One of the ways novelists can be inventive is with…inventions.

Yes, some of their books weave stories around some of the greatest inventions in the history of humankind. That can certainly add drama and historic resonance to partly fact-based fiction.

A prime example is Gutenberg’s Apprentice by Alix Christie, who tells the 15th-century story of a man who (at first reluctantly) helps the prickly, driven Johann Gutenberg develop the printing press — surely one of the most consequential inventions of all time. I’m currently in the middle of reading this absorbing 2014 novel.

Part of The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) revolves around the invention and early days of the automobile — which figures in Booth Tarkington’s absorbing exploration of progress vs. stasis, and new money vs. old money.

Stephen King’s novel Cell takes a horror-laden (and satirical?) approach to cell phones as that technology was becoming widely popular. The book — perhaps my least-favorite King effort — features a mysterious broadcast over a cell-phone network that turns a bunch of people into zombie-like beings. 🙂 Published in 2006, a year before the iPhone was introduced.

The main focus of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) is the switching in infancy of two boys — one born into slavery and the other born to the master of the house. But a fascinating subplot features a court case in which the new technology of fingerprinting figures prominently. Interestingly, that new technology was anachronistically more current to when Twain wrote the novel than to the time period in which the novel was set.

Also anachronistic was Ayla’s much-too-early invention of the travois (a type of sled or platform, pulled by a horse, on which could be placed heavy loads) in Jean M. Auel’s circa-18,000 BC-set series that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear. The incredibly resourceful Ayla’s method of starting a fire was more contemporary to her prehistoric time.

Novels with time travel can certainly make inventions fascinating. For instance, the 20th-century physician Claire of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels creates some homemade penicillin after she ends up living in the 18th century. Claire knew about that antibiotic because penicillin was discovered in 1928.

Another time travel book, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), was prescient in inventing an early version of a debit card — the modern version of which didn’t arrive until 1966.

Science fiction can of course also predict and depict inventions before they’re actually invented. One of countless examples is the spaceship from Earth in H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon.

For younger readers, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams took an early look at computers — which tended to be huge at the time of that novel’s 1958 publication.

Your thoughts on this topic? Other novels with a strong invention element?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a controversial project being voted on again, some overpaid municipal hires, and more — is here.

In Amiens, France.

Jules Verne died on this day, March 24, in 1905. A good excuse for a post about science fiction, but I’ve “been there, done that” in 2016. So I’ll instead discuss fiction writers who were also elected to public office.

What’s that have to do with sci-fi master Verne? Well, in 1888 he was elected a councilor in the French city of Amiens, and served in that role for the next 15 years.

Then there’s John Grisham, who I read again this month…namely, his compelling novel The Broker from 2005, exactly a century after Verne’s death. Unlike Verne, Grisham held political office mostly before his writing career, serving in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. Which would certainly help his books, many of which have a political bent in addition to their frequent legal bent.

Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons, etc.) did one term in the Indiana House of Representatives starting in 1902 — meaning he and Verne were in office at the same time, 4,000 miles apart.

Clare Boothe Luce was elected in Connecticut to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving from 1942 to 1946. She first became famous the previous decade as a playwright, most notably with her Broadway smash The Women.

Vaclav Havel also first rose to prominence as a playwright before becoming the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic between 1989 and 2003.

Then there were writers who tried for public office but weren’t elected. For instance, Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, etc.) ran for governor of California in 1934 on a progressive anti-poverty platform and received a very respectable 879,000 votes despite being massively smeared by wealthy right-wing interests. He wrote a book about that campaign the following year that contained this classic line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Gore Vidal lost campaigns for a New York congressional seat (1960) and a California U.S. Senate seat (1982). In 1969, Norman Mailer ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.

Why do some authors seek and/or hold political office? There’s ego, of course, and the hope that they can have more impact in an elected position than through their writing. Or at least additional impact from combining the two pursuits.

Then there are people best known as politicians who have also written novels (often but not always after they leave office and sometimes with the help of co-authors or ghostwriters). Hillary Rodham Clinton co-authored State of Terror with renowned mystery writer Louise Penny, and Bill Clinton wrote The President Is Missing with author James Patterson. Other politicians going the novel route have included Jimmy Carter, Winston Churchill, and Newt Gingrich, among others.

I realize I’ve probably left out many fiction writers/elected officials, especially non-U.S. ones. Any you’d like to mention? Thoughts on this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my town’s controversial fire chief thankfully retiring, and more — is here.

Why do I have con artists on my mind? Well, Donald Trump recently wrapped up the 2024 Republican nomination for president, and I just read a novel featuring a character who seemingly has scamming on her mind.

There are a number of fictional people in literature who can be described as grifters, swindlers, carnival barkers, etc. Some are blatant scoundrels, while others are somewhat more nuanced amid their skullduggery. Once in a while, they might not be con artists at all, even if we think they are for much of the book.

If they ARE tricksters, we as readers ask: How clever are they? Will they succeed? When might they get their comeuppance? Just how gullible are their victims? Are we reminded of our own gullibility we may have displayed sometime in the past? Do we think of real-life flimflammers? Such as the aforementioned Trump.

The novel I just read — Joy Fielding’s Whispers and Lies — features twenty-something Alison Simms as the con artist (or not?) and 40-year-old Terry Painter as her “mark” (or not?). The lonely Painter, a nurse at a Florida facility for senior citizens and people with disabilities, rents the cottage behind her home to Alison. Terry finds her tenant charming, even as she’s also wary of her. Some very dramatic stuff ensues, and we get a twist ending few readers would see coming.

Other examples of con artists in literature?

There’s of course the iconic title character in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which inspired an obscure movie you probably never heard of. 🙂 He is pictured above in that film, as played by Frank Morgan.

Nouveau riche millionaire Jay Gatsby, who made his fortune illicitly, is also a snake-oil salesman of sorts — reinventing himself as someone he’s really not in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

While he has some admirable qualities, Tom Sawyer of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels has con-artist tendencies as well — whether it involves getting others to paint a fence in the first book or cruelly messing around with runaway slave Jim’s psyche in the second work. (Huckleberry Finn also features some shady characters in secondary roles.)

Lydia Gwilt possesses a measure of decency amid the unscrupulousness in Wilkie Collins’ novel Armadale. Like some con artists, she might have behaved differently if she hadn’t had such a challenging upbringing.

There is also Savannah, who insinuates herself into the lives of the Delaney family in a way that feels very suspicious in Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall.

I’ve only read one of Patricia Highsmith’s five novels featuring Tom Ripley, but that character is clearly a con artist who mixes criminality, likability, and more.

The last book I’ll mention is The Confidence-Man, but that’s one of the few Herman Melville works I haven’t read so I can’t say anything about it.

In the theatrical realm, we have Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man and its dishonest traveling salesman Harold Hill.

Fictional con artists you’ve known and loathed? Or maybe liked a little bit?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about whether a local governing body should take a stand on global issues such as the current Mideast carnage — is here.

The vehicle in The Time Machine movie from 1960. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)

I’ve written before about how I love to occasionally read time-travel novels — even mediocre ones. It’s exciting to see how sojourning characters react to the past or future, to see how residents of the past or future react to those travelers, and to think about ourselves leaving the current era. Other reasons to enjoy those novels, too.

But one angle I’ve never focused on is the wide variety of methods authors use to get their characters into another time period. That can be fascinating, and we admire the oft-cleverness of said methods.

I just read the compelling Timeline by Michael Crichton, who transports his late-1990s characters into 14th-century France with the help of computers and quantum physics. People are sent to the past like Star Trek crew members beamed to a planet’s surface, or maybe more like three-dimensional faxes. (It’s hard to explain; you’d have to read the novel. 🙂 )

What are the transporting methods in some of the other time-travel novels I’ve enjoyed?

There are books, of course, that put their characters into the past or future via an actual time machine, as in H.G. Wells’ novel…The Time Machine.

Or characters can be in a seemingly ordinary vehicle that ends up making a temporal journey — as with a railroad train that takes the protagonist of Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back into the past, and a subway train that does the same for the children in Caroline Emerson’s novel The Magic Tunnel.

Hermione in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban uses a small “Time-Turner” device that enables the studious teen not to miss any courses scheduled at the same time. 🙂

An unusual library situated between life and death provides the means to visit various timelines in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series has her characters go through stones to travel from the 20th century to the 18th century and back again.

Drugs? Those, too. The 1960s protagonist of Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand gets to the 1300s that way.

A severe blow to the head also works; that’s how “Camelot” is visited from the 19th century in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Self-hypnosis does the trick in Jack Finney’s Time and Again. Similarly, the lead character in Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward goes to the future via a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep.

The co-star of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is repeatedly pulled from the present because of a genetic disorder.

How some other characters travel through time is kind of mysterious. Octavia Butler’s Kindred protagonist is yanked to the past perhaps by being summoned by an ancestor? The star of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time somehow uses her empathy and perceptiveness to interact with a future being.

Thoughts about and/or examples of this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my town’s unpopular mayor thankfully not seeking reelection — is here.

In 2018, I wrote about late-career novels. Today, I’m going to tighten that focus to discuss final novels.

There’s something poignant and memorable about an author’s last book — whether it’s good or not-so-good, finished or unfinished, written when the author was aged or relatively young, published in the author’s lifetime or posthumously, etc.

Few final novels are the very best of an author’s canon, given that many soon-to-die people are often not in the very best of health — and/or perhaps not brimming with as many new ideas as when they were in their writing primes. But there can be exceptions or near-exceptions.

A couple of mentions before I begin: I’m focusing on authors with a number of books in their canon, not authors who wrote only one or two novels. And there have been some cases where posthumously published novels were written by the author before other novels by the author, so I’m not considering those to be final books — even if they were the last to be released.

Maybe the most famous last hurrah was The Brothers Karamazov (1880), considered one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s two best novels along with Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky died at age 59, so there might been more stellar works ahead; in fact, the author reportedly envisioned The Brothers Karamazov as the first of a trilogy. But death intervened in early 1881.

George Eliot, who died in 1880 at age 61, saw her final novel Daniel Deronda published in 1876. Not as highly esteemed as Middlemarch, but I found it to be her most emotionally gripping work. Quite a fiction finale, as it turned out.

Ten years later, in 1886, Herman Melville began sporadic work on Billy Budd — not finishing it before he died in 1891 at age 72. It was finally published in 1924, and is in the conversation as possibly the best Melville novel other than Moby-Dick (1851).

Staying with the 19th century, the novel that Charlotte Bronte wrote last was Villette (1853) — which has many good moments but nowhere near the power of the author’s Jane Eyre (1847). With her young novelist sisters Emily and Anne dying in 1848 and in 1849, respectively, Charlotte was understandably depressed during the Villette writing process. She died in 1855 at age 38.

In the 1890s, Robert Louis Stevenson worked on two novels simultaneously — both of which he would not finish before his 1894 death at age 44. One of them, Weir of Hermiston, is a quantum-leap better than his excellent previous fiction.

Unfinished as well was The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald — who also passed at 44, in 1940. Not The Great Gatsby or Tender Is the Night, but very compelling.

John Steinbeck’s final novel (though not his final book) was The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which is very absorbing, even if not in The Grapes of Wrath masterpiece territory. Steinbeck died in 1968 at age 66.

Any final novels you’d like to mention?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a huge unpaid municipal utility bill and more — is here.