Going back in time with Samantha Hunt
By Sean F. Jones
Girls convinced they are mermaids, scientists skipping through time and speaking to the dead: Samantha Hunt’s fiction is like a waking dream, but don’t call it magical realism. Her latest protagonist, The Invention of Everything Else’s self–proclaimed inventor/poet Nikola Tesla, is historic proof of Hunt’s conviction that “magic” is a dirty word in a world too elementally wondrous for make–believe. Slice conferred with Hunt about her historical research, the lessons of Tesla, and her writing career.
What are the unique pressures and rewards of writing a novel based on a significant body of historical research?
I probably will not write a historical book again. There is a lot of pressure to get it right and I’m not necessarily interested in that. I was especially worried [writing about] Tesla. He had already had so many false things said about him…I didn’t want to add any more to that pile, so I tried to be very careful, but I knew that no matter what, I would hear from angry scientists, and I did. Because he is relatively unknown, when people find him they make him their own...and become very defensive when other people write about him.
But there's also a fear that too much historical information is going to kill any good writing…For a while it was really hard to not just write a straight biography of Tesla since the facts of his life were already so strange. There were lots of interesting true things from his life that I had to leave out because I thought nobody would believe anything so weird.
What specifically did you leave out?
He knew [intuitively] when his mother was dying. He left Paris, where he was giving a lecture, and flew to her bedside [and] arrived five hours before she died.
Another thing I left out, [that] at first I had in, but then I thought, “This reads like the worst sort of writing”: when he got to America he got off the boat and an Italian guy was on the street with a piece of broken machinery and he couldn't get the thing to start; Tesla fixed it for him in an hour and the guy gave him twenty dollars. When Tesla arrived he only had four pennies in his pocket—twenty dollars in 1884 is a lot of money! That's what Tesla recorded, though. It might be that he was lying.
Did he create a bit of a false legend around himself?
I think so. He wrote his autobiography when he was quite old and he was already getting a little bit unhinged from reality…It's still really interesting. That autobiography is pretty far–out.
I read Mark Twain had a hand in it.
Yes, they were really good friends. Tesla says that he read Twain when he was a boy and meeting him brought him back from the edge of cholera.
By Sean F. Jones
Girls convinced they are mermaids, scientists skipping through time and speaking to the dead: Samantha Hunt’s fiction is like a waking dream, but don’t call it magical realism. Her latest protagonist, The Invention of Everything Else’s self–proclaimed inventor/poet Nikola Tesla, is historic proof of Hunt’s conviction that “magic” is a dirty word in a world too elementally wondrous for make–believe. Slice conferred with Hunt about her historical research, the lessons of Tesla, and her writing career.
What are the unique pressures and rewards of writing a novel based on a significant body of historical research?
I probably will not write a historical book again. There is a lot of pressure to get it right and I’m not necessarily interested in that. I was especially worried [writing about] Tesla. He had already had so many false things said about him…I didn’t want to add any more to that pile, so I tried to be very careful, but I knew that no matter what, I would hear from angry scientists, and I did. Because he is relatively unknown, when people find him they make him their own...and become very defensive when other people write about him.
But there's also a fear that too much historical information is going to kill any good writing…For a while it was really hard to not just write a straight biography of Tesla since the facts of his life were already so strange. There were lots of interesting true things from his life that I had to leave out because I thought nobody would believe anything so weird.
What specifically did you leave out?
He knew [intuitively] when his mother was dying. He left Paris, where he was giving a lecture, and flew to her bedside [and] arrived five hours before she died.
Another thing I left out, [that] at first I had in, but then I thought, “This reads like the worst sort of writing”: when he got to America he got off the boat and an Italian guy was on the street with a piece of broken machinery and he couldn't get the thing to start; Tesla fixed it for him in an hour and the guy gave him twenty dollars. When Tesla arrived he only had four pennies in his pocket—twenty dollars in 1884 is a lot of money! That's what Tesla recorded, though. It might be that he was lying.
Did he create a bit of a false legend around himself?
I think so. He wrote his autobiography when he was quite old and he was already getting a little bit unhinged from reality…It's still really interesting. That autobiography is pretty far–out.
I read Mark Twain had a hand in it.
Yes, they were really good friends. Tesla says that he read Twain when he was a boy and meeting him brought him back from the edge of cholera.