eye_of_a_cat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2004-11-19 10:34 pm
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2004-11-19 10:34 pm
Entry tags:
"I'm just trying to get home!"
If it's ever discovered that the Quantum Leap project has been real all along, I nominate Morgan Robertson as Person Most Likely To Have Been Temporarily Impersonated By A Time-Travelling Scientist Who Fixes Things In Very Minor Ways While Having Full Knowledge Of Future Events. It won't fit on the trophy, but me and Al, we'll know.
He was a little-known Victorian author who turned to writing because his eyesight wasn't good enough to let him train as a jeweller. In 1905 he wrote a book called The Submarine Destroyer, simultaneously a) proving that the ability to think up good titles is a rare and precious thing and b) inventing the periscope. When officials from the Holland Submarine Company arrived at his door to ask whether he'd thought to sketch out a couple more details (and what a fun place that must have been to work if its employees read things called The Submarine Destroyer on their days off, too), Morgan Robertson didn't say "?!", as most of us would. Instead, he showed them a model periscope that he'd already patented, and sold it to them for $50,000.
Another book of his, Futility, featured a huge and expensive British ocean liner called the Titan which was carrying society's rich and famous across the North Atlantic. The biggest and best of its kind, it was widely claimed to be unsinkable, and therefore didn't have enough lifeboats to save all the passengers when - you've guessed it - it hit an iceberg and sank. The book was published in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic did just that.
However. The story he should have been remembered for The Battle of the Monsters, written in 1899. Given that my academic work is on supernatural fiction, it's saying something that this is the weirdest story I've read for a long, long time.
It begins with a short excerpt from a man's hospital records, after he's admitted 'in extreme mental distress' after having swum ashore from a ship infected with cholera and then being bitten on the arm by a rabid dog. Further details on what kind of day the poor man had are not available, because the story now switches focus to its somewhat unconventional main character:
He was an amphibian, and, as such, undeniably beautiful; for the sunlight, refracted and diffused in the water, gave his translucent, pearl-blue body all the shifting colours of the spectrum. Vigorous and graceful of movement, in shape he represented a comma of three dimensions, twisted, when at rest, to a slight spiral curve; but in travelling he straightened out with quick successive jerks, each one sending him ahead a couple of lengths. Supplemented by the undulatory movement of a long continuation of his tail, it was his way of swimming, good enough to enable him to escape his enemies; this, and riding at anchor in a current by his cable-like appendage, constituting his main occupation in life. The pleasure of eating was denied him; nature had given him a mouth, but he used it only for purposes of offence and defence, absorbing his food in a most unheard-of manner - through the soft walls of his body.
And if you aren't fond of him yet, here's his opinion on sunlight:
But his dislike of it really came of a stronger animus - a shuddering recollection of three hours once passed on dry land in a comatose condition, which had followed a particularly long and intense period of bright sunlight. He had never been able to explain the connection, but the awful memory still saddened his life.
He's happily going about his daily business when he finds himself plunged into a chaotic new environment, full of creatures strange to him - 'quickly darting little monsters about a tenth as large as himself - thousands of them, black and horrid to see, each with short, fish-like body and square head like that of a dog; with wicked mouth that opened and shut nervously; with hooked flippers on the middle part, and a bunch of tentacles on the fore that spread out ahead and around.'
The dog-like creatures begin attacking the huge red-and-grey blobs that are floating past, then themselves get attacked by a different kind of creature, '[a] gigantic, lumbering pulsating creature, white and translucent but for the dark, active brain showing through its walls, horrible in the slow, implacable deliberation of its movements'. 'Sick with horror', our hero watches them battle until the dog-like creatures begin to turn on him. He fights them as best he can, but he's almost at death's door when the cavalry arrives, and it takes a while before he strikes up conversation with one of the white 'sentries'. Naturally, they discuss microscopes.
'Why, Koch had me under his microscope once. He discovered my family, and named us - the comma bacilli - the Spirilli of Asiatic Cholera.'
In silent horror they drew away from him, and then conversed together. Other white warriors drifting along stopped and joined the conference, and when a hundred or more were massed before him, they spread out to a semi-spherical formation and closed in.
'What's the matter?' he asked, nervously. 'What's wrong? What are you going to do? I haven't done anything, have I?'
'It's not what you've done, stranger,' said his quondam friend, 'or what we're going to do. It's what you're going to do. You're going to die. Don't see how you got past quarantine, anyhow.'
'What - why - I don't want to die. I've done nothing. All I want is peace and quiet, and a place to swim where it isn't too light nor too dark. I mind my own affairs. Let me alone - you hear me - let me alone!'
They answered him not. Slowly and irresistibly the hollow formation contracted - individuals slipping out when necessary - until he was pushed, still protesting, into the nearest movable cave. The walls crashed together and his life went out. When he was cast forth he was in five pieces.
And so our gentle, conservative, non-combative cholera microbe, who only wanted to be left alone to mind his own affairs, met this violent death, a martyr to prejudice and an unsympathetic environment.
*sniff*
He was a little-known Victorian author who turned to writing because his eyesight wasn't good enough to let him train as a jeweller. In 1905 he wrote a book called The Submarine Destroyer, simultaneously a) proving that the ability to think up good titles is a rare and precious thing and b) inventing the periscope. When officials from the Holland Submarine Company arrived at his door to ask whether he'd thought to sketch out a couple more details (and what a fun place that must have been to work if its employees read things called The Submarine Destroyer on their days off, too), Morgan Robertson didn't say "?!", as most of us would. Instead, he showed them a model periscope that he'd already patented, and sold it to them for $50,000.
Another book of his, Futility, featured a huge and expensive British ocean liner called the Titan which was carrying society's rich and famous across the North Atlantic. The biggest and best of its kind, it was widely claimed to be unsinkable, and therefore didn't have enough lifeboats to save all the passengers when - you've guessed it - it hit an iceberg and sank. The book was published in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic did just that.
However. The story he should have been remembered for The Battle of the Monsters, written in 1899. Given that my academic work is on supernatural fiction, it's saying something that this is the weirdest story I've read for a long, long time.
It begins with a short excerpt from a man's hospital records, after he's admitted 'in extreme mental distress' after having swum ashore from a ship infected with cholera and then being bitten on the arm by a rabid dog. Further details on what kind of day the poor man had are not available, because the story now switches focus to its somewhat unconventional main character:
He was an amphibian, and, as such, undeniably beautiful; for the sunlight, refracted and diffused in the water, gave his translucent, pearl-blue body all the shifting colours of the spectrum. Vigorous and graceful of movement, in shape he represented a comma of three dimensions, twisted, when at rest, to a slight spiral curve; but in travelling he straightened out with quick successive jerks, each one sending him ahead a couple of lengths. Supplemented by the undulatory movement of a long continuation of his tail, it was his way of swimming, good enough to enable him to escape his enemies; this, and riding at anchor in a current by his cable-like appendage, constituting his main occupation in life. The pleasure of eating was denied him; nature had given him a mouth, but he used it only for purposes of offence and defence, absorbing his food in a most unheard-of manner - through the soft walls of his body.
And if you aren't fond of him yet, here's his opinion on sunlight:
But his dislike of it really came of a stronger animus - a shuddering recollection of three hours once passed on dry land in a comatose condition, which had followed a particularly long and intense period of bright sunlight. He had never been able to explain the connection, but the awful memory still saddened his life.
He's happily going about his daily business when he finds himself plunged into a chaotic new environment, full of creatures strange to him - 'quickly darting little monsters about a tenth as large as himself - thousands of them, black and horrid to see, each with short, fish-like body and square head like that of a dog; with wicked mouth that opened and shut nervously; with hooked flippers on the middle part, and a bunch of tentacles on the fore that spread out ahead and around.'
The dog-like creatures begin attacking the huge red-and-grey blobs that are floating past, then themselves get attacked by a different kind of creature, '[a] gigantic, lumbering pulsating creature, white and translucent but for the dark, active brain showing through its walls, horrible in the slow, implacable deliberation of its movements'. 'Sick with horror', our hero watches them battle until the dog-like creatures begin to turn on him. He fights them as best he can, but he's almost at death's door when the cavalry arrives, and it takes a while before he strikes up conversation with one of the white 'sentries'. Naturally, they discuss microscopes.
'Why, Koch had me under his microscope once. He discovered my family, and named us - the comma bacilli - the Spirilli of Asiatic Cholera.'
In silent horror they drew away from him, and then conversed together. Other white warriors drifting along stopped and joined the conference, and when a hundred or more were massed before him, they spread out to a semi-spherical formation and closed in.
'What's the matter?' he asked, nervously. 'What's wrong? What are you going to do? I haven't done anything, have I?'
'It's not what you've done, stranger,' said his quondam friend, 'or what we're going to do. It's what you're going to do. You're going to die. Don't see how you got past quarantine, anyhow.'
'What - why - I don't want to die. I've done nothing. All I want is peace and quiet, and a place to swim where it isn't too light nor too dark. I mind my own affairs. Let me alone - you hear me - let me alone!'
They answered him not. Slowly and irresistibly the hollow formation contracted - individuals slipping out when necessary - until he was pushed, still protesting, into the nearest movable cave. The walls crashed together and his life went out. When he was cast forth he was in five pieces.
And so our gentle, conservative, non-combative cholera microbe, who only wanted to be left alone to mind his own affairs, met this violent death, a martyr to prejudice and an unsympathetic environment.
*sniff*