Scientific
Romance
AN INTERNATIONAL
ANTHOLOGY OF
PIONEERING
SCIENCE FICTION
Introduced and Edited by
BRIAN STABLEFORD
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Brian Stableford
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2017, is a new anthology of stories reprinted from standard texts. Brian Stableford has made the selection and has also written an Introduction and author biographies specially for this edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stableford, Brian M., editor.
Title: Scientific romance : an international anthology of pioneering science fiction / edited by Brian Stableford.
Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016048968| ISBN 9780486808376 (paperback) | ISBN 0486808378
Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Short Stories.
Classification: LCC PN6071.S33 S39 2017 | DDC 808.83/8762—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048968
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
80837801 2017
www.doverpublications.com
INTRODUCTION
The “scientific romance” for which this anthology provides a showcase is a species of imaginative fiction that existed before the modern term “science fiction” was adopted in the 1920s. The latter label was initially used to distinguish a small set of competing American magazines specializing in futuristic fiction and tales of technological invention, but such fiction already had a long history, and “scientific romance” was the term most commonly used to describe it when it enjoyed its period of greatest success in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.
Imaginative fiction that took its inspiration from the advancement of science existed long before the creation of any distinguishing label, and fiction featuring some of the themes that eventually became central to scientific romance, and science fiction—especially stories of fantastic voyages beyond the limits of the known world—is as old as the habit of storytelling. It is easy to find precursory echoes of scientific romance in the earliest stories that have survived to the present day, including the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and the Greek account of the Odyssey. Various new concerns were added to the fiction of imaginary voyages over the centuries, including crucial contributions by Dante’s Commedia and Thomas More’s Utopia, but with regard to the adoption of a scientific outlook and the attempt to employ the scientific imagination as a springboard for speculative invention, the first significant attempt to do something of the sort was undertaken by the British philosopher Francis Bacon. He never finished the work in question, but the fragment he produced, New Atlantis, was appended to one of his posthumous publications in 1627.
Hardly anyone was inclined to follow Bacon’s lead during the next century, and it proved somewhat undiplomatic even to try, as ideological conflicts broke out between dogmatic religious faith and the implications of science, and political powers became increasingly anxious about the subversive intentions of utopian schemes. The most extravagant writer of philosophical fiction in the seventeenth century, Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, was unable to publish his account of L’Autre Monde ou les Etats et Empires de la lune [The Other World] during his lifetime, firstly because he was badly injured by a wooden beam that fell on his head, perhaps deliberately, and secondly because the final half of the manuscript was stolen and, presumably, destroyed. The surviving sections, which were published after his death, were extensively bowdlerized to minimize their potential offense to the Church, and the full texts were not restored until the 1920s. By then, poor Cyrano was most remembered because Edmond Rostand had written a play in which he figured as a lovelorn soldier with a colossal nose, and his reputation as a literary pioneer had been comprehensively eclipsed.
The vast strides made by science in the seventeenth century made the precedents set by Bacon and Cyrano seem increasingly important, and in spite of the real dangers involved in taking up imaginative arms against Church and State—because there was a war of ideas that needed to be fought in spite of the risks—writers in the “Age of Enlightenment,” particularly in pre-Revolutionary France, became increasingly eager to test the limits of tolerance in aggressive satires employing all the weapons that could be found in the armory of the imagination or added to it.
It was in France that the term roman scientifique, translated into English as “scientific romance”—although a more accurate translation would be “scientific fiction”—was first coined, in the mid-eighteenth century. It was initially employed, however, as a term of abuse to be hurled at scientific ideas that the user rejected. Élie-Catherine Fréron used it to denigrate Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, and others employed it to put the boot into the discredited notion of phlogiston. The English equivalent had been imported by 1780 and was used in a broadly similar fashion, often employed by religious believers to assault geological theses that cast doubt on Biblical chronology.
The French term roman scientifique was used by Honoré de Balzac to describe the famous New York Sun “Moon Hoax” of 1835, which reported discoveries of lunar life supposedly made by the astronomer John Herschel by means of a new telescope located at the Cape of Good Hope. The fake reportage, which grew gradually more extravagant over the five days that the “story” ran, equally caused a sensation when it was translated by French newspapers. That was, however, fiction masquerading as fact, and only signified a partial shift in the term’s significance. The crucial redefinition occurred in the 1860s, when a French boom in the popularization of science gave rise to numerous experiments in the use of fiction as a vehicle to make scientific information more palatable and engaging.
The term roman scientifique was not the only one recruited by journalists to describe such fictional endeavors, but it became the most frequently used when the early novels of Jules Verne, especially the classic set consisting of Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; revised 1867; tr. as Journey to the Centre of the Earth), De la terre à la lune (1865; tr. as From the Earth to the Moon), its sequel, Autour de la lune (1870; tr. as Around the Moon), and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), seemed to many readers and critics to be the definitive texts of a new kind of fiction. It was with reference to the translations of these novels that journalists in Britain and America began to routinely use the term “scientific romance.”
Once the huge international success of Verne’s work had established the notion of scientific romance, observers began to notice previous works that had affinities with Verne’s and realized that this kind of fiction went back as least as far as the Moon Hoax. In America, Edgar Allan Poe was recognized as having been a significant precursor of Verne in a handful of Poe’s remarkably varied works; other American journalistic writers influenced by Poe who had used scientific inspiration in some of their work in a kindred fashion while seeking a similarly broad scope—including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fitz-James O’Brien, Edward Page Mitchell and Ambrose Bierce—were then seen to be in the process of building up a slender but nevertheless significant and ingenious tradition of American scientific romance.
The term “scientific romance” went through a new phase of evolution in the 1890s, however, when Britain produced a writer who, like Jules Verne, had a spectacular impact with a sequence of early works of a related kind: H. G. Wells. Any pleasure that Wells might initially have derived
from the comparison soon evaporated, however, as he was averse to being seen as anyone’s follower, and he quickly began to protest that he was a very different type of writer—an insistence echoed by Verne, who similarly did not want to yield to the impression that his work might have been overtaken and superseded.
The conflict of opinion became newsworthy in itself, as registered in a series of quotations that are still cited today, including the resentful remarks made by Verne to the English journalist Gordon Jones in an interview reproduced in the June 1904 issue of Temple Bar: “I consider [Wells], as a purely imaginative writer, to be deserving of very high praise, but our methods are entirely different. I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge. . . . The creations of Mr. Wel[l]s, on the other hand, belong unreservedly to a degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I will not say beyond the limits of the possible.”
Other observers, however, thought that what Verne and Wells had in common was far more important than the differences between them, and continued to bracket them together. When the American publisher Hugo Gernsback coined the term “scientifiction” (a contraction of “scientific fiction”) to describe the new genre he wanted to promote, prior to replacing it with the less unwieldy “science fiction,” he identified it specifically as the genre pioneered by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, whose exemplary works he hastened to reprint in the pages of his specialist magazine Amazing Stories.
The first person to use the phrase roman scientifique in a deliberate attempt to designate, delineate and exemplify a genre of fiction was Louis Figuier, the editor of the popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, who began running a regular fiction section in 1888 under that heading. Over the next decade and a half, Figuier published dozens more works, which extracted a series of exemplars from the past and mingled them with new works, in order to lay them out as a kind of tacit map of what he considered to be the genre of roman scientifique. It was, in essence, a Vernian genre, but Figuier seems to have urged the writers he recruited to be more adventurous in their endeavors than the fiction featured in the geographical periodical Journal de Voyages, which used Vernian serials in abundance.
From the very beginning, Figuier edged his putative genre in the direction of bolder speculative fiction, and began to do so even more wholeheartedly in 1898, when he discovered a new source of useful material in translations of the works of H. G. Wells, twelve of which he published over the next five years. His fiction slot did not last much longer, however, and the periodical was devoted entirely to non-fiction after 1905. By that time, the term “scientific romance” was solidly established in Britain and America as a journalistic and critical label for “Wellsian fiction”—which was indeed seen by many commentators there to have overtaken and superseded its Vernian ancestor.
Wells initially accepted the term, and was perfectly happy to tell a journalist who interviewed him in 1897 that he was “working on another scientific romance,” but he soon decided that he did not like it, probably because it seemed to bracket him with Verne, and he abandoned its use in personal references to his own works. In the classified lists of previous publications included in his books in the early years of the twentieth century, Wells generally filed his archetypal scientific romances with other works under the rubric “Fantastic and Imaginative Romances.” It was not until 1933, when Victor Gollancz issued an omnibus edition of eight novels, The Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells, that he grudgingly consented to allow the phrase to reassume its authoritative status, and even then, in the preface he supplied to the volume, he only referred to his “fantasies” and his “scientific fantasies,” and remarked:
“These tales have been compared to the work of Jules Verne and there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts. The interest he invoked was a practical one. . . . But these stories of mine collected here do not pretend to deal with possible things.”
Gollancz was, of course, being disingenuous: Wells’s scientific romances do not, in fact, deal with possible things—nor had Verne’s, in fact—but they do pretend to, and they pretend very insistently.
Wells’s personal rejection was undoubtedly a stumbling block to the general acceptance of the term “scientific romance,” but it remained in common use in Britain, just as roman scientifique did in France, for much of the twentieth century, until the American “science fiction” label, imported on a massive scale after the end of World War Two, eclipsed its rivals completely.
Other British writers did not manifest the same allergic reaction to “scientific romance” as Wells. In 1884, the publisher William Swann Sonnenschein issued a pamphlet entitled Scientific Romances No. I: What is the Fourth Dimension?, by C. H. Hinton, and followed it up with four further pamphlets in the series; they were then bound up into a book as Scientific Romances: First Series (1886), mingling essays and philosophical fiction. The series was interrupted thereafter, and soon virtually forgotten, although H. G. Wells borrowed extensively from Hinton’s discussions of the fourth dimension in providing the imaginative underpinnings of his breakthrough novel The Time Machine (1895), but it had helped to popularize the term in England.
In 1890 a reviewer in the Athaeneum unhesitatingly classified Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space as “a pseudo-scientific romance of the Jules Verne type,” and the publisher sent a copy to Verne for comment; the latter wrote a letter of praise in return that was duly reproduced as a preface to the second edition. Cromie later suggested that Wells had appropriated certain elements of his own text for use in The First Men in the Moon (1901), but Wells replied, with not-untypical rudeness, that not only had he never read A Plunge into Space, but he had never even heard of Robert Cromie. Wells was equally dismissive of his contemporary George Griffith, who also had no objection to being compared to Jules Verne, or to being described as a writer of scientific romance.
Griffith made his own breakthrough in the field of future war fiction, which was then booming in British newspapers, and although Wells steered clear of it until 1908, when the temptation became too strong and he wrote his distinctive account of The War in the Air, several other writers came into the genre by that route before diversifying into the broader areas of the genre, including M. P. Shiel, author of the newspaper serial “The Empress of the Earth” (1898; reprinted in book form as The Yellow Danger). Like Griffith, Shiel—who spent a good deal of time in Paris during the 1890s—might well have borrowed some inspiration from French future war fiction, although the influence was not obvious at the time to English critics. Other writers who made crucial contributions to the British genre while it was in its heyday, in the two decades prior to the outbreak of the Great War of 1914–18, included Fred T. Jane, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and J. D. Beresford.
The definitive core of the British genre, however, remained the work of Wells. The eight novels contained in the 1933 Gollancz omnibus are The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), The Food of the Gods (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906) and Men Like Gods (1923). Some critics would argue that the last two do not really belong in the set, and would have preferred to see When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; revised 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes) and The War in the Air included instead.
Wells presumably considered that the ideas for social reform contained in When the Sleeper Wakes had been superseded by those developed in Men Like Gods and omitted The War in the Air from the omnibus because he thought that its anticipatio
n of the politics and armaments of a future war had been rendered obsolete by the actual war of 1914–18. Quibbles aside, however, it was the first five novels featured in the omnibus, along with a number of shorter stories, that had initially prompted the widespread adoption of “scientific romance” as a descriptive term by commentators, and it was that material that effectively framed and anchored an understanding of what people meant in the late 1890s and early 1900s when they said “scientific romance.”
By the time the Gollancz omnibus had appeared, many of Wells’s shorter scientific romances had already been reprinted in an omnibus of The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927), but they had not been sorted by genre (although Tales of Space and Time (1899), which included the long novella “A Story of the Days to Come” (1897), was almost a specialized collection). There is, therefore, no single book that contains the whole set of the works that Wells produced in 1895–98, which created and formulated the notion of “scientific romance,” but a core of a dozen items could be established by supplementing the first four novels in the Gollancz omnibus and “A Story of the Days to Come” with “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” (1895), “The Plattner Story” (1896), “In the Abyss” (1896), “The Sea Raiders” (1896), “The Crystal Egg” (1897) and “The Star” (1897).
The French genre of roman scientifique was more prolific than the American or English genres of scientific romance even before the advent of Jules Verne, and became much more so once Verne had provided the crucial exemplars previously noted. Futuristic fiction examining the prospects of technological progress had obtained an initial boost from the French Romantic Movement, many of whose prose writers dabbled in it.
The writers in question included the founder of the first of the cénacles [literary sets] that gave the Movement its principal arena of discussion, Charles Nodier, in the futuristic satires “Hurlubeu” and “Léviathan le Long” (1833; combined in English translation as “Perfectibility”). Shortly thereafter, Nodier’s friend Félix Bodin published a prospectus for a new genre of roman futuriste [futuristic fiction] in Le Roman de l’avenir (1834; tr. as The Novel of the Future), including a specimen text that was unfortunately interrupted by the author’s ill-health, and remained incomplete.
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