Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (52 page)

In the following decade, Edwin Abbott’s
Flatland
(1884) attempted to educate the British public through defamiliarizing displacement and rigorous cognitive thinking. The first half of the novel exposes the arbitrariness and hypocrisy of class hierarchies and gender inequality by transposing them into the two-dimensional world of Flatland, where the inhabitants are geometrical figures, a male figure’s number of sides corresponds to his social class, and female straight lines are viewed with contempt. In the novel’s second half, the narrator, A. Square, learns that his world actually has three dimensions, and tries to convince the reader that our world may have a fourth dimension (or more) beyond our powers of perception. Abbott thus popularizes geometry at a time when developments in non-Euclidean and higher-dimensional geometry were sparking debates about pedagogy and epistemology (Smith 180–210). The 1880s also saw the appearance of a decidedly more pessimistic work of British science fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). It is a hybrid work, and participates in the late-nineteenth-century gothic revival through its incorporation of a vicious murder, a disfigured villain, and an allegory of good and evil. Yet the allegory is not a simple one, because Jekyll and Hyde are not as distinct as the title suggests, or as Jekyll insists. Moreover, Stevenson’s portrayal of evil is indebted to quasi-scientific discussions of degeneration (the regression of individuals or groups to earlier, less complex forms) by E. Ray Lankester and Cesare Lombroso.

British science fiction of the 1890s was dominated by H. G. Wells and his string of successful novellas:
The Time Machine
(1895),
The Island of Doctor Moreau
(1896),
The Invisible Man
(1897), and
The War of the Worlds
(1898), the first and last of which established enduring paradigms for later science fiction.
The Time Machine
was preceded by two important American novels of time travel—Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)—but Wells innovates on previous works and influences much subsequent time travel fiction by using a machine that seems capable of a rational explanation and allows for a return to the present (Alkon 49–50). Wells’s Time Traveler journeys to the year 802,701 and witnesses the results of class division and Darwinian evolution: The human race has split into two distinct species, one of which literally preys on the other. In a subsequent journey, he travels through a cosmological rather than evolutionary span of time, and sees a dying planet barely warmed by its dying sun. The War of the Worlds similarly dissociates evolutionary change from necessary progress and upsets the reader’s complacency, this time by imagining Martians as biologically and technologically more advanced, yet physically grotesque and ethically unsound. Wells uses his Martians to reflect on the cruelty of actual instances of invasion and imperialism, and to reinvent the future war genre with aliens as invaders. Wells was quite self-aware about writing “scientific romances,” and his works solidified the emerging conventions of science fiction. By the close of the nineteenth century, science fiction had reached a mature and lasting form.

Works Cited

Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 1973.

Alkon, Paul K.
Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. Genres in Context. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Attebery, Brian.
Strategies of Fantasy
. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Bagwell, J. Timothy. “Science Fiction and the Semiotics of Realism.”
Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction
. Eds. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. 36–47.

Freedman, Carl.
Critical Theory and Science Fiction.
Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000.

Gigante, Denise.
Life: Organic Form and Romanticism
. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

Lipking, Lawrence. “
Frankenstein
, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques.”
Frankenstein
. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996. 313–31.

Mellor, Anne K.
Mary Shelley, Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters
. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Miller, Joseph D. “Parallel Universes: Fantasy or Science Fiction?”
Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction
. Eds. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. 19–25.

Morgan, Monique R. “Frankenstein’s Singular Events: Inductive Reasoning, Narrative Technique, and Generic Classification.”
The Gothic: From Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice
. Ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra. Spec. issue of
Romanticism on the Net
44 (December 2006). http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2006/v/n44/013998ar.html

Rauch, Alan. “The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 34.2 (Summer 1995): 227–53.

Shelley, Mary.
Frankenstein
. 1818. Eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. 2nd ed. Peterborough: Broadview, 1999.

Smith, Jonathan.
Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994.

Stableford, Brian.
Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950
. London: Fourth Estate, 1985.

Suvin, Darko.
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre
. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Notes

¹
For the novel’s relation to science, see Gigante, Mellor, and Rauch. On the creature’s use of induction, see Morgan. For an overview of responses to the novel’s moral, see Lipking.

²
Not all critics see science fiction and the gothic as antithetical genres. Brian Aldiss defines science fiction as “characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould” (8), and suggests the two genres share an “emphasis. . . on the distant and the unearthly” and heavily use suspense (18).

³
According to Brian Stableford, this long gap is partly due to the dominance of the triple-decker novel in British publishing and the challenges of sustaining sci-fi speculations at that length (14).

4
The title was later changed to “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.”

* * * *

Monique R. Morgan
is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University, where her research and teaching focus on Romantic and Victorian literature, narrative theory, poetics, and early science fiction. Her publications include
Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem
(Ohio State UP, 2009) and articles in
Narrative
,
Science Fiction Studies
,
Romanticism on the Net
, and
Victorian Poetry
.

(1894–1967)

Eugene Toomer is better known as a figure in the Harlem Renaissance than for genre writing, despite the vividly technological lyricism of works like “Her Lips Are Copper Wire.”

Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, he would end up experiencing multiple sides of America’s wide racial divide. His grandfather was a larger-than-life figure who was briefly governor of Louisiana (the first U.S. governor of African American descent), and Toomer and his mother lived in Washington, D.C. with his grandparents after his father abandoned them. (As a condition of taking them in, his grandfather insisted that Toomer no longer be named Nathan, which was his vanished father’s name.). Toomer, who was very light-skinned, attended all-black schools in Washington, and all-white schools in New York City after his mother remarried and relocated there. He drifted between six different colleges and became widely read without graduating from any of them. By 1918 he was writing idealistic stories and essays for various outlets, but a two-month stint as interim principal of a school in Alabama gave him a much harsher view of what racial conditions were like for African Americans who came from less-privileged backgrounds.

Toomer’s only published novel,
Cane
, came out in 1923, blending prose sketches with poetic interludes like the one below. He wrote stories, plays, and essays prolifically until the mid-1930s while becoming involved with a variety of philosophical movements, such as the Gurdjieff Institute for Harmonious Development in France.

Toomer’s first wife died in childbirth in 1932. He met his second wife through his (by then) former lover, Georgia O’Keefe. He eventually drifted into Quaker philosophy, and shifted his writing to mostly poems and essays related to Quaker philosophy. After 1950 he stopped writing literary work; failing eyesight and other ailments eventually forced him to stop writing entirely.

First published in
Cane
, 1923

whisper of yellow globes

gleaming on lamp-posts that sway

like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me

like bright beads on yellow globes

telephone the power-house

that the main wires are insulate

(her words play softly up and down

dewy corridors of billboards)

then with your tongue remove the tape

and press your lips to mine

till they are incandescent

* * * *

Copyright © 1923 by Boney and Liveright

(1828–1905)

While it’s not correct to say that Verne was the father of science fiction, he certainly fathered a certain kind of science fiction—the near-future adventure story that uses technology that doesn’t exist, but is close enough to existing technology to be plausible. There’s nothing in Verne that will make you question the nature of humanity or the underpinnings of society, but plenty of scientists and SF writers first got hooked on the field by reading Verne.

Originally from a well-to-do family (his father was an attorney and his mother was of noble descent), Verne was cut off from his family money when his father found out he preferred writing theater librettos to studying law. Verne went to work as a stockbroker and continued to write on the side. When a publisher suggested he change his speculations about exploring Africa by balloon into an adventure novel, it became
Cinq semaines en ballon
(1863;
Five Weeks in a Balloon
, 1869), and the first of the
Voyages Extraordinaires
was born. Publisher Pierre Jules Hetzel agreed to a longterm arrangement in return for two books a year and Verne went to work writing full-time. The result was a string of hits including
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864),
From the Earth to the Moon
(1865),
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
(1869), and
Around the World in Eighty Days
(1872). The earnings from the novels (and even greater earnings from stage adaptations) allowed Verne to buy progressively larger yachts and indulge his passion for world travel.

That travel slowed a bit in 1886, when Verne was shot by his mentally ill nephew. And his writing darkened somewhat over the next few years when both Hetzel and Verne’s mother died. Verne also dabbled in politics, serving as a councilor in Amiens for fifteen years. He died in 1905 of complications from diabetes.

The translation here was by Ellen E. Frewer in 1877 as
Hector Servadac; Or the Career of a Comet
. This excerpt is from part 1, and is the same translation reprinted in the first issue of
Amazing
in April 1926. Verne’s casual anti-Semitism and national sterotypes, commonplace in popular literature of the 1870s, posed no particular problem for Gernsback or his readers in the 1920s.