Science Fiction Writers : Critical Studies of the Major Authors From the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day 0684167409

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SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day

E. E Bleiler Editor

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day

E. F. BLEILER, Editor

Charles Scribner's Sons

New York

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY

Copyright © 1982 Charles Scribner's Sons Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title:

Science fiction writers. Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Science fiction, American —History and criticism. 2. Science fiction, English —History and criticism. 3. Science fiction, American — Bio-bibliography. 4. Science fiction, English — Bio-bibliography. 1. Bleiler, Everett Franklin, 192081-51032 823'.0876'09 PS374.S35S36 AACR2 ISBN 0-684-16740-9

This book published simultaneously in the United States of America and in Canada — Copyright under the Berne Convention All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

1 3579 II 13 15 17 19 Q /C

20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgment is gratefully made to those publishers and individuals who have permitted the use of the following mate­ rials in copyright.

Alfred Bester Excerpt beginning with "I've carried my concept" and ending with "production problems." From an unpublished letter of Alfred Bester. Reprinted by courtesy of the author. Ray Bradbury Three excerpts from: "Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle," an introduction by Ray Bradbury, from The Stories of Ray Brad­ bury. Eight lines from: "Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time," page 71 from Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns. Copyright line for the introduction: Copyright © 1980 by Ray Bradbury Enterprises/A California Corporation. Copyright line for "Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket," etc.: Copyright © 1977 by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permis­ sion of the Harold Matson Company, Inc. John Brunner Six lines from "The H-Bombs' Thunder" by John Brunner. Copyright © 1958 by John Brunner; copyright assigned in 1959 to The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); excerpted from The Book of John Brunner (DAW Books, New York, 1976) by permission of the author.

Philip K. Dick From "Man, Android and Machine" by Philip K. Dick, in Sci­ ence Fiction at Large, edited by Peter Nicholls. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022. Aldous Huxley Fifth stanza from "First Philosopher's Song" in Leda from The Collected Poetry of Aldous Huxley, edited by Donald Watt. Copyright © 1920 by Aldous Huxley. Specified extracts from letter "To George Orwell (E. H. Blair) Wrightwood, Cal. 21 Oc­ tober, 1949" (pp. 604-605) and letter "Dearest M, 3276 Deronda Drive, L.A. 28, Cal. 20 August, 1959" in Letters of Aldous Hux­ ley, edited by Grover Smith. Copyright © 1969 by Laura Hux­ ley. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and by permission of Mrs. Laura Huxley and Chatto & Windus Ltd. StanisFaw item From The Star Diaries by StanisFaw Eem, English translation copyright © 1976 by The Seabury Press, Inc. Reprinted by per­ mission of The Continuum Publishing Company.

H. P. Lovecraft Excerpt of a letter from H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long (February 1924). Reprinted from Selected Letters of H. P. Love­ craft, Vol. 1, by permission of the publisher, Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City, Wisconsin.

Richard Matheson Lines from "As I Walked Out One Evening," copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, by permission of Random House, Inc., and by per­ mission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Publishers. C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner Excerpt from Henry Kuttner's diary reprinted by permission of the Estate of Henry Kuttner. Excerpt from the C. L. Moore (un­ published) autobiography reprinted by permission of C. L. Moore (Mrs. Thomas Reggie).

Eric Frank Russell Excerpt of letter by Eric Frank Russell (9 January 1973). Re­ printed by permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Es­ tate of Eric Frank Russell. Margaret St. Clair Autobiographical note published in Fantastic Adventures, No­ vember 1946. Copyright © 1946 by Margaret St. Clair. Copy­ right renewed. Reprinted by permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc. Clark Ashton Smith Excerpt from "To the Daemon" in Poems in Prose (1965). Re­ printed by permission of Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City, Wisconsin.

James Tiptree, Jr. Excerpts from "With Tiptree Through the Great Sex Muddle" by James Tiptree, Jr. Copyright © by Jeffrey D. Smith 1975; reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd. Excerpts from "Everything but the Signa­ ture Is Me" by James Tiptree, Jr. Copyright © by James Tiptree, Jr., 1978; reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.

Stanley G. Weinbaum From "A Martian Odyssey and Other Science Fiction Tales." Copyright © 1935 by Fantasy Magazine; reprinted by permis­ sion of Forrest J Ackerman, 2495 Glendower Avenue, Holly­ wood, California 90027, for the heir.

EDITORIAL STAFF CHRISTIANE L. DESCHAMPS, MANAGING EDITOR

(âmes F. maurer, Associate Editor G. michael mcginley, Associate Editor david William voorhees, Associate Editor

Carolyn patton, Assistant Editor Russell

handelman, Editorial Assistant

IOEL honig, Associate Editor Elizabeth i. wilson, Associate Editor scott kurtz, Copy Editor

eva galan, Proofreader carol holmes, Proofreader

Judith anderson, Indexer JANET hornberger, Production Supervisor MARSHALL DE BRUHL, DIRECTOR, REFERENCE BOOK DIVISION

CONTENTS

xi

Introduction

I. Early Science Fiction

1

3

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEYBrian W. Aldiss E. F. Bieder

EDGAR ALLAN POE

John Scarborough

H. RIDER HAGGARD H. G. WELLS M. P. SH1EL

11

19

Brian W. Aldiss

25

E. F. Bleiler

31 39

James L. Campbell, Sr.

GARRETT P. SERVISS

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

fames L. Campbell, Sr.

45

II. Primitive Science Fiction: The American Dime Novel and Pulp Magazines 51

LUIS PHILIP SENARENS

E. F. Bleiler

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS

A. MERRITT

53

E. F. Bleiler

E. F. Bleiler

65

III. Mainstream Georgian Authors JOHN TAINE

59

73

lames L. Campbell, Sr.

S. FOWLER WRIGHT

OLAF STAPLEDON ALDOUS HUXLEY

75

E. F. Bleiler

83

James L. Campbell, Sr.

101

IV. American Science Fiction: The Formative Period

MURRAY LEINSTER DAVID H. KELLER

91

John R. Pfeiffer

John Clute

109

111

Brian M. Stableford

119

vii

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS E. E. SMITH

John Clute

125

Colin Wilson

H. P. LOVECRAET

131

Brian M. Stableford

CLARK ASHTON SMITH

STANLEY G. WEINBAUM

Brian M. Stableford

E. F. Bleiler

JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.

V. The Circumbellum Period

Frederick Shroyer

171

Brian M. Stableford

v ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

179

Peter Nicholls

185

Malcolm Edwards

197

ERIC FRANK RUSSELL

Brian M. Stableford

THEODORE STURGEON A. E. VAN VOGT

161

169

Willis E. McNelly

L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP

145

151

C. L. MOORE AND HENRY KUTTNER

RAY BRADBURY

139

203

209

Colin Wilson John Scarborough

219

JACK WILLIAMSON

Robert E. Myers

225

GEORGE ORWELL

Charles L. Elkins

JOHN WYNDHAM

C. S. LEWIS

233

John Clute 249

VI. The Modems

Willis E. McNelly

BRIAN W. ALDISS

POUL ANDERSON \ ISAAC ASIMOV

J. G. BALLARD

251

Roald D. Tweet

259

L. David Allen

267

Brian M. Stableford

ALFRED BESTER

JAMES BLISH

243

277

Willis E. McNelly

283

John Clute

JOHN BRUNNER

291

John R. Pfeiffer

297

Peter Nicholls

ALGIS BUDRYS

305

David N. Samuelson

'"'•'ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Chris Morgan

HAL CLEMENT

SAMUEL R. DEL ANY

PHILIP K. DICK

321

Douglas Barbour

Brian M. Stableford

GORDON R. DICKSON

THOMAS M. DISCH

313

329 337

John Clute

345

Brian M. Stableford

351

HARLAN ELLISON George Edgar Slusser PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER Roald D. Tweet

357 369

FRANK HERBERT

377

FRED HOYLE

Willis E. McNelly

John Clute

387

viii

CONTENTS DAMON KNIGHT

Gardner Dozois

C. M. KORNBLUTH

393

Malcolm Edwards

401

David N. Samuelson

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Brian M. Stableford

FRITZ LEIBER

Peter Nicholls

RICHARD MATHESON

JUDITH MERRIL

425

Chris Morgan

WALTER M. MILLER, JR.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK

433

John B. Ower

441

Peter Nicholls

449

LARRY NIVEN

Richard Finholt/John Carr

CHAD OLIVER

L. David Allen

FREDERIK POHL

ROBERT SHECKLEY

CORDWAINER SMITH

513

Chris Morgan

519

525 531

Malcolm Edwards

ROGER ZELAZNY

543

Charles L. Elkins

551

Peter Nicholls

VII. Continental Science Fiction

563

571 573

E. F. Bleiler

John Clute

STANISTAW TEM

505

Roald D. Tweet

Susan Wood

KURT VONNEGUT

KAREL CAPEK

497

Malcolm Edwards

JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

JULES VERNE

491

Malcolm Edwards

CLIFFORD D. SIMAK WILLIAM TENN

483

John Clute

Chris Morgan

ROBERT SILVERBERG

JACK VANCE

475

Marilyn J. Holt

JOANNA RUSS

459

467

David N. Samuelson

MARGARET ST. CLAIR

409 419

583

John Scarborough

591

List of Contributors

599

General Bibliography

601

Index

603

IX

INTRODUCTION

ELECTING THE MOST important authors of science fiction is not too difficult a

S

task as long as the number selected remains very small. Almost everyone would agree that Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Olaf Stapledon are obvious choices about which there would be little argument. But selecting a considerably larger number of men and women is a much more difficult task, for in the middle range there are so many solid authors among whom choices must be made. Nor is the number of authors the only problem that makes such a selection difficult. There are many ways in which the word "important" can be defined, depending on the criteria of the reader. First, there is literary quality according to the standards of mainstream fiction —such factors as characterization, style, and development. Yet in science fiction, as in the detective story, this criterion has been disputed, and there are critics who regard literary quality as either irrelevant or less significant than imagina­ tion, novelty of idea, and trickiness of conceit. A second possible criterion for "important" is historical position within the science fiction form. Some writers have invented narrative methods, plot mechanisms, and con­ cepts that have been borrowed and used extensively by other authors. Such a writer is H. G. Wells, whose short novel The Time Machine (1895) set off a whole chain of development, or George Chesney, who for all practical purposes invented the imaginary war story in English with his sketch The Battle of Dorking (1871). A typologist of popular fiction, who is interested in establishing "pure forms," might consider an otherwise minor work like The Phantom City by William Westall (1886) very "important." For it contains, clearly stated, almost every motif of a lost race situ­ ation: a hidden land, a well-known people of antiquity (Aztecs), a beautiful princess, a battle between priestly and secular forces, a volcano, and so on. A cultural historian, on the other hand, might find dime novel science fiction fascinating, since it is so firmly grounded in popular culture and reveals folkways more clearly than does main­ stream fiction. A delimitation of the field of science fiction is also necessary because not all critics and readers agree on its boundaries. Stories that one person would accept as science fiction might be rejected by others. Such differences of opinion are great enough that science fiction sometimes seems carved up between writers doing certain things and

xi

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS outsiders analyzing what has been or should have been done, a modern parallel to English bards anti Scotch reviewers. Defining science fiction has proved very difficult, as can be seen from the many descriptive definitions that exist. In the older presophisticated days before World War II, readers and critics took a simplistic view of science fiction. It was customary to divide literature into two streams, realistic and fantastic, and to place science fiction within the fantastic current. Science fiction was then defined as fantastic fiction based on ex­ trapolated or imaginary science. Unfortunately, while this definition works well enough for some stories (notably "idea” stories or "hard" science fiction), it is irrelevant for many others that are generally accepted as science fiction but have little to do with science, either serious or imaginary. Another objection to this two-stream interpretation of literature (which crops up in other definitions of science fiction) is that it confuses an idea obtained by critical anal­ ysis with an actual phenomenon, for literature obviously does not break down into two mutually exclusive groupings. There are shadings and varied proportions of realism and fantasy; and — the largest objection of all — there is no clear definition for either realism or fantasy. Back in the 1930's, when the readers and writers of American pulp science fiction became conscious that they were concerned with a new sort of literature, there was considerable dispute about its definition. Part of the dispute turned on words. If one examines the older fan literature, like The Science Fiction Critic of 1937 or 1938, one sees that three terms were used interchangeably: science fiction (with or without a hyphen); scientifiction (the horrible malformation created by Hugo Gernsback); and scientific fiction. Oddly enough, the abbreviation stf. (which really stood for scienti­ fiction) was considered a valid abbreviation for science fiction well into the 1940's and 1950's, even though the term science fiction alone survived. The argument on definitions at that time often boiled down to a question of words and things. "Since it is called science fiction, it should have science in it" was a claim that was often put forth. But this opinion gradually faded as readers came to realize that the words science and fiction were only labels and not necessarily exact descrip­ tions of what was being published. Like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, one can call something anything, and derivations are not the last horizon of truth. A decade or two ago, when mainstream critics began to work in science fiction, the same interpretation arose again. There have been claims that science fiction and the scientific method are connected, and that the inclusion of scientific data or subject mat­ ter makes a work of fiction science fiction. That this is obviously wrong can be seen by examining the fifty or so years of modern science fiction. Yet this misapprehension has a small historical basis, for in Hugo Gernsback's early science fiction magazines, Amazing Stories (1926-1929) and Science Wonder Stories (1929-1930), he proclaimed stridently and frequently that what he published was sci­ entifically sound. It was never clear, though, whether Gernsback was entirely serious or simply making a sales point to disarm parents and others who objected to pulp fiction per se. In all probability, the claim was partly serious and partly business policy. Behind these attempts at defining science fiction (fantasy with a basis in imaginary science, fiction based on actual science) and other more recent definitions lies the larger question of what a definition is and what it should do. It can list attributes, as is the case of the two aforementioned definitions. Or, according to other modern theories, a XÜ

INTRODUCTION definition can be based on the functions that objects serve. Certain neo-Marxists define science fiction as a form of fiction that permits a new look at our own culture in terms of dissociation and reassociation of elements. This is similar to an interpretation put forth in the late 1940's that invoked historian Arnold Toynbee's concept of withdrawal. Unfortunately, these functional approaches tend to be open-ended definitions; not all science fiction accomplishes what the critics claim, and many other forms of literature examine our world existentially. The most successful type of definition, it would seem, is an "operational" definition, or a description of a set of actions necessary to get a certain result. An operational def­ inition of science fiction would be based not so much on the science component of science fiction as on the fiction component; it would be pragmatic and frankly plural­ istic. In its simplest form, it would say, "Science fiction is what is published in science fiction magazines" — in other words, what the consensus accepts —and would then proceed to examine and perhaps classify what is accepted. If science fiction is looked at operationally, it is seen to be not a simple genre like the detective story or the story of supernatural horror or the Western story. Instead, it is a grouping (compound genre or pseudo-genre) of story types, not all of which are closely related. There are stories about inventions; stories set in the future,- stories of non-human civilizations; adventure stories placed in other worlds; stories of great nat­ ural catastrophes; stories that transform reality in various non-supernatural ways; and so on. All in all, what we group together as science fiction is a set of story types, the population of which set is somewhat arbitrary and perhaps accidental. According to such an operational approach, other definitions of science fiction have not been suc­ cessful because they treat as a single thing something that is not a single thing. Within the fifty and more years that modern science fiction has flourished, its na­ ture (the population of the set) has changed somewhat. Fifty years ago, stories of cavedwellers (reasonably realistic) were considered science fiction. Today, they would not be. Today, though, stories that shade over into irrational subject matter are accepted as science fiction and might be called stories of "inner space." Philip K. Dick's Ubik (1969) and Harlan Ellison's "Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans, Latitude 38° 54' N, Lon­ gitude 77° 00' 13" W" (1974) are not questioned, whereas fifty years ago they might have been published in Weird Tales as "weird science." The concept behind this operational theory of science fiction is much the same as the one used in the social sciences to study groups of people: definition is a matter of membership, and membership is a matter of acceptance. Science fiction, to make a truis­ tic statement, is what is accepted as science fiction by readers and writers. From a historical point of view science fiction presents a very odd picture, and a discussion of its age is likely to be paradoxical. In critical studies one can find statements that science fiction begins with Plato, with Lucian, with Sir Thomas More, with Sir Francis Bacon, with Johannes Kepler, with Mary Shelley, with Jules Verne, with H. G. Wells, or with Hugo Gernsback. These varied opinions can be confusing, especially since much of this earlier work has little resemblance to the modern stories. Another historical problem is that although, exceptionally, an occasional earlier work like Kepler's Somnium (1634) does resemble modern "hard" science fiction, there is little connection —or only the most tenuous —between such works and the modern period. Many of these historical difficulties can be resolved if one uses the standard distinc-

xiii

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS tion between the terms form and genre, ignoring for the moment the insight that mod­ ern science fiction is a composite genre. A form, by definition, would consist of the totality of stories that share major characteristics distinguishing them from other fic­ tion, no matter where or when these stories were written. A genre would be a group of such stories that are connected with one another in develppment, time, and place, and perhaps were written with a consciousness of these connections. A form is automati­ cally larger than a genre, and many genres may exist within the form. And, if one is concerned with the genre of modern science fiction, one may, under some circum­ stances, be completely justified in disregarding earlier material that chances to be pres­ ent in the form. Yet there are a few works of fiction resembling modern science fiction that are scat­ tered erratically back over a century or two in French and English literature. Such are Giphantie (1760) by Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche, which is a rich source of early fantastic inventions, and L'An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1770) by LouisSébastien Mercier, which considers the future in some detail. Similar are the works of Edgar Allan Poe described in the present volume. The important point about such early stories is that they assume an identity as science fiction only because of developments one hundred and two hundred years later. They constitute science fiction in retrospect. These complicated questions of chance resemblances, remote ancestry, convergence of ideas, and the composite nature of modern science fiction all become important when one establishes a beginning for the modern genre. We can say, on the one hand, that Jules Verne has a good claim to be called the Father of Science Fiction, since he was the first important author to realize clearly that he was writing a new sort of literature. Yet we must also say that modern science fiction came into being as a genre in the United States (and to a lesser extent in Great Britain) in the 1920's and 1930's. These two state­ ments are not really contradictory. Verne's contribution was enormous, but the work of his immediate followers became frozen in type and formed only one or two aspects of modern science fiction: the factual interplanetary and the rogue engineer. When modern science fiction got under way, it contained far more than Verne dreamed of. Nor, to point out another area of complexity, is it contradictory to say that H. G. Wells wrote the first modern science fiction stories back in the 1890's. Despite the freshness of his ideas, his work had few immediate imitators and his stories were lost among his social novels. As has happened at other times in the history of popular fic­ tion, it took roughly a generation for an innovation to be expanded into a subgenre or genre. This later amalgamation of the ideas of Verne and Wells, the contemporary adventure story, the imaginary war, and other subgenres formed what we know as modern science fiction. Whether or not it is the highest possible development in the form, it remains the standard-giving body of literature that defines the form throughout time and space. For this reason it has been stressed in this volume.

The selection of subject-authors in this volume has been the responsibility of the editor, although the initial lists were submitted to each of the contributors and to sev­ eral outside experts for comments and suggestions. As has been stated above, the choice of subject-authors was difficult, and of necessity, at times personal, since various criteria for selection were held in mind, and every book must come to an end. The arrangement of authors has been made in terms of writing generations. Within the twentieth century there are two marked generation gaps —the 1930's and the late

xiv

INTRODUCTION 195O's or early 1960's. Surprisingly, World War II was not a watershed, since the major authors who were writing when the war began — Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, and others —either continued to write through the war or resumed after it ended. Around 1960, though, a new generation of authors appeared, most of whom are still active or have been active until recently. Within these general delimitations set by the editor, the individual contributors have been allowed freedom to develop their ideas. Only certain basic data have been required: biographical information, comments on important stories, historical position, evaluation, bibliography, and whatever else was needed to provide an introduction for a new reader or a full survey for a regular reader of science fiction. The bibliography at the end of each article offers first-edition information supplied by the contributors; the editor is responsible for adding such information about transatlantic editions as has been available. It will be observed that many different approaches are present among the articles, ranging from external-biographical to cultural-historical, psychological to literary-his torical, depending upon which approach is best suited to the subject-author. It will also be noted that there are differences of opinion from article to article, and from the po­ sition of the editor. We do not see this diversity as a flaw, but as a virtue, for science fiction is a varied, complex field, intricate in its intermeshed manifestations and still very largely unstudied. Rigidity of approach would only work harm. E. F. BLE1LER

XV

I Early Science Fiction

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY 1797-1851

N ANTHONY BURGESS' novel Beard's Roman

nerically ambivalent, hovering between novel, gothic, and science fiction, just as its science hovers between alchemy and orthodox science — precisely similar factors obtain even today in the most cele­ brated science fiction novels. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) contains magic; Anne McCaffrey's dragon novels hover between leg­ end, fairy tale, and science fiction. Pure science fic­ tion is chimerical. Its strength lies in its appetite.

I

Women (1977), there is a passage where Beard, the central character, meets an old girl friend, Mir­ iam Gillon, in an airport bar. Both work in what it is fashionable to call "the media"; they discuss Byron and Shelley, and she says, "I did an overseas radio thing on Mary Shelley. She and her mother are very popular these days. With the forces of women's liberation, that is. It took a woman to make a Frankenstein monster. Evil, cancer, corruption, pollution, the lot. She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life. . . ." Even today, when our diet is the unlikely, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein seems extremely far-fetched; how much more so must it have appeared on pub­ lication in 1818. Yet Beard's girl friend puts her fin­ ger on one of the contradictions that possibly ex­ plains the continued fascination of Frankenstein — it seems to know a lot about life while being preoc­ cupied by death. This preoccupation was undoubtedly an impor­ tant strand in the character of the author of Fran­ kenstein. Marked by the death of her mother in childbirth, she was haunted, at the time of writing Frankenstein, by precognitive dreads concerning the future deaths of her husband and children. By em­ bodying some of this psychic material into her com­ plex narrative, she created what many regard as that creature with a life of its own, the first science fic­ tion novel. It should be pointed out that Frankenstein is ge­

I Mary Shelley's life forms an unusual pattern, with all the events crowding into the early part and, indeed, many transactions that would mold her character occurring before she was born. Both her parents played important roles in the intellectual life of late eighteenth-century England. Her father, William Godwin (1756-1836), was a philosopher and political theorist, whose most important work was The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Po­ litical Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793). Godwin also wrote novels as a popular means of elucidating his thought, the most durable being Caleb Williams (1794), which can still be read with interest, even excitement. The influ­ ence of both these works on Godwin's daughter's writing is marked. Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759-1797), was a brilliant woman who wrote the world's first feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary Wollstone-

3

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS ration for Godwin's revolutionary but now some­ what faded political theories. He had married, at nineteen, Harriet Westerbrook; but he soon fell in love with Mary, and she with him. Before his twenty-second birthday, the pair had eloped to France, taking Jane with them. What freedom Europe must have represented to Mary, after her sixteen circumscribed years, and what close companionship Shelley, handsome and intellectual, must have offered. But these youthful travelers were among the first to enter France after the Napoleonic Wars, and a desolate place they found it, the fields uncultivated, the villages and buildings destroyed. On the way to Switzerland, Shelley wrote and invited Harriet, now pregnant with Shelley's second child, to join the party. Before they reached Lake Lucerne, Mary knew that she was also pregnant. Catastrophe followed the harum-scarum young lovers. Mary's first child, a daughter, was born after they returned to London and their debts,- it was pre­ mature and died. A second child, William, scarcely fared better. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary returned to Switzerland, taking along William and, inevitably, Claire, as Jane now called herself. On the shores of Lake Geneva, they found accom­ modation at the Maison Chapuis, close to the Villa Diodati, where Byron was staying. Although Claire threw herself at Byron's head, and managed to en­ compass the rest of him too, it was a happily creative time for them, with philosophy and learning pur­ sued as well as the more touted facets of the good life. Here, Mary began to write Frankenstein. Sum­ mer had too short a stay, and the party returned to England to face more trouble. Mary's self-effacing half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum at the age of twenty-two, by which time the Shelley ménage had moved to Bath; Claire still followed them, as the monster followed Frankenstein, and was now also pregnant. Then news reached them that Shelley's wife Harriet had drowned herself in London, not in the Thames, but in the Serpentine. She had been far advanced in pregnancy. Shelley and Mary were mar­ ried almost immediately. The date of the marriage was 29 December 1816. Six and a half years later, in July 1822, Shelley was

craft came to the marriage with Godwin bringing with her a daughter, Fanny, the fruit of her affair with a charming but elusive American, Gilbert Imlay, who deserted his pregnant mistress in the Paris of the Terror. A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by Sir John Opie shows a moody and passionate woman. Distracted by the failure of her love for Imlay, she tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames off Putney Bridge. She survived to marry Godwin and bear him a daughter, Mary. After the birth, puerperal fever set in, and she died ten days later. Godwin remarried. His second wife was Mary Jane Clairmont, a widow who brought with her two children by her previous marriage, Charles, and Jane, who later preferred to be known as Claire and bore Byron an illegitimate child, Allegra. Fanny and Mary, who was then four years old, were further upset by the arrival of this step-mother into their household, and the alienation was no doubt in­ creased when she had a son in 1803. The five chil­ dren crowded into one house increased Mary's feel­ ing of inner isolation, the refrain of which sounds throughout her novels and short stories. Another constant refrain, that of complex familial relation­ ships, is seen embodied in the five children, no one of whom could muster two parents in common, Charles and Jane excepted. Mary grew to be an attractive woman. Her re­ served manner hid deep feelings baffled by her mother's death and her father's distance — two kinds of coldness, one might say, both of which are em­ bodied in her monster's being in a sense dead and also unloved. When Shelley arrived, he received all her love, and Mary remained faithful to him long after his death, despite his callow unfaithfulness to her. She was also a bluestocking, the product of two intellectuals, and through many years maintained an energetic reading program, teaching herself sev­ eral foreign languages. Moreover, she had had the good fortune to know in childhood many of the cel­ ebrated intellects and men of letters of the time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them. Edward Trelawny said of Mary that “her head might be put upon the shoulders of a Philosopher." Enter Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet, son of a baronet. An emotional and narcissistic youth, full of admi­

4

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY account makes up the bulk of the book, to be rounded off by Walton again, and to include six chapters that are the creature's own account of its life, especially of its education. If the style of the novel is discursive, Mary Shelley was following a method familiar to readers of Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne,- the method became unfashion­ able but, to readers of eccentric modern novels, may now be increasingly sympathetic and help to ac­ count in part for the newfound popularity of the book. One of the enduring attractions of the book is that Mary sets most of the drama, not in the seamy London she knew from childhood, but amid spectac­ ular alpine scenery, such as she had visited with Shelley. The monster's puissance gains greatly by this association with the elements: storm, cold, snow, desolation. Interest has always centered on the monster and its creation. (It has no name in the novel, merely being referred to as "creature," "daemon," or "mon­ ster," which accounts for the popular misusage by which the name Frankenstein has come to be trans­ ferred from the creator to the created —a mistake that occurred first in Mary's lifetime.) This is the essential science fiction core of the narrative — a fas­ cinating experiment that goes wrong —a prescrip­ tion to be repeated later, many times, in Amazing Stories and elsewhere. Frankenstein's is a Faustian dream of unlimited power, but this Faust makes no supernatural pacts,- he succeeds only when he throws away the fusty old reference books, outdated by the new science, and gets to work on research in laboratories. But science fiction is not only hard science, and related to the scientific experiment is another exper­ iment, also science fictional, an experiment in polit­ ical theory that relates to William Godwin's ideas. Frankenstein is horrified by his creation and abjures responsibility. Yet the monster, despite its ugliness, is gentle and intelligent, and tries to win its way into society. Society repulses it. Hence the monster's cry, "I am malicious because I am miserable," a dramatic reversal of received Christian thinking of the time. The richness of the story's metaphorical content, coupled with the excellence of the prose, has tempted commentators to interpret the novel in var­

drowned while sailing on the Ligurian Sea. By that time, William was dead, as was another child, Clara; Mary had also had a miscarriage, but another son, Percy Florence, had been born in 1820. He alone of Mary's progeny survived to manhood. Even Claire's daughter by Byron, Allegra, had died. In 1824 Byron died in Greece. The rest of Mary's life is curiously empty, lived in the shadow of her first twenty-five years. Mary remained ever faithful to the memory of her hus­ band. She edited his poems and papers, and earned a living by her pen. She wrote historical novels, such as Perkin Warbeck (1830) and Lodore (1835), which enjoyed some success, short stories, and one novel, The Last Man (1826), which, by its powerfully op­ pressive theme of world catastrophe, is classifiable as science fiction. Percy married. Her cold father, God­ win, died; Shelley's difficult father died. Finally, in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Mary herself died, aged fifty-three.

II This painful biography, as confused as any mod­ ern one, is worth retelling, for it helps to explain not only why Mary's temperament was not a sanguine one, but where much derives from what is read in her two science fiction novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. Both owe a great deal to the literature that preceded them,- more is owed to experience. Critics are liable comfortably to ignore the latter to concentrate on the former. The essence of the story of Frankenstein is fa­ miliar, if in distorted form, from many film, stage, and television versions, in which Victor Franken­ stein compiles a creature from corpses and then en­ dows it with life, after which it runs amok. The novel is long, and more complex than this synopsis suggests. It is a flawed masterpiece of growing repu­ tation, and an increasing body of criticism attests to the attraction of both its excellences and its flaws. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus be­ gins with letters from Captain Walton to his sister. Walton is sailing in Arctic waters when he sees on the ice floes a sledge being driven by an enormous figure. The next day, the crew rescues a man from a similar sledge. It is Victor Frankenstein of Geneva,when he recovers, he tells his tale to Walton, which

5

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS the capabilities of the medium; and to claim that Gilgamesh or Homer started it all is to claim so much that almost anything becomes science fiction. Mary Shelley, in her Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, says that she wanted her story to “speak to the mysterious fears of our (i.e. human kind's) nature. ..." Is that not what science fiction still excellently does? That the destructive monster stands for one side of Shelley's nature, and the constructive Victor for the other, has been convincingly argued by another critic, Christopher Small (Ariel Like a Harpy, 1972). Mary's passion for Shelley, rather than blinding her, gave her terrifying insight. In case this idea sounds oversophisticated, it must be recalled that Mary her­ self, in her Introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, meant it as a kind of metaphor when she wrote "Invention . . . does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being substance itself." In referring to Frankenstein as a diseased creation myth (Billion Year Spree, 1973) I had in mind phrases with sexual connotations in the novel such as "my workshop of filthy creation," used by Fran­ kenstein of his secret work. Mary's own experiences taught her to regard life and death as closely inter­ twined. The genesis of her terrifying story came to her in a dream, in which she says she saw "the hid­ eous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy half vital motion." The powerful line suggests both a distorted image of her mother dying, in those final restless movements which often tantalizingly suggest recovery rather than its opposite, and also the stirrings of sexual in­ tercourse, particularly when we recall that "power­ ful engine" is a term used in pornography as a syn­ onym for penis. The critic Ellen Moers, writing on female gothic, dispatched the question of how a young girl like Mary could hit on such a horrifying idea (although Mary was herself the first to raise it). Most female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were spinsters, and in any case Victorian taboos op­ erated against writing on childbirth. Mary experi­

ious ways. Frankenstein's subtitle, The Modern Pro­ metheus, leads to one level of meaning. Prometheus, according to Aeschylus in his play Prometheus Bound, brings fire from Heaven and bestows the gift on mankind; for this, Zeus has him chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle eats his viscera. One thinks here of the scene after Shelley's death, when Trelawny caused his corpse to be burnt on the shore, Byron and Leigh Hunt also being present. At the last possible moment, Trelawny ran forward and snatched Shelley's heart from the body. Another version of the legend, the one Mary had chiefly in mind, tells of Prometheus fashioning men out of mud and water. Mary seized on this aspect of the legend, while Byron and Shelley were writing “Pro­ metheus" and “Prometheus Unbound" respectively. Mary, with an inspired transposition, uses electricity as the divine fire. By this understanding, with Frankenstein acting God, Frankenstein's monster becomes mankind it­ self, blundering about the world seeking knowledge and reassurance. The monster's intellectual quest has led David Ketterer to state that “basically Fran­ kenstein is about the problematical nature of knowl­ edge" (Frankenstein's Creation.- The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality, 1979). Although this interpretation is too radical, it reminds us usefully of the intellectual aspects of the work, and of Mary's understanding of the British philosophers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Leonard Wolf argues that Frankenstein should be regarded as “psychological allegory" (The Anno­ tated Frankenstein, 1977). This view is supported by Ketterer, who thinks that therefore the novel cannot be science fiction (" 'Frankenstein' in Wolf's Cloth­ ing," 1979). Godwin's Caleb Williams is also psy­ chological or at least political allegory; it is never­ theless regarded as the first crime novel. Surely there are many good science fiction novels that are psy­ chological allegory as well as being science fiction. Algis Budrys' Who? is an example. By understand­ ing the origins of “real" science fiction, we under­ stand something of its function,- hence the impor­ tance of the question. Not to regard Frankenstein but, say, The Time Machine or even Hugo Gernsback's magazines as the first science fiction —as many did only a few years ago — is to underestimate

6

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY enced the fear, guilt, depression, and anxiety that often attend childbirth, particularly in situations such as hers —unmarried, her consort a married man with children by anotherwoman, and beset by debt in a foreign place. Only a woman, only Mary Shelley, could have written Frankenstein. As Miriam Gillon says, "She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life." Moreover, the casual remark made by Gillon takes us to a deeper level of meaning which, al­ though sufficiently obvious, has not been signifi­ cantly remarked upon. Frankenstein is auto­ biographical. It is commonly accepted that the average first novel relies for its material on personal experience. It does not deny other interpretations —for a meta­ phor has many interpretations — by stating that Mary saw herself as the monster. This is why we pity it. She too tried to win her way into society. By running away with Shelley, she sought acceptance through love. But the move carried her further from society; she became a wanderer, an exile, like Byron, like Shelley. Her mother's death in childbirth must have caused Mary to feel that she, like the monster, had been born from the dead. Behind the monster's eloquence lies Mary's grief. Part of the continued ap­ peal of the novel is the appeal of the drama of the neglected child. Upon this structure of one kind of reality, Mary built a further structure, one of the intellect. A mad­ ness for knowledge abounds; not only Victor Fran­ kenstein but the monster and Walton also, and the judicial processes throughout the book, are in quest for knowledge of one kind and another. Interest­ ingly, the novel contains few female characters (a departure from the gothic mode, with its soft, fright­ ened heroines); Victor's espoused remains always a cold and distant figure. The monster, product of guilty knowledge, threatens the world with evil progeny. The monster is, of course, more interesting than Victor. He has the vitality of evil, like Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) before him and Quilp in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) after him, eloquent villains both. It is the monster that comes first to our minds, it was the monster that came first to Mary's mind. The monster holds

its appeal because it was created by science, or at least pseudo-science, rather than by any pacts with the devil, or by magic, like the golem. Frankenstein emerges from the gothic tradition. Gothic still tints science fiction with its hues of sus­ pense and doom. In Billion Year Spree it is argued that Frankenstein was the first real science fiction novel. Here the adjective "real" serves as an escape clause. The point about discussing where science fic­ tion begins is that it helps in understanding the na­ ture and function of science fiction. In pre-Revolutionary France, for instance, several books appeared with Enlightenment scenarios depicting a future where present trends were greatly developed, and where the whole world became a civilized extension of the Tuileries. The best-known example is LouisSebastien Mercier's L'An 2400 (1770), set seven cen­ turies ahead in time; it was translated into several languages. Mercier wrote in the utopian tradition; Mary Shelley did not. Here we see a division of function. Jules Verne was influenced by Mercier and worked with "actual possibilities of invention and discovery." H. G. Wells was influenced by Fran­ kenstein and wrote what he called fantasies — the phrase set in quotes is Wells's, who added that he "did not pretend to deal with possible things." One can imagine Mary Shelley saying as much. R. Glynn Grylls, a biographer of Mary Shelley, writing in the 1930's advanced the argument that Frankenstein is "the first of the Scientific Romances that have cul­ minated in our day in the work of Mr. H. G. Wells," because it. erects "a superstructure of fantasy on a foundation of circumstantial 'scientific fact.'" Shrewd judgment, although the excellence of the novel is otherwise underestimated. As Muriel Spark writes in Child of Light (1951), Mary Shelley in her thinking seems at least fifty years ahead of her time. She discovered the "irra­ tional," one of the delights and torments of our age. By dressing it in rational garb, and letting it stalk the land, she unwittingly dealt a blow against the tra­ dition to which Mercier was heir. Utopia is no place for the irrational. In sum, Victor Frankenstein is a modern, con­ sciously rejecting ancient fustian booklore in favor of modern science, kicking out father figures. His creation of life shows him further usurping paternal

7

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS ships of these personages, together with a profusion of mothers and sisters, fills the first of the three vol­ umes. Adrian is Mary's portrait of Shelley, the bright rather than the dark side, Perdita is Claire, Raymond is Byron. Verney plays the part of Mary, and eventually becomes the Last Man. Verney, like Frankenstein, is a paradigm of the Outsider. There is undoubted strength in the second and third books, once the plague has the world in its grip. Society disintegrates on a scale merely hinted at in the unjust world of Frankenstein. "I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety. In the south, the disease, virulent and immedicable, had nearly annihilated the race of man; storm and innundation, poisonous winds and blights, filled up the measure of suffering. In the north it was worse. ..." Finally, Verney-Mary alone is left, drifting south towards the equator, like a character in a J. G. Bal­ lard novel. So Mary tells us how life was without Shelley; her universe had gone. Through science fic­ tion, she expressed her powerful feelings. In his brief book on Mary, William Walling makes a point that incidentally relates The Last Man still more closely to the science fictional tem­ per (1972). Remarking that solitude is a common topic of the period and by no means Mary's monop­ oly, Walling claims that by interweaving the themes of isolation and the end of civilization, she creates a prophetic account of modern industrial so­ ciety, in which the creative personality becomes more and more alienated. Tales and Stories by Mary Shelley were collected by Richard Garnett and published in 1891. They are in the main conventional. Familial and amorous misunderstandings fill the foreground, armies gallop about in the background. The characters are high­ born, their speeches high-flown. Tears are scalding, years long, sentiments either villainous or irre­ proachable, deaths copious and conclusions not un­ usually full of well-mannered melancholy. The tales are of their time. Here again, the game of de­ tecting autobiographical traces can be played. One story, "Transformation," sheds light on Franken­ stein—hut not much. We have to value Mary Shel­

power, invading what was previously God's prov­ ince. Victor and his monster together function as the light and dark side of mankind, in a symbolism that was to become increasingly comprehensible after Mary's death. As befitted an author writing after the Napo­ leonic Wars, when the Industrial Revolution was well under way, Mary dealt not merely with extrap­ olated development, like Mercier before her, but with unexpected change, like Wells after her. Above all, Frankenstein stands as the figure of the scientist (although the word was not coined when Mary wrote), set apart from the rest of society, un­ able to control the new forces he has brought into the world. The successor to Prometheus is Pandora. No other writer, except H. G. Wells, presents us with as many innovations as Mary Shelley.

Ill The Last Man was published in 1826, anony­ mously, as Frankenstein had been. Few critics of standing have praised the novel. It meanders. Yet Muriel Spark has said of it that it is Mary's "most interesting, if not her most consummate, work." The theme of The Last Man was not new, and could hardly be at a time when epidemics were still commonplace. The title was used for an anonymous novel in 1806. Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) wrote a poem with the same title; while at the Villa Diodati, Byron composed a poem entitled "Darkness," in which the world is destroyed and two men, the last, die of fright at the sight of each other. In the same year that Mary's novel was published, John Martin painted a watercolor on the subject (later, in 1849, he exhibited a powerful oil with the same title). The novel is set in the twenty-first century, a pe­ riod, it seems, of much sentimental rhetoric. Adrian, the earl of Windsor, befriends the wild Lionel Verney. Adrian is the son of the king of England, who abdicated; one of the king's favorites was Verney's father. Adrian is full of fine sentiments, and wins over Verney. Verney has a sister called Perdita who falls in love with Lord Raymond and eventually commits suicide. Raymond is a peer of genius and beauty who besieges Constantinople. The relation­

8

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY ley, as we do other authors, for her strongest work, not her weakest; and her best has a strength still not widely enough appreciated. This collection of stories from scattered journals and keepsake albums indicates Mary's emotional and physical exhaustion. In the course of eight years, between 1814 and 1822, she had borne four children, three of whom died during the period, and had suffered miscarriages. She had traveled hither and thither with her irresponsible husband, who had most probably had an affair with her closest friend, Claire. And she had witnessed suicides and death all around her, culminating in Shelley's death. It was much for a sensitive and intellectual woman to endure. No wonder that Claire Clairmont wrote to her, some years after the fury and shouting died, "I think in certain things you are the most daring woman I ever knew."

Tales and Stories. Collected by Richard Garnett. London: W. Paterson, 1891. Collected Tales and Stories with Original Engravings. Ed­ ited with an Introduction and Notes by Charles E. Rob­ inson. Baltimore-. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree.- The History of Sci­ ence Fiction. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Dunn, Jane. Moon in Eclipse.- A Life of Mary Shelley. Lon­ don: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978. An enjoyable biography. Grylls, R. Glynn. Mary Shelley, A Biography. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. Jones, Frederick L., ed. The Letters of Mary Shelley, 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944. Ketterer, David. Frankenstein's Creation.- The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality. Victoria, Canada: Uni­ versity of Victoria Press, 1979. ------- . " 'Frankenstein' in Wolf's Clothing." Science Fic­ tion Studies 18 (July 1979). Marshall, Florence Ashton. Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. London: R. Bentley and Sons, 1889. Moers, Ellen. "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother." New York Review, 21 March 1974; reprinted in Lit­ erary Women. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Small, Christopher. Ariel Like a Harpy; Shelley, Mary, and Frankenstein. London: Victor Gollancz, 1972. Re­ titled Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein".- Tracing the Myth. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Spark, Muriel. Child of Light.- A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Hadleigh, Essex, England: Tower Bridge Publications, 1951. Walling, William A. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972. Wolf, Leonard, ed. The Annotated Frankenstein. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1977. -BRIAN W. ALDISS

Selected Bibliography SCIENCE FICTION WORKS OF MARY SHELLEY Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, 1818. Third edition, with considerable textual change,- Lon­ don: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Many editions are in print, almost all of which reprint the 1831 text. For scholarly purposes the text edited by M. K. Joseph (London: Oxford University Press, 1969) may be mentioned. The 1818 text is reprinted in the edition prepared by James Rieger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), with full analysis of textual variations and commentary. The Last Man. London: Henry Colburn, 1826.

9

EDGAR ALLAN POE 1809-1849

HE POSITION OF Edgar Allan Poe in the his­

early youth and quarreled irrevocably upon reach­ tory of science fiction is a matter of dispute. ing maturity. Poe attended the University of Vir­ Some critics and historians have called him at best ginia at Charlottesville for a year; was withdrawn by a marginal figure, while others have rated him high Allan because of high gambling debts,- left Virginia as an innovator and formative influence. His work for Boston, where he arranged for the publication of Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827); enlisted in the has appeared in science fiction magazines and an­ thologies; he has been cited as a founding father army, where he spent about two years, rising to the rank of regimental sergeant major; was discharged so when prestige figures have been needed; and articles that he could attend the U.S. Military Academy; treating individual stories as science fiction have ap­ peared in the technical journals. Yet it has also been spent less than a year at West Point; rebelled against pointed out that his stories have very little in com­ cadet life and his circumstances, and was court-mar­ mon with what is indisputably accepted as science tialed out of the service. This was in 1831. In 1836, fiction. This is not just a question of changing tastes he married his fourteen-year-old first cousin, Vir­ or evolution within the genre, it is added, for other ginia Clemm, whose long, lingering illness with tu­ stories by Poe are immediately recognizable as an­ berculosis rendered a normal marriage impossible. cestral works in other genres. "The Murders in the Her death in 1847 was a trauma from which Poe Rue Morgue" (1841), despite superficial differences, may not have recovered. is obviously similar to a modern detective story, and From 1831 until his death in 1849, Poe made a is almost universally accepted as the retaining pin scanty living as a journalist. He contributed prolififor a long chain of historical development. No such cally to the better periodicals and newspapers, and case can be made for any of Poe's stories in the his­ in his later years was recognized as a major critic, tory of science fiction. essayist, poet, and writer of fiction. Unfortunately, journalism paid very badly. He was associated edi­ I torially with various periodicals and newspapers.- the Southern Literary Messenger, Graham's Lady's and The facts of Poe's life are so familiar and so easily accessible elsewhere that it should not be necessary Gentleman's Magazine (the foremost magazine in the United States while Poe was its editor), Godey's to give more than a reminder of them. He was born Lady's Book, the New York Mirror, and the Broad­ at Boston in 1809, to parents who were actors; was way Journal. He was a brilliant editor, and his col­ orphaned at about age three; was reared as a foster child by John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Rich­ leagues rated him high in his work. Yet his personal life was a dismal and unhappy failure, and his in­ mond, Virginia, with whom he disagreed during his

T

11

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS Running through Poe's life was a strong interest in the sciences. From his West Point days he had a good grounding in mathematics, probably up into the calculus, and astronomy was a lifelong interest. He was fairly well versed in natural history — an ag­ glomeration of observational biology, geology, and geography — and he followed the crank sciences of his day with sardonic amusement. His chief interest, though, lay in what we would call scientific method. In his time science was not so divorced from philosophy (or, in the opposite direction, from technology) as it is today, and Poe could legitimately be fascinated by applying ratiocination to many un­ usual areas of life: the methodology of solving cryp­ tograms, determining the nature of truth, reasoning out an individual situation in terms of a calculus of probabilities (as in a murder case), and establishing a mathematics of human activities. His great analyt­ ical ability has never been questioned. Yet despite Poe's keen interest in science, his emotional attitude toward it was ambivalent. His early sonnet "To Science" (1828) upbraids science for stripping the romance from life:

creasing alcoholism not only forced him out of good jobs but on several occasions drove opportunity away. Poe died at Baltimore in sordid circumstances. After being missing for several days, he was found semiconscious in a tavern. He died in psychological torment a few days later. Exactly what happened to him is not known, but it is possible that he was cap­ tured by political toughs who drugged and liquored him, and dragged him around the polls to vote fraudulently, until he collapsed. The unifying factor to this pathetic life was bad luck. Fate poured genius into Poe, but also doused him with misfortune. He was born into an unstable parental situation and was placed with an uncongen­ ial foster parent, with whom he engaged in a tug-ofwar. He was cursed with a bad emotional constitu­ tion. He suffered from fits of deep depression, which alcohol relieved; he was hypersensitive, excitable, and subject to extreme responses in situations of stress. In his later years Poe's health was bad. He had a weak heart, and probably suffered from degenera­ tive diseases. And, of course, there was alcohol. When he was under the influence of liquor, his sober industry, punctiliousness, charm, and affabil­ ity disappeared, and he became irresponsible and im­ possible. As his living circumstances became more desperate, his character degenerated and his actions were not always to his credit. Yet, despite all this, Poe was a man of remarkable achievement. Although the emotional range of his fiction and poetry was narrow, his intellectual range was very wide. It is true that he was a highly skilled "window dresser," but it would be wrong to con­ clude from this that he was a faker. Such window dressing was a common feature in the literature of his day. Poe had a working knowledge of French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian, perhaps some­ what less of German, and some acquaintance with the literature of each of those languages. He also had a wide knowledge of contemporary letters. He en­ joyed a background in the major philosophical sys­ tems, which he occasionally worked into his stories, and his general fund of knowledge was enormous. A specialist in any field could criticize Poe's attain­ ments, but Poe could reciprocate by criticizing the specialist's attainments in fields other than his or her own.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood . ..

This attitude was not a passing pose of youth or a literary device, for Poe expressed the same point of view many times in his later work. Yet a problem that he did not resolve, and that we sometimes over­ look, is exactly what he meant by the word "sci­ ence." Basically, his hostility was focused on applied science and technology, since he considered them responsible for changes in material culture, for deg­ radation, and destruction. But even here his hostility was theoretical. Poe might inveigh against "prog­ ress" and poke fun at balloon travel, but he did not hesitate to mount a train, and he did not advocate doing away with the steam presses in his own occupation. Unlike Mary Shelley, who in her muddled way feared that Romantic science would expose the lie of a godly universe and come to rival divinity, Poe had no objection to the theoretical aspects of science.

12

EDGAR ALLAN POE the seamen in Wilhelm Hauff's "Geschichte der Gespensterschiff" (1825), they are enacting and reenacting a situation without relevance to the world of reality. The vessel heads southward and is about to descend into an Antarctic abyss when the narrator ends his account. Where is the ship going? A possible interpretation is that Poe had in mind a notorious crank theory of the day — that of Captain John Cleves Symmes, who argued that Earth is hol­ low, with polar openings permitting entry to the in­ terior. But it is also possible that Poe had in mind the common premodern theory that the waters of Ocean flowed down through whirlpools and chasms into a great subterranean reservoir (the Abyss of Waters), whence they reemerged as ground water or ocean. A classic statement of this theory was the fa­ mous Mundus Subterraneus (1664) of Athanasius Kircher. Like many of Poe's other stories, "MS. Found in a Bottle" is a highly personal combination of three elements not usually found in association: verisimil­ itude created by exact detail and rational argument, a fantastic narrative structure, and a metaphoric ele­ ment that is sometimes allegorical and sometimes a symbol less amenable to interpretation. (While Poe often denounced "allegory" as such, his use of the term —as was the case with the word "science" — was not exactly the same as ours. A modern reader can legitimately regard metaphoric elements in Poe's fiction as allegorical or symbolic.) That the story has a symbolic meaning is commonly ac­ cepted, although there is disagreement as to its read­ ing. The ancient men are sometimes taken to be fig­ urations of the author; personages in an allegory of life; Christopher Columbus and his crew; the Flying Dutchman in a very early, aberrant appearance; or the Spirit of Discovery. But why any of these per­ sons should plunge into Symmes's Hole or the Abyss of Waters is problematic. "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal," which first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger (June 1835) and was reprinted in the New York Transcript, is a work of mixed form. It is partly a fantasy of aeronautics like the later story "The Balloon-Hoax" (1844); partly a topical satire, in which the followers of Washington Irving's Knick­ erbocker School are linked to old Holland; and it is also a self-proclaimed hoax. In early publications the

For metaphysics — in the early sense of something beyond physics, explaining physics —he had the profoundest respect. Indeed, he was so fascinated by it that he could not keep his pen away from it. This interest, which can be seen in such essay-stories as "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844) and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841), culminated in the book Eureka (1848), which he called a prose poem. It is prose in that it is not written in meter, a poem in that it reasons about the universe in terms of analo­ gies and poetic tropes. In Eureka, Poe first pokes grotesque fun, with many wordplays, at classical systems of logic, and then proposes his own way to attain truth: intuition, or direct apprehension by means of the imagination. A cosmology then follows that in some ways is a last gasp of the Naturphilosophie of the early nine­ teenth century, particularly the work of Friedrich von Schelling and his followers. It presents an emanational universe, and like the Naturphilosophie it contains much nonsense and wrong-headed fantasy. But it also displays occasional intuitive insights that approximate the modern understanding of the uni­ verse. In a sense it is both a philosophy of science and a scientific philosophy, but not really successful as either. Poe felt very strongly that Eureka was his most important work, but few of his contemporaries or successors have taken it seriously, although it is valuable for interpreting many of his stories.

II This general interest in science manifested itself in several of Poe's stories, scattered through his lit­ erary life, from very early publications to late. Poe's first significant work of fiction, "MS. Found in a Bottle" (Baltimore Saturday Visiter [sic], 10 Oc­ tober 1833), won the first prize of $50 in a contest conducted by the newspaper and established Poe as a professional writer. It presented his work to a wide public and offered literary contacts that would have been very useful to a less fated man. "MS. Found in a Bottle" is essentially a dreamlike fantasy. The narrator has suffered a shipwreck, and is on a derelict that is run down by a gigantic ancient vessel. He "chances" to be tossed onto the other ship, which is operated by old men dressed in an­ tique garb, who ignore his presence. There is some­ thing supernatural about their actions, in that, like

13

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS vehicle is a conversation between two free-floating spirits in space (Aidenn), the abode of the evolved dead, who reminisce upon the fate of Earth. Eiros describes the end of the world. A comet is approach­ ing, and threatens to collide with Earth. The astron­ omers offer encouragement to the people, since the nucleus of the comet, being gaseous, can do little harm. But as the comet rides the sky, it becomes ob­ vious that life on Earth is changing. Vegetation is growing more luxuriantly, and people are brisker, more excitable than before. The comet, it is re­ vealed, is extracting the nitrogen from the atmo­ sphere, leaving only oxygen. The world bursts into flame. Like "Pfaal," "Eiros and Charmion" has many levels of appreciation. It is experimental in form, starting with a dramatic situation, then shifting to a monologue in heightened language. Its kernel is a scientific aperçu, the origin of which has been found in a contemporary popular science book. But its ultimate referent is religious, linking the tradi­ tional belief that the next destruction of the world would be by fire with the contemporary interest in the chiliasm connected with Millerism. The ulti­ mate message — that the spirits praise God and that there is personal survival —may not have offended many, but it should be noted that there is no Christology. A collateral story is "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (Graham's Lady's and Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1841). Once again two disembodied spirits converse, but this time their topic is death and re­ birth, on both a general and an individual level. Monos declaims that the world had degenerated, ru­ ined by progress and industrialism, and it was de­ stroyed by fire (probably as in "Eiros and Char­ mion''). More significant, however, is Monos' description to Una of his experiences after death. These are remarkably physical and are connected with the dissolution of his body. He describes his death, his immediate postmortem sensations as Una is sitting by his corpse, his burial, and the departure of his senses as he decays. The final passage has ob­ vious references to Aristotelian form and matter and to Kantian time and space as the dweller remains in his grave. Yet, in some fashion, Monos must have been resurrected in order to carry on his conversa-

eponymous Hans's family name was not Pfaal but Phaal, or "laugh" sounded backward. Within a grotesque frame situation set in the Netherlands, a manuscript is dropped from a madly designed balloon by a dwarf. The manuscript de­ scribes a lunar voyage accomplished by Hans Pfaal, a local bellows maker (air), to evade his creditors. Pfaal builds a large balloon that attains lift through a recently discovered "atomic component" of hydro­ gen, blows up his creditors, and sails to the moon. There he finds a race of mentally deficient dwarfs, each of whom corresponds to an individual on Earth. But the story is a hoax. The dwarf who delivered the manuscript was a circus freak; Pfaal and his cred­ itors had simply been abroad, and are now carousing locally. Poe had intended to write a continuation, in which, one may guess, certain lunar dwarfs would have exhibited the foibles of their earthly counter­ parts. But about three weeks after the appearance of "Pfaal" in the Transcript, Richard Adams Locke's moon hoax appeared in the Sun and deflated Poe's work in the public mind. Locke's exposition, which was presented with complete seriousness, told of lunar observations made by Sir John Herschel with his giant telescope, and described moon men. Poe was outraged at what he considered plagiarism, an­ noyed by the scientific naïveté of Locke's work, and discouraged from continuing his own story. Despite the calculated grotesqueness of the frame situation, Poe wrote "Pfaal" after much serious thought. He checked the astronomy and physics of such a voyage, and acquainted himself with earlier lunar voyages, some of which he cited in a later postscript. Although his purpose, in the tradition of the subgenre of the lunar voyage, was to have been personal satire, he also strove for scientific accuracy. He describes an atmospheric condenser for the car and pays heed to phenomena of gravitation even though he was not entirely correct. Poe's interest in astronomy and chemistry was again demonstrated in "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, October 1839). The title refers to Shakespeare's An­ tony and Cleopatra, in which Iras and Charmian, Cleopatra's attendants, witness the death of a world when a luminary (Octavian) approaches. Poe's story

14

EDGAR ALLAN POE ment. It is concerned with memory, with the reex­ periencing of a past event in India. There are also parallelisms of fate, as the events in India are re­ peated (though on a symbolic level) in Virginia. In some vague way mesmerism caused the experience; but Poe does not elaborate his ideas with his usual clarity, and the story is open to several inter­ pretations. "Mellonta Tauta" (Godey's Lady's Book, Febru­ ary 1849), which H. G. Wells translated nicely from the Greek as "things to come," uses the trappings of futurology to belabor humorously a few of Poe's bêtes noires. The story consists of a letter, dated April Fools' Day, 2848, written by a woman aboard a superballoon. Although a thousand years have passed, Poe's projections of science are minimal, namely, the balloon itself, which carries about 200 people; trains that race at 300 miles per hour; and (indirectly) telescopes of great power. Pundita, the letter writer, expresses ludicrous misunderstandings of nineteenth-century America. She first attacks sys­ tems of logic —one invented by a Hindu sage named Aries Tottle, the other by one Hog, the Ettrick Shep­ herd — and offers in their place what we would call the "faggot theory" of knowledge: consistency with what is known. After ridiculing both the republican form of government and mob rule, she describes the making of cloth by grinding up silkworms and dis­ cusses the religions of the nineteenth century (that is, wealth and fashion) —until her balloon falls into the sea. All in all, "Mellonta Tauta" is more deftly handled than most of Poe's humor and is amusing, but it is hardly important as science fiction. Much the most interesting in idea of Poe's ap­ proaches to science fiction is his early geographical fantasy, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Connected with the fanciful geography of "MS. Found in a Bottle," it was probably written to capitalize on the current interest in Antarctic explo­ ration. In form it is a hodgepodge, consisting of a novel of sea adventure, a pastiche of historical In­ dian-white relations, a hoax story, and a puzzle story with links to crank science and idealistic philoso­ phy. It is presented mostly as a diary kept by Pym and is related with great verisimilitude, although sensational in event. It was accepted by some read­ ers, notably in Great Britain, as a factual account.

tion with Una and to praise the good world in which he now finds himself. As for Una —perhaps she is his mate, perhaps a statement of spirit as opposed to Monos' matter, perhaps an identity with Monos on a different plane of being. In any case, as in "Eiros and Charmion," Poe attempts to unify theories of matter with a sort of theism. What personal rele­ vance the two stories had is speculative. Three of Poe's stories are concerned in a substan­ tive way with mesmerism or related topics. These are "Mesmeric Revelation" (Columbian Lady's and Gentlemans Magazine, August 1844), "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (Whig Review, December 1845), and "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (Godey's Lady's Book, April 1844). In each of these stories mesmerism reveals an ultimate truth, a com­ mon enough concept in the occult thought of the day. Poe did not take mesmerism seriously, and used it only as a literary device. In "Mesmeric Revelation" a mesmerized subject continues to speak after physiological death and of­ fers speculations much like those of Eureka. The point of the. story, though, is personal-, happiness is not a primary emotion, but simply the absence of pain — an explanation that suited both Poe's theatri­ cality and his private life. A much stronger narrative vehicle is to be found in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which Poe presented very skillfully as reportage. His at­ tempt at a hoax was taken seriously by many readers (as was "Mesmeric Revelation"). Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning) wrote to Poe, commenting that the British pirated publication of the story was locally taken to be a case history. As Poe tells the story, Valdemar dies while in trance and not only is preserved from corruption but also maintains a half-life of a sort. He is able to speak. But when the mesmeric connection is bro­ ken, he dissolves almost instantly into corruption and putridity. This shocking "smash ending," one of the most effective in the history of horror fiction, has had great historical importance in the develop­ ment of American supernatural fiction, particularly in the school of H. P. Lovecraft, where such endings became almost a conditioned riposte. The third mesmeric tale, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," is a much less successful accomplish­

15

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS how Pym returned to America; but the "editor" (Poe) appends a "Note" interpreting some of Pym's factual data. The "Note" analyzes diagrams pro­ vided by Pym as characters in ancient Semitic alpha­ bets, forming words indicating darkness, whiteness, and the south. The reader may also remember that the name of the king of the islands is Tsalemon (which echoes Solomon). The crux in Pym is understanding what (if any­ thing) Poe was driving at with Tsalal, the area far­ ther south, and their peculiarities. Pym was long taken to be empty mystification, but it has recently been shown that Poe's Semitic analogies were not fakery, and probably were supplied by a friendly biblical scholar. The geography of Tsalal also has been examined closely. J. O. Bailey, whose work in­ itiated the modern study of Pym, concluded that Poe was attaching his novel to Symzonia (1820) by "Adam Seaborn," a pseudonymous political satire of unknown authorship set in Symmes's hollow Earth. According to Bailey, Tsalal contained criminals from inside Earth, and the white figure was a Symzonian guard. A stronger interpretation would align the natives of Antarctica with the Lost Tribes. While this sounds absurd to us, we must remember that in Poe's time there was intense speculation about the Lost Tribes, and that cranks kept finding them in the oddest places. On the level of religion, only eleven years before Pym the Book of Mormon de­ scribed a Hebrew settlement in South America around 600 b.c. The strongest interpretation of Antarctica, though, is that Poe was projecting the cosmological system of Schelling or one of his circle into fanciful, mythologized geography and ethnology. The heart of this system is the idea that creation proceeded by alternating polarities and merging opposites —spirit and matter, good and bad, plus and minus — in a Eu­ ropean counterpart of the Chinese yin and yang. Thus the good-white first emanation is followed by the bad-black response or antithesis, both combining to form the outside world. According to this inter­ pretation, Poe may have been hinting that Antarc­ tica was the site of divine creation and that the white figure was an angel, perhaps even the angel that guarded Eden. But Poe wisely ended his story without an explanation (which would have been ex-

The first half of Pym is taken up with adventure at sea. Pym, a young man from Nantucket, stows away aboard a ship and is fortunate enough to sur­ vive a mutiny, widespread slaughter, shipwreck, and sufferings on a derelict. This portion echoes, al­ though in a personal way, the sea-adventure stories of Captain Frederick Marryat or James Fenimore Cooper. Personal knowledge undoubtedly entered into it, for Poe had crossed the Atlantic twice. Poe achieves a suspension of disbelief, if one can accept the statistical probability of so much horror on a sin­ gle voyage. The later portion of Pym is geographical fantasy, related on the one hand to the imaginary voyages of the eighteenth century and on the other to factual accounts of voyages of exploration or whaling voy­ ages to the Antarctic. Pym and a companion, Dirk Peters, are rescued from their derelict by the sealer Jane Guy, upon which they sail into that area of global mystery, the Antarctic. As they proceed southward, the waters become much warmer; and at about 84° South, they come upon the subtropical land of Tsalal, inhabited by black men on the cultural level of California In­ dians. The island of Tsalal is a strange place, with curious animals and odd vegetation, and with multi­ colored, stranded water. The color white is absent, and the natives are terrified when they see a white object from outside. Even their teeth are black. The crew of the Jane Guy comes to trust the natives, who seem very friendly; but in a sudden act of treachery, the men of Tsalal kill a landing party and capture the ship. In this episode Poe is obviously drawing on incidents of contact with the Indians of the Northwest Coast of America, perhaps the fate of the Boston in Nootka Sound. Pym and Peters escape, evade the natives for a time, steal a canoe, and head farther south. The water becomes warmer and warmer, the color white comes to predominate, with the sea turning milky; a curtain of mist arises before them, and they are obviously approaching a titanic falls, into which the sea tumbles. They are about to go over the edge when before them rises "a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin was of the per­ fect whiteness of snow." This is the end of the story, and we do not know

16

EDGAR ALLAN POE mummy in "Some Words with a Mummy" (Amer­ ican Whig Review, April 1845). He has been awak­ ened from the dead by galvanism applied by one Dr. Ponnonner ("'pon honor"). The mechanism of the story may have been derived from a fairly wellknown novel, The Mummy! (1827), by Jane Webb (later better known as Mrs. Loudon), in which, in the twenty-second century, the mummy of King Cheops is seemingly revived by galvanism. Apart from the galvanic mechanism, though, Poe's story is really satire, a succession of gibes at modern tech­ nology and a sneering comparison of the achieve­ ments of his own day with those of ancient Egypt. Both material progress and social reform come under attack. As the conversation of the condescending mummy is summarized: "Great Movements were awfully common things in his day, and as for Prog­ ress, it was at one time a nuisance, but it never progressed."

tremely difficult to support), and the reader can let his or her fancy run free. Poe, though, was an intellectually playful man, and he did conceal two little messages in the for­ mations and inscriptions of Tsalal, which appear in chapter 23: his own name and perhaps Pym's. Poe's original

Transliteration

h pot Other stories in Poe's large corpus contain ele­ ments of contemporary science or are placed in the overlap area between science and philosophy, but these stories are not necessarily science fiction. The tales of abnormal psychology — such as "The Black Cat" (1843), "Berenice" (1835), "William Wilson" (1839) —need not be described, for abnormal psy­ chology in itself, unless rendered fantastic by other elements, has never been considered science fiction. Two of Poe's more important stories (perhaps ulti­ mately suggested by the work of Ludwig Tieck, with which Poe was familiar) are ultimately philo­ sophical—the examples of Fichtean Will displayed by the bluestockings in "Morelia" (1835) and "Ligeia" (1838). These tell more about Poe the man than do the "science fiction" stories. His mathemat­ ical background is visible in stories that reduce the multiplicity of life to a calculus of probabilities, but these, too, are not science fiction. Such stories are "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in which Dupin expounds on a calculus of life, and "The Gold Bug" (1843), which is really a study in elemen­ tary probability. In "The Angel of the Odd" (1844) Poe raises, in somewhat diffuse form, the probability of improbable events. Although presented as a spoof, it does raise a serious question about idealistic phi­ losophy, and might also have interested contempo­ rary insurance companies. Some words must be added about the whimsical

Ill It must be admitted, unfortunately, that Poe's sto­ ries that approach science fiction are, by and large, not among his major works. As a group they are much less interesting critically than the stories of abnormal psychology, the wonderland stories, or the detective stories. Only "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" can be considered among his finest stories. Poe's stature as a giant of letters and his unques­ tioned importance in other areas of writing may lead one to overstate his historical position in the devel­ opment of science fiction. Some of his stories, it can safely be said, form part of the common American background as required reading for the young. Oth­ ers have been almost uniquely important in the de­ velopment of supernatural fiction or the detective story. But the stories considered in this article (ex­ cept "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" and perhaps "MS. Found in a Bottle") were not widely known during the formative period of science fic­ tion. Even today it is doubtful if anyone but a spe­ cialist or enthusiast has read them all. Nor were they the stories that were esteemed in the nine­ teenth century. The most that can be said is that Poe's fiction as a whole influenced Jules Verne, who admired Poe greatly. But the elements that Verne took over were not always those of science fiction.

17

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS yet prepared; and at the moment is still the best general edition.) The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Collected and ed­ ited, with an introduction and commentary, by Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. (Contains the stories discussed in this article, Eureka and several mar­ ginal works, annotations, and full coverage of the schol­ arly literature; texts are Poe's latest versions.) Tales and Sketches. Edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott with the assistance of Eleanor D. Kewer and Maureen C. Mabbott. Two volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. (Volumes 2 and 3 of the Col­ lected Works of Edgar Allan Poe-, the set is still in pro­ cess of publication, and will probably become the de­ finitive edition of Poe.)

Poe was not a great innovator or pattern creator in science fiction like Wells, nor a historically im­ portant specialist like Ray Bradbury or Robert A. Heinlein. He was a writer, a few of whose stories, in retrospect, can be uncomfortably squeezed, with crumpling and edges sticking out, into the genre we now call science fiction. One can admire the deft­ ness with which knowledge was pressed into ser­ vice, the great originality, the ingenuity in combin­ ing levels of narration, the remarkable blend of wild imagination and sober rationality, the technical bril­ liance (allowing for period styles), but one must still admit that the evolution of science fiction would have been much the same had Poe never written these stories.

CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES The critical literature on Poe is vast in quantity, and even a listing of important studies would be beyond the scope of this volume. The following items, though, have been especially relevant to the preparation of this article.

Selected. Bibliography WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree.- The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Bailey, J. O. "Sources for Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, 'Hans Pfaal,' and Other Pieces." PMLA, 57 (1942). Campbell, Killis. The Mind of Poe and Other Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933. Falk, Doris V. "Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism." PMLA, 84 (1969). Ketterer, David. "Poe, Edgar Allan." In The Science Fic­ tion Encyclopedia. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Lind, Sidney E. "Poe and Mesmerism." PMLA, 62 (1947). Nicolson, Marjorie. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Pollin, Burton R. "'Some Words with a Mummy' Re­ considered." Emerson Society Quarterly, 59 (1969). ------- . Discoveries in Poe. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. (Resourceful, closely ana­ lyzed studies of motifs, sources, influences.) Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe. A Critical Biog­ raphy. New York: Appleton-Century, 1941. (Excellent, full scholarly biography.) Sambrook, A. J. "A Romantic Theme, The Last Man." Forum for Modern Language Studies, 25 (January 1966). Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe. The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. (Pleasant, informative, nontechnical study.) — E. F. BLEILER

There are scores of editions of Poe's fiction containing some or all of the stories described in this article. In most cases the texts they follow are those of the Griswold (New York, 1850-1856) edition, which, while accurate enough for the stories, does not always present Poe's best or final texts. Poe continually revised his work, but it must be ad­ mitted that his changes are usually not important to the general reader. The first five books listed are the first edi­ tions of his fiction; these are followed by modern collections.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket [etc.]. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Two Volumes. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840. Tales by Edgar A. Poe. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845. Mesmerism "In Articulo Mortis.” London: Short and Company, 1846. Pamphlet. (A British piracy of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.") The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by Rufus W. Griswold. Four volumes. New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850-1856. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Virginia Edi­ tion. Edited by James A. Harrison. Seventeen volumes. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902. (Includes some material that is now generally thought not to have been written by Poe; is the closest to a variorum edition

18

H. RIDER HAGGARD 1856-1925

discovers Haggard is the setting of his many adven­ tures: they are distant in both time and place, offer­ ing a literate escape from the cacophony of ordinary life, much as they offered a pleasant and polite route for fantasy in the late nineteenth and early twen­ tieth centuries. The reading publics of British and American cities bought Haggard's "romances" in staggering numbers, gobbled up pirated editions, and awaited sequels in the Allan Quatermain series with a loudly voiced impatience. A first, rapid reading of Haggard's King Solo­ mons Mines (1885), She (1886; rev. ed. 1896), Cleo­ patra (1889), Eric Brighteyes (1891), Nada the Lily (1892), The People of the Mist (1894), Heart of the World (1895), Ayesha (1905), She and Allan (1920), or any other of the novels set in South Africa reveals a novelist who had lucked into a theme that hap­ pened to be immediately appealing to a public some­ what jaded by Robert Louis Stevenson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and a number of other popular writers. Now readers could breathe the clear air of Haggard's mountain citadels, wonder at intertwined strands that formed the Zulu cultures then being brutally buried by the Boers and English, and muse at Haggard's fascina­ tion with the Eternal Woman. Haggard may have unwittingly anticipated later Freudian notions of sexual repression, but he did not wallow in the un­ fortunate negativism all too characteristic of the un­ derground pornography of the day. He approached the mystery of birth and rebirth with the exuber­

The ship rushed on through the glow of the sun­ set into the gathering night. On sped the ship, but still Swanhild sang, and still the swans flew over her. Now that war-dragon was seen no more, and the death-song of Swanhild as she passed to doom was never heard again. For swans and ship, and Swanhild, and dead Eric and his dead foes, were lost in the wind and in the night. But far out on the sea a great flame of fire leapt up towards the sky.

VEN IF ONE has not perused many tomes of

E

Victorian-era British fiction, one would proba­ bly know the name of H. Rider Haggard as the au­ thor of King Solomon's Mines, and perhaps of She. If, on the other hand, one were asked to identify the author of the lines quoted above, one might be sur­ prised when informed that they are from the mov­ ing conclusion of Haggard's Eric Brighteyes, a retell­ ing of an Icelandic saga, which was so infused with the mood of the Norse and Icelandic tales that con­ temporary readers were fooled into thinking that it was a genuine saga. It is this attention to mytholog­ ical and historical detail that gives many of Hag­ gard's books their curious wearing power, even though modern tastes have swerved from the overly flowery descriptions and even from the periodic ca­ dences that resound in most of Haggard's novels. Perhaps as important to the modern reader who re­

19

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS archaeology in the Middle East, ever since Austen Layard had "dug up" Nineveh in 1845. Young Rider thus grew up in an era of intense intellectual excitement, an era also fraught with the stresses of fervent industrialism coupled with the ef­ fects of British imperialism. In addition to the mul­ tifarious aspects of intellectual, social, and artistic ferment there were also the changes wrought by technology and the radically altered context of med­ icine. Haggard grew up aware of the drastic impli­ cations of Pasteur's "germ theory," the first results of antisepsis, and the startling improvements in sur­ gery made possible by anesthetics; the full flowering of the applications of chemistry in drugs and explo­ sives; and the continually changing applications of industrial technology — from the newer Bessemer converters for better steel to the growing use of pe­ troleum in place of whale oil. In some senses the Victorians took for granted what technology could accomplish, so that once electricity was harnessed in the 1880's, or the tele­ phone supplanted the telegraph, or when the auto­ mobile and the airplane arrived in the early 1900's, all were assumed normal. This emphasis on tech­ nology and its beneficial effects permeates Haggard's works; but, unlike H. G. Wells, Haggard did not delve into the actual workings of either the new medicine or the expanding numbers of technologies. He — like his reading public — simply accepted such matters and perhaps pondered their obvious impact upon the customs of the time, wondering if these changes that were occurring at such a frenetic pace were indeed "good." Haggard also reflected the venerated tradition of longing for a simpler time, when farmers' virtues dominated, well delineated by his continual interest in the British farmer and his plight in the early twentieth century. In Regeneration, Being an Ac­ count of the Social Work of the Salvation Army in Great Britain (1910), Haggard addressed some of the essential problems of his time, noting the destabil­ izing effects of industrial technology; Theodore Roo­ sevelt wrote of Regeneration that the book "... grasped the dangers that beset the future of the English-speaking people and the way these dangers can be best met... ." In his two monumental studies of agriculture (Rural England, Being an Account of the Agricultural and Social Researches ... in the

ance of the first anthropologists. One could argue that Haggard provides a literary mirror of James Fra­ zer's vast collections of cultural customs (particu­ larly well illustrated in Adonis Attis Osiris, 2nd ed. [1907]), in these lines from When the World Shook (1919), a tale of Atlantis:

There are other reflections . . . [that] concern the wonder of a woman's heart, which is a micro­ cosm of the hopes and fears and desires and de­ spairs of this humanity of ours whereof from age to age she is the mother. (chapter 27)

Born in Norfolk on 22 June 1856, Henry Rider Haggard was the sixth son of William Rider Hag­ gard and Ella Doveton, of Bradenham Hall. His fa­ ther, who had trained as a barrister, was a " . . . flam­ boyant squire of the old school, a kindly and paternal despot.. . His mother had been born and raised in exotic and tropically unhealthy Bombay. She was an author in her own right, having pub­ lished Myra, or the Rose of the East: A Tale of the Afghan War (1857), a poem in nine cantos about the Kabul campaign of 1842. Rider's childhood was laced with his mother's recollections of life in India, as well as her acquain­ tance with literature. Perhaps his devotion to the rich tapestries of folk traditions and his acute sensi­ tivity to nuances were gained from her, and there are a number of links between Ella Haggard's strong, positive Christianity and Rider's own quandaries as he wrestled with the implications of Darwinism. With the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Victorian England began the heated debate still heard in some quarters in the late twentieth century, and the literary world of Hag­ gard's youth shortly absorbed the new interpreta­ tions of natural history. Once the famous Oxford Debate (between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce) had taken place in June 1860, the general public soon became aware of the "new'' anthropology, paleontology, botany, mammalogy, comparative anatomy, and geology,- newspapers hap­ pily carried accounts of the theories of Huxley, Richard Owen, William Hooker, John Henslow, Charles Lyell, and Darwin; and readers of the Times soon were familiar with these personalities, much as they had followed the wide-ranging implications of

20

H. RIDER HAGGARD Years 1901 and 1902 [1902] and Rural Denmark and Its Lessons [1913]), Haggard faced the demise of his ideals and argued "... that it was futile to revive the dying feudalism ..." (Cohen, page 250). Haggard's literary production can best be under­ stood by placing his "romances, fantasies, and adven­ tures" within the context not only of his years spent in South Africa (1875-1881), but also within the century immediately preceding World War I. His Cetywayo and His White Neighbours (1882), "... a collection of fact, impression, and opinion [that] no scholar writing about South African his­ tory can afford to pass by . . ." (Cohen, page 68), showed Haggard's power of description, as well as his unusual perception of the nobility of the Zulus. His most famous novels (King Solomons Mines, She, Cleopatra, and in its time The World's Desire [1890, in collaboration with Andrew Lang]) mani­ fested a Haggard perplexed by the loss of values as a result of the new technology, yet quite pleased by the progress brought by the new sciences. A mem­ orable scene in When the World Shook (1919) pic­ tures the wonderment at, yet easy acceptance of, the remnants of what appeared to be "aeroplanes" inside the burial vault of the last Atlantean king and his daughter. Literary critics may argue that Haggard's "ro­ mances" lie strictly outside the genre called science fiction, but there are elements within many of his works that fit easily into the usually accepted themes of science fiction. It was Haggard who first exploited the lost-world motif to its fullest in King Solomon's Mines, She (and the cycle of books de­ rived from She.- Ayesha, She and Allan, and Wis­ doms Daughter [1923]), The People of the Mist, Heart of the World, The Yellow God (1908), and Queen Sheba's Ring (1910). It may be that the young Haggard had heard rumors of a lost civilization somewhere in the heart of Africa, which turned out to be the still-mysterious ruins called Great Zimbabwe. By populating his books with strong, well-crafted characters quickly recognized as "types" (Allan Quatermain in Mines, for example), Haggard made his works rapid successes, especially when these characters were connected by the British and Amer­ ican reading publics with half-known stereotypes: the "white hunter" of Africa,- the "mysterious, all­

pervasive" woman who was exploited in the Pre-Ra­ phaelite art school; the "cynical physician" (Bickley in When the World Shook); the "pig-headed theo­ logian" (Bastin in When the World Shook); the quixotically motivated "humanist" trying to com­ bine the best of the old traditions with the unset­ tling new world (Harmachis in Cleopatra, and Arbuthnot in When the World Shook); the "hero" (Eric in Eric Brighteyes, and Umslopogaas in Nada the Lily); the "explorer" ("Jones" in Heart of the World, and Allan Quatermain in Mines and Allan Qudterm