of Raffles Haw by A. Conan Doyle

Tomorrow's Christmas, so I shan't be updating. Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Hardcover, 147 pages
Published 1982 (originally: 1891)

Acquired October 2012

Read January 2013

The Doings of Raffles Haw by A. Conan Doyle

Raffles Haw is a scientist (his name may have inspired that of A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief created by E. W. Hornung, Doyle's brother-in-law) who has amassed a fortune and intends to use it to better the world. So of course I'm interested here, given my tracing of the scientist character in Victorian literature, but there's not much to interest me in Raffles. Most scientist characters have their epistemology realized in the form of vision: they see the world differently than non-scientists, not even metaphorically, but literally.

Raffles, however, does not see differently, and the root of this lies in the fact that he's a chemist: he says at one point, "Chemistry is to a large extent an empirical science, and the chance experiment may lead to greater results than could, with our present data, be derived from the closest study or the keenest reasoning" (94). Raffles does not see, he does.

It's also just dull. Basically the premise of the book is that Raffles shows off all the inventions he will use to change the world for, like, a hundred pages (he has, gasp, an electric elevator!), but then he's persuaded not to do it because helping people out of their problems destroys their self-reliance: a local villager has his roof blown off in a storm, and back in the day he could have fixed it himself, but since becoming accustomed to Raffles's assistance, all he is able to do is send off letters and wring his hands helplessly. So don't help poor people; the status quo is all: "he dimly saw that vast problems faced him in which he might make errors which all his money could not repair. The way of Providence was the straight way. Yet he, a half-blind creature, must needs push in and strive to alter and correct it. Would he be a benefactor? Might he not rather prove to be the greatest malefactor that the world had seen?" (130). Raffles's problem, then, turns out to be that he does not see, that he only experiments: but experimenting with society is much more dangerous than experimenting with chemicals.

I have my philosophical objections to this conclusion: how can the solution to making the world a better place possibly be leaving it as we found it? Especially given that the world's problems don't descend from Providence, they're problems that we made with the way we built society. But it also makes for a boring book. He does resolve that perhaps he can help out people in slums because their situation "was the result of artificial conditions, and it might well be healed by artificial means" (131). But then he hears that the love of his life is engaged to another man, and (spoiler alert) the shock kills him (even though it's all just a misunderstanding). The end. So it all turns out to have been pretty pointless.

Review: The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

Trade paperback, 129 pages
Published 2001 (originally 1890)

Acquired July 2014

Read August 2014

The Sign of Four
by Arthur Conan Doyle

Though it has its inescapably Sherlockian moments (the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes's various disguises, and so on), this is definitely duller than most of the short stories I've read, nor is it even as strong as A Study in Scarlet. Doyle will go on to perfect the formula, but he's not quite there yet, and the "romance" feels completely tacked on. I hate those chapters which are just characters explaining backstory to each other.

Review: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

Trade paperback, 144 pages
Published 2001 (originally 1887)

Acquired May 2014

Read July 2014

A Study in Scarlet
by Arthur Conan Doyle

Though I've read some of the short stories before, this is my first time reading a Sherlock Holmes novel-- though I suspect "novella" is more accurate in this case. You can kinda see Holmes writing his way into the character and his milieu: Watson list of Holmes's supposed defects of knowledge is not only contradicted by later stories, but the later chapters of this one! (And doesn't really make any sense anyway.) It's hard to imagine the Watson of the later stories as the layabout young man he is here, though that might be more the adaptations influencing me. As for the story itself... it certainly has a number of good moments, but you can see why Doyle shifted Holmes to the genre of the short story, where he is a much better fit: even at its short length, this goes on a little bit too much. Though I actually did like the extended Utah flashback!