Here is my Goodreads review of a new book that will be of interest to those interested in life after death, old science fiction, or Spiritualism. I cyberly met the editor, whose PhD project this was, through a weird orchestration of events last winter, and, being a fellow writer, offered to review the book. It’s now available on Barnes and Nobel, but here is the text of my review:
The heading, “Fake News from Futures Past,” is from the Foreword. The Acknowledgements of all that it took to compile the stories of Robert Duncan Milne, and the detailed Introduction to the collection of stories themselves, this massive treasury of stories from the time of the first blossoming of genre science fiction fifty years before it was called that, gives us a window back into a time when science and spirituality were not at such odds as they are for most people today.
I was a participant for two decades in a USA based Spiritualist church, and even briefly a member. Having had a series of mystical experiences in 1996, including a materialization event that was pretty scary, the Independent Spiritualist Church, combining belief in science and spirit, became a welcoming community for me. Yet nobody mentioned science fiction. We knew about the Fox sisters, but not Robert Duncan Milne. By the time I was attending, the attention paid to science was mostly perfunctory and declaratory, claiming that Spiritualist seances offered irrefutable scientific proof of the world of spirit. The actual members of the congregations had little to no interest in actually gaining any understanding of scientific facts or reasoning. This was disappointing to me, as a working engineering consultant. But reading the introduction to the book provides lots of historical context to what was happening in the American culture as technology started battering older ways of life.
I have been a lifelong lover of science fiction, and especially older science fiction. As Scottish sci fi writer Ken MacLeod writes in the Foreword, the writing practice of the time, which continued in full strength up through John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), was to include “fake news” and other “fake” (fantasy, fictional) references to provide the background for the stories. I miss this style of storytelling, and was happy to get a drink of it in the stories I read for this review. Nowadays, writers of all genres are told to “show, not tell” what is going on. That’s annoying for me. If I wanted them to show me everything, I would watch a movie, not read a book.
Here are some thoughts on a few of the stories, written in a time of skeptics, but not a dogmatically skeptical population at large. Science was new, science was interesting, science seemed to provide credibility to Spiritualism, when compared to the old “revealed truth” faiths.
The Silent Witness: What a great story. Anyone working as an expert witness over the last 30 years will be familiar with the arguments about whether digitally captured photos, rather than film, could be presented as evidence. AI is reopening those arguments again. Here we have the latest scientific gadget of the 19th century, an experimental recording and playing phonograph, that becomes the silent witness and saves the innocent accused.
HOT NEWS! An AI video was just allowed in court to let a murder victim speak.
The Eidoloscope: The editors note that this story is considered one of Milne’s greatest works. While he was not the only speculative writer describing the possibility of travel to the past, they conclude that he likely picked the idea up from what we now might call “the thought field,” rather than from any of the other writers exploring this idea. In the story, we learn that the walls really do have eyes, or at least the ability to see and record, even if they need the help of Milne’s character’s invention to let them retell what they’ve seen. Milne is absolutely not giving mere lip-service to science. He explains in clear prose that any willing lay-person may readily understand, the concepts of how his character’s time machine works. It’s simple cause and effect, like any other science, even if it appears to bring us recordings of ghosts rather than embodied beings. The timing is such that the embodied beings whose likenesses are brought before the witnesses are still remembered and recognized by current living humans, when they have the chance to see the walls emit their memories.
The editors show what a visionary Milne was, in addition to being a literary and scientific genius. He understood, brought to life, and warned us about the ethical issues that are usually only revealed after extensive use and reliance on new technologies.
It’s also interesting that Milne, likely in line with the word usage of the day, calls out the new technological gadgets as “art.” The sci-fi gadgets were made by individuals using concepts and tinkering skills, rather than a methodological scientific process. Of course, as the Rosicrucians and modern physicists alike tell us today, it’s all about harmonization of vibrations. Who needs a team and a big budget? Besides, the inventor meets the skepticism of the other character with irrefutable 18th century thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed! It is merely changed from one form to another. Thus any energy thing that has ever experienced energy in its neighborhood, sits ready, in proper circumstances, to disgorge that energy in form identical to that in which it was absorbed. The local “Akashic Record” is held in every solid object. Anything that happened once is eternal. We don’t even need the mysterium of quantum physics!
A New Palingenesis: Milne starts out by noting that the ideals of Spiritualism are pure, and uplifting to those who live according to a belief in an afterlife, a point also made by the founder of another modern religion, the Bahai. Yet, he acknowledges the dogmatic blocks that many will have in following his tale. This is obviously still a problem today for many different “occult” phenomena.
This story is particularly beautifully written. The paragraph describing the caring doctor’s action to comfort his dying wife lets us imagine being present in the room with the narrator, the doctor and his wife. It covers all the things open minded people wonder about. “While noting the tender care and consideration with which the doctor arranged the cushions and performed those hundred little nameless offices, which only affection dictates, for his invalid wife, I could not help wondering, as so many more have fruitlessly done, at the mysterious provision which does not permit us to know whether the emotions and affections are merely the chance mechanism of a moment, or enduring and imperishable entities which have an infinitely more lasting existence than the forms of matter with which they are now associated.”
Is love forever, even if the body is not? Read the story and come to your own conclusion!