Pyat and the Battlefields of the World's Armageddon

[pyat]

Also, I'm reading an awesome book written in 1894, about the frightening future world of 1910. I'm on page 30 and there's already been a mad scientist, evil Germans, a flying submarine, and a comet that's going to blow up the Earth. It's heady stuff! The author was out-selling HG Wells by a considerable margin back in the 19th century, and is almost forgotten today.

For a fan of what is now called "Steampunk," it is good to turn one's back, from time to time, on the modern pastiche that represent the genre, and get back to the source. Not that there is a source, really, since these books were being written in a time when stories of this kind were not yet even classified with the Gernsbackian term, "scientificition".

A sample of the text:

"I shall not state my price in money, your Majesty. I am not working for money, but you will understand that I cannot convert what I have shown you to-day into the fighting reality. Only a nation can do that. It will cost ten millions of marks, at least, to — well, to so far develop this experiment that no fleet save your Majesty's shall sail the seas, and that no armies save yours shall, without your consent, march over the battlefields of the world's Armageddon."

"Make it twenty millions, fifty millions," laughed the Kaiser, "and it will be cheap at the price."

The Mad Scientist is selling his evil experiment to the freaking KAISER. How cool is that?

Comments

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

There's an obscure Edgar Rice Burroughs book entitled something like Crossing Forty that envisions a prosperous US that isolated itself from the slaughter of WWI while the Europeans destroyed themselves. It was a great read and it had aero-submarines!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I think I may have even read that one!