Most peo­ple know that Mark Twain wrote about Jim and Huck­le­ber­ry Finn nav­i­gat­ing down the Mis­sis­sip­pi. Less well known is that he occa­sion­al­ly dab­bled in the bur­geon­ing genre of sci­ence fic­tion. His 1898 short sto­ry “The Great Dark” is about a ship that sails across a drop of water on a micro­scope slide. His nov­el Con­necti­cut Yan­kee in King Arthur’s Court is one of the first to explore time trav­el. And, in a short sto­ry called “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904,” Twain pre­dict­ed the inter­net. In 1898. Read it here.

Set five years into the future, the sto­ry starts off as a crime mys­tery. Clay­ton, a quick-tem­pered army offi­cer, is accused of mur­der­ing Szczepanik, the inven­tor of a new and promis­ing device called the Tel­elec­tro­scope. The tale’s unnamed nar­ra­tor describes it like this:

As soon as the Paris con­tract released the tel­elec­tro­scope, it was deliv­ered to pub­lic use, and was soon con­nect­ed with the tele­phon­ic sys­tems of the whole world. The improved ‘lim­it­less-dis­tance’ tele­phone was present­ly intro­duced and the dai­ly doings of the globe made vis­i­ble to every­body, and audi­bly dis­cuss­able too, by wit­ness­es sep­a­rat­ed by any num­ber of leagues.

That sounds a lot like social media. Mark Twain dreamed up Twit­ter and Youtube dur­ing the Grover Cleve­land admin­is­tra­tion.

Fac­ing the hangman’s noose, Clay­ton asks for, and receives, a tel­elec­tro­scope for his cell. As the nar­ra­tor describes Clay­ton’s tel­elec­tro­scop­ic rev­el­ry, it sounds uncan­ni­ly like a bored cubi­cle dweller surf­ing the web at work.

…day by day, and night by night, he called up one cor­ner of the globe after anoth­er, and looked upon its life, and stud­ied its strange sights, and spoke with its peo­ple, and real­ized that by grace of this mar­velous instru­ment he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a pris­on­er under locks and bars. He sel­dom spoke, and I nev­er inter­rupt­ed him when he was absorbed in this amuse­ment. I sat in his par­lor and read, and smoked, and the nights were very qui­et and repose­ful­ly socia­ble, and I found them pleas­ant. Now and then I would hear him say ‘Give me Yedo;’ next, ‘Give me Hong-Kong;’ next, ‘Give me Mel­bourne.’ And I smoked on, and read in com­fort, while he wan­dered about the remote under­world, where the sun was shin­ing in the sky, and the peo­ple were at their dai­ly work.

The sto­ry itself is an admit­ted­ly minor work by the mas­ter of Amer­i­can fic­tion. In its last third, the sto­ry abrupt­ly turns into a sur­pris­ing­ly sour satire about the sad state of our legal sys­tem. As Clay­ton is get­ting marched to the gal­lows, the nar­ra­tor spots the guy Clay­ton sup­pos­ed­ly mur­dered on the tel­elec­tro­scope screen, stand­ing in a crowd for the coro­na­tion of the new “Czar” of Chi­na. Even though no crime took place, Clay­ton is still sen­tenced to hang.

“From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904” con­tains two long-run­ning themes in Twain’s work and life. One is the absur­di­ty of the courts – see, for exam­ple “The Facts in the Great Land­slide Case.”

And the oth­er is a fas­ci­na­tion with tech­nol­o­gy. In spite of his folksy image, he was, as they say now, an ear­ly adopter. He was the first in his neigh­bor­hood to get a tele­phone. He may or may not have been the first major author to use a type­writer to write a nov­el. He lost his shirt invest­ing in a Vic­to­ri­an-era start up hawk­ing an exceed­ing­ly com­plex print­ing press called the Paige Com­pos­i­tor. And he allowed him­self to be filmed by Thomas Edi­son in 1909, a year before his death.

One won­ders what he would have thought of his tel­elec­tro­scope in action.

Note: The char­ac­ter Szczepanik men­tioned above was clear­ly named after a Pol­ish inven­tor, Jan Szczepanik, who talked about cre­at­ing a “telec­tro­scope,” in the late 19th cen­tu­ry.  How­ev­er, if you read a report in The New York Times in 1898, it becomes appar­ent that Szczepanik’s “telec­tro­scope” was­n’t as vision­ary as what Twain had in mind.

via Cracked/TheTy­ee

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

Mark Twain Shirt­less in 1883 Pho­to

Mark Twain Cap­tured on Film by Thomas Edi­son in 1909. It’s the Only Known Footage of the Author.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Although J.K. Rowl­ing wrote the final book in the Har­ry Pot­ter series in 2007, she con­tin­ues to give Pot­ter fans an occa­sion­al fix, pub­lish­ing short works that add a lit­tle more col­or and detail to the Har­ry Pot­ter sto­ry. Ardent fans know that Rowl­ing wrote a short Pre­quel in 2008. Also, ear­li­er this year, she began writ­ing new sto­ries about the 2014 Quid­ditch World Cup Finals for Pot­ter­more, the web­site for all things Har­ry Pot­ter. She lat­er fol­lowed with a sto­ry that takes the form of an arti­cle pub­lished in The Dai­ly Prophet  (“Dumbledore’s Army Reunites at Quid­ditch World Cup Final”), which gives us the first glimpse of the adult Har­ry Pot­ter.

Now, on Hal­loween, we get “The Sto­ry of Dolores Jane Umbridge” — a short fic­tion­al essay that gives us a more com­plete per­son­al por­trait of the char­ac­ter that read­ers found so easy to dis­like. In the essay [SPOILER ALERT], we learn that Umbridge was, gasp, a half blood, who had demon­strat­ed a cer­tain capac­i­ty for wicked­ness at a young age: “Even at sev­en­teen, Dolores was judge­men­tal, prej­u­diced and sadis­tic, although her con­sci­en­tious atti­tude, her sac­cha­rine man­ner towards her supe­ri­ors, and the ruth­less­ness and stealth with which she took cred­it for oth­er peo­ple’s work soon gained her advance­ment.”

Rowl­ing then appends some per­son­al com­ments to the sto­ry, explain­ing the ori­gins of the Umbridge char­ac­ter. She writes:

Once, long ago, I took instruc­tion in a cer­tain skill or sub­ject (I am being vague as vague can be, for rea­sons that are about to become obvi­ous), and in doing so, came into con­tact with a teacher or instruc­tor whom I dis­liked intense­ly on sight.

The woman in ques­tion returned my antipa­thy with inter­est. Why we took against each oth­er so instant­ly, hearti­ly and (on my side, at least) irra­tional­ly, I hon­est­ly can­not say. What sticks in my mind is her pro­nounced taste for twee acces­sories. I par­tic­u­lar­ly recall a tiny lit­tle plas­tic bow slide, pale lemon in colour that she wore in her short curly hair.… [H]er ten­den­cy to wear frills where (I felt) frills had no busi­ness to be, and to car­ry under­sized hand­bags, again as though they had been bor­rowed from a child’s dress­ing-up box, jarred, I felt, with a per­son­al­i­ty that I found the reverse of sweet, inno­cent and ingen­u­ous.

To learn more about the fic­tion­al and non-fic­tion­al sides of Dolores Umbridge, read Rowl­ing’s new piece here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How J.K. Rowl­ing Plot­ted Har­ry Pot­ter with a Hand-Drawn Spread­sheet

Take Free Online Cours­es at Hog­warts: Charms, Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts & More

The Quan­tum Physics of Har­ry Pot­ter, Bro­ken Down By a Physi­cist and a Magi­cian

I rarely think back to mem­o­ries from that busy­work-inten­sive con­tain­ment unit known as Amer­i­can ele­men­tary school, but when I do, I usu­al­ly arrive at lis­ten­ing to a Ray Brad­bury sto­ry — some­thing about a far­away plan­et, some­thing about mon­soons, I can nev­er remem­ber which one — dur­ing read-aloud time. Even then, on some lev­el, I under­stood that the author of Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles (not that I yet had any idea at the time about books like Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles) wrote with the human voice in mind. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly the momen­tar­i­ly defa­mil­iar­ized voice of a teacher read­ing to a post-lunch class­room of ten-year-olds, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly the flaw­less­ly pro­nounc­ing and paus­ing, many-takes-record­ed-per-sen­tence voice of the pro­fes­sion­al audio­book nar­ra­tor (though Brad­bury’s work did pro­vide mate­r­i­al for a few pro­to-audio­books), but, per­haps, the voice of the mind. Of all Brad­bury’s tales we love to read aloud, few seem quite so effec­tive in this way as “The Veldt.”

The sto­ry first appeared, accord­ing to the web site of pub­lic radio sta­tion WNYC, in a 1950 Sat­ur­day Evening Post “with the title ‘The World the Chil­dren Made,’ which is a good descrip­tion of what goes on in this eerie tale.  It imag­ines the ‘mod­el home’ of the future, includ­ing a pro­gram­ma­ble nurs­ery that becomes the site of a pow­er strug­gle. [Fel­low spec­u­la­tive writer Neil] Gaiman says that Bradbury’s tale rais­es com­plex ques­tions: ‘Are our chil­dren our own?,’ and ‘What does tech­nol­o­gy do to them?’ ” Pub­lic Radio Inter­na­tion­al com­mis­sioned no less a speak­er than Col­bert Report and future Late Show host Stephen Col­bert — a satirist high­ly attuned to the ironies inher­ent in mankind’s visions of its own future — to read it for their “Select­ed Shorts” series, and you can hear the whole thing above.

Giv­en how much progress our pur­suit of total automa­tion and vir­tu­al stim­u­la­tion (and our par­al­lel desire to escape those con­di­tions) has made in the past 64 years, “The Veldt” has grown only more rel­e­vant. Pair it with “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Brad­bury’s oth­er famous­ly read-aloud­able sto­ry of the home of the 1950 future, for a rich­ly fun­ny and trou­bling dou­ble-fea­ture of the mind.

For anoth­er son­ic angle on the mate­r­i­al, see also our pre­vi­ous­ly-fea­tured radio adap­ta­tions of “There Will Come Soft Rains” on Dimen­son X and “The Veldt” on X Minus One — or you can hear Leonard Nimoy read both of them in the 1970s.)

Some of the read­ings list­ed above appear in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries From The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles & The Illus­trat­ed Man (1975–76)

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

X Minus One: More Clas­sic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.