Yet another post about invisibility in fiction! Will I ever run out of these? I feel like I need to write another book just about invisibility fiction.
So in my last post, I wrote about “Invisible Death”, which appeared in the January 1930 issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science. On a whim, I happened to browse the rest of the stories, and found another story about invisibility in that same issue. Clearly invisibility was a hot topic in that era.
The new story I found is titled “The Cave of Horror,” by Captain S.P. Meek.
It is a mixture of horror, action, and science fiction, and features run-ins with an invisible monster that has wandered up from the bowels of the earth and is now haunting Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky!
With the book out, my endless advertising blitz has begun! Let me lead off with a blog post that I wrote for my publisher, Yale University Press: How Many Ways Can We Be Invisible? In the post, I talk about a bunch of different science fiction ways authors have attempted to explain invisibility, and how close they got! A short sample:
Invisibility—the ability to make something invisible to visible light—has long been assumed by science to be impossible. This changed in 2006, when two groups of researchers published back-to-back papers in the journal Nature demonstrating theoretically that invisibility is, at the very least, plausible. Since then, there has been intensive research on a variety of different ways in which invisibility might be achieved. So far, a practical demonstration of true invisibility has remained elusive, and it is unclear when, if ever, it will be achieved.
With that in mind, maybe it is worthwhile to turn to science fiction for ideas. Long before it was science fact, invisibility was a regular topic of science fiction, and many famous authors imagined their own ideas of how invisibility might be achieved. There are many more invisibility stories than most people are aware of. We may not find the secret to being unseen in them, but these stories give a fascinating snapshot of the science of their time.
As the title indicates, this is a look at the intersection of science and invisibility throughout history, ranging from the earliest attempts by science fiction authors to explain how invisibility might be possible in the 1850s right up to the present day, in which optical scientists have been attempting through theory and experiment to make invisibility cloaks.
Invisibility has a surprisingly long and subtle history in physics. The first real hints of it appeared in the early 1900s, as researchers tried to explain how electrons could be orbiting in an atom without giving off radiation, as classical physics predicted they should. This led to the strange phenomenon of “nonradiating sources,” sources of light radiation that, paradoxically, do not give off radiation. Over the next 100 years, nonradiating sources and other crude forms of invisibility kept being rediscovered, and scientists struggled to find a use for such an interesting phenomenon: it was a “solution in search of a problem!”
In the latter years of the 20th century, invisibility became associated with so-called inverse problems, in which a “cause” is deduced from measurements of an “effect.” Such problems include modern imaging techniques such as MRIs and CAT scans.
I have a personal connection to this work, which motivated the writing of this book in the first place! My own PhD research, completed in 2001, was on nonradiating sources and invisible objects. I like to describe myself as the hipster invisibility scientist — I was looking at such problems before it was “cool.” The book talks a bit about my own work, especially related to my late PhD advisor Emil Wolf, who played his own significant role in invisibility physics.
In Invisibility, I endeavor to explain in plain language how invisibility is predicted to work. In fact, the book ends up being a bit of a history of the physics of light itself, as the history of invisibility is tied closely to our understanding of light. This is a book intended to be read by everyone, and I worked hard to keep it interesting and entertaining! I should add: if you don’t completely understand some physics explanation in the book, that’s okay! Learning science is often about just picking up a little bit of new knowledge at a time. (Feel free to send me a tweet or a comment on my blog here if you want some clarification.)
The book includes quite a bit of discussion of the science fiction of invisibility, as well. Long before scientists started studying the phenomenon, a surprising number of authors attempted to give the fantastical concept a plausible scientific basis. There are so, so many science fiction stories about invisibility, almost certainly more than you’ve heard of! (I say this with confidence because a search of the internet shows that nobody has looked at invisibility in science fiction as thoroughly as I have.)
A little example of invisibility fiction: an illustration for Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 short story “The Horla.”
Throughout the month, to celebrate the release of the book, I will be blogging and reblogging about classic stories of invisibility in science fiction and horror; you can track down the archive of posts here.
The book is not all history; since 2006, invisibility has been an active field of scientific study, and researchers have predicted all sorts of strange phenomena using the tools of invisibility cloaks: optical black holes, optical wormholes, anti-cloaks, perfect illusions, and more! I talk about all of these, and discuss where invisibility physics stands today, and whether someone invisible might be standing behind you right now!
I’m very excited for folks to see this book, which has been a long time coming! It was originally going to be my first popular science book, but I ended up writing my book on Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics first!
Invisibility should be available through the bookseller of your choice (including Target — go figure). Here again is the link to the Yale University Press website, which links to a lot of the popular sellers.
I hope you enjoy it!
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PS yes, the subtitle is a reference to a classic Monty Python sketch; I had to fight a little with the marketing department to get them to keep it as is!
We have run into a few authors who made it a bit of a career to write stories about invisibility, including Captain S.P. Meek, who wrote “The Attack From Space” and “The Cave of Horror,” as well as Victor Rousseau, who wrote “The Invisible Death” and The Sea Demons. We may also add Edmond Hamilton, who wrote “Valley of Invisible Men” that I’ve blogged about previously, but also whose very first science fiction story was “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” published in August of 1926 in Weird Tales!
Hamilton became an incredibly prolific writer for Weird Tales, joining H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as regulars, and branched out into other magazines and genres over his productive career. And it all started with an invisibility story!
Back into some posts about invisibility in fiction, based on those stories that I didn’t talk about in my (hopefully) upcoming book about the history and physics of invisibility!
If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you might think that I made a mistake and have reposted something that I posted last week! Because didn’t I just write a post about “The Invisible Death“?
Well, I did, but that was “The Invisible Death,” by Victor Rousseau, which appeared in Astounding Stories of Super-Science in October, 1930, but now we’re talking about “Invisible Death,” which appeared in Astounding Stories of Super-Science in January, 1930!
If you’re confused, well, so was I: I stumbled upon Pelcher’s story while looking for Rousseau’s, but more on that later. Let’s talk about the story and the science of “Invisible Death”!
Two days until my book on the history and science of invisibility is released! To celebrate, here’s another reblog of a post on a classic invisibility story in fiction.
Yet another post about a story of invisibility. I keep finding more for my book bibliography, so I might as well blog about them here!
Invisibility has been a key feature of stories in pretty much every genre of writing. Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” for instance, is pretty much a straight horror tale. H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man is, of course, classic and even foundational science fiction, and tales like D.W. Hall’s “Raiders Invisible” are really straight up adventure fiction. Invisibility has even been used in romance; the 1895 novel Stella by C.H. Hinton tells the tale of a man who falls in love with a woman who has been turned invisible! (It’s not a very good story, IMHO.)
So it is not surprising to find invisibility used in comedy stories as well, and such is the case with Henry Kuttner’s “The Elixir of…
When I started researching invisibility stories, I was not only surprised by the number of stories out there that I was unaware of, but was also amazed by the number of stories that focus on the concept of invisible buildings! I haven’t written about any of these yet, but they include “The Monster God of Mamurth,” by Edmond Hamilton (1926), and “The Invisible City,” by Clark Ashton Smith (1932). Honorable mention should also be given to “The Invisible Man Murder Case” by Henry Slesar (1958), which doesn’t have an invisible building but suggests that one application of invisibility could be making unsightly buildings invisible.
The most famous of this category of tales, however, is probably “In the Walls of Eryx,” written by H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth J. Sterling and finally published in 1939.
I only recently learned that this story was technically co-authored. Most collections in which I have seen the story tend to credit Lovecraft alone, though the story was published with Sterling as a coauthor. Lovecraft often helped ghost-write stories for authors hoping to break into the magazine market, and “In the Walls of Eryx” is one of those collaborations. Kenneth Sterling was a high-school student who sent Lovecraft a draft of a story about an invisible maze, inspired by the aforementioned Hamilton story “Monster-God of Mamurth.” The original draft was lost, but it is assumed that Lovecraft extensively rewrote it, as the prose of the tale is very much unmistakably his.
The story was rejected by most publications during Lovecraft’s lifetime, and was only published posthumously by Weird Tales two years after his death.
Story spoilers follow, so if you’ve never read the story before, you can read it here.
Four days until the official release of Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen! Here’s another reblog of a post about classic science fiction invisibility.
So: in the process of tracking down Rousseau’s The Invisible Death a few days ago, I learned that there is another story about invisibility, with almost the exact same name, Invisible Death, that appeared in the same magazine, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, earlier in the same year but by a different author, Anthony Pelcher. Rousseau’s tale appeared in the October 1930 issue; Pelcher’s appeared in the January 1930 issue.
Let me describe what happened next using my tweets:
The story I’m referring to will appear in yet another upcoming post! But then, I got curious, and started browsing more issues of Astounding, and…
And I kept looking, and it just kept getting worse!
So, to recap: while researching one invisibility story, I managed to find four more!
The moral of the story is that I’m somehow even more behind in my blogging…
Five days until my book Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen is released! Here’s another classic blog post I did about invisibility in science fiction.
Will I ever run out of vintage science fiction stories about invisibility to write about? I hope so, because otherwise my book draft will never be polished off.
Some authors of weird fiction seem to be addicted to invisibility. One notable example is H.P. Lovecraft, who published The Dunwich Horror in 1929 and In the Walls of Eryx in 1936, together with Kenneth Sterling. The former story is about an invisible monster that is released upon the unsuspecting town of Dunwich, and the latter is a science fiction story about an invisible maze on the planet Venus and the prospector who gets trapped within it due to his greed.
Another notable example of an invisibility addict is Victor Rousseau. Only days ago I wrote about his 1916 novel The Sea Demons, about a race of invisible aquatic humanoids who plan to rise up and conquer the surface world. Yesterday…
I learned about this a few weeks ago, but forgot to post about it here! My upcoming book on Invisibility was selected as a “must-read book” for April 2023 for The Next Big Idea Club!
The Next Big Idea Club is a membership club that focuses on bringing the most interesting new non-fiction books every year to its audience. To quote from their page:
We are all hit by a tsunami of content options every day – never in human history has there been so much to read, watch, forward, swipe and winky-face. Over 600,000 new books are published every year. On YouTube, 300 new hours of video are uploaded every second. Where do you even start?
At the Next Big Idea Club, we believe you start with the people behind the ideas : writers, both established and up-and-coming, who engage, inspire, and motivate readers to make changes in their lives and the world.
Neuroscientists, historians, biologists, economists, journalists, psychologists, entrepreneurs … Next Big Idea Club authors come from a wide range of backgrounds. What they all share is a love of discovery, of investigation and exploration, and equally important, a love of communicating their stories and insights in entertaining, memorable ways.
So do we. We are believers – we think that the right book, the right speech, the right new habit, the right insight on what makes us tick, the right cautionary tale or clarion call or I-just-can’t-take-it-anymore rant — even the right tidying tip — at the right moment, can be life-changing.
Our goal is to make sure that everyone has access to these transformative ideas, and to nurture a community to discuss and build upon those ideas—both with each other and directly with the authors themselves.
I am very excited and honored to be chosen! I recorded some short audio files for the club to hit some of the key insights of the book, and am delighted that my book is being recognized in this way. I’m looking forward to everyone getting a chance to read this book.
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas.
Skulls in the Stars 