Hal Johnson's Blog, page 40
April 26, 2020
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.
April 24, 2020
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...
April 21, 2020
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!
April 19, 2020
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...
April 16, 2020
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...
April 14, 2020
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...
April 12, 2020
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.
April 9, 2020
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...
April 7, 2020
How Big Was Fafnir?
Sigurd complains to Regin, when he sees the dragons footprints, that old Fafnir must be bigger than Regin has let on. But how big is that?
Well, every day Fafnir would shuffle to a nearby cliff and a stretch his neck down from it to drink the water below. The cliff was thirty fathoms (about 180 feet) high, so Fafnirs neck must have been at least 180 feet long. Dragons have disproportionately long necks, but thats still going to be a big footprint.
April 5, 2020
Washington Irving Names New York
In 1809 Washington Irving got people to refer to New Yorkers as Knickerbockersthe New York Knicks continue this traditionwhen he pulled his Diedrich Knickerbocker stunt.
Washington Irving also coined the nickname Gotham for New York CityGotham was a place in England famous for breeding fools, and Irving started comparing New York to Gotham in a humor magazine in 1807.
