The Mummy! (1827)
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Jump to navigationJump to searchWebb, Jane. The Mummy!. 1827. As "Mrs. Loudon (Jane), and Jane W. Loudon, The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-second Century. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Cited in John J. Pierce's "Imagination and Evolution: A Conceptual History of Science Fiction" (in revision).
According to Pierce,
This is one of the earliest examples of making everyday technical details part of the story, instead of shoehorning them in as what are now called information dumps. It was part of the narrative strategy that H.G. Wells, a century later, would call an essential of scientific romance: to “domesticate the impossible hypothesis.” {NOTE: 218: Wells, H.G., preface to Seven Famous Novels, Knopf, 1934, p. viii.} (Pierce 72)
Pierce 73 — All this, however, sets off a tedious political and romantic intrigue over the fate of England that dominates the plot and overwhelms such sf elements as an optical telegraph service, illuminated ladies’ hats, railroads that carry summer homes to the country, steam-powered doctors and even robot judges and lawyers – one lawyer’s battery runs down in the middle of a summation. Oh, and air mail, as in Julius von Voss’ Ini – but surely pure coincidence – is shot by guns [...].
See, then, for an early instance of robots, future communication, and technological change in housing and recreation, medicine, law, and millinery: women's hats.
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Reviewed with a long plot summary by "basswood [sic on spelling], "The mummy! A tale of the twenty-second century" in "The Library Thing," 21 August 2015, giving date as 1928, and noting that the book was currently "free on Google Books."[1]
RDE, Initial Compiler, 23May20, 25May20