Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [76]
“Delightful,” she cried, grasping my hand. “Will Zorlin take us?”
A stellar express car was ordered immediately; and I have barely time now to jot down here that we are about to depart. Whether I shall ever come back I do not know, but my mind is quite made up that I will not come back alone.
POSTSCRIPT BY THE EDITOR
A.D. 2201
Bemis has returned to earth and married Eva. “It is worth while,” he says, “To have been vivificated for three hundred years and to have gone to Mars in order to find out a woman’s mind — and my own.”
THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE SEVEN KINGS
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace
The idea that the world is not as it seems but might be controlled behind the scenes by some secret cabal is another of those concepts that took hold in the late Victorian period. It had, of course, been around for a while, most notably with the Rosicrucians. Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875, maintained that her books Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) had been projected to her telepathically by secret Mahatmas in the Himalayas. Blavatsky settled in London in 1887 and spent her final years there, dying in 1891. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society with many theosophists amongst its members, was founded in 1888.
In Caesar’s Column (1890), Ignatius Donnelly suggested that in the future (the book is set at the end of the twentieth century) a small group of wealthy but ruthless plutocrats are the real rulers of Earth, operating either through governments or by manipulating the press. The idea was further implanted in popular fiction through the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle run in The Strand Magazine, starting in 1891. Holmes often finds himself pitted against evil masterminds or secret organisations.
The success of the Holmes stories left the publisher and editor of The Strand, George Newnes and Greenhough Smith, in a quandary when, in 1893, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes with his dramatic struggle with Professor Moriarty and their plunge into the Reichenbach Falls. They turned to other contributors to create similar characters which they could run in regular series. One of those who responded and who became one of the most creative contributors to The Strand in the 1890s was L. T. Meade (1844-1914). Born Elizabeth Thomasina Meade in County Cork, Ireland, she was always known as Lillie, and retained her maiden name for all her professional work, even after her marriage in 1879 to the solicitor Alfred Toulmin Smith. She was an immensely prolific writer with around 280 books to her credit, all but one of those written between 1875 and 1914, averaging seven a year. Much of her output was for teenage girls, but responding to The Strand’s demands she produced a considerable amount of detective fiction. She usually relied on a collaborator to provide the scientific (often medical) details. Initially this was Edgar Beaumont (writing as Dr. Clifford Halifax), with whom she wrote three series of Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1894, 1896 and 1901). Then she collaborated with Eustace Barton (1854-1943), writing as Robert Eustace, with whom she wrote A Master of Mysteries (1898), The Sanctuary Club (1900) and the series from which the following story comes, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899). In this series the narrator, Norman Head, had once belonged to this eponymous secret organisation which had been founded in Italy by the otherwise seemingly innocent and altruistic Madame Koluchy. He manages to escape her clutches and thereafter devotes his time, along with a lawyer colleague, Colin Dufrayer, to thwarting her evil schemes. Each story hinges upon the use of some new technological or scientific discovery, in this instance X-rays, which had only just been properly studied and identified by William Röngten in 1895. — M.A.
THE STAR SHAPED MARKS
ON A CERTAIN SUNDAY in the spring of 1897,