fiction into fact

What did Madame Blavatsky and Indiana Jones have in common? full text online From the Gothic Labyrinth... Although today known for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which awards prizes for bad opening sentences (Paul Clifford is the novel that opens It was a dark and stormy night) Bulwer-Lytton was, in his lifetime, arguably the most successful and influential novelist in England. Wagner based an opera on his novel Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes. After reading Rienzi, Poe wrote: There may be men now living who possess the power of Bulwer -- but it is quite evident that very few have made that power so palpably manifest. Indeed we know of none. The opera also had a profound effect on the young Adolf Hitler. In that hour it began, he was to say later. The Coming Race, an early science-fiction work, with its superman race the Vril-ya, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilization of the world, spawned an occult secret society known as Vril Society or Luminous Lodge. The Vril Society's philosophy and swastika symbol were absorbed by the Nazi party.

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