Clockwork Futures by Brandy Schillace

Clockwork Futures by Brandy Schillace

Author:Brandy Schillace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2017-12-27T05:00:00+00:00


Changing the Story

For Tesla, power was life; he was born to claim it as his own. He was also born (so he writes in his autobiography) during the tumult of a violent electrical storm. It reads so much like Victor Frankenstein’s family narrative that it’s tempting to assume he modeled his own story upon it, and in fact, this wouldn’t be the first time Tesla stood accused of copying fiction. His inventions seem sprung from the pages of a nineteenth-century novel, Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, though Tesla denied needing any motivation except that of nature herself. At the age of twelve, he saw a picture of Niagara Falls. The impressive sweep, slung round in a horseshoe of thunderous and foaming cascades, sends an average six million cubic feet of water over the crestline every minute. Though a black-and-white image, the falls made a deep impression. Tesla told his uncle then that “one day” he would harness it. A pretty childhood dream, except that, in 1897, Tesla would give the inaugural speech of the Niagara Power Station. The years between would be hailed as the “war of currents,” as ready-made for fiction as any wizard’s duel: American grit, ingenuity, and bullish pride against a near-clairvoyant visionary from abroad, with his flashes of light and electrical wonders. It’s little wonder the two men appear so often in steampunk. A fictional Tesla turns up in Ralph Vaughan’s four Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft crossovers, The Adventure of the Ancient Gods (1990), Sherlock Holmes in the Dreaming Detective (1992), “The Adventure of the Laughing Moonbeast” (1992), and Sherlock Holmes and the Terror Out of Time (2002). He turns up, too, in Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel and later Christopher Nolan’s steampunk movie adaptation, The Prestige. Edison gets his mentions too. In Five Fists of Science by Matt Fraction, Tesla teams up with Mark Twain to fight a dastardly Thomas Edison and his financiers J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Tesla’s quirks are taken as rote and amplified, while Edison’s brash and bullying ways make him ready fodder for evildoing. In The Lives of Eccentrics by Hirohiko Araki, Edison is violent and cruel to his workers, while in Five Fists, he performs occult human sacrifice. The desire and dread of technological progress shows itself best when fiction and fact collide: light and life, dread tech and death. The real-life men and their real-life contest were not nearly so dark, but they’re not as straightforward either.

Tesla arrived in Paris in 1882—a city he would often describe as a wonderland—to work for Edison’s man Charles Batchelor in Ivry-sur-Seine (at Edison’s Société Industrielle). It would be some time before Tesla met Edison himself, but they were not instant enemies by a long shot. Edison teased Tesla for his manners, calling him “our Parisian”; Tesla writes that the moment was “thrilling,” but that he also received his first comeuppance: “I wanted to have my shoes shined, something I considered beneath my dignity. Edison said, ‘You will shine the shoes yourself and like it.



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