(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: atmospheric theremin and ocean like noises while Gretchen reads three of Minna Irving's poems)
Gretchen:
Sea Wind
The sea-wind is a pirate bold
Whose ghost will not be laid,
But scourges still the sandy shores
That once he used to raid.
He left his bones in gibbit-chains
To haunt the dark sea caves,
And beaches bare, and stony cliffs,
Far isles and stormy waves.
His cutlass whistles to and fro
His voice is in the gales;
Of scuttled barks and drowning men
He tells unholy tales.
He cannot rest without a ship;
So his uneasy ghost
Goes seeking for his vanished crew
From a lonely coast to coast.
Legend of the Moonflower
When gardens fair exhale perfumes
Of attar, myrrh and musk,
The moonflower by the porch unfolds
Its blossoms in the dusk.
With the glimmering discs of pallid pearl,
The dark green vine is starred,
As if a host of little moons
Had risen in the yard.
For when at her appointed time
The moon withheld her light
The cricket cried: "I cannot see
To pipe my tune tonight."
The beetle blundered to and fro,
The shadows were so black,
The moth went out and lost her way
And nevermore came back.
So Nature, who's a Fairy Queen
In robes of sun and snow
And dewdrop crown, (as all of us
Discovered long ago),
Touched with her hazel wand a vine -
A barren vine and soon
From every spray and tendril shone
A copy of the moon.
Via the Ouija board
Low from beyond the veil, where wander spirits pale,
Via the mystic Ouija board a solemn message came
From one whose dust in France lies where the poppies dance
And weave around his wooden cross a ring of elf in flame.
I who have given all, I who feared not to fall,
Who made the sacrifice supreme, that nations might be free,
Ask for no monument but that my bones be sent back to my own beloved land
Across the Sundering Sea.
Let me repose at home, where breaks the fragrant foam
Of apple blossoms in the spring against the turquoise sky,
Where on my grassy bed, the clover flowers red
And golden banded honeybees all day go booming by.
Not there where to my sleep the leaves of battle seep
Do I desire my crumbling clay with alien soil to blend,
But where I first drew breath, when I return in death,
Mingling my ashes with the dust of many a dear old friend.
Bare ye my broken form, o'er oceans calm and storm,
To that green churchyard in my town and lay me there to rest,
Where violets may start, blue-pedaled from my heart
And where the flag for which I died may wave above my breast.
Thus spoke the Ouija board, while in the chimney roared
The unleashed northern rushing down from snow fields at the pole,
That was the fervent prayer out of the boundless air
Spanning eternity, the cry of one dead soldier's soul.
Irving background/non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Hello everyone, we are Chrononauts and this month we are discussing Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction pulp magazine. If you are just tuning in and you would like to hear a little bit of background please turn to episode installment number one where you can hear a bit of history of the magazine and what happened throughout its development and so on. For now though we are going to turn back to 1929 and Gretchen is going to lead us on discussing Minna Irving's story, "The Moon Woman".
Gretchen:
Minna Odell, known as Minna Irving, the poetess of Tarrytown, New York, was born on May 17th, 1864. Tarrytown was also the home of Washington Irving, likely why Minna chose that particular last name in her alias. From a young age she began to write poems and songs and at the age of 17 described herself as an authoress for the 1880 census. Irving's first published poems would appear in magazines during this very year. In 1885 Irving would publish a poem called "The Haunted Heart" in the Century which would become the title poem of a collection of poetry released by her three years later, "Songs of a Haunted Heart".
Unfortunately Irving's name would start to crop up in newspapers for reasons other than her writing abilities in the following years. Also in 1888 a scandal would break out between her and a man she was formerly engaged with, a Palmer B. Wells Jr. who, according to Irving, began sending her unwelcome indecent letters, exposing her own past love letters to the public and spreading lies about her plagiarizing two editors of papers she was writing for.
In 1892 Irving would claim John A. Lant, an editor of Tarrytown's paper Record of the Times, had also sent her inappropriate letters. In between these two incidents she had married a man named Irving Hasbrouck De Lamater twice, because according to a fortune teller the day of the week they had been initially married on was bad luck. De Lamater and Irving were separated by the time of the case against Lant and he was on Lant's side during the incident. The two divorced in 1911 and stated in one article on Irving on such hostile terms she bought a revolver to protect herself against De Lamater. Now I should say I couldn't find the primary source for the last piece of information and as for the other incidents, while I found multiple newspaper articles through my university library's resources, I still have limited access to papers that might further illuminate these situations but I still thought I should mention these events even though I'm not too sure how I feel about them.
Nate:
Yeah, no that's a rough situation to be in. I mean I can't envy her at all with this...
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's a pretty strange series of events.
Nate:
To say the least, yeah.
Gretchen:
It's really strange to see, especially for the second case with John A. Lant, it seems like the newspapers kind of took a much more hostile light towards her. I don't know if it was because they assumed she was lying after the first charge that she had against the first man so it was very strange to read that.
Nate:
Yeah, and it's kind of weird, I mean we think of people's personal gossip and business being all over social media in the present day but they also printed this stuff in popular newspapers back then.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It'd be awful just like everybody reading about your business.
JM:
Really terrible, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I mean we take a lot of that stuff for granted now. It's still bad but it's like, oh whatever, right? I don't know, it feels almost like the fact that it was in print would have made it worse at the time.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I reminded one of my friends once that it was like nothing was going on back then so people would just write about the personal lives of other people in newspapers. But it also seems like she was very well known as a poet, so I think it also feels kind of like how we treat celebrity gossip nowadays.
On a much lighter note, her next marriage to a man named Harry Michener, a mine owner and race car driver, fortunately seemed to be a much better relationship than her last marriage. Despite these personal issues, Irving's writing career continued and she was quite prolific. Although the work by her we're covering tonight is the only one she submitted to Amazing Stories, she contributed numerous poems and other pieces to magazines and newspapers such as The Century, New York Herald, which she was on the editorial staff for, Putnam's Monthly, Breezy Stories, Munsey's and Peterson's. One poem of hers, "Sea Wind", was actually published in Weird Tales in 1937 and would be one of the last of her works. Besides their initial publications, her poems were frequently reprinted in newspapers across the US. She received several honors for her works, including earning a gold medal for a poem commemorating the USS Maine in 1899 and being commissioned to write a poem that was engraved on a plaque of the grave of Theodore Roosevelt's son Quinton Roosevelt. Irving would die on July 23, 1940 in a sanatorium after seems like a pretty long illness. She lived quite an interesting career.
Nate:
Yeah, sounds it.
Gretchen:
I think that it's very clear from her writing that she excelled more as a poet than perhaps as a prose writer.
JM:
Yeah, it's a very unusual thing for Аmazing, I think.
Nate:
It is. It's not surprising to hear that she wrote poetry for Weird Tales because this very much feels like a Weird Tales story. And while the plot elements maybe don't exactly come together in a perhaps satisfying way, I really do like her style. I mean, she's really good at this kind of evocative imagery. And it's a little more refreshing to read somebody like her that kind of takes these kind of jumbled plot points and doesn't really like fuse them together. Then somebody like a Stone whose prose style is a little more flat and dull and by the numbers. She's really good at the imagery and the mood and the vibe. And I would certainly like to read some of her poetry and be curious if she wrote any kind of like gothic fiction.
Gretchen:
Yes, I did come across, I did not have a chance to read it, it seems that she did have other short stories that she wrote. She didn't just write poetry. She also wrote a couple of short stories. I couldn't find many of them when trying to find them through the newspapers I was looking for. But I did come across one that I think was called "The House of Dreams". That's what it was. So I didn't have a chance to read it myself, but I did see that she wrote that as well as other pieces. And I think they are sort of more gothic, which seems to be also the case in some of her poetry.
Nate:
Oh yeah. And you definitely get this from the story too. But yeah, something to check out for the future off the podcast, because I did like the mood and the vibe of this one a lot. I don't know, ranking the stories, I would probably put the Brackett and the Wells ahead of this. But I think I like this one more than the other three, the Stone, the Williamson and the Hansen.
JM:
That's cool. I mean, I always say that I appreciate style a lot. And I definitely appreciated the style of this one, but I was kind of frustrated by it. It just seemed every time I was really getting into it, it just stopped. You know, I mean, we'll get to the reason why, there's a reason why there's three separate parts to this really short story. And it's not really about any of the things that I thought it was going to be about. And I hate to be the plot centric person here, I guess, but I just the style was really cool. And I wanted, I guess I wanted more. I wanted more of both the story of, I mean, that's probably this comment is better saved for the end, but basically the two sort of separate elements of this story that don't really come together. I wanted more of either of them, one or the other or both.
Nate:
Yeah, it's interesting with these kind of stories where this one felt like somebody took a full length novel and just like cut the first 10 pages out of it. And then that was the story.
JM:
Yeah. And then a few pages and then like jumped ahead, a few more pages and then jumped ahead, a few more pages. It's really strange, really strange structure and really strange ending. And just, I don't know, it was a very weird story. I was very intrigued by it. I guess I found it a little frustrating though.
In terms of ranking the stories that we've been doing this episode, I don't really know where this one would fit for me. I'm really torn because it had one of the best styles for sure. I wish more had come of it, I guess. It was certainly very interesting. And I don't think anything that makes me kind of want to read more of an author is probably doing a good thing, but it doesn't seem like she really has a lot of fiction that we can find. So not really much of a poetry person, but I guess I would check out some of her poems. Sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It is interesting that it seems like the problem we've run into in these stories mostly relates to pacing. It seems like it's either a story that feels like there should be more to it or, you know, feels like it could be expanded upon or it's a story that kind of drags on a little too long or overstays its welcome.
JM:
At first I was excited about what I thought it was going to be about. And then I kind of saw, oh no, it's about something else and here's the moon woman. This could be interesting. And then I kind of realized, wait. It's almost over. It's over. I don't really understand why she wrote this or why she wrote it like this.
Nate:
Well, I think I have an idea, but we'll get to that at the end of the story because she kind of spells it out in a way that some of the other authors we've covered before who also go for that kind of ending also have spelled out.
JM:
Yeah. Well, it is certainly an interesting contrast to everything else.
Nate:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
Everything else this episode.
Nate:
Yeah. This does not feel like an Amazing Stories story.
JM:
No, it doesn't feel quite like one. I mean, I'm glad we did it. I'm glad you picked this one, Gretchen. I mean, it is, it certainly seems to stand out. It's not like anything I've read in the magazine. Maybe we were saying earlier that some of the reprints like Abraham Merritt reprints and stuff have a bit more of a weird feeling to them. And even "The Undersea Tube" had the whole Atlantis thing, which is a bit of that. This was something else entirely. It could have been a Weird Tales story, although I think they would have probably asked her to flush it out more, I think. She probably only got paid a quarter of a cent a word for this, and it's pretty short. So she probably, I don't know, she just wanted to do it, I guess. Yeah. Why not?
Nate:
Yeah, I think this one really contrasts perfectly with the Hansen emphasizing one side of the scientist and the other side being the poet.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And you could really tell that they're on kind of either extreme from one another.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, I did choose Hansen and Irving specifically because I found it interesting that these two people who had those different professions kind of worked on this same pulp. I kind of wanted to look at them also in relation with the other pieces that they created. So it was interesting to see that difference in style from both of them.
Nate:
I mean, it definitely contrasts really well. I think out of the two authors we've covered in this episode, they're the ones that really most illustrate that difference between kind of the philosophies of writing.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, that's very true.
Gretchen:
Yes. Well, I think I will get into the story.
JM:
Yeah. Because there are only a few comments to make about it at the end, I think, so what happens in it?
(music: Edward Woolf - "Mercury Polka" on brassy synth)
plot summary and spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
"The Moon Woman" is in the November 1929 issue of Amazing Stories, same as the Hansen story that we talked about. This was, though, completely unintentional. I picked both of them by looking through the Bleiler work, which groups together the works of authors who are arranged in alphabetical order. Only after I had chosen them did I realize the fact and found it a fun coincidence.
Irving's narrative starts after Professor James Holloway Hicks has successfully created a serum that can cause suspended animation. He has tested it on various animals with positive results, but hasn't used it on a human subject yet. No one has come to try it, and Irving makes a pointed remark that not even the would-be suicides would take a chance on a mysterious drug. Since what if it paralyzed the body but kept the mind alive and alert? Truly a frightful condition to contemplate.
So, Hicks, like any good scientist, decides to test it on himself. Having put his affairs in order, Hicks gives his friend and heir to his fortune a fellow scientist named Horace Blinkman the serum to inject him with. Injections he estimates will keep him in a state like death for a year. Blinkman, though, is nowhere near as successful in his work as Hicks. And since he will be given control of the professor's estate when he is suspended for the coming year, Blinkman decides to inject Hicks with several times the amount of serum that was originally planned, hoping to prevent the man's awakening by a few decades or even altogether.
JM:
Yeah, this guy's a real piece of work, this assistant.
Gretchen:
Yeah, he and the professor's attorney that helped arrange Hicks's affairs bring the now seemingly dead professor to a mausoleum built for this occasion. When they return with members of the press a year later to witness Hicks's resurrection, they instead find him to be still in the same death-like state and believe he is truly dead. They leave his body in the crypt, thinking that a second burial would be a mockery.
The story's focus then shifts to a young woman who finds Hicks's mausoleum now in ruins after the passing of 200 years. The woman who wears a pair of wings, and is, I just have to mention, described at one point as 150 pounds of solid, healthy womanhood, is curious.
JM:
She was really cute, I wanted more of her too.
Gretchen:
She also mentions that she has very strong but delicate hands, which she has that kind of combination of strength and it seems grace, which is pretty cool. She is curious about what she calls the temple of the dead she's come across. She flies the top of the crypt and finds an opening in the roof, then drops down through the hole. She comes across Hicks finally waking from his suspended animation and is terrified to experience an apparently dead man coming back to life.
Hicks, realizing she is there and that she is shocked, tries to reassure her. He is embarrassed, however, to find that his clothes have disintegrated and asks her to remain where she is for he is a very modest man. He learns that the woman's name is Rosaria and that the year is apparently 3014. So I guess Hicks is from the year 2814?
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know what was going on with this, but I think this might be another Amazing date misprint because they mentioned another date later that like, it's like, wait a minute, did they meant to print like 2114 here or something? I don't know.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I will mention the date because I found that to be, I'm pretty sure this is a typing error since...
JM:
Well, I thought it was like 21 something when he went to sleep the first time, right?
Gretchen:
I don't think they ever mentioned when he actually like goes to sleep and I don't think they ever, they never indicate, she never indicates that the date is different. I'm not...
Nate:
She mentions a date later that would indicate that when they went to sleep, it would be in the present day, so 1929.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it is a date that she says is 1930.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Oh yeah, okay.
Gretchen:
But I believe that would mean, that what I was assuming is maybe this is supposed to take place before the time she wrote this, where he awakes in 2014 and he had this sermon like 1814?
Nate:
Maybe.
Gretchen:
I assume. I don't know. Just a strange error on someone's part.
JM:
Well, I thought he was just, he had been asleep for like that long a time because everything was ancient and stuff, so it was obviously much more than, I don't know, 28 whatever made sense to me at the time.
Nate:
Yeah, it's just another thing where the dates don't line up. I mean, he could have very well slept for a thousand years in-story and it would have like made total sense. But I mean, just like the numbers that Rosaria is telling him about like what happened since he's been asleep, just like don't line up with one another.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Because it seems like the narrative's very clear that he was asleep for 200 years. They mentioned that multiple times and then there's, the other dates are 3014 and then 1930. So I assume 2014 is when he wakes up.
After being entombed and suspended for so long, Hicks is eager to leave his mausoleum, though again he won't leave his coffin without being properly dressed. Rosaria leaves him and returns soon with clothing, a set of wings and some food, which in the future are condensed into essences that one drinks from small vials. Hicks isn't too impressed by this, feeling that it seemed too much like taking medicines to be enjoyable. Rosaria also explains that the dead are now disintegrated using X-rays, which is why she was surprised to come across Hicks's mausoleum.
The professor finds himself falling in love with Rosaria and feels that her knowledge of the world he's now a part of sets her above him, but she denies that she is wiser than him. She is merely familiar with this time. She then tells him of the Moon people, who humans encountered in 1930. They are the ones who rule Earth, though through the consent of humanity. Rosaria herself is part human and part moon person, the latter heritage from her mother's side. Hicks then gets down on one knee and proposes to her. Immediately following this, Hicks wakes to find himself with Blinkman in his study. The serum had only assured him a good night's sleep and nothing more, and thus ends "The Moon Woman".
Nate:
Yeah, so I mean I never really liked the it was all a dream ending, but when the story itself reads like a dream and like you know "Arctiq" and things like that.
JM:
Yeah, the answer is I'm asking her to marry him. It's pretty silly, but I just kind of wish why not go all the way with it. I mean you started it. So I mean there are certain cases where it was all a dream like maybe it's okay to do that. It was just so weirdly not anti-climactic, it's not even the right word. It's just kind of like the very last short paragraph just reveals that everything we've witnessed is not real.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
So I don't know. I kind of thought that was disappointing. I don't know. It was like it was so weird to read this story because at both moments I thought I'm really getting into this. Like first I'm thinking is this story going to be about this dilettante guy living it up on this other dude's money while he's asleep and like getting into trouble and then I'm like oh no it's not about that. It's about him, the doctor waking up and encountering the moon woman. Hey cool and then she's telling us about what's happened and they're going to go off together. Great. Okay, I'm all for that. And then she took that away too.
So it was like having something cool snatched away from me like twice. Really odd to me that she kind of set up these two things like the whole idea of making the assistant such an utter bastard, right? And that really comes to nothing. I mean it's all there just so he sleeps longer. And then you know setting up this moon woman is like well he's kind of woken up in the best possible circumstance hasn't he? And she's friendly and maybe, I knew it was a pretty short story so I'm thinking okay it'll end soon but you know I guess they'll be happy or something and they'll go off together, and maybe not get married but hey whatever cool. And then she just sort of pulls the rug out. I don't know why. Why does she have to do that? Any ideas?
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe she just couldn't think of an ending. Maybe these are just kind of fragments she had that she didn't really want to piece together. I mean maybe it was an actual dream she had and she just wanted to get it down.
JM:
Hey that could have been it.
Gretchen:
Maybe it's like "Arctiq". She kind of has her narrator of course have it be all a dream and we know that with that it was especially autobiographical, so yeah maybe she also did have a dream like this and decided to write it down. I do think this does work more than in other situations where it does have a sort of dreamy atmosphere to it, because I also kind of had read a small summary of this in the Bleiler so I did kind of know that it ended like this but I thought that what it would be sort of more like "300 Years Hence."
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
And instead it does feel more like an "Arctiq" where it feels a little more deserved and a little more like it works.
Nate:
Yeah, there's like small parts in this one like certain scenes that like I really like like the chauffeur and them going into the graveyard and like they're just the way she describes the mausoleum in the night time.
JM:
Very atmospheric.
Nate:
Yeah. And then after when he wakes up the mausoleum is in a state of decay and you know the moon is spilling in and all that stuff and the obvious similarities between Rosaria and the Vrilya from "The Coming Race", I thought was pretty striking and it wouldn't surprise me if that was deliberate on her part.
JM:
Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And it was a weird absurdity, I kind of laughed the way she was describing the assistant and how like anxious he was and like you know I was like what am I going to do I have to make him sleep longer, and he's kind of in a rush and I'm kind of thinking like well I mean I guess that he's going to be in state and this mausoleum and maybe it's going to be hard for him to like break in and make him sleep for longer, but I kind of I was thinking to myself while reading why does he have to do it now, he's going to be asleep for like a decade or however long you know and it's just like pacing around getting all agitated. It's like kind of reminds me of some kid who's like spoiled and he's realizing like in 10 years he's going to be he's going to have to figure out how to fend for himself, and it's like 10 years from now so he's all worried about it even though it's a long way off, and so he starts poking the doctor with holes you know he's like jabbing him with the needle all over like indiscriminately. I don't know that was that was really funny, I guess like just poking him everywhere with the needle.
Gretchen:
I do think it would have been interesting to see him living it up on Hicks's money.
Nate:
Especially if she was able to connect the two plots and like his legacy or something like that affected the future 200 years from now.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
He stumbles upon some relic or something like that.
JM:
That would have been really cool.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
That would have been awesome, and I thought that was where it was going, and like she just seemed determined to snatch away the symmetry of the story at every turn.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean again it feels like the start of a 300 page novel that could go to all these places but it just kind of like abruptly stops.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And the time jump. Yeah. The time jump kind of throws you off and then you're like yeah you start getting into the next part. And very interesting thought experiment, though like it does feel a lot like a dream because, you know in dreams a lot of the time your sense of time is a little weird right. So you could jump 100 years into the future in a second. Not really think that much about it. You're like, oh it's the future now I can tell right. But that's beyond normal human experience to be able to do that. But that happens in dreams all the time. Weird time jump sometimes you can't tell what order things really happen in, even in your really vivid dreams. And I appreciated that and I appreciated her style very much like there was a lot of atmosphere. I felt like if she had written longer and more developed story the character work would have been really good. Like I got a sense of that you know the way she was describing the assistant, the way she was describing her and the way like it felt like she was capable of really taking this to some awesome places. I guess it was a little silly like the future speculation. I mean I'm guessing that's kind of why she published it in Amazing right was because of the speculation about what the future would be like under the...
Nate:
Yeah I guess Amazing didn't really do that many of the like the weird serum type stuff, though I guess the Wells "New Accelerator" kind of counts for that but that's a reprint so maybe it's a bit different there.
Gretchen:
Yeah. That was also in the first issue so they were still kind of working out probably what they were going to do in the pulp magazine.
Nate:
Exactly, yeah, I mean I think they kind of shifted their editorial policy towards the more sciencey stuff as they went and they probably had to reject a lot of stuff that was too like Weird Tales and not sciencey enough.
JM:
Yeah, I mean it seems later on though that they've loosened up about that, but I guess, I don't know it's, I mean when we get to the Brackett we can talk about that a lot more, but yeah I was definitely thinking like this feels the third part where she's about to take them up and she's explaining what society has become and everything. It definitely felt like the beginning of one of those sort of utopia things that we've read like "Herland and yeah "300 Years Hence" and stuff like that. And I thought okay it's pretty cool, I mean I keep imagining this story being longer and I keep thinking I'm glad that we read those things in the past but I don't necessarily need to read too many more stories like that, because it really is a lot of it just consists of somebody going on a tour you know being shown around and like there's no plot you know I was just like, well this is the way we do things now, and here's where babies are produced in test tubes, and here's what becomes of these kind of people on society, and here's how we build buildings now, and just being shown around the new society and going, wow we certainly didn't do things like this in my day. I don't know maybe it's good that I didn't go there, I don't know I just I thought her character work would was better than that though like...
Nate:
You could definitely see it developing into some kind of plot more than just like utopia where they're describing how the society works.
JM:
Yeah yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because even in the, I obviously focused on that in my summary what the future is like, but it is told in between like them actually meeting and having like sort of a connection and there's definitely more going on between the characters in those moments, than just like her kind of giving a lecture about what the future is like.
Nate:
Right and then the first part, I mean she sets up this like kind of over the top like murder plot in a very intriguing way. She pulls you right in.
JM:
Yeah it actually made me think of something out of like EC Comics, like the Tales from the Crypt almost.
Nate:
Yeah right.
JM:
Like it's like oh he's gonna get, somehow this guy's gonna get his just desserts and it's gonna turn out really bad, and then it turned into this playful moon woman thing and I'm like yeah cool alright I'm on board for that too. I like both aspects of it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean it is like one of those, the last few stories we've talked about, where it would be interesting just to focus on one of those aspects even on its own just to have a story that maybe expands on one of those different concepts that she explores altogether in this.
Nate:
I certainly wouldn't mind having this be the 40,000 word work rather than the Stone.
JM:
Yeah I would have been on board for that. So I think I mentioned this when we talked about Stone, but I'm thinking like what if she had a collaborator to help her out with the prose a little bit. What if Minna Irving and Leslie Stone collaborated on a story? That would have been cool. I would have been up for that. Stone could be like, I have all this really cool idea about a space opera come political intrigue court intrigue thing, and Irving could have sort of turned it into this really awesome well written piece. I don't know. Yeah. They didn't know each other.
Gretchen:
Even with Stone it's funny because I know we didn't do it in the story we chose, but she does have quite a focus and a number of stories on like aerial people like people with wings.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I was thinking about the stories I had heard about that Stone had wrote when thinking about the way Irving kind of imagines the future.
JM:
Right, so Stone has two stories published in Air Wonder Stories. One is called "Men with Wings" and the other one is "Women with Wings".
Nate:
Yeah. Definitely have the women with wings here.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean it's also kind of interesting because Irving I think is from a different generation than everybody else, right? She was like much older than all the others.
Gretchen:
This would have been written much nearer the end of her life.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I mean born in 1864 so.
Nate:
Right so she would have been like 65 when she wrote this.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
We're really at an interesting point now in doing these because we're seeing the real, for the first time, when I could really envision it clearly in the podcast. We're kind of seeing the different generations of play and how this really does resemble a lot of stuff we've done earlier on in the podcast.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
In a lot of ways and it's in Amazing which is amazing.
Nate:
Yeah but I mean I think a lot of the people we covered tonight aside from the Wells were much younger. I mean Williamson and Brackett were both quite young when they submitted their stories.
JM:
Yeah, but those two were of two different generations as well.
Nate:
Yeah, right, that's true.
JM:
Which is interesting.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
We'll be talking about Williamson very shortly but either really interesting cross-generational case for sure.
Nate:
But I guess when H.G. Wells' stuff came out Irving would have been almost in her 40s.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So it's not something she would have grown up with. I mean she probably would have read like the Gothic stuff, or maybe some Jules Verne if she read any of the adventure stuff but it seems like poetry was more her thing, and definitely the Gothic fiction was much bigger in the 19th century than really any of the pulp stuff.
JM:
Yeah. Definitely.
Gretchen:
It does seem like her publications though, she did at least submit to a wide range of magazines so I'm sure she picked up on a lot of the different genres that would later have their own pulp magazines.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
No, yeah, of course it's just kind of interesting when somebody comes to it in their life when you grow up with something from a very young age, versus when you encounter something like halfway through your life as an adult. It does have a different effect.
JM:
So I wonder how she actually found Amazing. Like how did she come across it? I guess we'll never know.
Gretchen:
I mean she seemed to be someone who, again, probably was very up to date on any sort of new publications that were coming out so she probably would have heard about it just through a more general knowledge of different publications.
Nate:
And I think around this time they were circulating like 100,000 copies per issue on newsstands so if she was like going by train to places or like walking around the city or whatever, she probably would have seen the cover on a newsstand somewhere and been like oh what's this?
JM:
I wonder what she thought of Frank Paul's awesome covers. Maybe she liked it. Who knows?
Nate:
Yeah who knows? Because I don't think she wrote into the magazine right? She didn't do any of the letters?
Gretchen:
No.
JM:
We didn't find any.
Gretchen:
Yeah I don't believe she did.
Nate:
Yeah. It's too bad. It would have been kind of interesting to hear her views on some of the other stuff the magazine was publishing because it's so different from what she wrote.
JM:
Yeah and that's kind of what makes me curious you know. I mean she wasn't, it's not like she was being getting paid that much to write this so she just wanted to do it right. I mean she could have, I'm not going to say because I just don't know how well she was doing with her poetry and everything but it's not like she was a struggling new writer. Like some of these people were talking about. She just wanted to do it, I guess. She did. I don't know this is really interesting. I honestly don't have a lot more to say about the story itself but just the fact that it exists is fascinating.
Gretchen:
It really was interesting, this is a story that's sort of like the Hansen where it's more interesting going into it and knowing about the author and how that affected the way it was written. Even looking through the magazines and the newspapers that I found through my college where she wrote was an interesting experience.
Nate:
You really get the feel for the sense of somebody doing that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I felt like, well it's even learning more about Anna Adolph and that kind of affecting the way that I feel about "Arctiq". I feel like that kind of affects the way that I feel about this work where I kind of respected more from looking at it and how her prose was impacted by her poetry.
JM:
Definitely I can relate to that because there are some things that we've done and maybe even somebody we're about to discuss where it's like kind of reading about them and reading about their thoughts and about other aspects of their creativity and their life has made it more interesting to me. And so I can definitely relate to what you're saying there. I think that's a big thing that I've discovered with doing the podcast in general. Although in not all cases have I really looked that deeply into author backgrounds and stuff like that. It really depends I guess on how much information is out there. Sometimes we don't have very much. But we've been trying to dig into that as much as possible because it is pretty interesting actually. I used to be the kind of person that kind of said, well the art should stand for itself and looking into backgrounds and listening to what they have to say outside of that, is like, it can sometimes take away from the enjoyment of what they created. And I guess sometimes that's still true. But I gotta say it's been really interesting looking at things from the other angle and kind of getting more into their backgrounds and history and stuff.
With this I think we'll close the chapter then on Minna Irving and it's been a really interesting little sojourn into the future and into dreams. So now I think we're going to talk about somebody who I think, I don't know if you guys will agree but I'll ask you at the end of our talk. I think that this guy, Jack Williamson, I think he's a real milestone in our podcast and he's a real milestone in terms of bringing science fiction into the modern era and he's been my big guy this podcast episode of just kind of looking into what he's all about. So I have a lot to talk about, without further ado, let us meet "The Prince of Space".
Bibliography:
Amazing Stories, November 1929 issue https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v04n08_1929-11_Missing_ifc-674ibcbc_AK
Bleiler, Everett - "Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years" (1998)
The Daily Times, Mamaroneck, New York, August 2, 1962, page 12.
Hanley, Terence E. "Minna Irving" (2022) https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2017/04/minna-irving-1857-1940.html
"Minna Irving Upholds History", New York Sun, October 9, 1894, page 6.
obituary, New York Times, July 7, 1940.
Times-Democrat of New Orleans, January 17, 1909, page 27.
"On the War Path", Yonkers Statesman, December 1, 1885, page 3.
Music:
Woolf, Edward - "Mercury Polka" (1851) https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1851.150610/ For Ralph.
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