A young penniless widow has an incredible tale for Frank Reade Junior: her late husband had found the legendary gold mine of Mazatlan, an unimaginable mountain of gold discovered in the Los Pinos Mountains of New Mexico by a lost Spanish expedition in 1592. Sworn to locate the mine and restore the widow’s fortunes, Frank will have to contend with the cruel and infamous outlaw Black Plume, iron-fisted ruler of that wilderness.
This book is an adventure story about the exploits of Frank Reade Jr. Reade is a famous inventor of steam, electrical and mechanical inventions of various kinds. He had previously completed building the greatest air-ship he had ever conceived of, and had added a crown to the glory of his great talent. A chance encounter with the wealthy Mexican Juan Zamora promises to yield great fortune to him. Zamora asks Reade to lend him his air-ship so as to effect a rescue of his young son who has been captured by the dreaded American outlaw called Captain Diavolo. And Reade agrees...
Frank Reade Jr.'s Submarine Boat; or, to the North Pole Under the Ice by Luis Senarens follows the riveting adventures of a little American hero, Frank Reade Jr. In this journey, he explores the North Pole aboard the submarine Explorer. Excerpt: "A report had gained extensive circulation that Frank Reade, Jr., of Readestown, U. S. A., had brought out a new invention. This rumor spread far and wide and created tremendous excitement. Everybody today is deeply interested in the marvelous mechanical productions of this young prince of the invention. The son of Frank Reade, himself a noted inventor, Frank Reade, Jr., came honestly by his talent."
A revealing study of the connections between nineteenth-century technological fiction and American religious faith. In Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America, Nathaniel Williams analyzes the genre of technology-themed exploration novels—dime novel adventure stories featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships, and submersibles. This genre proliferated during the same cultural moment when evolutionary science was dismantling Americans’ prevailing, biblically based understanding of human history. While their heyday occurred in the late 1800s, technocratic adventure novels like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court inspired later fiction about science and technology. Similar to the science fiction plotlines of writers like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, and anticipating the adventures of Tom Swift some decades later, these novels feature Americans using technology to visit and seize control of remote locales, a trait that has led many scholars to view them primarily as protoimperialist narratives. Their legacy, however, is more complicated. As they grew in popularity, such works became as concerned with the preservation of a fraught Anglo-Protestant American identity as they were with spreading that identity across the globe. Many of these novels frequently assert the Bible’s authority as a historical source. Collectively, such stories popularized the notion that technology and travel might essentially “prove” the Bible’s veracity—a message that continues to be deployed in contemporary debates over intelligent design, the teaching of evolution in public schools, and in reality TV shows that seek historical evidence for biblical events. Williams argues that these fictions performed significant cultural work, and he consolidates evidence from the novels themselves, as well as news articles, sermons, and other sources of the era, outlining and mapping the development of technocratic fiction.
A series of provocative essays on how the fantastic genres evolve and grow In this wide-ranging series of essays, an award-winning science fiction critic explores how the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror evolve, merge, and finally "evaporate" into new and more dynamic forms. Beginning with a discussion of how literary readers "unlearned" how to read the fantastic during the heyday of realistic fiction, Gary K. Wolfe goes on to show how the fantastic reasserted itself in popular genre literature, and how these genres themselves grew increasingly unstable in terms of both narrative form and the worlds they portray. More detailed discussions of how specific contemporary writers have promoted this evolution are followed by a final essay examining how the competing discourses have led toward an emerging synthesis of critical approaches and vocabularies. The essays cover a vast range of authors and texts, and include substantial discussions of very current fiction published within the last few years.
A fictional biography of the inventing and exploring Reade family, who travel the world and seek adventure with their helicopter airships, submarines, and robots.
With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by church leaders and educators of the time, these short, quick-moving, pocket-sized publications were also, inevitably, wildly popular with readers of all ages. This work looks at the evolution of the dime novel and at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the genre. Also discussed are related types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books. The author shows how these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought. Overall, this book is a thoughtful consideration of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature. Eight appendices provide a wealth of information, offering an annotated bibliography of dime novels and listing series books, story paper periodicals, characters, authors and their pseudonyms, and more. A reference section, index and illustrations are all included.
