SFE: Chesterton, G K (original) (raw)

Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Artist, Author.

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(1874-1936) UK author and illustrator of his own books and many by Hilaire Belloc – with whom he was long associated, closely enough that George Bernard Shaw referred to them as The Chesterbelloc. Two posthumous collections, The Coloured Lands (coll 1938) and Daylight and Nightmare: Uncollected Stories and Fables (coll 1986), which assemble short pieces including some sf stories from his entire career, may demonstrate the range of his emblem-haunted imagination as a teller of tales. But most of his numerous works fall into various other categories: Chesterton in general exemplified the professional Edwardian man of letters and wrote on almost everything, in every conceivable form, from poetry and the famous Father Brown detective stories to Christian apologetics and polemics, as well as very numerous "weekend" essays, plus literary criticism and history; his Eugenics and Other Evils (coll 1922) assembles some acute animadversions against the pre-World War One fad for Eugenic solutions to social issues (see also Devolution; Imperialism; Social Darwinism).

Shorter fiction of interest appears in: The Man Who Knew too Much and Other Stories (coll 1922; cut 1961), where mysteries solved by Horne Fisher (who knows too much about the seamy side of English Politics) culminate in War, while non-Fisher stories include "The Trees of Pride", whose exotic imported trees arouse fearful superstition and are in truth disseminators of Poison; Tales of the Long Bow (coll of linked stories 1925), tall tales describing the literal realization of figures of speech (the Thames, thanks to industrial Pollution, is easily set on fire), which climax in a Near-Future English revolution on cod-Pastoral lines; The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (coll 1929), featuring a case of abnormally rapid petrification in "The Finger of Stone" (December 1920 Harper's Bazaar); Four Faultless Felons (coll 1930), which includes a Ruritanian novella, "The Loyal Traitor" (May 1930 The Story-Teller); and The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (coll 1937), whose nonfantastic "The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse" (July 1935 The Story-Teller) was a tale strongly admired by Jorge Luis Borges. An ostensibly nonfiction piece of interest, "England in 1919" (Christmas 1919 Pears' Annual), is told as though written in 1969 after the Futurist Government has destroyed most historical documents. The standalone story The Sword of Wood (1928 chap), set in the seventeenth century, posits a quasi-sf Weapon: a highly Magnetized sword created by Scientists of the early Royal Society, that confuses and defeats wielders of steel blades but is overcome by the titular walking-stick.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), Chesterton's first novel, is set in a distant Near Future 1984 (George Orwell's use of the same date for Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949] seems coincidental), soon after whose outset London is whimsically balkanized by royal decree into a number of tiny Medieval-Futurist principalities, leading to a moderately spoofish War among these statelets. The tale immediately establishes the nostalgic, medievalizing, anti-Wellsian, Merrie-Englande tone of most of his longer works, which tended, in one way or another, to idealize a dreamlike England; but their insistence on the homeliness of the past and the familiar is so surreally put that the ultimate effect is deeply uncanny. In their arguments about the desirability of the homeland they comprise a series of Utopias, though often only by inarguable implication, and in a spirit much removed from the scrutiny typical of Scientific Romances of the time. Further novels of this sort include The Ball and the Cross (March 1905-November 1906 The Commonwealth, nine chapters only; exp 1909), which – lumberingly focused on a Professor Lucifer whose Invention of a fantastic flying machine seems almost irrelevant to his subtler poisoning of Near-Future England – is an allegory in which Faith and Reason, after repeated semi-comic clashes, ultimately join forces against Satan; and The Flying Inn (1914) which – not exactly prefiguring twenty-first-century troubles – posits a teetotal, vegetarian, Muslim-influenced rule over Britain; the failure of this regime comes from the fact that (as Chesterton makes clear), barring a few mad idealists, the politicians and other authorities who impose abstinence on the common people do not regard it as something which should interfere with their own pleasures: lockdown is for others. The later The Return of Don Quixote (1927) is a Near Future Satire set in England and espousing, not for the first time in Chesterton's career, a return to pre-industrial values: here politicians with purchased titles who are happy to adopt the cosmetic restoration of medieval costumes and pageantry (see Medieval Futurism) find themselves discomfited when an arbiter who is a genuine medievalist rejects their merely capitalist ownership of a guild on the ground that they have never been apprenticed to, let alone mastered, the guild's trade.

Chesterton's finest novel, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908; vt The Annotated Thursday 1999), is an Urban Fantasy [see _The_ Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] mostly set in the fragile Babylon-like London so alluring to writers of the fin de siècle, most tellingly in this context being Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors; Or, the Transformations (coll of linked stories 1895), which also hints at disarray within the body politic. Six secret agents disguised as anarchists, unaware of each others' true Identities and codenamed for the days of the week (the protagonist becoming Thursday) are shown to have been recruited to man the frontiers of the world against "Sunday", the anarchist leader and their greatest foe – who after various escapades including multiple unmaskings, a duel, nightmarish pursuit across a French province seemingly in the grip of world-engulfing anarchy, and an escape by Balloon, turns out to be not only their legitimate boss but in fact a forbidding Christ figure (see Godgame; Secret Masters); there is a Slingshot Ending. The book – dramatized by his brother's widow, Mrs Cecil Chesterton [Ada Elizabeth Jones (1869-1962), who also wrote as John Keith Prothero], and Ralph Neale (1896-1940) as The Man Who Was Thursday: Adapted from the Novel of G K Chesterton (1926) – was an acknowledged influence upon such Catholic writers as R A Lafferty and Gene Wolfe; and the uncanny magic-carpet London so lovingly created by Chesterton and his confrères arguably marks a significant stepping-stone – along with Robert Louis Stevenson's foundational New Arabian Nights (coll 1882) and the above-cited The Three Impostors – between the world of Charles Dickens and that of Steampunk. Chesterton's exceedingly genial presence in the eleven-part Television serialization of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (2022) – played by Stephen Fry as a surreally avuncular godling or spirit of place otherwise known as Fiddler's Green – seemed a natural outcome. [JC/DRL]

see also: Automata; Alternate History; Club Story; Gods and Demons; Jobs in SF; Martian; Parody; Time Travel.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

born London: 29 May 1874

died Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire: 14 June 1936

works (highly selected)

series

Wit, Whimsy, and Wisdom of G K Chesterton

individual titles

collections and stories

nonfiction

about the author

The literature on Chesterton is very extensive indeed. The following titles are highly selected.

links

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