Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [50]
There was the light of martyrdom in his eyes as he looked for the last time at the dial. Then he unscrewed the circular window from the bottom of the car, lowered himself through it, hung for a moment to the edge with his hands, and let go.
When Princeps and Brenda woke after several hours’ sleep, they were astonished to find the windows of the car glowing with a strange, brilliant light — the light of the Northern Aurora. Princeps got out, saying: “Hurrah, Professor! We’ve got there! Daylight at last!”
But there was no Professor, and only the open trap-door and the window hanging on its hinges below told how an almost priceless life had been heroically sacrificed to make the way of life longer for two who had only just begun to tread it together through the golden gates of the Garden of Love.
But Karl Haffkin’s martyrdom meant even more than this. Without it, the great experiment must have failed, and three lives would have been lost instead of one; and so he chose to die the lesser death so that his comrades on that marvellous voyage might live out their own lives to Nature’s limit, and that he himself might live forever on the roll of honour which is emblazoned with the names of the noblest of all martyrs — those who have given their lives to prove that Truth is true.
IN THE DEEP OF TIME
George Parsons Lathrop
From the conquest of the North Pole to the conquest of space. Space travel has been a fundamental part of science fiction from the very earliest days, but it became particularly prominent in the public consciousness during the 1890s because of the close opposition of Mars. Attention had been drawn to Mars in 1877 when Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to see canali, or channels. The idea that there may be life on Mars grasped the public imagination and this was encouraged by the American astronomer Perceval Lowell. He wrote three books on the subject, Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). Of course H. G. Wells had already taken the public imagination much further in The War of the Worlds (1898) which merged the public appetite for the future war novel with the idea of Earth being invaded by the technologically superior but morally merciless Martians.
The following story was written before War of the Worlds and, for that matter, before Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), with which it has much in common. It’s not impossible that the story gave Wells some ideas because he may well have read it when it ran in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1897, to which Wells also contributed. The story includes such ideas as automated factories, synthetic fabrics, suspended animation and the classic science fiction concept of antigravity. George Parsons Lathrop credited Thomas Edison with providing the technical ideas for the story. Lathrop had interviewed Edison a few years earlier, writing “Talks with Edison” for Harper’s Magazine (February 1890).
George Parsons Lathrop (1851-1898) was an American novelist, editor and scholar. He was also the son-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, having married Hawthorne’s daughter Rose in 1871. It was not an entirely happy marriage and they separated in 1895. That was just before this story was written and I wonder whether some of the narrator’s romantic anguish may reflect Lathrop’s own. Writers should be grateful to Lathrop as he founded the American Copyright League in 1883 which helped secure international copyright law. — M.A.
This story is the result of conversations with Thomas A. Edison, the substance of which he afterwards put into the form of notes written for my use. His suggestions as to inventions and changed mechanical, industrial, and social conditions in the future, here embodied, I understand to be simply hints as to what might possibly be accomplished. Mr. Edison assumes