Petersilea, Carlyle
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1844-1903) US pianist and author of the Discovered Country sequence, a discursive spiritualist Utopia expounded in The Discovered Country (1889) as by Ernst von Himmel and Oceanides: A Psychical Novel (1890) also as by von Himmel, both novels being republished in 1892 as by Petersilea. The series cannot be called sf as such, but is interestingly specific about the afterlife containing no Heaven or Hell but a Platonic world whose presiding angels take the protagonist to Jupiter, and show him the advanced civilization on offer there. Technology is disdained by its exceedingly long-lived inhabitants, who may have provided a background model for George Bernard Shaw' s Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1921). Petersilea's other fiction is spiritualist without grit. [JC]
Carlyle Petersilea
born Boston, Massachusetts: 14 January 1844
died Tropico, California: June 1903
works
series
Discovered Country
- The Discovered Country (Boston, Massachusetts: Ernst von Himmel Publishing Co, 1889) as by Ernest von Himmel [Discovered Country: hb/]
- Oceanides: A Psychical Novel (Boston, Massachusetts: Ernst von Himmel Publishing Co, 1890) as by Ernest von Himmel [Discovered Country: hb/]
individual titles
- Mary Carew: Wife, Mother, Spirit, Angel (London: James Burns, 1893) [hb/]
- Philip Carlislie: A Romance (London: James Burns, 1893) [hb/]
links
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