The other source of inspiration for this was a real woman. Her name is Shakuntala Devi, and she was known as the human computer for her ability to calculate complex cube roots in her head in a matter of seconds. Her roots were modest—her father was a circus performer—but not only was she a mathematical genius, she also wrote cookbooks, nonfiction on homosexuality, nonfiction on learning mathematics, and novels (many of these are available as ebooks today). She even ran for office.
In terms of the work Rose was doing, I ended up deleting a lot of astronomy and mathematics from this book as written. (I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that.) One of the things I deleted was a reason why she’d be using the law of gravitation to calculate the Great Comet’s trajectory. This was actually a huge open problem in astronomy at the time: everyone knew that comets didn’t purely obey the laws of gravitation in their trajectory around the sun, and nobody could figure out why they didn’t. It was a source of some serious disagreement. People came up with all kinds of theories as to the source of the discrepancy. The real answer—asymmetric outgassing of cometary materials as the comet approached the sun, and a few relativistic effects—was not known for many years yet. Rose’s goal in her calculations would be to try to fit the theory of gravitation with the other known theories to see which of those theories best approximated reality.
Yes, there was once a lengthy explanation of this in the book. Yes, I deleted it.
As for Patricia’s husband, the brief account that Rose gives is also accurate. Africanus Horton, the first black doctor in England, was sponsored by the editor of the African Times. Thereafter, several others were sponsored regularly, many of whom married women in England (some white). While we don’t have statistics of this by race, by 1882, Britain had probably trained at least as many black doctors as there were dukes. There were also a number of middle-class black families like the one Rose comes from—shopkeepers, lawyers, and the like. I don’t pretend there were many of them as a proportion of the population as a whole, but especially in the areas of the country that were near the major ports—Liverpool, London, Manchester and the like—there were known concentrations of people of color. I’m indebted to the book Black Victorians, Black Victoriana for their work in peering into the historical record on this point.
Finally, a brief note on the transit of Venus. Just about everything Rose says about the transit of Venus is true. I made one alteration to reality for the purposes of the story. In reality, the snow on December 6th started before the transit did, and so the transit was not visible at all in London. I moved the storm back a few hours, and gave Rose that first glimpse of the phenomenon. I hope you’ll forgive that tiny alteration.
Acknowledgments
Some books have a natural story to them, one that takes me almost no effort to write. Others require substantially more work on my part to uncover. This was a book that I thought I understood…until I started writing it and found that the story I’d hoped to tell was not at all the one that showed up on the page. It took me longer to put together than I had hoped.
But I had promised my husband that, for the first time in five years, when we took a vacation, I would not have a pending deadline. (The number of times he has gone out and entertained himself while I struggled with a manuscript back at the hotel room is huge. It’s happened in —in London, Hawaii, Chamonix, New York, Chicago, while visiting his parents, while visiting my parents…) The people who helped me with this book did so under extraordinary deadline pressures: Robin Harders, Keira Soleore, Martin O’Hearn, Martha Trachtenberg, Maria Fairchild, Rawles Lumumba… All of them got this book and turned it around in absolutely record time.
This is the final book in the Brothers Sinister series, and it feels strange to let it go. This series has found me thousands and thousands of new readers, has allowed me to quit my day job. It seems overly dramatic to call it life-changing—but what else do you call something that changes your life? To everyone who has enjoyed this series: thank you for changing my life. Thank you for everything.
I hope I can do my next series justice.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Talk Sweetly to Me: © 2014 by Courtney Milan.
Cover design © Courtney Milan.
Cover photographs © | shutterstock.com.
Digital Edition 1.0
All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.
Courtney Milan, Talk Sweetly to Me
(Series: Brothers Sinister # 4.50)
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