Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Zeppelin Destroyer by William le Queux

Since last October, I've been writing up the fourteen works of early science fiction I read at the Eaton Collection in January 2015; at last, I've finally wrapped that up with this World War I era work:

Hardcover, 251 pages
Published 1916

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Zeppelin Destroyer: Being Some Chapters of Secret History by William le Queux

This book came out in 1916, and takes place around then, as well, detailing the development of a weapon that will ignite the gas-bags in Zeppelins-- to my disappointment, the "Zeppelin Destroyer" means a destroyer of Zeppelins, not a Zeppelin that destroys. The protagonists, just like le Queux's later Terror of the Air, are a British aeronaut and his plucky flying fiancée.

It's not as science fictional as many of its contemporary proto-sf stories, nor even as science fictional as le Queux's other works: it's a pretty conventional spy/war story, with some military policy critique in the style of The Battle of Dorking or The Riddle of the Sands, with characters explaining to each other that they have nothing personally against the defence departments, and they're sure they're trying their hardest, but couldn't they institute better airraid warnings? There's also some pretty good scenes of mass destruction when the Zeppelins are attacked.

I was amused that the narrator admires his fiancée for not acquiring any hardness of feature despite her outdoor exploits, and doesn't seem to recognize the dissonance a couple hundred pages later when he complains that too many women wear makeup these days.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Terror of the Air by William le Queux

Hardcover, 312 pages
Published 19?? (originally 1920)

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Terror of the Air by William le Queux

William le Queux got his start in the 1890s and 1900s writing anti-German invasion fiction. The Terror of the Air reads like an attempt to port the conventions of the George Griffith narrative over into the post-Great War setting, though here the secret cabal of aerial pirates are the bad guys, a group of Germans bitter about losing the war. Their plan is a bit incoherent, though: first they raid air-ships, then they make terrorist threats and disintegrate Charing Cross (a lot like in The Three Days' Terror) then they release a plague, then they attack London's food supply, then they release poison gas. The pirates at one point seem to be like those of many 1890s revolutionary sf stories, with ideological motivations, given their threat:

WAR!
THE COUNCIL OF TEN
declare war against the social order.
CAPITALISM is abolished!
Everyone must live in absolute equality.
The social revolution is proclaimed anew.
In three nights London, the centre of Capital-
ism, will be punished for its crimes. Heed
this warning!
AND ACT!

But this seems to just be a ruse, as the ideology is never followed up on.

The ostensible protagonist is Major Alan Maclean, an officer in the British Imperial Air Force, but le Queux gives all the good ideas to his girlfriend Violet Eustace, and she's a better flier to boot. She saves his life more than once, yet the narrative always treats her as a sidekick. It's weird. Also she's about the only interesting thing in this tedious book. It ends with some points unresolved; I don't know if it was to set up a sequel or just sloppy writing.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: When All Men Starve by Charles Gleig

Hardcover, 192 pages
Published 1898 (originally 1897)

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

When All Men Starve: Showing How England Hazarded Her Naval Supremacy, and the Horrors Which Followed the Interruption of Her Food Supply

by Charles Gleig

To be fair, this book sounds from its title like it ought to be awful: another in a long stream of didactic Victorian books about political economy, imperial power, and land ownership. But to my surprise it wasn't. Charles Gleig, who apparently mostly wrote YA naval adventure tales, turns out to have a less obviously moralizing tone than many of his contemporaries. He's pretty sarcastic about the amount of money that goes into the imperial project, and about how the British upper classes overlook the plight of the lower classes, and how the middle classes have been bamboozled into siding with the upper.

The starting point for the novel is conflict between English and Boer settlers in South Africa that allows the Germans to land on a pretext of peacekeeping, doing so unimpeded because Britain pursues a diplomatic, rather than military solution. Soon, it's too late, and Britain is not just fighting Germany, but France and Russia have seized the opportunity and are demanding British withdrawal from the Mediterranean. Gleig isn't interested in your typical jingoistic future war, though: this is not The Next Crusade or even The Three Days' Terror. Rather, he focuses on the effect of the war on an already strained domestic situation: war mean no exports, which means no profits, which means mass unemployment.

The remedy [to the bread famine], hinted unpatriotic Socialism, was to make peace. War might be glorious, but what was glory upon an empty stomach?
     But as yet there was no general desire for peace. The nation hurled defiance at all accursed foreigners, and would yet find a Nelson to drive the Allies from the seas. […] Let Labour eat his turnips and be patient; above all, let him trust in the failing wisdom of the Government and all would be well. (76-7)

Because the government ignores the people (Gleig is particularly scathing of Radicals who are not actually radical), things spiral out of control at home while war is waged abroad. A Socialist leader, Jim Scalds, is arrested after a speech in the town of Braiding; the people riot, and when the police accidentally kill a rioter, things really go nuts.

The Justice of the Peace who arrested Scalds is hung, but a man named Robert Margrave, a former major in the "little wars" unites the rioters under his control. Gleig doesn't flinch from the violence, but he also doesn't revel in it; the book mostly reports it matter-of-factly, and I think it does a good job of expressing sympathy for the working-class position, unlike many of Gleig's contemporaries.

That regrettable excesses were committed, that violence and bloodshed marked the overthrow of the old order in Braiding, has to be admitted; but there is no evidence connecting Robert Margrave with the acts of violence perpetrated by his undisciplined followers, whilst, on the contrary, the rapidity with which some semblance of order was restored sufficiently indicates the force of character possessed by the man who dominated and guided the coming rebellion. (147)

The rebels aren't met in London by the military, but the police, and Gleig is most regretful over the horrific massacre that results: "one is forced to admit that the massacre left an indelible stain upon the character of the British rough" (178). Six thousand policeman are killed, but only one-third die in the actual battle: the others are killed afterward, while trying to flee. Buckingham Palace is burnt down, but the mob lets Westminster stand, apparently conscious that the only thing worse than the current government is no government: unlike many of his contemporaries, Gleig gets that these people aren't actually anarchists; they only want a just government. Margrave, though he is praised for his ability to channel the mob throughout, cannot control the revolution in those early days in London.

That's where the book ends, with the mob dancing around the embers of Buckingham Palace in a pretty haunting scene: "So they dance on, till the grey dawn steals up from the east and the burnt palace looms black and haggard in the cold light of morning" (192).

One thing I should note is that the book is fun and playful in its construction of future history; there are lots of footnotes, some of which cite what I think are real books, but many of them must be fake because they're things like London during the War by Andrew Slang and Chronicles of the Revolution by Professor Ducky. (I bet these are references to real writers, because Gleig likes doing this kind of thing; for example, the book transforms the real Sir Compton Domville into "Sir Dompton Colville" or Sir John Hopkins into "Sir John Skipworth."*) He's not the only person to do this kind of thing, but he's more playful than most, even establishing that "Alfred Norrison" (i.e., Arthur Morrison of A Child of the Jago fame) wrote novels about the events he's chronicling.

I particularly liked this skewering of writers of military fiction:

The English are a pugnacious race, yet how few Englishmen care very greatly to study those minutely detailed descriptions of sea fights which are to be found in the pages of James, Brenton, Laughton, Colomb, or even Mahan. The picturesque pen of a Froude, the robust irony of a Stevenson is needed to pierce the smoke of battle and show us the deportment of the dramatis personæ; otherwise the average citizen is sadly prone to yawn over whole pages of tactics and military manœuvres. (96)

He uses this as an excuse to not engage in such minute chronicles himself. Thank goodness, because he's right: they're dead boring, and his take is much more interesting.

* Thanks to Jess Nevins for pointing this out.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Invasion of New York; or, How Hawaii Was Annexed by J. H. Palmer

Hardcover, 248 pages
Published 1897

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Invasion of New York; or, How Hawaii Was Annexed
by J. H. Palmer

There are some works of literature from the past we make excuses: "It was a different time. They didn't know any better." And there are times this is okay, when people are straining to work out new moral standards in an era with different one. The Invasion of New York deserves no such concession. This is a shit book, with shit writing and shit politics and shit ethics. It's interesting as a relic of an ugly moment in American history (and one that's still with us today), but it has no redeeming literary merit of any sort, even in the context of often-rocky 1890s proto-science fiction.

In brief: At the ceremony of the annexation of Hawaii, 10,000 Japanese infiltrate the city; meanwhile, Spain amasses a fleet in Cuba. Both of these actions prompt an immediate response. Battleships and guns are catalogued exhaustively and lovingly as the United States attacks Havana. Seriously, you can sense J. H. Palmer's hard on. The Spanish sneak around the American fleet and attack New York, but don't worry; America kills 'em all anyway. The Japanese bombard San Francisco; in retaliation, after recapturing Hawaii, America continues on to Japan and bombs the hell out of 'em. Whoo, America!

Here are some choice bits of jingoism/racism:

• A lieutenant from the Maine who's been captured in Hawaii gives his report: "all the indignities of his position forced themselves upon him in overpowering strength, and with a shout of rage he threw himself upon the Japanese guard on his left and seized him by the throat, nor could his grasp be released until a lifeless mass the Japanese was flung to the ground." (22-3)
• The reaction to learning about the Japanese attack on Hawaii: "There was no debate; a desperation born of a nation insulted, of a flag outraged and dishonored, animated Republicans and Democrats; there was but one sentiment in one word. War! War to the Spanish cowards who slaughtered helpless women and starved their children! War to the Japanese upstarts who defied the progressive civilizers of the West! War! Horrid! Cruel! but war on all who dared to even speak of the glorious flag with derision!" (34) Yeah, say something about our flag, and we'll kill ya. Freedom of speech!
• I don't know anything about J. H. Palmer, but he still seems bitter about the Civil War: "There had been another war, not altogether of the past, a cruel internal conflict, fought for a principle, two principles, for a principle involving integrity of government, a principle of property rights; but a war tolerable by reason of its mistakes. Now there must be war, not to place a North against a South, not to free a slave and impoverish a million; but because Time was ripe for War." (57) Dag, how much it stinks to free slaves if it makes some people poor!
• Well, at least destroying San Francisco was a boon for urban planning: "Instead of bewailing the destruction of a beautiful city, steps were immediately taken to rebuild everything worth rebuilding; to seize the opportunity to correct mistakes made I first laying out San Francisco. New buildings were projected and commenced, streets widened in places, more open spaces provided for, and the city in many ways improved from an æsthetic and business point of view" (107-8)
• America retaliates on Japan: "In the morning, at the first streak of day the bombardment was recommenced. No sentiment about this—this was war. This was what Japan wanted, this was what the fleet was here to give. And the flimsy structures were battered, were given up to fire, were demolished, until ruin covered everything. Still white flags were seen everywhere on the shore." (202)

Go America! But seriously, don't read this book; it's one of the worst I've ever read. Jingoistic shit with no real story or characters or ideas.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Next Crusade by Robert Cromie

Brief prelude to point out that my attempt to catch up on audio reviewing continues, with the second meeting of the Eighth Doctor and River Song this month, in the second volume of DOOOOOOOOOOOM COALITION.

Hardcover, 240 pages
Published 1896

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Next Crusade by Robert Cromie

This is, without a doubt, the best of the books I read at the Eaton Collection. It's apparently a sequel to an 1889 novel called For England's Sake, but stands alone from it, as I never was confused. I don't know if they share any characters, or just a future history. I did like what Cromie says of his project in the preface: "I make no apology for taking upon myself to write the history of the future. This method already has many students; and certainly some advantages over that of writing the history of the past. It can hardly be so full of errors" (v). Basically, it's Turkey and Russia and Germany vs. England and Austria, which isn't quite the way the next war lined up, but whatever.

Cromie's story doesn't have the fantastic inventions that George Griffith would bring to the future war genre the next year, but Cromie groks what few of his contemporaries did: that he could have actual character stories playing out against his future-history backdrop. The Next Crusade isn't really the tale of the Anglo-Turkish War, but of the poor gentleman Charlie Cameron, his friend John Jackson, and the delightfully crotchety sergeant-major Joe Huggins. In some ways it's a very pessimistic story, in other ways it's very jingoistic (Cromie really hates on the Turks*), but on the whole, it's a rollicking war story of one of the better kinds: good characters and great naval battles!

* "The purpose of this enterprise was intrinsically barbaric and brutal, but, alas! necessary. Absolutely it was wrong. Relatively it was right. It was the least wrong possible, for it would displace a greater wrong. It was a New Crusade, the grandest that had ever sailed from the West unto the East" (72-3).

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe by Frank Attfield Fawkes

Hardcover, 271 pages
Published 1895

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe: Being a Record of Some Strange Adventures in the Remarkable Career of a Political and Social Reformer Who Was Famous at the Commencement of the Twentieth Century
by X

The title page attributes this book to just "X," who was apparently really Frank Attfield Fawkes, an industrialist (according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia) or a pharmacist (according a 1931 issue of the British trade publication The Chemist and Druggist). There's not a lot of biographic information out there, but he also wrote thrilling books like:

• How to Organize Bazaars, Concerts, Fetes, Exhibitions and Various Charitable and Other Functions 
• Horticultural Buildings: Their Construction, Heating, Interior Fittings, &c., with Remarks on Some of the Principles Involved and Their Application 
• Architects' Joinery and Its Ornament 
• Adventures of a Chemist: A Series of Unusual Detective Short Stories Embracing Drama, Comedy, Tragedy, Love, Humour, Infatuation, Passion, and Revenge
• The Mystery of Human Life: An Attempt to Throw a Little Light Upon the Great Problems: What Am I? Whence Do I Come? Why Am I Here? Whither Do I Go?

Just like The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century, this early sci-fi novel is framed by it being a document that has fallen back in time: the frame is narrated by a guy riding a train who momentarily slips into the future, where his companion in the compartment gives him this book to read. The "Marmaduke" of the title (I assume this name sounded less ridiculous for an emperor before the comic strip) is actually Arthur Hardy, an author and journalist who thinks he knows how to regenerate society, but no one will listen to his theories. After his wife dies, he's given an opportunity to put his theories into practice by the Emperor of Germany, who he eventually persuades to disarm-- at Germany's military peak, so it doesn't come across as a move of weakness. Hardy is a Christian:

it will be a bloodless revolution; a beneficent revolution; a revolution which is intended to cleanse the land of the foul weeds of class and national hatred; a revolution which will prepare the ground for the good growths of love, peace, and prosperity. The revolution is inevitable and imminent. But you will have no reason to dread it. On the contrary you will welcome it. For this revolution is nothing more or less than a rebirth of Christianity. (105-06)

But he is also a highly gifted statistician, who is not cowed by the immensity of his task, providing charts and tables showing the best way to disarm, yet his is flexible in the application of his theories; he does not follow a "cast-iron pattern" and try to fit every nation into the same mold (208). He writes to one of his skeptics:

You assume that I shall be ‘overwhelmed and crushed with the gigantic task of elaborating a system of political and social reform for such a vast area as Europe.’ What would you say if I told you that in dealing with Europe and European questions, I had a difficult task to persuade myself that I was not contemplating the infinitely little under a microscope? (206)

At a certain point, he's believed dead, and he lets the world maintain that belief, deciding it is better off animated by Marmaduke the spirit than Marmaduke the man. Peace eventually takes over the world!

Fawkes's work is mostly notable for how distinct it is from that of his contemporaries, especially George Griffith, whose protagonists in his novel Angel of the Revolution (published just two years before this book) are an alliance of anarchists, socialist, and nihilists that band together as the Terrorists to reform the world. This statement by the narrator about Arthur Hardy seems a repudiation of the Griffith worldview:

He abhorred anarchism, nihilism, and other exponents of brute force. He refused to identify himself with people who, calling themselves “socialists,” advocated such mad schemes as [...] general partition of property—all capital withdrawn from individual and put under public control—abolition of all private property and ownership—and other plans which simply meant slavery for the individual.
     Arthur believed in social reform, but only such reform as was just, gave to every man the equality of opportunity, and could be obtained by strictly constitutional means. (15)

Much of that is what Griffith's Terrorists accomplish in Angel. That said, there are many people who join socialism in Marmaduke because they like its stance against militarism though few others of its tenets; one assumes they eventually end up joining Marmaduke's movement because of his own hatred of force.

Griffith's revolutionaries frequently justify their violence by pointing out that they're only doing what the state does: when nations kill, we call it war, but when individuals kill, we call it murder. For Griffith, this authorizes terrorism, but for Fawkes, this points toward hypocrisy: (Apologies for all the long quotes, but Fawkes is one of those kinda writers.)

Militarism would indignantly repudiate any connection or similarity, however remote, with anarchy. Public opinion places them as far asunder as the poles. To the one is attached the title of ‘honorable profession of arms’; to the other is applied epithets of opprobrium and reproach. One marches proudly in broad daylight with music and flags, the other slinks in the hidden darkness. With one is connected glory and honour, with the other disgrace and degradation.
     Analyse results, however, and what do we find?
     They are both the visible embodiment of brute force. Neither of them has the slightest regard or pity for their innocent victims. They are both engaged in ringing the terrible changes on death, suffering, and disaster. They are each the antitheses of right. They are each absolutely void of utility or benefit. They are each the sworn enemies to progress, justice, or righteousness. Nations have progressed in spite of, not in consequence of, either militarism or anarchism.
     Does war produce anything but national chaos? Is anarchism intended to produce anything but social chaos? Granted that one chaos is on a smaller scale than the other, yet it is still chaos. (121)

Militarism ought to abhor us as much as terrorism, but we've dressed it up to make it justifiable. One suspects that Fawkes would have had a lot to say in this modern era of drone warfare and a military-industrial complex gone mad. Despite its preachiness, Marmaduke was one of the more interesting and nuanced 1890s books I read at the Eaton Collection.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century by Henry Lazarus

Hardcover, 463 pages
Published 1897 (originally 1894)

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century: A Prospective History
by Henry Lazarus

Like a lot of these early sort-of-sci-fi stories about the future, this one is framed by it being a document that has fallen back in time: it's a history of "the period of revolution 19— and onwards" (xxiii), focusing on a working-class uprising led by the mysterious Carlyle Democritus, who is able to mobilize the anger of the people, but also curb their excesses, preventing any "Reign of Terror"-esque tragedies. It really is a history book, written in a textbook fashion, with occasional excerpts from primary source documents, and at 400+ pages, it goes on far longer than could possibly be interesting.

The early pages, about the revolution itself, are the most interesting: the beef of Democritus (and thus, one suspects, Henry Lazarus, about whom the Science Fiction Encyclopedia indicates nothing other than that he was not a clarinetist) is largely with the accumulation of unnecessary amounts of wealth by a small portion of the population; one imagines we would see him hanging out with Occupy protesters these days. The revolutionaries seize jewelry and sell it to buy homes for the homeless, enact universal suffrage, stuff that we can mostly understand from a social justice perspective. For me, the most baffling thing was when Democritus went to meet with the King (I assume Edward VII): Democritus says that Edward has to hand over most of his jewelry, too, but that the Royal Family can keep its allowance, and that they'll have to give up all but two palaces, and promise to stop marrying foreigners. The King is down with all this (he felt burdened by all his stuff), and then Democritus makes one last request of him: to get rid of

the fashion, unnecessary to a woman’s modesty, and hitherto insisted upon at Court, of baring her bosom to the vulgar multitude. [...] [O]ne must needs visit and know the women of Eastern nations, whom the innocent and ignorant in this country deem beneath them, to realise even faintly the loathing and contempt which that disgusting European ‘fashion’ practised by our women arouses in any purely modest woman’s mind. (75)

Apparently bare bosoms are an equal problem to homelessness and mass starvation! I guess there's no doubt that Lazarus was a Victorian.

After the first hundred pages, though, it gets dead boring. First, Lazarus hates on statisticians:

The present historian is not a lover of statistics, or rather of statisticians, i.e. those of the economical political sort, a class of people much in requisition by ‘Honourable gentlemen’ and ‘Right honourable gentlemen’ of the Jubilee period,* one of whom had said, ‘Give me figures, and I’ll prove anything.’ And indeed a political statistician would prove anything. (109)

This is followed by page upon page of statistics used to support his points. Many of the pages of the edition I read had never been cut open. I can't lay claim to have actually read every page, but I am at least the first person to set their eyes upon all of them. The tedium of the book can be demonstrated by the fact that I took five single-spaced pages of notes on the first 109 pages, and then four and a half on the remaining 340 pages. Still, mixed in among the social reforms of the kind a contemporary liberal might applaud, there's the occasional nugget of an idea that seems totally crazy to us.

For example, Lazarus has some of the typical racial attitudes of his time, which are all over the place in 1890s revolutionary science fiction: "Amongst nations the children of Britain are as the oak amongst forest trees. Idle to inquire why, as idle to ignore the Divine message or fact. It is so" (287). This of course results in a British-American alliance of Anglo-Saxon enlightened despotism over the whole world.

And then Lazarus's wacky ideas about women return:

the God who made them [women] willed them to be the weaker of human kind, the weaker in order to invoke the protection of the strong. Be not misled by the ravings of Jubilee rant-idiocy of the political radical or any other type. True, they invented a hybrid variety of non-male monstrosity, by pumping the bosom nutrient into the brain organs, and called it strong-minded-women class—tough of skin, voluble of tongue, but that was not a branch of womankind, only of abortive, radical-political-economy malekind, a type of infinite degradation. (339)

Whoa, dude! We get it, women should not do anything other than be on pedestals. Your utopia sounds bad, and you should feel bad.

* This is Lazarus's future history term for 1880-94; Queen Victoria's Jubilee was in 1887.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Sack of London by the Highland Host: A Romance of the Period, Narrated by Jingo Jones, M.P.

Hardcover, 336 pages
Published 1900

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection
Read January 2015

The Sack of London by the Highland Host: A Romance of the Period, Narrated by Jingo Jones, M.P.

This book is about a group of Highlanders who attack London because of an unflattering stereotypical cartoon published in Punch; I read the novel two days after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, which made the premise much less farcical than its pseudonymous author intended, I'm sure. I think the book is intended to be funny, but I didn't find it to be so, and judging by the one contemporary review I dug up, neither did readers of the time, so I guess we can't blame that on cultural difference.

There's lot of Scottish “comedy” at first, with long, lengthy arguments and invasion planning and such, but then it turns quite serious when the Highlanders dynamite much of London: suddenly it’s death and fire and panic. The book justifies the Highlanders' violence by the fact that they work really hard to minimize casualties, carrying out rescue operations right away. And the book also argues this tragedy will all lead to a better, stronger Britain: with London’s importance reduced, everyone else’s will increase

So, then in what was a comedy and then was a terrorism novel, all of a sudden you get very detailed political reform ideas about the military, Irish self-government, criminal sentencing, poor laws, pensions, homeless, asylums, liquor taxes, endowments of the Churches of England and Scotland, university education and technical institutions, hereditary pensions, business tax rates, very specific payment rates for Old Age Pension Fund, the Houses of Lords and Commons, Free Trade, and the Boer Wars. It's about as exciting as it sounds.

But then the Royal Navy turns up, the ringleaders of the rebellion are killed, and everything goes back to the way it was. Weird and sort of inexplicable on the whole. Everett Bleiler suggest that the writer actually was an M.P.; maybe if you were in Parliament/from Scotland in the 1890s, you'd be amused/interested, but I know I wasn't.

I did dig up the actual 17 January 1900 Punch cartoon that inspired the book:

Yeah, I don't get it either. Highlanders really like oatmeal, I guess?

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Stolen Submarine by George Griffith

Hardcover, 320 pages
Published 1904

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Stolen Submarine: A Tale of the Russo-Japanese War
by George Griffith

Here I am, I'm George Griffith, and I'm reading the newspaper. In it I learn that war is brewing between Japan and Russia. "Great!" I cry. "This gives me a flimsy pretext upon which to hang my most recent recycling of my favorite plot: advanced military technology used to terrorize the world by a band of renegades!" Yup, it's his sixth stab at this exact same storyline.

Despite the fact that he ought to be an old pro at it by this point, the narrative seems to escape Griffith's control. There are foster brothers, each of whom is part of a pair of biological brothers, plus a pair of sisters (one good, one manipulative), and also a pair of twins. There's also a pirate queen, a Russian spy/princess who decides to break out on her own, tired of working for the government, and as always, there's nothing as sexy to George Griffith as a woman with the power of bloody destruction at her fingertips. (I wonder what he thought of Zalma, which ripped him off but perfected the form.)

The gist of it is that an experimental French submarine is stole by its crew, as they're secretly working for a British industrialist; they then re-steal it from him and sell it to the Russians. To defend the Japanese, a British inventor  makes both a submarine and an air-ship and uses them on behalf of Japan, and since he's British, his submarine is of course more awesome.

As always, the mild-mannered British inventor, Mark in this case, turns out to be very good at killing people as he rains death on Russia from the air: "Who am I, after all, that I should wield the thunderbolts of Jove, and fling death and destruction from the skies on those helpless people down yonder? Still, I promised you—and it’s got to be done. Anyhow, this is mercy compared with what happened at Blagowestchensk,* and the most merciful way of waging war is, after all, the most merciless." So, once again typically for Griffith, bloody massacres are okay for reasons of both utilitarianism and just that everyone else does it, though there is the fascinating realization that the most clinical ways of killing are the most barbaric. Also, like in so many Griffith novels, aerial violence is the threat that will prevent all future warfare: "This must be the last war fought on land or sea or in the air, and that is why I refuse to tell even his Majesty himself the secret of the motive power which has given me […] the command of the air."

The book ends with a submarine-vs.-submarine duel where Mark kills everyone, but at least he feels bad about it.

* The 1900 massacre of 5000-8000 Chinese civilians by Russian troops.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Three Days' Terror by J. S. Fletcher

Hardcover, 320 pages
Published 1927 (originally 1901)

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Three Days' Terror by J. S. Fletcher

This novel was originally published in 1901, but the edition in the Eaton Collection is a 1927 republication that's obviously undergone some updating, as there's a ship named after the German president from 1919 to 1925... but on the other hand, the English characters are very friendly to the Germans given how recent the Great War is, making me think it pretty unlikely there was that much updating.

This book starts out kind of all right at best. Terrorists approach the British government, demanding funds to build a better world. Their threats and justifications feel very George Griffith, actually: "We are lovers of peace, and of brotherhood, and of the human family, and our earnest desire is for the welfare and prosperity of all men. But we know, being acquainted with this world’s history, that it is in the blood and tears of the few that the happiness of the many must find its foundation. Many will suffer that many more may enjoy." This is contrasted with the opinions of an old socialist revolutionary, though, who says violence is not the answer: "It is by enlightenment, not by force, that society must be reshaped. We build, and unbuild, and build again, and each building excels the other." Unlike with Griffith, it's clear where Fletcher wants you to side.

The government doesn't accede to the threats, of course, and a chemical bomb causes a significant chuck of London centered on Trafalgar Square to simply disappear. People panic, and in the end the government surrenders. The book turns all weird at this point: the protagonists are kidnapped by De Reineville, a mysterious French scientist who is actually a servant (or member) of an ancient telepathic gestalt! But the gestalt is undone surprisingly easily when a German ship accidentally collides with De Reineville’s yacht, then the Germans bombard the mysterious island, and basically just win right then.

Ostensibly the protagonist is Henry Graham, a foppish rising politician, but the novel suddenly becomes awesome exactly three-quarters of the way through, when the best friend of Graham's love interest takes over the novel. Like, literally: not only does she avoid taking De Reineville's poison when no one else does and not only does she start telling German naval captains what to do, but the novel goes from being in the third person omniscient to the first person from her perspective. Her opinion on Graham sums up the tone of the shift: “he [Graham] is not exactly the sort of person one would turn to for guidance if one were suddenly placed in a deep intellectual hole.” She's like one of those bossy women from a P. G. Wodehouse novel that Wooster is in danger of marrying, and it's so much fun. I don't know why Fletcher did this-- perhaps he was getting as bored as I was-- but it's amazing that he did. If the whole novel had been written this way, I'm convinced it would be a classic.

Of course, London is rebuilt, and unlike in some of these kind of novels, apparently exactly the same as it was before; those who want violent change are very much in the wrong here. The novel ends with some ridiculous praise of the resoluteness of the British people and the British Empire:

For here, where London the Marvelous was for a brief moment crushed and staggered, in the heart of the world—here, where the four lions crouch at the feet of the hero of the sea—within the circle of a released carrier-pigeon’s first flight, all the strength and power of the Empire is comprised. From within that circle, as by invisible wires, go the bonds of Empire—ever widening, ever being strengthened. This is life—to hear the world’s wild heart beating close to your ear, to feel its fierce, keen, but always purposeful pulsation throbbing beneath your touch. Are these streets, stretching away from you as the spokes of a wheel stretch away from the hub, commonplace of aspect and dingy of color? But they are the haunts of the moles who go on scraping persistently and patiently until they have fashioned a kingdom and thrown out high towers above it. This is the very prospective of Empire and Government—when you gaze along yonder street your glance goes past the historic buildings which flank it to things and scenes far beyond, to wide stretches of continent, to lonely islands, to little scraps of land where the national flag floats undaunted. Heart of the world!—there is not a stone about it, new or old, that does not cry out its pæan of praise to the life that throbs and palpitates about it.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: A Woman against the World by George Griffith

Hardcover, 320 pages
Published 1903

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

A Woman against the World by George Griffith

The protagonist of this novel is a woman whose husband was wrongfully executed for murder because of some obscure point of English law raised by a corrupt lawyer. One imagines George Griffith reading about this happening in the newspapers-- it has a very "ripped from the headlines" feel about it-- and thinking to himself, Oh, this is really rather interesting. I'd like to write a novel about it. Maybe, once her husband his dead... she could revenge herself on society by bankrolling advanced military technology to be used in acts of international piracy by a shadowy cabal! Because, after Angel of the Revolution, Syren of the Skies, Outlaws of the Air, and The Great Pirate Syndicate, it's apparently the only plot he's capable of. I mean, I guess, who wouldn't decide to revenge themselves on ALL SOCIETY after something like this? Also, Griffith clearly has a type: aggressive, take-charge women with no respect for the law, pirate queens.

Lady Sybil is actually pretty aggressive. Despite her goal really just being to get revenge on those involved in the court case, she's willing to do anything at all to get there. Her rhetorical justification for piracy is that the only different between her and a military is a government; if a nation did what she was doing, it would be a war and thus okay, but since she's a private citizen, it's arbitrarily dubbed "terrorism." (I don't think the word "terrorism" is actually used in this book, though.) During one theft, Sybil pronounces, "We shall claim the spoils of war because they are necessary to our existence. Even civilised nations do that." Later, one of her lieutenants argues, "After all, we have as much right to make war on it as the big Powers have to make it on each other, if we like to take the consequences." Is this a sharp critique of the arbitrariness of state-sponsored violence, or does George Griffith just like stories about explosions? The more of him I read, I feel like the less I know.

In her pursuit of revenge, she actually ends up creating a little utopian society, as she needs a port of call to support her fleet of superfast warships, and it in turn needs a whole infrastructure. We're told the folks living on it have it much better than in the World:

There was another very striking feature of the quaint island life which was not without its effects on the after-lives of the exiles. There was no business to be done and no money to be made. All Society conventions naturally and automatically ceased to exist. The social atmosphere was so pure it killed them. Wherefore it was not long before Lady Sybil’s guests and prisoners found themselves, somewhat to their surprise at first, acting and speaking with one another in perfect candour and honesty. Not even Mr. Merrick [a millionaire she's captured] could get the better of anyone in a deal, for there were no deals to make, and the white lies of Society had lost their usefulness. It was a curious sensation at first—speaking the absolute unguarded truth yourself and being able to believe all that was said to you—but they soon got accustomed to it.

The millionaire even learns to do actual work!

Eventually Lady Sybil hangs the real murderer, turns herself into the authorities, and commits suicide-- her men on their ship die before they can surrender, but her island civilization carries on. Her admiral is actually really bloodthirsty (he's Irish), but again, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Is his bloodthirst admirable or condemned? Or maybe it just is what it is, and he's no different than all the real admirals out there, except that he's honest about his desires.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Great Pirate Syndicate by George Griffith

Hardcover, 302 pages
Published 1899

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Great Pirate Syndicate by George Griffith

Something I've quickly learned in reading novels by George Griffith, is that he's one of those authors who, having got hold of a good idea,* thinks that if worked for one book, there's no reason it won't work for a dozen more. This is basically just like his Angel of the Revolution, Syren of the Skies, or Outlaws of the Air, except that instead of being a band of anarchists, the heroes are a band of capitalists! I don’t know what happened to Griffith’s politics—or if it was just a public backlash—but after two early novels that depict socialists/anarchists very sympathetically, all of his later books seem to go out of their way to demonize them. They use a couple anarchists, but only as tools; they are villainized or mocked. It's a bizarrely far cry from the noble, faultless anarchists of Angel.

Basically, the capitalist cabal decides that Britain isn’t any good at protecting her own interests, so they’ll do it for her. No air-ships in this one, but they do have super-fast ships and a very devastating aerial torpedo and a weapon that polarizes metal. Their actions are justified as being “business”, and sometimes we’re even told their enemies bring it on themselves! As a business, the cabal declares war on continental Europe. Their President: “Nearly all wars have been waged from motives of pure greed, and therefore, taking no higher ground than this, and granted that we are merely going to war to get back for this country what it has lost, either through competition abroad or laziness and stupidity at home, I don’t think that, morally speaking, there will be any more real piracy in our warfare than in anybody else’s. In war I take it that the end must justify the means.” Of course, what belongs to “this country” is a bunch of imperial possessions that were stolen by Britain to begin with, but whatever.

Griffith (here and elsewhere) actually evinces an interesting attitude to the violence of war. As the above quote shows, his heroes never really take the moral high ground, or tangle themselves in knots trying to explain why it's okay to bomb civilians: they basically just go, 'Well, everyone else does it, so why shouldn't we?' Two key exchanges along these lines, the first when they make a French captain watch his ship be obliterated by overwhelming force:

“That is not war. It is murder, assassination!” the French captain had cried when he saw his ship go down.
“All war is that, more or less, m’sieu’.”

And then later, the same guy:

“But m’sieu’, this is not war!” exclaimed the Frenchman.
“No,” replied Philip. “It is not. It is only business.”

Business justifies all, just as reform justified all in Griffith's earlier works.

The conspirators end up blockading Europe until economic collapse forces it to capitulate. They demand that no European nation can make war or have a military or have colonies, and that the Anglo-Saxon Federation controls all trade. No matter what political side he takes, Griffith's racial preferences are clear.

* And it is a very good idea; I think you can argue that as much as Frankenstein and The Battle of Dorking and Robur the Conquerer and The Coming Race are all important works of proto-sf, Angel of the Revolution is where the genre really comes into existence.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: 6,000 Tons of Gold by H. R. Chamberlain

Hardcover, 349 pages
Published 1894

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

6,000 Tons of Gold by H. R. Chamberlain

This book definitely has the most awesome cover of all the ones I read in the Eaton Collection.

In it, Robert Brent, a young American man, comes into a vast fortune of Indian gold through very complicated circumstances that the novel goes through great pains to make morally above-board. The gold is worth $3,600,000,000, which is $95,000,000,000 in 2013! He wants to use the money to make the world a better place, beginning with stopping a stock market crash. H. R. Chamberlain was a journalist (a financial one, I think) and you can tell, because the mechanics of this are rendered in tediously complete detail.

What else he does with the money is pretty random: investing in aerial navigation (we don't see this come to fruition), building a super-fast ship (he sells it to the British to use only as a deterrent... apparently Britain can be trusted with it, but not France and Russia), and donating it to women's colleges as it goes to the branches "which best fitted woman for the domestic circle." I thought some terrible discussions of women's roles were about to come up, but it turns out that this can mean anything in the advanced year of 1895! The best way a women can become "best fitted" is to have all the advantages of a man.

Robert can't go too far, though, because his massive concentration of wealth threatens to destabilize the entire global economy. After a lot of lengthy and dull discussions of bimetallism and economic policy, he a group of finance ministers from all over the world dump the bulk of his gold in the bottom of the ocean.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Year of Miracle: A Tale of the year One Thousand Nine Hundred by Fergus Hume

Hardcover, 187 pages
Published 1891

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Year of Miracle: A Tale of the year One Thousand Nine Hundred
by Fergus Hume

This is one of a large number of early science fiction texts I read this winter at the Eaton Collection at the University of California Riverside, thanks to a Mullen Fellowship that defrayed my travel and lodging expenses. My focus was on novels about future revolution in the period from 1890 to 1910, especially those featuring air-ships and/or scientists. Partly this ties into my dissertation, and partly this will feature into whatever I do after that.

The Year of Miracle is about a young medical doctor improbably named Francis Rebelspear trying to make it. It frequently invokes evolutionary rhetoric, such as when the narrator says of his ailing practice, "Here was a brilliant illustration of the Darwinian theory concerning the survival of the fittest. Question: Was Rebelspear one of the fittest who would survive? Answer: Entirely depends upon his capacity for holding out, or the public’s giving in." Francis has a friend improbably named Julian Delicker, one of those idlers who loaf around Victorian fiction launching verbal barbs but not contributing to society, who suggests that a plague would be awesome: "if all the weak, the sick, and the revolutionary were killed off, think of how much smoother things would go" (!).

You might not be surprised to learn that a plague does happen. A Prophet of Doom brings a deadly vial back from the Middle East and drops it in London to cleanse it (and, not incidentally, to get revenge on the guy who stole his wife). This Prophet uses both Darwinian justifications for his actions and preaches against the uselessness of science, so he's not very consistent. Also the narrator justifies the fact that the guy who stole his wife had plague-death coming, completely glossing over the thousands-- hundreds of thousands?-- of other people who died in the plague. The narrator too sneers at the science believed in by Rebelspear and Delicker but also uses Darwinism to argue that the apocalyptic ending is totally hopeful: "A great number of those poorer classes had been swept away, and in this case of the survival of the fittest those left in England to rebuild London and the social life of the British people were mostly either physically or mentally strong. The brain workers aided the physically strong in the work of rebuilding a new England out of the ruins of the old, and the twentieth century began its career under the happiest auspices."

Um, happy? Yay, plague! Also I want to suggest that Fergus Hume doesn't have the firmest grasp of the actual causes of poverty. Delicker converts to Christianity, though, so I guess it's all worth it.