More penetratingly, even an ignorant modern reader cannot help noticing a series of clashes between reality as perceived in 1737 and as it is perceived now. For one thing, there is the ‘coca’ de Maillet’s vision could be/is a drug-induced hallucination, predictably enough supporting his life’s work on the one hand, on the other expressing his secret fears. Yet, though nothing said above is false, and nothing major has been omitted, no reader is likely to take the story just as sketched.
Summarised like that, the story becomes an icon of modern orthodoxy, a ‘Whig Interpretation of History’ applied in more-than-textbook style to the history of science (that home of ‘Whig interpretations’) it is a ‘must-be-so’ story. Not surprisingly, he then sees a vision in the sea of a ‘Dark Girl’, whom he equates with ignorance, and who complains that her reign is over and that the new philosophy of science will eclipse her. In it an old philosopher of the period of the Enlightenment, c.1737, sits on the seashore and unwarily inhales a gift of something like coca powder sent him by a correspondent, believing that it is snuff.
It is called ‘Telliamed’, and can be described with almost indecent brevity. Take, for instance, a short story by Sterling in Fantasy & Science Fiction for September 1984 (reprinted in his 1989 collection Crystal Express).
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