Deceptively romantic short story
“For a Night of Love,” a short story by French author Emile Zola, was originally published in 1876 in the Russian literary journal European Messenger (Vestnik Evropy). For whatever reason, it never made it into one of Zola’s canonical short story collections, such as Contes à Ninon or Parisian Sketches, so this story is little-known and often absent from “complete works” collections of Zola’s writings, at least those published in the English language. In 1911, however, the Warren Press published a series of thin volumes of Zola works in English that includes For a Night of Love as a stand-alone 64-page book. Unlike the earlier stories of Contes à Ninon, which dabbled in popular romanticism, “For a Night of Love” was published in the midst of Zola’s work on his extraordinary Rougon-Macquart cycle and thus displays his mature naturalistic style. In subject and tone it most closely resembles Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, which in 1867 was a flagship publication for the school of naturalism and his first overt declaration of independence from the conventions of romanticism.
Though the title is deliberately misleading, the story begins as love stories often do. A shy, awkward young man who lives alone spies his beautiful neighbor enjoying the moonlight on her balcony. He worships her from afar but considers her out of his league. To liven up his solitary existence, he plays simple tunes on his flute, until one night he discovers his lovely neighbor is actually listening to his musical efforts and apparently finding enjoyment in them. From that moment on, he plays only for her, secretly hoping that by pleasing her ear he might somehow win his way into her heart.
Just when you think you know what you’re in for, Zola, as he is often wont to do, takes the story in a dark direction. From that moment on, the narrative firmly falls within the bleak, harsh realism of Zola’s powerful naturalist novels. More than a mere romance, For a Night of Love is a profound study in human psychology. True to the literary tenets of naturalism, Zola documents the relationship between Julien and Therese with the observational precision of a scientist. Through his depiction of the love that binds the couple together and the differences of class and culture that separate them, Zola illustrates how nature and nurture develop human character and influence the course of life and death.
In my opinion, Zola is history’s greatest craftsman of prose fiction, and For a Night of Love is a very fine example of his work. Its biggest flaw is its brevity, which hinders it from competing with the sheer impressiveness of Zola’s more monumental novels. Along with this obscure little book, the Warren Press also published the hard-to-find stories Love’s Chase and Shell-Fish, as well as a little-known collection of five stories entitled Death. Scanned copies of these books are available for reading and download at the HathiTrust website.
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Eloquently imaginative solar system travelogue
Wladislaw Lach-Szyrma was an English curate of the Anglican Church. (His father was a Polish immigrant, hence the name.) In addition to his work as a parish priest, Lach-Szyrma penned two science fiction novels, the first of which, Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds, was published in 1883. Though a member of the clergy, Lach-Szyrma seems to have held very liberal religious views. In his preface to Aleriel, he expresses cosmological views similar to those for which Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600—that is, that there is nothing special about the Earth or the human race. The universe is filled with worlds, and it is likely that these myriad planets are teeming with life, intelligent or otherwise. Lach-Szyrma envisions each world as being in a different state of evolutionary development, with some life forms more primitive and some more advanced than those of Earth. In Aleriel, Lach-Szyrma illustrates his theories by taking the reader on a tour of several celestial bodies in our solar system.
The story opens in Brittany, France, where the narrator, an Oxford student, is enjoying a holiday. There he meets a strange man, piteously deformed with a pronounced hunchback, yet possessing a remarkably beautiful face. This man is a foreigner, but won’t say exactly where he’s from. Though obviously intelligent, the stranger exhibits a surprising naivete, asks many oddly penetrating questions, and is often quite openly critical of European society and customs. As Lach-Szyrma has already revealed in his preface, this encounter leads to a journey to other planets, but the less revealed about the details the better for the reader..
Lach-Szyrma certainly seems to have been well versed in the scientific knowledge of his time, both astronomical and biological. He demonstrates a thorough familiarity with the topographical features of Mars, for example, and makes reasonable conjectures about the life forms of these foreign worlds. Many of his ideas are antiquated, of course, like the formerly popular notions that empty space is filled with ether or that Mars has oceans and canals. Lach-Szyrma relates his story so eloquently, however, that such forgivably erroneous ideas never seem ridiculous nor hokey.
One of the few faults in Lach-Szyrma’s storytelling is that he structures the narrative such that the narrator experiences most of the novel’s wonders through second-hand accounts rather than as a first-hand witness. In addition, as one might expect from a clergyman, the author devotes maybe too much attention to the subject of religion, asserting that no matter which planet we may live on, all intelligent life worships the same God, each in his or her own way. Lach-Szyrma describes the religious rituals of each race of beings encountered, as if he were conducting a contest to see which of his imaginary species can boast the most pious planet.
I read a lot of these old-school science fiction novels, and Aleriel is really one of the better examples of early space travel fiction. The literary quality of Lach-Szyrma’s writing is a cut above many of the sci-fi practitioners of his era. He may not be in the same league with H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, but Aleriel is certainly better than John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) or Garret P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898). Aleriel is a lesser-known gem definitely worth a read for anyone interested in 19th century science fiction.
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Heavily medicated humor
Polish author Stanislaw Lem is one of the most widely read and widely translated science fiction writers in the world. Best known as the author of Solaris, he enjoyed a productive and successful literary career spanning roughly half a century. His novel The Futurological Congress, published in 1971, is narrated by the scholar and space explorer Ijon Tichy, a recurring character in several of Lem’s works. Unlike Solaris, the Ijon Tichy stories are mostly satirically comic tales, as evidenced by The Futurological Congress, in which nearly every sentence drips with delightful black humor. The story Tichy tells is not only laugh-out-loud funny but also an oddly thought-provoking piece of speculative science fiction.
The subject of space travel is only mentioned in the first paragraph, as Tichy returns to Earth from who knows where in order to attend the Eighth World Futurological Congress in the fictional city of Nounas, the capital of Costa Rica. Scholars of many nations check into the Hilton to attend the delivery of countless papers theorizing upon the future of life on Earth. The conference takes place at an unspecified time in the near future. Thanks primarily to overpopulation, Earth’s problems—violence, crime, pollution, disease, energy shortages, hunger, etc.—have all escalated to horrific proportions. Tichy and his colleagues, however, seem to take each new misery as merely another everyday matter of course. Lem lampoons the stuffy, academic atmosphere of scholarly conferences while satirizing the lofty, futuristic utopian visions of the sci-fi genre. Tichy’s Earth is a third-world world where mayhem, filth, and bad taste are comically rampant.
The fact that armed rebels have threatened to disrupt the conference is viewed blasély by Tichy and his colleagues as an expected inconvenience. Only when the government bombs the hotel is the monotonous delivery of arcane scientific papers interrupted. Tichy suspects that the tap water in his hotel has been spiked with a chemical designed to inflict a more cheerful and benevolent demeanor upon him. When soldiers start hurling smoke bombs into the Hilton, Tichy discovers it’s not tear gas they’re slinging but more of these mood-changing “benignimizer” drugs. The myriad consciousness-altering possibilities of such “psychem” drugs soon becomes the primary focus of the book. Lem depicts a world where every mood, thought, and vision can be conjured through pharmaceutical means. The exaggerated absurdities compound when Tichy gets a glimpse into a future that the Eighth World Futurological Congress would never have predicted.
Translator Michael Handel deserves a medal for his work on the English edition of 1974. Much of the novel’s humor arises from Lem’s use of puns and invented words, including the names of dozens of fictional drugs such as opinionates, rhapsodines, or amnesol. This book must have been a nightmare to translate, but Handel’s English version reads beautifully with clear, lively prose that smartly delivers the laughs that Lem intended. Because of all the drugs involved, it is often quite difficult to figure out whether what you are reading is Tichy’s reality or simply a hallucination. While this in itself is one of the book’s funnier aspects, sometimes the jumping back and forth between the two can get a little tiresome. Lem relentlessly satirizes the conventions of science fiction by negating the gravity of his own narrative. Nevertheless, the future that Lem has constructed functions well as both a cautionary dystopia and a ridiculous farce. I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to reading the further adventures of Ijon Tichy.
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Much ado about nothing
Long before Winston Churchill (1874-1965) became famous as the prime minister of the United Kingdom, another Winston Churchill (1871-1947) had already achieved fame and fortune in America as a successful author of fiction. From the late 1890s to the end of World War I, the American Churchill wrote a string of bestsellers, several of which were also adapted into Broadway plays and films. That streak began in 1897 with The Celebrity, his first novel to be published in book form.
The title character of this comedic novel is a pretentious author whose novels are popular but of questionable literary merit. The book is narrated by John Crocker, an attorney and old friend of the Celebrity. Crocker and the other characters refer to the novelist only as the Celebrity; his real name is never mentioned. This gimmick might be amusing the first three times you’ve read it, but it soon grows tiresome and awkward. Luckily, the Celebrity adopts an alias for most of the book, which provides relief from this contrivance and makes the narration and dialogue less cumbersome.
The story takes place in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest, where Crocker works in an unnamed city. Crocker spends his summers at a fictional lakeside resort named Asquith. There he is surprised to run into his old friend the Celebrity, who has likewise decided to vacation at Asquith. To lessen the burden of his fame, the Celebrity has decided to travel incognito. He calls himself Charles Wrexell Allen, a name he has stolen from a man in Boston who looks enough like the Celebrity to be his doppelganger. Another new arrival in Asquith is Farquhar Fenelon Cooke, a wealthy man from Philadelphia who is buying up timber lands in the area. Cooke is kind of like Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack. He’s too loud and unrefined and parties too hard for stuffy old Asquith, so he decides to build his own resort nearby, named Mohair. Meanwhile, of course, there are two attractive young women in Asquith for Crocker and the Celebrity to court, but who will end up with whom remains uncertain until the end of the book.
Not at all surprisingly, the Celebrity’s assumed name leads to a case of mistaken identity, and his extrication from this sticky situation occupies the bulk of the book. It also leads to a lot of tedious and unproductive bickering among the members of the cast. Though the 1890s were too early for photo identification, it is very hard to believe that the Celebrity would not have some documentary evidence of his identity, or that the problem could not have been resolved by some much simpler means than the farce Churchill creates from this ridiculous premise. Suspension of disbelief is fine if the farce is funny, but this story is just tiresome. Your great-grandfather might have found this novel hilarious, but today’s readers are likely to find it mildly amusing at best.
Churchill also pokes fun at the restrictive conventions of being a “gentleman,” like the one that requires a gentleman to marry any woman to whom he shows even the slightest nonphysical affection. Churchill doesn’t really have the guts to subvert such ideas, however, so any satire contained herein is very weak and tepid. Though he may make fun of stuffy social mores, he buys into them all the same. Following The Celebrity, Churchill achieved greater success with serious historical novels, so maybe comedy just isn’t his strong suit.
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The man who knew everything
Views of Nature, also known as Aspects of Nature, was originally published in 1808 under the German title of Ansichten der Natur. The author, Prussian explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, revised the work for second and third editions during his lifetime. I am reviewing an English translation of the third edition of 1849, published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press, translated by Mark W. Person and edited by Stephen T. Jackson and Laura Dassow Walls.
Two and a half centuries ago, Humboldt may have been the most famous man on earth. He is best known for a daring and scientifically productive expedition he led into South America, Cuba, and Mexico, which he chronicled in detail in his book Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804. Views of Nature also uses that exhibition as a starting point but takes a different approach. Though the book is heavy on scientific content, Views of Nature is really the prototype for what we now call “nature writing,” as later practiced by writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. When Humboldt writes about the tropics in this book, his intention is to convey to the reader what it really feels like to be in these exotic natural locales. As a romanticist, he is more concerned with capturing the general impression of the natural environment than the details of temperature readings, altitude measurements, and specific species present. As an obsessive empiricist, however, Humboldt can’t resist including all these minute details. What results is a sort of hybrid format with the primary, somewhat literary narrative supported by extensive scientific endnotes that often exceed the length of the main text itself. Chapter 5: Ideas for a Physiognomy of Plants, for example, is under 15 pages in length but has 72 pages of notes!
In addition to his South American adventures, Humboldt traveled extensively in Europe and also made a voyage across Russia. In addition, he studied the accounts of numerous explorers in other parts of the world. When he describes natural environments in Views of Nature, he constantly compares the scene at hand with other biomes throughout the world. Chapter 1: Concerning the Steppes and Deserts, for example, is a survey of all the world’s flatlands, from the Sahara desert to the Arctic tundra, pointing out universal similarities in climate, terrain, and vegetation while also celebrating the differences that make each habitat unique. Humboldt was the ultimate multidisciplinary generalist who eschewed specialization in favor of unifying multiple fields of study. He writes with expert authority on a shocking number of disciplines: geography, botany, geology, zoology, meteorology, mineralogy, astronomy, electricity and magnetism, anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics, politics, and ecology, a field he practically invented.
Those who have read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species know the feeling of amazement at how Darwin seems to have read and studied every biological text ever published. That amazement is dwarfed by the staggering realization of Humboldt’s extensive polymathic erudition in all the fields listed above. He not only refers to hundreds of scientific and historical works in his notes but even cites specific page numbers. The same herculean stamina he displayed in his journeys is manifested in his research, writing, and editing. Views of Nature contains an atlas worth of obscure place names, countless Latin designations of plant and animal species, and several archaic units of measurement. I can’t claim to have understood it all, but I enjoyed it immensely. Half the time I felt like I was at Humboldt’s side in the jungles of the Amazon basin; the other half I imagined I was sitting across from the great scholar in his library as he regaled me with his seemingly unlimited knowledge of the world. Views of Nature is truly a wonderful trip inside the mind of this great genius adventurer.
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Obsessive authorized fan fiction
The Dune Encyclopedia was published in 1984, following the publication of God Emperor of Dune, the fourth novel in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Herbert did not write the Encyclopedia, but he did give the project his blessing. He stopped short of recognizing the Encyclopedia as canon, however, and subsequent Dune novels do not intentionally adhere to the book’s contents.
The Encyclopedia was compiled by Dr. Willis E. McNelly, a close friend of Herbert’s. The entries, however, are the work of 43 different authors, McNelly included. Thus the book is like a glorified compendium of fan fiction, but as if all the fans held PhDs. The entries on the Fremen and Galach languages, for example, were obviously written by a linguist. The sections on imperial law are likely to have been penned by a legal scholar, and there must have been at least a few religious studies professors on hand to elaborate on the Orange Catholic Bible. The Dune Encyclopedia purports to have been written by historians and archaeologists in the year 15540 AG (after Guild), following the discovery of a huge hoard of diaries and documents hidden by Emperor Leto II roughly 2,000 years earlier. The text reads like a collection of essays from an academic journal, complete with citations to an entire library full of imaginary books. For the most part the Encyclopedia evokes the lofty intellectualism that one associates with Herbert’s novels. This is by no means light reading. It sometimes gets bogged down in ponderous prose, but its ingenuity and clever tie-ins to the official narrative make it a fun read for avid Dune fans.
The first three Dune novels are set roughly 25,000 years in the future, and the events of God Emperor of Dune take place about 3,500 years after that. That is a lot of history to uncover, and the authors of the Encyclopedia leave few stones unturned. Extensive biographies flesh out the lives of the characters before, after, and in between the events of Herbert’s novels. Readers learn about the invention of faster-than-light space travel, the causes of the Butlerian Jihad, and the formation of the Empire. The origins of the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, the Bene Tleilax, the Sardaukar, and the CHOAM corporation are all explored in depth, as well as the Zensunni migrations that brought the Fremen from Earth to Arrakis. The richness of Herbert’s invented universe is unparalleled in fiction, and this is a fitting celebration of his visionary creativity.
Unfortunately, not every entry is a winner. Some of the writers seem to have watched a few too many Joseph Campbell specials on PBS before crafting their new agey mythologies. The entry for Gamont, a planet devoted to the sex trade, is a silly slapstick story that sticks out like a sore thumb amid all the faux scholarly seriousness. Many of the entries are just way longer than they need to be, wallowing in detail that supports the feigned authenticity but challenges attention spans. Through all the character biographies, you sometimes feel like you are reading Herbert’s narrative over and over again, just told from different perspectives. Still, for all its faults, this is a remarkably thorough and imaginative sci-fi companion volume, and Dune fans have to admire the daring ambitiousness of McNelly and his coterie of writers.
The Dune Encyclopedia has long been out of print because the Herbert heirs refuse to rerelease it, but someone has posted a “bootleg” pdf copy online for those willing to search for it. This pdf was made by scanning the original book, and the resulting text is riddled with typographical errors. Considering this is probably the only way most readers will ever be able to access the book, however, it is an acceptable substitute.
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Half-baked hollow-Earth adventure
The Smoky God, or A Voyage to the Inner World, published in 1908, is a science fiction novel by American author Willis George Emerson. The book opens with an extensive preface that details how the author was contacted by 95-year-old Olaf Jansen, a Norseman (half Norwegian, half Swedish) who is dying in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Before he passes, he has a story he wants to get off his chest, one so astonishing that for decades he has been afraid to tell it for fear of being thrown into an insane asylum. He then proceeds to relate how as a teenager he accompanied his father, a fisherman, on an extended fishing voyage northward into the Arctic Ocean. At a certain point both men are surprised to find that the climate is becoming milder and warmer despite their far northern latitude. The father tells Olaf that he has heard legends of a paradise at the top of the world. Olaf enthusiastically proposes that they search for this mysterious land, and so the two Norsemen, worshippers of Odin and Thor, set off to find the lost polar Eden.
The Smoky God is one of many sci-fi novels in the Hollow Earth subgenre, which includes such works as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881), and the Pellucidar series (1914-1963) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Hollow Earth theory proposes that the crust of the Earth is like an eggshell with land, water, and life on both its inner and outer surfaces. At the North Pole, Olaf and his father find a portal into this Inner Earth where they discover a veritable Garden of Eden with a utopian civilization much more advanced than the surface world, inhabited by beings who, in godly fashion, are superior to us surface dwellers in every way. Serving as the sun in this subterranean world is a molten, luminous core that is in some way surrounded by nebulous electrical clouds that simulate night and day. The inhabitants of the Inner World worship this central sun as their “Smoky God.”
For centuries many intelligent people considered the Hollow Earth theory a viable hypothesis, but by the early twentieth century it was mostly relegated to the realm of pseudoscience. Unlike Verne and Burroughs who use the Hollow Earth device merely as an entertaining launching point for farfetched fiction, Emerson actually seems to believe the theory. He proposes that the North and South Poles are the entry points to this inner realm, and he supports his speculations with footnotes referring to the accounts of actual polar explorers such as Charles Francis Hall, Fridtjof Nansen, and Robert Peary. Emerson also quotes from the Bible to support his Garden of Eden theories, which are largely derived from William Fairfield Warren’s 1885 nonfiction book Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole.
I enjoyed the deathbed memoir format of the work, with Olaf Jansen as narrator, and even the footnotes add to the fun. The problem is, Olaf and his dad barely spend any time in the Inner World (two years for them, but only a chapter and a half for the reader), so Emerson really doesn’t have a whole lot to say about what’s going on in there. Most of the book focuses on the getting there and the getting back, which is mostly just about a ship navigating through icebergs. Fans of early science fiction might enjoy the campiness of this work, but it never really lives up to its ambitious premise. Whereas Verne or H. G. Wells could have developed the idea into a full-fledged narrative with engaging characters, Emerson’s story never really takes off.
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