The tales of Kate Thomason were spurred by this fragment penned by my great-great-grandmother – with whose name I graced my protagonist.
“One night as Professor Weston and I labored late attempting to produce artificial cavorite and the professor made, again, a weak pun on trying to produce catamites. Somehow from there our distracted conversation wandered to the Society of Most Remarkable Fellows, about which we had heard whispers.
For his part, the professor inveighed against the injustice his lack of invitation signified; for my part, I tersely pointed out the very name of the society forbade my participation, a snub with which I was far too familiar. Weston groused about those gentlemen of lesser accomplishments who were members in good standing – his ready listing of their names and their attainments betrayed just how much grief his exclusion caused him.
I knew these men, some of them intimately, and none did I consider more than passably above-average. Bertie Wells, while a sometimes-intriguing fictionist, saw himself as a one-eyed king in the land of the blind. Chief among his duties was to exercise the droit de seigneur , the feudal right of the lord to a woman’s bed. In Berties case he saw it as an obligation, his contribution to improving the gene pool.
I loathed the fellow. Most of the others were little better; I knew well their reputations exceeding their abilities, their skills and energies exercised solely in self-promotion. Looked at in this light my exclusion was less a slight than a benison. Were I to be invited my acceptance would entitle me to what? Back- stabbing and butt-grabbing? No thank you!
This did set me to considering the historical mismatches of forward-thinkers and their societies through the ages.
Regarding Professor Weston’s social skills, and my own awkwardness which was rendered acceptable only because of my appearance and allure, I wondered what would happen if a future Kate Thomason were brought back to Victorian times, perhaps by Wells himself.”
Thus Kate Thomason, my great-great-grandmother became my proxy, a woman of twenty-first century thinking and knowledge sent to a land almost wholly foreign. I endeavored to remain true to actual chronologies, but admit to some fudging – a tension which incited fresh insights in my own psyche. Many of these were resolved, for both Kate and me, through various and sundry transgressions and affronts to contemporary mores.
Has it not always been so? Men and women pairing, grouping, groping at the next level in our evolution?
No longer did I concern myself with trivial indiscretions of time and place where my fictive world failed to mesh cleanly with history’s gears. Thus – any characters are not completely accurate, all accounts of events are surely misleading, and sensibilities likely anachronistic.
No, do not come here seeking insights into the past – come for entertainment, and perhaps a few questions you’d never considered before.
