Poll Is Star Trek: Khan khanon?

[Stevil2001]

Inspired by this thread, I've just finished reading The Lost World and The Poison Belt for the first time. I thought TLW was a lot of fun and quite well-written, but TPB was much less successful (and it seems like Doyle was already becoming occupied with thoughts about mortality and the afterlife when he wrote it). Now I'm debating whether I'm enough of a completist to read The Land of Mist out of morbid curiosity. There are also the two short stories that were written last, but that Wikipedia's "biography" of Challenger places before TLoM, so I may read them first.

The Poison Belt is very much an example of a contemporary subgenre of proto-sf; people at the time were obsessed with mass apocalyptic events, especially ones caused by astronomical objects. It's also very much a weak example of it though, thanks to the soft-pedaled ending! Give me The Purple Cloud any day. But I think it's entertaining enough up until that point.

The Land of Mist is the worst kind of bad, though, bad boring. Challenger isn't even in it very much; it's much more about the tedious and sanctimonious spiritualists.

The shorts aren't great but they're short. They read like Golden Age sf stories: a scientific idea made into a story, but not an interesting story or a well told one.

 

[Christopher]

The shorts aren't great but they're short. They read like Golden Age sf stories: a scientific idea made into a story, but not an interesting story or a well told one.

Yeah, they weren't much. Although I do find it interesting that Conan Doyle was one of the first people to write an SF story about the invention of what we would call the transporter. (Apparently the first was Edward Page Mitchell in the 1877 story "The Man Without a Body.") Although maybe I'm wrong, since "The Disintegration Machine" was a 1929 story, which borders on the pulp era, so maybe teleportation stories weren't uncommon by that point.

 

[Stevil2001]

Yeah, they weren't much. Although I do find it interesting that Conan Doyle was one of the first people to write an SF story about the invention of what we would call the transporter. (Apparently the first was Edward Page Mitchell in the 1877 story "The Man Without a Body.") Although maybe I'm wrong, since "The Disintegration Machine" was a 1929 story, which borders on the pulp era, so maybe teleportation stories weren't uncommon by that point.

The SF Encyclopedia says there were matter transmission stories in the pulps, citing ones from 1922, 1924, and 1927, so Doyle definitely had his predecessors.

 

[Christopher]

The SF Encyclopedia says there were matter transmission stories in the pulps, citing ones from 1922, 1924, and 1927, so Doyle definitely had his predecessors.

"Beam me up, Watson!" "Elementary, my dear Scotty!"

 

[KRAD]

The Poison Belt was worth reading for the characters -- seeing what the protagonists of The Lost World were up to now. As a story it was meh, but I enjoyed looking back in on the folks from TLW.

I'm perfectly happy to pretend The Land of Mist doesn't exist.

 

[Christopher]

I'm perfectly happy to pretend The Land of Mist doesn't exist.

Well, TLoM posits that the earlier Challenger books are fictional, so it isn't in continuity with them anyway. Still, I've started in on it and I don't find it bad so far. I know more or less where it's going, but at least initially it's acknowledging that there's a lot of fraudulent spiritualism and offering up intelligent counterarguments. Honestly, given the state of knowledge in the 1920s, Doyle writing a book that posits spiritualism as an open question with some validity to it seems no worse than John W. Campbell in the 1930s onward approaching psychic phenomena as real and encouraging generations of authors to do the same. Though we'll see if I continue to feel that way later in the book.

And it is kind of interesting to see Challenger with a daughter, particularly one who goes into his most loathed profession, journalism. So far the book hasn't done much with that, though.