{"id":1793,"date":"2011-04-26T19:50:56","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T00:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=1793"},"modified":"2011-05-01T07:51:40","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T12:51:40","slug":"take-that-phileas-around-the-world-in-65-days-with-george-griffith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/take-that-phileas-around-the-world-in-65-days-with-george-griffith\/","title":{"rendered":"Take That Phileas: Around the World in 65 Days with George Griffith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[amazon_link id=&#8221;1897350279&#8243; target=&#8221;_blank&#8221;  container=&#8221;&#8221; container_class=&#8221;&#8221; ]<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51CFsaNn5fL.jpg\" alt=\"Around the World in 65 Days with George Griffith: The Story of the Real Phileas Fogg\" width=\"200\" height=\"332\" \/>[\/amazon_link]Twenty two years after Verne rushed his character around the world in 80 days another science fiction writer set out to best the fictional Fogg&#8217;s time more than two weeks. George Griffith was his name, and he&#8217;d cut his teeth on Verne as a child, then moved on to roam the world in search of adventures of his own. In 1894 the adventurer set off on his exploit, chronicling it London&#8217;s <em>Pearson Weekly<\/em>, and offering a narrative that contrasts with Verne (and Hollywood&#8217;s) sugar coated travelogue. While it&#8217;s not as spicy as the fictional voyage, it&#8217;s considerably more illuminating.<\/p>\n<p>The actual record had already fallen to Nellie Bly, a reporter from the <em>NY Herald<\/em>, who had made the trip in 72 days in 1889 (the forward gives this as 74 days and doesn&#8217;t name Bly, but I got this from Wikipedia, so it must be true).<\/p>\n<p>The travelouge is interesting, though fairly dry, and one guesses that there wasn&#8217;t quite the fervor that Nellie&#8217;s trip caused, but still, it&#8217;s quite an adventure.<\/p>\n<p>The small book includes a number of shorter travelogues to wild and exotic places like the mountains of Peru, or across the channel by balloon (Hurrah!), and it&#8217;s easy to see why the jacket copy offers him up as the spiritual father of <em>Steampunk<\/em>.\u00a0 Fair enough, I say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Appeared in SFRevu May 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1795,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions\/1795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}