“Tom Edison Jr.'s Electric Sea Spider; or, The wizard of the submarine world” was written by “Philip Reade” and first appeared in The Nugget Library no. 134, (Feb. 11, 1892). “Philip Reade” was a house name for writers at Street and Smith, where the Tom Edison, Jr. Adventures appeared.

Kiang Ho is a giant Mongolian sea pirate and brilliant inventor, “keenest of all Celestials, and better fitted to rule China than the emperor.”¹ When Tom Edison, Jr., encounters Kiang Ho, Kiang Ho rules a port town in China and has assembled a fleet of ships with which he dominates the Yellow Sea. Besides his armed junks and the “steel clad ram” the Ylang Ylang, Kiang Ho uses a technologically advanced submarine, the Sea Serpent. Although it is eventually defeated by Tom Edison Jr.'s ship, the Sea Spider, the Sea Serpent has some strong early innings. Kiang's submarine is yellow and moves through the water with a sinuous, snake-like motion, as opposed to the waterbug movements of the Sea Spider. The Sea Serpent has fin-like wings which help it to steer through the water, and it can achieve great speed. It has electric lights, can fire deadly “steel balls,” and can whirl around in a circle at high speed, creating a miniature vortex (This maneuver, embodying what Edison Jr. calls the “spiral principle,” astonishes Edison Jr., who cries out that Kiang Ho is “ahead us all”²).

Edison, Jr. raids Kiang Ho's home islands, frees various Yankee prisoners, and smashes most of Kiang Ho's fleet. Eventually the Sea Serpent and the Sea Spider fight, and there is the requisite exchanges of fire, storming of submarines in powered suits, and hand-to-hand combat, with Tom’s “electric rifle” being opposed by Kiang Ho's “electric water gun.” Tom is locked in battle with Kiang Ho, who is at least seven feet tall and is using his superior strength to overwhelm Tom, when Tom’s female cousin Georgie, a stowaway on the Sea Spider, shoots Kiang Ho in the back, killing him.

“Electric Sea Spider” is an undistinguished dime novel story, but Kiang Ho is notable as the most memorable opponent Tom Edison, Jr. or any other hero of an Edisonade faced. Kiang Ho is also the first modern Yellow Peril character in popular literature. Previous Yellow Perils appeared in narratives set in the past, sometimes centuries ago; Kiang Ho’s appearance is set in the present, and in terms of invention and technology he is at least the equal of the very modern Tom Edison, Jr.

“Electric Sea Spider” is representative of how late nineteenth-century Americans saw China itself, as a peculiarly antithetical kind of foreignness, both so different from America as to be on the other side of an unbridgeable gulf, and incredibly contagious. In the years leading up to the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) American fantasies of getting rich in China by selling products to the Chinese population were matched by an insatiable hostility to Chinese immigrants. Great efforts were made by American Protestant missionaries to convert the Chinese, both in China and in the United States, but most Americans simultaneously felt that there was something innately wicked and especially Asian about the Chinese. China itself, seen to be without an emperor and wracked by internal unrest, including the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), that led to widespread chaos and the deaths of tens of millions, was viewed as a sick empire of indolent, depraved, and opium-smoking men, women, and children. In “Electric Sea Spider” this view manifests itself in the portrayal of the Mongolian Kiang Ho as being “better fitted to rule China than the emperor;” just as the Ming Dynasty had given way to the Qing Dynasty in 1644, so too, felt Americans, were the Qings ready to give way to something else. For most Americans the idea of democracy working in China in the 1880s was laughable. What seemed more likely was a strongman taking power—just what Kiang Ho, it is implied, is working towards.

Print: Philip Reade, Tom Edison Jr.'s Electric Sea Spider; or, The wizard of the submarine world. New York: Dime Novel Club, 1981.

¹ Philip Reade, “Tom Edison Jr.’s Electric Sea Spider; or, The wizard of the submarine world,” The Nugget Library no. 134 (Feb. 11, 1892): 9.

² Reade, “Electric Sea Spider,” 10.