The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-second Century

Frankenstein wasn't the only classic horror novel created by a woman.

Within a decade of the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, another Englishwoman invented a foundational work of science fiction. Seventeen-year-old Jane Webb Loudon took up the theme of reanimation, moved it three hundred years into the future, and applied it to Cheops, an ancient Egyptian mummy. Unlike Shelley's horrifying, death-dealing monster, this revivified creature bears the wisdom of the ages and is eager to share his insights with humanity. Cheops boards a hot-air balloon and travels to 22nd-century England, where he sets about remedying the ills of a corrupt government.

In recounting Cheops' attempts to put the futuristic society to rights, the young author offers a fascinating portrait of the preoccupations of her own era as well as some remarkably prescient predictions of technological advances. The Mummy! envisions a world in which automatons perform surgery, undersea tunnels connect England and Ireland, weather-control devices provide crop irrigation, and messages are transmitted with the speed of cannonball fire. The first novel to feature the concept of a living mummy, this pioneering tale offers an engaging mix of comedy, politics, and science fiction.

Other books in the Haunted Library of Horror Classics series:

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

The Beetle by Richard Marsh

Vathek by William Beckford

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

The Parasite and Other Tales of Terror by Arthur Conan Doyle

Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

Jane Webb (Jane C. Loudon, 1807-1858) was a British writer best known for creating the first popular gardening manuals. Born into a wealthy family, she was orphaned at the age of 17 and began writing to support herself. Her first major work, THE MUMMY! A TALE OF THE TWENTY-SECOND CENTURY was published anonymously in 1827 when she was twenty years old. Many believe that she was inspired by Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, which had published less than a decade prior. THE MUMMY! is considered a pioneering work of science fiction, and the first English language story to feature a reanimated mummy.

LESLIE S. KLINGER is the two-time Edgar® winning editor of New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s. He has also edited two anthologies of classic mysteries and, with Laurie R. King, five anthologies of stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon. Klinger is the series editor of Library of Congress Crime Classics, a partnership of the Library of Congress and Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks. He is a former Chapter President of the SoCal Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and lives in Malibu, California.