by James Gunn
The Road to
Science Fiction
Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to Wells
Edited by James Gunn
SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
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Copyright © 1977 by James Gunn
First Scarecrow reprint 2002
Originally published in 1977 by New American Library and
White Wolf Publishing
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ISBN: 978-0-8108-4414-8
The New American Library edition of this book was cataloged as LC#77-76965
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Manufactured in the United States of America.
To Edgar Allan Poe
Jules Verne,
and H. G. Wells . . .
who got it started
Contents
Introduction
The First Voyage to the Moon
From A True Story—by Lucian of Samosata
Strange Creatures and Far Traveling
From The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville—Anonymous
The Good Place That Is No Place
From Utopia—by Thomas More
The New Science and the Old Religion
From The City of the Sun—by Tommaso Campanella
Experience, Experiment, and the Battle for Men’s Minds
From The New Atlantis—by Francis Bacon
A New Look at the Heavens and Another Trip to the Moon
Somnium, or Lunar Astronomy—by Johannes Kepler
Commuting to the Moon
From A Voyage to the Moon—by Cyrano de Bergerac
The Age of Reason and the Voice of Dissent
From “A Voyage to Laputa”—by Jonathan Swift
Imaginary Voyages in the Other Direction
From The Journey to the World Underground—by Ludvig Holberg
Visitors from Space
From Micromegas—by François Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Science and Literature: When Worlds Collide
From Frankenstein—by Mary Shelley
Science as Symbol
Rappaccini’s Daughter—by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Anticipations of the Future
Mellonta Tauta—by Edgar Allan Poe
Expanding the Vision
The Diamond Lens—by Fitz-James O’Brien
The Indispensable Frenchman
From Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
From Around the Moon—by Jules Verne
Lost Civilizations and Ancient Knowledge
From She—by H. Rider Haggard
The New Frontier
From Looking Backward—by Edward Bellamy
New Magazines, New Readers, New Writers
The Damned Thing—by Ambrose Bierce
A Flying Start
With the Night Mail—by Rudyard Kipling
The Father of Modern Science Fiction
The Star—by H. G. Wells
About the Editor
Introduction
1
Science fiction is the literature of change. In the first edition of this anthology I called it “the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.” But shorter is better. Traditional literature is the literature of continuity, and thus of the past; science fiction is the literature of change, and thus of the present and the future. As the literature of change, science fiction, at its most characteristic, inserts the reader into a world significantly different from the world of present experience because of catastrophic natural events, because of the evolutionary alterations of time, or because of human activities, particularly scientific and technological. Its basic assumptions are that the universe is knowable (though it may never be fully known) and that people are adaptable (that is, they, like everything else, evolve as a consequence of environment and natural selection); science fiction is fundamentally Darwinian and thus could also be called “the literature of the human species.”
Science fiction has adopted other fictional modes—the adventure and the romance, for instance—but it is most typical when it deals with ideas worked out in human terms. It is not “the” literature of ideas but surely “a literature of ideas.” One touchstone story, Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” (Astounding, August 1954), takes as its thesis that humanity’s romantic notions about how life ought to be have no influence on the inexorable facts (”the cold equations”) of the universe. Another Godwin story said, “Machines don’t care.”
At the hard core of almost every true science-fiction story is an idea—“the quality that makes humanity human is curiosity”; “if people only saw the stars every thousand years, they would not adore but go mad”; “the star that shone over Bethlehem may have been a supernova that destroyed an intelligent race”—and the reader who misses the intellectual level of discourse is missing what more than anything else distinguishes science fiction from other forms of fiction.
The skill of the science-fiction author is evidenced in the way he gives his ideas human form and value. In the process of fictionalizing his ideas, he may develop a structure—a story or plot, if you like—that is indistinguishable from other kinds of fiction. Robert Heinlein, the dean of sciencefiction writers, once wrote (Of Worlds Beyond, 1947) that there are only three main plots for what he called the human-interest story (as opposed to the gadget story): 1) boy-meets-girl; 2) the Little Tailor; and 3) the-man-who-learned-better. It is for this—the promise that draws a reader into a story and the reward that satisfies him—that we read fiction, and the more we are drawn into a story and care what happens to the characters, the better satisfied we are when the author resolves their situation.
But it is not for this alone that we read science fiction. The best sciencefiction stories are those that match manner with matter, story with idea. In “The Cold Equations,” for instance, we become concerned about the threat to the girl who stows-away aboard an emergency delivery ship in order to see her brother, who is a member of a small party exploring a frontier planet. The ship has only enough fuel to complete its mission; if the girl remains aboard, the ship will crash on landing, not only killing the girl and the pilot, but also dooming the members of the exploration party, who will not receive the plague serum the ship has been launched to deliver. Those are the cold equations, and the girl goes out the air lock. The reader’s concern for the girl is transformed into an intellectual awareness of a higher law than “women and children first”—sentiment is expensive, good intentions are irrelevant, and ignorance is punished as severely as guilt.
James Joyce has defined the “epiphany” of a short story as the flash of recognition that shows the situation in a new light: “its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.” In the science-fiction story,
the epiphany usually is a revelation not of character but of the relationship of man to his environment, whether man-made or natural, or of man to other men or to other creatures or to his own creations.
2
Thus defined, science fiction could not be written until people began to think in unaccustomed ways. They had, first of all, to think of themselves as a race—not as a tribe or a people or even a nation. Science fiction may contain unconscious cultural or political biases, but there is little tribalism, little rejoicing in the victory over another human group, but rather an implied or overt criticism of the act of war, and there is even less nationalism. Catastrophes, for instance, are catholic; in fact, they usually are placed close to home, as in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds or John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, for immediacy of impact if nothing else.
People also had to adopt an open mind about the nature of the universe—its beginning and its end—and the fate of man. Science fiction’s religion is skepticism about faith, although there is science fiction about religion, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” (Infinity, November 1955) and James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958; story version, If, September 1953). The reasons for this are clear: religion answers all the questions that science fiction wishes to raise, and science fiction written within a religious framework (such as C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra trilogy) turns into parable.
People also had to discover the future. As long as the future was merely a place where today’s activities went on in some eternal cycle, perhaps even spiraling downward from some earlier golden age, a fiction about the future was meaningless. Not until the Industrial Revolution brought to Western peoples the unsettling feeling that tomorrow was going to be markedly different from today did men begin to think about the future, begin to consider choices, such as “Shall I stay here on the farm or go to the new weaving factory opening in Birmingham?” People began to think of the future as a place where they would live, different in degree and perhaps even in kind, a place they might be able to make better lives for themselves if they thought about it and did the right things.
It was no coincidence that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 or that Auguste Comte began working on the systematization of sociology about 1830, or that these dates embraced the American and the French revolutions; these were men taking account of change and considering how conditions might be better.
Technological discoveries that had been accumulating since the Renaissance reached a critical mass in the middle of the eighteenth century. With this, and the systematic study of the laws of nature that ran parallel to the Industrial Revolution and later became known as the Age of Science, came the beginnings of science fiction. Inseminated by such new scientific possibilities as electricity and medicine, the gothic novel produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818; the technology of ballooning and such scientific discoveries as mesmerism, along with the new scientific way of thought, produced the scientific fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe; Poe, geographic discoveries, and the growing potential of technology produced the voyages extraordinaires of Jules Verne; Charles Darwin and his disciple T. H. Huxley and a scientific education produced the scientific romances of H. G. Wells; Poe, Verne, Wells, and the new excitement of electricity and radio produced Hugo Gernsback, and he and the pulp magazines produced Amazing Stories in 1926; John W. Campbell and breakthroughs in physics and astronomy and other sciences produced modern science fiction. . . . All this is a familiar story (see Alternate Worlds, 1975) that will be incorporated in the headnotes that follow.
Science and technology created social change, and the awareness of social change created science fiction. Technology increased agricultural productivity and offered farmers the opportunity to work only a twelve-hour day in the factory; technology helped create nationalism and provided it with weapons and armies; technology created money (or made it meaningful by spreading it more widely) and provided people with products to spend it on; technology turned raw materials into energy and enhanced man’s control over his environment, improved his standard of living, and extended his life span through more healthful conditions and better medicine; technology produced a belief in progress that became a kind of religion for Western man.
Science fiction was the artistic response to the human experience of change. Man began to look ahead to something different and perhaps something better; one way he looked was through a new kind of fiction. John Campbell once said (Modern Science Fiction, 1953): “Fiction is simply dreams written out. Science fiction consists of the hopes and dreams and fears (for some dreams are nightmares) of a technically based society.”
Man has lived in a technically based society for perhaps a hundred years or so, and although the frame of mind essential to the creation of modern science fiction has developed largely since 1900, the process of invention began long before that. Technology goes back to the discovery of fire and the invention of the wedge, the wheel, the horse collar, the stirrup, the astrolabe, the abacus, and movable type; and science goes back beyond Aristotle, even beyond Democritus, to inquiring minds among the ancient Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Chinese.
So, too, back beyond 1900, back beyond 1750, back beyond even the birth of Christ, go the hopes and dreams and fears that ultimately found expression, in a technically based society, as science fiction. In an earlier time, before the future was discovered, much less the concept of progress, men wrote about travel to the distant places of the earth and the wonders that might be found there, even about journeys to other astronomical bodies, particularly the moon, hung out there in the night sky almost near enough to touch; they wrote about the wonders that once were; they speculated about the place of man in the universe. And they incorporated their basic questions and desires into fictional narratives, not into short stories and novels, which had not yet been invented, but into epic poems and plays and tales.
It is this period that this book intends to cover, from Gilgamesh to Wells, roughly from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1900. It will include examples and works that preceded and led up to the contemporary expression of science fiction in magazines and books. In order to understand why science fiction is the way it is today, I think it is important for readers and students of the genre to understand what it has been.
3
Humanity’s earliest dreams were to control its environment (by propitiating the gods who controlled—or were—the natural forces of his world), to control other people (by conquering them or by ruling over them, or both), and to live forever. Humanity’s greatest fear, after personal death or that of family, was that a particular people would be destroyed, its civilization wiped out, its culture and its history lost.
Humanity’s dreams are seldom fulfilled, but its fears are almost always realized. Humanity’s heroes—they have been called culture heroes—have been men who were part god, to whom the gods listened, who controlled the elements, who became king, who sought to live forever, and who founded, or saved, the people. All of these elements later found their expression in science fiction.
The earliest written narrative, the first epic, contains almost all of these dreams and fears. Gilgamesh, a Babylonian epic poem of about three thousand lines written in cuneiform on twelve tablets, was discovered in scattered fragments over a period of about eighty years beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing until about 1930. A partial translation was first published in 1872 and the first complete translation in 1900.
The epic begins with a description of Gilgamesh and a recapitulation of his career. Freely translated, the lines run something like this:
He saw everything, to the ends of the earth;
He knew all things and could do all things;
He saw secret things and revealed hidden things;
He brought information about the days before the flood;
He went on a long journey, became weary and worn;
He engraved on a stone table all of his labors;
; He built the walls of Uruk, the enclosure,
Of holy Eanna, the sacred temple. . . .
Two-thirds of him is god and one-third of him is man.
None can match the form of his body.
Translate that into modern terms, and you would have something like the novels of Edward Elmer Smith, particularly the Lensman series; besides their length, readers had good reason to call Smith’s space adventures “epics.” One fan press, after World War II, would publish Smith’s six-volume Lensman series as The History of Civilization.
Gilgamesh’s concerns are those of science fiction: social (people need a heroic king, but what do people do when a king rules too heavily?) and personal (can man live forever, or, if not, how does he live with the fact of death?). Gilgamesh was not simply a hero; he was part god—the son of a goddess and a high priest—who became king of Uruk. But his exuberance, strength, vigor, and arrogance led him to carry off the maidens and force the young men to work on the city walls and the temple. Finally his subjects called on the gods for relief.
They responded by creating a wild man of incredible strength named Enkidu. Eventually, led by a prostitute, Enkidu came to battle Gilgamesh; after a terrific fight, Gilgamesh was victorious and the two became friends. They went off together to win fame by killing a terrible ogre who guarded a vast cedar forest. With the help of the gods, they succeeded. On their return to Uruk, Ishtar, goddess of love, offered to be Gilgamesh’s wife, but he refused. Enraged, she asked her father, Anu, to send the bull of heaven to destroy Gilgamesh, but Enkidu and Gilgamesh killed the bull.
The gods decided that one of them had to die; Enkidu was chosen by lot. Torn by grief at the death of his friend, stricken by the thought that he, too, must die, Gilgamesh went to seek immortality from Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah, who was made immortal by the gods. After great difficulties and perils, Gilgamesh finally reached Utnapishtim but learned that only the gods can confer immortality, and why should they choose him?
One hope remained: a thorny plant that grew at the bottom of the sea could rejuvenate old men. Gilgamesh retrieved some, but on his return home, as he was bathing, a serpent ate the plant (and thereby won the power to shed its skin and renew its life). Gilgamesh wept, but eventually he returned to Uruk, having learned to be content with his lot and to rejoice in the work of his hands.
