The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  “Beatrice,” asked he, abruptly, “whence came this shrub?”

  “My father created it,” answered she, with simplicity.

  “Created it! created it!” repeated Giovanni. “What mean you, Beatrice?”

  “He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of Nature” replied Beatrice; “and, at the hour when I first drew breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his earthly child. Approach it not!” continued she, observing with terror that Giovanni was drawing nearer to the shrub. “It has qualities that you little dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni,—I grew up and blossomed with the plant and was nourished with its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human affection; for, alas!—hast thou not suspected it?—there was an awful doom.”

  Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and trembled. But her faith in his tenderness reassured her, and made her blush that she had doubted for an instant.

  “There was an awful doom,” she continued, “the effect of my father’s fatal love for science, which estranged me from all society of my kind. Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, O, how lonely was thy poor Beatrice!”

  “Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.

  “Only of late have I known how hard it was,” answered she, tenderly. “O, yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore quiet.”

  Giovanni’s rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a lightning flash out of a dark cloud.

  “Accursed one!” cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. “And, finding thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me likewise from all the warmth of life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!”

  “Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his face. The force of his words had not found its way into her mind; she was merely thunderstruck.

  “Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion. “Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself—a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity! Now, if our breath be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!”

  “What has befallen me?” murmured Beatrice, with a low moan out of her heart. “Holy Virgin, pity me, a poor heartbroken child!”

  “Thou,—dost thou pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish scorn. “Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a pestilence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!”

  “Giovanni,” said Beatrice, calmly, for her grief was beyond passion, “why dost thou join thyself with me thus in those terrible words? I, it is true, am the horrible thing thou namest me. But thou,—what hast thou to do, save with one other shudder at my hideous misery to go forth out of the garden and mingle with thy race, and forget that there ever crawled on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?”

  “Dost thou pretend ignorance?” asked Giovanni, scowling upon her. “Behold! this power have I gained from the pure daughter of Rappaccini.”

  There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the air in search of the food promised by the flower odors of the fatal garden. They circled round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him by the same influence which had drawn them for an instant within the sphere of several of the shrubs. He sent forth a breath among them, and smiled bitterly at Beatrice as at least a score of the insects fell dead upon the ground.

  “I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I. Never! never! I dreamed only to love thee and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image in mine heart; for, Giovanni, believe it, though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God’s creature, and craves love as its daily food. But my father,—he has united us in this fearful sympathy. Yes; spurn me, tread upon me, kill me! O, what is death after such words as thine? But it was not I. Not for a world of bliss would I have done it.”

  Giovanni’s passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips. There now came across him a sense, mournful, and not without tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice and himself. They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would be made none the less solitary by the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then, the desert of humanity around them to press this insulated pair closer together? If they should be cruel to one another, who was there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might there not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, by the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an earthly union and earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s love by Giovanni’s blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of Time—she must bathe her hurts in some fount of paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality, and there be well.

  But Giovanni did not know it.

  “Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Behold! there is a medicine, potent, as a wise physician has assured me, and almost divine in its efficacy. It is composed of ingredients the most opposite to those by which thy awful father has brought this calamity upon thee and me. It is distilled of blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it together, and thus be purified from evil?”

  “Give it me!” said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive the little silver vial which Giovanni took from his bosom. She added, with a peculiar emphasis, “I will drink; but do thou await the result.”

  She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused; his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he spread out his hands over them in the attitude of a father imploring a blessing upon his children; but those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously, and pressed her hand upon her heart.

  “My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely in the world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid thy bride-groom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My science and the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within his system that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all besides!”

  “My father,” said Beatrice, feebly,—and still as she spoke she kept her hand upon her heart,—“wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?”

  “Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy—misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath—misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?”

  “I would fain have been loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. “But now it matters not. I am going, father, where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will pass away like a dream—like the fragr
ance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. O, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”

  To Beatrice,—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini’s skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunder-stricken man of science,—

  “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment?”

  Anticipations of the Future

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was a major figure in American (and European) literature, and a major figure, as well, in the developing literature of science fiction. Neurotic, tragic, alcoholic, he was also a genius who excelled in poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism. Some critics say that Poe founded science fiction.

  Sam Moskowitz, who gives the credit for the founding of science fiction to Mary Shelley, wrote in Explorers of the Infinite (1963): “The full range of Poe’s influence upon science fiction is incalculable, but his greatest contribution to the advancement of the genre was the precept that every departure from norm must be explained scientifically.”

  Poe was one of the three writers Hugo Gernsback pointed to when he tried to describe what he was going to publish in the first science-fiction magazine, his Amazing Stories (1926).

  Poe tried to live by his pen, and much of what he wrote was hasty or commercial. Critics of our technological age who recommend a return to simpler, more congenial times might reflect upon the experience of authors throughout the greater part of man’s history: in most periods authors have been imprisoned because of their writing or had to be cautious of what they wrote or published for fear of prison, or were unable to support themselves by their art because few could read and fewer yet had the money to spend for literature.

  Seldom, until the middle of the nineteenth century, was it possible for a person to find financial success in writing who did not have an independent income or the support of a patron.

  Poe, the orphaned son of actors, became the ward of a Richmond merchant, John Allan. Their relationship was troubled by Poe’s dissipation and gambling debts at college, and Allan’s lack of sympathy for Poe’s ambitions. They quarreled, Poe left home, and the rest of his career was a story of struggle, jobs lost or abandoned, a tragic marriage, and at last, literary success. He served some time in the army, tried to get through West Point and lasted less than a year, published three youthful volumes of poetry, and tried to live by hack writing.

  His first short stories were published in 1832, his first pseudoscientific story, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” in 1833, winning a prize offered by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor.

  He found various editorial positions with the small-circulation literary journals of his day, performed brilliantly as an editor, but lost each job through drinking and personal problems. In 1836 he married a fourteen-year-old tubercular cousin, Virginia Clemm; she died in 1847.

  Finally he achieved recognition with the publication of “The Gold Bug” in 1843, another prize-winning story, and “The Raven” and a major volume of poetry in 1845. Collections of his stories were published beginning in 1840. His critical articles and reviews, including a major statement in his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, were beginning to shape a new theory of poetry and of short-story writing that would be a significant contribution to the history of literature.

  In 1849 he proposed to a widowed childhood sweetheart and was accepted, but two months later, while on a Philadelphia business trip, he disappeared for six days and was found unconscious on the streets of Baltimore, where he died in delirium.

  His contribution to literature was an emphasis on the creative act to the exclusion of other purposes. Hawthorne was often didactic. Poe’s stories had no moral statements; he sought a single effect and shaped everything to it. The poem, he said, should aim at beauty and produce an elevating excitement; the short story, at truth.

  Poe created the detective story, gave poetry a new direction, and helped shape the short story. His contribution to science fiction was almost as important.

  He wrote several kinds of stories: detective stories such as “The Gold Bug” and those featuring the first fictional detective, Auguste Dupin; terror stories, mostly about death, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Black Cat”; allegories such as “The Masque of the Red Death”; and fantasies related more or less to science fiction.

  Some of his fantasies had only a trace of the speculation that suggests science fiction. “MS. Found in a Bottle,” for instance, is a sea voyage that turns into a fantasy of the Flying Dutchman variety; only at the end is the protagonist caught in a giant whirlpool at the South Pole that may take him into the unknown. The only unusual element in “A Descent into the Maelstrom” is the size and power of the whirlpool. Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is an adventure story that includes a stowaway on board ship, a mutiny, a violent storm, cannibalism, an attack by savages, escape by giant canoe; only at the end, as in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” do the two survivors floating toward the South Pole encounter the fantastic.

  Other stories were inspired by the new science, and Poe, unlike Hawthorne, was capable of looking at the scientist and the results of science without prejudice. Mesmerism was the inspiration for several stories, including “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and “Mesmeric Revelation.” “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” is a long story about a Dutch bankrupt who gets to the moon by means of a balloon, taking along equipment to protect himself against the rarefaction of the air; when Richard Adams Locke’s “Moon Hoax” appeared, Poe accused him of stealing material Poe had prepared as a sequel. Ironically, Poe later published a story (that was to become known as “The Balloon-Hoax”) in the New York Sun, describing the crossing of the Atlantic by balloon.

  Some of Poe’s stories, however, exhibited a unique understanding of the nature of change, perhaps the single most important characteristic of later science fiction. “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” described the science and technology of Poe’s time as Sindbad might have experienced it—more marvelous, and to the king more fantastic, than any of the other tales.

  “Mellonta Tauta” (1849) may be the first true story of the future. Dated one thousand years from the time Poe wrote it in 1848 (and on April 1), the story incorporates an important recognition that the future will be so different that it will have forgotten its past (Poe’s present) almost completely, and what it remembers will be confused and often wrong. The novel effect on the reader is the intellectual counterpoint between our knowledge and Mellonta Tauta’s understanding, and our recognition of why these differ.

  Mellonta Tauta

  BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

  ON BOARD BALLOON “SKYLARK,”

  April 1, 2848.

  Now, my dear friend—now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure excursion (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!), and I have no prospect of touching terra firma for a month at least. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with one’s friends. You perceive, then, why it is that I write you this letter—it is on account of my ennui and your sins.

  Ge
t ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed. I mean to write at you every day during this odious voyage.

  Heigho! when will any Invention visit the human pericranium? Are we forever to be doomed to the thousand inconveniences of the balloon? Will nobody contrive a more expeditious mode of progress? This jog-trot movement, to my thinking, is little less than positive torture. Upon my word we have not made more than a hundred miles the hour since leaving home! The very birds beat us—at least some of them. I assure you that I do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no doubt, seems slower than it actually is—this on account of our having no objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on account of our going with the wind. To be sure, whenever we meet a balloon we have a chance of perceiving our rate, and then, I admit, things do not appear so very bad. Accustomed as I am to this mode of traveling, I cannot get over a kind of giddiness whenever a balloon passes us in a current directly overhead. It always seems to me like an immense bird of prey about to pounce upon us and carry us off in its claws. One went over us this morning about sunrise, and so nearly overhead that its drag-rope actually brushed the network suspending our car, and caused us very serious apprehension. Our captain said that if the material of the bag had been the trumpery varnished “silk” of five hundred or a thousand years ago, we should inevitably have been damaged. This silk, as he explained it to me, was a fabric composed of the entrails of a species of earthworm. The worm was carefully fed on mulberries—a kind of fruit resembling a water-melon—and, when sufficiently fat, was crushed in a mill. The paste thus arising was called papyrus in its primary state, and went through a variety of processes until finally became “silk.” Singular to relate, it was once much admired as an article of female dress! Balloons were also very generally constructed from it. A better kind of material, it appears, was subsequently found in the down surrounding the seed-vessels of a plant vulgarly called euphorbium, and at that time botanically termed milkweed. This latter kind of silk was designated as silk-buckingham, on account of its superior durability, and was usually prepared for use by being varnished with a solution of gum caoutchouc—a substance which in some respects must have resembled the gutta percha now in common use. This caoutchouc was occasionally called India rubber or rubber of whist, and was no doubt one of the numerous fungi. Never tell me again that I am not at heart an antiquarian