Friday, September 11, 2009

A "Lost" Lost Race serial


The lost race novel set in Australia had a particular vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Probably the best known example is Erle Cox's science fiction classic, Out of the Silence (1919), but well known authors of weird and fantasy fiction like Rosa Praed and Ernest Favenc also dabbled in the genre. A particularly bizarre example is Austyn Granville's The Fallen Race (1892), about a strange spheroidal race evidently descended from kangaroo-human hybrids.
The Australian author of colonial adventures, William Sylvester Walker (1846-1926), wrote a lost race novel called The Silver Queen (1908), which has attracted some academic attention in recent years. Walker, who often wrote under the pen name "Coo-ee", was the nephew of the great colonial writer, "Rolf Boldrewood", who wrote Robbery Under Arms (1888). Late in life Walker moved to Scotland and died at Oban in Argyllshire in 1926.
His last work appears to have been a lost race novel that was published in The Queenslander in 1924-25 with the unlikely title of Koi; or, The Thing Without any Bones. It traces the efforts of an Australian adventurer and bushman, Mark Payton, and his love interest, the rich, beautiful and ambitious Brenda Sardrou, to foil the machinations of the evil German Jew named Solomons, an international spy, self-made millionaire and dabbler in the occult. Solomons is the direct descendant of Ben Suleiman, who two thousand years earlier led an expedition out of Mesopotamia to northern Australia where he established a new civilisation based on Egyptian magical beliefs. Koi is the Soul Shadow, a disembodied spirit that attaches itself to a living person and only departs during sleep, sickness and death to wander in other places - aboriginal descendants of the ancient race are accompanied and aided by their Koi. Solomons plans to return to northern Australia and set himself up as ruler of the revived kingdom - a European invasion of the Commonwealth, no less! Heady stuff: a spectacularly over-the-top fantasy.

6 comments:

  1. Alstublieft,

    I am interested in communicating a few things with Mr. Theo Paijmans.

    I am almost done with a documentary I am producing about actual Remnant Nazis (not Neo-Nazis), their efforts to undermine Liberal and Democratic societies since the failure of the Third Reich to conquer Europe (and the rest of the World) by so-called conventional military means.

    I have studied many sources, including Uki Goni's (Go'ny'i)excellent research on Nazis in South America (esp. in Argentina), and have a few interesting observations and some questions for which your feedback would be much appreciated.

    Just so you may know: I am ethnically Jewish, but I am not religious (a bit Spiritual, but certainly opposed to all pseudo-spiritual attitudes/worldviews, including those of Liszt, Blavatsky and others). So this is not about any effort to glorify Nazis or even serve the sick agenda of historical revisionists and dangerous Holocaust-deniers...quite the contrary! Though this should not be an issue between scholars: my personal political views are Liberal, Social Democratic, Humanistic and Environmentalistic. My heros are M.K. Gandhi, A. Einstein, Maria Montessori, Isaac Asimov, Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, King Charles II of England, George Orwell, Orson Welles, Antoine de Saint-Exupery etc... in effect people who sought to make the world much more humane and civilized.

    Though I directed a small NGO in Washington, DC, known as The Infinity Society, I had to close the office in DC during the final year of the Bush Administration (after several sinister incidents by the inner Cabal of Neo-Con elitists to harm me). I currently reside in London (UK) and I am busy with various things, including completing my documentary work on what I call Remnant Nazis.

    I hope to hear from you sooner than later...

    I may be reached herein or through my current Free Advice Man website (at yola.com).

    You seem to be very well informed and your research methodology is definitely at the highest professional standards.

    In case you're over here in London any time we might meet.

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  2. Dear Free Advice Man,

    If there was anything philosophically substantive and meaningful about National Socialism it was far older then the Nazi Party and their mere ten years or so in power. They were not the first to draw from that ancient weltanschauung of Western societies. You seem to think that it was unique to them. England and America are not much different, historically. Personages like Charles Lindbergh and D.H. Lawrence show this. True the Nazis actualized it in a remarkably pure and unadulterated form, vulgarly if you like. But any of the actual British King’s (or Queens) and the Founding Fathers of America would not have disagreed with most of the cultural presuppositions of Adolf Hitler…Those occult (hidden) tendencies, as you are a self-described “spiritual” man…Remain today, they were there long before the Nazis, and they will still be here when man is extinct…That tradition forms the core of the so-called Western Canon, in fact. Hardly a remnant...I notice a singular dearth of artistic personalities in your list of so-called heroes. They are mostly third-world ascetics and technical people who are humanly irrelevant…The only two artists you include are Orson Welles and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, two Fascist sympathizers…Perhaps you recognize the deeply atavistic, un-democratic nature of the arts and sexuality, and so like many left-wing people you try to avoid that glaring deficiency in your thinking.

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  3. C.S. Lewis said the Nazis took mythology seriously and like certain literary critics who take literature “seriously” they lose the real meaning and pleasure that mythology and literature can give us.

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  4. Until the time of the Romantics - nobody ever suggested that literature and the arts were an end in themselves. It was only in the nineteenth century that we became aware of the full dignity of art. We began to 'take it seriously' as the Nazis take mythology seriously. But the result seems to be a dislocation of the aesthetic life in which little is left us but high-minded works which fewer and fewer people want to read or see, and 'popular' works of which both those who make them and those who enjoy them are half ashamed. Just like the Nazis, by valuing too highly a real, but subordinate good, we have come near to losing that good itself. What is the first thing? The only reply I can offer here is that if we do not know, then the first, and only truly practical thing, is to set about finding out.

    C.S. Lewis, June 1942.

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  5. How does someone publish a fantasy entitled "Koi; or, The Thing Without any Bones", and it doesn't see a reprint anywhere ?

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  6. Hi,

    Happy to announce that we've published Koi; or, The Thing Without Any Bones in our Lost Worlds Australia Kindle Anthology. The full list of works includes:

    Oo-a-deen, or, The Mysteries of the Interior Unveiled, Anonymous, 1847 (First Kindle Edition)
    The Lost Explorer by James Francis Hogan, 1890 (First Kindle Edition)
    The Golden Lake by W Carlton Dawe, 1891 (First Kindle Edition)
    The Fallen Race by Austyn Granville,1892 (First Kindle Edition)
    A Haunt of the Jinkarras by Ernest Favenc, 1894 (First Kindle Edition)
    The Secret of the Australian Desert by Ernest Favenc, 1896 (First Kindle Edition)
    Marooned on Australia by Ernest Favenc, 1896 (First Kindle Edition)
    An Australian Bush Track by John David Hennessey, 1896
    The Adventure of the Broad Arrow by Morley Roberts, 1897 (First Kindle Edition)
    The Last Lemurian by George Firth Scott, 1898
    Eureka by Owen Hall, 1899 (First Kindle Edition)
    Fugitive Anne by Rosa Campbell Praed, 1902
    The Lost Explorers by Alexander MacDonald, 1906
    The Silver Queen by William Sylvester Walker, 1908 (First Kindle Edition)
    Out of the Silence by Erle Stanley Cox, 1919 (The original edition, not the text available freely online)
    Koi: or The Thing Without Any Bones, William Sylvester Walker, 1924 (First Kindle Edition)

    You can read sample chapters of the novels in the collection below:
    https://www.rohpress.com/masterworks_lost_worlds_australia.html

    ReplyDelete