2023 read #145: The Poison Belt by Arthur Conan Doyle.*

The Poison Belt by Arthur Conan Doyle*

62 pages

Published 1913

Read December 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories are frequently collected into a single volume. Such was the case with the edition I had as a tween, and such is the case with the edition I have at hand today. I remember reading The Lost World for the very first time, and paging ahead with anticipation, speculating what the other stories would be. The Land of Mist would surely prove to be a direct sequel to The Lost World, full of strange and pulpy adventures (alas, it was very much not). But The Poison Belt was a strange title, and I had no idea what to expect. (My tweenage imagination leapt to the possibility that some mad inventor had a belt with a packet of poison attached, which he would whip around to crack against his enemies. Needless to say, I was abused as a child. Who else would see the word belt and immediately think weapon?)

The Poison Belt is, of course, an early cross between cosmic sci-fi and eschatological fiction, an expression of pre-World War anxieties. Challenger invites his old companions from The Lost World to stay with him and his wife in Rotherfield to witness the end of humankind, which he has calculated with precision after some astronomical observations. As Challenger predicted, the Earth passes through a belt of “ether” which seemingly causes asphyxiation in all oxygen-dependent creatures. Locked in an airtight room with supplementary bottles of oxygen, Challenger and friends observe the death of humanity — only to discover, with horror, that the belt has passed, and they seem to be the only beings left alive on Earth.

Belt has a leg up over The Lost World because the climax here does not involve our British heroes heroically genociding a population. The scenes in which our group motors around dead Sussex and London in the Challengers’ flivver are outstanding, fixed forever in my tweenage imagination. One is inevitably reminded of similar scenes throughout The War of the Worlds.

Most of the novella, though, exists to set up the antiquated sci-fi of the soporific “ether,” or to muse upon mortality and life after death. And even in such a brief and self-contained story, Doyle couldn’t help but center imperial race theory, just because he could. Also a bit of classist bullshit that escaped me as a tween, but feels particularly glaring now: no one in Challenger’s party even thinks to invite the professor’s faithful manservant into the oxygen room before the crisis.