Alfred Russel Wallace

I've been nerding out on archaic weird science in a major way lately for Sharon and I's new film project. It means I get to read and research all sorts of oddities, including the journals of some of the early explorers like Sir Alfred Russel Wallace. You know the "other guy" who came up with the theory of evolution independent and at the same time as Charles Darwin...

Many people know who Darwin is but Wallace doesn't always ring a bell. He must be the most unsung hero in all of science, but man he is fascinating! I've been reading The Malay Archipelago, a hefty natural history travelogue memoir he wrote way back in the the early 1800's traveling all over the Malay Peninsula in what is now modern day Indonesia. You know, Singapore, Java, Sumatra, Maluku, Sulawesi, Bali, Papau, the Aru Islands and many more exotic and obscure corners of the world.

He writes like a true English Victorian, a man of his age. I've afraid its starting to rub off on me actually. Reading on in his proper deadpan matter of fact style its easy to underestimate what a complete "badass" he had to have been to do the sort of traveling he did to the places he did at that time in history. Man eating tigers, head hunters, tropical diseases, ship wrecks and all sorts of dangers abound. In between trapezing after butterflies, running after specimens of new birds, or ruminating on the origin of obscure plants you forget he is holed up alone in a bamboo shack with a local tribal chief in a remote and forlorn backcountry mountain kingdom in the jungles of Borneo or Papau New Guniea....WHOA

The Malay Archipelago was reportedly some of Joseph Conrad's favorite bedside reading. That says a lot coming from the author of Heart of Darkness. And you know, he was right. For being over two hundred years old its been making for some surprisingly good stuff and is steadily helping widen a great gaping fissure in my brain pouring forth innumerable ideas and questions about that grey hazy, misty place somewhere between past and present, fantasy and fiction, and myth and science.

Oh and some of the old pictures and sketches are great too. GAaa! Man eating monsters and savage ape men....AKA wild tigers and belligerent orangutans :)