“[Milne’s] cryogenics story, ‘Ten Thousand Years in Ice’, in which a survivor from an ancient advanced civilisation is revived in the present, unintentionally became one of science fiction’s great literary hoaxes”
Robert Duncan Milne (1844–1899) was born #OTD, 7 June, in Cupar, Fife. He emigrated to the USA & became America’s first full-time writer of #sciencefiction
Robert Duncan Milne’s short story “Ten Thousand Years in Ice” – published in ARGONAUT STORIES (San Francisco: Payot, Upham & Co., 1906) – is online via @gutenberg_org
If that’s whetted your appetite, a new critical edition of Robert Duncan Milne’s work, edited by Keith Williams & Ari Brin & with a foreword by Ken MacLeod, is due to be published in January 2025 by Bloomsbury
“I was in love with the book. In pure, ignorant defiance of the decree of the Iowa Writing School that controls almost all modern fiction, Galt tells without showing.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin discusses John Galt’s ANNALS OF THE PARISH
English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and short story writer E. F. Benson died #OTD in 1940. Benson was a precocious and prolific writer. His first book was Sketches from Marlborough, published while he was a student. He started his novel-writing career with the fashionably controversial Dodo. The Mapp and Lucia series, written relatively late in his career, consists of six novels and two short stories. via @wikipedia
Huge fan of the Mapp & Lucia series. I even made the pilgrimage to Rye, an almost perfect match for Tilling in the novels, where Benson lived while writing them. Specific places were repurposed for the narrative, so you can read the books and accurately follow in the footsteps of the characters.
I think of Mapp & Lucia as two dinosaurs locked in an epic struggle for dominance, while constrained by the social rules of the 1930s. @bookstodon
James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was born #OTD, 13 Feb. Author of SUNSET SONG – & many other titles from #HistoricalFiction to #ScienceFiction – he is one of the most important #Scottish writers of the #20thcentury
Regina Erich compares the original #German#translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A SCOTS QUAIR trilogy published in the #GDR between 1970 & 1986, with its more recent republication in a unified Germany
“When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus & unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast.”
Ian Campbell discusses the vivid realisation of a slave revolt in Mitchell’s SPARTACUS (1933)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s #shortstory “The Bottle Imp” was first published (in English) #OTD, 8 Feb 1891, in the New York Herald. It was originally published in #Samoan translation as “O le Fagu Aitu” in the missionary magazine O le sulu Samoa (The Samoan Torch)
“To pick up a pen is to place oneself outside the community in the act of being self-conscious about it. As Burns discovered, it is not really possible to write about community and remain uncompromised within it.”
—read Dorothy McMillan’s essay “Rural Realism”, on George Douglas Brown’s THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS
Looking back on his early life in Aberdeen, Byron declared that he was ‘half a Scot by birth, & bred/A whole one’. To what extent should we privilege such a claim? In what ways did Byron engage with a Scottish poetic heritage, if at all?
—Dr Daniel Cook, “Byron’s Scottish Poetry”, The Byron Journal 50/1, 2022 (subscription/institutional access required)
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"Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh;
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky."
Now the Day Is Over
Anglican priest, hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist Sabine Baring-Gould died #OTD in 1924.
He is remembered particularly as a writer of hymns, the best-known being "Onward, Christian Soldiers", and "Now the Day Is Over". He also translated the carols "Gabriel's Message", & "Sing Lullaby" from Basque to English.
"To trace the unfamiliar to the familiar... is to understand."
Incredible Adventures
Algernon Henry Blackwood British writer of tales of mystery and the supernatural died #OTD in 1951. His two best-known stories are probably "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". Though Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. via @wikipedia
Dr Craig Lamont looks at how Robert Louis Stevenson & his literary creations have been – & continue to be – remembered & memorialised, in Scotland & around the world
#OTD in 1845, 250 veterans of the Battle of Baltimore were honored in Washington DC on the battle’s
31 st anniversary – and they took time to honor their wartime First Lady.
(1)
(2)
The Weekly National Intelligencer reported that, after marching from the railroad depot to the White
House to meet President James K. Polk, the “Old Defenders of Baltimore ... marched in admirable order
to the residence of the venerable Mrs. Madison, where they saluted that much-respected lady, as she
stood on her front steps, attended by the Mayor and several of her friends in the city.”
(3)
Dolley Madison,
by then 77 years old, had become an icon of an earlier time in American history.
William Elwell, 1848 portrait of Dolley Madison, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Robin Jenkins (1912–2005), one of Scotland’s most prolific & acclaimed 20th-century novelists, was born #OTD, 11 Sept. In this paper from 2012, Dr Linden Bicket argues that Jenkins anticipates the urban realist fictions of Galloway, Kelman & Welsh
A birthday 🧵 for Violet Jacob (1863–1946) – poet, novelist, short story writer, & key figure in the 20th-century Scottish renaissance & #Scots language revival – born #OTD, 1 September
John Buchan called FLEMINGTON – Violet Jacob’s novel of the 1745 #Jacobite uprising – “the best Scots romantic novel since The Master of Ballantrae”, & The List magazine chose it as one of their Best 100 Scottish Books of All Time
#OTD 201 yrs ago, #JamesMadison wrote to W. T. Barry, praising the Kentucky legislature for appropriating funds for general #education, which Madison saw as essential for good government. “We the People” needed a good education in order to govern ourselves.