The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue #296 April 2013

by Kevin J Maroney

  In “A Story of Psyche,” the titular character is banished from Eden for having committed a crucial sin, but compensation for her fallen plight is offered by her two children, Judgment and Imagination—a boy and girl respectively, the latter being, in her turn, the parent of Science. Guided by Imagination, Science, and the Senses, Psyche is led on a quest for happiness through the gate of knowledge in spite of the advice of Judgment to cultivate virtue instead, but she occasions evil wherever she goes. When Imagination finally deserts her, she seeks out Judgment again, only to find him metamorphosed into Philosophy, quoting Socrates, Newton, and Democritus. All is not lost, however, and she is eventually guided back to the true path of progress by ardent prayer.

  For Griffin’s Psyche as for D’Israeli’s homunculus, there is no innate “happiness of life” but only the misery of the fallen state, from which the only possible escape is piety—a piety that only holds out the remote promise of reward, a heaven undescribed by its virtue of being unimaginable. It is not obvious why Griffin or his devout readers—the book must have been popular to have gone through so many editions although it is forgotten today—felt that this was a preferable outlook to the one embraced by The Temple of Nature. But they were not lacking in support in the next century and a half when there was to be no shortage of people who wished sincerely, if somewhat hopelessly, that the age of “scientific romance” would very soon be past. In Griffin’s own day, it had hardly begun.

  The Ibbetson/D’Israeli/Griffin usage of “scientific romance” was also repeated, naturally enough, in 1845 by at least one reviewer of Robert Chambers’s evolutionist account of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, prompting the introducer of the second American edition, George B. Cheever, to observe that “This book has well been called a scientific romance” (vii). The apparent acceptance of the term encouraged some favorable reviewers to use it, too. When Archibald Tucker Ritchie’s The Dynamical Theory of the Earth was reviewed in Annals and Magazine of Natural History in 1851 the reviewer compared it to Chambers’s Vestiges, calling the latter a “delightful scientific romance.” In the same year, a reviewer in Macphail’s Edinburgh Ecclestiastical Journal and Literary Review described Robert Hunt’s Panthea as a scientific romance in a similarly complimentary manner. The geological account of the Earth’s past popularized by Chambers and rhapsodized by Hunt continued to attract the use of the phrase. In 1884, a reviewer in Popular Science Monthly applied it, as if it were the natural term to use, to Alexander Winchell’s pioneering endeavor in “astrogeology,” World-Life; or, Comparative Geology.

  The abandonment of insulting implication by some of the mid-century users of the phrase presumably helped clear the way for the development of the somewhat different meaning that was later appropriated for reference to H. G. Wells. The French-derived usage that crops up in comments on translations of Jules Verne’s early works was also used in the frame narrative of Henry Holt’s 1867 translation of Edmond About’s L’Homme à l’oreille cassée (1862, published in the U.S.A. as The Man with the Broken Ear), in which it is a straightforward translation from the French roman scientifique. A reference in William Stanley Jevon’s Principles of Science (1874) to Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur the pluralité des mondes as a scientific romance was probably inspired in the same way.

  The use of the term in Moritz Kauffmann’s Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement from Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx (1879) might be reckoned particularly significant in that it combines the idea of scientific romance with other notions that were to remain closely linked with it, with specific reference to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. Kauffmann states that New Atlantis

  embodies Bacon’s visions of the future, and is remarkable not only as a philosophical speculation or scientific romance, but as being the outcome of sane reflection, containing but few, if any, of those chimerical extravagancies to be found in other Utopias. In the description of the conditions of mankind here, we have nothing but the practical results he anticipated from a practical and diligent study of nature according to his own principles. (18)

  Although not intended as a definition of, or manifesto for, scientific romance, the remark highlights the more serious ambitions of that form of “philosophical speculation.”

  The use of “scientific romance” as a descriptive term with no pejorative implication continued in the 1880s. 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, numbered II-V, which were then bound up into a book as Scientific Romances: First Series (1886). As promised, other pamphlets followed, but the series was interrupted after two more for reasons too complicated to go into here.

  The Swann Sonnenschein series helped to make the phrase sufficiently familiar to invite pedantic modification on the part of hesitant users. A reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1885 referred to the Earl of Lytton’s Glenaveril; or, The Metamorphoses as “a scientific romance in verse.” In 1889, a review in the English Illustrated Magazine referred to “the quasi-scientific romance of Jules Verne and his imitators,” and the following year a reviewer in the Athaeneum referred to Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space as “a pseudo-scientific romance of the Jules Verne type.” The meaning of “scientific romance” that referred to works of fiction rather than conjectural essays in nonfiction seems to have become more frequent than its mildly insulting rival after 1870, but the other did not disappear entirely, and it continued to crop up in popular science magazines in the early twentieth century.

  The quasi-oxymoronic ambiguity of the phrase, mischievously exploited by D’Israeli and still retained in the odd admixture of speculative essays in Hinton’s series, is a thoroughly Romantic phenomenon. The notion that scientific writing should not only stick to reportage but to dour reportage from which all metaphor, illustration, and decorative style has been ruthlessly eliminated along with more vulgar forms of inexactitude seemed innately conservative and “Classicist” by the end of the eighteenth century, even though it had no Classical ancestry and had good arguments to support it. The proposition that literary romance ought not to allow itself to be fettered by any allegiance with a discipline intrinsically opposed to enchantment and fancy has also had eloquent advocates, but that too seemed a trifle obsolete to eighteenth-century writers eager to introduce serious implications into their work and to employ fanciful apparatus for serious rhetorical purposes. There was, therefore, every reason why the dismissive use of the term “scientific romance” should at least be counterbalanced and perhaps displaced by a more generous implication.

  Several notable British scientists of the nineteenth century had a definite poetic streak in their writing which often led them to rhapsodize about the wonderful implications of their discoveries. To some extent, this arose from a desire to dramatize their findings for the layman, communicating something of the excitement of scientific inquiry, but it was also intimately connected with the ongoing battle of ideas whereby men of science were trying to displace or modify the dogmas and prejudices of religion. In that contest, it was often considered strategic folly simply to argue flatly that certain beliefs encouraged by religion had been found to be false and that the actual truth of some such matters had now been ascertained. The war was not so much about individual items of belief but a struggle of world-views to which aesthetic and moral considerations were far from irrelevant, and many would-be champions of science who went in search of converts to their cause were very sensitive to the esthetic considerations of their work.

  The impact of geology, cosmology, and evolutionary theory on traditional views of “man’s place in nature” and on moral and metaphysical philosophies relating to that question inevitably became one of the central themes of British scientific romance. In dealing with such notions, the best writers of scientific romance exhibited a philosophical ambition that was quite remarkable and noticeably different in its tone an
d implication from those of French and American writers of speculative fiction. Their greater reluctance to involve themselves in that particular war of ideas and their typical manner of handling it when they did inevitably reflected differences in the religious cultures of the three nations, and the different influences of religious culture on publishing policy. French Romanticism and American Romanticism each had their own distinct flavor—as, for that matter, did French anti-Romanticism and American anti-Romanticism—and those differences affected the way that science was viewed by scientists as well as laymen.

  The most obvious difference of that kind is perhaps the heavy American emphasis on technology and the practical application of science at the expense of theory and philosophy as reflected in the glorification of Thomas Alva Edison as an archetype of pragmatic American genius. That emphasis not only affects the typical patterns of American science fiction but American attitudes to speculative fiction from Europe and hence attempts to locate writers like Verne and Wells within the generalized “history of science fiction.” Although Wells became a very popular writer and a key exemplar in France and America as well as in Britain, it does not follow that readers in those various countries were paying attention to the same aspects of the fiction, and it is undeniable that the patterns of his influence and that of generic scientific romance in France and America were different from one another and different from the pattern of their influence in Britain.

  * * *

  Brian Stableford lives in Reading, Kent.

  Works Cited

  Cheever, Rev. George B. “Introduction” In Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers. Second US Edition. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845.

  D’Israeli, Isaac. Flim-Flams! Or, the Life and Errors of my Uncle, and the Amours of my Aunt . . . (as by Messieurs Tag, Rag, and Bobtail). In three volumes. London: John Murray, 1805–06.

  Griffin, Gerald. The Christian Physiologist: Tales Illustrative of the Five Senses. London: Edward Bull, 1830.

  Ibbetson, James. A Dissertation on the Judicial Customs of the Saxon and Norman Age. London: B. White, 1780.

  Kauffmann, Rev. M. Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement from Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx. London: Kegan Paul, 1879.

  * * *

  Rusty’s Space Ship Flies Again

  Darrell Schweitzer

  It is enough to make me feel old, the realization that I’ve just gone back to the very first science fiction novel I ever encountered and that encounter took place more than 50 years ago. Fifty-two years ago, to be precise. When I was in the third grade, and therefore 8—this would have been late 1960 or early 1961—the teacher read the class a chapter of a science fiction book as a special treat in the last fifteen minutes or so of each school day as we waited for the bus. For decades thereafter, I didn’t know the title or author, but I could remember that it was about some children (I didn’t remember the characters specifically) who built a wooden spaceship in the back yard, rather the way many kids used to build tree houses. The boy in charge of the project had found a “heat shield” in the city dump, which he nailed onto the front of the vessel. Shortly thereafter, an alien came to claim this, explaining that the mysterious disk was a “flying saucer” on which the ill-tempered ruler of the planet Eopee sometimes banged his cup. When he did, it went flying through space. This alien had been sent to fetch it. Now that it was nailed onto the front of the spaceship, he had no choice but to bang the “cup” on the “saucer” and take the ship and the children into space with him. But, alas, he could not remember where Eopee was! So they went on a tour of the solar system looking for it, until at the very end the alien remembered (or recited) a bit of verse:

  O messenger from Eopee

  From Andromeda galaxy . . .

  At the end of the story, the kids ended up back home, and their mother assumed it was some game they were playing. Of course, she did not believe a bit of their adventures.

  I think even at the time I knew that should be “AnDROMeda,” not “AndroMEda,” and that either the pronunciation was wrong or something was wrong with the meter. I’d been taught to read on Dr. Seuss and had some (nontechnical) idea of what meter was.

  Decades later, I found the book, which proved to be Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman (Doubleday, 1957). This is one of two children’s science fiction books written by Ms. Lampman, the other being The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek (1955). There is a short biography of this author in the second volume of Robert Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (Gale Research, 1979), which tells us that the author was born in 1907, was first a radio continuity writer and later a full-time writer, wrote in fields other than science fiction, won a Dorothy Canfield Fisher Memorial Children’s Book Award in 1962 for something called City Under the Back Steps, and won a Western Writers of America Spur Award in 1970 for Cayuse Courage.

  Now at the age of 60 I have actually read Rusty’s Space Ship. I find that my memory of it was fairly accurate. There are minor details I had wrong: the spaceship was built in Rusty’s garage, not back yard, and the alien wielded not the planetary ruler’s cup but another “saucer” which, when folded up like an umbrella, was a bit more practical for the purpose. Otherwise it was as I recalled it: the tour through the solar system, a scene in which the hero has to crawl out on the hull and strike the “saucer” on the nose to get the spaceship moving, and so forth, leading to the conclusion with the disbelieving parent. I had even remembered the two lines of verse correctly.

  The hero is a boy of 10 or maybe a little older. He is accompanied by his friend, Susan, and their dog, Cookie. This is not a teen book but a preadolescent book. Rusty is of the age where he has previously been perfectly happy to play with the tomboyish Susan, but now he’s beginning to feel it an affront to masculine pride to carry on as before. She feels that the boys are excluding her. She is the last to be picked on a team for sports and so on. But in private, in the garage, Rusty reverts to their former relationship and proudly shows Susan his latest creation, which he christens the Terra Terror 1.

  Then the alien arrives, disguised in a hat and fur coat swiped from a clothesline. This is Tiphia, who, despite the feminine ending on the name, is male. Tiphia is a first-time junior messenger from Eopee, sent on his first mission to retrieve that saucer. He is desperately eager to prove himself capable, for all he forgets things sometimes. But he does endlessly praise the ineffable wisdom and goodness of his planet’s ruler, the great Gwump, from whom all blessings flow, and if he sounds a little bit like a Chinese Communist extolling Mao Zedong, well, that is surely my adult perception adding something in retrospect that isn’t really in the book. Here is a typical example of one of Tiphia’s ditties:

  In Eopee there is no greed,

  You wish aloud for what you need,

  And if you’re too polite to say,

  Why, Gwump will grant it anyway.

  All hail, Eopee, hail! (152)

  Physically, Tiphia looks rather like a green lizard that walks upright and has rather humanlike arms but no claws. He is conveniently telepathic and, even more conveniently, dispenses pills which relieve the children of all need for breathing (though they still must wear clothespins over their noses to control the impulse). Thus, wearing dark goggles to block out the unfiltered sunlight, they are ready to soar off into space.

  Needless to say, the level of scientific accuracy in this book is nowhere near the Hal Clement level or that of the Heinlein juveniles. Sometimes the “science” is downright frivolous, as when, after a narrow escape, the children look back on the surface of Mars and realize that the “canals” and seasonal dark areas are actually swarms of billions of ants. Mercury is locked with one face toward the sun. They land on the hot side, and the dog’s license melts right off its collar, and the children’s shoes begin to smoke, but otherwise they are unharmed. Venus proves to have rather comfortable temperatures beneath its cloud cover, and the place is inhabited by rather imaginatively conceived semigaseo
us creatures no more substantial than soap bubbles. Mars has its ants. That Jupiter has a cold surface and thundering rivers of liquid methane is not a totally obsolete notion for the late ’50s and was certainly not unknown in the respectable, adult science fiction of the decade or in the art of Chesley Bonestell. The spaceship lands on the rings of Saturn, which are described as billions of tiny moonlets packed together like pebbles on a beach. The Eopeean messenger’s handbook warns against landing on Saturn itself. We find out why: it is hypnotic. Everyone whirls around the planet, staring at it, hypnotized into seeing whatever they most desire until an escape is effected.

  Where Ms. Lampman falls down badly is basic physics. She does not seem to understand acceleration or gravity at all, thinking the latter something that ends when you leave a planet’s atmosphere. Thus in the space between planets, the occupants of the Terra Terror float weightlessly, but as soon as they enter an atmosphere, they thump to the floor.

  Needless to say, it is absurd to hold a book like this to a hard sf standard. That’s not what it’s for. It is a piece of whimsy, ideal for a third-grade teacher reading to her charges in 1960. The teacher probably didn’t understand the science, either. This was the era of “duck and cover” air raid drills, which the kids did not take very seriously, particularly when the very same teacher explained that if the Russian pilot dropped his atomic bomb right on our school, you could forget it, but if he dropped it in the Treadway Inn (a large establishment about the equivalent of two city blocks away), you might have a chance. Well, at age 8 I already knew something about World War II, and I knew what had happened at Hiroshima fifteen years earlier and that the blast radius of an A-bomb was measurable in miles, not yards. Admittedly, I probably didn’t know any more about acceleration and gravity than my teacher did. This was the tail end of an era of innocence, when kids’ stories, which used to be outright fairy tales, maybe even with fairies in them, now looked to outer space and other planets but were still a species of fairy tale, not quite taken seriously. Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepherd were about to go up. The “technological Pearl Harbor” of the Sputnik launch had already happened, though I had no awareness of it. Hearing Rusty’s Space Ship was, I think, the first time I had ever encountered a story of interplanetary travel, and it came right at a time of endings and beginnings and it was, in a subtle way, a life-changing event.