inject submarines and man - eating jellyfish intoJane Austenmay sound like a simple , gimmicky feat , butSense and Sensibility and Sea MonstersauthorBen H. Wintersclaims writing the book required a great deal of ingenuity , research , and Jules Verne .
In today ’s edition ofSlate , Winters sketch his writing cognitive operation forQuirk Books ‘ follow-up to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . Unlike P&P&Z , which contained only 15 % new text , Winters explains that Sense and Sensibility andSea Monstersis a rather different book from the original , containing 60 % of the original Austen , and 40 % of his own original penning . Part of this stems from his less than watery choice of original text edition :
As I began writing , it was immediately clean-cut that the original context would need to be reconsidered . Devonshire is endearing and all , but this is n’t Sense and Sensibility and Lake Monsters . ( And yes , I know , there is a great Austen novel set on the water , but thought is n’t as ripe a target for satire as Sense and Sensibility . Also , Persuasion and Sea Monsters does n’t quite have the right ring to it . ) In Austen ’s original , the Dashwoods , upon their disinheritance , are invited to live in what is fundamentally the guest house of a wealthy relation , Sir John Middleton . In my version , their move is to Pestilent Isle , part of a huge archipelago check by Sir John - now an knotty explorer / collector with a beard “ as white as the snows of Kilimanjaro ” and a necklace of human ear .
Winters also found that describe ocean monsters within the setting of Austen ’s earthly concern require a safe deal of research into the scientific language of the flow , as well as a bit of mashing up her look with that of the Victorian earned run average ’s own science fiction writers :
One of the most consistent creative challenges of write the book was on the basic level of mental lexicon . For the conceit to work , the new cloth would need to sound as much like Austen ’s marvelous and precise early-19th C choice of words as potential . So how to notice the right vocab Holy Writ to describe stuff that Austen never would have discover in a million years ? I borrowed a lot from my sources . From Verne , I got swell fish - describing watchword like cartilaginous and bioluminescence . From Stevenson , enceinte abandoned - island word like miry and marish , not to mention nautical word like cockleshell and fly jib . I also turned frequently to the synonym finder . Poring through my Peter Mark Roget ’s , I arrive at the befittingly eloquent and disgusting phrasal idiom to report the slimy stomach of an oversize solitudinarian crab just before it smothers someone to expiry : mucocutaneous undercarriage .
How I drop a line Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters[Slate ]
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