Hey kids, welcome back to The You-Know-What! Just two more days until the first Mythoi trade hits the general consumer market, so go pre-order immediately.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Quantum Theory and ways fiction writers use it for stories, and one of those ways was time travel. This got me thinking about the number of different time-travel novels I’ve enjoyed, and so I thought I’d take The Book Report on its own journey through time, examining time travel literature.

The Long Sleep
Perhaps the earliest time-travel story occurs in the 4th century Hindu script of the Mahabharatha, concerning King Revaita. He travels to Brahma to ask who among the candidates would be a worthy suitor for his daughter, to which Brahma replies that time runs differently on each plain of existence and while the King was making his request many ages have passed on earth.
Early time-travel stories have much in common with this story, where the main character falls asleep (such as in Washington Irving’s 1819 story Rip Van Winkle) or visits a magical realm and when they awake or return they find that many years have passed. One early example is Urashima Tarō, an 8th century Japanese legend about a fisherman who rescues a turtle and as a reward is allowed to visit the Palace of the Dragon God under the sea. When he returns to his village three days later, he finds that three centuries have passed.
What nearly all of these early time-travel stories have in common is the idea that time can move faster, allowing the character to view or visit (or be stranded) in the future. One of the first examples of a time traveler going backwards in time is Mark Twain’s 1895 satire A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But even then, the main character goes through time by a blow to the head.

Rise of the Machines
The first example of a character using a machine to travel through time is in a story by H.G. Wells, but it wasn’t in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. Seven years earlier, he wrote a serialized story called The Chronic Argonauts. The characters mention the different years they traveled to, but they don’t offer any detailed accounts of what happened on their adventures. Wells’ popular novel The Time Machine holds that distinction. The concept of a time machine remains popular to this day.

A Couple of Places to Tie A Boat
The main issue most time travel stories have to get around is the paradox. It is called the Grandfather Paradox, first proposed by science fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book The Imprudent Traveller. Here’s how it works: “if one goes backwards in time and kills one of their ancestors before he had children, the traveller cannot exist and therefore cannot kill the ancestor.”

Time Travel novels come up with several different ways to avoid the Grandfather Paradox. One way is through the many-universe theory of quantum mechanics, which I briefly described when I examined Crichton’s Timeline.
Another way to deal with the Grandfather Paradox is through a Destruction Resolution. One of the most well known cases would be in the movie Back To The Future, where (Spoiler) Marty McFly starts to disappear because his mother fell in love with him instead of his father. Most stories that deal with a Destruction Resolution work to prevent it. In Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, Orson Scott Card writes of a situation where a Destruction Resolution might be embraced. I generally enjoy most things Card writes, and this novel is no exception. It’s a great examination of the mistakes humans made in discovering the Americas, and a lovely fantasy of how to prevent it.
A final way to deal with the Grandfather Paradox is by strict adherence to the Novikov Principle, employed to great effect in The Time Traveler’s Wife, published in 2003 by Audrey Niffenegger. The Novikov self-consistency principle was developed in the mid-1980’s by Russian scientist Igor Novikov, and asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to change the past in any way, then the probability of that even occurring is zero. What this means is that our history is a fixed timeline. Everything that happened did so either because the time-traveler failed or was never there. You can’t go back and stop the Titanic from sinking because it already sank. Science fiction author John Varley proposed an acceptable way to deal with that problem in his 1983 novel Millennium (which became the 1989 film of the same name), where passengers of a plane that was doomed to crash were saved by bringing them to the future and replacing them with copied duplicates to be found in the crash debris. Since there was no deviation from the fixed timeline, ie. a plane crashed and there were no survivors, there was no paradox.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey through Thyme. Give the books I mentioned a read, they are all great fun.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Howdy folks! Welcome back to The Book Report.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about two books featuring previously unpublished work by Mark Twain, and Sgt. Angle pointed out that Mark Twain wrote a book titled Is Shakespeare Dead? You see, Twain was an avid Baconist — that is, Mark Twain was one member of a group who believed Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.

Actually, there are five popular theories about who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I thought it would make for an interesting author’s spotlight to examine the five theories in closer detail.

1. Baconian Theory
The first goal any Baconist needs to have is to discredit Shakespeare’s learning. Shakespeare’s father was a glove-maker in the relatively poor town of Stratford. How could he have been able to afford to provide the education concerning law, politics, religion, and mythology that so inundates all of Shakespeare’s work? Additionally, any hard copies of his plays (such as the First Folio) were published posthumously, so there isn’t any tangible evidence that Shakespeare actually wrote them. In fact, so little about Shakespeare’s life in known, most biographies about his life ends up being mostly conjecture.
Once enough doubt concerning Shakespeare as a credible author has been raised, it then falls on the Baconist to offer his substitute: Francis Bacon. Bacon has become known as the father of inductive reasoning (the scientific method). He was a philosopher and statesman, poet, and avid follower of theater. In 1576, Bacon entered Gray’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court by which a person may be able to practice law in England, and it is at Gray’s Inn that the first bit of evidence for Bacon arises.

On December 28th, 1594, during Innocent’s Day revels “a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was performed by the Players…” Bacon was at Gray’s Inn during this time and several accounts show him to be involved with the Gray’s Inn Players. Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors was written by this time, but there is evidence that Shakespeare and his troop of actors were performing at Whitehall that evening. The plot of The Comedy of Errors takes plot points from two of Plautus’s plays, most notably his Menaechmi, where a pair of identical twins who were separated at birth show up at the same town and are confused for each other by the townsfolk.

The second bit of evidence is that many scholars believe Shakespeare’s The Tempest was inspired by a letter from William Strachey titled True Reportory sent to the Virgina Company from the Virgina colony in 1610, about a year before The Tempest’s first performance. Baconists argue that True Reportory’s viewing was restricted to the Virgina Council, of whom Bacon was a member. The Council released True Declaration in November of 1610 as a piece of propaganda, relying heavily on information in True Reportory, in order to counteract any harsh criticism from returning colonists. It is generally agreed that Bacon was the author of True Declaration, and since Shakespeare couldn’t have seen a copy of Strachey’s letter, Baconists argue only someone on the Virginia Council must have written The Tempest, with Bacon as the likely choice.

Because of Bacon’s work in government, he had access to many government ciphers, and indeed, created one of his own. Many Baconists believe that Francis Bacon included ciphers in Shakespeare’s plays proving he was the true author. Additionally, in Love’s Labours Lost, once character mentions the word “Honorificabilitudinitatibus”, which is the Latin plural of the word, meaning “the state of being able to achieve honors.” Baconists believe the word is used as an anagram for the Latin phrase “hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi”, which translates to “these plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.“

Ultimately, the problem with Baconian Theory is that it relies too heavily on conspiracy theory.
While it is possible that Bacon wrote The Comedy of Errors, a comedy of errors is also a well known genre of comedy, and there is no indication that the play performed at Gray’s Inn is the same play with Shakespeare listed as the author. And although Shakespeare may have never seen Strachey’s letter to the Virginia Company, he certainly would have read their propaganda piece True Declaration. And in 1970, satirist John Sladek showed that “honorificabilitudinitatibus” could also be an anagram showing that Ben Johnson wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
Bacon’s writings already show a keen intellect, vast education, and a willingness to write it all down. If he wrote the plays, why hide behind the name of someone else? And if it were to be shown that Shakespeare and Lord Bacon had a close working relationship, it can just as easily be supposed that Shakespeare was looking for scientific or legal clarification for his own writing as suppose Bacon is handing off sheets of his own plays to Shakespeare.
Baconists have come up with a reason for Bacon using Shakespeare as a front, but it involves a huge conspiracy with nothing in the way of proof. As a result, most Elizabethan and Shakespearean scholars reject Baconian theory as, more or less, a 19th century superstition.

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Whew. When I set out to write about the different Shakespearean theories, I knew it’d be a fairly long post, but not the epic one it’s turning out to be. Thanks for getting through this much with me. What I thought I’d do is break this post up into three parts, so part two will cover the Marlowian, Elizabethan, and Oxfordian theories and part three will finish it off with the Stratfordian theory.

In the meantime, pick up a preorder of Mythoi: Birth, and I’ll see you next week.

Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hi, kids! Welcome back the The Book Report.

He was credited as publishing the first Great American Novel. Earnest Hemingway, in fact, once said of that book that “all modern American literature comes from [it].” He was as famous for his humor as his satire, called “the greatest humorist of his age.” His name was Samuel L. Clemens, and he wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain.

By the time of his death, more than fifty novels and essays were published by Twain. You’ve probably read a few of them. But Mark Twain wrote many articles and gave many speeches that never appeared in a novel collection, and a group of editors formed The Mark Twain Project to track them down. One result of their hunt is Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living: A handbook for The Damned Human Race, published in 2004. Another book worth taking a look at is The Bible According to Mark Twain, published in 1995.

Helpful Hints is a bunch of letters, anecdotes, newspaper articles, and short stories on topics ranging from the telephone to advice for burglars and traveling salesmen. Many of the letters and anecdotes had never been published before. Some of the other entries are rare finds receiving only their second printing.
What the book really offers, however, is a glimpse into the Clemens household. The humor is all there, of course, but you also get a sense of the man. Beyond the satire and moralizing was a man who smoked, swore, laughed, loved, and endured the same problems we all endure. It’s rare to find a book about an author that does what Helpful Hints does for Mark Twain.

Collected from four decades of writing, The Bible According to Mark Twain takes a humorous approach to the Bible. Often his satire will point out problems or inconsistencies he sees with the book, but the stories never fail to tickle the funny bone. One of my favorites is “The Diaries of Adam and Eve”, hilarious personal accounts of Eden, the Fall, and of being the first two lovers in the Universe.
Even amidst all the hilarity, however, are issues and ideas that Twain himself acknowledged as being heretical. Some of the stories were not published until 1962, when his daughter Clara finally allowed some stories to print.

What these two books offer a reader is some material from one of America’s greatest authors that many people have never read before. I highly recommend these books for anyone who enjoyed anything Mark Twain ever wrote.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey kids, it’s Akatzen with another Book Report for you!

Today I want to talk about a particular device authors use when they wish to hide or mask their identity for any of a variety of reasons: the pseudonym.

Pseudonym: n, SU-doh-nim. A false name. (Derived from the Greek, pseudonymon)

Sometimes an author uses a pseudonym to separate their personal life from their work. Sometimes, a pseudonym is created because more than one author worked on the book, such as the detective novelist Ellery Queen, actually authored by two cousins: Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky. Their work covered 42 years of detective writing, heavily influencing the genre. The cousins also wrote four novels about detective Drury Lane using the pseudonym Barnaby Ross.
A group of 20th Century mathematicians created the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki to publish their work as a collective.

Two of the most famous pseudonyms, or pen names, are Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll (covering for the identities of Samuel Clemens and mathematician Charles Dodgson, respectively)
Charlotte Bronte originally published Jane Eyre (and also Shirley) under the pseudonym Currer Belle. Her sister Emily originally published Wuthering Heights under the name of Ellis Belle. Many of their characters were inspired by neighbors, and so they published under the pseudonyms to avoid embarrassing them.

One popular French author, Romain Gary, started publishing books under the name Emile Ajar to see if people liked his books because they were good or because he was popular. Turns out they liked his books no matter who was writing them.

Who else uses pseudonyms?
Stephen King published his early non-horror novels as Richard Bachman because he wasn’t sure readers would accept his break from genre.
Popular storyteller O. Henry was a pseudonym used by William Sydney Porter.
Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility using “A Lady” as the author.
Eric Arthur Blair is more recognizable as George Orwell.
Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum published as Ayn Rand.
Fantasy author Robert Jordan was the pen name of James Oliver Rigney, Jr. He also wrote under the names Reagan O’Neal and Jackson O’Reilly.
And, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, when Dave Eggers writes with his brother Christopher, they use the names Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey

And, I’m sure you’ve noticed one or two of the writers on Semantink use pseudonyms.

Pseudonymitry is a time-honored practice, and while a reader may sometimes wonder, “who are you, really?” most often the mystery is part of the appeal.