The election as referendum on trickle-down economics

E.J. Dionne makes the argument that the presidential election has become a referendum on trickle-down economics, with Obama making the case for progressive taxation and McCain calling that socialism. One of Obama's rhetorical tricks that I just love is his description of trickle-down as the theory that if you give more money to the wealthy, some of it will trickle down on the rest of us. To my ear, the usage "trickle down on" conjures an image of the wealthy pissing on the rest of us. I'm guessing that's the image it's intended to conjure.

Homer Eon Flint, "The Planeteer"

Back to Homer Eon Flint. "The Planeteer" was originally published in All-Story Weekly in March 1918, and it was his second published story. There's a lot going on it. It's set in something of a socialist utopia a few hundred years in the future. Earth is heavily populated, and the story begins with the announcement that an earthquake in California has caused the Sacramento Valley to be flooded by the sea, raising the specter of starvation unless some way of compensating for the loss of now rare cropland can be found. The main characters are two scientists who pursue separate solutions, and a world-famous singer who loves them both and tells them she'll marry whoever solves the problem.

So early on we get a glimpse of the marvels of the far-flung future while this central situation is being set up. After that we get a brief tour of the solar system that's reminiscent of earlier scientific romances such as John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) and George Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space (1901). One of the scientists invents a spaceship which is used to first explore the dead moon, then a Mars inhabited by hostile aliens, and finally a Jupiter that is like Earth before humans evolved -- a verdant, uninhabited paradise. All of this is complicated by a wandering planetoid crashing into Saturn, igniting its atmosphere and driving it sunward, pulling Jupiter in its wake. The solution to the food problem that the space scientist therefore proposes is to pull the Earth out of it's own orbit and bring it within the atmosphere of Jupiter, where humans could use airplanes to migrate to the surface and colonize the vast swaths of fertile territory.

Flint is seen as a predecessor of the superscience fiction of Edmond Hamilton (who acknowledged the debt) and E.E. "Doc" Smith. He said that his greatest influences were the complete works of H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), although it should be said that "The Planeteer" in particular bears a number of similarities to the Astor novel mentioned above, including the almost utopian technological future and colossal engineering projects. He's definitely a Big Idea guy who is interested in social problems and has a clear sympathy for socialism. "The Planeteer" has some impressively dramatic, if not very realistic scenes, too, as when the wandering planet is slung past the Earth and comes within 90 miles of the surface, as our protagonists watch from the deck of a ship and thus have to survive a huge tsunami. Over all, however, Flint was a pretty clumsy writer, and his handling of the romantic triangle, for example, is crude. (Not unusual for pulp writers, it's true.) Yet one of the interesting aspects of his clumsiness is that the narrator of the story, who is one of the two scientists, does not win the girl, and actually ends up taking a fairly subservient attitude toward his competition for her hand. Can't imagine that Hamilton or Smith would have gone for this unheroic pose, but it makes the story more human in a way. The scientist who comes out on top is also interesting for showing qualms toward the destruction of the Martians that he causes -- an echo, perhaps, of the regretful massacre that concludes Garrett P. Serviss' jingoistic Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898).

Flint wrote a sequel to this novella called "The King of Conserve Island" that apparently follows the humans to surface of Jupiter. I hope I can track it down at some point. It has never been reprinted, as far as I can tell. The copy of "The Planeteer" that I read (courtesy of Curt Phillips, bless his soul) was from Caz Cazedessus' Pulpdom, which reprinted old pulp stories in recent years. To read "The King of Conserve Island" I'll have to track down the 12 October 1918 issue of All-Story Weekly. Likewise for Flint's story "The Man in the Moon," which was serialized in four issues of All-Story in 1919. I have two of those issues. At some point I'd like to put together a collection of Flint's stories, because it does look to me that he was a key transitional figure between the scientific romance and scientifiction. He and Garrett P. Serviss seem to be the key figures amongst the nearly-forgotten writers I've sampled from the pre-Amazing era of American SF.