The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  April 7.—Continued last night our astronomical amusements. Had a fine view of the five Nepturian asteroids, and watched with much interest the putting up of a huge impost on a couple of lintels in the new temple at Daphnis in the moon. It was amusing to think that creatures so diminutive as the lunarians, and bearing so little resemblance to humanity, yet evinced a mechanical ingenuity so much superior to our own. One finds it difficult, too, to conceive the vast masses which these people handle so easily, to be as light as our reason tells us they actually are.

  April 8.—Eureka! Pundit is in his glory. A balloon from Kanadaw spoke us to-day and threw on board several late papers: they contain some exceedingly curious information relative to Kanawdian or rather to Amriccan antiquities. You know, I presume, that laborers have for some months been employed in preparing the ground for a new fountain at Paradise, the emperor’s principal pleasure garden. Paradise, it appears, has been, literally speaking, an island time out of mind—that is to say, its northern boundary was always (as far back as any records extend) a rivulet, or rather a very narrow arm of the sea. This arm was gradually widened until it attained its present breadth—a mile. The whole length of the island is nine miles; the breadth varies materially. The entire area (so Pundit says) was, about eight hundred years ago, densely packed with houses, some of them twenty stories high; land (for some most unaccountable reason) being considered as especially precious just in this vicinity. The disastrous earthquake, however, of the year 2050, so totally uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for it was almost too large to be called a village) that the most indefatigable of our antiquarians have never yet been able to obtain from the site any sufficient data (in the shape of coins, medals or inscriptions) wherewith to build up even the ghost of a theory concerning the manners, customs, &c. &c. &c., of the aboriginal inhabitants. Nearly all that we have hitherto known of them is, that they were a portion of the Knickerbocker tribe of savages infesting the continent at its first discovery by Recorder Riker, a knight of the Golden Fleece. They were by no means uncivilized, however, but cultivated various arts and even sciences after a fashion of their own. It is related of them that they were acute in many respects, but were oddly afflicted with a monomania for building what, in the ancient Amriccan, was denominated “churches”—a kind of pagoda instituted for the worship of two idols that went by the names of Wealth and Fashion. In the end, it is said, the island became, nine-tenths of it, church. The women, too, it appears, were oddly deformed by a natural protuberance of the region just below the small of the back—although, most unaccountably, this deformity was looked upon altogether in the light of a beauty. One or two pictures of these singular women have, in fact, been miraculously preserved. They look very odd, very—like something between a turkey-cock and a dromedary.

  Well, these few details are nearly all that have descended to us respecting the ancient Knickerbockers. It seems, however, that while digging in the centre of the emperor’s garden, (which, you know, covers the whole island,) some of the workmen unearthed a cubical and evidently chiseled block of granite, weighing several hundred pounds. It was in good preservation, having received, apparently, little injury from the convulsion which entombed it. On one of its surfaces was a marble slab with (only think of it!) an inscription—a legible inscription. Pundit is in ecstasies. Upon detaching the slab, a cavity appeared, containing a leaden box filled with various coins, a long scroll of names, several documents which appear to resemble newspapers, with other matters of intense interest to the antiquarian! There can be no doubt that all these are genuine Amriccan relics belonging to the tribe called Knickerbocker. The papers thrown on board our balloon are filled with fac-similes of the coins, MSS., typography, &c &c. I copy for your amusement the Knickerbocker inscription on the marble slab:—

  THIS CORNER STONE OF A MONUMENT TO THE

  MEMORY OF

  GEORGE WASHINGTON,

  WAS LAID WITH APPROPRIATE CEREMONIES ON THE

  19TH DAY OF OCTOBER, 1847,

  THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE SURRENDER OF

  LORD CORNWALLIS

  TO GENERAL WASHINGTON AT YORKTOWN,

  A.D. 1781,

  UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE

  WASHINGTON MONUMENT ASSOCIATION OF THE

  CITY OF NEW YORK

  This, as I give it, is a verbatim translation done by Pundit himself, so there can be no mistake about it. From the few words thus preserved, we glean several important items of knowledge, not the least interesting of which is the fact that a thousand years ago actual monuments had fallen into disuse—as was all very proper—the people contenting themselves, as we do now, with a mere indication of the design to erect a monument at some future time; a corner-stone being cautiously laid by itself “solitary and alone” (excuse me for quoting the great Amriccan poet Benton!) as a guarantee of the magnanimous intention. We ascertain, too, very distinctly, from this admirable inscription, the how, as well as the where and the what, of the great surrender in question. As to the where, it was York-town (wherever that was), and as to the what, it was General Cornwallis (no doubt some wealthy dealer in corn). He was surrendered. The inscription commemorates the surrender of—what?—why, “of Lord Cornwallis.” The only question is what could the savages wish him surrendered for. But when we remember that these savages were undoubtedly cannibals, we are led to the conclusion that they intended him for sausage. As to the how of the surrender, no language can be more explicit. Lord Cornwallis was surrendered (for sausage) “under the auspices of the Washington Monument Association”—no doubt a charitable institution for the depositing of corner-stones.—But, Heaven bless me! what is the matter? Ah! I see—the balloon has collapsed, and we shall have a tumble into the sea. I have, therefore, only time enough to add that, from a hasty inspection of fac-similes of newspapers, &c., I find that the great men in those days among the Amriccans were one John, a smith, and one Zacchary, a tailor.

  Good bye, until I see you again. Whether you ever get this letter or not is a point of little importance, as I write altogether for my own amusement. I shall cork the MS. up in a bottle however, and throw it into the sea.

  Yours everlastingly,

  PUNDITA.

  Expanding the Vision

  Hawthorne and Poe had discovered an appropriate subject for fiction in the new science, and a suitably dramatic figure to serve as protagonist in the scientist. Science fiction was being shaped, and writers of all kinds occasionally would publish stories that later would be recognized as belonging to the science-fiction tradition or even at the time were clearly influenced by the possibilities of science and technology.

  Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), the great French realistic novelist, wrote a couple of stories, somewhat Gothic in tone, about an elixir of life and an effort to transmute base elements into gold. Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909) wrote a novel about a brick moon that accidentally gets launched into space while the workmen are living in it. Mark Twain (1835–1910) wrote his famous time-travel novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and a foreshadowing of television in “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904” (1898); there were science-fiction elements also in his Extracts from Captain Stromfield’s Visit to Heaven and Letters from the Earth. Even Herman Melville had a story about an automaton. And a group of utopian writers in the last three decades of the nineteenth century wrote for or against science and technology. Prof. H. Bruce Franklin, in his pioneer study Future Perfect (1966, revised 1978) commented: “There was no major nineteenth-century American writer of fiction, and indeed few in the second rank, who did not write some science fiction or at least one utopian romance.”

  One of the most important of the sometime science-fiction writers was a prolific magazine writer of the 1850s, Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–1862). A dashing, romantic figure, O’Brien was born in Ireland, where he ran through an inheritance of eight thousand pounds, tried to elope with the wife of an English officer, and fled to the United States.

  He had already publishe
d some stories and verse. In New York he began to write seriously and became a literary and social success in a profligate career that lasted only ten years. In the first year of the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union army, received a slight wound in a duel with a Confederate officer, and after inadequate treatment died at the age of thirty-three.

  O’Brien was published in many of the literary journals of the time, including Harper’s and the Atlantic, but few literary histories even mention his name. He would be little remembered if it were not for a handful of strikingly original fantasy and science-fiction stories, such as “The Wondersmith,” about gypsies who manufacture an army of toy soldiers to kill all the Christian children at Christmas; “From Hand to Mouth,” about a man who sits in a hotel room surrounded by disembodied hands and mouths; “What Was It? A Mystery,” perhaps the earliest of the invisible-creature stories; “The Lost Room,” in which the narrator returns to find his hotel room occupied by strangers he cannot evict; and “How I Overcame My Gravity,” about an inventor who makes an antigravity machine by the use of the gyroscope.

  His most effective story, and most original notion, was the often-reprinted “The Diamond Lens” (1858). It is the first known story in which another world is perceived through a microscope (although at the time of publication O’Brien was accused of stealing the idea from an unpublished story by a friend, a controversy resolved in O’Brien’s favor). It would be followed by hundreds of stories about microscopic creatures, including many in which characters accomplish what O’Brien’s microscopist cannot do: they descend into the microscopic world.

  O’Brien’s story opened up another world, not just for readers but for writers as well. Just as later writers would open galactic vistas, O’Brien let writers into the world of the very small. Perhaps just as important to the development of science fiction was O’Brien’s realistic treatment of the fantastic.

  One part of science fiction’s appeal is the wonderful; another, and perhaps more important part, is the manner in which science fiction relates the wonderful to the everyday world of reality. Up to this time, Mary Shelley had written a romantic story with Gothic elements, Hawthorne had dealt with the symbolic figure of the scientist making moral choices, and Poe had shown the man of extreme and sometimes poetic sensibility facing the unusual; Poe sometimes became matter-of-fact but always jocularly.

  O’Brien includes elements of the Gothic in the séance that puts the microscopist in touch with the spirit of Leeuwenhoek, and the murder of an acquaintance to obtain a diamond for the microscope. The microscopist’s obsession is as romantic as Frankenstein’s, though redeemed from the Gothic by the absence of guilt. But throughout the rest of the story, and even the Gothic parts, O’Brien’s tone is colloquial and realistic.

  Hugely popular in its own time, “The Diamond Lens” may be the first modern science-fiction story.

  The Diamond Lens

  BY FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN

  I

  THE BENDING OF THE TWIG

  From a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been towards microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me, by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole, in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

  Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes, that intervened between that promise and his departure.

  Meantime I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest resemblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon, and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as “bull’s eyes” were ruthlessly destroyed, in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvellous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha’s spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties,—in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

  At last the promised instrument came. It was of that order known as Field’s simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could not have been selected. Accompanying it was a small treatise on the microscope,—its history, uses, and discoveries. I comprehended then for the first time the “Arabian Nights Entertainments.” The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments. I felt towards my companions as the seer might feel towards the ordinary masses of men. I held conversations with Nature in a tongue which they could not understand. I was in daily communication with living wonders, such as they never imagined in their wildest visions. I penetrated beyond the external portal of things, and roamed through the sanctuaries. Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce and protracted as those of men. In the common spots of mould, which my mother, good housekeeper that she was, fiercely scooped away from her jam pots, there abode for me, under the name of mildew, enchanted gardens, filled with dells and avenues of the densest foliage and most astonishing verdure, while from the fantastic boughs of these microscopic forests hung strange fruits glittering with green, and silver, and gold.

  It was no scientific thirst that at this time filled my mind. It was the pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed. I talked of my solitary pleasures to none. Alone with my microscope, I dimmed my sight, day after day and night after night, poring over the marvels which it unfolded to me. I was like one who, having discovered the ancient Eden still existing in all its primitive glory, should resolve to enjoy it in solitude, and never betray to mortal the secret of its locality. The rod of my life was bent at this moment. I destined myself to be a microscopist.

  Of course, like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer. I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantage of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schultz, Dujardin, Schact, and Schleiden were then entirely unknown to me, or if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches. In every fresh specimen of cryptogamia which I placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was as yet ignorant. I remember well the thrill of delight and admiration that shot through me the first time that I discovered the common wheel animalcule (Rotifera vulgaris) expanding and contracting its flexible spokes, and seemingly rotating through the water. Alas! as I grew older, and obtained some works treating of my favorite study, I found that I was only on the threshold of a science to the investigation of which some of the greatest men of the age were devoting their lives and intellects.