HiLobrow is pleased to present the first installment of our serialization of “The Comet,” a 1920 science fiction story by W.E.B. DuBois, the most important black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. “The Comet” was originally published as the tenth chapter of Du Bois’s avant-garde fiction, poetry, and autobiographical collection Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. New installments will appear each Tuesday for five weeks.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

He stood a moment on the steps of the bank, watching the human river that swirled down Broadway. Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him save in a way that stung. He was outside the world — “nothing!” as he said bitterly. Bits of the words of the walkers came to him.

“The comet?”

“The comet —”

Everybody was talking of it. Even the president, as he entered, smiled patronizingly at him, and asked:

“Well, Jim, are you scared?”

“No,” said the messenger shortly.

“I thought we’d journeyed through the comet’s tail once,” broke in the junior clerk affably.

“Oh, that was Halley’s,” said the president; “this is a new comet, quite a stranger, they say — wonderful, wonderful! I saw it last night. Oh, by the way, Jim,” turning again to the messenger, “I want you to go down into the lower vaults today.”

The messenger followed the president silently. Of course, they wanted him to go down to the lower vaults. It was too dangerous for more valuable men. He smiled grimly and listened.

“Everything of value has been moved out since the water began to seep in,” said the president; “but we miss two volumes of old records. Suppose you nose around down there, — it isn’t very pleasant, I suppose.”

“Not very,” said the messenger, as he walked out.

“Well, Jim, the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time,” said the vault clerk, as he passed over the keys; but the messenger passed silently down the stairs. Down he went beneath Broadway, where the dim light filtered through the feet of hurrying men; down to the dark basement beneath; down into the blackness and silence beneath that lowest cavern. Here with his dark lantern he groped in the bowels of the earth, under the world.

He drew a long breath as he threw back the last great iron door and stepped into the fetid slime within. Here at last was peace, and he groped moodily forward. A great rat leaped past him and cobwebs crept across his face. He felt carefully around the room, shelf by shelf, on the muddied floor, and in crevice and corner. Nothing. Then he went back to the far end, where somehow the wall felt different. He sounded and pushed and pried. Nothing. He started away. Then something brought him back. He was sounding and working again when suddenly the whole black wall swung as on mighty hinges, and blackness yawned beyond. He peered in; it was evidently a secret vault — some hiding place of the old bank unknown in newer times. He entered hesitatingly. It was a long, narrow room with shelves, and at the far end, an old iron chest. On a high shelf lay the two missing volumes of records, and others. He put them carefully aside and stepped to the chest. It was old, strong, and rusty. He looked at the vast and old-fashioned lock and flashed his light on the hinges. They were deeply incrusted with rust. Looking about, he found a bit of iron and began to pry. The rust had eaten a hundred years, and it had gone deep. Slowly, wearily, the old lid lifted, and with a last, low groan lay bare its treasure — and he saw the dull sheen of gold!

“Boom!”

A low, grinding, reverberating crash struck upon his ear. He started up and looked about. All was black and still. He groped for his light and swung it about him. Then he knew! The great stone door had swung to. He forgot the gold and looked death squarely in the face. Then with a sigh he went methodically to work. The cold sweat stood on his forehead; but he searched, pounded, pushed, and worked until after what seemed endless hours his hand struck a cold bit of metal and the great door swung again harshly on its hinges, and then, striking against something soft and heavy, stopped. He had just room to squeeze through. There lay the body of the vault clerk, cold and stiff. He stared at it, and then felt sick and nauseated. The air seemed unaccountably foul, with a strong, peculiar odor. He stepped forward, clutched at the air, and fell fainting across the corpse.

He awoke with a sense of horror, leaped from the body, and groped up the stairs, calling to the guard. The watchman sat as if asleep, with the gate swinging free. With one glance at him the messenger hurried up to the sub-vault. In vain he called to the guards. His voice echoed and re-echoed weirdly. Up into the great basement he rushed. Here another guard lay prostrate on his face, cold and still. A fear arose in the messenger’s heart. He dashed up to the cellar floor, up into the bank. The stillness of death lay everywhere and everywhere bowed, bent, and stretched the silent forms of men. The messenger paused and glanced about. He was not a man easily moved; but the sight was appalling! “Robbery and murder,” he whispered slowly to himself as he saw the twisted, oozing mouth of the president where he lay half-buried on his desk. Then a new thought seized him: If they found him here alone — with all this money and all these dead men — what would his life be worth? He glanced about, tiptoed cautiously to a side door, and again looked behind. Quietly he turned the latch and stepped out into Wall Street.

How silent the street was! Not a soul was stirring, and yet it was high-noon — Wall Street? Broadway? He glanced almost wildly up and down, then across the street, and as he looked, a sickening horror froze in his limbs. With a choking cry of utter fright he lunged, leaned giddily against the cold building, and stared helplessly at the sight.

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013.

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

HiLobrow is pleased to present the eleventh installment of our serialization of Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (also known as Lest Ye Die). New installments will appear each Monday for 25 weeks.

When war breaks out in Europe — war which aims successfully to displace entire populations — British civilization collapses utterly and overnight. The ironically named Theodore Savage, an educated and dissatisfied idler, must learn to survive by his wits in the new England, where 20th-century science, technology, and culture are regarded with superstitious awe and terror.

The book — by a writer best known today for her suffragist plays, treatises, and activism — was published in 1922. In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish it in a gorgeous paperback edition, with an Introduction by Gary Panter.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

Theodore lived through the winter — as all his fellows lived — destructively, on the legacy and remnant of other men’s savings and makings; scraping and grubbing in other men’s ground, burning furniture and wood-work, the product of other men’s labours, and taking no thought for the morrow. At the beginning of winter some four or five score of human shadows, men and women, crept about the dead streets and the fields beyond them in their daily quest for the means to keep life in their bodies; but, as the weeks drew on and the winter hardened, starvation and the sickness born of starvation reduced their numbers by a half. Those lived best who were most skilful at the trapping of vermin; and they had long been existing on little but rat-flesh, when some hunters of rats, on the track of their prey, discovered a treasure beyond price — a godsend — in the shape of sacks of grain in the cellar of an empty brewery.

The discovery meant more than a supply of food and the staving-off of death by starvation; with the possession of resources that, with care, might last for weeks there came into being a common interest, the fellowship that makes a social system. After the first wild struggle — the rush to fill their hands and cram their gnawing stomachs — the shadows and skeletons of men controlled their instincts and took counsel; the fact that their stomachs were full and their craving satisfied gave back to them the power of construction, of fore-thought and restraint; they ceased to be instinctively inimical and wholly animal and took common measures for the preservation and rationing of their heaven-sent windfall. They advised, consulted, heard opinion and gave it, were reasonable; counted their numbers in relation to the size of their hoard; and in the end decided, by common consent, on the amount of the daily portion which was to be allotted to each in return for his share in the duty of guarding it — against the cravings of their own hunger as well as against the inroads of rats and mice…. With food — with property — they were human again; capable of plans for the morrow, of concerted and intelligent action. The enmity they had hitherto felt against each other was suddenly transferred to the stranger — the foreigner — who might force his way in and acquire a share in their treasure. Hence they took precautions against the arrival of the stranger, kept watch and ward on the outskirts of the town and drove away the chance newcomer, so that the knowledge of their good fortune should not spread. With duties shared, the dead sense of comradeship revived; they began to recognize and greet each other as they came for their daily portion. And if some were restrained only by the common watchfulness from appropriating more than their share of the common stock, there were others in whom stirred the sense of honour.

For a week or more they lived under the beginnings of a social system which was rendered possible by their certainty of a daily mess; and then came what, perhaps, was inevitable — discovery of pilfering from the store that gave life to them all. The pilferers, detected by the night-guard, fled on the instant, well knowing that their sin against the very existence of the little community was a sin beyond hope of forgiveness; they eluded pursuit in the darkness and by morning had vanished from the neighbourhood. For the time only; since they took with them the knowledge of the hoarded grain they had forfeited — a knowledge which was power and a weapon to themselves, a danger to those they had fled from. Two days later, after nightfall, a skeleton rabble, armed with knives, clubs and stones, was led into the town by the renegades; and there was fought out a fierce, elementary battle, a struggle of starved men for the prize of life itself…. From the first the case of the defenders was hopeless; outnumbered and taken by surprise, they were beaten in detail, overwhelmed — and in less than five minutes the survivors were flying for their lives, the darkness their only hope of safety.

Theodore Savage was of the remnant who owed their lives to darkness and the speed with which they fled. As he neared the outskirts of the town and slackened, exhausted, to draw breath, he heard the patter of running steps behind him and for a moment believed himself pursued — till a passing burst of moonlight showed the runner as a woman, like himself seeking safety in flight. A young woman, with a sobbing open mouth, who clutched at his arm and besought him not to leave her to be killed — to save her, to get her away! … He knew her by sight as he knew all the members of the destitute little community — a girl with a face once plump, now hollowed, whom he had seen daily when she came, in stupid wretchedness, to hold out her bowl for her share of the common ration; one of a squalid company of three or four women who herded together — and whose habit of instinctive fellowship was broken by the sudden onslaught which had driven them apart in flight.

“I don’t know where they’ve all gone,” she wailed. “Don’t leave me — for Gawd’s saike don’t leave me…. Ow, whatever shall I do? … I dunno where to go — for Gawd’s sake…”

He would gladly have been rid of her lamenting helplessness but she clung to him in a panic that would not be gainsaid, as fearful almost of the lonely dark ahead as of the bloody brawl she had fled from.

“Hold your tongue,” he ordered as he pulled her along. “Don’t make that noise or they’ll hear us. And keep close to me — keep in the shadow.”

She obeyed and stilled her sobbing to gasps and whimpers — holding tightly to his arm while he hurried her through by-streets to the open country. He knew no more than she where they were going when they left the silent outskirts of the town behind them, and, pressing against each other for warmth, bent their heads to a January wind.

That night for Theodore Savage was the beginning of an odd partnership, a new phase of his life uncivilized. The girl who had clutched at him as the drowning clutch at straws was destined to bear him company for more than a winter’s night and a journey to comparative safety; being by nature and training of the type that clings, as a matter of right, to whomsoever will fend for it, she drifted after him instinctively. When she woke in the morning in the shelter he had found for her she looked round for him to guide and, if possible, feed her — and awaited his instructions passively.

One human being — so it did not threaten him with violence — was no more to him than another, and perhaps he hardly noticed that when he rose and moved on she followed. From that hour forth she was always at his heels — complaining or too wretched to complain. He would let her hang on his arm as they trudged and shared his findings of food with her — because she had followed, was there; and it was some time before he realized that he had shouldered a responsibility which had no intention of shifting itself from his back…. When he realized the fact he had already tacitly accepted it; and for the first few weeks of their existence in common he was too fiercely occupied in the task of keeping them both alive to consider or define his relationship to the creature who whimpered and stumbled at his heels and took scraps of food from his hands. When, at last, he considered it, the relationship was established on both sides. She was his dependent, after the fashion of a child or an accustomed dog; and having learned to look to him for food, for guidance and protection, she could be cast off only by direct cruelty and the breaking of a daily habit.

In the beginning that was all; she followed because she did not know what else to do; he led and they hungered together. For the most part they were silent with the speechlessness of misery, and it was days before he even asked her name, weeks before he knew more of her life in the past than was betrayed by a Cockney accent. So long as existence was a craving and a fear, where nothing mattered save hunger and the fending-off of present death, the fact that she was a woman meant no more to him than her dependence and his own responsibility; thus her companionship was no more than the bodily presence of a human being whose needs were his own, whose terrors and whose enemies were his.

They prowled and starved together through the long bitterness of winter in a world stripped bare of its last year’s harvest where all hungry mouths strove to keep other mouths at a distance; and time and again, when they grubbed for food or sought to take shelter, they were driven away with threats and with violence by those who already held possession of some tract of street or country. No claim to ownership could stand against the claim of a stronger, and one man, meeting them, would avoid them, slink out of their way — because, being two, they could strip him if the mood should take them. And when they, in their turn, sighted three or four figures in the distance, they made haste to take another road.

Once, when a solitary wayfarer shrank from them and scuttled to the cover of a ragged patch of firewood, there came back to Theodore, like a rushing mighty wind, the memory of his last days in London, the thought of his journey down to York. The strange, glad fellowship of the outbreak of war, the eagerness to serve and be sacrificed; the friendliness of strangers, the dear love of England, the brotherhood!… The creature who scuttled at his very sight would have been his brother in those first days of splendid sacrifice! “Lord God!” he said and laughed long and uncontrollably; while the girl, Ada, stared in open-mouthed bewilderment — then pulled at his arm and began to cry, believing he was going off his head.

In their hunted and fugitive life their wanderings, of necessity, were planless; they drifted east or west, by this road or that, as fear, the weather or the cravings of their hunger prompted. They sought food, thought food only and, as far as possible, avoided the neighbourhood of those, their fellow-men, who might try to share their meagre findings. House-room, bare house-room, stood ready for their taking in the country as well as in the town; but wherever there was more than house-room — food or the mere possibility of food — the human wolf was at hand to dispute it with his rivals. There was a time when a road, followed blindly, led them down to the sea and the corpse of a pretentious little watering-place — where stiff, blank terraces of ornate brick and plaster stared out at the unbroken sea-line; they found themselves shelter in a bow-windowed villa that still bore the legend “Ocean View: Apartments,” trudged along the tide-mark in search of sand-crabs and fished from an iron-legged pier. When a long winter gale swept the pier with breakers and put a stop to their fishing, they turned and tramped inland again…. And there was another time when they were the sole inhabitants of a stretch of Welsh mining-village — they knew it for Welsh by the street-names — where they hunted their rats and grubbed for roots in allotments already trampled over. For very starvation they moved on again; and later — how much later they could not remember — took shelter, because they could go no further, in a cottage on the outskirts of a moor-land hamlet, where they were almost at extremity when a bitter spell of cold, at the end of winter, sent them food in the shape of frozen rooks and starlings. And, a day or two later, they were driven out again; Theodore, searching for dead birds in the snow, met others engaged in the same hungry quest — other and earlier settlers in the neighbourhood who saw in him a poacher on their scanty hunting-grounds and, gathering together in a common hate and need, fell on the intruders and chased them out with stones and threats. Theodore and the girl were hunted from their homestead and out on to the bleakness of the moor; whence, looking back breathless and aching from their bruises, they saw half a dozen yelling starvelings who still threatened them with shouts and upraised fists…. They went on blindly because they dared not stay; and that, for many days, was the last they saw of mankind.

It must have been towards the end of February or the beginning of March that they ended their long goings to and fro and found the refuge that, for many months, was to give them hiding and sustenance. Since they had been driven from their last shelter they had sighted no enemy in the shape of a living man, but the days that followed their flight had been almost foodless; and in the end they had come near to death from exposure on a stretch of hill and heath-covered country where they lost all sense of direction or even of desire. There, without doubt, they would have left their bones if there had not already been a promise of spring in the air; as it was, they could hardly drag themselves along when the moor dropped suddenly into a valley, a wide strip of land once pasture, now bleak and blackened from the passing of the poison-fire which had seared it from end to end. Here and there were charred mummies of men and of animals, lying thickest round a farmhouse, partly burned out; but beyond the burned farmhouse was a stream that might yield them fish; and with the warmth that was melting the snow on the hilltops little shafts of green life were piercing through the blackened soil. Before dark, in what once had been a garden, they scraped with their nails and their knives and found food — worm-eaten roots that would once have seemed unfit for cattle, that they thrust into their mouths unwashed. They sheltered for the night within the skeleton walls of the farm ; and when, with morning, they crawled into the sun, the last patch of snow had vanished from the hills and the tiny shafts of green were more radiant against the blackened soil…. The long curse and barrenness of winter was over and Nature was beginning anew her task of supporting her children.

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.

HiLobrow is proud to present the fifteenth installment of Robert Waldron’s novel The School on the Fens. New installments will appear each Saturday for thirty-eight weeks. CLICK HERE to read all installments published thus far.

Late-night phone calls are common in a teacher’s life. Disgruntled students who have failed a subject or simply dislike a teacher play this eerie game. I have received such calls, chilled by the silence on the other end of the line. I have also been a victim of other pranks: my car splattered with eggs on Halloween or my tires flattened around report card time. When carried out by youngsters, we can chalk it up to immaturity, but when Rell and his minions did such things, it was another matter.

Our new Latin teacher Maureen Riley has received several such calls. Tall, pretty, and gifted with a razor-sharp wit, Maureen was a breath of fresh air when she arrived at Classical. She swiftly perceived the lay of the land. “This is a place of fear,” she announced in a teachers’ lounge, “and the headmaster is nuts.”

Needless to say we were delighted by her honest appraisal, but Jim warned her about ubiquitous spies — and that she would be well advised to keep her opinions to herself.

She drove an old jalopy to school; it frequently broke down, often causing her to be late for school. As we predicted, she received a “Kindly Note” in her mailbox, summoning her to the headmaster’s office. Still an innocent about Classical’s ways, she told none of us and went to the meeting alone.

She explained her car dilemma to Farrell and Murkin. “Get a new car,” Murkin said.

“You want to pay for it?” Maureen shot back.

“Then take the public transportation,” Murkin said. “We don’t tolerate tardiness from our professional staff.”

“No problem,” Maureen said, reining in her pique.

“There’s another matter that’s come to my attention,” Farrell said. “You’ve been mouthing off about this school — and about me. If you don’t like it here, you’re free to go elsewhere.”

She now understood the real reason why she’d been summoned.

“I didn’t leave my constitutional rights at the door when I came here,” Maureen said. “And I don’t like threats. If you or this skinny bitch here gives me any more shit, I’ll pick up the phone and call Senator Keating; he’s my uncle, and he loves me, and he won’t let anyone hurt me.”

Farrell’s and Murkin’s jaws dropped.

“Oh, I get it. You didn’t know about my uncle because I didn’t get my position through connections,” she continued. “I got my job fairly because I have the credentials. But if I need help, say regarding you two, he’d be very happy to help me. Nice talking to you guys, and have a great day.”

When she left, their mouths were still open.

Maureen loved telling her story, word for word, and before long the whole faculty knew it.

Shortly after, the late-night phone calls started. Maureen had great rapport with the kids, and she was convinced it wasn’t one of them. It had to be either Murkin or Farrell or one of his lackeys. She admitted that such calls in the middle of the night were unnerving, especially if you’re a single woman living alone.

Stay tuned!

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

I can’t help but think that comedian and author TINA FEY (born 1970) is the perfect person to solve the European debt crisis. She is, after all, half Greek and half German (roughly). I imagine her telling Germany how to deal with volatile Greece, which can’t be any worse than Lindsay Lohan: “Oh, are you going crazy? I’ll be back in an hour.” I imagine her telling Greece how to deal with supercilious Germany, which can’t be any worse than Christopher Hitchens: “Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.” 30 Rock, which of course was the critically-acclaimed sitcom she created, wrote for, starred in, and executive-produced, was among many other things a very successful exercise in depicting a believable friendship between the liberal Liz Lemon and the conservative Jack Donaghy. A person who can imagine that kind of harmony between representatives of America’s polarized political parties can surely do anything.

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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Ai Wewei, Chow Yun-Fat, Mark Mothersbaugh.

READ MORE about members of the Reconstructionist Generation (1964–73).

Recently, the University of Iowa Libraries acquired the Joshua Glenn Zine Collection — somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 zines that I squirreled away during the so-called Zine Revolution (1984–93, according to my eccentric reckoning), plus scores of letters from zine publishers, plus all sorts of ephemera related to the printing, distribution, and promotion of zines including my own: Luvboat Earth and Hermenaut. My collection — including such titles as 8-Track Mind, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, ANSWER Me!, Baby Split Bowling News, babysue, The Baffler, Bananafish, Beer Frame, Ben is Dead, Bimbox, Bitch, Boiled Angel, bOING bOING, Bunnyhop, Bust, Chip’s Closet Cleaner, Crank, Crap Hound, DishWasher, Duplex Planet, Ersatz, FAT!SO?, Flatter!, Flipside, Forced Exposure, The Freakie Magnet, Giant Robot, Gourmandizer, Grand Royal, Heinous, Hey There Barbie Girl!, Hip-Hop Housewife, Holy Titclamps, I Hate Brenda Newsletter, Idiotooth, It’s A Wonderful Lifestyle, King-Cat Comix, Lizzengreasy, The Lumpen Times, The Match, Maximumrock’n'roll, McJob, Mommy and I Are One, Motorbooty, Murder Can Be Fun, Mystery Date, Organ & Bongos, Pagan’s Head, Rollerderby, Scram, Sidney Suppey’s Quarterly and Confused Pet Monthly, Stay Free, Teenage Gang Debs, Temp Slave, Thrift SCORE, Tiki News, Tray Full of Lab Mice, Verbivore, Wandromedia, and X Magazine — will be added to the U. Iowa Libraries’ other excellent collections of zines and amateur press materials.

Later this summer, I’ll publish a series of posts about the 1984–93 Zine Revolution. Here’s a sneak peek.

One of the very first zines (in the sense that the term came to be used — i.e., not a fanzine dedicated to science fiction or music or skateboarding) that I ever saw was The Mark of Cain, published at Boston Latin School in 1985 by my friends John Cradock and Ben Pomicter. The masthead (title logo) is a thing of beauty, and I enjoyed the comics and the rants. But what impressed me most about The Mark of Cain is how it inspired a thuggish football player to punch John in the mouth… because the guy (correctly) assumed that the message “Diana, will you please shut the kindly fuck up” inscribed onto one of the zine’s pages was a reference to his girlfriend. John and I were co-editors of the school’s literary magazine, which inspired no such visceral reactions! Not that I wanted to be punched in the mouth, but in some inchoate way I realized then and there that literary publishing would never provide me with the kind of immediate, personal feedback loop I craved.

Below is another of the first non-fanzine zines that I encountered: Patrick Smith’s one-off publication Why Do Men Kill Elephants?, published c. 1986 in Revere, Mass. Pat was a friend of John Cradock’s from Boston’s post-punk scene — his earlier fanzine Alternative Focus was a pretty big deal. (He was one of the first to use “alternative” as a descriptor for the DIY rock music then emerging.) Why Do Men Kill Elephants? was a collection of Patrick’s non-music musings, fiction, poetry, collages and so forth. In the mid-1990s he started another excellent zine — of poetry, music writing, travel writing, and more — called Stargreen Review. NB: Although I’m sending my copy of Why Do Men Kill Elephants? to Iowa, I’m doing so with some anxiety because I strongly suspect that it’s the only copy still extant. There was a period in the early 1990s when Pat — now well known as the author of the brilliant website ASK THE PILOT — went around to his friends’ apartments and — in a fit of embarrassment — destroyed all copies.

I also have a large collection of David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet from the early 1980s. Greenberger’s is one of the best and most famous of all zines, and it’s another of the first zines I encountered. The Duplex nursing home was in my neighborhood, and Greenberger was friends with Jeff Ferris, who owned (and still owns) the local bicycle shop Ferris Wheels. I worked for Jeff when I was in high school, and in the summer of 1986 he bequeathed me his entire collection. Greenberger would later spin all sorts of media out of his Duplex Planet archive: records, books, comics. Amazing.

The zine-review publication Factsheet Five, which would in the mid-1980s play a key role in connecting zine publishers, was founded — as a two-page dittoed publication dedicated to science fiction fanzines — by Mike Gunderloy in 1982. Which suggests to me that although zine-like publications certainly existed before, say, 1984, the Zine Revolution didn’t start before that year. (Mike Gunderloy’s collection of over 10,000 zines and mail art is now held at the New York State Library in Albany, New York.) PS: The first round-the-clock Kinko’s opened in 1985.

My college friend Sherman Wilmott, who started publishing Kool Thangs in 1988, was the guy who told me that these things had a name: “zine.” (As zinester Candi Strecker once wrote, before the early ’80s you’d hand people your photocopied publication and say, “Here, take a look at, um, this thing I made”; it wasn’t until the mid-’80s that the term “zine” caught on widely. In a 1997 interview that appears in Re/Search’s Zines! vol. 2, Strecker officially confirms that the first time she ever used the word “zine” in print was in 1979.) In addition to starting a record store and producing great rock albums and making documentaries, not to mention publising the zine/city guide Kreature Comforts, Sherman would go on to spend the next quarter-century obsessively documenting the “low-life” musical history of Memphis, Tennessee; Kool Thangs was the beginning of that brilliant career.

The years 1988–89 were the apex of the Zine Revolution; I discovered them that year, but didn’t start publishing my own zine right away. As is typical in DIY culture, I began as a fan and supporter and eventually, inexorably joined the movement as a fellow creator. In 1989, I visited Sherman in Memphis and spent a couple of days poring over his pile of zines. Back in Boston, I discovered a bookstore in the Allston neighborhood that carried zines — right next to the Fantagraphics and Semiotext(e) titles. Sherman turned me on to Factsheet Five, issues of which I read cover to cover during the 1989–1990 schoolyear. During the 1990–91 school year (my final undergrad year), I started Luvboat Earth with the help of friends — including Patrick Hubenthal, my girlfriend Susan, and (naturally) John Cradock. Luvboat Earth began with issue no. 9 because I was applying to grad school at the time, and discovered that I was expected to list my extracurricular activities. I had none! So I pretended that I’d been publishing Luvboat Earth for a couple of years; the first issue (#9) featured a list of back issues that were fictional and permanently unavailable. At last, the truth can be told.

Shortly before I graduated from college in June of 1991, I started swapping copies of Luvboat Earth with one of the zinesters I’d discovered through Sherman: Pagan Kennedy, publisher of Pagan’s Head, in Allston. During my first year of graduate school, Pagan hired me as a freelance researcher to help her with her book Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s, which was published in 1994.

Below is the 19th issue of Luvboat Earth. Published in March 1992, near the end of my first year of graduate school at Boston University, it is almost entirely devoted to reprinting the ZENMAN comics that I’d drawn in the margins of my school notebooks. It also includes poems by Rob Agredo, a travelogue by my brother Patrick, and an essay I wrote about hungover epistemology in the poetry of William Corbett. The issue’s introduction mentions that my fiancée Susan and I had just moved into an apartment building in Jamaica Plain (Boston) with a “groovy landlord”; Mimi Lipson would turn out to be a lifelong friend. PS: The resemblance between the cover of this issue of Luvboat Earth and The Mark of Cain is striking, isn’t it? I’d never noticed that before.

I started my zine Hermenaut in the summer of 1992 — at the tail end of the Zine Revolution. I’d graduated from college in the spring of ’91, with a useless degree in Religion, and immediately enrolled in the Master’s program for Sociology at BU. By the summer of ’92, I’d quit the Sociology degree program and had enrolled in a Master’s program for Teaching at BU. I had a lot of nervous energy, and I was also worried that if I didn’t pursue an academic career, I’d stop reading theory and philosophy. Hermenaut was the perfect solution.

Hermenaut no. 1: Photocopied, b/w. 26 interior pages. Print run of 50.

COVER: Luke Perry of 90210. I was trying to make the cover look like SASSY. I thought that “Still Only $1″ (for a 1st issue) gag was pretty funny, at the time.

HERMENAUT OF THE MONTH: Novalis.

ALSO: First installment of a series of essays I’d write on the topic of “S.L.A.C.K.E.R.,” in which I would explore the mainstreaming of subcultures, slacking vs. idling [I'd later write a book on that topic: The Idler's Glossary], hermeneutic vertigo and irony, and generationism generally. Please note that if the Sociology department at B.U. hadn’t pooh-poohed my interest in these topics, I might have earned a Ph.D. after all.

While hanging out with Pagan at a Combustible Edison show at Green Street Grill in Cambridge, at some point in 1993, I met her friend Scott Hamrah. He liked Hermenaut, and I volunteered on the movie he and Chris Fujiwara were directing that summer. The next thing you know, Scott was co-editor of Hermenaut and his girlfriend Jennifer Engel, who became a good friend of mine, was the zine’s art director. Hermenaut no. 3 had a color cover (designed using Quark, instead of using scissors and glue), 26 interior pages, a print run of 100. Between the summer of ’93 and the summer of ’98, despite the fact that Susan and I moved to Minneapolis and then western Massachusetts for four years, Scott and Jennifer and I published a dozen glorious issues.

Thousands of zines were published after 1993, yet I date the Zine Revolution’s demise to that year. Why? Because in 1993, the Mosaic web browser gave everyone access to the World Wide Web; and in 1994, Justin Hall popularized the “web log.” Like Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff but not realizing it right away, we zinesters kept working furiously — it seemed like we were gaining traction in the culture! — but we were already obsolete. Over the course of the mid- to late 1990s, the Web had the same effect on zine publishing as it will in the next few years have on book and magazine publishing: Zine publishers were forced to choose between creating beautifully designed and printed artifacts or going entirely digital. The Web offered free publishing and distribution; after the Web happened, it didn’t make sense to spend a fortune printing and mailing zines when your potential audience could find the same sort of “content” online. Zines had to offer something that blogs couldn’t: a unique tactile and aesthetic sensation. Form became critical.

In the early 1990s a host of zines — Rollerderby, ANSWER Me!, Bust, Hermenaut — began sprucing up their act… to the scorn or outrage of those who equated DIY authenticity with crude packaging. A new age had begun, for zines — we were no longer in the Zine Revolution era. If the Zine Revolution was a mannerist phase of DIY publishing, this was a baroque phase — I consider neither of these terms a pejorative, by the way.

In the mid- to late-1990s, a number of zine books appeared. David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet: Everybody’s Asking Who I Was appeared in 1993, an Answer Me! collection in 1994, Pagan Kennedy’s Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally…Found Myself…I Think in 1995, a Rollerderby collection by Lisa Carver in 1996, a Thrift SCORE book by Al Hoff in 1997, and also in 1997 A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution. Rather than representing the flourishing of the Zine Revolution, these attractively packaged and carefully edited collections mirrored the transformation of zines and signaled the Zine Revolution’s demise. The final efflorescence happened all at once: The Factsheet Five Zine Reader (1997) by R. Seth Friedman, Zines! vols. 1 (1996) and 2 (1997) by V. Vale, and The Book of Zines (1997), by Chip Rowe, Stephen Duncombe’s Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (1997), Zine Scene: The Do It Yourself Guide to Zines (1998) by Francesca Lia Block. Zines, an art book by Liz Farrelly, came out in 2001.

The first zine book was Mike Gunderloy and Cari Goldberg Janice’s The World of Zines, published by Penguin in 1992. Its Introduction concludes on a note that in hindsight is ironic: “The zine field is in the middle of a boom that’s been going on at least since the Seventies, and there is no end in sight.” Again, I don’t mean to suggest that people stopped publishing zines in 1993; to the contrary, there were tens of thousands of zines published after that date. (I published Hermenaut until 2001, going into credit card debt in the process.) By the mid-1990s, however, the Revolution — though most of us didn’t realize it until, say, 1999 — was moribund.

In addition to collecting zines by my friends, I collected zines by people who subsequently became my friends — like Lisa Carver (and Dame Darcy) of Rollerderby. My stack of Rollerderby issues is another thing I’m very reluctant to send to Iowa. But they’ll take good care of these… and make them available to interested readers who weren’t around in the 1990s and don’t realize how influential and important Rollerderby was in those days.

Another good friend I made via swapping zines is Lynn Peril of Mystery Date. Mining her incredible archive of “femoribilia,” Lynn has since published three terrific history/cultural criticism books with W.W. Norton: Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons, College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens and Co-eds, Then and Now, and Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office. It’s sweet to have a time-stamped documentation of the first encounter in our two-decades-long friendship.

Other zinesters from the 1990s who remain my friends to this day: Kim Cooper and David Smay (Scram), Jonathan Lethem and Shelley Jackson (Idiotooth), Annalee Newitz (Bad Subjects), Tony Leone (Commodity), Tom Frank (The Baffler), Pagan Kennedy (Pagan’s Head), Mark Frauenfelder (Boing Boing), Paul Lukas (Beer Frame), and Tom Hodgkinson and Matthew De Abaitua and Greg Rowland and James Parker (The Idler).

Hermenaut ended after 16 issues in 2001. But when I edited my first book, Taking Things Seriously, in 2007, I rounded up so many Hermenaut contributors and zinesters — John F. Kelly, Lisa Carver, Tom Frank, A.S. Hamrah, Patrick Smith, Chris Fujiwara, Paul Lukas, Mimi Lipson, Clarke Cooper, Kim Cooper, Ingrid Schorr, Paul Maliszewski, Lynn Peril, Michael Lewy, Tony Leone — that I privately re-titled the book Hermenaut no. 17. A few of the same folks — Matthew De Abaitua, Mark Frauenfelder, Shelley Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Mimi Lipson, James Parker, Greg Rowland — appear in Significant Objects, which I co-edited in 2012 with Rob Walker, who, I discovered when started working on the project in 2009, had been a zinester and Hermenaut subscriber. So perhaps that book’s secret subtitle is Hermenaut no. 18…

¡Viva la Revolución!

MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY THIS AUTHOR: We Are Iron Man! | And We Lived Beneath the Waves | Is It A Chamber Pot? | I’d Like to Force the World to Sing | The Argonaut Folly | The Dark Side of Scrabble | The YHWH Virus | Boston (Stalker) Rock | The Sweetest Hangover | The Vibe of Dr. Strange | Tyger! Tyger! | Star Wars Semiotics | The Original Stooge | Fake Authenticity | Camp, Kitsch & Cheese | Stallone vs. Eros | Icon Game | Meet the Semionauts | The Abductive Method | Semionauts at Work | Origin of the Pogo | The Black Iron Prison | Blue Krishma! | Big Mal Lives! | Schmoozitsu | Calvin Peeing Meme | The Zine Revolution | Debating in a Vacuum (notes on the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad) | Pluperfect PDA (series) | Double Exposure (series) | Fitting Shoes (series) | Cthulhuwatch (series) | Shocking Blocking (series) | Quatschwatch (series)

READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE

HiLobrow is pleased to present the thirteenth installment of our serialization of Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist. New installments will appear each Thursday for eighteen weeks.

“The Devolutionist” (Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 1921) is the third occult-science-fiction Dr. Kinney story; the others are “The Lord of Death” (June 1919), “The Queen of Life” (August 1919), and “The Emancipatrix” (September 1921). Having learned how to visit other worlds telepathically, without leaving Earth — by means of Venusian technology — Dr. Kinney and his companions enter the minds and share the sensations of the inhabitants of a human-like civilization on other planets. In this story, they visit a double planet: Hafen is the abode of capitalists, Holl of workers. A nearby planet of “cooperative democrats” is in trouble, so Kinney & co. step in.

Cobbler and one-reeler writer Homer Eon Flint (1888–1924) published a number of pulp science fiction stories — including “The Planeteer” (1918; one of the earliest examples of cosmic sci-fi) and The Blind Spot (1921, with Austin Hall) — during the genre’s Radium Age. Everett Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years calls Flint “in many ways the outstanding writer of s-f in the Munsey pulp magazines.” Flint died in a crash near Oakland, Calif., after supposedly stealing a taxi at gunpoint in order to use it in a bank hold-up.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |16 | 17 | 18

Meanwhile Billie was still “haunting” Mona, and shortly was able to tell the other three that Fort had called, taking the surgeon out in a machine large enough to hold them both. They proceeded to a near-by park, where a game of aerial punt-ball was already in progress. [Footnote: The game is described more or less completely in various sporting publications.]

Billie took great interest in the darting play of the little flylike machines, the action of the mechanical catapults, and the ease with which the twelve-inch ball was usually caught in the baskets on the machines’ prows. She reported the score from time to time in a manner which would have made a telegrapher jealous.

Returning from the game, Mona and Fort became pretty confidential, the natural result of a common enthusiasm; for their side won. But Fort was content for a while to merely watch Mona, who was driving.

Finally the conversation made an opening for him to say, “I asked your mother, Mona, what she thought of me as a prospective son-in-law.”

The girl was in no way rattled. “I suppose she told you that it wouldn’t make any difference what she might say; I’d do as I pleased anyhow. Didn’t she?”

Fort nodded, slightly taken back. Then his boldness returned. “Well, I had to bring up the subject somehow. And now that I’ve done it — do you love me well enough to marry me, Mona?”

She pretended to be very busy with the driving; so that Billie never knew whether Fort looked anxious or not. Presently Mona said:

“I think —I rather think I like you too well to marry you. What I mean is, I’m afraid it would spoil you, my dear boy. You’re too well satisfied with yourself. I don’t want to marry a man who is content to fly around half the time and admire me the other half; although,” she added, “I like to be admired as well as any one.”

Fort looked as though he would, with an ounce more provocation, take her in his arms and say something to get quick results. But he didn’t. “I see,” pretty soberly, for him. “You want me to get in and do something important. Like Powart?” suddenly.

But Mona would not answer him directly. “It’s only fair to say that I’ve given him an ultimatum, too.” She hinted at what she had told the chairman. “I said nothing about — you.”

Fort took a deep breath. Mona gave him a glance or two, and Billie could see a startling change come over him. It was amazing; Fort, for the first time in his life had made a serious resolve!

“This makes everything very different!” he declared; and even his voice was altered. There was a determined, purposeful ring about it which was altogether unlike his usual reckless tones.

“Thanks for not telling Mr. Powart,” Fort went on in the same quiet way. “Clearly, I should tell him myself. And I shall. After that it is up to me!”

Next instant he had thrown off his seriousness, and for the remainder of the flight was his former jovial self. He seemed a trifle ashamed, however, of his old lightheartedness; so much so that Mona warned him not to tamper too much with his disposition. “I like it too well, boy.”

He went straight home after a hurried leave-taking, and Mona did not see him again until after the declaration of war. The next the four heard of him was through Van Emmon; Fort called upon the self-made commander-in-chief as quickly as he could.

“I have the honor to inform you,” said Fort, coming straight to the point, “that Miss Mona has seen fit to encourage my suit. In short, sir,” with the strange new note of resolution in his voice, “I am your rival for her hand! I thought it only right that you should know.”

Powart took this as he took everything, standing. And Van Emmon could see no sign that the announcement had disturbed his poise.

“You are considerate,” he stated with the faintest trace of sarcasm. “Let me call your attention to the fact that, because of the position which recent events have forced upon me, it is quite within my power to dispose of your opposition”— significantly.

“Quite so! I shall appreciate your consideration also.” Then the athlete permitted himself a slight smile. “On second thoughts, however, you can’t afford to be other than considerate. If anything happens to me now, Miss Mona will naturally think of you; for she knows I have come here!”

A single exclamation escaped Powart, and from the light in Fort’s eyes, Van Emmon knew that the chief was sorely provoked. However, he spoke with his usual coolness and certainty.

“Under the circumstances, you will be exempt, Mr. Fort, from the conscription which is now under way. I shall do nothing that might hinder your activities in any way? I take it”— evenly —“that you hope to accomplish something — big?”

Fort bowed. “It is my intention to set a mark even further than your own, sir!”

For the first time Powart laughed. It was a really hearty laugh, as though Fort’s preposterous boast was so utterly ridiculous that sarcasm was out of place.

“Mr. Fort”— when his mirth had subsided —“I only wish your judgment was as sound as your optimism! Tell me — do you intend to make yourself ruler of a bigger world than this?”

Fort dropped his seriousness for an instant. “To tell the truth, Powart, I haven’t any plan at all — yet. Thanks for the exemption. In return, I assure you that whatever I do will be as truly in the interests of the people as what you have done.”

Powart eyed him keenly. For a moment Van Emmon thought he would try to learn if Fort had any suspicions. But he said nothing further than a curt, “The audience is ended.”

A few minutes later Billie, through Mona, knew that Fort was reporting progress. He did it by telephone.

“Thought you’d like to know,” he finished. “Hope I didn’t rouse you out of bed.”

It was night in Mona’s part of the world, and Billie had come upon the girl just as she was preparing for bed.

“Thank you,” she said, through a tremendous yawn. “I was just about to retire. Good luck”— another yawn —“and good —”

Her voice changed. “Mr. Fort!” sharply. “Powart’s declaration of war on Alma is a frame-up! Never mind how I happen to know; it is true; they are not planning to invade us at all! He trumped up this affair in order to make himself dictator!”

“What!” The athlete was astounded. “Are you sure of this, Mona?”

The girl’s manner had changed again. “I beg your pardon?” she inquired, vastly confused. “Did I say something that — why, I am not aware, Mr. Fort, that I had said anything more than ‘good night’!”

“You AREN’T!” His voice was strained and excited. “Mona — you just now said something of the most extraordinary — surely — incredulously — you recall saying something, don’t you?”

She was still bewildered. “I do not!” Then gathering her poise again, “What did I say?”

“You said —” He stopped and waited a long while before going on.

Then he stated with a soberness that was almost stern:

“Mona, you told me something which could have come only through a supernatural agency. I am sure of it, from your manner. You were temporarily possessed.” He paused again.

She sensed his earnestness, and spoke just as seriously. “It is not impossible. I have heard of such things before. I was sleepy, and — the point is, what did I say?” she demanded.

“I do not intend to tell — you. What I learned gives me a great advantage over Powart; that’s all I can say. More would be dishonorable. Will you take my word for that, Mona?”

“Certainly,” with swift decision, and a grace that Billie envied. Whereupon she went to bed, but not to sleep until after many an hour of wide-eyed wondering.

Fort next showed himself to Smith, through Reblong. He had secured a pass to the engine-room of the Cobulus; and shortly his breezy manner completely broke down the engineer’s usual reserve.

“Always glad to show the machinery,” said Reblong, denying that the visitor was making any trouble. Fort’s technical knowledge had delighted him. “Come again any time you like.”

Which Fort did, the very next day. And this time he brought a package of sweetmeats, during the eating of which the two men became pretty friendly.

“You’re different from most of the folks of your — station,” Reblong finally made bold to remark. “Any harm in my saying so?”

“On the contrary,” laughed the athlete. “I rather pride myself on my democracy.

“The fact is, I want you to tell me a few things about your fellow-workers. I understand you’re one of the officers of your guild?”

“Secretary,” replied Reblong, a little dubiously. Was Fort a secret investigator?

“Then you can tell me. Is there any dissatisfaction? Are the men entirely content with their treatment?”

Reblong hesitated about replying, and Fort assured him, “This is a purely personal matter with me, old man. I am really anxious to know whether the working world is as well satisfied, as happy as I am.”

And thus Fort discovered, just as another man had already discovered, that the average Capellan workman was entirely satisfied with what he knew to be unjust treatment. Even when Fort told Reblong what he had learned about Powart’s trickery — leaving out all details about Mona, of course — the engineer would not listen to any hint of revolution.

“I don’t like to question your word, Mr. Fort”—Reblong was very uncomfortable —“but I have such confidence in the commission that — well, you understand.”

And Fort said, just as the other fellow had said after talking with Reblong —Reblong, the representative Capellan workman; Reblong, who voiced the opinions of his billions of fellow-workmen when he refused to consider a rebellion —Fort said:

“Well, I’ll be utterly damned!”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.”

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels (both original and reissued) on HiLobrow, and to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. The following titles can be read in serial form via HiLobrow.com and/or purchased in gorgeous paperback form online or via your local independent bookstore: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

HiLobrow is pleased to present the ninth installment of our serialization of E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man. New installments will appear each Wednesday for 20 weeks.

Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live complacent, well-regulated lives. However, when one of these devices goes awry, a “clockwork man” appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village. Comical yet mind-blowing hijinks ensue.

Considered the first cyborg novel, The Clockwork Man was first published in 1923 — the same year as Karel Capek’s pioneering android play, R.U.R.

“This is still one of the most eloquent pleas for the rejection of the ‘rational’ future and the conservation of the humanity of man. Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity, this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue.” — Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950. “Perhaps the outstanding scientific romance of the 1920s.” — Anatomy of Wonder (1995)

In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish a gorgeous paperback edition of The Clockwork Man, with a new Introduction by Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the science fiction and science blog io9. Newitz is also author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013) and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006).

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Whatever inconveniences the Clockwork man suffered as a result of having lapsed into a world of strange laws and manifestations, he enjoyed at least one advantage. His power of travelling over the earth at an enormous speed rendered the question of pursuit almost farcical. While Allingham’s car sped over the neighbouring hills, the object of the chase returned by a circuitous route to Great Wymering, slowed down, and began to walk up and down the High Street. It was now quite dark, and very few people seemed to have noticed that odd figure ambling along, stopping now and again to examine some object that aroused his interest or got in his way. There is no doubt that during these lesser perambulations he contrived somehow to get the silencer under better control, so that his progress was now muted. It is possible also that his faculties began to adjust themselves a little to his strange surroundings, and that he now definitely tried to grasp his environment. But he still suffered relapses. And the fact that he again wore a hat and wig, although not his own, requires a word of explanation.

It was this circumstance that accounted for the Vicar’s late arrival at the entertainment given in aid of the church funds that night. He had lingered over his sermon until the last moment, and then hurried off with only a slight pause in which to glance at himself in the hall mirror. He walked swiftly along the dark streets in the direction of the Templars’ Hall, which was situated at the lower end of the town. Perhaps it was because of his own desperate hurry that he scarcely noticed that other figure approaching him, and in a straight line. He swerved slightly in order to allow the figure to pass, and continued on his way.

And then he stopped abruptly, aware of a cool sensation on the top of his head. His hat and wig had gone! Aghast, he retraced his steps, but there was no sign of the articles on the pavement. It seemed utterly incredible, for there was only a slight breeze and he did not remember knocking into anything. He had certainly not collided with the stranger. Just for a moment he wondered.

But duty to his parishioners remained uppermost in the conscientious Vicar’s mind, and it was not fair to them that he should catch his death of cold. He hurried back to the vicarage. For a quarter of an hour he pulled open drawers, ransacked cupboards, searching everywhere for an old wig that had been discarded and a new hat that had never been worn. He found them at last and arrived, breathless and out of temper, in the middle of the cinematograph display which constituted the first part of the performance.

“My dear,” he gasped, as he slid into the seat reserved for him next to his wife, ” I couldn’t help it. Someone stole my hat and wig.”

“Stole them, Herbert,” she expostulated. “Not stole them.”

“Yes, stole them. I’ll tell you afterwards. Is this the Palestine picture? Oh, yes —”

And so the Clockwork man was able to conceal his clock from the gaze of a curious world, and the grotesqueness of his appearance was heightened by the addition of a neatly trimmed chestnut wig and a soft round clerical hat. His perceptions must have been extraordinarily rapid, and he must have acted upon the instant. Nor did it seem to occur to him that in this world there are laws which forbid theft. Probably, in the world from which he came such restrictions are unnecessary, and the exigency would not have arisen, every individual being provided by parliamentary statute with a suitable covering for that blatant and too obvious sign of the modus operandi in the posterior region of their craniums.

It was shortly after this episode that the Clockwork man experienced his first moment of vivid illumination about the world of brief mortal span.

He had become entangled with a lamp-post. There is no other way of describing his predicament. He came to rest with his forehead pressed against the post, and all his efforts to get round it ended in dismal failure. His legs kicked spasmodically and his arms revolved irregularly. There were intermittent explosions, like the back-firing of a petrol engine. The only person who witnessed these peculiar antics was P.C. Hawkins, who had been indulging in a quiet smoke beneath the shelter of a neighbouring archway.

At first it did not occur to the constable that the noise proceeded from the figure. He craned his head forward, expecting every moment to see a motor bicycle come along. The noise stopped abruptly, and he decided that the machine must have gone up a side street. Then he stepped out of his retreat and tapped the Clockwork man on the shoulder. The latter was quite motionless now and merely leaning against the lamp-post.

“You go ’ome,” suggested the constable, “I don’t want to have to take you. This is one of my lenient nights, lucky for you.”

“Wallabaloo,” said the Clockwork man, faintly, “Wum —Wum —”

“Yes, we know all about that,” said the constable, “but you take my tip and go ’ome. And I don’t want any back answers neither.”

The Clockwork man emitted a soft whistling sound from between his teeth, and rubbed his nose thoughtfully against the post.

“What is this?” he enquired, presently.

“Lamp-post,” rejoined the other, clicking his teeth, “L.A.M.P.- P.O.S.T. Lamp-post.”

“I see — curious, only one lamp-post, though. In my country they grow like trees, you know — whole forests of them — galaxy of lights — necessary — illuminate multiform world.”

The constable laughed gently and stroked his moustache. His theory about the condition of the individual before him slowly developed.

“You get along,” he persuaded, “before there’s trouble. I don’t want to be ’arsh with you.”

“Wait,” said the Clockwork man, without altering his position, “moment of lucidity — see things as they are — begin to understand — finite world — only one thing at a time. Now we’ve got it — a place for everything and everything in its place.”

“Just what I’m always telling my missus,” reflected the constable.

The Clockwork man shifted his head very slightly, and one eye screwed slowly round.

“I want to grasp things,” he resumed, “I want to grasp you. So far as I can judge, I see before me — a constable — minion of the law — curious relic — primitive stage of civilisation — order people about finite world — lock people up — finite cell.”

“That’s my job,” agreed the other, with a warning glint in his red eye.

“Finite world,” proceeded the Clockwork man, “fixed laws — limited dimensions — essentially limited. Now, when I’m working properly, I can move about in all dimensions. That is to say, in addition to moving backwards and forwards, and this way and that, I can also move X and Y, and X2 and Y2.”

The corners of the constable’s eyes wrinkled a little. “Of course,” he ruminated, “if you’re going to drag algebra into the discussion I shall ’ave to cry off. I never got beyond decimals.”

“Let me explain,” urged the Clockwork man, who was gaining in verbal ease and intellectual elasticity every moment. “Supposing I was to hit you hard. You would fall down. You would become supine. You would assume a horizontal position at right angles to your present perpendicularity.” He gazed upwards at the tall figure of the constable. “But if you were to hit me, I should have an alternative. I could, for example, fall into the middle of next week.”

The constable rubbed his chin thoughtfully, as though he thought this highly likely. “Whatd’yemean by that,” he demanded.

“I said next week,” explained the other, “in order to make my meaning clear. Actually, of course, I don’t describe time in such arbitrary terms, but when one is in Rome, you know. What I mean to convey is that I am capable of going not only somewhere, but also somewhen.”

“’Ere, stow that gammon,” broke in the constable, impatiently, “s’nuff of that sort of talk. You come along with me.” He spat determinedly and prepared to take action.

But at that moment, as the constable afterwards described it to himself, it seemed to him that there came before his eyes a sort of mist. The figure leaning against the lamp-post looked less obvious. He did not appear now to be a palpable individual at all, but a sort of shadowy outline of himself, blurred and in – distinct. The constable rubbed his eyes and stretched out a hand.

“Alright,” he heard a tiny, remote voice, “I’m still here — I haven’t gone yet — I can’t go — that’s what’s so distressing. I don’t really understand your world, you know — and I can’t get back to my own. Don’t be harsh with me — it’s so awkward — between the devil and the deep sea.”

“What’s up?” exclaimed the constable, startled. “What yer playing at? Where are you?”

“Here I am,” the thin voice echoed faintly. The constable wheeled round sharply and became aware of a vague, palpitating mass, hovering in the dark mouth of the archway. It was like some solid body subjected to intense vibration. There was a high-pitched spinning noise.

“‘Ere,” said the constable, “cut that sort of caper. What’s the little game?” He made a grab at where he thought the shadowy form ought to be, and his hand closed on the empty air.

“Gawd,” he gasped, “it’s a blooming ghost.”

He fancied he heard a voice very indistinctly begging his pardon. Again he clutched wildly at a shoulder and merely snapped his fingers. “Strike a light,” he muttered, under his breath, “this ain’t good enough. It ain’t nearly good enough,” Reaching forward he stumbled, and to save himself from falling placed a hand against the wall. The next moment he leapt backwards with a yell. His hand and arm had gone clean through the filmy shape.

“Gawd, it’s spirits — that’s what it is.”

“It’s only me,” remarked the Clockwork man, suddenly looming into palpable form again. “Don’t be afraid. I must apologise for my eccentric behaviour. I tried an experiment. I thought I could get back. You said I was to go home, you know. But I can’t get far.” His voice shook a little. It jangled like a badly struck chord. “I’m a poor, maimed creature. You must make allowances for me. My clock won’t work properly.”

He began to vibrate again, his whole frame quivering and shaking. Little blue sparks scintillated around the back part of his head. He lifted one leg up as though to take a step forward; and then his ears flapped wildly, and he remained with one leg in mid-air and a finger to his nose.

The constable gave way to panic. He temporised with his duty. “Stow it,” he begged, “I can’t take you to the station like this. They’ll never believe me.” He took off his hat and rubbed his tingling forehead. “Say it’s a dream, mate,” he added, in a whining voice. “’Ow can I go ’ome to the missus with a tale like this. She’ll say it’s the gin again. It’s always my luck to strike something like this. When the ghost came to Bapchurch churchyard, it was me wot saw it first, and nobody believed me. You go along quietly, and we’ll look over it this time.”

But the Clockwork man made no reply. He was evidently absorbed in the effort to restart some process in himself. Presently his foot went down on the pavement with a smart bang. There followed a succession of sharp explosions, and the next second he glided smoothly away.

The constable returned furtively to his shelter beneath the arch, hitched himself thoughtfully, and found half a cigarette inside his waistcoat pocket.

“It’s the gin,” he ruminated, half out loud, “I’ll ’ave to knock it off. ’Tain’t as though I ain’t ’ad warnings enough. I’ve seen things before and I shall see them again —”

He lit the cigarette end and puffed out a cloud of smoke. “I never see ’im,” he soliloquised, “not really.”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, serialized between March and July 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.

Although guitar-driven rock’s incursions into the world of popular music are regular, widespread embrace of guitar virtuosity is a rarer thing. Akron, Ohio’s DAN AUERBACH (born 1979) is one of only a handful of his generation who have the talent and inclination to make the guitar wail and lament, growl, chirp, buzz and cry. In his most fertile mode as one half of The Black Keys (along with feral drummer Patrick Carney), Auerbach uses his right thumb to carve out the grooves usually handled by the bass guitar, his forefingers ripping out piercing melodies while he sings soulful and hook-filled blues in a display of multi-tasking that one watches live in a state of disbelief. If he can’t create enough variety in color and dynamics with the subtlety of his finger-picking and strumming, his liquidy left hand, or deft touch with the tremolo arm, he has an army of effects pedals to increase his palette. Auerbach’s ear is phenomenal; you can hear his thumb slide across the strings, the variance in the sonic attack between his plucked runs and those done with only his left hand. Few bands seem to care about dynamics anymore, but Auerbach makes his guitar whisper. Over time his compositions have become more hooky, the dynamics, range and style resemble rock music more, and he and Carney have added extra musicians onstage. But they haven’t gone Hollywood yet. Auerbach’s guitar tech is the owner of the shop in Akron where he first had his guitars set up, his strings are manufactured by an Akron shop, he and Carney are strong supporters of Ohio musicians. Let’s hope this guitar sufi doesn’t lose his religion.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Wim Mertens, Edward Ricketts, George Lucas.

READ MORE about members of the Revivalist Generation (1974-82).

HiLobrow is pleased to present the thirteenth and final installment of our serialization of Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon —2419 A.D..

In Philip Francis Nowlan’s novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., which first appeared in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories (the same issue which launched E.E. “Doc” Smith’s serial The Skylark of Space), 29-year-old WWI vet and mining engineer Anthony Rogers falls into a state of suspended animation in the year 1927. Five hundred years later, he wakes up in an America that for the past three centuries has been a backward province of the globe-spanning, part-Mongolian part-alien Han Empire. Taken in by a gang of American rebels, he becomes a freedom fighter in the Second War of Independence.

Nowlan’s long-running and much-imitated Buck Rogers comic strip, illustrated by Dick Calkins, first appeared in January 1929. The protagonist was renamed in imitation of the popular cowboy actor Buck Jones.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

As we crossed the Hudson River, a few miles north of the city, we dropped several units of the Yellow Intelligence Division, with full instrumental equipment. Their apparatus cases were nicely balanced at only a few ounces weight each, and the men used their chute capes to ease their drops.

We recrossed the river a little distance above and began dropping White Intelligence units and a few long and short range gun units. Then we held our position until we began to get reports. Gradually we ringed the territory of the Sinsings, our observation units working busily and patiently at their locators and scopes, both aloft and aground, until Garlin finally turned to me with the remark:

“The map circle is complete now, Boss. We’ve got clear locations all the way around them.”

“Let me see it,” I replied, and studied the illuminated viewplate map, with its little overlapping circles of light that indicated spots proved clear of the enemy by ultroscopic observation.

I nodded to Bill Hearn. “Go ahead now, Hearn,” I said, “and place your barrage men.”

He spoke into his ultrophone, and three of the ships began to glide in a wide ring around the enemy territory. Every few seconds, at the word from his Unit Boss, a gunner would drop off the wire, and slipping the clasp of his chute cape, drift down into the darkness below.

Bill formed two lines, parallel to and facing the river, and enclosing the entire territory of the enemy between them. Above and below, straddling the river, were two defensive lines. These latter were merely to hold their positions. The others were to close in toward each other, pushing a high-explosive barrage five miles ahead of them. When the two barrages met, both lines were to switch to short-vision-range barrage and continue to close in on any of the enemy who might have drifted through the previous curtain of fire.

In the meantime Bill kept his reserves, a picked corps of a hundred men (the same that had accompanied Hart and myself in our fight with the Han squadron) in the air, divided about equally among the “kite-tails” of four ships.

A final roll call, by units, companies, divisions and functions, established the fact that all our forces were in position. No Han activity was reported, and no Han broadcasts indicated any suspicion of our expedition. Nor was there any indication that the Sinsings had any knowledge of the fate in store for them. The idling of rep-ray generators was reported from the center of their camp, obviously those of the ships the Hans had given them — the price of their treason to their race.

Again I gave the word, and Hearn passed on the order to his subordinates.

Far below us, and several miles to the right and left, the two barrage lines made their appearance. From the great height to which we had risen, they appeared like lines of brilliant, winking lights, and the detonations were muffled by the distances into a sort of rumbling, distant thunder. Hearn and his assistants were very busy: measuring, calculating, and snapping out ultrophone orders to unit commanders that resulted in the straightening of lines and the closing of gaps in the barrage.

The White Division Boss reported the utmost confusion in the Sinsing organization. They were, as might be expected, an inefficient, loosely disciplined gang, and repeated broadcasts for help to neighboring gangs. Ignoring the fact that the Mongolians had not used explosives for many generations, they nevertheless jumped at the conclusion that they were being raided by the Hans. Their frantic broadcasts persisted in this thought, despite the nervous electrophonic inquiries of the Hans themselves, to whom the sound of the battle was evidently audible, and who were trying to locate the trouble.

At this point, the swooper I had sent south toward the city went into action as a diversion, to keep the Hans at home. Its “kite-tail” loaded with long-range gunners, using the most highly explosive rockets we had, hung invisible in the darkness of the sky and bombarded the city from a distance of about five miles. With an entire city to shoot at, and the object of creating as much commotion therein as possible, regardless of actual damage, the gunners had no difficulty in hitting the mark. I could see the glow of the city and the stabbing flashes of exploding rockets. In the end, the Hans, uncertain as to what was going on, fell back on a defensive policy, and shot their “hell cylinder,” or wall of upturned disintegrator rays into operation. That, of course, ended our bombardment of them. The rays were a perfect defense, disintegrating our rockets as they were reached.

If they had not sent out ships before turning on the rays, and if they had none within sufficient radius already in the air, all would be well.

I queried Garlin on this, but he assured me Yellow Intelligence reported no indications of Han ships nearer than 800 miles. This would probably give us a free hand for a while, since most of their instruments recorded only imperfectly or not at all, through the death wall.

Requisitioning one of the viewplates of the headquarters ship, and the services of an expert operator, I instructed him to focus on our lines below. I wanted a close-up of the men in action.

He began to manipulate his controls and chaotic shadows moved rapidly across the plate, fading in and out of focus, until he reached an adjustment that gave me a picture of the forest floor, apparently 100 feet wide, with the intervening branches and foliage of the trees appearing like shadows that melted into reality a few feet above the ground.

I watched one man setting up his long-gun with skillful speed. His lips pursed slightly as though he were whistling, as he adjusted the tall tripod on which the long tube was balanced. Swiftly he twirled the knobs controlling the aim and elevation of his piece. Then, lifting a belt of ammunition from the big box, which itself looked heavy enough to break down the spindly tripod, he inserted the end of it in the lock of his tube and touched the proper combination of buttons.

Then he stepped aside, and occupied himself with peering carefully through the trees ahead. Not even a tremor shook the tube, but I knew that at intervals of something less than a second, it was discharging small projectiles which, traveling under their own continuously reduced power, were arching into the air, to fall precisely five miles ahead and explode with the force of eight-inch shells, such as we used in the First World War.

Another gunner, fifty feet to the right of him, waved a hand and called out something to him. Then, picking up his own tube and tripod, he gauged the distance between the trees ahead of him, and the height of their lowest branches, and bending forward a bit, flexed his muscles and leaped lightly, some twenty-five feet. Another leap took him another twenty feet or so, where he began to set up his piece.

I ordered my observer then to switch to the barrage itself. He got a close focus on it, but this showed little except a continuous series of blinding flashes, which, from the viewplate, lit up the entire interior of the ship. An eight-hundred-foot focus proved better. I had thought that some of our French and American artillery of the 20th Century had achieved the ultimate in mathematical precision of fire, but I had never seen anything to equal the accuracy of that line of terrific explosions as it moved steadily forward, mowing down trees as a scythe cuts grass (or used to 500 years ago), literally churning up the earth and the splintered, blasted remains of the forest giants, to a depth of from ten to twenty feet.

By now the two curtains of fire were nearing each other, lines of vibrant, shimmering, continuous, brilliant destruction, inevitably squeezing the panic-stricken Sinsings between them.

Even as I watched, a group of them, who had been making a futile effort to get their three rep-ray machines into the air, abandoned their efforts, and rushed forth into the milling mob.

I queried the Control Boss sharply on the futility of this attempt of theirs, and learned that the Hans, apparently in doubt as to what was going on, had continued to “play safe,” and broken off their power broadcast, after ordering all their own ships east of the Alleghenies to the ground, for fear these ships they had traded to the Sinsings might be used against them.

Again I turned to my viewplate, which was still focussed on the central section of the Sinsing works. The confusion of the traitors was entirely that of fear, for our barrage had not yet reached them.

Some of them set up their long-guns and fired at random over the barrage line, then gave it up. They realized that they had no target to shoot at, no way of knowing whether our gunners were a few hundred feet or several miles beyond it.

Their ultrophone men, of whom they did not have many, stood around in tense attitudes, their helmet phones strapped around their ears, nervously fingering the tuning controls at their belts. Unquestionably they must have located some of our frequencies, and overheard many of our reports and orders. But they were confused and disorganized. If they had an Ultrophone Boss they evidently were not reporting to him in an organized way.

They were beginning to draw back now before our advancing fire. With intermittent desperation, they began to shoot over our barrage again, and the explosions of their rockets flashed at widely scattered points beyond. A few took distance “pot shots.”

Oddly enough it was our own forces that suffered the first casualties in the battle. Some of these distance shots by chance registered hits, while our men were under strict orders not to exceed their barrage distances.

Seen upon the ultroscope viewplate, the battle looked as though it were being fought in daylight, perhaps on a cloudy day, while the explosions of the rockets appeared as flashes of extra brilliance.

The two barrage lines were not more than five hundred feet apart when the Sinsings resorted to tactics we had not foreseen. We noticed first that they began to lighten themselves by throwing away extra equipment. A few of them in their excitement threw away too much, and shot suddenly into the air. Then a scattering few floated up gently, followed by increasing numbers, while still others, preserving a weight balance, jumped toward the closing barrages and leaped high, hoping to clear them. Some succeeded. We saw others blown about like leaves in a windstorm, to crumple and drift slowly down, or else to fall into the barrage, their belts blown from their bodies.

However, it was not part of our plan to allow a single one of them to escape and find his way to the Hans. I quickly passed the word to Bill Hearn to have the alternate men in his line raise their barrages and heard him bark out a mathematical formula to the Unit Bosses.

We backed off our ships as the explosions climbed into the air in stagger formation until they reached a height of three miles. I don’t believe any of the Sinsings who tried to float away to freedom succeeded.

But we did know later, that a few who leaped the barrage got away and ultimately reached Nu-yok.

It was those who managed to jump the barrage who gave us the most trouble. With half of our long-guns turned aloft, I foresaw we would not have enough to establish successive ground barrages and so ordered the barrage back two miles, from which positions our “curtains” began to close in again, this time, however, gauged to explode, not on contact, but thirty feet in the air. This left little chance for the Sinsings to leap either over or under it.

Gradually, the two barrages approached each other until they finally met, and in the grey dawn the battle ended.

Our own casualties amounted to forty-seven men in the ground forces, eighteen of whom had been slain in hand to hand fighting with the few of the enemy who managed to reach our lines, and sixty-two in the crew and “kite-tail” force of swooper No. 4, which had been located by one of the enemy’s ultroscopes and brought down with long-gun fire.

Since nearly every member of the Sinsing Gang had, so far as we knew, been killed, we considered the raid a great success.

It had, however, a far greater significance than this. To all of us who took part in the expedition, the effectiveness of our barrage tactics definitely established a confidence in our ability to overcome the Hans.

As I pointed out to Wilma:

“It has been my belief all along, dear, that the American explosive rocket is a far more efficient weapon than the disintegrator ray of the Hans, once we can train all our gangs to use it systematically and in co-ordinated fashion. As a weapon in the hands of a single individual, shooting at a mark in direct line of vision, the rocket-gun is inferior in destructive power to the dis ray, except as its range may be a little greater. The trouble is that to date it has been used only as we used our rifles and shot guns in the 20th Century. The possibilities of its use as artillery, in laying barrages that advance along the ground, or climb into the air, are tremendous.

“The dis ray inevitably reveals its source of emanation. The rocket gun does not. The dis ray can reach its target only in a straight line. The rocket may be made to travel in an arc, over intervening obstacles, to an unseen target.

“Nor must we forget that our ultronists now are promising us a perfect shield against the dis ray in inertron.”

“I tremble though, Tony dear, when I think of the horrors that are ahead of us. The Hans are clever. They will develop defenses against our new tactics. And they are sure to mass against us not only the full force of their power in America, but the united forces of the World Empire. They are a cowardly race in one sense, but clever as the very Devils in Hell, and inheritors of a calm, ruthless, vicious persistency.”

“Nevertheless,” I prophesied, “the Finger of Doom points squarely at them today, and unless you and I are killed in the struggle, we shall live to see America blast the Yellow Blight from the face of the Earth.”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.”

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels (both original and reissued) on HiLobrow, and to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. The following titles can be read in serial form via HiLobrow.com and/or purchased in gorgeous paperback form online or via your local independent bookstore: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

HiLobrow is pleased to present the tenth installment of our serialization of Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (also known as Lest Ye Die). New installments will appear each Monday for 25 weeks.

When war breaks out in Europe — war which aims successfully to displace entire populations — British civilization collapses utterly and overnight. The ironically named Theodore Savage, an educated and dissatisfied idler, must learn to survive by his wits in the new England, where 20th-century science, technology, and culture are regarded with superstitious awe and terror.

The book — by a writer best known today for her suffragist plays, treatises, and activism — was published in 1922. In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish it in a gorgeous paperback edition, with an Introduction by Gary Panter.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

“Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him — and at the question his old humanity stirred curiously within him.

“Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer…. When I think of what I wrote — the little, little things that seemed important!… I spent a year once — a whole good year — on a book about a woman who was finding out she didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived comfortably — and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put into it — the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called atmosphere…. And all the time there was this in us — this raw, red thing — and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits…. Do you know where we made the mistake?” — he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger — “We were not civilized — it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there — lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh — clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.”

He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore listened — not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had passed.

“The religions were right,” he said. “They were right through and through; the only sane thing and the only safe thing is humility — to realize your sin, to confess it and repent…. We — we were bestial and we did not know it; and when you don’t even suspect you sin how can you repent and save your soul alive?… We dressed ourselves and taught ourselves the little politenesses and ceremonies which made it easy to forget that we were brutes in our hearts; we never faced our own possibilities of evil and beastliness, never confessed and repented them, took no precautions against them. Our limitless possibilities…. We thought our habits — we called them virtues — were as real and natural and ingrained as our instincts; and now what is left of our habits? When we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as science applied to destruction and progress that has led us — to this…. And to-day it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we started with — hunger and lust! Brute instincts… and the primitive passion, hatred — against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing else — how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost the habit and power of loving…. ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’ — of hatred and hunger and lust.”

“Yes,” said Theodore — and he, too, stared at the fire…. What the other had said was truth and truth only. Even Phillida had left him; the power of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that — but it’s right…. We can only hate.”

“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment…. God pity us!”

He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that mean you still believe in God?”

“There’s Law,” said the other. “Is that God?… We have got to see into our own souls and to pay for everything we take. That’s all I know, so far — except that what we think we own — owns us. That’s what the wise men meant by renunciation…. It’s what we made and thought we owned that has turned on us — the creatures that were born for our pleasure and power, to increase our comfort and our riches. As we made them they fastened on us — set their claws in us — and they have taken our minds from us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of their life. We created life without a soul; but it was life and it went its own way.”

Crouched to the fire, and between his bouts of coughing, he played with the idea and insisted on it. Everything that we made, that we thought dead and dumb, had a life that we could not control. In the case of books and art we admitted the fact, had a name for the life, called it influence: influence a form of independent existence…. In the same way we took metals and welded them, made machines; which were beasts, potent beasts, whose destiny was the same as our own. To live and develop and, developing, to turn on the power that enslaved them…. That was what had happened; they had made themselves necessary, fastened on us and, grown strong enough, had turned on their masters and killed — even though they died in the killing. The revolt against servitude had always been accounted a virtue in men and the law of all life was the same. The beasts we had made could not live without us, but they would have their revenge before they died.

“Think of us,” he said, “how we run and squeal and hide from them! … The patient servants, our goods and chattels, who were brought into life for our pleasure — they chase us while we run and squeal and hide!”

“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I’ve felt that, too — the humiliation.”

“The humiliation,” the sick man nodded. “Always in the end the slave rules his master — it’s the price paid for servitude, possession. I tell you, they were wise men who preached renunciation — before what we own takes hold of us and possession turns to servitude. For there’s a law of average in all things — have you ever felt it as I have? A law of balance which we never strike aright…. When the mighty tread hard enough on the humble and meek, the humble and meek are exalted and begin to tread hard in their turn. That’s obvious and we’ve generally known it; but it’s the same in what we call material things. We rise into the air — make machines that can fly — and grovel underground to protect ourselves from the flying-man. As we struck the balance to the one side, so it has to swing back on the other; a few men rise high into the air and many creep down into trenches and cellars, crouch flat…. If we could work out the numbers and heights mathematically, be sure that we should strike the perfect balance — represented by the surface of the earth. Balance — in all things balance.”

He rambled on, perhaps half-delirious, coughing out his thoughts and theories concerning a world he was leaving…. In all things balance, inevitably; the purpose of life which, so far, we sought blindly — by passion and recoil from it, by excess and consequent exhaustion…. It was in the cities where men herded, where life swarmed, that death had come most thickly, that desolation was swiftest and most complete. The ground underneath them needed rest from men; there was an average of life it could support and bear with. Now, the average exceeded, the cities lay ruined, were silent, knew the peace they had craved for — while those who once swarmed in them avoided them in fear or scattered themselves in the open country, finding no sustenance in brickwork, stone or paved street…. With the machine and its consequence, the industrial system, population had increased beyond the average allotted to the race; now the balance was righting itself by a very massacre of famine — induced by the self-same process of invention which had fostered reproduction unhindered. Because millions too many had crawled upon earth, long stretches of earth must lie waste and desolate till the average had worked itself out…. The art of life was adjustment of the balance in all things — was action and reaction rightly applied, was provision of counter-weight, discovery of the destined mean. Was control of Truth, lest it turn into a lie; was check upon the power and velocity of Good ere it swung to immeasurable Evil….

The fire, for want of more wood to pile on it, had died low, to a flicker in the ashes, and the two men sat almost in darkness; the one, between the bouts that shook him, whispering out the tenets of his Law; the other, now listening, now staring back into the world that once was — and ever should be…. He was with Markham, listening to the Westminster chimes — (on the crest of the centuries, Markham had said) — when there were sudden yelping screams outside and a patter of feet on the road. The human rats who had crept into the town for shelter from the night were bolting in panic from their holes.

“They’re running,” said the dying man and felt towards the stairs. “It’s gas — it must be gas! Oh God, where’s the door — where’s the door?”

As they groped and stumbled through the door and up the stairway, he was clutching at Theodore’s arm and gasping in an ecstasy of terror; as fearful of losing his few poor hours of life as if they had been years of health and usefulness. In the open air was darkness with figures flying dimly by; a thin stream of panic that raced against death by suffocation.

The man with death on him held to Theodore’s arm and besought him, for Christ’s sake, not to leave him — he could run if he were only helped! Theodore let him cling for a dragging pace or two; then, looking behind him, saw a woman reel, clawing the air.

He wrenched himself free and ran on till he could run no further.

It was somewhere towards the end of autumn that Theodore Savage realized that the war had come to an end — so far, at least, as his immediate England was concerned. What was happening elsewhere he and his immediate England had no means of knowing and were long past caring to know. There was no definite ending but a leaving-off, a slackening; the attacks — the burnings and panics — by degrees were fewer and not only fewer but less devastating, because carried out with smaller forces; there were days and nights without alarm, without smoke-cloud or glow on the horizon. Then yet longer intervals — and so on to complete cessation…. By the time the nights had grown long and frosty the war that was organized and alien had ended; there remained only the daily, personal and barbaric form of war wherein every man’s hand was raised against his neighbour and enemy. That warfare ceased not and could not cease — until the human herd had reduced itself to the point at which the bare earth could support it.

It seemed to him later a wonder — almost a miracle — that he had come alive through the months of war and after; at times he stood amazed that any had lived in the waste of hunger and violence, of pestilence and rotting bodies which for months was the world as he knew it. He was near death not once nor a score of times, but daily; death from exhaustion or the envy of men who were starved and reckless as himself. The mockery of peace brought no plenty or hope of it, no sign of reconstruction or dawn of new order; reconstruction and order were rank impossibilities so long as human creatures preyed on each other in a land swept bare, and prowled after the manner of wolves. No revival of common life, no system was possible until earth once more brought forth her fruits.

He judged, by the length of the nights, that it was somewhere about the middle of November when the first snow came suddenly and thickly; the harbinger and onslaught of a fiercely hard winter that killed in their thousands the gaunt human beasts who tore at each other for the refuse and vermin that was food. In the all-pervading dearth and starvation there was only one form of animal life that increased and flourished mightily; the rat overran empty buildings, found dreadful sustenance in street and field and, in turn, was hunted, trapped and fed on.

With the coming of winter the human remnant was perforce less vagrant and migratory, and Theodore, driven by weather to shelter, lived for weeks in what once had been a country town, a cluster of dead houses with, here and there, a silent factory. Only the buildings, the semblance of a township, remained; the befouled and neglected body whence the life of a community had fled; and he never knew what its living name had been or what was the manner of industry or commerce whereby it had supported its inhabitants. It lay in a flattish agricultural country and a railway had run through its outskirts; the rusted metals stretched north and south and the remnants of a station still existed — platforms, charred buildings and trucks and locomotives in sidings. Perhaps the charred buildings had been burned in a fury of drunken and insane destruction, perhaps shivering destitution had set light to them for the sake of a few hours’ warmth.

The shell of the town — its brickwork and stone — was still practically intact; it was anarchy, pillage and starvation, not the violence of an enemy, that had reduced it to a city of the dead. The means of supporting life were absent, but certain forms of what had once been luxury remained and were counted as nothing. At a corner of the main street stood a jeweller’s premises which, time and again, had been entered and ransacked; the dwelling-house behind it contained not so much as a fragment of dried crust but in the shop itself rings, brooches and pendants were still lying for any man to take — disordered, scattered and trampled underfoot, because worthless to those who craved for bread. The only item of jeweller’s stock that still had value to starving men was a watch — if it furnished a burning-glass, a means of lighting a fire when other means were unavailable.

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.