Science Fiction

Patrick Parrinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136493478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

1	WORKING DAYDREAMS, WORKSHOP DEFINITIONS

THE idea of literature is unthinkable without the conception of genres, or conventional literary forms. Many of the forms which still dominate our literature go back to the beginnings of Western civilization; these include the lyric, the drama, the satire, and the fable. Others, such as the novel, the crime story, and science fiction, came to prominence in very recent times. To refer to these new classes of writing as genres is to make a double assertion. At the very moment of insisting on their novelty and modernity, we imply that they have precursors and a history, that the contemporary practice is a combination of elements (which can now be seen with a new understanding) in the literary past.

Science fiction, though in many ways a highly conventional kind of writing, is one that cannot be defined uncontroversially. At first glance, it might appear to invite self-evident definition, as detective fiction is fiction about detectives and the art of solving crimes. Yet this is not the case, as is proved by the innumerable attempts that have been made to define it. On close inspection science fiction turns out to be a highly self-conscious genre: that is, the way it has been defined has an unusually close and symbiotic relationship with the way it has been written. For this reason, the question ‘What is science fiction?’ will be initially answered by looking at the critical history of the term itself and of its antecedents. Definitions of science fiction are not so much a series of logical approximations to an elusive ideal, as a small, parasitic sub-genre in themselves.

‘Science Fiction’ owes its name – though certainly not, as has sometimes been claimed, its existence – to Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback invented the term ‘scientifiction’ in 1926 to characterize the contents of Amazing Stories, one of the many magazines that he edited. Three years later, he switched to the more euphonious ‘science fiction’. The widespread adoption of the latter term is signalized by the re-christening of the rival magazine Astounding Stories (originally Astounding Stories of Super-Science) as Astounding Science Fiction in 1938. For many years after this the term remained exclusively attached to magazine fiction and to the anthologies which reprinted such fiction; it was only in the 1950s that the SF label began to be applied to paperback novels.

From the start Gernsback had insisted, both in editorials and through the medium of a shrewdly commercial reprint policy, that the precursors of ‘science fiction’ were Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. In other words, there was a direct and acknowledged continuity between twentieth-century SF and the nineteenth-century tradition of the ‘scientific romance’. Even the term ‘science fiction’, we now know, was not of Gernsback’s invention. Scholars have recently traced it back to a long-forgotten tract of 1851, William Wilson’s A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject, which predicts the spread of a new form of didactic literature:

[Thomas] Campbell says that ‘Fiction in poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.’ Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true – thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.¹

In Wilson’s use of the term, as in Gernsback’s, there is a blend of prediction and retrospection, of the new and the old. The idea that the truths of science could be interwoven in a pleasing story was soon to receive its most thorough-going realization in the early novels of Jules Verne – novels packed with useful knowledge in the fields of engineering, astronomy, physics, geology, zoology, oceanography, palaeontology, and other sciences. Wilson, however, seems blind to the speculative and prophetic potential of such romances, and his idea of science fiction sounds a lot duller and more orthodox than the reality of a Verneian ‘extraordinary voyage’. In fact, to speak of the ‘Poetry of Science’ as something altogether separate from the ‘Poetry of Life’ was already old-fashioned in 1851, when the industrial revolution had reached the stage at which science was visibly changing life. Such a development had been anticipated fifty years earlier by William Wordsworth, in a passage from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads which is perhaps the most famous of all pronouncements on the ‘Poetry of Science’:

If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; … 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, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.

Despite its visionary rhetoric, this is again a highly conservative statement, though its conservatism is of a different kind from Wilson’s. Guided by a naturalistic aesthetic of poetry as a record of men’s actual impressions and feelings, Wordsworth does not see it as the poet’s duty to anticipate the coming scientific revolution, but to wait until it is ready to put on a ‘form of flesh and blood’. Nor does he doubt that this form will be benign – a gentle house-guest rather than a Frankenstein’s monster. His commitment to the human nature that he believed he saw around him was, in fact, so rock-like that he could only allow the subject-matter of science into poetry once it had become ‘familiarized’. Yet even so classically-minded a critic as Samuel Johnson, in the Preface to Shakespeare (1765), had recognized the claims of that sort of literature which takes hold of the strange and makes it familiar:

Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned.

Accounts of wonders and marvels have a venerable place in literature itself, if not always in critical discussion. The emergence of an aesthetic outlook bringing together the ideas of the ‘Poetry of Science’ and the familiarization of the wonderful was one of the fruits of the late-eighteenth-century taste for the Gothic – a taste which both Johnson and Wordsworth deplored. The Gothic preoccupation with the sensational and the exotic lies behind the immediate predecessor of science fiction, the nineteenth-century ‘scientific romance’.

The scientific romance

Scientific romance at its simplest consists in the use of scientific (or, more often, quasi-scientific) elements in highly-coloured romantic fiction. Perhaps the best-known examples are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, such as ‘The Birthmark’ (1843) and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844), in which the gruesome labours of a demonic scientist serve to blight the happiness of the hero or heroine. Similarly, in Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’ (1858), Linley, the ‘mad microscopist’, constructs a perfect microscope which enables him to see the interior of the atom. As he increases the magnification, the water-drop on his slide is resolved into the apparition of a beautiful female, Animula, who of course is doomed to shrivel and disappear as the water evaporates. Hawthorne, O’Brien, and their many followers are not so much science-fiction writers as romancers dabbling in the scientific exotic. It is when an author becomes conscious of an obligation to bring the ‘Poetry of Science’ within the sphere of the probable that we approach science fiction proper. As Scott wrote in his review of Frankenstein:

In this view, the probable is far from being laid out of sight even amid the wildest freaks of imagination; on the contrary, we grant the extraordinary postulates which the author demands as the foundation of his narrative, only on condition of his deducing the consequences with logical precision.²

In many ways Frankenstein, like ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ and ‘The Diamond Lens’, is written in the mode of ‘scientific romance’. The monstrous creature pining for a mate, and the slaughter of Frankenstein’s bride on her wedding-night, are prime examples of Gothic eroticism. Yet the original preface to Frankenstein (reportedly written by Mary’s husband Percy Shelley) joins with Scott in emphasizing that this is no supernatural tale of uncontrolled horrors:

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, 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. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops, and 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.

Whatever we make of Frankenstein itself, the preface unmistakably claims for it the status of science fiction. The whole story is said to depend on a single ‘event’, the creation of human life in the laboratory, which certain scientists have alleged to be possible. (Mary Shelley had in mind the recent discoveries in the field of atmospheric electricity and galvanism, and Erasmus Darwin’s observations of the activity of bacteria in dead vegetable matter.) But the possibility of reanimating a corpse is viewed hypothetically, in a mood of wary scepticism rather than credulity. Frankenstein is thus a piece of speculative fiction which does not rely on mythmaking or supernatural terrors to get its effects. The author has preserved ‘the truth of the elementary principles of human nature’, even though she does not scruple to ‘innovate upon their combinations’. The result is a tale which looks at human life from a distanced and (to use the modern term) estranged point of view, one not available to realistic fiction with its ‘ordinary relations of existing events’. While this interpretation of Frankenstein unquestionably plays down the more lurid and romantic aspects of the story, the preface may be allowed to stand in its own right as an aesthetic statement closely anticipating modern theories of the science-fiction genre. It is with this brief manifesto that the self-consciousness of science fiction might be said to begin.

After Mary Shelley, it is true, there is a prolonged gap. Although the scientific romance played a minor if underappreciated part in the output of such writers as Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, and although the popularity of the form dramatically increased in the later Victorian decades, it did not undergo systematic development until the work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Verne’s most important predecessor was Edgar Allen Poe, whose note to ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall’ (1835) claims priority in the ‘application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit) to the actual passage between the earth and the moon’.³ Poe’s attachment to ‘verisimilitude’, however, is as deceptive as that of earlier satirist like Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. The more he protests it, the greater is the reader’s suspicion of being the victim of an outrageous hoax. (Thus the critic David Ketterer argues that, far from successfully completing his balloon-voyage to the moon, Hans Pfall is actually blown to pieces at the moment of take-off.)⁴ Nothing in Poe’s world is plausible in the sense that the adjective may be applied to Verne, who set his face against ‘irresponsible’scientific speculation and confined himself, for the most part, to short-range extrapolations from existing knowledge and existing technology. The type of naturalism pursued in his ‘extraordinary voyages’ is brought out in his much-quoted dismissal of Wells’s The First Men in the Moon:

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 material which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c’est très joli … but show me this metal. Let him produce it.⁵

Not only has Verne apparently confused The First Men in the Moon with another contemporary space-voyage, but his mode of space-travel now seems no less impossible than Wells’s. Nevertheless, Verne’s fiction is a logical extension of the engineering mentality of the Age of Steam. It is probably quite superfluous to effect a rigid separation between his ‘scientific’ fiction and a non-science-fictional travel epic such as Around the World in Eighty Days. The romanticization of science accomplished in his novels is somewhat superficial, given that his submarines, airships and space projectiles can all be traced back to contemporary prototypes and blueprints. Verne’s fiction today is being rescued from the status of boys’ fiction to which it has long been confined, but recent critics have emphasized the quality of his social and mythical, rather than his strictly scientific, imagination.

Although both Verne and Wells have usually been described as authors of scientific romances, their achievement – above all, that of Wells – was to free science fiction from its initial dependence on the romance form. The lineage of the nineteenth-century prose romance includes the works of Scott, Hawthorne, Dumas, and Victor Hugo. In the late Victorian period these writers were succeeded, not only by bestselling entertainers like Rider Haggard and Stanley J. Weyman, but by such self-conscious literary artists as William Morris and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson is the most persuasive of the nineteenth-century apologists for romance, which he sees as a necessary reaction to the ascendancy of realistic and naturalistic (or, as they were often described, ‘scientific’) attitudes in fiction. His outburst, in a letter to Henry James, against the tyranny of everyday detail suggests the extent to which he thought of realism as a curb placed on the free-ranging imagination: ‘How to get over, how to escape from the besotting particularity of fiction. “Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step.” To hell with Roland and the scraper!’⁶ Against the Jamesian aesthetic of ‘solidity of specification’, Stevenson is the spokesman of ‘significant simplicity’, of a stripping-down of fiction to the essential elements which make up the adventure-story and the fairy-tale. The mark of great writing, he argues in ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), is to

satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music.

It is possible to share the impatience with Zolaesque realism that Stevenson expresses in such essays as ‘A Note on Realism’ (1883) without being more than momentarily beguiled by his ideal of the romance. His ideal reader appears to be a juvenile reader, totally absorbed in an illusory world of ‘clean, open-air adventure’ told in words which ‘run … in our ears like the noise of breakers’.⁷ This is a soothing and nostalgic, not a challenging ideal, and it seems to confuse the ‘timelessness’ of great art with the temporal suspension of the daydream.

Stevenson came nearest to science fiction in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a proto-Freudian romance of the ‘war in the members’ of the human frame which is undoubtedly serious in subject, if not in treatment. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a near-classic case of a fantasy drawing on scientific themes which should nevertheless be excluded from the category of science fiction.⁸ Dr Jekyll, the epitome of Victorian respectability, transforms himself into the shape of the criminal Hyde as the result of taking a chemical concoction. The transformation defies physiological explanation and, in addition, it is not caused by the otherwise harmless drug but by an unknown impurity. Eventually, Jekyll finds himself degenerating into Hyde willy-nilly and without chemical assistance. At this point we do not doubt that we are reading an allegory of a species of diabolic possession rather than a science-fiction story. Stevenson’s use of a laboratory atmosphere is simply one of the many layers of mystification with which the central character is surrounded. The novel is a remarkable attempt to exploit the melodramatic conventions of the age in such a way as to expose Victorian hypocrisy and self-division. Its science-fictional trappings, however, are a rather transparent concession to the ‘besotting particularities’ of late-nineteenth-century life. They are neither coherent in themselves, nor do they in any way affect the nature of Stevenson’s allegory.

Logical speculation: H.G. Wells

It may be noted that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is no more acceptable as a detective story, in the tradition of Poe and Conan Doyle, than it is as science fiction. Both science fiction and the classical detective story can be seen to define themselves by their opposition to Stevensonian ‘timeless’ romanti...