Grab-baggery

 

New to the Archives

"Morlock Night is a science fiction novel by American writer K. W. Jeter. It was published in 1979. In a letter to Locus Magazine in April 1987, Jeter coined the word "steampunk" to describe it and other novels by James Blaylock and Tim Powers.

"Morlock Night uses the ideas of H. G. Wells in which the Morlocks of Wells' 1895 novella The Time Machine themselves use the device to travel back into the past and menace Victorian London." -Wikipedia

As a matter of curiosity, this is one of the few paperbacks I've got in the last few years, rather than a larger softcover, like the three volumes of The Dour Trilogy (halfway through the second book, by the way). This will conclude my acquisition of Jeter's work until I catch up on my reading. Here is the original Daw cover by Josh Kirby, famous for his Discworld art:

The Shadow Library

“The Detection Club was formed in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, Hugh Walpole, John Rhode, Jessie Rickard, Baroness Emma Orczy, R. Austin Freeman, G. D. H. Cole, Margaret Cole, E. C. Bentley, Henry Wade, Constance Lindsay Taylor and H. C. Bailey. Anthony Berkeley was instrumental in setting up the club, and the first president was G. K. Chesterton. There was a fanciful initiation ritual with an oath written by Sayers, and the club held regular dinner meetings in London.

"A number of works were published under the club's sponsorship; most of these were written by multiple members of the club, each contributing one or more chapters in turn. In the case of The Floating Admiral, each author also provided a sealed "solution" to the mystery as he or she had written it, including the previous chapters. This was done to prevent a writer from adding impossible complications with no reasonable solution in mind. The various partial solutions were published as part of the final book.” - Wikipedia

The club oath, sworn upon a real skull they dubbed Eric: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?”

I got my copies in the 1980's, and found the experience of reading them more of a curiosity than a satisfying tale, as one dissected each author's contribution and pondered their differences of style, and their efforts at one-upping their fellow members. More like a game than books, and engaging if taken that way.

I remember when I was in (or at least near) our high school's Writer's Round Table and had the outline for a juvenile fantasy novel, including the chapter titles. The notion came to me that if each member took one of the twelve chapters to write, we could have a complete working draft in a month. We might even be able to get it published, and then fortune and fame would be ours. The scheme never materialized, of course.

And here is the Bhavagad-Gita As It Is, which floated in and out of ours libraries for years: