The Purple Emperor (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)

By Robert W. Chambers

This early work by Robert W. Chambers was originally published in 1897 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'The Purple Emperor' is a short story about rival butterfly collectors. Robert William Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, USA in 1865. His mother was a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island, and his brother, Walter Boughton Chambers, was one of the world's most famous architects. Chambers was a hugely prolific author, producing more than seventy novels and short story collections between 1894 and 1933. As a result, he had one of the most successful literary careers of his period, his later novels selling well and a handful achieving best-seller status. The Cryptofiction Classics series contains a collection of wonderful stories from some of the greatest authors in the genre, including Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. From its roots in cryptozoology, this genre features bizarre, fantastical, and often terrifying tales of mythical and legendary creatures. Whether it be giant spiders, werewolves, lake monsters, or dinosaurs, the Cryptofiction Classics series offers a fantastic introduction to the world of weird creatures in fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Feb 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473399846

Robert W. Chambers

Robert William Chambers (1865-1933) was a Brooklyn-born artist and writer best known for producing supernatural, horror and weird tales. He published his first novel, In the Quarter in 1894 but didn’t receive major recognition until 1895 with a collection of short stories called The King in Yellow. Despite entries in other genres, such as romance and historical fiction, Chambers’ most acclaimed works were Gothic in nature. His eerie tales would go on to inspire a generation of writers including H.P. Lovecraft.

Book preview

The Purple Emperor

By Robert W. Chambers

A Cryptofiction Classic

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

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Introduction

The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.

Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden – cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.

Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – which featured a mysterious giant sea monster – the 1890s saw an explosion of cryptofictional short stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s A Matter of Fact (1892) and H. G. Wells’ The Sea Raiders (1896). Into the 20th-century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) centred on an expedition to a plateau of the Amazon basin where prehistoric animals continued to thrive, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1924) picked up a similar theme, featuring not just dinosaurs but also Neanderthals. Less than a decade later, a prehistoric ape took centre stage in the 1933 film King Kong.

The fifties witnessed what was probably the heyday of cryptozoology. It