(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: technoish piece with a robot singing mocking vocals)
Volodymyr Vladko - "The Defeat of Jonathan Govers" (1929)
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate and I'm joined by my co-hosts Gretchen and JM and this month we're doing a series, the second part of which is on artificial intelligence, robots, and mechanical lifeforms. If you are interested in the historical background, you can listen to our last month's episode on Samuel Butler's "Erewhon", or this month's episode we also covered two previous stories, EM Forster's, "The Machine Stops", and Karel Čapek's "RUR".
But right now, we are going to be taking a look at the first in a series that we'll be doing, though perhaps not sequentially over these next few episodes, but adding them to the pile of future stories. And that is previously untranslated 1920s Soviet science fiction. So by the time that we'll be recording this, and probably by the time you'll be able to listen to this, we've already posted four stories to our blogspot, which you can read. And three more are coming very shortly, two of which are pretty much more or less done. The third one will be done very shortly, and several more will be coming further down the road, all of which will eventually cover.
JM:
Yeah, and some of these are really cool. And they're really obscure outside of Russia.
Nate:
Yeah, it kind of varies on the level of recognition. So the, I guess authors like everybody else, they range in popularity where some people have had some of their works translated into English, but different works that we're taking a look at. And others are totally obscure within Russia, the story that I was doing today before we were recording. I can't even find the guy's first name. He's that obscure.
JM:
Well, which one is that?
Nate:
That is an N. Pavlov, who wrote a story called Chicks. I'm through the first pass of it, the second pass, I guess I'll be finishing up after we.
JM:
So it's not that Poe-like one.
Nate:
No, no, this is a different one. Again, very, very short. But yeah, that'll be posted on the Blogspot again in the next couple weeks, probably after we finish editing this one and have these posted.
But it is a, I think major hole in the English language science fiction scholarship, as there's a lot of the stuff here. And it's a pretty significant scene as far as the volume is produced. That's both culturally interesting and from the standpoint of a different take on these early science fiction tropes as far as the underpinning ideologies of the authors writing the stories.
They again range quite a bit as far as the political underpinnings and ideologies here, our author tonight is certainly more in line with the values of the mainstream Communist Party versus some of the dissidents that we've covered on the podcast in the past that have run into trouble with the sensors and the police. So it really does range from the people who had mainstream acceptance within the Soviet Union during their lifetimes versus people who were suppressed by the authorities and some of them even sentenced to the Gulag.
This one woman will be translating in a little while did 20 years in the Gulag system and it just sounds completely horrible, but not our author tonight. So I guess you have quite a bit to look forward to in the next coming weeks as far as these translations go. Most of them are in Russian initially however this one was written in Ukrainian as we have a Ukrainian author who has very much looked upon as a Ukrainian national hero.
So, Volodymyr Nikolayevich Eromchenko, who wrote under the pseudonym of Volodymyr Vladko, or Vladimir Vladko in the Russian language translations, was born in St. Petersburg on January 8 of 1901 to a working class family. His father was a newspaper technician, and his mother was a midwife. He attended public education in Voronezh, and he was attracted to science, engineering, and writing from an early age.
In addition to Ukrainian and Russian, he was fluent in Latin and English, and his first published works are from 1917 when he was just 16 years old in the form of poems and various reviews.
JM:
Yeah, and he was quite young when he published our story tonight.
Nate:
He was, yeah. But his fluency in English led him to adopt a somewhat English manner. He was described by one of his future employees as, "a man with excellent manners and always externally and internally buttoned up, looking like an Englishman or rather the way we imagine the English."
So, I just kind of imagined him carrying himself like a Sherlock Holmes figure, very stuffy and proper all the time in his mannerisms.
JM:
So that's what an Englishman should be like.
Nate:
Exactly, right, yeah. But around 1917, he was working in the newspaper and magazine industry, which he more or less did the entirety of his life. So he already had a foot in the door here when the war broke out. After the revolution, he graduated from the Voronezh Institute of Public Education in 1921, and during the 1920s was a rather prolific theater critic in the various newspapers.
It's around this time when he adopted the Vladko surname pseudonym. It's one that came about by accident as somebody had accidentally misprinted his name, and he apparently thought it was so amusing that he just decided to keep it.
During the 1930s, he reported extensively on the various five year plan construction sites all around the Soviet Union. And he manages to stay in the good graces of the regime by actively adopting the Stalinist ideology. So again, as mentioned, unlike some of the other Soviet era authors we've covered previously and will cover in the future, Vladko was very much a party cheerleader in his works, and that very much carries over into his fiction.
During World War II, he was a political commentator on the Ukrainian radio station named after T.G. Shevchenko, and after the war wrote numerous texts for early childhood education. Generally speaking, was highly regarded and decorated for the remainder of his life, dying on April 21st of 1974.
So as a fiction author, which was largely science fiction, he was incredibly prolific. And aside from a period of about 10 years after World War II, which slowed down in the mid 1940s and resumed in the mid 1950s, he basically wrote science fiction and fantasy for his entire life. While he wrote in both Russian and Ukrainian, most of his stories were written in Ukrainian and not translated into Russian and tell quite recently, like within the last 10 years or so.
As such, he is incredibly popular and influential within Ukraine and considered to be the "Ukrainian Jules Verne", a title which would have pleased him as Verne was one of his major childhood influences, like I think a lot of authors we've covered on the podcast before.
He started publishing science fiction stories in 1929, with a few stories, the earliest of which is Rocketoplane-S218, and also the story we're covering tonight. So the late 1920s is when the Soviet science fiction genre writing really starts to get going. A lot of the revolutionary era and pre-revolutionary writers that wrote SF were what Rafail Nudelman calls, "mainstream writers". They're like the Bulgakov we covered previously or the Platonov, which is up on the blogspot now.
JM:
Or even Alexei Tolstoy, right?
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
He certainly became more known as a, quote, realistic novelist later on, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, so a lot of authors that otherwise did non-genre fiction, more of a literary scope than the Amazing Stories style pulp magazine stuff. The other author we've posted up on the blogspot now from this batch of recent translations, Graаl Arelsky kind of fits between the two movements, but Vladko here is definitely a part of this late 1920s wave that is kind of a mirror image of Amazing Stories and the wave of pulp stuff that comes out of America around the same time.
JM:
Yeah, except it's Soviet propaganda.
Nate:
Exactly, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, why not, I guess.
Nate:
It's kind of a cool take on it. Vladko's most famous novel is "Argonauts of the Universe", which was originally written in Ukrainian in 1935 and translated into Russian in 1939. And as such was incredibly popular upon publication and pretty influential within the Soviet Union.
JM:
I wonder what that's like. That sounds interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, from what I understand, they go to Venus or something like that. And again, it has these Soviet revolutionary themes where they introduce socialism to the galaxy and that makes everybody happy. But it influenced a lot of the 1960s Soviet science fiction authors, the Strugatsky brothers said that they read it as a kid and all that.
So I mean, I think it has the more or less same place in Soviet science fiction history as a Gernsback or somebody like that would have in American science fiction history. Since Vladko pretty much towed the party line throughout his entire career, despite the fact that he often revised his earlier works in his later life, he never had problems with the censors, like some of the other Soviet authors we've covered, and was highly recognized and decorated, including two orders of the badge of honor, a certificate of honor from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, a certificate of honor from the Pravda newspaper and certificates of honor from the Central Committee of the Komsomol. So another Central Committee here. His fluency in English gave him an opportunity to explore American science fiction, and he had reviewed Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" for one of the Ukrainian magazines, The Universe.
JM:
Did he like it?
Nate:
I believe so. Yeah, I didn't actually read his review, but he seemed to be at least somewhat familiar with mainstream American science fiction. And from what I can tell, wrote about it a fair amount, though the "Martian Chronicles" review was the one thing that I could verifiably find that actually, you know, he wrote.
This particular story, though, as previously mentioned, is one of his earliest ones from 1929, "The Defeat of Jonathan Govers". This was initially published in Ukrainian under the title "Jonathan Govers' Mistake" in the magazine, Knowledge and Work, volume number three from 1929, with illustrations by a J. Dietz, and was later republished in his 1936 anthology 12 stories. Later, Vladko reworked the story into the novel "The Robots Are Coming" from 1931, and again later in the novel "Iron Revolt" from 1967. The 1931 version seems to get mentioned in a few English language sources.
But for this translation, we went with the short story version, mainly due to the length. The 1931 version is about 50,000 words. This one is about a tenth of the length of that around 5,000 words or so. I mean, likewise with the other untranslated Soviet fiction we'll be looking at, we'll be going through primarily on short stories for that very reason. That's a lot quicker for us to move through the stuff, and I'm not sure if I would be able to do a 50,000 word version of something like this versus the 5,000, which I think is about the right length for this kind of story.
JM:
But we will keep an eye out for things that are coming out in the future. Some of these works may be unearthed, and I guess we're doing our part.
Nate:
We'd certainly like to get the ball rolling in that direction because there's a lot there. And again, not just in Russian, but there's Ukrainian stuff. I found a couple longer works in Belarusian. I'm sure there's some stuff in some of the Central Asian languages as well that were spoken in the Soviet Union, like in places like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. But even with the Russian language stuff, there's not that much English language stuff that goes deep on a lot of these more obscure stories. A lot of the English language criticism is around the bigger works, some of which we've covered before, like "Heart of a Dog" and "Professor Dowell's Head". Other stuff is things that we're likely to cover in the future, like "Red Star" or "We".
But a lot of the magazine fiction, which this one doesn't come from World of Adventure, but World of Adventure was like the first major genre fiction magazine in the Soviet Union. It started out before the Revolution, but existed for several years after the Revolution until 1930 or so. But they publish a lot of this Amazing Story style science fiction, and presumably Vladko would have had stuff published in there if he wrote more stuff in Russian. I didn't find the original printing of this as far as a scan of the magazine Knowledge and Work that it came with, so I'm not exactly sure what else knowledge and work published.
The magazine does appear to be entirely in Ukrainian language. I was able to find some descriptions of the magazine that make it sound like one of those early Hugo Gernsback publications, where it was mostly science-focused, but published a couple science fiction adventure type stories every now and then.
Gretchen:
It suggests more of a technical manual.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Right.
So, I mean, I kind of wonder if like, I mean, it isn't uncommon for sometimes something like certain types of nonfiction magazines to include a story or two.
Nate:
From what I understand, it was, again, Ukrainian language, so not widely distributed throughout the entire Soviet Union, but rather just in Ukraine.
So yeah, this story. It's fun. It's short. Very much communist propaganda, but again, it adds a kind of flair to it.
JM:
It definitely isn't not like, it is in line with some of the other stuff we're reading tonight. I mean that the characters are not exactly three-dimensional.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It's fine. I think the Forster probably does best out of all of them. And there's mostly only one, maybe two to consider, right? So, all of these stories, the characters are like more ideas than people, or they're like over-the-top villains, like somebody coming up and maybe this covers character too. He's kind of like that Rip Ratten guy that Čapek was just talking about. He seems to work too.
Nate:
He definitely is. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nate:
And I'm not sure if Vladko read Čapek I assume he had because a lot of the Russian language criticism specifically mentions the novel version of this one being like a souped-up version of the RUR robots.
JM:
Okay.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It is a very interesting story to have, like, in counterpoint with RUR.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's kind of a bit of the opposite going on, you know, where instead of having this revolution of just robots against humans, it's become the workers and the robots unite.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And the robots seem very primitive. Like, I don't even just mean like, maybe the design was primitive, but I mean, like, it seems that most of the essence of the story is pointing at just how formidable they are because they are so unstoppable. Unstoppable and relentless. Like, they're not, there's not even like, you forget about them being conscious in any way, right? Even though there's all this, oh, the robots are joining the workers. Like, it's very blatantly artificial, I guess, because like they're just radio-controlled kind of like the zombies and that Leigh Brackett story, you know, they're just radio-controlled metal monstrosities, right?
Nate:
Yeah. They're very much like factory assembly line type of machines rather than thinking sentient beings or any kind of artificial intelligence like in the Forster that kind of has to process logical decisions. They're given very specific commands for movement of producing whatever this New Harris factory produces. It doesn't really go into it, it doesn't really matter that much, but it's this big assembly line type environment where each robot has one specific task. It just does that over and over and over again, thousands of times a day because it's a machine.
JM:
They're no smarter than the housemaids in the story last time.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
They're just like, they walk upstairs and if there's not a bed, they see whatever, I guess, looks like a bed and start doing bed-making things.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Whatever comes out, comes out like these robots are.
Gretchen:
There's only one broom, they're going to fight over it.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But with this one, we don't really get too much robots fighting robots or anything like that. Their instructions seem to be fairly simple and they mess up due to a very important principle of engineering called electromagnetic compatibility, which isn't spelled out here and wasn't really, I guess, starting to be a thing in the 1920s, but would become far more important later on, especially when radio and wireless stuff becomes more ubiquitous in devices that are being engineered and used in day-to-day life. But a lot of cool amateur radio talk on this, which is always fun to see.
JM:
That was kind of an interesting touch.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
This actually might have fit in well even with our radio episode.
Nate:
It would have. Yeah. There's a lot of ways we could have taken this story and the logical choices, of course, here, but it does have some interesting crossovers with other themes in science fiction, too. So I guess it's real short.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So unless you guys have anything else to say on the non-spoiler thing, I'll just get into the plot and we'll see what happens in this Ukrainian robot story.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So our story opens up in the offices of the working class newspaper, The Chronicle, where our hero, reporter Tim Crounty, has just read a piece of information in Scientific...
JM:
The names and names in here are great.
Nate:
I know, yeah.
JM:
And they're very obviously, hey, this is America or something like that, right? Like, it's not here. It's there where the workers really need a lot of help.
Nate:
Yeah. So the fake English names, I think, are very amusing. Tim Crounty. We had a couple other good ones later. But he reads a piece of information in scientific news that's quite alarming. And that is, Jonathan Govers' factories in New Harris are producing robots, and they're going to replace the human workers who are currently striking. The workers need to know about this, of course. So he sent an assignment to find out what he can. And he's able to secure a meeting with Govers himself, who, after a rather tense exchange, demonstrates the robot in such an awesome way.
He presses this James Bond villain style button on his desk, and a wall opens up, and a huge robot walks out, all stiff and thunderous. And he just takes Govers' briefcase. And Tim Crounty is just totally shocked and scared stiff.
Gretchen:
Kind of reminds me of "The Triumph of Mechanics" when he walks in with those robotic dogs. It's a very grand scene.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a very impressive demonstration.
JM:
It also makes me think of The Avengers and the Cybernauts episode. This is kind of industrialist with these giant robot creatures, cybernetic. I think they were once human or something, or they had some human element to them. But anyway, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, the first impression is always the most important. When the idea is to instill this fear, this demonstration of power that we have these huge, awesome robots, what better way to do it than this elaborate production. And he definitely gives him that. And by this demonstration, he assures Tim that the strike will indeed be crushed, even if the company's profits are at initial loss from having to do robot stuff or whatever.
But still, the strike is holding firm for several days. The workers are in horrid conditions and they see a truck drive in and unload a shipment of these robots. So what can they do? Tim wants to get closer to have a look at the factory. It's going to be tough because there's lots of security guards everywhere, but if they're stealthy enough, maybe it'll be possible.
They're able to peek in a window unseen and the robots are all working in an eerie silence. Completely flawlessly doing however hundreds of repetitions per second. And they're just monitored by a human overseer who's kind of walking up and down the hallways, checking to making sure everything is okay. And it seems like everything is going flawlessly except, however, this one robot suddenly makes a wrong move and collapses on the floor and is promptly removed by the overseer.
And Tim realizes that the robots can make mistakes too, but how did this one fail? And more importantly, why did it fail? So Tim holds a series of conversations with a Jim Winton, an ardent radio amateur and tech wizard.
Gretchen:
Tim and Jim.
Nate:
Yeah. He deduces that the robots are controlled by radio waves. You know, he doesn't see wires anywhere. They're not big enough to house a gigantic battery. So it has to be something wireless.
JM:
And he's going to hack them.
Nate:
Oh yeah, and hack them he does.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
They observe the robots for a while and they note that the malfunctioning robots are near an electric clock on the wall. So there must be some kind of interference in that particular spot that causes them to mess up and crash out.
JM:
I like how they figured this out. Like the guys at the factory couldn't be bothered to figure this out. But these guys are just like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. It's cool that the way that that was done.
Nate:
It's the knowledge of the working class that gives them the edge over these evil capitalist. So this of course gives Jim the idea. And he works for hours and hours trying to figure out a solution. Days even, talking on a short waved radio transmitter. And one day they're observing the robots. And at noon all the robots suddenly raise their left hand. So what could this mean?
The poor conditions of the workers are coming to a breaking point and they're ready to march on Govers. It's a last ditch effort, but after almost a month, what else can they do? If it doesn't work, they'll be forced to give in anyways, so they might as well try.
It seems hopeless, but wait!
There's metallic footsteps and they're coming. The robots are with the workers! The crowd erupts and cheers! The workers have won!
So it turns out that Jim Winton, again, another great fake English name. He'd been talking on the short-wave radio to the radio geniuses from the Red Countries. Where else, of course, who had been using their superior socialist engineering knowledge. They hacked the robots using radio waves and have used them against the forces of capitalism. They're now lying dormant in a warehouse for now. Maybe, maybe one day, they'll join the workers again on the revolutionary barricades.
JM:
Thunderous music.
Nate:
Yeah. Socialism triumphs, and that is the Defeat of Jonathan Govers.
Gretchen:
Yes, the defeat of Jonathan Govers by comrades Tim and Jim.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, it's pretty adorable. I must say. It's pretty cute. I don't know. Definitely, I guess in a way, the silliest of all of the stories, maybe. Well, I don't know. It has some stiff competition coming up.
Nate:
Yeah, it does.
JM:
But yeah, I don't know. I liked it. It was a fun, quick read. It's not very long. I do kind of wonder what the expanded versions was like.
Nate:
Yeah, so I looked at the 1931 one, and it uses the same character names. So I'm not exactly sure which parts he expands.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I didn't look at the 60s one. So I'm not sure if he changes the character names or the scenario.
JM:
I mean, I do think like it's, it's kind of unfortunate that the story is just like the robots aren't that interesting. They're just radio controlled, lumbering machines.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And the, the story itself is, I don't know, it's like the yay, the workers unite. It feels a little bit like he didn't have to write it like that. I don't know. It's, it's, I guess, it's quite possible to maintain that philosophy and exhort these kind of principles without being quite so on the nose about it. But like you said, it is kind of on the level of these Amazing Stories, kind of publications, which tend to be a little bit like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I feel like it would have made the message better if the robots had some depth to them because it feels like it's a more, a stronger sense of solidarity between different classes.
But yeah, again, it's still a fun story and it is kind of endearing how much of a propaganda piece that it is.
Nate:
It really is. Yeah.
JM:
And I did like the industrial espionage angle. Like that was actually really cool. I always liked that. Like that's one of the things that I think is cool about the Avengers is that like a lot of the stories are just these rich capitalists with weird ideas and they're usually really eccentric and John Steed had to have appeal or whoever his assistant is. It has to, you know, out with them. And then usually there's this massive chaotic explosion of chaos at the end of the last scene.
Gretchen:
But usually Steed has to sort of hobnob with them for a little bit.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. And there's a bit of that at the beginning of this story. Like there's, I liked that he was a reporter. Like again, it has that set up. And I mentioned in when we did the Williamson story, how much I liked that. Although that guy didn't really contribute to the story at all, which is like, it wasn't the best use of that trope, maybe, but it's still a trope that I really like. And this one didn't really use it either, mostly because it was really short. So again, like I'm kind of thinking maybe an expanded version would be better. Maybe, maybe in this case, like it was kind of make things a little bit more at least two dimensional. Like here, I think a lot of the draw is the spectacle of the robots, but they are just a spectacle unlike Čapek's robots. You know what I mean?
Like Čapek's robots, although they're only a couple that you could really consider characters. They have motivations and feelings and like developing souls and everything, whereas these don't. And so this story is, it just has a couple of things to go on and it needs to push hard at them to make it work. So it's pretty endearing, but like, I guess I'm curious as to whether a longer version would be better or whether it would just be more of the stuff that I didn't really, I don't know, like that, that was just kind of, yeah, that's silly, whatever. Like, I don't know. I'm very curious actually.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And I feel like there is that hint at the end of the story about using them on the barricades of a revolution. So maybe that's how they, it's expanded is sort of going into another scenario like that.
Nate:
Yeah, it could be. Again, I didn't really look at it that much in depth at all. I just checked the word count and I wanted to see if it kept the same names, which it does. So it is more or less at least an expanded version, if not a total continuation of the story when it ends. Yeah.
Again, another interesting area that is yet to be explored by English language scholarship. The expanded version again does come up a bit in some of the English language criticism on Soviet science fiction, especially Ukrainian science fiction, but it doesn't really go into a lot of the depth on the novel itself.
JM:
Right.
Nate:
I'm not sure if it's more like socialist party cheerleading, or if it does expand it out more. Vladko himself was a newspaper man and did reporting stuff, especially like wartime reporting stuff during both world wars. So he might expand it out more.
JM:
Well, I'm glad we did this.
Nate:
Yeah, I am too. This was a fun experience. I'm obviously much better in Russian than I am with Ukrainian. The languages are similar, but they're not at all the same thing. The translation process, especially with works like this that are written on a more basic level, when I have some, I guess, kind of root knowledge of the language base, it does help a lot.
The main aspects of getting this stuff across into English are grammar. So Ukrainian grammar is more or less the same as Russian grammar, then you have vocabulary, which can easily be looked up for words I don't know, and the toughest part is always the idioms and phrases, which you see more of in some literary fiction sometimes than some of this, I guess, pulpy science fiction stuff.
JM:
So can we talk about this when I looked at the translation, obviously, before we kind of put it up and we talked about this and I think you were uncertain of this as well. But the way Govers' title was, it was like, what do we call him? And it's almost like the text was saying Supreme Overlord. That's not really what you usually call the CEO of a company, but it sounds evil, right?
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, there's words like that that are, you got to consider the context and how they're being used. So Communist Party propaganda would describe a capitalist CEO like that.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, that's true. So that's why I think that's why I kind of debated for a while. Is that something to keep in or is it like a bit too, I don't know, like it's not accurate, but that's not really the point, right?
Because the people reading this wouldn't have experience of what it was like in these English speaking parts of the world, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
They're kind of writing about it. Like it's this dangerous, terrible land where the rights of the workers haven't fully been established. Yeah.
Nate:
So, yeah. Yeah. The transliteration issue doesn't come up that much with any of the other stories that I've done. It poses a particular problem with these letters in both Russian and Ukrainian, and that the letter used for G can be sometimes transliterated as an H. The same letter is used for the G and Govers as the Russian language translations are for Harry Potter. Literally, it'd be like Garry Potter instead of Harry Potter. And likewise, the letter used for V in this circumstance for guvers can sometimes be transliterated as a W for English names. So, I went with Govers instead of Hovers or Howers or Gowers, but...
JM:
Yeah. That seems to make sense. Yeah. It sounds like the name of a supreme overlord.
Nate:
Yeah, right. But it's just one of those odd issues that, again, it came up more in this one than some of the other stories that I've been translating over the last couple months.
JM:
Yeah, the Arelsky ones are really interesting. They are. Yeah. We'll be talking about those.
Nate:
So, I'll give a bit of a teaser of stuff that's currently on the Blogspot and yet to come. So, this is the first one I did from this batch. It's the only one in Ukrainian, and all the rest are in Russian initially. So, the other ones that we have up there are Platonov's "Markun", which is an earlier one from the 1920s that's primarily written by one of those, I guess, termed mainstream authors. And he was not really known for genre writing, but more literary type stuff. And that's kind of more of a weird moody piece that does involve some science fiction concepts. But it'll be an interesting one to try to figure out where to stick it on the podcast. It might be one for, like, a miscellaneous short story roundup or something.
But we also have the "Tales of Mars" cycle by Graal Arelsky, which is a set of three short stories that are loosely interconnected that are set about a thousand years apart from one another that each deal with different aspects on this fictional civilization on Mars. And the way it plays out is really, really cool.
JM:
Yeah, that's something totally unexpected.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I haven't read the third one yet, but, like, just the idea of this cycle that was created, like, this is before, what were these published?
Nate:
24. Sorry, written in 24 and published in 1925.
JM:
Okay, yeah. It's pretty, I mean, I don't know, I guess I'm just not used to seeing that kind of thing, like a series of stories that are sort of connected and set many years apart, like, in a cycle like that until a bit later when it became extremely popular to do just that kind of thing.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But, like, in the 20s, in that kind of science fiction context, no, I don't think so, not too much.
Nate:
Yeah, no, it's not that common. And it's, again, a really cool take in that each story is, I guess, the preferred order is reading them all in sub-sequential order, but they can all be taken as standalone stories, and they deal with different aspects of the world. And it's a really cool exercise in world building.
JM:
Yeah. We'll talk about that when we get to it.
Nate:
Yep, absolutely. And coming up in the future is going to be Vladimir Orlovsky's "Steckerite", and he had a story translated, actually, in Amazing Stories in 1929, but this is the Edgar Allan Poe-style story of a character trying to escape a terrible situation, and it just really follows all the mental twists and turns that the character goes through and how to get out of it. And yeah, Edgar Allan Poe, Amicus Horror, but with a sci-fi bent, it's a really cool one.
And the other one that's coming up soon is the story "Chicks" by N. Pavlov, again, I couldn't find the first name for him, where this amateur scientist who built an incubator for chickens in particular, his friend finds a bunch of fossilized eggs in the woods that are like millions of years old, so they decide to hatch them, and what could go wrong there?
JM:
What could happen? What could possibly go wrong? So I was going to ask if they made headless chickens. Well, so yeah, lots of really awesome Russian translations to look forward to then.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely.
JM:
I don't know how we're going to incorporate these, but they'll be up on the blogspot, so you can read them. And yeah, I mean, they might be works in progress, like I'm probably going to, I don't know, we'll definitely be updating as we go, and we'll get all these on the podcast at some point. So I think a lot of the time, listeners, they want to listen, but they haven't necessarily read a lot of the things that we're going to be talking about on the podcast. But when something is up there on the blogspot, it's right there, so you just go to the one-stop shop for Chrononauts, as you might say. You go there, you see all the translations that are, yeah, these are going to be pretty cool. It's just really great to be able to bring all these stories out into the English-speaking world.
Nate:
Yeah, I agree. I'm trying to do my part for science fiction scholarship, and hopefully that gets people interested in this stuff.
JM:
All right. Well, I don't really have anything else to add to that. So why don't we visit with an old friend, Edward Page Mitchell.
(music: echoey broken piano)
Edward Page Mitchell - "The Ablest Man in the World" (1879)
Gretchen:
Edward Page Mitchell is a writer we've covered several times on the podcast, so I feel like he really needs no introduction. The story we're covering tonight is "The Ablest Man" in the World, published in the New York Sun during May of 1879.
I enjoyed this story. I would say, though, that out of the Mitchell stories I've read, this one is probably my least favorite, but I still think it's quite a fun story to read.
Nate:
Yeah, it's definitely one of his comic ones. It does raise some interesting ethical issues, which...
JM:
Well, that's for sure, yeah. I mean, there is a lot actually packed into this, I think, in a way. I do think, like, it's funny because, I mean, I was just even saying before we started recording that in the book I was reading one or two years ago that I have in e-book, it was right before this story called "The Senators' Daughter", which was, like, way more futuristic and inventive, and there was a lot more to that one, but I guess I didn't really feel that this, the "Ablest Man", was diminished, necessarily, because even though it's very short and, like, a lot of kind of things make you raise your eyebrows and go, wait.
Like, did he think of the consequence of that? Like, I think, in a way, maybe he would have if it would have been longer, but that's another thing, like, Mitchell only wrote pretty short work like this. He was really talented, like, I kind of wonder, you know, what would a longer work by him have been like?
Nate:
Yeah, and it's interesting because I think the length comes out of necessity. I found a scan of the original Sun issue, and it's all on one page. The entire story is just on one page. So I think that's what he shot for, is things that he didn't-
JM:
Probably uncredited, right?
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it would be interesting because, like, some of his stories just have, like, really interesting concepts and a lot of things that could definitely go deeper if he wanted to. So, yeah, it would be interesting to see what a longer work would have looked like.
JM:
Yeah, I would say so far, out of all the ones that I've read, which has made me two or three more than we've done on the podcast, plus there was that Hollow Earth interview piece that, to me, that was pretty minor, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It was kind of a cool, satirical thing, but I guess out of all the Mitchell that I have read, that one was probably the one where it seemed very, very topical according to what we were doing. Like, it was a great way of actually starting that Hollow Earth episode that we did. But it was, okay, yeah, this guy's really weird that he's interviewing and he's like, leaves in some strange nonsense about the Hollow Earth, right? Like, brings up the Symmes theory and all this stuff. But, yeah, I mean, like, "The Clock That Went Backwards" and "The Senator's Daughter" are probably the two that I really, really thought were very special. But then, like, even his not as special works have this interesting concept to them, like you were saying, this cool feeling of this, yeah, concept being laid out in a very short space. There could be more to it, but it's almost like it doesn't have to just like it leaves it to your imagination.
And earlier when we were talking about "The Machine Stops" and how Forster might have been inspired by "The Book of the Machines", I couldn't help but think of Olaf Stapleton, again, because of the way, especially his books like "The Star Maker" and "Last and First Men" are just throwing ideas at you in a very short space. And leaving you to sort of pick up the pieces that maybe form something out of it. Like, there's not really a lot in the way of characters or people you can identify with. But the broad concept that he's throwing to you, it's like throwing a bone to you, you know, really. And you're like, but you're invited, your imagination is invited to play with it. And I think that's one of the really cool things about some of these Mitchell short stories too. And it's definitely the case with this one.
Nate:
Yeah, he's an interesting author and I know we say this like every time we cover him, but he just does so much for how early he is. And Wells gets a lot of the rightful credit for being a wide and influential author as far as the science fiction genre goes. But it seems like Mitchell pretty much sketches out the entire scope of science fiction tropes like 20 years before Wells started writing. He does like a different thing with each story that's still relevant to modern science fiction. And while I would agree that this is definitely on the weaker end of the stuff we covered, a weaker Edward Page Mitchell is like an 8 out of 10 for me. And I think that's where I'd like rank this one.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Gretchen:
I found like his stories just seem like consistently good.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Like, yeah, even a weak Edward Page Mitchell is like better than a lot of other writers at their medium spot. It's really great to read. So even like a story that I don't care as much about, like I never regret reading it. I never think that it's terrible. It's always still a nice read.
Nate:
And this is like 1870s, I mean, you know, who else was out there doing this much science fiction related stuff at the time. I can't really think of anybody. I mean, you know, Jules Verne was writing adventure stories and that's what he wrote. And he was good at doing that, but he didn't have the breadth of science fiction ideas that Edward Page Mitchell does. I mean, here we get the robotics, mechanical intelligence story, but time travel, cryogenics, weird mathematical concepts, Hollow Earth stuff. He gives us everything that you could ever possibly want.
JM:
Changelings. Yeah, right. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And even like he is able to sort of mix up his tone as well sometimes like with that "Old Squids and Little Speller", it's like he kind of goes for a more somber tone. And then he can also do, you know, more comedic pieces very well. So yeah, I always like impressed by his stories in some way. And I know we were talking earlier about like Forster being ahead of his time, but Mitchell as well as just like you said, he kind of captures so many sci-fi tropes and a variety of stories.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It's interesting too, though, because we don't know what people really thought of them at the time. Because he's often appeared without a byline. You can't even say like, oh, look up what to see what people thought of Edward Page Mitchell stories in 1879. Right. Is this not possible? And that that's interesting in a way like the author we're going to do next, Fitz James O'Brien, not too far apart and live probably around the same area. The previous generation, I guess, somewhat.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
A lot more like even though he didn't write too much either, like it had mostly in shorter work. People knew him and people competent on his stuff and his stuff was popular and people knew his name. Unlike Mitchell. So that's kind of interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, I think the one, I mean, the rediscovery was 100 years after or whatever when Moskowitz published that anthology. And what was it the 70s or something like that?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It seems that way. Yeah, it seems like Sam Moskowitz might have had a bit to do with sort of popularizing his name again. But I don't know when these two anthologies that are on Project Gutenberg. I don't know if they date from the 1970s like because they would be under copyright. So I can't really say but it doesn't seem like books by him were published in his lifetime. So yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, thinking about comparing the popularity of O'Brien and Mitchell. I had known about O'Brien's work and I had read "The Diamond" Lens several years ago, but I did not ever hear about Mitchell until J.M., you told me about "The Clock That Went Backwards" and...
JM:
Okay, yeah. That story was so awesome.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's a really great story.
Nate:
Yeah, but I mean, I feel like "The Diamond Lens" and "What Was It" have been anthologized a billion times where. I don't know, Mitchell just doesn't get the same treatment aside from maybe "The Clock That Went Backwards". And I think he really should.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Very inventive author, for sure. And this one in particular has a lot of touches of humor that again, you don't see in a lot of these early science fiction works in that the humor in somebody like a Butler or whatever is going to be satirical criticism of society. You're not going to get those really sharp one off quips that you might see in more of a Mark Twain type story.
JM:
Yeah, this has a bit of that for sure.
Nate:
Oh, it has a lot of it. Yeah.
JM:
It's the first two stories tonight where booze is the hero of the story. Yeah. So yeah, a bit of foreshadowing there. It left me feeling like a little bit, I don't even know, like it's kind of cool because he makes it ambiguous enough where you don't really know the protagonist maybe doesn't, I don't know, maybe he hasn't done the right thing.
Gretchen:
Right.
JM:
And so it's open enough that it's not 100% certain and I like that I like that aspect to it. It does seem like he acted kind of prematurely. And I feel like maybe Mitchell was kind of aware of that a little bit like he didn't highlight it too much. Like you kind of feel like you're supposed to side with him. But at the same time, I don't know, maybe not, especially when we'll get to that part, but like this terrible scream at the end, you know, it's like.
Gretchen:
There's several different touches throughout the story, which we will get to once we summarize it, that do feel like, yeah, maybe this guy is in the palm. Not to mention that you're receiving the story by a narrator who is telling the story of his friend. So it's like, he doesn't know the actual way that it went down. He's just kind of taking his friend's words for it. Right. Yeah.
Nate:
Good use of the unreliable narrator trope.
JM:
Yeah, indeed. I also like that like this is a story about a true cyborg, right? And yeah, here's the thing, right? Like it's a kind of there's definitely technical questions, right? But from what it seems to me, this person, right, it's individual who is the ableist man, without his implant, he's pretty much unable to communicate.
Maybe his intellect is highly suppressed. You know, he just doesn't have he doesn't seem to have an agency or mind. And then when he has his implant, he's like suddenly a super being, right? It just kind of makes me think, well, what is the essence of humankind, right? Well, what is the essence of humanity is that essence? Where does it come from? Like, if you put this thinking machine inside a person's brain, and the machine could do all this like calculating and thinking stuff. Would that leave another creature behind? Like the operator, the operator with the will and the emotions and the story heads and all these things and doesn't really get into any of it, which is on one hand. Maybe it's frustrating, but it's cool that it's there, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, especially because I mean, again, how early it is. This is around the same time Butler was speculating on mechanical intelligence in "The Book of the Machines" and all that.
JM:
Yeah, 1870s.
Nate:
Not too far after Babbage was doing his experiments, which are directly cited in the story.
JM:
Yes, that's true.
Nate:
We're decades away from any kind of real world electronic digital computer. And even the earliest of those from the 1940s, they could basically just crunch ballistic tables and differential equations for solving said ballistic tables. So I mean, it's not like they were anywhere near the sophistication of intelligence. Never mind the fusion of man and machine that we have in today's world. So I mean, him foreseeing these issues in the 1870s is just absolutely incredible.
JM:
Yeah. And what really gets me to is like, this kind of plays into, I mean, I've been a little bit vocal about certain things lately where I'm not like all these things start to annoy me, like especially AI generated music and writing and all this stuff and kind of railing against it.
But another part of me is like, I like this revolution because I mean, as a person who has some disabilities, it's kind of like, yeah, this technology has some good implications that I look forward to. And the fact that this person is like, considered non compos metis, so to speak, without this thing and he's given it. And just because he's really powerful and really like it turns him into, again, I'm kind of reminded of a future thing "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes, where this person with severe mental developmental issues is given a drug that turns him into a genius, right?
It's about his observations about the world and how things change when his intellect grows and how he starts to become a little bit full of himself and a little bit cocky, right? And a little bit like Napoleonic, if we want to be like, he doesn't have any ideas about world domination or anything though, right? And I don't know, like they're just sort of assuming that this guy might. So it's kind of interesting like that that Napoleon comes up a lot in some of these 1800s stories. He was a big behind the scenes player in "Repairer of Reputations" by Chambers.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
People were afraid of a new Napoleon. So some kind of, I don't know, it's interesting and how it was almost this like theme that started to develop to develop around then into the 20th century where this like mastermind tried to take over the world, right? And the protagonist of this story believes he's found such a person. But on what basis? You may well ask, maybe we should detail how the story goes. Yeah, I'll take a look at it.
Gretchen:
Alright. The main character of the story, Fisher, a friend of the narrator, starts the story while visiting Baden, Germany. Although he is not a doctor, he has given the title Herr Doctor Professor in the officials list of the hotel. This is to compensate for the lack of titles among US visitors and Fisher gained his purely through his use of spectacles.
It is due to this title that one day a porter comes to him when there is a medical emergency. Baron Savitch, working under Russian General Ignatieff, is in a terrible fit and needs assistance. Despite insisting he isn't actually a doctor, the porter drags Fisher to the Russian suite where everyone except Savitch and a valet are out. Fisher finds the Baron doubled over in pain, so he has the porter fetch Kentucky Bourbon from his own suite and gives some of it to Savitch.
While the Baron relaxes from the alcohol, Fisher takes in his appearance. He is a young man in his 20s and is handsome, except that he has a strange head. It is round on top and completely bald, covered only by a skull cap. When the Baron begins to feel dizzy and Fisher finds his pulse irregularly high, causing him some uneasiness, Savitch grips his head in pain, then tells the other man, still believing him to be a doctor, to unscrew his head, ripping off that skull cap to reveal a silver dome.
Though dumbfounded, Fisher starts to do as the Baron asked, but then the Baron faints. At this moment, another resident of the suite, Dr. Rapperschwyll, rushes in, pushing Fisher out of the door and slamming it in his face.
The next day, Fisher receives money from Rapperschwyll, a bribe to keep what he saw secret. However, Fisher isn't satisfied, wanting to know more about the doctor and the Baron. He asks the Polish Countess who his wife befriended about them. Of the Baron, he learns that his origins are mysterious, but that his successful career has been unprecedented, quickly advancing and becoming a Baron before 25 because of his skills as a tactician.
Rapperschwyll, he also discovers, is Swiss and used to be a watchmaker, but is now entirely dedicated to Savitch, constantly by his side since the Baron is apparently prone to illness. With these facts in mind, Fisher still wants to confront Rapperschwyll about the incident in the Russian suite and gets the chance to speak with him alone a few days later.
He returns the bribe and bluffs by implying he has technical knowledge and that he had actually seen inside the Baron's head after he had fainted. In return for not revealing to the public what he saw, he wants Rapperschwyll to explain everything, which the doctor does.
The doctor tells Fisher that he used to be a watchmaker before turning to the study of physiology and other sciences. Using knowledge across these various fields, the doctor made a completely logical machine, devoid of human fallacy, and wanted to replace a human brain with it, creating a strategic genius.
JM:
This is so interesting. Here we're creating a calculating machine based on the principles of Babbage that he vaguely alludes to. It's approximating the way the human brain works. That became so much of a thing later on to consider this kind of thing, right? But here's Mitchell doing it.
Nate:
Yeah, tying the two together explicitly.
Gretchen:
He found a young boy in a mental institution who was devoid of most of his senses and performed such a surgery on him, which is how the Baron became the person he is in the present.
Nate:
Yeah, again, quite an ethical dilemma here of just pulling somebody mentally incapacitated and cutting their head open without any kind of meaningful consent.
Gretchen:
It kind of reminded me a bit of "The Soul Giver", with the woman who is kind of considered the same as this young boy, and they just sort of, yeah, it's a little dodgy, morally.
JM:
Yeah, but I mean, you know, once he was activated, there was no doubt in his mind that it was the right thing to do, right?
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
I think it's really cool. I mean, I would like, I suppose, cybernetics is really interesting that way, right? Because you can enhance people in all kinds of different ways, right? I don't know. This is really interesting to me that this ethical quandary starts to come up here.
Gretchen:
He tells Fisher, "Baron Savitch is my creature, and I am his creator, creator of the ablest man in Europe, the ablest man in the world."
Fisher does not see the doctor or the Baron during the rest of his time in Baden, but in Paris, two months later, he finds out that Savitch will be staying at the same hotel as him. He is alone, as Rapperschwyll is in Switzerland for personal reasons. He is not happy to hear of Baron's presence, thinking of him as a monstrous, impossible creation, but due to his promise to the doctor, he can't reveal his feelings or the reason behind them to anyone else.
JM:
Yeah, definitely shades of Frankenstein and all this too.
Nate:
Absolutely, yeah.
Gretchen:
Just the descriptions of the Baron just give a very Frankenstein vibe. However, his feelings against the Baron are heightened when he comes across him wooing an American woman, Miss Ward, who is in a relationship with a friend of Fisher's. Fisher is horrified by the prospect of Ward getting involved with him, as he thinks, allowing that the Baron's intentions were of the most honorable character, was the situation any less horrible? Marry a machine. He decides then to take action against Savitch.
On his last day in Paris, before heading for his train, Fisher offers Savitch bourbon, the same drink that had incapacitated him in Germany. As they are in front of others, the Baron reluctantly accepts it, not wanting to appear rude. He soon begins to exhibit similar symptoms he displayed the first time he had been given bourbon, and Fisher urges the others to get ready while he takes care of the Baron alone.
Once the rest of the party has left, Fisher unscrews the unconscious Baron's head and removes the mechanism inside it, then leaves for the train himself. Once out at sea, Fisher drops the device into the ocean and believes he hears a cry as he does, though it could have been the cry of a seagull.
When Miss Ward approaches him soon after he does this and asks what he's doing, he responds that he has preserved the liberties of two countries and saved her peace of mind by throwing the Baron overboard, to which Miss Ward laughs, exclaiming upon how droll he is.
JM:
Yeah, it's terrible.
Gretchen:
Yeah, so that was the right decision.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Now, I think he probably imagined the scream, but I don't know. I mean, I don't think the mechanism could scream, but still.
Nate:
Who knows, I mean.
JM:
Who knows, right? Yeah.
Gretchen:
I do like that they just very quickly brush over the fact that Miss Ward is engaged in a relationship to Fisher's friend. So like, that's not the reason he's doing it. You know, it's for completely different reasons that I'm getting rid of the Baron.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Another ethical quandary here that factors into the equation.
JM:
Well, for real. Yeah. And now this guy's like, he's going to be unable to express himself and communicate and think the way he used to. And he's probably going to know now. And that's like, that's what makes the ending of "Flowers for Algernon" so sad is because you know, they had this, the main character had this grasp of a great intellect and now he can't do it anymore. He can't express himself. He can't write the way he used to. He can't like, and you see his degeneration and it brings up the whole thing. Well, was it right to do that to him in the first place? Right. Like, I don't know. I would like to think it's worth it. I'm kind of rooting for him. Like, I don't want the cyborg to get crushed. I don't know that he's going to be a Napoleon. Maybe he is. Maybe that's a good thing. I don't know.
Gretchen:
Maybe he's just in love and wants to date Miss Ward.
JM:
Yeah. And man, all he wanted was to be able to have a nice drink like everybody else.
Nate:
Yeah, right. And it's American whiskey that is the thing that knocks him on his ass.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
Kentucky bourbon.
Nate:
Right. Yeah. Tried and true.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
One of the many nice subtle, I guess, comic touches of this story. A couple of the other ones are the very silly, fake German and fake Russian names that he intersperses throughout the tale.
JM:
As well as his other stories, they remind me of Poe.
Nate:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Twain also does similar things. I also really like the gossiping Polish Countess.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
That was a pretty funny throwaway character.
Gretchen:
And there is the line like, it seems like a Polish Countess can come in handy or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Overall, I think this was a lot of fun. And yeah, the ethics are kind of, you know, his stories really do leave you feeling something. Yeah. I think it's just really interesting the way, yes, they feel almost written very specifically with a certain structure and with a certain like thing in the tale that's supposed to leave you with something like even, I would say, the most simple story like "Old Squids and Little Speller". Right. Like it was just kind of this really sentimental, sort of cute story about a man, a simple man bonding with a strange offspring. Right. Like that's not even his. And then he's just sort of inherited. Right. This is a changeling. And then in the end, the offspring dies and it's so tragic and sad. And it's like, but it leaves you with something. And Mitchell always seems to want to, like it always seems conscious. You know, like again, he's writing for a newspaper uncredited. Right. So it feels like maybe that was the thing the newspaper wanted him to do. But, you know, he's writing to leave you with something. That's really cool. Like every story always leaves you with something.
And so, and I don't know, I feel like people in 1879 probably thought about these ethical things a little differently than we do now, but maybe not as much so as what might think.
Nate:
Right. Right.
JM:
I don't know. I'm like I said, I'm a little bit on the side of the cyborg in this one, but you know, and it's definitely feels tragic at the end and that's great. Right. Like, is that even if it was in his head, right? Like it was maybe that's his guilty conscience screaming at him.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it is like, I mean, just the imagery of, you know, dropping it into the ocean, you know, it feels like it's, I think you are supposed to feel bad, you know, at least a little bit for the cyborg, you know, for Savitch.
Nate:
And he never really proves himself to be like a malicious character. I think he's just like an alarming character
JM:
No, he just seems to be popular with the ladies.
Nate:
Yeah, right. But I think people project their own insecure reason, what they might do in that situation onto it. You know, we don't really see him screwing anybody over in the way that all the other characters seem to be doing.
JM:
No, the doctor and, you know, the protagonist and though now, yeah, like, he's probably, he might not be safe after this, right? Like, yeah, I don't know. That guy might want to come after that doctor there has told him the story and everything and gave him the opportunity to like, you know, oh, it just happened to me away. And this, this, this guy now knows everything. Right. And he says like, sabotage my plan very obviously.
Gretchen:
But yeah, it is like, it is kind of tragic to think that Savitch really doesn't, isn't allowed to be just, you know, his own person. Because it's like, for Rapperschwyll, it's like, he's my creation. And for Fisher, he's just this monstrous being. And he just, he deserves to just, you know, have a nice romance with Miss Ward, I think.
Nate:
Or just live his life.
Gretchen:
Yeah, just live his life.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, you know, should just be allowed to do whatever he wants to do.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But he is the ablest man in the world. So of course, everyone would want to use him, right?
Nate:
Right. Exactly. Yeah. Now definitely a lot of issues that he brings up here. And again, like you were mentioning, J.M., I wonder about the reception of all this. And it's just one of those annoying mysteries that I just have never been able to find anything about. There's that detailed history of the Sun, but that's almost like totally useless for figuring out like any of the sci-fi story component or Mitchell's contributions to these stories. I mean, he was running the paper for a while. And you'd think that running a major New York City area newspaper, he'd be in contact with a lot of the major literary figures across the country in terms of both the fiction and the nonfiction writers. But his name just doesn't seem to come up in any of the contemporary sources in context with this stuff. I don't know. I mean, the Sun must have had a big circulation. If they did it, it must be logical to assume that other newspapers published science fiction. But who, you know, it's again, a lot of mysteries and unanswered questions that...
JM:
But I think what really stands out to me is that Mitchell is a talent unto his own.
Nate:
Absolutely. Yeah. These are good stories.
JM:
I really liked learning about Schuyler, right? And I liked "The Beast of Bradhurst Avenue". And I think it was a cool example of a pulp story published in a newspaper that was reasonably well circulated in its time and place, right?
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
But still not, you know, recognized the way maybe it could have been. But Mitchell almost seems like he's beyond the structures of the format that he's writing for a little bit.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It would be interesting if I kind of tried to perform something similar that I did with Minna Irving and see if I can find something about him.
JM:
Yeah. So we're also going to do some... We haven't decided when to do it yet. But we're also going to do a, like, probably host choice short story episode, maybe a little thing where, like, each of us gets to pick a few or something like that. And yeah, I want to get a few more authors that we've kind of talked about that we haven't really been able to get some of the work on there. And yeah, maybe another Mitchell story or two, like "The Senator's Daughter", for example. And some of the other things we've been talking about on and off. But yeah, I like this. Interesting Mitchell stuff. So I don't really have anything else to add, but this is a really cool story, actually. And yeah, it leaves you with that kind of frustrated feeling. But in a cool way, right?
Nate:
Yeah. He's great at that. It's kind of fitting that his life and his place in science fiction also leaves you with that feeling. Because it's just such a good reflection of his stories and his work.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Definitely.
Gretchen:
I definitely would be happy to read more of him in the future.
Nate:
Absolutely.
Gretchen:
You know, he should just be a Chrononauts main that we bring up occasionally.
Nate:
I think so. I think we're going to pretty much cover his entire bibliography as far as the science fiction stories goes.
JM:
Yeah, maybe. He's got a lot of, I don't know, stuff that maybe we've moved a little bit out of the range of now, like the mesmerism, like spiritualism stuff, like definitely some more fantastic kind of stories, but are still cool. I've read a couple of those and I like them, but I don't know if we necessarily want to cover them on the podcast now, but definitely a few more of the science fiction stories.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes. And I think it's a time that we move on to a story with even more dubious moral stuff going on.
Nate:
To say the least, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, some pretty dubious implications.
JM:
Yes. So they've got cars, biggest bars, they've got rivers of gold, but the wind goes right through you. It's no place for the old. It's time for a fairytale of old New York.
Bibliography:
Karatsupa, Vitaly - "Vladko, Volodymyr Mikolaiovich", Archive of Fantastika, http://archivsf.narod.ru/1900/vladimir_vladko/index.htm
Laboratory of Fantastika - "Volodymyr Vladko", https://fantlab.ru/autor2735
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