“He read the well-known symbols with defiant eyes. He saw that it was just a quarter to thirteen in the afternoon of Thursday, July 18th, 13,000,085 A.D.”

So says the hero in George C Wallis’ Last Days of Earth. Yes, we’re off on our Edwardian Arcane theme again, with some early speculative fiction, a weekly comic of the times, and a great article on themes in Victorian and Edwardian SF by John Guy Collick – author, lecturer and fount of knowledge when it comes to this sort of thing.

So today we take you to the early twentieth century, and far beyond. George C Wallis (1871 – 1956) was an unusual chap in that he was a late Victorian SF writer who was still publishing towards the end of the nineteen forties. To put him in context, his novel The Last Days of Earth came out in 1901, the same year as H G Wells’ The First Men in the Moon. We’re not claiming that he was a great writer, but he certainly produced some imaginative stuff. Here’s part of his SFE entry:

Wallis “began writing sf and historical and adventure fiction in 1895 for the penny weekly adult magazines, the first of these seeming to be a novella, “Behind the Barrier: A Story of Mystery and Peril in the Antarctic Regions” (12 October 1895 Pearson’s Storyteller) and then, from the turn of the century, for the “slick” magazines; he occasionally wrote as by Royston Heath and as by John Stanton. Early stories of interest include “The White Queen of Atlantis” (1896 Pearson’s Weekly Extra Christmas Number), a Lost Race tale set in Atlantis, “The Last Days of Earth: Being the Story of the Launching of ‘The Red Sphere'” (July 1901 The Harmsworth Magazine), an End-of-the-World tale set in 13,000,000 CE, “The Great Sacrifice” (June 1903 The London Magazine), in which benevolent Martians save us from ourselves, and “In Trackless Space” (19 December 1904 Union Jack Library).”

Online Encyclopedia of SF

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/

He was still writing SF up until 1948, his last novel being a tale of lost races trying to conquer the world – The Call of Peter Gaskell – but it’s his Edwardian work that interests us most. We called on John Guy Collick to provide the details, and to explore a little…

The Last Days of Earth

John Guy Collick

The Victorians would have loved Godzilla. An antediluvian beast stamping London flat would have sent a frisson of delight through an audience increasingly uneasy about its place in the world. Late 19th century and early 20th century British science fiction was obsessed with the end of civilisation. Briefly glancing through the contents of the wonderful 1979 anthology Science Fiction by the Rivals of H.G. Wells (Castle Books) we find England, and London in particular, threatened by three plagues and six natural and manmade disasters. And, of course, H.G. Wells’ Martian tripods cheerfully wrought havoc in the Home Counties as they made their way round what would later become the M25. Wells was pretty explicit in visiting the arrogance of imperial conquest back on Britain. Other authors went for more elegiac descriptions of the collapse of mankind and the death of Earth.

The Last Days of Earth. Being the story of the launching of the ‘Red Sphere‘ by George C. Wallis (illustrated by Victor Prout) from The Harmsworth Magazine, July 1901 is a really interesting example of this era’s take on the end of all things (in this particular case it all comes to a head on Thursday, July 18th, 13,000,085 A.D.). The tale starts with Alwyn and Celia sitting in front of the Pictorial Telegraph which shows them scenes from a world frozen by the sun, and man’s futile attempts to stem the encroaching cold with Cities of Heat and giant glacier-retarding moats. After spending a languid TV dinner channel-hopping from one desolate scene to another they repair to the Red Sphere to leave Earth behind and journey to another star. One slight wrinkle is that there is another couple, Amy (who Alwyn loved more than Celia) and her other lover, in a Heat-house nearby with their own Red Sphere. On launching their own craft they find that the awkward buggers have also taken off and their two vessels are set on a collision course.

The story is more of a mood piece than a narrative, but two things make The Last Days of Earth stand out as a particularly interesting fin-de-siècle tale. One is the idea of Deep Abyssal Time that permeates the tale, and the other is the strong Symbolist feel.

Ever since Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology in the early 1830s in which he argued that the Earth had been formed by processes still in action (and was therefore extremely old), human-centred Biblical history of six thousand years had been replaced by an immense gulf in which all of mankind’s dominion was nothing more than a tiny dot. This total perspective vortex fascinated, and terrified Victorian and Edwardian writers, especially when you took the millennia behind and stuck them on front, and then realised that no matter how arrogant and accomplished imperial society was now, everything was going to come to a grinding halt when the sun ran out.

Wallis’s cosmos is a grim and hostile place, relentless and unforgiving. Journeying across to a new ‘young and fiery star’ is a ‘terrible undertaking’. Alwyn and Celia are citizens of the future who have conquered their passions with wisdom and reason, but all that seems to have done is turn the pair of them into enervated fatalists left to ponder the immensity of everything and utter languid sighs.

There’s also an interesting Symbolist thread running through The Last Days of Earth. Apart from the Pre-Raphaelites and a few eccentrics like Aubrey Beardsley the Victorian and Edwardian art scene eschewed the decadence of the continent and focussed on narrative paintings with moral messages. There is, however, a strong Symbolist streak through late 19th century and early 20th century science fiction and fantasy, from George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) through to David Lyndsey’s utterly bizarre Nietzchean A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).

Symbolism was all about atmosphere, dreams and mystery. It offered up strange and enchanting narratives filled with images that possibly meant something, but were in fact just there to evoke a sense of the otherworldly and the outre. Symbolist narratives are populated by indolent lotus eaters, like Alwyn and Celia, set in gloomy and decaying worlds. The red sphere possibly represents something – passion, death, eternity, science transformed into magic, who knows? – but that’s not the point. The mood of decadence and fatalism before an unknowable and hostile universe is enough. The tale of the last humans, while ultimately corny, plays second fiddle to a string of wonderfully compelling visions of entropy and decay, of shadows and desolate landscapes, against which the red sphere sticks out like a giant crimson full stop.

The Last Days of Earth suffers from all the drawbacks of much Victorian and Edwardian science fiction – chiefly that of transplanting a middle-class couple from the London suburbs into the distant future, sticking black robes on them and making them a bit droopy and indolent to signify humanity at the end of its game. Minds conquered by reason make for a very dull pair and it’s hard to feel a huge amount of sympathy for Alwyn and Celia. But where the story really shines is in its evocation of mood, a portrayal of civilisation swamped by abyssal time and a hostile universe, a theme its early 20th century readers loved to scare themselves with.

We interviewed John Guy Collick himself here – a colossus of mars, and discussed his major tetralogy The Book of the Colossus, which was completed this year with the publication of the fourth book, Dark Feathered Hearts.

dark feathered hearts, amazon uk

John is currently working on a new speculative period novel of strange doings somewhat east of Blighty, but we’re not allowed to tell you any more.

While we were doing a bit of idle research on George Wallis, we also noticed this in the SF Encyclopedia:

“Only three of (Wallis’) early sf and fantasy novels were reprinted as books: Children of the Sphinx (1901), a historical fantasy set in Egypt, A Corsair of the Sky (1910-1911 Lot-O’-Fun; 1912) as by Royston Heath, in which an airborne pirate declares war on the world, and Beyond the Hills of Mist (1912 Lot-O’-Fun; 1913), in which a Tibetan Lost Race, equipped with aircraft, plans world domination.”

What the heck was Lot-O’-Fun, we wondered? Turns out that it was a British tabloid comic which ran from 1906 to 1929. This 8 page weekly comic had a mixture of strip cartoons, with one on the cover, and text stories inside. Stock characters included schoolboys, tramps and the sort of dunderheads who keep having daft accidents and unfortunate misunderstandings.

Sadly we couldn’t find any more about A Corsair of the Sky or Beyond the Hills of Mist. However, as the Great War dawned, many of the stories were patriotic tales of derring-do. In 1914 Lot-O’Fun ran a story about a detective with the wonderful name of Pontifex Shrewd, which was too good not to investigate, and we found an entry on this tale on-line:

“The Great Coup features ‘The Adventures of Pontifex Shrewd at the War’. The famous detective, now engaged in special missions as an Army Captain – though still accompanied by his faithful Chinese servant, Feng Wo – has been wounded (‘a little scratch’) in last week’s action near Cracow. Despite Dr Michaelovitch’s warning that he needs three weeks rest, Pontifex flies to Paris in his Taube monoplane (on this occasion, owing to Shrewd’s injuries, piloted by Feng Wo – ‘All li’, me can do’). Pontifex is taken to meet General Joffre, who removed ‘from his breast the Cross of the Legion of Honour and pinned it upon that of Shrewd.’ Two days later, Shrewd is back in Britain, tackling this week’s adventure involving a German spy, an indispensable character in early war stories. Shrewd is not deceived by his disguise, spotting a tell-tale duelling scar on the spy’s cheek (‘some brawl in Heidelberg,’ speculates Shrewd). The detective, Feng Wo and some action-hungry Territorials foil an attempt by several thousand Germans and a couple of Zeppelins to free hundreds of German prisoners from a camp near Maidenhead. At least, I think that’s what happens – the plot is a little convoluted towards the end.”

Geoff Fox, Books for Keeps

books for keeps

If anyone turns up any of George C Wallis’ stories from Lot-O’Fun, we’d be delighted to see a scan or two.