Customer Reviews

Queen Victoria's Bomb

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Franklin Huxtable is a 19th century physicist who dreams of ending war. After conducting a secret test on the uninhabited Jubila Plateau in India he believes he has discovered the solution - a device that can vaporize an area of land within a one mile radius, reduce living things to "their original elements", and theoretically destroy a city in one blow. Franklin Huxtable is the father of the atomic bomb.

With this ultimate weapon it would seem reasonable that Huxtable's discovery would cause squabbling leaders to come to their senses and abandon the folly of war. But things are not as simple as that. At the behest of Queen Victoria, Huxtable is obliged to keep his invention secret. Ironically for Huxtable the century in which he lives is full of missed opportunities to put his findings to use: the Crimean War and the American Civil War being a couple of examples. For more than thirty years after that test on the Jubila Plateau, Huxtable is unable to make his weapon publicly known. If only film and television had been available in the 19th century, Huxtable could have recorded that detonation and things might have been so much different.

"Queen Victoria's Bomb" (1967) is essentially a story of Huxtable's life, beginning with his days as a young student at Cambridge in the 1830s, when he was friends with Alfred Tennyson. Over the next fifty years he associates with many other famous people including Henry Lane, Queen Victoria, her husband Albert, Florence Nightingale, and Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun. Through Joseph Dalton Hooker, Huxtable becomes aware of mutated plant specimens that grew in the vicinity of the Jubila Plateau, and Colonel Godwin-Austen describes a tribe whose members have been afflicted with all manner of deformity. They too lived a few miles downwind from the atomic explosion.

The value of knowledge seems to be an important issue in this book. As we know, progress is a double-edged sword, something that can be used for good or evil. As Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out, people use fire for evil purposes, but civilization wouldn't have existed without it. There was a famous library in Ancient Alexandria that was damaged by fanatical arsonists. A lot of valuable knowledge was lost. Carl Sagan believed the damage done to this library may have delayed the Renaissance by a thousand years. The point is, it may be possible to slow down progress, but ultimately it can't be stopped. It's a matter of deciding whether or not we're ready for a great discovery, whether we're ready to accept its consequences.

As "Queen Victoria's Bomb" points out, there are questions of morality to consider. Real-life history has proven that atomic bombs are horrible weapons, but they haven't made war unthinkable to the statesmen. The twenty-first century will be just as blood-thirsty as the last, maybe more so. In addition to "Queen Victoria's Bomb" I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's short story "The Lucky Strike". This can be found in "The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century".

I was unaware of this novel until I read Jess Nevins's essay ` The 19th Century Roots of Steampunk' in the recent anthology `Steampunk' (Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds), in which it's mentioned as a prototype (along with Michael Moorcock's `Warlord of the Air') of this genre of SF.

Ronald W. Clark (British, 1916 - 1987) was a prolific writer who authored a number of well-received biographies of famous scientists, including books on eminent Victorians Charles Darwin and the Huxleys. He also wrote a history of the atomic bomb, `The Greatest Power on Earth : The Story of Nuclear Fission' (1980). Both of these topics are melded in his 1967 novel `Queen Victoria's Bomb'. My copy is a 1973 Panther Books edition with a nice cover painting (artist unknown, unfortunately) of some pith-helmeted British soldiers manhandling the disturbing-looking, black, cast-iron Bomb on a railway cart on a plateau in East Africa.

The other reviewer (G. Hughes) gives a good synopsis of the novel in his posting, so I won't belabor the details of the plot. I do have to say that I found the novel disappointing. The premise - that a gentlemen physicist (Franklin Huxtable) succeeds in discovering fission, fashions a crude nuclear bomb, and first detonates it in the early 1850's - is certainly provocative, and the first 40 or so pages of the book are interesting. However, after that, the narrative fails to build on its promising starting point and quickly bogs down into a tedious exposition on the moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in possessing the `Ultimate Deterrent'.

I won't disclose any spoilers, but I will say that we are given lots of conversations and soul-searchings between Huxtable and various historical (Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Gladstone), and fictitious, personages. But there's really not much else. Indeed, readers hoping to see the plot expand into an alternate 19th century, in which Rule Brittania sends out fleets of airships to nuke the snot out of truculent Hindoos, Huns, or Fuzzie-Wuzzies, will be disappointed. Moorcock's `Warlord' novels are much better at taking what would eventually be labeled the Steampunk concept, and running with it.

In fact, after finishing the book, I felt that Clark's main intent in writing it was less to craft a gripping or exciting storyline, but more to show off his ability to write a pastiche of the Victorian novel, with all its stilted syntax and sentence structure. There is also a dedicatedly worshipful presentation of the main characters appearing in the novel, particularly Victoria and Albert. Needless to say, for Brits angered by Harry Harrison's (rather vicious) depiction of Victoria as a screeching, unhinged harridan in his `Stars and Stripes Forever' Steampunk series, Clark's Victoria will be much more acceptable ! But regardless of how accurately `Bomb' depicts its historical participants, the net effect is to render the narrative too slow-moving, and devoid of action, to appeal to me.

Had to get a copy from the State Library. I liked very much the way the author played it straight and didn't try to be all Clever and everything. I get a favorable impression of the author's personality from reading this novel.