Helga Funk
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Helga Elizabeth Funk is one of the most respected science fiction writers of the nineteenth century. In an age where most authors' works were little known, due to the hardships of communication and transportation, Funk was able to reach out to America and capture the hearts and souls of hundreds of adolescent immigrants. Her best known works include The Horseless Carriage and Man on the Moon. She impressively predicted the inventions of automobiles, the entire field of aeronautics, and man's landing on the moon.
Funk was born in 1870 to John and Marie Funk just outside of present day Denver, Colorado. Very little is known about her early childhood, but at 15, she set off for California after the death of her parents. It is believed that they were killed by a tribe of Indians after a dispute about a particular horse which the family owned. There is no hard evidence that points to this but Funk herself writes about a similar situation in one of her lesser known works, The Bird That Carried Me. The feeling she uses in passages such as the following is so real that even skeptics have accepted the legend of the death of her parents, "My parents have been killed by a particular pack of Indians, and I could not save them, so I had a cry today and tomorrow I believe I may go in to town."
Funk began writing once arriving in California and her first novel, The Horseless Carriage, was published in 1886. She continued to write until 1899. It was during this year that a controversy arose in which the government first debated, then banned the reading of her novels due to the provoking images of the future she created.
She lived out the remainder of her life in Boston, MA and was buried beneath the Liberty Bell, after her untimely death in 1904.
