Vintage Visions : Essays on Early Science Fiction [1 ed.] 9780819574398, 9780819574374

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Vintage Visions

••

•Vintage

Visions • Essays on Early Science Fiction EditEd by Arthur b. EvAns

WE s l E yAn u n i vE rs i t y P rEss Middletown, Connecticut

Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2014 SF-­TH Inc. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Richard Hendel Typeset in Miller and Didot by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. “Future-­War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871–1900” by I. F. Clarke. Copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and Science-­Fiction Studies. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vintage Visions : Essays on Early Science Fiction / edited by Arthur B. Evans. pages cm. — (Early Classics of Science Fiction) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8195-7437-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8195-7438-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8195-7439-8 (ebook) 1. Science fiction—History and criticism. I. Evans, Arthur B., editor of compilation. PN3433.5.V56 2014 809.3′8762—dc23 2013045014 5 4 3 2 1 Cover illustration by Alphonse de Neuville (1835-1885) of the interior of the Nautilus, for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, by Jules Verne.

Contents Preface vii 1

Sylvie Romanowski Cyrano de Bergerac’s Epistemological Bodies: “Pregnant with a Thousand Definitions” (1998, with an afterword by Ishbel Addyman) 1

2

Paul K. Alkon Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1985) 25

3

William B. Fischer German Theories of Science Fiction: Jean Paul, Kurd Lasswitz, and After (1976) 47

4

Josh Bernatchez Monstrosity, Suffering, Subjectivity, and Sympathetic Community in Frankenstein and “The Structure of Torture” (2009) 66

5

Arthur B. Evans Science Fiction vs. Scientific Fiction in France: From Jules Verne to J.-H. Rosny Aîné (1988) 82

6

I. F. Clarke Future-­War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871–1900 (1997, with an afterword by Margaret Clarke) 96

7

Allison de Fren The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve (2009) 124

8

Andrea Bell Desde Júpiter: Chile’s Earliest Science-­Fiction Novel (1995) 163

9

Rachel Haywood Ferreira The First Wave: Latin American Science Fiction Discovers Its Roots (2007) 177

10 Nicholas Ruddick ​“ Tell Us All About Little Rosebery”: Topicality and Temporality in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (2001) 217

11 Kamila Kinyon The Phenomenology of Robots: Confrontations with Death in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1999) 240 12 Patrick A. McCarthy Zamyatin and the Nightmare of Technology (1984) 267 13 Gary Westfahl ​“ The Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe Type of Story”: Hugo Gernsback’s History of Science Fiction (1992) 278 14 William J. Fanning, Jr. The Historical Death Ray and Science Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s (2010) 298 15 Susan Gubar C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction (1980, with an afterword by Veronica Hollinger) 325 16 Stanislaw Lem On Stapledon’s Star Maker (1987, with an afterword by Istvan Csicsery-­Ronay, Jr.) 342

150 Key Works of Early Science Fiction 353



Bibliography of Criticism on Early Science Fiction 357

Contributors 433

Preface Vintage Visions brings together some of the finest essays ever published on early science fiction (sf ). These sixteen articles first appeared in the scholarly journal Science Fiction Studies from 1976 to 2010, and their collective focus spans nearly three centuries of sf, from Cyrano de Bergerac in 1657 to Olaf Stapledon in 1937. They have been selected not only for the quality of their analytical content (some have received the prestigious SFRA “Pioneer Award” for the best critical essay of the year) but also for how they represent the breadth of the genre itself as it has morphed through time. Although its origins and evolution continue to be the subject of lively debate among scholars, science fiction emerged as a genre in the imaginary voyages, utopias, and futuristic fiction of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. During the nineteenth century, it popularized its narrative recipe and ideological worldview in the gothic fiction of Mary Shelley, the extraordinary voyages of Jules Verne, and the scientific romances of H. G. Wells. And it eventually adopted its generic name and social identity in the American pulp-­fiction magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Vintage Visions includes in-­depth discussions of important sf writers and themes from each of these seminal historical periods. In its appendix, it identifies 150 key works of early science fiction, listed in chronological order. And it features an extensive bibliography of criticism about early sf—the largest of its kind ever published and a valuable reference tool for all those who wish to do research in the field. It is important to understand that the critical essays in this book are not intended to serve as a general introduction to the world of early science fiction. Nor is their goal to offer “definitive” readings of specific sf authors and works. By virtue of their thematic breadth and the depth of their analytical insight, however, they do constitute an excellent snapshot of the current state of academic scholarship in this field. Let me give a brief explanation about the terminology used in this book. Vintage Visions is being published in Wesleyan University Press’s “Early Classics of Science Fiction” series. For definitional clarity, Wesleyan classifies as “early” those works of science fiction published before 1940—before World War II but, of more importance for sf scholars, prior to sf ’s “Golden Age,” which began when John W. Campbell took over the reins of Astound

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ing magazine in the late 1930s. Some sf scholars prefer to use the epithet “proto” for sf published before 1940. But I find the term “proto-­sf ” intrinsically biased and dismissive; it implies that true science fiction came into being only at some later date. The term “early sf,” though admittedly more vague, does offer the advantage of not defining its subject exclusively and retroactively in terms of a subsequent narrative form. It allows these premodern fictional texts to stand on their own and be considered within their specific historical contexts, rather than being viewed as an unfinished “pre”-­ version of something else. From this more inclusive point of view, works of science fiction existed long before the term “science fiction” became the preferred label for this brand of speculative writing in the late 1930s. Also, as regards the standard abbreviations used in this book, most writers and aficionados of the genre eschew the label “sci-­fi” (too reminiscent of grade-­B Hollywood movies) and prefer instead “SF” or “sf.” In the original versions of the essays that follow, both upper- and lowercase versions of this abbreviation can be found. The reason for this is quite simple: the in-­house style of Science Fiction Studies changed from “SF” to “sf ” in the mid-­1990s. For purposes of this collection, the lowercase abbreviation “sf ” will be used throughout. Each essay in this volume is also followed by a short afterword written by its author (or, in a few cases, by another scholar) that has been added expressly for Vintage Visions. In asking for these afterwords, I left the door open for the contributors to decide for themselves how they wished to supplement their original article. As a result, the afterwords vary considerably in scope, content, and tone. For example, some discuss how their essay was conceived and written and how it sought to enhance the existing sf criticism of the time; others explain how it dovetailed with their professional careers and how their lives were changed by it; and still others offer a “state of the art” survey of various new critical studies that have appeared since their essay was published and go on to assess the latter’s historical significance in the context of today’s scholarship. In my letter to the contributors, I requested only that the afterwords be “useful and interesting to the reader.” I am confident they are both. Finally, these essays would most likely have never seen the light of day if it had not been for the hardworking editors of Science Fiction Studies, the journal in which they were originally published. I would like to recognize two in particular: Richard Dale Mullen, founder of SFS and managing editor from 1973 to 1979 and 1991 to 1998, and Robert M. Philmus, managing editor from 1979 to 1991. These two unsung heroes of sf scholarship viii ] P re fa ce

were exemplary editors—not only because of their vast knowledge of the sf field but also because of their uncompromising demand for accuracy, clarity, and documentational authenticity in every essay they published in Science Fiction Studies. This anthology would not have been possible without them.



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Vintage Visions

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• 1• Cyrano de Bergerac’s Epistemological Bodies

“Pregnant with a Thousand Definitions” Sylvie Romanowski The genre that is today called science fiction has its roots in the speculative tales and imaginary voyages of the seventeenth century and before. One early writer who is often hailed as an important precursor to what sf would later become was the French soldier and philosopher Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac. Although better known as the long-­nosed and chivalrous hero of an 1898 play by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano was also a daring thinker whose fantastic fictional voyages to the Moon and Sun offered new ways of thinking about humanity and the ­universe. This essay originally appeared in SFS 25, no. 3 (November 1998): 414–32.

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55) wrote two highly imaginative texts of cosmic exploration and travel that defy all attempts at classification. Sometimes collectively entitled L’Autre Monde (The Other World), the two novels L’Autre Monde ou Les Estats et Empires de la Lune (The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon) and Les Estats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun)1 have been the object of debate and widely differing interpretations. They have been considered as critical and satirical (Mason), libertine (Chambers, DeJean, Spink), materialist and epicurean (Alcover, Laugaa), and hermetic (Gossiaux, Hutin, Van Vledder). Cyrano has been considered both as an epigone of Campanella and late-­ Renaissance magical thought (Erba, Lerner) and as skeptical and “modern,” anticipating the eighteenth-­ century philosophers (Harth, Prévot, 

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Spink, Weber).2 Yet Cyrano’s texts transcend all these labels. L’Autre Monde explores other spaces, and are themselves situated elsewhere, in another intellectual and critical space that, with Calle-­Gruber, Philmus, and Suvin, I will take as belonging to the genre of science fiction: according to Ursula Le Guin, science fiction is defined by “its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology” (introduction, n.p.). But which science? In Cyrano’s time, the first half of the seventeenth century, this question itself—let alone the answer—would be markedly different from ours. In our time, very specialized scientific fields focus on the many aspects of life and the cosmos: e.g., biology, chemistry, physics—all based on certain commonly accepted quantitative and logical principles born in the seventeenth century: “Science was becoming [in the seventeenth century], and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measurements” (Whitehead 47). In the early seventeenth century, however, the situation was quite different: rivaling methodologies were available to explore the universe, and they were not so cleanly partitioned into highly specialized domains. In Cyrano’s time, several types of interpretations of the world competed with and influenced each other in rather complicated ways. Modern science, as we know it and recognize it in the works of its ancestors such as Galileo and Descartes, was actively engaged in debates with other alternative systems of thought—such as atomism, animism, ­hermetism—that we cannot truly label as “sciences,” yet which were seen as viable competitors in the intellectual debates of the period. In a French version of this essay, I called Cyrano’s writings, written during this unique period in Western history, not so much science fiction as “savoir fiction” [knowledge fiction]—a phrase impossible to translate into English felicitously. Cyrano’s point of departure in writing these novels was to critique, refute, and mock the traditional religious, Aristotelian, and Church-­promoted scientific beliefs considered orthodox in his day and, in so doing, to satirize the society of his time. His eclectic and completely heterodox thought incorporated other competing paradigms: e.g., the mechanistic and mathematical view proposed by Galileo, Descartes, and Mersenne (still very new in his day); the atomistic explanation defended by Gassendi; and the animist, esoteric, alchemist traditions—very ancient but still continuing to enjoy a widespread popularity during the seventeenth century. From the perspective of the modern reader, the latter traditions may not seem worthy of being placed alongside those of mathematical and mechanistic science—or 2 ] S ylvie Rom anowski

even on par with certain atomistic views—because our modern science considers itself as deriving exclusively from Galileo and Descartes rather than from the alchemists. But, as strange as animism and alchemy may seem today, in the seventeenth century these systems of knowledge were considered as competitors to Cartesian thought, and it was not clear which kind of science would eventually win out. The alchemists and animists were deemed worthy of serious rebuttal by such scientists as Mersenne, Gassendi, and Kepler. In the upheavals of science in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, alchemy, animism, and atomism must have seemed both interesting and tempting, without there being much means available through which to discriminate completely and persuasively among them. Even Descartes started out as an animist in his early works such as the Cogitationes Privatae. Frances Yates sums up the situation as follows: Thus in these momentous years when the Renaissance world is cracking and the modern world is rising from its ruins, currents and counter-­currents still running strongly out of the past swirl round the protagonists in the epic struggle, the outlines of which are not as yet clear to the spectators. Mersenne and Descartes were suspected of being Rosicrucians because of their recondite interests. And at the same time and place in which Hermetism is in retreat before the onslaughts of Mersenne . . . Campanella is prophesying at court that the infant Louis XIV will build the Egyptian City of the Sun. (447)3 To a person curious about the science of matter in the early seventeenth century, the “hands-­on” experimental activities carried out by alchemists in their laboratories—filled with retorts, ovens, and water baths, where they were busy burning, condensing, fusing, and crystallizing (Holmyard 43–58)—may well have seemed at least as interesting as the telescope or the microscope. Alchemy declined quickly at the end of the seventeenth century under the twin impacts of Cartesianism and Boyle’s chemistry, but in Cyrano’s time it was still very much alive and was indeed enjoying a last blaze of glory. In the fight against Aristotelian science, the alchemists were the allies of the materialists and other antagonists of Church-­supported science in that they “ran counter to the Church in preferring to seek through knowledge rather than to find through faith” (Holmyard 164). Cyrano found fodder for his attacks on orthodox sciences in all the competing sciences of his day, those new and not so new: “in Cyrano de Bergerac’s view, Descartes and Campanella and others could appear to be travelling companions . . . did they not share in the rejection of a philosophical heritage still firmly implanted in the institution of the school” (Lerner 129). Cyrano was blessed

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with what Lerner calls a “decidedly ecumenical mind” (129–30) which allowed him widely different points of view—ranging from Pythagoras to Descartes, along with others like Cardan, Campanella, Kepler, and Gassendi. He used these viewpoints in order to provoke his readers into thinking differently about the universe and its inhabitants. The complete sentence from which my title is taken will furnish the entry point into my description of Cyrano’s peculiar enterprise. At the very beginning of his first novel, observing the moon with four companions, the narrator lists several possible descriptions and definitions of the Moon, concluding: “je demeuré gros de mille definitions de Lune dont je ne pouvois accoucher” (I remained pregnant with a thousand definitions of Moon to which I was unable to give birth) (L 359). This statement contains three odd aspects: (1) the narrator is male and pregnant; (2) he has a thousand definitions; (3) he is unable to give birth. The first, a pregnant man, shows a reversal, while the second shows that he is going beyond mere reversals, with no less than a thousand definitions. The third part indicates the inadequacy of language, as he is unable to give birth, to produce one definition, let alone a thousand. This sentence also indicates an important aspect of Cyrano’s vision: the close relationship between the body, knowledge, and statements about knowledge. The narrator’s body and all bodies are intimately involved in the production of intellectual knowledge, for the body is not just a metaphor or a representation, but a knower. It is, in short, an epistemological body. While Cyrano is a convinced materialist, explaining all phenomena by the arrangement and movement of particles and atoms, he is also a seeker of purification and enlightenment that necessitate going beyond matter and into the life of the mind. Preoccupied with knowledge of matter and the nature of knowledge itself, Cyrano unites, in my opinion, two views: the materialism of the atomists and the idealism of the animists and hermetics. As Pol Gossiaux says, Cyrano tries to reconcile “his absolute materialism and his absolute animism” (594), though Gossiaux locates the reconciling image in fire, rather than in the body, fire being the traditional means of purification and place of enlightenment in hermetic science. But Cyrano is radically original in making the body the keystone that holds the composite edifice together, the place of juncture of both the materialist and the hermetic visions. Cyrano’s two novels can be viewed as a persistent effort to mix, even to reconcile, these two philosophies of the universe, the atomistic and the hermetic, without fusing their identities into some single new vision—his attitude being one of joyful inclusion and bold exploration of both the outer and the inner universes.4 4 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

Critics of Cyrano’s texts, however, have tended to emphasize either one or the other aspect. Madeleine Alcover has viewed Cyrano as a materialist, almost eliminating the hermetic side; others, such as Erba, Lerner, Gossiaux, and Van Vledder, have placed him in the esoteric tradition. I believe that it is more faithful to Cyrano’s strange enterprise—as historians of science fiction (Suvin, Philmus, et al.) tend to do when citing him as an early writer in that genre—to assume that he drew on several systems. While the new mechanistic views are given less prominence (despite his defense of heliocentrism at the beginning of Lune and the intervention of Descartes at the end of Soleil), the atomistic-­materialist paradigm is adopted by Cyrano along with the esoteric one. In other words, he sought to consider these two explanations together in a unique worldview that had no equal in his time. Cyrano was choosing systems that were truly unorthodox, exploratory, and highly unconventional—but even more unconventional in that he drew upon these different systems at the same time. These twin aspects, which can be grouped as materialist/bodily, and immaterial/animist, come together in Cyrano who uses and sometimes transforms them to suit his own purposes. With the atomistic view, he refutes the Aristotelian tenets, and with the heliocentric view he refutes geocentrism; but he goes far beyond that new science, which was already dangerously unorthodox. He also develops a vision of the world based on a part of the hermetic tradition, which furnishes him with the exploration of an inner enlightenment, both epistemological and philosophical. This tradition, however, is stripped by Cyrano of any belief in the divine or in a Christian God, though not of belief in the soul. Through such reinterpretations, his doubly imaginative vision gives his works a rich and complex thickness that has not lost its appeal for modern readers. Darko Suvin sums up Cyrano by describing his “charmingly whimsical yoking together of elements from disparate fields” (106). I would differ with the idea that this was “whimsical”: I believe that Cyrano was playing a very serious game, one which Suvin himself says might have cost him his life, surmising that the writer died young in an act of “political murder by clerical enemies” (106). At stake were vast belief systems (e.g., Christian Catholic orthodoxy, cosmology) and questions no less vast, such as the place of humanity in the universe, the existence of an eternal soul, the possibility of an infinite universe, and the foundations of nature. If Cyrano wants to jolt readers out of their orthodoxy and complacency, reversals are an obvious place to start: perhaps the Moon is, as he says, a world like ours, and ours a moon for the Moon. This hypothesis produces great laughter among his companions, to whom he replies that perhaps Moon dwellers are laughing just as hard about us. It is shortly after this

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sentence that he meditates on the thousand definitions of the moon that he is unable to bring forth. Reversals are an easy way to amuse and to unsettle the mind from its usual perspectives, and are used more frequently in Lune than in Soleil. Inanimate objects become animate: books talk (the ancestor of the record player?) and plants talk. Pebbles become soft. Food becomes immaterial, producing no excrement, which might be a definite advantage. Sexual organs are revered as the givers of life instead of being hidden as shameful: one character, a naked man, wears nothing but a belt adorned with bronze likenesses of the male sexual organs, and a scarf sporting a medal with the same image. He explains that sexual organs are to be honored as givers of life, replacing the sword, bringer of death. Besides, such organs bring joy and should not be the object of shame: “Malheureuse contrée où les marques de generation sont ignominieuses et où celles d’aneantissement sont honorables!” (unhappy land, where the insignia of reproduction are shameful, and those of annihilation are honorable) (L 417). In a similar vein, the young are revered more than the old, and the son chastises his father rather than the other way around, for the son represents youthful vigor; and there are even houses and walls that move around with their inhabitants (mobile homes?) in this “monde renversé” (upside-­down world) (L 407). These reversals never fail to amuse, and they carry a subversive charge that is perhaps underestimated in our contemporary era, where multicultural views prevail. In the past, a hierarchized society would be more upset by, say, a carnivalesque reversal of authority and uprisings by the peasants and other lower classes.5 But reversal is not the most original vehicle of Cyrano’s vision of the other world. In Lune and especially in Soleil he uses many other means to imagine and make readers imagine other possibilities of bodily and intellectual existence, and it is to these that I now turn. The multiplicity of new possibilities emphasizes two aspects of body and mind that Cyrano uses with equal effect: first, matter in its many varieties, and second, the immaterial, which is both transparent and lightweight. His novels’ elaborate descriptions of other worlds seem to imply that one can indeed explore and represent other realities. But this knowledge and understanding will be limited—indeed, severely restricted—by fundamental failings in the sensory apparatus of human beings: only five senses, three faculties of the mind, one or two languages at most, and binary logic. All these capacities are hardly adequate for dealing with the multiple, startlingly different worlds encountered elsewhere in the universe. The difficulty is not rooted in a basic partiality or subjectivity, but in the inadequacy of the tools, mental and physical, at one’s disposal. In an age when new 6 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

technologies and hands-­on experiments were becoming more widespread, Cyrano seemingly was fascinated not so much by the new science in itself as by the gap it revealed between types of knowledge—the superior power of experimentation over the unassisted senses. Paradoxically, it seems that the increasing ability to know through mechanical devices made the human sensory apparatus seem all the more inadequate, even as knowledge itself was increasing. Humans are confined by five senses: “Il y trop peu de rapport . . . entre vos sens et l’explication de ces misteres,” says Socrates’ Daimon, who goes on to state: “il y a dans l’Univers un million peut-­estre de choses qui pour estre connues demanderoient en nous un million d’organes tous differens” (there is very little relationship between your senses and the explanation of these mysteries; there are in the universe maybe a million things which, in order to be known, would require us to have a million organs, all different from each other) (L 379–80). How can we know these million things, which the Daimon perceives “par les sens qui vous manquent” (by means of the senses you lack) (L 380), if they have to be funneled through a mere five senses?6 Similarly, we are limited by our relatively poor linguistic tools. Not only is the original, matrix language of the world still in existence on the Moon, but trees and cabbages talk, and human language is not limited to the voice or to letters. The whole body talks: “certaines parties du corps signifient un discours tout entier” (certain parts of the body signify an entire discourse) and a finger, a hand, an ear, a lip, an arm, or a cheek can mean a whole sentence, while other parts or actions of the body convey meaning, such as frowns, twitching of muscles, stomping of feet, and contortion of arms. In a kind of balletic dance, the Moon’s inhabitants make all these parts move together so that the whole body is talking: “il ne semble pas d’un homme qui parle, mais d’un corps qui tremble” (it does not appear that a man is talking, but that a body is trembling) (L 381). Add to that the detail that people are “tous nuds” (entirely naked) (381), and a vivid picture emerges. Bodies in action are central to communication. The philosophical basis of this multiple view of the human body is grounded in the atomistic theory of the universe, where all is matter, and all depends only on the arrangement of particles, not on souls or on God: “l’Univers infini n’est composé d’autre chose que de ces atosmes infinis tres solides” (the infinite universe is composed of nothing else but these infinite, very hard atoms) (L 408). Not only is everything a product of chance, but in a curious twist, Cyrano also imagines that everything that could have been but was not created is also a product of chance, so that what might have been is given equal weight with what might not have been: “aussy bien est-­

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il impossible que de ce remuement il ne se fasse quelque chose, et cette chose sera tousjours admirée d’un estourdy qui ne sçaura pas combien peu s’en est fallu qu’elle n’ayst pas esté faicte” (so it is impossible that out of these movements something does not arise, and this thing will be admired by a scatterbrain who will not know that this thing very nearly did not occur) (L 409–10). The culmination of this expanded vision of the world occurs in the description of the multiple and infinite worlds: “il y a des mondes infinis dans un monde infini” (there are infinite worlds in an infinite world) (L 405), for just as we seem to be mites to large animals like elephants, there are mites, “cirons,” to whom we appear to be giants, and these in turn have their own mites. This materialist, atomistic theory of the universe (derived variously from Lucretius and Gassendi, among others) Cyrano elevates to a principle called “cette cironalité universelle” (this universal mitedom) (L 406) in which there is no stable point of reference anywhere. The materialist vision shades into a vision of the profound unity and harmony of the universe, an idea basic to hermetism. The reader thus is prepared for the Daimon’s affirmation that “touttes choses sont vrayes” ([all things are true), that one can “unir phisicquement les veritez de chacque contradictoire” (unite physically the truths in each contradiction) (L 413)—both good hermetic principles—and that one should go beyond contradictions or paradoxes, however sophisticated. Creation is undifferentiated, flattened out, so to speak, without hierarchy, infinitely creative, and deeply harmonious. Matter is the only reality in the world: all the intellectual and mental processes result from the arrangement of atoms, to the exclusion of any other principle. Yet matter seems capable of transcending itself, of generating a soul: “l’ame n’estant que l’action de ces petittes bestes” (the soul being only the action of these little animals) (406). If the body is made up only of matter arranged in such a way as to produce thought, then it seems logical that the transmission of knowledge is also conducted in a material fashion, through bodily contact rather than through teaching or lecturing or reading, especially when it comes to the most prestigious of learned people, philosophers. At the end of Lune, there is a rather startling episode of the epistemological body, in the description of the philosophers’ happy death. When a philosopher feels death approaching, he lets his friends know: they kiss him tenderly on the mouth in a kind of lovemaking among men. He then plunges a dagger into his own heart, and one person after the other sucks his blood from the wound. After everyone is satiated, young girls are brought in, and they all make love, so that “de ces embrassemens il peut naistre quelque chose, ils soient comme asseurés que c’est leur amy qui revit” (from these embraces something may arise, they 8 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

may be assured as it were that their friend is living again) (L 415). There is even cannibalism: “pendant trois ou quatre jours qu’ils sont à gouster les delices de l’Amour, ils ne sont nourris que de la chair du mort, qu’on leur faict manger toutte crue” (for the three or four days that they are enjoying the delights of love, they are fed only by the flesh of the dead man which they are made to eat raw) (L 415). In this extraordinary passage, all functions of the body are simultaneously put to the service of the transmission of knowledge: kissing, bleeding, death, sex, procreation, and the eating of flesh.7 This passage is also an example of the melding of both the atomistic and the alchemical traditions. According to the first, particles of matter convey knowledge, and in the second tradition, this whole episode is placed under the sign of the Sun, to whom a sacrifice is offered before these proceedings—and let us not forget that the philosopher is a standard representation of the enlightened follower and practitioner of alchemy.8 Given the capacity of the particles of the body to carry knowledge, it is not surprising that if one can arrange one’s particles in exactly the same manner as another person’s being, then one has exactly the same knowledge as that other person. This principle is explained to the narrator of Soleil by Campanella, who serves as his guide in that world: “afin de connoistre vostre interieur, j’arrangeay toutes les parties de mon corps dans un ordre semblable au vostre; car estant de toutes parts situé comme vous, j’excite en moy par cette disposition de matiere, la mesme pensée que produit en vous cette mesme disposition de matiere” (in order to know you from the inside, I arranged all the parts of my body in an order similar to yours; being organized in every way like you, I excite in me, by this organization of matter, the same thought which is produced in you by that same organization of matter) (S 489). This passage has been interpreted (Erba 489, Lerner 126) as an example of Cyrano’s use of physiognomy taken from Campanella: it seems clear, however, that Cyrano reinterprets physiognomy to make of it something much more interior and radical, for Cyrano’s Campanella indicates that he rearranges the disposition of particles within his body, not his outward facial expressions (“j’arrangeay toutes les parties de mon corps”). This may seem odd, but the example that follows stresses the same point: that of twins who, though separated, do the same things in every domain, because “il estoit impossible que la composition des organes de leurs corps estant pareille dans toutes ses circonstances, ils n’operassent d’une façon pareille, puisque deux instrumens égaux touchez également doivent rendre une harmonie égale” (it was impossible that, since the composition of their bodily organs was similar in every fashion, they would not operate in similar fashion, because two equal instruments played in the same way must produce a

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similar sound) (S 489). Again, the emphasis here is on the inner restructuring of one’s organs to produce insight. We have come a long way from mere reversals of perspectives and talking trees. In a vision that is materialist but not reductive, Cyrano challenges his readers to imagine a vastly different world from ours, a world where human beings are their bodies—are wholly material—but not in the least unintellectual. But there is more: along with this materialist vision of the human body/intellect, there is yet another vision of what I call immaterial matter, where matter is transparent, light in weight. It is to this vision that I now turn. It is a vision that conveys esoteric meaning, the search for enlightenment, although it never renounces embodiment. This vision, which draws more heavily on hermetic concepts, is developed in Soleil rather than in Lune, as if to provide yet another possibility to the materialist, atomistic option explored principally in Lune. The choice of Campanella (not picked at random by Cyrano as one of the principal officers of the Sun [Lerner 127]) as a mentor for Dyrcona underlines this new point of view: Campanella was known primarily for his knowledge of magic and astrology and as the utopian writer of Civitas Solis. The Sun and the Moon, symbolized by gold and silver, respectively, represent the higher goals of alchemists and other initiates into superior knowledge; of these, the Sun is the highest, the most enlightened and authentic world to which one can aspire. With this emphasis on light, the very old Manichean dichotomy of dark and light, matter and spirit, might reappear—though not without significant modifications in Cyrano’s texts. For on the Sun, there is no perfection: there is opacity, there is death, and in a curious passage I will evoke later, the Beast of Fire, who could be expected to be dominant on the Sun, is killed by the Beast of Cold. Conversely, matter is not hopelessly condemned by Cyrano, as it was in the Manichean tradition. On the whole, however, the narrator’s existence on the Sun, as well as his travel to it, exhibit a lighter, happier state. This new mode of being is foreshadowed in a dream during which, before his second voyage, the narrator ascends towards the sun and feels lighter, delivered from gravity: so much so that he gets agitated and falls out of bed, landing naked on the bare floor with his eyes wide open. When he subsequently makes his real ascent towards the actual Sun, he feels strong, warm, and not at all burnt in the fire, in “le feu (cette poussiere quasi spirituelle)” (fire, this quasi-­spiritual dust) (S 445). He feels emotions of joy, rapture, voluptuousness, and deliverance. To indicate that this knowledge is not pure spirit, but is embodied, he describes his body as becoming exquisitely transparent: “ma veuë . . . passa tout à travers . . . comme si mon corps 10 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

n’eut plus esté qu’un organe de voir, je sentis ma chair, qui, s’estant décrassée de son opacité, transferoit les objets à mes yeux . . .” (my sight went through everything, as if my entire body was only an organ of sight, I felt my flesh, cleansed of its opacity, transferring objects to my eyes) (S 453). “J’estois devenu diafane” (I had become diaphanous) (S 453), but this diaphany includes volume and colors, for he sees all the organs of his body as if in an anatomical illustration: “aucun endroit . . . quoy que transparens, n’avoit perdu sa couleur naturelle; au contraire, mes poulmons conservoient encor sous un rouge incarnat leur mole délicatesse: mon coeur toujours vermeil balançoit aisément entre le sistolle et le diastolle; mon foye sembloit brûler dans un pourpre de feu” (though transparent, no place had lost its natural color; on the contrary my lungs still kept beneath a reddish pink their delicate softness: my ever vermilion heart moved easily between the systole and the diastole; my liver seemed to burn in a bright crimson) (S 453). He has used most of the synonyms for “red” that the French language contains. Besides being the color of blood, red, of course, was the color of the hermetic Philosophers’ Stone. This beautiful, red, glowing and transparent body is the effect of the being in proximity to the sun, and when Dyrcona leaves its immediate vicinity, he becomes more opaque again: proximity to the Sun means enlightenment in all the senses of the word—becoming lit, transparent, and light in weight, as well as enlightened in the mind, in a sense that was increasingly emphasized in the next century. Here, being dense in body also means being dense in mind, and gaining in lightness means gaining understanding. The philosophers again have a privileged status, just as in Lune, but in keeping with the new vision of corporeal transparency, their body is immaterial and their place is in the Sun, the highest principle of light and clarity. Campanella thus explains the special status that philosophers enjoy because their souls are made of finer particles: “une ame de Philosophe est tissuë de parties bien plus deliées” (a philosopher’s soul is woven with much finer particles) (S 492), and hence, philosophers can be the Sun’s principal inhabitants. He explains that there are three kinds of spirits: “les plus grossiers” (the coarsest) who merely repair holes in the Sun’s girth, the “subtils” (subtle) who belong in the Sun’s rays, and the best, the spirits of the philosophers: “mais ceux des Philosophes . . . arrivent tout entiers à la sphere du jour pour en estre habitans” (but those of philosophers arrive whole to the day-­sphere in order to live there) (S 493). They do so by a principle of resemblance, of light going to light, with an exceptional philosopher such as Epicurus having the extraordinary privilege of arriving in the Sun complete

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with body and soul together: “Epicure dans le Soleil est le mesme Epicure qui vivoit jadis sur la Terre” (Epicurus in the Sun is that same Epicurus who used to live on Earth) (S 493). Alcover finds it troubling that the philosophers’ souls are superior to other souls and explains this in terms of the hermetic tradition.9 The possibility of enlightenment in the Sun, emphasizing the soul’s ascent toward light, is only the culmination of many other esoteric aspects and allusions to the hermetic tradition. As Philmus says, “there is a great deal of internal evidence that occult traditions inspired Cyrano’s manner of concealing his theories in myth and allegory,” and his work demonstrates “a conversance with the doctrines of alchemy” (129). Chambers, Gossiaux, Spink, and especially Erba and Van Vledder, have analyzed many of these aspects that I will not reiterate here. In my conclusion, I will return to the matter of Cyrano’s use of these and other views of the universe.10 In Cyrano’s novels, however, souls are accompanied by bodies—for Cyrano yokes together several systems of thought, obviously refusing to be confined by one system alone. Furthermore, even on the Sun there are not only transparency and lightness, but degrees of these qualities, “car le Lecteur sçaura que toutes les contrées n’en sont pas diafanes, il y en a qui sont obscures, comme celles de nostre Monde” (the reader will note that all regions are not transparent: there are obscure ones like the ones in our world) (S 500). Nothing is pure: even the province of philosophers is not exempt from opacity, but this opacity can be conquered by an effort of the will: “nous pouvons toutefois par une vigoureuse contention de la volonté, nous rendre diafanes lors qu’il nous en prend envie” (by a vigorous exercise of our will, we can, however, become transparent when we feel like it) (S 501). The embodiment of knowledge and the spiritualization of matter constantly coexist on Cyrano’s Sun, where opacity is in fact necessary and never renounced. According to Ross Chambers: “To the question: is imagination material or spiritual? Cyrano does not decide” (“L’Autre Monde ou le mythe” 42). I would rather say that Cyrano sees a constant double interaction of the body on the spirit and of the immaterial on the material, the purification of the spirit from the body coexisting with the embodiment of ideas.11 There is a contrast between the Sun and the Moon: in the Sun’s domain, there exists a hierarchy, and matter can be transparent and weightless: on the Moon, there is no hierarchy, and materiality of thought is transmitted through blood, flesh, and sperm. Cyrano has imagined not one, but two universes, different from each other and radically different from our perceptions of the earthly mode of being. That he needed not one but two visions indicates the fecundity and generosity of his imagination, and also the dif12 ] S ylvie Rom anowski

ficulty of stepping out of our usual habits of mind. As Maurice Laugaa says in his introduction to Lune, Cyrano “tries to reverse the Christian principle of an order based on irreducible differences among various parts of creation, but at the same time he must allow for slippage between these differences, for an expansion of the text provided by the cosmic theories of his time” (24).12 At the center of both visions is a meditation on the relation between the body and knowledge, a body that is more consistent than the “corps humoral” (body made up of humors) of Montaigne, more unified than Descartes’ double vision of the extended body and the immaterial mind. Perhaps Cyrano’s is the most modern, if one thinks of modern conceptions of the human being as stepping away from the division between body and soul toward a view of human beings as holistic; the physical and the mental intertwine in still imperfectly understood ways. In concluding, I will refer back to my title and its source in Cyrano’s emblematic sentence, “dont je ne pouvois accoucher” (to which I was unable to give birth), which suggests the difficulty not only of attaining enlightenment, but of expressing new visions of the body and of the universe. Bringing forth is, of course, what Cyrano does in these books; hence there is an aspect of self-­referentiality that is layered on top of the philosophical visions he gives us. The knowing body brings forth a text that comments on its own coming into the world. This is done by an overt reference to his own work: in Lune, Socrates’ Daimon says to the narrator that he esteems very much a book, which we will read in the future, after Lune, entitled Les Estats et Empires du Soleil, which he says is nothing less than “le ‘Grand Œuvre des Philosophes,’ qu’un des plus forts esprits du Soleil a composé” (the “Great Work of the Philosophers” written by one of the very best minds on the Sun) (L 413). Here Cyrano counts himself among the best philosophers, and a reference to these people can be taken as a self-­reference. It is also one of the clearest indications that Cyrano is placing his work in the tradition of hermetism: “Grand Œuvre” was the name given in practical alchemy to the transmutation of metals into gold, and in mystical alchemy to the personal purification and spiritual knowledge gained by the hermetist.13 It is not surprising that philosophers, who represent hermetic initiation, occupy a special position in these books: they are either bodies transmitting knowledge through various solids and fluids (in Lune), or bodies of light floating into the Sun’s rays (in Soleil). Such self-­references become self-­glorifying and very gratifying to the narrator, who is happy to learn that philosophers’ souls dwell in such high places. But there are also indications that such enlightenment is difficult both to obtain and to sustain. In

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Soleil, there are threats to enlightenment, one of the most significant being the battle between the Beast of Cold and the Beast of Fire, a salamander. One would expect the Beast of Fire to win, in good alchemist tradition, for fire is the superior and basic force of transmutation of base metals into silver and gold. But the Beast of Fire is vanquished and “le cœur de la pauvre Salemandre, où tout le reste de son ardeur s’estoit concentrée, en se crévant, fit un éclat si épouvantable, que je ne sçay rien dans la Nature pour le comparer” (the poor salamander’s heart, where all its remaining strength had gathered, burst and in so doing made such a horrible noise that I can’t compare it to anything in nature) (S 491). Heat and light are the losers here, and the magnitude of such a defeat is underlined by the narrator’s incapacity to find a suitable comparison: it is no less than the incapacity of a being to achieve enlightenment, the falling back into base, dark, and cold matter. This is a catastrophe of monumental proportions for the universe, yet it does not dampen the enthusiasm of Dyrcona as he becomes more and more enlightened in body and in soul on the Sun. If we remember, however, the context of this event, another signification emerges: for the trees, feeling threatened by fire, had called upon the Beast of Cold to save their precious lives—these oaks, the descendants of Greek oaks, have inherited the gifts of prophecy, speech, and divination (S 478–79). Thus the defeat of the Beast of Fire, even on the Sun, perhaps especially there, is a good thing for these oaks and for the transmission of their knowledge to the narrator and hence to the human race—as the oak says to Dyrcona: “je croy parler, en vous parlant, à tout le Genre Humain” (when I speak with you, I believe that I am speaking to the whole human race) (479).14 The fragility of the transmission of accumulated knowledge is such that only the very sharpest ear can hear the murmur of the trees and their mysterious speech, but the very embodiment of learning also assures its transmission to future human beings. Cyrano’s identity is multiple: as satirist, as polemicist, and as defender of libertinism, materialism, heliocentrism, and hermetism. Such an enterprise relies on the power of the imagination that can be fully expressed only in fiction. In the unique situation of the early seventeenth century, he straddled two principal worlds: that of the soon-­to-­be-­outmoded late-­Renaissance hermetism, and that of the new mechanical, mathematical science. And like proponents of both those views, he fought the traditional Aristotelian view. J. S. Spink sums up the Cyranian vision as “a wider synthesis . . . between the panpsychism of Italians such as Campanella and the atomistic materialism of Lucretius as revised by Gassendi” (“Form” 150). Campanella is a late-­Renaissance figure rather than one belonging to modern science, though he was in touch with modern developments and was an admirer 14 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

and defender of Galileo. For Cyrano, Campanella was an attractive figure still belonging to the “late Renaissance magical/astral view of the physical world” that contrasts with the new, “modern empirical/mathematical view” of Galileo (Headley 179). In short, through his choice of Campanella, and all the allusions to hermetic authors, Cyrano shows that he does not yet adhere to the thoroughly modern camp, for “to those with whom the future lay . . . to Mersenne, Descartes . . . Campanella meant nothing” (Yates 396). Cyrano also presents Descartes as the other great mentor on the Sun, and it was a volume of Descartes’ Physics that lands Dyrcona in prison at the beginning of Soleil (S 432). Again, Cyrano is making two visions coexist, and even interact. Campanella praises Descartes and is happy to welcome him to the Sun; in reality, Descartes was quite contemptuous of Campanella. It is this inclusivity that marks Cyrano’s attitude as quite different from the other reactions to science prevalent in this unique period. He did not align himself exclusively with either of the anti-­Aristotelian views, nor did he experience a sense of loss and anguish at the breaking apart of the old world—an anguish that appears in authors such as John Donne and Pascal, and which has been studied by Koyré and Nicolson.15 It is important not only to examine the details of Cyrano’s vision, but also to explore its multiple sources insofar as they indicate his adherence to both materialism and hermetism, the two main and opposing visions on which he drew. I believe that the answer lies not in identifying Cyrano as an adept of either view, but as a writer of literature. Erba says it well: “the fortunate encounter of Cyrano with magic is defined and clarified under the banner of literature” (66); that is, as Erba explains, Cyrano’s work represents a “personal reworking” situated in literature that seems be more a “work of ‘literature on literature’ than a deep excavation and in-­depth exploration of the living substance of the hermetic materials themselves” (59; Erba’s emphasis). I believe that what Erba says about hermetism also holds true for Cyrano’s other sources of inspiration. Cyrano’s work is truly a work of fiction, of imagination based on scientific views—as Suvin, Le Guin, and Philmus all agree—but one reveling in absolute freedom, freedom to wonder. And it is only by considering him within this framework that no injustice is done to this writer’s complex sf work.16 Beyond Cyrano’s yoking together of wildly different visions, there is, however, as I have tried to show, a guiding thread: to put it simply, knowledge matters. I take this in two ways, stretching the syntax of that phrase: knowledge is important, and knowledge is embedded in matter, in the material body. First, knowledge is not mere curiosity, and even goes beyond being an intellectual quest (Philmus 131; Chambers “ ‘L’Autre Monde’ ou

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le mythe” 29), for it has an impact on conduct and human life and history. Second, Cyrano’s two views of the body—of a solid, material body, and an immaterial, translucent and crimson body—both stress self-­knowledge and knowledge of the universe of which they are a part: they both are epistemological bodies. For Cyrano requires two books to challenge the traditional, Christian, Aristotelian concepts. In both visions, the division between body and soul, matter and spirit, is undermined in favor of other corporeal visions: a body of material atoms and a body of light. Both visions, though apparently divergent, meet in a common view that there are no divisive boundaries between knowledge and body. Cyrano’s works are an optimistic, syncretic enterprise focused on the material body, but one which also glorifies the imagination: although he suggested that our five bodily senses were inadequate tools for understanding the universe, he affirms the power of our imagination to overcome these limitations, to transcend both the body and received knowledge. At the heart of any new vision, he says, our bodies must be at the center: imagine a new body, he says, and you will be able to imagine new knowledge.

Appendix Since these novels may not be familiar to many readers, I will summarize briefly their content. In Les Estats et Empires de la Lune (The States and Empires of the Moon), his first novel, the unnamed narrator wants to visit the moon, to prove that it is an inhabited world. He devises a machine using many bottles filled with dew to lift him up, but he succeeds only in landing in New France (Canada), where he meets with the governor and discusses such topics as heliocentrism, the earth’s rotation, the plurality of worlds, etc. On the twenty-­fourth of June, on the feast of “la Saint-­Jean” (Saint-­ Jean-­Baptiste, still celebrated in Québec), a bonfire lifts him in a better machine powered this time by rockets, taking him to an earthly Paradise, where he meets the prophets Elijah and Enoch. As the narrator is expelled from Paradise after an impious outburst, and as he plunges into the darkest night toward the Moon, he steals an apple from the tree of knowledge. Now on the Moon, he first meets Socrates’ Daimon, “le Demon de Socrate” (L 377), and then is taken to the court, where he is thought to be a pet animal. Put on trial in order to determine his true nature, the narrator is first found to be a bird, then a man, and for this latter offense, he is condemned to make a public apology. He then goes to the home of the Daimon’s host, and discourses with two university professors and the young son of the host on an extremely wide range of scientific, moral, and philosophical topics: the respect due to old people, the thinking and talking life of plants, the 16 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

eternity of the universe, the role of chance, the burial practices of the lunar people, and praise of sexuality. With the son of the host, who remains unnamed, he embarks on a series of increasingly bold refutations of many standard Christian beliefs: he refutes the immortality of the soul, the existence of miracles, the spiritual nature of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and finally the existence of God. Upon this last declaration of atheism, the devil himself appears to cart off the young son to hell, and the narrator decides to accompany him in order to regain Earth on the devil’s way to the underworld, landing in Italy. The second book, Les Estats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun), picks up where the first left off: the narrator returns to France and is taken care of by two noblemen. The narrator is also named Dyrcona (taken to be an anagram of Cyrano). His tales of his sojourn in the Moon have attracted enemies, but even more dangerous than his tales is Descartes’ Physics, discovered in his belongings. Thrown into prison in Toulouse, Dyrcona escapes, then is recaptured and thrown into a worse dungeon, from which he is liberated upon the noblemen’s orders. They decide that he be held in a tower. There Dyrcona constructs a complicated machine that enables him to be aspirated upward and reach the vicinity of the Sun. Landing first on a solar macula or sun cloud, he encounters a small, naked man who, speaking in what he says is the perfectly clear, original language of the world, explains the history of the Earth, and the three principal faculties of the soul. After a longer voyage of twenty-­two months, Dyrcona finally arrives on the Sun, where he encounters several strange beings. In a dark region, he meets fantastic creatures: a golden tree, a talking nightingale, fruits that fall from the trees and transform themselves into little men, who then unite together to form one young man. After arriving in the kingdom of the birds, Dyrcona is made prisoner by the birds, who put him on trial for being human and condemn him to die by being eaten by flies; he is saved at the last moment by Cesar, his parrot: Dyrcona had set him free and he now repays the favor. In a forest, Dyrcona listens to talking oak trees who tell him stories of legendary people in love. Finally, arriving in an open field, Dyrcona witnesses the combat of the Beast of Fire against the Beast of Cold, and he meets the philosopher Campanella, who discusses with him such topics as the souls of philosophers, the three kinds of minds, the five rivers of the senses, and the philosophers’ various degrees of enlightenment. A man and woman burst onto the scene, the woman demanding justice against her husband for not making love to her frequently enough. The woman, originally from the kingdom of Truth, now prefers to reside in the kingdom of Lovers, and she explains her preference for the

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kingdom of Lovers. As Descartes arrives, the novel breaks off, presumably having been interrupted by Cyrano’s death.17 Notes

1. A shorter version of this article was presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in April 1997. For a summary of these novels, please see the Appendix at the conclusion of this article. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to the first novel as Lune and the second one as Soleil, abbreviated as L and S (page references are to the Prévot edition). I furnish the original French version only for Cyrano, and translations for other materials. All translations are my own. 2. The division between critics affirming his materialism and those who interpret his work as a mythic quest based on alchemy is well represented by Ross Chambers’s “ ‘L’Autre Monde’ ou le mythe du libertin” and the sharp rebuttal of that article by Madeleine Alcover in “Le mythe de M. Ross Chambers.” While defending Cyrano’s materialism, Alcover does, however, have recourse to a promethean myth in an article of her own, “Cyrano de Bergerac et le feu.” I find myself wanting to agree with both these readers, approving Chambers’s reference to the hermetic quest and keeping Alcover’s vision of materiality, but including it even in the most spiritual world. 3. This interpretation differs somewhat in emphasizing competition among several possible sciences, from Chambers’ suggestion that there was a “conflict between new certainties and ancient convictions” (“ ‘L’Autre Monde’ ou le mythe” 34). The only science that seemed ancient was that of Aristotle, and it was no longer persuasive for people such as Cyrano. 4. This statement represents my one disagreement with Joan DeJean’s analysis of Cyrano: she maintains that “libertine heroes are alienated from their bodies” and “view them as objects with an independent existence” (Libertine Strategies 143). Yet she too discusses the significance of the extraordinary passage of Dyrcona’s transparent body, which I will discuss later in this essay. It is precisely the body’s “independent existence” which enables it to be an epistemological body. In the light of recent studies of the body, and of homosexuality, the embodiment of Cyrano’s ideas seems evident and interesting; see Albert-­Galtier’s suggestive article on homosexuality as one element of Cyrano’s liberation from various orthodoxies. 5. See Christian Barbe’s analysis on the dangers represented by subversion. 6. Chambers analyzes the problem of the intermixture between senses, imagination, and the cosmos, and notes that Cyrano’s position is that “human consciousness should grapple with phenomena which are alien to it,” in “ ‘Que diray-­je de ce miroir fluide . . .’” (124). But Cyrano is not alienated from the world because his whole being, body and mind, participate in and are transformed by all phenomena. 7. Alcover has noted the homosexuality here, and Albert-­Galtier gives an interpretation of this passage that emphasizes the homosexuality of the philosopher and his lover; I believe that other bodily functions are included, as well as heterosexual love, but I agree with him that “the lover’s body is above all the body of knowledge” (326). 8. The alchemists called themselves “philosophers” and their goal, the magic sub18 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

stance that would change baser materials to gold, the “Philosophers’ Stone” (Holmyard 15). Transmitting the philosopher’s spirit through his blood derives both from animist and materialist ideas. 9. Her statement makes it clear that she does this reluctantly: “And so we resort to the hermetic tradition to give meaning to the privilege of the Wise men” (Pensée philosophique 133). She does not consider Cyrano’s work to be defined by occult or alchemist sciences, though she grants that he may have derived some inspiration from some alchemical practices (Pensée philosophique 147). 10. A detail not discussed by these critics is the reference to formation by heating, for example, the formation of the earth by three successive cookings (“coction”) by the Sun, followed by the formation of man also by three cookings (S 449–50), and the formation of the perfect seed also by the same process (S 485). 11. Here I disagree with Erba, who talks of Dyrcona becoming pure spirit (57) as he rises (not to the stars, as Erba says, but to the Sun). There is never anything pure in Cyrano. 12. What Laugaa sees in Cyrano is extended to the entire cast of libertine writers by Joan DeJean in her Libertine Strategies, where she successfully refutes any attempt to enclose those writers in a simple category, basing her arguments on their deliberate attempts at escaping definition and identification. 13. Alcover also disputes the reference to “Estats et Empires du Soleil” as a reference to Cyrano’s own future work, seeing it rather as a reference to Campanella. But the words are exactly Cyrano’s words for his work, so it is a type of amusing “flash forward” that is entirely in keeping with Cyrano’s self-­referentiality. She also disputes that the words “Grand Œuvre” are a title; she rejects the possibility of a hermetic reference, or of a reference to Campanella, but sees rather a possible reference to the work of Giordano Bruno. I believe that the words themselves, “grand œuvre,” even if uncapitalized in all sources, were a stock phrase that would immediately have been recognized as referring to the alchemists’ work. 14. Vledder sees the fight between the two beasts as having an alchemical meaning, symbolizing the fight between flame and air, and earth and water (61). But the salamander is defeated, which Gossiaux interprets as showing Cyrano’s “dismay and anxiety” (598)—too negative an interpretation, in my opinion. 15. I thank John Woodward, who drew my attention to Nicolson and to the quotation from Donne’s “First Anniversary”: “ ’Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone” (l.214; in Nicolson 120). 16. Other critics who emphasize Cyrano’s “advocacy of freedom” (Harry 207) of the imagination, rather than his construction of a cosmological or philosophical system, are Chambers, Gauthier, and Sick, though Harry reproaches Cyrano for not having offered a “viable alternative” (208) and for wanting only “to deconstruct, to desystematize” (209). Cyrano is more positive and syncretic than destructive. As Sick says, Cyrano is interested in the sciences for the new spaces they can open up, rather than for the sciences’ contents themselves (68). 17. Gossiaux speculates that Cyrano had planned to write a third, concluding novel entitled “Histoire de l’Estincelle” [History of the Spark] mentioned in one of the

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original editions, which would have furnished “the key to Cyrano’s ontology” (595). This “spark” is very likely a reference to the alchemists’ belief that there is a spark of light entombed in the matter of our bodies that must be liberated and returned to the source, the sun. In this aspect the alchemists and the Manicheists are on common ground, so to speak, in opposing matter and spirit, dark and light. Whether we would have had a Cyranian “ontology” remains unknowable, since Cyrano’s work was unfinished, remaining, tragically and ironically, forever “pregnant with a thousand ­possibilities.”

Editions of Cyrano’s Works

Bergerac, Cyrano de. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Jacques Prévot. Paris: Librairie Belin, 1977. ———. Histoire comique des Etat et Empire [sic] de la Lune et du Soleil. Edited by Claude Mettra et Jean Suyeux. Paris: Pauvert, 1962. ———. Voyage dans la Lune (L’Autre Monde ou les Etats et Empires de la Lune). Edited by Maurice Laugaa. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1970. ———. L’Autre Monde ou les Estats et Empires de la Lune. Edited by Madeleine Alcover. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1996.

Works Cited

Albert-­Galtier, Alexandre. “Derniers embrassements et consommation amoureuse: un aspect des amours masculines chez Cyrano.” In Le corps au XVII e siècle, edited by Ronald W. Tobin, 321–29. Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1995. Alcover, Madeleine. “Critique textuelle, Commentaire Critique.” L’Autre Monde ou les Estats et Empires de la Lune, xi–lxvii. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1996. ———. Cyrano relu et corrigé (Lettres, Estats du Soleil, Fragments de Physique). Genève: Droz, 1990. ———. “Cyrano de Bergerac et le feu: les complexes prométhéens de la science et du phallus.” Rice University Studies in French 63 (1977): 13–24. ———. “Le mythe de M. Ross Chambers sur ‘Le mythe du libertin.’” Rice University Studies in French 63 (1977): 1–11. ———. La pensée philosophique et scientifique de Cyrano de Bergerac. Genève: Droz: 1970. Barbe, Christian. “Cyrano: la mise à l’envers du vieil univers d’Aristote.” Actes des Journées Internationales d’Étude du Baroque 7 (1974): 49–70. Calle-­Gruber, Mireille. “La métaphore: une machine à voyager en utopie.” Cahiers de Littérature du XVII e siècle 3 (1981): 45–62. Chambers, Ross. “ ‘L’Autre Monde,’ ou le mythe du libertin.” Essays in French Literature 8 (1971): 29–46. ———. “ ‘Que diray-­je de ce miroir fluide . . . ?’: Text and its double in a Letter by Cyrano.” Australian Journal of French Studies 14 (1977): 121–40. Crombie, A. C. “Galileo’s Conception of Scientific Truth.” Literature and Science, 132–38. 20 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

DeJean, Joan. Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in Seventeenth-­Century France. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981. ———. “Method and Madness in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage dans la Lune.” French Forum 2 (1977): 224–37. ———. “Seventeenth-­Century Libertine Novels: Autobiographies romancées?” Esprit Créateur 19 (1979): 14–25. Delpuech Pinhas, Rosy. “Les machines cyraniennes: de la parodie au fantasme.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 186–87 (1982–83): 67–74. Erba, Luciano. “L’incidenza della magia nell’opera di Cyrano de Bergerac.” Contributi del Seminario di Filologia Moderna. Serie Francese, 1–74. Vol. 1. Milano: Società editrice Vita e Pensiero, 1959. Gauthier, Patricia. “A propos de l’idée de fragmentation dans L’Autre monde de Cyrano de Bergerac.” In Discontinuity and Fragmentation, edited by Freeman G. Henry, 45–53. French Literature Series, 21. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Gossiaux, Pol. “La conclusion de L’Autre Monde: Conjectures sur une oeuvre perdue de Cyrano de Bergerac, L’Histoire de l’Estincelle.” Revue des Langues vivantes/ Tijschrift voor Levende Talen 34 (1968): 461–79, 589–615. Goux, Jean-­Joseph. “Language, Money, Father, Phallus in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Utopia.” Representations 23 (1988): 105–17. Harry, Patricia. “The Concept of Freedom in the Works of Cyrano de Bergerac.” Ouverture et Dialogue: Mélanges Offerts à Wolfgang Leiner. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988. 207–18. Harth, Erica. Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Headley, John M. Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Hervier, Julien. “Cyrano de Bergerac et le voyage spatial: de la fantaisie à la science-­ fiction.” Proceedings of the 10th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (1985): 436–42. Holmyard, E. J. Alchemy. 1957. New York: Dover, 1990. Hutin, Serge. L’Alchimie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, “Que sais-­je,” 1966. Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 147–58. Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. 1957. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. Laugaa, Maurice. “Cyrano: Sound and Language.” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 199–211. ———. “Introduction.” Voyage dans la Lune, 15–24. Paris: Garnier-­Flammarion, 1970. ———. “Lune, ou l’Autre.” Poétique 3 (1970): 282–96. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969. Lerner, Michel-­Pierre. Tommaso Campanella en France au XVII e siècle. Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1995.

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Literature and Science: Proceedings of the Sixth Triennial Congress. Oxford: Blackwell, 1954. MacPhail, Eric. “Cyrano’s Machines: The Marvelous and the Mundane in L’Autre Monde.” French Forum 18 (1993): 37–46. Mason, Haydn. Cyrano de Bergerac, L’Autre Monde. London: Grant and Cutler, 1984. Neefs, Jacques. “Cyrano: ‘Des Miracles des Rivières.’” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 185–96. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth-­Century Poetry. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Philmus, Robert. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970. Pintard, René. Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVII e siècle. Paris: Boivin, 1943. Prévot, Jacques. Cyrano de Bergerac romancier. Paris: Belin, 1977. Puech, Henri-­Charles. Sur le Manichéisme, et autres essais. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. Sick, Franziska. “Cyrano de Bergerac: le monde dans la perspective de L’Autre Monde.” Papers on French Seventeenth-­Century Literature 21, no. 40 (1994): 65–80. Spink, J. S. “Form and Structure: Cyrano de Bergerac’s Atomistic Conception of Metamorphosis.” In Literature and Science, 144–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. ———. French Free Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire. London: Athlone Press, 1960. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Van Baelen, Jacqueline. “Reality and Illusion in L’Autre Monde: The Narrative Voyage.” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 178–84. Van Vledder, W. H. Cyrano de Bergerac 1619–1655. Philosophie ésotérique. Étude de la structure et du symbolisme d’une oeuvre mystique (L’Autre Monde) du XVII e siècle. Amsterdam: Holland Universiteits Press, 1976. Weber, Henri. “Introduction.” L’Autre Monde. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1968. 7–35. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. 1925. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. 1964. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Afterword Ishbel Addyman I was a postgraduate student when I first came across Dr. Romanowski’s essay. Rereading it in preparation for this piece, I was impressed that the passage of time has done nothing to diminish its persuasiveness. Like most readers, my first encounter 22 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

with Cyrano had not been with the author but with Edmond Rostand’s fictional hero. When I went up to Oxford as an undergraduate, I had looked for Cyrano in the Bodleian library out of idle curiosity, and finding him listed as author, rather than subject, was electrifying. I read the first text listed—the illustrated Folio edition entitled Voyages to the Moon and Sun (Richard Aldington’s translation illustrated with verve and charm by Quentin Blake)—and a lifelong obsession took root. When I returned to the university as a postgrad it was to look at Cyrano’s writing in the context of a thesis on the links between literature and the history of science. For anyone interested in Cyrano’s work, the highlight of recent years has to be the 2004 publication of Madeleine Alcover’s fully annotated edition of Les États et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil for Honoré Champion. Finally, Cyrano’s delirious, fantastical science fiction writing, the jewel of his varied oeuvre, had the scholarly edition it deserved. It only took three and a half centuries. A year later, the 350th anniversary of his death, saw a wealth of celebratory events, including a fascinating International Cyrano conference in Sannois, the Parisian suburb where he died. My own much humbler contribution appeared in 2008, and writing this afterword today is not just a pleasure but also rather apt, since my book, Cyrano: The Life and Legend of Cyrano de Bergerac, was a historiographical study of Cyrano’s afterlives, intended to bring the real Cyrano back to the attention of the everyday reader. Fecund with inspiration at the sight of the full moon and yet frustrated in his urge to utter the “thousand definitions” that occur to him, Cyrano’s narrator offers a vision of the anxiety of authorship, as well as a metaphor for the curious afterlife of the writer himself. The tremendous success of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac owes a significant debt to his close reading of Cyrano’s works, the science fiction in particular, as well as to a shared fascination with trickery and truth telling. Cyrano’s prose gains much of its impetus from his febrile metafictional experimentation. It is ironic that the culmination of his inventive, personal mythmaking was to be the blotting out of the man behind the shadow of his own fictional representation; a typically Cyranien paradox. Elucidating Cyrano’s biography, unraveling his life and legend, revealed the man to be as paradoxical as his writing. Cyrano eludes definition both as a writer and as a man, and the strength of Dr. Romanowski’s vision of Cyrano’s epistemology is that she wisely resisted the temptation to impose reductive limits onto Cyranien multiplicity. Her respect for the irrepressible inventiveness and innovation in Cyrano’s work is key. Furthermore, her characterization of his science fiction writing as more accurately “savoir fiction” signposts yet another paradox of Cyrano’s provocative creativity. His fascination with knowledge and knowing was often expressed through a focus on ignorance. He always placed great emphasis on the limits of the human perspective. In the voyages to the other worlds of the Moon and Sun, his imaginative, satirical vision of superior alien beings consistently underlines the myriad ways in which human knowledge is paltry, partial, and problematic. Cyrano’s science fiction masterpiece conjures up an imaginative space outside the realms of human knowability, in order to play with the “thousand definitions” inspired by the new cosmology. He also foreshadowed the ways in which modern cosmology has come to rely on the techniques of literature for an understanding of the universe.

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Physicists from Einstein to Stephen Hawking use metaphor to expand the reaches of human understanding beyond the range of mechanical observation. The Higgs boson was a persuasive idea long before it was an observable fact. Paradoxically, Cyrano’s genius was to attempt this technique (a throwback to modern science’s origins as natural philosophy, in which fiction frequently took precedence over observation) and to make of it an epistemological strategy of the future.

24 ] Sylvie Rom anowski

• 2•

Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of

the Twentieth Century Paul K. Alkon

A strong candidate for literary history’s first work of futuristic fiction is Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), a satire about documents that are supposedly transported back in time from the twentieth century to the eighteenth century. Although Madden’s narrative is notable as one of the earliest examples of the sf subgenre of time travel, within a few decades such tales of the future would increasingly become commonplace in France and England, including Louis Sébastien Mercier’s highly influential 1771 utopia L’An 2440 (The Year 2440). This essay originally appeared in SFS 12, no. 2 (July 1985): 184–201.

The impossibility of writing stories about the future was so widely taken for granted until the eighteenth century that only two earlier anticipations are known: Frances Cheynell’s six-­page pamphlet of political propaganda set in a very near future, Aulicus his dream of the Kings sudden comming to London (1644); and Jacques Guttin’s heroic romance Epigone, histoire du siècle futur (1659).1 Before their publication, the future was reserved in Western literature for prophets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. As a trope for madness, John Donne could use the proverbial castigation Chronica de futuro scribet: “He undertakes to write a Chronicle of things before they are done, which is an irregular, and a perverse way” (2:77). The first English book to discard this aversion to chronicling the future is Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps in deference to the taboo against tales of the future, it was published anonymously 

[ 25

in 1733, and then immediately suppressed by its author, an Irish Anglican clergyman who destroyed almost all copies of his extraordinary work as soon as they came from the press.2 Consequently Memoirs of the Twentieth Century had no apparent impact on later eighteenth-­century fiction. Nor has it figured even in histories of sf as anything more than one of those legendary works that are duly mentioned but which nobody discusses in any detail. It has been ignored partly because it is satire, not sf or any kind of serious extrapolation to a possible real future, and partly because copies, even of a Garland Press reprint, are very scarce.3 Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, however, provides excellent evidence about the origins of science fiction. Madden found a new way of distancing narrative setting from the targets of satire. Seven years earlier Gulliver’s Travels had used distance in space. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century uses time. No previous English writer had done so. Even Epigone, though it includes satiric as well as utopian passages and resorts to a putative future by way of augmenting the remoteness favored as a locus for adventure in heroic romances, is not set in a chronologically specified future. Because it is more like an alternative history, Epigone could hardly have served as a pattern for Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Nor is there any evidence that Madden knew of Guttin’s book. Madden deserves great credit for originality. Unfortunately he was not up to sustained exploitation of his innovative future setting. It should also immediately be said, to avoid a misunderstanding of my argument, that although Madden wrote anticipatory satire, not predictive fiction, and should be judged accordingly, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is by any criterion known to me failed satire. There are passages reminiscent of Swift at his best. But Madden’s few palpable hits lose their force in a welter of tiresome religious satire and other incoherent attacks that miss their mark or hit their target too bluntly. Moreover, the tone frequently wavers between satiric and utopian in ways that make it unclear whether some passages are satirically or prescriptively intended. Without making any brief for Memoirs of the Twentieth Century as a neglected masterpiece, then, I do want to suggest that despite his failure to write a coherent anticipatory satire, or for that matter a work that we would call sf, Madden nevertheless created a viable form in the shape of a tale of the future that could work perfectly well as a framework for futuristic fiction in any of its modes. I shall suggest, too, that by examining the self-­reflexive comments which Madden includes within Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, we find important evidence of how literary conventions and social change interacted in eighteenth-­century culture to provide a cli26 ]

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mate of opinion that at last allowed writers to cast aside the ancient prejudice against tales of the future. Finally, I shall argue that although Madden failed as a satirist, he makes a respectable showing as a critic by providing an explanation that may still go far to account for the way sf and related forms can present narratives of imaginary history—usually but not invariably future history—that are often most powerful when they run most strongly counter to our intuitive canons of probability. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is described by its subtitle as “Original Letters of State, Under George the Sixth: Relating to the most important Events in Great Britain and Europe . . . from the Middle of the Eighteenth, to the End of the Twentieth Century and the World. Received and Revealed in the Year 1728; and now Published . . . in Six Volumes.” There were no sequels to volume one, nor were any intended. Allusion to five more volumes satirizes long-­winded memoirs. Classification as letters of state would have prevented eighteenth-­century readers from expecting even in satiric form an account of the private life of some individual, and would thus have excused in advance any lack of that suspense created by arousing curiosity about the fate of a protagonist. The closest approach to a fully realized character is the nameless narrator of three bizarre “prefaces” that cannot be taken as straightforward statements from the anonymous real author. Given the novelty and, according to conventional wisdom, the evident absurdity of such future records as the subtitle promises, eighteenth-­century readers would have registered at first glance the book’s satiric intention. They would accordingly have taken its allusion to revelations concerning the end of the world as satire aimed at millenarian prediction.4 Laughter at such targets is sustained and directed also at those who cling to belief in guardian angels, when early in the book’s first preface its narrator explains that he received the ensuing letters from his guardian angel on the evening of January 20, 1728. He claims no credit for prophecy but only for the hard work of translating each letter from “the English that will be spoke in the XXth Century” (5). Although primarily a satiric entry in controversies over the existence of guardian angels, Madden’s resort to the fiction of documents transported backward through time is as viable as H. G. Wells’s conceit of a time machine that in defiance of the laws of physics carries his narrator forward on a tour of the future. By 1895 it was easier to suspend disbelief in any sort of machine, however impossible it might be in the real world. Even today, as every critic of sf is bound to remark, the genre makes ample use of such convenient impossibilities as faster-­than-­ light space travel. Only a small part of sf confines itself to situations that accord exactly with scientific canons of possibility. Though guardian angels Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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would now relegate a narrative to the realms of fantasy rather than sf, the situation was less clear-­cut in 1733. Belief in guardian angels was waning and under attack. They were nevertheless still defended by some as part of a scientifically correct—because theologically accurate—picture of the universe as it really is.5 The lines between theology, superstition, and science were being redrawn in a way that allowed the idea of a guardian angel with documents from the future to be used as a narrative framework and also as a vehicle of satire that by various means, especially a lengthy mock defense of belief in such spirits, ridicules those who take them seriously. At the start of that mock defense, and thus very prominently, Madden includes one of his few hints of a possible model for Memoirs of the Twentieth Century by referring ambiguously to the irrelevance for that defense of allusions to “Kircher’s good Genius, who carried him through the Planets in his Iter Extaticum” (225). Madden thus invites readers to take his book, despite its odd format, as merely an acceptable comic variation on a familiar literary device. After the hint has been dropped, it is easy enough to regard documents brought by the narrator’s guardian angel as in effect equivalent to the tour of our solar system provided in 1656 by Athanasius Kircher for his protagonist in the Itinerarium Extaticum. Again Madden substitutes time for space. An angel provides access to the future just as an angel had provided access to space. Madden’s variation of Kircher’s idea deserves credit for seizing on the possibility of a kind of time travel instead of following what was, as Marjorie Nicolson has shown, an already trite convention of spatial journeys on or off the Earth. It would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveler arriving from the future, although what the narrator’s guardian angel does in appearing one evening in 1728 to hand over twentieth-­century documents makes me think of such tales as Robert Silverberg’s The Masks of Time (1968). Madden is, however, to my knowledge the first to write a narrative that purports to be a document from the future. He deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time travel in the form of an artifact sent backward from the future to be discovered in the present. This too is an original variation on a familiar literary tradition: the discovery and interpretation of some ancient document (an artifact from the remote past) containing political or other prophecy. This convention had been used both seriously and satirically. In eighteenth-­century England satiric applications prevailed, as in Swift’s Windsor Prophecy (1711) and Samuel Johnson’s Marmor Norfolciense (1739). Madden’s artifact from the twentieth century is a series of letters to the British “Lord High Treasurer” from English ambassadors in Turkey, Rome, 28 ]

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Paris, and Moscow, together with a few replies sent from the English foreign office. The first letter is from “Constantinople, Nov. 3, 1997.” The last letter is dated “May 1, 1998.” Each ambassador sketches local conditions in the late 1990s and on one pretext or another also gives some outline of events from the 1940s onward in the country where he is stationed. In a report from France in 1997, for example, the English ambassador tells of current quarrels between Louis XIX and Rome, then sketches by way of background the earlier loss of French conquests resulting in a situation where “the Pope is now the entire Object of the fears of Europe, instead of the conquering French” (78). This letter also describes internal problems plaguing a militarily weak France whose people are poorly governed, overtaxed, and suffering from a situation in which “the Luxury of the Nobility and Gentry is increas’d beyond all Bounds, as if they were not only insensible of, but even rejoyc’d in the publick Calamities of their Fellow-­Subjects” (85). Such passages partly reflect Madden’s view of France as it was in his own day, and partly display the rather tediously elaborated fantasies of a British patriot and Protestant whose most ignominious biases against the French and all Roman Catholics are indulged in ways that need not further concern this essay. In a lighter vein, Madden often attempts to satirize perennial human dilemmas by means of obviously absurd fantasies of progress. Thus in response to reports of medical reforms in the Russia of 1998, an English foreign-­office official writes to the British ambassador in Moscow reporting that English physicians have at last found a cure for violent love: “now whenever people find their passion is unsuccessful and desperate, without hanging or drowning, shooting or poisoning, which was the usual method, they calmly send for Dr. Howard, who immediately puts them into the Love-­course, as they call it, and so they get rid of it at once, and then very quietly go about their affairs; and as soon as they have recover’d from the cure, (which, as in most other cases, generally takes up as much time as the distemper) they chuse a more proper, or at least a less cruel person for their adorations” (431). Several correspondents also allude to much earlier British history, going as far back as the mid-­eighteenth century, thereby providing readers in 1733 with glimpses of more immediate possibilities. References to the close future are most often in the mode of prescriptive satire, as when a correspondent remarks with approval how eighteenth-­ century kings “peremptorily drove the Italian Opera and Music twice from Great Britain, and forbid their acting . . . as enervating our Spirits, and emasculating the British Genius” (138). The moral of this bit of future history is of a piece with many eighteenth-­century attacks on English addic Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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tion to Italian opera. Madden puts other suggestions in a more utopian mode. There is, for example, a description of how the Royal College of St. George at Oxford was “founded by his Majesty’s Ancestors in the Eighteenth Century” in order to establish twenty-­six fellowships for deserving continental refugees as well as four new professorships in such useful subjects as agriculture, gardening, mechanical arts, and meteorology. We learn that, thanks to establishment of a chair for “the Weather Professor,” whose task is to keep meteorological records as an aid to weather forecasting, “Six Volumes in Folio of these Calendars have been publisht [sic] from 1840 to 1991” (144). Such passages, whether satiric or utopian, are prescriptive, not predictive. They are scenarios of what should be done, not prophecies of what will be done. As a framework for a tale of the future, Madden’s scheme is more flexible than that adopted in 1771 by Louis-­Sébastien Mercier for L’An 2440 (The Year 2440) and indeed in some ways more flexible than that employed by Wells in The Time Machine (1895). Madden’s epistolary narrative allows for a portrait of life in England, France, Italy, Turkey, and Russia during the 1990s together with attention to eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century developments. Mercier’s protagonist dreams that he wakes in the year 2440 to walk around Paris observing the city and discussing its social institutions with twenty-­fifth-­century Parisians. Developments elsewhere are glanced at in extracts from newspapers but are not described in much detail. Wells’s time traveler can set the controls for any date, but once arrived is pretty much confined to observing how things are at that target moment in history. Madden’s device of letters from diplomats with a professional knowledge of history allows for presentation of a synchronic portrait of Europe at one historical period (the 1990s), and also allows for a diachronic account of previous events. Mercier presents an eyewitness narrative that results in a vivid but static portrait of Paris in 2440 without much attention to the stages by which deplorable eighteenth-­century conditions gave way to those of the distant and better future that his narrator describes. Madden’s epistolary framework more easily allows for depiction of historical change. For Mercier’s purpose, which was primarily to arouse discontent that could motivate political action, it was effective enough simply to plunge readers into an encounter with a utopian Paris devoid of eighteenth-­century shortcomings. Indeed, by withholding any account of how such perfection had been achieved, Mercier sharpens the contrast between 1771 and 2440. This encourages readers to supply the missing causal links in their own imagination—thereby considering what might actually be done to move the France of 1771 toward Mercier’s vision of a better future. In his preface to 30 ]

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the third edition of L’An 2440, Mercier claimed, with some justice, that he had been the prophet of the French Revolution.6 By way of proof, he stated that his book was being reprinted without the slightest change so readers could judge for themselves its predictive power as “a dream that had announced and prepared the French revolution.” Mercier only disclaimed responsibility for encouraging the Terror, which so nearly cost him his life, and which was, he insists, impossible to foresee because one cannot imagine a handful of scoundrels suddenly dominating an enlightened country. Mercier thus notes in retrospect (though only in retrospect) that the implausibility, and hence unpredictability, of events that have actually happened is occasionally a bar to accurate future history. Reality is sometimes so incredible as to hinder fictive extrapolation beforehand. But Mercier does not discuss this as a problem for his genre. Concerned above all with public affairs, Mercier, like Madden, avoided opportunities for depicting personal relationships among the characters inhabiting his future. He could certainly have done so effectively within the framework of a first-­person narrative. Yet Madden’s device of letters from several correspondents would have been an even better matrix for narrating in a suspenseful way developing emotional encounters in the manner of later Richardsonian fictions had Madden cared to do so, or had he been sufficiently talented. A series of dated letters also allows more easily sustained awareness of a future setting. There can be no doubt that L’An 2440 is the superior book because of its coherence in sticking to a utopian mode, and also because of its influence as a widely read work that helped prepare for social change while also by its success encouraging other writers to invent tales of the future.7 Madden nevertheless deserves recognition for his achievement in designing, though not fully exploiting, a better framework for such tales. Ever since the Christian Gauss seminar at Princeton was devoted to science fiction in 1958 by Kingsley Amis, critics have tackled with increasing refinement the problem of adequately defining that genre. I accept Darko Suvin’s argument that sf is best considered as the literature of cognitive estrangement rather than taking it, with Brian Aldiss, merely as “a lively sub-­ genre of the gothic” in which some alarming future locale is substituted for the old castles favored by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and their imitators for, in effect, transporting readers to a disturbing past. By identifying a kinship between gothic tales and sf during the Romantic period when the new genre was unequivocally exemplified in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Aldiss shows the relevance of eighteenth-­century theories of the sublime that provided a necessary aesthetics for the new form by legiti Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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mizing terrifying strangeness of setting and incident, eventually including future settings. Aldiss rightly suggests that by a displacement to the future sf can manage better than its precursors “to encompass those fears generated by change and the technological advances which are the chief agents of change” (53). However sf is defined, no one can very well deny that its rise is closely connected with the tale of the future. Not everyone, to be sure, would agree with Thomas Hanzo’s provocative assertion that all sf “is a proleptic structure,” that is, a kind of writing using in a fictional mode that rhetorical strategy in which for persuasive purposes “the future is treated as the past” so that “what is to come is . . . put into the past tense.” Still I find among academic critics a consensus for which Hanzo speaks when in the same challenging essay he asserts of sf that “Space may be its scene, the extraterrestrial its locale, but time is its peculiar realm; the future gives science fiction its energy and purpose” (132).8 For the genre thus energized if not defined by its attention to the future, Suvin accurately locates “its central watershed . . . around 1800, when space loses its monopoly upon the location of estrangement and the alternative horizons shift from space to time” (89). Various explanations for this shift have been offered, usually in terms of widening temporal horizons and heightened awareness of change induced by the new geology, by theories of biological evolution, and by the political and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These transformations all play some part, but Suvin is nevertheless right to say of the shift from space to time that “this turning, that cuts decisively across all other national, political and formal traditions in culture, has so far not been adequately explained” (116). Suvin maintains that setting narratives in the future became appealing partly because that was the easiest means of getting away from the constraining demands of “naturalistic plausibility” that were looming ever larger throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in conjunction with a “strict positivist ideology” at odds with those genres that aimed at eliciting by astonishing stories the effects of cognitive estrangement (72–73). Whatever the role of positivist ideology in putting a greater premium on plausible fiction, there can be little doubt that in view of the generic or purely formal pressures toward verisimilitude exerted so vigorously by Defoe, Richardson, and their successors, it was becoming harder than ever before to locate tales like Gulliver’s Travels in the present. More important for Suvin as an underlying cause of that difficulty, and hence of the shift to fictions of the future, is “the strong tendency toward temporal extrapolation inherent in life based on a capitalist economy, with its salaries, profits, and progressive ideals always expected in a 32 ]

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future clock-­time” (73). There is surely some truth to this suggestion. But it too strikes me as only a partial explanation of the shift to chronicles of the future. Though one does not find such chronicles in the Middle Ages, one does find the new money-­oriented attitudes toward time notably emerging if not yet triumphant well before the Renaissance.9 Even more to the point, there were in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries transformations quite as profound in their consequences for human relationships to time as the shift to capitalist modes of production: the rise of experimental science and the new astronomy along with related mathematical developments such as calculus and probability theory, exploration of the Americas and the Pacific, and increasing skepticism about those religious convictions that had deflected writers from concern with the secular future by focusing attention instead upon apocalyptic visions of time’s end and eternity’s beginning. It begs the question to lump all such transformations together as epiphenomena of changing modes of production caused by the rise of capitalism. I believe the formalist part of Suvin’s argument points in a more rewarding direction than the Marxist part. But we must still ask what social as well as literary pressures pushed writers toward setting stories in the future. A closer look at Memoirs of the Twentieth Century will provide some answers. The self-­reflexive quality of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, its insistent invitations to consider in relationship to previous literature what kind of book we have in hand as we read, is achieved mainly by the device of a narrator who in “prefaces” placed at the beginning, middle, and end of the work comments on the main text of letters from the future. But this narrator is so obviously demented that we cannot simply equate his opinions with those of the anonymous real author, much less always accept them at face value as an account of how the work we are reading came to assume its unusual form. Instead, as in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), with its mad narrator commenting in lunatic ways on the strange story he tells of three brothers, or the parallel situation in Pope’s Dunciad Variorum (1728), with its surrounding parodic apparatus of Scriblerian commentary, there is every reason to be wary of supposing that Madden’s letters from the twentieth century were intended for serious acceptance as a new kind of writing. For readers in 1733, that would have been tantamount to believing every word about the dunciad as a genre provided by Pope in the amusing essays and notes supposedly written by Martinus Scriblerus. The difference is that while dunciads have not become a major form of literature (however much we still need them), the case is otherwise with chronicles of the future. Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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Although Madden’s narrator foresees no such development, what he says about the book nevertheless provides significant clues to the influences that led his creator, Madden, to discard the idea that narratives can only be set in the present or past. Addressing people of the future (“I do hereby declare beforehand to Posterity”), the narrator, a corrupt ex-­politician who bribed his way into Parliament and then turned student of astrology (11–18), gives two reasons why all discrepancies between the prophetic elements of his book and events subsequent to its publication must be the fault only of careless future readers: “First, that either they do not understand what is or appears to be written, thro’ the disguises I necessarily made use of . . . or 2dly, Men are deceiv’d, either by reports of others, or their own fallacious senses, persuading them they have seen things happen otherwise, than they really have. . . . Pretended facts, are never to be set in competition with unquestionable Predictions” (517–18). Via the narrator’s obdurate conviction that no mere fact could possibly invalidate his predictions, Madden makes the same satiric point, although less brilliantly, that Swift made in The Bickerstaff Papers (1709) against vague astrological prophecy: Partridge’s witless insistence that he was still alive after the predicted hour of his death became in Swift’s hilarious response an irrefutable proof that in fulfillment of the prophecy Partridge was (mentally, at least) indeed dead. In another moment of concern over ways in which inept future readers could be led to misunderstand his book, Madden’s narrator takes precautions against those who might alter his text: That Posterity may not be impos’d on, by any spurious Additions, Forgeries or Obliterations in this Admirable Work, I have with great Labour number’d and reckon’d up the whole of what is in it, which is a sager and fairer Way than a Table of Contents, which our modern Publishers tack to their mangled Volumes. I find there is in this Collection, (Publish’d and to be Publish’d) 28,967 Sentences that have meaning in them, 1,232,356 Words, 2,125,245 Syllables, 6,293,376 Letters, and thro’ the Roughness of our barbarous Tongue, but 2,992,644 Vowels, (exclusive of y and all Dipthongs) as any careful Reader may find, who will cast them up with equal Diligence. (30) This flight of deconstructive fantasy does not inspire confidence in the narrator as a reliable spokesman for the implied real author. Nor is it easier to accept with a straight face the narrator’s explanation of why he is publishing letters from the twentieth century that include an account of the exploits in high political office of one of his descendants: 34 ]

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When I saw . . . that the World and my Descendant’s Ministry would end together; I was the more willing to have my fame and his laid open to the present Age, since it was impossible for future Times to do us Justice, by assigning us that shining place in History, which Printing these Volumes will so fully entitle us to. . . . As my Fame has been entirely conceal’d, and his reduc’d to take up with the short-­liv’d Applause of a few Years, in his old Age, the Dregs of Life, and the Last Moments of the World, I resolv’d to be beforehand with the Glory of my self and Family, and to enjoy some part of our Reputation before we had earn’d it. (23) Here the statement in the book’s subtitle that the world is to end at the close of the twentieth century is reiterated, as it is in several other places, by way of satire aimed at dire millennial predictions. Madden encourages readers to laugh at this kind of prophecy coming from a credulous narrator, whose ready acceptance of a specific date for the end of the world leads him to abandon so cheerfully the laws of cause and effect along with their necessary temporal sequence as he endeavors to help himself and his family enjoy fame two centuries before they become famous. Such passages create a context in which there is thus primarily comic force in the narrator’s insistence that he alone has “the Honour and Misfortune, of being the first among Historians (if a mere Publisher of Memoirs may deserve that Name) who leaving the beaten Tracts of writing, . . . the accounts of past Actions and Times, have dar’d to enter by the help of an infallible Guide, into the dark Caverns of Futurity, and discover the Secrets of Ages yet to come” (3). By stressing, in this and similar passages the novelty of an account of the future that is neither religious prophecy nor poetic imitation of religious prophecy nor astrological forecast, but is instead a kind of history (even if only a memoir), Madden succeeds in playing with some originality the eighteenth-­century game of inventing mock forms. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century results in part from the same literary climate of exuberant formal experimentation that led Madden’s more skillful contemporaries to produce those masterpieces of mock form, The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Peri Bathous, A Tale of a Tub, The Bickerstaff Papers, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Beggar’s Opera. Pope, Swift, and Gay parodied such familiar forms as epic, critical treatise, travel narrative, astrological prediction, and opera. Madden chose history, perhaps the only major genre not yet turned upside down for comic purposes, and created another absurdist mock genre: the future history. If most subsequent chronicles of the future, or even such later eighteenth-­ Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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century efforts as L’An 2440, were primarily intended to evoke laughter, or if Madden’s narrator provided nothing but explanations in the vein I have just sampled, the emergence of futuristic fiction might be adequately accounted for on purely formal grounds by arguing that once writers as powerful as Pope, Swift, and Gay so brilliantly set the example of turning established generic conventions around to provide parodic mock forms serving as vehicles of satire, it was inevitable that someone would fasten on history for the same purposes and convert narration of the past into narration of the future—thus creating a new form that could then be adapted to non-­satiric purposes, just as The Beggar’s Opera led to musical comedy. But this is only part of the genesis even of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Attitudes less exclusively literary than a taste for parodies also account for its creation, as they do for the ensuing proliferation of serious future histories. The social as well as literary pressures encouraging establishment of the tale of the future as a respectable mode of writing are suggested when Madden’s narrator takes up an issue that is fundamental to the aesthetics of science fiction: the question of probability. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines the boundaries within which this problem has mostly been debated by remarking ambiguously that although “the impossible” can sometimes be justified “by reference to artistic requirements,” it is usually the case that “a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible.” Aristotle adds a reminder that because reality is often so surprising as to seem unlikely, it is not always easy to decide whether a represented event is improbable: “there is a probability of things happening also against probability” (263). The history of criticism on this vexing point is alluded to in eighteenth-­century England most significantly in Fielding’s chapter on the marvelous in Tom Jones (bk. 8, chap. 1). Typically for the period, that discussion remains within the framework set by Aristotle, with whom Fielding essentially agrees in stressing the importance of probability. Even in a fiction modeled to some degree on factual narratives by, among other devices, a title announcing The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, and claiming by virtue of its affinity to history the liberty of showing how people actually behave rather than how we might wish them to behave, Fielding insists that unlikely events not crucial to the story should be suppressed in the interests of preserving an air of probability.10 In Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, however, Madden’s narrator abandons this traditional narrative strategy of caution. To the potential charge “that these vast discoveries and improvements, these changes and revolutions of things below, which are mention’d in the subsequent letters, cannot possibly happen, nor consequently be true, many 36 ]

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of them are so improbable,” the narrator answers with a lengthy argument that for this very reason they must be true (550 ff.). By “subsequent letters” the narrator means the five unpublished volumes, about whose contents readers are in no position to argue. This aspect of Madden’s comedy ensures that attention centers on the general issue of probability, not particular episodes. For the new genre of future history improbability becomes a touchstone by which to measure verisimilitude. This is reminiscent of that passage so revealing of our own outlook when a character in Childhood’s End (1953) remarks that a report of strange events struck him as true because it was so incredible (18:170). If Madden were merely turning the Aristotelian tradition upside down for satiric purposes, his narrator’s subsequent discussion would be noteworthy only as another moderately talented attempt at imitating those comic modes of mock criticism put to more brilliant use by Swift in A Tale of a Tub and by Pope in The Dunciad Variorum and Peri Bathous. In elaborating on the question of probability, however, Madden veers gradually away from comedy to provide some arresting observations on the literary implications of the history of science and its impact on society. First Madden’s narrator denies that he would go so far as “to say with Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est.” But he remarks that if his guardian angel had given him fraudulent letters, or if he himself wished to deceive readers, then the twentieth-­century documents “would have been contrived with greater approximation, (as the learned speak) and verisimilitude to truth” (506). After remarking, too, that nothing is easier or more common than fictions “cook’d up” to provide a plausible resemblance to everyday life, the narrator insists that the small regard . . . here, to such little tricks . . . in [narrating] many prodigious discoveries in arts and sciences, travels, revolutions, and alterations of all kinds, and especially in the 4th and 6th volumes, ought to stand as evidence of their truth; and that they are not forgeries and impostures, but real facts, which time will produce, and which are delivered to mankind with the carelessness and simplicity of an honest publisher; more solicitous to reveal actual facts and events, as he receiv’d them, than to disguise them so craftily to the world, as to seem more likely to happen, and easy to be believ’d. (507) In fact, as I. F. Clarke points out in dismissing Memoirs of the Twentieth Century from extensive consideration in his study of seriously predictive tales of the future, Madden offers no picture of a world radically different from that of the eighteenth century. What Clarke takes as a deficiency in Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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predictive power is on one level simply an obviously intended (and effective) part of Madden’s comedy: the narrator’s defense of unpublished letters showing “prodigious” future alterations is unnecessary because those particular letters remain unavailable. The future actually depicted is only superficially unlike the world of 1733. There is little need to disarm objections to the first (and only) volume by proposing implausibility as the true test of verisimilitude because that test applies mainly to volumes that readers can only imagine. Carrying on this joke for a bit, the narrator remarks that “were there occasion for it”—as there obviously is not—he could “say a great deal here on that famous observation, Aliquando insit in incredibili veritas, & in verisimili mendacium; and convince my readers, how little weight any objection ought to have with him, that is bottom’d on this sandy foundation” (507). I do not know whether the Latin phrase, which means “let there sometimes be truth in the incredible and in the probable a lie,” is from some well-­known source that has eluded me, or whether it is Madden’s own mock-­authoritative variation on Aristotle’s statement that sometimes it is probable for things to happen against probability. Since the Latin tag is in any event not prominent among eighteenth-­century commonplaces, I take the reference to its fame as comic hyperbole. The next comment, however, brings up a consideration that cannot be taken so lightly: “Indeed whoever are knowing and learned enough, to be acquainted with the infinite incredible verities in the world of science, the vast numbers of improbable and unimaginable truths, to be met with there, and the heaps of plausible errors and delusive falsehoods, that men are so usually led away with; will never consider the improbability of some relations in this work, as an argument for anything, but their being more unfeign’d and genuinely true” (507–8). Any reference to the “incredible verities” of science will of course ring more solemnly in our century for readers who have struggled to understand a universe filled, so we are told by our scientists, with quasars, quarks, black holes, and the like, all governed by the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. But eighteenth-­century readers with knowledge of current advances in astronomy, physics, and biology must also have seen that Madden’s tone veers at this point decisively away from comedy. There is no satire when Madden’s narrator piously states that nothing foretold in the book need seem improbable in view of “the infinite power of the great Source of all events below.” Nor is there any levity in a catalogue of secondary causes of drastic change such as “operations of nature” and “the vast fields of art and knowledge, which the new world hath brought 38 ]

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forth among us, by the labours of different voyagers.” In 1733, neither allusions to the power of God nor invitations to consider natural forces (which are specified as “deluges and earthquakes . . . volcanoes, tempests, and innundations”), much less allusion to the impact of the New World, could be taken as sure signs of irony. Quite the contrary. Madden’s narrator pursues this more serious line of thought with an invitation to those “that are buried in the present state of the earth, and think it will continue in a manner unimprov’d and unalter’d” to “look back, if they know anything of it in former ages” (507). That backward glance over history is not merely to note previous geological and social changes, in order, as was then more conventional, to see the past as a mirror of possible futures. While the logic here does rely in part on a traditional premise that by looking at the past one can see the shape of things to come, that assumption is invoked for the unusual purpose of proving that the future will be different, that all one can tell from the past is that everything changes not only drastically but unpredictably. It is the past as a history of unforeseeable transformations that Madden stresses next by inviting readers to alter their temporal vantage point. They are to consider how the history of the world since the rise of Rome would have seemed if narrated as a prediction of the future to those living at the dawn of the Roman Empire: Let them consider how absurd and incredible it would have appear’d, if a man . . . at the building of Rome, had . . . foretold the vast growth of that Monarchy, the overturning all others by that embryo state, the majesty of the pagan religion there, the birth and rise of the Christian, the breaking of the Roman Empire into several little scraps and pieces, which are now miscall’d Kingdoms; the spreading conquests of the Pope and his Monks . . . the reformation of Religion, and all the wars, factions and revolutions. . . . Let them reflect, I say, if such a relation (or prediction) would not be receiv’d as more ridiculous and impossible, than those that are mention’d in these six volumes. (507–8) This argument for the implausibility of history assumes for its persuasiveness that readers will mentally transport themselves backward in time for a moment to imagine a book like the one in their hand, only real not fictive, predictive not satiric, in which authentic revelations from the future are presented but inevitably dismissed as improbable. What is most striking here is a rhetorical strategy—which recapitulates that adopted throughout Memoirs of the Twentieth Century—based upon devices that enforce a double temporal perspective. Events from the establishment of the Roman Empire to the Protes Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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tant Reformation must be viewed as at once in the past from the vantage point of those reading Madden’s book, and in the future for someone in the early days of Rome looking ahead. For its audience in 1733, the letters in Memoirs of the Twentieth Century likewise had to be viewed as dealing simultaneously with the past and future: with later eighteenth-­century and nineteenth-­century events imagined as in the future for readers but also in the past for the imaginary twentieth-­century correspondents looking backwards. All stories narrated in the past tense invite some degree of temporal doubling, of course, especially if they are told by first-­person narrators. In a work like, say, Robinson Crusoe (1719), readers are invited to notice differences in outlook between the narrator’s earlier and later selves, or to notice that a given episode such as Crusoe’s rescue from the island must be taken as both in the past from the narrator’s vantage point while writing and also in the future with respect to himself as he was at prior moments in the story. Typological modes of narration and their derivatives such as Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), as well as allegories like The Faerie Queene (1596), also collapse past and present or even present and future in ways that create complex temporal doubling. Such works are nevertheless very different from Memoirs of the Twentieth Century in their manner of conflating past and present. No matter how inept as a satire, Madden’s book remains noteworthy as the first work of prose fiction to adopt the central technique of those sf and related modes that are formally distinct from previous narrative traditions by virtue of inviting readers to imagine themselves looking backward from a far future to their own present and immediate future, which are thus also to be regarded as the past. Here, for the first time in prose fiction, is the proleptic structure identified by Hanzo as the narrative method most closely affiliated to sf. The social transformations encouraging experiment with that proleptic structure are suggested most explicitly when, to the argument that major episodes in Western history were not in fact probable but only seem so in retrospect, Madden’s narrator adds a survey of “the amazing alterations, in the manners and customs of particular nations” from ancient Greece to the eighteenth century. He concentrates on “The state of learning in the last two ages,” thereby stressing the acceleration of change. It is during this interval, he remarks, that Aristotle fell into disrepute along with “the schoolmen, who gave laws to heaven and earth” but who have been supplanted by “the great improvers of knowledge, who have made such important and successful discoveries, in this wide world of matter and life, which the others had so 40 ]

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long kept us strangers to” (512–13). By singling out recent discoveries, Madden invites as much attention to the rapid pace as to the surprising nature of scientific advances. This emphasis on the quickening tempo of progress bolsters Madden’s argument for the sheer improbability of past history and thus, by implication, of what lies ahead: If we consider how few years are past, since we improv’d Astronomy by a true system, verified by demonstration, and founded Philosophy on actual experiments, not on imaginary notions and opinions; since the compass and the needle trac’d out the mariner’s unerring road on the ocean, and war join’d fire to the sword, or muskets banish’d bows and arrows; since the invention of printing had a new birth in the world; since regular posts were first invented, and set up by de Tassis in Spain, and trade and correspondence got wings by land, as well as by sea; since Physicians found out either new drugs or specificks, or even the secrets of Anatomy, or the circulation of the blood; since our own nations learn’d to weave the fleece of our sheep, or that even one half of the earth had found out the other; and above all, if we reflect, that the small compass of time, which all these great events have happen’d in, seems to promise vast improvements in the growing centuries; it will not appear surprising, and much less absurd, that such discoveries and improvements are allotted to our posterity, in these volumes. (513) This passage cannot now, and could not in 1733, be dismissed as nothing more than the ravings of an amusing character mouthing ludicrous arguments for satiric purposes. Whatever Madden’s intentions may have been for the overall effect of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, in this passage, as sometimes also in Swift’s more well-­controlled satire, the comic mask is set aside for a moment, and we hear an authentic voice stating an important truth. Although Madden quickly puts on again the disguise of his bizarre narrator, at whom both we and he laugh, and although neither Madden nor his grotesque editor of letters from the twentieth century claims to be formulating an aesthetics for some new and more serious genre that may develop from the parodic future history inaugurated in Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, it is here that Madden became the first to articulate one of the basic aesthetic postulates of sf. By noting that unpredictable change is a distinctive corollary of the accelerating pace of scientific discovery, as well as a somewhat less conspicuous feature of all Western social and religious Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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history from the time of the Roman Empire, Madden derives a new canon of probability and accordingly a paradoxical new test of verisimilitude that applies especially to narratives of the future: acceptance of the implausible (we might say the counterintuitive) as the most likely shape of things to come. It follows that for tales of the future alone among genres there is a premium on enhancing verisimilitude by eliciting astonishment at astounding stories that depict apparently (though only apparently) implausible new developments in society or, better yet, strange new developments in science. It follows too, although Madden does not explicitly remark this consequence, that when confronted with tales of an apparently fantastic future, the reader’s initial response of disbelief is analogous to the surprise experienced at contemplating in retrospect real scientific discoveries that could not easily have been predicted beforehand. In this view, aesthetic response to science corresponds to the aesthetics of narratives relating the future with most verisimilitude. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century thus reveals that, within the mind of the writer who inaugurated English futuristic fiction, there was a close connection between awareness of accelerating scientific discovery and inevitable corresponding alterations in our very concepts of probability in life as well as in literature. Madden certainly understood that alterations in accepted standards of plausibility derive not only from awareness of the increasing tempo of social change and scientific progress, but even more from recognition that science discovers implausible truths: what Madden calls “the infinite incredible verities in the world of science,” and what more recently led to the dictum that our universe is not only stranger than we ordinarily imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. To the arguments of Aldiss, Suvin, and others about the conditions that made tales of the future possible if not inevitable by the end of the eighteenth century, I can on the basis of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century add a new hypothesis. I do not deny that some role was played by the rise of capitalism and related future-­oriented modes of thought, along with heightened awareness of change and resulting concern with the future induced by eighteenth-­century industrial and political revolutions. Also relevant, certainly, are theories of the sublime that created an aesthetics favoring strange narratives. Increasing pressures from realistic fiction against setting fantastic narratives in the present must also have exerted some influence in convincing writers to set stories in the future. But pressure to locate strange adventures in the future was not only negative, not only pressure to avoid the present. The early eighteenth-­century literary scene in England was distinctive for its extraordinary encouragement of formal experimen42 ]

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tation: a positive trend that led most notably, in the hands of Swift, Pope, and Gay, to creation for satiric purposes of unusual works that parodied recognized genres while sometimes also almost accidently creating viable new forms, as in the genesis of musical comedy via The Beggar’s Opera.11 Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, and with it the tale of the future as a new form, is in part another such outcome of a literary climate strongly favoring generic innovation. Setting out to parody history by writing a chronicle of the future, Madden created a genre capable of better uses. Moreover, he was not only the first English writer of futuristic fiction, but the first anywhere to note the importance for that form of transformations induced by science in accepted standards of probability. The coincidence is a telling clue to the origins of sf. If by the late seventeenth century comment on the acceleration of scientific discovery was something of a commonplace, the potential consequences for literature were not yet appreciated. Although Madden was insufficiently talented to work out the implications of his insight in a successful narrative, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century provides unequivocal evidence that by 1733, almost a century before proliferation of futuristic fiction as an established genre, science had suggested the possibility of a new aesthetic, with corresponding forms such as the future history, based upon reversal of hitherto accepted connections between plausibility and verisimilitude.12 Notes

1. See I. F. Clarke, Tale; Pierre Versins, Encyclopédie, articles on “Anticipation” and “Guttin (Jacques)”; and Cioranescu. 2. Madden’s motive in suppressing his book is not known; see Lee, “Samuel Madden.” 3. According to the National Union Catalogue, there are copies of the 1733 edition at Harvard, the Library of Congress, and the Huntington Library. Northwestern University now has a copy. A 1972 Garland Press reprint edition is announced as the facsimile of a copy in Yale’s Beinecke Library, and includes a four-­page introduction by Malcolm J. Bosse, who is not much concerned with the history of sf. I. F. Clarke (Pattern, 16) gives six sentences to Madden. Anyone who looks up Madden in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature or the New Cambridge Bibliography will find Memoirs of the Twentieth Century correctly attributed but confused with an anonymous work, The Reign of George VI (London, 1763), which is wrongly listed as the second edition of Madden’s book. All citations in my text are taken from the Huntington Library copy of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. 4. For the background of millennial and apocalyptic writing that Madden would have taken for granted as known at least in its general outlines to his readers, see Jacob, esp. chap. 3, “The Millennium,” (100–42); and McKeon, esp. part 2, “Eschatological Prophecy.” Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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5. See Baine, esp. chap. 1, “Defoe and the Angels” (12–36). 6. See in Mercier, vol. 1, the “Nouveau Discours Préliminaire”: “Je suis donc le véritable prophète de la révolution. . . . Sans forcer le sens, et d’une manière claire et précise, j’ai mis au jour et sans équivoque, une prédiction qui embrassoit tous les changemens possibles, depuis la destruction des parlemens, de la nobless et du clergé, jusquà l’adoption du chapeau rond. . . . Au milieu de cette révolution . . . il y a eu d’autres révolutions terribles et sanglantes qu’il m’étoit bien impossible de prévoir; car, comment imaginer qu’une poignée de scélérats ineptes et féroces, étrangers à la première et courageuse explosion, domineroient tout-­à-­coup une nation éclairée.” (I am therefore a veritable prophet of the Revolution. . . . Without forcing the meaning and in a manner that is both clear and precise, I put forth unequivocally a prediction that embraced all the possible changes, from the destruction of the parliaments, of the noble and clerical classes, to the new fashion of round hats. . . . In the middle of this Revolution . . . there were other terrible and bloody revolutions that were impossible for me to foresee because how could one imagine that a handful of inept and vicious scoundrels, who were not part of that first and courageous uprising, would suddenly come to dominate an enlightened country?) 7. For evidence detailing the popularity of L’An 2440, see Wilkie. 8. See also Eizykman and Huntington. 9. See “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages” and “Labor Time in the ‘Crisis’ of the Fourteenth Century: From Medieval Time to Modern Time,” in Le Goff (29–52). 10. For more on relationships between history and fiction in eighteenth-­century England, see Braudy. 11. Amid these experiments there was even an acclaimed poem set in the near future: “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” Although written two years prior to the appearance and suppression of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century in 1733, Swift’s poem was not published until 1739. For an account of its textual history see Scouten & Hume. I cannot say whether Madden knew of “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” or whether Swift read Madden’s book. But even if there was no influence of one work upon the other—perhaps especially if there was not (as seems most likely)—the climate of literary experimentation is noteworthy for their resort in the same decade to a parallel strategy built upon a similar device of double temporal perspective involving the future. Swift’s resort to a future setting for considering his own death may also be of more than incidental interest for the history of sf: see in this connection the speculations by Benford and Ketterer on death and the textual shadow of the sf author. They plausibly suggest that futuristic fiction may sometimes be occasioned by the author’s need to deal acceptably with powerful fantasies about his or her own death. 12. For help with Madden’s Greek and Latin phrases, I am grateful to my late friend and colleague Dean David S. Wiesen. Although this essay owes much to him, he never saw it and now I can only wonder if he would have liked it.

Works Cited

Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, NY: 1973. 44 ]

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Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. New York: Ballantine, 1960. Aristotle. “Poetics.” Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater. New York: Modern Library, 1954. Baine, Rodney M. Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1968. Benford, Gregory. “Death and the Textual Shadow of the SF Author, Again,” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 3 (November 1982): 341. Braudy, Leo. Narrative Form in History and Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. [Cheynell, Frances]. Aulicus his dream of the Kings sudden comming to London. London, 1644. Cioranescu, Alexandre. “ ‘Épigone’ le premier roman de l’avenir,” Revue des sciences humaines 39, no. 155 (1974): 441–48. Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood’s End. 1953. New York: Ballantine, 1964. Clarke, I. F. The Pattern of Expectation 1644–2001. New York: Basic Books, 1979. ———. The Tale of the Future from the Beginning to the Present Day. 1961. 3rd. ed. London: Library Association, 1978. Donne, John. “Sermon Number 2: Preached at Lincolns Inne.” In The Sermons of John Donne, edited by George R. Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 72–94. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1953–1961. Eizykman, Boris. “Temporality in SF Narrative.” Science Fiction Studies 12, no. 1 (1985): 66–87. [Guttin, Jacques]. Épigone, histoire du siècle futur. Paris: Pierre Lamy, 1659. Hanzo, Thomas A. “The Past of Science Fiction.” In Bridges to Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser, George R. Guffey, and Mark Rose, 131–46. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Huntington, John. “Olaf Stapledon and the Novel about the Future.” Contemporary Literature 22, no. 3 (1981): 349–65. ———. “Remembrance of Things to Come: Narrative Technique in Last and First Men.” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 3 (November 1982): 257–64. Jacob, Margaret C. The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689–1720. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976. Ketterer, David. “Death and the Denial of History: The Textual Shadow of the SF Author.” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 3 (November 1982): 228–30. ———. “Death and the Textual Shadow of the SF Author, Again.” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 3 (November 1982): 342. Lee, Sidney, ed. “Samuel Madden.” In Dictionary of National Biography, 740–41. London, 1909. Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, 1980. Originally published as Pour un autre Moyen Age: Temps, travail et culture en Occident, 18 essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. [Madden, Samuel]. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. London: Osborn, Longman, et al., 1733. McKeon, Michael. Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

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Mercier, Louis-­Sébastien. L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: rêve s’il en fut jamais. 1771. Rev. ed., 3 vols. Paris, An VII. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Scouten, Arthur H., and Robert D. Hume. “Pope and Swift: Text and Interpretation of Swift’s Verses on His Death,” Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 205–31. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Versins, Pierre. Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires, et de la science fiction. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1972. Wilkie, Everett C., Jr. “Mercier’s L’An 2440: Its Publishing History during the Author’s Lifetime, Part I.” Harvard Library Bulletin 32, no. 1 (1984): 5–35.

Afterword

Research on Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century was part of a larger investigation whose results are presented in my book Origins of Futuristic Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 1987). There my analysis of Madden’s innovation appears, with appropriate revisions, as chapter 3. Origins of Futuristic Fiction is now also available (including illustrations) in a paperback edition published in 2010 by the University of Georgia Press.

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• 3•

German Theories of Science Fiction Jean Paul, Kurd Lasswitz, and After William B. Fischer The following article was one of the first English-­language scholarly discussions of the early German writers and literary theorists Jean Paul and Kurd Lasswitz. Both authors had a very large influence on the development of German science fiction in the nineteenth and early twentieth ­centuries. This essay originally appeared in SFS 3, no. 3 (November 1976): 254–64.

Science fiction is a recent form of literature and an even newer topic of literary criticism. While many excellent interpretations have already been written, there is still no lack of unexamined material or unanswered questions. One of the most fundamental problems of sf criticism concerns the theory and definition of sf—its aesthetics or poetics. At least four major issues are involved: (1) the manner in which the content, methods, and outlook of science interact with the artistic temperament to produce the attitudes and themes of sf; (2) the nature of sf as a literary form; (3) the reciprocal interplay of author, text, and reader in the creation and reception of texts and in the evolution of a concept of genre; (4) the consideration of sf and sf criticism from literary traditions other than modern Anglo-­American sf in the formulation of theories about the general nature of sf.1 One major body of sf and sf criticism that has been unduly neglected is the one produced by German writers. In this essay I will discuss early German theories of sf, with particular attention to two writers, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825) and Kurd Lasswitz (1848–1910), whose work spans a period of over a century. Both participated, as theoreticians and writers of fiction, in the development of German sf. Their ideas and those of other German sf critics deserve a place in the history of the genre and can also 

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contribute much to the application of the concepts and methods of literary criticism to the study of sf. The prehistory of German sf can be traced at least as far back as the Renaissance and Kepler’s Somnium (ca. 1610, pbd. 1634). None of the few German utopias and imaginary voyages written during the next two centuries, however, are as well known or as important to the history of sf as those written in England, France, and Italy.2 It was only after the middle of the eighteenth century that science even began to become a significant part of German literature. The impact of the Scientific Revolution on worldview and poetic imagery can be detected in some lyric poetry, for example, the effusive cosmological poems of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803).3 Many critics have noted the importance of science for Goethe, who was an able student of many sciences, and for the German Romantics, some of whom had formal scientific training.4 The effect of modern cosmology and Newtonian physics on poetic consciousness is also apparent in several poems by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), such as “Keppler” (sic) and “Die scheinheiligen Dichter” (The Hypocritical Poets) both written shortly before 1800. None of these writers, however, can reasonably be considered authors of German sf, nor did they address themselves at any length to the philosophical and aesthetic questions raised by the interaction of science and literature. Even less did they—or for that matter most other German writers of the time—concern themselves in their fiction to any notable degree with technology, the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, or serious utopian thought. Here, as in industrialization and the development of a national state, Germany lagged behind Great Britain, France, and the United States. Perhaps the German literary community was too busy dealing with the issue of German nationalism or investigating the artistic implications of Faust or Wilhelm Meister to devote much thought to science, industrialization, or speculation about what society might be like after Germany finally became a nation. The contrast between German literature and British and American literature of this period, which was so important for the later development of Anglo-­American sf, is readily apparent. At the end of the eighteenth century there did appear one major statement about science and literature by a German writer. It is to be found, curiously enough, among the several whimsical prefaces and stories that accompany the novel Leben des Quintus Fixlein (The Life of Quintus Fixlein, 1796) by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, who is better known by his pseudonym Jean Paul. Jean Paul’s relation to German Classicism and Romanticism has been warmly debated, and he is usually placed outside the main 48 ]

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current of German literature. His literary excellence and originality, however, are widely acknowledged, and his reputation as an aesthetician is established by his Vorschule der Ästhetik (Introduction to Aesthetics, 1804). Jean Paul’s discussion of cosmology, fantasy, and literature is couched as the “Dedication to My Foster-­sister Philippine” that precedes the delicate, even fey story “Der Mond: Eine phantasierende Geschichte” (The Moon: A Fantasy Story).5 Jean Paul, or rather the narrator of the story, begins the Dedication by describing the discrepancy between the cosmology of modern science and the older fantastic cosmology whose sentimentality and anthropomorphism, he says, still govern the thoughts of frivolous girls: In none of my books, my dear foster-­sister, have I yet expressed my ridicule about how you girls make so much of the Moon. It is the plaything of your hearts and the nest-­egg around which you set the other stars when you hatch fantasies from them. . . . But one could quarrel about something else, too, namely that you would rather love and look at the dear old Moon and the Man who lives there than get to know them—as is your custom with men who live here below the Moon. . . . Dearest, there is even the question of whether you yourself still know that the Moon is but a few square miles smaller than Asia. How often I had to drum it into your head before you could retain the fact that on the Moon not only does the day last half a month, but also—­something even more worth hearing—the night. . . . I have it on good authority that you don’t even remember what kind of a Moon the Moon has overhead—our Earth is the Moon’s Moon, you silly thing, and to whoever is up there it looks no bigger than a wedding-­cake. (Werke, 4:50–51) Such familiarity with modern science in a German writer of the late eighteenth century is noteworthy but not unique. What is remarkable about Jean Paul is that he makes science an important ingredient of his philosophical outlook and his literature as well. The storyteller’s flippant remarks about his foster-­sister and the mysteries of modern astronomy give way to an earnest assertion that the study of the cosmos revealed by modern science “gives man an exalted heart, and an eye which reaches beyond the Earth, and wings which lift one into the Incommensurable, and a God who is not finite, but rather infinite” (4:51). The serious tone is appropriate, for it soon becomes apparent that Jean Paul intends something more than a comment on the lag between modern science and popular consciousness. His observations about the differences between the modern and the

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old-­fashioned cosmologies are the foundation for a statement about the effects of modern science on the worldview, themes, and images of poetry. In a passage that can count as an early attempt to resolve the problem of the “Two Cultures,” Jean Paul declares that literature and modern science are not incompatible: “One may have fantasies about everything under the Moon, and about the Moon itself too, as long as one does not take the fantasies for truths—or the shadow play for a picture collection—or the picture collection for a natural-­history collection. The astronomer inventories and assesses the sky and misses by only a few pounds; the poet furnishes and enriches the heavens. . . . The former lays measuring lines about the Moon, while the latter lays garlands about it—and also about the Earth” [4:51]. I would suggest that in this brief passage Jean Paul is offering a program for a new kind of literature much like science fiction, and that in his conception of the new type of “fantasy” he also touches on issues that have continued to occupy the attention of sf critics and theorists.6 The elliptical syntax and eccentric terminology make it difficult at first to discern the exact meanings of the distinctions between “fantasies” (“Phantasien”), “truths” (“Wahrheiten”), “shadow play” (“Schattenspiel”), “picture collection” (“Bilderkabinett”), and “natural-­history collection” (“Naturalienkabinett”). But the general purport is evident and the choice of such puzzling imagery in fact contributes to the argument. Jean Paul seems to be examining the differences between imagination (including the creation of fiction) on the one hand, and philosophical truths, historical and biographical facts, and the knowledge furnished by modern science on the other. The key word is Phantasie, which refers not only to the daydreams of adolescents, but also to the faculty of imagination and its expression in the form of literature. According to Jean Paul the new fantasies and fictions do not claim to be statements of absolute fact (Wahrheiten) and should not be considered as such; they have other functions and employ other categories of truth and validity than do philosophy, history, and science. Many modern theorists also suggest that a work of sf, despite its emphasis on concrete, realistic description and its use of the past tense and indicative mood, is not a prediction or prophecy but rather a “thought model” or hypothesis in which author and reader explore future or alternate worlds. The reader, because he enjoys reading fiction and is interested in scientific speculation, temporarily and conditionally accepts the imaginary world as a real place. He then judges the fiction not according to its factual truth as a prediction of the future, but rather its validity and internal consistency as a plausible representation of an imaginary world, including its inhabitants and their culture. In the next phrase Jean Paul formulates another distinction: the “shadow 50 ]

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play” of fiction is not to be mistaken for a “picture collection.” At the very least he is restating the notion that the new fantasies are not to be viewed as assertions that claim to express absolute truth. It is conceivable that he is also drawing our attention to the idea that the characters in the new kind of fantasy would perhaps have a different nature and function than those in other, more “realistic” fiction. Modern proponents of sf have argued similarly that the use of type characters or the avoidance of abnormal personalities in sf may have a legitimate function as part of the author’s effort to make the imaginary world familiar and plausible. The multiple meanings of “Bilder” make possible still another shift of argument. In a certain sense a work of literature, even though it does not claim to reproduce historical and biographical truth, can indeed be seen as a “Bilderkabinett,” a collection of “representations,” “images,” or “figures.” But the “images” of fantasy, even fantasy based on modern science, are not to be viewed as though they were parts of a “natural-­history collection.” Here, I think, Jean Paul is pointing out the distinction in content and function between science, including the nonfictional scientific text, and what we would call sf. The poet is given a certain license with reality, including scientific facts. He may create imaginary science, and he may use the cosmos of modern science as a background for speculations not immediately justified by present science. But he must also conform to the demands of fiction, which deals with living beings, not just with inanimate objects. To emphasize this difference Jean Paul contrasts the outlook and functions of the scientist and the poet. The astronomer, for example, measures the cosmos, while the practitioner of the new form of literary fantasy, like the writer of sf, speculates imaginatively about science and about life in the cosmos. Even if the “Dedication” were nothing more than a comment about the impact of science on modern consciousness, it would be an important document for the attempt to trace the interplay of science and literature in the emergence of the type of sensibility that was a prerequisite for the creation of science fiction. But Jean Paul’s remarks on science, imagination, and art, despite their brevity, irony, and eccentric style, make this “Dedication” even more significant for the history of sf. Although there was as yet no real sf to which he might have referred in his speculations about the new “fantasies,” his own abilities as a writer and aesthetician as well as his familiarity with the science of his time enabled him to analyze the impact of science on modern consciousness and to form conjectures about the possible literary expression of such interaction. At the end of the “Dedication,” and often during the short stories “Die Mondfinsternis” (The Eclipse of the Moon) and “Der Mond” (The Moon), Jean Paul does indeed return to the old cos

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mology that had served poetry so well. But in the “Dedication” he anticipated, briefly but provocatively, a number of issues important to sf criticism. By no means does the work of Jean Paul begin an essentially continuous tradition of German sf and sf criticism. At most one can distinguish a very minor and often historically discontinuous genre composed of science-­ oriented fantasies and whimsical pieces that resemble those of Lewis Carroll, Edwin A. Abbott, and C. H. Hinton.7 Nor did any of the few German utopias of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, some of which describe imaginary science and technology, achieve any appreciable currency. The essential stylistic, thematic, and conceptual roots of German sf, like those of Anglo-­American sf, are to be found instead in a later period, in technological fiction, the “future war” story, the modern utopia, the tradition of middle-­brow realistic fiction, and the direct confrontation of the author with science and technology in an industrialized society. The real father of German sf was Kurd Lasswitz (1848–1910), who wrote a number of short stories, novellas, and novels, including his masterpiece, the two-­volume novel Auf zwei Planeten (On Two Planets, 1897).8 Lasswitz’s personality, professional activity, literary works, and even his ideas about aesthetics show a juxtaposition and sometimes a happy synthesis of the sciences and the traditional humanities. Although he was a trained scientist, his education, like that of most German intellectuals of the time, heavily emphasized the humanistic culture of Goethe’s Weimar and of German idealism. Indeed, it was as a teacher of philosophy as well as mathematics and physics that he spent thirty years at the Gymnasium Ernestinum in Gotha while writing his scientific works, histories of science and philosophy, essays on aesthetics, and sf. Lasswitz was deeply aware of his dual position as a descendant of German Classicism and an inhabitant of a modern world pervaded by science and technology. His confidence in his ability to bridge the gap between Goethe’s Weimar and Bismarck’s Germany was no doubt strengthened by his knowledge and near adulation of Goethe and Kant, who had dealt so successfully with science as part of their humanistic lives. Several times during his literary career Lasswitz examined the nature of the new kind of literature that he was helping to create. He first expressed his ideas in 1878 in the Preface to his Bilder aus der Zukunft (Images from the Future, cited below as BZ ). In the May 1887 issue of the general-­interest liberal journal Nord und Süd he discussed “the poetical and the scientific views of nature” in “Die poetische und die wissenschaftliche Betrachtung der Natur” (cited as PWBN ). An essay on futurology in philosophy and fiction, “Über Zukunftsträume” (On Dreams about the Future, cited as ZT ), 52 ]

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forms one chapter of the philosophical work Wirklichkeiten (1899). The two essays “Der tote and der lebendige Mars” (The Dead and the Living Mars, cited as TLM) and “Unser Recht auf Bewohner anderer Welten” (Our Claims on Inhabitants of Other Worlds, URBAW ) are Lasswitz’s final word on science fiction. The latter appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 16 November 1910, one day before his death; both are included in the posthumous volume Empfundenes und Erkanntes (Things Felt and Known, 1919), from which they are cited here. It would be impossible in these few pages to explore the full range and complexity of Lasswitz’s thought or even to quote more than a few essential passages. I intend instead to summarize the major steps in his argument and to suggest its relevance to the major issues of modern sf criticism. Lasswitz’s essays on the aesthetics of science fiction reflect both his cultural heritage and his training in science. In its point of departure, conceptual organization, and terminology his course of reasoning resembles that of the treatises on aesthetics written by Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and, for that matter, Hegel and Schelling, who discuss art from psychological and cultural perspectives before turning to issues of artistic practice. Thus Lasswitz’s theory of sf begins with the attempt to show that fiction about science reflects and satisfies basic human needs and is therefore a legitimate form of art. He states that it is human nature to speculate about the future of mankind and of human culture, because man has an intellect and a sense of curiosity, and also because “striving for improvement is the essence of human life” (ZT 423). To these traditional philosophical notions Lasswitz adds the concepts and methods of modern science. He argues that man’s confrontation with nature, especially the cosmos, is the initial impetus and recurring form of conceptualization for the attempt to comprehend human existence (PWBN 270–71). Thus science, as the German term Naturwissenschaft suggests, is not the mere collection of facts; rather it is intimately related to man’s deepest philosophical, emotional, and cultural drives. In fact, as science progresses from superstition to a mature and systematic form of knowledge, it contributes more and more to man’s effort to understand himself and his world and to transcend his intellectual and physical limitations. Astronomy, the study of the universe, is therefore the particular “paragon of the sciences” (PWBN 271), while technology is the modern expression of man’s desire to gain practical mastery over his environment (“die technische Beherrschung der Natur” (ZT 432, 435). Lasswitz’s knowledge of philosophy enables him to explore the implications of science and technology with particular acuity. Conversely, his sci

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entific training adds new energy and relevance to his philosophical thought. As a neo-­Kantian he thinks of space and time as subjective modes of perception. As a modern scientist he also views space and time as objective, quantifiable concepts. Both space and time are used to measure and describe the physical world, and both can be treated—graphically as well as conceptually—as dimensions. Lasswitz also combines modern science with older concepts of historical and cultural development. To the ancient ideas of eschatological historical progression, cultural development, and the improvement of human nature, he adds the notion of extraterrestrial life and the theory of evolution. One result is a belief—not without reservations—in the possibility of a “relative improvement of conditions through a gradual process of evolution” (ZT 425). Another is a concept of the equivalence of travel through space and progression in time. Both ideas are of great importance to sf. The opening paragraphs of URBAW best express Lasswitz’s thought: Ever since science has incontrovertibly made the Earth into a planet and the stars into suns like our own, we cannot lift our gaze to the starry firmament without thinking, along with Giordano Bruno, that even on those inaccessible worlds there may exist living, feeling, thinking creatures. It must seem absolutely nonsensical indeed, that in the infinity of the cosmos our Earth should have remained the only supporter of intelligent beings [Vernunftwesen]. The rational order of the universe [Weltvernunft] demands that there should necessarily even be infinite gradations of intelligent beings inhabiting such worlds. To this idea might be added the profound and inextinguishable longing for better and more fortunate conditions than those which the Earth offers us. Indeed we do dream of a higher civilization [Kultur], but we would also like to come to know it as something more than the hope for a distant future. We tell ourselves that what the future can sometime bring about on Earth must even now, in view of the infiniteness of time and space, have already become a reality somewhere. (URBAW 163) Even in his earliest writings, however, Lasswitz was aware that the concepts of philosophy and the content and method of modern science could be combined to produce visions of new worlds and cultures. Although in URBAW Lasswitz’s interest was directed to nonterrestrial cultures, in the Bilder aus der Zukunft he described superior terrestrial cultures located in the future. In Auf zwei Planeten Lasswitz incorporated the equivalence of travel through space and progression through time. There he described the 54 ]

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confrontation of contemporary terrestrial civilization with a superior alien culture, a conflict whose result is the gradual improvement of humanity. We may question the validity and relevance of Lasswitz’s cultural optimism, his rationalistic psychology, and his use of the concepts and terminology of Idealist philosophy. Nevertheless, these ideas and attitudes, in combination with his extensive knowledge of modern science, enabled him to reach conclusions about science, society, and the function of literature that are much the same as those which form the foundations of modern science fiction. Lasswitz believed that science and technology had become major determinants of history, society, and individual consciousness. He also shared the conviction that the impact of science on the modern world and its future could be explored in an artistically legitimate form. He even anticipated and explained the preference in sf for future or other worlds as settings, and for astronomy and physics as sources of themes and imaginary scientific content. In his essays Lasswitz examined with considerable insight the kind of imagination encountered in sf. As an aesthetician and writer he understood the creation of art to be a matter of conception as well as execution. In sf, particularly, both of these processes are often viewed as consciously methodical acts. The writer must construct a detailed and consistent imaginary world that is distinctly different from our own and yet does not directly contradict modern science. He must then use his literary skills to gain our emotional and logical acceptance of that world. It is therefore not surprising to find in science fiction a concept of imagination that claims to be rational and systematic rather than absolutely unrestrained. There is also a corresponding preference for stylistic techniques that aim to encourage an impression of reality, rather than to create a sense of alienation or to remind the reader of the artificiality of the text. Lasswitz’s ideas about imagination and literary technique in sf are very similar to those of many later sf critics and writers. In ZT and URBAW he bravely attempts to distinguish sf, which he calls “das wissenschaftliche Märchen” (ZT 441), from other fiction, especially fantasy fiction or “das Märchen” (“tale”); the issue is still a subject of considerable debate. Lasswitz suggests that science, viewed as a strict discipline, has neither the capability nor the mission to exceed the bounds of its knowledge in order to speculate freely about the future or other worlds (BZ iii, ZT 439, URBAW 164). If we wish to explore such ideas “we must turn to [the faculty of ] imagination [Phantasie],” but such fantasy “need not be unbridled,” as it is in fantasy fiction (ZT 439). The “bridle,” as Lasswitz repeatedly states, is provided not only by common sense, but even more by the concepts, meth

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ods, and standards of science. Like the scientist, the writer of science fiction, even though he has greater freedom of imagination, thinks in terms of hypotheses, quantifiable factors, and formulas: Who can answer these questions [about the future]? Science cannot venture to do so, as long as it has not yet found the famous Universal Formula of Laplace, which answers all questions about the past and future and enables us to perceive the mechanism of the universe in the same manner that this mechanism presents itself to the human intellect in the motion of atoms. And yet there is a magical agency by which we can anticipate this formula and with one fell swoop lift ourselves beyond the reality that slowly works itself out in space and time in accord with [the laws of ] mass and energy. This magical agency which enables us to lift the veil of the future is imagination [die Idee]. Fiction [Dichtung] has the privilege of looking into the future. But if that which fiction narrates is really to inspire in us a sense of trust, then fiction must take counsel with reality and conform closely to experience. Many inferences about the future can be drawn from the historical course of civilization [Verlauf der Culturgeschichte] and the present state of science; and analogy offers itself to fantasy as an ally. [BZ iii–iv] The scientific knowledge of a particular time is part of the common interest of humanity. . . . The picture of the nature of things that we form in this field is an essential element of the total content of the culture and can therefore also become a subject for literary treatment. But fiction gives form to this its raw material by transforming it into a part of the personal experience of fictional characters. Now, in this process fiction is much freer in its use of hypotheses than is science, whose business is to provide the objective knowledge. As long as he does not contradict the scientific knowledge of his time, the writer of fiction may expand the hypothesis in order to further those aims that he considers essential to his function. In science the hypothesis must receive its justification through the ongoing process of experience, while in fiction the hypothesis is justified simply by its psychological utility, that is, by the effect that it creates by making objects and events vivid and plausible and by transforming them into elements of the reader’s active emotional response. [URBAW 167–68] Lasswitz’s choice of terminology makes it almost superfluous to emphasize once again the similarity of his ideas to those of later writers and critics of 56 ]

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science fiction. The insight with which he outlined the process of “extrapolation” and the use of “analogs,” key concepts in sf, is remarkable. His notion of the sf text as the formulation of a “hypothesis” also points the way toward modern theories of sf, which view the imaginary world as neither a pure fantasy nor an absolute prophecy, but rather as a “thought model” similar to the theoretical models of reality proposed by the natural sciences. In his earliest and latest essays Lasswitz also spells out the implications of this “scientific” concept of imagination in terms of literary aesthetics. As in the previous passages, he emphasizes plausibility, probability, and verisimilitude as principles of imagination and goals of literary style: We have endeavored to relate nothing that cannot stand either as probable or at least as not completely impossible according to present knowledge. . . . Here the difficulty of artistic representation places a natural rein on fantasy; it is essential to find the proper mean between fantastic fabulation [Fabuliren] and didactic explanation. For that which is alien must be mediated to our understanding through that which is already familiar; this is not always simple to do and necessitates much and varied postulation [vielerlei Voraussetzung]. [BZ v–vi] In the transformation [of speculations about science, the future, etc.] into literary form, the laws of nature and the soul may not be infringed without arousing the objection of the reader and interfering with the effect. For everything that occurs in a novel that is intended seriously as art must be capable of being related to our own experience, that is, the contemporary view of natural laws and psychology; in short, it must be explainable and plausible. An effect that occurred simply by magic and could not be explained scientifically would be just as unusable poetically as a sudden, psychologically unmotivated transformation of a character. . . . Our sense of veracity tolerates no postulates that directly and absolutely contradict previous scientific and psychological experience. [URBAW 165–66] As the two passages show, Lasswitz was aware that in science fiction the plausibility of the imaginary world is suggested and judged in several different ways. The sense of plausibility depends first of all on the creation of a general impression of correspondence between the imaginary world of the fiction and our own world of experience; or, as recent students of Realism express the idea, the fiction attempts to encourage a sense of “sharable experience” by suggesting the verifiability of its content.9 But Lasswitz’s notion of plausibility, like that of many if indeed not all writers of sf,

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also shows the direct influence of science. The scientific method, with its combination of hypothesis, projection, collection of data, and reevaluation, is considered the model for sound imaginative speculation. The particular natural sciences, which furnish the categories and standards by which the real world is most validly observed and described, are the source of the individual criteria according to which the validity of the imaginary world is asserted and evaluated. The next logical step in a theory about fiction in which the concept of imagination and standards of plausibility are based on science is the conclusion that science should be an important part of the content of the imaginary world and that such fiction might well look to science for help in creating particular stylistic techniques that would contribute to the impression of plausibility. In his theoretical essays Lasswitz mentions a number of themes and concepts of imaginary science that he considers appropriate and challenging subjects for the new kind of fiction. Among them are extraterrestrial life, space travel, solar energy, antigravity, synthetic food, and differences in psychological sensibility in non-­terrestrial beings or in new environments (ZT 442; URBAW and TLM, passim). Many of these ideas are important themes and motifs in later science fiction. Lasswitz also hints at some of the major structural patterns and stylistic tendencies of sf, for example, the preference for exciting plots and heroic characters (ZT 435–37, 440–45). Lasswitz’s sf, however, offers a better indication of his notion of the stylistic techniques of sf. While his works are marred by a relative weakness in the representation of character and dialogue, even the early stories in BZ are quite successful as evocations of imaginary worlds in which science and technology are important elements. In the short stories written in the 1880s and 1890s Lasswitz refined his science-­fictional techniques, expanded his thematic repertoire, and moved toward a more mature conception of the imaginary world as a “thought model” interesting in its own right, rather than just as a satirical allegory of our own world. Lasswitz’s conceptual powers and literary skills reached their highpoint in his modest best seller, Auf zwei Planeten, which appeared in the same year as Wells’s War of the Worlds. In this lengthy novel Lasswitz employs the archetypal sf idea of “first contact” to explore one of the fundamental themes of literature, the nature of humanity. Imaginary technology, speculation about alien biology, philosophy, character, and plot all play a role in the exposition of the theme. Many stylistic techniques that appear constantly in later sf are found in Auf zwei Planeten. Among them are technological neologisms, alien language, documental inserts and pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical discourses. 58 ]

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Throughout the novel Lasswitz uses a measured, transparent, matter-­of-­ fact narrative style calculated to win the reader’s acceptance of the imaginary world. Despite his foresight as an aesthetician and writer, Lasswitz was more conservative in his speculations about the subjects and functions of science fiction than has been borne out by later sf, although at the time his ideas would have seemed quite visionary. In his theoretical essays he also did little more than suggest the general stylistic characteristics of an sf genre that was still embryonic. Lasswitz was attempting to distinguish sf clearly from other literature, to establish its artistic legitimacy, and to argue the “scientific” nature of its form of imagination. He therefore concentrated on its more readily ascertainable features and emphasized its realistic and methodical nature. Later writers, better aware of both the possibilities and the supposed limits of their genre, would consciously seek to expand its boundaries and to achieve what had previously been considered unachievable. A number of German writers and critics besides Jean Paul and Lasswitz have contributed to the discussion of science and literature, including science fiction. Except for the Nazi era, the modern tradition of sf theory and criticism in Germany is fairly continuous, although initially sparse. Until quite recently, however, almost all such discussion took place within larger contexts such as naturalism, realism, utopian thought, or mainstream literature. German sf did not diverge from the literary mainstream nearly as greatly as did Anglo-­American sf. Similarly, sf criticism in Germany did not develop into a distinct discipline pursued by a cohesive community of writers and nonacademic critics. Technological consciousness, the theory of evolution, and the scientific outlook played a significant role in the social and aesthetic thought of the German naturalists. A major figure in such discussion was Wilhelm Bölsche (1861–1939), a writer, editor, and popularizer of science. Bölsche wrote a treatise about “the scientific foundations of poetry” (Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie, 1887), as well as some speculative articles that explore themes familiar in later sf. Even more important as a landmark of sf theory and textual interpretation is his enthusiastic essay about Auf zwei Planeten, “Das Märchen des Mars.”10 The article does much to clarify the relation of Lasswitz’s sf to that of Verne and Wells, to realism, and to the genres of fantasy and Märchen—questions that are by no means resolved yet. Another writer associated with the naturalists and realists was Hans Lindau, who published a biographical and critical essay on Lasswitz, as well as several book reviews.11 He also added a longer (and better) biographical and interpretive introduction to Lasswitz’s posthumous volume of essays,

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poetry, and stories, Empfundenes und Erkanntes (1919). The publication of Auf zwei Planeten in 1897 inspired a few other reviews in German journals associated with realism, naturalism, and liberalism. Perhaps the most perceptive of these are “Ein Robinson des Weltraums” (A Robinson Crusoe of Outer Space) by Fritz Engel (Zeitgeist: Beiblatt zum Berliner Tageblatt, 1897, no. 49; excerpted in Das Magazin für Litteratur, 18 December 1897) and “Weltphantasien” (Space Fantasies) by M. Kronenberg (Die Nation, 31 December 1898).12 At least three major essays exploring science fiction from quite different perspectives appeared during the years of the Weimar Republic: Das naturwissenschaftliche Märchen (The Scientific Tale) by Anton Lampa in 1919; “Weltraumschiffahrt: ein poetischer Traum und ein technisches Problem der Zeit” (Space Travel: A Poetic Dream and a Contemporary Technical Problem) by Karl Debus in 1927; and “Die phantastische Literatur: Eine literarästhetische Untersuchung” (The Literature of Fantasy: A Literary-­ Aesthetic Investigation) by Hans-­Joachim Flechtner in 1930. To these studies one might add Hans Dominik’s observations on sf in his autobiography, Vom Schraubstock zum Schreibtisch (From the Workbench to the Writing Desk, 1942). While Dominik’s remarks scarcely constitute a systematic and profound analysis, they offer important indications of the intentionality of his science fiction. After 1933 the forced adaptation of literary criticism to Nazi party goals, the suppression of most German sf, and the termination of openly conducted rocket research in Germany brought about an almost complete cessation of science fiction and sf criticism in Germany, although Dominik’s sf novels continued to be published in mass editions because of their escape value and fascist ideology.13 The postwar years have seen a modest rebirth of science fiction in Germany, as well as an impressive amount of sf criticism that Franz Rottensteiner reviewed recently in this journal (see SFS 1, no. 4 [1975]: 279–84). For all its variety and occasional historical discontinuity, German sf criticism, both older and more recent, exhibits a number of persistent characteristics that are already apparent in Lasswitz and even in Jean Paul. In effect the German critics combine the strengths (and sometimes the weaknesses) of the two traditional schools of Anglo-­American sf critics, the academic scholars and the “indigenous” community of writers, editors, fans, and critics. For the most part the German critics evidence a solid foundation in aesthetic theory and critical methods, an interest in philosophical and ideological discussion, a thorough knowledge of mainstream literature, and an impressive familiarity with both German and non-­German science 60 ]

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fiction. Each of these virtues, however, has its corresponding vice. One occasionally encounters a certain inflexibility of aesthetic concepts and terminology, a lack of attention to German sf, an insistence on associating or even confusing modern sf with other literary traditions whose importance to the development of sf may well be small, or a tendency to overemphasize the political or philosophical implications of sf. These traits may well have to do with certain factors in the German intellectual tradition, as well as the lack of a clearly defined native body of sf and readership community distinct from mainstream literature. Despite—or perhaps because of—such differences in background and critical orientation German discussions of science fiction offer much valuable material to the student of sf. Jean Paul’s provocative and remarkably prescient remarks on the new “fantasy” have a definite historical value and can also still contribute to our understanding of the fundamental relation between science and fiction. Even as early as the turn of the century, Lasswitz was able to explore the idea of science fiction with the special insights of a trained and experienced scientist, philosopher, and writer. The better recent studies, too, can compete with those written anywhere. In my own work with science fiction, including German sf, I have found such studies invaluable in the interpretation of primary texts and in the evolution of a descriptive definition suitable for sf in general and for German sf as a form of literature which, for all its differences from Anglo-­ American sf, exhibits many of the same philosophical attitudes, scientific themes, and stylistic techniques. Notes

1. All translations are my own. Where necessary I have sacrificed smoothness to achieve a closely literal rendition, since many of the texts are not readily available. For several reasons I have chosen to translate both Phantasie (in some instances) and the very difficult Idee as “imagination,” even though the customary German word for “imagination” is Einbildungskraft. I feel this translation is justified by the particular connotations of Phantasie, as artistic imagination and the actual product of such imagination, and by the special meanings of “imagination” and “imaginary” in sf. The context in which Lasswitz uses Idee (BZ iii) makes it clear that he means the process of imagination rather than “idea,” “concept,” “notion,” etc. I have also translated naturwissenschaft(lich) and wissenschaft(lich) interchangeably as “science/scientific” (in the texts cited here there is no indication that the writers intend the latter to mean either “knowledge in general” or “scholarly learning”), and Märchen simply as “tale” rather than as the “folktale” or “fairy tale” into which it is often rendered when referring to Grimm’s stories and similar texts. 2. Specialized bibliographies of early German utopias and imaginary voyages include Bingenheimer and Klinckowstroem. 3. See Ulshöfer 1:168–84.

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4. See, for example, Gode-­von Aesch, Denker, Usinger, and Hartner. 5. All references are to Jean Paul, Werke. 6. In its thought and language the passage is reminiscent of the famous “golden world” passage near the beginning of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1595); I would not consider a direct textual influence impossible. Despite the modern nature of his subject, Jean Paul, in his notion of aesthetics, clearly belongs to the classical tradition. In his view of art as mimesis he inclines toward Aristotle rather than Plato. Certainly the images of “garlands” and ornamentation in the passage quoted suggest the Platonic idea that art is removed from reality. But Jean Paul does not see art, including the new fantasies, as a misrepresentation or even a mere embellishment of reality; rather, art expresses a deeper, or at least another kind of truth. Jean Paul’s discussion of the place of art between absolute philosophical truth and concretely observed fact reminds one very much of Aristotle’s idea that the realm of art is located between the abstract ideals of philosophy and the individual, often imperfect actualities of biography and history. 7. Abbott, Flatland (1884); Hinton, A New Era of Thought (1888), Scientific Romances (first series, 1886; second series, 1902). The major German writers of such proto-­sf, besides Jean Paul, are Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), and Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915). 8. The short stories, some of which appeared in Nord und Süd, are collected in the volumes Seifenblasen (1890) and Nie und Nimmer (1902). Willy Ley translated three of the stories into English as “When the Devil Took the Professor,” “Aladdin’s Lamp,” and “Psychotomy” and published them in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science ­Fiction. 9. I owe the term “sharable experience” and much of my understanding of realism to an unpublished essay, “Realism as Communication,” by Prof. Peter Demetz. The association of Lasswitz, the writer of sf, with literary realism and naturalism, is not inappropriate, for he was in close contact with the German and foreign members of both schools, as is indicated by his long association with the journal Nord und Süd and with the publishing house of Emil Felber. 10. The various articles appeared over a number of years in the Neue Deutsche Rundschau and were reprinted in volumes of essays: “Das Märchen des Mars” in Vom Bazillus zum Affenmenschen (1903), “Luftstadt” in Auf dem Menschenstern (1900), and “Ob Naturforschung und Dichtung sich schaden?” (Whether Science and Poetry Are Mutually Injurious) in Weltblick (1904). 11. “Kurd Lasswitz und seine modernen Märchen” in Nord und Süd. See also Lindau’s review of Lasswitz’s Nie und Nimmer in the same issue and his eulogy of Lasswitz in Kantstudien. 12. Otherwise the scant secondary material on Lasswitz includes a eulogy by Otto Jauker; a survey of Lasswitz’s fiction and essays by Raimund Pissin in Die Nation; an essay by Edwin M. J. Kretzmann, “German Technological Utopias of the Pre-­War Period”; Mark Hillegas’s essay on Wells, Lasswitz, and Orson Welles called “Martians and Mythmakers: 1877–1938”; two articles by Franz Rottensteiner; and an essay by Klaus Günther Just in his Aspekte der Zukunft that subsumes two earlier essays on Lasswitz. 62 ]

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13. One might well speculate that Golden Age Anglo-­American science fiction profited from Germany’s loss. In effect it was left to Anglo-­American writers to explore the implications of modern physics and the German rocket research of the twenties and thirties. In doing so they had the assistance of German emigrés like Willy Ley, an admirer of Lasswitz, who under other circumstances might well have contributed as a writer and critic to a Golden Age of German sf.

Works Cited

Bingenheimer, Heinz. Transgalaxis: Katalog der deutschsprachigen utopisch-­ phantastischen Literatur aus fünf Jahrhunderten (1460–1960). Friedrichsdorf/ Taunus: Transgalaxis, 1959. Bölsche, Wilhelm. “Das Märchen des Mars.” Vom Bazillus zum Affenmenschen. Leipzig: E. Diederiches, 1903. 321–41. ———. Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie. Leipzig: Reissner, 1887. ———. “Luftstadt.” Auf dem Menschenstern. Dresden: Reissner, 1900. ———. “Ob Naturforschung und Dichtung sich schaden?” Weltblick. Dresden: Reissner, 1904. Debus, Karl. “Weltraumschiffahrt, ein poetischer Traum und ein technisches Problem der Zeit” Hochland. (July 1927): 356–71. Denker, Rolf. “Luftfahrt auf montgolfierische Art in Goethes Dichten und Denken,” Jahrbuch der Goethe-­Gesellschaft 26 (1964): 181–98. Dominik, Hans. Vom Schraubstock zum Schreibtisch. Berlin: Scherl, 1942. Engel, Fritz. “Ein Robinson des Weltraums.” Zeitgeist: Beiblatt zum Berliner Tageblatt 49 (1897). Flechtner, Hans-­Joachim. “Die phantastische Literatur. Eine literarästhetische Untersuchung.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 24 (1930): 37–47. Gode-­von Aesch, Alexander. Natural Science in German Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Hartner, Willy. “Goethe and the Natural Sciences.” In Goethe: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Victor Lange, 145–60. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1968. Hillegas, Mark. “Martians and Mythmakers: 1877–1938.” In Challenges in American Culture, edited by Ray B. Browne et al., 150–77. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green University Press, 1970. Jauker, Otto. “Kurd Lasswitz.” Deutsche Rundschau für Geographie 33, no. 6 (1911): 279–80. Just, Klaus Günther. Aspekte der Zukunft: Zwei Essays. Bern: Francke, 1972. Klinckowstroem, Carl von. “Liftfahrten in der Literatur.” Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde 3 (1912): 250–64. Kretzmann, Edwin M. J. “German Technological Utopias of the Pre-­War Period.” Annals of Science (October 1938): 417–30. Kronenberg, M. “Weltphantasien.” Die Nation, 31 December 1898, 202–3. Lampa, Anton. Das naturwissenschaftliche Märchen. Reichenberg: Verlag Deutsche Arbeit, 1919.

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Lasswitz, Kurd. “Aladdin’s Lamp.” Translated by Willy Ley. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 4, no. 5 (May 1953): 92–99. ———. Auf zwei Planeten. Weimar: Emil Felber, 1897. Translated by Hans Rudnick as Two Planets, as abridged by Erich Lasswitz. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. ———. Empfundenes und Erkanntes. Introduction by Hans Lindau. Leipzig: Elischer. 1919. ———. Nie und Nimmer. Neue Märchen. Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1902. ———. “Psychotomy.” Translated by Willy Ley. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 9, no. 1 (July 1955): 102–10. ———. Seifenblasen. Moderne Märchen. Hamburg: Leopold Voss, 1890. ———. “When the Devil Took the Professor.” Translated by Willy Ley. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 4, no. 1 (January 1953): 52–62. Lindau, Hans. “Kurd Lasswitz.” Kantstudien 16, no. 7 (1911): 1–4 ———. “Kurd Lasswitz und seine modernen Märchen.” Nord und Süd (September 1903): 315–33. Paul, Jean. Werke. Edited by Norbert Miller. Munich: Hanser, 1962. Pissin, Raimund. “Lasswitz.” Die Nation, 3 December 1904, 153–54. Rottensteiner, Franz. “Kurd Lasswitz, a German Pioneer of Science Fiction.” In SF: The Other Side of Realism, edited by Thomas D. Clareson, 289–306. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971. ———. “Ordnungsliebend im Weltraum: Kurd Lasswitz.” In Polaris 1, edited by Franz Rottensteiner, 133–64. Frankfurt/Main: Insel Verlag, 1973. Ulshöfer, Robert. “Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: ‘Die Frühlingsfeier.” ’ In Die deutsche Lyrik, edited by Benno von Wiese. Düsseldorf: August Bagel Verlag, 1957. Usinger, Fritz. Tellurische und planetarische Dichtung. Mainz: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1964.

Afterword

This 1976 article drew on research that was incorporated into my PhD dissertation (Yale, 1979). That was then published in 1984, by Bowling Green Popular Press, under the much more sensationalistic title The Empire Strikes Out: Kurd Laßwitz, Hans Dominik, and the Development of German Science Fiction 1871–1945. A DAAD grant allowed me to add a chapter covering German sf from 1945 to nearly the time of publication, especially Herbert W. Franke, various other authors in both West and East Germany, and some particular features of German sf production, above all radio drama (Hörspiel), including the “binaural” or “synthetic head” (Kunstkopf ) stereo/3D recording technique. In 1978 I came to Portland State University, where I remain today, and pursued German sf, among other areas of literature and interdisciplinary studies. But very soon my chief professional interest turned to foreign-­language pedagogy, including the related fields of technology (software development), textbook writing, and assessment. Still, I maintained my contacts with Franke and occasionally taught courses in science fiction and also the interrelationship of science and technology with language 64 ]

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and literature. Often I combined old interests (sf, German literature) and new ones (language teaching, technology). I have taught German sf courses in which the students would translate, produce, stage, and record a radio drama, using German as their language of communication from initial choice of text through production planning, casting, and eventual presentation to an invited public. I have extended that approach, which in language pedagogy is termed “content-­based instruction,” to other courses unrelated to German sf. For ten years I have taught an upper-­level German course in which the students, always while using and improving their German, create “SpeakEasy,” an actual startup student-­run business. Its chief product is a line of multilingual greeting cards printed on paper made of recycled elephant poop, thus in a way recapitulating the theme of endangered environment and sustainable solutions now so prominent in sf. Another interest of my later and latter years, indeed related to science and to the German culture of my earliest study (and indeed its original focus on the Age of Goethe), has been my “Humboldt Project.” The HP is about the great German explorer of the New World, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)—once world famous, then obscure, now again gaining prominence in discussions of sustainable environmentalism. The aim of the HP is to use Humboldt’s multifaceted work in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and human rights to encourage better learning in the many K–12 schools named for him in North America: hands-­on, location- and community-­based learning, with maybe a little attention to language and literature. To further that end, and also the chief goal of my university (“Knowledge Serving the City”), I am now teaching a sophomore inquiry course titled “Origins of Sustainable Environmentalism: Alexander von Humboldt.” But I still “do” German sf. In 2006 I published an invited chapter, about Franke’s binaural stereo radio drama “Papa Joe & Co.” in the volume Literatur für leser (Peter Lang).



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• 4•

Monstrosity, Suffering, Subjectivity, and Sympathetic Community in Frankenstein and “The Structure of Torture” Josh Bernatchez Some historians of the genre have identified Mary Shelley’s memorable gothic tale Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) as the original “ur-­text” for all modern science fiction—an assertion that continues to be the subject of lively debate today. What remains undisputed, however, is that Shelley’s novel has generated a substantial amount of critical commentary by a wide range of scholars during the past few decades. The following essay, for example, takes a unique and interesting look at Shelley’s tragic “Creature” in the context of Elaine Scarry’s 1985 study of torture, identity, and social interaction. This essay originally appeared in SFS 36, no. 2 (July 2009): 205–16.

Mary Shelley’s 1818 version of Frankenstein displays a deep interest in how individual subjectivity arises out of a negotiated relationship with a broader social world. This interest is manifest in the Creature’s physical construction by Victor and is also mirrored in the failed attempts by the Creature to achieve sympathetic relationships. The exact structure of these failed attempts and the subsequent monstrousness of the Creature can be analyzed through the model provided by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985), in which Scarry argues that an individual’s perceptual world can be recoded by pain, which annihilates subjective identity by its systematic interruption and reversal of efforts at self-­extension—that is, the individual’s attempts 66 ]

at connection with others. In her chapter “The Structure of Torture,” Scarry dissects a fully formed and established subjectivity. Shelley’s Frankenstein offers an early science-­fiction creation myth that describes a creature who comes into being in an attempt to assert himself despite a social world that is as structurally antagonistic to his efforts as Scarry’s torture chamber is to a victim’s consciousness. Initially, Scarry’s interest in what is ultimately a very physical process may seem unrelated to the Creature’s succession of failed attempts at social communion. Nonetheless, the basis of comparison between The Body in Pain and Frankenstein is a compellingly similar conception of individual identity as being ontologically contingent on sympathetic social interaction. The development of the Creature in Frankenstein is informed by the theories about the relationship between individuals and their societies that were prevalent in Shelley’s era. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), for example, Adam Smith argued that the greatest hindrance to being a “good” person is any withdrawal of sympathy by the human community: “Human virtue is superior to pain, to poverty, to danger, and to death; nor does it even require its utmost efforts to despise them. But to have its misery exposed to insult and derision, to be led in triumph, to be set up for the hand of scorn to point at, is a situation in which its constancy is much more apt to fail” (83). In his “Theatricality of Moral Sentiments” (1984), David Marshall draws on the underlying imaginative function described by Smith, casting it in terms of theatrical performance and writing that Smith “is concerned with the inherent theatricality of both presenting a character before the eyes of the world and acting as a beholder to people who perform acts of solitude” (594). For Marshall, physical and psychological suffering and annihilation exist in a continuum; denying individuals the refuge of community can be destructive to their sense of self. The relationship between the physical and psychological components of a conscious being is, however, better articulated in the structural model provided by Scarry. Indeed, these concepts form the locus of interaction between Scarry’s ideas and those contemporary to, and rendered in, Shelley’s Frankenstein. Scarry’s model rests on the idea that there is a structural interdependence between physical comfort and the psychological well-­ being necessary to actualize human consciousness. She describes human consciousness as a product of civilization, in that civilization represents the large-­scale consideration of physical needs that precipitates human ­consciousness:

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There is nothing contradictory about the fact that the shelter is at once so graphic an image of the body and so emphatic an instance of civilisation: only because it is the first can it be the second. . . . In the details of its outer structure and in its furniture (from “furnir,” meaning “to further” or “to forward,” to project oneself outward), the room accommodates and thereby eliminates from human attention the human body: the simple triad of floor, chair and bed . . . makes spatially and therefore steadily visible the collection of postures and positions the body moves in and out of, objectifies the three locations within the body that most frequently hold the body’s weight, objectifies, finally, its need to become wholly forgetful of its weight, to move weightlessly into a larger mindfulness. As the elemental room is multiplied into a house of rooms and the house into a city of houses, the body is carried forward into each successive intensification of c­ ivilisation. (39) Torture reverses this outward, creative progression, because all the self-­ extending markers of civilization are recoded, becoming sources of pain and forcing people back into their own bodily sensations. In conformity with Scarry’s model, Mary Shelley’s abandoned Creature relates his early experiences as arduous. He is driven to fulfill basic bodily needs and to save himself from suffering: “oppressed by cold,” for instance, he is forced to seek shelter in a shepherd’s hut (130). He describes the hut as being “as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandemonium appeared to the daemons of hell after their sufferings” (132), comparing himself to Milton’s Satan, another outcast (who is, however, surrounded by a community, his army, even in exile). The Creature’s respite in the hut is very brief, however: he is rejected from potential fellowship and treated as a transgressor, long before any malevolent action on his part, as the panic-­stricken shepherd flees the hut, running across the countryside on a maimed leg. The Creature, continuing his progression of expanding self-­extension as set out by Scarry, moves outward toward successively larger emblems of civilization, from a hut of one room to a town of many houses. He describes his hopefulness at sighting a village: “How miraculous did this appear! The huts, the neater cottages, and stately houses, engaged my admiration by turns” (132). Yet his attempt to enter a civilized space is again met with a forceful exclusion: “the whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked [him], until, grievously bruised [he] escaped” (132). In the Creature’s narrative, representations of civilization are recoded as sources of anguish. The village attacks him, just as Scarry writes of the torture process in which “civilization is brought to the prisoner and in his presence annihilated in 68 ]

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the very process by which it is being made to annihilate him” (44). Artifacts that embody civilization (tables, chairs, walls) are recoded as implements of pain: things to be beaten with or against, like “the conversion of a refrigerator into a bludgeon” (41). To understand both how these physical assaults on the Creature translate into assaults on his identity, and to examine Scarry’s arguments that support this idea, it is necessary to recognize that torture is ostensibly a recourse necessitated by an impasse in a verbal interrogation. This verbal component structures torture because it demands that the victims be complicit in their own self-­annihilation by “betraying themselves.” Scarry asks why we commonly use the word “betrayal” when describing the forced confession resulting from torture. Ostensibly, the word is appropriate because it implies that the elicited response typically requires that victims undermine their sense of self by “betraying” their secrets, their families, or their organizations. Scarry argues, however, that in such a context the term becomes absurd: “One cannot betray or be false to something that has ceased to exist and, in the most literal way possible, the created world of thought and feeling, all the psychological and mental content that constitutes both one’s self and one’s world, and that gives rise to and is in turn made possible by language, ceases to exist” (30). Scarry asserts that the content of the question or answer is often irrelevant, since the regime does not need the information, already possesses it, or the victim does not have it. What is crucial is “the form of the answer, the fact of . . . answering” (29). The torture scenario is the performance of “the fiction of power” (27). It is empty, because all the act really exhibits is cruelty. “The question,” writes Scarry, “whatever its content, is an act of wounding; the answer, whatever its content, is a scream” (46). The narrative trajectory of the Creature’s life can be interpreted as an implicit response to the implicit question: “what are you?” The interrogation demands of the Creature that he betray himself—confess, against his aspirations for self-­creation, virtue, and recognition, that “I am a monster.” This verbal component of torture played out in Frankenstein is, effectively, a naming contest. At the moment of his first sympathetic interaction, the Creature refers to old De Lacey’s family as “your fellow-­Creatures” (159), placing them all in a common category that excludes himself. He uses the phrase “thy Creature” (125) when speaking of himself to Victor, always in opposition to the designation of “monster” and always implying a shared culpability in his “misdeeds.” 1 Conversely, Victor calls him a “devil,” a “daemon,” or a “monster” (125). Victor refuses to use a name that would link his creation to any shared community or category. The conflict between the

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two can be interpreted as a semiotic battle between Victor, representative of human community in general, and the Creature, in search of identity and social niche. This naming contest and its structure extend beyond interactions with Victor. The human versus monster binary is also mirrored in the tension between the physical and the verbal or mental. In Scarry’s model, victims are forced into the suffering of their physical bodies, capable only of animal responses; their voices, the ultimate sign of human self-­extension and community, are appropriated by their torturers. This process plays out repeatedly in Frankenstein as the Creature is entrapped and isolated in his own body. When he is caught by young Felix De Lacey in a potentially successful and classical gesture of supplication, touching the knees of Felix’s blind father and reaching upward, the Creature recounts the moment as one of anguish: “Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? . . . Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground, and struck me with a stick. . . . I saw him on the point of repeating his blow, when, overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage” (160). The Creature, in the verbal forum, begins to be successful in achieving a sympathetic response, but is ultimately denied it because of young De Lacey’s rejection of the ugliness of his body. Over the course of events, Frankenstein’s Creature explicitly describes a sense of his body as the root of his isolation: “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal” (242; emphasis added). The passage identifies the contrast between the Creature’s “excellent qualities” (human), which would endear him to social beings, and his degraded (animalistic) state. Scarry’s text emphasizes “the opposition of body and voice” (45). She discusses a story by Jean-­Paul Sartre in which a condemned character “perceives the body as an ‘enormous vermin’ to which he is tied, a colossus to which he is bound but with which he feels no kinship” (31). This is one of the opening anecdotes in “The Structure of Torture” and defines the bodily estrangement fostered by torture, in which the physical aspect of a condemned man’s consciousness is systematically turned against him. Once the victim’s voice has been set against the victim himself, the next stage in Scarry’s model is the appropriation of the victim’s suffering and right to sympathy. As a victim’s consciousness is pushed far from his communally conferred identity and far back into painful bodily sensations, a 70 ]

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parallel distancing occurs between torturer and victim. It is true that the Creature is not subject to the premeditated plan of a single torturer, yet this role is nonetheless filled at critical junctures, often by Victor, who always insists on his categorical moral distance from his creation. Victor responds to the Creature’s civil first attempts to communicate with him by saying, “Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me” (126). The Creature, meanwhile, insists that he is of the same essential nature as humans, that his “soul” glows “with love and humanity” (126), and that he is capable of virtue. At the end of the novel he recounts that “when [he] first sought [sympathy], it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which [his] whole being overflowed, that [he] wished to be participated” (242). The word “participated” exemplifies the idea that virtue is a capacity that must be exercised in conjunction with others and is stifled in isolation. Victor denies his Creature’s needs when he insists that “there can be no community” between them because the Creature is fiendish and undeserving of compassion. Victor compounds the problem when he destroys the female companion, denying his creation an alternate community. He initially agrees to create her, conceding that “there was some justice in his [the Creature’s] argument” (170) and that “his tale, and the feelings he . . . expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensation” (170). Yet the Creature’s categorical monstrosity is finally cited as justification for Victor’s destruction of the female. Aside from the psychological pain inflicted on victims by denying their claims to community and therefore any claims to sympathy or rescue, the process of distancing also has a psychological effect on the torturer. A major concern of Scarry’s text is the question of how “one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it . . . to the point where he himself . . . goes on inflicting it” (12). Her answer is that a radical act of distancing interrupts natural sympathetic responses in the torturer: “it prevents the mind from ever getting to a place where it would have to make” a comparison between torturer and victim (59). Suggesting a parallel between the distancing of torturer from victim and consciousness from body, Scarry writes that “all those ways in which the torturer dramatizes his opposition to and distance from the prisoner are ways of dramatizing his distance from the body” and that “the most radical act of distancing resides in his disclaiming of the other’s hurt” (57). Taken to this extreme, the act of distancing becomes the torturer’s own act of appropriating the right to suffer. To illustrate, Scarry relates a victim’s description of German concentration camp guards who testified that they would shoot prisoners were it

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not for the expense of the bullets. This would produce no intelligible effect on the victims, but rather indicated that the guards were being forced to pay for every expended bullet. Describing Himmler’s strategy for conditioning guards, Scarry quotes Hanna Arendt, who writes that “instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders” (Arendt 106). So indoctrinated, individuals can perpetrate inhuman crimes, because torture reinforces in the individual the aggressor-­state’s assumption of justification and superiority. That Victor has appropriated suffering as a means and justification for the continued infliction of pain on the Creature is evident in this speech: “you have made me wretched beyond expression. You have left me no power to consider whether I am just to you, or not” (Shelley 127). Even though Victor has been integral to the creation of the situation he bemoans, he insists that he alone is the innocent sufferer; he denies the Creature’s right to sympathy or justice. It is worth noting that an analysis based on Scarry’s model does not allow the Creature to be characterized as innocent; any such argument is eroded by the text. For the Creature in his turn often tortures Victor: “slave. . . . Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you” (192). Scarry’s morally unambiguous model is not fully coextensive with Shelley’s protean fiction. Yet even though the evil perpetrated by the Creature complicates the full application of Scarry’s ideas, the framework she provides does offer two distinct but related avenues for reconciling Shelley’s ambiguity, although we are still missing analogues for two elements of Scarry’s model. First, we have not seen the actual “confession,” which Scarry says that “whatever its content, is a scream.” Second, we have yet to see any means of escape or rehabilitation for the victim. Both of these are accounted for in Scarry, and both have curiously linked analogues in Frankenstein. To see how Scarry’s confession-­scream is played out, it is useful to turn to a question asked by Chris Baldick: Why is Frankenstein’s creature, given that Victor “selected his features as beautiful” (Shelley 85) and assembled them to create a beautiful form, so ugly that Victor, at first sight, reports that “horror and disgust filled [his] heart” (85)? Baldick bases his answer tentatively on a problem in aesthetic and social theory contemporary with the writing of Frankenstein—a conceptual gap between a whole and the sum of its parts. He draws on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction between 72 ]

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the assembling function of Fancy and the unifying, harmonizing Imagination, which makes something whole and beautiful: “[T]he beauty of the whole can arise only from a pure vital principle within, to which all subordinate parts and limbs will then conform. The parts, in a living being, can only be as beautiful as the animating principle which organizes them, and if this ‘spark of life’ proceeds, as it does in Victor’s creation, from tormented isolation and guilty secrecy, the resulting assembly will only animate and body forth that condition and display its moral ugliness” (Baldick 35). Bal­ dick relates the moral crisis that generates the Creature’s ugliness to Johann Christof Friedrich Schiller’s notion of the fractured human subject. Quoting Schiller, Baldick writes: Modern society is but “an ingenious mechanism” made from “the piecing together of innumerable but lifeless parts.” In Schiller’s diagnosis, an advanced division of labour has dismembered the human personality so completely into distinct faculties that “one has to go the rounds from one individual to another in order to piece together a complete image of the species.” Now that the individual has become just a stunted fragment, society can be little more than a monstrous aggregation of incomplete parts. (34–35) Schiller describes in contemporary life a reciprocal degradation of the individual and also of society at large. The problem is more clearly (if perhaps reductively) articulated by Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, in Political Justice (1793): “Man is a social animal. How far he is necessarily so will appear if we consider the sum of advantages resulting from the social, and to which he would be deprived in the solitary state” (386). The tentative answer to Baldick’s question about the root of the Creature’s ugliness (physical and moral) is, we begin to see, an anxiety contemporary with Mary Shelley about the absence of social cohesion. The Creature adamantly refuses to be treated as an absence. As Denise Gigante writes: This via negativa of aesthetic theory . . . will not suffice as a hermeneutic mode to account for the positive ugliness of Mary Shelley’s creature. If the ugly object lacks beauty, the Creature, as the aesthetic object of Frankenstein’s “unhallowed arts” . . . functions more actively than lack. He not only fails to please, he emphatically displeases. . . . Contrary to the . . . argument that conceives ugliness as the defective mode of beauty, as its distortion, one should assert the ontological primacy of ugliness: it is beauty that is a kind of defence against the

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Ugly in its repulsive existence—or, rather, against existence tout court, since . . . what is ugly is ultimately the brutal fact of existence (of the real) as such. (566) Gigante goes on to state that the conception of the ugly as a lack is a failure of aesthetic theory, a sort of willful ignorance in which “aesthetic theory itself turns away, shrinking back, rejecting, and (in Kant’s terms) setting its face against” (579) that which is called ugly. A thing becomes “ugly” because its positive existence is denied due to its conflict with accepted patterns. If we understand the Creature’s moral ugliness to have been produced by a community’s refusal to grant positive recognition, and yet reject that ugliness is the manifestation of a lack, we must conclude that the ugliness signifies something beyond itself: pain. The Creature never offers a literal confession in the text, but he does seem to concede the point that he is a monster implicitly through his crimes. If we take Scarry’s formulation to heart, this confession of monstrosity, like any other such confession, is a scream. And what is a scream? In this framework, a scream is the instinctual attempt to extend the experience of pain into the world, to force its common recognition. Adjectives traditionally used to describe a scream, such as “blood-­curdling,” “heart-­wrenching,” and “bone-­chilling,” remind us that a scream recreates in anyone who hears it some of the pain felt by the screamer. The sound itself is disturbing, irrespective of any abstract compassion or sympathy one might feel (or fail to feel) for the screamer. The Creature’s more heinous actions, for all intents and purposes, may make him a true monster, but it is important to note that he is not irretrievably so. He consistently displays the capacity and drive to be something else. As he says, “[he] had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn” (192), and there is something compelling about his complaint. Throughout the Creature’s development we see him work toward achieving his noble aspirations. Scarry’s model identifies separate patterns for rehabilitating a person’s identity as well as its dissection. In Frankenstein, however, we see these two processes superimposed. The Creature is constantly beaten back into his body, but this happens precisely at junctures where he has contrived opportunities for outward self-­extension. He attempts to communicate, to participate in community, to find recognition, and to escape the isolation of his own frame, actions that can be mapped onto Scarry’s model for the rehabilitation of a victim: As torture consists of acts that magnify the way in which pain destroys a person’s world, self, and voice, so these other acts that restore the 74 ]

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voice become not only a denunciation of the pain but almost a diminution of the pain, a partial reversal of the process of torture itself. An act of human contact and concern . . . provides the hurt person with worldly self-­extension: in acknowledging and expressing another person’s pain, or in articulating one of his nonbodily concerns while he is unable to, one human being who is well and free willingly turns himself into an image of the other’s psychic or sentient claims, an image existing in the space outside the sufferer’s body . . . until the sufferer himself regains his own powers of self-­extension. By . . . giving the pain a place in the world, sympathy lessens the power of sickness and pain, counteracts the force with which a person in great pain or sickness can be swallowed alive by the body. (50) All the Creature’s actions constitute an attempt to achieve what in Scarry’s model would lead toward rehabilitation and a return to human consciousness. That the Creature relates his development in such vivid detail suggests that he is endowed from “birth” with a fully formed rational consciousness. His tale begins: “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being: all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct” (128). While the Creature relates the sense of confusion, he also describes that confusion with detail usually only available to a fully functioning, analytic mind. He even describes the confusion itself: “a strange multiplicity of sensation seized me . . . and it was . . . a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses” (128). He displays, for a being who is in effect an infant, an excellent understanding of the world: “Before [he] had quitted [Victor’s] apartment, on a sensation of cold, [he] had covered [him]self with some clothes” (129). The newly sentient Creature recognizes cold and then, by dressing, applies a typically learned response to the problem. Finally, prior to acquiring language, the Creature knows what language is and understands its function. He recounts that “thoughts [of interacting with the cottagers] exhilarated [him], and led [him] to apply with fresh ardour to the acquiring of the art of language” (141). Though he has been denied the benefits of social interaction, innate abilities lead the Creature outward in a quest for community and self-­extension. The creature is initially composed out of other human beings; as a created object, he is a metaphor for the dependence of the individual on a community, for he is an individual composed of many other individuals. Likewise, the Creature’s preternatural consciousness, which suggests that

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his mental being is already composed of the faculties of others, drives him toward a moment the Creature himself identifies as one of creation: The old man paused, and then continued, “If you will unreservedly confide to me the particulars of your tale, I perhaps may be of use in undeceiving them. . . .” “Excellent man! I thank you, and accept your generous offer. You raise me from the dust by this kindness; and I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow-­ Creatures. (159; emphasis added) As noted in Macdonald and Scherf ’s edition, the phrase “you raise me from the dust” is an allusion to the moment in Milton’s Paradise Lost when Adam is giving their creation as a reason why he and Eve are indebted to God. This second (verbal) instance of creation in Shelley’s text is the only interaction in which the Creature is not perceived as ugly. This can be attributed to the blindness of his interlocutor, but it is telling that the Creature’s ugliness is invisible at the precise moment when he is offered tentative admission into a community. This is chronologically the first instance in his narrative where the Creature uses his voice to convey his thoughts to another being. In referring to the “society and sympathy of [De Lacey’s] fellow-­Creatures,” this conversation also marks the Creature’s first attempt to imply that he and humans are “creatures” all—the same in kind. Finally, this scene marks the moment when the Creature begins to consider himself categorically alienated from the human community; after Felix’s beating he reports that “[his] protectors had departed, and had broken the only link that held [him] to the world” (162). Once this link is severed, the Creature sets out to track down and persecute Victor. The Creature’s actions to this point were accompanied by sincere attempts at a positive engagement with society. He first tried to help the De Lacey family anonymously, hoping that by “gentle demeanour and conciliating words, [he] should first win their favour, and afterwards their love” (140). Even after his disappointment, there were still moments of altruism, such as his efforts to save a child, that were requited with gunshots. After his failure with the De Laceys, however, the Creature moves toward more violent actions. Yet at first his purpose remains the same: to form a community. He tries to force Victor to create for him a being that, in parallel with Scarry’s model, can acknowledge “the other’s psychic or sentient claims” and act like an “image existing in the space outside the sufferer’s body” 76 ]

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(50). To this end, the Creature demands of Victor a mate “with whom [he] can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for [his] being” (Shelley 168). Denied, the Creature begs, “Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing” (170). At this point, the request for sympathy constitutes a plea for life. Denied any opportunity to communicate, defeated by his own body, the Creature is driven to self-­hatred. Scarry writes that “if self-­hatred, self-­ alienation and self-­betrayal . . . were translated out of the psychological realm where it has content and is accessible to language into the unspeakable and contentless realm of physical sensation it would be intense pain” (47). The Creature reveals just such a painful consciousness to Walton: “You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself ” (243). All the Creature’s crimes serve to attest to the monstrosity attributed to him. The violence of his suffering, exceeding Scarry’s model of the torture chamber, culminates in his taking charge of his own annihilation. The Creature, who in his last words reveals his intent to immolate himself, says that “when the images which the world affords first opened upon me . . . and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?” (244). Beginning with his first crime, the Creature moves simultaneously toward achieving both his and Victor’s annihilation. Upon Victor’s death, the Creature says that “in his murder my crimes are consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close” (240), suggesting a coextensive relationship between his creator and himself that is only actualized in death. The main difficulty in applying Scarry’s model to Frankenstein is the perpetration by the Creature of premeditated crimes against the innocent. One example is the misery he forces on Justine, yet even in this crime there is an attempt at self-­extension. Justine’s fate, sealed by “circumstantial evidence” (112)—and in which a clear case of coerced confession and annihilation is played out in conformity to Scarry’s model—provides a reprise of the Creature’s plight orchestrated by the Creature himself. Baldick suggests that Justine, accused of murdering the Creature’s first victim, becomes a stand-­in for the Creature: “The Genevese court . . . is tricked into doing what Victor finally refuses to do for his Creature: it makes a female ‘monster’ of Justine, and the priest even comes close to convincing Justine of her monstrous nature . . . forcing her to confess falsely to the murder. Only by staging parodies of the injustice he suffers can the monster reproduce his outcast kind; so long as there are victims, he is not altogether alone” (53).

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Justine, named a monster and condemned by the “popular voice” (Shelley 111) of her community, is “threatened and menaced” into confessing, on pain of “excommunication” (113), to being the child-­killing monster. In one of her final acts she reports: “I did confess; but I confessed a lie. I confessed that I might obtain absolution; but now that falsehood lies heavier at my heart than all my other sins” (113). Scarry writes that during the torture process, “the torturers are producing a mime in which the one annihilated shifts to being the agent of his own annihilation” (47); Justine, falsely admitting her guilt, justifies her own execution. While Justine participates, it is only to acquiesce to a prejudgment made by the judges over which she has no other control. She is no willing stand-­in for the Creature. In fact, she serves to highlight the Creature’s categorically irredeemable nature in contrast to her own access to contrition and absolution. This practice reintegrates even “the most depraved of human creatures” (120) into the Christian community in their last moments, a right to which the creature has no recourse.2 Of course, Justine is innocent, and the only guilt in the events is shared by the judges and the Creature who has orchestrated the events. If we accept that the creature himself is the victim of torture, however, then we can also implicate his torturers by extension. Victor, notably, feels guilt and responsibility for Justine’s plight and understands himself as having caused her death. He expresses compassion for her, which, she says, “removes more than half [her] misfortune” (114) and “consoles” her even though she is to “suffer ignominy and death” (113). Victor also decides that his contempt for the “monsters” of the convicting court is “unjust” (120) given the circumstances. But in spite of his complicity, he can extend no sympathy to the Creature or acknowledge responsibility for his suffering. The one aspect of Scarry’s model that is still lacking an analogue in Frankenstein is a containing torture chamber, apart, that is, from the world itself. This fact, in conjunction with the superimposed attempts at rehabilitation and torture, accounts for many of the text’s moral ambiguities. The untapped possibilities hinted at in Frankenstein are signaled in the structure of the text, a matter emphasized in Elanor Salotto’s examination of overlapping multiple narratives in Frankenstein. “The text is involved in a dialectic between presenting the self and the subsequent absenting of the self. The artificial assemblage of the body parts of the creature signifies that body and narrative parts are productions to be put on. And Shelley rearranges those parts to suggest a new assemblage of fictional selves continually wandering away from origins. . . .” (200). The multiplicity of narrative voices ensures each speaker’s liberty and versatility.3 Pertinent to this 78 ]

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discussion is the idea of the self as something that can be inserted, hidden, and expressed through other voices. The difference between Scarry’s torture chamber and the experience of the Creature is the inevitability of the outcome. As Walton recounts, “I shut my eyes involuntarily, and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties. . . . I called on him [the Creature] to stay” (240). Walton, even though indoctrinated against the Creature by Victor, is able to restrain his visceral response and to converse with the Creature. The only difference between Walton and any other interlocutor is that he has access to Victor’s narrative, which serves to prepare him against shock. And yet the resulting interaction is not undercut by rejection or violence. The scene suggests that the exiled Creature of Frankenstein has simply been in constant need of an introduction. The subtitle of Scarry’s book is “The Making and Unmaking of the World,” significantly not “the unmaking and remaking”; Scarry’s model teaches us something general about our relationship with our world and the communities through which it is formed. In Shelley’s open-­ended novel, the Creature does not die in the text; his annihilation is only suggested as his form is “lost in darkness and distance” (Shelley 244), and the problem he represents continues beyond the text. The question we are left with: If we find the Creature to be sympathetic in his noble aspirations, pitiable in his loneliness, coerced by the terrible pain inflicted on him, and yet “monstrous” for his premeditated actions, what does that mean for our understanding of the boundaries of individual identity? The difficulty in assigning any unilateral culpability in Frankenstein, in spite of the usefulness of Scarry’s model in the text’s structural tensions, suggests that all members (and would-­be members) of a community bear responsibility for the world they collectively create. Notes

1. The exception that proves the rule is the Creature’s association with the word “wretch,” which according to the OED, once specifically denoted “an exile.” 2. It is interesting to note that the theme recurs later in the text: the Creature, apostrophizing the deceased Victor, asks, “what does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me?” (Shelley 240). 3. Salotto is concerned with developing a feminist reading of Frankenstein in which the multiplicity of narrative voice is cast as a means for a female writer to resist restrictive classifications. While the political implications of the argument cannot be dealt with here, this idea of a decentralized identity that resists categorization is clearly pertinent.



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Works Cited

Arendt, Hanna. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977. Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-­ Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Gigante, Denise. “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein.” EL: English Literary History 67, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 565–87. Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness. 1793. 3rd ed. 1978. Edited by F. E. L. Priestly. Vol. 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946. Marshall, David. “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments.” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 592–613. Macdonald, D. L., and Kathleen Scherf. “Introduction.” Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, 11–38. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2003. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667. In John Milton: The Complete Poems. Edited by John Leonard. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998. Salotto, Elanor. “Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity.” Journal of Narrative Technique 23 (Fall 1994): 190–211. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2003. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000.

Afterword

My career has changed tack since I wrote the preceding essay. The research and analysis I am a part of now is related to current events rather than literary study. Both Shelley and Scarry taught me the imperative for compassion and appreciation of nuance and exercised my capacity for understanding the human condition and the world it is perpetually unmaking and remaking. These lessons very much shape how I understand emerging patterns. Studying literature always had a very personal relevance for me, and the work never stops. Shelley’s Frankenstein came at a time when the world seemed on the cusp of altering the fundamental governing parameters of its world through changes brought about by science and reason: indeed it imagines a world where science can encroach on the domain of death and change the underlying nature of mortality. What this myth of scientific creation yields to us is a very human monster and a very monstrous human vying against each other. Though not phrased as such, Scarry’s The Body in Pain is very much about human monsters and how they operate. The book takes the tools we usually apply to the study of literature and explores the world-­destroying structures of torture that allow the monstrous to enact their monstrosity. The interaction of the two texts gives us a model of how monsters are created and recreate themselves. Almost two centuries after Frankenstein was written we still live 80 ]

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in a world that, irrespective of staggering developments, is full of human monsters. We have a vested interest in learning the science of monstrosity, just as we have a vested interest in virology. Great literature and great theory can change us if we let them broaden our limited understanding of the possibilities of existence. If we can imagine ourselves as monsters we can imagine monsters as persons. That isn’t to say that monsters are just misunderstood or that people are simply the victims of the world that created them: that would be a drastic oversimplification. But if monsters are created by the interactions of people it reinforces that we all bear responsibility for their making. Responsibility implies agency, which brings us to the central lesson of science fiction: the world can be different. If we are very diligent, very self-­aware, and very lucky, it could even be better.



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• 5•

Science Fiction vs. Scientific Fiction in France From Jules Verne to J.-H. Rosny Aîné Arthur B. Evans This synoptic survey of early French sf was the first to examine the semiotic evolution of the genre in France from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. A comparison of the role of science in the narrative recipe of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires and the works of later French sf writers such as Gustave Le Rouge, Albert Robida, and J.-H. Rosny Aîné reveals structural differences so fundamental that Verne’s novels should perhaps be labeled “scientific fiction” instead of science fiction. This essay originally appeared in SFS 44, no. 1 (March 1988): 1–11.

When discussing the nineteenth-­century roots of modern French science fiction (sf ), literary historians tend to cite Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires as the generic starting point for this particular brand of fiction. Such assertions suffer from reductionism; they are almost always based on a number of loosely defined thematic resemblances rather than on any rigorous examination of the narratological functioning of these texts. Instead of a primitive variant of a later genre (satisfying the literary historian’s need for origins and species continuity), Verne’s romans scientifiques should be viewed as what they were and are—the first important examples of scientific fiction in Western literature, quite distinct from sf. The difference between these two literary cousins might be most succinctly illustrated by analyzing the role played by science itself in the discursive structure of these texts: that is, the manner in which a sustained scientific discourse is grafted onto a literary one. Scientific fiction, as in the 82 ]

case of Verne, presumes a predominantly pedagogical function for such scientific discourse; it is oriented toward the implantation of more or less factual scientific knowledge. Science fiction (in the case of Robida and Rosny Aîné, for instance) utilizes science—or, quite frequently, pseudoscience— for purely fictional purposes; it is used primarily as a catalyst for plot progression and special effects, as a verisimilitude builder, and as a means for creating a kind of Brechtian “estrangement” in the reader. The didactic discourse of scientific fiction rarely varies: it is linear, accumulative, reductive, “non-­distancing,” highly mimetic, generally nominative, and deductively one-­dimensional in its hermeneutic structure. The fictional discourse of sf, by contrast, uses a wide variety of different possible reader-­text dialectics, reflecting the very heterogeneous nature of this genre. For example, in its satiric mode (e.g., Robida), it is playfully non-­mimetic, purposely oxymoronic, and socially—as opposed to scientifically—proselytizing in nature. In its fantastic mode (e.g., Le Rouge), it is obscurantist, impressionistic, and sometimes even metaphysical. In its speculative mode (e.g., Rosny Aîné), it is most often nonmimetic, paradigmatically pluri-­dimensional, and inductive in its narrative structure. In all cases, sf does not seek to teach science through/with fiction, but rather to develop fiction through/with science. The raison d’être of science in the narrative process itself shifts from primary position to secondary, from subject to context. It seeks no longer to address the reasoning intellect but rather the creative imagination. To illustrate these general principles, I now propose to examine somewhat more closely this historical evolution of scientific fiction into science fiction by considering some French texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—texts drawn from works by the above-­mentioned authors. My discussion will focus primarily on the slowly changing role of science in the signifying structure of these texts. And I will argue for using the narratological parameter of didactic discourse as a kind of litmus test for distinguishing between these two scientifico-­literary genres. First, let us consider a rather typical passage of scientific pedagogy from Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires (the selection of these examples being dictated as much by their brevity as by their typicality—most of Verne’s pedagogical passages are much longer, often continuing for many pages at a time). The following is taken from De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865), where Michel Ardan is explaining the technical feasibility of a continuous fresh air supply inside Barbicane’s space capsule: The matters of food and lighting having been resolved, there remained the question of the air supply. . . . It would be necessary to constantly

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renew the air inside the capsule. How? By a very simple procedure invented by Reiset and Regnault and outlined by Michel Ardan during the discussions of the meeting. As we know, air is composed principally of 21 parts oxygen to 79 parts nitrogen. And what occurs during respiration? A quite simple phenomenon. Man absorbs the oxygen of the air . . . and exhales the nitrogen. The exhaled air loses approximately 5 percent of its oxygen, replaced by an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide which is produced by the combustion taking place between the blood and the oxygen inhaled. So, in an enclosed space and after a period of time, all the oxygen is replaced by carbon dioxide, a gas that is essentially toxic. The question comes down to this: . . . (1) to replenish the oxygen, (2) to get rid of the exhaled carbon dioxide. Both are easily accomplished by means of potassium chlorate and potash. Potassium chlorate is a kind of salt that takes the form of white flakes; when brought to a temperature above 400 degrees, it changes into potassium chloride, and the oxygen that it contains is released. . . . So much for replenishing the oxygen. As for the potash, it hungers for the carbon dioxide mixed in the air, and one need simply shake it to absorb the former and create potassium bicarbonate. So much for the carbon dioxide. In combining these two procedures, one can be sure that the vitiated air in the capsule would be made breathable. Two chemists, MM. Reiset and Regnault, have successfully experimented with this. But, it must also be noted that until now all their experiments have taken place in anima vili. However precise their results, exactly how this procedure would work on humans was as yet unknown. (306–9, this and all other translations are mine) This passage is quite representative of Verne’s scientific pedagogy. It is integrated—or, rather, inserted en bloc—into the text through authoritative indirect discourse using one of the main characters of the novel as a discursive stepping-­stone. The explanation is clear, concise, and comprehensive, and it is structured very logically for immediate understanding. And the facility of the “lesson” itself is underscored again and again. The textual function of the names of the scientists is to supplement the technical authoritativeness of the theories presented while also serving as a kind of effet de réel to build verisimilitude. Further, the inclusion of certain other phatic devices such as the “As we know” (extremely typical of Verne) enhances the persuasiveness of the text by assuming an a priori knowledge of the fun84 ] A rth ur B. E vans

damentals of chemistry on the part of the reader/listener. But, of course, this does not prevent the narrator from reiterating just the same all the scientific details of what “we” supposedly already know! And the concluding reference to the “still-­in-­the-­experimental-­stage” nature of the proposed technology serves to anchor the passage in historical actuality as well as to add a measure of suspense to the ensuing plot. It acts, moreover, an authorial insurance policy for Verne himself, just in case this particular piece of technological extrapolation never materializes in the real world (as it never would, of course, because—“as we know”—Verne’s basic premise concerning the chemical composition of air is incorrect: he, and Messrs. Reiset and Regnault, are proceeding from the chemical principles formulated earlier in the century by Lavoisier—principles proven erroneous only in the 1880s and 1890s, about twenty years after Verne wrote De la Terre à la Lune and after which he no longer mentions the feasibility of such a device). The next quotation is from Paul d’Ivoi’s La Diane de l’Archipel (Diane of the Archipelago, also known as Jean Fanfare), published in 1897 as part of d’Ivoi’s continuing series called (very suggestively) the Voyages Excentriques. The scientific pedagogy displayed in d’Ivoi’s narratives, while less overtly elaborated than in Verne’s (i.e., occupying less textual “space”) continues nevertheless to play an important role in his individual fictional recipe. Following the same general “travel and learn” narrative format used in Verne’s immensely successful Voyages Extraordinaires, these novels were part of the massive influx of didactic adventure stories (oriented principally toward youth) that penetrated the French publishing market during the final years of the nineteenth century and the pre–World War I years of the twentieth. As we shall see, the twenty-­one novels of d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentriques provide both a thematic and narratological transition between Verne’s generally cautious scientific didacticism and the more fanciful fictions of Le Rouge, Robida, and Rosny Aîné. In this excerpt, the heroes are being introduced to the marvels of the “Karrovarka,” a kind of armor-­plated home-­on-­wheels (a typically Vernian vehicle). Powered by electricity, it features, among its other wonders, an air-­ filtration system similar to that previously described in De la Terre à la Lune: “For the moment, dear sirs,” he said softly, “I will add only this: You can be assured of hygienically pure air in your sleeping quarters. So that its purity remains at 100 percent, it is essential that the air not vitiate like in the bedrooms of people who are sedentary. . . . In order to accomplish this, I crack open the valve of this metal receptacle attached to the rear partition. It is a tank of oxygen. This salutary gas will flow drop by

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drop, replacing that used by your lungs. There are imperceptible perforations in the floor of your compartment, connecting it with one in the rear of the Karrovarka. Located therein are trays of potash which, as we know, is always hungry for carbon dioxide and exerts a veritable attraction on it. In other words, your air will automatically cleanse itself of those products of combustion which are likely to vitiate.” “Marvelous!” exclaimed Jean. (224) Here, the parallels with Verne’s text are unmistakable—even to the epithet “hungry” and the “as we know” that almost seems to prompt the reader’s recall of Verne’s novel of thirty years earlier. But what is truly interesting is the extent to which this same piece of scientific pedagogy is now muted and made secondary to the fiction itself. The technology portrayed is no longer essential to maintaining the lives of the protagonists; it is now a simple hygienic convenience. The chemical composition of air and the mechanics of respiration are no longer explained in detail but simply passed over as “this salutary gas” and “those products of combustion.” And Verne’s “potassium chlorate,” originally brought along to produce oxygen, completely disappears—to be replaced by a “tank of oxygen.” Could it be, given the date of the text, that d’Ivoi was aware of the scientific advances made in this field since Verne’s time? Perhaps. By 1895, the British inventor William Hampson and the German physicist Carl Lindé had discovered how to liquefy oxygen, and it had already entered into common commercial use. But it is much more likely that d’Ivoi simply wished to relocate the focus of his text away from scientific didacticism per se and more on the results that such science could offer his “eccentric” fictions in terms of exoticism, plot progression, and ideological phatics in general. In other words, d’Ivoi chose to adopt Verne’s overall narratological prototype but then toned down its (sometimes pedantic) pedagogical character. This phenomenon—where the role of science is changed from subject to object, from being the primary subject of the plot into being an object that functions as an accessory to the plot—is even more pronounced in many of Gustave Le Rouge’s novels. The following passage is from La Princesse des Airs (The Princess of the Skies, 1902), the title of which is taken from the name of a flying machine that incorporates the futuristic technology of Verne’s balloon and airplane narratives, and more. Among its other gadgets, one finds a similar air-­supply system: The outer shell of the Princess of the Skies was constructed to be hermetically sealed. 86 ] A rth ur B. E vans

A system of rubber membranes could be placed along the edges of the doors, shutting off all contact with the exterior atmosphere. This mechanism had been adopted so as to permit flying at great altitudes. In that event, the travelers would be able to breathe thanks to liquid air; huge tanks containing chemical substances similar to potash would be placed here and there to absorb the carbon dioxide produced by respiration and to purify the air in the cabin. (259–60) Here, however, the bottled oxygen has become “liquid air” and the absorption chemical an unnamed substance described as “similar to potash.” “Liquid air” was the common, nonscientific name given to liquefied oxygen around the turn of the century; and by using such a term, Le Rouge is not only moving his discourse from a technical to a vernacular mode, but is also taking full advantage of the exotic oxymoronic qualities that the word itself adds to his fiction. Le Rouge tends to come back to this particular item again and again in his narrative whenever a deus ex machina scientific solution is needed to shore up verisimilitude or to heighten melodrama. For example, in his initial description of the Princess, the inventor Alban points out: “The aircraft would remain airborne only because of its speed. As soon as it was slowed down, it would, because of its massive weight, fall like a stone. I solved this problem by installing around the perimeter of the aircraft a series of steel cylinders filled with liquid air with the valves pointing downward. When I release the liquid air, the upward thrust it delivers to the aircraft allows the Princess to land with the grace and the gentleness of a butterfly alighting on a flower” (75). Here, liquid air serves as a kind of retro-­rocket to break the fall of the landing aircraft. And in the following passage, when they are forced to make a crash landing in the Himalayas and a youthful passenger is near death due to injuries received, it is again liquid air that saves the day: “All that’s left to try,” thought Alban, “is a high energy procedure, but it might be dangerous. . . . Bring me a cylinder of liquid air. . . . The temperature of 400 degrees below zero that it takes to change air from its gaseous state to liquid will undoubtedly have a sufficiently energetic effect on Ludovic to help him regain consciousness. Liquid air, by the instantaneous and dramatic shock that it gives to organic tissue, is the only thing that can bring him back to life.” The right arm of Ludovic was bared, and a first application of the liquified gas was attempted.

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The child’s nervous system shuddered and his heart began to beat more rapidly. His pulse, until now imperceptible, became normal. By the fifth application, Ludovic opened his glazed eyes . . . the child was saved! All he needed now would be some rest and care. (267) The application directly to the skin of a “high energy” cold pack of minus 400 degrees (centigrade) brings the young man back to life. Indeed! Quite obviously, Le Rouge crosses here (and elsewhere in his text) the boundary separating science from magic. But it is interesting to note that the narrative mechanism involved is always the same: an incarnation of advanced scientific technology—mysterious in nature and unexplained as to its physical properties—is summoned up as a kind of textual “magic wand” to create verisimilitude and to expand the thematic possibilities of the plot. Le Rouge’s work is particularly rich when studying this fictional shift in the portrayal of science from pedagogy toward “special effects.” His novels stand as a kind of thematic (and structural) intermediary between the Verne-­d’Ivoi narrative model and those of Robida and Rosny Aîné. Although Le Rouge still continues to anchor his “imaginary voyage” fictions in didactic (or pseudodidactic) scientific passages such as this one, he is also shifting what had been the traditional relationship of the reader to this type of text onto new cognitive ground. Here it is not yet a question of the reader’s constant confrontation with a host of non-­mimetic referents or seemingly empty signifiers—as we shall find in Robida and, even more so, in Rosny Aîné. But in Le Rouge’s texts, the evolution toward this new “sf ” discursive configuration is already palpable. The position of Albert Robida in this evolution is a curious one: the less one is familiar with the actual texts, the more one tends to identify Robida’s technological romances with Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires—especially when both are viewed in retrospect as early variants (“grandfathers”) of modern science fiction. In reality, they are very different. This distinction might be most simply described as follows: the scientific didacticism, a fundamental structural feature of Verne’s fiction (and still used, although in a quite different manner and for other narrative ends, by authors such as d’Ivoi or Le Rouge), is completely absent from Robida’s texts. The futuristic technology portrayed by Robida is always a “given,” neither explained nor even made to appear in any way wondrous or supernatural. But Robida’s fanciful extrapolations cannot be simply categorized as fantasy, in the true sense of that word. For, in terms of verisimilitude and mimesis, his novels are solidly anchored in a quite realistic (from a nineteenth-­century perspec88 ] A rth ur B. E vans

tive) representation of daily and family life, similar to Balzac’s Scènes de la vie privée or Scènes de la vie parisienne. It is this rather oxymoronic (and often hilarious) juxtaposition of futuristic technology and nineteenth-­century lifestyles, customs, and social institutions that characterizes the vast majority of Robida’s fictions: husbands and wives now argue about their daughter’s dowry over the “telephonoscope”; traditional weekend outings to the country are done via the “pneumatic tube” or “aircoach”; the bourgeois home is decorated with artistic works of “photo paintings” or “galvanosculpture”; and so forth. The following, quite typically “Robidian,” passage is taken from the opening scene of Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century, 1883) and will serve to illustrate this bipolar character of his narratives: The month of September 1952 was drawing to a close. Summer had been magnificent; the sun, cooler now, bathed the golden days of autumn with a soft and caressing glow. Airship omnibus B, whose route went from the central Tube station on boulevard Montmartre to the aristocratic suburbs of Saint-­ Germain-­en-­Laye, was following the winding lines of the outer avenues and cruising at the statutory altitude of 250 meters. The arrival of the train at the Brittany Tube had quickly filled a dozen airbuses parked above the station. A swarm of aircabs, veloces, skiffs, flashes, and baggage tartans (whose heavy-­winged tugs that can barely do thirty kilometers an hour) bustled to and fro. . . . The passengers of Airship omnibus B were, for the most part, Parisian businessmen coming home with their families from their villas at Saint-­Malo or from little picnics in the rocks of Brittany. This was obvious by the many empty picnic baskets, the plant collections, and the shrimp nets of the children. . . . Seated gracefully on the folding stools of the rear platform were three young girls dressed in high school uniforms. . . . The two brunettes were daughters of the billionaire banker Raphael Ponto, one of these stars of the Stock Market around whom gravitates a veritable host of inconsequential millionaires, like so many satellites. The blond girl, named Hélène Colobry, was an orphan and a charge of the banker Ponto, who was a distant relative of her family. (1–3) The initial shock produced by the mention of the year “1952” at the outset of this text (and the late-­nineteenth-­century reader’s accompanying expectations of a radical “otherness” in what is to follow) are promptly mitigated by the reassuring and quite poetic description of the changing seasons—a

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common literary motif and a solid touchstone for establishing the “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” tone of the entire fiction. But this comforting Romantic topos is then followed by a rapid succession of textual “nova”—a series of totally non-­mimetic technicisms and indirect referents that, one might assume, would serve to substantiate the reader’s earlier anticipations concerning this tale of the future. But in reality, they provide the reader with only mildly alienating stepping-­stones to his or her visualization of this new world. Terms such as “Airship omnibus B,” or “aircabs” (portmanteau words, combining the old with the new), “Tube” (an English term for underground railroads, perhaps already in use during this period, but still quite exotic, especially when later expanded to “Brittany Tube”!), “the suburbs of Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye” (a comfortably recognizable toponym, like that of the “boulevard Montmartre,” but now the suburb is seen as a part of the city proper, indicating—in an indirect fashion—how immense Paris has become), all these references gently ease the reader into the realm of a distant tomorrow. Further, the nautical names of these many strange vehicles—“airship,” “skiffs,” “tartans,” and “tugs”—provide a concrete metaphorical link enabling the reader to associate this scene with the standard seaport motif and thereby to assimilate it without difficulty (although the terms chosen are, ironically and most likely deliberately, archaic ones). And on the purely denotative level, even the most unusual of these vehicles—“veloces” and “flashes”—seem to literally define themselves. Finally, mentioning that the heavy-­winged “tugs” fly “barely” thirty kilometers an hour functions, at least within the nineteenth-­century sociolect, as a kind of reverse anachronism of satiric humor—an “inside joke” between author and reader that considerably lightens the enumerative and technical tone of the passage as well as indicating (again, in an oblique manner) how speed is a purely relative matter. Continuing its practice of oscillating between the hyperbolically futuristic and the commonplace, the text then focuses on the passengers. In spite of their milieu and their having apparently traveled great distances for a “little picnic” (another oblique reference, revealing the social implications of air travel, rendered with humorous irony by the use of the word “little”) a quite typical nineteenth century family is portrayed—right down to their empty picnic baskets and the other standard paraphernalia of such outings. And among the three high school girls (complete with uniforms) is one who is undoubtedly destined to become the heroine of the story: in proper nineteenth-­century novelistic fashion, she is an orphan and blond. Lastly, mixing the same indirect-­reference procedure with humor and an astronomical metaphor, Robida characterizes Raphael Ponto as a billionaire 90 ] A rth ur B. E vans

banker and one of those shining stars of the stock market “around whom gravitates a veritable host of inconsequential millionaires.” If the financial criteria have changed, readers say to themselves, the social ones certainly have not! Thus Robida’s scientific technology is rooted neither in pedagogy nor in the need to justify the verisimilitude of his heroes’ and heroines’ actions. Nor, however, can it be said to be totally gratuitous: it serves as an effective fictional springboard for humorous social commentary and satire. The reader is never expected to truly believe in the scientific marvels of this future Earth, but rather to maintain one foot in the present and to continually compare the two societies in question. On the other hand, this procedure does serve certain implicit pedagogical ends—if not for the instruction of science, at least for the acclimatization of humankind to science. And it does so in two ways. First, by the very nature of the narrative itself, the nineteenth-­century reader is led to conceive of a world much like his or her own but now filled with newfangled gadgets the functioning of which she or he cannot possibly understand—­ undoubtedly very evocative of his or her own experiences during a historical period that witnessed the advent of telegraph, electric lights, phonographs, and motorcars. But the text also implies that such an understanding does not really matter. The basic social structures are the same, the human problems are the same, and this potentially alienating technology appears to be fully integrated into the daily lives of those fictional characters who, themselves, are very much the same. Further, if the technology itself is alternately portrayed as comical, problematic, or even dangerous (especially in its military applications), it is most often shown to be subordinate to humanity. It is, as always, human nature that dictates its use and misuse. Hence, although Robida is traditionally revered as an imaginative ancestor of modern sf (which he definitely is, at least for some brands of sf ), the “let’s-­look-­at-­ourselves-­through-­foreign-­eyes” dynamics of Robida’s narratives also tend to identify him as a direct literary descendant of writers of social satire such as Montesquieu and Voltaire. With the scientific fantasies of J.-H. Rosny Aîné, however, we fully enter the world of sf proper. Correspondingly, intertextual overlaps with the narratological character of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires begin to grow weaker and progressively more tenuous. Not only is there a complete absence of textual didacticism and of the quasi-­scientific, credibility-­building explanations of technology (as noted in d’Ivoi and Le Rouge), but also the final link with the mimetic representation of reality is broken. Readers are thrust fully into the realm of the alien “other” and are required to recon

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struct their referential coordinates ex nihilo in order to assimilate the text. This “filling in the blanks” procedure becomes the predominant reading mode for this brand of narrative—most often unaided by the text’s semantic content or the visible presence of a narrator. And the traditional “imaginary voyage” narrative format now becomes a (sometimes disorienting) journey into the strange world of seemingly absent paradigms and non-­ referentiality. The following passage, found at the beginning of Rosny’s La Mort de la Terre (The Death of the Earth, 1910), is among the first such texts featuring this new narratological formula: The terrible North Wind had become silent. Its harsh voice had, for two weeks, been filling the oasis with fear and sadness. It had been necessary to erect the storm wall and to implant the hooks of elastic silica. Finally, the oasis was beginning to cool down. Targ, the guardian of the Great Planetary, felt one of those sudden pangs of joy that brightened men’s lives during the holy times of Water. . . . His face was dark and swarthy, his eyes and hair as black as anthracite. Like all of the Last Men, he had developed a very large chest and a shrunken belly. His hands were delicate, his jaw small, and his limbs indicated more agility than strength. Clothing of mineral fibers, as supple and warm as ancient wool, snugly encased his body. . . . Since the Great Planetary was located on the border between the oasis and the desert, Targ could observe the sinister landscape of granite, silica, and minerals. A plain of desolation stretched out as far as the foothills of the barren mountains, devoid of glaciers, waterholes, blades of grass, or even patches of lichen. In this desert of death, the oasis, with its rectilinear groves and metallic houses, seemed like a wretched stain. Targ felt the weight of the vast solitude and the implacable mountains. He lifted his head melancholically and looked at the conch of the Great Planetary. The conch spread its sulfur corolla toward the jagged mountaintops. Made of arcum, as sensitive as the retina of an eye, it recorded only those rhythms emanating from the other oases far away, and it was calibrated so as to squelch those that the guardian need not answer. (126–27) The narrative voice alone of this opening passage is sufficient to establish its “other world” and “other time” tonality, which is subsequently concretized by the semantics of the text’s content. The capitalization of words such 92 ] Arth ur B. E vans

as “North Wind,” “Great Planetary,” “Water,” and “Last Men” lends a kind of primitive mythological and/or epic quality to the scene described, and the repeated tribal-­like anthropomorphizing of the elements enhances this impression. But the identity of the narrator, obviously indigenous to this place and time, is not (and never will be) revealed to the reader. Further, this primitivism is strangely juxtaposed with signs of futurism: the association of “oasis” and “the holy times of Water” with the title of the novel, along with the altered physiology of Targ himself (who is one of the “Last Men”) clearly places the events in a distant tomorrow—at the end of human supremacy on Earth. Thus, the reader surmises, this must be a tale of the far future where humanity has devolved into primitivism and now lives in isolated oases as the world turns to dust. Correct. But it is only by combining a number of disparate textual references and filling in a variety of paradigmatic “blanks” that the reader can, inductively, arrive at this conclusion. This “oblique” method of referentiality, first noted in Robida, serves here to reconstruct an entire imaginary world, instead of a simple linear extrapolation of the known. But the signifying process in this text then becomes more complex as the reader encounters such references as “hooks of elastic silica,” “clothing of mineral fibers, as supple and warm as ancient wool,” and “metallic houses,” not to mention the mysterious “Great Planetary” itself—this strange “conch” that “spread its sulfur corolla toward the jagged mountaintops” and that was “made of arcum, as sensitive as the retina of the eye.” The phrases in the first group, although quite non-­mimetic in nature, are nevertheless similar to Robida’s portmanteau words: while semantically juxtaposing the old with the new, they generate concrete paradigms and visual associations that, although somewhat odd, are still able to be rationalized by the reader. The second group, on the other hand, pushes this hermeneutic operation to its breaking point, nearly short-­circuiting the signifying process itself. On the semantic level, for example, the inorganic is identified with the organic (“Great Planetary . . . conch . . . sulfur corolla”), compounding to an even greater degree those semantic difficulties first encountered in the apparent oxymorons of “mineral fibers” and “metallic houses.” And even on the purely lexical level, words normally used as adjectives become nouns (“Planetary”), nouns become adjectives (“sulfur”), and other words present in the text are totally of the author’s invention (e.g., “arcum”)—­requiring the reader to go well beyond the normal mechanisms of signification in order to create meaning. Rosny’s fiction thus spans the gamut of several signifying practices, ranging from common mimetic denotation to purely impressionistic non-­

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referentiality. Unlike those of Verne, d’Ivoi, Le Rouge, or Robida, in Rosny’s narratives it is the dynamics of language itself that effectively adds yet another level of “otherness” to the reader’s assimilation of the text’s “alien” content. The “scientific novel” format has obviously reached a totally new generic configuration: the Vernian journey through space to distant lands and the Robidian journey through time to distant tomorrows has now become a journey through the (distancing) signifying structure of the text itself. The reader’s fictional travels, used earlier as a vehicle for scientific pedagogy and/or social satire, now becomes a narrative end in itself. The overt textual presentation of “lessons-­to-­be-­learned” (normally the result of an instructive dialogue between “teacher” and “pupil” characters who are embedded in a fictional milieu that is highly mimetic and that initially elicits such discussions) is replaced by a growing proliferation of “absent paradigms” and non-­mimetic signifiers, requiring the active participation of the reader in order to generate meaning. Hence the inherent didacticism of this new brand of fictional discourse is no longer scientific; it is hermeneutic. It no longer seeks to expand the reader’s knowledge of science, but rather to expand the reading experience itself. Its goal is no longer factual. It is textual. And as such, it can no longer be termed scientific fiction, but rather what the twentieth century has come to call science fiction. Works Cited

D’Ivoi, Paul. La Diane de l’Archipel. Paris: P. Furne, 1897. Paris: J’ai Lu, 1983. Le Rouge, Gustave. La Princesse des Airs. Paris: Guyot, 1902. Paris: UGE, 1976. Robida, Albert. Le Vingtième Siècle. Paris: E. Dentu, 1883. Rosny Aîné, J.-H. La Mort de la Terre. Paris: Nourrit, 1910. In Récits de la science-­ fiction by J.-H. Rosny Aîné, 126–77. Verviers, Belgium: Marabout, 1975. Verne, Jules. De la Terre à la Lune. Paris: Hetzel, 1865. Paris: Livre de poche, 1966.

Afterword

This article grew out of two different but overlapping scholarly interests: Jules Verne and early French science fiction. The former dates from 1982–83 when I chose Verne’s romans scientifiques (scientific novels) as the topic of my PhD dissertation at Columbia University, which was later published as Jules Verne Rediscovered (1988). It is important to note that, since the 1960s, there has been a growing “renaissance” of public and academic interest in Jules Verne both in France and among Anglo-­American readers. The precise reasons for this are impossible to know for sure. It is no doubt related to the huge increase in popularity (and newfound curricular legitimacy) of science fiction as a genre. And it might also be partly the result of a growing public fascination with what I call “vintage tech” stories (narratives that portray premodern forms of technology), such as the Victorian-­themed sf subgenre “steampunk” that continues 94 ] A rth ur B. E vans

to be very much in vogue today. Whatever the underlying causes, books on or by Verne have proliferated greatly—see, for example, my overview “Jules Verne in English: A Bibliography of Modern Editions and Scholarly Studies” (2008) published in the online journal Verniana (http://www.verniana.org/volumes/01/HTML/ArtBiblio.html). It lists dozens of new English translations by and monographs about Verne, as well as over a hundred critical articles, all of which have appeared since 1965. Publishing venues for Verne-­related manuscripts have multiplied as well—not only in scholarly journals and in organizations such as the North American Jules Verne Society (especially its “Palik” series) but also in major university presses such as Wesleyan’s “Early Classics of Science Fiction” series (for which I serve as series editor), the University of Nebraska’s “Bison Frontiers of Imagination” series, and Oxford’s “World’s Classics” series. The best website on Jules Verne continues to be the late Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection at http://jv.gilead.org.il/. Originally founded in 1995, it features an active listserve called the “Jules Verne Forum,” a large selection of Verne’s works in electronic format (in French, English, and other languages), an authoritative biography and bibliography, a good amount of (full-­text) academic scholarship on Verne, useful links, and many other interesting features. Highly recommended. My interest in early French science fiction developed as a spin-­off from my research on Verne. A year after the above article appeared in Science Fiction Studies, I published a brief history of science fiction in France, along with a select bibliography of secondary materials (SFS 16, no. 3 [November 1989], 254–76 and 338–68) that was later reprinted in the Handbook of French Popular Culture (ed. Pierre L. Horne, 1991). And since that time I have published or edited pieces on a variety of different French sf authors: Maurice Renard, Gustave Le Rouge, Albert Robida, Paul d’Ivoi, J.-H. Rosny Aîné, Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam, and Jacques Spitz, among others (for links, see http:// academic.depauw.edu/aevans_web/Research/Research.htm). It is also worth noting that, paralleling the recent upsurge in Verne studies, there has been growing interest in the genre of science fiction—and in French sf in particular—within the French Academy. A new peer-­reviewed online scholarly journal called ReS Futurae (http:// resf.revues.org, managed by Professor Irène Langlet of the Université de Limoges) began publishing in 2012, and several excellent new books on French sf have also appeared in 2012 in Paris’s academic bookstores: Natacha Vas-­Deyres’s Ces Français qui ont écrit demain, Daniel Fondanèche’s La Littérature d’imagination scientifique, and Simon Bréan’s La Science-­fiction en France, among others. One final word on the above article: since its publication in 1988, my opinions on Verne’s place within the genre of sf have shifted. After many years of editorial work with Science Fiction Studies, my personal definition of sf has evolved to include many different narrative styles. Accordingly, I no longer view Verne as representing a separate genre called “scientific fiction”; instead, I now see him as exemplifying one important variant of science fiction, “hard sf ” (as opposed to the Wellsian variant of “speculative/fantastic sf,” or the “gothic sf ” variant by Mary Shelley, etc.). Although my Vernian friends—and especially the French ones—might not approve, I now believe that Verne’s adventure tales mixing science with fiction were the first to popularize this new, hybrid genre around the world and paved the way (both narratologically and institutionally) for the rise and popularity of sf in the twentieth century.

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• 6• Future-­W ar Fiction

The First Main Phase, 1871–1900 I. F. Clarke

The late British scholar I. F. Clarke (1918–2009) was the world’s expert on future-­war fiction. His pioneering study Voices Prophesying War 1763–1984 (1966) was the first to identify and map this rich sf subgenre. The following essay—winner of the 1998 Pioneer Award for best critical study of science fiction from the SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association)—surveys one crucial period in the history of these “war-­to-­come” tales: from Chesney’s influential The Battle of Dorking (1871) to the early years of the twentieth century. This essay originally appeared in SFS 24, no. 3 (November 1997): 387–412.

Only the most perverse would reject the proposition that an evolutionary process of challenge and response has controlled and directed the tale of the war-­to-­come ever since that far-­off day in 1644, when the citizens of London first had sight of a six-­page fantasy about the Civil War then raging in England. This was Aulicus his Dream of the Kings Sudden Comming to London—a primitive thing, filled with passion recollected in tumultuous disquiet. The author was Francis Cheynell, who was notorious enough to secure a minor place in the Dictionary of National Biography, where he appears as a Puritan fanatic well known for his detestation of Charles I and all he represented. Cheynell is the first dreamer in futuristic fiction. He relates how he fell asleep afflicted by thoughts of the Civil War, and in a protracted nightmare he has a fearful vision of King Charles triumphant over Cromwell and the forces of Parliament. That political fantasy had bite in the May of 1644, when it was still thought possible that the king could prove the victor 96 ]



in the Civil War. With that in mind Cheynell did what so many would go on doing long after him. Within the limitations of six pages he told his tale of the disaster-­to-­come as dramatically as he could, so that readers would have no doubt that the meaning of his message was: ACT NOW BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. Few followed where Cheynell had boldly gone. For two and a quarter centuries after the appearance of Aulicus his Dream, the history of future-­war fiction was a series of occasional and usually most unremarkable stories— so few in number that a modest briefcase could contain them all.1 And then quite suddenly the great powers of the press, politics, and population came together in 1871, when Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking touched off the chain reaction of future-­war stories that continued without cessation until the outbreak of the First World War. From 1871 onward not a year went by without the appearance of a tale of the war-­to-­come in Britain, France, or Germany. At times of major anxiety—the Channel Tunnel panic in 1882, the Agadir Crisis of 1911, for instance—they appeared by the dozen; and the probable total for the period from 1871 to 1914 is not less than some four hundred stories in English, French, or German. Those languages point to a massive European interest in The Next Great War, der nächste Krieg, La Guerre de demain, as they called it in the cheerful language of anticipation. Their tales of the war-­to-­come were joined together in an unholy marriage of conflicting interests. They owed the origin, the circumstances, and the consequences of their projected conflicts to the Other. Locked in a necessary and unloving embrace with tomorrow’s enemy, they found complete justification for their narratives in the often repeated claim that their future war would be the next phase in the history of their nation. As these tales of the war-­to-­come grew in numbers from the 1880s onward, the range of their preoccupations expanded so that, by the end of the nineteenth century, a paradigm of military and political possibilities had come into existence both in Europe and in the United States. At the far-­out paranoid end there were the total fantasies of the Yellow Peril, of Demon Scientists and Anarchists, all armed with the most fearful weapons conceivable and all hell-­bent on taking over the world. These all require, and may yet obtain, their own separate assessments; but for the present it is enough to say that the Yellow Peril was one theme the Europeans had in common with the United States. As Bruce Franklin has shown in War Stars (33–45), the American versions began with Pierton Dooner’s Last Days of the Republic in 1880, and within two decades they had become a flood. During that time the Europeans did almost as well: Jules Lermina in La Bataille de Strasbourg (The Battle of Strasbourg, 1895) described how a scientist blows Future-­War Fiction

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up Mont Blanc and destroys the invading Asiatics; the British writer, M. P. Shiel, dealt with the Chinese attempt to conquer the world in The Yellow Danger (1898); and the Asians were still on the move in 1908 in Bansai!, a German account of a Japanese attack on the United States by Parabellum (Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff ). These were future-­war themes taken to the limit. They had no immediate and substantial links with the contemporary world situation, as Capitaine Danrit made clear when he dedicated his three-­volume tale of L’Invasion noire (The Black Invasion, 1895–96) to Jules Verne. He wrote that his account of a future invasion of Europe—by hordes of fanatic African Muslims led by a sultan of genius—“depended on a very questionable proposition, since the reverse is happening in our age. The European powers are carving up the Dark Continent as they like, and they are distributing the primitive populations among themselves as if they were cheap livestock” (2). That uneasiness with European colonialism was the trigger for an imaginary eruption of overwhelming forces—Chinese, Japanese, African—who play their own imperial power games with the Western world. The contemporary versions of the “Bad American Dream,” for example, clearly derived from subliminal anxieties about the “enemy within” in King Wallace’s The Next War: A Prediction (1892), and from American anxieties about the new Japan in J. H. Palmer’s The Invasion of New York: Or, How Hawaii was Annexed (1897). For those who had the courage of their racial prejudices, however, there was a final solution for the nightmare from the East—wipe out the inferior races. Two stories are prime contenders for the title of the Best in Genocide Fiction. The first, and likely winner on length, is the chapter on “The Fate of the Inferior Races” in Three Hundred Years Hence (1881) by the one-­time Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, William Delisle Hay. The second is the short story, “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910), a by-­product of Jack London’s work as a war correspondent during the Russo-­Japanese War. The British author looked forward to the perfect world of the Victorian dream— advanced technologies, universal peace and plenty, the white races united within the Oecumenic Parliament of the States of Humanity. Throughout the Century of Peace, Hay wrote, “men’s minds had become opened to the truth, had become sensible of the diversity of species, had become conscious of Nature’s law of development. . . . The stern logic of facts proclaimed the Negro and the Chinaman below the level of the Caucasian, and incapacitated from advance towards his intellectual standard” (235). Nature’s law required that the Caucasians should inherit the world. Vast air fleets sweep across China and discharge 98 ] I . F. Clarke

a rain of awful death upon the “Flowery Land” below . . . a rain of death to every breathing thing, a rain that exterminates the hopeless race, whose long presumption it had been, that it existed in passive prejudice to the advance of United Man. What need is there to say more? You know the awful story, for awful it undoubtedly is, that destruction of a thousand millions of beings who once were held to be the equals of intellectual men. We look back upon the Yellow Race with pitying contempt, for to us they can but seem mere anthropoid animals, not to be regarded as belonging to the race that is summed and glorified in United Man. (248)



The American argument for wiping out the Chinese did not cite “Nature’s law of development.” It was, in the words of Jack London, a matter of simple prudence: “There was no combating China’s amazing birth-­rate. If her population was 1000 millions and was increasing 20 millions a year, in twenty-­five years it would be 1500 millions—equal to the total population of the world in 1904” (265). The final solution starts with the United States in 1975, when President Moyer brings the major White powers together for the destruction of all human beings in China. On 1 May 1976 their planes begin dropping “strange, harmless-­looking missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and housetops” (269). It is the start of a planned program of bacteriological warfare. “During all the summer and fall of 1976, China was an inferno. . . . There was no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the remotest hiding-­places. The hundreds of millions of dead remained unburied, and the germs multiplied; and, toward the last, millions died daily of starvation. Besides starvation weakened the victims and destroyed their natural defenses against the plague. Cannibalism, murder and madness reigned. And so China perished” (269).2 These extreme fantasies derived from the ceaseless dialogue between Western culture and the immense, ever-­growing powers that the new industrial societies had generated since that day on Glasgow Green in 1764 when James Watt got the idea for the separate condenser. One hundred years later Jules Verne began his most profitable career as the first great writer of science fiction by demonstrating the most desirable applications of the new technologies in the achievements of Nemo, Robur, and the Baltimore Gun Club. And then in Les 500 Millions de la Bégum (The Begum’s Millions, 1879) he looked at the morality of intentions in the use of scientific knowledge. Franceville is the ideal city, dedicated to peace, the happiness of its citizens, and the good of humankind; Stahlstadt is the dark opposite, Future-­War Fiction

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the home of Dr. Schulze and his super-­gun—totalitarian, regimented, bent on the conquest of the world. The unwritten conclusion was that, given sufficient power, anyone—any nation, any group, any race—could take control of planet Earth. No one put this better than H. G. Wells in the most telling and most effective of all future-­war stories, The War of the Worlds (1898). In that classic tale Wells began with the notion of superior force, as it had been suffered by the Tasmanians who “in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.” When the Martian cylinders land on the common between Horsell and Woking, the rifles and artillery of the British prove as useless as the wooden clubs of the Tasmanians. The superweapons of the Martians—all the firepower and mobility any general could desire—were warning images of what science might yet do for the military. As contemporary weaponry continued to advance, Wells pursued the theme of ever-­accelerating power and came down to earth from planetary space. First, he looked at what technology could do on the battlefield in “The Land Ironclads” (1903). Then, he looked at total warfare in a terrestrial setting in The War in the Air (1908)—the destruction of New York and the collapse of all human society in that near-­future time when “the great nations and empires have become but names in the mouths of men” (157). And then he produced the most perceptive anticipation in future-­fiction with his account of atomic warfare in The World Set Free (1914). He confronted the ultimate weapon and thought that the immense destructiveness of the atomic bomb (he gave the term to the world) would lead to world peace and to “the blazing sunshine of a transforming world” (255). This discussion of military power provided abundant material for a parallel sequence of more conventional tales about “What It Will Be Like in the Sea Warfare of Tomorrow.” These were a straightforward form of future-­ war fiction—all the fighting without the politics—for the narratives concentrated almost entirely on the operations of naval vessels. They were written as answers to serious questions prompted by the coming of the ironclad warship, by the introduction of the ram, and by the development of the destroyer and the submarine. And here again national interests decided the distribution of these stories. British writers dominated the field for the good reason that the Royal Navy was the first line of national defense for the United Kingdom.3 German writers were conspicuous by their absence. They had nothing to write about, since the new Reich did not start on a naval building program until the first Navy Law of 1898. The French were more interested in, and wrote more about, their army; and across the Atlantic, as Bruce Franklin has demonstrated in War Stars (23–33), American pro100 ] I. F. Clarke



pagandists were turning out preparedness tracts to present the case for the great navy that the United States did not have in the 1880s. One of the best examples of this anticipatory fiction came from the British member of Parliament Hugh Arnold-­Forster, later Secretary of the Admiralty. He wrote his tale of a ramming action, In a Conning Tower: A Story of Modern Ironclad Warfare (1888), in order to give his readers “a faithful idea of the possible course of an action between two modern ironclads availing themselves of all the weapons of offence and defence which an armoured ship at the present day possesses” (ii). It proved most popular: after appearing in Murray’s Magazine (July 1888), the story went through eight pamphlet editions, and there were translations into Dutch, French, Italian, and Swedish. There was a comparable interest in Der grosse Seekrieg im Jahre 1888 (The Great Naval War of 1888), written by Spiridion Gopčević, an officer in the Austrian Navy. His elaborate account of naval tactics in a war between the British and French first appeared in the highly professional Internationale Revue über die Gesamten Armeen und Flotten in 1886, and in the following year the story went into an immediate English translation as The Conquest of Britain in 1888. One unusual feature of these naval anticipations was the good temper and the remarkable courtesy of the authors—a welcome change from the propaganda and invective of tales like Samuel Barton’s The Battle of the Swash and the Capture of Canada (1888), George La Faure’s Mort aux Anglais! (Death to the English!, 1892), or Karl Eisenhart’s Die Abrechnung mit England (The Reckoning with England, 1900). For instance, the British naval historian William Laird Clowes assured his readers that in writing his tale of The Captain of the Mary Rose (1892) he had “been animated by no unfriendly and by no unfair feelings towards France.” Again, F. T. Jane, the journalist and the founder of the influential Jane’s Fighting Ships, began his account of Blake of the Rattlesnake (1895) with a long preamble about “future war yarns.” They could not be a danger to peace between nations for the simple reason that “Foreign nations are frequently turning out similar stories; yet I have never heard of any of us bearing them ill-­will for it.” In like manner the anonymous naval lieutenant who wrote La Guerre avec l’Angleterre (The War with England, 1900) began by saying that his subject was the war at sea, and that meant: “For France there can only be one naval war—against the British. It does not follow from this that France should fight the British, nor that France should have a greater interest in making war than in maintaining the peace. It is even less permissible to think that France should wish for a war with the British” (v). The evident popularity of these various tales of the war-­to-­come marks a Future-­War Fiction

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sudden and extensive change in long-­established modes of communication. Almost overnight fiction had replaced the tract and the pamphlet as the most efficient means of airing a nation’s business in public. For centuries “the address to the nation” had done good service in warning of the dangers-­ to-­come—from the first signals of alarm at the coming of the Invincible Armada in 1588 to the outpouring of pamphlets that accompanied, and often profoundly influenced, the course of events in the United States in 1776, in France in 1789, and in Great Britain during the time when the Armée de l’Angleterre was waiting in Boulogne to start on the invasion of England. Although the undisputed effectiveness of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking was a most potent force in encouraging this shift into fiction, the prime movers in the great change were a combination of social and literary factors. First, there was the matter of demand and supply: the constant growth of populations and the parallel rise in the level of literacy provided more and more readers for the increasing numbers of newspapers, magazines for all interests, and books of every kind. Second, a new and most influential conclave of historians demonstrated, often with great eloquence, how their nations had secured their place in the nineteenth-­century world. So, an exclusive sense of nationhood fed on and grew out of the new histories, which were the lifework of eminent writers like Guizot, Thierry, Michelet, Francis Parker, Macaulay, Carlyle, Buckle, von Ranke, and Treitschke. In keeping with the general belief in “progress,” they explained the evolution of their nations as the work of exceptional individuals and the result of communal movements, of struggles with other nations, and of decisive victories at Austerlitz, Saratoga, and Waterloo. The new, centralized systems of education passed on their simplified versions of one-­history-­for-­one-­people to the state schools, so that by the 1890s the young in all the major technological nations had received an appropriate grounding in the received history of their country. Again, and for the first time in human history, the young could see the evolution of the nation-­state in the maps that showed the unification of the German states, or the advance out of the thirteen colonies westward toward the Pacific, or the lost provinces of Alsace-­Lorraine, or the many additions to the British Empire. In the parallel universe of the new historical fiction, the heroic individual had his appointed role in the male worlds of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Fenimore Cooper, Alessandro Manzoni, and many others. In their various ways they sought to reveal the intimate links between character and action, between the person and the nation. And so, in January 1871, when Chesney 102 ] I. F. Clarke

was considering what would serve him best as a model for the tale about a German invasion he had contracted to write, he thought immediately of fiction in the style of Erckmann-­Chatrian. Those two most popular writers had set their tales about the “Conscript” in the well-­established circumstances of the Napoleonic Wars. Their handling of their stories was an ideal example for a British colonel who wished to show that the projected events in his history of the coming invasion would follow from the faults and failings of the nation in 1871. These errors of the past—so evident, so avoidable, so serious—gained a powerful psychological spin from a future history that could handle disaster or victory with equal facility. The time frame recorded events as a chapter, often the last chapter, in the national history: victory happily and gloriously confirmed the national destiny; and defeat allowed for telling contrasts between the final disaster and the better days gone beyond recall. All these tales of the war-­to-­come advanced along the contour lines of contemporary expectations. The majority—some two-­thirds of them—kept closely to the political, military or naval facts; and, whenever their authors had a warning to deliver, they waved the big stick of fiction at their readers. Most of their tales were admonitory essays in preparedness—arguments for a bigger army, or for more ships. Since most of these authors were responding to some danger or menace represented by the enemy of the day, they were usually careful to present their accounts of the war-­to-­come as the next stage in the nation’s history. Chesney did this very well in the opening sentences of his Battle of Dorking. His many imitators noted, and often adopted, the deft way in which he established the time and scale of the future disaster, as he began his ominous woe crying in his first lines: You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my own share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. ’Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us in England it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us suddenly unawares. It burst on us suddenly, ’tis true, but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been willfully blind. (27)



Transfer that threat from the external enemy to an American setting, and “Stochastic” (Hugh Grattan Donnelly) responds with a Chesney-­style lamentation to introduce an American argument for strengthening the naFuture-­War Fiction

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tional defenses. He begins his history of The Stricken Nation (1890) by recalling the good years before the British fleet reduced New York to rubble and caused immense damage to the Eastern seaports: The pages of universal history may be scanned in vain for a record of disasters, swifter in their coming, more destructive in their scope, or more far-­reaching in their consequences, than those which befell the United States of America in the last decade. Standing on the threshold of the twentieth century, and looking backward over the years that have passed since the United States first began to realize the tremendous possibilities of the impending crisis, we are amazed at the folly and blindness which precipitated the struggle, while bewildered and appalled by its effects on the destinies of mankind. In 1891 we behold a nation! A Republic of sixty-­two million . . . an intelligent, refined, progressive people; peace and plenty within their borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Gulf. In 1892, we see the shattered remnants of the once great Republic. We read with tear-­dimmed eyes of its tens of thousands of heroes fallen in defence of its flag, of its thousands of millions of treasure wasted in tardy defence, or paid in tribute to the invader. (162) It was standard practice to start from established positions in the political geography of Europe or of the United States. The French, for example, saw a war with Germany and the recovery of Alsace-­Lorraine as no more than patriotic duty. That agreeable prospect provided cause and consequence for a succession of anticipations that began in the year of defeat with: Édouard Dangin, La Bataille de Berlin en 1875 (The Battle of Berlin in 1875; 1871). That theme reappeared five years later in Anonymous, France et l’Allemagne au printemps prochain (France and Germany Next Spring, 1876); and again in 1877 in Général Mèche, La Guerre franco-­allemande de 1878 (The Franco-­German War of 1878). These were the first in an ever-­ growing flood of these guerres imaginaires that reached the highest-­level mark in the many publications of Capitaine Danrit (Commandant Émile Auguste Cyprien Driant, 1855–1916). He belonged to the new fraternity of senior officers—patriot writers to the public—who chose to make their appeals to the masses through the medium of fiction; for they knew from the success of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking that a tale of the war-­to-­come, fought against the expected enemy, was the most effective means of putting the case to their citizen paymasters for more funds for more troops and for more warships. 104 ] I. F. Clarke

Commandant Driant was an eminent person, like so many of the authors who wrote future-­war stories before the journalists of the new mass newspapers took over from them about the turn of the century. He was commissioned into the infantry, and after eleven years of service with the colors he was appointed adjutant to General Boulanger at the Ministry of War in 1888. In that year the general’s political activities led to the removal of his name from the army list and in that same year Driant married the general’s youngest daughter and began work on his first guerre imaginaire. The distinguished record continues: instructor at St. Cyr; battalion commander by 1898; resigns commission in 1906 and goes into politics as the deputy for Nancy; dies a hero’s death on the Verdun front in 1916. The biography reveals an ardent patriotism and a determination to prepare the French for the war that they would one day have to fight with Germany. He made this very clear in his dedication of La Guerre en rase campagne (War in Open Country, 1888) to his old regiment, 4e Régiment de Zouaves: “With you I would have liked to depart for the Great War, which we are all expecting and that is so long in coming. Under your flag I still hope to see it, if there is a god of battle and he can hear me. To while away the waiting I have dreamed of this war, this holy war in which we shall be victorious; and this is the book of my dream that I dedicate to you.” Driant always gave his readers what they wanted: heroic episodes, great victories over the Germans, and in the 1,192 pages of his Guerre fatale: France-­Angleterre (The Fatal War: France-­England, 1902) he had ample space in which to relate the total defeat of the British. Driant has a world record as the man who turned out more future-­war stories (some twelve in all) than any other writer before 1914. In 1888 he opened the war against Germany in La Guerre de demain (The War of Tomorrow) with the first of three full-­length stories that told the tale of: La Guerre en forteresse (Fortress Warfare), La Guerre en rase campagne (War in Open Country), and La Guerre en ballon (Balloon Warfare). As the scene of battle shifts from forts to open country and to the skies, Driant works to link the history of France with his version of la guerre de l’avenir. The action opens in La Guerre en fortresse, as reports come in of a sudden German attack. Danrit goes into stereotype mode: the good French face the dastardly Teutons who have not declared war. The troops stand to in their positions, and at dawn their captain addresses them “in a serious voice”:



“Mes enfants, the great day of battle has arrived, the one I have so often spoken about in our theoretical lectures. The Germans are on the move, advancing toward our line of forts. They are attacking us Future-­War Fiction

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Figure 6.1. Capitaine Danrit. La Guerre de demain (1888).

without any declaration of war, and without any provocation from our side, like one nation that wants to annihilate another. We are fighting for our lives, for our survival, for our homes. If we are defeated, we shall be removed from the map of Europe; we shall cease to be a military power. If we are victorious, that will be a very different matter. Here, in this small corner of France we shall soon be cut off from the rest of the world. We are going to face determined attacks; we shall face danger every second. Steel your hearts for this task! There cannot be any doubt that I would have preferred to march with you in open country, behind the regimental flag, but fate has decided otherwise. We have to guard one of the gateways of France. To let the enemy take it by storm would be most shameful; to surrender it would be a crime. I have been a prisoner in Germany; and in Cologne I went through all the humiliation of defeat after the great battles we fought over there.” And his voice trembled with emotion as his finger pointed in the direction of Metz. “I am too old to go through that again,” he said in a solemn tone that moved us profoundly. “Swear all of you that you are ready to die with me in defending the fort of Liouville that France has entrusted to us.” (14) By 1913 Driant had published so much fiction, and his stories were so long that half a century later Pierre Versins felt called on to protest in the name of sanity. The hundred pages of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking, said Pierre Versins in his admirable Encyclopédie, were far more important and revealing than the thousands of white pages soiled day after day by a national hero of France (they dedicated a postage stamp to him in 1956). Thousands? Judge for yourself! La Guerre de demain 2,827 pages L’Invasion noire 1,279 pages La Guerre fatale 1,192 pages L’Invasion jaune 1,000 pages L’Aviateur du Pacifique 512 pages L’Alerte 454 pages La Guerre souterraine 332 pages TOTAL 7,616 pages (222–23)



A comparable association between the British public and the military can be examined in the ways General Sir William Francis Butler (1838– Future-­War Fiction

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1910) and his wife exploited the general interest in warfare. He had distinguished himself in various colonial operations—the Ashanti campaign, the Zulu War, Tel-­el-­Kebir—and he went on from one senior post to another, and ended his career as a lieutenant general in 1900. In between campaigns he found time to make his contribution to the growing literature of future warfare with The Invasion of England (1882), a variant on an already well-­established theme. His wife, however, was far more famous. The battle paintings of the celebrated Lady Butler were reported at length in the press; they attracted huge numbers of viewers whenever they were shown at the Royal Academy; and the editors of the principal illustrated magazines spent thousands of pounds to secure rights of reproduction. When her paintings went on tour, it was reported that viewers queued for hours. The showing of the famous painting of Balaclava, for instance, attracted some 50,000 at the Fine Art Society in 1876, and when it arrived in Liverpool more than 100,000 had paid to see the picture. The general had made the connection between military preparedness and the future of the nation in his one venture into the fiction of future warfare; and his wife gained an international reputation for paintings that showed the masses the life-­and-­death connection between the history of the nation and the courage of the ordinary soldier. In her most admired works—The Roll Call, The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras, Scotland for Ever!—she revealed how much she had profited from the style of the French genre militaire, especially from the realism and accuracy of the most famous of the French military painters, Jean Louis Meissonier. He thought highly of her battle scenes, and he has been quoted as saying of Lady Butler: “L’Angleterre n’a guère qu’un peintre militaire, c’est une femme.”4 The French had created their own heroic iconography out of their exceptional military history. A succession of gifted painters—Horace Vernet, Adolphe Yvon, Alphonse de Neuville, Edouard Detaille, and the incomparable Jean Louis Meissonier—revealed the supreme moments of victory and defeat. To look backward was to see the glorious past, battle by battle, and one great warrior after another, as they appear to this day in the “Salle des Batailles” at Versailles. To look forward to the war of the future, however, required gifts of imagination that were peculiar to only one man. Albert Robida (1848–1926) was the Jules Verne of the sketch pad and the magazine drawing. The two men quarried from the new technologies for their vision of things to come; and both had their base in the new magazines—for Verne the Magasin d’éducation et de récreation; for Robida his own La Caricature. Where Verne was all high seriousness in his stories, Robida was relaxed and amused at the images that came to him out of the future. He looked into the 108 ] I. F. Clarke



twentieth century in his Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century, 1883) and found a world where the droll, whimsical images confirmed the fact of progress and universal prosperity: air taxis, aeronefs-­omnibus, transatlantic balloons, aerial hotels, apartment blocks made from compressed paper, television for all, synthetic foods, submarine cities, underwater sports, and a women-­only stock exchange. Robida was equally at his ease with the possibilities of future warfare. His first anticipation of la guerre qui vient appeared in La Caricature. This was the famous account of La Guerre au vingtième siècle (War in the Twentieth Century, no. 200, 27 October 1883), and then a revised version came out in a magnificent forty-­eight-­page album in 1887. It was a remarkable moment in the history of publishing. An amiable French civilian with a wry sense of humor had produced the first images of what the sciences could do for the military. His alphabet of aggression revealed the extraordinary shape of things to come: armored fighting vehicles, bacteriological weaponry, bombers, chemical battalions, female combat troops, fighter planes, flamethrowers, poison gas provided by the Medical Assault Corps, psychological warfare experts, underwater troops. Although his drawings were well ahead of their time, Robida was a true man of his times in the nonchalance he showed in contemplating the most lethal weapons then conceivable. We know now what was then hidden. The planners and the prophets had drawn the wrong conclusions from the unprecedented advances of the age. A sturdy confidence in the continued progress of humankind encouraged the belief that the new weapons would lead to shorter, even better wars. In 1901, for example, at the end of a chapter on “Changes in Military Science,” a senior instructor at West Point set down the then current American military doctrine that “wars between civilized nations, when carried on by the regularly organized forces, will be short.” He reasoned that “the great and increasing complexity of modern life, involving international contacts at an ever-­increasing number of points, will combine with the military conditions herein outlined to reduce the duration of war to the utmost” (Willcox 492–93). This view of coming things is apparent in Robida’s draftsmanship. His images are brilliant, now slightly archaic anticipations of what the military would achieve in the twentieth century. Unfortunately Robida’s writing is not the equal of his drawing. His narrative finds its own place in the never-­never void of a fantastic future history, as if Robida could never bring himself to make the obvious conclusions from the lethal weaponry he had drawn. The story opens, for instance, on the droll note that Robida reserves for the more destructive events in his narrative: “The first Future-­War Fiction

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Figures 6.2a and 6.2b. Albert Robida. Illustrations from La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1883).



half of the year 1945 had been particularly peaceful. Apart from the usual goings-­on—that is, apart from a small three-­month civil war in the Danubian Empire, apart from an American offensive against our coast that was repulsed by our submarine fleet, and apart from a Chinese expedition that was smashed to pieces on the rocks of Corsica—life in Europe continued in total calm” (94). Again, Robida uses the desperate and often hilarious adventures of his intrepid hero, Fabius Molinas from Toulouse, as his best means of keeping the reader amused with the unfolding jollity of total warfare. The narrative moves with lightning speed, as Molinas goes through a series of rapid promotions for the sake of the images—air gunner to pilot officer to second lieutenant in the mobile artillery to commandant of “the Potassium Cyanide, a submarine torpedo vessel of entirely new construction” (105). As Molinas survives disasters far beyond the call of duty, the swift and somewhat flippant style keeps the narrative going at such a speed that the reader has little time to ponder the consequences of the more striking incidents. On occasions Robida seems to point toward a far from comfortable conclusion. There is, for example, the air attack on a town: “There was a loud cry, and a puff of smoke. Three more bombs followed; and then there was total silence. The camp fires had been extinguished, and a pall of death covered all, even the wretched inhabitants who had stayed on in the town. They were all instantly suffocated in their homes. These things are the accidents of war to which the recent advances of science have accustomed all of us” (99). Robida was the Lone Ranger in the French guerres imaginaires: one of the very few (like A. A. Milne and P. G. Wodehouse) who found it possible to be funny about “the next great war.” He rescued his comic tale from the Bastille of real events, because he was able to ignore contemporary politics, unlike the hundreds of earnest writers—British, French, and German—for whom the tale of the European war-­to-­come was a desirable extension of national policy by means of fiction. For that reason these tales often sold well, and went on selling in sudden bursts of popularity whenever some perceived danger attracted the attention of a nation. In 1882, for instance, the proposals for the construction of a Channel Tunnel set the alarm bells ringing in the United Kingdom; and, as the arguments against so imprudent, so perilous a connection with the Continent went the rounds of the press, anxious patriots took to writing fearful tales that promised the worst in their titles: The Seizure of the Channel Tunnel, The Surprise of the Channel Tunnel, How John Bull Lost London, The Siege of London, The Story of the Channel Tunnel, The Battle of Boulogne. The best of these was the work of Horace Francis Lester, a barrister and an eminent person in the Future-­War Fiction

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British legal system. In The Taking of Dover (1888) he told a tale of French treachery—of French assault troops hidden in Dover, waiting for the day when they could emerge to seize the town and begin the invasion of England. The tale, slotted into an appropriate place in French history, is told after the conquest by the commander of the assault troops who shakes his head with great effect at his recollections of British folly and unpreparedness. It seemed only yesterday they were plotting the seizure of Dover, and now he could not “but pity the nation; but their humiliation, as it was occasioned by sheer recklessness, by avarice for the gains of trade, and by blind stupidity, appears to my judgment to have been fully deserved” (11). The topicality of tomorrow’s peril guaranteed that most of these stories would have their brief day of popularity before they vanished into the hands of the rare-­book dealers. At their most notorious best, however, they can still bring home the seriousness of politics at the times of major crises; and they reveal how easy it was for the citizens of the pre-­1914 world to believe that a future European war would be a short affair—without immense casualty lists, fought with conventional weapons, and conducted in a reasonably humane way. They were writing about, and preparing for, the wrong war. One of the ablest historians of the First World War has pointed out that The nations entered upon the conflict with the conventional outlook and system of the eighteenth century merely modified by the events of the nineteenth century. Politically, they conceived it to be a struggle between rival coalitions based on the traditional system of diplomatic alliances, and militarily a contest between professional armies—swollen, it is true, by the continental system of conscription, yet essentially fought out by soldiers while the mass of the people watched, from seats in the amphitheatre, the efforts of their champions. (Hart 28) A benign conspiracy had made it impossible for all but the very few to see that the rapid advances in weaponry would change the scale of warfare. For example, the favorite dogma of technological and social progress caused Charles Richet—the distinguished bacteriologist and winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine—to forecast a best of all possible future worlds in his Dans cent ans (In One Hundred Years, 1892). Eight years before the Wright brothers began their flights at Kitty Hawk, Richet was confident that the prospect of everlasting peace was growing day by day, because modern armaments had brought the nations up before the ultimate deterrent. Vast national armies had replaced the small forces of earlier times; and as for their weaponry, 112 ] I. F. Clarke

Quick-­firing rifles, enormous guns, improved shells, smokeless and noiseless gunpowder—these are so destructive that a great battle (such as there never will be, we hope) could cause the deaths of 300,000 men in a few hours. It is evident that the nations, no matter how unconcerned they may be at times when driven by a false pride, will draw back before this terrible vision. But things are changing for the better. New means of warfare, probably more destructive than ever, are on the drawing-­board. By continually improving our armaments, we will end by making war impossible. Should flying machines ever be invented, they will spread devastation everywhere. No town, no matter how far it is from the frontier, will be able to defend itself. (62–63) Richet had no figures to support his belief that the nations would “draw back before this terrible vision,” whereas Ivan Bloch produced a mountain of statistics in the six volumes and 3,094 pages of his lengthy treatise on The Future of War (1899). For some nine years Bloch had studied every war since 1870—everything from the numbers of combatants, ammunition supply, rate of fire to casualty lists—and he had come to the conclusion that war has become impossible alike from a military, economic, and political point of view. . . . The very development that has taken place in the mechanism of war has rendered war an impracticable operation. The dimensions of modern armaments and the organization of society have rendered its prosecution an economic impossibility; and, finally, that if any attempt were made to demonstrate the inaccuracy of my assertions by putting the matter to a test on a great scale, we should find the inevitable result in a catastrophe which would destroy all existing political organizations. Thus, the great war cannot be made, and any attempt to make it would result in suicide.5



The general view was the very opposite. What the majority expected can be examined in The Great War of 189–(1891), the first-­ever piece of future-­war writing composed by a consortium of military and naval experts. This was an action replay of contemporary assumptions and expectations about the most likely conduct of operations on land or at sea in a future European war; and it did in its time what General Sir John Hackett and associates set out to do in their Third World War (1978). The publication of the story in the then-­new illustrated magazine, Black and White, is even more significant than its contents. It was the first full-­length illustrated study of “the next great war”—the parts appeared weekly from 2 January to 21 May 1891. Future-­War Fiction

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Moreover, the editor of Black and White had commissioned the story—as he told his readers in his introduction to the first part—in order to give them “a full, vivid and interesting picture of the Great War of the future.” That bid to increase the print run of a new magazine marked the beginning of a new trend in the press. The war-­to-­come had moved out from its original base in the middle-­class journals and had become a valued commodity for the mass-­circulation magazines and newspapers that began to appear in the 1890s. Thus, the editorial hand can be seen at work in the presentation of the story. One major innovation showed in the realism and careful attention to detail in “the scene of action” style of the narrative. This was most evident in the up-­to-­the-­minute accounts that told the tale in a sequence of dated reports from the front, telegrams from correspondents with the combatants, and editorial comments in the manner of contemporary newspapers. Another innovation in this search for the authentic appeared in the frequent first-­class action illustrations—the work of outstanding contemporary war artists who sought to give the impression of on-­the-­spot photography. Again, the members of the writing team represented an array of the major talents. The coordinator was the distinguished naval officer, Rear Admiral P. Colomb, known as “Column and a Half ” from his habit of writing long letters to the Times. He contributed the naval episodes, and he edited the land-­warfare accounts from Charles Lowe, a distinguished foreign correspondent of the Times, and Christie Murray, who had been the special correspondent of the Times during the Russo-­Turkish War of 1877. The great war of 189–begins in the Balkans, in keeping with general expectations; and the immediate cause proved unusually prescient—the attempted assassination of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The ultimate cause—a preview of 1914—is the chain-­effect of the Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-­Hungary, and Italy. The action begins with the Serbian attack on Bulgaria. The Austrians occupy Belgrade as a precautionary move; and in response the Russians occupy the principal Bulgarian ports on the Black Sea. Germany mobilizes in support of Austria-­Hungary; the French rally to Russia and declare war on Germany. The United Kingdom begins by keeping to the traditional policy of “glorious isolation,” but is eventually drawn into the conflict against the French and the Russians. Well-­known contemporary personalities—political, military, naval—play their parts in this drama of the expected. There are various major engagements on land and sea, most of them one-­day affairs, in a war of rapid movement with infantry advancing at the double and grand cavalry charges. There are no long casualty lists; all combatants behave like gentlemen; and the war is over by Christmas. 114 ] I. F. Clarke

From 1890 onward the tale of the war-­to-­come adapted to the new circumstances of an ever-­growing demand from the burgeoning popular press. Editors began to commission tales of “the next great war.” One of the first into the new business was that astute entrepreneur, Alfred Harmsworth. He began a most profitable association with the sensational writer, William Le Queux, when he commissioned a future-­war story for his new tabloid, Answers. This was The Poisoned Bullet, a tale of a Franco-­Russian invasion, which ran for six months and ended on 2 June 1894. The yarn went on to even greater success. When it was later published as a book with the title of The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), it ran through five editions in a month, and attracted attention in France, Italy, and Germany. Twelve years later Harmsworth (by then elevated to Viscount Northcliffe) made the newspaper coup of the pre-­1914 period. In 1906 he commissioned Le Queux to write a serial, The Invasion of 1910, for his tabloid Daily Mail. The story did wonders for the circulation figures of the newspaper. It made a small fortune for Le Queux; there were translations into twenty-­seven languages, and over one million copies of the book edition were sold. At that time, however, the enemy was still France for the British. That was quite evident from the activities of editors and publishers. Grant Richards, a successful publisher, commissioned a French invasion story from Colonel Maude, The New Battle of Dorking (1900), in the hope that it would do as well as the original Chesney story. Again, the editor of Le Monde Illustré commissioned Henri de Nousanne to write an end-­of-­the-­British Empire story, La Guerre Anglo-­Franco-­Russe (The Anglo-­Franco-­Russian War). That took up the entire special number of 10 March 1900, complete with excellent illustrations and a detailed map of the world that showed how the Russians and the French shared out the British possessions between themselves. But the scale of that hopeful history could not compare with the far greater enterprise that transferred the locations and events in Wells’s War of the Worlds (without the knowledge or permission of the author) to a New England setting in the Boston Post and to the New York area in the New York Evening Journal. As David Y. Hughes has shown in a groundbreaking study, the double act of brigandage started from the legitimate publication of Wells’s story in the Cosmopolitan (April–December 1897).6 For the editor of the New York Journal, Arthur Brisbane, that version was an ideal opportunity to run a serial that would, so he calculated, send up sales toward the hoped-­for million figure by the simple process of turning the British original into an all-­American affair. The copy editors on the Journal got to work—changing the text and adding their own variations to the original— and on 15 December 1897 their readers had the pleasure of beginning the

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serial account of Fighters from Mars: The War of the Worlds. The process was repeated in the editing room of the Post, and on 9 January 1898 the Boston-­only version opened as Fighters From Mars: The War of the Worlds in and Near Boston. This spectacular triumph of entrepreneurial journalism suggests that two American editors had to fall back on the pretense of the Fighters from Mars, because the United States did not have any enemies able to wage war on the scale of the conflicts contemplated across the Atlantic. Their enterprise proved so successful, and the interest in the most fantastic of future-­war fiction so great, that the Journal and the Post combined for another venture into the no-­man’s-­land of coming things. They decided to commission, and they printed six weeks later, a great Yankee sequel: Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss. This primitive version of Star Wars was the most ambitious and the most way-­out future-­war story of the 1890s. The trailer in the Post promised the final salvation of planet Earth: “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” . . . A Sequel to . . . “FIGHTERS FROM MARS” OF EXTRAORDINARY INTEREST How the People of All the Earth, Fearful of a Second Invasion from Mars, Under the Inspiration and Leadership of Thomas A. Edison, the Great Inventor, Combined to Conquer the Warlike Planet. Written in Collaboration With Edison by Garrett P. Serviss, the Well-­Known Astronomical Author Edison provides the know-­how for Earth to strike back against the Martians; but the world has to find the funds to manufacture his electrical ships and vibration engines by the thousand. The word goes forth from Washington that all the nations must unite their resources, and if necessary, exhaust all their hoards, in order to raise the needed sum. Negotiations were at once begun. The United States naturally took the lead, and their leadership was never for a moment questioned abroad. Washington was selected as the place of meeting for a great congress of nations. Washington, luckily, had been one of the places which had not been touched by the Martians. But if Washington had been a city composed of hotels alone, and every hotel so great as to be a little city in itself, it would have been utterly insufficient for the ac116 ] I. F. Clarke

commodation of the innumerable throngs which now flocked to the banks of the Potomac. But when was American enterprise unequal to a crisis? (16) By the end of the century, the tale of the war-­to-­come had clearly become a thriving business that responded to the very different interests of two sets of readers. In the universe of serious politics and national defense, the short story declined in numbers and vanished from all but the most prestigious magazines, like the Strand and McClure’s Magazine; but the lobbyists for preparedness continued with their messages, working more effectively in long stories that often ran to many editions. In the newer universe of the fancy-­free—those who followed conjecture wherever it led—there were no limits to their fantasias of the future. One favored theme was the scientist of genius and his invention of the superweapon; and here the delightful excitement that powered these hectic dramas of the boundless—dynamite ships, immense flying machines, superbombs—tends to obscure the beginnings of a confrontation between science and society. Jules Verne was the first to create the Prospero image of the inventor of genius in Nemo and Robur. His heroes exemplified a confidence in science and in human capabilities; their theme song could have been set to the sweet music of progress in Walt Whitman’s line: “Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God” (“Years of the Modern,” 1865). Those sentiments had once inspired the young Tennyson with great hopes for the future in his hymn to progress, “Locksley Hall”; but some forty-­three years later, he had very different thoughts in his “Locksley Hall. Sixty Years After”: Is there evil but on earth? or pain in every peopled sphere? Well, be grateful for the sounding watchword ‘Evolution’ here. Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.



Jules Verne in his old age, like Tennyson, revised his ideas about the gifts of science. In Face au drapeau (Facing the Flag, 1896) the invention of the superbomb, the Fulgurator, is the occasion for weighing scientific achievement in the scales of good and evil. Verne went further in his Maître du monde (Master of the World, 1904), where Robur reappears—an Edison gone wrong—as a danger to the world. In like manner, the bad genius, “a mad genius in charge of a new and terrible explosive,” dominates the action in Robert Cromie’s The Crack of Doom (1895). He has discovered that “one grain of matter contains enough energy, if etherized, to raise one hundred Future-­War Fiction

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thousand tons nearly two miles” (36). He sets out to destroy the world, but fortunately a prototype James Bond defeats him at the last moment. Good scientists came singly or in groups. The example of Ferdinand de Lesseps, for instance, offered the French ideas for turning the tables on their hereditary enemy. In George Le Faure’s Mort aux Anglais! (Death to the English!, 1892) the good French patriot and man of genius devises yet another perfect scheme to defeat the British: reverse the Gulf Stream and freeze them out! An even more ingenious variant on that notion comes from Alphonse Allais who devotes the aptly named Projet d’attitude inamicale vis-­à-­vis de l’Angleterre (Plan for Hostile Relations against England, 1900) to a plan for freezing the Gulf Stream. The Channel then ices over ten feet deep and the French march across to final victory. Other operations for the good of the nation or of humankind were the work of secret international brotherhoods like the dedicated anarchists in George Griffith’s The Angel of the Revolution. That tale of terror began in January 1893 as a serial in the new British tabloid, Pearson’s Weekly; it ran through thirty-­nine installments; and worked through the contemporary schedule of superweapons from compressed air guns to fast aerial cruisers. Good here triumphs over evil: the Franco-­Russian forces are defeated; and the Anglo-­Saxon Federation of the World is proclaimed. This happy notion of the Anglo-­Saxon conquest of the world appeared in a scenario that had similar scripts on both sides of the Atlantic. In G. Danyers’s Blood Is Thicker than Water (1895) a British writer reckoned the Americans and the British had so much in common that the two nations would inevitably become the policemen of the world; they would intervene in a war between France and Germany; and would finally come together in a grand fraternal union: “all will be equal in the brotherhood of their race, and over all will float, as against the rest of the world, a common flag, which, hoisted when danger threatens, will be the signal for the rally for a common object of every force that can be disposed of by the greatest union of which history makes mention” (158–59). An American version of these world ambitions appeared in B. R. Davenport’s Anglo-­Saxons Onward! A Romance of the Future (1898), where an American author looked forward to an alliance between Americans and British against the Russians and the Turks. As the president of the United States told the Senate when he presented the Treaty of Alliance between the two nations: “the fact that Great Britain was America’s only natural ally, that any circumstance tending to weaken the English nation was pregnant with danger to the influence and welfare of the Anglo-­Saxon race all over the world, and consequently an attempt upon Great Britain was full of dire consequences to the Republic as the other great Anglo-­Saxon 118 ] I. F. Clarke

nation” (257). These final solutions for the problems of war and peace must have owed something to Andrew Carnegie who had argued for an Atlantic alliance in his tract on “The Reunion of Britain and America” in 1893. Indeed, the idea that the future belonged to the Anglo-­Saxons was in the air about the turn of the century. It was central to Wells’s forecast in Anticipations (1902) where he showed himself convinced that: a great federation of white English-­speaking peoples, a federation having America north of Mexico as its central mass (a federation that may conceivably include Scandinavia) and its federal government will sustain a common fleet, and protect or dominate or actually administer most or all of the non-­white states of the present British Empire, and in addition much of the South and Middle Pacific, the East and West Indies, the rest of America, and the larger part of black Africa. (260–61)



When Wells was engaged on his Anticipations in 1901, he saw no connection between the Navy Law of 1898, which began the construction of a large German navy, and the increased possibility of a great European war. The first signs of a possible Anglo-­German confrontation, however, had already appeared in T. W. Offin’s How the Germans took London (1900) and in Karl Eisenhart’s Die Abrechnung mit England (The Reckoning with England, 1900). The German writer describes the war-­to-­come against the United Kingdom; and he begins by saying that “The entire Navy had long yearned for the day when they could take on the hated English; for they had brought on themselves immense hatred and an animosity like that which the French had experienced in 1813” (3). That was the signal for a great outpouring of tales about the coming war between the British and the Germans. For the following fourteen years, British writers described a German invasion of England in tales like Tracy’s The Invaders (1901), Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906), Wood’s The Enemy in our Midst (1906), Cole’s The Death Trap (1907). And German writers gave their version of der nächste Krieg in Niemann’s Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche Träume (World War: German Dreams, 1904), Bleibtreu’s Die ‘Offensiv-­Invasion’ gegen England (The Offensive Invasion of England, 1907), and Grautoff ’s Deutschlands Flotte im Kampf (Germany’s Fleet in Battle, 1907). All these essays in future-­think had two things in common: the authors expected a war between the Imperial Reich and the United Kingdom; and in their descriptions of naval and military engagements they failed entirely to foresee the new kind of warfare that would begin in the autumn of 1914. Future-­War Fiction

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Notes

1. All translations from the French and German have been made by the author. For a survey of early future-­war stories, see I. F. Clarke, “Before and After The Battle of Dorking.” 2. Ironically, London’s story has been chosen as one of the texts to be used by students of English in the Central China Normal University at Wuhan, Hubei, People’s Republic of China. 3. These British naval stories became a flood in the 1890s—an effect of the interest in many new types of warship and of the increasing tension between the United Kingdom and France, the only comparable naval power at that time. The major stories were: William Laird Clowes, The Captain of the Mary Rose (1892); A. N. Seaforth (George Sydenham Clarke), The Last Great Naval War (1892); Captain S. Eardley-­ Wilmot, The Next Naval War (1894); The Earl of Mayo, The War Cruise of the Aries (1894); J. Eastwick, The New Centurion (1895); F. T. Jane, Blake of the Rattlesnake (1895); Francis G. Burton, The Naval Engineer and the Command of the Sea (1896); H. W. Wilson and A. White, When War Breaks Out (1898); P. L. Stevenson, How the Jubilee Fleet Escaped Destruction, and the Battle of Ushant (1899). 4. “England has barely one military painter, and she’s a woman.” Quoted in Paul Usherwood and Jenny Spencer-­Smith (166). This survey gives an excellent account of Lady Butler’s paintings. The influence of Meissonier is examined in the chapter entitled “The Influence of French Military Painting” (143–66). 5. “Has War Become Impossible?” (1–16). Bloch began his study of modern warfare in 1888. The book was first published in Russia in 1897, then in France and Germany in 1898. An abridged English translation appeared in 1899 (see Steed). 6. For the full, fascinating story of how Wells’s story was pirated by the “Yellow Press,” see Hughes.

Works Cited

Allais, Alphonse. “Projet d’attitude inamicale vis-­à-­vis de l’Angleterre.” In Ne nous frappons pas, 60–63. Paris: Ed. de la Revue Blanche, 1900. Anon. La France et l’Allemagne au printemps prochain. Paris: 1876. Anon. La Guerre avec l’Angleterre. Paris: Berger-­Levrault, 1900. Arnold-­Foster, Hugh Oakley. “In a Conning Tower: A Story of Modern Ironclad Warfare.” Murray’s Magazine 4 (July 1888): 59–78. Also in The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914, edited by I. F. Clarke, 139–61. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Barton, Samuel. The Battle of the Swash and the Capture of Canada. New York: Dillingham, 1888. Bleibtreu, Karl. Die ‘Offensiv-­Invasion’ gegen England. Berlin: Schall and Rentel, 1907. Bloch, Ivan. “Has War Become Impossible?” Review of Reviews: Special Supplement (January–June 1899): 1–16. Burton, Francis G. The Naval Engineer and the Command of the Sea. Manchester: Technical Publishing, 1896. Butler, Sir William Francis. The Invasion of England. London: Sampson Low, 1882. 120 ] I. F. Clarke

Carnegie, Andrew. “The Reunion of Britain and America.” Triumphant Democracy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893. 512–49. Chesney, Sir George Tomkyns. The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. London: 1871. First published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1871). Also in The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914, edited by I. F. Clarke, 27–73. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Cheynell, Francis. Aulicus his Dream of the Kings Sudden Comming to London. London: 1644. Clarke, I. F. “Before and After The Battle of Dorking.” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 1 (March 1997): 33–46. ———, ed. The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Clowes, William Laird. The Captain of the Mary Rose. London: Tower, 1892. Cole, Robert William. The Death Trap. London: Greening, 1907. Colomb, Philip Howard, John Frederick Maurice, Frederick Maude, Archibald Forbes, Charles Lowe, David Murray, and Francis Scudamore. The Great War of 189–. London: Heinemann, 1893. Cromie, Robert. The Crack of Doom. London: Digby, 1895. Dangin, Édouard. La Bataille de Berlin en 1875. Paris: E. Lachaud, 1871. Danrit, Capitaine [Commandant Émile Auguste Cyrien Driant]. La Guerre de demain. Paris: 1888. ———. La Guerre des forts. Paris: Fayard, 1900. ———. La Guerre en ballon. Paris: Flammarion, 1888. ———. La Guerre en forteresse. Paris: Flammarion, 1888. ———. La Guerre en rase campagne. Paris: Flammarion, 1888. ———. La Guerre fatale: France-­Angleterre. Paris: Flammarion, 1902. ———. L’Invasion noire. Paris: Flammarion, 1895–96. Danyers, G. Blood is Thicker Than Water. 1895. Davenport, Benjamin Rush. Anglo-­Saxons Onward! A Romance of the Future. Cleveland, OH: Hubbell, 1898. Donnelly, Hugh Grattan. The Stricken Nation. New York: Baker, 1890. Also in The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914, edited by I. F. Clarke, 162–92. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Dooner, Pierton. Last Days of the Republic. San Francisco: Alta California Publishing House, 1880. New York: Arno, 1978. Eardley-­Wilmot, Captain S. The Next Naval War. London: E. Stanford, 1894. Eastwick, James. The New Centurion. London: Longmans, 1895. Eisenhart, Karl. Die Abrechnung mit England. Munich: Lehmann, 1900. Franklin, H. Bruce. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gopčević, Spiridion. “Der grosse Seekrieg im Jahre 1888.” Internationale Revue über die Gesamten Areen und Flotten. 1886. Translated as The Conquest of Britain in 1888. Trans. F. H. E. Crowe, Portsmouth, UK: Griffin, 1887. Grautoff, F. H. Deutschlands Flotte im Kampf. Altona: J. Harder, 1907. Griffith, George. The Angel of the Revolution. London: Tower, 1893. Hackett, Sir John. The Third World War. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1978.

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Hart, B. H. Liddell. History of the First World War. London: Cassell, 1970. London: Pan Macmillan, 1992. Hay, William Delisle. Three Hundred Years Hence. London: Newman, 1881. Hughes, David T. “The War of the Worlds in the Yellow Press,” Journalism Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Winter 1966): 639–46. Jane, F. T. Blake of the Rattlesnake. London: Tower, 1895. Le Faure, Georges. Mort aux Anglais! Paris: Fayard, 1892. Le Queux, William. The Great War in England in 1897. London: Tower, 1894. ———. The Invasion of 1910. London: E. Nash, 1906. Lermina, Jules. La Bataille de Strasbourg. 2 vols. Paris: L. Boulanger, 1895. Lester, Horace Francis. The Taking of Dover. London: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1888. London, Jack. “The Unparalleled Invasion.” Excerpt from Walt. Nervin’s “Certain Essays in History,” McClure’s Magazine (July 1910): 308–14. Also in The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914, edited by I. F. Clarke, 257–70. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Maude, Colonel F. N. The New Battle of Dorking. London: Grant Richards, 1900. Mayo, The Earl of [Dermot Robert Wyndham Bourke]. The War Cruise of the Aries. Dublin: E. Ponsoby, 1894. Mèche, Général. La Guerre franco-­allemande de 1878. Anvers: J. Roeder, 1877. Niemann, August. Der Weltkrieg-­Deutsche Träume. Leipzig: F.W. Bobach, 1904. Nousanne, Henri de. “La Guerre Anglo-­Franco-­Russe.” Le Monde illustré (10 March 1900). Offin, T. W. How the Germans Took London. London: Simpkin-­Marshall, 1900. Palmer, John Henry. The Invasion of New York: Or, How Hawaii was Annexed. New York: F. T. Neely, 1897. Parabellum [Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff ]. Bansai! Leipzig: Theodor Weicher, 1908. Richet, Charles. Dans cent ans. Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1892. Robida, Albert. La Guerre au vingtième siecle. Paris: Decaux, 1897. Rpt. in English in The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914, edited by I. F. Clarke, 95–112. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. ———. Le Vingtième siècle. Paris: Decaux, 1882. Seaforth, A. N. [George Sydenham Clarke]. The Last Great Naval War. London: Cassell, 1892. Serviss, Garrett P. Edison’s Conquest of Mars. 1898. Los Angeles: Carcosa House, 1947. Shiel, M. P. The Yellow Danger. London: Grant Richards, 1898. Steed, W. T., ed. Modern Weapons and Modern War. London: Review of Reviews Office, 1899. Stevenson, P. L. How the Jubilee Fleet Escaped Destruction, and the Battle of Ushant. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1899. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Locksley Hall.” Poems. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1842. ———. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. London: Macmillan, 1886. Tracy, Louis. The Invaders. London: Pearson, 1901. 122 ] I. F. Clarke

Usherwood, Paul, and Jenny Spencer-­Smith. Lady Butler. Battle Artist, 1846–1933. London: National Army Museum, 1877. Verne, Jules. Les 500 Millions de la Bégum. Paris: Hetzel, 1879. Versins, Pierre. Encyclopédie de l’Utopie, des Voyages Extraordinaires, et de la Science Fiction. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1972. Wallace, King. The Next War: A Prediction. Washington, DC: Martyn, 1892. Wells, H. G. Anticipations. London: Chapman and Hall, 1902. ———. “The Land Ironclads.” The Strand Magazine 26 (December 1903): 751–64. ———. The War in the Air. London: Bell, 1908. ———. The War of the Worlds. London: Chapman and Hall, 1898. ———. The World Set Free. London: Macmillan, 1914. Willcox, C. De W. “Changes in Military Science” in The 19th Century: A Review of Progress. London: G. P. Putnam, 1901. 492–93. Wilson, H. W., and A. White, When War Breaks Out. London: Harper, 1898. Wood, Walter. The Enemy in our Midst. London: J. Long, 1906.

Afterword Margaret Clarke [NB: I. F. Clarke passed away on November 5, 2009. His wife and colleague, Margaret, has kindly agreed to write an “afterword” for the present volume, where she remembers his pioneering work on future-­war fiction and two other book projects from 2002 and 2004 for which I had the distinct honor of serving as editor.]



When I look back on all the publications of my late husband, and on his writings about future warfare in particular, there are two things that strike me forcefully: the first is the way in which his interests were shaped by his own experiences of soldiering in six years of fighting during the Second World War; the second, apparent already in our student days immediately after the war, is his powerful and enduring desire to understand how past generations of men envisaged future scientific and technological developments and future conflicts. Put those two strands together and it is not difficult to see why so much of his study was directed to the discovery and recording of voices prophesying war. The future as seen from the past was central to his work. By a happy chance we were able to work together on two tales of the future with quite different themes when Wesleyan University Press suggested translations of Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man, 1805) by Jean Baptiste François Xavier Cousin De Grainville and Le Monde tel qu’il sera (The World as It Shall Be, 1846) by Émile Souvestre. The challenge with Grainville was to transpose into modern English a work conceived in the epic mode that the author deemed necessary for the treatment of such a serious subject as the last days of the human race on our planet. Le Monde tel qu’il sera was a joy for both of us to work on. Souvestre’s intention was serious: a warning to his own contemporaries of the deeply unattractive society their policies were in danger of creating. However, his touch was light, the many and varied episodes always entertaining, witty, and at times hilarious. It was our great good fortune that we were able to work together on these projects. Future-­War Fiction

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• 7• The Anatomical Gaze in

Tomorrow’s Eve Allison de Fren

For the following essay, Allison de Fren won the SFRA’s Pioneer Award for 2010. In the words of the selection committee, her article “reconfigures our understanding of how a defining figure of science fiction—the female cyborg— emerged and why,” and it “makes important connections among some of the best known texts in sf criticism and the very early days of the genre, enriching our sense of its engagement with questions of embodiment and gender” (SFRA Review no. 293 [Summer 2010]: 11). Allison de Fren is also the writer and director of the documentary film The Mechanical Bride, which explores the Pygmalionesque world of “perfect” artificial women—from the fembots and gynoids in sf literature, cinema, and television to today’s growing industry of life-­sized silicone love dolls. This essay originally appeared in SFS 36, no. 2 (July 2009): 235–65

In the early sf novel L’Eve future (Tomorrow’s Eve) by Philippe Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam (1838–89), the female body is dissected repeatedly. The novel—which appeared in serialized form in La Vie Moderne between 1885 and 1886 before the definitive text was published in 1886—follows the creation of a female android by a fictionalized Thomas Alva Edison for a British patron and friend named Lord Celian Ewald, a poetic type who is on the verge of suicide due to a failed love. The object of Lord Ewald’s torment is a young singer named Alicia Clary, whose unearthly beauty he compares to that of the Venus de Milo, but whose banal personality destroys whatever romantic sentiments her image inspires. Edison, whose goal is to create a factory for the manufacture of ideal 124 ]

women, sees his friend’s plight as an opportunity to bring to fruition the robotic prototype he has been secretly developing in his underground laboratory. He proposes to transfer onto his mechanical template Alicia’s image and voice, while disposing of the interior self that his patron finds so distasteful. Although Lord Ewald is skeptical of—if not somewhat offended by—the idea that a mechanical doll could possibly live up to his nobility of feeling, Edison sets out to convince him through a series of lengthy conversations that form the bulk of the novel, many of which deconstruct female beauty in order to substantiate its replicability. Such deconstruction is literalized as dissection in a scene in which Edison opens the female android for his patron, providing not only a thorough examination of her innards but also a medico-­technological inventory of her components and their functions. This initial dissection is then repeated in textual form: various parts of the android’s body are given their own chapters—Flesh, Rosy Mouth, Pearly Teeth, Physical Eyes, Hair, Epidermis—and explained at length by Edison. The dissection of the android not only serves as the narrative nucleus of Villiers’s novel, it is also the matrix within which a variety of discourses about the novel intersect. Considering the novel as a work of proto-­science fiction, this scene is of note for its use of an actual inventor/scientist and of scientific exposition that references recent inventions—such as the phonograph and photosculpture (the former is how the android will speak, the latter the process used to transpose the image of Alicia onto her frame)— for narratological ends.1 The detailed explanation of the android’s inner workings both enhances verisimilitude and establishes Edison’s scientific authority in an undertaking that is—by the standards of readers both then and now—speculative. From this demonstration, we are to surmise (as Lord Ewald starts to suspect) “not only that the engineer was going to resolve all the problems raised by this monstrous set of affirmations, but that he had already resolved them, and was simply concerned to set forth the proof of established facts” (129). Edison’s technological-­anatomical demonstration is, in this sense, reminiscent of the “mise-­en-­abyme mini-­lessons of scientific fact” embedded within the fiction of Jules Verne (Evans 84). As Arthur B. Evans argues, “Here, many of the same narrative elements used to facilitate such didacticism are present: e.g., the dialogue format, the incredulous interlocutor serving as intermediary for reader identification, the systematic and logical presentation, itself constructed around linear cause-­ effect ‘scientific’ principles, the de rigueur valorization of the travail and patience required to bring the project to fruition, and so on” (98). Despite Edison’s allusions to real technologies and the granularity with

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which he explains the android’s functions, however, his anatomical explications are pseudoscientific patter, an “ ‘enabling device’ to allow for developments in the narrative that might not otherwise have been possible” (Evans 94)—namely, the Pygmalionesque fantasy of an artificial woman brought to life. This fantasy has animated a number of sf novels and stories, from such classics as Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (1938) and C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” (1944) to Richard Calder’s recent Dead Trilogy (1992–96).2

The Medico-­Erotic Gaze While Evans views the “non-­mimetic referents” of Edison’s anatomical demonstration as a bridge between the scientific didacticism of Verne and the “hybrid semiotic recipe” of twentieth-­century sf, both film and feminist theorists have drawn attention to how this scene also links scientific inquiry to cinematic viewing. Not only does the android foreshadow the cinematic creations of the next century of sf film, but the appearance of Thomas Edison—who would be dubbed (rightly or wrongly) the father of cinema, and who demonstrates in the novel cinematic projection nearly a decade before it premiered in reality—anticipates both the advent of cinema and its ability to perform visually the kind of deconstructions that Tomorrow’s Eve attempts textually. Annette Michelson draws an explicit correspondence between the dissection of the android in Villiers’s novel and the gendered dynamics of representation in cinema. There is, she suggests, a kind of fetishistic anatomy that is not only enacted repeatedly in cinema by “cutting up” the female through close-­ups, medium- and long-­shots, but that also is formative in cinema and evident in even the earliest cinematic experiments, particularly within the “cinema of attractions.”3 The female body is subject to “mutilations, reconstitutions, levitations, and transformations” (Michelson 19) both within the work of the real Edison and especially in the trick films of Georges Méliès, the pioneer of the fantasy film, wherein women repetitively—and, it seems, obsessively—vanish, reappear, are dismembered, and then reassembled. The film Illusions funambulesques (Extraordinary Illusions, 1903), in which Méliès produces a living woman from mannequin parts, is prototypical in this regard. As in most of his films, Méliès plays a magician and appears as if on a theater stage, addressing the camera directly. Surrounded by statues on pedestals (a foreshadowing of the Pygmalionesque fantasy that will follow), he places a “Magic Box” upon a table, from which he pulls a mannequin’s legs, torso, and head, proceeding to assemble them into a make-­believe girlfriend. After kissing and briefly conversing with her, he throws the mannequin into the air, and she is instantly 126 ] A llis on d e Fren

Figures 7.1a and 7.1b. Méliès transforming a mannequin into a living woman in Extraordinary Illusions (1903).

transformed into a living woman, a dancer who flits around the stage (see figures 7.1a and 7.1b). The magician changes her dancing costume to pedestrian clothes, and the two promenade together in a kind of happily-­ever-­ after jig. Their happiness is short-­lived, however, for not long after she has been brought to life, the woman unexpectedly transforms into a male cook with a grotesque, clownish mask, stirring a pot with a spoon. The magician attempts to turn him back into a she, but each time he does so, she switches back into the cook, a cycle that continues until the magician, in frustration, grabs the cook and disassembles him into separate dummy parts. Méliès enacted similar Pygmalionesque fantasies in many other films, most significantly, Pygmalion et Galathée (Pygmalion and Galatea, 1898), which featured his wife, Jehanne d’Alcy, as a statue who comes to life and then literally falls to pieces as her sculptor attempts to embrace her. Lucy Fischer has described these films, in which the female body is the object of manipulation and disassembly, as engaging in a form of “magical misogyny,” and Linda Williams traces such “perverse” proclivities not only to Méliès’s pre-­filmic work as a magician but also to his fascination and experimentation with the automata that he inherited when he purchased the Théâtre Robert-­Houdin in Paris. Williams suggests that there is a parallel between Méliès’s attempts to control the appearance and movement of the mechanical humans in the basement of his theater and his later manipulation and control of the female body in his films: “From the first trick of assembling a simulation of the whole body out of mechanical parts to the further trick of making the imaginary bodies projected on a screen appear and disappear, Méliès perfects his mastery over the threatening presence of the actual body, investing his pleasure in an infinitely repeatable trucage” (525). Giuliana Bruno offers further corroborative evidence for the connections that Michelson draws between the dissection of the android and the inven

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tion of cinema by recounting the anatomical attractions of the first movie theater to open in Naples, Italy. The proprietor, Menotti Cattaneo, began his film exhibitions with a spectacle called “the anatomy lesson,” which he had developed in his career as a showman. Dressed as a surgeon, Cattaneo “dissected” a human body that he had constructed out of wax, removing various organs to the wonder and horror of his audience. He followed this spectacle with a film exhibition, the latter seamlessly following the former, according to Bruno, since their common terrain is a discourse of investigation and the fragmentation of the body. The spectacle of the anatomy lesson exhibits an analytic drive, an obsession with the body, upon which acts of dismemberment are performed. Such “analytic” desire is present in the very language of film. It is inscribed in the semiotic construction of film, its découpage (as the very word connotes, a “dissection” of narration in shots and sequences), its techniques of framing, and its process of editing, literally called “cutting,” a process of (de)construction of bodies in space. (241) The anatomy lesson, particularly when performed on the female body, is for these critics the primal scene of cinema, whose appeal to a medico-­erotic gaze will be repetitively staged and reenacted, serving not only as a form of cinematic pleasure but also as the fantasmatic ground of cinema itself. “Primal scene” is the operative phrase, since in their interpretations of the dismemberment of the female body in early cinema, Williams and Bruno in particular invoke psychoanalytical theory, taking many of their theoretical cues from Laura Mulvey’s influential 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” For Mulvey, the role of the female body in cinema is to remain static and passive, emanating a quality of “to-­be-­looked-­at-­ness” that serves the visual delectation of the active male gaze. The insistent interrogations of this gaze are rooted in early sexuality—in particular, the fear of castration inspired by the realization of female lack. In Mulvey’s terms, the assembly and disassembly, appearance and disappearance of the female body functions in cinema as a contradictory gesture, an attempt at revealing the “truth” of the woman’s body at the same time as it tries to hide that very truth. The “truth” in this case is that which Freud, in collaboration with his close friend and associate Sándor Ferenczi, dubbed the “Medusa’s Head,” a figure that emblematizes the female’s lack of a phallus: “The terror of Medusa is a terror of castration that . . . occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of 128 ] A llis on d e Fren

the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother” (Freud 202). In the original myth, Medusa is vanquished through a kind of dissection, for she is decapitated by Perseus with the help of a mirrored shield and harpe (the same instrument used by Zeus to castrate his father Kronos, supporting Freud’s formulation: decapitation = castration). She is ultimately offered as a votive gift to the goddess Athena, who wears the head on her aegis or shield as a means of terrifying her foes. Once decapitated and mounted on the shield, the Medusa’s head becomes the prototype for the apotropaic image, a means of protection from the terror that it once embodied. For Freud, the invocation of the Medusa’s head within literature and art is understood as a way of raising the specter of castration while simultaneously disavowing it, as well as defusing its threat, an interpretation that he suggests is supported by the site of its mythological display: the aegis of the virgin goddess, Athena. The amputative site of terror is, then, transformed via mediation, the filling in of an absence with a symbolic presence, which serves as a protective barrier between the conscious mind and the suppressed truth. Within Villiers’s novel, this symbolic presence is the android who, following her dissection, becomes a mediating agent between Lord Ewald and Alicia. As Anne Greenfeld points out, there is a distinct analogy made in the novel between the Gorgon and Alicia, whose deadly beauty paralyzes and whose stunted personality invokes, in Lord Ewald’s words, “the most hideous of the Eumenides” (Villiers 40–41): “What Ewald desires can be seen as a kind of inversion of the Medusa-­Perseus relationship: that of Pygmalion and Galatea. In such a relationship the woman would be transfixed in stone, entirely powerless until a man’s gaze would ‘create’ her, animate her” (Greenfield 69). And, as Michelle Bloom observes, the Pygmalionesque desire that leads to the creation of the android in the novel is, Villiers seems to suggest, best fulfilled by the “ ‘illusions of movement’ made possible by the advent of cinema” (291).

Deconstructing the Act of Dissection In this essay, I seek to expand on and complicate the discussion of Tomorrow’s Eve as a bridge between the Pygmalionesque concerns of nineteenth-­ century French literature and the animated and deconstructed bodies (both real and artificial) of cinema by exploring the novel’s central thematic of dissection. Over the course of this essay, I will conduct a close reading not only of Edison’s anatomical demonstration of the android, but also of two other dissections—the verbal anatomization of a living woman (Alicia) and

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the cinematic deconstruction of a dead one (Evelyn Habal)—to show how the act of dissection is used repeatedly in the novel to encourage a mode of awareness or perception that will become more formally associated with later science fiction. In order to make this conceptual leap forward, however, I will work backward, tracing this mode of awareness to the anatomy theater of the Renaissance, which combined medical investigation with visual spectacle, and which the novel references explicitly in the lead-­in scene to the android’s dissection, in which Edison compares himself to Andreas Vesalius (1514–64), the most famous anatomist of his time: The young man looked at the electrician: already bent over his glittering surgeon’s case, Edison was choosing from among his crystal scalpels. . . . The table tilted up; the Android now stood with her back to it, her head resting against the cushion. The electrician stooped and loosened two steel clamps riveted to the floor, slid them beneath the feet of Hadaly, and then moved the table back to its horizontal position, with the Android now lying on it like a corpse on the dissecting table in an amphitheater. “Think of the picture of Andreas Vesalius,” said Edison with a smile. “Though we’re alone down here, we’re imitating the general idea of it at this moment.” (124–25) To begin to unpack the “general idea” of anatomy to which this scene refers, we must review the extraordinary shift that occurred during the Renaissance. For over a century prior, anatomical practice had been influenced by the work of Galen of Pergamum (ca. 129–200), who produced over two hundred medical volumes that extrapolated studies of dissected animals to describe human anatomy. From the time of Galen, on the rare occasion when a body was dissected, the process was conducted by barber-­ surgeons while an anatomy professor stood at a distance from the proceedings reading from Galen’s works. Indeed, the physical findings were of less significance than the transmission of ancient knowledge, much of it incorrect since it was based on animal physiology. Vesalius was one of the first anatomists to perform dissections with his own hand, rather than relegating them to assistants. Based on his physical investigations, he published an exhaustive anatomical treatise entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543), whose illustrative woodcuts replaced Galen’s text as the most authoritative reference on the human body. Under the influence of Vesalian anatomy, the visual began to vie with the textual for authority, eventually giving rise to the concept of autopsy or auto-­ opsis—“seeing for oneself ”—as the basis of anatomical truth. Thus, when 130 ] A llis on d e Fren

Edison states that he is reproducing the “picture” of Andreas Vesalius in his dissection of the android, he is both conjuring an image of the anatomy theater and underscoring the act of seeing as foundational to that image. Despite his invitation to gaze into the android’s interior, however, the mechanics of narration within the dissection scene that follows work against our comprehension of what it is that we (and Lord Ewald) are viewing. As Evans notes, while Edison’s complex descriptions of the android’s inner workings gesture toward science, they invariably veer toward the metaphoric (“This is . . . the place in the spinal column from which springs the marvelous tree of the nervous system”), the mythical (“This particular electric spark—it’s on loan from Prometheus . . .”), the hyperbolic (“Here are the two golden phonographs, placed at an angle toward the center of the breast; they are the two lungs. . . . They exchange between one another tapes of those harmonious—or should I say, celestial—conversations. . . . The words are those invented by the greatest poets, the most subtle metaphysicians, the most profound novelists of this century”), as well as the vague and obscure (Evans 97–99; emphases in original). Such passages make clear that the novel’s central concern is “metaphysics rather than physics” or rather the conjuring of the metaphysical from the physical, and it is in this sense and for this reason that the novel references the anatomy theater. As I will demonstrate, Vesalian anatomy, while setting the stage for medical science, was grounded in older traditions of ritual and symbolism, and to the extent that it fostered empirical analysis, it also inspired metaphysical awe. Such awe was cultivated via an anamorphic or doubled vision, which encouraged a sublime reading of grotesque phenomena—that is, a reading in which dissection is simultaneously a revelation of the interior wonders and horrors of the body and larger, universal truths that defy both vision and intelligibility. Tomorrow’s Eve anticipates how the anatomical gaze will inform the cinematic gaze, encouraging a way of seeing that, while focused on the specificities of material reality, gives way to experiences that defy rational explanation. In the novel, the pre-­Cartesian, metaphysical origins of the anatomy theater are invoked in relation to a contemporary inventor and a machine body in order to inspire a “sense of wonder” through technological innovation and, in so doing, to subvert and critique the rational agenda of which it is the manifestation. This use of science self-­reflexively to inscribe its own limitations will become a hallmark of twentieth-­century science fiction.

The Woman in Pieces The first dissection in Tomorrow’s Eve occurs shortly after the novel opens, when Lord Ewald pays Edison a visit at his compound in Menlo Park to bid

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the great inventor farewell before killing himself. In explaining the despair to which he has been reduced by his mistress, he enumerates the ways in which her body resembles a statue that has come to life: Miss Alicia is about twenty years old, and slim as a silver aspen. Her gestures are gently and deliciously harmonious, her body is molded in lines to delight and surprise the greatest sculptors. Her figure is full, but with the pale glow of lilies; she has indeed the splendor of a Venus Victorious, but humanized. . . . Her nose exquisitely straight, with translucent wings, continues perfectly the line of her forehead. Her hands are more pagan than aristocratic; her feet have the same elegance as those of Greek statues. . . . (29) Less a lover’s effictio than an introduction to “the problem,” this verbal dissection hearkens back to a form of poetry popularized within the anatomical imaginary of the Renaissance: the blason du corps or blasons anatomiques, in which discrete fragments or features of a beautiful woman were amputated from the whole and described in intimate detail. The anatomical blazons, which offered the textual equivalent of the kind of physical interrogations performed within the anatomy theater (indeed, “the authors of the blazon poems were called by themselves and by their contemporaries ‘anatomistes’” [Vickers, “Members Only” 7]), were attributed to Clément Marot and considered a banalization of the psalms, which he translated during his exile from Fontainebleau. In place of the body of Christ, Marot substituted parts of the female body, the first being “Le Blason du Tetin” (The Blazon of the Breast) in 1535, which he presented to an esteemed group of court poets as a form of literary challenge. Their responses, each dedicated to a separate part of the female body, were organized and eventually published as a single volume, Blasons Anatomiques, in 1543, the same year that Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica appeared; the book enjoyed wide appeal in the French and English courts of the mid-­sixteenth century. Although literary, the blazons drew from the visual culture not only of the anatomy theater, but also of courtly pageantry featuring displays of heraldic paraphernalia, “which fed into a nostalgic fascination in the waning chivalric tradition of knights and armor that ‘tended to proliferate as the practical function of knighthood disappeared’” (Vickers, “This Heraldry” 210, citing Ferguson 17). As Nancy Vickers points out, “blazon” is a word that combines the French blason or shield (and, in particular, the heraldic or ornamental display on a shield) with the older English verb “to blaze”—that is, “to proclaim as with a trumpet, to divulge, to make known.” The two meanings are combined in the poetic blazon, in which parts of women’s bodies are 132 ] A llis on d e Fren

displayed by men in a gesture of rhetorical challenge to other men: “Combatants offer up blazons—poems or/as shields—for aesthetic judgments. . . . [T]he heraldic metaphor ‘woman’s face is a shield’ emblematizes the conflict that motivates it. Here celebratory conceit inscribes woman’s body between rivals: she deflects blows, prevents direct hits, and constitutes the field upon which the battle may be fought” (“This Heraldry” 219). The rhetorical displays of the blasoneur, although criticized by some as idolatrous or scandalous, fed into the Renaissance tradition of ut pictura poesis, in which the poet, who was able to construct verbal monuments of greater duration than the bronze from which many a shield was cast, was considered the equivalent if not the superior of the warrior, and equally deserving of glory.4 Moreover, the overarching goal of such piecemeal appraisal was Love in the abstract, which was considered the highest object of both the courtier and the poet, a reflection of the Love of God. The evocation of a divine unity and the spirit of courtly competition in which the anatomistes engaged inflected the anatomy theater as well, and as Jonathan Sawday notes, both operated within a similar erotic economy: “Both sought to gaze upon the body which they dismantled, piece by piece. Both too progressively constructed a new body made of the parts which they had examined. Just as Vesalius was to dismiss his scientific rivals in anatomical demonstrations, so the poetic texts struggled in competition with one another, brandishing the dissected female form as a token of mastery” (219).5 Within Villiers’s novel, the competitive association between the poetic mastery of the blasoneur and the intellectual and manual prowess of the anatomist is made explicit in the narrative progression from Lord Ewald’s anatomical presentation of Alicia, the woman who resembles a statue, to that of the mechanical statue that Edison will create in her image. Lord Ewald’s blazon of Alicia, although a testament to her beauty, is intended (as were the blasons du corps) to reveal less about her than about him, for it demonstrates his rhetorical gifts and lyricism (and we are immediately struck by how out of place his courtly prose seems in proximity to the scientist Edison). His blazon is, however, mere prologue to an in-­depth moral appraisal of his mistress, conducted over the course of three chapters—­ entitled “Analysis,” “Hypothesis,” and, significantly, “Dissection”—in which he suggests that there is a lack of proportionality between her celestial body and earthbound soul, and that the prosaic leanings of the latter cancel out the divine resonances of the former: “between the body and the soul of Miss Alicia, it wasn’t just a disproportion which distressed and upset my understanding; it was an absolute disparity. . . . The traits of her divine beauty seemed to be foreign to her self; her words seemed constrained and out of

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place in her mouth. Her intimate being was in flat contradiction with the form it inhabited” (31). According to Lord Ewald, Alicia’s soul is weighed down by a bourgeois concern for the rational, literal, and commonsensical; she is, we might say, a material girl. Although her body recalls a Venus statue of classical and transcendent proportions, “in everyday life, Miss Alicia is the Goddess Reason . . . she believes in heaven, but a heaven of rational dimensions” (40–41). The set of distinctions that Ewald draws between Alicia’s “sacred body” and her “profane soul,” as well as between the Venus and the goddess of reason (whom, we are reminded, was Athena), provides a clue to the agenda of Villiers (for whom Lord Ewald is a stand-­in).6 As translator Robert Martin Adams suggests, Villiers was, like his contemporaries Baudelaire and Mallarmé, a man very much at odds with the positivist values of the time into which he was born. He loathed materialism and the very idea of progress, scientific or otherwise. He peddled a form of romantic irony, and there is, indeed, an irony in the scientist Edison’s proposed solution to the woman who is so afflicted by positivist rationalism that she acts, according to Lord Ewald, like a mechanical doll or puppet—namely, to create a mechanical doll in her image. The android, to whatever extent she is a fulfillment of a Cartesian worldview in which the body is rendered as a machine, is also in a dialectical sense (and Villiers loved Hegel) an antidote to it, for she will, according to Edison, restore to Alicia’s body its metaphysicality. Indeed, the semantic arc of Edison’s anatomical presentation of the mechanical woman, in which the concrete gives way to the abstract, serves as a counter to Lord Ewald’s presentation of Alicia, in which the metaphoric aspirations of her poetic blazoning are canceled out by her literal-­mindedness. Their differences are reflected as well in their very names: Alicia, whose surname, “Clary”—likely inspired by “Clara,” the practical woman in E. T. A. Hoffman’s story “Der Sandmann” (The Sandman, 1816), whom the protagonist compares to an automaton and whom he rejects for the mechanical doll Olympia—etymologically points to a consciousness within which all is submitted to the light of reason. On the other hand, the android is named Hadaly, a word that, Edison tells Lord Ewald, means ideal in Persian, and which will be etched and mounted on a plaque in the coffin in which the android, upon her completion, will be presented to her new master. Below this plaque will be placed the Ewald family’s ancient coat of arms (that is, his blazon), a symbol that will, according to Edison, sanctify Lord Ewald’s captivity of her. Thus, to whatever extent Edison’s anatomical presentation serves as a riposte to Lord Ewald’s poetic blazoning, Lord Ewald will, the scientist insists, claim the final prize. 134 ] A llis on d e Fren

From Medusa to Anatomia The visual coding of heraldry—of knights and shields—not only inflects the presentations of the female body in the novel but is also relevant to our understanding of the apotropaic matrix within which Lord Ewald’s dilemma and Edison’s solution are posited, of which dissection is the instrument. If “the scorpion cures the scorpion,” as Paracelsus once claimed, then the mise-­en-­abyme of the opened android body in the dissection scene is the symbolic site at which the medusant powers of Alicia are both mirrored and transformed.7 Here, all the contradictions—between animacy and inanimacy, transcendence and rationality, beauty and horror—that mortify Lord Ewald in Alicia will be transfigured in such a way that those same contradictions in the android will revive his will to live. The question is: What is it that Edison is showing us in this scene, and how does it help solve Ewald’s problem? The Medusa figure may provide a clue. As Freud acknowledges at the end of his essay “Medusa’s Head,” his reading of the Gorgon is highly interpretive and “in order seriously to substantiate this interpretation it would be necessary to investigate the origin of this isolated symbol of horror in Greek mythology as well as parallels to it in other mythologies” (203). This invitation was, in fact, taken up by Stephen Wilk in a book-­length study of the Gorgon, which suggests that in order to solve the mystery of this pan-­cultural symbol, one needs to pose a question with a surprisingly simple answer: What item, common to the experience of a broad range of humankind, could produce a humanlike face with huge, staring eyes, broad nose, wide, gritted-­toothed grin, protruding tongue, facial lines, and stylized hair? We are not familiar with the answer because it is kept from us, deliberately. At one time in our history it was a much more common sight, just as deliberately placed in view. Much of the time, it was simply considered inevitable. But it was distasteful at best, horrifying at worst, and so over time it has been carefully removed from immediate view, a process that has now gone on for so long that the object is no longer familiar. (186) According to Wilk, the Gorgon is not, as Freud suggests, a symbol of the opening from which we all enter the world, but the abyss to which we are all heading: death. Specifically, Medusa’s head is an aestheticized portrayal of the human face one to two weeks after death when gases from putrefaction cause the body to bloat, pushing out the eyes and tongue. “The Gorgoneion is terrible because it shows us the transformation of a human being

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into Death, and does so by a process that destroys all dignity” (190). It is in death and decay that the subject becomes an object and, in particular, one of horror. While it is a sight that is rarely encountered today due to embalming and the medicalization of death and dying, the horrifying specificities of putrefaction were once all too familiar, particularly in instances in which the burial of the body was delayed, such as war and public execution. When we consider the fact that the body within the anatomy theater of the Renaissance was, in most cases, the criminal body recently removed from the gallows and saved from the ignoble fate of public decomposition in order to serve the greater good through its participation in the acquisition of anatomical knowledge, then a consideration of the symbolism of dissection in general and, in particular, its relation to the image of the Medusa’s head seems warranted. Indeed, it is within the mise-­en-­scène of the anatomical demonstration that the reflective glances of which the Medusa is emblematic are transformed into those of the goddess Anatomia, who holds a mirror in one hand and a skull in the other, a personification of the moral imperatives inscribed within the theater’s ritualized atmosphere: “ ‘Nosce te ipsum’ (know thyself ) and ‘Pulvis et umbra sum[u]s’ (we are dust and shadows)” (Sawday 72). The anatomy theater invites a self-­reflexivity whose revelatory insights are linked to death, a view that is reinforced throughout Villiers’s novel and that can be elaborated by examining the “primal scene,” epitomized by the title page of Vesalius’s anatomical masterpiece, where Vesalius himself stands above a dissected female corpse revealing her innards—a scene that would, over three hundred years later, inspire Edison’s technological demonstration of the android in Villiers’s novel (see figure 7.2). On the title page of the Fabrica, Vesalius appears front and center (a novelty at the time; Vesalius was the first anatomist to show himself at work within a printed book), and it is as though he is personally welcoming us at the gates of the anatomical wonders to which we are about to receive admittance. To his left is the female cadaver, surrounded by circular benches populated by a seemingly unruly crowd of humans and animals, the living and the dead, some of whom watch Vesalius while others are clearly distracted. Only Vesalius meets our gaze (with a significant look not all that dissimilar from that of Méliès before performing a magic trick), while he pulls open the abdomen of the dead woman, as if gesturing us inside both the female womb and the mysteries of the anatomical body to which it gives birth (and that the Fabrica will help to disclose). While Vesalius opens the womb with his right hand, with his left he points up to a skeletal figure directly above, a gesture that bifurcates both our focus and the page: “if the womb marks our 136 ] A llis on d e Fren

Figure 7.2. The title page from Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543).

point of entrance into the world, then Vesalius’s own left hand, with its finger raised in a gesture of signification, as well as rhetoric, guides our attention back to the skeleton, our point of departure: ‘Nascentes Morimur’—we are born to die. A drama of life and death is, then, being played out within the circular confines of the temple of anatomy” (Sawday 71). The symbolic circuit created between womb and skeleton on the title page is not just that between life and death, according to Sawday, but between death as representative of the Fall and eternal life as represented by the body of Christ. Indeed, the sacrificial pose of the body at the center of the title page of the Fabrica, as well as those within other anatomical treatises of the time (which were as often male as female) is a clear evocation of the body of Christ after crucifixion. Such allegorical richness offers, perhaps, our first clue to the texture of the performance within the anatomy

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theater and the argument, made convincingly by Sawday, that anatomy was not its sole aim but one aspect incorporated into a larger sphere of multivalent significance: The anatomical Renaissance, the reordering of our knowledge of the human body which took place in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was not merely a moment of high intellectual excitement. Instead, the discovery of the body was grounded in older, traditional, patterns of symbol and ritual. . . . The confrontation which had taken place outside the anatomy theatre, on the gallows, was transformed once the body had been taken inside the theatre. Instead of being a mere object of investigation, the criminal corpse was invested with a transcendent significance. (75) To help us understand the constellation of signification circulating around the dissected corpse within the anatomical imaginary of the Renaissance, Sawday brings our attention to the arrangement of the scene on the title page of the Fabrica. Here, the womb forms the midpoint, and it and the skeleton above it form the central vertical axis around which all other elements in the picture rotate, including the semicircular columns of the theater dome. The heliocentric construction of the scene conforms to the architectural principles of Vitruvius, whose belief that the human body should form the foundation of proportional design served as the basis of many of the basilica churches built during the Renaissance. According to Sawday, such symbolism suggests that there is an overarching universal harmony, where the human body represents not itself but a greater organizing principle in which its dissection is “no less than a demonstration of the structural coherence of the universe itself, whose central component—the principle of life concealed within the womb—Vesalius is about to open up to our gaze” (76). The dissection within the anatomy theater is, then, not just a way of gaining knowledge of the body in an analytical or empirical sense, but also a way of enacting a transfiguration of its base nature into a realm of divine abstraction of both spiritual and ontological significance. The title page alerts us to this agenda through a kind of visual paradox: while it invokes a Vitruvian sense of cosmic order through its circular arrangement (the figure at its center, an anatomical elaboration of da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”), it also undermines its own formal coherence with discordant imagery, whether the vacillating gesture between life and death or the teeming figures surrounding this central drama, who both compete for our attention and por138 ] Allis on d e Fren

tray for us the limitations of human perception in grasping its full revelatory potential: Each of these: the naked figure, the spectral figure, the young man reading, the figure with the slashed arm, the monkey, the squabbling assistants, the figure with the dog, can be envisaged as contributing to the rich allusive web of meaning enfolded within the title-­page. . . . The young man reading is suggestive of youth endeavoring to understand the world according to formulaic precepts contained in written texts, unable to realize that the most significant feature of the world is contained within the conjunction of womb and skeleton. The older man, who has closed his book (as though realizing the futility of written observation), answers the figure of youth by gesturing towards the dissective arm beside him. Again, the figures in the foreground, undoubtedly offering a commentary on older anatomical practices, also echo the central message of the image. Thus, the ape who distracts two of the spectators on the left of the image symbolizes the distracting power of human ingenuity, deflecting the understanding from contemplation of the central truth now understood by Vesalius and those who follow his left hand. (Sawday 71–72) If meaning can be derived from this confusing scene (as Sawday attempts above), its significance is based, in large part, on the extent to which it is overwrought with meaning, exhibiting all the formal excess and semiotic ambivalence of the “Renaissance Grotesque.” As Geoffrey Harpham notes, the grotesque or grottesche was a term that came into popular usage during the Renaissance in reference to a form of ornamental design (or “art of the fringe”) in which human and animal figures commingled promiscuously with each other and non-­figural decorative elements in a manner that drew attention away from that which it embellished while suggesting valences beyond what representation can adequately convey (Harpham 7): When we use the word “grotesque” we record, among other things, the sense that though our attention has been arrested, our understanding is unsatisfied. Grotesqueries both require and defeat definition: they are neither so regular and rhythmical that they settle easily into our categories, nor so unprecedented that we do not recognize them at all. They stand at a margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world, of dividing the continuum of experience into knowable particles. (3)8

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Often hybrid in nature, the grotesque tends to subvert the boundary between high and low (the divine and the fallen), to render time into space (and vice versa), to compress narrative into image, and to produce a tension between the center and the periphery. The title page achieves such effects by invoking a universal harmony within a circular frame that is both thwarted and realized by its own eruptive visual content, and by combining human and bestial, pagan and Christian, figural and decorative elements in a way that distracts from a “central truth” that is, itself, irreducibly suspended within a vacillating gesture between space (womb) and time (skeleton). Presented as both ornamental entrance to the Fabrica and macrocosmic encapsulation of the anatomical demonstration, which includes its observers, the title page alerts its viewers to the fact that autopsy—or “auto-­opsis”—is not just an act of seeing for oneself, but also seeing oneself (as both subject and object) and seeing oneself seeing. Such self-­reflexivity is, according to Harpham, part of the raison d’être of grotesque images: “although they are frustrating they are far from pointless, for with their help we can arrive at a better understanding of the methods of representation, of the relation between play and creation, and of the force of habit and convention in understanding. Looking at ourselves looking at the grotesque, we can observe our own projections, catching ourselves, as it were, in the act of perception” (43). The grotesque arises in the uncomfortable zone between mimesis and fantasia; its familiar imagery invites interpretation only to frustrate comprehension through visual excess, straining the relationship between seeing and knowing, and engaging the mind in a hermeneutic paradox that urges it beyond the sensible toward the Intelligible. Within the historical context of the Fabrica, such imagery served a Christian Neoplatonic conception of the universe, in which the material or aesthetic realm could lead, via a hierarchy of correspondences, to the invisible realm of Ideas. Such a conception—played out on the title page of the Fabrica through visual paradox, the center of which is the focal tension between womb and skeleton—is elaborated throughout the folio pages that follow in the form of “living anatomy,” a convention that was common until well into the eighteenth century, in which the anatomized corpse was figured as alive and often engaged in a scene of allegorical significance. Throughout the Fabrica, dissected bodies reenact familiar Christian narratives—the creation story, the crucifixion, the martyrdom of various saints; they appear against scenic backdrops—­strolling through pastoral landscapes, near tombs or crumbling ruins, imagery that itself vacillates between the monumental and the transient; or they assist in their own dissection, in some cases with knife in hand (see figure 7.3). Such imagery is both descriptive (of the bodily interior) 140 ] Allis on d e Fren

Figure 7.3. “Living Anatomy” folio pages from De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543).

and narrative, thus rendering the dissected body both dead and alive, both object and subject. This vacillation produces, as Janis Caldwell suggests, a self-­reflexivity that not only collapses the distinction between viewer and viewed—encouraging the recognition of ourselves in a body that, while dead and dissected, still roams the countryside—but between cadaver and anatomist.9 It is the self-­reflexive circuit, in this sense, that the figure of Anatomia personifies, as mediating agent between the skull and the mirror, for within the anatomical demonstration we are all, anatomist included, the future dead examining ourselves in a spectacle that both reveals and hides the truth from us. The animated corpse is, then, like the Medusa’s head, both a shield and a mirror. It is, as Kenneth Gross says of the statue that steps down from its pedestal to enter the human realm, “a wedge between myself and my death, as well as a reflection of my astonishment at death” (19).

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Embodied in the living-­dead android Hadaly are the symbolism and contradictions of the living corpse, a fact made explicit by Edison when he suggests that he is recreating “the general idea” of a Vesalian dissection in his anatomical demonstration of her. The meaning of Hadaly exists outside of what we are seeing, while what we are seeing is being offered as proof of her meaning; as in the dissection scene, the gross materiality of her mechanical body will serve as the site where an act of transfiguration of macrocosmic proportions will be wrought in a manner similar to that depicted on the title page of Vesalius’s Fabrica. As Edison proclaims to Lord Ewald (and, it seems, to the heavens): “In place of this soul which repels you in the living woman, I shall infuse another sort of soul . . . capable of impressions a thousand times more lovely, more lofty, more noble—that is, they will be robed in that character of eternity without which our mortal life can be no more than a shabby comedy. . . . I will compel the Ideal itself to become apparent, for the first time, to your senses, PALPABLE, AUDIBLE, AND FULLY MATERIAL. . . .” (64). Within Edison’s promise to lift the veil of appearances in order to compel the Ideal to reveal itself, we can detect the Platonic urge for the Intelligible beyond the rational or the sensible. That this eternal realm will be embodied by a modern ideal (Hadaly) forged from the latest technologies may appear contradictory, but it conforms to the aesthetic program of both Vesalius, whose work Villiers evokes in Hadaly’s construction, and Baudelaire, his mentor; indeed, it underscores the semiotic relationship between the two as represented by the vanitas, a form of “still life” painting whose “motion-­stasis-­paradox” is, I would argue, a touchstone for understanding the paradoxes inherent in the living statue Hadaly.

Anamorphosis The vanitas was an art form, popular in post-­ Reformation northern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which the grotesque iconography of the anatomical scene was recreated, albeit in a more private and secularized fashion. Within the vanitas, the kind of contemplative visual study encouraged by the “still life” was subverted by the appearance of symbolic objects, such as human skulls, rotten fruit, or hourglasses, which served as memento mori, “a reminder of the illusory, flimsy, and ultimately unreal character of the things of this fading world in the face of death’s eternity” (Krieger 210). By introducing time into the spatial array depicted in the painting, the descriptive image was rendered metaphorical or allegorical, underscoring the illusionism inherent not only in the material objects being displayed, but in the painting itself. Such self-­ 142 ] A llis on d e Fren

consciousness, the image’s full disclosure of its own illusionary qualities, is a testament to and a justification for the work of art: “It suggests that all worldly existence is to be seen as delusion, leading us astray, except for the conscious self-­referentiality of the work of art: the work’s confession that its illusion reveals itself to us as a self-­conscious version of delusion that can serve as our metaphysical beacon through these shadows and snares. In reminding us of its own status as illusion, as soothsayer of our universe, the work of art may be the only thing we can trust, even as it self-­consciously retreats before itself ” (212).10 The artistic work as allegorical beacon of the Real was a view that was both espoused and practiced by Baudelaire, to whom Villiers’s oeuvre owes its greatest debt. For Baudelaire, art is ideally marked by duality, which “is a fatal consequence of the duality of man,” encompassing both the immutable/eternal and the ephemeral/transient: “Consider, if you will, the eternally subsisting portion as the soul of art, and the variable element as its body” (“The Painter” 3). In an attempt to shed light on the duplicities to which Baudelaire aspired, Maria C. Scott draws a helpful analogy to the technique of visual anamorphosis. Anamorphic images are distorted or monstrous-­looking images that, when viewed from a certain vantage point (often from an angle or through a curved mirror) appear in regular proportion: “At the moment that this angled image is perceived, the initial (frontal) image or impression fades in clarity, such that a simultaneous and clear perception of both images is impossible. The preservation of a tension between two viewpoints is essential to an anamorphic work; neither perspective ever entirely does away with the other” (Scott 10). By creating a tension between two perspectives, the anamorphic work underscores the illusionary qualities of all works of art, achieving an allegorical self-­referentiality. Indeed, one of the most famous anamorphic works, The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger, draws on the iconology of the northern European vanitas: in the painting, two well-­ dressed men, an ambassador and a bishop, lean against two shelves, the upper shelf containing objects seemingly related to the heavens, while the lower shelf has objects of earthly interest (see figure 7.4a). Between them, at the bottom center of the painting, is an anamorphic image that is difficult to see unless one stands to the far right of the painting, at which point it reveals itself as a human skull (see figure 7.4b). As Scott points out, Baudelaire attempted a similar kind of double-­edged text, “hovering between what is said and what is left blank, between the visible and the spectral” (67). Such obliquities are evident in Baudelaire’s poem “Le Masque” (“The Mask”) in his Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers

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Figures 7.4a and 7.4b. The Ambassadors. Hans Holbein the Younger, 1853.

of Evil, 1857), which was inspired by an anamorphic statuette by Ernest Christophe, referenced in the poem’s subtitle: “Statue allégorique dans le goût de la Renaissance” (“An Allegorical Statue in Renaissance Style”). From the front, the statuette appears to represent a grinning woman, but when viewed from the side, the woman’s smiling face is revealed as a mask that hides her true countenance, distorted in agony. The poem begins with a description of the statue from the front that recalls, in its evocation of classical beauty, Ewald’s depiction of Alicia as the Venus de Milo: Let us observe the prize, of Tuscan charm; In how the muscles of the body flow Those holy sisters, Grace and Strength, abound. This woman, this extraordinary piece, Divinely robust, admirably slim, Was made to be enthroned on sumptuous beds As entertainment for a pope or prince. (41, 43) Baudelaire then replicates the experience of surprise that one would have if moving around the statue: Let us approach and look from every side! O blasphemy of art! fatal surprise! This woman fashioned to embody bliss, Is at the top a monster with two heads! (43) In so doing, the poem describes “the movement from comfortable delusion to confusion to recognition of the artist’s ruse,” effecting a self-­reflexivity that, as Scott suggests of the prose poems, lends it “a mysterious, durable, eternal element” (102).11 It is anamorphosis, a double gesture in which the artwork lays bare its illusionism in the process of its reception, to which Villiers points in his novel and to which the fictional Edison seems to aspire in his dissection and construction of the android Hadaly. Hadaly is artifice as revelation as opposed to art(ifice) for its own sake, a condition with which modern women are, according to Edison, afflicted. Her allure will reside in the truth of her deception as opposed to the lie of the deception that real women perpetrate on men. The latter deception is emphasized throughout the novel, but is made explicit when Edison performs a cinematic dissection of beauty, while conjuring the equivalent of the anamorphic statue in Baudelaire’s poem, as justification for the creation of Hadaly. In this scene, Edison recounts for Lord Ewald a tale about his friend, Edward Anderson, who was ensnared, bankrupted morally and financially,

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and brought to eventual suicide by the “seductive arts” of a dancer named Evelyn Habal (104). Edison states that after his friend’s demise, he made it a point to investigate the dancer in scientific fashion to determine the exact nature of what seduced and demoralized his friend. What he discovers is that the dancer was rendered all the more intoxicating by the fact that her charms were spun around a complete absence of charm, a kind of abyss which both drew his friend and repelled him. In order to demonstrate for Lord Ewald the great disparity between the illusion cast by the woman who destroyed his friend and her reality, Edison both resurrects and deconstructs her aura by displaying a moving image of Evelyn Habal dancing. This scene is prophetic in its anticipation not only of cinematic projection, which would not premiere in reality for another decade, but of cinematic content—in particular, the controversial Serpentine Dance, which the real Edison “borrowed” from the performer Loie Fuller (the dancing muse of the Symbolists) and shot in the Black Maria: “A long strip of transparent plastic encrusted with bits of tinted glass moved laterally along two steel tracks before the luminous cone of the astral lamp. Drawn by a clockwork mechanism at one of its ends, this strip began to glide swiftly between the lens and the disk of a powerful reflector. Suddenly on the wide white screen within its frame of ebony flashed the life-­size figure of a very pretty and quite youthful blonde girl” (Villiers 117). Shortly thereafter, in a move that collapses the functionality of the magic lantern and the film projector, evoking a cinematic Phantasmagoria, Edison adjusts his device so that “a second heliochromic band replaced the first and began running as quick as light before the reflector,” on which appears “a little bloodless creature, vaguely female of gender, with dwarfish limbs, hollow cheeks, toothless jaws with practically no lips, and almost bald skull, with dim and squinting eyes, flabby lids, and wrinkled features, all dark and skinny” (118). Edison informs Lord Ewald that this is the same Evelyn Habal as in the first image, magically stripped of her make-­up and accoutrements. This doubled vision of beauty and decrepitude not only recalls the anamorphic statue in Baudelaire’s “The Mask,” but it also references directly “Danse Macabre,” a second poem in The Flowers of Evil inspired by a Christophe statuette. The poem describes a female skeleton who dances in a ballroom encircled by couples perfumed with musk but who smell of death and who, like those circling the skeleton on the title page of the Fabrica, remain oblivious to the truth in their midst. The Danse Macabre, a common allegorical trope in the late Medieval period, often depicted as a death 146 ] A llis on d e Fren

figure leading a group of dancing skeletons to the grave, was both admired and emulated by Baudelaire (see Anzalone 784). While both the poem and Villiers’s chapter play on its visual themes, they also hearken back to a particular elaboration of the vanitas image in which a beautiful woman sits at a looking glass, her mirrored reflection appearing as a skull or skeleton (see figure 7.5). Such images lend themselves to a dual interpretation, forming at once a critique of female vanity and a memento mori in which the female figure represents the personification of Beauty as that to which the world of appearances aspires, made poignant by the face of death smiling back, which reminds the viewer of the ephemeral nature not just of beauty, but of the entire world of things. In Villiers’s novel both readings are brought into play: if Evelyn Habal represents the woman/death dyad as vanity (indeed, the name “Habal” derives from the Hebrew word for “vanity”),12 then Hadaly (“the ideal whose name, spelled backwards, roughly renders the Hebrew noun yaldah, signifying ‘a girl or maiden,’ especially one of marriageable age” [Leasure 140]). serves as her antidote, the vanitas or that which Baudelaire described admiringly in “Danse Macabre” as a “charm of nothingness so madly decked” (197). The comparison between the two is underscored in the next chapter, in which Edison leads Ewald to a drawer in which he has kept Evelyn Habal’s things since her death. He is accompanied by Hadaly, who illuminates the collection with a torch, “like a statue at the side of a tomb” (119), bringing to mind a statue of liberty whose call to freedom is in the form of a memento mori. Edison’s presentation of the dancer’s beautifying accoutrements is the contreblason to Ewald’s initial blazoning of the singer, Alicia, a parodic echoing of those same attributes upon which praise was bestowed, now rendered horrifying through their deconstruction: “Here we have . . . the tresses of Salome, the glittering fluid of the stars, the brilliance of sunlight on autumn foliage, the magic of forest noontides, a vision of Eve the blond, our youthful ancestry, forever radiant! Ah! To revel in these tresses! What a delight, eh?” And he shook in the air a horrible mare’s nest of matted hair and faded ribbons, streaked here and there where the coloring had worn away, mottled and tangled, a dirty rainbow of wig work, corroded and yellowed by the action of various acids. “Here now is the lily complexion, the rosy modesty of the virgin, here is the seductive power of passionate lips, moist and warm with desire, all eager with love!”

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Figure 7.5. All Is Vanity. Charles Allen Gillbert, 1892.

And he set forth a make-­up box filled with half-­empty jars of rouge, pots of greasepaint, creams and pastes of every sort, patches, mascara, and so forth. . . . “Here now are the lovely breasts of our siren, from the salt sea waves of morning! From the foam of ocean and the rays of the sun, here are the ethereal contours of the heavenly court of Venus!” And he waved aloft some scraps of gray wadding, bulging, grubby, and giving off a particularly rancid odor. “Here are the thighs of the wood nymph, the delirious bacchante, the modern girl of perfect beauty, more lovely than the statues of Athens, and who dances with such divine madness!” And he brandished aloft various old girdles, falsies, and apparatus of steel and whalebone, busks of orthopedic function, and the remains of two or three ancient corsets so complicated, what with their laces and buttons, that they looked like old dismantled mandolins, with their strings whipping at random about them. (120) However frightening these objects are in isolation, they were once able in their totality to cast a spell of seduction that, like a siren’s call, lured Edward Anderson to his eventual doom. Echoing Baudelaire’s views on the tricks of artifice with which modern women conjure an image that verges on the supernatural, Edison assures Ewald that even if Anderson had been aware of the dancer’s trickery, his fate was sealed. “What is this craft called ‘make-­up’? Women have fairy fingers, it’s clear! And once the original impression is produced, I tell you the illusion clings forever . . . even on the most hideous of all women” (118). Indeed, Edison conjectures that such “modern Furies” as Evelyn Habal benefit from an unfortunate equation in which “their morbid and fatal influence on their victim is in direct ratio to the quantity of moral and physical artifice with which they reinforce—or, rather, overwhelm—the very few natural seductive powers they seem to possess” (115; emphasis in original). Thus, the dancer’s deleterious effect on Edison’s friend, which was complete and all-­consuming, must have been caused by a total negativity: “Only the absolute void could have imposed on him this particular manner of vertigo” (110; emphasis in original).13 After discovering the secret of Evelyn Habal’s allure, Edison concludes that if the vertiginous effect that the dancer had on his friend Edward Anderson can be reduced to the contents of a drawer, why not mobilize the same production to a more positive end? “In a word, I have come, I, the ‘Sorcerer of Menlo Park,’ as they call me here, to offer the human beings of these new and up-­to-­date times, to my scientific contemporaries as a

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matter of fact, something better than a false, mediocre, and ever-­changing Reality; what I bring is a positive, enchanting, ever-­faithful Illusion. If it’s just one chimera for another, one sin against another sin, one phantasm against all the rest, why not, then?” (164; emphasis in original). Edison then sets to work building the android Hadaly, in which he will recreate the formula of artificially induced desire that he has distilled from his studies of Evelyn Habal, but amplified by “saturating it with a profound awe hitherto unknown” (123; emphasis in original). He will thus coax from the most degraded form of artifice a vision of impossible sublimity. And despite the advanced technologies used in the process, Hadaly’s creation, as implied by her initial dissection, has less in common with scientific invention than with mythological transubstantiation. As Marina Warner tells us at the start of her essay “Aegis of Athena,” “the transfiguration of a Homeric hero is achieved through armour” (104)—and, indeed, our first glimpse of the android Hadaly in the novel is “a coat of armor, shaped as for a woman out of silver plates,” onto which the image of Alicia will be forged. The transformation of this metallic figure into the image of a woman will be replicated in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), in which Rotwang, the mad scientist, builds an android whose initial appearance resembles a coat of armor (with a distinctly art deco flair), into which he invests the life force of the virginal Maria, an act that also magically transposes her image onto the android’s outer shell. While both new and imaginary technologies figure heavily in the creation scenes of both Hadaly and the false Maria, in each case the metal body onto which the female image is cast is figured as the base element in an occult process whose result is an alchemical transubstantiation (made explicit in Metropolis by a pentagram that hangs behind the android as she is being transformed), which will result not in a copy but in a radically altered being. Hadaly is described by Villiers not as an android but as an “Androsphinx” (193), a paradoxical enigma in the form of a living woman. Although a technological marvel, she will, from the moment Lord Ewald first encounters her, continually direct him beyond her own material presence to the metaphysical realm as the source from which she has been incarnated. When Lord Ewald is reintroduced to the transfigured Hadaly later in the novel, he asks, “Who are you?” (194), and in her explanation, Hadaly recreates the parable of Plato’s cave, suggesting that she is an emissary from a more real, infinite reality, for which our own is “merely the metaphor” (195; emphasis in original). She suggests that this supernal realm can be glimpsed in flights of the imagination, such as in the forms and figures that take shape in the shadows of night, when we are between sleep and 150 ] A llis on d e Fren

waking. “And the first natural instinct of the Soul is to recognize them, in and through that same holy terror which bears witness to them” (196; emphases in original). They are often quickly extinguished, however, when, in the morning light, our sense of reason dismisses them as mere illusions cast by “clothes tossed hastily over the back of a chair” (195). It is the reasonable mind that deadens the world by turning those objects, shapes, and colors that vibrate with metaphysical possibility into a world of inanimate things: “I am an envoy to you from those limitless regions whose pale frontiers man can contemplate only in certain reveries and dreams. There all periods of time flow together, there space is no more; there the last illusions of instinct disappear. . . . Who am I? A creature of dream, who lives half-­awake in your thoughts, and whose shadow you may dissipate any time with one of those fine reasonable arguments which will leave you, in my place, nothing but vacancy, sorrow, heartache— the fruits of that truth to which they pretend.” (198) Hadaly is a portal to an infinite realm beyond time and space, but the rational mind, if it so chooses, can reduce her to an aesthetic object, a piece of metal inscribed with a programmatic series of interactions. She implores Ewald to defend her against his reason for, she suggests, it is only in his imagination that the spark of her existence is ignited: “Attribute a being to me, affirm that I am! Reinforce me with your self. And then suddenly I will come to life under your eyes, to precisely the extent that your creative Good Will has penetrated me” (199). Hadaly’s confession to Ewald of her own contingency is not just an entreaty but a justification of her artificiality; it is what makes her the phantom that edifies rather than the phantom that corrupts, as in the manner of women like Evelyn Habal, who attempt to pass off illusion as reality.

The Anamorphic-­Anatomical Gaze in Cinema It is as self-­conscious illusion, accomplished via anamorphosis, that the dissection and transfiguration of Hadaly achieves its status as heir to the anatomical imaginary of the Renaissance. Like Vesalius, who both points toward and away from the dissected body on the title page of his masterwork, there is, Villiers suggests through Edison, a revelatory quality to the vacillating gesture between the beautiful woman and the “truth” beneath her appearance, whether it is the skeleton beneath the semblance of glamour or the mechanism within the android. Indeed, it is this gesture that sustains both the narrative and our interest in the android Hadaly; once she is completed and indistinguishable from a living woman, the story is brought

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to a swift close.14 Moreover, it is in the invocation of the anamorphic-­ anatomical gaze that Tomorrow’s Eve anticipates the cinema and, in particular, the films of Georges Méliès. Indeed, the kind of vacillation that Hadaly represents is writ large in the first trick film that Georges Méliès ever shot, entitled Escamotage d’une Dame au Théâtre Robert Houdin (The Vanishing Lady, 1896), a cinematic interpretation of the vanitas. In the film, a magician (Méliès) covers a seated woman with a fabric; when he removes it, she has disappeared, and in her place sits a skeleton. Lucy Fischer, in her essay “The Lady Vanishes,” has written at length about early trick films, both those of Méliès and other filmmakers including Edison, showing how they incorporate the visual rhetoric of stage magic. As she points out, there are many examples in which the female body is juxtaposed with or transformed into symbols of death, including Edison’s film The Mystic Swing (1900). She considers such films, along with the magical tradition they emulate, as a site at which complex and contradictory attitudes toward women, and in many cases a distinct fear of the Other, are enacted by the male magician: “Perhaps this fear of women explains why so many magic films involve tricks in which women are turned into men, thereby annihilating their disturbing sexual status. In A Delusion (Biograph/1902) a female model turns into a man each time the photographer looks into the camera lens. In The Artist’s Dilemma (Edison/ 1901) a woman turns into a clown” (34). While Fischer’s discussion is both broad and nuanced, drawing on insights from anthropology and psychoanalysis, it overlooks the tropes of allegorical representation in which Méliès dabbles in his films, many of which deal with hieratic themes (from Satan to Faust) as well as their parodic undertones. As many have pointed out, Méliès revives in his films the mythological and ritual roots of modern magic, while borrowing techniques and themes from the stagecraft of his day, including theatrical repertory, opera, the circus, and, in particular, the féerie, a theatrical spectacle of acrobatics, music, and mime, which appealed to the newly liberated masses following the French Revolution and in which decapitations, dismembered bodies, and other magical transformations were often the highlight (see Kovács). Despite his recreation of such scenes and the proscenium arch beneath which they unfold, however, Méliès’s work is, above all, a celebration of the new technological abilities of cinema to produce, in unprecedented fashion, an allegorical spectacle that, like the anatomical scene, points simultaneously at and beyond its own outrageous visuality. In attempting to understand Méliès’s oeuvre, it is helpful to consider the distinction that Walter Benjamin draws between the magician and the sur152 ] A llis on d e Fren

geon, as well as the homologies that he then makes between the magician and painter and the surgeon and cameraman. Although Benjamin is referring to the magician, who heals through a laying on of hands, his insights still hold for the prestidigitator or the stage magician who is able to conjure magical illusions with the wave of a wand. According to Benjamin, unlike the magician, who faces his patient (or audience) directly and whose art requires a certain distance, the cameraman, like the surgeon, is invisible yet directly penetrates his patient’s (the spectator’s) body: “Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law” (233–34). While the films of Méliès recreate the environment of the theatrical stage, with the magician performing at a substantial remove from his audience, whom he faces directly, the magic of a Méliès film lies not only in what is conjured before our eyes by the magician (played by Méliès), but also by the stop-­motion substitutions and editorial splicing of the filmmaker (who is also Méliès).15 And there is enacted within many of his films a sustained tension between the two. While the magician attempts to conjure for our visual delectation (and his own) an image of monumental beauty (whether in the form of a beautiful woman or statue), the cameraman keeps replacing the image with its opposite: a man, a cook, or that ultimate reminder of the transience of all worldly things, a skeleton. The result is an ongoing vacillation whose equivalent is the anamorphic statue, and which achieves a self-­referentiality that destabilizes the illusionism inherent not only in the magic act, but in the act of representation itself. Indeed, as the examples given by Fischer make clear, it is not just the magician who is being undermined in such films, but the painter, the photographer, and the sculptor. Even Pygmalion, that rare soul whose encounter with a living statue ends happily, is in Méliès’s reinterpretation confronted with a Galatea who refuses to be contained. Méliès is, like the fictional Edison who resurrects the illusion of Evelyn Habal in order to denature it, conjuring for us an image whose illusionary status he himself will repetitively emphasize by its transience. More particularly, however, he is (also like Edison) showcasing for us the powers of cinema to explode the visual world with what Walter Benjamin hailed as “the dynamite of the tenth of a second” (236). The transience of the visual object in Méliès’s films, its repetitive substitution by people and things from an unseen field of action, and the parodic manner in which it is dissimulated, effect not only a satirical destabilization

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of beauty (which proves to be two- and even three-­faced), but of the entire world of appearances. As Darragh O’Donoghue suggests, “Méliès’s cinema is not simply an indulgence of joyous escapism and brain-­bypassing spectacle—the ‘liberating’ quality of his work destabilizes familiar conceptions of gender, class and the body” (par. 9). Moreover, he resuscitates (as Baudelaire once claimed about French caricature; and it is of note that Méliès was a caricaturist for a political journal before becoming a filmmaker) the visual language of the carnivalesque-­grotesque of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including the techniques of anatomical enumeration. Indeed, the blasons anatomiques, to which Méliès’s and Villiers’s work hearkens, grew out of “the popular dual-­faced praise of the [Renaissance] marketplace,” according to Mikhail Bakhtin, who reminds us that even Clément Marot’s blazoning of “The Beautiful Breast” was to be read in conjunction with its contreblason “The Ugly Breast,” a combination intended to produce ambivalent laughter over a female body part that was never meant to be isolated from the whole, let alone addressed as if it were a person (Bakhtin 427–30). By invoking the carnivalesque-­grotesque within the context of film, Méliès is able to achieve what Villiers is only able to hint at in his novel: the use of new technologies to rupture mimesis and habitual perception. It is Villiers, however, who links such rupture, and the cognitive estrangement it produces, specifically with the technological and scientific, and it is in this sense that Villiers, perhaps even more than Méliès, has something to teach us about the cultural role that the technological—particularly when it takes the form of a female android—plays within fictional narratives. Villiers links the android with a “sense of wonder” that, as Istvan Csicsery-­ Ronay, Jr. suggests, will become a hallmark of science fiction, but which is grounded (as Villiers also indicates) in the interrelated aesthetic categories of the sublime and the grotesque. While the sublime tends to be associated with “objects too great to be encompassed” (Csicsery-­Ronay 71) that “surpass reason towards the abstract” (79), the grotesque is associated with objects whose irregularity, hybridity, or odd combination of disparate elements defy categorization, surpassing “reason towards the concrete” (79). In each case, however, “the resisting object forces the observing consciousness to recoil and reorganize its concepts and its horizons of possibility,” showing the sublime and the grotesque to be “in such close kinship that they are shadows of each other” (79). Villiers underscores just how closely the two experiences are related through an invocation of the anatomy theater of the Renaissance, in which the visual attraction and repulsion of the grotesque—produced via the rupture of the familiar contours of the human body to reveal an unfamiliar and 154 ] Allis on d e Fren

excessive inner landscape—was translated by the ritualized environment surrounding the anatomical performance into a larger symbolic context, so that it was experienced as sublime. And by replacing the human body in the dissection scene with that of the android, Villiers anticipates the merging of the grotesque and sublime within the techno-­scientific imaginary of the postmodern. Indeed, Hadaly presages a long line of literary and cinematic female androids, whose ideal hyperrealism will be punctured and punctuated by a grotesquerie of exteriorized technological components, implicated in the kind of global, networked systems of power and control that Fredric Jameson has famously associated with the postmodern sublime (Jameson 37–38).16 One can, for example, find echoes of Hadaly in the female android star of the television series The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–9). In this latest installment of the Terminator franchise, the future savior of humanity, John Connor, is a teenager living in Southern California with his mother Sarah and the android, named Cameron (after James Cameron, the creator of the first Terminator films), who is being passed off as his sister but who has been sent by his future self to protect him through an adolescence troubled by, among other things, the specter of the coming robotic apocalypse. Like Tomorrow’s Eve, the story is set in the present, but one that is continually visited by both the past and the future: not only do a range of characters arrive from other time frames, but John and Sarah have jumped into the present moment from the past (i.e., 1999) in order to intervene at a critical juncture in the development of the networked system of artificial intelligence that will give rise to the robotic ruling class. The figure of Cameron offers a surprising answer to a trend on which Csicsery-­Ronay comments. As Csicsery-­Ronay remarks, the grotesque has lost much of its visceral impact due not only to biotechnologies that have made hybridization—from genetic engineering to prosthetics—a fact of everyday life, but also to an increasingly postmodern sensibility in which both the forms of and boundaries between objects and people have been called into question. As an example, he notes how radically attitudes toward cyborgs shifted from the first Terminator film in 1984 to its sequel in 1991: whereas in the original film, “The Terminator is a version of a monster from the Id, a heartless biker killer, while Sarah is presented as an exaggeratedly feminine woman,” in the sequel the very same T-­800 model sent to kill Sarah in the first film has been reprogrammed to protect her and John, while Sarah “has been transformed into a hard-­bodied guerilla” (76), a transformation that gave audiences little pause. Cameron, a figure who embodies both the femininity of the old Sarah and

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Figures 7.6a and 7.6b. Posters for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–9). Note the similarity between 7.6b and the Borg Queen of Star Trek: First Contact (1996).

the ruthless killing machinery of the original Terminator, is able to revive the kind of anamorphic vision with which the grotesque was originally associated through a vacillation between the two. This vacillation is achieved in moments of physical rupture—whether through violence or dissection, the latter usually conducted in order to fix something that has gone awry, and often with John acting as surgeon—during which Cameron’s beautiful appearance is penetrated through the exteriorization of her technological components. Such moments, which are emphasized in the promotional materials for the series (see figures 7.6a and 7.6b), not only recall the dissection of Hadaly in Villiers’s novel but also its aesthetic origins in the blasons anatomiques and the memento mori, for it is in these moments that we are reminded of the future death of humanity, of which Cameron is both harbinger and intermediary, which continues to drive the series (and the franchise) both forward and backward. While androids such as Cameron and Hadaly raise legitimate questions 156 ] A llis on d e Fren

about the status of the female body within contemporary media representations (particularly when presented, as Hadaly is in Villiers’s novel, as a corrective to the flaws of living women), they are also fantastical creatures whose technological artificiality is a key aspect of their meaning. Heir to the Renaissance grotesque, a paradoxical image or object limning the margin between sense and senselessness, such beings are mascots—that is, both ornamental extra and embodiment—of science fiction as a paraspace, “a zone of heightened rhetoricity and linguistic defamiliarization” (Bukatman 15) in which the shock and awe of technological penetration and possibility is experienced as integral to everyday human life. Notes

I am indebted to Rob Latham for his editorial guidance throughout the process of writing this essay. I would also like to thank the two anonymous SFS reviewers who gave me excellent advice for revision, and my colleagues in the faculty writing group at Connecticut College (James Downs, David Greven, Simon Hay, Eileen Kane, Cybèle Locke, and Jessica Mulligan), who offered valuable feedback on an earlier draft of the essay. 1. For a discussion of the novel’s treatment of the (then) new art of photosculpture, see Lathers (46–55). 2. Calder’s trilogy encompasses the novels Dead Girls (1992), Dead Boys (1994), and Dead Things (1996); for analyses of this series in terms of its conflation of cybernetic transformation, gender performance, and sexual desire, see Foster, Latham, and Melzer (183–218). For a discussion of the influence of Villiers’s Pygmalion fantasy on twentieth-­century avant-­garde and popular works of sf, from Tommaso Landolfi’s “Gogol’s Wife” (1954) to Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), see Pulham. 3. The “cinema of attractions” is a phrase coined by Gunning to refer to cinema before 1906, in which narrative is secondary to visual interest. One of the key elements of this early form of cinema is the direct address of the camera by the actors. Like a sideshow spectacle, “the cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle—a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself ” (Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions” 40). 4. In 1539, Parisian poet-­bookseller Gilles Corrozet published Les Blasons Domestiques, which praised the “parts of a respectable house as correctives to the ‘anatomical blazons’” that he considered offensive (Vickers, “Members Only” 2–5). 5. Unlike Sawday, who is interested in drawing correspondences between the blazon and anatomical dissection, Vickers suggests that while the practice of anatomy situated the fragmented body “in relation to an image of a vital whole,” few attempts were made to recover bodily integrity in the presentation of the blasons anatomiques (“Members Only” 9). 6. Translator Robert Martin Adams draws parallels between Miss Alicia in the novel and Miss Anny Eyre Powell, a wealthy London woman whom Villiers attempted

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to court with disastrous results: “Villiers escorted his young lady to Covent Garden, and in the privacy of a box declared his passion. But he recited so much poetry, gave such a long reading from his next novel, and grew so frantically agitated that the young lady was frightened, thought him a lunatic, and made her escape from his society as abruptly as she could. . . . [O]f the whole episode what remained most strongly in Villiers’ mind was the spiritless, blockish female who had been utterly incapable of responding to his romantic declarations, had not even glimpsed the world of his ideal values” (Adams xii). 7. The mise-­en-­abyme was originally understood as the placement of a smaller version of a heraldic escutcheon within the same escutcheon. 8. According to Harpham, the “Grotto-­esque” was inspired by the fantastical, bestial, and anatomically hybrid forms that populated the frescoes discovered in the buried rooms and labyrinthine passageways of Nero’s Domus Aurea, or Golden Palace, which were excavated in 1480 and had a great influence on ornamental design (73–104). 9. Caldwell, a medical doctor turned literary scholar, is unique in her reading of the animated corpse of the High Renaissance. Whereas most find themes of sadism, masochism, and misogyny in anatomical imagery that combines the aesthetic and scientific contemplation of dissected bodies in situ, Caldwell points to an implied self-­ referentiality that contributes to an ethics of medicine, which she finds lacking in the age of clinical detachment (325–57). 10. Krieger is here summarizing Rosalie Colie’s argument in her 1966 book Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. 11. This phrase is borrowed from Baudelaire’s description of French caricature (“un élément mysterérieux, durable, éternel”) in “On the Essence of Laughter” (147). 12. See Ecclesiastes 1:2: “habal habalim, vêk’hôl habal ” (vanity of vanities; all is vanity). The name Evelyn Habal thus suggests a vain or self-­conscious (and thus postlapsarian) Eve akin to the rational Venus, Alicia Clary. For a discussion of the three dissected women of Villiers’s novel—Alicia Clary, Evelyn Habal, and Hadaly—as instantiations of the Eve of Milton’s Paradise Lost, see Leasure (129–44). 13. The thematic of a spiraling nullity around which desire is constructed was explored to great effect by Alfred Hitchcock in his 1958 film Vertigo, in which a simple and ordinary woman, Judy Barton, is able to trick the main protagonist, Scottie, into believing that she is Madeleine, the wife of an old friend of his, whom he has been hired to follow. As Madeleine, she will appear to be possessed by the spirit of a dead woman, in front of whose portrait in a museum she sits in a trance for hours at a time, and Scottie will find her so beautiful and mysterious that he will become obsessed with her. After Madeleine’s apparent death, Scottie accidentally runs into Judy Barton and, although initially put off by her banality, is so taken by her visual similarity to Madeleine that he attempts to recreate the aura of the dead woman by asking Judy to wear her hair and clothes in a similar style. The conception of desire expressed in the film—that it can be catalyzed by an assemblage of technologies of artifice producing the effect of a woman, and that the greater the absence for which such artifice compensates, the greater the desire it inspires—is articulated by Edison in Villiers’s novel. 14. Rather than living happily ever after, Hadaly is destroyed in a fire on the ship 158 ] A llis on d e Fren

on which she and Ewald are returning home. Lord Ewald makes it clear in a telegram to Edison that he will follow her into the abyss, encouraging an association between their courtship and the Danse Macabre (218–19). 15. According to Gunning, while many believed that most of the tricks in Méliès’s films were produced by stop-­motion substitutions performed in camera, closer examination of the prints has revealed that, in most cases, such substitutions were perfected by splicing the film (“ ‘Primitive’ Cinema” 3–12). 16. For a discussion of the anime film Ghost in the Shell (Kôkaku kidôtai, 1995) in terms of the figure of the networked female cyborg, see Silvio.

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Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 198–209. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. O’Donoghue, Darragh. “Georges Méliès,” Senses of Cinema (May 2004). Online at http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/melies. Accessed 26 April 2009. Pulham, Patricia. “The Eroticism of Artificial Flesh in Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s L’Eve Future.” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 7 (October 2008). Online at: http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/view/486. Accessed 6 April 2009. Pygmalion and Galatea [Pygmalion et Galathée]. Dir. Georges Méliès. 1898. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Scott, Maria. Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Silvio, Carl. “Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamaru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell.” Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 1 (March 1999): 54–72. Terminator, The. Dir. James Cameron. Cinema ’84/Pacific Western/Orion. 1984. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm/Carolco/Orion. 1991. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Created by Josh Friedman. Warner Brothers Television/C2 Pictures. 2008. The Vanishing Lady [Escamotage d’une Dame au Théâtre Robert Houdin]. Dir. Georges Méliès. 1896. Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures. 1958. Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body: A Translation of De Humana Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum. 1543. 3 vols. Translated by William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman. Novato, CA: Norman, 2003. Vickers, Nancy J. “This Heraldry in Lucrece’s Face.” In The Female Body in Western Literature, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman, 209–22. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. ———. “Members Only.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 3–22. London: Routledge, 1997. Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam, Philippe Auguste. Tomorrow’s Eve. 1886. Translated by Robert Martin Adams. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. Wilk, Stephen R. Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Williams, Linda. “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions.” 1981. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 507–34. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.



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Afterword

“The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve” was the first essay that I revised for publication from my doctoral dissertation, which examined artificial female bodies in literature, art, and media. The dissertation was itself an outgrowth of a feature-­length documentary that I directed on the science fiction fantasy of creating the perfect artificial woman and the present-­day technological reality of artificial companions, particularly within the “real-­to-­life” love doll industry. I spent a good three years conducting interviews with companies that manufactured love dolls (in the United States, Germany, and Japan) and their customers; those who attempt to enhance the dolls through robotic animation, motion sensing, and artificial intelligence; and those who build female robots, along with robot fetishists. What I experienced in the “field” had a direct influence on my readings of artificial bodies in science fiction and popular culture, and some of the subjects I interviewed became source material for the topics I chose to address in the dissertation. This particular essay was inspired, in part, by a man I interviewed named Slade, who has made a name for himself as “The Realdoll Doctor.” Realdolls are life-­sized silicone sex dolls with articulated skeletons that achieve a remarkable degree of verisimilitude and that, for many, offer a glimpse into a future where one might be able to go out and obtain the perfect artificial companion. Slade has become somewhat of a cult figure in the Realdoll community not only because he restores broken dolls to their former condition, but because of the performative aspects of his repairs. Each doll “surgery” is conducted with an air of the theatrical; medical instruments procured from a coroner’s lab are positioned in and around the injured doll and the various stages of her reconstruction are photographically documented and posted to his website. Slade’s work simultaneously recalls the wonders of surgery (plastic and otherwise) and the horrors of autopsy, consciously playing to a medico-­erotic gaze that has long been a mainstay of the sf and horror genres. Such work peddles in a scopic ambivalence in which the beautiful is rendered terrifying and, particularly in relation to the artificial body, raises a number of questions: Why create a visual spectacle that calls to the gaze only to avert it? Why dissect an artificial human when there is nothing to reveal? And why are such equivocal gestures so often centered on the female body? Villiers’s novel, although written over a hundred years before the Realdoll was invented, served as the ideal text for working through such questions, as well as tracing the historical origins and cultural valences of an anatomical gaze that continues to be invoked in various media forms and to which Slade’s contemporary Internet performances give an ironic nod.

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• 8• Desde Júpiter

Chile’s Earliest Science-­Fiction Novel Andrea Bell

Among her other scholarly accomplishments in the sf field, Andrea Bell coedited the first classroom anthology of science fiction from Latin America and Spain (Cosmos Latinos, 2003) and recently co-­translated what is arguably the genre’s earliest time-­machine tale, by Spanish novelist Enrique Gaspar (The Time Ship, 2012). The following pioneering essay examines one of the many nineteenth-­century roots of today’s Latin American science fiction, an “extraordinary voyage” novel from 1878 by the Chilean writer Francisco M ­ iralles. This essay originally appeared in SFS 22, no. 2 (July 1995): 187–97.

Critical attention has only occasionally focused on Spanish-­language science fiction, and much of what has been written has been directed at Spain.1 Latin America, however, has maintained a limited tradition of science fiction since the late nineteenth century, although technological leadership is not historically associated with the region. As the twentieth century draws to a close, the genre continues to thrive among small but creative and enthusiastic communities of Latin American writers and fans. In 1984 Remi-­Maure published one of the few essays on Chilean sf, which he opens by stating that “Chile, unlike Argentina, does not seem to have had a ‘Prehistory’ in its development of sf ” (181). He considers 1959, the year that Hugo Correa published his classic novel, Los altísimos (The Superior Ones), as marking the beginning of Chile’s sole period of sustained science fiction production to date, a golden age that lasted only into the mid-­1970s. Remi-­Maure is justified in highlighting periods in which science fiction 

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enjoyed some degree of continuity and recognition in Chile. Nonetheless, there are isolated instances when Chilean authors did recognize the exciting potential of speculative scientific fiction much earlier than the sustained period Remi-­Maure describes. Francisco Miralles, a contemporary of Jules Verne, helped introduce the nascent genre to Latin American readers in his 1878 novel, Desde Júpiter: Curioso viaje de un santiaguino magnetizado (From Jupiter: The Curious Voyage of a Magnetized Man from Santiago).2 On the one hand, this earliest known work of Chilean science fiction fits squarely in the late-­Romantic literary tradition in vogue at the time; on the other hand, it seizes on the fantastic situations and quasi-­scientific devices being popularized by writers like Verne and uses them to provide a critical distance from which to analyze contemporary Chilean society. One of the most alluring qualities of science fiction is the unique freedom it gives us to reinvent reality. It also affords a safer distance from which to critique one’s society. This can be especially attractive to historically marginalized voices. Desde Júpiter is an early example of the appropriation of these powers by a citizen of a nation whose sovereignty and right of self-­ determination have usually been heavily compromised by external forces. The novel is a worthy object of study for its significance in literary history, and by analyzing the critical stance, the attitude toward technology, and the philosophical orientation in Desde Júpiter, I hope to contribute information valuable to those charting the development of science fiction in Latin America in general and in Chile in particular. On the surface, Desde Júpiter is an adventure story driven by the ersatz hero’s pursuit of romantic love. Carlos, the first-­person narrator, is a young man from Santiago who tells of his experiences on Jupiter, where he arrives as a result of being magnetized one afternoon by his friend, Federico. Carlos’s positivist mission is to learn and remember all that he can of Jovian society by means of direct observation and experience. He is aided in his studies by Eva, Abel, Nemrod, and other wise and benevolent inhabitants of the city of Babilonia (an ironic name, given the city’s monolingual, culturally homogeneous population). Unfortunately, Carlos immediately becomes infatuated with Eva, and the rather feeble plot of the novel revolves around his inauspicious attempts to woo her. In an uneven blending of storytelling and didactic social commentary, the love story is relegated to the background in favor of Carlos’s discoveries about Jovian society. His observations and the dogmatic pronouncements by Jovian scholars form the basis of Desde Júpiter’s philosophical and critical intent. Various literary models helped shape Miralles’s work. Many writers of the time were responding to the public’s fascination with exotic travel 164 ] A nd rea Bell

books. Antonio Pagés Larraya has shown that in the Southern Cone a reader interested in scientific adventure fiction had access to the works of Captain Mayne Reid and Camille Flammarion (45–47); Desde Júpiter’s preoccupation with cosmology, spiritualism, and life on alien worlds may in fact have been inspired by Flammarion. Other aspects of Desde Júpiter show the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whose impact on Latin American fiction has long been recognized. For example, Miralles grounded the Jovians’ idyllic future society in a curious philosophical doctrine uniting science and mysticism, which is evocative of Poe. And by the time Miralles published his novel of scientific adventure, translations of Verne’s best works were becoming available in South America; as will be shown, Miralles’s work shares many structural and thematic elements with that of the French writer. There were also a few Spanish-­language inspirations. An engaging novel about space travel called Una temporada en el más bello de los planetas (A Season on the Most Beautiful of Planets) appeared in serialized form in Spain in 1870.3 Furthermore, the Argentine author Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg had just completed what may be Latin America’s very first novel of science fiction, El maravilloso viaje del señor Nic-Nac (The Marvelous Voyage of Mr. Nic-Nac). Published just three years before Desde Júpiter, the striking similarities between the two would argue that Miralles was familiar with Holmberg’s work and with the possibilities of the fledgling genre.

Criticism in Desde Júpiter Desde Júpiter’s entertainment value is both enhanced and compromised by frequent digressions into scathing social criticism, which at times can be humorous, and at other times can seem awkward and disruptive of the narrative’s progression. The critical content of the novel generally reflects values, attitudes, and assumptions predominant among Chile’s urban intelligentsia in the mid to late nineteenth century. Commentary is effected by means of a standard artifice in science fiction, that is, the creation of an alien culture that is used as a model against which to compare and contrast conditions on Earth. Unlike Holmberg’s Nic-Nac, which criticizes Argentina through subtlety and disguise, in Desde Júpiter no attempt is made to hide the fact that Chile is the country under scrutiny. The Jovians are avid students of terrestrial culture. Engaged in a systematic analysis of Earth, their data-­gathering devices are now trained, conveniently enough, on Santiago. Their primary interest is in ascertaining the period in evolutionary history that Chile—and by extension, humankind—has thus far attained. This is done by means of a complex series of calculations that assigns values to technological, moral, and aesthetic de

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velopments—perceived as functions of the intellect—and plots them along a deterministic “Progress Curve.” The Progress Curve brings precision and quantification to the humanities in a manner reminiscent of the “Calculus of Probabilities” of Poe’s Dupin stories. The working hypothesis is that terrestrial civilization is some 147,500 years behind the Jovians. However, the human condition greatly perplexes them: it seems full of grave contradictions, for although our experiments with hot air balloons point to a relatively high level of intellectual development, the lack of a universal language on Earth, the use of animals for brute labor, the practice of smoking tobacco, and the ideals of democracy are all interpreted as signs of shocking primitiveness. This irresolution in the critical stance in Desde Júpiter may best be understood in the context of Chile’s social and political history. The first half century of Chilean independence saw dramatic changes in the country’s political organization, economic conditions, infrastructure, and attitudes. Enthusiasm about progress and change was tempered by insecurity over the demise of traditional values and institutions. Although Chile’s economy grew steadily through most of the nineteenth century, this was due in large part to its lucrative copper and wheat industries, which in the 1870s suffered a severe blow from the emergence onto the world market of more efficient methods of producing these commodities. European models of culture and civilization could not easily be reconciled with Chile’s primarily rural, semi-­educated population, and while the standard of living improved for many over the course of the century, the national conscience was being pricked by increasing evidence of social and economic injustice. Hence the ambivalence in Desde Júpiter: Francisco Miralles embraces the spirited optimism that the urban elite felt about the promise that science and technology held for Chile’s future; yet he appropriates the futuristic perspective of the Jovians to look “back” at his country with mingled pride and despair, nostalgia and scorn. Carlos the narrator represents Everyman in the novel, and as such understandably bristles at the Jovians’ harsh and sometimes simplistic criticism of his homeland. His initial condition of invisible and inaudible on Jupiter is symbolic of the impotence felt by the common person in the face of the twin monoliths of tradition and authority, and it is only through knowledge and experience that Carlos achieves some degree of empowerment. He is also a comedic reminder of why the Jovian model of society may be slow in coming on Earth, and of why social utopias succeed more often in theory than in practice. For Carlos overflows with human imperfections, chief among them selfishness, pride, pettiness, and impatience. On 166 ] And rea Bell

the other hand, he proudly acknowledges his natural disdain for authority, his fierce sense of individual liberty, and the rebelliousness of the human spirit—traits which get him into many a tight spot on Jupiter, but which also save him from time to time. A political reading of the novel might liken Carlos to the disadvantaged minor player who, armed with little more than an irrepressible sense of self, doggedly resists the manipulative tactics of the patronizingly generous superpowers. The Martians in Eduardo Holmberg’s El maravilloso viaje del señor NicNac represent Earthlings, possessing all our vices and standing in for us as objects of criticism. Not so in Desde Júpiter, where the enlightened Jovians represent not what we are but what we can evolve into. Theirs is a world unconstrained by authoritarian dictates; rather, it is guided by a radiant spirit of cooperation. Miralles does not set up the Jovians as a fully utopian model, however. Depicted as superior to terrestrials in many ways (it is not clear that they belong to a different species) they are nonetheless flawed, in the narrator’s eyes, by their very perfection. “I felt lousy in that damned world, where there’s so much perfection that not even a slight distraction is forgiven . . .” (57:263) he complains. Nor do his hosts on Jupiter consider themselves the evolutionary zenith: “You who judge us as superior beings because we have something that you lack for the moment, suffer a grave mistake; for we find ourselves very far behind others who inhabit better worlds” (24:109). The two most controversial targets of criticism in Desde Júpiter are, not surprisingly, religion and politics. Both contribute to the confusion surrounding the dating of terrestrial society. During a discussion on this subject, two Jovian scholars remark, “popular elections signify foolishness enthroned by ignorance, while [papal] infallibility signifies. . . . Exactly the same thing. . . .” (38:162). Miralles does well to distance himself from these and other harsh comments by putting them in the mouths of aliens. Political and clerical reform were deeply divisive issues in the decades following Chile’s formal independence in 1818. Anticlerical legislation was adopted in an attempt to curtail the power of the Catholic Church in determining political and social policy. This explains the frequency with which religious criticism in the novel is directed at the pope: “Just think,” he said, “on Earth there’s a man who governs the beliefs of everyone else, or at least of a large group. . . .” “But that’s impossible,” said Ada, “because ordering someone to believe is like ordering someone to understand.” (9:58)

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Catholic doctrine is perceived as a serious obstacle to Chile’s bid for modernization and progress in Desde Júpiter. Sardonic comments condemn religious credulity, which the Jovians perceive as a distortion of their particular understanding of faith. To them faith is an essential part of furthering one’s spiritual maturity and concomitant advancement along the Progress Curve: it should be subordinate to the rational humanist quest for truth and not replace it. To the Jovians, faith as exemplified by Catholicism is mere fatuousness and is, they feel, perplexing, aberrant, and regressive: “we have found that the inhabitants of [Earth] love life to such an extent that they concern themselves little or nothing with what comes afterward. For example, they have someone who assures them that eternal suffering exists and that the punishments of the Universal Father are cruel and without end. And yet they prefer to believe this, or not believe anything, rather than try to investigate what is real and true” (10:62–63). Terrestrial political systems also perplex the citizens of Jupiter. Both democracy and hereditary rule come under heavy fire in the novel, for with the former the unfit can be elected to power by the ignorant, and with the latter one can become a ruler “no matter how much of an idiot one may be” (32). To the surprise and scorn of the Jovians, people on Earth have not learned that, although physically individual humans may be more or less equal, qualitatively they are decidedly not. This fact is one of Jupiter’s most important social truths, and belief to the contrary is seen as the leading cause of class conflicts on Earth. As a result of their study of Santiago, Jovian scholars are exceedingly harsh in their criticism of Chileans. The catalog of their defects, outlined in an article written by the character Abel, includes their indiscriminate adoration of all ideas coming from Europe and corresponding disdain for local talent; their distrust in business dealings; their intellectual laziness and haphazard way of learning; their pride (which Jovians recognize as the dominant passion in all primitive worlds); and their flawed electoral system and sensitivity to public opinion, which hold them hostage to the masses. Even their virtues are handicaps, especially patience, which the Jovians believe leads to the passive acceptance of atrocities. In summary, Abel writes, “Chile is the terrestrial country that presents the greatest number of contradictions in its march toward development. There, people smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, . . . believe in the infallibility of one man, use gunpowder to kill one another, practice black-­and-­white photography, and decide the truth by numerical majority, while rats, spiders, flies and other pests freely inhabit the country” (44:203–4). Implicit in the novel is a sense that Chile168 ] A nd rea Bell

ans are responsible for their own sufferings, which are a consequence and expression of the country’s archaic beliefs, attitudes, and institutions.

Futuristic Elements in Desde Júpiter According to Jean Chesneaux, Jules Verne’s classics extol “the Saint-­ Simonian vision of a world ‘administered by scientists,’ ” where scientific advances improve the quality of life in a world beset by natural and physical challenges to humankind (70). This belief in technology as savior, and in scientists as unimpeachable moral and intellectual leaders who use knowledge and creativity for the betterment of society is evident in Desde Júpiter as well. The nineteenth century was an era of breathtaking transformation. The optimistic faith that men and women such as Miralles had in the potential of scientific progress was an indispensable part of the social climate that engendered the Industrial Revolution. In Latin America a vigorous spirit of modernization translated into the construction of ships, railroads, bridges, communications systems, buildings, streetlights, and parks at an unprecedented rate. “Science and technology, and the people who could best manipulate them, ushered in the new millennium.”4 Scientific literature was consumed avidly by intellectuals of the age, for it was a time of passionate interest in science and geography.5 Jules Verne’s earliest works played to the reading public’s appetite for adventure stories set in fantastic locales, and Romanticism exalted the application of scientific inquiry to lofty patriotic ideals. “Reason,” proclaims Nemrod in Desde Júpiter, “is the divine light that illuminates all mankind, and progress . . . is the consequence of the application of reason” (9:59). Inasmuch as Miralles extols the virtues of science for the betterment of Chile, then, Desde Júpiter, despite its futuristic feel, fits comfortably within the prevailing literary aesthetic. Even if Miralles’s main intent is the critique of his society by means of the distancing afforded by sf, not all aspects of the alien world he creates are devoted exclusively to this goal. He is occasionally lured by the thrill of the technology itself. While the futuristic elements in Desde Júpiter are usually not essential to the plot, they aid in the critical intent of the novel and bespeak the author’s firm belief in the glorious promise of technology.6 Miralles is unwilling or unable to maintain Verne’s high standards for scientific precision; nor do most of his inventions fall within the realm of the technologically feasible. Mechanical innovations abound on Jupiter, but Carlos’s descriptions of them are notoriously imprecise. The main instrument used for terrestrial study is the “indefinite microscope,” of such power

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that it enables Jovians to read newsprint on Earth.7 The great hall in which alien behavior and artifacts are studied is equipped with amazing telescopes, cameras, projectors, and elevators. Architects on Jupiter construct “infinite monoliths,” and design cities so that their aesthetic charms can be appreciated from all perspectives, including an aerial one, for Jovians can fly—and what is more, they can do so without any apparent need for aircraft.8 And although the story’s pacing and cohesion would be stronger without some of these futuristic devices, their inclusion in the novel underscores Miralles’s sheer delight in scientific innovation. The mechanical instruments in the study halls may serve the author’s critical intent, but scientific interest is the primary reason for including human flight, the physics lessons in chapter 33, and the discussions about theories of evolution and the creation of the universe. Carlos also discovers many extraordinary non-­technological qualities about life on Jupiter. Besides their aeronautical talents, for example, Jovian citizens can vanish at will, read minds, pass through solid objects, and inhabit the bodies of others through a mysterious process of displacement called “coming alive in Time.”9 These wondrous abilities suggest the influence of Poe and reflect the late-­nineteenth-­century fascination with phrenology, parapsychology, spiritualism, and other paranormal phenomena. Other futuristic cultural differences on Jupiter are more suggestive of utopian fiction. Jovians work at that for which they are best suited and set their own work hours. There are no locks on anything, and buildings and sidewalks are in perfect condition. Teaching and learning are highly valued, for women as well as for men (unlike in Verne, the women in Desde Júpiter are the moral and intellectual equals of men). Ancestors are revered, personal worth is measured by one’s talents and virtues rather than possessions, and selfless love is the ideal. And although presumably humanoid, Jovians have evolved to such a point that certain digestive organs are superfluous; indeed, they are considered the mark of a primitive species. The application of science has enabled Jovians to devise such perfect food (ingested in pill form) that the body produces no waste: “On Earth . . . humans, not knowing how to extract what is useful, eat huge quantities, like animals. Nature is thus obliged to provide them with an intestinal tube destined to excrete excess foolishly introduced within. In a world in which humans are fundamentally manure machines, one easily understands that the rest of their functions must be subordinate to that menial necessity. That world is thus indisputably a world of correspondingly vile and lowly spirits, and is many centuries behind us” (53:243). In sum, Jovian society is peaceful, ordered and unhurried, with no men170 ] And rea Bell

tion of any social problems at all. As in the Voyages extraordinaires, however, only a narrow representation of the population on Jupiter is evident; that society is orderly and content is the assurance of only a few spokespersons who obviously do not want for food, material comfort, education, or personal liberty.

Attitudes and Philosophies on Jupiter Jovian scholars decry the linguistic cacophony on Earth, which has not yet advanced sufficiently to discover the Universal Language. Representing perfection in communication, this Universal Language is “composed of the useful elements of all other languages in a rational and scientific fusion” (3:23). In the great Vernian tradition, the esteem of reason and science and the insistence on experiential knowledge of the world are the principal underpinnings of Jovian positivist philosophy, and all else, even love, is subordinate to it. Reason and science contribute greatly to the serene equilibrium that reigns on the planet. Jovians’ harmonious coexistence with nature, for example, is the result of planning and complete control. “There was nothing there that was . . . the result of chance. Nature contributed its strength, and people the ideas” (18:87). Technology serves both practical and aesthetic needs. Gender is unimportant and quite incidental; it would be wholly irrational to privilege one gender over another, and thus on Jupiter it is not done—much to the discomfort of the narrator, who has always harbored a “superstitious horror” of educated women (4:33).10 Spiritual maturity, too, is essential for development into superior beings: Jovians speak of something called the “visibility scale,” which basically indicates the degree of spiritual development one has attained. Abel and Eva, for example, who are spiritual equals, can make themselves invisible to Carlos, their inferior, but not to each other. Invisibility, then, symbolizes the attainment of a relative degree of purity and spiritual enlightenment. As a way of encouraging Carlos’s progress and understanding, Abel frequently exhorts him to think about what point he has reached on the visibility scale. As explained earlier in this essay, Earth’s stage of development is derived through a series of mathematical calculations that are plotted along a Progress Curve. This Jovian concept of social evolution accords with Laplace’s thesis of historical extrapolation (as summarized by Ormson), wherein “given a knowledge of the state of the universe at some date, it is in principle possible to predict all the subsequent history of the universe” (97). The wise Nemrod claims that the coupling of reason and progress is a crucial turning point that leads inexorably to “a domination plan destined

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to end all resistance, and which, once understood, initiates the union of the oppressed, and after that, war. Immediately following comes death and then the aurora of religious unity. This is the path followed by us and all other superior planets” (9:59, emphasis added). Evolution toward utopia is assured, once knowledge is attained and applied by enlightened men and women of science. Religious attitudes on Jupiter are also fundamentally rationalist. Throughout Desde Júpiter the citizenry acknowledges an Absolute Being (also referred to as Universal Father, Creator of Nature, and other honorifics). Faith itself is not disparaged, just blind faith, an attitude exemplified by the Jovian aphorism, “To desire successfully, one must desire that which is possible” (59:273). Faith untempered by knowledge and reason gives rise to erroneous beliefs that hinder progress. For example, great confusion ensued when a being from an advanced world visited a comparatively primitive one about two thousand years ago: “some superior spirits became incarnate on Earth with the objective of establishing among the inhabitants the universal laws of Absolute Morality. Such was the effect that there are many who still believe that they were really gods” (64:315–316). Vast ignorance, the speaker goes on to say, is what repeatedly leads terrestrials to deify prophets. The Jovian concept of love is one of the hardest for Carlos to accept. His declaration of love to Eva is at first happily misunderstood by her to be platonic, which is precisely the nature of the love both she and Abel feel for Carlos. This sublime, all-­encompassing spiritual love, which only comes with understanding the laws of progress, is for them the greatest love to which one can aspire. It does not privilege the young, for one must have “lived truth” (i.e., progressed) before one can understand it, and Carlos, in Eva’s estimation, is experientially too young to know love. What he feels, she cautions him, is merely individual attraction, based on little more than physical appearance. Eva is incapable of accepting the validity and worth of the love Carlos feels for her. Nor is he ever able to embrace the ideal love that all Jovians value. At the end of the novel, after a series of tragicomic adventures in courtship that all too well showcase his fallible human nature, Carlos returns to Earth with these last words from the benevolent Abel ringing in his ears: “You are going to awaken. I forgive you and go with you. We will see each other again. Remember me as a friend, and Eva as a sister. I will not forget you because I have pitied and understood you” (68:332). Abel’s love is the kind of which Carlos thought only God capable, but instead of rejoicing in it and feeling renewed, it leaves him feeling “guilty, 172 ] And rea Bell

criminal, and humiliated” (68:332). Thus, in spite of the novel’s structural similarity to the Bildungsroman, Carlos’s resistance to betterment makes Desde Júpiter more a parody of that genre than an example of it.

Desde Júpiter and Subsequent Chilean Science Fiction It is difficult to find other examples of nineteenth-­century Chilean science fiction. However, a number of works were published in the first half of the twentieth century, prior to the “golden age” initiated by Correa’s Los altísimos in 1959. These include Tierra firme: Novela futurista (Terra Firma: Futuristic Novel, 1927) by R. O. Land; Ovalle: El 21 de abril del año 2031 (Ovalle: 21 April 2031, 1933), by David Perry; the short stories of Alberto Edwards (published between 1913 and 1921); La caverna de los murciélagos (The Cavern of the Bats, 1924) by Pedro Sienna; the stories of Ernesto Silva Román, collected under the titles El dueño de los astros (The Master of the Stars, 1929) and El holandés volador (The Flying Dutchman, 1949) as well as his novel Jristos (Jristos, 1957); Luis Thayer Ojeda’s lengthy novels La Atlántida pervertida (Atlantis Corrupted, 1934) and En el mundo en ruinas (In the Ruined World, 1935); El caracol y la diosa (The Snail and the Goddess, 1950) by Enrique Araya; Visión de un sueño milenario (Vision of a Millennium Dream, 1950) by Michel Doezis; and Diego Barros Ortiz’s novel Kronios: La rebelión de los Atlantes (Kronios: The Rebellion of the Atlanteans, 1954).11 Science fiction did not seem to attract Chilean writers (or publishers) again until the 1920s. Francisco Miralles’s novel received little critical attention at the time and was probably regarded chiefly as a literary curiosity. However, it represents a significant moment in the history of Chilean science fiction, for it is that country’s earliest example of the genre, complete with interplanetary travel and a fully developed extraterrestrial society. It helps chart the spreading influence of Verne’s scientific romances, and like them often includes wonders of technology for their intrinsic interest, rather than merely as convenient vehicles for plot advancement and social commentary. Desde Júpiter captures the heady spirit of the late nineteenth century, when members of Chile’s intellectual, political, and economic elite were enamored of the liberal ideas coming from Europe, when expansion, exploration, and individualism were the order of the day, and when the almost magical potential of technology and science encouraged people to face the future with eager confidence. Miralles used an exotic literary mode to critique what to him were exotic times. He took advantage of the distancing sf

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affords to express potentially unpopular, even incendiary views. Along with Holmberg, his counterpart in Argentina, Miralles began adapting the new genre to the particularities of Latin American reality. It remains to be seen, through the study of the pre-­Correa works listed above, to what extent his stylistic and thematic legacy found continuance in the next generations of Chilean sf writers. Notes

1. A recent search of the literature turned up fully twice as many citations about sf in Spain than in Latin America, in spite of the outstanding work in the genre currently coming out of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. 2. The citations in this paper are taken from the second edition of the novel, published in 1886. All translations are my own. 3. See Dendle. 4. See Ewell and Beezley. 5. Angela Dellepiane, writing about Argentina, notes that that country’s Generation of 1880 produced writers who were pioneers of literature “in which the fantastic, introduced into everyday reality, was a result of . . . the scientific advancements toward which the intelligentsia of this time was strongly attracted” (21). 6. This optimistic belief in technology has changed over the years in Hispanic sf; in many recent works the attitude toward progress reflects anger at Latin America’s subordinate position in the world economy and a growing concern about the social costs of new technologies. 7. Besides using their fabulous microscope, Jovian scholars also possess terrestrial books and newspapers, but it is unclear whether these were reproduced via long-­ distance photography or if they had perfected a means of interstellar matter transference. Another possibility is that Carlos and Federico brought them during earlier visits to Jupiter. 8. Miralles’s interest in the possibility of human flight was an abiding one: in 1889 he published a monograph, Locomoción aérea (Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes), in which he explores the feasibility of applying the principles of avian flight to humans. 9. Many thanks to my colleague David Sunderland for his help in translating the unusual Spanish phrase, “viviendo el tiempo.” In the novel, “coming alive in Time” is equated with the terrestrial concept of “being awake” (59:276), not in the literal sense, but rather awake to a truer understanding of life. To achieve this higher level of consciousness (by means, of course, of direct experience), Jovians periodically inhabit the bodies of others, “so that by coming alive in Time, your being discovers many ways of establishing direct contact with the sphere of action of those who surround you . . .” (25:112). Interestingly, one’s gender does not change during the experience. In one scene the male character Abel is occupying the body of Eva. In response to a remark from the unsuspecting narrator she says that she is satisfied—using the masculine form of the adjective. That linguistic marker is what tips Carlos off that his beloved Eva is not who he thinks she is, at least not at that moment. 10. Through the character of Carlos we can sense the personal threat that many 174 ] And rea Bell

nineteenth-­century Chilean men were feeling as women began exploring opportunities to increase their spheres of influence, challenge their dependent status, and broaden their experience of the world. 11. I am indebted to Moisés Hassón for his assistance with this section. A Chilean, Hassón is one of the most active chroniclers of his country’s science fiction and horror literature. These data on early Chilean sf come from his article, “Introducción a la literatura de ciencia-­ficción en Chile” and from his unpublished “Bibliografía de la ciencia-­ficción chilena.”

Works Cited

Chesneaux, Jean. The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne. Translated by Thomas Wikeley. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. Dellepiane, Angela B. “Critical Notes on Argentinian Science-­Fiction Narrative.” Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica 3 (1987): 19–32. Dendle, Brian J. “Spain’s First Novel of Science Fiction: A Nineteenth-­Century Voyage to Saturn.” Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica 3 (1987): 43–49. Ewell, Judith, and William H. Beezley, eds. The Human Tradition in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989. Hassón, Moisés. “Introducción a la literatura de ciencia-­ficción en Chile.” Cinco conferencias de literatura de fantasía y ciencia ficción. Santiago: Departamento de Cultura de la Secretaría Ministerial de Educación, 1989. 13–22. ———. “Bibliografía de la ciencia-­ficción chilena.” Unpublished bibliography. Miralles, Francisco. Desde Júpiter: Curioso viaje de un santiaguino magnetizado. 1878. 2nd ed. Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1886. ———. Locomoción aérea. Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1889. Ormson, J. O., ed. The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1965. Pagés Larraya, Antonio. “Introduction.” Cuentos fantásticos, by E. L. Holmberg, 7–98. Buenos Aires: Librería Hachette, 1957. Remi-­Maure. “Science Fiction in Chile.” Trans. Lynette Stokes, Laird Stevens, and Robert M. Philmus. Science Fiction Studies 11, no. 2 (July 1984): 188–89.

Afterword

I almost changed the subtitle of this essay to “One of Chile’s Oldest Science Fiction Novels.” For years, historians of Chilean sf, myself included, had heard of a nineteenth-­century novel by Benjamín Tillman called El espejo del future (The Mirror of the Future), but no one had ever seen it. Its existence was only speculative, at least until recently when Chilean sf expert Roberto Pliscoff confirmed the existence of a thirty-­two-­page booklet, published in 1875 by Benjamín Tallman and titled ¡Una vision del porvenir! O El espejo del mundo en el año 1875 (A Vision of the Future! Or, the Mirror of the World in 1875). The text predates Desde Júpiter by three years. It has now been scanned and uploaded to the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile’s website at www .memoriachilena.cl. To my knowledge, it has not been reviewed or studied as a work of sf, but it is quite possible Desde Júpiter now has a predecessor, and more contemporaries may be found as interest in Chilean sf history grows.

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I am also happy to report that the first line of my essay, written almost two decades ago, is no longer quite so true. A quick search of the MLA Bibliography and other online sources turned up over seventy peer-­reviewed journal articles and books on Latin American sf literature and film. The number triples if the search broadens to include Iberia, book reviews, and non-­peer-­reviewed essays. And while that pales in comparison to the amount of publications devoted to English-­language sf, it still represents a significant and very welcome gain. Numerous websites and digital journals showcase sf criticism written in Spanish and Portuguese. The journal Alambique features peer-­ reviewed criticism of sf originally written in Spanish or Portuguese. Brazil’s “Fantasticon” and the academic conferences organized by Elton Honores of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru attract world-­class researchers. In Chile, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, under the energetic leadership of Marcelo Novoa, has distinguished itself by preparing a new generation of sf scholars and promoting Chilean fantastic fiction. Latin America has grown to be a strong presence in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction which has eleven expanded regional entries and numerous author- or text-­specific ones. Why is this? Three reasons come to mind. First, digital media have not only decreased the cost of publishing but have enabled scholars to more easily find and collaborate with one another. Second, the postmodern blurring of creative boundaries, along with the impact of international blockbusters like the Harry Potter and Twilight series have brought greater acceptance of scholarship on fantasy and science fiction in Latin America, where the academy has not always been receptive to popular genres. And third, there is far more Latin American sf literature and film to write about these days. Authors and directors such as Gabriel Trujillo and Bernardo Fernández (Mexico), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Alex Rivera (United States), Jorge Baradit (Chile), Daína Chaviano (Cuba), Gustavo Mosquera (Argentina), and Gerson Lodi-­Ribeiro (Brazil), among many others, have achieved critical and sometimes commercial success. Countries that, historically, have been underrepresented in the genre are gaining more of a presence: from Costa Rica comes, for example, Posibles futuros: cuentos de ciencia ficción (Possible Futures: Science Fiction Stories, 2009) and the Colombian Campo Ricardo Burgos López has published as both a critic and author of sf. This is only a sampling of recent activities that illustrate growth in the field and, to be sure, science fiction still lags behind fantasy and horror in terms of both primary and critical texts. But the rocket has been launched. Let us hope its course remains steady and strong.

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• 9• The First Wave

Latin American Science Fiction Discovers Its Roots Rachel Haywood Ferreira In this article, another preeminent American scholar of Latin American science fiction, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, explores the genre’s earliest-­known prototypes in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. This study was later expanded into her groundbreaking book The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011), which has become essential reading for all sf researchers interested in the history of this important and rapidly growing sector of non-­Anglophone sf. This essay originally appeared in SFS 34, no. 3 (November 2007): 432–62.

Now we have a historical consciousness of belonging to a global movement and, at the same time, we respond to this world science fiction movement with our own characteristics, with notable antecedents and with distinctive, complementary aspirations. Trujillo Muñoz, Biografías (355)

Retrolabeling the Early Works of Latin American SF If Hugo Gernsback’s first act in the inaugural issue of Amazing Stories was to choose the term that would eventually become “science fiction” to designate the type of works that his magazine published, his second act was to use that term retroactively to label—or retrolabel—a body of existing texts that he felt belonged to the same tradition: “By ‘scientifiction,’” he states, “I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” (3).1 Although the genealogy of science fiction has been actively traced in its coun

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tries of origin since the moment Gernsback formally baptized the genre,2 in Latin America this process did not get underway until the late 1960s and is still a work in progress. Like all such bibliographical processes, the effort to retrolabel Latin American sf has in part been the result of a desire for the stature and legitimacy that identifiable ancestors bestow upon their descendants. While Latin Americans can point to northern hemisphere antecedents for their science fiction and claim that established pedigree as their own, their late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-­century search for a more direct national or continental sf family tree represents a desire for evidence that science fiction has been a global genre from its earliest days, that Latin America has participated in this genre using local appropriations and local adaptations, and that this participation is one way in which Latin America has demonstrated a continuing connection with literary, cultural, and scientific debates in the international arena. But as an examination of three nineteenth-­century texts from Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina reveals, the addition of pre-­space-­age texts to the genealogical tree of Latin American sf does more than provide its writers and readers with local roots: it broadens our understanding of the genre in Latin America and the periphery; it extends our perceptions of the role of science in Latin American literature and culture; and, together with later Latin American sf, it contributes new perspectives and new narrative possibilities to the genre as a whole. From the nineteenth century to the present day, the sf tradition/genre has proved to be an ideal vehicle for registering tensions related to national identity and the modernization process in Latin America. The challenge of constructing and/or maintaining a national identity in the face of significant input and influence from the North has been a constant.3 Latin America has also consistently existed in a state of what García Canclini has termed “multitemporal heterogeneity” due to the uneven assimilation of technology (47). M. Elizabeth Ginway’s metaphor of science fiction as “a barometer to measure attitudes toward technology while at the same time reflecting the social implications of modernization in Brazilian society” is equally apt in describing a key function of sf in Spanish America (Brazilian 212). Association with the genre can be more costly today than in the nineteenth century, however. Having their work carry the sf label has often been a double-­edged sword for Latin American writers in more recent years. If the name recognition of science fiction brings them an easily identifiable genre home and a ready-­made reader base, that reader base is still relatively small.4 The label often draws charges of having “associations with ‘low art’ and popular fiction” (Ginway, Brazilian 29), of being a party to 178 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

cultural imperialism, and of failing to reflect local realities. (It should be said that with the contemporary boom in the writing and criticism of Latin American sf, and with a shifting of genre tides away from the predominance of shiny, rocket-­launched visions of the future, contemporary writers and promoters of the genre in Latin America are better able to defend themselves against such charges.)5 In the nineteenth century, however, sf was not so thoroughly perceived as an external genre that was unrelated to Latin American realities, nor had such strong links yet been forged between sf and popular ­culture. Rather than the more recent association with mass culture, science-­ fictional texts in the nineteenth century were read almost exclusively by the literate elite classes. They tended to be published in newspapers and magazines, and any Vernian didacticism was lauded as providing scientific knowledge to the reading public. While many writers in the young nations of Latin America sought to establish and make contributions to their countries’ bodies of national literature in the nineteenth century, still it was more acceptable to have the works of Northern writers as literary influences. This was a time in Latin America when the political, economic, cultural, scientific—and even racial—characteristics of northern European nations such as Britain, France, and Germany were often touted as models for bringing progress to, or “civilizing,” the “barbarous” Latin American nations. The United States was viewed as an example of a nation that had successfully applied these models in the New World. Thus an association with literary genres of Northern origin such as the utopia, the fantastic voyage, futuristic fictions, the scientific romance—genres that were fast coalescing into the sf tradition—was more likely to increase than to decrease the cachet of a text. The nineteenth century was also the time in Latin America in which scientific discourse was the supreme guarantor of truth. In Myth and Archive, his landmark study of Latin American narrative, Roberto González Echevarría describes what he has termed the “hegemonic discourse of science” as “the authoritative language of knowledge, self-­knowledge, and legitimation” in Latin America (103).6 This legitimating power of scientific discourse would imbue texts written in the nascent science-­fictional genre with an additional authority originating outside the texts themselves. As in the twenty-­first century, nineteenth-­century Latin American nations were rarely producers of original scientific research, so the source of this authority would necessarily be associated with the North. While Northern influence in science as well as literature is sometimes seen as doubly damning in Latin American sf today, this was much less the case 140 years ago. González Echevarría addresses one important aspect of influence—the

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non-­American component of hybrid/mestizo/post-­colonial Latin American cultures: It does not escape me that the hegemonic discourse described here comes from “outside” Latin America; therefore Latin America appears to be constantly explaining itself in “foreign” terms, to be the helpless victim of a colonialist’s language and image-­making. There is a level at which this is true and deplorable. However, in Latin America, in every realm, from the economic to the intellectual, the outside is also always inside. . . . Latin America is part of the Western world, not a colonized other, except in founding fictions and constitutive idealizations. (41–42) This is to say, political independence from European colonial powers did not completely divorce Latin Americans, especially Latin American elites, from their European roots. Another key aspect of the status of Latin American nations as importers of science in the nineteenth century is that this dependence was expected to be short-­lived. The mid to late nineteenth century was a time of nation building and of great real and/or perceived national potential in Latin America. It is not a coincidence that a majority of the earliest works of Latin American science fiction are utopian in flavor, including our three texts. The Argentina of the 1870s and 1880s, during which Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg (1852–1937) wrote Viaje maravilloso del Señor Nic-­Nac (The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-­Nac, hereafter Nic-­Nac, 1875–76), showed imminent promise of joining the first world: “Compared to other Latin American countries,” Julia Rodríguez writes in Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State, “Argentina was surging ahead. It appeared that the nation had a chance to reach the levels of prosperity and development of its northern neighbor, the United States” (2). Another of our writers, Joaquim Felício dos Santos (1828–95), put Brazil as potentially on a par with the United States in his text Páginas da história do Brasil escripta no anno de 2000 (Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000, hereafter Brasil 2000, 1868–72) “due to its [geographical] position and natural resources” (Brasil 2000, 21 February 1869).7 Although our third text, “México en el año 1970” (Mexico in the Year 1970, hereafter “México 1970,” 1844), was written in a time and place that were somewhat less inspiring of optimism than the previous two, advances in technology, primarily in the areas of transportation and communication, also permitted its pseudonymous author “Fósforos-­Cerillos” to view progress as eminently attainable for his nation. Texts written in the sf tradition in nineteenth-­century 180 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

Latin America, then, would not have been perceived as pale imitations of imperialistic literary models, but as works that described the present with the authority of scientific discourse and reached for the brighter future that seemed destined to come.

Out of Chaos, Utopia: Patterns and Commonalities in the Production, Publication, and Form/Content of Three Founding Works of Early Latin American SF When these three early Latin American texts were originally published, readers would certainly have recognized the “loose bonds of kinship” between them and texts written by the founding fathers and mothers of Northern sf. The clearest indications of these kinships are the use of the tropes of time and space displacement, direct citations of the works and ideas of Northerners in the texts themselves, and the advertisement published by the newspaper El Nacional promoting the forthcoming book version of Nic-­Nac as a narrative that would awaken “the same interest as any of the best novels of this genre coming from the pen of the popular Jules Verne” (13 March 1876).8 Only in the last fifteen years, however—after over a century of being lost and found and re-­lost and re-­found—have “México 1970,” Brasil 2000, and Nic-­Nac come to be definitively and universally recognized and retrolabeled as some of the earliest examples of Latin American science fiction.9 In recent years the three have frequently been cited as such, the individual texts have often been referred to in prefaces and articles and have occasionally been analyzed in greater detail, but they have never been considered in conjunction. Despite the undeniable diversity of the national histories, cultures, and literary contexts from which the three texts emerged, major commonalities among Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina contribute to distinct patterns of similarity in the three texts: Iberian colonial pasts, unequal modernities, location on the periphery of political influence and scientific research, and the centrality for each country of issues of national identity and Northern influence. Before continuing to an examination of the uniqueness of each text in greater detail, it might be useful to outline some of the parallels among these three works. Northrop Frye has said, “The utopia form flourishes best when anarchy seems most a social threat” (27). These three utopian texts all emerged during conditions of national unrest (with at least two of them published in specific response to political events), although, as discussed above, a more ideal society also seemed to lie just over the horizon. All of the tales set their utopian societies in locations remote either in time or in space, using these devices of displacement to achieve Suvin’s effect of cognitive estrangement

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of the writer’s own reality. One function of the displacement of the utopia in space or time has been explained by Frye: “The desirable society, or the utopia proper, is essentially the writer’s own society with its unconscious ritual habits transposed into their conscious equivalents. The contrast in value between the two societies implies a satire on the writer’s own society, and the basis for the satire is the unconsciousness or inconsistency in the social behavior he observes around him” (27). As Suvin puts it, utopia’s “pointings reflect back upon the reader’s ‘topia’” (51). These texts, then, sought to pinpoint areas that required improvement in order for their nations to join the forefront of world progress and take what their writers felt to be their rightful places near the center of the international stage. Thus, the oft-­cited function of the science-­fictional text as an agent to bring about change would have been particularly attractive to our three writers, as all were active participants in the processes of nation building and consolidation in their home countries.10 All three writers were also informed about the scientific and technological advances of the day, and they viewed these advances as one of the principal means to national progress. Lastly, all were writers for national or regional newspapers and magazines, and at least two of the three were also editors. All three were originally published in these rather ephemeral media, and even as utopias, futuristic fictions, and/or serial publications of fiction go, they are particularly localized both temporally and geographically. I. F. Clarke has described authors of early Northern sf as writing “for the nation and for the world” and as having “an international audience for their stories” (xiii). Latin American authors, however, did not feel included in these descriptions of the future, and so they wrote their own. The resulting works, which were so narrowly time-­stamped and place-­stamped, are less about showing humanity a broad vision of utopia than about bringing Latin American nations forward, catching them up to the Northern nations. Once this was accomplished, our writers appear to be saying, Latin Americans would be able to describe and/or be described by a more general vision of what was to come. As is often the case in utopian tales, all three texts are, to varying degrees, framed narratives. The nineteenth-­century or Earth-­based outer frames work together with other metafictional, realistic, and fantastic narrative devices—such as footnotes, epigraphs, sessions of spiritism, and the inclusion of real, extrapolated, and fabricated texts, events, and figures—to emphasize their own fictionality while at the same time claiming the authority lent by their use of historical fact and scientific discourse.11 The narrative frames also create what Paul K. Alkon has described as “a twofold narration 182 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

that proceeds simultaneously along [two different] time tracks”: a “double temporal perspective” in the case of our two futuristic fictions, a double spatial perspective in the case of the planet-­hopping Nic-­Nac” (Alkon, Origins 125).12 It is no coincidence that Don Quijote is mentioned directly in two of the texts, not for the science-­fictional episode of the cosmic voyage aboard the horse Clavileño described by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in her Voyages to the Moon (18–19), but rather for Cervantes’s magisterial use of the framed narrative and for the episode of the marvelous journey into the Cave of Montesinos. The sociocultural, political, and literary influences of Europe and the United States are central to the form and content of these works. All of the authors portray the estranged, utopian versions of their own nations as strong, politically independent, culturally rich, and globally important,13 yet each text betrays in some way the legacy of the deeply ingrained culture of dependency: either the Latin American nation in question maintains this high level of “civilization” with some sort of European and/or North American support, or the authority or approval of the North is symbolically required to legitimize and seal the Latin American success. While the influence of Latin American writers is surely important in our three texts, that of Northern writers is at least as strong, particularly that of Northern writers of proto and early science fiction. Flammarion is mentioned by name in Nic-­Nac, and the works of Kepler, Mercier, Poe, and Verne, among others, likely influenced our writers in terms of the use of the fantastic voyage, of a specific future setting for utopia, of travel through time and space via medium or spiritist, of scientific detail and didacticism, of extrapolation from the present, and of the combination of real and fictitious characters and events. Other themes that appear in most or all of our texts reflect the writers’ visions of national progress: individual merit to be valued more highly than one’s inherited title or class or race; the involvement or integration of different races and immigrant groups into national life; the importance of education and literacy; the political as well as the economic and cultural benefits of new technologies of transportation and communication; and the necessity of a free press. But it is time to let each text speak for itself.

“México en el año 1970” (Mexico in the Year 1970, 1844) “México 1970” was originally published in El Liceo Mexicano (The Mexican Lyceum). Although the magazine stopped publication after only two issues (in January and May of 1844), El Liceo Mexicano was part of a significant publishing phenomenon of the time, the literary magazine. Advances in the

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technology of typography and economies of scale contributed to the new look, content, and popularity of the “revista literaria” in 1840s Mexico. According to a study of publishing trends in Mexico during this time period, this type of magazine generally “reproduced the latest in letters, the sciences, and the arts produced in Europe and the United States” and eventually works by national writers as well, and its contents were “miscellaneous, instructive, and entertaining” (Suárez de la Torre 584). In the introduction to their first issue, the editors of El Liceo Mexicano declared their raison d’être to be nothing less than “to make the multitude . . . well acquainted with useful discoveries, with progress in the sciences, and with the steps being taken on the path that must lead to the perfection of man’s knowledge” (“Introducción” 3). The two pages of “México 1970” appeared amid four-­ hundred-­plus pages of other “perfecting” articles on topics ranging from railroads, the daguerreotype, aviation, and electricity to hygiene and education, to Mexican history, literature, and figures of note to poetry, fashion plates, and musical scores. The editors of El Liceo stated their intentions to emphasize Mexican topics and include “very few translations” (4). Because they wanted the magazine to be accessible to all and “a source of varied and very useful instruction” to their compatriots, they promised that the articles on scientific progress would be “written in a colloquial style . . . avoid[ing] the use of technical terms” (3). The ultimate proof that they give of the worthiness of their enterprise, however, was the recognition of the value of this type of publication by Europeans; the opening lines of the introduction are: “The utility of publications such as this one is universally recognized today. It is sufficient to peruse the voluminous list of publications of this type that are being produced in Europe in order to be convinced of the degree of acceptance that they have merited” (3). As has been noted, Fósforos-­Cerillos can be credibly linked with the publication mission of El Liceo Mexicano, as he writes a number of articles for both issues that vary in nature from the sociocultural to the scientific to the literary. In the opening paragraph of “México 1970” itself, his protagonist don Próspero (Mr. Prosperous) criticizes the majority of literary periodicals from the past (nineteenth) century for lacking just those elements that El Liceo Mexicano prided itself for including, articles on scientific and historical themes. “México 1970” was published during particularly violent times. Between 1833 and 1855 there were thirty-­seven Mexican presidents, and eleven of them were Antonio López de Santa Anna of Alamo fame; this period in Mexican history can be summed up as “constantly teeter[ing] between simple chaos and unmitigated anarchy” (Meyer et al. 312). The text of 184 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

“México 1970” does not mention the political intricacies of 1844 directly. It takes the form of a dialogue between don Próspero, a man of ninety, and his nephew, Ruperto. They touch on a variety of topics in their short conversation: the importance of specialization in field of study and work, the death of the governor of the Californias (with no implications that “the Californias” would soon be lost to the United States), a twentieth-­century elopement via balloon in a well-­lit neighborhood, the punishment of a corrupt politician, and the theater scene in Mexico City with its French acting troupes and Italian opera companies that pop over from Europe several nights a week to perform. The common thread running through this hodgepodge of themes is the writer’s desire to reveal the progressive national future that has replaced the retrograde national past. Mexico has left behind the superficial “encyclopedic spirit” of the nineteenth century. Sophisticated and efficient transportation and communication networks make it possible for the nation to hear of the death of a far-­off governor and have governors of other states gather for his funeral on the same day. Advanced daguerreotype technology allows for life-­sized images of the events to be viewed in other cities. Balloons—never mind trains or cars—are the principal means of private as well as public transportation. Corruption in the Mexican political system is now extremely rare, and perpetrators are given the death penalty. National institutions provide a wide range of cultural and educational opportunities as well as social services to the citizenry. “México 1970” is not a framed narrative per se. There is no actual journey through time to reach the year 1970 as there is in many utopias or futuristic fictions, and the dialogue format means that there is no room for a traditional third-­person narrator who might address comments to the contemporary nineteenth-­century reader. And yet that “double temporal perspective” is clearly present: the text is, as the Mexican critic Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz points out, “more an x-­ray of the Mexico of 1844 than a premonitory fiction about the Mexico of 1970” (“El futuro en llamas” 13). The creation of a de facto narrative frame is carried out via the character of don Próspero and via metafictional means. Don Próspero’s opening line lays the groundwork for the constant connection of past and present (or present and future) narrative threads throughout the story: “It is necessary to confess, dear nephew, that the advances of the twentieth century are gigantic in all areas” (347). Born in 1880, don Próspero would have grown up in the nineteenth century and been an eyewitness to the reforms that have brought his nation out of its troubled past and into the mainstream of global progress. This potential great-­grandchild to Mexicans of Fósforos’s generation is thus the ideal au

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thority to contrast the utopian Mexican society of the twentieth century with the problems of the nineteenth and so to serve as mouthpiece for Fósforos’s criticisms of his present and for his ideas about the correct path to a better national future. Don Próspero continually refers to the past during the conversation: to those inferior literary periodicals, to the bad old days when corrupt politicians were the norm, to what the value of a coin collection would have been “a century ago” (348). His final pronouncement is something of a closing of the frame he opened with his first lines. Here he describes the Mexico City of 1970 as seen through the eyes of a typical nineteenth-­century Mexican leader, and he makes it clear that this utopian future is not due to the efforts of such men: “If one of our pseudo-­great men from the past century were to come back to life and see in Mexico City 22 theaters, 43 libraries, 164 literary institutes, 32 hospitals; in short, if he were to see 800,000 inhabitants enjoying liberty, salubrity, and inalterable peace in the most beautiful city in America, he would ask to be returned to his tomb immediately for fear of finding himself confronted on all sides by the curses of men” (348; emphasis in original). The text of “México 1970” also carries out temporal doubling on a metafictional level, in the epigraph and the footnote appended to the tale. The epigraph is attributed to J. J. Mora, one of the possibilities suggested for Fósforos’s true identity. How many times our great-­grandchildren will cross themselves When they take the annals of this century Into their hands! They will say: “Our grandparents “Were discreet, cultured, theatrical: “In conversing and writing, they were accomplished men; “In self-­praise, without equal; “But in the midst of so many perfections “They were great scoundrels.” (347) This sarcastic ditty is, then, a perfect gloss of the story itself, as it pokes fun at Mora’s contemporaries by referring to their great-­grandchildren’s future poor opinion of them. It also foreshadows don Próspero’s concluding praise of the accomplishments of 1970 that have come about in spite of his predecessors. The other metanarrative connection to 1844 is a single but lengthy didactic footnote that Fósforos cannot resist including. He adds the note to explain that his portrayal of Mexico City as being illuminated at night in 1970 is not so far-­fetched, as it was extrapolated from experiments with flammable hydrogen bicarbonate being carried out in Paris. Fósforos recounts the details and progress of the experiment, and he abandons 186 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

his technologically advanced fictional future completely as he addresses his readers of 1844 directly. “It seems ridiculous to say,” he begins, and “The project seems harebrained at first glance,” he acknowledges—that is to say, ridiculous and harebrained to someone in 1844. Fósforos ends by assuring the unnamed French scientist that if he imitates the work ethic of Daguerre, his labors are sure to bear fruit. If Fósforos’s primary purpose is to satirize the Mexico of 1844, his intent does not negate the fact that his vision of the national future is fairly optimistic. Although Mexico lacked the infrastructure and the political stability of Northern nations in his own time, still, a writer in Fósforos’s position could envision the products of rapid advances in science and technology as motors powerful enough to drive Mexico’s leap in development in the next century. It should be underlined at this point that, whoever Fósforos may have been, like many nineteenth-­century Northern writers of science-­fictional texts, he was au courant on the science of his day. All of the technology that appears in this story was extrapolated from the latest in nineteenth-­century inventions from around the world: the daguerreotype process had just been perfected in 1839, the telegraph would only be put into actual use for the first time in the spring of 1844 in the United States, and balloons were not used as steerable methods of transportation until the early twentieth century (see also the articles by “F.C.” in El Liceo Mexicano on electricity [30] and the construction and use of the thermometer [61]). It should also be mentioned at this point, however, that despite his portrayal of Mexico’s tremendous progress in the text, there is a certain shortfall in the daring of Fósforos’s vision. It is not unexpected that not all groups are represented as participating equally in the utopian “liberty, salubrity, and inalterable peace” of Fósforos’s future: no mention is made of members of any but the governing class; the issue of race and racial minorities is not addressed; and the only woman in the story has to elope to escape a forced marriage with a cousin interested in her dowry. What is somewhat more surprising is that Fósforos has been unable to free himself from the concept of—and possibly belief in—European ascendancy. Although, with the episode of the funeral of the governor of the Californias, Fósforos shows that revolutions in transportation and communication have served to unite Mexico, he gives just as much importance to the fact that these technologies also now link Mexico more closely with Europe. If at first glance it seems that the future Mexico is on a par with Europe, even in this imagined utopia Europeans are the purveyors of culture and of science, as the only artists and scientists mentioned in the text are French or Italian. Perhaps Fósforos believed that national scientific and artistic contributions would

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come once Mexico had caught up with the North in terms of access to the products of scientists and artists. Don Próspero does speak early on of his hopes that the next Mexican generation “will cause a brilliant revolution in the sciences and arts,” now that specialization is the accepted method of study (347); but apparently Fósforo did not believe that 126 years would be enough time to bring this about.

Páginas da história do Brasil escripta no anno de 2000 (Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000, 1868–72) Joaquim Felício dos Santos was a member of a prominent family from the state of Minas Gerais. A lawyer by training, he also worked as an educator, a businessman, a politician, and a newspaperman. He wrote in multiple genres, but he is best known for his historical text Memórias do Distrito Diamantino (Memoirs of the Diamantino District) and for the Indianist fiction Acayaca; he himself considered his greatest work to be his multivolume project rewriting the Brazilian civil legal code. Felício dos Santos was writer, editor, and “the principal person responsible” for O Jequitinhonha (pronounced “Zhe-­kee-­chee-­NYO-­nya”), a four-­page weekly newspaper based in the city of Diamantina and serving the northern part of the province of Minas Gerais (Teixeira Neves 21). Here he published Brasil 2000 in almost weekly installments between 1868 and 1872. An ardent Liberal-­cum-­Republican, Felício dos Santos wrote Brasil 2000 in direct response to specific political events of the day. It was a biting satire against the Brazilian emperor and his regime, a sort of fictional complement to or glosa (“gloss”) of the contents of the newspaper’s front and editorial pages (Eulálio 104). Some historical background is necessary to understand the driving force behind the work of this earliest known writer of Brazilian science fiction. Brazil’s independence process and the resulting political situation that continued throughout the nineteenth century are unique among Latin American nations. When Napoleon’s forces invaded Portugal, King João VI and the Portuguese royal court fled with sixteen thousand of their closest friends to Rio de Janeiro, a move, as Skidmore points out, “unprecedented not only in the history of the Americas but in the whole history of colonial exploration” (35). From 1815 to 1822, the state of Brazil enjoyed equal status to Portugal in a United Kingdom. In 1821 Dom João returned to Portugal, leaving his son, Pedro, as prince regent of Brazil; in 1822, with his father’s blessing, Pedro declared Brazilian independence and was crowned Emperor Pedro I of Brazil. After his father’s death in 1831, Pedro I returned 188 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

to Portugal to assume the Portuguese throne, leaving his five-­year-­old son, the Brazilian-­born Pedro II, to rule Brazil. The reign of Pedro II, referred to as the Segundo Reinado (Second Reign), lasted for most of the nineteenth century, and it is often compared to that of Queen Victoria for its length and stability. The violent rebellions against the colonizer and the internal upheaval that preceded independence and national consolidation in Hispanic America had virtually no counterpart in Brazil. Brazilian development during the Segundo Reinado looked good on paper: factories were being built at an increasing rate, railroad tracks and telegraph lines were expanding rapidly, the steamship had reduced what had been a two- to three-­month trip up the Amazon to a mere nine days. A look beyond the numbers, however, reveals that the economic growth benefited only a wealthy minority, and independent Brazil was continuing the colonial pattern of dependency within the country’s borders and in its relationship with Europe. Land ownership remained in the hands of an elite minority; the expanding railroads, instead of serving to unify the far-­flung provinces of the vast Brazilian empire, “generally ran between plantation and port. Thus, they helped to speed exports to market rather than . . . to create an internal economic infrastructure”; and Brazil extended telegraph lines to Europe (1874) before sending lines to its nearest neighbors (Montevideo in 1879, Buenos Aires in 1883) or to many of its own provinces (Burns 159–61, 168–71). This process of quantitative growth without real qualitative development contributed to the phenomenon of unequal modernity that persists in Brazil today. The Segundo Reinado lasted until 1889, when Pedro, much weakened physically and politically, ceded power to junior military officers who rose up in a nearly bloodless coup. Felício dos Santos had halted publication of O Jequitinhonha in order to attempt to change the Brazilian political situation from within when he was elected to a term in the legislature of the Empire of Brazil for 1864–66, but he left government in frustration after only a few months, as his attempts at political reform were virtually ignored. By the late 1860s the first cracks in the national political situation were already becoming visible. Brazil was embroiled in a costly war with Paraguay (1865–70) for which Dom Pedro II took much of the blame at home. When in July of 1868 Pedro II invited the Conservative Party to form a government despite a Liberal majority in the Chamber of Deputies, Felício dos Santos resumed publication of his newspaper with a vengeance. On August 23, 1868, the first installment of Brasil 2000 appeared in its pages. Despite the freedom enjoyed by the press at that time, the degree to which Felício dos Santos felt free to attack Brazil’s political system and the

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figure of her monarch in Brasil 2000 seems surprising. The text has, in fact, been called “the best critique of the monarchy in our country” (Magalhães 252). Some of Felício dos Santos’s favorite anti-­imperial and anti-­status-­ quo hobbyhorses were the alleged nonconstitutional intentions of the constitutional monarch; the institution of the lifelong senate term; the lack of any real difference between the Conservative and Liberal political parties; corruption among legislators; the centralization of political power and the economic infrastructure in Brazil to the detriment of provinces such as his own; the war with Paraguay; and the prevailing custom in Brazil of determining a person’s worth based on social class, economic means, royal favor, and/or race rather than on individual merit. The list is quite particular to the Brazilian milieu, yet has marked similarities to Fósforos’s targets in “México 1970.” The mordancy of Felício dos Santos’s satire can be attributed to his belief that he was publishing in the relative “anonymity” of O Jequitinhonha and subsequently that Brasil 2000 would never reach farther than the newspaper’s regional mineiro audience. The work was “ephemeral” by design, which is why he never republished it either in other newspapers or in book form, as he did several of his other serialized works (Eulálio 103–4). By all accounts, however, the impassioned literary editorial did not go unnoticed at court, and it is likely that his attacks on the monarchy in O Jequitinhonha, and particularly in Brasil 2000, were the deciding factor in Pedro II’s rejection of Felício dos Santos’s projected revision of the legal code (Teixeira Neves 26; Eulálio 107–8). Brasil 2000 eventually sank into relative oblivion. A few historians and literary critics have revealed knowledge of the text, but only Alexandre Eulálio has written about it in depth. The fragility of the medium on which the text was printed meant that not even Eulálio had access to the complete work (“Páginas” 106n5); for the purposes of this study I have been able to read the majority of the text and Eulálio’s summaries of most of the rest of it.14 Although we do not have either the beginning or a true ending of the text of Brasil 2000—Eulálio tells us that the text peters out in late 1872, rather than ending definitively (103)—we do have something almost as good. On November 22, 1862, Felício dos Santos published a short story in O Jequitinhonha entitled “A História do Brasil escrita pelo Dr. Jeremias no Ano de 2862” (A History of Brazil Written by Dr. Jeremias in the Year 2862), which I have examined in greater detail elsewhere (Haywood Ferreira 155– 63). According to Eulálio and to my own reading of the text, “Dr. Jeremias 2862” is the seed of what eventually became Brasil 2000 (106). Both “Dr. Jeremias 2862” and Brasil 2000 are futuristic utopias, and the narrational premise of each involves a nineteenth-­century re-­(pre-­)edition of a 190 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

history of Brazil brought back in time from the twenty-­ninth or twenty-­first century (with notes, excisions, and commentary by sundry historians, narrators, translators, and historical and/or fictional authorities from the two time streams). Eulálio goes as far as to call Felício dos Santos a “Júlio Verne sertanejo” (“Jules Verne from the Brazilian sertão region”) (103), but he does not analyze either of these texts as science fiction. Brasil 2000 was only definitively reclaimed for the genre by Bráulio Tavares in the early 1990s, most visibly in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (in the entry on “Latin America”). Eulálio describes the composition process of Brasil 2000 as follows: “Joaquim Felício wrote the History of the Year 2000 without particular care, practically [with the paper] on his knee, just at the deadline for handing material over to the typesetter. Without any very defined plan, the narrative constructs itself, bit by bit, and it varies infinitely according to the fantasy and the humor of the writer of the serial” (103). Despite the rather loosely knit structure of Brasil 2000 that resulted from such a writing process, the text can be divided into two clearly defined parts or, to use Eulálio’s term, “phases” (105–6). Phase one runs from 23 August 1868 through 5 December 1869, and phase two from 12 December 1869 through late 1872. The second phase of the text is referred to far more often by both historians and literary critics because it is more “action oriented” (Eulálio 105), because it contains the actual time-­travel journey to the year 2000, because it is the “utopian” half of the tale, and/or because it contains Felício dos Santos’s—often accurate or “prophetic”—predictions about the Brazil of the future (Magalhães 252). The installments of the first phase of Brasil 2000 do not devote a great deal of space to life in the future, but they do not have to in order to be considered sf since they are purportedly from the future. These time-­traveling pages do not proclaim the progress and the scientific advances that were being or would be made in coming years so much as they describe the antiscientific forces that were working against progress in Brazil in the nineteenth century. We are not shown the wonders of the republic but rather the evils of empire holding Republican forces in check. Phase one of Brasil 2000 is an unofficial, nonestablishment version of the events of 1868–69 in Brazil, a version written from the periphery of national power—though not, it should be remembered, from a position of complete powerlessness—and revelatory of the darker side of the center. What Felício dos Santos’s science-­fictional history of Brazil’s present is able to do (that his historical text Memórias do Distrito Diamantino cannot) is to claim for itself the authority of the ultimate victors, to say that this will be the official history, this will be how today’s people and events are remembered in

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the future. Despite the literary realism of phase one of Brasil 2000, with its heavy emphasis on dialogues and diatribes, there is also a great sense of metanarrative play. As Alkon has observed, “Where fantasy is avoided, various metafictional devices often play an equivalent role in moving futuristic fiction away from unselfconscious realism” (Origins 193). Figures such as a nineteenth-­century editor and a translator of the history book from 2000 leave clear and deliberate editorial scissor marks and opinions scattered throughout the text. The nineteenth-­century editor writes in the body of the text: “Let us skip several pages dealing with the Saraiva Mission, the retaliatory actions, the protest of the neutral nations etc., etc. Then the historian continues: . . .” (Brasil 2000 114). The translator puts the following comment in a footnote: “So as not to fatigue the reader, we will suppress a long and fastidious dissertation on diplomacy (Translator’s Note)” (Brasil 2000 16 May 1869). Interjections such as these provide constant connection with the future-­time perspective of the history text from the year 2000 by reminding readers that this is not simply a nineteenth-­century history book that is being narrated in an omniscient style, but rather a mediated, retrospective view of nineteenth-­century history, whose writer and mediators therefore know which facts and information will be most pertinent in the long run and which opinions and attitudes will turn out to have been the correct ones. Yet Felício dos Santos is so blatant about his narrative manipulation in Brasil 2000 that the reader never forgets that this is a projected retrospective history written with an overt nineteenth-­century agenda. Felício dos Santos’s satire—and his sense of humor—extends to the very notion of the possibility of an unmediated, ultimate, true history and to his own endeavor to persuade the reader that this text is just such a work. Phase one of Brasil 2000, then, is a dystopia in which Felício dos Santos paints the evils of Brazil’s political system, of the Paraguayan War, and of the usurpers in the new Conservative cabinet. He focuses on the figure of Pedro II as the personification of corrupt, nonprogressive forces that arrogate all power to the central government. To support his criticism, he links Dom Pedro with all that belongs to the outmoded past in a number of ways, both metanarrative and plot-­centered. The writer first makes it known that the monarchical system of government in Brazil will have fallen before the year 2000, and he has the emperor himself betray his “true” motivations and character. This is done both in the outer frameworks of the year 2000 history (in a footnote, one Dr. Sckwthrencoff cites a tradition that “was preserved until the fall of the Brazilian monarchy” [5 December 1869]), and within the text itself (at one point the fictionalized monarch himself recognizes that the Brazilian people 192 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

will inevitably unite against him: “Wretches, who one day will decide to rise up and contest the divine prerogatives of royalty!” [28 February 1869]). It is never made clear how the historian in 2000 gained the fly-­on-­the-­ wall perspective of the latter example; at other points in the narrative Felício dos Santos prefers to place this type of insider’s view within a citation of a text written by someone else. Most—not all—of the writers of these intercalated texts are real, and they come from both the past and the future time streams; most—not all—of the texts are completely fictional or fictionalized works with real titles. For several weeks, for example, Felício dos Santos “cites” from a play, Eleições do Ceará (The Ceará Elections), supposedly written by the well-­known writer and newly minted Conservative José de Alencar; in scene thirty-­seven of this one-­act play, Pedro II admits his tendency toward the accumulation of power to one of his ministers: “In monarchies the nation is a great head on a rickety body, all the vitality of the extremities should flow to a single point, the capital. . . . Paris is France; London, England; Saint Petersburg, Russia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Washington goes unnoticed on the world map: it is the capital of a savage, degenerate people, the scourge of nations, who disdain the supreme happiness of government by a crowned brow!” (5 December 1869). The passage is of further interest for its association of Dom Pedro with Europe (the Old World) rather than the United States (the New World); Pedro II is repeatedly shown seeking approval and recognition from Europe and speaking against the decentralization of power in the United States, a political model that is the bane of his existence.15 This inversion of Felício dos Santos’s own ideas is another example of how he uses the king’s view of the world as a foil for his own. Felício dos Santos also relegates Pedro II and his monarchy to the past by portraying Dom Pedro as antiscientific and therefore anti-­progress, unable to function in the modern world. Felício dos Santos makes this accusation in spite of the fact that Pedro II was a patron of the sciences and something of an amateur scientist in his own right. In Brasil 2000 Pedro II is represented as a presumptuous dabbler who uses science as an instrument of imperial control, a vain man who believes that a scientific veneer will grant him status and respect from the European monarchs he longs to impress. One of many examples of the king’s complete ignorance of all things scientific is given in a (fictional) passage cited from a (fictional) scientific text by a (real) writer. Here Dom Pedro favors a new technique he has read about in a pamphlet claiming it is possible to produce detonators from roasted coffee beans (21 February 1869). Thus, instead of bringing Brazil to the higher level of technological sophistication required to produce detonators from

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the usual fulminate of mercury, the king invests national resources in low-­ tech quackery. Phase two of Brasil 2000 functions as an antidote to phase one; it is as much an anti-­dystopia as a utopia. Here Felício dos Santos draws an even tighter connection between the two temporal threads of his narrative. In addition to bringing a text back in time, he sends a person traveling into the future. But he does not take the more usual course of choosing someone sympathetic to his own vision; rather than sending a person to admire, learn about, and bring ideas back from his ideal future, Felício dos Santos sends his fictionalized Pedro II.16 This rather abrupt turn of events begins in the episode of 12 December 1869, which opens with these words from the nineteenth-­century editor: “We owe the reader an explanation of our title— Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000. How, in the year of our Lord 1869, can you publish fragments of a history book that will not be written for another 131 years?” The editor insists that a text that travels through time should not seem absurd in a world of instantaneous communication through space between America and Europe. He then makes a connection that would resonate with Brazilian readers in the 1870s: the text of Brasil 2000 has been brought from the future by a medium. Spiritism had been brought to Brazil via France in the early 1850s, and by the 1870s it was enjoying wide popularity among the Brazilian elite (see Machado 68, 92). It is important that Felício dos Santos’s choice of spiritism as a method of time travel be viewed in this context and in the context of typical science-­fictional methods of travel through time and space prior to Wells’s Time Machine (see, for example, Nicolson and the entries on “Time Travel” by Edwards and Stableford and “Sleeper Awakes” by Clute in the Clute/ Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). Felício dos Santos was clearly not a believer in spiritism himself, and his inclusion of spiritism in the text should not be construed as a third-­world, low-­tech alternative to travel via technological means nor as evidence for the common and only partially correct characterization of Latin American sf as tending toward the “soft” sciences and the fantastic. In a somewhat confused plot twist, the editor’s promised explanation of how he obtained this history book from the future morphs into an account of Pedro II’s trip to the future. The monarch’s journey through time in Brasil 2000 is immediately preceded by a (meta)literary experience: It was 14 minutes and 23 seconds after 11 o’clock at night. Profound silence reigned in the palace of St. Christopher, everyone slept; only H.R.M. the emperor remained awake. Reclining near a table, H.R.M. 194 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

was attentively devouring the marvelous adventures of Don Quijote of la Mancha . . . the reading of which is permitted only to great monarchs. “Oh! If only a prince were allowed to read about the history of his reign in the future!” His majesty broke off. Through the shadows of his thoughts he discerned the pallid figure of a man. It was not an illusion. The man advanced, bowed, and kissed the imperial hand. “Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?” the emperor asked. “Dr. Tsherepanoff, your majesty’s most humble servant. A native of Russia, I have just come from France; I have traveled 9,645 leagues today.” “A madman!” “No, Sir, I am not a madman. I am a medium. . . .” (12 December 1869) After Dr. Tsherepanoff gives further evidence of his credentials as medium-­ to-­the-­monarchs, he puts the emperor into a hypnotic sleep. Dom Pedro awakens on 1 January 2000. Instead of discovering the greatness of his legacy, he finds that a Republican government has decentralized Brazil and made it a federation. In the “confederation of the United-­States of Brazil,” transportation by “aerostatic packet” and communication via “electrical telegraphy” allow for power and influence to be shared equally among all Brazilian cities, towns and villages, uniting the entire country rather than concentrating power in the capital (12, 19, and 26 December 1869). In the text of this author from the provinces, Rio is reduced to a virtual ruin, and a statue of Pedro I has been replaced with one of Tiradentes, a republican hero. Pedro II learns that he was deposed at some point, and that his body lies in a modest tomb in Italy, where most of his descendants are now hardworking farmers. When Pedro II happens to meet a Brazilian descendant, the man knows nothing of the former glories of his line and barely remembers that Brazil had ever been an empire. Despite a few errors and exaggerations, Felício dos Santos was surprisingly successful in a number of his predictions for the year 2000. Brazil would indeed become a republic in his own lifetime. He also predicted the relocation of the national capital to the geographic center, an end to slavery in Brazil (1888), the population of Brazil in 2000 (within twenty million people), and the creation of a United Nations. But, as Fredric Jameson has noted, “the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine

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the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (152). Felício dos Santos’s device of a history of the nineteenth century written in the year 2000 is a literalization of this transformative process. He was far less invested in representing an idyllic future in his text than in using that text to plant seeds of change in his own time. With another of his predictions, for example, he sought to prepare his countrymen for a change he believed to be inevitable. Although he was unable to predict the presidency of Lula, Felício dos Santos did imagine a president of mixed Indian and African ancestry, which was for his time and place an extremely unlikely possibility. Anticipating his readers’ rejection of the idea of such a president, he has his fictional nineteenth-­century editor argue his case: Peace, friend reader; our poor imagination does not come into this at all; it is reality. . . . Other times, other customs. Peoples are like individuals: their ideas, their principles, their tastes, their character change with the eras. The nineteenth century in which we live is not the same as the twenty-­first. We say with Voltaire, “what things, what marvels our children will see!” In the twenty-­first century color and birth are purely accidental qualities; people consider things from a rational point of view, they heed only the personal qualities of the individual. (Brasil 2000 139–40) Felício dos Santos uses his chosen science-­fictional narrative technique to particular advantage here: this is not supposition or invention, it is reality; this is not literary imagination (claims the author’s literary invention, the nineteenth-­century editor), but historical fact. This is one of the beauties of the time-­travel narrative; as McLemee has pointed out in his analysis of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the future may be radically different from the time traveler’s present, but “There is also the evidence of [the time traveler’s] senses: you can’t argue with success” (23). In comparison with Fósforos’s vision of a twentieth-­century Mexico, Felício dos Santos projects a Brazil that is far more secure in its sense of national identity and far less dependent on the North. Once the Brazilian republic has recovered from the backward conditions Felício dos Santos blames on the monarchy, it finds itself “rivaling the cultured nations of old Europe” (Brasil 2000 137). Brazil and other nations of the nineteenth-­ century periphery are now producers of science and of culture: the mechanism for steering dirigibles has been discovered by an African engineer 196 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

from Timbuktu (26 December 1869); Pedro II reads a scientific treatise by Dr. Japoti, a celebrated chemist from the Macuné Indian tribe (139); more newspapers in African languages than European languages are available in the future Brazilian capital; and European students come to study at superior Brazilian universities. But if Brazil is the future while Europe is now the past, still Felício dos Santos cannot quite rid himself of the last vestiges of the mind-­set of dependency. In what is perhaps an unconscious slip into nineteenth-­century rhetoric, a transportation engineer in the year 2000 explains the benefits of connecting the interior of Brazil with the coast with the phrase “Duty-­free passage down the river was promoted, opening the republic to the sea, to foreign commerce, to light and civilization” (143). Felício dos Santos can see Brazil helping European and other central nations financially, politically, and even educationally, but he still refers to the “light and civilization” as coming from without rather than from within. Felício dos Santos’s decision to transform a future history into a time-­ travel narrative reflects his increasing optimism about the future of Brazil. He himself went from being a Liberal to a full-­fledged Republican during his years writing for O Jequitinhonha, while Pedro II went from an evenhanded user of his moderating power to a conservatively biased monarch at the head of a long and costly armed conflict. Still, the author of Brasil 2000 had to live through nearly twenty more years of monarchy, of waiting for his country to take what he firmly believed was the key first step along the way to realizing its true potential. Felício dos Santos was a nation builder, but as he began to run out of time to build as he saw fit, he created his own time in which to do so: A patriot in a nation that was taking its first steps, surrounded by difficulties of every order, having its aspirations to become a great power curbed by the naturally inferior situation that we [Brazil] occupied in international politics, he turned to the blank page of the future where he would draft his dreams of greatness. In this way he sublimated his disenchantment and his dissatisfaction with contemporary reality at the same time as he spiritedly served his political faction. (Eulálio 107)17 Amid his musings on the wonders of his utopian future, Felício dos Santos writes rather wistfully, “Oh! if only some fairy, medium, or spiritist could prolong our lives until then!” (140). Before Joaquim Felício dos Santos died in 1895, he participated in the industrialization of Brazil; he saw slavery completely abolished (1888) and Pedro II and the Bragança monarchy fall (1889); and he was elected to a term in the Republican senate (1890).

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Viaje maravilloso del Señor Nic-­Nac en el que se refieren las prodijiosas aventuras de este señor y se dan á conocer las instituciones, costumbres y preocupaciones de un mundo desconocido: Fantasía espiritista (The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-­Nac in Which Are Recounted the Prodigious Adventures of This Gentleman and Are Made Known the Institutions, Customs and Preoccupations of an Unknown World: A Spiritist Fantasy, 1875–76) Our third text, Nic-­Nac, was published by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg in weekly installments in the “Folletín” (serials) section of the Buenos Aires newspaper El Nacional between 29 November 1875 and 13 March 1876. At this time, Argentina was just emerging from a period of national unrest. The domination of national politics by the caudillos of the mid-­nineteenth century had been broken, and the aftershocks of the rebellion of Bartolomé Mitre, the losing presidential candidate in the elections of 1874, were almost over. National institutions were being founded left and right, and the watershed year of 1880, commonly cited as the point at which Argentina achieved national consolidation, was almost in sight. As discussed above, this was a time of great optimism about Argentina’s potential for development. The hegemony of scientific discourse was at its height, and it was now accompanied by a pragmatic drive to improve scientific education, as science was perceived as one of the keys to national progress. Argentina’s greatest educational reformer was the second president of the republic, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88; presidency1868–74). As part of his efforts, Sarmiento brought foreign scientists to Argentina to advance scientific knowledge of/in the country. The most important of these scientists was Carlos Germán Conrado (Karl Hermann Konrad) Burmeister (1807– 92), but despite his contributions to Argentine science, Burmeister proved a disappointment on a number of levels. He did not share Sarmiento’s belief in Darwinism. His works on Argentina itself, such as his Description Physique de la République Argentine (Physical Description of the Argentine Republic), were largely published and distributed in Europe in French or German. Further, in the words of Holmberg’s son and biographer, “Dedicated to his scientific work, [Burmeister] did not attract a single young person, he trained no disciples” (Luis Holmberg 138–39). It fell to the Argentine Generation of 1880 to improve national scientific literacy and to build the foundation of an Argentine scientific establishment. Holmberg was a prominent member of the Generation of 1880, although he was also well known in the modernist circles of the subsequent genera198 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

tion. This “shining star of early Argentine natural science” was a licensed medical doctor, an Argentine Linnaeus who worked to catalogue the national flora and fauna, an educator who taught in most branches of the sciences from anatomy to zoology, and the director of the national zoo (Rodríguez 29). He was also a poet, a prolific writer of fiction short and long, and the person often credited with introducing three genres in Argentina and/ or Latin America: the fantastic tale, detective fiction, and science fiction.18 While he was instrumental in importing scientific and literary ideas and trends from the North through his professional work and his translations of documents from English, French, and German, he was also a key figure in the movement for scientific and literary autonomy as a founder of the first scientific periodical written and published in Argentina by Argentines (El Naturalista Argentino [The Argentine Naturalist]), as a contributor to a project on national variants of the Spanish language (the Diccionario del lenguaje argentino [Dictionary of the Argentine Language]), and as the author of Lin-­Calél, an epic poem in the indigenista (Indianist) tradition. Holmberg was not merely interested in introducing the rest of the world to Argentina, but in introducing Argentina to itself. Perhaps Holmberg’s “carácter de frontera” (“transitional/border character”) (Ludmer 173), his location in “between”—between generations, between intellectual disciplines, between national traditions—was what made him such an important national literary innovator and popularizer of science. For Holmberg and his generation, national development was inextricably linked to the creation of a scientifically informed population. As he wrote in the Advertencia (Note to the Reader) of the first issue of El Naturalista Argentino in 1878, “The natural sciences, the sciences of observation, should be considered the foundation of modern progress” (qtd. in Pagés Larraya 18). Holmberg saw literature and science as natural partners in this process. “In order to awaken a love for Natural History in the Argentine public,” he said in 1876, “it is indispensable that fairly literary language be used to present the material, . . . that the useful always be combined with the pleasant” (qtd. in Luis Holmberg 76). It is true to course, then, that when Holmberg finally became the one to present Darwin’s theories to the general Argentine reading public, he chose to do so in a work of fiction, Dos partidos en lucha (Two Factions Struggle for the Survival of the Fittest). In addition to defending Darwinism in the text of Dos partidos, we also find Holmberg recognizing a number of Northern writers for making science more accessible and more palatable to his compatriots. He cites scientists such as Flammarion and Figuier for their contributions toward putting science “within reach of all levels of intelligence” (70). He also cites writers of

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adventure and science-­fictional tales such as Mayne Reid and Verne, particularly the latter, for having “sheathed the mysteries of science with a vaporous and attractive mantle” (70). The influence of all of these writers is also clear in Nic-­Nac, which Holmberg wrote during the same time period as Dos partidos. In the tale, Nic-­ Nac, a doctor, and a German medium called Friedrich Seele travel together to Mars. Not unlike the Europeans arriving in the New World, some of Nic-­ Nac’s first actions on Mars are to name geographic features after places they resemble on Earth and to worry that the inhabitants might be cannibals. Nic-­Nac and the doctor soon become acquainted with the landscape, beings, customs, and institutions of the red planet. Before Seele, who turns out not to be German at all, but a Martian who had been visiting Earth,19 leaves the two to their own devices, he endows each with a phosphorescent aura that will function as a protective shield against any aggression by the natives as well as overcome any language barriers, a sort of nineteenth-­ century version of the universal translator in Star Trek or the babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A series of adventures follow, including an interspecies love affair between the doctor and a Martian girl; Nic-­ Nac’s visit with the local Martian leaders; and flight via some unnamed means to the capital city. At many points in the tale the Martians appear to be a more advanced, utopian civilization; at others they seem to possess flaws with marked similarities to those of their terrestrial counterparts. The text ends with Nic-­Nac’s return to Earth, where his efforts to share the lessons of his journey result in his being treated like a modern version of the proverbial prophet in his own country: he is confined to an insane asylum. The tale of Nic-­Nac’s fantastic journey has two distinct narrative frames. The outermost frame of the tale takes place in Buenos Aires on 19 November 1875, a week before Holmberg’s Nic-­Nac began to appear in El Nacional. In this frame we hear the voices of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires reacting to the news that Nic-­Nac claims to have returned from a trip to Mars, and we read the latest news bulletins on the matter. Some citizens believe Nic-­Nac, calling him “the daring Livingstone of outer space” (3); others refer to his supposed journey as “his harebrained and fantastic excursion” (4). The authorities are in agreement with the latter group,20 and Nic-­Nac is declared mad. Over the next three days Nic-­Nac writes the tale of his adventures in order to defend their veracity and his own sanity; his book, Viaje maravilloso del Sr. Nic-­Nac al planeta Marte (The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-­ Nac to the Planet Mars), is published on 22 November. As this frame closes, the third-­person narrator turns to address the reader directly, employing language similar to that which Holmberg had used to laud Verne’s talents 200 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

as a popularizer of complex scientific ideas. “In our times,” the narrator says, “serious ideas do not fulfill their destiny except when they are wrapped in the mantle of fantasy. . . . [L]et us then read Mr. Nic-­Nac’s book; it may resolve some important matter” (7). The narrator’s injunction is followed by the text of Nic-­Nac’s account, which is a framed narrative in its own right. The frame to Nic-­Nac’s tale is his own explanation of the mechanism he used for the first known space trip from Earth. Like Felício dos Santos’s Pedro II, Nic-­Nac achieves his displacement, or “transplanetation” (122), with the help of a foreign medium. Also, as with Brasil 2000, this method of transportation in Nic-­Nac should not be read as an avoidance of technology in Latin American sf. Rocket ships were not yet de rigueur for space travel in early science fiction, and Holmberg undoubtedly modeled Nic-­Nac’s voyage after the ideas of the French scientist, popularizer of science, and spiritist Camille Flammarion (1842–1925). Flammarion’s 1872 story Lumen was a dramatization of ideas he had first expounded in several nonfictional books (Stableford, “Introduction” xiv). In the tale, Lumen is the spirit of a recently deceased Frenchman who describes the interplanetary travels of his spirit to his former student, Quærens. What humans call death is, according to Lumen, but the final separation of the body and the soul, which he sees as a continuation of the evolutionary process: “The earthly animal kingdom has followed, from its origin, this continuous and progressive march toward the perfection of its typical forms of mammalia, freeing itself more and more, from the grossness of its material” (97). Under the guidance of the medium, Seele, Nic-­ Nac decides to induce the separation of his “spirit-­image” from his material body by depriving himself of “all that might debilitate the spirit by strengthening the material being,” that is to say, by starving himself (Nic-­Nac 18). His declared purpose is to gain a new perspective on the great questions of this life and the next: “It is necessary . . . to liberate the spirit from the weight of the material being and to elevate it substantially to those regions that may perhaps serve to resolve the most difficult issues of the Universe” (10). But while Flammarion uses spiritism to give his title character greater authority, Holmberg uses it both to claim greater authority for Nic-­Nac and simultaneously to call Nic-­Nac’s authority into question. Lumen speaks to his student from a higher plane of existence, but Holmberg brings Nic-­Nac back to Earth to tell his tale from our terrestrial, material plane, where Nic-­Nac faces charges that his tale is the product of hallucination or of a deranged mind.21 The invitation by the narrator to look below the surface of Nic-­Nac’s fantastic journey for a more serious subtext also has a literary echo in Nic-­

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Nac’s choice of reading material during his initial preparation for his trip. Immediately after making the decision to starve the body to feed the soul, he sits down with the same book Felício dos Santos’s Dom Pedro was reading prior to his displacement: “As proof of my determination,” Nic-­Nac tells the reader, “I spent the rest of the day reading the description of the wedding of Camacho”; the chapter ends (18). Immediately after the wedding of Camacho in the second volume of Don Quijote comes the famous episode of the Cave of Montesinos. Upon being lowered into the cave, don Quijote says, “I was, all of a sudden, overpowered by a most profound sleep” (Cervantes 485). Don Quijote goes on to describe awakening in front of Montesinos’s castle and the many marvelous things he witnessed in the company of Montesinos over the next three days, although Sancho Panza informs him he was gone only an hour and that a number of the events his master has described could not have happened. When Sancho doubts don Quijote’s sanity aloud, the good knight rejoins: “As thou art not experienced in the events of this world, every thing that is uncommon, to thee seems impossible” (491). In addition to the comedic value of a starving man reading about a feast and to a literary interest (also seen in Brasil 2000) in Cervantes’s use of narrative frames, Holmberg includes this reference to the Quijote as a second injunction to the reader to look beyond Nic-­Nac’s apparent insanity to the sense that lies beneath. Holmberg directs our attention from Mars to Earth, from fictional situations to real ones, from utopia to “topia.” Holmberg’s Mars fluctuates between a direct analogy for Earth and a representation of a more advanced, utopian society that Terrans would do well to emulate. Chapter 7 of Nic-­Nac, the first chapter that takes place on Mars, ends with a direct statement that each continent of Mars has an equivalent on Earth (31). Chapter 8 then opens with a declaration of Martian superiority: “Their advances, superior to those of the Earth, have been conquered by means of numerous sacrifices that today place them at the first level among planetary civilizations” (31–32). Nic-­Nac later again implies that Martian society is the more advanced when he uses the nebular hypothesis (as H. G. Wells also did over twenty years later in War of the Worlds) to state that because Mars is an older planet than the Earth, Martian life evolved sooner (61). On the next page, however, he brings the Martians back to the level of Terrans, saying that Martians have evolved at a slower pace (62). The utopian Mars continues to reappear throughout the narrative. There is no illness on Mars; love on the red planet is “more elevated, more sublime” than on Earth (120); Martians themselves are more generous (126). Indeed, at one point Nic-­Nac laments the need ever to return to his inferior home planet: “Ah! What a shame! . . . to arrive at the 202 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

pedestal of glory and of hopes on the rosiest of the planets, and to return to Earth to contemplate the same storms, the same valleys, the same faces. . . . What a shame! To rise so high only to sink so low!” (84). When Nic-­Nac arrives at the twinned Martian cities of Theosophopolis (city of God and of the wise) (48), his visit to the Sophopolis section seems to confirm the utopian characteristics of the planet’s inhabitants. Sophopolis is the embodiment of Frye’s characterization of utopias as “elite societies in which a small group is entrusted with essential responsibilities, and this elite is usually some analogy of a priesthood. . . . The utopias of science fiction are generally controlled by scientists, who of course are another form of priestly elite” (Frye 35). In Sophopolis the Academy of Sciences functions as the seat of government. It is also a substitute for a religious institution; weddings are held there rather than at a church because, Nic-­Nac tells his readers, the academy is “a more worthy temple, a more sacred building” (128). At the same time as he is elevating the sciences, however, Holmberg is turning a critical eye on scientists. He portrays the scientists in Nic-­Nac as myopically focusing on their special fields of interest and as tending toward interdisciplinary squabbling. Upon witnessing an astronomer and a zoologist bickering, Nic-­Nac exclaims, “Poor wise men! . . . They are the same everywhere; always ill-­humored, and not infrequently irrelevant!” (82). Eduardo Ortiz has persuasively compared the Sophopolitan scientists in Nic-­Nac with Burmeister and the younger generation of German scientists that Sarmiento had brought to Argentina, whom Ortiz terms the “Córdoba Six.” If Holmberg was indeed a “keen supporter of the German scientists” in their disagreements with Burmeister (Ortiz 60),22 he was also critical of them for staying inside their ivory towers and failing to spread scientific knowledge widely throughout their host country.23 Holmberg was more overt elsewhere in his criticism of Argentina’s scientific dependency on the North and in his advocacy of his country becoming a producer of science.24 In Nic-­Nac he limits his commentary on the matter to the above-­mentioned rather negative characterization of scientists and to the fact that, in the narrative, all scientists—canonical and occult, fictional and actual, identified and implied—are associated with the North: Seele, Gould, Flammarion, Burmeister, and the “Córdoba Six.” But if Nic-­Nac describes Sophopolis, the semi-­utopian “city of the wise,” as a place in which “the light is of a white or rosy cast, and a pleasant yet at the same time rigorous majesty seems to have traced the lines of the buildings” (49), he does not characterize Theopolis, “the city of God,” as such a model place: “The doors of the houses almost never open; a profound silence reigns during the day, interrupted only by the creaking, or

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rather the lamentations of some instruments that the inhabitants of Earth would call bells, . . . and by the sacred choirs that no one understands, because if they were to be understood they would lose their eminently mystical character” (48). To the Argentine reader of Holmberg’s time as well as to the alert reader today, Theosophopolis clearly represents the Argentine city of Córdoba, famous for being the seat of the Jesuits in Argentina and for the Academy of Sciences of Córdoba, founded in 1874. In his personal life Holmberg was a skeptic, but publicly he attacked religious hypocrisy and intolerance rather than religion itself.25 In Nic-­Nac he is not interested in placing science above religion, but rather in mutual respect between the two, a respect he saw as one-­sided in Argentina at that time: “The Sophopolitans viewed the inhabitants of Theopolis as their equals, but the latter, in their heart of hearts, saw an inferior in each Sophopolitan” (75). Holmberg’s criticisms of religion in Nic-­Nac are limited to the ostentatious, opaque, intolerant brand of Christianity practiced by the Theopolitans; unlike other Martian Christians, Seele explains to Nic-­Nac, “the characteristic feature of their life is the exaltation of an abominable quality: hypocrisy; and this quality, converted by them into dogma, has brought more evils to Mars than all of the Martial/Martian wars and abuses” (73). As for his own beliefs, Nic-­Nac sums them up with the words, “I am a Christian, but in my own way” (97). From Theosophopolis, Nic-­Nac and Seele cross an unpopulated plain that bears a strong resemblance to the Argentine pampa in order to reach the capital city of the country of Aureliana (argentum becomes aurum) on the coast. They find the unnamed capital city, much like the Buenos Aires of the time, divided by the factional squabbling that is, Seele tells Nic-­Nac, “so common in countries that have not yet consolidated their internal organization” (145). Nic-­Nac claims to have the most impartial view of the situation due to his outsider’s perspective; the critical distance of “an extranatural being like myself, yes, I, Nic-­Nac . . . who is ruled by the single desire to learn and to judge” (165). Nic-­Nac tries to convince the two major factions to value peace and national unity as a route to progress, saying, “The progress of nations is the favorite son of Peace” (146). He tries to make the factions realize that they are not two groups (on Mars they are given names other than “Nationalists” and “Autonomists”) but one (never quite called “Argentines”). Although this situation is not resolved in the narrative, there is a sense of optimism at the end of the episode. As Nic-­Nac and Seele leave the capital to return to Theosophopolis, Seele promises positive changes to come: “Later, when all is calm, we’ll return, and you will see such a metamorphosis!” (173). 204 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

Once he has read Nic-­Nac’s account, the narrator, who now refers to himself as the “Publisher,” declares that he is disillusioned and concludes that Nic-­Nac suffers from “Planetary Mania” (186). The Publisher does, however, explicitly and implicitly rescue some of Holmberg’s “serious ideas” from underneath the “mantle of fantasy” of Nic-­Nac’s Martian odyssey in this closing frame of the text. Rather tongue-­in-­cheek, the Publisher rejects the veracity of Nic-­Nac’s means of transportation, but he insists that Nic-­ Nac is to be believed on the matter of the existence of life on other planets. Further, the Publisher cites the testimony of “brilliant spirits like that of Flammarion” to support Nic-­Nac’s story, and he declares in his own right: “The plurality of inhabited worlds is not a fantasy born of a fevered brain, it is a necessity, a conquest of the human spirit, an homage to the greatness of the Universe” (184–85). The Publisher also gives indications of seeing the Argentines reflected in the Aurelians and understanding Nic-­Nac/Holmberg’s criticisms of them. But why, the Publisher asks, must Nic-­Nac insist upon presenting his story using “that indefinable vagueness of the concepts, those luminous forms, those indecisive glows” (185–86)? The same could be asked with regard to Holmberg’s choice of using a science-­fictional “mantle of fantasy” to speak to his countrymen. The Publisher’s speculations provide answers to both questions, as he admits that “All of those elements that constitute the whole tale could not, perhaps, have been expressed in any other way” (186).

A Global Genre in the Periphery We owe the reader an explanation of our title—“The First Wave: Latin American Science Fiction Discovers Its Roots.” How, in 2007, can one publish an article that appears to claim that a few isolated texts that were all but lost for around 131 years constitute a wave?26 In Latin American science fiction, as in Northern science fiction, it is common practice to talk of “waves,” “golden ages,” and “booms” when discussing the trajectory of the genre, although these terms are usually applied to time periods such as the late 1950s or the turn of the millennium.27 With the reminder that in Latin America “the outside is also always inside” (González Echevarría 41), our texts of early Latin American sf can be located within the leading edge of what Suvin has termed the Euro-­Mediterranean sf tradition’s “fin-­de-­siècle cluster (ca. 1870–1910)” (87). Of course, we must admit that, with the possible exception of the Argentina/River Plate region, our texts were not foundation stones for national sf traditions in their respective countries.28 Eighteenth and nineteenth-­ century works of Latin American sf had little if any influence on the Latin

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American sf writers of subsequent generations because these works had virtually disappeared for several reasons: the condemnation of such works by the Inquisition, their limited distribution in periodicals and/or in small print runs of monographs, and the extremely local nature of the texts. Lately, however, these retrolabeled early works of Latin American sf seem to be coming into their own. They are now becoming valued as reflections of Latin American attitudes toward science, national identity, fiction, and other sociocultural issues of their times. And they are, at long last, becoming appreciated as evidence of the roots of Latin American participation in the sf genre. The latest chronology of Latin American science fiction by Molina-­ Gavilán et al.—published in this issue of SFS (see Works Cited)—lists thirty-­ four works from seven different countries published before 1900. I am not claiming that this clustering of texts constitutes a wave of Latin American science fiction in and of itself; but I am suggesting that these works are evidence of Latin American participation in the global wave of science fiction in the nineteenth century. Bell and Molina-­Gavilán are right to characterize our authors as having “no particular commitment to the genre,” and they are equally right to say that there is “no cohesive science fiction tradition” in Latin America in the nineteenth century (“Introduction” 4). Fósforos, Felício dos Santos, and Holmberg wrote in many genres, literary and otherwise, and they did not identify themselves primarily as writers in the science-­fictional vein. They were, however, all at least cognizant of or at most very engaged with the works and mores of the sf tradition, as we have seen. The writers of these thirty-­four nineteenth-­century texts may not have been aware of each other or of the fact that together they were establishing a pattern of Latin American participation in the science fiction genre, but they were most certainly aware of the “bonds of kinship” between their texts and those of writers in the North. If, when characterizing Latin American science fiction, nineteenth-­century authors and texts are taken into account, it will become clearer that the genre is more firmly anchored in Latin American literary and cultural history than has often been supposed. The genre should be seen not as just a space-­age and computer-­age phenomenon in Latin America, but as literature that has evolved over time, and has been adapted by Latin Americans to reflect their perspectives and to say what could not, perhaps, have been expressed as well in any other way. A final note on what a better understanding of Latin American sf—early and later—can contribute to the Northerner’s understanding of the genre: in the North, especially in the United States, we suffer from a certain myo206 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

pia in our perception of the world and its literatures. The Argentine sf critic Pablo Capanna has described this phenomenon as “the incapacity, characteristic of all imperial centers in history, to understand what occurs far from the center of power, or how those who live in the periphery think” (165). Latin American sf can provide some much needed correction to our vision; as Ginway puts it in her article, “A Working Model for Analyzing Third World Science Fiction,” “The subaltern or outsider position provides new and varied perspectives on hegemonic cultural production” (488). In his keynote address at the 2007 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Geoff Ryman spoke of science fiction as a “collective activity,” as a “continuity,” as a “mass dream”; and he characterized the science fiction of the center (my term) as suffering from an ethnocentric view of the world, from gender-­bias, and from a limited view of the role of the “other” (we either shoot it or assimilate it).29 Ryman then spoke of the potential for science fiction written in the periphery to help the genre to break away from its stereotypes and to contribute to the construction of a new mass dream. The retrolabeling of early Latin American science fiction is part of a process by which we are recognizing what Latin American writers have contributed, are contributing, and may contribute to the future of the genre. Notes

1. As Brian Stableford writes in the entry on “Proto Science Fiction” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “Hugo Gernsback clearly believed that he was merely attaching a name to a genre which already existed” (965). Gernsback’s “scientifiction” genre label had become “science fiction” by 1929. Like Stableford, I reserve the term “proto science fiction” for pre-­nineteenth-­century works. For texts written in the nineteenth century through 1926, I employ terms such as “early science fiction,” “science-­ fictional,” and “belonging to the science fiction tradition.” 2. Gernsback was not the first to recognize the existence of an sf tradition; nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century writers and readers of science-­fictional texts were well aware of the “loose bonds of kinship” of these texts to others. What Brian Stableford has written of scientific romance in Britain holds true as well for science fiction written in other Northern countries and in Latin America prior to 1926: “What entitles us to think of scientific romances as a kind is not a set of classificatory characteristics which demarcate them as members of a set, but loose bonds of kinship which are only partly inherent in the imaginative exercises themselves and partly in the minds of authors and readers who recognise in them some degree of common cause. What binds together the authors and books to be discussed here is mainly that they were perceived by the contemporary audience as similar to one another and different from others” (Scientific Romance 4). 3. I later clarified some of the geographical distinctions most pertinent to Latin

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American sf in The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction, including the capitalization of the words “North” and “Northern”: “My capitalization of ‘North’ and ‘Northern’ . . . is a deliberate effort to designate the region that has historically exercised the greatest political, cultural, and sf genre influence on Latin America. Most often this region includes the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and perhaps Russia and excludes Spain, Portugal, and usually Italy” (232n3). 4. I am referring to the local reader base. Little science fiction from Latin American has been translated or reaches an international audience. A notable exception to this rule is the 2003 anthology Cosmos Latinos, edited by Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-­Gavilán and published in Wesleyan University Press’s Early Classics of Science Fiction series. Internet fanzines such as the Argentina-­based Axxón (http:// axxon.com.ar/axxon.htm) also make Latin American sf available to national and international readers of Spanish. 5. Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz dates the change of fortune in the reception and the writing of Mexican science fiction from the 1968 publication of Carlos Olvera’s Mejicanos en el espacio (Mexicans in Space), and he sees a similar trend in the rest of Latin America at around the same time: [With Mejicanos en el espacio] for the first time in this genre, the future is not a superior stage of human evolution, but rather an avalanche of prejudices and complexes shared by all with humor and without shame. Since the 1970s, national [Mexican] science fiction, like Latin American sf, is taking new paths. Social criticism, a libertarian spirit, stylistic experimentation, and the search for less obvious themes are transforming the paradigms of the future visualized by the youngest creators. (Biografías 346; my translation) The more recent phenomenon of retrolabeling the earliest works of Latin American sf is another sign of the increasing acceptance of the legitimacy of the genre there. 6. González Echevarría defines hegemonic discourse as “one backed by a discipline, or embodying a system, that offers the most commonly accepted description of humanity and accounts for the most widely held beliefs of the intelligentsia” (41). 7. This lauding of Brazil’s natural conditions for greatness, or grandeza, permeates Brazilian culture and also Brazilian sf. For more on this topic see Ginway (Brazilian 21–22, 204, 220n19); see also her contribution to the “Chronology of Latin American SF 1775–2005” (Molina-­Gavilán et al., “Chronology”). 8. All translations in this paper are my own unless otherwise indicated. 9. While some of these texts were claimed for the genre earlier (Nic-­Nac by Goligorsky in 1968, “México 1970” by Staples in 1987), they have been consistently cited as foundational Latin American sf texts only in more recent years. The bibliography in the entry on “Latin America” by Mauricio-­José Schwarz and Bráulio Tavares in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists Brasil 2000 and Nic-­ Nac. All three texts are included in the important bibliography compiled by Yolanda Molina-­Gavilán et al. in Chasqui in 2000 and in their revised and updated bibliography published in English in this issue of SFS. 10. The identity of Fósforos-­Cerillos has been variously posited as either Sebastián Camacho y Zulueta (Fernández Delgado in the Chasqui and SFS bibliographies) or 208 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

José Joaquín Mora (Trujillo Muñoz, “El futuro en llamas” 12). Lacking definitive proof, I base my characterization of the writer on the content of “México 1970” and on the fact that a number of other articles in the same issue of El Liceo Mexicano on sociocultural and scientific themes are signed “Fósforos,” “Fósforos-­Cerillos,” or “F.C.” I take this to indicate a certain degree of involvement on the part of this writer in the journal and in the publication mission proclaimed in its introduction. “México 1970” is signed “Fósforos” at the end of the article itself (El Liceo Mexicano 348), and its author is listed as “Fósforos-­Cerillos” in the index at the back of the issue. 11. I am indebted to Paul Alkon’s discussions of the interplay of metafictional, realistic, and fantastic elements in his Origins of Futuristic Fiction (124–25, 193–206). 12. Here Alkon is summarizing and building upon ideas from Bronislaw Baczko’s analysis of Mercier’s L’An 2440 (The Year 2440) in Lumières de l’utopie (165n22). 13. There is some vacillation in the utopian portrayal of the estranged society in the case of Nic-­Nac. My analysis of Holmberg’s representation of the relationship between Europe and Argentina is based on another of his texts in addition to Nic-­Nac: the 1875 science-­fictional work Dos partidos en lucha: Fantasía científica (Two Factions Struggle for the Survival of the Fittest: A Scientific Fantasy). 14. I am indebted to Bráulio Tavares and to the staff of the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro for their help in acquiring copies of over a hundred pages of the manuscript. 15. This passage was also chosen from a number of possibilities because it provides fairly clear evidence of the influence of Mercier on Felício dos Santos. A footnote in chapter one of Mercier’s Memoirs of the Year 2500 (the English translation of L’An 2440) reads: “The whole kingdom is in Paris. France resembles a ricketty child, whose juices seem only to encrease and nourish the head, while the body remains weak and emaciated” (4). 16. Phase two of Brasil 2000 is still an account of a mediated history text brought back from the year 2000. The text now includes the account of Pedro II’s visit to the Brazil of the future, and the reader reads about it filtered, as usual, through the nineteenth-­century editor et al. 17. I have changed this quotation from the plural to the singular. Originally it referred to both Joaquim Felício dos Santos and his Brasil 2000 and to another, unlocatable, text by Justiniano José da Rocha. 18. The diversity of Holmberg’s publications and his work as a scientific generalist at a time when specialization was increasingly valued is explained by Luis Holmberg as a necessary sacrifice during that generation in a country of “little scientific culture” (140–41). His reasoning shares a number of similarities with Nancy Stepan’s arguments against the attempts by modern Latin American nations to reproduce the structures of Northern scientific research systems in the final chapter of her Beginnings of Brazilian Science. 19. In Nic-­Nac the inhabitants of Mars are referred to as “Marcialitas” [“Martialites”], a nod to the warlike tendencies of some of the inhabitants. As these inhabitants only appear in a few chapters of the tale, we will use the more standard “Martians” to avoid confusion. 20. The two authorities mentioned, Mr. Gould and Dr. Uriarte, were public figures

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in Argentina at the time. Benjamin Gould (1824–96) was an American astronomer and the first director of the National Observatory, established at Córdoba in 1871. Dr. José María Uriarte was the first director (1863–76) of San Buenaventura, a mental institution in Buenos Aires. 21. While Flammarion’s belief in and defense of spiritism eventually damaged his reputation in scientific circles, Holmberg continued his work as a respected scientist throughout his career. Pagés Larraya writes of Holmberg’s attitude toward spiritism: “Although [Holmberg] may not have been a militant adept of these practices and even satirizes them . . . it is common knowledge that they interested him greatly” (42). Holmberg’s treatment of spiritism is less satirical in other works of fiction, but in Nic-­ Nac spiritism is used as a literary device. For more on the relationship between spiritism, science, and the popularization of science, see Moore (7, 19–22). 22. In the same article, Ortiz excludes Nic-­Nac from the genre of science fiction (62–64), but the definition of sf that he uses does not take into account the permeable boundaries of the genre, especially at this time before it had been more rigidly codified by publishers, writers, critics, and tradition. Ortiz subsequently cites Verne, Flammarion, Poe, and Hoffmann as important influences on Holmberg’s work, though he identifies these writers only with the fantastic (84). 23. In 1878 in El Naturalista Argentino Holmberg compared certain scientists unfavorably to Verne: “Those men of science, who keep themselves completely isolated from the world that surrounds them without reaching them, are certainly not those who pour the heat and the light of the truth onto the populace” (qtd. in Luis Holmberg 136). Luis Holmberg identifies both Burmeister and “the German professors Sarmiento brought to form the Academy of Sciences in Córdoba” as being guilty of sundry acts of inaccessibility in the eyes of his father (139). 24. For further examples of Holmberg’s declaration of Argentine scientific independence from Europe, see Luis Holmberg (4) and Eduardo Holmberg, Dos partidos (90, 113, 133). 25. For more on Holmberg’s views on Christianity and the relationship between science and religion, see Luis Holmberg, chapter 9. 26. See, for example, the discussion of Brasil 2000 above. 27. For a good discussion of the trajectory of Latin American sf, see Bell and Molina-­Gavilán (“Introduction” 4–10). 28. A direct line can be traced from Holmberg to Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) to Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937) and on to Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–99). 29. The text of this address has not yet been published, and so my comments are based on my own notes taken at the talk. Please see Ryman’s text in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts [editor’s note: it was later published as “The Science Fiction Dream,” JFA 18, no. 2 [2007]: 232–46) for a complete representation of his views on this and other sf matters.

Editions of Primary Texts (* indicates edition[s] cited)

*Felício dos Santos, Joaquim. “Páginas da história do Brasil escripta no anno de 2000.” O Jequitinhonha. 23 August 1868–[date unknown] 1872: [pages vary]. 210 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

*———. “Páginas da história do Brasil escrita no ano de 2000 [Excerpts].” Revista do Livro 2, no. 6 (1957): 103–60. *Fósforos-­Cerillos. “México en el año 1970.” El Liceo Mexicano 1 (1844): 347–48. ———. “México en el año 1970.” Ed. Anne Staples. Ciencia y desarrollo 12, no. 73 (1987): 149–52. ———. “México en el año de 1970 [sic].” 1844. El futuro en llamas: Cuentos clásicos de la ciencia ficción mexicana. 1844. Ed. Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz. Mexico City: Grupo Editorial Vid, 1997. 37–44. Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao. “Viaje maravilloso del señor Nic-­Nac [Selections].” 1875–76. Los argentinos en la luna. Ed. Eduardo Goligorsky. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1968. 15–31. ———. Viaje maravilloso del señor Nic-­Nac al planeta Marte. 1875–76. Colección Los Raros. Ed. Pablo Crash Solomonoff. Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional; Ediciones Colihue, 2006. *———. Viaje maravilloso del señor Nic-­Nac en el que se refieren las prodijiosas aventuras de este señor y se dan á conocer las instituciones, costumbres y preocupaciones de un mundo desconocido: Fantasía espiritista. Buenos Aires: El Nacional, 1875. ———. “Viaje maravilloso del señor Nic-­Nac en el que se refieren las prodijiosas aventuras de este señor y se dan á conocer las instituciones, costumbres y preocupaciones de un mundo desconocido: Fantasía espiritista.” El Nacional 29, November 1875–13 March 1876, sec. Folletín del Lunes.

Works Cited

Alkon, Paul K. Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987. ———. Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. 1994. Twayne. Reprint, Genres in Context Series, edited by Ron Gottesman. New York: Routledge, 2002. Baczko, Bronislaw. Lumières de l’utopie. Paris: Payot, 1978. Bell, Andrea L., and Yolanda Molina-­Gavilán. “Introduction: Science Fiction in Latin America and Spain.” In Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-­ Gavilán, 1–19. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Burns, E. Bradford. A History of Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Capanna, Pablo. “Entrevista con Pablo Capanna (Interview by Eduardo Carletti).” Axxón 106 (2000): 162–70. Online at: http://axxon.com.ar/c-­106.htm. Accessed 15 November 2004. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. 1605. Trans. Tobias Smollett. 1761. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Clarke, I. F. Tales of the Future: From the Beginning to the Present Day. 3rd ed. London: Library Association, 1978. Clute, John. “Sleeper Awakes.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 1115–16. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.

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Edwards, Malcolm J., and Brian Stableford. “Time Travel.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 1227–29. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. Eulálio, Alexandre. “As páginas do ano de 2000: Joaquim Felício Dos Santos.” Revista do Livro 2, no. 6 (1957): 103–8. Felício dos Santos, Joaquim. “A História Do Brasil Escrita Pelo Dr. Jeremias No Ano De 2862.” 1868–72. Revista do Livro 2, no. 6 (1957): 111–13. Flammarion, Camille. Lumen. 1887. Trans. and ed. Brian Stableford. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Frye, Northrop. “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” In Utopias and Utopian Thought, edited by Frank Edward Manuel, 25–49. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Gernsback, Hugo. “A New Sort of Magazine.” Amazing Stories 1, no. 1 (April 1926): 3. Ginway, M. Elizabeth. Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004. ———. “A Working Model for Analyzing Third World Science Fiction: The Case of Brazil.” Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 3 (November 2005): 467–94. González Echevarría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. 1990. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Goligorsky, Eduardo, ed. Los argentinos en la luna. Buenos Aires: La Flor, 1968. Haywood Ferreira, Rachel. “The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction: A Global Genre in the Periphery.” Diss. Yale University, 2003. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2003. Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao. Dos partidos en lucha: Fantasía científica. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de El Arjentino, 1875. Holmberg, Luis. Holmberg el último enciclopedista. Buenos Aires: Colombo, 1952. “Introducción.” El Liceo Mexicano 1, no. 1 (1844): 3–4. Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 147–58. Ludmer, Josefina. El cuerpo del delito: Un manual. Buenos Aires: Perfil Libros, 1999. Machado, Ubiratan. Os intelectuais e o espiritismo: De Castro Alves a Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Antares; Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1983. Magalhães, Basílio de. Estudos da história do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1940. McLemee, Scott. “Back to the Future.” New York Times Book Review, 24 December 2000. 23. Mercier, Louis-­Sébastien. Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred. 1771. Translated by W. Hooper. Philadelphia, PA: Thomas Dobson, 1795. New York: Sentry, 1973. Meyer, Michael C., William L. Sherman, and Susan M. Deeds. The Course of Mexican History. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Molina-­Gavilán, Yolanda, Andrea Bell, Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado, 212 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

M. Elizabeth Ginway, Luis Pestarini, and Juan Carlos Toledano. “Chronology of Latin American Science Fiction, 1775–2005.” Science Fiction Studies 34, no. 3 (November 2007): 369–431. Molina-­Gavilán, Yolanda, Andrea Bell, Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado, Luis Pestarini, and Juan Carlos Toledano. “Cronología de cf latinoamericana: 1775– 1999.” Chasqui 29, no. 2 (2000): 43–72. Moore, R. Laurence. In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Ortiz, Eduardo L. “On the Transition from Realism to the Fantastic in the Argentine Literature of the 1870s: Holmberg and the Córdoba Six.” In Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America, edited by Evelyn Fishburn and Eduardo L. Ortiz, 59–85. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2005. Pagés Larraya, Antonio. Estudio preliminar to Cuentos fantásticos, by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, 7–98. Buenos Aires: Librería Hachette, 1957. Rodríguez, Julia. Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Ryman, Geoff. “In Praise of Science Fiction.” 28th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Hilton Fort Lauderdale Airport Hotel, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 15 March 2007. Schwarz, Mauricio-­José, and Bráulio Tavares. “Latin America.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 693–97. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. Skidmore, Thomas E. Brazil: Five Centuries of Change. Latin American Histories. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Stableford, Brian M. “Introduction.” Lumen, by Camille Flammarion, translated by Brian M. Stableford, ix–xxxv. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002 ———. “Proto Science Fiction.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 965–67. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. Staples, Anne. “Una primitiva ciencia ficción en México.” Ciencia y desarrollo 73 (March/April 1987): 145–52. ———. Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890–1950. London: Fourth Estate, 1985. Stepan, Nancy. Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, 1890–1920. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Suárez de la Torre, Laura. “Los intereses de las principales casas editoriales de la Ciudad de México entre 1840 y 1855.” In Literatura mexicana del otro fin de siglo, edited by Rafael Olea Franco, 577–93. Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Teixeira Neves, José. “Joaquim Felício Dos Santos: Estudo biográfico.” Memórias do Distrito Diamantino da Comarca do Sêrro Frio, Província de Minas Gerais, by Joaquim Felício dos Santos, 19–30. 3rd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Edições O Cruzeiro, 1956. Trujillo Muñoz, Gabriel. Biografías del futuro: La ciencia ficción mexicana y sus autores. Mexicali, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2000.

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———. “El futuro en llamas: Breve crónica de la ciencia ficción mexicana.” In El futuro en llamas: Cuentos clásicos de la ciencia ficción mexicana, edited by Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, 7–29. Mexico City: Grupo Editorial Vid, 1997.

Afterword

A great deal has happened in Latin American science fiction in recent years. In their introduction to the 2012 collection Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice, J. Andrew Brown and M. Elizabeth Ginway provide a useful summary of the trajectory of scholarship in the field, describing the past two decades as an early “archeological” or “recovery” phase during which “academics, writers, and fans have been intensely engaged in identifying texts, compiling bibliographies, and translating seminal works in order to establish a literary history”; they assert the increasing maturity of the field, stating “The aim of this anthology of critical essays is to initiate a more theoretical phase, applying a range of literary and cultural theories to the Latin American SF corpus” (2). Indeed, now that some basic groundwork has been laid, ongoing recovery efforts can increase in range and depth, and theoretical discussions can reach new heights. My own work with Latin American sf, and with early Latin American sf in particular, has fostered several passions (at times verging on fixations) that draw on both the “archeological/recovery” and the “theoretical/expansion” phases: identification of primary and secondary sources, access to and preservation of those sources, and an appreciation of the value and the function of foundations. When I began research on Latin American sf in 1999, it was very difficult to get a sense of the parameters of the field—it was particularly challenging to characterize a body of work whose size, dates, and thus topics/concerns/approaches were still quite nebulous. The “Latin America” entry by Braulio Tavares and Mauricio-­José Schwarz in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls, St. Martin’s, 1993) and an early draft of the “Cronología de cf latinoamericana: 1775–1999” (Chronology of Latin American SF: 1775–1999), generously shared by the authors (Molina-­Gavilán et al.), were my bibliographical bibles in the early stages of my work. When I learned that “First Wave” would appear in a special issue of Science Fiction Studies on Latin American sf alongside a translated and updated “Chronology of Latin American Science Fiction, 1775–2005,” I immediately wrote to the authors to request another advance copy, which they also generously shared. This “Chronology” has become a landmark reference in the field (SFS recognized its importance and quickly posted it open access online at http://www .depauw.edu/sfs/chronologies/ latin%20american.htm). In my own sf identification efforts, I have built upon what these scholars began. My book The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011)—for which “First Wave” is something of a dress rehearsal—covers the science fiction of (primarily) Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico up to 1920. So arduous was the location and accessing of the works of early sf written in these countries that I included an expanded “Chronology of Latin American Science Fiction through 1920” as an appendix; my “Chronology” is built from the SFS “Chronology” by Molina-­Gavilán et al., and it includes titles for all Latin American countries. In addition, in 2011 I volunteered to coordinate a Latin American and Iberian expansion in the third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction because it is an 214 ] Rac hel H ayw ood Ferreira

ideal venue for promulgating developments in our branch of the genre (see the “Latin America” entry for links to many of the new entries). All six authors of the SFS “Chronology” as well as a dozen other experts have contributed various country and author entries to date, and this work is ongoing. In addition to identifying and retrolabeling early works of Latin American sf, another important task has been to insure that others can locate and use copies of these quite frequently rare works. For this reason the “Chronology” section of my book has an accompanying “Bibliography of Primary Sources” that includes the most complete bibliographical information available for all works listed; whenever possible the bibliographical data was taken directly from the source, as I was able to obtain copies of the vast majority of these works via archival work, interlibrary loan, and the generosity of scholars around the world. Access and preservation are often an issue for more recent works of Latin American sf as well, since many are published in small print runs in specialized presses in a single country (i.e., without continent-­wide distribution). A number of libraries in the United States are working to build the Latin American portion of their sf collections, among them the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at University of California–Riverside and the University of South Florida Special and Digital Collections. Efforts are also underway in Latin American libraries and archives, most notably the “Literatura de Ciencia Ficción en Chile” (Literature of Science Fiction in Chile) pages of the Memoria Chilena (Chilean Memory) website and digitization project (Biblioteca Nacional Digital de Chile and Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentos .asp? id_ut’literaturadecienciaficcionenchile). Whereas, in the past, the nineteenth-­ century work “Desde Júpiter” by Francisco Miralles (see Andrea Bell’s article in this collection) was only available in two or three libraries in the world, now this and a number of other works of early and golden age Chilean sf are available for access and download from anywhere in the world. The meaning of building foundations in Latin American sf scholarship is twofold, as the entire field is relatively new and work on early Latin American sf particularly sparse. In the past six years, in addition to the publication of a number of fine articles and monographs on Latin American sf of one or more countries, special mention should be made of the aforementioned collection Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice and the special double issue of the Revista Iberoamericana (ed. Silvia Kurlat Ares, 238–39, 2012), both of which contain articles by Northern and Latin American scholars. Future growth in the field seems assured, as conferences, awards, journals, and doctoral dissertations increasingly feature work on “LAsf.” Eight essays on Latin American sf have been finalists or winners of the Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for an essay on the fantastic in a language other than English (sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts), for example, and new scholarly journals are being founded in LAsf and related fields: see Zanzalá: Estudos de Ficção Científica (Zanzalá: The Brazilian Journal for SF Studies), founded 2011 and based at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, http://editoraufjf .com.br/revista/ index.php/zanzala/index; Brumal: Revista de Investigación sobre lo Fantástico (Brumal: Research Journal on the Fantastic), founded 2012 and based at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, http://revistes.uab.cat/brumal/index;

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and Alambique: Revista Académica de Ciencia-­Ficción y Fantasía / Jornal Académico de Ficção Científica e Fantasia (Alambique: Academic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy), founded 2011 and based at the University of South Florida, http://scholar commons.usf.edu/alambique/). Coverage of Latin American sf has also increased in established journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Foundation, and others. For my part, I am finding that my recent and current projects on more contemporary Latin American sf are meaningfully influenced by my work on the sf of the nineteenth century, a time period to which I shall undoubtedly return. Two of the most rewarding responses I have received to my work on early Latin American sf are an e-­mail exchange with the Chilean collector Roberto Pliscoff, who contacted me to tell me of other works of early Chilean sf (I’m now considering creating a webpage with updates to the chronology/bibliography in my book), and, most recently, new correspondence with a scholar working on the early sf of some of the Latin American countries that I was not able to cover. It is a pleasure to see how far we’ve come and to learn how much there is left to explore.

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• 10 •

“Tell Us All About Little Rosebery ” Topicality and Temporality in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine Nicholas Ruddick No collection of essays on early science fiction would be complete without an article about the “scientific romances” of H. G. Wells. This one, by the veteran scholar Nicholas Ruddick—whose most recent books on sf include a critical edition of Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890 dystopia Caesar’s Column (2003) and a landmark study of prehistoric sf called The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (2009)—focuses on Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). It seeks to demonstrate that the events described in this time-­ travel novel reflect a unique temporal logic directly related to their topicality— i.e., to the historical reality existing at the time of the novel’s composition. This essay originally appeared in SFS 28, no. 3 (November 2001): 337–54.

The writer confesses his profound disbelief in any perfect or permanent work of art. All art, all science, and still more certainly all writing are experiments in statement. There will come a time for every work of art when it will have served its purpose and be bereft of its last rag of significance. H. G. Wells, “A General Introduction” (xviii). Maybe no literature is perfect and enduring, but there is something specially and incurably topical about all these prophetic books; the more you go ahead, the more you seem to get entangled with the burning questions of your own time. And all the while events are overtaking you. H. G. Wells, “Fiction” (246) 

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Most of the events depicted in The Time Machine (1895) take place in the far future at a time when the human species in its present form no longer exists—consequently after human history has come to an end. Yet everything that happens in Wells’s “invention” 1 is deliberately and rigorously historicized by being placed in a specific temporal relation to a moment in history that corresponds very closely to the date of The Time Machine’s composition. Indeed, The Time Machine’s unusual narrative structure may be accounted for by the work’s topicality—its rootedness in the specific historical moment of its composition. It will be argued here that Wells was concerned to specify when events in The Time Machine were happening2 because such a clarification of their temporal configuration would account for and justify the asymmetrical and apparently fragmented quality of the double narrative he was presenting. One corollary of this argument is that the nontraditional structure of The Time Machine, though it may appear to anticipate modernist narrative practices, is not strictly a modernist (or postmodernist) phenomenon—even though it has been creatively and critically interpreted as such.3 The Time Machine’s topicality, which Wells never did anything to conceal, has been largely ignored by critics, possibly because they have felt that its status as a “permanently established” classic (Geduld 1)—one of the very few in the sf genre—might be jeopardized by an emphasis on those elements of the text that are not “timeless,” possibly because topical allusions quickly lose force and meaning over time, and critics have simply not noticed their significance.4 Indeed, the older Wells came to feel that its topicality had over time reduced The Time Machine, at least in his own eyes, to a polemic by an immature writer—not that he lamented this circumstance. It will be suggested here, however, that The Time Machine’s topicality, perhaps paradoxically, helps to endow the work with both the formal and thematic durability characteristic of the classic. The narrative of The Time Machine is organized according to a temporal logic that is governed by topicality. The short novel that is familiar to us was for the most part composed very rapidly in the summer of 1894 by an author in temporarily reduced economic circumstances, in poor health, and impatient for recognition, who was addressing a readership, not of the future, but of the immediate present. The text’s topicality first becomes visible in the opening scene at the Time Traveller’s house at Richmond, which does not take place at some unspecified time in the Victorian fin de siècle, nor (as has been ingeniously suggested) at the turn of the twentieth century (Parrinder, Shadows 42), but almost certainly in early February 1894. That most of the action of the internal narrative takes place in AD 802,701 may not be 218 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

because of the author’s fascination for numerology or cryptography, nor because he, concerned only to get the Time Traveller into the very far future, generated at random a date with more than the familiar four numbers, but may be explained by the 1894 setting of most of the external narrative. Similarly, there is a good reason, also rooted in 1894, why the Time Traveller’s last stop, as described in the chapter originally called “The Further Vision,” takes place thirty (rather than ten, or ten thousand) million years thence. For a reader today, the topicality of a work may cause even greater problems of comprehension than complexity of expression. To take an example from Shakespeare: Rosencrantz’s disparaging reference in Hamlet (1601) to the “little eyases” (II. ii. 336) who are all the rage in Elsinore and driving the (traditional) players out of a living is a topical reference to the Children of the Chapel who began to perform at the Blackfriars Theatre from Michaelmas, 1600 (Jenkins 1, 255). Shakespeare’s satirical allusion to a late Elizabethan theatrical fad for boy actors would be incomprehensible today were it not for the painstaking annotations of scholars. But does the topical allusion, which may well be cut from a modern performance, weaken the play? One might argue that, on the contrary, Hamlet draws part of its strength from what was happening in the London theater in late 1600. By the allusion, Shakespeare was affirming his solidarity with his fellow actors against the juvenile intruders, while emphasizing that Hamlet is a drama with mature and enduring themes, not one motivated by fashion or suitable in any sense for children. The Time Machine is certainly rooted in the nineteenth-­century fin de siècle in the manner eloquently demonstrated by Bernard Bergonzi in his contextualization of the early scientific romances (1–61). But the topicality at issue here is not a literary-­historical dimension of the text perceptible only in hindsight by the reader today, but a historically specific expression of its author’s intentions in 1894. It will be suggested that for Wells, topical references offered a means of exposing and satirizing the gulf of incomprehension that separates the more blinkered of the dinner guests from their host. One implication of such a suggestion is that in 1894–95 The Time Machine was addressed, not to readers of the future (as was sometimes the case with the ambitious modernist text),5 but primarily to the readers of the present. To be topical is to add an expiration date to certain elements of a text, and by doing so a writer risks losing readers of the future. But it is likely that Wells, whether in 1894 or thereafter, was never greatly concerned with future readers. There is plenty of evidence (such as the passages quoted in the epigraphs above) that Wells always thought of his writing, even when it was prophetic, as provisional, contingent, and ephemeral, his attitude

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deriving both from his training as experimental scientist and his experience as a journalist. However, the now enigmatic topical references upon which the temporal logic of The Time Machine rests pass almost unregistered by a reader today swept up by the narrative and visionary power of the work—they are no more aesthetically damaging than the allusion to the “little eyases” is to Hamlet. Indeed, as with Hamlet, one could argue that The Time Machine draws some of its strength from its author’s response to a set of momentary historical conditions. Moreover, while The Time Machine’s asymmetrical and quasi-­fragmented narrative structure has proved easy to naturalize from a postmodernist perspective, this act of naturalization may blind us to the adherence of the text to more traditional narrative canons. The Time Machine is about the transformed post-­Darwinian relationship between humanity and time. Late nineteenth-­century biology, working with the extended temporal scale provided incrementally by astronomers and geologists from the Renaissance on, had radically revised humanity’s temporal place in nature. But late in the Victorian age the implications of this revision had still not fully registered with the reading public. The time was ripe for a work on the grand theme of humanity’s place in time that would capture the popular imagination. Victorian novelists in the dominant realist tradition, ignorant of science or unused to dealing in millennia, had largely ignored this theme. Wells was well positioned to explore it, by his own later admission having conceived as early as 1887 a plan of a universal history in which humanity was “definitely placed in the great scheme of space and time” (“Scepticism” 376) from the courses in embryology, paleontology, and astronomy he had taken at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. The unusual narrative structure of The Time Machine offers the main clue to understanding Wells’s approach to the grand temporal theme. The double narrative has two main components of very unequal length. The shorter is the external or frame narrative beginning and ending the work, told in first person by a primary narrator who is a frequent dinner guest of the Time Traveller;6 the longer is the Time Traveller’s internal or framed narrative as reported verbatim7 by this primary narrator. The embedded narrative takes the form of an (almost) uninterrupted8 chronological narrative of just-­experienced events by a first-­person narrator who was the protagonist in those events. It too is divided into two unequal sections: the longer first section is set in the degenerate world of the Eloi and Morlocks in AD 802,701; the shorter second section, constituting the chapter called “The Further Vision,” is set “more than thirty million years hence” (TM 220 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

§14:139), as the Time Traveller recounts firsthand the (probable) moment of total extinction of life on earth. Three different time scales operate in The Time Machine: the historical, the evolutionary (or geological), and the astronomical.9 These three time-­ scales correspond to the tripartite temporal structure of the work: AD 1894– 97 (the external narrative; see n. 20 below); AD 802,701 (the world of the Eloi and Morlocks); and more than thirty million years thereafter (“The Further Vision”). All coexist simultaneously, as they do in the real world, but the last two are not at first evident to the narratees, actual (the Time Traveller’s dinner guests) or implied (The Time Machine’s readers). In the external narrative, historical time is dominant. Indeed, the dinner guests imagine that historical time is the only kind of time in the universe, or at least the only one that affects their lives; that is why the more unimaginative of them dismiss the Time Traveller’s tale of the future as incredible (TM §16:146, 148). Historical time, marked out by dates BC or AD, also offers narratees the comforting illusion of continuity with their own present—with their listening or reading situation in real time. When the internal narrative ceases toward the end of The Time Machine, historical time, which has been suspended, reasserts itself, but by then the narratees, like the narrators, are likely no longer to have the same confidence in locating and grounding themselves exclusively in historical time. It has been claimed that the reader’s vertigo is the result of Wells’s precocious discovery of modernist or postmodernist time (Caldwell 132–33). In my view, however, Wells is not trying to liberate his text from traditional chronology as part of a (proto-­)modernist project,10 but simply to raise the reader’s awareness of a temporal frame too large to be measured by the clock or the calendar, and indifferent to human concerns.11 The historicity of historical time in the external narrative is enforced by topicality. Very early in the first chapter, the Time Traveller proposes to his guests the idea of a four-­dimensional geometry, with a fourth dimension at right angles to the other three. Aware that such an idea, even if it is understood, will be resisted by his more conventionally minded guests, he immediately supports the speculation by remarking, “Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago” (TM §1:4). As commentators have noted, Newcomb (1835–1909), probably the most famous American mathematician of his age, presented a paper entitled “Modern Mathematical Thought” as an “Address delivered before the New York Mathematical Society at the annual meeting, December 28, 1893” (Newcomb 325n1). This paper, which did speculate on four-­dimensional mathematics, was reprinted in the British weekly gen

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eral science periodical Nature (1 February 1894), just over a month after the address was given. Though the Time Traveller may be interpreted as suggesting that he was present at Newcomb’s lecture in New York, it is more likely that he is implying that he has just read the text of the address in the most recent issue of Nature—indeed, the purpose of the reference seems to be to show how up-­to-­date the Time Traveller is in his scientific reading.12 This topical allusion, then, almost certainly fixes the date of the Time Traveller’s dinner party that opens The Time Machine as a Thursday some time in early February 1894.13 Indeed, as 1 February 1894 was a Wednesday, one might without excessive presumption date the Time Traveller’s two Thursday soirées at the beginning of the narrative as February 2 and February 9, 1894.14 At the Time Traveller’s second dinner, the six guests include three returnees from the previous week—the Psychologist, the Medical Man (a.k.a. the Doctor) and the primary narrator—and three new faces, the Editor, the Journalist, and the “quiet, shy man with a beard” (TM §3:19) (who replace the Provincial Mayor, Filby, and the Very Young Man.) They are kept waiting for the host, who eventually arrives late, “in an amazing plight” (TM §3:20)—dirty, disheveled, limping, pale, haggard, with a cut on his chin and seemingly grayer of hair than he was the previous week. He drains a glass of champagne, then excuses himself to go and wash and dress for dinner. After he returns, the Editor, having established that his host has been time traveling, remarks to him, “Tell us all about little Rosebery, will you? What will you take for the lot?” (TM §3:23). This is another topical allusion, of the sort whose semantic expiration date is rapidly reached. Lord Rosebery (1847–1929) became Liberal prime minister on Monday, March 5, 1894, after the resignation of Gladstone from his fourth and final ministry three days earlier. A turf enthusiast, Rosebery would remain prime minister only until June 1895, but his brief political elevation coincided precisely with his greatest success as racehorse owner. In the spring of 1894, Rosebery’s horse Ladas performed the remarkable feat of winning three major races for three-­year-­olds: the 2,000 Guineas (May 9), the Newmarket Stakes (May 23), and the Derby (June 6), for all of which he was odds-­on favorite. (Before then, Rosebery’s horses had not won any great race since the Oaks in 1883.) The Editor’s epithet “little” derives from Rosebery’s boyish appearance—much emphasized in contemporary caricatures—in contrast to the patriarchal Gladstone. As the Newcomb reference allows us to date the Time Traveller’s two soirées as occurring a week apart in early February 1894, so the Editor’s questions, viewed in this narrow temporal frame, concern both the imminent likelihood of Rosebery’s succeeding Gladstone 222 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

as prime minister, and Rosebery’s possible successes on the turf in the upcoming racing season. The Editor is asking the Time Traveller whether Rosebery would sweep the upcoming season both politically and on the racing turf (as he did, though this would have been a matter of speculation for the dinner guests in February 1894).15 The Editor intends by his (facetious) questions to fish for racing tips based on the Time Traveller’s supposed inside knowledge of future winners. In trying to reduce the extraordinary invention of the time machine to a device to cheat bookmakers, the Editor is revealing his utter fatuity. For Wells reserves the full measure of his scorn for those of the dinner guests who, like the Editor, have no scientific imagination,16 and who consequently cannot understand that the Time Traveller has visited a future in which our descendants could not be less concerned with horse racing or election results, and have no access to, nor indeed knowledge of, clothes brushes (TM §3:23). The Rosebery allusion, then, reveals the Editor’s extreme temporal myopia, and he, or rather the attitude he represents, becomes the primary butt of the satire. As Lord Rosebery’s premiership is now a historical parenthesis, and his ownership of racehorses a mere footnote, it is not surprising that not only modern readers but also annotators of The Time Machine do not fully understand the Editor’s joke, even though they may understand his motive for making it. So, Frank McConnell glosses the phrase “little Rosebery” as “A horse named for its owner, Lord Rosebery” (Time Machine 27n6). For Harry Geduld, “Little Rosebery was the latest champion racehorse of . . . Rosebery” (99n16). For Patrick Parrinder, little Rosebery was “a racehorse owned by the Earl of Rosebery” (Time Machine [1996] 224n16). For Leon Stover, little Rosebery is “a recent winner in the Derby . . . a champion racehorse bred in the stables of Archibald Philip Primrose, fifth Earl of Rosebery” (50n51).17 That scholars in the late twentieth century found it difficult to distinguish between a late nineteenth-­century prime minister and his racehorse ironically strengthens Wells’s satirical point in 1894 about the triviality of human concerns when viewed from outside the exclusive perspective of the historical present.18 As the Time Traveller’s narrative begins, historical time rapidly dissolves (this vertiginous idea is expressed through the famous description [TM §4:28–32] of the sensations of time traveling), and an underlying time scale, evolutionary (or geological) time, supersedes it. The existence of the concept of historical time depends upon the existence of an advanced, literate human culture that can measure and record time’s passage. But the Eloi and Morlocks are in their different ways living in the ruins of culture,

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and there is no evidence that either species is numerate or literate enough to be measuring time or recording its passage as history. The Eloi indeed are almost certainly not literate,19 while the Morlocks live in darkness, where reading and writing could hardly be expected to flourish, and avoid the sun, chief index of the passage of time on earth. The AD in AD 802,701 (TM §6:46) is consequently ironic, and not just because of the total disappearance of the Christian religion. The date thus invoked sounds historical, and derives from the Time Traveller’s initial assumption that after a very great leap in time into the future he will meet a race that has made a very great advance on humanity in AD 1894. What has apparently happened instead is that during this period evolutionary elaboration has ceased and degeneration toward homogeneity, not progress toward heterogeneity, has become the dominant tendency in the biosphere. William Bellamy first suggested that by the number 802,701 Wells “presumably intends a sense of ‘running down’ ” (221n7), a point taken up by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (124) and then by McConnell, who called the number a “hieroglyph of entropy” (Science Fiction 82). The entropic theory may be glossed as follows: the number 802,701 is composed of two related three-­digit sequences, in which 7 is one less than 8, and 1 one less than 2, each minimally descending pair separated by an irreducible zero. The number, then, may arithmetically symbolize a cosmic running-­down. But this theory does not explain why the date is 802,701 rather than, say, 702,601 or 906,805. Certainly, a figure in the hundreds of thousands—in contrast to the AD 12,203 of the National Observer version (Philmus and Hughes 66–70) or the AD 32,701 of the intermediate MsB version (Loing 73–74)—suggests a very remote future that stands as the counterpart of the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that culminated in the Victorian age (Loing 74; Parrinder, Time Machine [1996] xxii). Parrinder suggests that the number 802,701 encrypts the double historical-­biological time scale, as a support to his argument that The Time Machine takes place both in the near and far human future at the same time and that the setting of the opening scenes is a near-­future Richmond of 1901 (Shadows 40–42). But as we have seen, the Newcomb and Rosebery allusions, retained through the Atlantic revision, make it fairly clear that the two dinner parties that open the external narrative take place in early February 1894.20 That is, the temporal specificity of the external narrative is part of the satirical system that highlights the pettiness of the Time Traveller’s guests (especially the Editor and Journalist) by placing their trivial, banal, quotidian concerns against the vast backdrop of evolutionary and astronomical time. Why specifically 802,701? Probably, as Loing suggests, Wells decided to 224 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

advance the MsB date, AD 32,701, to a figure in the hundreds of thousands of years because this allowed more time for the devolution of humanity into two distinct species to occur plausibly. In practical terms, it is possible that Wells merely lopped off the 3 in AD 32,701 and replaced it with 80 because the latter was the first two-­figure number he thought of. But the deliberation with which 802,701 is on three separate occasions literally spelled out in the text—“Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One, AD” (TM §6:46, §8:71, §13:131)—suggests that the date bears some more specific symbolic weight. In chapter 10, “When the Night Came,” the Time Traveller, watching over the sleeping Weena to protect her from Morlocks, finds little that is familiar even in those supposed symbols of immutability, the constellations: Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. (TM §10:103; italics added) The precession of the equinoxes refers to their slightly earlier occurrence every year, a phenomenon reflected in the perceptible shift in the position of the so-­called fixed stars over long periods of time that had been observed but not fully understood by ancient astronomers. It is a result of the slight retrograde motion of the circle described by the earth’s axis, itself caused by the combined gravitational drag of the sun and moon. The whole circle or cycle, which the ancients, imagining that after that time all the heavenly bodies would occupy the same place as they did at the creation, called a great year (or Platonic cycle) and estimated variously, is now known to be completed approximately every 25,800 years. When the Time Traveller, having established that he is in the year 802,701, refers to forty precessional cycles having elapsed since his starting point in 1894, we may conclude that either his math is poor, or his astronomical knowledge is weak. But it is likelier, I think, that Wells has rounded a great year down to 20,000 years, perhaps because this period was associated in his mind with a temporal cycle whereby one might gauge the Time Traveller’s enormous historical distance from his own present, while at the same time show that in astro

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nomical terms such a distance is insignificant. The entire course of human civilization, Wells later noted, was “a matter of at most the last twenty thousand years” (Outline 183). By the Time Traveller’s calculation, the precessional cycle has occurred “only forty times” since 1894, and here one suspects that Wells was drawing on the biblical resonances of that number.21 Moreover, the cycle of the great year had, as recently as 1893, been notably invested with apocalyptic connotations. In his Romanes Lecture of that year, “Evolution and Ethics,” Wells’s master T. H. Huxley had memorably stated: “The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year” (85). This Huxleyan “great year” is here associated with the life cycle of the human species and does not seem conceived as a precise astronomical quantity; it is thus very suited to be adapted to Wells’s requirements in The Time Machine. Forty Wellsian-­ Huxleyan great years of 20,000 years each plus 1894 equals 801,894. If we accept the possibility that Wells had in mind the suggestive possibility of a minimally entropic number, then the first such number after 801,894 is 802,701.22 In “The Further Vision,” evolutionary time has itself been superseded by yet another time scale, that of astronomical time, which cannot be meaningfully measured by terrestrial yardsticks at all. The section set in the world thirty million years in the future is short, because once the effects upon the earth of astronomical change have been described (in the most highly charged passage in the whole work), there is nothing more to say: the plot, that characteristically human superimposition of a temporal structure on randomness, is over. Wells offers a vision of global extinction, taking us to a point beyond which human narrative cannot go. At the same time, it should be remembered that one of the less obvious but striking elements of The Time Machine is its strict unity of place. That is to say, the area around the White Sphinx is the same location as the beach where the last creature is hopping about, and both are in the same location as the comfortable Richmond of February 1894, for the time machine has the (frankly miraculous) ability to travel in time without moving in space. This uncanny unity of place greatly strengthens the complex temporal theme and adds to the horror of (and the dinner guests’ resistance to) the Time Traveller’s narrative. Darwin, with the support of geologists, had assumed that life on earth 226 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

had evolved over hundreds of millions of years, for such a length of time was needed if his model of gradual evolution through natural selection was to be credible. In the later nineteenth century, however, this time scale came under serious question, not by religious fundamentalists but by physicists. Lord Kelvin’s interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics reinforced what Helmholtz and Clausius had foreseen as an ultimate heat-­ death for the universe, as stars’ energy became dissipated and the entropy of the macrocosm inevitably increased. It had long been recognized that life on earth was entirely dependent on our local star, and Kelvin’s calculations in his paper “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat” (1862) concluded that it would burn itself out, not in hundreds of millions, but in a few tens of millions of years at the very latest (Thomson 393). (Nuclear fusion was not yet understood, and the sun was supposed to be exhausting its radiant energy in roughly the same manner as a candle burns itself up.) In other words, the grim vision of global extinction thirty million years hence at the end of The Time Machine derives from theories of a cosmic time scale that had shrunk in an alarming manner between Darwin’s heyday and 1894.23 Moreover, the end of the earth would not come suddenly in the far future but slowly in a process that had already begun. For extrapolations from the theories of orbital retardation by tidal (i.e., gravitationally induced) drag proposed by G. H. Darwin in 187924 suggested that the earth would eventually come always to offer the same face toward the sun, just as the moon now does to the earth, and that the moon, gradually losing orbital velocity, would fall into the earth, which would subsequently and for the same reason fall into the sun. From the perspective of those relatively few observers who, like Wells, were fully in touch with fin-­de-­siècle astronomy, then, the future of human life on earth came to seem very precarious indeed. It is also not hard to understand why Wells in 1894 felt so exercised about the complacency of the vast majority of educated people, who blithely professed their ignorance of science or indifference to the amazing but terrifying vistas that scientists had opened up. The specific figure of (more than) thirty million years is most likely Wells’s educated guess based on combining Kelvin’s calculations on the age of the sun’s heat with G. H. Darwin’s calculations on tidal drag. A passage from La Fin du monde (1893–94), the best-­known fictional work by the distinguished French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), is significant here. (This novel was translated into English as Omega: The Last Days of the World in 1894, the same year that The Time Machine was written.) An astronomer from Colombia offers his theory of how the world will end:

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One thing is certain, that the sun will finally lose its heat; it is condensing and contracting, and its fluidity is decreasing. . . . When this circulation shall have ceased, the brilliant photosphere will be replaced by a dark opaque crust which will prevent all luminous radiation. The sun will become a dark red ball, then a black one, and night will be perpetual. . . . The solar heat having vanished, the atmosphere will remain undisturbed, and an absolute calm, unbroken by any breath of air, will reign . . . and the earth, a dark ball, a frozen tomb, will continue to revolve about the black sun, travelling through an endless night and hurrying away with all the solar system into the abyss of space. It is to the extinction of the sun that the earth will owe its death, twenty, perhaps forty million years hence. (109–10; italics in original) .

Thirty million years, then, is a mean estimate of the length of time remaining to life on earth that someone well versed in astronomy in 1894 would offer. It is not necessary to establish the direct influence of Omega on The Time Machine, merely to note that Wells, like Flammarion and his Colombian mouthpiece, was up-­to-­date with contemporary astronomical theory in 1894. The reason why the temporal logic of The Time Machine has not been fully understood is partly accounted for by its elements of topicality, and the fact that this topicality has itself not been recognized is partly due to the strange temporal paradox associated with its composition. On the one hand, it is relatively well known that The Time Machine was a work that evolved slowly, from undergraduate speculations at South Kensington in 1885 about time as the fourth dimension, through the awkward first step of “The Chronic Argonauts” in 1888, two lost revisions, the National Observer sketches, the surviving partial drafts described by Bernard Loing (97–126), the Holt text of the American first edition, the New Review serial, and the Heinemann first British edition. If one counts Wells’s subsequent revision of the text for the Atlantic edition of 1924, there is an apparent evolutionary process of composition of almost forty years. On the other hand, it is less well known that the essentially definitive text—far outstripping any previous version in aesthetic achievement—was actually written in a concentrated burst of two to three weeks from July to August 1894 in Sevenoaks (“Bouts” 3:5; Loing 64), to fill an economic hiatus in Wells’s journalistic career. In other words, The Time Machine as we now know it was very long in the gestation, yet remarkably rapid in the execution. Expectedly, it bears the marks of its long evolution, but more surprisingly, it also bears the clear traces of its 1894 conception, when the writer was essentially used to 228 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

producing topical journalism in short order and knew little of the luxury of leisurely artistic composition. There is a related paradox in the contrast between the grandeur of Wells’s theme—nothing less than humanity’s temporal place in nature—and the brevity of its expression—the mere 32,334 words of the Heinemann Time Machine. But this can be accounted for, not by an urge toward ironic modernist compression,25 but by the exigencies of the 1894 moment. The invention of the concept of a time machine as early as 1888 had given Wells the means to articulate the big idea that he had been contemplating probably ever since his early South Kensington days, but during the long struggle to support himself and his various households through the years of poverty, ill health, and emotional turmoil after leaving the Normal School without a degree, he had never had the leisure to work it out properly on paper. The National Observer sketches, composed presumably from early February 1894, were the closest he had come to articulating the idea that he would refer to on 22 December 1894 just before the serial began appearing in the New Review, as his “trump card,” adding that “if it does not come off very much I shall know my place for the rest of my career” (Smith 226). Wells’s vivid description in Experiment in Autobiography (1934; see 435–37) of the circumstances of the work’s composition in Sevenoaks makes it clear that he was making the fullest possible use of a very narrow window of opportunity, and it is clear that The Time Machine, as it first came into being, was an expression of the big idea that was relatively brief only because of the constraints of the moment. From our perspective, part of what makes The Time Machine a classic is its compression; it avoids the discursiveness that weakens so much of Wells’s other longer fiction. But Wells would always be discontented that he had not had greater scope in 1894 to introduce his big idea to the world. Indeed, Wells tended to be quite dismissive of The Time Machine in later life. In the “Preface to Volume I” (1924) of the Atlantic Edition, Wells said that he now found The Time Machine “hard and ‘clever’ and youthful. And—what is rather odd, he thinks—a little unsympathetic” (xxii). In 1931, in the preface to the Random House edition, he noted that as a young man he had saved up his one big idea “in the hope that he would one day make a much longer book of it than the [sic] Time Machine, but the urgent need for something marketable obliged him to exploit it forthwith,” the result of which was “a very unequal book” (vii–viii). Indeed, “the story of the Time Machine as distinguished from the idea, ‘dates’ not only in its treatment but in its conception. It seems a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer” (ix). Moreover, “The Further Vision,” notes Wells, was rooted

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in a pessimism that was born of the errors of scientists: “the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the “inevitable” freezing up of the world—and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling Universe Around Us [1931] waves us on to millions of millions of years” (ix–x). In other words, the older Wells remembered The Time Machine as a highly topical work (in its “story” if not in its “idea”), the product of a rapid period of composition by an immature writer at a time when the human vision of the future was clouded as much by faulty scientific theory as by his own ill health and general fin-­de-­siècle pessimism.26 His low estimate of the work was not false modesty but the result of a vivid recollection of the economic urgency behind the particular circumstances of composition—the specific historical moment out of which The Time Machine sprang and to which it was addressed. Wells makes a similar point even more strongly in his preface to Seven Famous Novels (1934), now emphasizing the satirical and polemical elements that The Time Machine has in common with his later work: My early, profound and lifelong admiration for Swift . . . is particularly evident in a predisposition to make the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions. It is an incurable habit with literary critics to lament some lost artistry and innocence in my early work and to accuse me of having become polemical in my later years. That habit is of such old standing that the late Mr. Zangwill in a review in 1895 complained that my first book, The Time Machine, concerned itself with “our present discontents.” (viii–ix)27 What Wells means here is that critics’ habit of (correctly) viewing his fiction as polemical dates back to the original reception of The Time Machine. Later literary critics, for whom The Time Machine had become a classic, bewailed the author’s “lost artistry” in subsequent works. Yet from Wells’s perspective such critics were oblivious to, or were ignoring, the topical, polemical urges that underlay The Time Machine. His memories of the circumstances of its composition in 1894 made it impossible for the author in 1934 to view The Time Machine as an immortal work. But just as readers may admire the classics Hamlet and Gulliver’s Travels without registering Rosencrantz’s allusion to the “little eyases” or the references to early eighteenth-­century political factionalism in book 1 of Swift’s great satire, so “little Rosebery” passes by without telling us anything, for The Time Machine has become, with delicious irony, timeless. 230 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

The Time Machine as we now know it was the product of an author, almost unknown and in poor health, who used a hiatus in his journalistic career and a consequent downturn in his economic fortunes to bring rapidly and perhaps prematurely into being a work on the big idea that he had nursed for more than seven years in the hope that it would one day make his literary fortune. This big idea, articulated in the internal narrative, was that “man’s place in nature”—in Huxleyan phrase—was at once closer to the apes biologically than anyone liked to think, and insignificant in the light of earth’s astronomical destiny. Yet for all the grandeur of its temporal theme, The Time Machine was, as its narrative framing strategy suggests, couched as a satire upon the narrow-­mindedness, complacency, and scientific ignorance of the supposedly well-­educated professional men in 1894. The Time Machine, as its subtitle tells us, was An Invention. That is, the short novel, employing the fantastic device of the eponymous contrivance, was a means by which the young Wells, infuriated by the smug confidence of the late Victorian bourgeoisie in its ascendancy over the material universe, could launch an “assault on human self-­satisfaction” (“Preface” [1934] ix). To understand this is not to conclude that The Time Machine is a polemic masquerading as a classic; but it is to understand more fully how the work was a direct response to a historical moment, and why Wells was dismissive of it in later years. It is also to learn to treat with caution claims that The Time Machine was conceived as primarily a work for the future, or that it is a “timeless” classic, or that it is a miraculous anticipation of (post)modernism. Notes

1. How to refer to The Time Machine? I am indebted to Brian Aldiss for pointing out that the work conforms well to Goethe’s definition of the novella as a work about “a peculiar and as yet unheard-­of event” (“eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit”) (Eckermann 171). Wells himself was conscious of the problem of how to label The Time Machine, referring to it in a letter of 1895 as part of his project to develop “scientific romance with a philosophical element” (Smith 245–46), and elsewhere in correspondence simply as his book. His nonce-­subtitle An Invention suggests that he saw it as a work original enough to evade traditional categories, as indeed it still is. Yet though it was certainly not a novel by Victorian standards, to refer to it today as a short novel does not offend too much against looser twenty-­first-­century criteria. All references to The Time Machine (hereafter abbreviated TM in citations) will be to the Heinemann London first edition (1895), essentially the definitive text emerging from the period of composition. 2. Cf. Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885) and W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887), both fantasies whose narratives have been deliberately dehistoricized by obscuring, if not entirely obliterating, the temporal relation between the future events recounted and the historical present.

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3. Perhaps the most notable creative response was by Joseph Conrad in his early modernist masterpiece Heart of Darkness. McCarthy (38–39) summarizes the debt Conrad owed to The Time Machine at the level of both narrative structure and theme. J. R. Hammond (73–84) offers a summary of the ways in which The Time Machine might be read as a modernist work. Larry Caldwell claims that in The Time Machine Wells shows “a radical skepticism about narrative” that suggests his “critical affiliation . . . is with the post-­Modern” (130). Wells did nothing to discourage such readings. In 1895 he described his forthcoming novel, The Wonderful Visit (1895), one much more conventional in every way than The Time Machine, as an “experiment in form” (“New Writers” 135), while in later life he affirmed that all writings were “experiments in statement” (see the first epigraph above). 4. One possible recent exception is David Y. Hughes, who, noting the Time Traveller’s allusion to “a queer notion of Grant Allen’s” (TM §8:75), asserts that “Wells expected a wide sampling of his readers to remember Allen’s story [“Pallinghurst Barrow” (1892)] and to appreciate how closely it bore” upon The Time Machine (Hughes 280). 5. For example, James Joyce, when asked why he had written Finnegans Wake (1939) in such an obscure style, responded, “To keep the critics busy for three hundred years” (qtd. in Ellmann 703). 6. The primary narrator is often referred to by critics as Hillyer, though this name, mentioned only once in an ambiguous context (TM §14:143), may refer to the Time Traveller’s manservant (TM §16:151). The primary narrator’s name, like that of the Time Traveller, is one of the interesting indeterminacies of the text that require further exploration. 7. That we hardly think to ask how the primary narrator can possibly have recorded the Time Traveller’s long narrative verbatim suggests that we quickly learn that narratorial veracity in The Time Machine is an issue only for characters already marked as unsympathetic (see n. 16 below). There is little evidence that Wells in 1894 was interested in already well-­established strategies of interrogating subjectivity through narratorial unreliability of the sort pioneered by Poe and developed by Henry James. To contrast J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1869) with The Time Machine, for example, is to reveal how much more Le Fanu was interested in psychologizing and rendering opaque a framed narrative—also set in Richmond—than was Wells twenty-­five years later. 8. There is an italicized interpolation by the external narrator (TM §10:100), and an editorial footnote (TM §11:111). These interruptions are of different narratological orders, and both are worth further analysis. 9. Bernard Loing, discussing the change in the manuscripts of The Time Machine from a five- to a six-­figure date for the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, notes that “La première est encore d’ordre historique, la second est d’ordre géologique, voire cosmique” (74). McConnell conflates the evolutionary and astronomical scales into “the abyss of geological time” (Science Fiction 82). Parrinder identifies only two time-­scales, the “historical” or “historiographic” and the “biological” or “evolutionary” (Shadows 41–42). Kathryn Hume identifies three time frames, “Victorian England, the Realm of the Sphinx, and the Terminal Beach” (233), but her ideological concerns lead her 232 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

to stress the dubiousness, rather than the coherence, of the logic that binds them. Suvin (231–33), seeking evidence for the way that Wells by manipulating narrative rhythm mutates scientific into aesthetic cognition, distinguishes the frame from the “Eloi,” “crab,” and “eclipse” episodes, accounts for their proportional lengths, and reveals their formal significance, but does not dwell on the question of a specific binding temporal logic. 10. “[T]he keynote of Modernism is liberation, an ironic distrust of all absolutes, including those of temporal or spatial form” (Hollington 432). 11. Wells’s avoidance of engagement with temporal paradoxes in The Time Machine suggests that he was not interested in raising the relativistic issues associated with time that are characteristic of the modernist sensibility and that were already becoming familiar in the 1890s. Israel Zangwill as early as 1895 chided Wells for failing to explain how the Time Traveller in the future avoids his own death (153). 12. Newcomb’s address does not mention the possibility that time might be a fourth dimension, and notes that as far as the actual likelihood of a fourth dimension of space is concerned, “so far as observation goes, all legitimate conclusions seem to be against it” (329). Peter Morton consequently notes that the Time Traveller “serves up a bogus philosophy of time under cover of a calm citation” from Newcomb (103). Stover goes so far as to claim that Newcomb’s address dismisses modern talk of the fourth dimension as “nonsense” (39n14). In fact, Newcomb clearly states that it is the “limitations of our faculties,” not the laws of nature, which compel us, “as far as our conceptions go, to accept three dimensions and no more” (329). He actually raises the question of the fourth dimension because it is “very interesting” (328), not simply to dismiss it out of hand as absurd. 13. “Time Travelling: Possibility or Paradox,” the first installment of the early version of The Time Machine published in the National Observer on 17 March 1894, contains the sentence: “Professor Simon Newcombe [sic] was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago” (Philmus and Hughes 59). Thus the allusion was even more topical when the National Observer serial was composed in February or early March 1894. When writing the definitive Time Machine a few months later, Wells corrected the spelling of Newcomb’s name but otherwise did not change the sentence; this suggests that he had already fixed the beginning of the historical frame of reference at early February 1894, presumably very close to the historical moment when he had composed the conversation that opens the first soirée. 14. Paul Nahin, who affirms that Wells “certainly” read Nature, comes to an almost similar conclusion (263n21). The importance of Nature to the young Wells is a topic warranting further study. 15. By chance or by design the Rosebery allusion, unchanged, might have had a different topical meaning for readers from January 1895, when The Time Machine began to appear as a serial in the New Review, to late May 1895, when the Heinemann Time Machine appeared. Then the question was whether a horse owned by Rosebery would win the Derby for the second year running (Sir Visto did indeed win on May 29, the same day that the Heinemann Time Machine was published), or whether Rosebery’s government would fall, as seemed imminent (it did, on June 21). 16. The guests are accorded sympathy by the author in proportion to their pre

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paredness to credit the veracity of the Time Traveller. The Medical Man and Psychologist, who evidently have scientific training, are treated with rather more sympathy than the Editor, Journalist, or Provincial Mayor, while the guest who is the most sympathetic in both senses is the primary narrator himself (see also Hennelly 157). Geduld claims that the character of the primary narrator is a mystery that causes epistemological problems for the reader (16). But I would venture that there is little mystery about the primary narrator, who reveals himself as a serious-­minded science writer of the sort that Wells in 1894 aspired to be. Consider, for example, his meeting with the Medical Man at the Linnaean Club (TM §3:18), his plans to meet his publisher (TM §16:150), and his scientific imagination based on an up-­to-­date grasp of paleontology (TM Epilogue:151–52). Bruce Sommerville, however, comes to a completely different conclusion (26) based on his ingenious but improbable argument that the Time Traveller’s story is an elaborate hoax. 17. Stover wages the bravest battle with topicality, noting that Rosebery “was still prime minister (March 1894–June 1895) when The Time Machine came out. . . . [He] had wished to marry the richest heiress in England, to become Prime Minister, and to win three times at the Derby. All that he got except for the last of the last. With little Rosebery he won for a second time in 1894; and now the whole kingdom waited breathlessly on the question, to see if he did it a third and final time in 1895” (50n51). Only the last sentence is incorrect, partly as a result of the common misconception that, as The Time Machine was first published in 1895, it must be set in 1895. 18. The reference to “Hettie Potter” (TM §3:24), of whom the Journalist tells anecdotes shortly after the Editor’s Rosebery allusion, would seem also to be topical, but no commentator has adequately identified this person. It can be said with some certainty that there was no real celebrity of this name active in 1894, so that it is likely that, unless “Hettie Potter” was a private joke, the prosaic name was intended to suggest a music-­hall artiste, actress, spiritualist, or other female celebrity, comic anecdotes about whom the Journalist, just as fatuous as the Editor, might expect would relieve the suspense around the table. “Hettie” (a diminutive of Hester or Henrietta) was the sort of forename associated with music-­hall stars—cf. Vesta Tilley (1864–1952), Lottie Collins (1866–1910), Cissie Loftus (1876–1943)—while “Potter” suggested the theater, through the American-­born actress Mrs. James Brown-­Potter (1859–1936) or the successful dramatist Paul Potter (1853–1921). The familiarity with which Hettie Potter’s name, shorn of Miss or Mrs., is raised at this all-­male gathering suggests that the anecdotes are sexually scandalous; it would have been worse than indecorous in the 1890s for Wells to have used the name of a real woman in this context. All the same, the effect of this allusion is topical and its function satirical, as with the reference to “little Rosebery.” 19. For example, one of the Eloi asks a question about the Time Traveller’s origin that shows the little creature to be “on the intellectual level of one of our five-­year-­old children” (TM §5:39), while “the bare idea of writing had never entered [Weena’s] head” (TM §11:107). 20. When The Time Machine first appeared in print in 1895, the narrative present was actually in the near future. For the primary narrator notes at the end of the final 234 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

chapter that the Time Traveller “vanished three years ago” (TM §16:151). As he disappeared in February 1894, that would make the narrative present circa February 1897. Was Wells giving himself time to compose a sequel that would clarify the Time Traveller’s fate? 21. “A number of frequent occurrence in the scriptures and hence formerly treated as, in a manner, sacrosanct. Moses was ‘in the mount forty days and forty nights’; Elijah was fed by ravens for forty days; the rain of the flood fell forty days; and another forty days expired before Noah opened the window of the ark; forty days was the period of embalming; Nineveh had forty days to repent; Our Lord fasted forty days; he was seen forty days after His Resurrection, etc.” (Brewer’s 430–31). 22. It might be argued that there is a set of entropic numbers—802,101, 802,201, 802,301, 802,401, etc.—between 801,894 and 802,701 that Wells might have come to before 802,701; and, moreover, that the implied idea of a “countdown” (8, 7 . . . 2, 1) in 802,701 is anachronistic in that such a concept did not enter the language until the rocketry experiments of the 1950s. (The OED’s first reference to “count-­down” is dated 1953.) In reply to this, it might be pointed out that the suitable entropic qualities of 802,701 are in the idea of minimal descent suggested by the correlation of the pair of three-­number sequences. Entropy suggests a slow reduction in usable energy and order, and this is best conveyed by the double one-­step descent from 8 to 7 and from 2 to 1. Any of the set of entropic numbers above suggests not slow and minimal but more rapid and possibly even quasi-­exponential descent, e.g., 802,401 necessitates a jump from 8 down to 4. Gradual devolution or degeneration (and certainly not a countdown, which would anyway have logically generated 876,543) are the underlying terms that are likely to have influenced Wells’s choice of AD 802,701 as symbolic date—for does The Time Machine not offer a kind of ironic literalization of the Darwinian evolutionary phrase, The Descent of Man? 23. The ideas summarized in the preceding paragraph are dealt with in more detail by Morton in his important study The Vital Science (26–27). 24. In two papers, “On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid, and on the Remote History of the Earth” and “The Determination of the Secular Effects of Tidal Friction by a Graphical Method.” This Darwin (1845–1912), second son of Charles, is mentioned by name in The Time Machine (TM §8:76). 25. Cf. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as modernist epic in a mere 434 lines. Parrinder offers an ironic, if not precisely modernist, rationale for the brevity of the work (“Time Machine” 21). 26. Parrinder (Shadows 46–47) elaborates well the connections between Wells’s poor health and his pessimism in the 1890s. 27. Wells alludes to the review of The Time Machine in Pall Mall Magazine (September 1895) in which Zangwill describes the work as “a fine imaginative creation worthy of Swift, and possibly not devoid of satirical reference to ‘the present discontents’” (153). While what Zangwill meant by “the present discontents” is now uncertain, it is clear that he felt that The Time Machine was topical but not weakened by its topicality. Though Wells remembered Zangwill’s point as a complaint, he must surely have been sufficiently struck by the truth in it to recall it almost forty years later.

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Works Cited

Bellamy, William. The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy: 1890–1910. London: Routledge, 1971. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1961. “Bouts of Spontaneity, H. G. Wells’s Secret of Writing.” New York Herald, 15 April 1906, 3:5. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1870. Centenary ed. London: Cassell, 1971. Caldwell, Larry W. “Time at the End of Its Tether: H. G. Wells and the Subversion of Master Narrative.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 46 (October 1997): 127–43. Darwin, George Howard. “The Determination of the Secular Effects of Tidal Friction by a Graphical Method.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 39 (1879): 168–81. ———. “On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid, and on the Remote History of the Earth.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 170, no. 2 (1879): 447– 530. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Words of Goethe: Being the Conversations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Translation of Gespräche mit Goethe. 1836–48. New York: Classic, 1933. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. New and rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Flammarion, Camille. Omega: The Last Days of the World. Translation of La Fin du monde. 1893–94. New York: Cosmopolitan, 1894. Geduld, Harry M., ed. The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. Hammond, J. R. “The Time Machine: The Riddle of the Sphinx.” H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. 73–84. Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. “The Time Machine: A Romance of ‘The Human Heart.’” Extrapolation 20, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 154–67. Hollington, Michael. “Svevo, Joyce and Modernist Time.” In Modernism 1890– 1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, 430–42. 1976. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1991. Hudson, W. H. A Crystal Age. 1887. London: Duckworth, 1929. Hughes, David Y. “A Queer Notion of Grant Allen’s.” Science Fiction Studies 25, no. 2 (July 1998): 271–84. Hume, Kathryn. “Eat or Be Eaten: H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.” Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 233–51. Huxley, Thomas H. “Evolution and Ethics.” The Romanes Lecture, 1893. In Collected Essays, vol. 9, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, 46–116. New York: Appleton, 1902. Jefferies, Richard. After London: Or, Wild England. 1885. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Jenkins, Harold, ed. Hamlet. By William Shakespeare. 1601. London: Methuen, 1982. 236 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. “Green Tea.” 1869. In a Glass Darkly. 1872. Vol. 1. Edited by Devendra P. Varma, 1–95. New York: Arno, 1977. Loing, Bernard. H. G. Wells à l’oeuvre: les débuts d’un écrivain. Paris: Didier, 1984. Mackenzie, Norman, and Jeanne Mackenzie. H. G. Wells: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. McCarthy, Patrick A. “Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H. G. Wells: Evolution, Anarchy, Entropy.” Journal of Modern Literature 13, no. 1 (March 1986): 37–60. McConnell, Frank [D]. The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. ———, ed. “The Time Machine” and “The War of the Worlds”: A Critical Edition, by H. G. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900. London: Allen and Unwin, 1984. Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. New York: American Institute of Physics, 1993. Newcomb, Simon. “Modern Mathematical Thought.” Nature 49 (1 February 1894): 325–29. “New Writers: Mr. H. G. Wells.” The Bookman 8 (August 1895): 134–35. Parrinder, Patrick. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. ———. “The Time Machine: H. G. Wells’s Journey through Death.” Wellsian 4 (Summer 1981): 15–23. ———, ed. “The Time Machine” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” by H. G. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Philmus, Robert M. and David Y. Hughes, eds. H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975. Smith, David C., ed. The Correspondence of H. G. Wells. Vol. 1. 1880–1903. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998. Sommerville, Bruce David. “The Time Machine: A Chronological and Scientific Revision.” Wellsian 17 (Winter 1994): 11–29. Stover, Leon, ed. The Time Machine: An Invention; A Critical Text of the 1895 London First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices. By H. G. Wells. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Thomson, W[illiam] [later Lord Kelvin]. “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat.” Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (March 1862): 388–93. Wells, H. G. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). 1934. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967. ———. “Fiction about the Future.” In H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, edited by Patrick Parrinder and Robert M. Philmus, 246–51. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980. ———. “A General Introduction to the Atlantic Edition.” In The Works of H. G.

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Wells. Atlantic Edition. Vol. 1, The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit, and Other Stories, ix–xx. New York: Scribner’s, 1924. ———. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. 1920. Rev. ed. Vol. 1. Garden City, NY: Garden City Books, 1949. ———. “Preface.” Seven Famous Novels, [vii]–x. New York: Knopf, 1934. ———. “Preface.” The Time Machine: An Invention, [v]–x. New York: Random House, 1931. ———. “Preface.” The Works of H. G. Wells, Atlantic Edition. Vol. 1, The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit, and Other Stories, xxi–xxiii. New York: Scribner’s, 1924. ———. “Scepticism of the Instrument.” 1903. “Appendix” to A Modern Utopia (1905), 375–93. Introduction by Mark R. Hillegas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. ———. The Time Machine: An Invention. London: Heinemann, 1895. Zangwill, Israel. “Without Prejudice.” Pall Mall Magazine 7 (September 1895): 151–60.

Afterword

During the 1990s I became fascinated with exploring possible parallels between the Victorian fin de siècle and the approaching end of our own millennium. I even wrote a book-­length manuscript on the subject, but publishers proved resistant to it—perhaps because I concluded that the analogies between, say, the trials of Oscar Wilde and the tribulations of Michael Jackson were largely illusory. Yet the fin de siècle had captured my imagination. I had read very widely in its literature and culture, so I looked around for some project in which to apply my new expertise. As the new millennium dawned, the generation-­ long stranglehold of post-­ structuralist “theory” weakened. A revived interest in literary-­cultural history (not to be confused with “new historicism”) started to be evident. My interest in the 1890s had originally been sparked by curiosity about why this era had generated the great scientific romances of H. G. Wells. (Bernard Bergonzi had raised the question years before, but his thread had not been diligently pursued.) To Broadview Press, publishers of a series of historically contextualized classics, I proposed a scholarly edition of the first and most seminal of those romances—The Time Machine: An Invention (1895). My Broadview Time Machine appeared in 2001 and has since sold more than 10,000 copies. Though it was far from the first annotated edition of The Time Machine, the extent and nature of its apparatus set it apart from others intended for the classroom. In particular, long appendices contained extracts from works that had influenced Wells. The edition aimed to account for the appearance in 1895 of this Invention, one of the most original works of fiction ever written. My editorial adventures with The Time Machine had produced enough new material for an article. In it, I drew attention to the topicality of one of sf ’s few indisputable classics. I noted how Wells deliberately alluded to specific issues in the minds of readers in 1895, issues trivial enough to have since dropped into such obscurity that 238 ] Nicholas Ru d d ick

later editors glossing the phrase “Little Rosebery” confused a British prime minister with his racehorse. I argued that its topicality partly explains why Wells himself tended to dismiss The Time Machine later in life. He believed, as do many, that topicality weakened a work of fiction by giving it an expiry date. Taking a contrary position, I tried to show that because of The Time Machine’s radical revision of humanity’s temporal context, its topicality was actually a strength—though its author wouldn’t have agreed with me. Like all earlier editors of The Time Machine, I had failed to identify the “Hettie Potter” about whom the Journalist tells distracting anecdotes. (Nowadays he’d have got the stories by hacking into her cell phone.) The power of search engines has increased enormously since 2001, and obscure topical references are now much easier to track down. Could the Journalist be referring to the silent film actress “Hetty Potter” whom the Internet Movie Database credits with such roles as “Bacteria” in the 1905 short Prehistoric Peeps? No, I like to think that my article offers a plausible explanation why Wells’s “Hettie” never existed in the flesh.



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• 11•

The Phenomenology of Robots Confrontations with Death in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. Kamila Kinyon The earliest and most widely available English translation of Karel Čapek’s 1920 theater play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was seriously incomplete and did not do justice to the complex philosophical issues that the author intended to address in this work. A more recent 1989 translation of R.U.R. is better but still comes up short in communicating the fullness of Čapek’s original vision. The following essay by Kamila Kinyon examines not only the linguistic accuracy of these translations but also their treatment of the Kantian and Hegelian concepts of identity, freedom, duty, and death—themes that form the philosophical nucleus of Čapek’s powerful tale. This essay originally appeared in SFS 26, no. 3 (November 1999): 379–400.

Karel Čapek’s 1920 drama R.U.R. is a science fiction landmark. The play achieved immediate popularity in the United States, where it was performed in a translation by Paul Selver. Although valuable in its introduction of Čapek’s work to an English-­speaking audience, this translation unfortunately eliminated the character of Damon who, as I will discuss, is central to the play’s philosophical themes.1 Despite its initial popularity and lasting significance, R.U.R. has received relatively little critical attention, much of the existing criticism focusing on problems of genre.2 In this paper, I will consider Čapek’s play not only as an example of its genre but, more importantly, as a carefully constructed philosophical reflection on major epistemological and ethical issues. Čapek was a philosopher before becoming a writer of fiction, and as I will argue, his play contains an implicit criticism of Hegel’s master-­slave dialectic and of Kant’s categorical imperative. 240 ]

R.U.R. traces how biomechanical beings become humanized through their development of independent self-­consciousness. Robots, created to work for humans, initially behave as automatons, programmed in speech as in action. But the robots deviate from the attitudes and behaviors humans have prescribed for them. A number of factors contribute to these deviations and thus to the eventual rebellion of the robots and the massacre of their human masters. Among these factors are the “křeč robotů” (robot’s cramp), the introduction of pain nerves in their manufacture, and experiments to increase their “irritability.” For their development of self-­consciousness and for their humanization, however, more crucial moments in the play occur in the robots’ individual and collective confrontations with death. In addition to the “stali jsme se dušemi” (we have become souls) scene, where robots respond to the death of humans in a scene of collective conscience, the play also emphasizes three individual confrontations with death. The first is Radius’s refusal to serve humans and his insistence that they can place him in the stamping mill: “Můžete mne poslat do stoupy.” The second is Damon’s sacrifice of himself for the good of the robot group. The last is Primus’ willingness to sacrifice himself for his beloved Helena. I will discuss each of these examples in turn. In order to understand what Čapek means by the development of independent self-­consciousness, we must turn to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: “And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-­consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life” (233). This reference to Hegel—and my references to Kant below—should not be seen as a critical imposition, since Čapek was familiar with German idealism, which was the dominant philosophy in the intellectual scene of his time. In his doctoral dissertation on American pragmatism,3 Čapek is often critical of Kantian and Hegelian views, preferring instead the ethical precepts of the pragmatists Peirce and Dewey. In R.U.R. Čapek’s portrayal of the individual’s or the group’s relation to death, whether of the self or of the Other,4 evokes a number of philosophical concepts, ranging from those of Kant and Hegel to those of Gustav Fechner, whose concept of the group soul is mentioned in Čapek’s dissertation. Throughout my essay, I will draw on diverse philosophical sources whenever they are relevant to explicating characters’ confrontations with death. Robot leader Radius’s response to death is motivated by his obsession with becoming master/lord of humans (pán lidí). This psychology may be best understood through the lens of Hegel’s philosophy of the master as expli

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cated in the Phenomenology of Mind. In Hegel’s view, a master or lord is defined by his willingness to risk life for recognition, as registered in the gaze of the slave or bondsman. Radius certainly fits this characterization, since he fearlessly pursues his search for pure prestige. Radius’s ultimate failure to become lord may also be explained in Hegelian terms. Hegel stresses that the trial by death—the struggle for recognition between master and slave—paradoxically precludes the possibility of mastery. The lord is defined as such by risking his own life while seeking the annihilation of his opponent; however, a dead opponent can no longer recognize the lord. The lord’s prestige is thus dependent upon the slave’s subservience: the master, ironically, needs the slave. Radius experiences this Hegelian paradox when the humans over whom he wishes to be lord are killed in a robot massacre. A contrast to Radius is provided in the play’s other robot leader, Damon. Introduced in the play’s last act and cut out of Selver’s translation, Damon perceives the relationship to death differently from Radius. Unlike the narcissistic Radius, Damon apparently believes in the importance of individual sacrifice for the benefit of others. Kant’s concept of duty clarifies Damon’s shifting responses to self-­sacrifice. According to the Kantian notion of the categorical imperative, it is one’s duty to behave in such a way that one’s actions can be generalized into a universal principle. Actions should not be performed selfishly, since they should benefit the group as a whole. Furthermore, duty should be followed as a formal principle, for the pure sake of duty itself rather than for a concrete purpose. When Damon demands that Alquist perform experiments on living robots, he imposes the categorical imperative of unquestioning duty toward “the law” as such, disassociated from any concrete reason for the action to be performed. Yet the viability of following one’s duty without regard to results is brought into question. When obedience to the categorical imperative forces Damon to confront his own death, he becomes aware of his individuated identity, and his desire to live comes into conflict with his obedience to the general law. Through the characters of Radius and Damon, Čapek is expressing an implicit critique of Hegelian and Kantian ethical precepts. This is not to say that the play offers any escape from these ethical systems. In Alquist’s final speech, responding to Primus’s readiness to sacrifice himself for his love Helena, the Hegelian obsession with mastery becomes dominant. Having admired the humble and altruistic nature of Primus’s behavior, Alquist ironically reverts to an obsession with dominion. He claims victoriously that man will once again become lord of the universe. The philosophical issues invoked by Čapek throughout R.U.R. are not clearly resolved. In 242 ] Kamila Kinyon

diaries and interviews, Čapek expressed uncertainty about the ending of his play, feeling unsure about its implications. While I cannot hope to resolve the play’s contradictions and ambiguities here, I believe that much can be clarified by mapping, throughout the play, the dialectic of individual and group confrontations with death. Unfortunately, many of the philosophical implications of Čapek’s play have become lost in English translation. Radius’s narcissism and his desire to be lord of men differ from Damon’s evident belief in sacrifice for the good of the group. When Damon’s character was cut from Selver’s 1923 translation, some of his lines being given to Radius, these intricacies of characterization were lost. While Damon was restored in Novack-­Jones’ 1989 translation of the play, there are still linguistic subtleties that are bound to be lost in any translation. To mention one example here, I will argue that the word pán (master/lord) forms a complex semantic web throughout the text. The master/slave relation, initially developed through the characterization of would-­be lord (pán) Radius, is emphasized as well at the end of the play when Alquist, in a closing monologue, anticipates the expected lordship (panování) of future humanity. In Novack-­Jones’s English translation, the word pán becomes, in different contexts, “sir,” “lord,” and “master.” This leads to a shift, however slight, of connotation. As part of my explication of the philosophical implications of Čapek’s play, I will thus need to draw attention to differences between the Czech original and translations into English by both Selver and Novack-­Jones.

Radius: The Slave Becomes Lord Radius is the first robot to emerge as an independent self-­consciousness, in Hegel’s sense of this term. Radius’s willingness to die for recognition distinguishes his motives from those of Damon and Primus, who risk their lives for the benefit of others. Damon follows the dictates of duty; Primus follows the dictates of romantic love. Radius, by contrast, thinks only of his own status, desiring to become “pán lidí” (lord of humans). Hegel specifies that to become an independent self-­consciousness, one should be willing to confront death purely out of a desire for prestige. This view is summarized by Alexandre Kojève5 in his influential “Lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit”: All human Desire—the Desire that generates Self-­Consciousness, the human reality—is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.” And the risk of life by which the human reality “comes to light” is a

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risk for the sake of such a Desire. Therefore, to speak of the “origin” of Self-­Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.” Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have been human beings on earth. (7) By this definition, Radius is conscious indeed. In a conversation with Helena, he reveals both fearlessness and contempt for humans: RADIUS: Pošlete mne do stoupy. HELENA: Mně je tak líto, že vás usmrtí! Proč jste si nedal na sebe pozor? RADIUS: Nebudu pro vás pracovat. HELENA: Proč nás nenávidíte? RADIUS: Nejste jako Roboti. Nejste tak schopní jako Roboti. Roboti dělají všechno. Vy jen poroučíte. Děláte zbytečná slova. HELENA: To je nesmysl, Radie. (57) (RADIUS: Send me to the stamping mill. HELENA: I am so sorry that they will put you to death! Why weren’t you more careful? RADIUS: I will not work for you. HELENA: Why do you hate us? RADIUS: You are not like Robots. You aren’t as efficient as Robots. Robots make everything. You just command. You make unnecessary words.6 HELENA: That’s nonsense, Radius.) Although Radius is shortly to reveal his narcissism, these initial assertions indicate his belief in the general superiority of robots over humans. Robots should be elevated above their lords because of their relationship to the object of their labor. Radius’s statement “Robots make everything. You just command” illustrates the inherent paradox of the master-­slave relation as explicated by Hegel. Initially it is the master who is an independent self-­ consciousness while the slave, who merely follows the master’s commands, is a dependent self-­consciousness. This, however, is not a lasting relation, because the master becomes dependent on the object of the slave’s labor. The true master is the slave who has overcome his own bondage: “Just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence” (Hegel 237). It is through labor, through the shaping of the object, that the slave gains superiority over 244 ] Kamila Kinyon

the master. In Radius, the robot who challenges the master, one can see Hegel’s master-­slave dialectic at work. As Radius stresses, it is through active labor that he and other robots have become superior to humans. In his praise of action, Radius may initially be seen as progressive. Kojève writes, in summary of Hegel, that a positive social progress may be expected to result from the labor of the slave: “If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history of the working Slave” (20). Radius refuses, however, to take part in such historical progress through labor, regressing instead to an earlier stage of the dialectic. Radius replays the initial battle in which the relation between master and slave first becomes established. His response to bondage is one of pure negation, since he attempts to assert lordship through destruction, breaking statues in the library. Radius is arrested at a point of the dialectic at which he has not yet become a social being. Importantly, Radius does not see himself as just one of many robots who, through their work, have become superior to the group of humans. Rather, Radius is aware of himself as an isolated consciousness. He has reached the Hegelian moment at which a consciousness first becomes aware of itself, gaining the ability to say “I.” Kojève writes: “Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when—for the ‘first’ time—he says ‘I.’ To understand man by understanding his ‘origin’ is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed by speech” (3). Radius passes through this primal scene of coming to consciousness in the following ­passage: RADIUS: Nechci žádného pána. HELENA: Nikdo by vám neporoučel. Byl byste jako my. RADIUS: Chci být pánem jiných. HELENA: Jistě by vás pak udělali úředníkem nad mnoha Roboty, Radie. Byl byste učitelem Robotů. RADIUS: Já chci být pánem lidí. HELENA: Vy jste se zbláznil! RADIUS: Můžete mne dát do stoupy. HELENA: Myslíte, že se bojíme takového potřeštěnce jako vy? (Sedne ke stolku a píše lísteček.) Ne, zrovna ne. Ten lístek, Radie, dáte panu řediteli Dominovi. Aby vás neodvedli do stoupy. (Vstane.) Jak nás nenávidíte! Copak nemáte nic na světě rád? RADIUS: Já dovedu všechno. (58) (RADIUS: I want no lord. HELENA: Nobody would command you. You’d be like us. RADIUS: I want to be the lord of others.

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HELENA: Then they would certainly appoint you as an official in charge of many Robots, Radius. You could be the teacher of Robots. RADIUS: I want to be lord of humans. HELENA: You have gone mad! RADIUS: You can send me to the stamping mill. HELENA: Do you think we are afraid of a lunatic like you? (Sits at the table and writes a letter.) No, not at all. Radius, give this note to Central Director Domin. So that they don’t take you off to the stamping mill. (Gets up.) How you hate us! Is there nothing on earth that you like? RADIUS: I can do everything.) It is in the above exchange between Radius and Helena that Radius first uses the word “I” (Já) in reference to himself. In Czech grammar, it is possible to construct a sentence without the explicit subject “I.” The verb ending in itself implies that the subject is first-­person singular. This implied form is what Radius uses in the lines: “Nechci žádného pána” and “Chci být pánem jiných.” But when Radius stresses that he wants to be the lord of humans, not of robots, he then switches to the explicit “I” form: “Já chci být pánem lidí.” Radius’s wish for mastery is expressed through an actual mastery of language, as indicated in his acquisition of the word “I.” After stressing that he does not fear death (“Můžete mne dát do stoupy”), Radius once again emphasizes the importance of his own ego. It is significant that he answers Helena’s question, “Is there nothing on earth that you like?” with a reference to himself: “I can do everything.” Radius is apparently willing to sacrifice himself not for the good of the robot group but, rather, to gain recognition for his individuated ego. Radius associates the “human” not with altruism and self-­sacrifice but with violence and narcissism. It is only by the latter definition that his own behavior might be deemed human. Radius’ impulse toward violence is described by Helena to Dr. Gall, who enters the scene shortly after Radius tells Helena of his desire to be “lord of humans.” After testing Radius’s reflexes, shining a light in his eyes, and pricking him with a needle, Gall concludes that Radius’s consciousness has developed beyond that of earlier robots. Gall differentiates between Radius’s rebellion and the earlier robot manifestation of “křeč robotů,” in which robots would drop everything, stand rigidly, and grind their teeth: DR. GALL (Usedne): Hm, nic. Zorničky reagují, zvýšená citlivost a tak dále.—Oho! Tohle nebyla křeč Robotů! HELENA: Co to bylo? 246 ] Kamila Kinyon

DR. GALL: Č ert ví. Vzdor, zuřivost nebo vzpoura, já nevím co. HELENA: Doktore, má Radius duši? DR. GALL: Nevím. Má něco ošklivého. HELENA: Kdybyste věděl, jak nás nenávidí! (59) (DR. GALL (sits): Hm, nothing. The pupils are responsive, a heightened sensitivity et cetera—Aha! This was not the robot’s cramp! HELENA: What was it? DR. GALL: The devil knows. Defiance, rage, or revolt. I don’t know. HELENA: Doctor, does Radius have a soul? DR. GALL: Don’t know. He’s got something ugly. HELENA: If you only knew how much he hates us.) While the “křeč robotů” was seen as a physiological malfunction, Radius’s act seems to indicate a conscious will. The word křeč has multiple associations in Czech. It may be translated as “cramp,” “spasm,” or “convulsion.” Křeč may be associated with pain and with orgasmic pleasure. In Selver’s 1923 translation, “křeč robotů” is translated as “robot’s cramp”; in the 1989 translation by Novack-­Jones, it becomes “Robotic Palsy,” which is somewhat further from the connotations of the Czech original. Radius evidently suffers from neither cramp nor palsy. His rebellion, rage, or uprising is caused by the workings—the spasms and convulsions—of Mind or Spirit. But despite Dr. Gall’s disassociation of Radius’s behavior from the earlier “křeč robotů,” there are important similarities between the two forms of behavior. Both the “křeč robotů” and Radius’s rebellion constitute robot refusal to carry out the work set forth by the master. Both indicate a possible coming to consciousness as manifested through speech; in the “křeč robotů” the robots’ grinding of teeth may be an ur-­form of speech. Both entail a risk of the “malfunctioning”—or rebelling against—robot’s life. And both are associated, through Helena’s comments, with the possible acquisition of a soul. A comparison of Radius’s deviation with “křeč robotů” is important for an understanding of how robot consciousness evolves. The phenomenon of the “křeč robotů” is introduced in the prologue, when Hallemeier describes it to Helena: HALLEMEIER: Jsou to jen Roboti. Bez vlastní vůle. Bez vášní. Bez dějin. Bez duše. HELENA: Bez lásky a vzdoru? HALLEMEIER: To se rozumí . . . jen časem . . . Někdy se jaksi pominou. Cosi jako padoucnice víte? Řiká se tomu křeč Robotů. Najednou

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některý praští vším, co má v ruce, stojí, skřípá zuby—a musí přijít do stoupy. Patrně porucha organismu. DOMIN: Vada ve výrobě. HELENA: Ne, ne, to je duše! FABRY: Myslíte, že duše začíná skřípáním zubů? (32–33) (HALLEMEIER: They are just Robots. Without their own will. Without passion. Without history. Without a soul. HELENA: Without love and defiance? HALLEMEIER: That goes without saying . . . only occasionally . . . Sometimes they sort of lose it. Something like epilepsy, you know? It’s called the Robots’ cramp. All of a sudden one of them will throw down everything he’s holding, stand, grind his teeth, and then he must go into the stamping mill. Evidently a malfunction of the organism. DOMIN: A flaw in the manufacture. HELENA: No, no, that’s a soul! FABRY: You think that the soul begins with a grinding of teeth?) Although the “křeč robotů” indicates the possibility of a coming to consciousness, it is not yet associated with a full self-­awareness. The robots grind their teeth but cannot yet say the word “I.” Their nonconformist behavior results in their death, but this behavior seems to be the product of a mechanical spasm or some external agency rather than coming from within. The robots cannot yet become human in the “křeč robotů” because they cannot feel pain, not having been manufactured with pain nerves. Nor does their action involve a true confrontation with death. They do face destruction as a result of the “křeč robotů,” since they are placed afterwards in the stamping mill. This is not a reason for fear, though, because they have no experience of the concept of mortality. Although the “křeč robotů” may be seen as a preliminary form of consciousness, the robots who experience this cramp have not yet achieved independent self-­consciousness by Hegel’s definition of the term. Not only are they unaware that they are risking their own lives, they also lack the desire to destroy the Other, a defining characteristic of the self-­consciousness of the master in Hegel’s concept of lordship and bondage. Unlike the robots experiencing “křeč robotů,” Radius has an awareness of his own mortality as well as a desire to obliterate the Other. Radius follows the requirements for the acquisition of independent self-­consciousness set out by Hegel: “Each must aim at the death of the other, as it risks its own life 248 ] Kamila Kinyon

thereby” (233). While Radius is well on his way toward becoming master, however, he falls into the trap against which Hegel warns. Hegel stresses that a dead adversary can no longer recognize the victor’s position: “This trial by death cancels both the truth which was to result from it, and therewith the certainty of self altogether. For just as life is the natural ‘position’ of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural ‘negation’ of consciousness, negation without independence” (233). The condition of robots after the human massacre becomes a “negation without independence.” Not only do the robots lack recognition by humans, they also lack the ability to reproduce themselves, since the recipe for robot production has been destroyed by Helena. Radius could have become lord had he remained content to master his opponents dialectically. As Kojève writes: “It does the man of the fight no good to kill his adversary. He must overcome him ‘dialectically.’ That is, he must leave him life and consciousness, and destroy only his autonomy” (15). Radius could have been capable of such dialectical overcoming. It is because of his mastery of language that he is able to influence masses of robots toward rebellion. An example of Radius’s use of propaganda may be found in the new robot manifesto: “My, první rasová organisace Rossumových Universálních Robotů, prohlašujeme člověka nepřítelem a psancem ve vesmíru” (We, the first racial organization of Rossum’s Universal Robots, proclaim that humans are enemies and outcasts in the universe) (72). It is specifically through the restructuring of discourse that Radius comes to power; however, the propaganda is directed not at dialectical mastery but at annihilation: “Roboti světa, nařizujeme vám, abyste vyvraždili lidstvo” 7 (Robots of the world, we order you to exterminate the human race) (73). Since Radius is responsible for annihilating the self-­consciousness of the Other, he can no longer be recognized as lord. The above discussion of Radius’s character reveals his egoistic desire to attain power. Ostensibly, he serves the interests of the robot group. He seems concerned with robots’ rights when he states “roboti dělají všechno” (robots do everything). Furthermore, he seems to be serving group interests when he formulates the robot manifesto as though it represented the beliefs of the collective “we.” These ostensible reasons for bringing about the revolt are, however, only veils for a self-­serving will to power. In this sense, Čapek’s characterization of Radius is reminiscent of his similar characterization of communist leaders. Čapek’s concern for the misuse of Marxism by Czech communists may be seen in his 1924 essay “Proč nejsem komunistou?” (Why I am not a Communist?). Čapek writes:

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Buržoasie, která zde nedovede nebo nechce pomoci, je mi cizí; ale stejně cizí je mi komunismus, který místo pomoci přináší prapor revoluce. Poslední slovo komunismu je vládnout a nikoli zachraňovat; jeho velkým heslem je moc, nikoli pomoc. (8) (The bourgeoisie, which cannot or does not wish to help, is foreign to me; but equally foreign to me is communism, which instead of help brings the flag of revolution. The last word of communism is rule and not salvation; its big slogan is power [moc], not help [pomoc]). Radius follows this “last word of communism.” He facilitates the robot revolt because of his desire to rule, motivated by considerations of “moc,” not of “pomoc.”8 As the play progresses, the robots suffer a guilty conscience. They believe that they hear the voices of the humans they have massacred. Through this birth of collective conscience, a new stage of robot humanization is reached.

“Stali Jsme Se Dušemi”: The Birth of Collective Conscience In the third act of Čapek’s play, following the robot massacre, the robots experience a sense of remorse for their past action. This remorse results in a transformation of the robots into a collective spirit/soul. In a crucial passage, a group of robots speaks to Alquist, the last surviving human. In a metaphoric equation that has been lost in the two published English translations, the robots explicitly say “stali jsme se dušemi”—“we have become souls,” not Selver’s “we have acquired souls” or Novack-­Jones’ somewhat closer “we’ve become beings with souls.” The Czech word duše can mean either the individual soul or the group spirit (as in the Hegelian universal spirit). Both senses of this word are drawn on throughout R.U.R. The wording of the statement “stali jsme se dušemi” is significant. First of all, it is important that the robots claim “we have become spirits/souls” not “we have acquired spirits/souls.” The wording of their statement indicates that they serve as figures for spirits rather than just possessing individual souls. Yet the use of the plural form dušemi, though it references a potential collective, implies that these souls have not yet merged into a Hegelian notion of a unified and single universal Spirit. A close reading of the passage in question can lead to a better understanding of Čapek’s notions of conscience and of the function of spirit and soul: ALQUIST: Roboti nejsou život. Roboti jsou stroje. 2. ROBOT: Byli jsme stroje, pane; ale z hrůzy a bolesti stali jsme se— ALQUIST: Č ím? 250 ] Kamila Kinyon

2. ROBOT: Stali jsme se dušemi. 4. ROBOT: Něco s námi žápasí. Jsou okamžiky, kdy do nás něco vstupuje. Přicházejí na nás myšlenky, které nejsou z nás. 3. ROBOT: Slyšte, ó slyšte, lidé jsou naši otcové! Ten hlas, který volá, že chcete žít; ten hlas, který nařiká; ten hlas, který myslí; ten hlas, který mluví o věčnosti, to je jejich hlas! Jsme jejich synové! (109) (ALQUIST: Robots are not life. Robots are machines. 2. ROBOT: We were machines, sir; but from terror and pain we have become— ALQUIST: What? 2. ROBOT: We have become souls. 4. ROBOT: Something struggles within us. There are moments when something enters us. Thoughts come upon us that are not from within us. 3. ROBOT: Hear, oh hear, people are our fathers! That voice that calls that you want to live; that voice that laments; that voice that thinks; that voice that speaks of eternity. That is their voice! We are their sons!) Conscience arises from hearing the voice of the Other and from responding to the pain this voice causes. Conscience is not an inner voice arising from the heart of the subject; it is an external voice that is carried in the traces of memory. Conscience thus becomes a linguistic construct.9 The robots hear the voices of people who are no longer alive, having been murdered in the robot rebellion. The voice of conscience is thus not a personal possession of a subject who is taking responsibility for individual actions. Rather, conscience serves to place the subject into a larger historical context that involves a sense of responsibility and guilt for the group’s past actions. The robots serve as figures for a plurality of souls that yet implicitly belong to a single group collective: “Stali jsme se dušemi” (We have become spirits/souls). This brings to mind several possible philosophical notions of soul and spirit. First of all, one might consider a Hegelian notion of the robots’ position. Hegel stresses the importance of relating the individual to the collective: “Conscience is the common element of distinct self-­ consciousnesses” (650). The statement “stali jsme se dušemi” reflects this view because it relates the individual soul to the robot group rather than treating the soul as an individual possession. The philosophy of the soul expressed by the robots is also closely related to the ideas of Gustav Fechner and William James, both of whom Čapek discusses in his doctoral dissertation. Čapek examines the notion of the

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group soul, deliberating on the significance of “oneness within the plurality” ( jednotu v mnohosti) (50). The following passage on group spirit is part of an explication of Fechner’s influence on James: Je možno pojmouti vesmír jako Fechner: jako svět oduševnělý ve všech částech, jehož jednotlivá vědomí se spolu skládají ve vědomí vyššího řádu. . . . Zemře-­li někdo z nás, je to “jako by se zavřelo jedno oko”: jeho myšlenky však trvají v duši země, vstupují tam v nové vztahy a kombinace, rostou tam a vyvíjejí se; naše vlastní postřehy nás přežívají v širšim životě země. (Pragmatismus 52) (It is possible to conceive of the universe in the manner of Fechner: as a world filled with souls in all its parts, whose individual consciousnesses gather together into consciousnesses of a higher order. . . . When one of us dies, it is “as though one eye had closed”: his thought, however, persists in the earth, enters there into new relationships and combinations, growing there and evolving; our own observations survive us in the larger life of the earth.) As Čapek stresses, James was highly influenced by Fechner’s idea of the relationship of the individual soul to the greater unity of Spirit. In the robots’ statement “stali jsme se dušemi,” traces of Fechner’s and James’s philosophy may be found. Particularly relevant is Fechner’s idea that the thoughts of a dead person remain and take on new combinations. The robots are not able to escape the voice of the humans they have killed, because these consciousnesses actually have not been obliterated, even in death. In their experience of having become souls yet still remaining part of a larger group unity, the robots furthermore seem to confirm Fechner’s and James’s idea of a larger “I” into which individual consciousnesses merge. The idea of a group soul may also be found in other scenes of R.U.R. For example, shortly before the massacre of humans, Hallemeier feels that he, as an individual, is filled with the souls of all people. He says: “Byla to veliká věc být člověkem. Ve mně bzučí milion vědomí jako v úle. Miliony duší se do mne slétají” (It was a great thing to be a human. Millions of consciousnesses are buzzing within me as in a hive. Millions of souls are flying into me) (99). Hallemeier here conceives of his own body as a sort of repository for the collective consciousness and conscience of all humanity. The hive serves as a fitting metaphor for the group soul, since the hive is the ultimate emblem of cooperation, evoking a multiplicity of voices enclosed in a single, orderly unity. Even Hallemeier’s death does not obliterate the millions of souls that have flown into him, because the robots have “become 252 ] Kamila Kinyon

souls.” Through their symbolic transformation into Spirit—as composed of a multiplicity of souls—the robots merely constitute a transformation of the souls that had earlier buzzed within the hive of Hallemeier’s body. Throughout the “stali jsme se dušemi” dialogue, conscience is treated as a collective phenomenon. This does not, however, imply that conscience always functions analogously in all members of a group, as a universal principle. As the third act unfolds, it becomes evident that conscience may be an individual matter. As he confronts death, Robot leader Damon confronts a divided sense of responsibility. It becomes impossible for him to be responsible both towards himself and towards others. Therefore, he can no longer be regarded as an anonymous part of the collective soul.

Damon: Being Toward Death and Daemonic Individuation The philosophical significance of Damon as a character does not seem to have been previously recognized—and for good reason, since he was completely cut from Selver’s 1923 translation. With reference to Selver’s translation, Abrash has pointed out that “the bowdlerization of Čapek’s original text is astonishing” (185). Damon has been reintroduced to English-­speaking audiences in the 1989 translation of Novack-­Jones. Damon’s role is philosophically significant, since his experience of split duty at the moment of his death poses a challenge to Hegelian and Kantian notions of collective duty. Damon, who enters the play as a figure for group rule, comes to symbolize, rather, a daemonic notion of individuated conscience. Through his name, Damon draws attention to the Platonic notion of the daemon.10 Of course, since Damon’s name also evokes the legend of Damon and Pythias, the name itself is split in its reference. At the moment of his death, Damon’s discourse becomes symbolically daemonic in accord with the Greek notion of this word. The daemon is an ambiguous figure for conscience in Plato, as in the writings of the Stoics. The signifier itself is split in its reference, since daemons reside in an ambiguous realm between the human and the divine. The word daemon means “divider,” which makes the concept an apt reference to the language of conscience that divides the subject. When Damon stutters into self-­awareness, his discourse reveals a daemonic language of ethics that undermines any notion of a universal sense of duty. A split between the self and others is introduced as Damon confronts death. Čapek repeatedly expresses criticism of the universal notion of duty. In his essays and philosophical writings as well as in his fiction, Čapek reveals his concern for the individual as separated from a standardized notion of group ethics. In Čapek’s time, Kantianism was dominant in philosophy

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departments. A form of neo-­Kantianism was popular in literary circles as well, as William Harkins discusses in his comprehensive study of Čapek’s life and times. In his 1920 text, Čapek compiles a set of definitions of words that he considers important. In his definition of povinost (duty), Čapek responds to Kant’s “Metaphysics of Morals,” according to which “duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law” (Kant 495). Čapek introduces his entry on duty as follows: “Je to kouzelné slovo, tak mocné, že kdyby ho nebylo, byl by je musel Kant vymysliti” (It is a lovely word, so powerful, that if it didn’t exist, Kant would have had to invent it) (31). Čapek is here expressing sarcasm concerning the Kantian categorical imperative11 that functions as an unambiguous, universal principle, true for all people regardless of the specific contingencies of particular circumstances. According to Čapek, there are two spheres of morality: “conscience,” which does not allow much, and “duty,” which allows what conscience does not. The executioner serves as an example of the atrocities that may be justified by “duty.” Čapek writes ironically that even the executioner is not an unkind and unsympathetic person; he is merely performing his duty and his conscience is clear. Čapek ultimately asserts that it is the “I,” however, not the “we,” that is the true voice of conscience: “Já je zároveň slovo svědomý a slovo činu” (I is simultaneously the word of conscience and the word of deed) (16). When the robot Damon first enters R.U.R., his discourse is that of the “we,” self-­certain and prescribed, coinciding with his alleged identity as a generalized figure for “vláda” (meaning “rule”). Damon’s identification with “rule” is revealed when he is first introduced to Alquist, the last person remaining after the massacre of humanity. 3. ROBOT: Je ti nařízeno— ALQUIST: Mně? Mně někdo nařizuje? 3. ROBOT: Vláda Robotů. ALQUIST: Kdo je to? 5. ROBOT: Já, Damon. ALQUIST: Co tu chceš? Jdi! DAMON: Vláda Robotů světa chce s tebou vyjednávat. (107) ( 3. ROBOT: You are commanded— ALQUIST: Me? Somebody is commanding me? 3. ROBOT: The rule of the robots. ALQUIST: Who is that? 5. ROBOT: I, Damon. ALQUIST: What do you want here? Go away! 254 ] Kamila Kinyon

DAMON: The rule of the robots of the world wishes to negotiate with you.) Damon here posits his identity as subject in terms of the symbolic rule of the robots whom he represents. Significantly, Čapek uses the word vláda (rule, government) rather than the more personalized vladař (ruler). Damon thus posits himself not as an individual filling the slot of ruler, but as an abstract principle for “rule” itself. Damon’s impersonation of a generalized abstraction becomes lost in translation: Novack-­Jones translates vláda as “ruler.” Yet it is precisely to the power of abstraction that Damon appeals when he successfully challenges Alquist’s imperative that he go away, positing himself not as a singular “I” but, rather, as a representative of the rule of the robots of the world. Damon seems to embody the categorical imperative in his issuing of commands, expecting these commands to be followed by virtue of the fact that they represent universal principles. A change in Damon’s character comes about as a result of his command to Alquist that he conduct experiments on living robots. When Damon initially issues this command, he is thinking about the good of the group as a whole rather than himself as an individual. He does not guess that Alquist will choose him as the experimental victim for the benefit of future robot survival. Oblivious to the result his command will have, Damon orders Alquist: “Dělej pokusy na živých Robotech. Najdi, jak se dělají!” (Conduct experiments on live robots. Find how they are made!) (110). Damon does not listen to Alquist’s list of explanations as to why he could not succeed in this endeavor. Alquist protests that he has never murdered before, that he is too old, that he cannot hold a scalpel, that his eyes fill up with tears, and that, in general, he just is not competent for the task at hand. To each objection, however, Damon responds by merely reiterating the imperative “Vezmi živá těla . . . živá těla” (Take live bodies . . . live bodies) (110). The rule of Damon is imposed linguistically, through the imperative form, rather than through any justification of the content of the commands. Damon serves as a Kantian figure for the law, his commands following the logic of the categorical imperative. He expects his instructions to be followed without question or reason, merely out of pure duty, out of respect for the “rule.” Damon does not remain a Kantian for long, however. His discourse ruptures his earlier identity as vláda when Alquist chooses him to be the victim of the first dissection. It is apparently against his will that he asserts his individuated self at this dramatic moment of fear and trembling. Damon exclaims “Já—proč právě já?” (Me?—Why me exactly?) (111). The personal voice is a flaw in Damon’s discourse, an unwelcome crack in the

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self-­certain categorical imperative of duty. This já is not the já with which he introduced himself, but is rather an indicator of his impending individuation. The dash, a device Čapek uses throughout the play, suggests hesitation;12 Damon is no longer following a prescribed text. If Damon were still embodying the categorical imperative of duty, he would not have interposed a concern with his own “I” as distinguished from the group as a whole. Kant writes: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (496). Alquist challenges Damon with “Ty tedy nechceš?” (You don’t want to?) (111). The stress here is on the “ty” (you), a pronoun that is not necessary in Czech since the verb ending makes it clear that the second person singular is intended. Alquist is thus confronting Damon with the fact that he is making an exception of himself from a rule that was intended to be universal. Damon denies this implied accusation by replying “Půjdu” (I will go) (111). During the course of the dissection, Damon struggles to be as impersonal as possible. For example, when commanding Alquist to cut into him, Damon uses the infinitive form řezat (to cut) rather than addressing Alquist directly, with the imperative form. Damon thus generalizes and abstracts the moment of the dissection, excising both his own individuality and that of his executioner. It is evidently impossible to cut the self out of discourse, however, since at the moment of death the personal voice again elides the rule. Damon stutters into an acknowledgment of his subjectivity through the exclamation “ži—žiju” (li—I live) (113). The stutter indicates that the emphasis this time is on the subjective ending -­ju (žiju). Thus Damon’s self-­identity is born through a flaw in speech. The connection of individuation with stuttering indicates that the language of the subjective “I” precludes the will, coming to the individual by way of a rupture in the smooth functioning of the expected ideological system. The certainty of the Kantian categorical command is undermined by the unwilled intrusion of the self. Damon attempts to cut back into a more public register, since after exclaiming “ži—žiju!” he reverts to a more impersonal generalization through the words: “Je—je—je lépe žít!” (It—it—it is better to live!). Yet the categorical law of the group here loses its certainty because it can only be expressed through the stutter. The culminating conflict between self and group rule comes at the moment of Damon’s death: “život!—Já chci—žít! Je—lépe—” (Life—I want— to live! It—is better—) (114). There is only one letter separating Já (I) and Je (it), but this letter is crucial in distinguishing the self from the generalized categorical law. In this line, Damon first mentions himself as a subject wishing for life. The more general statement “je—lépe—” (it—is better—) is left unfinished and must be completed by the conscience-­plagued Alquist, who 256 ] Kamila Kinyon

fills in the last “žít”—“to live.” It is while confronting death that Damon becomes aware of his absolute singularity, the apprehension of death making him aware of himself as subject; however, Damon is apparently caught between two contradictory movements, since he cannot make of himself a gift of self-­sacrifice for the robot group while simultaneously retaining his apprehension of himself. The split in responsibility at the moment of death indicates an implicit move away from the Kantian notion of the categorical imperative toward a much more ambiguous notion of conscience. The apprehension of an authentic and individuated self at the moment of death is reminiscent of the philosophy of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, a spokesman for the Charta 77 human rights declaration of 1977. As Derrida discusses in The Gift of Death, Patočka posits the apprehension of death in terms of the daemonic.13 Patočka writes: “The responsible man as such is a self, an individual who doesn’t coincide with any role that he might happen to assume—something Plato expresses through the myth of the choice of destiny” (qtd. in Derrida 52). Patočka is here referring to the “Myth of Er” in Plato’s Republic. At the end of Plato’s utopian treatise describing the ethical position of individuals within a community, the daemon enters as a force of individuation, because each soul chooses its own particular daemon that will follow it through life as its singular protector.14 When confronting death, Damon gains responsibility; he refers to himself as a subject, no longer merely playing the role of the group leader who imposes duty on others. It would, however, be an oversimplification to say that responsibility to the self as subject should come first. Patočka, in spite of his Heideggerian stress on responsibility toward the self, concludes that there is an inherent split between the individual and the group that inevitably leads to the sense of guilt. Patočka writes: “individuality has been related to infinite love and man is an individual because he is guilty, always guilty with respect to that love” (qtd. in Derrida 52). This definition of individuality as the guilt of split responsibility bears particular relevance to the experience of Damon, who is caught between the self and others at the moment of his death and who therefore cannot maintain his role as univocal “rule.” The guilt resulting from split responsibility is experienced as well by Alquist, who hears the voice of the dying Damon even while, like Lady Macbeth, he must wash the blood of Damon from his hands: “Ach, mé ruce, mé ruce! Budu si vás do smrti ošklivět? ” (Oh, my hands, my hands, will I despise you forever?) (114). Alquist’s personal “conscience” is here in conflict with his public “duty.” Unlike the executioner mentioned in Čapek’s Critique of Words, Alquist cannot rest assured that he has followed the imperative of absolute duty. The dissection of Damon for the good of the general col

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lective has failed to produce the secret of life, but even if it had succeeded, Alquist’s split decision whether or not to sacrifice Damon would not have led to a univocal moral answer. The voice of the individuated dying Damon leads to an inevitable moral dilemma.

Primus: The Offer of Self-­Sacrifice Damon’s experience of doubt and terror in his confrontation with death contrasts with Primus’s expressions of fearlessness. Immediately following the scene of violence in which Damon’s dying words echo from offstage, robots Primus and Helena come onto the stage. They examine the laboratory experiments through which the new recipe for robot manufacture is being sought. As their conversation turns to the subject of mortality, Helena expresses her consciousness of pain and her consequent fear of death, while Primus speculates that death may actually constitute a new coming to ­consciousness: HELENA: Já nevím, Prime. Mně je tak divně, já nevím, co to je: jsem jako pošetilá, ztratila jsem hlavu, bolí mě tělo, srdce, všechno bolí—A co se ti mně stalo, ach, to ti neřeknu! Prime, já musím myslím umřít! PRIMUS: Není ti někdy, řekni, Heleno, jako by bylo lépe umřít? Víš, snad jenom spíme. Včera ve spaní jsem zas mluvil s tebou. . . . Mluvili jsme nějakým cizím nebo novým jazykem, protože si ani slovo nepamatuju. . . . Já sám jsem tomu nerozuměl, a přece vím, že jsem nikdy nemluvil nic krásnějšího. . . . Když jsem se tě dotknul,15 mohl jsem umřít. (116–17) (HELENA: I don’t know, Primus. I have such an odd feeling, I don’t know what it is: I’m distracted, I feel as though I’d lost my head. My body hurts, my heart, everything hurts—And what has happened to me, ah, I can’t tell! Primus, I think that I must die! PRIMUS: Don’t you sometimes feel, Helena, as though it would be better to die? You know, perhaps we are only sleeping. Yesterday, I spoke to you again in my sleep. . . . We spoke in some foreign or new tongue, because I can’t remember a word. . . . I didn’t understand it myself, and yet I know that I have never spoken anything more beautiful. . . . When I touched you, I could have died.) Helena’s pain indicates her newly found consciousness of her now human body. In contrast to the “stali jsme se dušemi” scene, in which the pain of conscience turned the robots into figures for souls/spirits, the above scene shows that robots can become not only souls but also bodies. Primus’ rejoin258 ] Kamila Kinyon

der shows yet another stage in robot humanization. Not only have robots acquired bodies that feel pain, they have also begun to dream. Primus may be the first robot to experience dream reality, an experience that he associates with the acquisition of a new language. Primus’ newfound dream experience has in turn given him the capacity to philosophize about the meaning of death and the possibility that consciousness may continue after death. In addition, death becomes eroticized in its association with love. Primus believes that touching Helena may bring about his death, but he derives evident pleasure from this thought. As Primus and Helena continue to converse, each comes to a sense of self-­consciousness through the double awareness of mortality and love for the Other. Alquist intrudes into this romantic exchange between Primus and Helena, threatening to dissect Helena in order to seek the secret of robot manufacture. It comes as no surprise when Primus offers to die in Helena’s place; he has already established his readiness to confront death for the sake of the Other. ALQUIST: Tak tedy, milý Prime, já——já musím dělat nějaké pokusy na Gallových Robotech. Záleží na tom všechno další, rozumíš? PRIMUS: Ano. ALQUIST: Dobrá, doved’ to děvče do pitevny. Budu ji pitvat. PRIMUS: Helenu? . . . Hneš-­li se, rozbiju ti hlavu! ALQUIST: Tak tedy rozbij! Jen rozbij! Co budou pak dělat Roboti? PRIMUS (vrhne se na kolena): Pane, vezmi se mne! Jsem stějne udělán jako ona, ze stejné látky, stejného dne! Vezmi si můj život, pane! (Rozhaluje kazajku.) Řež tady, tady! (120) (ALQUIST: So then, dear Primus, I—I must make some experiments on Gall’s Robots. Everything hereafter depends on this, you understand? PRIMUS: Yes. ALQUIST: Good, take the girl to the dissection room. I will dissect her. PRIMUS: Helena? . . . If you move, I’ll smash your head in! ALQUIST: So smash it then! Go ahead and smash it! What will the Robots do then? PRIMUS (falls to his knees): Sir, take me! I was made exactly like her, from the same material, on the same day! Take my life, sir! (Opening his shirt.) Cut here, here!) Alquist’s stuttering repetition of the word “I” may reveal his split sentiments about his identity as experimenter/executioner, a role that the rule of

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the robots has thrust upon him. It seems that Alquist’s memory of the stuttering Damon, whom he had so recently murdered in the name of experiment, has affected the characteristics of his own speech. It is only through Primus’ offer of self-­sacrifice that Alquist regains his lost faith in love and life. This newly found faith is expressed in the play’s final monologue: “A stvořil Bůh člověka k obrazu svému: k obrazu Božímu stvořil ho, muže a ženu stvořil je. I požehnal jim Bůh a řekl: Rost’tež a množte se, a naplňte zemi, a podmaňte ji, a panujte nad rybami mořskými, a nad ptactvem nebeským, i nad všemi živočichy, kteří se hýbají na zemi.” . . . Kamarádi, Heleno, život nezahyne! Zase se začne z lásky, začne se nahý a maličký. . . . Nyní propustíš, Pane, služebníka svého v pokoji; nebot’ uzřely oči mé—uzřely—spasení tvé skrze lásku, a život nezahyne! (Vstává.) Nezahyne! (Rozpřáhne ruce.) Nezahyne! (122–23) (And God created man in his own image: in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. God blessed them and said: Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish in the sea, and the birds of heaven, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. . . . Friends, Helena, life will not die. It will begin anew from love; it will start out naked and tiny. . . . Now, Lord, you will release your servant in peace; for my eyes have seen your salvation through love. Life will not perish! [Rises.] Will not perish! [Raises his hands.] Will not perish!) The language of this last paean of hope is significant. Alquist invokes the Christian God as Pane (lord); the final e indicates the imperative form. The word pán had been used earlier in the play by Radius to indicate his desire to become master of humans: (“Já chci být pán lidí”). Radius’s destructive wish to be master/lord (pán) is replaced in this last speech by a religious ideal in which God is lord (pán). Alquist’s invocation of the lord signifies his Christian humbleness; he becomes a mere servant. This entails, for Alquist, a relinquishment of his earlier position as pán. In his previous conversation with Primus, in which he had demanded that Helena be the next sacrificial victim of his dissections, Primus had addressed Alquist as pán, pleading that Alquist take him in Helena’s place: “Pane, vezmi si mně ” (Sir, take me.). Čapek thus makes subtle variations on the word pán throughout R.U.R. These associations become inevitably lost in translation. In the English translation by Novack-­Jones, there are three words used for the Czech pán: Radius wishes to be master (pán); Alquist is referred to as sir (pán); Alquist refers to God as lord (pán).16 There is perhaps no way to avoid this 260 ] Kamila Kinyon

loss in translation, since no single word in English can be used for all contexts. It is important, however, to note how pán is used in the Czech original, since this word is crucial for understanding the nuances of how the master-­slave relation is defined. In Alquist’s final monologue, the human and robotic will to power, the desire to assert the self as lord of others, presumably becomes subverted. Instead, in line with the progression of the Hegelian dialectic, a universal duty is accepted, the submission to the higher master, God. A renewed faith in God is in turn a way to overcome fear of the play’s other master, Death. As Hegel writes in the “Lordship and Bondage” chapter of Phenomenology of Mind, death is “the sovereign master” (237). But, ironically, Alquist’s recitation of the Biblical discourse includes within itself God’s imperative that humans should rule over all living things: “Panujte [rule/be lord] . . . nad všemi živočichy.” In the Czech translation of the Bible, the imperative panujte (rule) once again contains the word pán (lord). By his repetition of the Biblical text, Alquist suggests that Primus and Helena, like future humanized robots, are meant to dominate a different species, presumably the animals. Such will to power over the Other may seem dangerously similar to the psychology exhibited by humans earlier in the play in their attempts to dominate the “nonhuman” robots. Similarly, the robot desire to dominate the human, the non-­robotic Other, is likewise evoked. It was this dangerous desire, of course, that had led to the ultimate massacre of humanity. It may thus seem strange that Alquist, the altruist and would-­be peacemaker, recites a text about the importance of dominion. After all, what has just impressed him about Primus’ behavior was its humbleness and readiness for self-­sacrifice. Yet instead of eulogizing Christian humbleness, it is the Christian theme of lordship that obsesses Alquist in his concluding words. Apparently oblivious of the negative implications of panování, Alquist recites the Biblical text as a way of regaining faith. Overcoming the fear of death, he sees a new beginning to the historical process through the new Adam and Eve, Primus and Helena. Čapek evidently had mixed feelings about the ending of R.U.R. He wrote in a letter to his wife Olga: “Bylo mi nedobře Olgo a proto jsem hledal ku konci skoro křečovitě nějaké vyřešení dohody a lásky” (I was unwell, Olga, and so I was looking almost křečovitě [madly/spasmodically] for some resolution in agreement and love.) (qtd. in Buriánek 136). It is an interesting slip that Čapek here uses the very word křečovitě which is so important in R.U.R. The “křeč robotů” (robot’s cramp) represents a moment of slippage, a deviation from the prescribed text. Čapek too is taken over by a křeč when he contemplates what he takes to be an excessively sentimental and

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optimistic ending for his play. Like his character Alquist, Čapek apparently misses the ambiguous implications of the final speech, which by no means indicates a “clear resolution in agreement and love.” Čapek expresses uncertainty whether the ending is really believable or whether it has slipped into a conventionalized and prescriptive mode of discourse. Yet Alquist’s recitation of the biblical text, with its emphasis on lordship (panování), indicates that there is no easy escape from the lordship and bondage relation. Perhaps life will not perish, but the next cycle of history may be as violent as the previous one. Alquist, like the robots of the text, resorts to fixed phrases, his speech becoming externally determined. Yet for a reader or spectator of the play, the ending contains more ambiguity than Čapek’s letter admits. The ending of R.U.R. does not allow for a smooth or simple narrative closure. Notes

1. For a discussion of the Selver translation in comparison with the more recent Novack-­Jones translation, see Abrash. 2. McNaughton’s essay is an example of genre-­based criticism. 3. Čapek’s doctoral dissertation, “Pragmatismus čili filosofie praktického života” (Pragmatism or the Philosophy of Practical Life), focuses on the work of William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce. In his introduction, Čapek critiques the tenets of German idealism, including the Hegelianism of Bradley (7). Čapek’s critique of Kant is particularly evident in section five, in which Hans Vaihinger’s establishment of “Kantian Studies” in Germany is discussed (25). In Čapek’s time, interpretations of Kant were largely influenced by Vaihinger’s reading of Kant’s idealistic positivism. 4. When considering robots’ confrontations with death in R.U.R., it is important to differentiate between their apprehension of their own possible death and their apprehension of the death of the Other. Hegel uses the term “Other” in Phenomonology of Mind, and I will use it throughout my paper. The Other may be defined as that which is separate from the self, external to self-­consciousness. Within the context of R.U.R., the Other whose death the robots apprehend varies. For Primus, the Other is his love Helena. For the robots who “have become souls,” the Other is manifested through the voice of the humans they have massacred. 5. Kojève reads Hegel through the lens of Marx’s thought, bringing out the social implications of the Phenomenology. Kojève gave a series of lectures in Paris in the 1930s, explicating his reading of Hegel. Although Čapek wrote R.U.R. in 1920 and although he didn’t know of Kojève’s reading, it is useful to refer to Kojève’s summary. This summary reflects a type of interpretation of Hegel’s text that would have been well known during Čapek’s time. Both Čapek and Kojève spent time in Germany. Both would have been exposed to analogous interpretations of Hegel, including those of F. H. Bradley, who emphasized the relationship of the individual to the community. There are, of course, important differences. Kojève was sympathetic to Marxism and to a Marxist reading of Hegel. Čapek, by contrast, was critical both of Marx and of 262 ] Kamila Kinyon

Hegel. Through the character of Radius in R.U.R., Čapek may be offering his critique of the master-­slave relation as it is understood by readers of Hegel who approach his text from a Marxist standpoint. 6. All translations included in this paper are my own. In this particular passage, Radius makes the peculiar remark “děláte zbytečná slova” (You make unnecessary words). This is not a Czech idiom; indeed, it sounds as strange in Czech as it does in English. Former translations of the play have evidently tried to correct the Czech original. The phrase “děláte zbytečná slova” is translated by Novack-­Jones as “utter empty words” (66) and by Selver as “You do nothing but talk” (48). Radius is, however, evidently concerned with labor and he transfers the word “dělat” (to make) from his discussion of physical labor (“roboti dělají všechno”) to his discussion of the useless labor of making unnecessary words. The exact wording of the Czech original is important for understanding Radius’s psychology as a defender of the manual labor of the robots. Significantly, when Radius engineers the robot revolt, in which humans are massacred, he chooses to save the life of one human, Alquist, who is like the robots because he makes things with his hands: he builds houses. By contrast, Radius has contempt for those who only know how to make words. 7. It is interesting to consider Radius’s use of slogans in light of Čapek’s theory of language. Toman discusses Čapek’s mistrust of political propaganda and of journalists’ fixed phrases. In the 1920s, Čapek was influenced by the writings of Kraus. In a 1934 review of Kraus as critic of language, Čapek writes: “Words, thoughts, and ideas motivate or sanction reality. . . . General slogans replace conscience, as he [Kraus] shows: not only the massacres in trenches, but also this is war—this corruption of the spirit, this thoughtlessness and untruth. . . .” (qtd. in Toman 97). When Radius uses slogans in R.U.R., he is not only instigating the massacre of humans, he is also instigating a massacre of language. Through a false use of words, Radius corrupts the very spirit that the robots are just beginning to develop. 8. R.U.R. is not the only work of fiction in which Čapek encodes implicit criticism of the misuses of Marxism. In his 1936 novel War with the Newts, Čapek parodies Communist propaganda. The manifesto of Mr. Povondra states: “Working Newts! The hour is at hand when you will come to realize the whole burden of the slavery in which you live (7 lines cut by censor) and when you will demand your rights as a class and as a nation! (11 lines cut by censor). . . .” (158). Čapek reveals a general mistrust of slogans, manifestoes, and formulaic language in Kritika slov (Critique of Words). This more general concern is often instantiated through parodies of Czech Communist slogans. 9. The connection between language and conscience recurs in R.U.R., becoming important not only in this collective scene, but also in Damon’s later encounter with individuation through language, as he stutters into self-­awareness. See below. 10. Damon’s name, like other character names in R.U.R., is surely significant. McNaughton and Bengels have both pointed out the resemblance of robot creator Domin to “Dominus” and of Helena to Helen of Troy. Unfortunately, the symbolism of the name Damon has escaped critical attention due to the excision of this character from Selver’s 1923 translation. There is also a character named Damon in Čapek’s 1924 novel Krakatit. For an analysis of the Damon in Krakatit, see Eagle. 11. Čapek’s critique of Kant in Kritika slov may have been influenced by F. H.

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Bradley’s reading of Kant. Čapek mentions Bradley in his dissertation and was obviously familiar with his work. In his Ethical Studies, Bradley includes a chapter on “Duty for Duty’s Sake,” in which he explicates Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative. Bradley critiques the categorical imperative as follows: “ ‘Duty for duty’s sake’ says only ‘do the right for the sake of the right’; it does not tell us what right is. . . . It tells us to act for the sake of a form, which we saw was self-­contradictory. . . . We saw that duty’s universal laws are not universal if that means they can never be overruled” (Bradley 97). Like Čapek, Bradley concludes that a collision of duties is unavoidable. 12. Dashes, indicators of hesitation, are used both for human and for robot characters. Helena and Domin both stutter and hesitate at those moments when they break out of their prescribed scripts. Hesitations particularly occur whenever their conversation touches (obliquely) on sexual matters. For example, Domin discusses Rossum’s experimentation with hormones and asks whether Helena understands it. She responds “N-­n-­nevim” (I d-­d-­don’t know) (16). 13. This is in contrast to the Christian notion of the demonic. Like Patočka’s writings, R.U.R. is filled with contrasts between Greek and Christian concepts. The religious Nána, for example, views robots as demonic beings who were created against God’s will: “To je proti Pánubohu, to je dˇáblovo vnuknutí, dělat ty maškary mašinou” (It is against God, it is the demon’s influence, to manufacture those farcical monsters by machine) (43). Yet Damon’s name is spelled with an “a” rather than an “e,” pointing to the ancient Greek daemon. This is particularly appropriate given Damon’s stuttering individuation at the moment of his death. 14. In Daemonic Figures, Lukacher reads the Platonic notion of the daemon as a figure for the language of conscience, which individuates the subject. Lukacher writes: “The daemon is a figure for the God that dwells in language and, by virtue of this daemonic function of language, allows human beings to be called into their humanity” (7). Significantly, individuation comes about as the result of an externally determined language that precludes the will. This makes an interesting analogy to the language of Damon, who is individuated by means of an unwilled stutter. 15. “Když jsem se tě dotknul ” has a double meaning in this context. Primus may intend the phrase in the literal sense “when I touched you” or he may be using the phrase metaphorically, in the sense “when you were touched” (by my words). Selver translates the line as “When I touched you.” Novack-­Jones translates it “When I saw that my words touched you.” Both interpretations are possible. 16. In the Selver translation, Alquist’s last monologue is omitted. The play ends with Alquist’s statement to Primus and Helena: “Go. Adam—Eve.” For a discussion of Selver’s omission, see Fox.

Works Cited

Abrash, Merritt. “R.U.R. Restored and Reconsidered.” Extrapolation 32 (1991): 185–92. Bengels, Barbara. “ ‘Read History’: Dehumanization in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.” In The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction, edited by Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich, 13–17. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982. Bradley, F. H. Ethical Studies. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951. 264 ] Kamila Kinyon

Buriánek, František. Karel Čapek. Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1988. Čapek, Karel. Kritika slov: Dvaapadesát nedělňich čtení. 1920. In V Zajetí Slov, edited by Miroslav Halík, 11–124. Praha: Dilia, 1969. ———. Pragmatismus čili filosofie praktického života. Praha: F. Topič, 1925. ———. Proč nejsem komunistou? 1924. Mňichov: Kamený Erb, 1957. ———. R.U.R. 1920. Praha: Aventinum, 1931. ———. R.U.R. 1920. Trans. Paul Selver. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1923. ———. R.U.R. 1920. Trans. Claudia Novack-­Jones. 1989. In Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Čapek Reader, edited by Peter Kussi, 34–109. Highland Park, NJ: Catbird Press, 1990. ———. Válka s Mloky. Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1953. ———. War with the Newts. 1936. Translated by Ewald Osers. Highland Park, NJ: Catbird Press, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Eagle, Herbert. “Čapek and Zamiatin—Versions of Dystopia.” In On Karel Čapek: A Michigan Slavic Colloquium, edited by Michael Makin and Jindřich Toman, 29–41. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1992. Fox, Mary Ann. “Lost in Translation: The Ending of Čapek’s R.U.R.” ICarbS 4 (1981): 101–9. Harkins, William E. Karel Čapek. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Hegel, Friedrich. Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. London: Allen and Unwin, 1964. Kant, Immanuel. “Foundation for the Metaphysic of Morals.” In Philosophic Classics, vol. 2, edited by Walter Kaufmann, 492–500. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Lukacher, Ned. Daemonic Figures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. McNaughton, James D. “Futurology and Robots: Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.” Renaissance and Modern Studies 28 (1984): 72–86. Plato. The Republic. Translated by S. Halliwell. Warminister: Aris and Phillips, 1988. Toman, Jindřich. “Karel Čapek, Karl Kraus, and the Theory of the Phrase.” In On Karel Čapek: A Michigan Slavic Colloquium, edited by Michael Makin and Jindřich Toman, 87–108. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1992.

Afterword

Growing up in a bilingual family, I was introduced as a child to Czech author Karel Čapek, who has long been an iconic figure in Czech culture. When pursuing a doctoral degree in Slavic studies and comparative literature at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, I started to think about Čapek’s work through the lens of current critical and philosophical frameworks such as continental philosophy and deconstruction; the Hegelian master-­slave relation seemed particularly relevant for viewing the 1920 robot play R.U.R. In researching Čapek’s life, I learned that there is a biographical foundation for viewing his work through such critical lenses. Čapek’s doctoral disser

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tation in philosophy reveals his engagement with the contrasting philosophies of Kant and Hegel. The central idea for my R.U.R. article emerged from my interpretation of the initially Kantian character Damon, and of the possible associations of his name with “daemonic” individuation, which he achieves when confronting death. I found it striking that the character of Damon had been deleted in Selver’s 1923 English translation of the play. Damon’s lines were given to Radius, whose actions imply very different ethical precepts. Since I am fluent in Czech, I was able to look carefully at the language of Čapek’s original and to analyze how Čapek uses the subtleties of the Czech language to build his philosophical themes. Since writing the article, I have remained interested in philosophical approaches to texts. For example, this has informed my teaching of a first-­year seminar on dystopian themes in literature, philosophy, and film that I first taught at Indiana University South Bend and now teach at the University of Denver. Students study a variety of dystopias ranging from Čapek’s R.U.R. and Zamiatin’s We to more contemporary pieces such as Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the films Blade Runner and The Matrix. Inspired by my teaching of this class, I presented a paper at the 2010 SW/TX PCA/ACA entitled “Human Machines and Mechanical Humans: Epistemological Quandaries in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.” I would like to pursue further research on Čapek’s texts, especially in relation to the sociocultural forces emerging in Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. The threat of crowd psychology and consequent loss of individuation are recurring themes in Čapek’s works, and may be found, for example, in the 1936 satirical science fiction novel Válka s mloky (War with the Newts). In contrast to the technological dystopia R.U.R., Válka s mloky imagines a threat to humanity through primitive newts who, like the robots in the earlier work, form a frightening, anonymous mass. I am currently interested in Čapek from both philosophical and historical perspectives. For example, some of his work from the 1930s can be read as a critique of rising Nazi and Communist ideologies in Czechoslovakia. The philosophical implications of Čapek’s fiction are especially compelling when understood within the social and cultural context of the time.

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• 12 •

Zamyatin and the Nightmare of Technology Patrick A . M c Carthy The futuristic novel We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin is a powerful portrayal of how a repressive totalitarian state can dehumanize its citizens. Completed in 1921 but first published (in English translation) in 1924, We influenced George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-­Four (1949) and serves as a classic prototype for all modern psycho-­political dystopias. The following essay analyzes We in the context of Zamyatin’s other writings, explores the role of technology and machine imagery in the novel, and demonstrates how the author makes use of the Prometheus myth to depict how the products of human imagination can paradoxically be both the source of our freedom and the means of its d ­ estruction. This essay originally appeared in SFS 11, no. 2 (July 1984): 122–29.

In a 1918 essay entitled “Scythians?” Yevgeny Zamyatin set forth his belief that the reach of the true revolutionary should exceed his grasp.1 The question mark in his title signifies that Zamyatin doubted that the ideologue Ivanov-­Razumnik and other “Scythians” (Skify) were upholding the romantic ideals of the nomadic tribe from which this association of writers and intellectuals took its name. Reasserting the belief in perpetual revolution that the Scythians embraced before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Zamyatin defined the Scythian as “an eternal nomad” whose being revolts against the constraints of civilized existence. Thus, for Zamyatin, the Scythian is “the spiritual revolutionary, the romantic”; like the crucified Christ, he is the emblem of freedom. His enemy or antitype, however, is the oppressive, institutionalized Christ, “the grand inquisitor” whose mission is to stamp out freedom wherever it arises. Challenging the judgment 

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of Ivanov-­Razumnik, Zamyatin cites the writer Alexey Remizov as an example of a Scythian; as the grand inquisitor, we have N. V. Krylenko, a public prosecutor and a type of the people who, Zamyatin says, “have covered Russia with a pile of carcasses, who are dreaming of socialist-­Napoleonic wars in Europe—throughout the world, throughout the universe!” For Zamyatin, the true writer must be a Scythian, that is, a heretic and revolutionary constantly in revolt against the Krylenkos of the world. Inevitably, as Alex Shane observes, Zamyatin regarded the fate of the writer-­prophet as “a Faust’s eternal dissatisfaction with the present and the attainable” (52). Similar ideas appear in a 1923 essay entitled “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” where the Krylenko types are recognizable in what Zamyatin there calls the “dead-­alive” people, those who are like machines in that they “make no mistakes” and “produce only dead things.” The heretics, on the other hand, are like the Scythians: they are “alive-­alive” people, “constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.” Errors, Zamyatin asserts, “are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive.” Truth, however, can never really be fixed and mechanical, for “today’s truths become errors of tomorrow; there is no final number.”2 Between these two essays, Zamyatin wrote, but was denied permission to publish, his anti-­utopian novel We, which made its first appearance, in English translation, in 1924.3 Several ideas in these essays figure prominently in We: the reference to people who dream of socialist wars “throughout the universe” foreshadows the building of the spaceship Integral, whose mission is to help spread the gospel of Reason to other planets in order to release their inhabitants from the primitive state of freedom; the dichotomy of energy and entropy, introduced in the later essay, had already been developed as an important theme in We; and the declaration that “there is no final number” is logically derived from the conversation of I-­330 and D-­503 in chapter 30 of the novel. Such connections are obvious; less obvious, I believe, are the ways in which the essays might help us to reconcile the political and technological levels of meaning in Zamyatin’s futuristic nightmare fantasy, a novel that Zamyatin described as “a warning against the twofold danger which threatens humanity: the hypertrophic power of the machines and the hypertrophic power of the State” (qtd. in Shane 145). The logic behind that dual warning seems to be implied by the machine imagery used throughout We, and by the Promethean sequence in the novel that apparently developed out of Zamyatin’s involvement with the Scythian writers during the early years of the Soviet state. Criticism of We has tended to focus on one side of Zamyatin’s warning or 268 ]

Patri c k A . McCarthy

on the other. George Orwell, for example, called the novel “in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again.”4 Some other critics, emphasizing the political satire in the book, have regarded it as essentially an anti-­Bolshevik tract, a protest against the growing totalitarianism of Soviet Russia. In retrospect, however, it is possible to see that the focus on technological politics—or on the political implications of technology—is evident from the first page of We, where the narrator, D-­503, opens the first page of his diary by copying, “word for word,” the State newspaper’s announcement of the purpose of the Integral and the need for Numbers (citizens) to compose essays, poems, or other writings “on the greatness and beauty of the United State”; these compositions, in turn, will be the Integral ’s first cargo, a barrage of propaganda aimed at those unfortunate free beings who may live on other planets. Reduced at the beginning of his diary to the most mechanical of literary activities—copying an official announcement—D-­503 soon declares his intent to record what he sees and thinks, and to offer the result as “a derivative of our life, of our mathematical, perfect life in the United State” (1:4). Mechanical copying has given way to the expression of personal feelings; yet in keeping with his political conditioning D-­503 is unable to admit that he really enjoys the freedom of expression that a diary record will allow him: the diary, he insists, will record not just what he sees and thinks but, “to be more exact, the things we think.” To reassure himself of the orthodox nature of his undertaking, he entitles the record We. Throughout the book, D-­503 is almost always conscious of a desire to support the heavily regimented or mechanical structure of life in the United State, on the grounds that the life developed there is most consistent with reason and economy. The movement of the lathes and other machines used in building the Integral, for example, seems to him beautiful “because it is an unfree movement. Because the deep meaning of the dance [of the machines] is contained in its absolute, ecstatic submission, in the ideal non-­freedom” (2:6). The mechanical ideal of non-­freedom extends to all of society; and although some people have been known to revert to the primitive values of freedom and individualism, this “is only a case of small parts breaking; these may easily be repaired without stopping the eternal great march of the whole machine” (3:15). Later he notes with displeasure that “some Number has impeded the smooth running of the great State machine” (6:24). Throughout the book, the people of the State seem to be machines or parts of machines, a role that is suggested by the petroleum food they eat (5:22). Nor does D-­503 initially see this situation as undesirable: on the contrary, having awakened from a dream, he is horrified that

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his brain, which he had thought mechanically perfect—“this precise, clean, glittering mechanism, like a chronometer without a speck of dust on it”— could be subject to the irrational influence of the imagination (7:31). The model for the orderly scheduling of life in the United State is the Tables, which in turn are comparable to “that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature, the Official Railroad Guide” (3:12). Like the railroads of Zamyatin’s day, the Numbers of the United State run on schedule: The Tables transformed each one of us, actually, into a six-­wheeled steel hero of a great poem. Every morning, with six-­wheeled precision, at the same hour, at the same minute, we wake up, millions of us at once. At the very same hour, millions like one, we begin our work, and millions like one, we finish it. United into a single body with a million hands, at the very same second, designated by the Tables, we carry the spoons to our mouths; and at the same second we all go out to walk, go to the auditorium, to the halls for the Taylor exercises, and then to bed. (3:13) In short, the people are like automatons. Much of the conditioning needed to turn people into machines has been accomplished through the implementation of measures derived in large part from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) and other writings. Not only are there several specific references to Taylor (3:12–13, 4:18, 7:32, 8:39), but Taylor’s priorities of efficiency and standardization, his desire to bring the principles of shop management to bear upon the home, and his interest in “a control so extensive and intensive as to provide for the maintenance of all standards” (Copley xvi)5 are all reflected in Zamyatin’s United State. That the references to Taylorism have a general political significance is obvious enough; but they are also specifically directed against Lenin, who, in three essays published in April and May 1918 praised the Taylor system and argued for its immediate introduction into the Soviet economy.6 Lenin’s admiration for the Taylor system’s combination of “the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation” and “scientific advancements” (664) might surface in We in another context. Several times D-­503 compares some aspect of life in the United State with something from “ancient times”; and, like the comparison of the Tables to the Official Railroad Guide, the point always is that life is being perfected under the United State. Thus, he rejects the charge that the Operation Department—a sophisticated torture chamber—is akin to the Inquisition; to say this, he contends, “is as absurd as to compare a surgeon performing a tracheotomy with a highway cutthroat” simply because the scalpel is a kind of knife (15:77). In one sense, 270 ]

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of course, the argument is altogether false: the surgeon’s purpose in cutting the patient’s throat has nothing in common with the highwayman’s intentions, but the Operation Department and the Inquisition, as different as they may be in technological sophistication, are essentially alike in their purpose. In another sense, however, D-­503 is basically right to argue that one should judge a technology primarily by the ends for which it exists. What he fails to recognize is that the machines, and the rigid mentality that they serve and perpetuate, have become the masters of humanity. Ironically, the technological situation here bears little resemblance to the ideal of Leninist thought; instead, it is more like the decadent capitalist state that Marx protested against, in which “machines, invented to help man, have ended by becoming the symbols of his servitude” (Edwards 50). The dual vision of the machine as man’s potential liberator and his actual master helps to explain the strange account of the Prometheus myth given in We. As the rebellious demigod who was punished for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man, Prometheus has always been an ambiguous figure in Western literature: his act may be regarded as Satanically defiant and subversive or as Christlike in its self-­sacrifice. For the Romantics, however, the myth typically assumed two related forms, both positive: The re-­creation of the mythic culture-­hero followed two main lines. One was the conception of Prometheus as the archetype of the free creative artist, the original genius, the half-­divine “maker.” . . . The other conception, more familiar and more enduring, was that of the heroic, isolated rebel against repressive authority, divine and human. These interpretations, which could readily merge together, symbolized and strengthened the Romantic exalting of self-­expression over neoclassical restraints, and, later and more largely, the revolutionary struggle against political, social, and religious oppression and reaction. (Bush Pagan Myth, 40–41)7 In various ways, such writers as Blake, Byron, Goethe, and (above all) Shelley found the plight of Prometheus to be an appropriate symbol of the artist’s desire to express himself proudly and freely, and of the battle between imaginative energy and the rational or institutional restraints upon the imagination; typically, too, the Romantics associated sexual desire with the Promethean fires of the imagination. Given what Shane calls Zamyatin’s “essentially romanticist philosophy” (52), it is unsurprising that D-­503 exhibits several Promethean characteristics. Yet he is generally a timid rebel, a Prometheus malgré lui: his desire to express his feelings and ideas in his journal is subverted by his conditioned aversion to personal and idiosyn

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cratic elements; his sexual experience with I-­330 develops erratically, and she leads him into adventures whose consequences he fears; and in the end, he accepts the hard rock of Reason, undergoing a lobotomy on his imagination rather than struggling against his fate in true Promethean fashion. To read events as D-­503 reads them is therefore to accept the limitations of his essentially orthodox viewpoint, so that in the brief episode where the Prometheus myth is explicitly described we need to regard the incident from a somewhat different angle. Significantly, the Promethean theme surfaces during a public event at the Plaza of the Cube, where people feel somewhat like “the ancients . . . during their ‘church services.’” D-­503 adds, however, that while the ancients “served their nonsensical, unknown god, “the people of the United State serve a “rational god” who “gives us absolute truth” (9:43). Again the narrator has made a distinction between his era and ours, but has only succeeded in reinforcing the parallel between blind submission to orthodox Christianity and blind subservience to the United State. More importantly, however, the emphasis on their service to a god, even a rational one, puts the audience at the opposite end of the spectrum from the rebellious Prometheus, and makes it impossible for the Numbers assembled at the Cube to interpret the following events in their true light. The occasion is the execution of a criminal, apparently someone who has dared to assert his individuality against the will of the State. The execution is carried out by the Well-­Doer, or head of government; his instrument is the Machine, a device that dissolves the human body into its constituent elements through a “dissociation of matter” (9:46). Before the actual execution, however, a state poet reads some “iambic brass verses” that D-­503 cannot well remember, although he is convinced that “one could not choose more instructive or more beautiful parables” (9:44–45). What he does remember is the following: [The verses] dealt with the man who, his reason lost and lips like glass, stood on the steps and waited for the logical consequences of his own insane deeds. . . . A blaze. . . . Buildings were swaying in those iambic lines, and sprinkling upward their liquefied golden substance, they broke and fell. The green trees were scorched, their sap slowly ran out and they remained standing like black crosses, like skeletons. Then appeared Prometheus (that meant us): “. . . he harnessed fire With machines and steel 272 ]

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And fettered chaos with Law. . . .” The world was renovated; it became like steel—a sun of steel, trees of steel, men of steel. Suddenly an insane man “unchained the fire and set it free,” and again the world had perished. . . . (9:45) Superficially, the passage might appear to depend on a simple reversal— the reference to Prometheus as the law-­giver and protector of the status quo rather than as the revolutionary figure or liberator who is here regarded as an “insane man.” The reference to the “black crosses,” however, calls to mind the interpretation of Prometheus as a type of Christ and suggests that Zamyatin’s essay on the Scythians, with its distinction between the crucified Christ and the institutionalized Christ, might provide us with a gloss on this passage. The “insane man” who liberates the fire is the Prometheus who resembles the crucified Christ: like the true Scythian, he is an emblem of freedom, and therefore an object of fear to those who cannot face the insecurity and responsibility of human liberty. As in the Romantic conception of Prometheus, he is a Christlike figure whom the political establishment will regard, mistakenly, as Satanic. Yet the other figure, who creates a technology and builds a civilization upon it, is also Prometheus: originally a figure of energy and of the imagination, he evolves naturally into a rigid systematizer, much as Blake’s Orc (Prometheus) first revolts against, and then becomes, Urizen (Jupiter). The political-­technological connection is especially apparent in this poem, whose two figures parallel those on the stage: in his revolt against the rigidity of the State, the condemned man attempts, like the “insane man” of the poem, to set free the fire of the human imagination, while the Well-­Doer, who is in charge both of the literal machine (the instrument of execution) and the machine of the State government, resembles the “Prometheus” of the poem in his attempt to restrain the imaginative energies. That every revolution is capable of degenerating into a narrowly conformist and doctrinaire state is one implication of the Promethean sequence in We. As a corollary to this observation, we might add that the machinery we create—and this applies to the machinery of government as well as to technological marvels like the Integral—is in its inception the product of the open and lively imagination, but its end may be to thwart the kind of inquiring mentality that gave it birth. Translated into the political arena, the requirements of the machine shop—dependability, standardization, simple efficiency—become mediocrity, conformism, and the loss of aesthetic awareness. Raised in this environment, D-­503 cannot “see anything beautiful in flowers,” since he believes that “Only rational and useful things

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are beautiful” (9:46). This prejudice against natural beauty is a symptom of the sterile thought fostered by a machinelike state. Most of the events I have described so far occur rather early in We, before D-­503 begins his love affair with I-­330 and ventures outside the Green Wall that surrounds the United State. Throughout the remainder of the novel, D-­503 is torn between his instinctive desire for freedom and individual love, and his conditioned dependence upon the State. He never becomes a true rebel, unlike Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984. His confusion and ambivalence are resolved only when he is forced to submit to the operation that removes his imagination and makes him, at the end of the novel, little more than a robot. Ironically, in this final state D-­503 never could design anything so brilliant as the Integral, a triumph not only of technology but of the imagination. Earlier, when a doctor said that D-­503 should have the operation to remove his fancy, another doctor observed that he might need it to build the Integral (16:86). Again, the point is that technology is a product of the imagination, even though it may have the effect of impairing imagination in others. Meanwhile, without the operation D-­503 has failed to be what he believes he should be: a perfectly rational, and therefore mechanical, being. He entitles his record We, intending, like the Proletarian writers of Zamyatin’s day, to glorify “the collective and the machine” (Collins 42–43), but instead emphasizes the individual and the human; inside this Proletarian writer is a Scythian trying to avoid suffocation. The struggle of the imagination to free itself is dramatized most obviously in D-­503’s two trips beyond the Green Wall: first a trip underground, during which D-­503 seems for the first time to come alive; then the flight of the Integral, in which he and the revolutionary forces, the Mephi,8 fail in their attempt to seize control of the spaceship. The two episodes are related: in the first scene, a visionary or dreamlike sequence in which D-­503 first encounters the Mephi, he is really confronting forms of his own unfettered imagination, while in the second episode, the recapture of the Integral by forces of the United State signals the failure of the imagination to free itself and to gain control over the technology it has created. The same idea is played out in different form when a dream about his lover, I-­330, changes to nightmare: a ray of sunshine falling on her neck becomes a “cruel ray blade” (18:96) that seems about to behead her as he awakens. The lesson that D-­503 draws from this nightmarish sequence is that he is unfortunately subject to irrational influences; we might more accurately see that the sunlight’s transformation into a cruel blade is typical of the way the political and technological products of the imagination may become horrors. 274 ]

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From Zamyatin’s fundamentally Romantic point of view, the entire society of the United State, with its carefully regulated activity, its abolition of privacy, its repression of all opposition, and especially its resistance to all change, is the true nightmare. Early in the novel, D-­503 records his orthodox opinion that “the history of mankind . . . is a history of the transition from nomadic forms to more sedentary forms” (3:12). The “sedentary forms” are apparent throughout the novel; the “nomadic forms,” however, exist only beyond the Green Wall among the Mephi, who are clearly Zamyatin’s fictional version of the Scythian writers, Promethean figures whose imagination roves continually. The polar opposition of nomadic and sedentary forms is expressed elsewhere as the dichotomy of energy and entropy (28:153–54, 30:163); here, as in his essay “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” Zamyatin demonstrates his opposition to the entropic state of perfect equilibrium, which in political terms means quietude and a collectivist mentality. Similar to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in its rejection of a perfectly rational society modeled upon the Crystal Palace and the ant heap (which in We become the Integral and “all the cells of the gigantic hive” [34:182]),9 Zamyatin’s novel is at heart a protest against the sterile and rigid concept of a final revolution, or a static society—against a world ruled by a mechanism rather than by the human spirit. It is against this idea that man should emulate the machine—not against the machines themselves, but against the ascendancy of technology over the imagination that created it—that Zamyatin very effectively directs his satire. Notes

1. “Scythians” in Ginsburg (21–33). 2. “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters” in Ginsburg (107–12). 3. Zamiatin, We, trans. Gregory Zilboorg. Chapter and page numbers refer to this translation. 4. Review of We reprinted in In Front of your Nose, 1945–1950, vol. 4 of Orwell’s The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Lettters (75). 5. Taylor’s insistence on control is illustrated by his statement “If a man won’t do what is right, make him” (qtd. by Copley, 183). On Zamyatin’s use of Taylor, see Rhodes; on Taylor and Taylorism, see Haber. 6. “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, “Pravda, 28 April 1918; “Six Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” Bednota, 9 May 1918; “ ‘Left-­Wing’ Childishness and the Petty-­Bourgeois Mentality, “Pravda, 9, 10, and 11 May 1918—all in Lenin, Selected Works (2: 664, 683, 704). See also Haber (151–52). 7. See also his Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (78–79). 8. The name Mephi, derived from Mephistopheles, not only suggests a specific parallel with Goethe’s Faust but implies a broader correspondence between Zamya

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tin and such Romantics as Blake and Shelley, for whom the heroic rebel—like Blake’s Orc, representative of imaginative energy and desire—is often a sort of devil. See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where Blake associates energy with Milton’s Satan and Reason with the God of Paradise Lost, adding, “Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Likewise, the putative author of We, D-­503, is a true poet and ally of the Mephi without knowing it, until the extent of his heresy becomes apparent to him, at which point he retreats into the safety of blind, mechanical acquiescence to the State, represented by the godlike Well-­Doer. 9. Zamyatin’s debt to Dostoevsky has often been noted. See, for example, Jackson (150–57), Shane (141–44); Warrick (63–77), and Edwards (57–58, 85–86).

Works Cited

Bush, Douglas. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. ———. Pagan Myth and Christian Tradition in English Poetry. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968. Collins, Christopher. Evgenij Zamjatin: An Interpretive Study. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Copley, Frank Barkley. Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Bros., 1923. Reprint, New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969. Edwards, T.R.N. Three Russian Writers and the Irrational. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Ginsburg, Mirra, ed. and trans. A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Haber, Samuel. Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Jackson, Robert Louis. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Russian Literature. The Hague: Mouton. 1958. Rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Lenin, Vladmir Illich. Selected Works. 3 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1968. Rhodes, Carolyn H. “Frederick Winslow Taylor’s System of Scientific Management in Zamyatin’s We.” Journal of General Education 28 (Spring 1976): 31–42. Shane, Alex M. The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Warrick, Patricia. “The Sources of Zamyatin’s We in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.” Extrapolation 17 (1975): 63–77. Zamiatin, Eugene. We. Translated by Gregory Zilboorg. 1924. New York: Dutton, 1952. 276 ]

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Afterword

The article reprinted here is based on a paper I presented at the 1983 Northeast MLA meeting. Its argument, however, emerged from my class English 383: Literature of Science Fiction, in which we read We as an exemplary dystopia. In that respect the article is typical of much of my published scholarship on sf, and on some writers outside the field: my research interests often start with ideas I developed while preparing to teach a course—or even, sometimes, in the middle of class. For example, in spring 1984 I taught both the sf course and a survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-­century English literature. In the first course, having said that Stapledon’s Last and First Men resembled an epic, I gave Paradise Lost as an example of an epic. After noting a handful of similarities I realized that Milton’s poem was not only an epic but the epic Stapledon seemed to have in mind for his first book—much as he had The Divine Comedy in mind a few years later when he wrote Star Maker. In the same semester, a discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the survey course not long after my other class read Wells’s The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds led me to see several connections between Wells’s early sf and Conrad’s tale. As soon as the semester ended I began writing “Last and First Men as Miltonic Epic,” (SFS, November 1984) and an article on Conrad and Wells that appeared in the March 1986 Journal of Modern Literature. The Zamyatin article and the others I have mentioned are also typical of my work on sf in another way: I take science fiction seriously as a literary genre, often referring to mainstream literary or cultural texts in my work on sf. Other examples include studies of: Bester’s The Stars My Destination, as read through a Blakean lens (SFS, March 1983); Blish’s incorporation of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into A Case of Conscience (SFS, March 1988); Ballard’s use of allusions—to Donne, Keats, Conrad, Joyce, and Eliot, among others—in The Drowned World (SFS, July 1997); and Dick’s references to Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Paradoxa, 1999–2000). In working on science fiction this way I try to resist its marginalization and maintain its connections with other genres, even as I recognize its distinct history. I try to do this in my classes as well, which is one reason why English 383 is named The Literature of Science Fiction.



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• 13 •

“The Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe Type of Story ” Hugo Gernsback’s History of Science Fiction Gary Westfahl In describing the origins and the evolution of science fiction, a growing number of today’s literary historians view the American pulp magazines of the 1920s and the editorial role of Hugo Gernsback as pivotal. Such was not always the case. Recognition of their importance to the development of the genre is (partly if not largely) due to the efforts of one sf critic, Gary Westfahl. The following is one of Westfahl’s early pioneering essays on Gernsback that sought to identify him as the first to invent and promulgate the idea of science fiction as a separate, independent genre with its own history. This essay originally appeared in SFS 19, no. 3 (November 1992): 340–53.

While the importance of Hugo Gernsback in science fiction may be debated, critics of all schools can accept him as the first person to create and announce something resembling a history of sf. Some critics before Gernsback discussed earlier works now seen as sf, but they did not treat sf as a separate category and did not distinguish its texts from other forms of non-­mimetic fiction: for example, Julian Hawthorne’s 1891 discussion of “romantic writers” grouped together works by Plato, Sir Philip Sidney, Jonathan Swift, Percy Greg, Ignatius Donnelly, Edward Bellamy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling (9–10). On the other hand, some previous critics seemed aware of science fiction as a separate category, but they spoke mainly in the future tense—calling for a genre of scientific fiction and 278 ]

referring to few if any earlier works: Félix Bodin in 1834 claimed that there existed no example of “the epic of the future” (Alkon 8) and William Wilson in 1851 noted only one text, R. H. Horne’s The Poor Artist, that exemplified “Science-­Fiction” (Moskowitz 312). So it was left to Gernsback both to identify sf as a distinct form of literature and to cite a number of its past and present works, establishing in the process three major periods in its history.1 To be sure, the format and style of Gernsback’s presentation did not resemble that of conventional literary history: instead of writing a monograph, he made scattered comments on important texts in editorials, blurbs, and responses to letters in Amazing Stories and other magazines, and implicitly classified other works as science fiction by reprinting them in those magazines. It is true, of course, that he did not approach the subject of sf history with the attitude of a scholar: he was also interested in publishing a magazine and making money. Some works by prominent authors may have been reprinted because they were inexpensive or because Gernsback thought they would be popular with readers; and these and other prominent authors may have been featured or mentioned because he thought their names would add prestige to his undertaking.2 Still, questionable motives do not necessarily produce inferior results, and they certainly provide no reason to leave Gernsback’s achievements unexamined. In presenting the works he chose to include in the history of sf, Gernsback claimed to rely on a formula that modern critics would regard as naive and rigid: the work must be a narrative; it must incorporate passages of scientific explanation; and it must describe an imaginary but scientifically logical new invention or breakthrough. Blurbs to stories reprinted in Amazing Stories impose these odd priorities even when they do not seem to reflect the actual circumstances and purposes of the story’s creation. For example, presenting Verne’s A Trip to the Center of the Earth, he wrote: “Not only was Jules Verne a master of the imaginative type of fiction, but he was a scientist of high caliber. . . . Instead of boring a hole into the bowels of the Earth, Jules Verne was probably the first to think of taking the reader to unexplored depths through the orifice of an extinct volcano. He argues, correctly, that a dead crater would prove . . . perhaps the best route for such exploration” (Amz 1:101, May 1926).3 And he described H. G. Wells’s “The Crystal Egg” in this manner: Mr. Wells’ imagination is not running loose—he knows his science— and while the story at first glance may seem entirely too fantastic, no one knows but that it may, 5,000 years from now be quite tame and of everyday occurrence.

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If a civilization on another world were sometime to communicate with us, there might be thousands of methods, to us undreamt of, by which this could be achieved. The crystal egg method Mr. Wells uses in this story may be one of them. We who are accustomed to radio and who can bring voices out of the thin air with a pocket radio receptor, will not think that the crystal egg is impossible of fulfillment at some future date. (Amz 1:129, May 1926) In these statements, Gernsback implies that Verne wrote A Trip to the Center of the Earth in order to suggest such an underground exploration, that Wells wrote “The Crystal Egg” in order to stimulate interest in a possible new means of communication, and that both wrote to provide readers with accurate scientific information.4 In establishing the broad parameters of his sf history, Gernsback first described the time from the Middle Ages to 1800 as a kind of anticipatory era of “proto sf ” (to use the usual modern term): Scientifiction is not a new thing on this planet. While Edgar Allan Poe probably was the first to conceive the idea of a scientific story, there are suspicions that there were other scientifiction authors before him. Perhaps they were not such outstanding figures in literature, and perhaps they did not write what we understand today as scientifiction at all. Leonardo da Vinci . . . while he was not really an author of scientifiction, nevertheless had enough prophetic vision to create a number of machines in his own mind that were only to materialize centuries later. . . . There may have been other scientific prophets, if not scientifiction writers, before his time, but the past centuries are so beclouded, and there are so few manuscripts of such literature in existence today, that we cannot really be sure who was the real inventor of scientifiction. In the eleventh century there also lived a Franciscan monk, the amazing as well as famous Roger Bacon (1214–1294). He . . . foresaw many of our present-­day wonders. But as an author of scientifiction, he had to be extremely careful, because in those days it was not “healthy” to predict new and startling inventions. (Amz 1:195, June 1926) Interestingly, Gernsback did not dismiss this period on the grounds that there existed insufficient awareness of “science,” either as a concept or in its particulars; instead, he argued, while there were sporadic individuals in those times who possessed sufficient scientific knowledge and imagination 280 ]

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to write sf, they lacked a satisfactory—and safe—literary outlet for their visions.5 The second era of science fiction, which might be termed its developmental period, began in the nineteenth century with the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In Gernsback’s first editorial for Amazing Stories, he offered this capsule history: “Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of ‘scientifiction.’ It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread. Jules Verne, with his amazing romances, also cleverly interwoven with a scientific thread, came next. A little later came H. G. Wells, whose scientifiction stories, like those of his forerunners, have become famous and immortal” (Amz 1:3, April 1926). The works of Poe, Verne, and Wells were in Gernsback’s eyes the most important progenitors of science fiction; indeed, the statement that qualifies as Gernsback’s very first definition of sf is simply a list of their names: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” (3). And these three names are continually the focus of Gernsback’s surveys of older sf; introducing Air Wonder Stories, for example, he said, “Years ago, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his immortal ‘Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal [sic],’ as well as ‘The Balloon Hoax.’ Later, the illustrious Jules Verne gave the world his ‘Five Weeks in a Balloon.’ Still later, H. G. Wells startled us with his incomparable ‘The War in the Air.’ All of these famous stories, it should be noted, fall in the class of scientific fiction. . . .” (AWS 1:5, July 1929).6 However, these were not the only writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that Gernsback accepted as important contributors to sf history. One such writer was Luis Senarens, nineteenth-­century author of “invention stories.” Though Gernsback did not include Senarens in lists of major authors and never reprinted any of his dime novels, he twice published pictorial articles about him, entitled “The American Jules Verne” (S&I, October 1920) and “An American Jules Verne” (Amz, June 1928), suggesting that he could be compared to Verne, at least as an imaginer of wonderful machines (the focus of the articles). “The Moon Hoax” (1835) by Richard Adams Locke appeared in the September 1926 Amazing Stories and “The Diamond Lens” (1858) by Fitz James O’Brien in the December 1926 issue. H. Rider Haggard was mentioned by an editor who said, in response to a reader’s request, “We have Rider Haggard in mind” for a possible reprint (Amz 2:515, August 1927), though none ever appeared. Edward Bellamy was listed by Gernsback along with Poe, Verne, and Wells as writers who “have proved themselves real prophets” (Amz 1:3, April 1926). Garrett P.

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Serviss was named by an editor along with Verne and Wells as “three of our favorite authors” (Amz 2:413, July 1927), was called one of “the better known scientifiction writers” by Gernsback (Amz 2:625, October 1927), and was represented by three works reprinted in Amazing Stories. A revised edition of M. P. Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud was reviewed in the December 1930 Wonder Stories (761). And Arthur Conan Doyle was named in an editor’s letter-­response citing as earlier sf “the Wells, Verne, and Conan Doyle classics” (WS 3:132, June 1931). In associating writers whose careers began in the nineteenth century with science fiction, Gernsback, unlike later historians, did not attribute their work to larger events in that era; they were rather persons ahead of their time, “prophets” who anticipated both the value of scientific progress and the value of literature about scientific progress. All on his own, Poe “conceive[d] the idea of a scientific story.” Thus, according to Gernsback, nineteenth-­century sf was simply the product of isolated individual geniuses. To modern critics, Gernsback’s account of sf history before 1900 will also seem inadequate because of major omissions; and lacking a background in literature, Gernsback and his associates may have been unaware of possible sf precursors like Johannes Kepler’s Somnium, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, or Edward Bulwer-­Lytton’s The Coming Race.7 In some cases, however, comments by Gernsback and his editors in Amazing Stories show that they were aware of or informed about certain major works but chose not to include them in the history of the genre. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, for example, is mentioned in two responses to hostile letters (Amz 2:99, April 1927; 2:310, June 1927), but even though the circumstances were ideal to identify Swift’s work as sf, the editor failed to do so. A later response noted that “A writer such as Charles Lamb or Nathaniel Hawthorne, could consider the most ordinary scene and make it literature. But neither could have dipped into science for their subjects, because it would be unfamiliar ground for them” (Amz 3:370, July 1928), thus decreeing that those men never wrote sf. If the only motive Gernsback and his editors had had for discussing sf history was to find famous names to drop that could add prestige to the genre, they would have seized upon such examples instead of neglecting to do so. Gernsback’s third era of science fiction, the modern period, is immodestly marked by the emergence of Hugo Gernsback. At one time, Gernsback regarded the crucial date as 1908, when he started publishing Modern Electrics, a magazine that included an sf story in each issue: “I started the movement of science fiction in America in 1908 through my first magazine, 282 ]

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‘MODERN ELECTRICS.’ At that time it was an experiment. Science fiction authors were scarce. There were not a dozen worth mentioning in the entire world” (SWS 1:5, June 1929). Over twenty years later, he chose to be a bit more precise in setting a date for the beginning of “modern science fiction”: Usually authors not quite familiar with the writer’s [Gernsback’s] early work set the date of the start of modern science fiction in the year 1926, which date coincides with the first science fiction magazine, “Amazing Stories.” . . . We would like to correct this view for historical purposes. Modern science fiction, like so many other endeavors, had an orderly evolution. . . . The date which the writer would like to fix is the year 1911, not 1926. 1911 was the year in which the writer’s novel, RALPH 124C 41+, ran serially in “Modern Electrics,” which at that time had a circulation of around 100,000 copies. The novel caused so much comment and brought so much mail from readers that, at the end of the serial in 1912, it was found necessary to continue science fiction in some manner. . . .8 Still, Gernsback sometimes employed the commonly accepted starting date for “the Gernsback era,” the appearance of Amazing Stories in 1926: “Not until 1926, when I launched my first Science Fiction magazine, was any concerted movement possible. . . . The movement since 1926, has grown by leaps and bounds until today there are literally hundreds of thousands of adherents to Science Fiction scattered through the entire civilized world” (WS 5:1061, May 1934). Whether one chooses the date 1908, 1911, or 1926, Gernsback clearly believed that the beginning of modern sf should be attributed in part to his own actions, statements, and publications; however, he did not claim that all developments and changes in modern sf stemmed from his influence. On what grounds did Gernsback declare that the early twentieth century was the third and most important period in sf history? First, it was at this time—not the nineteenth century as others later maintained—that science and its products truly became part of everyday life. As he argued in 1929, Science—Mechanics—the Technical Arts—they surround us on every hand, nay, enter deeply into our very lives. The telephone, radio, talking motion pictures, television, X-­rays, Radium, super-­aircraft and dozens of others claim our constant attention, We live and breathe day by day in a Science saturated atmosphere. The wonders of modern science no longer amaze—we accept each

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new discovery as a matter of course. . . . No wonder, then, that anybody who has any imagination at all clamors for fiction of the Jules Verne and H. G. Wells type. . . . (SWS 1:5, June 1929) In the 1920s, then, one need not be a prophet to recognize the importance of science and write informed fiction on the subject. With this expanding awareness of science, the twentieth century next brought, Gernsback asserted, an increase in the amount of science fiction being written. Though it was not his intent, he provided tacit evidence for this claim by reprinting a number of contemporary works in Amazing Stories.9 A few came from his own scientific magazines, like George Allan England’s “The Thing from—Outside” (April 1926) and Jacque Morgan’s Mr. Fosdick stories (June, July, August 1926). Some were from other popular magazines: in 1926, Austin Hall’s “The Man Who Saved the Earth,” Ellis Parker Butler’s “An Experiment in Gyro Hats,” and Murray Leinster’s “The Mad Planet”; in 1927, Leinster’s “The Red Dust,” Captain H. G. Bishop’s “On the Martian Way,” Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot, A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” and The Moon Pool, T. S. Stribling’s “The Green Splotches,” and Harry Stephen Keeler’s “John Jones’s Dollar.” Gernsback also named Victor Rousseau’s The Messiah of the Cylinder as a possible reprint (Amz 1:99, May 1926). One 1927 story came from a more respectable source, the Yale Review: Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue-­Culture King.” And in the 1930s, Gernsback was energetic in recognizing and reprinting the science fiction of contemporary European writers, in this way implicitly recognizing a tradition of sorts involving such writings in other countries.10 In gathering together these disparate American, British, and European writers, Gernsback acknowledged another new feature of the third era in sf history: the emergence of people who might be considered, in an old-­ fashioned sense, sf scholars. Gernsback described himself as an expert in the field: having “made scientifiction a hobby since I was 8 years old,” he “probably [knew] as much about it as anyone” (Amz 1:1085, March 1927). With great fanfare, he announced in July 1926 the addition to the editorial staff of Wilbur C. Whitehead, “a scientifiction fan of the first rank,” and C. A. Brandt, “the greatest living expert on scientifiction. . . . There is not a work of this kind that has appeared in the last fifty years with which Mr. Brandt is not fully conversant” (Amz 1:390). Thus, not only were there more sf stories being written, but there were more people who knew about these stories as sf. With all of this knowledge available, then, Gernsback claimed the ability 284 ]

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to obtain and make use of a broader knowledge of previous sf than any earlier commentator, and he asserted at one point that he had “a list of 600 to 700 scientifiction stories” (Amz 1:195, June 1926).11 While Gernsback did not attribute these developments—the growing prominence of modern science, the increase in the amount of sf published, and the wider and deeper awareness of sf—to his own efforts, he did argue that he and his magazines were contributing to the growth of science fiction by effectively teaching a new generation of writers how to write sf. In itself, publishing a variety of sf stories and surrounding them with his commentary could have this effect; in addition, Gernsback and his editors claimed to be making particular efforts to train individual writers. One letter response stated, “we think Amazing Stories is doing its part in developing new authors” (Amz 3:272, June 1928). In 1930, Gernsback announced, “For the guidance of new authors, we have prepared a pamphlet entitled ‘Suggestions for Authors” ’ (AWS 1:677, Feb 1930). And a letter response described other efforts to educate writers: “Science Fiction is in its infancy, and . . . the publishers of this, and our sister magazines, spend hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars in advertising for Science Fiction writers, advising them, often teaching them the finer points and sometimes the fundamentals of their craft” (SWS 1:1143, May 1930).12 With the new prominence of science, more sf being written, a better awareness of the genre, and ongoing efforts to educate writers, the third age of science fiction, in Gernsback’s view, was destined to be its greatest. In 1926, Gernsback said, “We believe the era of scientifiction is just commencing” (Amz 1:483, September 1926). In the September 1928 Amazing Stories, the announcement of the results of a “$300.00 Scientifiction Prize Contest” described sf as “a new and distinct movement in literature that is gaining more impetus as the months roll by. There was a time when a Scientifiction book or novel was a scarcity. Now, with Amazing Stories Monthly and Amazing Stories Quarterly eagerly championing the cause, Scientifiction has excited the attention of hundreds of thousands of people who never knew what the term meant before” (3:519). And he noted in the same year that “until very recently, there were not enough scientifiction stories to go around. . . . But times are rapidly changing. . . . More and more authors of the better kind are taking to scientifiction as the proverbial duck takes to water. . . . Already, in our editorial opinion, our modern authors have far eclipsed both Jules Verne and H. G. Wells” (ASQ 1:147, Spring 1928). The general structure of Gernsback’s history of science fiction is thus clear: first, a long period of relative inactivity, when potential authors of

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sf were hampered by the lack of a supportive environment and appropriate medium; second, the nineteenth century, when a few prescient writers emerged who dealt imaginatively with science in their works; and third, the twentieth century, when the increased impact of science and a growing awareness of sf—the latter in part inspired by himself—greatly enlarged the field and would eventually lead to even greater achievements.13 In letters to Amazing Stories, one sees some readers responding enthusiastically to Gernsback’s vision of sf history and even adopting its parameters. To be sure, as is regularly noted, many complained about the older stories reprinted—but others appreciated them.14 One letter writer addressed the editor as someone with real curiosity about sf history: “It may interest you to know that I have met with an allusion to the ‘Moon Hoax’ which may interest you; it is from the North American Review, No. 89, October, 1835 (the writer is discussing Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus): ‘In short, our private opinion is, as we have remarked, that the whole story (i.e., Sartor Resartus) . . . has about as much foundation in truth as the late entertaining account of Sir John Herschel’s discoveries in the moon’” (Amz 2:1180, March 1927). And after Gernsback deemphasized older reprints in the 1930s, readers continued to request them—so much so that Gernsback felt obliged to write an editorial response, “On Reprints,” where he claimed the older reprints were either outdated or unavailable (WSQ 4:99, Winter 1933). Not only did readers accept as genuine, and share, Gernsback’s interest in sf history, but some also accepted and restated his version of its history. Consider these comments from a reader of Science Wonder Stories: Science fiction is a new endeavor. Until the advent of Mr. Gernsback, it was strongly individualized, resting in such luminaries as Wells, Verne, Poe, etc. But Mr. Gernsback knew that imagination was inherent in everyone; that suitable expression could be molded by just a little coaxing or incentive. So from all America he culled the outposts of science fiction writers. . . . we ought to keep in mind that science fiction is yet a scrubby infant. Tolerate its indiscretions as you would a child’s. (1:1142–43, May 1930) A young Jack Williamson contributed a reader editorial, “The Amazing Work of Wells and Verne,” where he argued that “while this form of literature was invented by an American, Edgar Allan Poe, and while America is the land of scientifiction today, Wells and Verne were its first two masters” (ASQ 2:140, Winter 1929). James T. Brady, Jr., wrote another editorial in an earlier issue, “History of Scientific Fiction,” which accepted Gernsback’s periods while adding names to the canon: 286 ]

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Until the time of Poe . . . there was no scientific literature of an influential character written, with the exception of a few stories by Bergerac (Voyages to the Sun and Moon) and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels). The evolution of the type really begins with stories such as “Scheherazade’s Thousand and Second Tale” [sic], “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “The Balloon Hoax.” For fifteen years after Poe there was a little fiction of this kind written. In 1862, however, Jules Verne turned his pen toward the scientific story and published “Five Weeks in a Balloon.” . . . In 1895 appeared Wells’ “Time Machine.” It was Wells who carried on the tradition in England and by giving impetus to the scientific-­fiction idea and purifying its technic [sic] paved the way for the numerous writers of the present day. Until this time little had been done since Poe’s death in America. There had been one little known writer, Lu Senarens, whose stories (written about 1890) have proved marvelously prophetic. . . . After Wells, however, many American writers entered the field. At the head of a long list are such names as A. Merritt, Garrett P. Serviss and A. Hyatt Verrill. (ASQ 1:571, Fall 1928) And did Gernsback’s version of sf history directly influence later scholars? There is one intriguing connection: in 1934, Gernsback began the Science Fiction League, with its activities reported in each issue of Wonder Stories. In “The Science Fiction League” column of the May 1935 issue, P. Schuyler Miller (later known as an sf reviewer and collector) is quoted as saying, “there is one piece of work which should certainly be undertaken. . . . a complete and accurate science-­fiction bibliography” (6:1519). The column editor agreed, asking for responses and specifying, “We particularly want items published a long time ago—ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years or longer” (6:1520). Two months later, the column reported that “J. O. Bailey of Chapel Hill, N.C., has been collecting rare science-­fiction for many years and asks us to wait until his bibliography, which he is putting a great deal of work into, is completed, before we go ahead and publish one of our own. . . . We are sure, from the interesting letter he sent us, that his knowledge of all published science-­fiction is practically unlimited and the LEAGUE would probably lose a lot without his aid” (7:214). It is not clear whether Bailey, who later published the first academic study of science fiction, Pilgrims through Time and Space (1947), actually shared his work with the League or made use of the bibliographies sent to Wonder Stories by members of the League; but clearly he was at least a regular reader of Gernsback’s maga

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zine; and the research inspired by the League may have contributed to or stimulated others’ studies of the subject.15 In any event, comparing Gernsback’s sf history with later efforts, one notes certain parallels between them. Gernsback’s identifications of writers of sf have endured: all the writers Gernsback embraced still appear in sf histories (albeit some of them only as peripheral figures), and his broad outline (a period of relative inactivity before 1800, a period of significant development in the nineteenth century, and a modern period beginning in the twentieth century) is generally followed.16 Of course, later histories differ from Gernsback’s, first in their thoroughness and criteria for selection, which are more sophisticated than Gernsback’s demands for scientific content and scientific prophecies.17 Later historians usually choose slightly different points in time to mark transitions between eras—Mary Shelley, not Poe, as the beginning of sf, and Wells or John W. Campbell as the founder of the modern period—and they typically offer different explanations for those changes—focusing less on individuals to identify larger cultural and literary developments to explain the growth of sf.18 One final difference—worth examining at length—is that Gernsback assigned himself a prominent role in sf history, while later historians often minimize his importance. To explain this tendency, one must consider Gernsback’s consistently poor relationships with his authors. His experience with H. G. Wells exemplifies his problems in this area. His letters to Wells suggest that he badly wanted Wells to offer a response to, or gesture of support for, his efforts to promote and publish “scientifiction.” His letter of 4 May 1926 said, “Amazing Stories is a new magazine, facing an uphill fight for recognition by the reading public, and there can be no question about your interest in a magazine of this kind, which is the first to come out with scientifiction. It really deserves your best cooperation to help put this publication on its feet. . . . we have arranged for you to receive a complimentary copy of this magazine each month.” Later, he again sought substantive comment from Wells: “The readers of Amazing Stories are all very much interested in your writings, as you probably have noted from the discussions appearing in the columns of our magazine. . . . we should like to publish a letter from you on any subject you may choose—preferably scientifiction. This would lend a personal touch for our readers. Perhaps a few words as to your impression of this magazine might not be amiss. . . . May not we hear from you?” (5 May 1927). Apparently, Wells never responded to these appeals and never said anything about “scientifiction.” Since he was then busy cementing his reputation as a serious writer and world statesman, the last thing Wells would have been 288 ]

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interested in, no doubt, was a new image as a writer of “scientifiction.” But Gernsback also spoiled what slim chance he had to get Wells’s support by gradually slipping into bad habits—not getting prior permission to reprint stories, making late payments, and not making full payments;19 and Wells ended the relationship in a letter dated 29 January 1929: “Mr. Wells would prefer that you do not publish any more of his stories.” Similar habits poisoned dealings with other writers. After selling Gernsback The Master Mind of Mars for $1,250, Edgar Rice Burroughs was appalled to receive payments in the form of “trade acceptances” rather than cash; and though he eventually accepted this arrangement, he avoided more business with Gernsback by demanding $800 when Gernsback asked to reprint Beyond Thirty (Porges 756). According to L. Sprague de Camp, H. P. Lovecraft, having submitted “The Colour Out of Space” to Amazing Stories, learned in June 1927 that it had been accepted: “Getting paid for it, however, presented a problem. After Lovecraft wrote many dunning letters, the magazine sent him a check for $25 the following May. This was fifth of a cent a word—a ridiculous price. Thereafter, Lovecraft referred to Gernsback as ‘Hugo the rat” ’ (282). Jack Williamson notes that Gernsback “bought perhaps a quarter-­million words of my fiction, and he paid for it rather reluctantly. After he paid for the first few stories at half a cent a word (sometimes less), he stopped paying me altogether. Finally, I got an attorney associated with the American Fiction Guild to force Gernsback to send me payment. I gather other writers had similar experiences with him” (238). One can reasonably ask why Gernsback, when reasonably active in describing and reprinting worthwhile older examples of sf, was so negligent about the other necessary aspect of his effort to establish the genre: developing and supporting talented new writers. Gernsback defended his penny-­ pinching as a matter of financial need, though one can question his sincerity.20 Perhaps Gernsback secretly enjoyed taking advantage of writers; perhaps, with no experience in producing a fiction magazine, he did not realize that such a project demanded treating writers with fairness and civility.21 Regardless of his motives, Gernsback’s policies undermined his own position in sf history: in the 1930s his failure to pay promptly and fairly drove major writers to Astounding Stories and the Sloane Amazing Stories, which contributed to the demise of Wonder Stories; his failure to endure in the field seemed to define him as a peripheral figure; and since historians often rely on the testimony of writers, Gernsback gave them no reason to remember him fondly, adding to the impression that he was an unimportant and rather unpleasant person.

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To understand Gernsback’s significance, then, one must turn away from writers and consider the responses of readers and other evidence of his impact on the field. Indeed, while scholars may properly examine Gernsback’s suspect motives and questionable business practices, nothing alters the fact that he wrote what he wrote and printed what he printed, and that people responded to and were influenced by what he wrote and what he printed. The pertinent question is not whether Gernsback was a saint; it is whether he warrants a prominent place in the history of sf. And that is the question that demands further critical attention. Notes

1. I discuss the general importance of Gernsback as an sf critic, in contrast to earlier critics, in “On The True History of Science Fiction” and in “An Idea of Significant Import.” 2. This charge dates back to an early letter to Amazing Stories that tells Gernsback, “You seek prestige through the names of such old Masters as Jules Verne . . .” (Amz 1:981, January 1927). 3. Most of the quotations in this article are from editorials and articles signed by Hugo Gernsback. The quotations from unsigned blurbs to stories in Amazing are ascribed to Gernsback on the basis of Sam Moskowitz’s claim that “Gernsback himself . . . wrote the editorials and the majority of the blurbs for the stories” (Explorers 227). Other critics, including Paul Carter, George Slusser, and Alexei Panshin, have routinely credited Gernsback with writing certain blurbs. Since there is no similar consensus on who wrote the responses to readers’ letters, I assign them to an anonymous “editor” and suspect that T. O’Conor Sloane, associate editor of Amazing Stories, wrote most of them. 4. Other instances may be cited where Gernsback apparently distorted stories in order to classify them as sf, like his specious defense of A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool as sf in “Amazing Creations” (Amz 2:109, May 1927); and Paul Carter comments that his blurb to Wells’s “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” “managed tenuously to define the tale as science fiction . . . surely this was straining at a gnat” (7). 5. This tentative embrace of writers before 1800 as at least potential authors of science fiction, however, seems to conflict with an earlier editorial: “Two hundred years ago, stories of this kind were not possible” because science was not then a part of everyday life (Amz 1:3, April 1926). 6. While Gernsback routinely celebrated the triumvirate of Poe, Verne, and Wells in the 1920s and 1930s—even after he stopped reprinting their works—his comments in the 1950s and 1960s, as in his “Guest Editorial,” mention only Verne and Wells (Amz 35:5–7, 93, April 1961), and a later remark seems to deny that Poe wrote science ­fiction: Let me clarify the term Science-­Fiction. When I speak of it, I mean the truly, scientific, prophetic Science-­Fiction with the full accent on SCIENCE. I emphatically do not mean the fairy tale brand, the weird or fantastic type of what mistakenly masquerades under the name of Science-­Fiction today. I find no fault with fairy tales, 290 ]

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weird and fantastic stories. Some of them are excellent for their entertainment value, as amply proved by Edgar Allan Poe and other masters, but when they are advertised as Science-­Fiction, then I must firmly protest. (“The Impact of Science-­ Fiction on World Progress,” SF+ 1:2, March 1953). 7. Years later, Gernsback apologized for one major omission in his history. In 1961, P. Schuyler Miller commented in his Analog book-­review column that “I have always wondered why, in [the reprints in Gernsback’s magazines], we were not given at least one of the stories of the acknowledged Russian pioneer in the theory and practice of rocket flight, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky” (67:162, May 1961). Gernsback replied that neither he nor Brandt had been aware of Tsiolkovsky’s fiction: At one time [Brandt] brought to my attention the name of Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky. I had never heard of him before 1926, and the book Brandt was talking about had nothing to do with Tsiolkovsky’s science fiction, but rather with his theoretical space flight and rockets. As far as I can remember, there wasn’t then in existence an English translation of Tsiolkovsky’s early work, and while I am fluent in French and German, I cannot read Russian. It would seem that neither Brandt nor I knew of the story “Beyond the Planet Earth.” If I had heard about it, it is certain that we would have run it sooner or later in Amazing Stories or Amazing Stories Annual. (Letter to Miller, Analog 69:168, March 1962) 8. The Evolution of Modern Science Fiction (New York, 1952). This pamphlet, found in the library of the University of California at Santa Barbara, was apparently privately printed by Gernsback as a guide to his sf publications before 1926, probably in connection with his appearance at the 1952 World Science Fiction Convention. 9. While Gernsback was usually frank in admitting that older stories and “classic” novels were reprints, he rarely acknowledged in blurbs that recent stories were not originals; still, some readers recognized them as reprints. Thus, even though the short stories in the first issue of Amazing Stories were not explicitly described as reprints, Gernsback felt obliged to add this note in the next issue: “Some of our readers seem to have obtained the erroneous idea that Amazing Stories publishes only reprints, that is, stories that have appeared in print before. This is not the case . . .” (Amz 1:135, May 1926). While Gernsback’s coyness regarding reprints did not fool all his readers, it can be a problem for scholars trying to sort out which stories were originals and which were not; Michael Ashley, for example, calls G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Coming of the Ice” (June 1926) the first original story to appear in the magazine (52); but Wertenbaker’s “The Man from the Atom (Sequel)” (May 1926) actually merits that distinction. 10. Gernsback’s reprinting of contemporary European science fiction is discussed by Gernsback himself in an editorial (WSQ, 4:5, Fall 1932) and has been discussed by Robert Lowndes and others. 11. In reporting what Gernsback claimed were the features of the modern era of science fiction, I am not necessarily obliged to investigate the accuracy of those claims; still, some discussion of how knowledgeable Gernsback and Brandt actually were may be appropriate. Editorials and introductions suggest that Gernsback was familiar with Verne’s works, and the reprints in the first four issues of Amazing indi

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cate that he knew something about the relevant literature of the previous thirty years. The addition of C. A. Brandt to his staff with the fifth issue provided another source of knowledge. However, there are signs that his awareness of sf history (and/or that of his staff ) was not all that extensive. A letter in the May 1927 issue referred to “Wells’s ‘The Lost World,” ’ and the error was not corrected in the response (Amz 2:205). Gaps in the knowledge of Wells’s work were admitted in a letter to Wells’s secretary (18 July 1927) requesting a full list of Wells’s “stories of a scientific nature.” A second letter (4 April 1928) asked the price of several novels, including The Research Magnificent, which Gernsback evidently imagined to be science fiction. I thank Gene Rinkel and the staff of the Rare Book Room of the University of Illinois for providing me with copies of these and the other letters from the Wells-­ Gernsback correspondence that are discussed below. 12. Again, one can question to what extent Gernsback and his editors were actually making an effort to educate writers. On the one hand, David H. Keller’s foreword to “The Human Termites” describes how Gernsback gave him the idea for the story (SWS 1:295, September 1929); Sam Moskowitz and Michael Ashley have discussed letters in which Gernsback seemed to be helping and encouraging writers (see Davin); and Frederik Pohl discusses the unusually detailed rejections slips from Wonder Stories, which could be considered educational devices (42–43). On the other hand, Gernsback generally did little to build personal relationships with writers and, as noted below, repeatedly alienated them with persistent low payments and belated payments. 13. In later comments, Gernsback described a fourth era in sf history, its period of decline, which began in the 1950s and is marked by two developments: a growing tendency to avoid science and an unfortunate tendency to be too literary. In a 1963 address to the MIT Science Fiction Society, he argued that “the genre of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells has now been prostituted to such an extent that it is often quite impossible to find any reference to science in what is popularly called science fiction today” (cited in Panshin 21). And his editorial for the December 1952 Science-­Fiction Plus proclaimed that Modern science-­fiction today tends to gravitate more and more into the realm of the esoteric and sophisticated literature, to the exclusion of all other types. . . . Good S-­F authors are few, extremely few. Most of them have become esoteric— “high brow.” They and their confrères disdain the “popular” story—they call it “corny,” “dated,” “passé.” . . . At present, science-­fiction literature is in its decline— deservedly so. The masses are revolting against the snob dictum “Let ’em eat cake!” They’re ravenous for vitalizing plain bread! (SF+ 1:2, March 1953) 14. “I was delighted to see [‘The Moon Hoax’], having seen many references to it in past time,” one reader said (Amz 2:414, July 1927); another praised Verne, Haggard, Leinster, Serviss, Burroughs, and England (Amz 2:103, April 1927); a third listed Wells, Verne, Poe, Serviss, O’Brien, Verrill, and Gernsback as favorite writers (ASQ 1:431, Summer 1928); and a fourth said that “The Moon Hoax” “was undeniably clever, well written and a fine story all around. . . . I hope . . . you do not exhaust the supply of Wells,’ Verne’s, and Serviss’s stories. They’re masterpieces” (Amz 2:413, July 1927). 15. Harry Warner, Jr.—citing no sources—claims that Bailey did receive help from 292 ]

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one fan, H. C. Koenig, and provided another fan, A. Langley Searles, with some help in return: J. O. Bailey, a scholar with almost imperceptibly faint connections with general fandom . . . announced as early as 1935, through the letter column of Wonder Stories, that he was compiling a bibliography of science fiction. Then working on his Ph.D. degree, he abandoned this project, after snaring 5,000 titles, as too big a task to handle. He sent his notes to Koenig, who had helped him gather information, and the data proved useful to Searles (who later presented his own extensive bibliography in issues of the Fantasy Commentator). (68). 16. Bailey’s first era of science fiction is “Before 1817” and the final era is 1915 and after, corresponding to Gernsback’s three periods (though Bailey divides the middle period into 1817–70, 1871–94, and 1895–1914). Aldiss dismisses science fiction before 1800 as “Lucian and All That” in the subtitle of chapter 3 of Billion Year Spree (1973) and in Trillion Year Spree (1986) argues that “The origins and inspirations for science fiction lie . . . within the period of the Industrial Revolution [i.e., the early nineteenth century]” (13–14), with a synthesis emerging in modern American pulp magazines (205). 17. Gernsback’s reductionist standards, however, can sometimes be detected in later, more erudite studies; e.g., Bailey, having defined “scientific fiction” as “a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences” (10), includes Thomas More’s Utopia, not for its larger features, but because “it describes a wonderful machine, the incubator” (11). 18. Aldiss begins with Mary Shelley, with Poe in chapter 2 of Trillion Year Spree, and says that Campbell, not Gernsback, produced the synthesis mentioned above (note 14); and Darko Suvin, while acknowledging earlier works in the genre, calls 1800 the key “turning point” in sf history (89), with a modern synthesis emerging in the works of H. G. Wells (219–20). 19. Several letters to Gernsback from Wells (i.e., written by a secretary in compliance with Wells’s instruction), the most extensive being the letter dated 20 March 1928, complained of such practices. 20. In the August 1927 issue Gernsback wrote that Amazing Stories was “not yet on a paying basis” and “Only by having additional readers can the magazine hope to be put on a profitable basis” (2:421), which he also maintained in a letter to H. G. Wells (5 May 1927), saying that “In another year the magazine should be on a paying basis.” One skeptical response to these claims of financial hardship comes from James Gunn: “From a good businessman, the statement was hard to believe; the editorial costs were low—he used many reprints which must have cost him almost nothing, and he paid only one-­half cent a word or less for new stories—and the price of the magazine was relatively high for the period” (125). 21. Gernsback’s thinking may have been colored by his experience with Clement Fezandié, the author he published most frequently (over forty stories between 1920 and 1926). Fezendié, according to Gernsback, “wrote for fun only and religiously sent back all checks in payment of his stories!” (“Guest Editorial,” Amz 35:141, April 1961). Knowing few professional fiction-­writers, Gernsback may have felt that Fezandié was somehow representative—that all fiction-­writers worked mainly for the joy of writ

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ing and the pleasure of seeing their stories in print; thus, he may have been surprised to find his writers getting so upset about small and tardy payments. Of course, this speculation in no way excuses Gernsback’s behavior; any editor who finds himself regularly getting sued should have the sense to change his policies, but Gernsback never did.

Works Cited

Aldiss, Brian W., with David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: the History of Science Fiction. London: Victor Gollanz, 1986. Alkon, Paul. Origins of Futuristic Fictions. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Ashley, Michael, ed. The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, 1926–1935. London: New English, 1974. Chicago: Regnery, 1976. Carter, Paul. The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Davin, Eric Leif. “Gernsback, His Editors, and Women Writers.” Science Fiction Studies 17, no. 3 (November 1990): 418–20. De Camp, L. Sprague. Lovecraft: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975. Gernsback, Hugo, ed. Air Wonder Stories (AWS), Amazing Stories (Amz), Amazing Stories Quarterly (ASQ), Science and Invention (S&I), Science Fiction Plus (SF+), Science Wonder Quarterly (SWQ), Science Wonder Stories (SWS), Wonder Stories (WS), Wonder Stories Quarterly (WSQ). Gunn, James. Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1975. Hawthorne, Julian. “Introduction.” The Goddess of Avatabar, by William R. Bradshaw. New York: Douthitt, 1892. A facsimile reprint was published in 1975. Lowndes, Robert. Letter. Foundation 35 (Spring 1986): 68–69. McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with Jack Williamson.” Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 2 (July 1991): 230–52. Moskowitz, Sam. “The Early Coinage of ‘Science Fiction.’” Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 3 (November 1976): 312–13. ———. Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1963. Panshin, Alexei. SF in Dimension: A Book of Explorations. Chicago: Advent, 1974. Pohl, Frederik. The Way the Future Was. 1978. New York: Ballantine, 1979. Porges, Irwin. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Warner, Harry, Jr. All Our Yesterdays. Chicago: Advent, 1969. Westfahl, Gary. “ ‘An Idea of Significant Import’: Hugo Gernsback’s Theory of Science Fiction.” Foundation 48 (Spring 1990): 26–50. ———. “On The True History of Science Fiction.” Foundation 47 (Winter 1989–90): 5–27. 294 ]

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Afterword

While it is flattering to have one’s works republished, I could initially discern little reason for reprinting this particular article; for after it appeared, the article was revised and expanded to serve as the fifth chapter of The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (1998), employing the same title. Why republish, then, what is effectively a rough draft of that final version? Further, I find it almost painful to reread this article since it so visibly displays what I would describe to students in my composition classes as a problem in focus: after surveying what Gernsback said about the history of science fiction, its announced subject, the article abruptly lurches into a discussion of completely unrelated matters, Gernsback’s strained relationships with H. G. Wells and other contemporary writers who contributed to his magazines. Anyone reading the article must wonder why this irrelevant material was appended to the article; yet by answering that question, I can justify its republication as an illuminating lesson about the history of science fiction criticism. The simple answer to the question is straightforward enough: I digressed in this manner because I was instructed to do so: in early 1991, the editor of Science Fiction Studies, reportedly guided by a consultant’s advice, informed me that, as a condition of publication, I must examine and report on the Wells-­Gernsback correspondence, held by the University of Illinois Library, which would naturally lead into a discussion of Gernsback’s lamentable tendency to underpay, or not pay, his authors. Struggling to devise some reason for doing these things, I disingenuously cast these digressions as one way to explain why later histories of science fiction paid little attention to Gernsback, while Gernsback’s own history assigned himself a prominent role; perhaps, lingering bad feelings about his penurious ways could account for the tendency to overlook his contributions. But this theory cannot withstand scrutiny, since the historians of science fiction ignoring Gernsback were mostly academic scholars, not writers, who would not have known or cared about his questionable payment policies. No, they were omitting Gernsback from their histories for other reasons I was perfectly willing to discuss, though not in this particular article. The next question that inevitably comes to mind is harder to answer: “Why would the erudite editor of Science Fiction Studies insist that the article include such unrelated material?” I cannot enter the editor’s mind to discern the motive behind his peculiar demands, but only one theory seems logical to me. For at the time I drafted this piece, the community of science fiction scholars had collectively settled upon their own history of science fiction that emphasized, almost exclusively, major literary figures of the past and present. The genre’s origins were to be found in esteemed authors like Lucian, Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Francis Godwin, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne; their works laid the groundwork for the first true giant of the field, H. G. Wells; the torch was then passed to worthy successors like Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis; and the tradition reached a magnificent climax with the genre’s modern masters, Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem. If Gernsback and other authors from the pulp magazines figured at all in this story, it was as a brief, annoying interruption in this glorious pageant, to be mentioned contemptuously then brushed aside as unimportant and unworthy of attention.

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After flirting with a project along similar lines for my dissertation, I instead became convinced that the true origins of science fiction lay with the person who first devised and promulgated both the term and the idea of “science fiction,” which led to intensive research into the writings of Gernsback and his most significant successor, John W. Campbell, Jr. And this necessarily meant that the entire picture of sf history then embraced by the critical community was basically nonsensical, as I boldly announced in another journal. And now, here I was, submitting another article on Gernsback to an editor who was heavily invested in that consensus history, having written a book about “the evolution of science fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells.” Because this article limited itself to the more modest claim that Gernsback devised the first history of science fiction, and because that claim was supported by persuasive evidence, it would have been difficult for any editor to reject the piece; yet establishing that Gernsback had made one noteworthy contribution to science fiction, did serve to buttress the larger argument I was mounting. But perhaps, that editor might have thought, this article could be hijacked to discredit that argument as well—hence, his demand to include a detailed examination of Gernsback’s questionable business practices. Surely, if readers observed this upstart’s pathetic efforts to engage the great H. G. Wells in learned discourse, only to be rebuffed as a duplicitous charlatan, and if they learned of his scurrilous efforts to defraud his authors, they would recognize that such a man could not be regarded as an important figure in science fiction history. If that was the editor’s scheme, of course, it was destined to fail, for no reasonable person would ignore an author’s seminal contributions to literature because of personal failings; it would be like removing T. S. Eliot from the history of twentieth-­century poetry because he was a mean-­spirited man who horribly abused his first wife. (Actually, I vaguely recall a feminist critic attempting to make such an argument, but it naturally had no effect.) But, I suppose, anyone observing his house of cards collapsing must make some effort to prop it up, which would explain why the editor felt obliged to impose his mandate. By reading the resulting article, then, younger science fiction scholars can learn the startling fact that there was once a dark era in the history of their field when, in certain circles, a critic was not allowed to discuss Hugo Gernsback without criticizing him as well. As it happens, while revising this article, the irrelevant material about Gernsback’s business dealings was not discarded, but rather placed in another chapter where it belonged; for this aspect of his career is unquestionably part of Gernsback’s story, though not the most important part, and it was further examined in my later book, Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction (2007). But despite such explorations of his flaws, there is evidence suggesting that my argument did have an impact: for today, histories of science fiction may still emphasize the literary greats, but they also discuss Gernsback and his key role in shaping the science fiction that we read today. As one sign of changing attitudes, the editors of a recent reference book, Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, invited me to write an entry on Gernsback—a decision that would have been absolutely unthinkable had the book been planned in 1988, not 2008. Did its publication provide me with the warm sense that I had been vindicated? Not exactly, for the book excluded Campbell, the second most important 296 ]

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figure in the history of science fiction, and all of the other editors and commentators who carried on Gernsback’s work like H. L. Gold, Damon Knight, James Blish, and Harlan Ellison; instead, the book’s other representative critics were Jean Baudrillard, Donna J. Haraway, and Darko Suvin, figures who had little if any impact on the literature of science fiction. However, since I have withdrawn from the critical wars to pursue other interests, other science fiction scholars will now have to persuade their community that it is not only Gernsback, but the entire tradition he spawned, which demands their learned scrutiny.



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• 14 • The Historical Death Ray and Science Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s William J. Fanning, Jr. Given the genre’s inherently speculative nature, it is commonplace for critics and commentators of science fiction (or “sci-­fi,” as it is often called in the media) to talk about how life imitates art—that is, how many scientific advances and/ or hi-­tech gadgets portrayed in the sf of yesterday eventually materialized in the real world of today. Less frequently discussed but just as interesting is how art imitates life in these works—that is, how the fanciful extrapolations of many sf tales were inspired/informed by the real-­life scientific prototypes of their time. The following essay offers an excellent case in point: the “death ray” so prominent in the sf pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s had its origins not only in H. G. Wells’s famous 1898 novel War of the Worlds but also in real news reports about inventors who claimed to have developed such a device during the years immediately following World War I. The essay originally appeared in SFS 37, no. 2 (July 2010): 253–74.

Although the war-­weary populations of Europe and the United States looked forward to an era of peace following the 1914–18 cataclysm, no sooner had the ink dried on the Versailles Treaty than the phrase “the next war” entered into common parlance (Irwin 1). Articles in newspapers, magazines, professional journals, and books began to appear that warned of a new conflict in which airpower, poison gas, disease germs, and exotic weapons such as death rays would result in the destruction, or near destruction, of civilization. Naturally, there were many who disagreed with such a scenario, charg298 ]

ing that antiwar activists, overzealous journalists, and well-­meaning but badly misinformed leaders perpetrated this frightening—and false—vision of the future. As a result, a spirited debate over the probability of a new war in the near future and how it would unfold raged in the popular media throughout the 1920s and 1930s. This “next war” concern also found expression in the fiction of the period, with tales of imaginary war and futuristic science appearing frequently in novels, short stories, theatrical plays, movies, and on radio.1 Some of these works reflected disillusionment with traditional ideals in the aftermath of the First World War—the uncertainty wrought by new discoveries in science and the increasing subordination of the individual to the machine. The development of powerful weapons and the widespread belief that humankind would not, or could not, change its aggressive nature also played a role. For other authors, however, the “next war” syndrome pervading the popular media simply provided updated story and plot ideas. Scenarios of future conflict were described in the mainstream media by journalists, military leaders, and others who sensed that the First World War had been only a prelude to an even greater cataclysm. These “next war” stories focused not only on existing weapons such as the airplane and poison gas but also on remote-­controlled weapons in development and various types of “death ray.” Indeed, H. G. Wells’s Martian heat ray in The War of the Worlds (1898) had introduced this exotic weapon to sf even before the twentieth century began. Yet the most important decades for the death ray were the 1920s and 1930s, and the increase in interest during this period coincided with multiple stories that announced its actual discovery or development. Following the First World War, extensive coverage in newspapers, popular magazines, books, and professional journals described a variety of new death-­ray weapons designed to destroy airplanes or lay waste to whole armies and civilian populations. Political leaders, soldiers, scientists, and prominent journalists engaged in a debate over the plausibility of such claims; indeed, after some years, consensus concluded that this type of energy weapon lay beyond the limits of existing technology. The media of this era nevertheless continued to encourage readers to see the advent of such weapons as inevitable. The death ray of popular sf—introduced into the genre, as mentioned, by Wells’s Martian heat ray—flourished mightily during this interwar period. Yet critical studies and histories of the genre seldom mention any real-­world, real-­time link as a context for this era’s sudden proliferation of “death ray” stories. My essay aims to fill that gap by examining the death

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ray’s association with “next war” anxieties. A wide range of novels, stories, plays, movies, and radio programs of the time were linked closely to contemporary newspaper accounts. During the 1920s and 1930s, there was no single concept of how a death ray would be powered (energy sources varied according to the speculator) or whether the new weapons would instantly kill or merely disable or slow down an enemy. In the media accounts, both the energy source and the effect varied widely, just as they did in the fictional stories. Before looking at popular sf, it is therefore best to begin with a sketch of the news accounts of death rays that began to appear even before the First World War. The death ray had its origins in the development of three important sources of energy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: electricity, X-­rays, and radium. (A fourth, atomic power, might be added to the list, although its potential was only beginning to be suspected.) By the start of the new century, scientists and others were anticipating the application of these new energy sources to warfare.2 In 1913 a sensational story appeared in the French newspaper L’Éclair and was reprinted in the New York Times: it concerned an Italian inventor, Giulio Ulivi, who claimed that he could set off explosives wirelessly with his infrared “F-­rays.” Living at the time in France, he had already acquired notoriety for his creative talents, enabling him to gain an audience with General Joseph Joffre, chief of staff of the French army. Ulivi convinced him to witness a demonstration in which he promised to detonate sea mines off the coast at Le Havre. Several French military personnel and government officials attended the exercise, in which Ulivi set off not only the mines but also explosives placed inside a fort. Although impressed by what they saw, their excitement turned to skepticism when Ulivi displayed ignorance of basic scientific principles and could not answer technical questions. He also balked at performing a demonstration under the supervision of the military. Shortly afterwards, Ulivi left France branded a fraud but received a warm welcome in Italy, where he obtained support for continuing his experiments. Ultimately these, too, proved unsatisfactory to the military and scientific establishments there.3 Even more fantastic was the story of a death ray that dominated the front page of the magazine section of the New York Times in July 1919. Well-­ known naval historian Edgar Stanton Maclay asserted in the article that the British possessed a powerful weapon based on the principles of Archimedes’s fabled polished mirrors, which supposedly concentrated the heat rays of the sun to destroy those Roman ships besieging Syracuse. Maclay claimed that the British device had actually been created during the Napoleonic Wars by naval officer Thomas Cochrane, later Lord Dundonald, but 300 ]

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that a committee of high-­ranking leaders had decided not to use it and had kept it a secret.4 Even during the height of the German U-­boat campaign in the First World War, according to Maclay, the British government refused to employ the weapon because it was considered “an affront to civilization.”5 Where he got his information and why he wrote such a preposterous story remains unclear. Although rumors circulated about German attempts to create a death ray during the First World War, it was not until afterward that stories of such a weapon began to appear in the popular media. Most of these death rays were powered by electricity that generated heat to achieve a lethal effect. In 1921 General Eugène Debeney,6 commandant of the French military school at Saint Cyr and later chief of staff of the army, predicted that electric waves might be unleashed in a future conflict. Although resembling more the fanciful ideas of sf writers, his description of such a weapon is significant because of his position in the French army and his writings on military matters during the 1920s and 1930s: “Under the attack of these electric waves the airplane will fall as though struck by a thunderbolt, the tank will burst into flames, the dreadnaught will blow up, poison gas will be dispersed” (“War of Tomorrow” 1). The same year American journalist and war correspondent Will Irwin published “The Next War”: An Appeal to Common Sense, in which he quoted British General Ernest Swinton, who was instrumental in developing the tank in the First World War: I imagine from the progress that has been made in the past that in the future we will not have recourse to gas alone, but will employ every force of nature that we can; and there is a tendency at present for progress in the development of the different forms of rays that can be turned to lethal purposes. We have x-­rays, we have light rays, we have heat rays. . . . We may not be so very far from the development of some kinds of lethal ray which will shrivel up or paralyze human beings. (qtd. in Irwin 49) Swinton’s comments were picked up by others, and several references to killing rays can be found in the professional and popular literature of 1921, including Joseph K. Hart’s “The Next War” in The Survey as well as British Major Victor Lefebure’s book on chemical warfare, The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War. The Literary Digest issue for 12 November featured “Aerial Navies and Armies of Chemists,” an article listing the new and fantastic weapons being proposed and developed; according to it, the British already possessed electrical rays that could explode ammunition at great distances and kill the enemy. An issue in the next month,

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entitled “ ‘Viper’ Weapons,” includes a cartoon depicting “The Modern God of War” holding among other weapons an “X-­Ray Killing Outfit.” 7 Probably the most sensational reference to rays that year can be found in the December issue of Popular Science Monthly. Entitled “Civilization Must Abolish War or War Will Destroy Civilization,” the brief article is accompanied by an artist’s rendition of how the next war will be fought, which includes a drawing of a large apparatus generating some type of destructive ray wrecking a city. The caption reads: “At least one great power is known to be at work on a machine by which lethal rays can be directed at the enemy’s military and civil centers” (12). By 1923 the death ray was flourishing in a fertile environment continually refreshed by new claims. Writing for the September issue of The Nineteenth Century and After, scientist A. M. Low, who had served in an advisory capacity to the British government during the war, describes how conflicts will be fought in one hundred years. In discussing the probable development of military technology, he predicts that the wireless transmission of electrical energy will be paramount, adding that he has already successfully destroyed “a wire at a distance of more than a yard” (357) and that with greater energy one should be able to destroy airplanes. An even more sensational prediction about death rays appeared in the November issue of Popular Mechanics: Electricity is to be a strong factor in future wars according to statements made by British experts who see in the discoveries of science a terrible power of destruction from mysterious waves of electric current sent through the air from hidden sources. Motors of airplanes and seacraft [sic] will be halted by special waves of wireless broadcast for thousands of miles, and even infantry and cavalry might be thrown into confusion or utterly destroyed by strong jets of water charged with electricity and mixed with acids. . . . Heat generated wirelessly will shoot out unseen over wide areas, destroying all life without warning. (“War Engines” 757) One of the first stories dealing with a real incident after the war was widely reported in newspapers and magazines in 1923; it concerned French commercial airplanes flying over a certain region of Bavaria that experienced sudden engine failure and were forced to land. Rumors quickly spread that the Germans had developed some type of ray that could short-­circuit the magneto of a gasoline motor and that they had tested the device against aircraft. The French government flatly denied the allegations, stating that an investigation revealed that normal mechanical difficulties were respon302 ]

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sible.8 The rumors persisted, however, especially when a leading German scientist, Oswald Flamm, asserted that such a ray apparatus existed (“Can Aero Engines” 69). Publicity surrounding the forced landings continued until eclipsed by another story. In early 1924 British inventor Harry Grindell Matthews announced that he had developed a ray that not only could cause airplane engines to stop but could also be used to annihilate armies on the battlefield. The only information about the nature of his device that he would share publicly was that it produced a path of conductivity through the air along which electricity could travel.9 The British government, after a meeting between Grindell Matthews and Air Vice-­Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond in May 1924, sent several representatives of the armed forces to witness a demonstration. Grindell Matthews succeeded in stopping and starting a small motorcycle engine and lighting an Osglim electric lamp, all wirelessly from a distance of about fifteen yards. Although performing several more tests in which he dispatched a mouse, he refused to conduct any under military supervision. Shortly afterward he left for France, where he had already been in contact with a private company. Back in Britain, publicity about him and his death ray became a cause célèbre and even reached the floor of the House of Commons, where members wanted assurances from the government that the death ray would not be sold to a foreign power. In the weeks and months that followed, Grindell Matthews gained greater notoriety and engendered considerable debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Most mainstream scientists concluded that his claim was at best bad science and at worst a hoax. But he had support, too, mostly from newspapers and magazines. Winston Churchill appeared to believe that death rays were possible on the basis of Grindell Matthews’s claims,10 for he included them as a future weapon in his widely publicized and often quoted September 1924 article in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, entitled “Shall We Commit Suicide?” In the end, however, nothing came of Grindell Matthews’ death ray, for he would never reveal its exact properties or let competent scientists test it. Except for a few brief interludes afterward, he gradually slipped into obscurity and died in 1941.11 His failure did not end the quest for a death ray. In fact, it sparked a flurry of activity for years to come. Both individuals and governments periodically reported that they had similar weapons in their possession. Not long after Grindell Matthews announced his discovery, deputy Reinhold Wulle told the Reichstag that Germany had a ray that could knock out airplanes and destroy armies on the battlefield. There was also a rumor that a Russian engineer had performed tests for the Soviet military in which he supposedly detonated explosives wirelessly at a distance.12

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Much to the annoyance of the mainstream scientists who fought a losing battle to debunk them, death-­ray claims continued to surface in the years to come. When the great wizard of electricity, Nikola Tesla, announced in 1931 and again in 1934 that he had developed a new force that could make the United States invincible, the story received publicity in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time magazine, which featured Tesla’s picture on its cover. Skeptical officials at the United States Bureau of Standards decided to test Tesla’s claim because of his reputation and previous achievements. They concluded, as had others before them, that it was technologically impossible to generate enough energy to create a ray capable of being an effective military weapon.13 Although most of the death-­ray claims were bogus, several inventors did develop killing machines that worked, if only at distances of a few feet. One of the most sensational accounts was that of Henry Fleur of San Francisco. The Fort Worth Star Telegram carried the story on its front page in May 1936. According to the article, disgruntled investors had sued Fleur because of his apparent lack of progress on his death ray. When the case came to trial, Fleur managed to get the judge to reconvene the court at his home workshop. Before a startled judge, jury, and group of lawyers, he turned on his death ray and killed a snake, a lizard, and some termites. It took the jury only four minutes to acquit him.14 Despite attempts by scientists and skeptical journalists to debunk death rays, new stories continued to appear up to the outbreak of the Second World War and beyond. After 1945, reports emerged that several of the belligerent powers had secretly taken the death ray more seriously than their public statements before the war had suggested. In an interview for Time in 1946, Dr. A. F. Murray revealed that in 1940 the National Defense Research Committee of the United States had created a section that came to be called Division 13. Its mission was to utilize radio communications to aid in defending the country. One of the tasks to which Murray was assigned involved evaluating the feasibility of a death ray. He and his team concluded, as had other scientists during the prewar period, that an effective range for such a weapon required more energy than was then technologically possible. Another significant revelation was that the British development of radar resulted from an attempt to produce a death ray in the mid-­1930s.15 And shortly after Germany surrendered in 1945, the United States Army discovered a secret laboratory installation at Hillersleben where scientists had been working on a type of death ray of true science-­fictional proportions. Labeled the Sonnengewehr, or “sun gun,” the project aimed at constructing 304 ]

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a space platform mounted with a large reflector (three square kilometers) to harness the sun’s rays. The “gun” could then concentrate the energy like a giant magnifying glass, directing it to targets on earth.16 American forces in the Pacific Theater uncovered evidence that the Japanese, too, had attempted to develop a death ray.17 Although mysterious ray weapons appeared most frequently in science fiction after the First World War, they had made their debut earlier, as previously mentioned. Several “ray” tales were published early in the new century. Not long after Wells’s publication of The War of the Worlds, British author George Griffith published The World Masters (1903), which introduces a device capable of controlling the world’s electrical energy and also is deployed as a weapon. Griffith is among the first to use the term “death rays,” as in this battle scene: “Then it stopped. Every gun was silent, for not a man dared go near it. Every officer and man who had shown himself in the open had been reduced to a heap of bones before he could get back under shelter. Then those who were out of reach of the terrible death-­rays saw six long guns rise from the masked batteries beside the two towers and over the central gate” (296). In the 1915 silent movie The Exploits of Elaine, based on the novel by Arthur B. Reeve published the same year, a device looking more like a small searchlight with a conical cover is employed as a death ray. Although not the same type of weapon, its label (“F-­ray”) borrowed directly from the publicity about Giulio Ulivi’s device. One of the first works of fiction using the concept, if not the name, of Ulivi’s “F-­rays” was by French authors Roland Dorgelès and Régis Gignoux, whose novel La Machine à finir la guerre (The Machine to End War) appeared in 1917. Their plot involves the use of ultra-­blue rays to set off explosives at a range of up to one hundred kilometers. In a film that had appeared the year before, The Intrigue (1916), an X-­ray gun’s lethal “shots” are effective to a range of a little more than twenty-­five miles.18 After the First World War, the mysterious ray was placed in the hands of both heroes and villains in science fiction, suspense, and mystery stories in a wide range of media that included film, plays, and comic strips as well as radio. The death ray figures prominently, for instance, in the immensely popular Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials. As in the news stories, these weapons are powered by varying sources: electricity, X-­rays, radium, and occasionally atomic energy. Among the most popular fictional death rays were the destroying death ray, the heat ray, the anti-­aircraft ray, the disintegrator ray, the bone-­dissolving ray, the paralysis ray, and more. By 1928 this was a favorite trope of sf and mystery readers, as suggested by a review

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in the New York Times: “Another member of the family ‘is likely to storm unless his fireside novel is about death rays carried around in a little black box by a Russian professor who is being shadowed by Bolshevist spies.’”19 One of the best-­known tales of this kind was the early Soviet science-­ fiction novel Engineer Garin and His Death Ray (also known as Engineer Garin’s Hyperboloid). Written by Alexei Tolstoy and published in 1926, it tells of an inventor who develops a powerful ray by means of a hyperboloid (in mathematics, a “quadric”—a type of surface in three dimensions). Garin’s aim is to create a utopian society on an island from which he can dominate the world. A Soviet police detective is on his trail, and an American who runs a huge chemical company wants to purchase his death ray. In this cloak-­and-­dagger novel, Garin eludes his pursuers, cuts deals, destroys an entire town, decimates a squadron of U.S. warships, builds his colony on an island, and gains mastery over the world—only to be overthrown by a revolution. As the story ends, he and a woman companion are marooned, isolated, and powerless on a speck of land in the ocean. Many of the situations in the novel reflect a close connection to death-­ray claims reported by the media, including those of Giulio Ulivi and Grindell Matthews. In fact, Tolstoy uses Grindell Matthews’s name with a slight alteration in one scene in which the character Khlinov is discussing Garin with Russian Inspector Shelga: That’s exactly the way Garin uses his genius. I know that he has made an important discovery concerning the transmission of infra-­ red rays over a distance. You’ve heard, of course, of the Rindel-­Matthews Death Ray? That death ray proved to be a fake although he had the right principles. Heat waves at a temperature of a thousand degrees centigrade transmitted parallel to each other constitute a monstrous weapon of destruction and defence in time of war. The whole secret lies in the transmission of a ray that does not disperse. (61)20 Garin himself describes what his weapon can do: “There is nothing in the whole world that can stand up against the power of the ray. . . . Buildings, fortresses, dreadnaughts, airships, rocks, mountains, the earth’s crust . . . my ray will pierce and cut through and destroy everything” (72). As portrayed in the novel, the weapon acts like a laser, for in one scene Garin uses a smaller model to cut a man in half, neatly and quickly. One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the weapon occurs when Garin trains his hyperboloid on the Aniline Chemical Works in Germany, destroying the facility and killing much of the neighboring town’s population. (This event, minus the death ray, may recall a horrific 1921 gas explosion at the Badische Ani306 ]

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lin Works in Oppau, Germany, in which more than 500 people died.) Two of Tolstoy’s characters witness the devastation as they flee for their lives: They turned to look back. From their point of vantage they could see the whole group of factory buildings covering many acres. Half of them were burning like paper houses. Down below, on the outskirts of the town, rose a mushroom of grayish-­yellow smoke. The ray of the hyperboloid was dancing madly amongst those ruins seeking the most important spot of all, the stock-­pile of half-­finished explosives. Half the sky was lit up by the glow. Clouds of smoke and huge showers of yellow, brownish and silver-­white sparks rose up higher than the hills. (115) Two other novels of this period reflect the influence of news coverage of Grindell Matthews, as well as the story about the French aircraft flying over Bavaria. In 1926, Paul Thieme’s Der Flug zur Sonne (The Flight to the Sun) describes a war between Germany and France that the Germans win without harming their enemy. They deploy rays that force French airplanes to land because of mechanical failure, and their gas bombs merely induce sleep, thereby rendering French ground forces helpless. In 1928, Otfrid von Hanstein published Elektropolis: Die Stadt der technischen Wunder (Electropolis: The City of Technical Wonder), a Zukunftsroman21 in which Germans attempt to establish a utopian colony in an uninhabited region of Australia; the hero has failed to get permission but goes ahead with the project. When Australian forces attack, he uses ray guns and other superweapons to neutralize them. Like Tolstoy, von Hanstein refers to the “Rindel-­Mathews rays.” Other novels depicted Ulivi-­type rays capable of remote detonation or weapons resembling Maclay’s “Burning Glasses.” In Werner Grassegger’s Die rächende Stünde: Englands Schicksalstag: Ein Zukunftsbild (The Hour of Revenge: England’s Fateful Day: A Picture of the Future, 1922]), Germany has been occupied by forces from Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Poland because it cannot make its reparations payments. The hero, a German exile named Wilhelm Gering, teams up with a former war buddy who happens to know an Austrian inventor with a ray device that can set off explosives from a distance. Fritz Skowronnek’s Dies Irae (1922) likewise uses the principle of remote wireless detonation, and in the following year, Adolf Saager’s Menschlichkeit (Humanity) depicts the German army equipped with similar ray weapons, thereby neutralizing all the armies, navies, and air forces in the world. Another Ulivi-­type weapon appears in Joseph Delmont’s Die Stadt unter dem Meere (The City under the Sea, 1925), in which

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a lone German submarine commander possesses a ray that neutralizes all existing conventional weapons, creating havoc for Germany’s enemies. That device is similar to Maclay’s “Burning Glasses,” for it is a reflector with quartz lenses; yet Delmont’s weapon also recalls Ulivi’s “F-­rays,” for it can explode the ammunition in warships. In 1925, Le Semeur de feu (The Sower of Fire) by French author André Falcoz also depicts a death ray that can set off explosives at a distance; in 1921, José Moselli’s Le Maître de la Foudre (The Lightning Master) had featured such a ray, but in Le Rayon phi (The Phi Ray, 1921), the ray weapon deployed is more reminiscent of Maclay’s: its prisms and lenses harness sunlight, directing heat to selected targets. Two other works featured a weapon resembling Maclay’s “Burning Glasses,” in these cases deployed from outer space. The 1927 German novel Flammen aus dem Weltraum (Flames from Space) by Karl August von Laffert describes a space station mounted with huge reflectors that act as a sun gun, anticipating, or perhaps inspiring, the actual secret German project at Hillersleben mentioned previously. Stanislaus Bialkowski, in Krieg im All: Roman aus der Zukunft der Technik (War in Space: Novel from the Future of Technology, 1935), describes a similar weapon that concentrates the sun’s heat, directing it at targets on Earth. In a French novel of 1920, Claude Farrère’s Les Condamnés à mort (Those Condemned to Death, published in English under the title Useless Hands), the disintegrator utilizes sound vibration. This fictional device may reflect the First World War collaborative research of American scientist Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins and French physicist Paul Langevin at Toulon. They had focused on discovering a way to detect German submarines by using supersonic sound waves. Although their efforts led to some success, Wood made an accidental discovery when he noticed that fish in the experimental tank died when they came into contact with the sound waves. When he put his own hand in the water, he felt intense pain. After the war, he continued to study the effects of high-­frequency sound on living organisms, although no “death ray” or any other type of weapon resulted.22 Farrère’s novel, with its sound-­wave weapon, is set in a future wherein James Fergus Mac Head Vohr, called the Man of Wheat, has monopolized this commodity and its products worldwide. A strong believer in Darwinian natural selection, he sees manual labor as destined to be replaced by machines, assuming that poor, uneducated workers will not be able to adapt to the change and will become extinct. A plot, however, hatches among a handful of the four hundred thousand laborers housed on the vast tract of land that contains the factory as well as Vohr’s palatial residence. Their con308 ]

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spiracy to overthrow the Wheat Man and free the workers is led by one of his supervisors and Vohr’s own daughter. The climax of the story describes their assault on Vohr’s estate. In the meantime, however, his scientist, Georges Torral, has developed a ray weapon that will kill any living thing by decomposing matter, with the added benefit of leaving no trace. In one scene Torral describes the power of the sound vibration: “You are perhaps familiar with the postulate of synchronized vibrations? . . . and the theorem of visual cones? These explain everything. It is simply a generator of N rays at differentiated vibrations, with a reflector and lenses.”23 Torral unleashes this weapon on the workers, killing them all and Vohr’s daughter, too. Some years later Sax Rohmer (real name Arthur Henry Ward) likewise employed a death ray that worked with sound waves. Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu mysteries, serialized The Day the World Ended in Collier’s between May and July of 1929. Rohmer’s villain, Anubis, plans to destroy the world so that he and his followers can rule what remains. He has set up his operations in a castle in Baden, Germany, that is protected by lethal zones of sound waves. As he explains to one of the heroes, the sound-­ray weapon is superior to an “energy” (electrical) device: “Energy has a limited range. . . . One station is insufficient. Unlike sound. Sound can be transmitted from this laboratory all round the world. And sound can kill ” (50; emphasis in original). As the hero relates to a companion, “From the spot he calls ‘the control tower,’ those death waves may be sent in uniting circles! There is a great model of the terrestrial globe. . . . Anubis can cover all its surface with his waves of sound. He can focus them or deflect them. It is for him a matter of choice, only. Where he wishes to spare—he spares!” (50). In the end, Anubis is foiled when his castle is destroyed by a powerful artillery shell from one of the giant Krupp guns of the World War, which manages to penetrate the sonic force field. Many authors’ ray weapons, however, were generic, bearing only faint resemblances to the devices described by Ulivi, Grindell Matthews, or Maclay. Sax Rohmer’s The Golden Scorpion (1920) features Fo-­Hi, the villainous “Scorpion,” who uses a variety of poisons as well as a disintegrating ray of mysterious operation. In one chapter, “The Blue Ray,” the weapon is described as working much like a modern laser: the hero, Dr. Stuart, who is in his study, barely avoids being struck by the lethal beam and then examines the result: “His dictionary was smoldering slowly. It had a neat round hole some three inches in diameter, bored completely through, cover to cover!” (82). Later in the story, Stuart encounters the Scorpion, who describes the weapon used in his attempt on the doctor’s life:

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Fo-­Hi rested one long yellow hand upon a kind of model searchlight. “I nearly committed the clumsy indiscretion of removing you with this little instrument,” he said. “You recall the episode? Ericksen’s Disintegrating Ray, Dr. Stuart. The model, here, possesses a limited range, of course, but the actual instrument has a compass of seven and a half miles. It can readily be carried by a heavy plane! One such plane in a flight from Suez to Port Said could destroy all the shipping in the Canal and explode every grain of ammunition on either shore!” (258) In 1923 Hans Dominik, among the most popular German writers of the early Weimar period, published Die Macht der Drei (The Power of the Three), which imagines a machine that collects energy and then releases it in the form of a powerful, destructive ray. It is noteworthy that Dominik, who had been trained in electronics, had tried to construct a ray device during the First World War. (He was not trying to produce a death ray but rather to develop a beam that could act as a nighttime target locator [Strahlenzieler].) Considerable time and effort went into the project, and Dominik managed to put together a carefully worked-­out design, presenting it to the Reichsmarineamt (Reich naval office) in spring of 1916. According to Dominik, he was turned down because he projected that it would take six months to make the device fully operational, and naval officials believed the war would be over before it could be ready.24 Reinhold Eichacker’s Der Kampf ums Gold (The Struggle for Gold), published in 1922, likewise features an electronically powered ray gun. The hero has developed a chemical means of creating gold, which enables him to pay the reparations bill levied on Germany by the Versailles Treaty but at the same time disrupts the world’s economic stability by flooding the gold market. Germany suddenly becomes financially strong because its currency is based on platinum. France then attacks Germany, but its air force and ground forces are defeated by the hero’s electronic rays. Aside from these many novels employing death rays, there were, of course, the pulp magazines.25 Amazing Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories, and others all became popular in the latter part of the 1920s. Their pages are filled with mysterious rays of all sorts, many of which correspond to the descriptions in news reports. One of the most successful series of that era was launched by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, in which the novella “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” introduced the character “Anthony Rogers”—better known as “Buck Rogers.” Nowlan’s description of a disintegrator ray in this first Buck Rogers tale bears a close resemblance to Grindell Matthews’s death ray: “These rays were projected 310 ]

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from a machine not unlike a searchlight in appearance, the reflector of which, however, was not material substance, but a complicated balance of interacting electronic forces.”26 Several photographs and artistic representations of Grindell Matthews’s death ray had appeared in the New York Times, the Literary Digest, and other print media in 1924; that year Pathé films also made the documentary The Death Ray in collaboration with the inventor. The most widely used image first appeared in the Illustrated London News magazine. In this illustration, the death ray resembles a searchlight with a few added features.27 Other pulp stories appear to have borrowed from news reports. One tale in Amazing Stories by Louis Buswell recalls the newspaper articles of 1923 and 1924 about rays developed to short-­circuit airplane motors. Entitled “Clouds of Death,” it was published in the June 1929 issue. After a second world war in which the United States did not participate, a third world war breaks out and America is attacked by an enemy using a ray that knocks out gasoline engines. Comically, the United States develops a new airplane with flapping wings that enables it to win. A story in the April 1930 issue of Air Wonder Stories in part anticipates an incident that could almost have occurred one year later. O. L. Beckwith’s “The Heat Ray” features an inventor who is killed by gangsters, who then make several copies of his heat-­ray and mount them on aircraft. In the end, the inventor’s son saves the day and destroys all diagrams of the ray. The near-­parallel that occurred in 1931 involved the German scientist Kurt Schimkus, who announced that he had developed a ray that was chemically produced. Claiming its effective range to be five hundred feet, he said that it could explode artillery shells and other types of ammunition. According to a story in the New York Times, Schimkus had successfully detonated submarine mines below the surface of the water as well as cartridges placed underground. As reported in The Pathfinder magazine, however, the German government showed little interest and Schimkus went to the United States with his device. He demonstrated it to representatives of the Army and Navy at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago. Afterward, it was rumored that local gangsters had at first been interested in acquiring the device but were put off because Schimkus’s weapon was not called a “death ray.” The scientist had referred to it as an “anti-­war ray.”28 One story reflects news stories about another type of technology being developed: cathode rays. “When the Atoms Failed,” by future Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr., appeared in the January 1930 issue of Amazing Stories; it describes an invasion from Mars. An American inventor battles against aliens who employ cathode-­ray projectors and heat rays. He

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manages almost single-­handedly to defeat them by using heat rays, atomic disintegrators, and other technology. Use of the cathode tube as a weapon in Campbell’s tale appears to be based on the work of W. D. Coolidge of General Electric as well as that of other scientists, including Abraham Esau at the University of Jena and Philip Lenard of Heidelberg. Coolidge had developed a cathode tube in which he could harness killing rays. In experiments in 1926 and 1927, widely reported in scientific journals as well as in the popular media, he managed to kill bacteria and insects and cause some physical injury to a rabbit. Given the recent publicity of death-­ray claims, Coolidge was quick to point out that his apparatus could in no way be considered such a weapon. The effective range of the cathode tube’s rays was three feet at most. Even with increased voltage, the distance would not extend to more than a few yards.29 A cathode tube weapon also showed up in the popular radio series Phyl Coe Mysteries, whose sponsor was Philco Radio Tubes. One episode of 1936 utilized a device closely resembling descriptions of both Coolidge’s instrument and Grindell Matthews’s death ray. Entitled “The Mystery of the Death Ray Tube,” this fifteen-­minute program begins with the heroine, private detective Phyl (Phyllis) Coe, visiting a Dr. Crowfoot at his lodge in the mountains of Colorado. An old friend of her father, Dr. Crowfoot has with two assistants been working on an astounding invention that he promises to demonstrate for Phyl and her sidekick Taylor. At that moment Major Osborne of the U.S. War Department joins their discussion, having arrived from Washington at the invitation of Dr. Crowfoot, who is anxious to give his new “death ray” to the government. Crowfoot escorts them into a shed where the apparatus is kept and uses it to kill a caged guinea pig in just one or two seconds. He claims that a larger and more powerful device would enable him to annihilate whole armies. Impressed, they all retire for the evening, only to be awakened later by a fire in the shed. The death ray has been stolen. Phyl asks everyone to return to the lodge while she tries to solve the case. She quickly realizes that the culprit is “Major Osborne,” actually a foreign agent who has assumed the major’s identity. When Phyl exposes him as the thief, he pulls out the death ray and kills Crowfoot before being overpowered by one of the professor’s assistants. The death-­ray tube crashes to the floor and is destroyed. Dr. Crowfoot had never written down the exact nature of the weapon and its properties, keeping all of that information in his head. Consequently, the secret of the death ray dies with him.30 Another popular arena for science fiction in general and for mysterious rays in particular was the budding industry of motion pictures.31 Most such movies involved mad scientists or other traditional villains employing these 312 ]

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weapons, usually in the contemporary world of the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the early death-­ray films include The Branded Four (1920), a serial depicting a “ray of destruction” as its weapon. In 1924 La Cité Foudroyée (The Destroyed City) appeared, in which a mad scientist uses a powerful ray gun to obliterate Paris. There were also The Perils of Paris (1924), in which criminals steal a ray device, and Lev Kuleshev’s The Death Ray (1925). As with stories in other media, some of these films depicted ray weapons similar to those in news reports. One of the earliest employed a device like the one described by Maclay in “Burning Glasses.” The Flaming Disk (1920) served up a modernized magnifying glass that could concentrate the rays of the sun strongly enough to vaporize steel and iron. (It should be noted that Maclay’s New York Times article of 1919 featured an illustration of the apparatus mounted on a modern dreadnought in the act of destroying an enemy vessel.) In Murder at Dawn (1932), released as The Death Ray in Britain, the featured weapon harnessed solar power and was called the “VXO Accumulator.” Some films directly refer to Grindell Matthews’s claim of having invented a death ray. In October 1924, the New York Times ran a brief description of a new movie completed but as yet without a real title. It was billed as A Story Without a Name and the public was invited to participate in a contest sponsored by Photoplay Magazine, with a $5,000 prize for the entry that came up with the best title. The film itself, according to the New York Times, “deals with the most recent invention of modern warfare, the much-­talked-­of death ray.”32 The film opened in New York on 27 October as Without Warning. In the story the hero has developed a death ray, but a villain named Drakma kidnaps him and his girlfriend in an attempt to acquire the weapon. He tries to force the young man to construct a device for him but predictably is foiled. The capabilities of this death ray include stopping battleships at a great distance by killing their commanders, taking out submarines, and annihilating armies on the battlefield.33 Another film strongly reminiscent of news accounts about Grindell Matthews’s invention came out the same year: Laughing at Danger involved a death ray stolen by foreign agents. “Anti-­aircraft ray” movies that reflected the influence of news stories about French airplanes being forced down over Bavaria (as well as the claims of Grindell Matthews) began to appear toward the end of the 1920s and continued on into the next decade. Among the first was Code of the Air (1928), in which a villain shoots down airplanes with “kappa rays.” In one of his earliest roles, actor Ralph Bellamy appeared in the 1935 production Air Hawks, a story about two small airlines competing for a contract

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to deliver mail. One airline owner resorts to the services of a mad scientist, whose death ray can explode airplanes.34 In 1936, Tim McCoy starred in The Ghost Patrol, in which airplanes experience sudden mechanical difficulties. In the opening scene, one sees an apparatus with the flashes of a Tesla coil and a radium tube that disrupts electrical impulses within a certain range. McCoy is flying his aircraft over the area to unravel the mystery when suddenly his plane’s engine begins to sputter and finally conks out, forcing him to parachute to safety. A remake of The Ghost Patrol appeared the following year as Sky Racket. Flight to Fame (1938) starred Charles Farrell; an anti-­aircraft ray figures prominently on a poster for the movie.35 Another film of this type featured two budding stars, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. In Q Planes, released early in 1939, their characters try to find out who is behind the crash landings of several new, secret British bombers. Olivier, playing an expert civilian pilot, and Richardson, an inspector with Scotland Yard and the secret service, find and foil a group of unnamed, but obviously German, saboteurs who operate a ray gun mounted on a ship in the English Channel.36 Blake of Scotland Yard (1937), a single film version of the earlier serial, combines references to Grindell Matthews and Ulivi with a pacifist desire for a means to abolish war. In the story, Blake, a retired member of Scotland Yard, promotes a ray that he believes will make war impossible. Having contacted the League of Nations, he wants to make the device available to all countries, ensuring that no one will have an advantage. In the story the League helps arrange a demonstration in England with the cooperation of the British government. Several people are present, among them representatives of the British military and an agent of the League. The complex apparatus shown in the film includes a television screen and a magnetic-­ beam target locator. Once the target has been found and its coordinates locked in, a powerful ray is sent via the magnetic beam. This resembles the device utilized by Giulio Ulivi and the description he gave to the newspapers, for he claimed that waves from a generator would locate the mines and bombs and bounce back to his telephonic headgear. He would then manipulate his “F-­rays” and direct them to the target.37 In the demonstration in the movie, an obsolete battleship is guided by remote control from an airplane overhead. In seconds, the ray destroys the vessel from a distance of 190 miles. One of the most popular types of death-­ray movies during this era was the serial. Several films featuring death rays and other exotic weapons appeared during the 1920s, including The Scarlet Streak (1926); but serials gained their greatest prominence in the next decade. Some of these later 314 ]

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movies also employed devices with properties corresponding to news reports. A 1935 serial was The Fighting Marines, in which the villain utilizes a magnetic ray to bring down aircraft. Arrest Drummond (1939) likewise alluded to Ulivi, in this case in references to an atomic disintegrator. According to the New York Times review, this was “a bifocal gadget guaranteed to detonate any explosives within a range of half a mile. Just press the switch, synchronize the rays on the combustibles and bang!” (Nugent, Arrest 27). Some serials used rays resembling the more generic descriptions in newspapers and magazines, with devices drawing on electricity as their source for destruction. In 1933 Bela Lugosi starred in The Whispering Shadow; his character helps to defeat an evil genius who operates a wireless, radio-­transmitted death ray. Wolf Dog (1933) with Rin-­Tin-­Tin Jr. employed a similar device. Two years later, Gene Autry’s first starring role was in a bizarre Western-­sf serial, The Phantom Empire. The story concerns the subterranean civilization of Murania, created by survivors of the legendary continent of Mu destroyed eons ago. It is located beneath Autry’s ranch, and a clash erupts between surface-­dwellers and the Muranians. The ruthless queen of the subterranean society has at her disposal a “lightning chamber” for executions and a “disintegrator ray.” Another serial of 1935 was The Lost City, in which the world is being buffeted by a series of unexplained weather disturbances of great intensity. A young scientist uses a type of ray generator to locate the source of the problem. Having done so, he and a team head to Africa. There they find an underground facility with a mad scientist, last of a race who fled the destruction of their continent thousands of years before. One scene in which the hero is strapped to a chair as the “death ray” inches its way toward him anticipates Goldfinger (1964), in which James Bond is placed on a gold table as a laser beam slowly makes its way toward him, burning through the metal. Other serials followed suit. In Undersea Kingdom in 1936, starring Ray “Crash” Corrigan as a U.S. naval officer fresh out of Annapolis, the fabled civilization of Atlantis turns out not to be a legend after all. A civil war between two factions there has led to the seizure of power by an evil warlord who seeks to conquer and rule the surface world. Before he is stopped by the hero and the U.S. Navy, the warlord uses a disintegrator ray, a force shield, and a handheld ray gun. Another serial of 1936 was Ace Drummond, which includes a radio-­transmitted death ray. Fighting Devil Dogs (1938) includes a masked antagonist called “Lightning,” armed with artificial thunderbolts. In The Phantom Creeps (1939), Bela Lugosi plays a ruthless scientist wreaking havoc with a ray gun, a robot, and a machine to make himself invisible.

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Another death-­ray serial of the same year was Daredevils of the Red Circle. Charles Middleton (“Ming the Merciless” in the Flash Gordon stories) was the villain. The fictional sleuth Dick Tracy contended with sound waves as a weapon. In the Dick Tracy 1937 series, a villain called the Spider possesses a sound-­ wave disintegrator that disrupts matter. He first demonstrates a small device before placing a much more powerful disintegrator on “The Wing,” his flying craft. The Spider then sets out to destroy a large bridge, but Tracy has discovered his mathematical calculations on the sound cycles required for this operation and manages to foil the attack.38 One of the most spectacular of these sf films was The Invisible Ray (1936). Starring two icons, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, this film features a radium-­based death ray. In the story, scientist Janos Rukh (Karloff ) has developed an apparatus that can receive light images from earth’s distant past traveling to the far reaches of space and then project them onto the ceiling of his laboratory. Rukh demonstrates his invention to a group of people, focusing on the Andromeda nebula, 750,000 light-­years away. What they see is a meteor heading to earth millions of years ago, which strikes Africa. Rukh tells them that the meteorite contains “Radium X,” an element that he believes possesses virtually unlimited power.39 A skeptical Dr. Benet (Lugosi), along with the others, decides to help him find it. After discovering the meteorite with its priceless space cargo, Rukh loads some of the radium into a large ray gun, which he demonstrates to his terrified laborers by melting a huge boulder. Later, Dr. Benet learns that “Radium X” has the capability to heal, too, and uses it to cure maladies at his clinic in Paris. Rukh develops radiation poisoning while in Africa, but that gives him the additional ability to kill by touch. His wife leaves him for another man, and he believes that the other members of the expedition have taken credit for finding “Radium X.” Consumed by madness and revenge, he goes on a killing spree before he dies by bursting into flames. Other films featuring some variety of death ray in the 1930s deserve mention as evidence of its ever-­increasing popularity. Bela Lugosi played a madman threatening the world in Chandu the Magician (1932) and a villain with an unusual weapon in Murder by Television (1935). In the latter case, his character has perfected a means whereby he can make a phone call that triggers a television camera to act as a death ray. Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy appeared as an evil father-­daughter duo in the 1932 movie, The Mask of Fu Manchu.40 In a German film of 1934, Der Herr der Welt (Master [or Ruler] of the World), a mad scientist creates robots equipped with death rays.41 The Girl From Scotland Yard (1937) features a villain who fires “radio 316 ]

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thunderbolts” from his airplane; the reviewer for the New York Times describes the weapon as a death ray (Nugent, Girl 11). These mysterious ray weapons showed up in the theater, too. Charles Bennett, one of the most prolific stage writers of the twentieth century, who later collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock, wrote The Last Hour, which debuted on 20 December 1928 at the Comedy Theater in London. This highly successful melodrama tells of a secret agent who is foiled in his efforts to steal a powerful death ray from the British government. According to Bennett, the play was a hit “mainly because I burned two of my main characters to charred embers before the thrilled eyes of my audience.”42 The Last Hour received praise for this technical feat from Charles Morgan in the New York Times: “The prince turns his death ray on to an intruder, there is a blinding flash, and when you look again there is the charred body of a man rolling on the floor. This was an extraordinarily successful piece of wizardry.”43 Although later made into a film that reduced the role of the death ray to a single demonstration, Bennett credited this play with ensuring his career as a writer of melodrama. In 1931 J. W. Elliott’s Death Ray opened in New York, and Pirate Mallory, a play by Mary Pakington, was staged in London in October 1935. The story of an inventor who builds a death ray but then tries to destroy the apparatus, Pirate Mallory received good reviews. The Rogue’s March, written by Langdon McCormick in 1939, was designed to entertain New York audiences by having a death ray “destroy the metropolis” on stage.44 As can be seen, the death ray became an important news story during the 1920s and 1930s. It was the most exotic weapon associated with the “next war.” More than a passing fancy of sensationalist journalism, the death ray attracted the careful scrutiny of governments and military agencies before ultimately being rejected as beyond the limits of existing technology. Many popular sf stories show a direct relationship to the descriptions of the death-­ ray devices covered by the popular media, especially those promoted by Giulio Ulivi and Harry Grindell Matthews. Although other stories featured a variety of different types of rays, these, too, often reflected the overall influence of contemporary news reports as well as the growing popularity of the death ray as a quintessentially science-­fictional weapon. Notes

1. For a fuller treatment of imaginary war in the literature of the 1920s and 1930s, see Clarke, Voices; Lindqvist; and Paris. This type of fiction did not originate on its own following the First World War but rested on a firm foundation. As I. F. Clarke points out, future-­war stories began during the French Revolution and continued on

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into the nineteenth century, culminating in George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking in 1871, which set the tone for many that came after. 2. Russian Prince Tarkanoff proposed that rays emitted by radium could be harnessed and used to set off explosives wirelessly. See “Possibilities of Radium,” New York Times, 28 Januaery 1904, 6. As for atomic energy, the first vivid and prophetic treatment of this power source was H. G. Wells’s 1913 novel, The World Set Free. But Wells acknowledged that he had been influenced by the physicist Frederick Soddy, who in 1903 told an audience that atomic power “would be the superweapon of the future” (qtd. in Lindqvist 6). 3. “Explosive Feats of Giulio Ulivi,” New York Times, 7 September 1913, Foreign News 5. See also “Exploding Mines by Wireless,” Dallas Morning News, 7 September 1913, 5; “Rays that Can Blow Up Battleships,” Current Opinion, January 1914, 36–37; “Ulivi’s Experiments in Exploding Bombs With Infra-­red Rays,” Scientific American, 4 July 1914, 6. Ulivi finally agreed to comply with the French army’s requests, but on three succeeding days his apparatus “broke down” and he was unable to perform any demonstrations (“Find ‘F’ Rays A Hoax,” New York Times, 5 October 1913, Foreign News 3). According to the New York Times, Ulivi had succeeded in detonating sea mines by a simple textbook understanding of chemistry. He had placed sodium inside each mine, bored a hole, and then placed a small amount of cotton wool into the opening. When water came into contact with the sodium, it ignited, setting off the explosion. The cotton wool acted as a “timer,” for water would have to soak through it to reach the sodium. In this manner, Ulivi could predetermine the time each mine would detonate, and all that he had to do was direct his rays in the right direction at the approximate time. This procedure, however, could not explain how he had caused ammunition inside a fortress to explode, and therefore some questions were left unanswered. See “Calls Ulivi Bomb a Chemical Fake,” New York Times, 20 July 1914, 1, as well as “Contemporary Thought, The ‘Death Ray,’” Dallas Morning News, 3 June 1924, 14. 4. Lord Dundonald did serve during the Napoleonic Wars, but he proposed to use a primitive type of chemical weapon composed of sulfur and other substances. This was the weapon—not a heat ray—that his superiors banned. 5. Maclay, New York Times, 20 July 1919, Magazine 1. A curious fact was the lack of response to the article by letters to the editor and the apparent absence of any mention of Maclay’s preposterous claim in the literature on naval history. 6. Debeney had held several high positions during the First World War, culminating in command of the French First Army from December 1917 to the end in 1918. 7. See Hart (234), Lefebure (230), and the unsigned articles “Aerial Navies” (12) and “ ‘Viper’ Weapons” (9). 8. “Can Aero Engines Be Stopt by a Mysterious Ray?” (64–71). See also Honoré; Nordmann; and “Secret Ray to Stop Planes Is Seen in Accidents” (931). See Gallica. Bibliothèque nationale de France http://gallica.bnf.fr/. 9. In a March 1920 article in Electrical Experimenter, Thomas Benson discussed the possibility of transmitting radio energy waves along paths of conductivity created by ionizing air with ultraviolet light (“Wireless Transmission” [1118–19]). 10. In a letter to his close friend and scientific advisor, Professor Lindemann, dated 318 ]

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21 April 1924, Winston Churchill wrote: “I wish you would make enquiries about the man who is said to have discovered a ray which will kill at a certain distance. I meet people who say that it can actually be seen to kill mice etc. It may be all a hoax, but my experience has been not to take ‘No’ for an answer” (qtd. in Gilbert 50). 11. The sources on the saga of Grindell Matthews are too numerous to list here. For a sampling, see “The Electric Ray and War,” Times (London), 16 April 1924, 12; “Invisible Death,” Time, 21 April 1924, 19; F. Honoré, “Le Rayon invisible et son inventeur,” L’Illustration, 24 May 1924, 512; “The Death Ray,” Times (London), 23 May 1924, 9; “The Misnamed ‘Death Ray,’ ” Guardian (Manchester), 23 May 1924, 403; “The Death Ray,” Times (London), 28 May 1924, 14; “ ‘Diabolic’ Ray Makes Scientists Wonder,” New York Times, 1 June 1924, Special Features 3; “For Test of Death Ray,” New York Times, 7 August 1924, 5; and Frederic Mortimer Delano, “Man’s Most Terrible Invention,” Popular Science Monthly, August 1924, 33. 12. See “From the Chicago Tribune,” 24 May 1924, in the New York Times, 25 May 1924, 1. 13. See “Tesla at 75,” Time, 20 July 1931, 27; “Tesla, At 78, Bares New ‘Death-­ Beam,’” New York Times, 11 July 1934, 18; “Tesla: Inventor Has Scheme for Dealing Out Death Wholesale,” Newsweek, 21 July 1934, 25. 14. “Demonstration of Death Ray Device Acquits Inventor,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, 14 May 1936, 1. 15. See “Death Rays Deferred” 99, Suits 125, and Clark 113. 16. See “Nazis’ Scientists Planned ‘Sun Gun,’” New York Times, 29 June 1945, 1. See also “Sun Gun,” Time, 9 July 1945, 58–60. 17. “Japanese Had ‘Death Ray’ in Stage of Development,” New York Times, 7 October 1945, 32; see also Grunden 110–16. The first report of Japanese attempts to develop such a weapon appeared in 1936 in Todesstrahlen und andere neue Kriegswaffen (Death Rays and Other New Weapons of War) by Seydewitz and Doberer 73. 18. See Variety Film Reviews 1907–1980, vol. 1, 20 October 1916, n.p. 19. See “Mystery Tales More Numerous,” New York Times, 1 April 1928, 22. 20. See Engineer Garin and His Death Ray (1926, rev. 1937). Tolstoy and others who referred to “Rindell Matthews” apparently got their information from German-­ language newspapers. In 1924, the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna carried a story from the Berliner Tagblatt entitled “Eine angebliche englische Erfindung zur Verhinderung von Luftangriffen” (An Alleged English Invention for the Prevention of Air Attacks) in which Grindell Matthews is referred to as “H. Rindell Mathews” (8). Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ÖNB/ANNO . On the same website see also “Gibt es noch einen Zukunftskrieg? ” (Will There Be Another War in the Future?) Die Neue Zeitung (Vienna), 10 April 1924, 2. 21. Science fiction and imaginary-­war literature of the Weimar period in Germany took on a special character of its own, reflecting the anger, disillusionment, and confusion following defeat in the First World War. Some authors who pursued the Zukunftsroman (novel about the future,) enjoyed considerable popularity, especially with works depicting a revived Germany or involving German individuals in possession of advanced weapons. Many writers pursued a theme of revenge, while others set out to erase the image of Germany as the uncivilized “Hun” of the World War and

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therefore produced novels in which Germans used their superior weapons for world peace. For a fuller treatment, see Brandt and Fisher. 22. See Thone (454); and in the same month and year, “High-­Frequency Sound Waves Destroy Life” 241. Former British Air Ministry official Cuthbert Hicks suggested in 1920 in the New York Times that sound waves could be used as a powerful weapon (Book Review and Magazine 7). 23. The original reads “—Vous connaissez peut-­être le postulat des vibrations synchrones? . . . et le théorème des cônes visuels? Tout tient là-­dedans. Ceci n’est qu’un générateur de rayons N à vibrations différenciées, avec réflecteur et lentilles” (Farrère 258). All translations in this article are my own. 24. See Dominik (189–93). 25. For further information on the pulp magazines, see Bleiler and Bleiler. 26. Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D., Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook No. 0601821.txt, Edition 1. 27. See also McCoy and “A New ‘Death-­Dealing Ray.’” 28. “ ‘Anti-­War’ Ray Reported”; also two articles in The Pathfinder from 1931: “The Death Ray Again” and “Anti-­War Rays.” 29. Davis (393–94); see also “New Ray Makes Cold Stones Glow” (1–2). 30. “The Mystery of the Death Ray Tube,” 12 February 1936, Phyl Coe Mysteries. Recording from Internet Archive. 19 April 2010. 31. Some of the films mentioned in this article can be viewed through the Internet at www.freemooviesonline.com. 32. “Around the Film World” New York Times, 5 October 1924, Drama 5. 33. “ ‘The Story Without a Name’ now named “ ‘Without Warning.’ ” IMDB. Online. 24 April 2010. This film was adapted from the novel A Story Without a Name by Arthur Stringer and Russell Holman (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1924). 34. See Sennwald (25). 35. See Gifford (69) and Variety, vol. 6. 36. Frank S. Nugent wrote two reviews of this film for the New York Times, 16 June 1939, 31; 18 June 1939, Drama-­Screen, 3). The Times (London) reviewer for “Entertainments: New Films in London,” 10 July 1939, 10) gave Q Planes good marks and praised Richardson’s performance; Olivier was not mentioned. The American version of the film was titled Clouds Over Europe. 37. For one reference to Ulivi’s ray, see “Invention of An Italian May Put an End to War” (2). 38. This film can be viewed online at the Internet archive www.archive.org/index. 39. The idea of a meteor containing an element of unlimited energy had appeared in the film Nan of the North (1920). One technological feature of The Invisible Ray shows a close correspondence to scientific speculation. In an article in Scientific American in 1926, M. Luckiesh, director of the Lighting Research Laboratory, National Lamp Works of the General Electric Company, addressed the possibility of developing a super telescope to view the past on earth “as a continuous film.” According to Luckiesh, the light from a certain event in the past would travel to an object in space, such as a planet. With a powerful telescope, it would be possible to focus on 320 ]

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a spot composed of crystal or molten material that would act as a “mirror” and see the light reflecting from it. By selecting objects at different distances in space, and therefore with a specifically known time that it took for light to reach it, one could focus on events such as the American Revolution or Columbus’s arrival in the New World (237). 40. See the review of this movie in volume four of Variety Film Reviews. 41. Variety Film Reviews, vol. 5. 42. Qtd. in Alfred Hitchcock Scholars Meet Here! 43. From Charles Morgan, “The London Stage.” New York Times, 6 January 1929, Drama-­Music 1. See also Marshall. 44. See “Death Ray Play in London” and “Gossip of the Rialto.”

Works Cited

“Aerial Navies and Armies of Chemists.” Literary Digest, 12 November 1921, 28. Alfred Hitchcock Scholars Meet Here! ‘The McGuffin’ Web Page. Online. 15 April 2010. “ ‘Anti-­War’ Ray Reported.” New York Times, 29 November 1931, 31. “ ‘Anti-­War Rays’ Shine.” Pathfinder, 26 December 1931, 14. “Around the Film World.” New York Times, 5 October 1924, Drama 5. Beckwith, O. L. “The Heat Ray.” Air Wonder Stories (April 1930): 890–97. Benson, Thomas. “Wireless Transmission of Power Now Possible.” Electrical Experimenter (March 1920): 1118–19. Bleiler, Everett F., and Richard J. Bleiler. Science-­Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998. Brandt, Dina. Der Deutsche Zukunftsroman 1918–1945: Gattungstypologie und Sozialgeschichtliche Verortung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007. Buswell, Louis. “Clouds of Death.” Amazing Stories (June 1929): 272–85. Campbell, John W. “When the Atoms Failed.” Amazing Stories (January 1930): 910–25. “Can Aero Engines Be Stopt by a Mysterious Ray?” Literary Digest, 23 February 1924, 64–71. Churchill, Winston. “Shall We Commit Suicide?” Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, 24 September 1924. “Civilization Must Abolish War or War Will Destroy Civilization.” Popular Science Monthly (December 1921): 26–27. Clark, Ronald W. Tizard. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Clarke, I. F. “Before and After The Battle of Dorking.” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 1 (March 1997): 33–46. Online. 23 April 2010. ———. Voices Prophesying War, 1763–1984. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Davis, Watson. “Cathode Ray a New Tool of Science.” Current History (December 1926): 392–96. “The Death Ray Again.” Pathfinder, 4 July 1931, 18. “Death Ray Play in London.” New York Times, 8 October 1935, 26. “Death Rays Deferred.” Time, 2 December 1946, 99. Delmont, Joseph. Die Stadt unter dem Meere. Leipzig: Grunow, 1925.

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Dominik, Hans. Die Macht der Drei. Berlin: Scherl Verlag, 1922. ———. Vom Schraubstock zum Schreibtisch: Lebenserinnerungen. Berlin: Scherl, 1943. Dorgelès, Roland, and Régis Gignoux. La Machine à finir la guerre. Paris: Albin Michel, 1917. Eichacker, Reinhold. Der Kampf ums Gold. 1922. Munich: Universal Verlag, 1925. “Entertainments. New Films in London.” Times (London), 10 July 1939, 10. Falcoz, André. Le Semeur de feu. Paris: Tallandier, 1925. Farrère, Claude. Les Condamnés à mort: roman. Paris: Flammarion, 1921. Google Livres. Online. 15 April 2010. Fisher, Peter S. Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Gifford, Denis. Science Fiction Film. London: Studio Vista/Dutton, 1971. Gilbert, Martin. Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth 1922–1929. Vol. 5. Boston: Houghton, 1977. “Gossip of the Rialto.” New York Times, 5 November 1939, Drama-­Screen 1–2. Grassegger, Werner. Die rächende Stünde: Englands Schicksalstag: Ein Zukunftsbild. Naumberg: Tancré, 1922 Griffith, George. The World Masters. London: Long, 1903. Google Books. Online. 20 April 2010. Grunden, Walter E. Secret Weapons of World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005. Hanstein, Otfrid von. Elektropolis: Die Stadt der technischen Wunder: Ein Zukunftsroman. Stuttgart: Levy and Müller Verlag, 1928. Hart, Joseph K. “The Next War.” Survey, 21 May 1921, 234–35. Hicks, Cuthbert. “A World Ruled from the Air.” New York Times, 3 October 1920, Book Review and Magazine 7. “High-­Frequency Sound Waves Destroy Life.” Popular Mechanics, February 1927, 241. Honoré, F. “L’Arrêt des avions par ondes hertziennes.” L’Illustration, 29 December 1923, 689. ———. “Le Rayon invisible et son inventeur.” L’Illustration, 24 May 1924, 512. “Invention of An Italian May Put an End to War.” New York Times, 21 June 1914, Magazine 2. Irwin, Will. “The Next War”: An Appeal to Common Sense. New York: Dutton, 1921. Lefebure, Victor. The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War. London: Collins, 1921. Lindqvist, Sven. A History of Bombing. Translated by Linda Haverty Rugg. New York: Norton, 2006. Low, A. M. “How We Shall Fight in A.D. 2023.” The Nineteenth Century and After (September 1923): 354–58. Luckiesh, M. “The Super Telescope, A Scientific Fantasy of the Past and the Future.” Scientific American, April 1926, 237. Maclay, Edgar Stanton. “Burning Glasses.” New York Times, 20 July 1919, Magazine 1. 322 ]

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Marshall, Ernest. “Notes of the London Screen, A ‘Bloodless Revolution’ in Britain’s Film Industry—New English Pictures.” New York Times, 13 July 1930, Amusements 4. McCoy, Samuel. ‘“Diabolic Ray’ Makes Scientists Wonder.” New York Times, 1 June 1924, Special Features 3. Moselli, José. Le Maître de la foudre. Paris: L’Intrépide, 1921. ———. Le Rayon phi. Paris: Sciences et Voyages, 1921. “A New ‘Death-­Dealing’ Ray.” Literary Digest, 7 June 1924, 27. “New Ray Makes Cold Stones Glow.” Popular Mechanics, January 1927, 1–2. Nordmann, Charles. “À propos des atterrissages d’avions français en Allemagne: Est-­il possible d’arrêter les moteurs à distance?” Le Matin, 6 August 1923, 1. Gallica. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Online. 29 April 2010. Nowlan, Philip Frances. Armageddon 2419 A.D. 1928. Project Gutenberg of Australia. Online. 23 April 2010. Nugent, Frank S. Review of Arrest Drummond. “The Screen.” New York Times, 12 Jan. 1939, 27. ———. Review of The Girl from Scotland Yard. New York Times, 31 May 1937, 11. Paris, Michael. Warrior Nation: Images of War in Popular British Culture, 1850– 2000. London: Reaktion, 2000. “Rays that Can Blow Up Battleships.” Current Opinion, January 1914, 36–37. Reeve, Arthur B. The Exploits of Elaine. 1915. Reprint, Teddington Middlesex, UK: Echo, 2007. Rohmer, Sax. “The Day the World Ended.” Collier’s, 6 July 1929, 25. ———. The Golden Scorpion. Google Books. Online. 24 April 2010. Saager, Adolf. Menschlichkeit. Zukunftsroman vom Geiste des Völkerbundes. Lugano: Salvatore Verlag, 1923. “Secret Ray to Stop Planes Is Seen in Accidents.” Popular Mechanics, December 1923, 931. Sennwald, Andre. “At the Criterion.” New York Times, 4 June 1935, 25. Seydewitz, Max, and Kurt Doberer. Todesstrahlen und andere neue Kriegswaffen. London: Malik-­Verlag, 1936. Skowronnek, Fritz. Dies Irae: Ein ostpreußischer Zukunftsroman. Berlin: Neudeutsche Verlags, 1922. Suits, C. G. Applied Physics: Science in World War II. Boston: Little, 1948. Thieme, Paul. Der Flug zur Sonne. Brandenburg: Verlag von J. Wiesike, 1926. Thone, Frank. “A New Magic.” Century Magazine, February 1927, 454. Tolstoy, Alexei. Engineer Garin and His Death Ray. 1926. Translated by George Hanna. Moscow: Raduga, 1987. “Ulivi’s Experiments in Exploding Bombs With Infra-­red Rays.” Scientific American, 4 July 1914, 6. Variety Film Reviews, 1907–1980. Vol. 1. 20 October 1916, n.p. ———. Vol. 4. 13 December 1932. n.p. ———. Vol. 5. 18 December 1934. n.p. ———. Vol. 6 14 December 1938. n.p. “ ‘Viper’ Weapons.” The Literary Digest, 24 December 1921, 8–9.

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“War Engines of Future to Be Electric.” Popular Mechanics, November 1923, 757. “War of Tomorrow.” New York Times, 25 September 1921, Special Features 1.

Afterword

Research for this article has increased my interest in probing more deeply into the fascinating, and largely unexplored, world of real death-­ray claims and their connection with science fiction, not only in this particular time period but in the years preceding the end of the First World War as well. Many of the tales written before 1918 also show a relationship, direct or indirect, to some of the news stories about wireless energy and its possible use as a weapon going back as far as 1890. Further examination of the interwar years has revealed syndicated newspaper cartoons such as L’il Abner, The Bungle Family, and Our Boarding House as platforms for the death ray. As for the emergence of science fiction in film, an interesting note is the almost obligatory use of the death ray as a standard feature. In the 1932 Sherlock Holmes film starring Clive Brook, for example, Holmes demonstrates how an electronic ray can burn out the ignition coil of a small model car. He says that he plans to offer his invention to Scotland Yard as another scientific means to fight crime, in this instance by stopping criminals in their attempts to elude the police. This ray device, however, plays no part in the story itself, which is all about Holmes foiling Professor Moriarty in his usual diabolical schemes. Further research into the realm of death rays and science fiction should yield other interesting results.

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• 15 •

C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction Susan Gubar For most of the twentieth century, it was generally assumed that women did not read, write, or study science fiction—that sf was a male-­dominated genre. And then (to paraphrase an early gender-­bending story by Joanna Russ), it changed. The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a host of new “feminist” sf works by Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Suzy McKee Charnas, and Marge Piercy, among others. These authors found in the sf genre a perfect vehicle for imagining worlds in which sexual identities and gender conventions could be radically different. And their speculative narratives found much success among sf readers. The following trailblazing essay by Susan Gubar was in the vanguard of this feminist movement; it sought to shed light on the question of how women write sf and on the oeuvre of an important early woman sf writer, C. L. Moore. This essay originally appeared in SFS 7, no. 1 (March 1980): 16–27.

Whether we search through the current proliferation of science fiction or research its origins, it is clear that women have always played a crucial role in its development. Looking backward we remember that the very moment Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein gave birth to his nameless and friendless monster, Shelley herself decisively shaped the new genre and, in doing so, she established several of the more powerful conventions that would inform its history (Aldiss 20–30). Actually her central characters—scheming scientist and revengeful monster—set up an axis around which sf by women revolves. While friends of the nineteen-­year-­old Shelley were puzzled “how 

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[she] . . . came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea” (Shelley, “Author’s Introduction,” xi), a number of recent critics have demonstrated that Shelley’s obsession with biological generation was related to her perspective as a mother.1 Certainly Shelley’s critique of technological coercion, implicit in her portrait of the satanic scientist who usurps female powers of procreation by “labouring” in the “filthy workshop of creation” to bring forth new life (4:39, 41), has been extended recently by more and more Women of Wonder authors like Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy, and Joanna Russ, all of whom are contributing to what promises to be an Aurora—a new dawning—in science fiction.2 But this contemporary fiction that originates out of Shelley’s critique of science as a form of male mastery tends to move in the direction of imagining alternative modes of consciousness and structures of social systems in worlds no longer patriarchal. Before such an optimistic evolution in women’s speculations could take place, however, the less widely known female fabulators, who wrote when science and sf were even more decidedly masculine domains than they are today, tended to relate more intensely to Shelley’s other major character, the monster at the center of Frankenstein. For this alien—with no patrimony, no patronymic, no education, and no history—is a secondary creature who is innocent yet rejected as inferior, intelligent and curious, yet excluded from his master’s cultural and technological knowledge. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Shelley may have concealed her anxious feelings of her own monstrosity by giving the monster a male disguise. But the monster’s namelessness, his orphanhood, his sense of physical deformity, even his reading, reflect Mary Shelley’s early life.3 Indeed, Shelley’s apprehension that femininity is considered a defective form of masculinity is embodied in the monster who expresses her feelings about herself as a member of a sex defined as secondary and inferior. As if commenting on the implications of this fact, Ursula Le Guin suggested four years ago that what distinguishes male from female sf is the hostility toward the alien expressed through the stereotypes of male representation, as opposed to the sympathetic identification established by female authors who endow the national, racial, or planetary outsider with inferiority (see her “American SF and the Other”). This suggestion that women have a tradition of their own in sf does not mean that women cannot write “mainstream” stories, although the technological hardware of sf, as well as the adolescent male audience at which much of it has been aimed, did restrict the number of women who would attempt such writing, as did the virtual exclusion (until relatively recently) of women from a university scientific or mathematical education. When sf 326 ] Susan G ub ar

written by male writers of the 1930s and 1940s consisted primarily of stories about all-­male crews setting out to conquer the universe, women writers had to be seriously hampered by the images available to them for their female symbols or characters: the womblike rocket ship, the virgin planet in need of civilizing, or the tiresome but necessary bearers of life brought along to populate new worlds (see Sanders). In all these roles, moreover, because the “feminine” was classified as irrational within the rhetoric of a genre dedicated to rationality, the woman was viewed as monstrous. While some women undoubtedly managed to write such “mainstream” stories, what I want to suggest is that many who did were attempting to recreate the conventions of this genre in their own self-­image. The development of this neglected tradition from Shelley to Le Guin is too complex to trace here; however, one writer, Catherine L. Moore, stands midway between the two, not only in her identification with the revengeful monster, but also in her criticism of the scientist who creates such a monster only to destroy it. Although some of Moore’s works are out of print today, she is a writer who deserves readers. Her career began unexceptionally enough during the Depression when financial difficulties removed the twenty-­two-­year-­old from Indiana University and placed her at a typist’s desk in a bank in Indianapolis. According to her own account, she was mechanically practicing her typing when she found herself writing her first story: “Midway down that yellow page,” she recalls, “I began fragments remembered from Sophomore English at the University. . . . I discovered myself typing something about a ‘red, running figure’ . . . and then shifted gears without even adding punctuation to mark the spot, swinging with idiot confidence into the first lines of the story which ended up as ‘Shambleau’” (“Footnotes” 365–66).4 Moore goes on to insist on the important role the unconscious played in the creation of her fiction, especially in her portraits of female characters whom she sees as “versions of the self I’d like to have been” (368). Most of the stories included in The Best of C. L. Moore appeared first in magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, and Astounding Science Fiction during the 1930s. After her marriage to Henry Kuttner in 1940, Moore collaborated with him on a number of prize-­winning stories under a variety of pseudonyms, and eventually, on her own, published two novels: Judgment Night (1943) and Doomsday Morning (1957). Although these later works are especially fascinating because of their high literary self-­ consciousness, it is the earlier stories that most successfully develop Mary Shelley’s identification with the monstrous alien and her concern over the coercive effects of technology on the lives/bodies of women, even as they adumbrate the impulse in contemporary fiction to imagine women’s situa

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tion in a world no longer or, more accurately in Moore’s case, not yet patriarchal. Her first story, “Shambleau” (1933), deserves to remain her most famous, providing—as it does—a key to understanding all her early work. It tells of Northwest Smith’s encounter in Earth’s latest colony on Mars with a defenseless girl whom he protects from a lynch mob only to discover that her green, flat cat’s eyes and her elaborate turban conceal a sinister secret—the snaky scarlet locks that squirm down from her head to the floor eventually to crawl over his skin to feed off his soul. When Mary Shelley’s monster promised “his” creator “I will be with you on your wedding-­night” (20:153), “he” hinted at some darkly perverse sexual confrontation between master and monster. But Moore no longer disguises the femaleness of the monster and quite literally imagines the deathly consummation of male master with monstrous mate on the “bridal bier” (23:179).5 Significantly, what first attracts Northwest Smith is the vulnerability of this girl. Her “creamy smoothness” and her “provocative, daring” smile, as well as her “velvety soft shoulders,” are teasing because they imply “sweet yielding” (10) that makes her “desirable beyond words as she sat submissive” (17). The rough and tough Smith is attracted to her quiet and mysterious dependence and docility: “She was so like a woman—an Earth woman—sweet and submissive and demure, and softer than soft fur, if he could forget the three-­fingered claws and the pulsing eyes—and that deeper strangeness beyond words. . . .” (17). But Moore’s handling of the myth of the snake-­haired Gorgon makes us wonder: if snaky, sinister horror lies behind the sweet submissiveness of Shambleau, what lies behind the sweet submissiveness of the Earth woman she so closely resembles? This story also characteristically raises the question of male mystification of female physicality, specifically the extent to which such mystification is based on hatred and fear of female sexuality, because Shambleau’s revenge only works on those men she attracts and because Smith acts almost parodically male as he conducts his business on the wharves and in the bars, only to return home slightly tipsy at night to the little lady who waits quietly for him in the dark. His leather spaceman’s suit, his boots, his gun, his colorless eyes, his taste for danger, and his name make Northwest Smith almost a caricature male hero, and his response to her need for protection is the only lure she needs to trap him. It is he, furthermore, who first imagines in a dream the tantalizing and terrible secret that rigidifies his body with fear. Or is it desire? That Shambleau represents woman as seen darkly through the glass of misogyny seems even clearer when the lovely feline and feminine facade is shown to hide the horrible locks, each “more scarlet than blood and thick 328 ] Susan G ub ar

as a crawling worm” (18). Endowed with a sickening life of their own, they are described repeatedly as wet, round, thick, and shining: She rose, and down about her in a cascade fell the squirming scarlet of—of what grew upon her head. It fell in a long, alive cloak to her bare feet on the floor, hiding her in a wave of dreadful, wet, writhing life. She put up her hands and like a swimmer she parted the waterfall of it, tossing the masses back over her shoulders to reveal her own brown body, sweetly curved. She smiled exquisitely, and in startling waves back from her forehead and down about her in a hideous background writhed the snaky wetness of her living tresses. And Smith knew that he looked upon Medusa. (20) As in all the dressing-­room poems from Juvenal to Swift, the girl who removes her clothing to reveal a “dreadful mockery of ringlets” is a “horrible travesty of a woman shaking out her hair” (18). The bright redness of these locks allows Moore to liken them to “naked entrails” (21), but it also represents Shambleau’s fiery passion and unredeemable physicality. Like Sylvia Plath’s furious “Lady Lazarus,” Shambleau could proclaim: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” (9) for she takes “nourishment” from the “life-­forces of men” (28). These cannibalistic images of the female sucking the vital fluids out of the male through her intestinal tongues of bright flame illustrate how Shambleau embodies fear of the insatiability of unleashed female sexual desire. Although she has been his guest, she makes of him a host—with a vengeance. Furthermore, her feeding tentacles give out a “nauseating, smothering odor as wetness . . . thick, pulsing, wetness and warmth” (21) which is “slimy and dreadful and wet” (25). In this context, the redness of her “waterfall” or “cascade” is reminiscent of menstruation. Her “nest of blind, restless red worms” (19) is, moreover, a virtual “nest of horror” that drains the vitality from the hero with “a little sucking sound” (26). This sound is her native language, her mother tongue, as she begins feeding off him, whispering passionately, “I shall—speak to you now—in my own tongue— oh, beloved!” Whether she embodies the female genitals or female phallicism, then, she also resembles Lady Lazarus in her insistence on surviving. Whether she is the horrible female flesh or the terrible terror of men at female flesh is left disturbingly ambiguous in the story; but she has been with us a long time, Moore implies, and she will not go away politely. Twice, in passages already quoted, Shambleau is said to be “beyond words,” and it is significant that she speaks men’s language only with difficulty. Similarly, with melodramatic irony, she explains that his food is not

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hers: “The food—I eat is—better” (16), she purrs. His categories—light and dark, for instance—are meaningless to her because her vision is different from his. By associating Shambleau with “a race older than man” spawned “from ancient seeds in times before ours” (29), by giving her a unique language and food, by identifying her so closely with blood, with feline grace, with a generic (rather than individual) name (complete with the submerged but nonetheless risqué and “French” sounds of shambling, shaming, and blowing), Moore implies that Shambleau might represent a separate female culture that is beyond our known words and worlds, a culture more similar to animal societies with their very special forms of communication than the male civilization Shambleau currently inhabits. By male standards, however, she is destined to be considered “not wholly human” (5). This means that she can only be “a hunted hare” (2) pursued by the mob of Earthmen, Martians, and Venusian swampmen: “We never let those things live!” (4). No wonder Northwest Smith is reminded of an ancient line, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (5). The brown, persecuted girl is, as Smith’s cohort recognizes at a glance, “the other” (25). Significantly Northwest Smith is staying in this “raw, red little town” on Mars waiting for his friend to arrive from dangerous but lucrative business on—of all places—Venus, and on board a ship appropriately called “The Maid.” Together these three—Smith, Yarol (whose name is an anagram of the Royal typewriter Moore was using), and The Maid—were “a trinity that caused the Patrol leaders much worry” (9). In other words, they too are outsiders. Indeed, Yarol, Smith’s rescuer, has “the face of a fallen angel, without Lucifer’s majesty to redeem it; for a black devil grinned in his eyes” (22). But this daemonic “trinity” of outlaws is still very much a part of the world on which it parasitically feeds. When Yarol arrives just in time to save his friend who is caught in “a mound like a mass of entrails” (23), he too experiences “a faint tingle of obscene delight” (25). But he uses a mirror to aim his gun against the man-­eating monster he cannot face directly. Like Perseus, whom he invokes, he dares not look at this temptation. He can only hope that his friend Smith will not succumb again to “the unspeakable pleasures” of intimacy the girl offers. At the end of this story we see a promise extracted from Smith that he will “try” to kill the next Shambleau he should see. This pact, a kind of blood brotherhood born of their murder of the female, constitutes the bond between the men, born of their common fear of being posterior to the female, under her sway, made into an instrument for her all-­ consuming desires. These heroes act on their fear of female genitalia (wet, sucking, slimy), their fear of female sexual desire (insatiable, rigidifying), and their fear of origin (the male incorporated back inside the female). Yet 330 ] Susan G ub ar

since our point of view is theirs, Moore demonstrates her own sense of self-­ division. While we can glimpse her identification with Shambleau’s revenge against her otherness, we also sense that this author shares her heroes’ revulsion at the grotesque physicality of the female monster. I have gone into some detail with this story because it so perfectly epitomizes the nature of Moore’s contribution to the history of science fiction: what is striking is first the lack of technological hardware; secondly, the revisionary mythmaking, specifically of a myth central to women’s identity; and finally, the concomitant portrait of the woman as alien, specifically the obsession with the ways in which her body is experienced as foreign or dangerous. This last motif finds expression not only in the monstrous Shambleau, but in the exceptionally beautiful heroines of other stories by Moore as well; in the Minga girls on Venus in “Black Thirst” (1933), for example, who have been bred to such exquisite grace that their loveliness is almost “soul-­destroying” to Northwest Smith when he attempts to help one member of the harem escape the prison guarded by their keeper-­creator. Both the ugly and the beautiful heroines—perhaps especially the latter—use their looks as a tactic for survival and retribution in a fallen world where female assertion and autonomy are defined as impossible or unnatural. The beauty of many of Moore’s heroines is especially potent through the alluring adornments of costuming, cosmetology, and cosmetics, as they are exotically practiced in extraterrestrial worlds. In a story she published in Astounding (March 1944), “The Children’s Hour,” Moore describes the fated infatuation of a soldier for a lovely alien girl who is closely identified with Danae, divine in a shower of gold. Moore’s sensitivity to the ethical issues surrounding the mystique of female beauty is probably best illustrated by “Vintage Season” (1946). Co-­ authored with her husband, Henry Kuttner, this is her most frequently anthologized story, in which she creates a race of aesthetes whose physical perfection and sensitivity lead to a narcissistic quest for sensation: time traveling to spectacular disasters in history, this race of beautiful people has lost all sense of responsibility or sympathy. The human hero of this story is destroyed when the aliens—most conspicuously the girl he falls in love with—come to watch voyeuristically the destruction of his city and his own demise. As in “The Bright Illusion” (1934), where the Great God’s priestess and the Great Goddess’s priest can only realize their love in death because they are of different species, the planetary worlds of sf repeatedly allow Moore to dramatize the gulf between men and women. Her image for the two sexes is that they come from different worlds, with different cultures and languages and different physical forms. The two main char

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acters in this story—priest and priestess—cannot realize their love until they leave their physical form because each finds the other’s appearance repulsive. If, as Eric Rabkin, Robert Scholes, and a number of other theoreticians of the genre argue, science fiction provides a “narrative world . . . at least somewhat different from our own” (Rabkin 91, Scholes 175–85) for female sf writers at least up to Moore’s time the world that is “our own” is inexorably patriarchal, and the “different” term is the female, seen now in all her alienation. But this means that “our own” is really theirs, and that “they” are really “us.” It is in its play with such categories that sf by women distinguishes itself. What I have shown so far is how C. L. Moore transforms Shelley’s monster by giving him an emphatically female role. But, as I hinted earlier, Moore also develops Shelley’s critique of the male scientist who attempts to appropriate female powers of procreation. Since we have been concerned thus far with female alienation from the body, we can trace this other strand of Moore’s evolution of Shelley’s themes in a slightly later story, “No Woman Born” (1944), where Moore focuses on a woman without a body of her own. In “No Woman Born,” the heroine, a celebrated performer, has survived an accident only because her brain has been placed in a metal case, a kind of golden cage. Deirdre is a robot who feels no less estranged from her own “body” than Shambleau or the Minga girls: reborn because of the well-­ meaning efforts of a male scientist, she is a “freak,” and his creature. And so we find direct references throughout this story to Frankenstein: “rather like a God” (254), Deirdre’s creator feels he must destroy her, for she is not really human, and she will be considered a scapegoat or a monster: he “remember[s] the lesson of the student Frankenstein” (276), although she assures him, “I’m not—well, subhuman. . . . I’m not a Frankenstein monster made out of dead flesh” (278). And, while her story describes the same anxiety about female flesh that informs the others we have discussed—the only good female body turns out to be this metallic one—in fact Deirdre proves her point that she is not inferior and in the process demonstrates Moore’s suspicion that the woman who has been placed below man as subhuman might very well turn out to be above him, superhuman. Deirdre had been a kind of golden girl of stage and screen; when her brain is planted inside a golden case, she paradoxically finds this metamorphosis less strange than she might, since both before and after the accident she was a woman created by and for men: a “marionette” (252). Unlike the “mechanical dolls” in their human bodies who perform before her on the stage, however, she is now literally what she was before metaphorically: a living doll. Like Frankenstein’s monster, who is stronger and more sensi332 ] Su san G ub ar

tive than those of woman born, Deirdre discovers the strength of being defined as an outsider. For one thing her golden metallic body functions like a mask, concealing her feelings and protecting the privacy of her thoughts. For another, although “no body before in all history . . . could have been designed more truly to be a prison for its mind” (270), she turns this body into a masterpiece that transcends human limitations of physical strength and agility, of pitch and sight: “I’ve found no limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try” (284). However, this fantasy of female power can only occur for a character who has died in the flesh and who, in the words of her creator, really “isn’t female any more” (258): Deirdre remains the object of her creator’s suspicions, for while he feared for her at first, he now has grounds to fear her for his own safety. She could as easily destroy as save him. It is worth pausing here for a moment to compare this story to one written six years earlier, in 1938, by the very man who eventually edited Moore’s stories, Lester del Rey. In “Helen O’Loy,” we are given what amounts to a male version of Deirdre’s story and the contrast is instructive. Two friends— Dave, who runs a robot repair shop, and Phil, who is a doctor specializing in glands, secretions, and hormones—decide to create a really good cook and housekeeper who would exceed the mechanical robots by being given mechanical emotions and consciousness of self. They create what amounts to a beautiful living doll and call her, after Helen of Troy, Helen of Alloy or Helen O’Loy: “Even the plastic and rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair” (54). What happens, of course, is that this paragon homemaker falls in love with one of her creators and they end up getting married and living happily ever after. “No woman ever made a lovelier bride or a sweeter wife,” says Phil, testifying to Dave’s bliss. Actually he himself should have married, “But . . . there was only one Helen O’Loy” (73). As handled by del Rey, the Pygmalion fantasy of creating and controlling the woman implies that only the man-­made woman will perform her duties properly. Again to quote Plath, “It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk. / . . . Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” 6 But for Moore the exquisite fluidity of Deirdre’s golden frame and the lovely tones of her superhuman range of voice are aspects of the power she exerts not for men, but over men. For this reason, although her manager finds that her slender form “called to mind no human figure in armor, not even the comparative delicacy of a St. Joan” (263), Deirdre does modulate into the figure of the powerful woman warrior. Eventually even the narrator experiences Deirdre’s “featureless head” as a “helmet with a visor of glass,” and sees her robe as “chain-­mail”

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(245). Specifically she recalls Moore’s Jirel of Joiry who is also a “mailled” figure—both armored and masculinized.7 A far cry from Helen O’Loy who decides to burn away her metal so as to “die” with her creator, Jirel of Joiry always chooses armor over amour. Moore published a series of stories from 1934 to 1939 about this “warrior lady” who is “impregnable to men” (“Jirel Meets Magic,” 7). The “commander of the strongest fortress in the kingdom,” Jirel calls “no man master” (“Black God’s Shadow,” 78). A virile virgin, her flaming red hair provides one clue to her author’s otherwise enigmatic comment that those readers who have “read past Shambleau to Jirel . . . will probably have noticed what a close relationship the two women bear to one another. They set the keynote for a lot of my own (incessant) writing until I met and married Henry Kuttner” (368). These are the two versions of herself that Moore considers most attractive. Hot-­headed like Shambleau, Jirel is also savage in her passion—her ferocity even—for independence. When Jirel finds herself appropriated by men or daemonic male gods who violate her physically, usually with a kiss or an embrace experienced as a kind of rape, she goes “outside God’s domain” (105) to find a weapon suitable for her revenge and she finds it, in one story at least, in a poisonous kiss she brings back to impress on the mouth of the man who has demeaned her with his desire. This annihilating embrace demonstrates the link between the female monster, the siren, and the woman warrior in Moore’s fantasies. All are fatally contaminating for men. Much more could be said about Jirel’s heroic quests. The tests she undergoes are always psychologically defined, as they are also in Moore’s novel Doomsday Morning, where the play’s the thing constructed to catch the conscience of the tyrannical technocrats that rule a future America when the old “god of mirth and joy” (Comus) is transformed into the repressive “Communication of the United States” (COMUS). The placing of the Jirel stories in what looks like the chivalric Middle Ages also raises crucial questions about the connection between women and sword-­and-­sorcery fiction: the preindustrial, quasi-­medieval locale seems to legitimize the commitment to revenge and the possibility of the emergence of an Amazon-­like queen, both of which find fuller expression in Judgment Night. And certainly Jirel’s legendary prototypes—St. Joan and Judith—sustain the revisionary mythic impulse we have traced throughout Moore’s early stories. But here prospective readers can only be urged to find these stories that serve as such an interesting addition to the other representations of women warriors from La Fille Soldat of folk song to Marlene Dietrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Anne McCaffrey’s singing female spaceship. What is 334 ] Su san G ub ar

important from the point of view of the history of women’s sf is that Jirel’s leadership and her conquests, which inevitably lead her to confront her simultaneous dread and desire for male mastery, suggest that sf provided Moore with the opportunity to locate the power struggle between the sexes in a fantastic past or future where its outcome is uncertain, or at least not entirely inevitable. Joanna Russ has argued persuasively in “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write” that fictional speculation into other worlds liberates writers, both male and female, from the tyranny of the “how-­heroines-­ fall-­in-­and-­out-­of-­love” plot found in so much so-­called “legitimate” fiction. While Moore’s adventure tales about Jirel demonstrate that this is undoubtedly so, we can also see through these stories that the trip to exotic landscapes simultaneously enables writers to imagine what love would be like for women not constrained by patriarchal culture. Fantasy also allows Moore to consider why and when women’s secondary status, women’s need for male approval and confinement in erotic plots, came into being. If historians cannot supply women with information concerning the origins of patriarchy, moreover, the fictional invention of such speculations on origins becomes a primary problem for the female imagination. When Moore’s stories move toward dropping science and technology altogether, they do so in order to analyze the origins and implications of female alienation. We can see this even more clearly, perhaps, in the last story to be discussed here, “Fruit of Knowledge” (1940), a story that explores the Garden of Eden as a world exotically and erotically distant from our own, a world out of which both history and patriarchy originate. Moore’s revisionary myth of the Fall reminds us that Genesis has always been a crucial text for women because it defines and justifies woman’s secondary status. As Mary Daly and a number of feminist theologians have recently taught us,8 the Bible implies not only that Eve was born second, out of and after Adam, but also that her powers of speech and assertion resulted only in the evils of exile and death. Significantly, however, Moore’s first woman is not Eve but Lilith, the legendary first woman of Jewish lore, who had to be punished and replaced by God because she presumed to speak the Ineffable Name and because she preferred the position “on top” not only metaphorically but also sexually. Moore’s Lilith—the self-­created “Queen of Air and Darkness”—puts on what she experiences as a “garment of flesh” in response to Adam’s need and image: “God didn’t send me,” she patiently explains to Adam in the Garden, “It was you, yourself, waiting and wanting me, that let me take shape . . . and come to you in the body you pictured for me” (205).

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But while she is refreshing herself in airborne flight and liberating herself from the humiliating dependency this fleshly garment betrays her into feeling toward Adam, she finds her body co-­opted by Eve, God’s replacement for her as Adam’s helpmeet. The rest of the story elaborates on the rivalry between these two women for Adam’s love: Lilith feels nothing but contempt for a man-­made woman created belatedly out of Adam’s rib, and she uses Lucifer-­the-­snake to plot her revenge, giving him the idea of leading Eve into disobedience in the hope that God will strike her dead, leaving Adam and Eden to her. Of course, as we all suspect, the plan cannot work. Adam’s loyalty to his own rib, it seems, exceeds his desire for the vision of Lilith’s power and beauty he merely glimpses in the end (or is it the beginning?) so he chooses his own destruction and Lilith’s subsequent loneliness. What is especially interesting in Moore’s retelling is that, while Lilith and Eve are competitors for Adam’s love, Moore implies that Lilith’s anger is shaped and shared by the seemingly more docile Eve, just as Eve’s dependency and passivity are experienced by the rebelliously resilient Lilith. Neither can escape the fate of the other. Eve’s first words on earth are “Who is Lilith?” (in response to Adam’s question, “Who are you? Where’s Lilith?”), and Eve—wearing Lilith’s body, using her charms—has enough of Lilith’s insubordination to be attracted by Lucifer’s whispered strategies of revolt. Similarly, Lilith feels herself “incomplete” without Adam, inasmuch as her “need for him was so deep that she could not escape.” Indeed, “the roots of her disease had been in the flesh, but the virulence had spread into the very essence of the being which was Lilith” (215). These two seemingly antithetical and prototypical females—furious witch and docile wife—have both rebelled, and both are diminished, for the myth itself results in their common “feminization.” Even Moore’s revision of Genesis—which gives so much volition and grandeur to the female will that Satan is turned into its emissary—proves that God’s voice rules all worlds inexorably. Only belated, retaliatory action is possible, turning each woman into the mother of monsters. So when Lilith promises that her children will haunt Eve’s (for “Mine are the disinherited—let them take vengeance!” [234]), the equally enraged and vindictive Eve makes a pact with Lucifer that her first descendent, Cain, will also let murder loose among Adam’s sons. Here, as in “Shambleau,” Moore imagines effective responses, if not alternatives, to the secondary status of women in our culture. The sisterhood of these women is powerful, but it is also destructive. In other words, even with the literary freedom of revisionary mythmaking, Moore can only imagine a Lilith uncomfortable in the body imagined not out of her own fantasies but out of Adam’s. While Lilith tries to inspire 336 ] Susan G ub ar

Adam with her own dream—“there’s no limit to what we could do here, together!” (205)—she cannot keep him from eating the fruit of knowledge that will so corrupt his vision. While she can use the war in Heaven between God and Lucifer as a distraction and cover for her own war in Eden against God (208), she herself “in the flesh or out of it, on earth or in ether” knows that “an insatiable need was upon her that could never be slaked” (215). Only real when Adam desires her, Lilith dissolves into “half-­flesh” (219) and finally into thin air, as if unable to find the foods that could possibly sustain her or slake her insatiable need. Like Shambleau, her tragedy consists in her inability to stomach the only proffered foods, the fruits of deathly knowledge that will eventually flower into science and technology. The story ends with Adam, like Northwest Smith, only “remembering the unattainable and the lost”; in this case, “Lilith—perfect in Eden” (234). But “Lilith—perfect in Eden” is also the originator of all free and fanciful storytelling: “But for Lilith,” Moore’s God reports with due authority, “the tale would have spun itself out here in the walls of Eden” (233). She is the cause of expulsion, then, but that makes her also the originator of travel, of exploration into other worlds, outside the walkways landscaped by God, in exotic places where men and women “go beyond temptation and work out [their] salvation” (233). So Lilith, for Moore, is the patron saint of female tabulation. No longer Adam’s or God’s creature, this first of all female monsters pays for her autonomy with her rage, specifically through her curse of Eve which constitutes a curse on herself as well: “Let her and hers beware of my children who wail in the night” (234). In this respect, then, Adam and Eve’s honeymoon promises to be no less macabre than Frankenstein’s. Yet autonomy is authority too, so Lilith reminds us of C. L. Moore, whose stories enable us to hear those daemonic offspring wailing throughout their nights of exile. Written out of her strong identification with the outsider, born of Lilith’s alienation, C. L. Moore’s stories shed much badly needed light on the history of women’s contribution to science fiction. First of all, they remind us that there were successful and pioneering female practitioners of this genre: Sophie Wenzel Ellis, Amelia Reynolds Long, Lilith Lorraine, Leslie Frances Stone (Mrs. William F. Silberberg), and Minna Irving are only a small sample of the women publishing stories in the 1930s and 1940s;9 a slightly later group composed of Leigh Brackett, E. Mayne Hull, Katherine Maclean, Francis Stevens, and Kate Wilhelm also needs to be studied. The fact that the heroine of Judith Merril’s latest novel, Juniper Time, decodes secret messages to make sense of alien languages indicates that contemporary sf by women still exploits the identification of the female with the

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alien, as do the otherwise very different stories of “James Tiptree, Jr.” and Vonda McIntyre. These writers may be as usefully analyzed in terms of female utopian and gothic fantasy as in relation to male-­dominated science fiction. Indeed, women’s current contribution to fantastic literature may be so strong because the creation and exploration of alternative worlds, plural possibilities, multiple forms of sexuality, effectively liberate the female imagination from binary thinking and, consequently, from the double bind of traditional (male-­female) sex roles. For Moore’s stories also alert us to the centrality of sex-­related issues in women’s sf, especially the issues surrounding the effects of female socialization. While contemporary feminist sf provides a window to view imaginary worlds where women are primary, the stories of Moore are a sourcebook of the powerful images in our culture that have surrounded and perpetuated the degradations of female secondariness. Notes

1. See, for example, Moers and Rubenstein. I should like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and to thank Robert Scholes, who introduced me to the stories of C. L. Moore. 2. See especially two recent feminist treatments of contemporary women’s sf in Hacker and Pearson. Also useful are the responses of women sf writers in the fall 1977 issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies in “ ‘Dear Frontiers’: Letters from Women Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers” (62–78). 3. These points are made by Sandra M. Gilbert in “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve,” an essay reprinted in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination. 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all stories by Moore are from The Best of C. L. Moore and page numbers will be included parenthetically in the text. Other pseudonyms used by Moore when she collaborated with Kuttner are “Lewis Padgett” and “Lawrence O’Donnell.” For a general consideration of Moore’s place in sf history, see Gunn. Judgment Night has recently been reissued by Dell with several later stories by C. L. Moore. 5. Since writing this I have learned of Natalie M. Rosinsky’s essay on “C. L. Moore’s ‘Shambleau’: Woman as Alien or Alienated Woman?” which was presented at the June 1978 National Convention of the SFRA in Waterloo, Iowa, and which subsequently appeared in the Selected Conference Proceedings. 6. Plath, “The Applicant,” in Ariel (5). 7. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry includes number of sword-­and-­sorcery stories about the fictional heroine which first appeared in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales: “Black God’s Kiss” (October 1934), “Black God’s Shadow” (December 1934), “Jirel Meets Magic” (July 1935), “The Dark Land” (January 1936), “Quest of the Starstone” (November 1937) (with Henry Kuttner), and “Hellsgarde” (April 1939), among others. 8. See Daly (47–49) and also Plaskow (198–209). 338 ] Susan G ub ar

9. I am indebted here to the research of Frank Cioffi, who is currently writing his dissertation at Indiana University on “Genesis of a Genre: Science Fiction of the 1930s.”

Works Cited

Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Del Rey, Lester. “Helen O’Loy.” The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Vol. 1. Edited by Robert Silverberg, 62–73. New York: Avon, 1970. Gilbert, Sandra M. “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” Feminist Studies 4 (June 1978): 46–73. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Gunn, James. “Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Lewis Padgett, et al.” In Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, edited by Thomas D. Clareson, 185–215. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1976. Hacker, Marilyn. “Science Fiction and Feminism: The Work of Joanna Russ.” Chrysalis 4 (1977): 67–69. Le Guin, Ursula K. “American SF and the Other.” Science Fiction Studies 2 (November 1975): 208–10. Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic.” In Literary Women, edited by Ellen Moers, 93–99. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Moore, C. L. The Best of C. L. Moore. Edited by Lester del Rey. New York: Ballantine, 1975. ———. “Footnotes to Shambleau . . . and Others.” In The Best of C. L. Moore. 365–66. ———. Jirel of Joiry. New York: Paperback Library, 1969. Pearson, Carol. “Women’s Fantasies and Feminist Utopias.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 2 (Fall 1977): 50–61. Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology.” 1972. In Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, 198–209. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Rabkin, Eric S. “Genre Criticism: Science Fiction and the Fantastic.” In Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mark Rose, 89–102. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1976. Rosinsky, Natalie M. “C. L. Moore’s ‘Shambleau’: Woman as Alien or Alienated Woman?” In Selected Proceedings of the 1978 SFRA National Conference, edited by Thomas J. Remington, 69–74. Cedar Falls, IA: University of Northern Iowa, 1979. Rubenstein, Marc A. “ ‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 15 (1976): 165–94.

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Russ, Joanna. “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write.” In Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Susan Koppelman Cornillon, 3–20. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1972. Sanders, Scott. “Woman as Nature in Science Fiction.” In Future Females: A Critical Anthology, edited by Marleen S. Barr, 42–59. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press: 1981. Scholes, Robert, and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History/Science/Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. 1818. New York: Bantam, 1973.

Afterword Veronica Hollinger In 1980, Susan Gubar and her coauthor, Sandra Gilbert, had just published one of American feminism’s most influential literary studies, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination (1979), which included a substantial chapter on Frankenstein called “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” In 1980, the best available history of women in science fiction was Pamela Sargent’s introduction to the first of her two Women of Wonder anthologies (1974 and 1976); Marleen Barr’s groundbreaking academic compilation, Future Females: A Critical Anthology would not appear until the following year; and the first full-­length study of women’s sf writing, Sarah Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction, was still eight years in the future. Gubar’s essay was published in a special issue of Science Fiction Studies carefully titled “Science Fiction on Women—Science Fiction by Women,” at the end of a legendary decade of feminist and women-­authored science fiction that still tends to overshadow the work of earlier writers. Overall, it was generally assumed that few women wrote sf before the late 1960s/1970s. As Connie Willis acerbically noted in 1992, however, “There’s only one problem with this version of women in SF—it’s not true.” By now, of course, we have excellent histories such as Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002) and Lisa Yaszek’s Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008) to provide a more complete record of those early years. In 1980, however, Gubar’s essay on the significance of C. L. Moore’s fiction of the 1930s and 1940s was both unique and prescient. “C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s SF” highlights the revisionary approach of women writers to the figure of the “alien,” the “other,” the “outsider.” Drawing on an observation by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gubar emphasizes “the sympathetic identification established by female authors who endow the national, racial, or planetary outsider with interiority” (16–17). Gubar’s essay is a foundational study of how women write sf, as well as an early examination of a writer whose oeuvre, in the decades since this article first appeared, has itself become foundational. Stories by Moore such as “Shambleau” (1933) and “No Woman Born” (1944) have achieved canonical status as powerfully estranging portrayals of women’s experiences in patriarchy. Gubar’s essay also reminds us of the significance of Shelley’s Frankenstein in establishing the con340 ] Susan G ub ar

ventions of women writers’ representations of otherness and monstrosity. Frankenstein is the key intertext, for instance, in “No Woman Born,” Moore’s proto-­feminist cyborg story. Whether or not Shelley’s novel is science fiction’s “origin” text—always a subject of lively debate—Gubar establishes its importance as a precursor of women-­ authored constructions of alterity in science fiction. By now all this is generally taken for granted, as suggested in the titles of such disparate studies as Jenny Wolmark’s Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (1993), Jane Donawerth’s Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (1997), and Patricia Melzer’s Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (2006). In 1980, however, all this was very important news indeed.



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• 16 • On Stapledon’s Star Maker Stanislaw Lem

Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 mind-­stretching sf work Star Maker has been compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy in its narrative structure and the richness of its cosmological and ontological visions. Polish sf writer and literary theorist Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) has been described as “one of the most significant sf writers of our century and a distinctive voice in world literature” (SF Encyclopedia). It should not be surprising, therefore, that an analysis by Lem of Star Maker would yield some remarkable philosophical insights, as the following essay aptly demonstrates. This essay originally appeared in SFS 14, no. 1 (March 1987): 1–8.

Stapledon intended Star Maker to be the summa of cosmic science fiction; and indeed science fiction could nourish itself for years on the treasures in this essay (it can hardly be called a novel).1 Yet, considered as a whole, Star Maker is a rather monstrous torso. The narrator, who leaves his English home each evening to marvel at the stars, ascends in spirit one night into the cosmic void, and embarks on an odyssey among the stars. He learns to insert himself for intervals into the minds of beings on other planets, and through their eyes and minds he comes to know the innumerable civilizations of the Milky Way: beings with human forms, “plant men,” “underwater men,” “flying men,” intelligent insects, crabs, a birdlike race with a collective intelligence, etc. In the course of his wanderings he expands to greater and greater magnitude; soon he’s describing not individual worlds but whole classes and categories of them. He contrasts “unified” civilizations with “insane” ones. He depicts species in which different sense organs dominate sense experience and which therefore construct different images of deity (“God as the Most 342 ]

Perfect Flavour”—for those beings who have extraordinarily highly developed organs of taste and scent). But that is not all. Once the universe has become densely populated by civilizations, the stars begin to destroy the life in their ecospheres with a series of nova explosions. Some even emit long, horrible protuberances from their chromospheres that wipe their planets clean of life. What does it all mean? It so happens that the stars are also endowed with spiritual-­intellectual life. They are born, they mature, and they age, since they are organisms, and indeed sentient organisms. And when the narrator begins to travel in time as he had in space, returning to the distant past of the universe, he understands that there was consciousness already awake in the very first galactic dust and gas clouds, before the stars had emerged from them. But not even this is enough. All these rungs in the cosmogonic ladder imply ever more clearly the existence of One who creates them all—the “Star Maker,” to whom Stapledon devotes his last chapters. Star Maker is a journey to the Last Things. Like the expanding vista viewed from an ascending balloon, an ever more monumental panorama of cosmic objects and projects extends before us. There are some sacred places in this cosmo-­psychogony—as well as some merely strange ones (the grotesque image of stars angrily sweeping the life from their planets’ surfaces with their protuberances reminds one of a feather duster). Stapledon depicts a mass of psychozoic monsters, because he pays no attention to the evolutionary law by virtue of which the emergence of reason—as an extraordinary accelerator of adaptation, compared with the results of natural selection—makes the outgrowth of any sort of wings quite impossible (since it would take millions of years to occur by evolution, while the art of flying can be mastered a thousand times faster by technical means). But these are not the book’s most serious flaws. After all, they are merely steps in the progress of thought in its ascent to the figure of the Star Maker. This Highest Being had Its own callow youth, during which, playing at creation, It constructed a multitude of “unsuccessful” universes, as it were. In different stages of Its life, good and evil elements collided within It with different results, as did also Its tendencies toward active intervention in Its creations and passive contemplation of their processes. This is the concept of the Developing God, which necessarily assumes the original imperfection of the god. It implies the existence of laws to which the Creator of the Cosmos is subject, since if It can develop and mature, then It Itself could not have given itself these qualities. Stapledon therefore turns out to be mystical system builder, although the logical character of his system is quite dubious. The present universe, which is also the creation of the Creator in ques

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tion, is a foundry of gigantic forces that alternately give birth to civilizations and annihilate them. The dizzying number of collapses, annihilations, injuries, and evolutionary and social anomalies is appropriate for the gigantic scale of the universe, with its metagalaxies and stellar nebulae. The Star Maker does not strive to give Creation psychic life directly; instead, It instills the evolutionary possibility of it. This is why consciousness came about in protoplanetary vortices just as it did in the great stars, in the biospheres of the cool heavenly bodies, and on the shells of stars dying heat-­deaths. All these minds, in so far as they do not stray, or die, or perish at the hands of other minds, finally arrive at the degree of enlightenment at which they can make contact with others. In this process—from the battlefields of different forms of consciousness—a Cosmic Mind gradually comes into being. What It will think about, we do not know. My greatest reservations about the logic of the book concern the double psychic nature of its ontology. Stapledon isn’t satisfied with the fact that mind becomes embodied in material systems—from insects through humans to the nebulae. Above the whole of matter he places the Star Maker, whose activities can be interpreted in two ways. Since It creates the worlds, and then merely contemplates them patronizingly, there are two possibilities. (Stapledon does not want Its activities to be interpreted like this, and he tries to prevent the reader from having such thoughts by stressing that the Creator’s motives are incomprehensible by human beings.) The first possibility is that the relation between the Creator and Its creation is determined exclusively by the Creator’s decisions, and therefore these decisions manifest Its axiology (after all, It does nothing It doesn’t want to do; I am excluding as trivial the possibility of a feeble-­minded deity). And this is a fairly peculiar axiology since It exposes its creatures to infinite torment, even if only indirectly. It has prepared only a this-­worldly existence for us. Once, long ago, It created the Trinity of “linked universes,” in which It connected This-­Worldly Existence with Paradise and Hell; but that was only a local prototype and it was not generalized. Thus, no “generalized transcendence” awaits the conscious beings of the universe. There will be no otherworldly measure, inventory, and payment. In this case, the Creator chose freely. Alternatively, not even the Maker is completely free. Its actions are constrained by some secret force, or the (religious?) axioms embodied in It, and therefore It must act the way it does and not otherwise. The first interpretation leads to a sort of “behavioristic teleology,” whose theses sound rather chilling. By “behavioristic teleology,” I mean simply that we can only reconstruct the axiomatics of choices relevant to the highest 344 ] S tanislaw Lem

values from the Star Maker’s behavior. Although we don’t know what the Maker is thinking, we at least know what It is doing. Obviously, It places the maximizing of variety among panpsychic phenomena above the happiness of Its creature—i.e., Mind. Therefore, Its relationship with Nature does not consist of ethical considerations. The relationship is ludic, or aesthetically determined. Its actions seem to indicate It believes that the greatest good lies in creating as much as possible. And when we compare two independent universes, like the one in which only Good exists and the one in which even Evil may become manifest, the phenomenal world of the former appears to be considerably poorer and less varied than the latter’s. Thus, even if the Star Maker is not an unequivocally sadistic Creator, It nevertheless does subordinate the ethical criteria of actions to criteria from which ethical qualities are absent. It is more important for things to happen in ever more various ways than for the creatures’ fates to become ever better. Accordingly, It is not an omniscient experimenter. It is not really very pleasant to live in a world ruled by a lord like this. The second interpretation leads to a hierarchy of gods, or rather to infinite regression, for it implies the question: Who created the laws that determine the behavior of the Maker? Who established the axioms for It? Who instilled the elements of Good and Bad in It? If the higher authority responsible for all this is also imperfect and unfree, then there must be a still higher authority, and so on. Stapledon anticipates this interpretative snare, and he tries to escape it by circumscribing the terms of inference. He shows, for example, that if a mind condemned to annihilation is sufficiently advanced, it feels neither anger at its fate nor fear. Certain magnificent civilizations, foreseeing the physical destruction brought on by the invasions of the “evil,” “insane” worlds, don’t even try to fend the threats off; they go to the slaughter serenely. Such civilizations, which are already capable of establishing spiritual contact with every mind in the universe, view themselves as leitmotifs in the gigantic symphony of the cosmos. By gaining an ever greater distance from themselves, they understand that they are only single notes in the magnificent music—infinitesimal notes, but constitutive parts of the whole. This is fine as metaphor, but not as metaphysics. From this standpoint, the highest value is the aesthetically True, it is acceptance that is aesthetic, not destruction. But why? Where does its value lie? Apparently in the following: (a) the accepter conquers itself (rather, it conquers its own survival instinct), and (b) it bears witness that it has understood the highest qualities of the Ontological Order. But why is it better to conquer the survival instinct than to conquer the “highest qualities of the Ontological Order”?

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Even if the Maker did structure the universe as music, why should we help It to make this music ever more harmonious, in tune with the counterpoint the Maker itself composed, rather than ruining it and, incidentally, saving ourselves? The following logical error burdens Star Maker: either existence gives meaning to itself, or it is sanctified by a higher value that does not originate from this existence, and is therefore transcendental. In this latter case, reason, in searching for this sanctification, must step over the bounds of this existence. But the Highest Authority must be perfect if it is to be accepted without resistance. For cognitive reason, perfection means the end of investigation. As soon as we say that the Highest is not perfect, the question immediately arises: What constrains, what injures Its perfection? This question, in turn, immediately implies the hypothesis of an even higher authority. Thus the system, which should have closed on itself to form a whole like a circle, remains open. But in the alternative case, where existence gives meaning to itself, everything that tries to patronize it from outside, everything that created it—to the degree that it is not a blind natural force but a conscious creative act— calls the immanent value of existence into question. Only someone who has deliberately set his or her own goals can be truly free and sovereign, and if the goals have been predetermined they cannot be entirely a-­teleological with regard to the creator. The creator of a conscious being is unconditionally aware of the meaning of the creative act. If it is not aware, it means the Creator did not act intentionally (and therefore it acted accidentally, and once and for all not axiologically). The first solution leads to the idea of an imperfect god (which I developed half-­seriously in Solaris and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub). Imperfect gods are more or less anthropomorphic. Their imperfection primarily involves limitations on their creative capacities. These limitations must necessarily be situated somewhere—either in a metaphysical hierarchy (in which case there are “increasingly less imperfect,” or “increasingly higher” gods—and their series approaches the perfection of omniscience and omnipotence) or in a purely material system (in other words, the cosmos comes first, with the game-­character of blind forces; beings are conceived in this game; and these beings can by degrees be transformed into the gods of other beings. This is actually an anti-­teleological “theology,” since the Highest Authority proves to be the material universe, which has no immanent meaning). It is impossible to derive a consistent image of god from the system of interpretative dichotomies described above. The concept of Star Maker is 346 ] Stanislaw Lem

therefore self-­contradictory. Stapledon wants to strike a compromise where tertium non datur applies. There is no third possibility. One can analyze the whole problematic either on the level of immanent systems-­analysis—­ investigating the “evolutionary theory of the attributes of god” as a superior concept—or on the semantic level. In the recent past, Teilhard de Chardin tried to import evolutionism into theology. Every evolution assumes a substrate and an environment, and thus the boundary conditions of the process as well. It childish to say that Good and Evil exist together because it simply cannot be otherwise, and to refer to speculative images from thermodynamics for support, as Teilhard does. He says: just as a motor produces products of combustion, and thus a certain decrease of entropy in one place increases it in another, so Evil, in the processes of existence, appears as product of combustion, the increase of entropy. The silent, but logically ineluctable, premise of these statements is there cannot possibly be any other sort of development than the one actually occurring. How absurd, from the standpoint of the doctrine of god’s attributes, according to which the Highest created everything, and consequently also the rules to which every kind of developing process is subject! Why should It have created an imperfect, evolutionary cosmos, approaching Its perfect goal along the curves of the evolutionary spiral like a wind-­up toy? Is god some gigantic child, who sets up toy trains and delights in directing them toward a goal? Unfortunately, we cannot pursue further the undeniable parallel between Stapledon’s cosmo-­psychic mysticism and Teilhard’s teleogical evolutionism. In Stapledon, both the Star Maker and Its creatures are capable of development. Its maturity means that a great harmony has developed within It, becoming manifest in the harmony (in a purely aesthetic sense) of the whole of Creation. The creature, on the other hand, must discover its place in this harmony through the greatest exertions, and it must act in accord with this knowledge in everything that follows. Let us note that human reflection is inclined toward such extremes. Either it says that consciousness is infinitesimal, a merely local anomaly in the apsychic and perfectly lifeless Cosmos; and hence this irregularity endowed with mind does not know how to find any existential or axiological reasons outside itself in surrounding matter. Or it preaches the panpsychic nature of cosmic phenomena—from which it follows that civilizations are only tiny parts of a single gigantic process of transformation that will ultimately transform the whole universe into a single Superconsciousness. Both positions are extreme, because both equally refuse to consider existence as the source of autonomous values.

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Neither gives an answer to the question of the meaning of existence. For we do not know why the universe “must be” a completely dead system in which thought seethes up at a single solitary point, nor why it “must become” a single Superconsciousness. What precisely would this Superconsciousness do, and why is Its coming into existence so perfect that we must strive for it with all our might? The analysis of this whole ontological problematic reveals that its true character is semantic. Something can be a value only to the extent that it has a meaning; and meanings are always determined by a system. If the whole world has no immanent significance, if it exists only physically, then humans—or other intelligent beings—will make what had been purely physical existence meaningful through their own actions, directing it toward themselves and thus appropriating it culturally. Values exist by virtue of the meanings that culture gives them within the framework of the cultural system. Outside its borders there are no values, therefore no Good, no Beauty, no Evil. If there were no human beings, stars and atoms would certainly exist, but they would not mean or represent anything; they would be neither beautiful nor ugly, neither noble nor base. If, on the other hand, the universe is the product of a creative—and hence, intentional—act, then its meaning is determined precisely by the content of the act. The Creator cannot simply grant it a meaning, accompanied by axiological gradients. No amount of explanation that our thought cannot be compared with the Creator’s can change this. Even if the logic of the Creator’s act absolutely cannot be derived from human logic, this state of things must also be the result of the creative act! It turns out then that the Creator manifests an immanent dishonesty vis-­à-­vis Its creatures, for God created us, but concealed the logic of the act from us. It made it inaccessible to us, in that we are unable—and never will be able—to reach, comprehend, and reconstruct it. The world thus carries meanings for the Creator, but we cannot understand them through our logic. Let us note that logic is a time bomb hidden in the premises of every transcendental metaphysical system operating with the higher concept of the personal creator. In order to save the system from the bomb, one must argue logically for a while, and then put logic on the shelf. Otherwise the intolerable contradictions within the system will appear. Put another way, considering the semantic aspects of the matter, a metaphysical system operating with the concept of a personal god cannot be reconstructed in a consistent way. The lacunae and logical contradictions we encounter when we try to perform this reconstruction are traditionally filled by love. We will 348 ] S tanislaw Lem

say we must have faith in God; let our faith in Him be greater than the restlessness caused by the discovery of these doctrinal contradictions. This line of thought eventually leads to a point where credo quia absurdum est— “I believe because it is impossible”—becomes inexorable. We are expected to overcome every obstacle to the logical reconstruction of the incoherent system with trust in the Creator. In contrast to the traditional image of the almost completely lifeless physical universe, in which the sparks of living consciousness vegetate in solitude on certain planets, Stapledon depicts a panpsychozoic universe, in which the primal nebulae, the stars, the galaxies, the planet-­inhabiting nations are all endowed with soul. The telepathic community of all the civilizations, stars, and gas clouds, fusing together in spiritual unity high above the level of mundane, existential matters, is strongly reminiscent of the community of saints. But Stapledon does not describe the actual contents of these panpsychic connections, where they lead and to what purpose. Instead, he announces that human language is incapable of articulating them. We are dealing therefore with the concept of the ortho-­evolution of a panpsychism, according to which the positive, desirable gradient of the development of the universe is the “intermingling” of all the existing minds within it with all the others. This, then, is the highest value, the magnificent product that the universe bears forth with the greatest pain and effort, through the work of a myriad stars. It is the culmination the universe strives towards. But why should this Pancosmic Yoga be the final stage of cosmogonic evolution? Why does this development begin with the lower stages? Why does the Star Maker begin Its work with such terrible, Sisyphusian, indirect means to create the panpsychic harmony, instead of creating it all at once? None of this can be known. Did It intend things to be this way, or was It compelled? The answer: silence. Stapledon thus raises the typical dilemmas and antinomies of every religion to a cosmic scale, elevating them from an earthly plane and earthly scale of magnitude to the dimensions of the fictive universe. He directs the traditional drama by manipulating not-­entirely traditional figures and symbols. Thus, although Star Maker is an artistic and intellectual failure, at least the author was defeated in a titanic battle. The road Stapledon traveled from his novel about “Superior Man”—via the history of humanity—to the book that tells the “universal history of the cosmos” is clearly visible. Stapledon’s book is a completely solitary creation. No other work in fantastic literature has begun from similar premises. For this reason, it defines the boundaries of the sf imagination.

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Note

1. This essay, translated by Istvan Csicsery-­Ronay Jr., forms the bulk of the chapter “Cosmogonic Science Fiction” in Lem’s Fantastyla i futurologia (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literakie, 1970). The present translation was made from Beatrix Muranyi’s Hungarian version (Budapest: Gondolat, 1974).

Afterword Istvan Csicsery-­Ronay, Jr. Stanislaw Lem’s “On Stapledon’s Star Maker” appeared originally as a chapter in Lem’s Science Fiction and Futurology (Fantasyka i futurologia, 1970). When it was published, Lem was already recognized as the most artistically ambitious writer of science fiction. His most celebrated works—The Star Diaries (1957), Eden (1959), Solaris (1960), Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), The Invincible (1964), The Cyberiad (1965), His Master’s Voice (1968), Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1968), and the magisterial treatise Summa Technologiae (1964)—were behind him. Science Fiction and Futurology attempts to construct a global theory of sf as a speculative literature shaped by the potential effects of “technoevolution” on cultural axioms, a materialist version of Nietzschean “transvaluation of values.” For Lem, sf should be the most philosophically ambitious literature of the age because it naturally assumes that human technology can transform every aspect of existence, including civilizations’ basic assumptions. But in fact, Lem concludes, most sf is tawdry trash that betrays its high vocation. Two exceptional writers stand out, however: the ironic minimalist Jorge Luis Borges and the tragic maximalist Olaf Stapledon. (Philip K. Dick would soon join them as a “visionary among charlatans.”) The chapter on Star Maker is one of the first careful analyses to appear on Stapledon’s great “cosmogonic essay.” It is actually the shorter of two essays on Stapledon in Science Fiction and Futurology. The other is an extensive meditation on Last and First Men (which unfortunately proved too long to include in this volume). While Lem is generally appreciative of Last and First Men (and its influence on his work is palpable), his reaction to Star Maker is more ambivalent. For Lem, Star Maker is “an artistic and intellectual failure,” but its defeat has come “in a titanic struggle.” It is a limit case in the megatext of sf, “a completely solitary creation,” because it attempted to achieve a transcendental vision impossible within the discourse of sf. The Star Maker essay is virtually the only text that Lem discusses in a chapter entitled “Cosmogonic Science Fiction.” Where Borges, in his 1965 afterword to the Argentine edition of Star Maker (still untranslated into most languages, though Lem may have read it in Spanish), connects Star Maker to the tradition of humanistic cosmic histories, Lem approaches it as a unique philosophical myth. Lem devotes little attention to the marvelous diversity of sentient creatures in the book and their struggles for community and collective enlightenment. He is concerned almost entirely with Stapledon’s attempt to square the possibilities of natural and techno-­evolution in the material universe, on the one hand, with a transcendent creator, on the other. The essay seems at times to be less an argument with Stapledon than with the irrationality of any cosmogony that involves a personal, intentional creator. This perhaps 350 ] S tanislaw Lem

exaggerated emphasis on the logical contradictions in Stapledon’s fictive metaphysics reveals Lem’s deep and troubled kinship with Stapledon. Lem detects in Star Maker Stapledon’s attempt to reconcile the great nineteenth-­century philosophical visions of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer—the same philosophers that obsess Lem in his profoundly skeptical and deconstructive sf. For Lem, Stapledon is the last monumental system builder in sf, whose edifice he cannot help but admire, but whose premises he devotes his career to undermining.



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150 Key Works of Early Science Fiction Compiled by Arthur B. Evans and Javier A. Martínez circa 150 1516 1623 1626 1634 1638 1657

Lucien of Samosata. A True History Thomas More. Utopia Tommaso Campanella. La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun) Francis Bacon. The New Atlantis Johannes Kepler. Somnium (The Dream) Bishop Francis Godwin. The Man in the Moone John Wilkins. The Discovery of a New World in the Moon Cyrano de Bergerac. Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon) 1662 Cyrano de Bergerac. Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun) 1666 Margaret Cavendish. Blazing World 1675 Denis Veiras. Histoire des Sévarambes (History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi) 1676 Gabriel de Foigny. La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Continent Revealed) 1686 Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) 1703 David Russen. Iter Lunare (A Voyage to the Moon) 1726 Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels 1733 Samuel Madden. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century 1741 Ludvig Holberg. Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (Nicolas Klim’s Journey to the World Underground) 1750 Robert Paltock. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins 1752 Voltaire. Micromégas 1763 Anonymous. The Reign of George VI, 1900–25 1771 Louis-­Sébastien Mercier. L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante (The Year 2440) 1775 Manuel Antonio de Rivas. Sizigias (Syzygies) 1781 Restif de la Bretonne. La Découverte Australe par un Homme Volant (The Discovery of the Southern Hemisphere by a Flying Man) 1788 Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt. Isocameron 1805 Jean-­Baptiste Cousin de Grainville. Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) 1810 Julius Von Voss. Ini, ein Roman aus dem ein und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Ini, a Novel of the Twenty-­First Century) 1816 E. T. A. Hoffmann. “Der Sandmann” (The Sandman)



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1818 1820 1826 1827 1833 1834 1835 1836 1838 1840 1844 1845 1846 1848 1854 1858 1861 1863 1864 1865 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1874 1875

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Mary Shelley. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus Adam Seaborn. Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery Mary Shelley. The Last Man Joseph Atterley (George Tucker). A Voyage to the Moon Jane Webb-­Loudon. The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-­Second Century Edgar Allan Poe. “MS Found in a Bottle” Félix Bodin. Le Roman de l’avenir (The Novel of the Future) Edgar Allan Poe. “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall” Louis-­Napoléon Geoffroy. Napoléon et la conquête du monde (Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) Edgar Allan Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Vladimir Odoyevsky. “4338 i-­god” Fósforos-­Cerillos (Sebastián Camacho Zulueta or José Joaquín Mora). “México en el año 1970” (Mexico in the Year 1970) Edgar Allan Poe. “The Balloon Hoax” Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” Edgar Allan Poe. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” Émile Souvestre. Le Monde te qu’il sera (The World as It Shall Be) Edgar Allan Poe. “Mellonta Tauta” Charlemagne-­Ischir Defontenay. Star, ou Psi de Cassiopée (Star or Psi of Cassiopeia) Fritz-­James O’Brien. “The Diamond Lens” Pierre Boitard. Paris avant les hommes (Paris Before Man) Jules Verne. Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chto delat? (What Is to Be Done?) Jules Verne. Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) Jules Verne. De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) Henri de Parville. Un Habitant de la planéte Mars (An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars) Edward S. Ellis. The Steam Man of the Prairies Joachím Felício dos Santos. Páginas da história do Brasil escripta no anno de 2000 (Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000) Mikhail Saltykov-­Shchedrin. Istoriya odnogo goroda (Chronicles of a City) Edward Everett Hale. “The Brick Moon” Jules Verne. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas) Jules Verne. Autour de la lune (Around the Moon) Sir George Chesney. The Battle of Dorking Edward Bulwer-­Lytton. The Coming Race Samuel Butler. Erewhon Camile Flammarion. Lumen Carlo Dossi. La Colonia Felice (The Happy Colony) Jules Verne. L’Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island) Eduardo L. Holmberg. Viaje maravilloso del Señor Nic-­Nac al planeta Marte (The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-­Nac to the Planet Mars)

150 K ey Works of Early Scien ce Fi ction

1876 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1901 1904



Charles Renouvier. Uchronie (Uchronia) Francisco Miralles, Desde Júpiter: Curioso viaje de un santiaguino magnetizado (From Jupiter: The Curious Voyage of a Magnetized Man from Santiago) Jules Verne. Les 500 millions de la Bégum (The Begum’s Millions) Percy Greg. Across the Zodiac Edward Page Mitchell. “The Clock that Went Backwards” Albert Robida. Le Vingtième siècle (The Twentieth Century) Edwin A. Abbott. Flatland H. Rider Haggard. King Solomon’s Mines Richard Jefferies. After London Jules Verne. Robur-­le-­conquérant (Robur the Conqueror) Villiers de L’Isle-­Adam. L’Ève future (The Future Eve) H. Rider Haggard. She Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde William Henry Hudson. A Crystal Age André Laurie [Paschal Grousset]. Les Exilés de la Terre (The Exiles of the Earth) Albert Robida. La Guerre au vingtième siècle (War in the Twentieth Century) J.-H. Rosny Aîné, “Les Xipéhuz” (The Shapes) Edward Bellamy. Looking Backward: 2000–1887 James DeMille. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens]. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Ignatius Donnelly. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century Mary E. Bradley Lane. Mizora. William Morris. News from Nowhere Camille Flammarion. La Fin du monde (Omega: The Last Days of the World) George Griffith. The Angel of the Revolution Gustavus W. Pope. Journey to Mars Paul d’Ivoi. Les Cinq sous de Lavarède (The Five Pennies of Lavarède) Grant Allen. The British Barbarians George MacDonald. Lilith J.-H. Rosny Aîné. “Un Autre monde” (Another World) H. G. Wells. The Time Machine Jules Verne. L’Ile à hélice (Propeller Island) H. G. Wells. The Island of Dr. Moreau Kurd Lasswitz. Auf zwei Planeten (Two Planets) Paolo Mantegazza. L’Anno 3000: Sogno (The Year 3000: A Dream) Enrique Gaspar. El Anachronópete (The Time Ship) H. G. Wells. The Invisible Man H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds Garrett P. Serviss. Edison’s Conquest of Mars M. P. Shiel. The Yellow Danger M. P. Shiel. The Purple Cloud H. G. Wells. The First Men in the Moon Jules Verne. Maître du monde (Master of the World) H. G. Wells. The Food of the Gods

150 K ey Works of Early Scienc e Fiction 

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1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1918 1919 1920 1922 1924 1925 1927 1928 1930 1932 1933 1934 1936 1937 1938

356 ]

Jack London. Before Adam Jack London. The Iron Heel Alexander Bogdanov. Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star) William Hope Hodgson. The House on the Borderland Gustave Le Rouge. Le Prisionnier de la planète Mars (The Prisoner of the Planet Mars) Maurice Renard. Le docteur Lerne, sous-­dieu (Dr. Lerne, Sub-­god, or New Bodies for Old) E. M. Forster. “The Machine Stops” Gustave Le Rouge. La Guerre des vampires (The Vampire War) J.-H. Rosny Aîné. La Guerre du feu (Quest for Fire) Karel Hloucha. Zakleta zeme (Enchanted Country) J.-H. Rosny Aîné. La Mort de la Terre (The Death of the Earth) J. D. Beresford. The Hampdenshire Wonder Hugo Gernsback. Ralph 124 C41+ F. W. Mader. Wunderwelten (Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets) Edgar Rice Burroughs. A Princess of Mars Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lost World Jack London. The Scarlet Plague Arthur Conan Doyle. The Poison Belt Paul Scheerbart. Lesabendio George Allan England. Darkness and Dawn Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the Earth’s Core Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Land that Time Forgot A. Merritt. The Moon Pool Eduardo Urzaiz. Eugenia Ray Cummings. The Girl in the Golden Atom Karel Čapek. R.U.R. David Lindsay. A Voyage to Arcturus Maurice Renard. Les mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac) Alexi Tolstoy. Aelita Yevgeny Zamiatin. We J.-H. Rosny Aîné. Les Navigateurs de l’infini (The Navigators of the Infinite) Sydney Fowler Wright. Deluge E. E. Smith. The Skylark of Space Olaf Stapledon. Last and First Men Aldous Huxley. Brave New World C. L. Moore. “Shambleau” Stanley G. Weinbaum. “A Martian Odyssey” Karel Čapek. War with the Newts Olaf Stapledon. Star Maker John W. Campbell. “Who Goes There?”

150 K ey Works of Early Scien ce Fi ction

Bibliography of Criticism on Early Science Fiction Compiled by Arthur B. Evans and Javier A. Martínez The following bibliography offers a large number of critical studies in English on early (pre-­ 1940) science fiction. In defining “science fiction,” we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible. The bibliography contains, for example, numerous works on utopian fiction, imaginary voyages, scientific romance, and prehistoric fiction. It does not, however, include works about fantasy, detective fiction, or horror. The bibliography contains two major sections: General Reference and Author Studies. The General Reference section is divided into three subsections: (1) encyclopedias, research guides, companions, and critical bibliographies; (2) collections and special issues whose essays are focused primarily on early sf; and (3) historical and thematic studies. The Author Studies section is arranged in (roughly) chronological order from Lucian to John W. Campbell. Online links have been provided for many entries whenever available and appropriate. For each sf author listed, readers are also advised to consult the online version of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (at http://www.sf-­encyclopedia.com/) for additional pertinent information. No bibliography of secondary sources can be totally exhaustive, and this one is no different. But we have tried to include in it as broad a selection of materials as possible. As a result, we believe this to be the most comprehensive bibliography of criticism on early science fiction ever published and should serve as a highly useful reference work for sf scholars in the field.

General Reference Encyclopedias, Research Guides, Companions, and Critical Bibliographies Ash, Brian, ed. The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: Harmony Books, 1977. Barron, Neil, ed. Anatomy of Wonder. 5th ed. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. Bleiler, Everett F. The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Naperville, IL: Fax, 1972. ———. The Checklist of Science-­Fiction and Supernatural Fiction. Glen Rock, NJ: Firebell Books, 1978. ———. Science-­Fiction: The Early Years; A Full Description of More than 3000 Science-­ Fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930, with Author, Title, and Motif Indexes. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990. ———, ed. Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. New York: Scribner’s, 1982. Bleiler, Everett F., and Richard Bleiler. Science-­Fiction: The Gernsback Years; A Complete Coverage of the Genre Magazines “Amazing,” “Astounding,” “Wonder,” and Others from 1926 through 1936. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998.



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Booker, Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Bould, Mark, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, eds. Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2010. ———. The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2009. Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Online at: http://www.sf-­encyclopedia.com/. Clareson, Thomas D. Science Fiction Criticism: An Annotated Checklist. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1972. ———. Science Fiction in America, 1870s–1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Clarke, I. F. The Tale of the Future from the Beginning to the Present Day: An Annotated Bibliography. London: The Library Association, 1961. 3rd ed. 1978. Eisen, Sydney, and Bernard V. Lightman, eds. Victorian Science and Religion: A Bibliography with Emphasis on Evolution, Belief, and Unbelief, Comprised of Works Published From c. 1900–1975. New York: Archon Books, 1984. Gunn, James E. The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: Viking, 1988. Hacker, Barton C., and Gordon B. Chamberlain. “Pasts That Might Have Been, II: A Revised Bibliography of Alternate History.” In Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World As It Might Have Been, edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, 301–63. New York: Garland Press, 1986. Hall, Hal. W. Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Index 1879–1985: An International Author and Subject Index to History and Criticism. 2 vols. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1987. See also the online Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database at: http://sffrd.library .tamu.edu/. Holdstock, Robert, ed. Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Octopus Books, 1978. James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Locke, George W. Voyages in Space: A Bibliography of Interplanetary Fiction 1801–1914. London: Ferret Fantasy, 1975. Lofficier, Jean-­Marc, and Randy Lofficier. French Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Magill, Frank N., ed. Survey of Science Fiction Literature. 5 vols. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979. Mann, George, ed. The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2001. Nicholls, Peter, ed. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. Parrinder, Patrick, ed. Science Fiction: A Critical Guide. London: Longman, 1979. Peterson, Jay P. St. James Guide of Science Fiction Writers. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1996. Rottensteiner, Franz. The Science Fiction Book: An Illustrated History. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Sargent, Lyman Tower. British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1986: An Annotated Chronological Bibliography. New York: Garland Press, 1988. Seed, David, ed. A Companion to Science Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

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Stableford, Brian. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. ———. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. London: Routledge, 2006. Tuck, Donald H. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. 3 vols. Chicago: Advent, 1975–82. Westfahl, Gary, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. 3 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Collections and Special Issues Brantlinger, Patrick, ed. Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain; Essays from Victorian Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Donawerth, Jane L., and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994. “A History of Science Fiction Criticism.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 2 (July 1999): 161–352. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/covers/cov78.htm. “A Jules Verne Centenary.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 1 (March 2005): 1–224. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/covers/cov95.htm. “Proto/Early Science Fiction.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 36, no. 2 (July 2009): 193–384. Sandison, Alan, and Robert Dingley, eds. Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000. Schenkel, Elmar, and Stefan Welz, eds. Lost Worlds and Mad Elephants: Literature, Science and Technology 1700–1990. Berlin, Germany: Galda and Wilch Verlag, 1999. “Science Fiction before Wells.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 3 (November 1976): 219–320. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/covers/cov10.htm. “Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 10, no. 2 (July 1983): 123–258. “The Science Fiction of Olaf Stapledon.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 3 (November 1982): 235–53. “Science Fiction through H. G. Wells.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1981): 1–120. Seed, David, ed. Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Stableford, Brian, trans. and ed. The Germans on Venus, and Other French Scientific Romances. 1796–1921. [Collection of thirteen early sf short stories by Restif de la Bretonne, Charles Nodier, Louis Ulbach, X. B. Saintine, Andrien Robert, Eugène Mouton, Jules Lermina, Rémy de Goncourt, Marcel Schwob, Louis Mullem, Alphonse Allais, André Mas, and Théo Varlet]. With an introduction and extensive footnotes by Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2009. ———, trans. and ed. Nemoville, and Other French Scientific Romances. 1757–1924. [Collection of twelve early sf short stories by Emerich de Vattel, Alfred Bonnardot, René du Mesnil de Maricourt, Alphonse Brown, Claude Manceau, Georges Bethuys, C. Paulon, Emma-­Adèle Lacerte, Pierre Mille, and José Moselli]. With an introduction and extensive footnotes by Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2012. ———, trans. and ed. News from the Moon, and Other French Scientific Romances. 1768–



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1902. [Collection of nine early sf short stories by Louis-­Sébastien Mercier, Adrien Robert, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean Richepin, Albert Robida, Eugène Mouton, Georges Eekhoud, Guy de Maupassant, and Fernand Noat]. With an introduction and extensive footnotes by Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2007. ———, trans. and ed. The Supreme Progress, and Other French Scientific Romances. 1862– 93. [Collection of eighteen early sf short stories by X. B. Saintine, Eugène Mouton, Charles Cros, Charles Epheyre, Paul Adam, and Louis Mullem]. With an introduction and extensive footnotes by Brian Stableford. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2011. “Utopia and Anti-­utopia.” Special issue of Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 115– 234. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/covers/cov27.htm. Historical and Thematic Studies Adams, R. P. “The Social Responsibilities of Science in Utopia, New Atlantis and After.” Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949): 374–98. Albinski, Nan Bowman. Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. ———. “The Laws of Justice, of Nature, and of Right: Victorian Feminist Utopias.” In Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, edited by Libby F. Jones, 50–68. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973. ———. “Some Early Men in the Moon.” In The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy, edited by Brian W. Aldiss, 150–58. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Aldiss, Brian W., with David Windrove. Trillion Year Spree: the History of Science Fiction. London: Victor Gollanz, 1986. Alessio, Dominic, ed. “The Great Romance, by The Inhabitant.” Science Fiction Studies 20, no. 3 (November 1993): 305–40. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/documents /inhabita.htm. Alkon, Paul K. Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987. ———. Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Twayne, 1994. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. NY: Harcourt, 1960. ———. “Starting Points.” In Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mark Rose, 9–29. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1976. Angenot, Marc. “The Emergence of the Anti-­Utopian Genre in France: Souvestre, Giraudeau, Robida, et al.” Science Fiction Studies 12, no. 2 (July 1985): 129–35. ———. “Science Fiction in France before Verne.” Science Fiction Studies 5, no. 1 (March 1978): 58–66. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/14/angenot14art.htm. Ashley, Michael, ed. The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, 1926–1935. London: New English, 1974. Chicago: Regnery, 1976. ———. The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-­Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2001. Atkinson, Geoffrey. The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature before 1700. New York: Columbia University Press, 1920.

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———. The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature from 1700 to 1720. New York: Franklin, 1922. Attebery, Brian. “From Neat Idea to Trope.” In Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, 17–38. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “The Magazine Era: 1926–1960.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 32–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Baehr, Stephen L. The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-­Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Bailey, J. O. Pilgrims through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction. New York: Argus Books, 1947. Banerjee, Anindita. “Electricity: Science Fiction and Modernity in Early Twentieth-­Century Russia.” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 1 (March 2003): 49–71. ———. We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Beaumont, Matthew. Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900. Boston: Brill, 2005. Becker, A. R. The Lost Worlds Romance: From Dawn to Dusk. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Begley, Walter. “Bibliography of Romance from the Renaissance to the End of the Seventeenth Century.” In Nova Solyma, the Ideal City, edited by Samuel Gott, 355–400. London: Murray, 1902. Bellanta, Melissa. “Fabulating the Australian Desert: Australia’s Lost Race Romances, 1890– 1908.” Philament: An Online Journal of the Arts and Culture, no. 3 (2004). Online at: http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/. Blackford, Russell, Van Ikin, and Sean McMullen. Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Bleiler, Everett F. “From the Newark Steam Man to Tom Swift.” Extrapolation 30, no. 2 (1989): 101–16. Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2011. Bozzetto, Roger. “Intercultural Interplay: Science Fiction in France and the United States (As Viewed From the French Shore).” Science Fiction Studies 17, no. 1 (March 1990): 1–24. Brasington, Bruce. “Boys, Battleships, Books: the Cult of the Navy in US Juvenile Fiction, 1898–1919.” In Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, edited by Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley, 72–90. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000. Brians, Paul. Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987. Brown, J. Andrew, and M. Elizabeth Ginway. Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Campbell, Mary B. “Impossible Voyages: Seventeenth Century Space Travel and the Impulse of Ethnology.” Literature and History 6 (Autumn 1997): 1–17.



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Capasso, Ruth C. “Islands of Felicity: Women Seeing Utopia in Seventeenth Century France.” In Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, edited by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten, 35–53. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Chatelain, Danièle, and George Slusser. “Flying to the Moon in French and American Science Fiction.” In Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl, 25–33. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Christensen, John M. “New Atlantis Revisited: Science and the Victorian Tale of the Future.” Science Fiction Studies 5, no. 3 (November 1978): 243–49. Online at: http://www.depauw .edu/sfs/backissues/16/christensen16art.htm. Claeys, Gregory, ed. Utopias of the British Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Clareson, Thomas D. “The Emergence of Science Fiction: The Beginnings to the 1920s.” In Anatomy of Wonder, 3rd ed., edited by Neil Barron, 3–48. New York: Bowker, 1987. Reprinted as “The Emergence of Science Fiction: The Beginnings Through 1915” in Anatomy of Wonder, 4th ed, edited by Neil Barron, 3–61. New York: Bowker, 1995. ———. “The Emergence of the Scientific Romance.” In Anatomy of Wonder, edited by Neil Barron, 33–78. New York: Bowker, 1976. ———. “Lost Lands, Lost Races: A Pagan Princess of Their Very Own.” In Many Futures, Many Worlds, edited by Thomas D. Clareson, 117–39. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977. ———. “The Scientist as Hero in American Science Fiction 1880–1920.” Extrapolation 7, no. 1 (1965): 18–28. ———. Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Clarke, I. F. “Before and After The Battle of Dorking.” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 1 (March 1997): 33–46. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/clarke71art.htm. ———. “Future-­War Fiction: The First Main Phase 1871–1900.” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 3 (November 1997): 387. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/clarkeess.htm. ———. The Pattern of Expectation: 1644–2001. New York: Basic Books, 1979. ———. “The Shape of Wars to Come.” In SF: The Other Side of Realism, edited by Thomas D. Clareson, 216–28. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971. ———. The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and Battles Still-­to-­Come. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. ———, ed. Fictions and Fantasies of the War-­to-­Come. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1997. ———. Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763–3749. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. 2nd ed. 1992. Crossley, Robert. Imagining Mars: A Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Crouch, T. D. “ ‘To Fly to the World in the Moon’: Cosmic Voyaging in Fact and Fiction From Lucian to Sputnik.” In Science Fiction and Space Futures, edited by Eugene M. Emme, 7–26. San Diego: Univelt, 1982.

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De Camp, L. Sprague. Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature. New York: Gnome Press, 1954. Dentith, Simon. “Imagination and Inversion in Nineteenth-­Century Utopian Writing.” In Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, edited by David Seed, 137–52. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1995. De Paolo, Charles. Human Prehistory in Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Free Press, 1998. Dingley, Robert. “The Ruins of the Future: Macaulay’s New Zealander and the Spirit of the Age.” In Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, edited by Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley, 15–33. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000. Donawerth, Jane L. “Science Fiction by Women in the Early Pulps, 1926–1930.” In Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, edited by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten, 137–52. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Dziubinskyj, Aaron. “The Birth of Science Fiction in Spanish America.” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 1 (March 2003): 21–33. Engholm, Ahrvid, “A Magazine of the Fantastic from 1682.” Foundation, no. 72 (1998): 88–93. Esler, Dominic William. “Soviet Science Fiction of the 1920s.” Foundation, no. 109 (Summer 2010): 27–52. Evans, Arthur B. “Functions of Science in French Fiction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination. 22, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 79–100. Online at: http://jv.gilead.org.il/evans /function.html. ———. “Nineteenth-­Century SF.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould et al., 13–22. London: Routledge, 2009. ———. “Optograms and Fiction: Photos in a Dead Man’s Eye.” Science Fiction Studies 20, no. 3 (November 1993): 341–60. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/61 /evans61art.htm. ———. “The Origins of Science Fiction Criticism: From Kepler to Wells.” Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 2 (July 1999): 163–86. Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues /78/evans78art.htm. ———. “Science Fiction.” In Handbook of French Popular Culture, edited by Pierre L. Horn, 229–65. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1991. ———. “Science Fiction vs. Scientific Fiction in France: From Jules Verne to J.-H. Rosny Aîné.” Science Fiction Studies 15, no. 1 (March 1988): 1–11. Online at: http://jv.gilead.org .il/evans/jv-­rosny.html. Fanning, William J. “The Historical Death Ray and Science Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s.” Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 2 (July 2010): 253–74. Fayter, Paul. “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.” In Victorian Science in Context, edited by Bernard Lightman, 256–80. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Fernandez-­Delgado, Miguel A. “A Moon Voyage Inside an Astronomical Almanac in Eighteenth Century Mexico.” New York Review of Science Fiction, no. 7 (September 1996): 17–18.



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Contributors Ishbel Addyman , who was educated at Oxford and at Université Paul Valéry III in Montpellier, currently lives in Hertfordshire, UK.

Paul Alkon is professor emeritus of English and American literature at the University of Southern California.

Andrea Bell is professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Hamline University. Josh Bernatchez currently lives and works in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Margaret Clarke is a translator and spouse of the late I. F. Clarke, who authored many studies about future-­war fiction.

Istvan Csicsery-­Ronay Jr . is professor of English at DePauw University. Arthur B. Evans is professor of French at DePauw University and editor of Wesleyan University Press’s “Early Classics of Science Fiction” series.

William J. Fanning, Jr . teaches history at All Saints’ Episcopal School in Fort Worth, Texas.

William B. Fischer is professor of German at Portland State University. Allison de Fren is professor of Media Arts and Culture at Occidental College. Susan Gubar is professor emerita of English at Indiana University. Rachel Haywood Ferreira is associate professor of Spanish at Iowa State University. Veronica Hollinger is professor of cultural studies at Trent University. Kamila Kinyon teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Denver. Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) is an important Polish writer and critic of science fiction. Javier A. Martínez is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Brownsville.

Patrick A. McCarthy is professor of English at the University of Miami. Sylvie Romanowski is professor of French at Northwestern University. Nicholas Ruddick is professor of English at the University of Regina. Gary Westfahl is adjunct professor of Mathematics at the University of La Verne.



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T he Wesleya n Ea rly Cla ssi cs o f Sc ien ce Fi ction Series General Editor Arthur B. Evans The Centenarian Honoré de Balzac We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity Anindita Banerjee Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-­ Gavilán, eds. The Coming Race Edward Bulwer-­Lytton Imagining Mars: A Literary History Robert Crossley Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century Ignatius Donnelly Vintage Visions: Essays on Early Science Fiction Arthur B. Evans, ed. Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology Peter Fitting, ed. Lumen Camille Flammarion The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey Enrique Gaspar The Last Man Jean-­Baptiste Cousin de Grainville The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction Rachel Haywood Ferreira The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction Justine Larbalestier The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia Kenneth Mackay The Moon Pool A. Merritt Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction John Rieder

The Twentieth Century Albert Robida Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind J.-H. Rosny aîné The Black Mirror and Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany and Austria Franz Rottensteiner, ed., and Mike Mitchell, tr. The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel Nicholas Ruddick The World as It Shall Be Emile Souvestre Star Maker Olaf Stapledon The Begum’s Millions Jules Verne Invasion of the Sea Jules Verne The Kip Brothers Jules Verne The Mighty Orinoco Jules Verne The Mysterious Island Jules Verne Travel Scholarships Jules Verne H. G. Wells: Traversing Time W. Warren Wagar Star Begotten H. G. Wells Deluge Sydney Fowler Wright