Passage Party

Last night was timons 17th annual Passage Party wherein participants read a 10 minute selection from a favorite book or article. This year, my passage was from "The Selene Gardening Society" by Molly Brown from the "Steampunk" anthology. (The story link will take you to a Google book listing of the text that is missing two pages in the middle.) I liked it a lot for it being a much more entertaining sequel than the Jules Verne original "From the Earth to the Moon."

There were a number of other stories in there and I admit that I haven't gotten trough all of them. One, that I abandoned halfway through was Joe R. Lansdale's "The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down." It seems based on the world he created in "Zeppelins West" and "Burning London" and suffers from the same obsession with crude jokes and bodily fluids. Everyone at Amazon seems to love the books but I thought they were quite awful.

Anyway, back to the passage party where the quality of readings was very high. Sort of. Just before my reading, some read the opening of "Edison's Conquest of Mars" by Garrett Serviss. It was published in 1898 as a sequel to H.G. Wells very successful "War of the Worlds." As I went up to begin my reading, I footnoted the previous reading by saying that if one reads the rest of the book, it is clear that Serviss did not originally write the book as a sequel as evidenced by the Martians bearing no resemblance to Wells' Martians. They were much more like the fantasy version of space men of the previous century, merely giants that were like humans in other respects. He tacked on a chapter at the beginning to tie the two together and ran with that. Phill Klass (who writes under the name William Tenn) then added something that I had not known; that Serviss was sued for copyright infringement but the case was dismissed because Wells refused to testify, not wanting to dignify Serviss' writing by comparing it to his own.

For as mediocre as the book is, I looked long and hard to find a copy and have a numbered first edition copy printed in 1947 sitting on my shelf. (The original publication was in 1898 in a 30 part serialization in the New York Journal.) I can't help that I'm a War of the Worlds geek, which also explains why I even bothered to read "Flaming London" (a War of the Worlds story) after I thought "Zeppelin's West" sucked so bad. I don't have a copy of either of those on my shelf. I read them from the library.

There was a reading from "Extracts from Adam's Diary" by Mark Twain. timons read from "Peter the Great" by Robert K. Massie. "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" by S. M. Stirling. And a reading about a giant redwood and the scientists and sequoia fanboys who study them. I wish I could remember the source because it's description of the tree doesn't hit you as to how immense they are until the scientist go out to survey the damage caused when this 36 story tall behemoth falls.

I didn't stay as long as I should have liked, I've been sick for a week and found myself getting overheated just sitting there. Perhaps I had a low grade fever or I was simply being more reptilian in my inability to regulate my temperature but I wasn't feeling well and went home.

My reading list from past years is available in last year's post.