The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  But however I shall so far do justice to this part of the Academy, as to acknowledge that all of them were not so visionary. There was a most ingenious doctor who seemed to be perfectly versed in the whole nature and system of government. This illustrious person had very usefully employed his studies in finding out effectual remedies for all diseases and corruptions, to which the several kinds of public administration are subject by the vices or infirmities of those who govern, as well as by the licentiousness of those who are to obey. For instance, whereas all writers and reasoners have agreed, that there is a strict universal resemblance between the natural and the political body; can there by any thing more evident, than that the health of both must be preserved, and the diseases cured by the same prescriptions? It is allowed that senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient, and other peccant humours, with many diseases of the head, and more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigoes, and deliriums; with scrofulous tumours full of foetid virulent matter; with sour frothy ructations, with canine appetites and crudeness of digestion, besides many others needless to mention. This doctor therefore proposed, that upon the meeting of a senate, certain physicians should attend at the three first days of their sitting, and at the close of each day’s debate, feel the pulses of every senator; after which, having maturely considered, and consulted upon the nature of the several maladies, and the methods of cure, they should on the fourth day return to the senate house, attended by their apothecaries stored with proper medicines; and before the members sat, administer to each of them lenitives, aperitives, abstersives, corrosives, restringents, palliatives, laxatives, cephalalgics, icterics, apophlegmatics, acoustics, as their several cases required; and according as these medicines should operate, repeat, alter, or omit them at the next meeting.

  This project could not be of any great expense to the public, and would, in my poor opinion, be of much use for the dispatch of business in those countries where senates have any share in the legislative power; beget unanimity, shorten debates, open a few mouths which were now closed, and close many more which are now open; curb the petulancy of the young, and correct the positiveness of the old; rouse the stupid, and damp the pert.

  Again, because it is a general complaint, that the favourites of princes are troubled with short and weak memories, the same doctor proposed, that whoever attended a first minister, after having told his business with the utmost brevity and in the plainest words, should at his departure give the said minister a tweak by the nose, or a kick in the belly, or tread on his corns, or lug him thrice by both ears, or run a pin into his breech, or pinch his arm black and blue to prevent forgetfulness; and at every levee day repeat the same operation, till the business were done or absolutely refused.

  He likewise directed, that every senator in the great council of a nation, after he had delivered his opinion, and argued in the defence of it, should be obliged to give his vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public.

  When parties in a state are violent, he offered a wonderful contrivance to reconcile them. The method is this. You take a hundred leaders of each party, you dispose them into couples of such whose heads are nearest of a size; then let two nice operators saw off the occiput of each couple at the same time, in such a manner that the brain may be equally divided. Let the occiputs thus cut off be interchanged, applying each to the head of his opposite party-man. It seems indeed to be a work that requireth some exactness, but the professor assured us that if it were dexterously performed the cure would be infallible. For he argued thus: that the two half brains being left to debate the matter between themselves within the space of one skull, would soon come to a good understanding, and produce that moderation, as well as regularity of thinking so much to be wished for in the heads of those who imagine they come into the world only to watch and govern its motion: and as to the difference of brains in quantity or quality among those who are directors in faction, the doctor assured us from his own knowledge that it was a perfect trifle.

  I heard a very warm debate between two professors, about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money without grieving the subject. The first affirmed the justest method would be to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly, and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated after the fairest manner by a jury of his neighbours. The second was of an opinion directly contrary, to tax those qualities of body and mind for which men chiefly value themselves, the rate to be more or less according to the degrees of excelling, the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast. The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex, and the assessments according to the number and natures of the favours they have received; for which they are allowed to be their own vouchers. Wit, valour, and politeness were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person’s giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and learning, they should not be taxed at all, because they are qualifications of so singular a kind, that no man will either allow them in his neighbour, or value them in himself.

  The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their own judgment. But constancy, chastity, good sense, and good nature were not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting.

  To keep senators in the interest of the crown, it was proposed that the members should raffle for employments, every man first taking an oath, and giving security that he would vote for the court, whether he won or no; after which the losers had in their turn the liberty of raffling upon the next vacancy. Thus hope and expectation would be kept alive, none would complain of broken promises, but impute their disappointments wholly to fortune whose shoulders are broader and stronger than those of a ministry.

  Another professor showed me a large paper of instructions for discovering plots and conspiracies against the government. He advised great statesmen to examine into the diet of all suspected persons; their times of eating; upon which side they lay in bed; with which hand they wiped their posteriors; to take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs. Because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool, which he found by frequent experiment; for in such conjunctures, when he used merely as a trial to consider which was the best way of murdering the king, his ordure would have a tincture of green, but quite different when he thought only of raising an insurrection or burning the metropolis.

  The whole discourse was written with great acuteness, containing many observations both curious and useful for politicians, but as I conceived not altogether complete. This I ventured to tell the author, and offered if he pleased to supply him with some additions. He received my proposition with more compliance than is usual among writers, especially those of the projecting species, professing he would be glad to receive farther information.

  I told him that in the kingdom of Tribnia, by the natives called Langden, where I had sojourned some time in my travels, the bulk of the people consist in a manner wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, evidences, swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern instruments, all under the colours and conduct of ministers of state and their deputies. The plots in that kingdom are usually the workmanship of those persons who desire to raise their own characters of profound politicians, to restore new vigour to a crazy administration, to stifle or divert general discontents, to fill their pockets with forfeiture, and raise or sink the opinion of public credit, as either shall best answer their private advantage. It is first agreed and settled among them, what suspected persons shall be accuse
d of a plot; then, effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the criminals in chains. These papers are delivered to a set of artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and letters. For instance, they can discover a close-stool to signify a privy council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame dog, an invader; a codshead, a— —; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a prime minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; a chamber-pot, a committee of grandees; a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, the treasury; a sink, the court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a running sore, the administration.

  When this method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the learned among them call acrostics and anagrams. First they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings. Thus, N. shall signify a plot; B. a regiment of horse; L. a fleet at sea; or secondly by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can discover the deepest designs of a discontented party. So for example if I should say in a letter to a friend, Our brother Tom has just got the piles, a skilful decipherer would discover that the same letters which compose that sentence may be analysed into the following words: Resist, a plot is brought home; The tour. And this is the anagrammatic method.

  The professor made me great acknowledgments for communicating these observations, and promised to make honourable mention of me in his treatise.

  I saw nothing in this country that could invite me to a longer continuance, and began to think of returning home to England.

  Imaginary Voyages in the Other Direction

  In the eighteenth century inventors began to rival scientists in their impact on the way Western man looked at his world and on his relationship with his environment.

  The progress of scientific discovery went on without pause: Du Fay worked out the theory of electrical charges and Franklin gave them names; Linnaeus published his taxonomical masterpiece, Systema Naturae; Buffon announced his theory of the formation of the planets by collision of a large heavenly object with the sun and Kant his theory of gaseous condensation; Lavoisier discovered the true nature of combustion; Gauss developed non-Euclidian geometry; and Hutton founded modern geology.

  Meanwhile, inventors produced two invaluable aids to navigation, the sextant and the chronometer, and the threshing machine, the weaving machine, the spinning jenny, the circular saw, the steel pen, the steamboat, the manned balloon and the parachute, the iron plow, and power loom, the cotton gin, lithography, and mass production through interchangeable parts. And the most important invention of all, the steam engine.

  Inventions were the response of ingenious minds to needs of one sort or another: the need for greater efficiency, the need for greater profit, or the need to do something that man was unable to do up to that time. The use of coal, for instance, came when England was deforested by men seeking firewood, but water seeped into coal mines and made many unusable. Savery and Newcomen invented machines that used steam to pump out the mines, and then James Watt improved their work so radically that he has been credited with inventing the steam engine. By 1769 Watt had produced his first working engine, and soon new applications were being discovered: the steam boat, foundries and textile mills, the steam locomotive, and an apparently endless series of uses for chemical power rather than human labor.

  In combination with other inventions, the result was the Industrial Revolution. Cottage industries were unable to compete. Workers, including many farmers, flocked to the new factories. Towns absorbed them. The blessings and the evils of industrialization descended upon humanity. An economic boon with social problems as a side effect, the Industrial Revolution provided an environment that encouraged expansion, new inventions, and further economic development. Man was set upon a path of change that could be reversed only at great human sacrifice of lives and the quality of life.

  In addition, the Industrial Revolution created a middle class, a newly literate middle class, and the middle class, in turn, created the modern novel. A steadily growing reading public demanded information rather than well-turned phrases and good taste. The Tatler and the Spectator were followed by a series of popular journals, and the new journalism that appealed to the new readers attracted new kinds of writers who could make a kind of subsistence living out of writing. The period came to be called Grub Street.

  Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) came out of the period. He turned to fiction at the age of almost sixty and wrote highly detailed fictitious autobiographies of adventurers or rogues—men and women of his own class trying to achieve success, which they defined as accumulation of property. His major work, Robinson Crusoe (1719), was the only one of his books to be widely read outside the middle class.

  The episodic narratives of Defoe and the satirical narratives of Swift led toward what has been called the first English novel, Pamela (1740) by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761). Pamela, in turn, would lead to the greater triumphs of Henry Fielding (1707–1754), Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), and Laurence Sterne (1713–1768).

  Meanwhile the great Danish writer Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), who wrote histories, plays (he was called “the Molière of the North”), and essays, wrote a notable imaginary voyage. Unlike the earlier examples, however, Holberg turned inward. His voyage was not a trip to the moon but to the center of the earth. But like the others, it had an ulterior purpose. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (1741) was intended, Holberg wrote, “to correct popular errors and to distinguish the semblance of virtue and vice from the reality.” The book was written in Latin but soon translated into German, Danish, and English.

  The story relates how Niels Klim, an impoverished university graduate, seeks to make a reputation for himself by exploring a mysterious cave in Norway, falls through the earth, orbits a central planet, fights off a griffin and is pulled by it to the planet where he discovers intelligent, mobile trees who consider him so flighty and shallow that he is good for nothing but carrying messages, tries to get a law passed overthrowing the equality of the sexes, and is condemned to be flown to the firmament (the inside of the earth), where he encounters all kinds of civilizations of monkeys, tigers, bears, gamecocks, bass fiddles, ice creatures, and finally humans. For the humans he trains cavalry, manufactures muskets, builds ships, and leads them into battle, where he is victorious. He succeeds the emperor and subdues most of the kingdoms of the firmament before power corrupts him, his people rebel against his cruelty, and trying to hide, he falls back through a hole in a cave and finds himself in Norway again.

  As in Gulliver’s Travels, Journey to the World Underground has plenty of story to hold the reader’s attention. This is one of the two new characteristics the imaginary voyage has developed; the other is credibility achieved through documentation by realistic prefaces, letters, and other kinds of evidence, through concrete detail, and through believable heroes. All of these would be important in the transition of the imaginary voyage to science fiction.

  From The Journey to the World Underground

  BY LUDVIG HOLBERG

  CHAPTER I

  THE AUTHOR’S DESCENT TO THE SUBTERRANEAN WORLD

  In the year 1664, after I had passed my several examinations in the University of Copenhagen, and had deservedly obtained the character, which is there called laudable, by the votes of my judges, as well philosophers as divines, I prepared for my return into my native country, and accordingly put myself aboard a ship bound for Bergen in Norway, dignified indeed with various marks of honour from the gentlemen of the several faculties, but in my fortunes quite impoverished. This was an evil that attended myself as well as several of the Norwegian students, who returned from the study of the arts and sciences into their own country stripped of all they were worth. As we had a pretty brisk gale, after a voyage of six days we arrived at Bergen harbour. Being thus restored to my country, something wiser indeed, though by no means riche
r, I was supported for a time at the expense of my near relations, and led a precarious sort of life, yet not altogether indolent and inactive. For in order to clear up by experience some points of natural philosophy, the study I had devoted myself to, I rambled over every corner of the province with an insatiable curiosity to explore the nature of the Earth, and to search into the very bowels of our mountains. No rock so steep but I climbed it, no cavern so hideous and deep but I made a descent into it, to try if haply I could discover anything curious and worth the inquiry of a philosopher. For there are a multitude of things in our country of Norway hardly ever seen or heard of, which if France, Italy, Germany, or any other country so fruitful of the marvelous could boast of, nothing could be more talked of, nothing more sifted and examined.

  Among those things which to me appeared most worthy of observation there was a large and deep cave upon the top of that mountain which the natives call Floïen. And because the mouth of the cave used to send forth a gentle murmuring sound, and that too by intervals, as if by its frequent sighs its jaws were now shut, and now opened; hence the literati of Bergen, and particularly the celebrated Master Abeline, and Master Edvard, one of our first geniuses in astronomy and natural philosophy, imagined this affair highly worthy of a philosophical inquiry; and since they themselves were too old for such an enterprise, they excited the younger inhabitants to a closer examination of the nature of the cavern; especially as at stated intervals, after the manner of human respiration, the sound being sometime withheld, issued out with a certain proportional force.

  What with these discourses, and what with my own natural inclination, I formed a design of entering into this cavern, and communicated my intention to some of my friends. But they by no means approved of it, plainly declaring that it was a wild and frantic undertaking. But all they could say, so far was it from extinguishing, that it did not even damp the ardour of my mind; and their advice, instead of weakening, administered fuel to my curiosity. For that eagerness with which I pursued the study of nature inspired me to face every danger, and the straitness of my private circumstances gave a spur to my natural inclination. For my own substance was quite wasted, and it seemed to me the greatest hardship to live in a state of dependence in a country where all hopes of preferment were cut off, where I beheld myself condemned to poverty, and every avenue to honour and advantage entirely stopped, unless I would make my way by some flagrant act of dishonour or immorality.