Envoy Extraordinary (novella)
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Date: 2022-01-08

Envoy Extraordinary (novella), by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10021835 / CC BY SA 3.0

#1956_short_stories
#Works_by_William_Golding
#British_novellas
#Fiction_set_in_ancient_Rome
#Eyre_&_Spottiswoode_books
"Envoy Extraordinary" is a 1956 novella by William Golding first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode as one third of the collection Sometime, Never, alongside "Consider Her Ways" by John Wyndham and "Boy in Darkness" by Mervyn Peake.
It was later published in 1971 as the second of three novellas in Golding's collection The Scorpion God.
The story concerns an inventor who anachronistically brings the steam engine to ancient Rome, along with three of the Four Great Inventions of China （gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press）.
Golding later adapted "Envoy Extraordinary" into a play called The Brass Butterfly, first performed in Oxford in 1958 starring Alistair Sim and George Cole.
Leighton Hodson compares it to "The Rewards of Industry" from Richard Garnett's 1888 collection The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales, in which three Chinese brothers bring printing, gunpowder and chess to the West, but only chess is accepted.
A Greek librarian's assistant named Phanocles and his sister Euphrosyne arrive at the villa of the Roman Emperor, having been forced out of their previous life of because of Phanocles' inventions, which drew scorn and allegations of black magic.
Phanocles shows the Emperor a model of his design for a steam-powered warship.
The Emperor has no interest in it, but is delighted by the potential of the steam pressure cooker, which Phanocles learned of from a tribe "beyond Syria".
Mamillius, the Emperor's grandson, has no interest in either but falls in love with the veiled Euphrosyne when he sees her eyes.
Phanocles is given the funds to build his warship, which is named Amphitrite, and a second invention – a gunpowder artillery weapon later called the tormentum – in exchange for building the pressure cooker.
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