Page 50 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Earlier in their careers, some real-life twenty-first-century geoengineers
worked on heroic schemes to deflect Earth-grazing asteroids. They would surely
appreciate another of Griffith’s novels, The World Peril of 1910 (1907), in which
astronomer Gilbert Lennard discovers a comet threatening to destroy the Earth.
In the novel, American money and know-how contribute to the construction of
a great cannon built into a mine shaft. The massive shot deflects the comet so
that it does not strike the Earth.

a Comedic Western

The Eighth Wonder: Working for Marvels (1907), by William Wallace Cook, is a
humorous “geoengineering” Western that was serialized in 1907 in the pulp mag-
azine Argosy. In the badlands of North Dakota, Ira Xerxes Peck, an out-of-luck
bicycle dealer, befriends a despondent but brilliant inventor, Copernicus Jones,
who plans to corner the nation’s electricity market by turning Horseshoe Butte,
a naturally occurring iron formation, into the eighth wonder of the world, the
world’s largest electromagnet. It is to be Jones’s Archimedean lever to move the
world. “I don’t think it pays, Copernicus,” Peck observes timidly, “to tinker with
11
the machinery of the universe. . . . Not unless there’s money in it.” When the
titanic magnet is turned on, everything made of iron within a 25-mile radius—
tools, pumps, wagons, threshing machines, even a sheet-iron house—flies
through the air and adheres to the mountain. Jones is ecstatic, as in the myth of
ships imperiled by the lodestone, “ancient fables come true in modern times . . .
that’s what we call civilization and progress” (81).
Jones is more an inventor than a scientist, and his device actually fails to
attract all the electricity from across the country. Instead, it begins to alter the
seasons by deflecting the tilt of the Earth’s axis. Jones takes credit for this unfore-
seen consequence and tries to capitalize on it by making the Northern Hemi-
sphere permanently warmer: “We will corner the hot weather . . . and we’ll make
the people pay for it! . . . [W]e will select the brand of weather we want, and I
will . . . hold the Earth’s axis at that precise inclination” (171–175). Ever his con-
science, Peck reminds Jones that “tampering with the Earth’s axis, Copernicus,
brings responsibilities. We must not shut our eyes to that fact” (187).
The citizens of the world respond to Peck and Jones by insisting that tinker-
ing with the seasons is a crime against nature. The industrialists are particularly
adamant, since they made much of their money in cold weather and during
changes of seasons. Parroting the claims of climatic determinists, they argue the

StorieS of Control | 33