Wladyslaw Lach-Szyrma and the First Martian

According to Brewers the idea of Martians living on Mars was invented by H.G. Wells in 1898. According to Wikipedia the idea was popularised by Percival Lowell from 1893. However, both of these fellows are trumped, beaten and knocked into a cocked chronological hat by the Vicar of Newlyn St. Peter, Reverend Wladyslaw Lach Szyrma. He was, after all, the first person to use the noun Martian in Aleriel or A Voyage to Other Worlds published in 1883.

Aleriel is a novel about an English vicar who meets a Venusian, who's on an incognito tour of the Solar System. The Venusian, Aleriel, describes Venus to him (it's rather like a long matins), and later sends him a letter describing the farther planets and a few of their moons. Aleriel lands his ether-car on Mars and:

buried it in the snows, so that it might not be disturbed by any Martian who might come across it.

And bam! The noun was in our language, as familiar to us now as those other great fictional creatures: the Australian and the American. Martians were originally like this:

Under the forest shade, as we descended, we saw a figure half-human in aspect - erect and dignified - but gigantic in figure. His face was very like a man's and like ourselves, but yet he had a sort of lion look also in his limbs.

We should be very scared of Martians. According to Rev. Lach-Szyrma, they are nine-foot tall, they're vegetarians, they're communists, and they speak Esperanto (or a Martian equivalent). I don't like them one little bit, though Lach-Szyrma thought they were super.

They also live in triangular stone houses with conical metal roofs and have a lot of canals.

Lach-Szyrma seems to have had terribly raw deal in the history of science fiction. There is almost nothing about him on the web*, and I had to go to the Rare Books department of the British Library to read Aleriel. This is odd because science fiction types tend to be a trifle fanatical about noting and archiving every detail of their genre.

Though I disagree with Aleriel's politics and vegetarianism, the book is very pleasantly written and is such a turning point in the history of literature and of our conception of extraterrestrials that it should be in print in some sort of scholarly edition. Its prequel is now completely lost.

It's strange to see a work that predates, essentially*, its own genre. Take this apologetic paragraph from the introduction:

I have endeavoured to avoid as much as possible any conflict with established scientific discoveries; and, indeed, have based my speculations on the known facts of astronomy, only allowing the fancy to have free play where science is, and must be, unable, in its present state, to answer the questions here considered.

Which is pretty much what science fiction is. Most of all, though, I like Lach-Szyrma. There's something cuddly about him, something so wildly hopeful yet politely apologetic. His imagination sailed the solar system in an ether-car, yet his body remained in the vicarage of Newlyn St Peter. When the Venusian describes the capital of Venus he says that it is beyond earthly comparison, but a bit like Edinburgh. The volcanoes of the moon are huge, terrifying and lifeless; but remind him of the Malvern Hills. The Venusian, who is of superhuman intelligence, believes that the strangest thing on earth is that so few people come to weekday services at the parish church.

Poor Wladyslaw. His book is a voice from another world.

I can't find a picture of Wladyslaw, so here is his father Krystyn, who was, of course, a Polish emigré. He was also a soldier, a philosopher and occasional author.

*Somebody has started typing out a brief biography of him here, and then given up. I'd watch out, though, as the page looks hacked and may be virus-ridden.

**I shall not be entering in to huge discussions of what the first science fiction novel is. The point about genre is that it is a form that the public understands and which therefore requires no explanation or apology. A book does not a genre make.

World

When God created the English language He very sensibly took several words and made them nearly unrhymable. He did this to stop bad poets going on about love, life and the world. Though you can make it to hurled, you then get stuck with curled and furled. You can't even use whirled because Rhyming With A Homonym Is Cheating. As David Bowie shouldn't have sung in Starman:

I had to call someone so I picked on you.
Hey, that's far out. So you heard him too.
Turn on the TV, we may pick him up on channel two.

World originally meant stuff people do or human life. It therefore got contrasted to Heaven, which is the next world. And from there it came to mean the little planet that the majority of Inky Fool readers call home. Earth, which originally just meant soil (as opposed to, say, water), similarly got saddled with new meaning.

Venus

No reasonable person can look at the word Venus without trying to rhyme it with something. It's like wombat: it's impossible. This is a mite unfair on the poor old lady. Venus has got a terrible press. From her do we get venal, venom, venial and venereal disease.

Vener is the Latin genitive. One early science fiction writer, W.A. Lach-Szyrma (of whom much much more later), wrote:

I must also apologise for the word "Venusian". I know well that compounds ought to be derived from the genitive Veneris; but these are already connected with ideas opposed to those I wish to convey.

Having a planet named after you is small compensation for such indignity. Even Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis makes her out as a slightly dotty and unwanted nymphomaniac.

Her Greek equivalent Aphrodite rhymes with nightie and gave us aphrodisiac.

I have already blogged about Venus of the Beautiful Bottom, and know nothing about fly-traps.

The Inky Fool was in a hurry and couldn't chat

Mercury

For the next few days we shall devote ourselves, dear star-crossed reader, to the study of the wandering stars, or stellae errantes, vulgarly known as planets. The first of these and the closest to the sun is Mercury.

Once upon a time the Romans traded stuff, which they called merx. From this we get merchandise, merchant, market, mercenary and mercer. Merx also meant that the god of trade was called Mercury.

To each planet was assigned a metal: Saturn had lead, Jupiter tin, Mars iron, and Venus copper. However, the only planetary-metallic name to have survived is mercury, the stuff you find in thermometers and tuna.

Also, those born when the planet Mercury is ascendant are liable to be fast-moving and energetic and, in a word, mercurial.






P.S. To amalgamate something is to combine it with mercury. It's an old alchemical term that seems to derive from malagma in Latin, which meant bandage.

Ephectic

Ephectic means habitually suspending judgement. If you are ephectic you are reasonable not rash, not pacy but ponderous. I believe it may be a useful word, but I'm not sure yet.

Just the place for a suspending judgement

The Duck-Billed Platypus

The platypus is a strange creature. When a specimen was first sent back to Europe from the eldritch antipodes it was widely thought to be a fake that had been stitched together from the parts of other animals. But the Inky Fool is interested only in words.

First, some irritating people insist upon latinising their plurals. I have deplored and condemned this habit already. But platypus is one of those lovely cases where latinising leaves the pedant with linguistic egg upon his face. The plural would not and could not be platypi. The word is Greek in origin and the plural would therefore be platypodes, or flatfoots.

Secondly, I have already written of how telegrammists paid by the word, and how this changed their prose style. Pennies sharpen the mind and the nib. Probably the most efficient telegram ever written was on the subject of the humble flatfoot. A platypus is a kind of monotreme. Monotremes are very odd mammals, if indeed they are mammals at all. The platypus is venomous (the poison comes out of a spur on its ankle) and can locate its dinner using electricity. They were also rumoured to lay eggs, but nobody was sure of this until 1884 when a naturalist called W.H.Caldwell found a platypus nest. He was terribly excited, but he was also in Australia and wanted to get the news back to a proper country as soon and as cheaply as possible so he sent a four word telegram:

Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.

Which means: platypuses lay eggs and within those eggs the young is formed from only a part of the yolk.

Thirdly, one of the greatest poems in the English language was written about a platypus. It is by Lord Patrick Barrington and describes the dazzling career of a duck-billed platypus in the British Foreign Office. The first stanza runs thusly:

I had a duck-billed platypus when I was up at Trinity,
With whom I soon discovered a remarkable affinity.
He used to live in lodgings with myself and Arthur Pervis,
and we all went up together for the Diplomatic Service.
I had a certain confidence, I own, in his ability,
He mastered all the subjects with remarkable facility;
And Purvis, though more dubious, agreed that was clever,
But no one else imagined he had any chance whatever.

And you can read the rest here.

Finally, what do you get if you feed a mallard to a cat?

A duck-filled fatty-puss.

Hogwarts, Hobbits and Priority

I was leafing through Finnegans Wake on the lavatory (the price of Andrex being what it is) and I came across this little passage:

Are you right there, Michael, are you right? do you think you can hold on by sitting tight? Well, of course, it's awful angelous. Still I don't feel it's so dangelous. Ay, I'm right here, Nickel and I'll write. Singing the top line why it suits me mikey fine. But, yaghags hogwarts and arrahquinonthiance, it's the muddest think that was ever heard dump since Eggsmather got smothered in the plap of the pfan.

J.K. Rowling, j'accuse! This proves what most literate readers have always suspected: that Harry Potter is nothing more than a thinly-veiled reworking of James Joyce's masterpiece.

The word Hogwarts also pops up in the Molesworth books where it is the title of a play that Nigel writes in Latin, the script of which consists pretty much of the word Eheu, meaning alas.

Of course, it's the second simplest thing in the world to look at the phacochoerus africanus, or warthog, and flip the name around in your head until it fits with hogwash. This has been done thrice: by Joyce in 1939, by Geoffrey Willans in 1953, and by J.K. Rowling in 1997.

Just so you know: warthogs have funny, wartish protruberances on their faces, and hogwash is the kitchen leftovers that are fed to pigs.

A much more peculiar question of priority comes from John Aislabie Denham, who was a folklorist in the first half of the nineteenth century. He wrote a list of mythical creatures that ran thus:

...ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, blackdogs, spectres, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-Wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom Thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks necks, waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins, Gyre-carling, pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles, korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description...

The odd thing is that that was published in 1859 and there is no evidence at all that Tolkien ever saw it. Hobbits don't appear anywhere else until John Ronald Reuel published The Hobbit, or There and Back Again in 1937.

It's impossible to know what the hobbit that Denham recorded might have been. Presumably the hob is just a shortening for Robin, as in hobgoblin (which appears twice in the list). Robin and therefore Hob was a popular name with demons like Robin Goodfellow. However, the bit is lost to history. Perhaps it just meant small, in which case a hobbit would be a small demon, the infernal answer to a godling.

Incidentally, if that list made you curious (and I recommend reading it through) Wikipedia has it up with lots of links here.

Fiat justitia, ruat copyright!