PEACE: Morryster's _Marvells of Science_

Jerry Friedman · 07 May 2002, 15:25 · from urth-v0205.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) PEACE: Morryster's _Marvells of Science_
Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 08:25:03 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-897 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/897.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


--- Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com> wrote:
> Ten months ago, Adam Stephanides wrote:
>=20
> >I was looking over the section where this book appears (211-12, Harper
> hc)
> >and I have an observation and a question.
> >
> >First, the observation: the book is introduced with the sentences
> "There
> >were several books on his table, and I picked one up.  It was
> Morryster's
> >_Marvells of Science_..." (211)  Now, this way of phrasing it strongly
> >suggests that Weer is already familiar with the author and title;
> otherwise,
> >he would say something like "It was entitled _Marvells of Science_," by
> a
> >man named Morryster.  However, the book does not exist: it was invented
> by
> >Ambrose Bierce in _The Devil's Dictionary_, and the author and title
> were
> >borrowed by Lovecraft.  The copy Weer picks up is one of Gold's
> forgeries
> >(and since he finds it in Gold's office, we can dismiss the possibility
> that
> >_Peace_ takes place in a universe in which _Marvells of Science_ does
> >exist.)
>=20
> Does THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (1911) have some reference to that title? In
> any event, it shows up, with a little quote, in Bierce's short story
> "The
> Man and the Snake" (1891).  See here
> http://www.online-literature.com/bierce/174/
> Yes, then Lovecraft used it later, but I've misplaced the note on which
> story that was.

"The Festival", according to the Invisible Library (which doesn't
mention the Bierce story, though--I'll tell the Librarian about it).
How certain is it that the _Marvells of Science_ in _Peace_, which
I'll get around to someday, is another of Gold's forgeries?

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness
http://health.yahoo.com

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net