A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  He went into a shop to buy some tobacco, and the shopkeeper guessed from his accent that he was a returned Moon-migrant. ‘Have you just come back to the old sod, sir? I’d say things have changed quite a bit since you left.’

  Seán replied that it seemed to him that the place still looked like the Old Country, and that was how he preferred it. The shopkeeper laughed, and gave Seán a strange look.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘are you by any chance the son of Pádraig Murphy of the Boats?’

  ‘Indeed I am, without a doubt,’ Seán said, with sparks of joy in his eyes. ‘Did you know my father?’

  ‘I can’t say that I did,’ the shopkeeper said, ‘but I’ve seen his picture – a picture of the greatest hurler that was ever in this area; no sooner did I see you than I remembered him.’

  Seán went to a hotel and asked to book a room for the night; he was not there long, however, before a newspaper reporter approached him, looking for his comments for an article to be called ‘There’s No Place Like Home’.

  ‘Most young Irish men and women are emigrating to Luna, or Mars or Venus,’ the reporter said. ‘It’s an awful shame!’

  ‘It probably is,’ Seán said, ‘but sense comes with age. Can’t you see that sense came to me, and I returned?’

  The following day was a wet one, but Seán went out to see the village anyway. Before long, though, he felt the cold starting to hurt him, and his cough was getting worse. He returned to the hotel and asked the maid to have an old-fashioned fire lit in his room.

  ‘A fine turf fire,’ he said, half-smiling. ‘There’s no turf on the Moon, you know.’

  The maid found it odd that anyone would ask for a fire to be lit – especially in the middle of the summer. The age of fires in fireplaces was over; for a long time, central heating had been provided by atomic power. However, plenty of hotels kept their old fireplaces, on the off-chance that guests might enjoy them. In any case, she did as she was asked, and Seán kept his coat on until all the turf in the fireplace was ablaze.

  He sat beside the fire, and he started to think of Hans and Irma. He had promised them that he would send a letter before long, and he felt now that he should fulfil his promise without any further delay. He would enjoy telling them how much he loved being back in his native land. He gathered a pen and paper, but no sooner had he done so than he lost all desire to write.

  ‘Yerra, it’s hard for me at the moment. I’m still tired from the voyage; it’d be better to wait until I’m feeling like myself again.’

  The following day, he felt strange pains in his bones. This worried him, because he could not remember ever having pains like that before. He went to a doctor, and the diagnosis was not difficult to reach.

  ‘Neuralgia, without a doubt,’ the doctor said. ‘It happens to everyone who returns to Ireland after a long time spent on Luna – and you’re going to suffer with it as long as you’re here.’

  Seán was shocked. ‘Hah? What are you saying, Doctor? Surely you can’t be saying that there’s no cure for it? I have plenty money, and I can pay for the finest treatment available.’

  The doctor shook his head and smirked. He knew well that the likes of Seán believed that there was no cure that money could not buy; even though it was difficult for him, once again he said that Seán could not hope to be free of his neuralgia as long as he was living on this planet. He was right, and that much became painfully clear to Seán after he had stayed in the hotel for a couple of months. In all that time, he was not able to find a new home for himself; nor was he able to write anything to Hans.

  The first week of August was very wet, and cold with it.

  ‘It’ll be a fine story in another few months!’ Seán said to himself one day, as the cold was chilling him to the marrow. He went to bed early that night, and he arose early the following morning. While he was sitting at the breakfast table, the maid told him that she would light the fire in his room as soon as she was able.

  ‘Yerra, don’t bother with the fire, love,’ he said. ‘I’ll be leaving ye today. Bring me my bill, please.’

  The maid did as she was asked, and brought Seán his bill. He gave her a hundred Lunar dollars for herself, and she was extremely grateful for it.

  ‘I’m … I’m getting married next month,’ she said, ‘and this will be a great help.’

  ‘Good! Well, may God send good fortune to you and your beloved!’

  Shortly after that, he went back to Dublin, and began the journey back to Luna.

  When Seán Murphy reached Luna City, he quickly went back to his old neighbourhood. Hans saw him approach, and was clearly amazed at the sight of him.

  ‘You’re back, Seán,’ he said, as casually as if he had last spoken to him an hour ago.

  ‘I am, Hans,’ said Seán. ‘You were thinking that I’d return, and you were right. There’s no place like home!’

  About the Authors

  JANE BARLOW (1856–1917) was born in Dublin. She wrote under a couple of different pseudonyms, most notably Felix Ryark and Antares Skorpios, the latter of which she shared with her father, the Reverend James William Barlow, Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin. As Felix Ryark, she published A Strange Land (1908), a ‘lost world’ story which is of some interest from a speculative fiction standpoint.

  FRANCES POWER COBBE (1822–1904) was born in Dublin, the daughter of the prominent landowning Cobbe family. An outspoken social reformer, she campaigned for women’s suffrage and published numerous treatises on the subjection of women, and she is also remembered for her fierce opposition to vivisection and her advocacy of animal rights; she was a founder of the National Anti-Vivisection Society and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. Cobbe was a regular correspondent with Charles Darwin, and wrote extensively on the moral implications of his theory of evolution. She is buried beside her partner Mary Lloyd in the cemetery of St Illtyd’s Church in Gwynedd, Wales.

  CLOTILDE (‘CLO’) GRAVES (1863–1932) was born in Buttevant, Co. Cork, and published her first novel at the age of forty-six, under the pseudonym ‘Richard Dehan’. Prior to this, she enjoyed considerable success as a playwright under her own name, having also briefly worked as a freelance journalist and a cartoonist. Despite her fervent Catholicism, she presented herself in an unconventional manner for her time, cutting her hair short, smoking in public and wearing masculine clothes. During her lifetime, she was perhaps best known for her controversial 1911 novel The Dop Doctor, which lionised the British side of the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

  MARGARET WOLFE HUNGERFORD (1855–1897) was born in Rosscarbery, Co. Cork, and later married a Dublin solicitor. Her first novel was written to support herself and her three young children following the sudden death of her husband. After becoming a professional author, she wrote under the pseudonym of The Duchess, and sometimes as Mrs Hungerford. She is perhaps most famous as the originator of the phrase, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ which first appeared in her second novel, Molly Bawn (1878).

  DOROTHY MACARDLE (1889–1958) was born in Dundalk, Co. Louth, into the famed Macardle brewing family. She studied at University College Dublin, and subsequently taught English at Alexandra College, the girls’ school at which she herself had been educated. As a member of Cumann na mBan and the Gaelic League, her political activities and opinions resulted in her being arrested twice – first by the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1918, during the War of Independence, and then by the Free State government in 1922, during the Civil War. Although she was best known as the author of The Irish Republic (1937), her 1942 novel Uneasy Freehold – adapted to film as The Uninvited (1944) and subsequently published under that title – is now acknowledged as a modern classic ghost story.

  WILLIAM MAGINN (1794–1842) was a native of Cork and a prolific writer of short fiction, contributing pieces to Blackwood’s Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, and Bentley’s Miscellany, the latter edited by Charles Dickens. A resident of London from 1824, he was a frequent contributor to various newspape
rs, and in 1836 he fought a duel with the Honourable Grantley Berkeley over the fallout from a negative review Maginn had written of the Whig MP’s debut novel. Also of genre interest is his 1827 novel Whitehall, presented as a historical novel about the 1820s from the year 2227.

  CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH (‘L’) MCMANUS (1853–1944), a native of Castlebar, Co. Mayo, is best remembered today for her novel The Professor in Erin, originally serialised in Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin Weekly in 1912. A nationalist and a member of the Gaelic League, she is also known for her patriotic historical novels, and during the Civil War, she supported the Anti-Treaty side. She also helped to establish the second branch of the Gaelic League in Co. Mayo, and was an esteemed member of the Irish Literary Society.

  L.T. MEADE, or ELIZABETH THOMASINA MEADE SMITH (1844–1914) was a prolific author, mostly of children’s stories. She was born in Bandon, Co. Cork, and later resided in London. The Brotherhood of Seven Kings was one of several works Meade created in collaboration with the English author Dr Robert Eustace. She was also a member of the Pioneer Club, a progressive feminist group based in London.

  AMELIA GARLAND MEARS (1842–1920) was born in Freshford, Co. Kilkenny, the daughter of the poet John Garland. She achieved some renown as a short story writer, with most of her material set in or around Hartlepool and the Yorkshire countryside, where she lived with her husband. The full novel version of Mercia, the Astronomer Royal indicates that she was passionately interested in the culture and history of the Indian subcontinent, and a supporter of Indian independence.

  FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN (1828–1862) was born in Cork, and grew up in Castleconnell, Co. Limerick. He wrote poetry calling for the establishment of relief programmes during the Great Famine, and emigrated to the US in the early 1850s. Evidently a hot-tempered man, he broke his nose in a fistfight in 1858, and he later fought for the Union in the American Civil War, serving under Brigadier General Lander at the Bloomery Gap Skirmish of 1862.

  TARLACH Ó hUID (1917–1990) was born Augustus Walter Hood, after his father, in London. His parents were English Methodists, associated with the Orange Order; however, he identified with Ireland so strongly that he joined the Gaelic League, learned to speak and write in Irish, changed his name to its Gaelicised form and converted to Catholicism in 1937, in the belief that such a conversion was necessary to properly identify as an Irishman. He was a member of the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and later a member of the IRA. For his IRA activities (mostly pamphleteering), he was jailed from 1940–1945, and he continued working for the Gaelic League after his release.

  ART Ó RIAIN (1893–1968), a native of Thurles in Co. Tipperary, was a civil servant who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Barra Ó Caochlaigh’ (since civil servants were not permitted to publish under their own names at the time); under this name, he wrote the Oireachtas Literary Award-winning novella An Tost [Silence], a short family saga that becomes explicitly science-fictional in its latter half. He went on to produce a number of well-received novels for the state Irish-language publishing company An Gúm, and he was also well-known as a pianist and organist.

  CATHAL Ó SÁNDAIR (1922–1996) was born in Weston-super-Mare to an English father and an Irish mother, and he published his first Irish-language short story at the age of sixteen. A prolific author of genre fiction in Irish, he is reputed to have written 160 books, most of which were intended for schoolchildren. Among his most famous creations are the intrepid detective Réics Carló, the cowboy Réamonn Óg, and the space-pilot Captaen Spéirling. As well as Irish, Ó Sándair was fluent in Scots Gaelic (Gaidhlig), Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Breton, and semi-fluent in German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian.

  Æ (GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL) (1867–1935) was born in Lurgan, Co. Armagh. A committed Home Rule nationalist, he was instrumental in the Co-operative Movement, and a vocal critic of the 1913 Lock-Out, the 1916 Rising, and the partitioning of Ireland. As a poet, novelist, essayist and painter, he was well respected and fondly regarded by Dublin’s bohemians, and he appears as a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Much of his work was influenced by his Theosophical beliefs, as can be seen in his story in this collection, and his pseudonym ‘Æ’ was abbreviated from the ambiguous spiritualist term ‘Æon’.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the estate of Dorothy Macardle for their permission to reprint ‘A Story Without an End’, and to Gráinne Ní Uid, Maelíosa Ó Riain and Joe Saunders for permission to translate and re-print ‘An Cianadóir’, ‘Aisling’ and ‘An Deoraí’, respectively. This collection is enhanced immeasurably by these stories’ inclusion.

  This book would not exist at all if not for the hard work of everyone involved in its production. Huge thanks are due to Lisa Coen, Sarah Davis-Goff, Fiachra McCarthy and Marsha Swan for their insight, humour, patience and aesthetic flair. Much gratitude also to Peter O’Connell for his help in bringing A Brilliant Void to the wider world.

  Copyright

  First published 2018 by Tramp Press

  www.tramppress.com

  Introduction ‘The Green Lacuna’ copyright © Jack Fennell (2018); ‘The New Frankenstein’ copyright © William Maginn (1837); ‘The Diamond Lens’ copyright © Fitz-James O’Brien (1858); ‘The Age of Science’ copyright © Frances Power Cobbe (1877); ‘The Story of a Star’ copyright © Æ (George William Russell) (1894); ‘Mercia, the Astronomer Royal’ copyright © Amelia Garland Mears (1895); ‘The Professor’s Experiment’ copyright © Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (1895); ‘An Advance Sheet’ copyright © Jane Barlow (1898); ‘The Luck of Pitsey Hall’ copyright © L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace (1899); ‘Lady Clanbevan’s Baby’ copyright © Clotilde Graves (1915); ‘The Great Beast of Kafue’ copyright © Clotilde Graves (1917); ‘The Sorcerer’ copyright © Charlotte McManus (1922); ‘A Story Without an End’ copyright © Dorothy Macardle (1922); ‘A Vision’ copyright © Art Ó Riain (1927), this translation copyright © Jack Fennell (2018); ‘The Chronotron’ copyright © Tarlach Ó hUid (1946), this translation copyright © Jack Fennell (2018); ‘The Exile’ copyright © Cathal Ó Sándair (1960), this translation copyright © Jack Fennell (2018).

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

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  ISBN 978–1–9997008–9–8

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