Page 47 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

William Douglas o’Connor’s “The Brazen Android” (1891), in which purple
prose serves to invoke the purple skies of medieval London after a thunder-
storm, with the terse elegance of a much greater apocalypse experienced by
Noah and his family and recorded in Genesis 7:12: “It rained for forty days and
forty nights.”

The Wreck of the South Pole

In The Wreck of the South Pole, or the Great Dissembler (1899), by Charles Curtz
Hahn, protagonist George Wilding finds himself shipwrecked and stranded in
low southern latitudes on a continent of ice. Befriended and guided by what
he takes to be mysterious spirits, Wilding makes his way south to warmer cli-
mates, to a great city inhabited by Theosophists, who, by practicing mind read-
ing and astral projection, seek to control nature with their minds. There, the
weather bureau does not predict the weather—it uses mental prowess to con-
trol it: “Their duty is to decide upon the proper kind of weather for certain
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seasons and days and then see that the country has it.” It is a land without
droughts or damaging winds. There the police do not arrest criminals—they
track and detain suspects who have been placed under suspicion by mind-read-
ing surveillance.
The Great Dissembler, the most advanced Theosophist sage, has mastered a
technique for keeping others from reading his mind: “I cultivated the habit of
jumbling up my thoughts in the worst mess you could imagine” so no one could
fasten on them (67–68). It is he who is both the chief geoengineer and the
greatest general. In order to defeat the revolutionary forces threatening his city,
the Great Dissembler decides to wrench the South Pole suddenly from its axis
to destroy the enemy with a tidal wave and “bring back the old order of things”
(72). When he executes this plan, all the climatic zones of the world will change
dramatically. Cyclones, tornadoes, and earthquakes will increase in both num-
ber and intensity until the temperate latitudes merge into the tropics. With the
wreck of the South Pole (a day later than planned, possibly due to the confused
thinking of the Great Dissembler) comes an unexpected rift in the surrounding
ice walls and unintended consequences described only as “days of terror and suf-
fering” (74). The story ends here abruptly, with no description of the fate of the
world but with the assurance that George Wilding, again stranded in a remote
and icy cove but cared for and comforted by the astral bodies of his friends, will
soon be reunited with them.

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