Jane Loudon

The Mummy! Jane Loudon

Published anonymously in three volumes when the author was only seventeen years old, The Mummy! is, as she describes it herself, a strange, wild novel that-to an audience nearer her future than when Loudon imagined it-is filled with striking similarities to our modern world, including a form of the internet. But it is also filled with brilliant flights of fancy: her court ladies wear hair ornaments of controlled flame; surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons; people holiday by moving their entire home on rails. The visionary technological setting contrasts with a morality seemingly gone awry as it falls to the reanimated mummy Cheops to try to find a role in this corrupted society. A lost curio of Victorian futurism waiting to be discovered, The Mummy! is as bizarre and entertaining as it's premise promises-and more.