10 Founder of the Science Fiction Genre

A Foreboding Prediction of What Lies Ahead in Edgar Allan Poe’s Work

Even though he helped establish the science fiction subgenre, Edgar Allan Poe is more famous for his works in the horror and macabre genres. He took advantage of the era’s preoccupation with new technology to write “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall,” a fable about a bellows mender who tries to evade his creditors by constructing a balloon and sending it to the moon. Adventure, space travel, and encounters with aliens are all present and accounted for in this work of science fiction. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon was inspired by it.

The hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s lone full-length work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, travels to the regions around the South Pole and meets odd people and islands. The popular Hollow Earth Theory from that era is brought up. The Antarctic Mystery, written by Jules Verne, is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s

According to “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” a comet destroyed Earth. “The Details of the Matter Involving M. Valdemar” delves into the practice of hypnotism as a means of evading death. As a dystopian future scenario, “Mellonta Tauta” takes place in the year 2848.

Poe wrote science fiction around once every five books. His contributions to literature as the father of the “scientific novel” were so significant that Jules Verne felt compelled to acknowledge and emulate him.

9 The Characterist

The Cryptographic Crisis: Edgar Allan Poe Jr.

During World conflict II, the Japanese fleet was defeated and the conflict was turned around when their coded attack on Midway was deciphered. William Friedman, who oversaw the group of codebreakers, was a legendary cryptographer. Who was he moved by? Horace Greeley, whose childhood favourite short tale “The Gold Bug” was written by Edgar Allan Poe. According to one reviewer, “The Gold Bug” is “unequalled as a work of fiction turning upon a secret message.” Some contemporary colleges still use it as a textbook for cryptography courses.

As a master cryptographer in his own right, Poe would often challenge readers to send him cyphers that he would decipher. In December 1839, a journal published such a challenge, and Poe asserted that he had cracked all one hundred or so substitution, or Caesar, cyphers that had been submitted. Even though it was solved in 1977, he wrote off one because he thought it was useless jargon. Although Caesar cyphers are the simplest type of code, Poe enjoyed solving more complex problems that required a secret word or numerous letters exchanged for one.

In 1840, Poe published an article called “A Few Words on Secret Writing” in Graham’s Magazine. Two years passed before each of the puzzles could be answered; the first was in 1992, and the second in 2000. W.B. is said to have provided the cyphers. Tyler, who was allegedly Poe himself, according to some. Furthermore, his more well-known works can have cyphers that have gone unnoticed. Quite intriguing.

8 The Little War of Longfellow

Wikipedia Commons/Poe/Longfellow is the source of the photo.

In 1841, while Poe was still a struggling writer and editor at Graham’s Magazine, he sent a polite letter requesting a piece from the renowned poet and contemporary languages professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Harvard professor politely declined, complimenting Poe on his own time, but he just didn’t have it in his hectic schedule. Still, Poe’s rudeness towards Longfellow must have irritated him, and the poet launched his vicious literary attacks on the poet.

First, Poe panned Longfellow’s translation of a poetry book, and then he attacked Longfellow for his own poetry. Poe scornfully claimed that Longfellow had written “beautiful poems—by accident.” The professor had the gall to accuse Longfellow of plagiarism, which meant using another person’s ideas, imagery, metres, and rhythms and not exactly reproducing them word for word. Longfellow was accused by Poe of engaging in “the most savage category of literary robbery.”

This was the starting point for what Poe called the Little Longfellow War. Many of Longfellow’s followers defended him even if he didn’t think Poe’s salvos warranted a counter-salvo. Under the identity “Outis,” one of these individuals redirected Poe’s definition of plagiarism by highlighting the fifteen correspondences between “The Raven” and an earlier poem, “The Bird and the Dream.” Unsurprisingly, Poe responded with a long reply, and the conflict continued for another six weeks.

For what reasons did Poe launch his rants against Longfellow? Envy in the workplace? Poe, who was struggling to make it as a poet despite his humble origins, may have harboured resentment against Longfellow, who was reasonably well-off and accomplished. Poe, who enjoyed pulling publicity stunts, could have orchestrated the whole thing. It is possible that Poe himself was the enigmatic Outis.[3]

7 The Balloon Scam

Dagoth Ur narrates Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax.”

The headline that made headlines in the New York Sun on April 13, 1844 was:

Shocking Updates! Through Norfolk, by express! In just three days, we crossed the Atlantic! BIG WIN FOR MR. MONCK MASON’S AIRCRAFT!!!

The story continued by explaining how Irish explorer Monck Mason, a genuine aeronaut who crossed the Atlantic in record time in 1836 with a balloon that had been technologically upgraded, sailed from England to Charleston, South Carolina. “Science has subdued the air, the earth, and the ocean,” the Sun boasted. “How wonderful! Who will claim that in the afterlife, nothing is impossible?The city newsboys and the Sun were able to cash in on the public’s insatiable need for news by selling daily editions. During a time of astounding scientific progress, everything did seem plausible.

Aside from this narrative, though. In an article published one month later, Edgar Allan Poe acknowledged as the story’s originator. I loved the way people responded to my hoaxes, Poe. Hans Pfall’s visit to the moon was supposed to be a hoax, but he stopped pulling the plug on it in 1835 after the Sun published a tale about astronomer Sir John Herschel seeing bat-like creatures and unicorns on the moon. Poe accused the story’s creator, Richard Adams Locke, of copying Hans Pfall’s work; Locke may have planned the balloon prank as an act of vengeance.

Poe was the one who came out on the losing end in the end. His career in journalism took a nosedive, ruining whatever chance he had of promoting himself. None of the money that the Sun made ever made it to him. One thing, however, was proven. True news is expensive.[4]

6 Sherlock Holmes’s Prototype

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Murders on the Rue Mortuary, Complete Audiobook

The modern detective fiction was invented by Poe. The accomplished amateur detective he hired, C. The work of Auguste Dupin served as a model for literary investigators who came after him. In other words, Sherlock Holmes likely wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Poe.

A former criminal who became a police officer and formed France’s Surete, Francois Eugene Vidocq was the inspiration for Dupin. An eccentric gentleman of leisure, Dupin solves murders using his keen analytical and deductive abilities. He is a pipe smoker with an anonymous flatmate who also serves as his narrator and sidekick. If this friend were to remain anonymous, it would be easy to imagine that we are reading about Holmes and his trusty Watson.

The superhuman armchair sleuth, the inept police force, and the locked-room murder were all introduced by Poe in the first Dupin adventure, “The Murders in the Rue Mortuary,” and would later become staples of classic detective fiction. Poe created a new literary subgenre by fusing the 19th century’s preoccupation with science and logic with a fear of the supernatural and the shadows.

5 The Fallacy of His Substance Abuse Problem

An explanation of the enigmas surrounding the demise of Edgar Allan Poe is provided by his biographer.

Out of your recollections of Lenore, pour out your scorn and nepenthe;
Forget about that missing Lenore while you savour this gentle nepenthe.”

In “The Raven” and other of Poe’s writings, the heroine is shown as partaking in opium use. The assumption that Poe was a drug user or, even worse, an addict, is understandable. His strange, imaginative stories were definitely the product of a mind on drugs. The character of Poe is tarnished by this regrettable urban legend. Whether or whether Poe had an addiction is conjectural. Even while he would binge drink sometimes, it seems he was not a chronic alcoholic either.

Nowhere in his letters or other personal papers did Poe ever mention his drug use. The one time he attempted suicide by taking opium, he said, was after a woman rejected him. Whether Poe was being serious or exaggerating is an open question. “Had Poe a drug habit, I would have discovered it during our frequent visits to each other’s home and our meetings elsewhere,” Dr. Thomas Dunn English said after Poe’s death. English was one of Poe’s haters and had good reason to speak ill of the poet. I find the accusation to be completely without merit and have not seen any evidence of it.

Rufus Griswold, who was both Poe’s literary executor and biographer, was the one who slandered him. He held a deep animosity towards Poe, whom he had never forgiven for criticising an anthology that Griswold had put together. Griswold shamelessly ruined Poe’s reputation in his biography, which unfortunately shaped how subsequent generations saw the man.[6]

4 Resolving the Case of Mary Rogers’ Murder

Unravelling the Cigar Girl’s Mysteries

A beautiful and energetic adolescent named Mary Rogers worked as a cigar salesgirl in New York. Men came to John Anderson’s shop in droves to chat with and flirt with her because she was so beautiful. Her abrupt disappearance in 1838 terrified her mother and the majority of the town. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when she returned two weeks later, claiming that she had gone to see family in Brooklyn. Some people thought it was just another one of the Sun’s famous pranks.

Consequently, on July 25, 1841, when Mary vanished once more, nobody was too worried. However, near Hoboken, New Jersey, three days later, the corpse of Mary Rogers was recovered from the Hudson River. Afterwards, parts of her attire were discovered in the forest near the riverside, and she bore visible signs of abuse on her body. Her partner, David Payne, was initially the target of suspicion, although he had a perfect alibi. Men who knew Mary could be considered suspects. On the other hand, a criminal group might have committed a random killing. No leads led the police anywhere.

The famous case was fictionalised by Edgar Allan Poe; all that was changed was the setting to Paris and the names of the characters. Except than that, everything was spot on. After reviewing the evidence, C. Auguste Dupin suggests a method to reveal the murderer in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” by drawing on close reasoning. However, Poe does not provide a resolution. Even though Dupin had his own theories, Poe lets the plot die out without a clear resolution.

For some, Poe’s “Marie Roget” revealed too much information. Did he know the identity of the murderer—maybe even too well? It is said that Poe was spotted with Mary just before her initial disappearance, suggesting that they were acquainted. Three days prior to the murder, a man that matched Poe’s description was spotted in Mary’s company. This writer’s stories revolve around the tragic ends of young, attractive ladies. Were Poe’s actions unfathomable? Poe was just as perplexed as the cops by Marie Roget’s weak conclusion. Nobody knows what happened in this case yet.[7]

3 The Big Bang Theory: What We Can Expect

Wow, Edgar Allan Poe

“Eureka,” Poe’s most fascinating and imaginative work, was prohibited in Czarist Russia due to its revolutionary themes, released a year prior to his death. This cosmological prose poem finds Poe arguing against the modern ideas of a clockwork world that he saw as stifling creativity, intuition, and, in the end, free will and self-determinism.

As an intuitive artist rather than a scientist, Poe fought against the notion of fixed axioms. However, he did this with astounding foresight, looking forward to the 20th century scientific discoveries that would support his theories of a dynamic and open cosmos.

The first to be influenced by Poe was the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann, who in 1922 challenged Albert Einstein’s “cosmological constant” with his equations for a dynamic universe. In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre expanded on Poe’s idea that the universe began with a singularity, or “primordial particle,” with his Big Bang theory, which he called Poe’s “one instantaneous flash” in English. As expected, Einstein believed Poe suffered from a pathological personality disorder.

An exquisite answer to the mystery of dark energy and matter can be found in Poe’s theories of electromagnetic and gravitation. He goes on to talk about how space and time are one, how energy and matter are the same, how fast light travels, black holes, and a cosmos that is always expanding and contracting. In fact, Poe provides an example of how his belief in intuition might reveal the truth about the universe is put into practice.

2 Cooping to Death?

How Edgar Allan Poe Died: A Mysterious Novel

Poe landed at Baltimore on September 28, 1849, while travelling from Richmond to New York. His whereabouts over the subsequent five days remained a mystery. He was discovered semi-conscious and dressed as someone else outside of Gunner’s Tavern on Election Day, October 3, laying in the gutter. Over the following several days, he called out “Reynolds” again while he slipped in and out of delirium. The official cause of death was phrenitis, which is swelling of the brain. Poe mumbled, “Lord, help my poor soul,” before passing away on the 7th.

Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain Poe’s death, including rabies, carbon monoxide poisoning, alcoholism, and murder. However, there is a school of thought that holds that Poe was a victim of “cooping,” a type of electoral fraud in which voters were abducted, manipulated, or coerced into casting several votes for the same candidate using different aliases.

The cooping theory clarifies Poe’s delirium and the source of his clothing theft. It was no accident that he was discovered on Election Day next to Gunner’s Tavern, a gathering spot for cooping gangs and a polling station. But nobody has ever figured out who the enigmatic “Reynolds” is.

The creator of the detective narrative had a mysterious death that may have been mentioned in one of his stories; it is fitting that we are left to unravel this intriguing mystery.

1 A Poem about the Hereafter

Strange Thursdays: The Mysterious Grave Visitor of Edgar Allan Poe

Even after he passed away, much remained a mystery about Poe. The 1863 publication of “Poems from the Inner Life” by psychic medium Elizabeth Dotten, who asserted that Poe’s ghost dictated the poems to her, is significant. She described Poe’s impact as “neither pleasant nor easy” in her writing. A kind of mental intoxication is the only way I can put it.

Sceptics and detractors, needless to add, disregard her account. The lines that separate this world from the next are, to put it mildly, hazy and unclear. No one can declare the boundary between the two.Poe had been writing. So, it is believed by some that Poe is still lingering in the physical locations of his homes in Baltimore and the Bronx, New York, where he once had a little cottage.

Historians are more concerned with tracing Poe’s body than with locating his soul. For fifteen years, the poet’s grave was marked solely by a small sandstone block. Poe, or what they believed to be his remains, were reburied beneath a new monument that the Baltimore citizens had donated money for because they felt he deserved more.

Apparently, the reinterred corpse was not Poe’s, and the other plots had been disturbed during renovations. The fact that the casket it was placed in was not even Poe’s, as a sexton recalled. We still don’t know if Poe got the funeral he deserved because subsequent counter-claims further clouded the issue.

It didn’t stop an enigmatic guy in black from making an annual visit to the tomb on Poe’s birthday from 1949 to 2009. He would drop by between the hours of midnight and six in the morning to leave a bottle of cognac and three red flowers at the location. Nobody ever found out who “The Toaster” was. However, his deeds had grown into a cherished custom, and the Maryland Historical Society chose to carry on the practice with a new, less enigmatic Toaster.

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