Science Fiction Before 1900

Imagination Discovers Technology

Paul K. Alkon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134980567
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand LeaguesUnder the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur'sCourt and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.

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A Short History of the Future

Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.

Mary Shelley, “Author's Introduction” to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Definitions and Aesthetics of Science Fiction

Science fiction starts with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Its first critic was Percy Shelley. For his wife he wrote a preface that (as she explains in her 1831 introduction) was printed in the 1818 edition as though it were by her. If this ventriloquism betrays some hesitancy in launching a new kind of tale, Frankenstein itself displays such confident mastery that for almost two centuries it has rewarded the attention of readers and inspired writers in a genre largely devoted to variations on its theme of the uses and abuses of science. Frankenstein's 1818 preface distinguishes between its scientific plot and the more familiar action of Gothic fiction: “I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment.”¹ There is no mistaking the dismissive tone of these references to “mere” stories of ghosts or magic. By printing this statement as her own, Mary Shelley endorsed what Percy Shelley understood: that Frankenstein's claim to originality is its rejection of the supernatural. Science fiction can only exist when it is possible to distinguish in this way between natural and supernatural as realms that very differently create “the interest of the story.”

Paradoxically, however, neither Frankenstein's 1818 preface nor its 1831 introduction by Mary Shelley renounces the goal of inducing “terrors.” Quite the contrary. Terror remains a desirable effect. It is only supernatural terrors that are to be avoided. Readers are to be frightened by natural means involving science. In suggesting that fear can be achieved by a new kind of plot, Frankenstein's preface and introduction stress both its claim to novelty and its affiliation to accepted Gothic forms subsumed under the label “ghost story.” Although this identifies precursors, the affiliation is more than a matter of ancestry.

The affinities of science fiction and Gothic literature also reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics called the sublime. A looming problem for writers in the nineteenth century was how to achieve sublimity without recourse to the supernatural. In 1819 John Keats famously complained in Lamia that science was emptying the haunted air. The supernatural marvels that had been a staple of epic and lesser forms from Homeric times would no longer do as the best sources of sublimity. Although ghost stories and related Gothic fantasies were to prove surprisingly viable right through the twentieth century, perhaps because they offer respite from the omnipresence of technology, writers sought new forms that could better accommodate the impact of science. Epics were displaced by realistic novels of quotidian life. By 1800 even William Wordsworth could imagine a time when “the remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed.”² Only sixteen years after Frankenstein, Félix Bodin argued for the importance of futuristic fiction, works set in future time, for which he invented the term littérature futuriste in his brilliantly prophetic 1834 novel-cummanifesto, Le Roman de l'avenir (The novel of the future).

Bodin eloquently urges writers to turn away from the past and present, and also from boring Utopias, to find plots combining interesting novelistic action with realistic visions of future social and technological possibilities such as aerial warfare and undersea voyages. He predicts that such works will become the epics of the future by finding new sources of the marvelous that are altogether credible, unlike the gods and other supernatural marvels in classical epics. Thus futuristic fiction alone, Bodin suggests, can appeal to our hunger for the marvelous while also remaining within the bounds of verisimilitude in a scientific age, thereby providing an artistically satisfying vehicle for rational speculation.³ He links the aesthetic issue of imaginative appeal with the moral question of how people may be aroused from indifference to their own futures. Bodin's 1834 manifesto articulating a poetics of futuristic fiction did more than anticipate techniques that have become one hallmark of science fiction. Underlying his advocacy of the future as a significant new arena for human imagination is an interest as keen as Mary Shelley's in finding new sources of the marvelous that will allow literature to retain its emotional power without turning away from science.

Science fiction ever since has been concerned as often to elicit strong emotional responses as to maintain a rational basis for its plots. Far from being mutually exclusive, the two aims can reinforce each other, as they do in Frankenstein and in Mary Shelley's own futuristic novel published in 1826, The Last Man, which describes a terrifying twenty-first-century plague that destroys the human race. The balance may shift along a spectrum from emphasis on ideas, technology, or alien encounters to emphasis on their emotional consequences. At the rational end of the spectrum are novels like Hal Clement's classic Mission of Gravity (1954), which avoids depicting or eliciting emotion in favor of concentrating on the technical problems of human-alien relationships on a high-gravity planet with life forms based on a chemistry different from our own and evolving culturally toward a society that can use scientific method. Works like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (1961) depict and surely aim to arouse strong emotions, among them fear, while also providing a scientific plot framework that raises philosophical issues of creation and human identity very much in the tradition of Frankenstein (1818). Films like the Aliens trilogy (1979, 1986, 1992) retain a scientific framework of futuristic space travel that keeps them within the boundaries of science fiction while tipping the balance toward effects of Gothic terror: instead of evil spirits, malignant aliens must be exorcised. With so many works at this end of the spectrum it is no wonder that some critics invoke Frankenstein mainly for the procrustean purpose of identifying all science fiction as little more than a variant of the Gothic mode with spaceships and horrifying aliens substituted for the creepy old haunted castles favored by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, and their successors to and beyond Stephen King in the line of pure Gothic.

But Mary Shelley achieved far more than a variation on well-known themes. She and Percy Shelley were right to deny so emphatically any equation of her novel and the “mere” ghost stories that served as one but only one inspiration for it. Frankenstein's preface and introduction provide accounts of that famous rainy summer of 1816 near Geneva when she, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, and Lord Byron amused themselves by reading ghost stories and then accepted Byron's challenge to try their own hands at this form. Of the four who thus started in emulation of supernatural tales, only Mary Shelley finished a narrative, although she deviated from her literary models because science too caught her imagination. Reminiscing about that summer in the 1831 introduction, she tells of trying to imagine “a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (Frankenstein, ix). She also recounts listening to a conversation about Erasmus Darwin's biological experiments, about galvanism, and about possible ways of creating life by reanimating a corpse or else manufacturing “component parts of a creature” that might somehow be endowed with vitality. Not surprisingly, there followed a vivid nightmare of just such a creature contemplated by its “horror-stricken” creator. From this dream Mary Shelley says she woke “in terror” with “a thrill of fear” that soon gave way to realization that here at last was the starting point for a tale that could frighten others just as she herself was frightened: “I began that day with the words [now opening chapter 5 of Frankenstein] ‘It was on a dreary night of November,’ making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream” (Frankenstein, xi). For Mary Shelley it is the dream of science, not the sleep of reason, that produces monsters. The imaginative genesis of Frankenstein, as of so much science fiction, is thus in the transition from contemplation of scientific possibilities to writing a story that preserves something like the effects of a disturbing dream, while grounding those effects in plots that do not depend on supernatural events.

Neither, however, do such plots necessarily command belief even as possibilities, much less as probabilities. Frankenstein's 1818 preface confronts the inescapable illogic often necessary to justify science fiction's solution (or evasion) of the difficult problem of achieving adequate verisimilitude. Percy Shelley starts by insisting that the artificial creation of life central to Frankenstein is not impossible according to “Dr. Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany.” Here is the fundamental gambit of all science fiction: appeal to the speculations of real scientists as an impeccable source of what follows in the fictional narrative. The very next sentence, however, warns readers not to suppose that the author gives “the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination.” What saves this startling about-face from simply undermining the tale altogether is the ensuing observation that a plot based on Victor Frankenstein's animation of the monster “however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield” (Frankenstein, xiii). Percy Shelley realized that the key issue for Mary Shelley's new kind of tale is not whether its scientific premise is believable—it was not—but whether a story based on such a premise can achieve a valuable “point of view to the imagination.” The role of science in Frankenstein, as in so much subsequent science fiction, is not so much to consider scientific realities as to afford a unique vantage point for contemplation of the human condition.

We may now accept this slippery proposition more easily thanks to our familiarity with tales of time travel, faster-than-light spaceships, antigravity devices, and similar impossibilities that have become established science fiction conventions. The genre's grand paradox, clearly articulated in the preface to Frankenstein, is that while a scientific premise is important, belief in its possibility is not. The science in science fiction may but does not have to be its main concern or even its claim to verisimilitude. Allusion to science more often, as in Frankenstein, serves a crucial enabling role: it allows for perspectives not otherwise attainable. This is the great leap away from Gothic.

Why science can allow perspectives not duplicated by tales of the supernatural based on elves, ghosts, magic, or the like, is a question that I shall for the moment defer as resolutely as Percy Shelley avoids it in the preface to Frankenstein. Here I will only remark that this question has become more insistent in the latter part of the twentieth century as science fiction once more converges on the forms of supernatural tale from which Mary Shelley dissociated it. The differences between science fiction and fantasy, though clear at either extreme, are becoming increasingly blurred at the boundaries. This recombining of genres is partly a consequence of post-Hiroshima disillusionment with the products of science and rationalism. As we retreat from Enlightenment certainties, our genres too lose their clarity. A more fundamental cause is twentieth-century acceleration of scientific innovation, which validates Arthur Clarke's dictum that to outsiders—and with respect to real science most of us are outsiders—a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. This aphorism has in turn gained relevance from the blurring within late-twentieth-century science fiction of the boundaries between natural and supernatural, as, for example, in the voodoo and other godlike entities that haunt the cyberspace of William Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.⁴ What matters for the early history of science fiction is Mary Shelley's realization and Percy Shelley's endorsement of the notion, however paradoxical, that valuable new perspectives can be achieved by recourse to science even if it is incredible science.

One hundred and fifteen years after the publication of Frankenstein that notion was endorsed too by H. G. Wells reminiscing in a preface to the 1933 edition of his early scientific romances. After characterizing the tales of Jules Verne as dealing “almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery,” Wells remarks that his own stories, unlike Verne's, “do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream.”⁵ Here again is the idea of striving for the vividness of a dream by means of an apparently scientific premise. Frankenstein is among the works that Wells retrospectively classifies in this preface as like his own. Jules Verne toward the end of his career was equally careful to distinguish his technique from that of H. G. Wells. Interviewed in 1903, two years before his death, Verne remarked of Wells, “We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. No, there is no rapport between his work and mine. I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon-ball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ca c'est très joli … but show me this metal. Let him produce it.”⁶ Verne makes a valid distinction here despite his apparent confusion of Wells's The First Men in the Moon with a story about travel to Mars. Wells and Verne were right to disclaim identity of method although Verne, for reasons that I discuss in chapter 3, does himself less than justice in claiming for his stories no more than the virtues of scientific accuracy according to the science of his day. Nor, for that matter, did Wells do his attention to science full justice in the self-deprecatory mood of his preface to the 1933 edition of his youthful science fiction tales, although he was right to call them “romances” and distinguish them from Verne's oeuvre in the matter of scientific precision. Verne in his way, no less than Wells and Mary Shelley in theirs, uses science as a springboard to creation of powerful myths allowing novel points of view to the imagination.

Science fiction might indeed be defined as the narrative use of science to create myths allowing novel points of view to the imagination—adding, to be sure, the caveat that such a definition is normative rather than descriptive since not all science fiction succeeds in creating such myths, much less in creating myths so powerful as those established by the genre's masterpieces from Frankenstein through Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond. But even thus qualified, this definition neither covers all works commonly termed science fiction nor does it suggest all the aesthetic considerations necessary for understanding as well as judging their artistry. Nor do any other definitions so far proposed.

The term science fiction was coined in an obscure 1851 text, William Wilson's A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject, and then forgotten. The phrase gained currency only after Hugo Gernsback reinvented it in 1929 to replace his less graceful neologism “scientifiction” as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• General Editor's Statement
• Contents
• Preface
• Chronology
• Chapter 1 A Short History of the Future
• Chapter 2 Englands: New Viewpoints
• Chapter 3 France: Technophilia
• Chapter 4 America: Technophobia
• Notes and References
• Bibliographic Essay
• Recommended Titles
• Index