Evelyn Kriete

A peculiar selection. The short stories included some early SF but were mostly mild horror. Other stories were thrillers (and I'm sure Freddie Threepwood read at least one of them) and rather heavy-handed Victorian/Edwardian humour. Reviews of the novels in the anthology follow:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:
Hank Morgan, a 19th century Connecticut factory manager, gets hit on the head and wakes up in 6th century Britain under King Arthur.

Apparently this was Mark Twain's riposte to the over-romanticised 19th century view of the Middle Ages. It started off quite enjoyably but after all I found the character of the narrator rather grated in his refusal to have anything good at all to say about the society he finds -- but then maybe that's as much a reflection of my 20th/21st century viewpoint as Hank Morgan's ideas are a reflection of Mark Twain's 19th century viewpoint.

The Lost World
When the woman he loves demands he do something extraordinary, journalist Edward Malone joins an exhibition to verify Professor Challenger's claims that on an isolated plateau deep in the Amazon jungles dinosaurs have survived into the 20th century.

An enjoyable yarn. It wasn't really gripping, just pleasantly entertaining when I wasn't in the mood for anything too demanding.

A Princess of Mars
Trapped in a cave by Apaches while prospecting in Arizona after the American Civil War, John Carter succumbs to some sort of gas and wakes up on Mars.

Another rip-roaring yarn. Better than I thought it would be, though I was starting to think 'Oh do get on with it' by the time we got to Warhoon.

The Man Who Was Thursday
Gabriel Syme is an undercover policeman who is elected to the ruling council of a worldwide group of anarchists and works to foil their plan to blow up the Tsar and the President of France during the Tsar's state visit to France.

I caught on to what the twist was going to be fairly early on, though there were times when I had doubts. I did not expect the supernatural ending and I'm not sure what it means for the earlier parts of the novel or what Chesterton is saying. I will have to read it again some time in light of the ending.… (mehr)