AtDDtA1: The Chums of Chance

[Dave Monroe]

"... that celebrated aeronautics club known as The Chums of Chance
..." (AtD, Pt. I, p. 3)


"John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to make his name by
kicking third-world people around, another extension of the boy's
adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading." (SL, "Intro," p. 11)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72588

The Chums of Chance

To be chummy with chance might mean lucky, fond of gambling, fond of
chaos, irrational, or anarchist. Or maybe they became chums by
accident.

The American philospher Charles Sanders Peirce, who set down his most
important ideas in the late 1800's, argued that 'Chance' was a feature
of the universe that can refute all determinisms.

Cameraderie and isolation are two recurring topics in Pynchon's works.
The Chums are a band of heroes like those commonly featured in the
19th century boys' fiction that Pynchon evokes, but also recall
Pynchon's high school fictions, Voice of the Hamster and The Boys, in
which the teenage Pynchon lovingly portrayed his group of high school
chums, known as, simply, "The Boys."

The names of the Chums may also be derived from famous Jazz musicians:
Miles (Davis), Chick (Corea), Darby (Hicks), (Boots) Randolph, and
(Vachel) Lindsay (a stretch here?), notes the Chums of Choice blog.

Note that there's five Chums, the number of chapters of the book.

http://pynchonwiki.com/index.php?title=ATD_1-25#Page_3

"Voice of the Hamster" is a fiction serialized in four issues of
Pynchon's high school newspaper, the Oyster Bay High School Purple and
Gold, in 1952-53, begun when Pynchon was only 15 years old ...

http://themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_hamster.html

"The Boys" is a short, humorous piece that appeared in Pynchon's high
school newspaper, the Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold, in 1953,
a few months before Pynchon graduated at the age of 16. "The Boys" is
what Pynchon called his group of friends and fellow members of the
school Math Club ...

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_boys.html

http://pynchonalia.wikispaces.com/Voice+of+the+Hamster

"Moorcock ... is perhaps the main figure here. We're thinking of his
Airship Boys tales ..."

[...]

"We first meet the Chums of Chance, a team of five plucky lads who man
the airship Inconvenience, at the Chicago World's Fair. Under the
orders of an unseen directorate which gradually becomes less
substantial as the years pass and history darkens, the Chums perform
feats of rescue and surveillance and exploration typical of their
breed. The world ages, but they do not seem to, though their ship
grows steadily around them; by the end of the novel, it seems huge
enough—like the ship in Gene Wolfe's The Urth of the New Sun [1987]—to
cause a partial eclipse when they pass between sun and earth. As with
most Airship Boys, their vector is utopian: through clean living and
industry and learning they will create a better world, a pax
aeronautica: through the force of their own example."

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw14197.html

Michael Moorcock. The Warlord of the Air
NY -- Daw Books -- 1971, 1978

A world where the airship rules instead of the airplane. Fictionally
proports to be a lost manuscript written in 1903 by Mr. Moorcock's
grandfather which he has published.

http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/airship/fiction.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlord_of_the_Air

Cf. ...

Tom Swift and his Airship
Or, the Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud
By Victor Appleton    Book #3 (c)1910

[...]

The book opens with a bang, or perhaps, more of a boom. Tom and his
new friend, balloonist John Sharp, are expelled from their workshop by
the explosion of a new volatile lifting gas that Tom has developed for
an airship project. The Red Cloud, a luxurious combination
dirigible/aeroplane is being built for comfortable long-distance
travel.

http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/airship.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3005

Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship
or, The Naval Terror of the Seas
By Victor Appleton (c)1915  Book #18

Barton Swift has lost faith in his son's abilities as an inventor.
"Putting guns and bombs in an airship just won't work," says he.
(Little does he know...) [...] Tom's fame and success have brought him
to the attention of various nefarious foreign plotters who do not want
the now-famous Swift Intellect designing devices that could be used
against them in the "European Conflict."  The Mars, an armed dirigible
airship is one such. But for dealing with Newton's  ( Sir Isaac's, not
Ned's ) Second Law, Uncle Sam might have a weapon that could become
the Naval Terror of the Seas.

Tom has to figure out a way to fire artillery from a floating platform
and convince the US Navy to purchase this poke with most of Tom's
piggy-bank tied up in it.

http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/airwar.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1281

Beale, Charles Willing. The Secret of the Earth. New York: Arno Press,
1975. Originally published: 1899.

Two brothers fly into the hollow earth on a homemade airship. They
enter through the North Pole and exit from the South Pole....

http://www.antarctic-circle.org/fauno.htm

The Secret of the Earth by Charles Willing Beale (1899)---perhaps
first to use aircraft through a polar opening, surface folks are
descendants from exiles from below....

http://www.bouncepage.com/Pellucidar/hollow.html

The Secret of the Earth, Charles Beale, 1899. Financed by a being from
the inner world, Guthrie and Torrence Attlebridge, co-inventors of the
airplane, travel north to the Pole and enter the interior of the
earth. Here they find roofless houses and a city of white and gold, a
paradise that was man's 1st home.

http://www.trivia-library.com/a/inside-planet-earth-science-fiction-ideas-on-the-center-of-the-earth-part-2.htm
  	
Beale, Charles Willing
THE SECRET OF THE EARTH

The Secret of the Earth combines several themes common to turn of the
century science fiction: the inner Earth theory, anti-gravity devices,
and the use of the lost manuscript device to lend credence to the
story. Two American brothers, Torrence and Guthrie Attlebridge,
journey to Britain to seek financing for their new anti-gravity
airship, which they intend to use in exploring the mysteries of the
North Pole. After finding sufficient financial help to build the
craft, they set sail on a northward course, and discover an unknown
sea, beyond which lies the entrance to the strange world inside the
Earth....

http://www.ayerpub.com/Product.asp?ProductID=4400000018047&Res=T

AIRSHIP BOYS
By H.L. Sayler

This eight volume series was published by Reilly & Britton between
1909 and 1915. The final volume was written by De Lysle F. Cass.

http://www.seriesbooks.com/airshipboys.htm

H. L. Sayler's "Airship Boys" series was one of the more sophisticated
juvenile fantastic flight series....

http://www.violetbooks.com/gal-flight.html

Sayler, H. L. THE AIRSHIP BOYS; or, The Quest of the Aztec Treasure.
Chicago: Reilly & Brittons, 1909.

Sayler, H. L. THE AIRSHIP BOYS ADRIFT; or, Saved by Aeoroplane.
Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1909.  Previously unknown pyramid builders
in Central America.

http://www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check6.html

Airship Boys. The Airship Boys were created by H.L. Sayler and
appeared in the "Airship Boys" series, beginning with The Airship
Boys; or, The Quest of the Aztec Treasure (1909) and running through
seven more novels. The Airship Boys were Ned Napier and Alan Hope, a
pair of boy geniuses from Chicago. They are, of course, highly
interested in creating airship, and they do, following which, with
their friend the newspaper reporter Robert Russell, they go on
adventures, variously seeking and finding Aztec treasure (and a lost
race of pyramid builders to go with it), setting airspeed and duration
records, and flying New York to London nonstop. Their airships begin
as dirigibles and move on to things like gas powered controlled
explosion motors and then a propellor engine fueled with "sulfuric
ether" capable of reaching very high altitudes and 800 mph.

http://www.geocities.com/jjnevins/pulpsa.html

On the Authorship of 'As It Is Written' Douglas A. Anderson

In 1982 Donald M. Grant published a novelette entitled As It Is
Written, with its authorship credited to Clark Ashton Smith. Found in
the files for the never—published December 1, 1919 issue of The Thrill
Book (a magazine which had previously published a Smith poem), the
story was bylined "De Lysle Ferree Cass". The attribution of
authorship to Smith was based on stylistic similarities and
circumstantial evidence.

But since 1982 further evidence has cone to light that would suggest
otherwise. For it has been discovered that this De Lysle Ferree Cass
also authored other works, some highly unlike Smith's. These include
one full—length, book and six additional stories (some very long); and
it has furthermore been discovered that Cass wrote (or planned to
write) two other items, for which copyright was filed at the Copyright
Office in Washington. D.C.

Cass's book was part of a juvenile series, on the "Airship Boys", and
was entitled The Airship Boys in the Great War; or. The Rescue of Bob
Russell. Published in 1915, by the Chicago firm Reilly & Brirton, it
was the last title in a  multi—volume series. Most of the series had
been written by H. L. Sayler. under his own name and under pseudonyms.
(Interestingly. Sayler wrote another series on the "Aeroplane Boys"
for the same publisher, under the name Ashton Lamar.) But Sayler died
in 1913; a few further of his "Airship Boys" books cane out, followed
by the Cass book, and with it the series ended....

http://www.eldritchdark.com/articles/criticism/32/on-the-authorship-of-'as-it-is-written'

Into the Heart of the World After Andrae, The Chicago Tribune ~ October 3, 1909

http://www.erbzine.com/mag14/1448.html