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pedanther. "The Diamond Lens" by Fitz James O'Brien (1858): A novella about a guy whose obsession with developing the Perfect Microscope Lens leads him to do terrible things to achieve his goal, and then what he sees through the lens drives him mad. I wasn't remotely surprised when I read the compiler's note afterward and was informed that H.P. Lovecraft had cited this story as one of his influences; I had said "this reminds me of Lovecraft" at several points in the story, in varying tones of voice. I spent most of the story expecting it to end with the main character getting some kind of karmic come-uppance for the awful things he does, but in the end the denouement feels so detached from what precedes it that it's difficult to tell whether it's meant to be a cautionary tale or what, if so, we're being cautioned against: Is pushing beyond the bounds of scientific knowledge supposed to be disastrous in itself, or does it only become a disaster when you resort to murder and/or occultism to do it? And is the main character's virulent antisemitism one of the things he's being punished for by fate, or is that just an incidental character detail with no moral significance?
. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864): A scientific expedition has a series of subterranean adventures after climbing down an extinct volcano. I had a massively-abridged children's version of the book when I was a boy, but this was my first time reading the full thing. Fortunately, out of the two English translations in the public domain, the compiler of the omnibus dodged the notoriously awful one and opted for the Malleson translation, which is apparently quite good (as public domain English translations of Verne go, anyway). The main characters and set-up reminded me a bit of The Lost World (although of course this came first), with the younger viewpoint character trailing along behind the short-tempered eccentric scientist with an unlikely theory to prove. I was amused by how Verne is trying to both have his cake and eat it: the story is a vehicle for conveying lessons about Earth's geological deep history and palaeontology, which are all presumably scientifically accurate by the standards of the time, but the framework those lessons are fitted into is one in which scientific reality is cheerfully jettisoned in favour of having exciting adventures. Which Verne happily lampshades: Axel, our viewpoint character, spends the entire novel periodically complaining that none of this should be possible and that Professor Lidenbrock's pseudoscientific justifications are all garbage.
. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888): A man from the late 19th century is transported (via suspended animation) to the 21st century, where everything is now part of a socialist utopia which his new friends helpfully explain at great length. Obviously, reading this in the actual 21st century means engaging with it in a way the author never intended. There are occasional remarkably good guesses, often paired with telling errors: for instance, Bellamy envisions that people can get music in their homes at any hour through scheduled public transmissions (and even predicts clock radios!), but assumes that the music will have to be provided by musicians playing live. (He also makes an appallingly matter-of-fact statement that when people can get professional music through the radio on demand, nobody will play music at home for fun any more, which he appears to sincerely believe will be a good thing.) On a broader scale, his vision of the future excesses of capitalism, before everybody comes to their senses and embraces socialism, is in places painfully spot on (there's this bit about chain stores swallowing up and driving out the small local businesses...), but the time scale is completely wacky: we're just now, over a century later, getting to the point he expected the world to have reached within a couple of decades, and of course there's no immediate prospect of the socialist utopia that was supposed to have been in place by now. (My impression is that he anticipated global effects from the steamship and telegraph that in actuality it took the internet to achieve.) While he has a clear picture of what the utopian society looks like once it's firmly in place, there's a lot of glossing over how it gets there, both in the historical sense and in the sense of how the society is maintained; the chapter on education has a lot to say about the educational philosophy of the society, and asserting that the system is set up to reliably turn out people who know exactly what they're good at and want to do with their lives, and then blatantly dodges giving any details at all about how a school of the future actually operates. I also want to note the chapter on the role played by women in this future society, which starts out well by saying that of course women contribute equally to men, but then it turns out they have their own entirely separate system of employment because Women Are Delicate Flowers Who Can't Do All The Things Men Do, and also as a side-effect of this, the only high-level government role open to women is the cabinet secretary for women's issues, with all the other cabinet positions and the presidency being filled as a matter of course by men. And the section on romance and courtship has some good things to say about the benefits to society when women can choose their own futures without being constrained by social and financial pressures, but then it gets eugenicist very quickly. (Race is barely touched on, and when it is the results are not great.)
. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898): Martian invaders tromp around the south of England for a few weeks oppressing the populace before being defeated in an unexpected way. Just the south of England: there's no mention of them landing anywhere else; it's an open question whether this is part of the theme of England being at the receiving end of Imperialism for a change or just creator provincialism. (There's also a theory that Wells set the Martian landing where he did because he found it cathartic writing about places he'd hated living in being zapped with death rays.) For a story about unprecedented events, it's very grounded in everyday details: every place is a real, named place occupied by ordinary people reacting to the interruption of their ordinary lives. There's some interesting stuff about how the human response to the invasion is hampered by the slow movement of reliable information (it takes several days before the people in London even find out that England has been invaded). At several points, the narrator mentions articles he's read about astronomy and speculative biology and other subjects, all of which genuinely exist as described (and one of which, if you look it up, was written by a certain H.G. Wells). This is so far the only book in the omnibus that I think there's any chance of me re-reading.
. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912): The classic tale of planetary romance and adventure that popularised so many tropes that it can seem like a collection of clichés. (There's at least one scene that's very clearly an ancestor of a specific scene in Star Wars.) It's also much, much more racist than I remembered from when I read it as a young man. On the plus side, I came out with a new appreciation of how much the 2012 movie did to get a coherent story out of it. (About halfway through, I was thinking I might watch the film again once I finished the book, so I could appreciate it properly. By the time I did finish the book, though, I'd had quite enough of Burrough's Mars for a while.)
. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864): A scientific expedition has a series of subterranean adventures after climbing down an extinct volcano. I had a massively-abridged children's version of the book when I was a boy, but this was my first time reading the full thing. Fortunately, out of the two English translations in the public domain, the compiler of the omnibus dodged the notoriously awful one and opted for the Malleson translation, which is apparently quite good (as public domain English translations of Verne go, anyway). The main characters and set-up reminded me a bit of The Lost World (although of course this came first), with the younger viewpoint character trailing along behind the short-tempered eccentric scientist with an unlikely theory to prove. I was amused by how Verne is trying to both have his cake and eat it: the story is a vehicle for conveying lessons about Earth's geological deep history and palaeontology, which are all presumably scientifically accurate by the standards of the time, but the framework those lessons are fitted into is one in which scientific reality is cheerfully jettisoned in favour of having exciting adventures. Which Verne happily lampshades: Axel, our viewpoint character, spends the entire novel periodically complaining that none of this should be possible and that Professor Lidenbrock's pseudoscientific justifications are all garbage.
. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888): A man from the late 19th century is transported (via suspended animation) to the 21st century, where everything is now part of a socialist utopia which his new friends helpfully explain at great length. Obviously, reading this in the actual 21st century means engaging with it in a way the author never intended. There are occasional remarkably good guesses, often paired with telling errors: for instance, Bellamy envisions that people can get music in their homes at any hour through scheduled public transmissions (and even predicts clock radios!), but assumes that the music will have to be provided by musicians playing live. (He also makes an appallingly matter-of-fact statement that when people can get professional music through the radio on demand, nobody will play music at home for fun any more, which he appears to sincerely believe will be a good thing.) On a broader scale, his vision of the future excesses of capitalism, before everybody comes to their senses and embraces socialism, is in places painfully spot on (there's this bit about chain stores swallowing up and driving out the small local businesses...), but the time scale is completely wacky: we're just now, over a century later, getting to the point he expected the world to have reached within a couple of decades, and of course there's no immediate prospect of the socialist utopia that was supposed to have been in place by now. (My impression is that he anticipated global effects from the steamship and telegraph that in actuality it took the internet to achieve.) While he has a clear picture of what the utopian society looks like once it's firmly in place, there's a lot of glossing over how it gets there, both in the historical sense and in the sense of how the society is maintained; the chapter on education has a lot to say about the educational philosophy of the society, and asserting that the system is set up to reliably turn out people who know exactly what they're good at and want to do with their lives, and then blatantly dodges giving any details at all about how a school of the future actually operates. I also want to note the chapter on the role played by women in this future society, which starts out well by saying that of course women contribute equally to men, but then it turns out they have their own entirely separate system of employment because Women Are Delicate Flowers Who Can't Do All The Things Men Do, and also as a side-effect of this, the only high-level government role open to women is the cabinet secretary for women's issues, with all the other cabinet positions and the presidency being filled as a matter of course by men. And the section on romance and courtship has some good things to say about the benefits to society when women can choose their own futures without being constrained by social and financial pressures, but then it gets eugenicist very quickly. (Race is barely touched on, and when it is the results are not great.)
. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898): Martian invaders tromp around the south of England for a few weeks oppressing the populace before being defeated in an unexpected way. Just the south of England: there's no mention of them landing anywhere else; it's an open question whether this is part of the theme of England being at the receiving end of Imperialism for a change or just creator provincialism. (There's also a theory that Wells set the Martian landing where he did because he found it cathartic writing about places he'd hated living in being zapped with death rays.) For a story about unprecedented events, it's very grounded in everyday details: every place is a real, named place occupied by ordinary people reacting to the interruption of their ordinary lives. There's some interesting stuff about how the human response to the invasion is hampered by the slow movement of reliable information (it takes several days before the people in London even find out that England has been invaded). At several points, the narrator mentions articles he's read about astronomy and speculative biology and other subjects, all of which genuinely exist as described (and one of which, if you look it up, was written by a certain H.G. Wells). This is so far the only book in the omnibus that I think there's any chance of me re-reading.
. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912): The classic tale of planetary romance and adventure that popularised so many tropes that it can seem like a collection of clichés. (There's at least one scene that's very clearly an ancestor of a specific scene in Star Wars.) It's also much, much more racist than I remembered from when I read it as a young man. On the plus side, I came out with a new appreciation of how much the 2012 movie did to get a coherent story out of it. (About halfway through, I was thinking I might watch the film again once I finished the book, so I could appreciate it properly. By the time I did finish the book, though, I'd had quite enough of Burrough's Mars for a while.)
