Hal Johnson's Blog, page 38

Shakespeare’s Other Monster

Shakespeares final play, The Tempest (ca. 1610), takes place on a remote island that had once been populated only by a strange beast named Caliban. The child of a witch and the devil himself, Caliban is a freckled whelp, not honored with a human shape. Later arrivals at the island teach Caliban language and enslave himbut Caliban dreams of revenge

Over 250 years after The Tempest, the poet Robert Browning wrote Caliban upon Setebos (1864) in which Caliban talks abut the god he worships,...

The Westminster Alice

Alice is one of the most famous characters from nineteenth-century literature, and she has been borrowed and reused many times by later writers and artists. One of her most successful later appearances is in The Westminster Alice by Saki (1902), where she encounters contemporary politicians behaving as absurdly as characters from Wonderland. Some of Sakis references are confusing if you dont know much (who does?) about British politics from 1902, but his jokes still work. We might not...

Honorable Mentions X

A Square from Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot (1884): A denizen of two-dimensional Flatland, A Square haunts the citizens of one-dimensional Lineland, who can only see one of his sides at a time.

More about the World of 2126

The Mummy! was the first novel about the future to spend quite so many pages describing the strange new technologies and cultural changes of the days to come. There have been so many wonderful discoveries made, and so many ingenious contrivances put into execution!

Webb explains how in the twenty-second century people can travel in moving houses that just fit on the iron railways, or, if they want to go far, in balloons that carry them upwards seventeen miles or thereabouts, which is...

The Walking Dead

There are many stories of vampires, mummies ghosts, and revenants, but the scariest undead storymaybe the scariest story there ever wasis about none of them. In The Monkeys Paw by W.W. Jacobs (1902), a family gets some wishes, and with their first wish they accidentally kill their son. So they wish him alive again. And suddenly on the front door there is a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible

Look, just go read the story!

On the Uses and Misuses of Eclipses

If an eclipse isnt caused by some giant snake eating the sun, what causes it? Would you believe a wizard from Connecticut?

In Mark Twains A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889) the eponymous Yankee is sent back in time to the days of King Arthur, where hes promptly arrested and condemned to be burned at the stake. The cunning Yankee, though, through the magic of future science, knows that an eclipse is coming, and tells the court that he will blot out the sun, which shall never...

Housmans

Clemence Housman wrote several novels and illustrated several more, but shes probably best remembered today for her work campaigning to win British women the right to vote. She co-founded, with her brother Laurence, the Suffrage Atelier, and used her artistic talents to design banners for suffrage marches.

Look, the truth is I dont know a lot about Clemence Housman. I should read more about her, but whenever I start, I get distracted by her other brother, A.E.

A.E. Housman has been a...

Sagas and Stories

The earliest literature from Scandinavia is poetrythe earliest literature from any given place is always poetry, because its easy to memorize and so can predate writingbut some time a little before the thirteenth century people in Iceland and Norway started writing a new kind of work in prose. These were called sagas, and they were sometimes records of historical figures, and sometimes records of mythological figures, and sometimes they were just made-up stories about made-up peoplethey were...

Honorable Mentions IX

The Orc from Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1532): A giant sea monster with the eyes and tusks of a boar, and a body like a mass unshaped, without a name.

The Most Poisonous Book of All

(Dont believe p. 13 in The Big Book of Monsters! This is the real one!) Dorian Gray reads a yellow book, a novel without a plot and with only one character, and the book overpowers and corrupts him. The Picture of Dorian Gray never reveals what the book is, but from its description, its perfectly clear: Dorian is reading Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884), a controversial French novel about a man named Jean des Esseintes who locks himself up on a house and spends his life...