"The Pacific Mystery"

"The Pacific Mystery" by Stephen Baxter was published in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection.

This is a dieselpunk story set in a world where the British made a separate peace with the Nazis, who then went on to defeat Russia. The vast, nuclear-powered aircraft Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering sets out on an expedition to cross the hitherto-uncrossable Pacific Ocean. The eponymous mystery is very reminiscent of Christopher Priest's Inverted World.

"Then how do you explain the fact that nobody has crossed the Pacific before?"

"Ocean currents," he said. "Adverse winds. Hell, I don’t know."

But we both knew the story is more complicated than that. This is the Pacific Mystery.

Humanity came out of Africa; Darwin said so. In caveman days we spread north and east, across Asia all the way to Australia. Then the Polynesians went island-hopping. They crossed thousands of miles, reaching as far as Hawaii with their stone axes and dug-out boats.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

And meanwhile others went west, to the Americas. Nobody quite knows how the first "native" Americans got there from Africa; some say it was just accidental rafting on lumber flushed down the Congo, though I fancy there’s a smack of racial prejudice in that theory. So when the Vikings sailed across the north Atlantic they came up against dark-skinned natives, and when the Portuguese and Spanish and British arrived they found a complicated trading economy, half-Norse, half-African, which they proceeded to wipe out. Soon the Europeans reached the west coast of the Americas.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

The Besler Steam Plane

On 12 April 1933 a Travel Air 2000 biplane made the world's first piloted flight under steam power over Oakland, California, powered by a two-cylinder V-twin steam engine developing 150 hp.

The aircraft, piloted by William Besler, raced down the runway and climbed into the air without a sound except the low whine of the propeller and the hum of wind through the rigging wires. The aircraft took off, landed, and circled three times, remaining aloft for 5 minutes at a time. Each time, as the machine descended to land and the wheels touched the runway, the pilot pulled back a small lever at the side of the cockpit and the steam engine instantly reversed, reducing the landing run to a minimum. The Beslers were quoted as saying that the aircraft, landing at 50 miles an hour, could come to a stop in a field only 100 feet square. The strangest feature of the flight was said to be the relative silence of the power plant; spectators on the ground could hear the pilot when he called to them from mid-air.

The aircraft's steam engine weighed 180 pounds, using steam generated by a barrel-shaped boiler behind the engine. Using vaporized fuel oil, the burner released as much as 3 million BTU per cubic foot of firebox space, an electric blower driving the heat down among the flat spirals of a single 500-foot pipe coiled within the boiler. Under the aircraft's nose was the condenser which looked like an ordinary car radiator, and which was said to recover more than 90 percent of the water from the used steam. Tests had shown that 10 gallons of water was enough for a 400 mile flight.

At the start of a flight, the pilot operated a small switch which activated the electric blower, to drive a mixture of air and fuel spray through the burner. An electric spark ignited the mixture, and a few minutes later steam pressure was high enough to take off. All the pilot had to do from then on was to operate the throttle and reverse lever.

The design had been assisted by former Doble Steam Motors engineer Nathan C. Price, who was working on high pressure compact engines for rail and road transport; the purpose of the flight was to obtain publicity for this work. Following its favourable reception Price went to Boeing and worked on various aviation projects, but Boeing dropped the idea of a steam aircraft engine in 1936. Price later went on to work for Lockheed, where his experience developing compact burners helped in the design of Lockheed's first jet engine.

The advantages of the "Besler System" listed at the time included the elimination of audible noise and destructive vibration; greater efficiency at low engine speeds and also at high altitudes where lower air temperatures assisted condensation; reduced likelihood of engine failure; reduced maintenance costs; reduced fuel costs (since kerosene was used instead of petrol); reduced fire hazard since the fuel was less volatile and operating temperatures were lower; and a lack of need for radio shielding.

However, the steam reciprocating engine turned out to be unsuitable for scaling up to the needs of large aircraft, as above 1000 hp a turbine captures the energy of the steam more efficiently than a piston.

The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James

I picked up a secondhand copy of the Penguin paperback edition of the "The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James", having owned a copy years ago which someone borrowed and never returned.

James was much anthologized over the years, so it is a rare ghost story fan who hasn't come across one of his tales. This tome, however, as it says on the cover, is the complete collection of his short fiction.

They're deeply creepy stories, much more unsettling than the grand guignol effects of horror; to use the clichéd expression, definitely not tales to be read with the lights out. The modern writer that comes closest is Peter Straub, but he tends more towards magic realism. James himself was influenced by the great Sheridan Le Fanu (of whom more later).

James' prose is crisp and clean, albeit with a substantial amount of Latin phrases, and his ghosts are authentically unpredictable and arbitrary, with a tendency to afflict innocent and guilty alike. Many stories are set in the 18th century, a period which James obviously had a considerable affinity for, and a sense of history and antiquity pervades them all.

Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys the more "spooky" sort of horror fiction, and most of the stories are available online on Project Gutenberg here, along with his extraordinary "Old Testament Legends" (with creepy illustrations!).