DIEUDONNE, Florence Carpenter

(Florence Lucinda Carpenter)

(1850-?)

   US writer. In her Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star (1887) the tale's several protagonists travel through the Solar System in a large ASTEROID (not a star). Transported to this asteroid by a pre-arranged explosion, the central figure of the tale becomes king of the native bird-people, in fact of vegetable origin, who are replaced by ferocious elves when the worldlet cools down. Much happens. In the end, the protagonist, with his woman, seems destined to rule the Universe. The book is a cacophony of irreconcilable elements, but the author's extremely fertile imagination, when harnessed, manages to create a tale which significantly prefigures 20th-century cosmological SPACE OPERA. Xartella (1891), self-published, is fantasy.

   JC