I’ve done three or four interviews now in which I’ve been asked about the literary models I used in my new novel Julian Comstock.

The name I generally mention is Oliver Optic—always good for a blank stare.

Now, I put it to you boys, is it natural for lads from fifteen to eighteen to command ships, defeat pirates, outwit smugglers, and so cover themselves with glory, that Admiral Farragut invites them to dinner, saying, “Noble boy, you are an honor to your country!”

That’s Louisa May Alcott in her novel Eight Cousins, describing the sort of books she called “optical delusions.”  She was talking about Oliver Optic, who was sufficiently well-known in the day that she didn’t have to belabor the point.  Her description of his work is perfectly apt, but the effect it had on me (and perhaps other readers) was the opposite of the one she intended:  Cripes, is there such a book? And if so, where can I find it?

[More pirates and unnatural adventures below the fold...]

This isn’t a formal review of Sarah Waters’ excellent new novel The Little Stranger, but you can consider it a strong recommendation.  If you haven’t read Sarah Waters, she’s a British writer with a superb command of voice, cultural history, and the art of storytelling.  Her first novel was Tipping the Velvet, an unputdownable tour of gender conventions and their bending in Victorian London.  Her latest, The Little Stranger, is a ghost story set in a crumbling manor house in post-World-War-II Warwickshire.

[More on ghosts, architecture, and the Krell below the fold...]

This week ABC broadcast a two-hour documentary special called Earth 2100 that used art, narrative and interviews to sketch a doomsday scenario for the next 90 years.  The problems the show enumerates—climate change, population pressure, and ever-fiercer competition for ever-scarcer resources—are inarguably real, though their consequences and potential solutions remain fiercely debated. 

What struck me, however, as I watched Bob Woodruff walk us through the collapse of civilization, was how far our consensus vision of the future has evolved.  Since when? Well, take as a baseline the year 1955, when TV viewers were exposed to another art-driven, scientifically-based panorama of the near future:  Disney’s Man in Space, broadcast in three parts (Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond) on the Sunday-night program then called Disneyland. 

[More Disney and apocalypse below the fold...]

Apologies to Gene Wolfe for borrowing the title of his story from Again, Dangerous Visions, but it’s a phrase that’s stuck with me for years.  I’m sure my family is tired of hearing me exclaim “Mathoms from the time closet!” whenever we drag out Christmas decorations, old newspapers, sneakers down at the heel, or any other of the other numberless objects that linger in limbo between daily use and the yard sale.  It seemed apt for this post, because I want to talk here about books, the mathomy sort of books: books old, obscure, out of print, or unjustly ignored; books that spring at you from dark places and take you by surprise.

Subject of today’s sermon is David Bradley’s No Place to Hide.  It isn’t science fiction, or fiction at all, but if you harbor a fondness for surreal Ballardian cold-war landscapes, or anything involving atom weapons, Bradley’s 1948 memoir is likely to ring your bell.

[More below the fold...]