Frankenstein Dreams

August 1, 2017

Victorian authors were just as curious about the unknown as writers of today's sf. In Alice W. Fuller's short story, "A Wife Manufactured to Order," a man discovers that having the "perfect wife" is not the dream he imagined. In Rudyard Kipling's "Wireless," the new invention of the radio allows a small group to reach across the airwaves--and into the mind of a dead poet. "Monsters Manufactured," an excerpt from H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, details the protagonist's decision to take his surgical skills down a dark path. And then there's the titular character of Mary Shelley's own creation, as Viktor Frankenstein confronts his monster. VERDICT The 20 works collected by editor Sims (The Phantom Coach; Dracula's Guest) highlights the importance of Victorian sf literature, both in its rich contributions to the genre and its exploration of the deeper themes that are still relevant today.--KC

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July 10, 2017
In a prefatory note, Sims credits Jules Verne for having “woke up our attention to the real world by animating it with fantastic stories,” but he could just as easily be talking about the 18 other authors whose work appears in this thoughtfully compiled anthology of Victorian-era science fiction. To illustrate “the cross-fertilization occurring between science and literature” that distinguished popular fiction in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Sims collects 15 stories and five novel excerpts whose themes include brain transplants, time travel, and robotics. Several are written in a faux journalistic style to heighten their plausibility. In addition to such well-known works as Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of postmortem mesmerism, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s speculation about monsters of the upper atmosphere, “The Horror of the Heights,” Sims includes little-known stories by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Rudyard Kipling, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, who were known primarily as mainstream writers. Even the most devoted science fiction reader will find unfamiliar treats in this assemblage of foundational fiction. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary.

August 1, 2017
The latest anthology of Victorian genre fiction from Sims (Arthur and Sherlock, 2017, etc.) focuses on historically significant science fiction and includes tales from Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle.Fueled by thrilling advances in science--from Herschel's discovery of Uranus to Darwin's breakthroughs in evolutionary biology--the 19th century brought about sweeping changes in the way humankind looked at the world. "New ways of thinking required new ways of writing," Sims explains in the introduction. A highly entertaining fusion of visionary speculation and primordial terror, the stories included within merged cutting-edge science with fiction and essentially created a new category that explored what it means to be human in a world irrevocably changed by technological innovations and conceptual advancements. But although it's excerpts from longer, iconic stories that will initially attract readers--like Shelley's Frankenstein, Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Stevenson's Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde--it's the lesser-known short stories that make this anthology so thematically compelling. Memorable selections include Florence McLandburgh's surreal "The Automaton Ear," which chronicles the consequences of inventing a device capable of hearing all the sounds that ever existed; "The Hall Bedroom," by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, which is set in a boardinghouse with a portal into the fifth dimension; and Alice W. Fuller's "A Wife Manufactured to Order," a story about finding the perfect spouse in the form of a robot--or not. Also of note is "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie" by Wardon Allan Curtis, a Hollow Earth story about a pair of researchers who find a plesiosaur living in a lake in a remote part of Wyoming. Utilizing concepts explored in Frankenstein, the tale takes a decidedly disturbing turn when one of the explorers dies. Although the science in these stories is dated, the thematic profundity and historical context make this anthology a thought-provoking and undeniably entertaining read.

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