(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Chrononauts main theme)
introductions, recent reads
JM:
Hello everyone, welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. As always, I am here, J.M., with my co-hosts, Nate and Gretchen. And last time we were on the podcast, we talked about babies. And today we're talking about, well, we're talking about animals and we're talking about people, and we're talking about the knife and some horrible vivisectionist activities. But before we get into that, we'll just run down some of our things.
So yes, we are a science fiction literature history podcast. You can find us on all sorts of places on the web. Obviously, your podcasting apps of choice. We're also on YouTube, Spotify, something Google. I don't know, they're always changing their things. Google podcast used to be a thing, but now it's not. So I guess it's all being incorporated into something else.
Nate:
Look for us on Lycos podcast in a bit.
JM:
Yeah, the thing with Google is they always introduce something and it's like an experiment that they push on everybody. And they're like, no, it's not working, so we're going to cancel it. So you never know, something's going to change or get incorporated into something else.
But anyway, you can also write us on Twitter @ChrononautsSF, chrononautspodcast@gmail.com is our email address. And we also, of course, have the blog spot, which we suggest that you go to all of our episodes are posted there. But we also have some translations and first digitizations of certain stories that we've done. So you can find us there at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com.
Nate:
Yeah, I haven't posted it yet, but I probably will by the time you actually hear this recording. But the story tonight that we're covering "The Vivisector Vivisected" that I think when I post the text of that on the blog spot, because that was a little difficult to find. And it's definitely well in the public domain. So you check that one out there.
JM:
Right. It's a bit hard to find that one. Yeah, some of the stuff we cover is not necessarily the easiest to find. Obviously, a lot of the older material you can find on Gutenberg and elsewhere. Like some of the stuff, most of the stuff we're doing tonight, actually, we are returning to the 19th century for the first time in a while. So you should be able to find all most of this stuff pretty easily now, including "Vivisector Vivisected" on the blogspot. But we'll also talk about where we found that story when we get to it.
Yeah, so hope everybody is doing well and a little bit of a tough couple of weeks for me, but gotten everything together now and happy to be here on Chronodots. I did a lot of reading over the past while. What about you guys?
Nate:
Yeah, I definitely have tot. So I said I was reading "Finnegan's Wake" last time, two thirds in, and I've finished with it now and yeah, definitely quite the experience. I think it's one of the few real world books that are comparable to like HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon or "The King and Yellow", where the more you read it, the more it feels like you actually go insane. But yeah, if you like "Ulysses" and you're able to do that, there's lots and lots of reference works and things like that that will complement nicely with your first read and even more that will go quite well with your second and third. So yeah, it's an endless rabbit hole to go down to. Not for everybody, but if it's for you, I think you already know who you are.
But I've also been reading some science fiction stuff. So I read Alfred Bester's "My Stars the Destination" and just before this recording, I finished up with Frederik Pohl's "Gateway". Certainly liked the Pohl a lot more than the Bester, though I didn't mind the Bester at all. I thought it was a lot of fun, but it's kind of interesting observing the changes in eras. There's only 20 years between the two roughly like 70s, mid 70s versus mid 50s-ish or so, but the Bester definitely feels a lot more like a continuation of the stories we've been doing in the pulps like Amazing and Astounding, just maybe a little bit more refined in certain areas. But the Pohl feels a lot more mature and definitely a different form of storytelling, even though it doesn't really work a hundred percent of the time. I think overall, I really liked it. And yeah, it definitely would be cool to cover either of those on the podcast at some point. Certainly there's a lot of things we can tie them into.
JM:
Yeah, actually next month, we should be doing some Frederik Pohl. His name keeps coming up. And so I figured it was finally about time. Again, we'll talk about that at the end of the podcast. But yeah, he's coming. So yeah.
Nate:
A couple of other things I read. I read Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko", Edith Wharton's "Sanctuary", and "By the River Piedra, I sat Down and Wept" by Paulo Coelho. And I thought, that's definitely the best out of those three novellas. But the Aphra Behn was okay. And the Edith Wharton wasn't my favorite. But yeah, it was decent enough. So yeah, that's what I've been doing since the last time. Definitely a pretty wide range of stuff. And yeah, some light stuff and some heavy stuff too.
Gretchen:
Nice. Yeah, I actually, I read the Aphra Behn for the same class that we had to watch "Children of Men", for biopolitics. So that's that's interesting that you recently read that.
Nate:
Yeah, I remember you mentioned that on the podcast and anyway, you mentioned that I was like, oh, yeah, I have that book. So it was short, wanted to catch up on my Goodreads reading challenge. So I figured that'd be a good one to knock out in a day or two.
JM:
That's cool. Yeah, I've read a few things too that I think would be sort of podcast relevant. So I'll try to talk about them all a little bit briefly if I can, not not to go out for too long. But the first thing I read was a collection of short stories by Margaret St. Clair. Normally, when I read short story collections and anthologies, I don't necessarily read the whole thing. I just kind of dip in and out because I kind of feel like that's the best way to do these sort of things usually. However, I was pretty into these stories and so I wanted to read pretty much all of them. So I did and yeah, she's really good.
Definitely want to cover one of her stories on the podcast. At some point when we do more short stories, I guess if I can compare her to any author that I'm aware of, it would probably be Ray Bradbury, but she's definitely different. She's definitely kind of doing her own thing, but I guess what reminded me of Bradbury was the tendency to favor kind of rural settings and sort of, I guess, emphasis on atmosphere and mood, maybe not quite as flowery and sort of poetic as Bradbury can sort of get sometimes, but kind of weirder as well. Her ideas are pretty original, I must say, and you can tell she's really into animals and plants and stuff like that too because there's a lot of interesting depictions of, I guess, alien animal life and not just animal life, but interesting intelligent life that sort of resembles plants and animals that we know and stuff like that and how people deal with that. Not exactly first contact, but some of it kind of resembles that and there's different moods.
Some of the stories are more horror. Some of them are more, I mean, you can tell she was writing for different markets. So she kind of, the stories that she wrote for weird tales kind of have a bit of that feeling and then there's some kind of weird zady space opera stories and then there's some really bizarre stuff apparently later in life. She got really into Wicca and the occult and stuff. So you can kind of see that in some of the later stories. I really liked the compilation a lot. So that was a lot of fun.
I also read a book called "Made for Love" by Alissa Nutting. And this is a newer book. Well, it's not that new now. I guess it's about seven or eight years old maybe, but it's kind of unusual choice for me. It's, I guess I heard about one of her other books, "Tampa" and knowing the subject matter of that book. I wasn't really sure I wanted to read that, but she still sounded kind of interesting. I'm not saying I'd never read "Tampa", but maybe sometime in the future. So I wanted to try something else.
And yeah, this kind of story about a woman who's just gotten out of a marriage with a evil tech CEO kind of guy and she lives, moves back into a trailer park with her dad and it's kind of a satire of all kinds of things, weird, but also kind of mainstream in feeling, I guess like it's, it's, I could see that book really appealing to a lot of people on an emotional level, but yeah, like the characters and the dialogue or it's all, it's quite strange and wacky and yeah, it's not the most subtle book in the world. The evil tech CEO's name is Byron Gogol. I don't really know what she has against those two authors, but I guess it's kind of like a double whammy there. You know, she's, she's like making you think of Gogol, but also like weird Byron, maybe was, maybe she thinks of him as a control freak or something like that. I don't know, but it was good. I enjoyed the humor of it. I enjoyed the wackiness of it really bizarre situations that it was a lot of fun and not too long. So worth getting into.
And finally, the last book I read was "Project Hail Mary", which is a very popular modern sci-fi book and YouTube channel that I sometimes watch, Bookpilled, just posted a video where he talked about the five worst books he's read this year and that was on the list, but I didn't think it was that bad at all. I quite enjoyed it. It's definitely, I don't know, the protagonist is a lot like a dorky kid, like he's kind of really into math and science, but he's, he's not a kid, but he just kind of, you see a lot of his internal monologue and it's an present tense first person, which is kind of a weird style to get into. Sometimes it takes a bit to, for me, to adjust to it because it's, it doesn't feel like you're reading a book sometimes and I think that's the intention. And when I started the book, I thought, oh, this might be kind of rough going because it was like reading a text adventure game almost. Okay, I go to the thing and then I press the button and wait, but nothing happens. And you know, it is just okay. But later on, he actually used the phrase "going into a maze of twisty little passages all alike". And so I knew it was kind of deliberate, I guess.
But so it's basically a save the world from a global catastrophe kind of book that turns into a first contact novel. So a lot of it's had this one lone astronaut, this one survivor of the space interstellar mission, the first interstellar mission. Now he's on his own and he encounters an alien who's also on his own. And so they become buddies and he's just kind of this big, weird looking rock spider alien who talks in musical notes. And a lot of the book is them trying to figure out how to communicate and solving math and science problems. I think Isaac Asimov and Hugo Gernsback would both approve definitely of this book because it definitely has that old school sort of fulfilling the educational aspect of science fiction to it. So it's full of pop culture references. I'm sure in 50 years, people will be calling it dated as well, but who cares? I mean, it's the thing is, I think it appeals to a lot of the same demographic that the old school science fiction does and Bookpilled didn't like it. He said it was very YA ish and he didn't, you know, it's just not into that and I get that and I think the reason I wanted to persevere with it was that my friend was reading it for her book club and I think she wasn't very satisfied with some of the way the book club discussions go. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll try it. I'll read it because it's already something that I was kind of interested in reading. So I'm persevered with it and in the end, I really ended up racing through it and kind of a bit of a long book, but easy read and even the math and science stuff was pretty fun. Yeah, it's definitely cool.
Gretchen:
For myself between having to arrange some stuff for next semester with housing, interviewing for internships and also editing an unpublished book. I didn't have too much time to read many other novels over the past few weeks, but I did read a couple of short stories one of which may be coming up next month, just perhaps. I also, I've been reading a bit of nonfiction like essays and stuff about absurdist literature and queer theory because I might use those for my upcoming thesis. So I did read "Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus, which was a really interesting text. I also did read "The Queer Art of Failure" by Judith Halberstam, which I had read a chapter of that for one of my queer theory classes about two, three semesters ago and I had not read the rest of it. So it was really interesting to get a fuller sense of his ideas, as it's actually Jack Halberstam now.
I believe besides that because I have been in my Red Dwarf fixation. I did end up reading the first novel that Grant and Naylor produced as well as I'm in the middle of the second one and the first novel is really interesting starting out as more like a prequel and then getting into the canon and kind of changing things around whereas the second novel so far is a pretty much a break from what the canon in the TV show is.
Nate:
That's pretty cool.
JM:
Yeah, I'm ashamed to say I've never actually read any Albert Camus yet, but I'm definitely interested. So something I'll have to do at some point that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've read a couple of his fiction work as well. "Stranger" and "The Plague" and he's he's a really good writer. I enjoyed the work I've read by him.
JM:
Yeah, lately just a bit a bit of health issues and stuff. So as a result, I was doing a lot of a lot of more reading than usual even. So but yeah, there was a couple of other things that I considered getting to and one of them was "The Stranger" I believe so something that sounds pretty interesting to me.
Nate:
Yeah, I read that and "The Plague" a very, very long time ago and certainly enjoyed both.
(music: J. Dayton's "The Mary Jane Polka" played on a cheap sounding electric piano)
general discussion on the legacy of "Frankenstein"
So tonight, I guess we're calling this set of stories Children of Frankenstein, maybe a bit of a play in the novel we did last time, but two of the stories we're covering tonight can be read in the 1974 anthology "The Monster Makers", which was edited by Peter Haining and in the introduction, he talks about what a foundational work "Frankenstein" is and indeed the first selection to appear in the anthology is Chapter 5 from "Frankenstein", which describes the creature's awakening.
JM:
So Peter Haining is a British guy. He's put out a lot of anthologies. I have a huge ghost story, it's like I think it's 18th and 19th century ghost stories or something and it's some of stuff is kind of hard to find but you can find it in used bookstores and stuff like that. But interestingly, when I first heard of him, it was through a different thing altogether because he's done a bunch of Doctor Who reference books in the eighties. So that's kind of where I first came across Peter Haining. It's kind of interesting to see some of the other stuff that he's been involved in editing a lot of anthologies and that introduction is pretty good actually.
Nate:
Yeah, the anthology itself is also an interesting mix of tales we're doing tonight, but also tales that play in the same theme in a more futuristic science fiction setting. So it's definitely worth checking out, but certainly "Frankenstein", the novel itself, has been well recognized and acclaimed for good reason for its historical significance. The, I guess Aldiss argument, maybe he was not the first probably to come up with it, but he certainly did a lot in popularizing it that the idea that "Frankenstein" is the first science fiction novel and as we probably discussed many times on the podcast before, I can probably agree with his definition if we hinge it around the word "novel" rather than the term "science fiction" as there is demonstrably science fiction that exists in shorter form that predates "Frankenstein" most notably being "Sandman" by ETA Hoffmann, which is a possible direct influence on Frankenstein, but not really novel form. So "Frankenstein" is certainly that, but getting past the quibbling about genre and first and all that kind of thing. It's obvious and undeniable that it was a massively, massively influential text. And while Mary Shelley certainly didn't invent the totality of science fiction in her head in 1818, "Frankenstein" is definitely a much more in-depth exploration of the ethics of creating another being than the Hoffmann.
JM:
And I think we have to, we have to be aware of that when we say the first science fiction novel, we're, we're doing this very retroactively, like there really is no first in a way because genres don't work like that, right? Like they just sort of like, it's like discussing, well, what's the first black metal album was as well, it can't be that one because it sounds like Motorhead, but it's not the way genres work. Like they, they come about after the fact. So we can agree that "Frankenstein" has a lot of the elements that we would consider modern science fiction, I think, and debating whether it's a horror novel or science fiction novel is really silly, in my opinion, but yeah, I mean, I like the idea of basically starting it there.
Nate:
Yeah, and I think it makes sense because it is a novel, it's a, you know, complete story that makes logical sense from beginning to end. And while the early picaresque type things like the Bergerac and the Godwin or whatever, you know, they are complete stories, but they don't really, I don't know, conform to how novels were constructed in the 19th century and, and all that. So, I mean, it's just a bit of a different conversation, I think.
But "Frankenstein"'s influence is obviously felt throughout basically the entire genre's history. And I think really the next cluster of science fiction activity, you know, the major, where it really starts to get going is roughly about 50 years later in the 1860s, 1870s, with Verne being a huge part of that, but also a lot of these other authors that, and we're going to be talking about tonight, culminating in H.G. Wells. And while the early days of the podcast are, I think, very, very rough listening, because we didn't really know what we were doing as far as audio production goes, but we did talk about "Frankenstein" at length in episode two. And the one thing that I like to reemphasize from that episode is that the Frankenstein story very quickly takes on a life of its own after Shelley through its numerous stage adaptations. And Shelley herself saw the first stage adaptation, which was "Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein" by Richard Brinsley Peake in 1823, and this discards much of her story and plays out much more like the 1930s Universal film with Boris Karloff that I'm sure you're all familiar with, including the classic "It's alive!!" scene, though here it's, "It lives!!", so they had to change it a bit, I guess.
You know, Shelley seemed to like it. She was a little bit critical of some of the changes, but it must have been a surreal experience for her as she remarked, "but lo and behold, I found myself famous!" and it was likely the stage perhaps more so than the novel that kept the legacy alive in the popular conscious, which then morphs into the film versions in the 20th century. And this subgenre of science fiction that is really embodied by "Frankenstein", the mad scientist creating the monster creature, also gets fleshed out quite a bit in this era of the 1860s and 1870s, which is what we're going to be largely taking a look at tonight. But we're also going to be taking a look at stories that touch upon Frankenstein's themes of scientific ethics and the innate horror of medical science.
We've taken a look at these sort of things on the podcast before, but primarily a later set of stories as these are really cluster from the 1870s to the 1890s and represent some of the earliest post Shelley works dealing with these themes. And I don't really want to present an in-depth history of changing medical technology between 1818 and the 1870s. We briefly touch upon the history of neurology. So if you want to hear a more in-depth example of how quickly these things change in a particular field, you can listen to the introduction of our "Heart of the Dog" episode by Bulgakov.
But here I just want to briefly note that while a lot of advancements were made in many medical technologies and practices in the 19th century, they certainly didn't have everything all figured out and medical procedures even in the 1890s were far riskier than they are today. And I think one fascinating look at this phenomenon is the novel "Middlemarch" from 1871, which a major theme is a provincial town's resistance to new medical practices of the modern college educated position who's always on the cutting edge of medical research going against the old time country doctor and his practice that goes back decades.
JM:
It's really interesting that a vivisection plays such a big part in this.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
All over the place, right? Yeah, we'll get to it shortly. But HG Wells, who will be talking about in a bit seems to have had conflicting views on the subject of vivisection because it's clear that we actually did learn a lot by conducting this horrible practice because I mean, it's one thing to dissect something when it's dead, but then you can't really tell you can't tell how things work, right? Because they don't work anymore because it's dead, right?
So I mean, you know, it's just like horrible thing that it could be an instructive practice. You can see how it could be, but obviously it's torturous and despicable, but I mean, science learns a lot from that and how else do you learn how something works in this? You can see something react when you modify things and take them apart. In the 19th century, that seems to be something that was a big issue on a lot of people's minds towards especially like the 1890s and stuff.
So yeah, it's kind of interesting how this it keeps coming up and yeah, and a lot of like modern day pastiches of Victorian stuff like even "A Night in the Lonesome October" by Zelazny, which we talked about before. There's some evil vivisectionists, that horrible bugbear of the 19th century medical science, I guess.
Nate:
So yeah, and I mean, keep in mind, antibiotics didn't even exist in the 19th century. So a lot of stuff that still hasn't been discovered that is crucial to medical technology today, which is kind of crazy if you think about it, how fast things advance.
Yeah, so this is kind of our second tribute to the "Frankenstein" story and its legacy throughout science fiction. And I'm sure there's plenty examples we can think of of the "Frankenstein" story being played out beyond the 1890s is we certainly covered a whole bunch on the podcast before. I'm sure we're going to cover a whole bunch in the future too.
JM:
It's it's been interesting returning to this time period because it's been a while.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I can't remember when the last time we did something was it was probably maybe another Mitchell story or probably around the time we did like, well, we were mostly looking at early 1900s stuff when we did like "House on the Borderland" and Blackwood and I think there was a yeah, it's been a while anyway. So it was it was sort of strange returning to that because I felt like we were really immersed in this kind of stuff early on in the podcast and we kind of went away from it did a lot of early 20th century stuff, a lot of pulp stuff and yeah, just coming back here was was interesting. I enjoyed it.
I do think that like it'll be interesting to return to the medical theme but do it in a more modern context at a future time.
Nate:
Yeah, we're certainly going to be coming back to this time period. I don't think we're going to do too much stuff older than this. I don't think there's a huge variety of stories pre-Shelley out there that we haven't covered that sound interesting, but you never know what surfaces. There's still a whole body of untranslated stuff. So maybe there's some weird masterpiece from French out there that's still out there. But yeah, as far as we go and you know, we're getting deeper into the golden age. Now we're probably going to do more stuff from the 60s and 70s later coming up. We are not going to leave the 19th century behind because there's still lots of really cool stuff that we haven't yet covered on the podcast that I think would be cool to do.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So I guess with that, let's take a look at the first story that we're going to be covering tonight.
JM:
So let's go Under the Knife.
Nate:
Yeah.
(music: psychedelic chainsaws, surrender or die)
"Under the Knife" discussion
Nate:
We've covered H.G. Wells numerous times on the podcast before, so we won't go too in depth into his biography here, which you can take a look at in episode five if you are interested. But we'll just note that this one was relatively early in his career during his extremely prolific and influential run of science fiction stories and novels from the 1890s. For point of comparison, his first major work was "The Time Machine" from 1895, which was serialized one year prior in The New Review. "Under the Knife" was also initially published in The New Review, specifically in the January 1896 issue. The New Review was a London magazine and looks like a pretty eclectic publication. It's a mixture of fiction and non- fiction. The only author I recognized in this issue aside from the Wells was a very short poem by W.B. Yates, but there's also a few anonymous polemics and rants signed by names like "Imperialist" or X or Z.
And perhaps most strangely is an article in French, which is called "The Art of the Biography". And while I haven't really gone deep into the weeds of non-genre fiction British magazines around this time, I was kind of surprised to see mixed language content here, even when I was thumbing through the pages of the Parisian magazine "transition", which is the experimental literary magazine that some of the early "Finnegan's Wake" chapters were initially serialized in. Very little content in the magazine is French language beyond advertisements and a poem here or there. The New York Times described "transition" as being, "hopelessly muddled and unintelligible", but presumably The New Review was intended for a broader audience than an experimental literature journal and not just a small group of literature and poetry nerds. So perhaps a strong testament to the dominance of the French language still in 1896.
So that's where this one initially appeared, but in addition to the many, many, many book form anthologies of H.G. Wells' short stories that this one was later republished in, the earliest of which being the following year in 1897. It also makes its way through the pulps, finding itself in the March 1927 issue of Amazing. And it also made the cut for Amazing's 1927 annual and was later republished in anthologies edited by Damon Knight and Isaac Asimov. So it's certainly been well celebrated and recognized by many major figures, which is pretty cool.
The initial publication was not illustrated, but the version in Amazing contains a full page illustration of a nude form flying through the rings of Saturn. So I think the Amazing issue is the ideal place to read it for that reason alone. There's two major parts of the story that play into one another. The first is the overwhelming and ever-present fear of doctors and operations. And then we get the psychedelic journey of what happens when the anesthesist comes in.
JM:
And I'd just like to point out that Wells himself was experiencing a lot of health issues around this time. And so he would have been probably visited by a lot of doctors. I don't think they would have actually been able to operate on him because a lot of his conditions had to do with like, well, he did have one of his kidneys removed. And also he had chronic lung inflammation that may or may not have been a result of tuberculosis. So definitely a time when this kind of stuff would have been on his mind, I would say.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. And you were more likely to die from something like TB back then where it would just be totally untreatable just because they had no idea how to cure it. You know, even infections with no antibiotics would prove very difficult to treat.
Around this time, nitrous oxide was widely administered and thumbing through the pages of the 1893 issues of the journal The Dental and Surgical Microcosm, which archive.org mislabels as the 1891 issue for some reason. But this journal describes itself as "a quarterly journal devoted chiefly to the sciences of anesthesia and surgery in their cooperative relations". And in it, the headline, "ANOTHER DEATH FROM NITROUS OXIDE GAS" appears numerous times. And there's even a great account with a headline "Crazed by Laughing Gas", which I want to read in his entirety.
It says, "'Annie Burns was found by the police wandering along the riverbank near the foot of 26th Street about two o'clock this morning. She was almost frozen and was evidently not in her right mind. She was locked up in the 12th Ward police station. And at the hearing this morning, she seemed all right. She said she had gone to a dentist's office yesterday afternoon to have a tooth extracted. She remembered nothing after taking the chair when laughing gas was administered until she woke up in the police station this morning. She was discharged.' The above was cut from the Pittsburgh press of January 19 1893. It is here given as a warning to those who produce unconsciousness with any agency, not to allow the patient to leave the office until perfect consciousness is restored. And the patient is in normal physical condition, as well as mental."
And there's also an article "Hypnotism, or Anesthesia in Dentistry". So there was clearly a non-zero number of quacks out there. And what we can look back on medical history as a constant progression, the fear of operation and surgery, especially at this time doesn't seem completely unfounded, as lots can very easily still go wrong.
The last story we did by HG Wells, "The New Accelerator", also republished by Hugo in Amazing, also involved the use of drugs and taking a brief cursory overview of drugs and science fiction. His story, "The Purple Pileus" and a much more famous novel, "The Invisible Man" are also name checked. So it does make me wonder to what extent he used recreational drugs and what his points of references were. Obviously, common modern drugs like LSD and DXM were not synthesized until decades after this was written. But as previously mentioned, nitrous oxide and morphine, cocaine, chloroform, ether all had wide uses in various forms of medicine. So definitely a much stronger cocktail of harder drugs more prone to fatal overdoses and brain damage were commonly available in many cases over the counter from your neighborhood pharmacy. So much different time. A lot of really intense stuff out there, operations and doctors were a lot more dangerous and risky than they are now. So the fears of death and disfigurement and permanent, I guess, mental incapacitation, I think are well justified.
JM:
Yeah, this one was definitely very nightmarish, but also reminded me of like, yeah, psychedelic experience pretty much. There's one part in particular, I'll point it out later, but it's like the feeling of anticipation that you sometimes get where you're anticipating that something is going to happen. And then it apparently, you know, maybe does or maybe doesn't, but you react in a certain way, like maybe it, you know, you react like it happens, even if it doesn't happen, because part of your mind kind of is tricked that way. And I guess, I don't know, this story definitely captured that.
There's absolutely nothing that I've seen that indicates that Wells was into this sort of thing. But that's the second time. I mean, you know, last time we did him was "New Accelerator". And that was also kind of trippy. So yeah, that's interesting.
Gretchen:
I couldn't help it be reminded of "House on the Borderland" during this, with like the, it has that same sort of, yeah, I guess trippiness to it, that same feeling of like a journey that you're going on.
JM:
The astral, the whole like...
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Universe unfolding before you. Yeah.
JM:
The astral journey almost flying off into space, that was definitely "House on the Borderland" vibes are there. Right. We kind of saw commented that that section of "House on the Borderland" seemed to be influenced by "The Time Machine". So like the Wells short stories, they seem to have been quite well read and circulated, even though maybe we'll get into this a little more in the next section, because it's been a while since we really, really talked about HG Wells and how busy he was and how how many different phases of his career there was, because he was just pretty much writing nonstop for 50 years.
Nate:
Sure. Yeah.
JM:
He wrote literally dozens, dozens and dozens of novels, nonfiction works, journalism works. He never stopped. And most of the short stories are early on in his career, but not all of them. There's some later stuff that I guess would count to maybe at least as like novellas or something like that. But this is what he was doing early on. So there's like four or five different collections that came out throughout his life that basically reprinted all of the short stories.
Nate:
Yeah. And like I said, the first one came out in 1897, a year after this one. So this one made its way out of the magazines very, very quickly. And it's not like it languished in obscurity for 30 years or something like that before somebody rediscovered it. It was definitely widely published and most likely widely read because HG Wells seems to be popular pretty much everywhere.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I've no doubt that Hodgson was aware of this stuff. So I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me anyway. But yeah, very trippy. Like there's no real happening in the story, but it's like death dream, basically. And actually, you know, not only did I feel the trip, but I kind of felt the sense of relief when it was over. It was cool. I mean, powerful little piece, I think. I like Wells. He's good at conveying this kind of stuff. So yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. And this is pretty short. So my notes on this are not very long at all.
So the narrator here seems rather emotionally distant from society. He's anxious about dying, but doesn't seem to have anybody to mourn for him if he does. Upon musing about death and moral feelings, he's brought back to reality by almost bumping into a butcher's boy. And this musing continues, and he drifts off to sleep on a park bench. And the park itself morphs into a cemetery in a dream-like state when some park attendant wakes him up and shuffles him off. And he just sees the signs of death wherever he goes. The doctors arrive the next day, and he's prepared, stretched out and given anesthetic. And in a dream-like state, proceeds to see himself cut apart in surrealistic ways. He envisions a cut vein spewing blood. The doctor's calling for ice, and he knows for certain he's going to die. He feels his soul leaving the body and flying out through London. These scenery morphs into this surrealistic burst of colors.
We've seen this kind of stuff before and after this period. You know, "Nic-Nac", "House on the Borderland". And it's great there. It's great here. Earth itself is falling below. He's been cut free from all matter. The immateria has no inertia. So through the Earth's natural rotation, it's leaving him rather than him leaving it. The galaxy unfolds. Time seems to lose all meaning. The solar system, the galaxy, the universe itself all fall away, which appears to be held in a giant, clenched hand. But then a sound like a tolling bell is heard. The hand appears to tighten around a rod, and the narrator's then pulled back into reality with the doctors around him, and he survives the operation.
And yeah, it's a quick little brief story, but a powerful imagery on both the sections, I think.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
So that part that gave me the creepy feeling was that where he anticipated that they were going to cut this vital artery. Before it happened, he felt that it was going to happen. I didn't know that while on mushrooms I've had feelings like that.
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
So it's like, oh no, it does happen. And it's like, it's worse. Usually it's not something that bad. I've never actually been cut like that. But anticipating that something's going to fall or something like that, or something's going to like, there's going to be a huge bang, because something's going to fall on the floor or something like that. And you're like, oh no, it's going to happen. And then it does.
That was like a trip flashback in a way, I guess, just feeling that the essence of that, because you describe it really well. You know, describe like, uh-oh, it's that horrible anticipation. And he's like, they're going to cut me. They're going to cut me and I'm going to bleed out. I don't want to die. And then all of a sudden, here's the doctor go, oh no.
Nate:
Yeah, he's good at writing this stuff. And while he probably wasn't a recreational user, I'm sure they gave him nitrous at the dentist or something like that. If it seems to be that commonly administered, where they're commonly giving too much that are documented in these surgical journals. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if he'd been administered some heavy doses in a medicinal setting before. Otherwise, how would he be able to describe the experience so well and accurately? You know what I mean? It just seems very unlikely that he would have had no experience with this stuff at all.
JM:
Yeah. So I think, I mean, not everybody's going to love this kind of thing, because it's flying off into the cosmos and describing astral phenomenon and stuff like that and seeing the universe. It's like, I think a lot of people do have trouble with this kind of stuff. But if you like this kind of thing, you'll enjoy this little story. It's only, it's, you know, it's really short. He doesn't overdo it. It's not like he spends 100 pages describing the rings of Saturn or something like that. It's short. It gets its feeling across in very few pages. So I think it's really effective. If you like this kind of weird astral voyage stuff, it's a good read. And it's also a really good way to introduce this topic, I think.
Nate:
Yeah. And cover is the fear of doctors, I think, pretty well, which is going to be permeating pretty much the entire episode with the stories we cover, though it'll manifest itself in different ways than this. I think in many ways, this is kind of the odd man out for the stories we'll be covering and that there's no creature or monster created in this. The monsters, if you will, are all in the narrator's head and they take a much different form. But yeah, yeah, it's very short.
JM:
Of course, if this hadn't been a real horror story, he would have actually died at the end.
Nate:
Yeah, it'd become, it'd be difficult for him to like, I guess, well, maybe convey it from like a spirit world or something like that.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Some seance bringing him back.
JM:
Yeah. Weirdly reminded of, there's nothing to do with this really, but the song "Gloomy Sunday". And how there's two versions of the song. And in the first version of the song, he's like lamenting about how his loves died and how he wants to join her and stuff like that. And he's like, I want to go where the black coach of sorrow has taken you and all this stuff. And it's like really dark and depressing. But then like somebody, I don't know if it was a record label person or something like that was like, that's way too dark and depressing. So they changed the ending of the song and made it so that he woke up and he was only dreaming and she was still actually there beside him. And everything was okay. And it's like, oh, and it's so funny too, because like most of the song is like minor chords and really sad. And then all of a sudden it's like goes up into a major key as like, I was only dreaming. I don't know. It was nice to feel that sense of relief. So yeah. Good story.
Nate:
Yeah, I like this one again, really short. I think it's like 3000 words. So you can probably read it in 15 minutes.
Gretchen:
Yeah, like you said, JM, it's really powerful. I like the sensations that it's able to convey.
JM:
Yeah. So be careful when you do drugs, I guess. Yeah.
Nate:
Yes, use harm reduction, which is not a thing that was in the 19th century. So I guess on that note, why don't we check out a longer work by Mr. Wells?
JM:
Yeah, we're not ready to leave Mr. HG Wells yet. So we got a longer work to talk about. We got "The Island of Dr. Moreau" coming up in just a moment.
Gretchen:
Yeah, we're going to be stranded for a little bit, I think.
Nate:
I think so. Yeah.
JM:
Yes, definitely. All right, we'll be back.
Bibliography:
Gaping Blackbird - "The Purple Pileus" https://gapingblackbird.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/the-purple-pileus-by-h-g-wells
Haining, Peter - introduction to "The Monster Makers" anthology (1974)
various articles from "The dental and surgical microcosm" (1891-1893) https://archive.org/details/dentalsurgicalmi03na/mode/2up
Music:
Dayton, J. - "The Mary Jane Polka" (1857) https://www.loc.gov/item/2023811721/
