This blog is named for an early sci-fi novel by under-appreciated Canadian author James De Mille, "A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder" (1888).
The book was unfortunately published after De Mille's death and following the release of H. Rider Haggard's "She" and "King Solomon's Mines." Critics thought De Mille's novel was derivative of those works, but in fact it was written before both of them. It tells the story of a British sailor who finds a "lost world" and "lost civilization" in Antarctica.
De Mille's novel symbolizes for me the importance of imagination in our lives. This blog will celebrate imagination and the quest for new knowledge. I welcome comments and posts of any kind that contribute to this end.
Was a lost civilization in some hyper-cold place a common theme in that era? It reminds of three things: Shangrila; Poe's "narrative of arthur gordon pym," i think the name is; and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, who gets chased to the north pole or some such place.
ReplyDeleteApparently so -- not necessarily because of the cold but because the poles were unexplored and thus open for speculation. De Mille's "lost world" is actually in a valley with a temperate or semi-tropical climate, perhaps caused by volcanic activity. Not all lost worlds and lost races were found at the poles, of course. In William Starbuck Mayo's Kaloolah (1849) a lost civilization of Yemeni origin is found to have built a great city in the jungles of Central Africa.
ReplyDeleteThis will assist with some mind-travelling.
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