Fixing the Sky by James Rodger Fleming Page A

as letter or telegraph, but with a “kiss across the universe” using a cosmic signal sent from the surface of the Sun itself—a vast attenuation of sunbeams that will generate envy even among current proponents of solar radiation management, especially those who propose to cast a shade on the Earth using orbiting space mirrors (chapter 8). Sellers writes:
    Meantime, watch for a sign from me. Eight days from now, we shall be wide asunder; for I shall be on the border of the Pacific, and you far out on the Atlantic, approaching England. That day, if I am alive and my sublime discovery is proved and established, I will send you greeting, and my messenger shall deliver it where you are, in the solitudes of the sea; for I will waft a vast sun-spot across the disk like drifting smoke, and you will know it for my love-sign, and will say “Mulberry Sellers throws us a kiss across the universe.” (273)
    As he promises, Twain ends The American Claimant with an appendix subtitled “Weather for Use in This Book. Selected from the Best Authorities,” in which he presents a rich parody of the type of dense weather writing that he fails to exclude from his own text. Here Twain contrasts the prolixity of
William Douglas O’Connor’s “The Brazen Android” (1891), in which purple prose serves to invoke the purple skies of medieval London after a thunderstorm, with the terse elegance of a much greater apocalypse experienced by Noah and his family and recorded in Genesis 7:12: “It rained for forty days and forty nights.”
The Wreck of the South Pole
    In The Wreck of the South Pole, or the Great Dissembler (1899), by Charles Curtz Hahn, protagonist George Wilding finds himself shipwrecked and stranded in low southern latitudes on a continent of ice. Befriended and guided by what he takes to be mysterious spirits, Wilding makes his way south to warmer climates, to a great city inhabited by Theosophists, who, by practicing mind reading and astral projection, seek to control nature with their minds. There, the weather bureau does not predict the weather—it uses mental prowess to control it: “Their duty is to decide upon the proper kind of weather for certain seasons and days and then see that the country has it.” 9 It is a land without droughts or damaging winds. There the police do not arrest criminals—they track and detain suspects who have been placed under suspicion by mind-reading surveillance.
    The Great Dissembler, the most advanced Theosophist sage, has mastered a technique for keeping others from reading his mind: “I cultivated the habit of jumbling up my thoughts in the worst mess you could imagine” so no one could fasten on them (67–68). It is he who is both the chief geoengineer and the greatest general. In order to defeat the revolutionary forces threatening his city, the Great Dissembler decides to wrench the South Pole suddenly from its axis to destroy the enemy with a tidal wave and “bring back the old order of things” (72). When he executes this plan, all the climatic zones of the world will change dramatically. Cyclones, tornadoes, and earthquakes will increase in both number and intensity until the temperate latitudes merge into the tropics. With the wreck of the South Pole (a day later than planned, possibly due to the confused thinking of the Great Dissembler) comes an unexpected rift in the surrounding ice walls and unintended consequences described only as “days of terror and suffering” (74). The story ends here abruptly, with no description of the fate of the world but with the assurance that George Wilding, again stranded in a remote and icy cove but cared for and comforted by the astral bodies of his friends, will soon be reunited with them.

The Great Weather Syndicate
    Weather and climate control, war, gender, and romance are juxtaposed in The Great Weather Syndicate (1906), by George Griffith. In the novel, Arthur