H. G. Wells’s ‘Short History of the World’

A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells, with updates by G. P. Wells and Raymond Postgate. Penguin Books, 1965 [Original version 1922]. 363 pages.

(A quick search indicates that the version I discuss here is no longer in print. The link above is to a reprint of the original version of this book.)

Nowadays, we mostly remember H. G. Wells as a pioneer of science fiction, but in his own day, he was better known for his nonfiction. Although he had no remarkable academic credentials, he was a prolific writer and a bold thinker, and he set England abuzz with often outrageous ideas, which changed constantly. A few years ago, I happened upon a volume of his Short History of the World, which is his second attempt at summarizing world history, the first and longer being the Outline of History. I finally sat down to read it recently and might as well offer my thoughts.

Wells opens the book by assuring us that this will be a dispassionate review of the history of the world with no personal editorializing, but anyone with a passing knowledge of Wells probably knows that refraining from editorializing was something of which he was incapable, so this is very much a vision of world history through the eyes of its particular author. But Wells is a difficult man to pin down because his ideas changed from year to year: Right at the turn of the century, he advocated the genocide of all non-white races, but a handful of years later, he was reading Booker T. Washington and expressing sympathy for the plight of the American negro. He liked eugenics one minute and later rejected it. He was a member of the Fabian Society but got kicked out when he argued in favor of polygamy. G. K. Chesterton gives Wells some backhanded compliments in his book Heretics, describing him as always growing—but it’s unclear if he was really growing or simply throwing ideas against a wall to see what would stick.

If Wells had any consistent principles, they were his atheism and his belief in the goodness and inevitability of a future worldwide government. The latter appears to have been his guiding light throughout his intellectual life and the reason why he was mostly a socialist and at times (maybe) a fascist. We may take this as his religious belief, something he clung to despite all obstacles and evidence to the contrary. It is remarkable that he could study history as he did and still believe in some far-off utopia: His portrayal of the past is a catalog of folly and duplicity, yet he continued to believe that this foolish animal called man would in the future produce global unity. Therefore, despite his atheism and malleability, we may say that he was a man of deep faith.

Continue reading “H. G. Wells’s ‘Short History of the World’”

Assorted Updates

Happy Easter.

A lot is happening in the Davidson household. The little magical girl is now fifteen months old. As is typical for a girl her age, she’s hit a sleep regression. She is having trouble getting to sleep at night and can’t handle being in her crib by herself, which is putting some strain on both her mother and me. My wife is a nurse and works nights; previously, when she worked, I could put the baby to bed and then write late into the evening, but now that the baby is fighting bedtime, I’m struggling to find time for other things I need to do. I’m attempting to rearrange my schedule to write early in the morning … but the baby wakes up really early to demand milk and cuddles, and then she won’t go back to sleep. I usually end up holding her until my wife gets home, and then I don’t even get breakfast before I have to rush to work.

So it goes.

My parents-in-law have been here for a while and have been a huge help with the baby, but they’re heading back to the Philippines now, which means I need to up my game. I’m trying to figure out a system to write and watch the baby simultaneously; the problem is, I can’t write in her presence because she wants to bang on my keyboard and has a tantrum if I don’t let her. I could potentially block her off so she’s in the room with me but can’t reach the computer, but that will make her cry.

On another first-time-parent, first-time-homeowner front, we’re working on the house. We’re putting in a garden and planning to plant fruit trees in the back. Also, we’re going to plant hedges in the front because the direction of the wind and location of the house cause a lot of trash to blow into our front yard. I figure, if we have hedges, the trash can pile up against them on the street instead of scattering across our grass. We’re moving slowly on all this because budgeting is tight, but we’re moving.

Also, it appears a vole has destroyed part of our sprinkler system. After reading some articles online, I suggested to my wife that I might be able to repair it myself, but she gave me “the look” and told me to call somebody instead.

And although this isn’t the highest priority, I want to put one of those miniature free libraries in the front yard. Having retired from archaeology, I work as a librarian, so passing out books to others is a mtter of principle for me. I don’t want to be officially associated with the organization called Little Free Library for the same reason I refuse to join the American Library Association despite official pressure: Because those guys are assholes. Nonetheless, I’ve always liked those miniature libraries, and I think there’s only one other in town at the moment, so I’d like to host the second. When I finally get it set up, I’m going to fill it with books that are edifying but not too demanding, such as Mortimer J. Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody and H. G. Wells’s Short History of the World.

I have plans to DIY our guest room after the grandparents head out. It may turn into a disaster, but it will at least be a disaster contained to one area of the house. Our house has an atrocious interior texture, and the walls were abused by previous occupants who didn’t understand the concept of stud-finding and thus ripped holes in the sheetrock that were then hastily patched. So I intend to try my hand at skim-coating. Some DIY sites online claim, no doubt falsely, that it’s super easy with the right tools, so I’m going to give it a shot, and if I destroy a room, at least I will have only destroyed one room. But if I succeed, that means I can go on to do the other rooms. The plan is, rip out the carpet, skim-coat the walls, apply new texture (orange peel, probably, because it’s easy and looks okay and comes in cans), and put down a floating floor. If that works out, I’ll move on to other rooms to do the same thing.

I have some ambitions that are beyond my skill level, such as a built-in bench for the dining area and built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases for my office, which would be extra cool because the office has high ceilings. These projects would, at the least, require tools I don’t currently own and can’t presently afford.

On a more serious note, my computer desperately needs replacing. One thing slowing down my writing is that I simply don’t know if my machine will cooperate with me when I turn it on. Sometimes it boots up fine. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes. Sometimes my word processor crashes unexpectedly or slows down the computer to a crawl. Sometimes I think I can squeeze in a little time to write but actually can’t because the computer is too slow. This computer is now over a decade old, well past its life expectancy. As with everything else, this is a budget item for which there are no funds. But I have been expecting for years now that this thing will simply one day fail to turn on when I press the power button, and although that still hasn’t happened, it is fast approaching.

I have yet another item that is halfway between a hobby project and a religious devotion. I am a fanatical Bible annotator. My notes are a stream of consciousness consisting of points from sermons and my own thoughts but mostly snippets from books and articles I’ve read, with quotes ranging from Jules Verne to Bertrand Russell to the Bhagavad Gita as well as a slew of archaeological journals. I’ve been through three different study Bibles over my lifetime, and I am almost finished copying my notes from the previous two into the third one. That third one is a first edition, in leather, of the Harper Collins Study Bible, and it is getting worn out, so I am seriously considering copying all of my notes, a project that would literally take years, into a new, fourth study Bible.

To that end, I recently acquired, for an embarrassing amount of money, a rare leatherbound edition of the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, a volume I have coveted for a long time. But after examining it and finding it dissatisfactory in some ways (poor binding and narrow margins mostly, but also the annotations are obnoxious), I think I am likely to settle for the fifth edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which I also acquired recently. The New Oxford is horrid in many respects but is also the only “ecumenical” study Bible that updates regularly, is designed for personal annotations, and is printed by a company that actually gives a darn how the product looks.

I anticipate that the fifth edition will be the last version of the New Oxford that is actually useable. All of the Bibles I just mentionend use the New Revised Standard Version, which is an offense to the ears that wreaks havoc on the texts it pretends to translate, but it is the only English version, unfortunately, that includes all the books used by the Eastern Orthodox and some prominent lesser Eastern Churches. A new version of the NRSV is forthcoming, which promises to be worse than the current one; the current NRSV I can fix with a red pen, but the new version will be beyond saving. I expect that the sixth edition of the New Oxford, whenever it appears, will use this newer version, so that means the fifth edition is the last “ecumenical” study Bible that will not be worthless. For that reason, I expect it will be the last study Bible I buy and may be the one into which I copy all my notes to create my own personal “definitive” edition. The New Oxford lacks features that anything calling itself a study Bible ought to have, such as a cross-referencing system and a concordance, and its formatting is horrendous, but it is, sadly, the best thing available in its niche and is likely to remain so.

On the writing front, I have two projects. I am working on a collection of Rags and Muffin short stories, though this has proven difficult: Although I’ve been editing, formatting, and promoting Rags and Muffin, actually writing and living in their world isn’t something I’ve done for some time, so it’s hard to get back into. I’m also moving ahead with the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo. I was having some difficulty with the plotting of that book, but I’ve recently found the solution. Finding the time to write, however—and getting my computer to cooperate—are other matters.

The Pulps: ‘The Torture Pool’

As proof that the pulps are not lightly dismissed, we have a story by MacKinlay Kantor, who later won a Pulitzer for his novel Andersonville. This collection presents his story “The Torture Pool,” which appeared in 1932 in Detective Ficiton Weekly.

Despite the (evetual) credentials of its author, this story returns us to the general status of this collection: Solid, workmanlike, competent, and somewhat forgettable. The last story stood out because it was outrageous. This story, although one of the better ones in the mystery section, is not so outlandishly entertaining.

The story follows a man who runs gift shop in a small, out-of-the-way town that happens to be a tourist spot. His brother had been a hermit who’d amassed a small but respectable fortune through meager living and selling wild herbs, and he had, five years previous, been found dead, apparently killed for his money.

“The Torture Pool” is notable mostly for its atmosphere, capturing as it does the sun-drenched and swampy backwater in which it takes place. Unfortunately, it lacks tension: It follows a cold case, and the killer’s identity is obvious from the beginning. In fact, the story is not about finding out whodunnit but about the protagonist, who already knows whodunnit, finding a creative way to force the killer to confess (the “torture pool” of the title is a pool of quicksand). The climax is a little contrived, but the extensive cultural and environmental details make it engrossing.

Review: ‘Magical Angel Creamy Mami’

Creamy Mami, the Magical Angel, directed by Osamu Kobayashi. Written by Hiroshi Konichikawa et al. Starring Takako Ōta. Studio Pierrot, 1983–1984. 52 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 20 hours, 48 minutes). Rated TV-14.

We haven’t reviewed an anime series here in a good long while. In large part, that’sibecause I’m married with children now, so I don’t have as much time to binge-watch TV as I once did. Besides that, I admit my interest in magical girls has waned slightly. Like, I have to deal with real-life girls now.

Anyway, Magical Angel Creamy Mami, which ran from 1983 to 1984, is a title I have wanted to see for over a decade, but aside from a short-lived Blu-Ray release that I sadly didn’t acquire in time, it has been almost completely unavailable in the U.S. except through piracy.

Recently, however, Creamy Mami appeared on streaming services. As of this writing, it is available on Amazon Prime, which is where I found it, but you can also watch it for free on RetroCrush, a service that streams older anime titles and which, notably, also hosts Magical Emi and Pastel Yumi, two other classics from the same era and studio. I’ll probably watch and review those next.

Creamy Mami singing.
Creamy Mami.

A review of Creamy Mami could be one sentence: If you are interested in magical girls, you should watch it. This holds such a place of importance in the history of the genre that any comments I might make about quality or entertainment value are largely unimportant.

But I’ll try anyway.

Continue reading “Review: ‘Magical Angel Creamy Mami’”

Interview in ‘Book Reader Magazine’

Check out my author interview in Book Reader Magazine, where I discuss Rags and Muffin:

Although I don’t like the term, the book is a “deconstruction” of the trope of the child hero who goes to school during the day and saves the world at night. Although almost invulnerable both physically and emotionally, Rags has surrounded herself with other children who aid her crime-fighting efforts. Unlike Rags, those children get the full brunt of their enemies’ brutality. In most stories of child heroes, the villains are buffoons, foolish adults who are so silly that even children can beat them. I wanted to change that formula by pitting kids against genuinely evil and ruthless adults who are perfectly willing to do the most atrocious things to children. For that reason, Rags and Muffin is not only a story with a lot of action and excitement but also a tale of horrifying abuse. Balancing those elements, being careful about what is shown and what is not, and being tasteful, was extremely difficult.

Book Interior Formatting: $45

I’m not yet planning to advertise this on other platforms yet because I’m hoping to get one or two takers to see how it goes, but I’m offering professional-grade book formatting for only forty-five dollars, a considerably lower price than you will find anywhere else.

I own the latest version of Vellum book-formatting software. I will use Vellum on your book to give you a professional-looking product for considerably less than you would pay either to buy Vellum yourself or hire a designer.

My novels Jake and the Dynamo and Rags and Muffin are formatted with Vellum. Follow the links and check out the See Inside option to observe their interior layouts. These are relatively simple designs, but numerous others are available, including ones that are more flashy or complex.

I will format nonfiction or fiction. Print versions are available in black-and-white only, but eBooks can feature full color. I can fit the book to any measurements required or allowed by your preferred print-on-demand platform. I will format any kind of book except erotica.

I need:

  • Word Document (or similar) containing the full text of your work. Authors who submit a document with both a semantic heading structure and triple asterisks (***) for section breaks get a $5 discount.
  • Any interior illustrations with directions for placement (optional). See your preferred publishing platform for instructions on size or file type.
  • Any images to be used as chapter headings or section breaks (optional).
  • Cover image (for eBooks), preferably measuring 1800 x 2700 pixels (optional but strongly recommended).

I will provide:

  • Basic typographical formatting (EM dashes, proper ellipses, and correctly oriented apostrophes, if needed). Tell me explicitly if you don’t want this.
  • An attractive, professional layout using Vellum’s templates. I will provide samples for your approval so you can pick the layout and fonts that work best for you.
  • Up to three free template alterations if you decide you need a different layout.
  • Free corrections of any compatibility issues (such as margins not matching a print-on-demand service’s requirements).
  • One free revision if you edit your manuscript or add cover art after submitting to me (additional revisions will require another submission with the same $45 price tag).

I will produce:

  • All eBook formats for all platforms, including optimally sized cover thumbnails if you provided cover art.
  • A PDF suitable for paperback or hardcover print books. (Interior only; all platforms will require you to upload the cover as a separate file.)

Bonus:

  • Additional, smaller documents, such as PDFs of short stories or sample chapters for use in promotion, are $10 each.

Contact me at dgddavidson@hotmail.com.

The Pulps: ‘Death’s Passport’

This collection contains two stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, unfortunately. Bellem wrote racy work that appeared in so-called “under the counter” pulps, and his sexually charged writing was infamous enough to get a mocking in The New Yorker, where satirist S. J. Perelman skewered his purple prose in the essay “Somewhere a Roscoe,” which is a truly entertaining work if you can find it (The New Yorker has it behind a paywall, but the Internet Archive will let you borrow it).

If you ever have the chance to read Perelman, you will discover some delightful wordplay as well as several snapshots of serial publications before the middle of the last century. But in “Somewhere a Roscoe,” he does not have to employ his usual wit: He simply quotes Bellem repeatedly, and the quotes are sufficiently goofy to supply all the necessary jokes.

The first example of Bellem’s writing in this anthology is easily the better of the two, though it is the worst of the mystery stories. “Death’s Passport” features Bellem’s most famous creation, the hard-boiled and perpetually horny detective Dan Turner. This story appeared in 1940 in Spicy Detective, a pulp dedicated to mystery stories with risqué content and themes. According to Perelman, Spicy Detective published “the sauciest blend of libido and murder this side of the Gille de Rais.” Dan Turner eventually got his own magazine, Hollywood Detective, which ran from 1942 to 1950. There have also been a couple of movies based on Dan Turner—both of them, as far as I can tell, obscure.

As for “Death’s Passport,” it has a good story buried under it, but that good story is covered with a heavy layer of stupid. Turner comes home one night to find a man in his apartment who’s supposed to be dead: Kensington had supposedly attempted a trans-Atlantic solo flight and died in a crash over the ocean, but he had in fact chickened out and sent another man in his place, a man who was murdered by means of a sabotaged plane.

The story features some double-crosses and dangerous femmes fatales. It is most notable for being written in overdone slang so inventive and absurd that this story is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. While the slang is merely silly, the obligatory sexual elements do damage to an otherwise engaging plot: At one point, Turner follows a woman back to her place and attempts to seduce her, but when she acts distracted, he instantly concludes that she must be the killer—because only a woman who had recently committed murder could possibly be less than enthusiastic about Turner’s affections!

To give some flavor, I’ll give some quotes. Here is a typical example of Dan Turner describing a woman:

She was embellished in a nightgown three shades thinner than watered whiskey and a lot more potent. Through the gossamer material I could tab her various tempting thems and thoses—including a pair of tapered white gams, a set of lyric hips, and a duet of curves that made my fingers tingle up to the elbows. Some damsels are built that way: just looking at them makes you pine for your vanished youth.

In fact, every damsel Turner encounters is built that way. Plain, dumpy, elderly, or fully clothed women simply don’t exist in his universe. Every woman is in her twenties, scantily clad, round in all the right places, and willing.

And every passage, no matter how mundane its contents, contains a barrage of inventive analogies:

I’ll say one thing for Dave Donaldson: when he scents a pinch in the offing he can drive like a maniac. He blooped that sedan up to seventy from a standing start; kicked the everlasting tripes out of it. The yellow-haired Vale cutie shivered against me like a cat coughing up lamb-chops; she must have thought she was headed for the pearly gates. Her even little teeth chattered like pennies in a Salvation Army tambourine.

Admittedly, this is one of the most entertaining stories in the collection, but it’s entertaining in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way. Although this anthology contains no true standouts, most of the stories display the workmanlike style and solid construction that characterized the pulps. Bellem’s work, on the other hand, represents what the pulps have unjustly been remembered for—overwrought prose and exploitative themes.

The Pulps: ‘The Deadly Orchid’

Probably the best of the detective stories in the collection, or at least the most involved, is this one by T. T. Flynn, originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1933. The hard-boiled narrator has been hired to take down the “Orchid,” a seductress and blackmailer, who has incriminating letters that can destroy a banker. Teamed with a female sidekick with a sharp tongue, the narrator has pose as a newlywed and find a way to beat the Orchid at her own game.

The story rides largely on the banter between the characters, especially the narrator and the woman posing as his wife. They fight in the usual manner, displaying mutual exasperation and mutual attraction. The story’s conclusion hinges on some creative devices and a few implausibilities. It makes for entertaining reading, though there are no true surprises.

The Pulps: ‘One Hour’

Dashiell Hammett was one of the pioneers of “hard-boiled” detective fiction and is now considered one of the greatest mystery writers of all time, so this collection rightly includes an example of his work. Hammett led a colorful life, having worked as a Pinkerton agent and later serving a prison sentence for running a Communist front group, and he made considerable contributions not only to literature but to comic strips and film.

“One Hour” stars the Continental Op, one of his recurring characters, a detective working for the fiction Continental Detective Agency. “One Hour” contains a complicated murder mystery, but its gimmick, as suggested by the title, is that the Op solves it in only one hour’s time, mostly by stumbling upon the solution and then engaging in a lengthy battle as he corners the evildoers. Goodstone apparently selected it to showcase the directness and brevity of Hammett’s narration.

The story finds the Op asked to solve a murder committed with a stolen car. Despite the terse description and brief time span, the story is a bit hard to follow as grasping both the mystery itself and its solution requires the reader to keep careful track of certain spatial relationships between streets and buildings. However, its centerpiece is neither the mystery nor its solution but the fistfight at the climax, which fills a full page and a half of a six-page story.

Much as I enjoyed reading this, I can’t help but ask if it’s the best example of Hammett’s work. It’s an early story, published in Black Mask in 1924, and its gimmick makes it feel anticlimactic since the Op solves the mystery with such little legwork, hitting on the answer while still doing the preliminary, routine questioning of witnesses and suspects.

The Pulps: ‘Mr. Alias, Burglar’

As we get into the mystery-story section of The Pulps, we first encounter “Mr. Alias, Burglar” by Ridrigues Ottolengui. Although amusing in a way, it is obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes and suffers from the defects of some of the worst Sherlock Holmes stories.

The tale opens by introducing Mitchel, a wealthy and extremely self-confident amateur detective who apparently solves murder cases after the typical drawing-room fashion. A man who goes by the name of Alias approaches him and declares that he can rob him without his detection. They agree to bet on this and then go their separate ways, Alias to the work of committing ther robbery and Mitchell to the work of foiling or detecting it.

As Tony Goodstone points out in his brief commentary on this story, it commits the “cardinal sin” of revealing all the clues at the end instead of delivering them throughout the story for the reader to figure out—but it has to do this because there is really no mystery here. Instead, the story features Mitchell mind-reading, predicting the future, and jumping to conclusions, all while pretending that his baseless assumptions are the power of deduction. Much as Holmes leaps to the conclusion that Watson must have been in India because he has a suntan—and turns out to be correct because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have it so—Mitchell precisely guesses when and in what way Alias will perform certain acts, and what his reactions will be to certain phenomena.

The story is entertaining mostly because of the dialogue: In the key scenes, these two men arrogant men, both supposing themselves to be intellectual giants, exchange verbal barbs. Their ripostes are fun to read, but they don’t have nearly the gravity that Ottolengui apparently thought they did.