H. G. Wells, Secret Agent

by Alex Shvartsman

  Then I hit upon the idea of making H. G. Wells, an author I greatly admire and grew up reading, my protagonist. He was to be a Victorian-era James Bond, having adventures around the world instead of writing books. This is alternate history after all, and I can do that.

  Once I established the protagonist, I got to thinking: what other well-known historical figures might he meet? As I ventured deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of research, I realized just how many fascinating writers, scientists, and other larger-than-life individuals were around and available for me to play with in the late nineteenth century.

  Remember how I said I was lazy and didn’t want to study up on Victorian England? Mea culpa. I ended up spending more time on research than writing the damn thing, after all.

  I decided that every single named character in the story would be based upon a real person: from the main heroes and villains down to the lowest gate guard. If you encounter a name you aren’t familiar with as you read, run a web search and you’ll find out who that character is.

  A single huge exception to this rule is Sue Ann MacLean. She’s the only character in this book not based on someone you can readily Google. There are Reasons for that, Reasons I don’t want to reveal just yet. You’ll find out more about her in future Wells stories.

  The anthology I was invited to never came together, but I had a fun universe to explore and I just kept writing until a short story turned into a novelette, and then into a novella. I have plans for future Wells stories: you’ll get to find out how van Gogh really lost his ear, Annie Oakley will blow up more stuff, and the Ministry will become tangled up in the War of Currents between Tesla and Edison.

  I loaded this novella to the gills with Easter eggs: from cheesy pop culture references to little-known historical facts, to direct quotes from the real-world versions of my characters, spoken as dialog. It became a game among my first readers to identify all of these Easter eggs, so I thought it would be fun to include some annotations below, for anyone looking to play “spot the reference.”

  Annotations

  The Case of the Weather Machine

  Scene 1

  Armorial Hall of the Winter Palace

  The Winter Palace, located in St. Petersburg, was the official residence of the Russian tsars, from 1732 to 1917. The lavishly decorated Armorial Hall served as the event space for many ceremonies.

  All of it created a storybook atmosphere the likes of which the young Englishman could only dream of until a few months ago.

  Herbert George Wells, a prolific British author, was born in 1866. The opening scene takes place in 1887.

  Improbably, the woman from the future had called this gadget “the Babel fish,” despite its apparent lack of any ichthyic qualities.

  A reference to Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the Babel fish universal translator device was an actual fish. The BabelFish.com web site is also named after this fictitious device.

  “My name is Nikolai Bunge, Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers.”

  A noted Russian economist and statesman, Bunge was Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, the highest civil administration post in the Russian empire. He rose to this post in 1887 after serving as Finance Minister for five years. Bunge was known as a reformer, introducing many capitalist ideas, overhauling the Russian banking system, and modernizing the economy. Many of his policies were considered highly protectionist, which makes him a good foil for Wells in this story.

  Modern science has proven that there’s far more to the world than was previously dreamt of in our philosophy.

  A take on Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Wells is apparently fond of this line as he references it again at the beginning of the Dirigible Heist case.

  Queen Victoria created the Ministry to arm the human race against the future. Twentieth century is when everything changes. And we’ve got to be ready.

  Since the Ministry is so similar in concept to Torchwood (a government agency originally introduced on Dr. Who, which was eventually featured on its own spinoff TV show), I thought it amusing to have Wells recite the lines spoken in the opening sequence of the show, adjusting for the century: “Torchwood: outside the government, beyond the police. Tracking down alien life on Earth, arming the human race against the future. The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And you’ve got to be ready.”

  We know that Russia has a secret weapon capable of altering weather patterns.

  The two greatest wars fought against invaders on Russian soil were the war of 1812 against Napoleon, and World War II. In both cases, Russian defense benefited greatly from the enemy troops, unaccustomed to such cold conditions, becoming mired in harsh Russian winter. It could be argued that in each case the outcome of the wars might have been different had those winters been milder.

  Scene 2

  “This mixture is my own invention; I’m going to patent it when I think of a good name. Make sure it’s stirred, not shaken. Wouldn’t want the drink to be weak.”

  He turned toward the blonde and flashed his best smile. “My name is Wells. Herbert Wells.”

  I couldn’t have Wells order a martini, because it hadn’t been invented yet. Conveniently, Ian Fleming helped me out. In Casino Royale, James Bond orders a Vesper martini, a variant on the cocktail that he had invented. Bond says: “The drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I can think of a good name.”

  Another interesting trope I got to play with is Bond’s preference for “shaken, not stirred.” Some folks believe this to be a bad idea. In an episode of West Wing, President Bartlet rants: “Shaken, not stirred, will get you cold water with a dash of gin and dry vermouth. The reason you stir it with a special spoon is so not to chip the ice. James is ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it.”

  Things really weren’t working out in the way he had imagined. He waited for his drink, composing excuses for Ministra MacLean in his head.

  Ministra is not a British title. It’s a Latin word for a female minister, currently used in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latvian. Although it’s not mentioned directly in the story, MacLean had adopted the title for her own, once she achieved a Minister-level post as the director of the Ministry of Preternatural Affairs.

  “You should have added lemon to that. I take a slice whenever I have to drink Cognac. Makes the vîle stuff taste almost tolerable.”

  Wells looked up at the man advising him, and swallowed the biting remark he was about to make. Standing in front of him was the heir to the Russian throne.

  Nicholas Romanov, the last tsar of Russia (still an heir to the throne in 1887) was indeed known for his dislike of Cognac. He occasionally had to drink it at formal occasions and added lemon to temper the taste.

  The Ministry’s chief had somehow acquired a copy of “The Chronic Argonauts,” a short story about traveling through time, which Wells was shopping around to newspaper publishers.

  This short story by Wells was published in 1888, seven years before The Time Machine.

  “Our true nationality is mankind.”

  Whenever possible, I’ve tried to use the characters’ own words in dialog. The above is an actual quote by H. G. Wells.

  Scene 3

  “The tsarevich wants me to find the leaders of a radical socialist group called the People’s Will,” said Wells. “They have waged war against the Romanovs for years. In ‘81 they had quite a coup, managing to assassinate Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II.”

  The People’s Will really existed, and the above statement is historically factual, as is all of the historical information relayed by Wells in his conversation with Doyle.

  Scene 4

  “Democracy is the road to socialism.”

  This quote is attributed to Karl Marx, though there’s some dispute as to whether he ever wrote/said these exact words. Wells himself had strong socialist l
eanings, and so having him “pretend” to be a Marxist was not a great stretch.

  “The cause of socialism is a global one.”

  This one is, supposedly, a Lenin quote, though I can’t find the reference via web search. It was often quoted as part of Communist propaganda which I got to experience firsthand, growing up in the Soviet Union in 1980s.

  Scene 5

  There was a hunting rifle hanging on the wall.

  There’s a dramatic principle called “Chekhov’s gun.” He wrote: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

  So I thought it would be fun to have a rifle hanging on the wall of Chekhov’s apartment. And to never mention it again for the rest of the story.

  “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.”

  An actual Chekhov quote. He was indeed a doctor who became a newspaper columnist, and wrote his plays and short stories on the side.

  “Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.”

  Another real Chekhov quote.

  “We can place your plays and stories in front of all the right people. By this time next year you could be an award-winning author.”

  Chekhov did indeed win the Pushkin Prize in 1887 for his short story collection At Dusk.

  “The Ministry has worked diligently over the years to strike all mentions of the undead from books such as Pride and Prejudice.”

  A nod to Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, wherein he combined the classic Jane Austen novel with elements of modern zombie fiction.

  Scene 6

  “Aleksandr Ulyanov, at your service.”

  Aleksandr Ulyanov was Vladimir Lenin’s older brother. In 1887 he was arrested and eventually executed for his part in an assassination plot against Tsar Alexander III. He was the chemist who was preparing bombs the revolutionaries were to throw at Alexander’s carriage.

  His execution may have played a role in Lenin’s increased involvement with the socialist movement.

  Scene 7

  “Don’t panic!”

  Another reference to Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  Scene 8

  “We’re being attacked by invisible men!”

  I thought it appropriate for H. G. Wells to face threats reminiscent of his most famous works. The Invisible Man is one of his best-known novels, and the plot of the two subsequent cases borrows a few details from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

  Chekhov grabbed for a crystal vase and shattered it on the floor. “They’re barefoot,” he shouted.

  Wells nodded and edged closer to the broken glass, pulling the prince along.

  This scene was loosely inspired by one of my favorite Chekhov quotes: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” This is the progenitor of the ubiquitous “show, don’t tell” writing advice. And while the line itself didn’t fit the plot, I had Anton take advantage of broken glass here, and mentioned moonlight in the scene where he first makes an appearance.

  “Rebel scum. The house of Romanov has ruled Russia for nearly three hundred years, and will surely continue to do so for three hundred more. It’ll take far more than their parlor tricks to take down the future tsar.”

  First, I couldn’t resist a tiny Star Wars reference with “rebel scum.” Second, for all of Romanov’s confidence, his family’s reign came to an end in 1917. Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate in the wake of the February Revolution. His entire family lived under house arrest, until they were ultimately executed by the Bolsheviks in July of 1918.

  Scene 9

  “Nightingale recently retired, Stoker and Wilde are entirely consumed by a melodramatic rivalry over some woman, and Kipling is on a long-term mission in India.”

  The most fun part of writing this series was figuring out which historical personages fit the timetable and could be presented as either Ministry agents or bad guys. In this sentence, I got to play with some off-screen characters. Florence Nightingale would have made an awesome agent but she was sixty-seven years old in 1887. Rudyard Kipling was in India at the time. And there really was a romantic triangle, with both Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker vying for the hand of Florence Balcombe. She ultimately chose Stoker and the two married in 1878, so the timeline doesn’t quite fit in this case, but it was too juicy a coincidence to discard and this is, after all, alternate history.

  “You’re to oversee the giant space transceiver which Gustave Eiffel is building for us in Paris. This should keep you out of trouble for a few years.”

  The construction of the Eiffel Tower was approved by the French government in 1886 and the contract with Gustave Eiffel was signed in early 1887. He was to build the structure in time for the 1889 World’s Fair, creating a nice segue into the next Wells adventure. The Eiffel Tower remained the world’s tallest man-made structure until the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930.

  “In my estimation, the Tunguska weather machine will blow itself up in the next twenty or so years.”

  I’ve intentionally remained vague on the precise location of the weather machine, offering only the subtle hints of its placement in Siberia so as not to spoil the reveal. There was a huge explosion there in 1908, referred to as the Tunguska event. Based on the crater size, it is considered to be the largest asteroid or comet impact event on Earth in recorded history.

  Of course, it could also have been an enormous, two-century-old steampunk weather machine finally succumbing to its design flaw.

  The Case of the Dirigible Heist

  Scene 1

  “Mr. Wells, meet the representatives of the Committee of Three Hundred,” said Curie. “Monsieurs de Maupassant, Gounod, and Bouguereau.”

  Many of France’s elite, especially those involved in the arts, were opposed to the construction of the Eiffel Tower. When construction began, a Committee of Three Hundred was formed: one member for every meter of the tower’s height. De Maupassant, Gounod and Bouguereau were all members of this group, led by a notable architect Charles Garnier.

  “In fact, I do not mind the excursion at all. This is presently my favorite place in all of Paris.”

  “It is?” Gounod asked incredulously.

  “The base of this structure remains the one place where I can still enjoy the view of my favorite city without seeing the giddy, ridiculous tower dominating its skyline like a gigantic black smokestack.”

  After the Eiffel Tower was completed, it is said that Guy de Maupassant often ate lunch in the restaurant at the tower’s base. When asked about this, he replied that it was the only place in Paris where the tower was not visible. “The giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack” is a line lifted directly from the petition by the Committee of Three Hundred, published in a Parisian newspaper in 1887.

  …pressure the French government into scrapping the tower after Eiffel’s license ran out, in twenty years.

  Originally the Eiffel Tower was only supposed to stand for twenty years and be scrapped in 1909, after Eiffel’s license had expired and the ownership reverted to the city of Paris.

  “This enormous edifice was created to serve as what’s called an antenna,” said Wells. “A brand new technology developed by Dr. Heinrich Hertz in recent years, to transmit sound across great distances.”

  The first antennas were built in 1888 by Heinrich Hertz, fitting nicely into the timeline of the story.

  “To me, tolerating one ugly structure is preferable to the idea of Martian tripods marching down the Champs-Élysées.”

  Evoking Wells’s own War of the Worlds here.

  France has its own secret agency. The Deuxième Bureau…

  The Deuxième Bureau de l’État-major general (S
econd Bureau of the General Staff) was France’s military intelligence agency from 1871 to 1940. Even though it has dissolved, “Deuxième Bureau” remains a popular culture generic term for France’s intelligence services.

  Scene 2

  “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  A direct quote by Arthur Conan Doyle, variants of which are oft repeated by Sherlock Holmes, his most famous creation.

  Scene 3

  “Gentlemen, meet Maria Sklodowska, an up-and-coming inventor and physicist.”

  While virtually all of the other famous persons mentioned in this chapter really attended the 1889 World’s Fair, Maria Sklodowska did not arrive in Paris until several years later. Most of us know her by her French name and her eventual husband’s surname: Marie Curie.

  It’s capable of making ten raised to the power of a hundred calculations per day, which is why I named the technology Googol Glasses.

  A Googol is a number equal to ten to the 100th power. Google is named after it, and the device name is, of course, a parody on Google Glass.

  Despite my best efforts, I had fallen prey to an unintended anachronism here. The term Googol was not coined until 1902.

  Scene 4

  “The airbags must have been filled with helium,” he said. “The Americans do this; helium is in far greater supply in the New World.”

  This is historically accurate. In the nineteenth century, the envelopes of European dirigibles were filled with hydrogen, as non-flammable helium was not as widely available as it was in America.