Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, page 43
Judgments about the novel’s moral complexity sometimes influence judgments about its balance of the gothic and science fiction. In Darko Suvin’s view, the two genres are fundamentally opposed, both because the gothic features “arbitrary supernatural phenomena” and “anti-cognitive laws” rather than rational extensions of physical laws and historical contingencies (8), and because gothic literature aligns the physical laws governing the world with a simplistic ethical framework of poetic justice.2 In the case of Frankenstein, Suvin argues that most of the novel is “in the tradition of the Gothic story, in which the universal horror and disgust at [Victor’s] creature would simply prefigure its behavior and its hideous looks testify to its corrupt essence” (129). The creature’s narrative, however, separates physical appearance from moral essence, prevents the reader from engaging in the easy moralizing encouraged by much gothic literature, and moves the novel toward true science fiction (Suvin 129–30).
Other readers tie Frankenstein to the gothic by interpreting the creature as Victor’s doppelgänger, his dark double acting out Victor’s worst, repressed urges. Some of the novel’s supernatural metaphors make this gothic motif quite explicit: Victor says of his creature, “I considered the being whom I had…endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror,…nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me” (104). Crucially, though, such rhetoric remains metaphorical, not literal, and Mary Shelley both invokes and rejects the supernatural world of the gothic. This technique recurs in Shelley’s portrayal of Victor’s education: as Paul Alkon notes, “Victor Frankenstein’s progress…from childhood dabblings in alchemy and magic to adult use—and misuse—of science, takes…her book over the border from fantasy to science fiction” (30).
This brings us back to the second basis for claiming Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel—its grounding in, and imaginative extension of, science and technology. From this perspective, the opening sentence of Percy Shelley’s preface to the novel becomes crucial: “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.” The novel’s allusions to Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, and Luigi Galvani connect its improbable events to serious speculations about the physical world. This is consistent with Joseph D. Miller’s suggestion that fantasy fiction, including gothic fiction, “is distinguished from science fiction on the basis of the author’s willingness or unwillingness to ground plot elements in some simulacrum of physical law” (25). Miller’s qualification that science fiction uses a simulacrum of physical law is important, though. Many works of science fiction blur or omit the details of the science they invoke, or depict events or inventions that prove to be impossible in actuality. Ultimately, the factual accuracy of the scientific and technological developments portrayed is less important than the rational exploration of the consequences of those developments (Aldiss 11; Alkon 5–6), or the rhetoric through which such developments are portrayed as if real (and hence subject to rational scrutiny) (Attebery 107; Bagwell 40–41). In Frankenstein, Victor’s rejection of alchemy in favor of science presents Victor’s experiment as real, and the novel focuses much more on its consequences than on the experiment itself. Yet paradoxically, while Frankenstein’s novelty and its status as science fiction depend upon “its rejection of the supernatural” (Alkon 2), in the end the novel seems to reject science as well, or at least to issue a very strong warning against the consequences of science. As Paul Alkon describes Frankenstein’s legacy, “Mary Shelley embodied what now seems the central myth for an age wherein the unparalleled creativity of science threatens the world with unprecedented disasters” (9).
Just as Mary Shelley invokes gothic conventions but rejects their supernatural underpinnings, and invents science fiction but rejects the allure of science, so too does she incorporate and discard the genre of travel narrative. As Carl Freedman astutely observes, “Frankenstein…marks the end (or at least obsolescence) of one genre even as it inaugurates another. Captain Walton, who initially appears to be the protagonist of the work, is in fact the hero of an old-fashioned travel narrative.…Frankenstein[’s] emergence as protagonist transforms the narrative into a predominantly science-fictional one” (49). Yet travel narratives do not completely disappear when Walton stops describing his voyage to the arctic and starts recording Victor’s story. The creature’s tale constitutes an important and lengthy travel narrative, but readers may not recognize it as such because the creature describes the basic conditions and customs of Europe, which are new to the creature but likely well-known to many of Shelley’s readers. The creature’s story transforms the travel narrative by having a strange character explore a familiar environment, rather than having a familiar traveler explore a strange environment. In so doing, the central episode of the novel induces cognitive estrangement “by inviting readers to see their own world as it appears to an intelligent alien,” as it appears, that is, to the creature (Alkon 34). The creature’s existence, though, does not depend on the logic of a traditional travel narrative, in which he may have been discovered in a region previously unknown to European explorers but “assumed to have always existed in pretty much the [same] condition” (Freedman 49). Rather, as Carl Freedman observes, “such an experiment as Frankenstein’s is a concrete possibility for the (near) future,” and Victor “is concerned with pushing back the frontiers not of space but of time” (49).
Science fiction’s typical orientation toward the future becomes much more overt in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Published in 1826 and set in the closing years of the twenty-first century, it imagines the plight of the sole survivor of a world-wide plague. Shelley was not the first to address this theme, but her predecessors were either less detailed or less secular. Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (1816), Thomas Campbell’s “The Last Man” (1823), and Thomas Hood’s “The Last Man” (1826) are relatively short poems. Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel The Last Man (1805, first English translation 1806) imagines a future suffering from infertility and exhausted natural resources, yet attributes this to God’s desire to hasten the Last Judgment, which God further encourages by sending Adam to convince the last fertile couple to refrain from reproducing. In Shelley’s novel, humanity ends not through Biblical apocalypse but rather through natural means, and Shelley traces the social and psychological consequences of the dwindling population in great detail.
After Mary Shelley’s two founding contributions to science fiction, the genre-in-formation largely languished in Britain until the early 1870s.3 In the interim, though, influential works of science fiction appeared in America and France, courtesy of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. Poe’s “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) presents an end-of-the-world scenario more extreme (though less secular) than Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. The story is a dialogue between two spirits in the afterlife, one of whom describes the end of humanity in a world-wide conflagration triggered by the Earth’s passage through an oxygen-rich comet. The story gestures toward both contemporary scientific theories about comets, and Biblical prophecies of the world’s destruction through fire. A less ambiguous instance of science fiction is Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), which is set in the distant future, imagines advances in balloon and rail travel technology, and refers to a dystopian form of socialism which considers individual lives worthless. It also highlights the difficulties involved in one historical period attempting to understand another (through the narrator’s comic distortions of historical figures in Poe’s present and past). Through these techniques, Poe both provides models for subsequent time travel fiction (Suvin 142), and divorces technological advancements from moral progress (Alkon 103). Balloon travel also features prominently in Poe’s “Hans Phaall—A Tale” (1835),4 this time to convey the title character to the moon. In this tale, the science-fictional elements (a newly discovered, extremely light gas and detailed discussions of the distance to the moon, Earth’s appearance from space, and the mechanisms of travel) are mixed with indications that the story is a hoax (Phaall begins his journey on April Fool’s Day) or fairy tale (characters named Grimm and Rub-a-Dub). A mixture of science fiction and fantasy is also evident in Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which depicts Pym’s travels towards the South Pole and his encounter with an extremely dark-skinned race in a land where the color white is unknown. These features are estranging, but a cognitive approach to them is disrupted by the novel’s heavy symbolism and abrupt ending.
Indeed, both Poe and Verne have been criticized for producing little or no cognitive estrangement, and hence failing to write serious science fiction. Darko Suvin labels Poe as “adolescent” for his sensational and inconsistent subject matter and his morbid style (141), and calls Verne’s works “juvenile” for their easily digested introduction of one imagined invention at a time and their emphasis on the thrill of adventure (152). In general, these authors fare better when their science fiction is judged based on the incorporation of probable technology and important sci-fi motifs. The appeal of advanced technologies of travel, and the debt to travel narratives of adventure in exotic locales, are clear in several of Poe’s works, but they become dominant in Jules Verne’s science fiction. The titles of some of Verne’s earliest novels make this obvious: Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Paul Alkon is not alone in saying of Verne, “Travel through space rather than time is his specialty. With him readers explore on land, under water, and in the air” (58–59). In Journey to the Center of the Earth, the protagonists travel across and below the Earth’s surface, via steamboat, raft, and rope ladder. Their journey downward is overtly indebted to actual mid-nineteenth-century scientific debates about the origin of the Earth’s internal heat, and whether or not the Earth’s temperature rises closer to its center. As they travel deeper underground, they encounter older rocks and fossils, as well as living animals thought to be extinct; in a sense, the Earth itself becomes a time machine, and traveling through space enables an exploration of the past (Suvin 149).
Journey to the Center of the Earth was first translated into English in 1872, just as Britain saw a resurgence of science fiction with the publication of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). In The Coming Race, the narrator travels underground to discover not the past, but a possible future, in the form of a technologically advanced utopian society that has mastered all forms of energy through mechanical innovations and Lamarckian evolution. Bulwer-Lytton combines these scientific motifs with estranged, satiric views of gender and democracy. Erewhon similarly combines social satire, evolutionary thought, and exotic travel, but Butler imagines a technophobic, dystopian society in an isolated valley in New Zealand. The Erewhonians imprison the sick but try to cure criminals, and they have deliberately rejected the advanced technology they once possessed out of fear that machines will evolve and enslave humans. By pushing seemingly logical positions to absurd extremes, Butler produces cognitive estrangement, but his satiric targets are so numerous and his irony so layered that it becomes difficult to assess his intent. George Chesney’s message in The Battle of Dorking is much clearer: he warns against Britain’s military unpreparedness, and invents the “future war” genre, by recounting Germany’s invasion of Britain from the perspective of a defeated British soldier. The narrator omits any explicit mention of the victors’ nationality because he is telling his experiences to his grandchildren living under a German regime, but Chesney’s readers must infer this based on seemingly casual details, setting a precedent for science fiction that gradually and indirectly hints at the fictional world’s rules and conditions.
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).
