THE LATER WORKS OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM opens with DR. ROBERT W. MALLET IV<\/b>, a young scholar at the Virginia Institute of Arts and Sciences, trying to keep up with the epic appetites of his eccentric Mentor, DR. OTHO BLACKWELL SHELLEY.\u00a0 <\/b>Otho takes Robert out for a day of gaming and drinking, as a break from the young Savant\u2019s work on a manuscript describing the outbreak of the American Secession War in 1850.\u00a0 On their way to the Maxim Games, they meet some of the great scientific adventurers of the day.<\/p>\n
They arrive at the Games just in time to see the live-fire skyship battle between the USS Havana and the British Super Dreadnought HMS Olympic.\u00a0 With some assistance from Otho, the American COMMANDER CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT<\/b> manages to down the Olympic by disrupting her coupled gravity and electrical systems.\u00a0 The Whiggish world is without wires, and depends on the remotely transmitted electrical power and gravity-decoupled weightlessness supposedly invented by Nicola Tesla in the 1880s.\u00a0 Commander Newport demonstrated the weaknesses of the Tesla System at the Games in his characteristically flamboyant manner.<\/p>\n
After a night of partying with the crew of the Havana, Robert\u2019s bank account is exhausted, and he temporarily loses his right to vote, which in the Whiggish world requires a high school diploma and $1000 in property.\u00a0 Robert reluctantly decides to visit his Mother to try to fix his franchise problem.\u00a0 On his way to Willow Lawn, he meets some old high school friends and the irrepressible Flying Grannies, who praise graduated emancipation and their liberation from gravity and sobriety.<\/p>\n
Robert learns that his Mother has taken a lover, and that his Father is entering a plural marriage, all proper by the standards of the day, but still shocking to the somewhat prudish Robert.\u00a0 His franchise is restored, and Robert\u2019s mother encourages him not just to accompany great men, but to become one in his own right.<\/p>\n
Robert is invited by his cousin, MARY DOUGLASS<\/b>, a fellow scholar and heir to the Delaware estate of Buena Vista, to investigate a mysterious document she has found in her late father\u2019s papers.\u00a0 Otho gives Robert a copy of \u201cThe Later Works of Arthur Gordon Pym,\u201d a little-known, non-canonical work of Edgar Allen Poe, which the VI stole from Buena Vista years ago.\u00a0 Robert is to right that wrong, and use the Pym volume to establish the authenticity of Mary\u2019s find.<\/p>\n
On his trip to Delaware, Robert meets EZRA HUSE<\/b>, who with Robert is one of the descendants of the McCaw Mission, a group of Virginians who travelled to Germany in 1861 and saved the life of Kaiser Frederick III.\u00a0 A Democratic terrorist tries to crash their chartership, fearful of potential alien influences Mr. Huse may be under as a result of his deep space travel.\u00a0 Their lives are saved by the aerial heroics of JULIUS CAESAR RODNEY<\/b>, a small but intrepid former Snake-eater who finds that corporate life is not sufficiently fulfilling.<\/p>\n
While hosting the Buena Vista Christmas party, Mary shows Robert the lost journal of Col. William Bliss, private secretary to President Zachary Taylor, Robert\u2019s greatest hero, and the man who saved the Union in the Secession War of 1850-1853.\u00a0 The journal reveals how Edgar Allan was able to survive his trip to Baltimore in 1849, and how he influenced the outbreak of civil war in 1850.\u00a0 Most importantly, the journal records that Mr. Poe found the first articles of coupled matter on his person after his miraculous recovery in Baltimore.\u00a0 Robert and Mary are alarmed that mysterious, possibly otherworldly, origin of coupled matter could lead to panic and no end of Democratic mischief.\u00a0 The Bliss also reveals how American blacks came to be transported to the Insular Possessions after emancipation, and how a few careless words led to the assassination of a German Kaiser Wilhelm I, the father of Kaiser Frederick III….<\/p>\n
The rest to be revealed when the book is at last published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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