in Darkness" by Mervyn Peake. The story concerns an inventor who anachronistically brings the steam engine to ancient Rome, along with three of the Four Great Inventions of China (gunpowder, the compass and the printing press). Golding adapted "Envoy Extraordinary" into a radio play for the BBC and then into a play called The Brass Butterfly in 1957. The play was first performed in 1958 in Oxford, in a production starring Alistair Sim and George Cole Leighton Hodson compares the novella to "The Rewards of Industry" from Richard Garnett's 1888 collection The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales, in which three Chinese brothers bring printing, gunpowder and chess to the West, but only chess is accepted. Walter Sullivan writing for The Sewanee Review in 1963, described The Brass Butterfly as "witty but by no means profound" and "Envoy Extraordinary" as "a not very successful novella about ancient Rome". In his book about Golding, Kevin McCarron says that The Brass Butterfly is "too often dismissed as lightweight" and that it has more to say about "the terrible cost of progress" than it is given credit for. Publication The first hardcover edition of The Scorpion God () was published in the UK by Faber & Faber on 25 October 1971 in an edition of 12,000. The US first edition () was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich on 26 January 1972 in an edition of 7,486. There was some disagreement about the appropriate advance. Golding had received $10,000 from Harcourt for his previous novel, The Pyramid, but was offered $3,500 for The Scorpion God. At Golding's insistence this was raised to $5,000. In the UK with Faber & Faber he received the same as he had done for The Pyramid: £500. References Further reading External links The Scorpion God on William-Golding.co.uk Short story collections by William Golding 1971 short story collections