This interesting piece of science fiction literature from the middle of the 19th century is a bizarre fusion of modernism and sword-and-sorcery fantasy. Akin to any comparable Atlantis-and-Agartha style work, it's written well enough to be entertaining, and is actually a very good fiction read; but its importance, for occultism, is far greater than its fictional impact.
The author himself was assuredly connected to the spiritual- Blavatsky apparently was familiar with this work, and like other utopian novels it went on to directly inform the spiritualism and new agery of the next half century. This is not surprising, Bulwer-Lytton's various works also influenced the rise of Victorian gothic works. For those into subterranean fiction, it's a must-read. For those interested in the works that influenced 20th century occultism, even more so.
182 pages.
The one thing that i don't understand is what does it mean that you "edit" previous works. Do you remove parts of it? Do you change the languaging? Do you add drawings? Seriously, if you were to explain what does it mean and why your works should be purchased rather than the originals than you'd probably have way more sales.
ReplyDeleteThe editing process is more in depth than some people believe. If your goal is to obtain an original version of some of these works you can look forward to paying hundreds of dollars, in some cases.
ReplyDeleteI begin by reformatting the work; sometimes (especially with Victorian era literature!) the spacing is inordinately large. For Enlightenment era works, inordinately small. Sometimes the only easily obtained version of a work is a facsimile- I've spoken of this- that's where some goofball grabs a scan and doesn't change it at all, retaining any grammar errors, poor format, etc. These usually have one star ratings for a reason.
Once the work is in a better format (something modern) I proofread the work, correcting any mistakes I find, and modernizing the language used- old works tend to have a lot of thees and thous and so forth, or use words that someone not inclined towards English wouldn't understand- archaic terms, basically.
Once the work is grammatically sound I write a short foreword, create new cover art for it (I don't use the very basic automated system supplied for cover art) and release it.
In some cases the work needs illustrating- in the past I've done this myself but lately I've hired an illustrator since it takes me a lot longer.
A final point; my editions are often the least expensive, which was one of my main goals to begin with- to release hand edited, non-facsimile versions of old spiritual works at as low a cost as possible, so that people of any economic condition could obtain them.