Another Thing I Didn't Know About FSF

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Besides the FYI on his birthday page, I did not know that, 
in 1922, Scott Fitzgerald wrote science fiction.

"You are now on the only five square miles of land in the country that's never been surveyed."
 
"Why hasn't it? Did they forget it?"

"No," said Percy, grinning, "they tried to do it three times. 
 The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State survey; 
 the second time he had the official maps of the United States tinkered with—
 that held them for fifteen years. 

"The last time was harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses 
 were in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up. 

"He had a whole set of surveying instruments made with a slight defection 
 that would allow for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them 
 for the ones that were to be used. 

"Then he had a river deflected and he had what looked like a village up on its banks—
 so that they'd see it, and think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley. 
 There's only one thing my father's afraid of," he concluded, "only one thing 
 in the world that could be used to find us out."
 
"What's that?"
 
  Percy sank his voice to a whisper.
 
"Aeroplanes." 


The story gets its name from this exchange:

"The Schnlitzer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts—"

"That's nothing...That's nothing at all. 

  My father has a diamond bigger 
  than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."

When the story was anthologized
in SIX TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE,
Mr. Fitzgerald wrote a preface for
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz:

[It] was designed utterly for my own amusement. 
I was in that familiar mood characterized 
by a perfect craving for luxury, and the story 
began as an attempt to feed that craving 
on imaginary foods. 




The next Fitzgerald page is here.

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