SF stories were only one type of dime novel, an American publishing format that was both the product and the reflection of the age. Dime novels were cheap paperbacks with lurid covers. These crude action-adventure stories were run off by the million on the new modern presses of the late Nineteenth Century to catch the nickels and dimes of the young reading audience which sprang up with the spread of literacy and basic education.
The first dime novel SF story was written by Edward S. Ellis, a man who was the supreme master of early dime novel hack writing. The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), Ellis’s only invention story, became the prototype of the form. In this story, a ten-foot-tall steam-powered automaton is invented by a fifteen-year-old boy and used to look for gold and to chase buffalo out West.
The degree of mystery in this imaginary technological achievement was extremely limited. Ellis’s steam man is most mysterious in the opening paragraphs of the story. It is first spied at a distance of two miles and described as “looking like some Titan as it took its giant strides over the prairie.”81 A comic Irishman even mistakes it for “ ‘the ould divil.’ ”82
And, we are told: “No wonder that something like superstitious awe filled the breasts of the two men who had ceased hunting for gold, for a few minutes, to view the singular apparition; for such a thing had scarcely been dreamed of at that day, by the most imaginative philosophers. . . .”83
But thereafter throughout the story, the steam man is described in thoroughly plausible terms as a mobile steam boiler with a quasi-human form. Even howling savages can see through it: “. . . their previous acquaintance with the apparatus had robbed it of all its supernatural attributes. . . .”84
Now, the steam man might have been a creature with at least the danger, uncertainty and power of Victor Frankenstein’s monster. Only it isn’t. It has no intelligence or volition of its own. It moves only where it is pointed. Eventually it is pointed at attacking Indians, the boiler is deliberately overloaded, and the steam machine explodes.
The only real mystery is the means of the machine’s movement. This is how Ellis describes the crucial step before the automaton is animated and runs into its first wall:
It required two weeks before Johnny Brainerd succeeded. But it all came clear and unmistakable at last, and in this simple manner:—
(Ah! but we cannot be so unjust to the plodding genius as to divulge his secret. Our readers must be content to await the time when the young man sees fit to reveal it himself.)85
This is the old I-can-tell-you-but-I-won’t trick that we have met before. We can hear echoes of Mary Shelley’s presentation in Frankenstein. But Victor Frankenstein wouldn’t tell us the details of his knowledge of the secrets of life in order to protect us readers from suffering a fate like his. In the case of The Steam Man of the Prairies, it is the poor bright young inventor Johnny Brainerd, dwarfish and hunchbacked, who is to be protected until he has the chance to patent and publish his work, and make a buck out of it.
This is typical. In the words that Jules Verne used in 1904 to describe the mysterious motive power of his submarine the Nautilus—imagined at almost the same moment as Ellis’s story—the mystery of the steam man could fairly be said to amount to no more than “a mere technical hiatus, as it were, quite capable of being filled in by a highly-trained and thoroughly practical mind.”86
So it would be with later SF dime novels. Almost invariably, they involved devices powered by steam or electricity, usually vehicles of some sort—cars, submarines or aircraft. Not very different from Verne’s steerable balloon Victoria. Always their inventors were teenage boys who employed these marvels of technology for purposes of adventure.
The dime novel invention story was established as a genre in 1876, following the third printing of The Steam Man of the Prairies, when a second SF dime novel written in close imitation of Ellis appeared. Thereafter, as long as dime novels were published—essentially to the end of the century—invention stories were issued in large numbers.
Of the many such stories published during the 1880s and 1890s, it has been estimated that 75% were the work of one man, Luis Philip Senarens, most frequently writing under the pseudonym Noname. In a lifetime production of fifteen hundred stories under twenty-seven different names, Senarens wrote several hundred of these minimally transcendent technological stories.87
In 1880, when he was at the very outset of his SF writing career—and still a teenager—Noname received a letter of praise from an admirer of his dime novel invention stories, none other than Jules Verne. And, in time, as the Age of Technology continued, Jules Verne’s own later stories would come to seem like dime novel SF—better written, perhaps, but of much the same kind.
But these conservative stories of the lower reaches of possible science were not the leading edge of the new SF literature. During the twenty-five years between Verne’s imaginative retreat and the rise of H.G. Wells, the first great master SF writer of the Age of Technology, many stories were written that tested the potentialities of that higher science which Verne had dreamed of in Journey to the Centre of the Earth but then found too overwhelming.
A convenient date to mark the birth of science fiction might be the month of May 1871. In that month, three highly significant SF stories were published, two of them by the very same publisher on the very same day. The three stories were “The Case of Summerfield”88 by William Henry Rhodes, “The Battle of Dorking” by Lt. Col. George Chesney, and The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. They might be thought of both as epitomes of Romantic proto-SF and as first examples of the new science fiction literature of the Age of Technology.
“The Case of Summerfield” was published in a newspaper, The Sacramento Daily Union, on Saturday, the 13th of May, 1871. Even more than the fiction of Jules Verne, this story might be said to be the completion or the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe.
William Henry Rhodes was a San Francisco lawyer, a frequent contributor of poems, essays and letters to local newspapers under the pseudonym Caxton. “The Case of Summerfield,” however, appeared as a page one newspaper story, purportedly reprinted from the Auburn Messenger of November 1870. It was, of course, an example of that familiar Romantic literary form, the newspaper hoax. And it worked pretty well in catching the gullible citizens of California and stirring up a public hubbub.
What remains interesting about this long-forgotten jape is the sheer audacity of the science-beyond-science that it presents, token of the new understanding of the meaning of the word science in the Age of Technology. In “The Case of Summerfield,” a mad scientist demonstrates to a lawyer that he has the power to make water burn. He threatens to start an unquenchable fire in the Pacific Ocean that will destroy the entire world unless he is paid off.
Like Verne’s balloon and Moon-cannon, like the steam man of the prairies, this is science-beyond-science brought out of the closet and allowed to have public effect in the world. But the nature of this science-beyond-science is of a new and different order. It can’t be passed off as a mere “technical hiatus.”
The “science” of “The Case of Summerfield” is not just an extension of what we know about the world. It is a reversal of our every normal expectation: no less than the assertion that science can find the means to make water burn, and not only burn, but burn so fiercely and unstoppably that the whole world might be consumed.
And people were ready to find this plausible. No wonder, then, that the day of SF literature was at hand.
Through the 1870s and 1880s, many stories comparable to “The Case of Summerfield” were published. Often they were cast as hoaxes. Many were published anonymously in newspapers. These stories were often of types established during the Romantic Period—tales of novel inventions, of bizarre medical experiments, or of natural or scientifically induced disasters. But the most original and daring of these otherwise old-fashioned tales, like “The Case of Summerfield,” did introduce new examples of radical science-beyond-science: anti-gravity, invisibility, matter transmitt
ers, the fourth dimension, time travel.
Because H.G. Wells made these devices his own, in our day they are generally credited to him. No, indeed. They were pioneered in often trivial and old-fashioned, but radically speculative stories written during the first two decades of the Age of Technology, the years when Wells was a boy, a student, and a young teacher.
Our second story of May 1871, “The Battle of Dorking” by Lt. Col. George Chesney, was more serious in intent than “The Case of Summerfield” and is better remembered, not because of any particular merit it may have as fiction, but because it was the first in a special genre of SF war stories.
Chesney was a member of a brilliant British military family, the most notable of whom was his elder brother Charles, an army engineer and military historian said to have “held at the time of his death a unique position in the army, altogether apart and above his actual place in it.”89 Charles Chesney was the author of an analysis of the Battle of Waterloo that spared neither Napoleon nor Wellington, and a commentator on the American Civil War. At the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War early in 1871, Charles was sent on a special military fact-finding mission to France and to the newly created country of Germany to report on the lessons of the war.
George Chesney had a more public career than his brother. He, too, was a military engineer. He fought in the Indian Mutiny, was wounded and promoted. He wrote textbooks for the administration of the colonial Indian government and founded an engineering college. He became a ranking general, was knighted, and finished his career as a member of Parliament. Along the way, he wrote novels and contributed to the periodical magazines.
By 1871, the familiar character of war had altered, as both the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War had demonstrated, and the point was not lost on George Chesney. He knew that he was no longer living in the Romantic Period, but rather in a new Age of Technology. In an attempt to alert a drowsy public to previously unconsidered dangers, he published an anonymous novelet, “The Battle of Dorking,” in Blackwood’s Magazine.
Chesney’s story peered into the near future and envisioned an invasion of Britain by a Germany using new and advanced weapons. This view of future possibility stirred up great controversy. It was reprinted as a slim book, published in all of the English-speaking nations, and translated into seven European languages, including German. It prompted many imitations, answers and variants that continued to be published until the eve of World War I. The genre might even be taken as being in some sense a pre-vision of World War I.
In its science-beyond-science, “The Battle of Dorking” was not much more imaginative than a Verne story or a dime novel. Its special importance to SF literature is that it opened up a new imaginary locale—the Future—that had been all but completely outside the sphere of Romantic proto-SF.
What’s this? Was there a time when the Future was not at the very center of SF? Didn’t old Hugo Gernsback himself once say, “Science fiction—under any term or name—must, in my opinion, deal first and foremost in futures. It must, in story form, forecast the wonders of man’s progress to come.”?90
It is true that the imagined future has been the primary locus of the World Beyond the Hill in science fiction, but Romantic proto-SF was never a futuristic literature. It was set in the present or in the recent past. “The Future” was a concept that belonged to a very different form of imaginative literature, the utopian story.
If science fiction has been the mythic expression of post-1870 materialistic Western techno-culture, then utopian literature could be said to have been the mythos of the immediately preceding stage in Western civilization—the period in which the modern Western world was conceived and brought into being. Instead of being a myth of science and the vast unknown, utopian literature was a myth of rationality and the Perfected Society.
Utopian literature was not fully materialistic, as science fiction has been. But neither was it an expression of the old spirit realm of ancient mythology. Rather it reflected that in-between period and state of mind in which man was assumed to have been specially created by a benevolent Deity and to be connected to Him still by the faculty of the rational soul.
In utopian literature, it was presumed that man might rise to God by creating the perfect rational society here in the material world. Utopian society was transcendent because it was superior to any now existing—the living fulfillment and expression of the God-given soul. And it was plausible inasmuch as it was considered to be an extension of the actual rationalization and modernization of Western civilization then taking place.
The model story for all subsequent utopian literature, which lent its name to the genre, was Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). “Utopia” is a Greek pun which can mean either “no place” or “the good place.” More’s story would set forth the limits of transcendence observed by all subsequent utopian fiction.
More—who was a humanist, a lord chancellor of England, and a martyred Catholic saint—begins the narrative by informing us that he was in the city of Antwerp while serving as an ambassador in Flanders for Henry the Eighth, when a friend introduced him to a voyager named Raphael Hythloday, who then relates his story. This man avers that he traveled to the New World with Amerigo Vespucci, and then continued on from there around the world—a feat that would not be accomplished in reality until the expedition of Magellan in 1519-22.
The traveler Hythloday is questioned closely by More and his friend:
But what he told us that he saw in every country where he came, it were very long to declare; neither is it my purpose at this time to make rehearsal thereof. But peradventure in another place I will speak of it, chiefly such things as shall be profitable to be known, as in special be those decrees and ordinances, that he marked to be well and wittily provided and enacted among such peoples, as do live together in a civil policy and good order. For of such things did we busily inquire and demand of him, and he likewise very willingly told us of the same. But as for monsters, because they be no news, of them we were nothing inquisitive. For nothing is more easily to be found, then be barking Scyllas, ravening Celenos, and Loestrygonians devourers of people, and such like great and incredible monsters. But to find citizens ruled by good and wholesome laws, that is an exceeding rare, and hard thing.91
This rings more humorously to us than it did to its original readers. In its own time, this was radical stuff! It says that the old mythic monsters might be found anywhere, but good, just and wholesome societies were so rare that you might have to travel to the far ends of the Earth—to a wholly unknown country—to find one.
In stories by the writers who followed More, it was always a new social order that was sought rather than ravening Celenos and Loestrygonians devourers of people. The Perfected Society might be located in some distant corner of the world, on the Moon or another planet, or under the ground. But always it was a human society (or some satirical distortion of human society with horses or sentient vegetables playing the human part) that was discovered.
Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler and Tommaso Campanella were all writers of works in the utopian tradition as well as being pioneers of the new scientific thought. The improved societies espoused in these stories were a minimal sort of transcendence carefully couched in terms that would be no threat to the still-overwhelming spiritual forms of transcendence. But to argue mythically for change in the social order at all was phenomenally challenging to the rigidity and backward-gazing of the men and institutions that derived their worldly authority from spirit, which is why so many of the utopian mythmakers were executed or thrown into jail.
It could be said that Western man took up rational thought in order to free himself from the accumulated weight of the past and the breathless grip of the ancien régime. The final step in this process was the introduction of the concept of progress—the last rational idea necessary in order to make conceptually possible the revolutions and overturnings of traditional society that would soon be taking place. This came in the reading of
a paper to the Sorbonne by a brilliant young theological student, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, in 1750. The paper was entitled A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind.
The concept of progress suggested that the modern man of today was superior to the unwashed barbarian of yesterday. And the man of tomorrow might be the citizen of the Perfected Society.
In short, the utopian society need not be located off on the Moon or in “no place.” The good society might be the familiar countries of Western Europe at some time in the Future.
The first significant utopian story to be set in the Future appeared in 1771, Louis Sebastien Mercier’s Memoirs92 of the Year 2440. In this story, the Future is reached in a dream. There has been a great rationalization of clothing, education and government. The wig, for instance, is no longer worn.
This book was a heavy political document. Like “The Battle of Dorking” a hundred years later, it went through many printings and translations. The King of Spain was one of those who recognized its true implications; he banned it in 1778 as blasphemous and anarchic. In later times, Sebastien Mercier himself was ready to claim credit for having anticipated the French Revolution.
After Memoirs of the Year 2440, most utopias were set by convention in the Future. The Future became the locus of the rational perfection that would be. And precisely for that reason, it was no home for proto-SF.
The Romantic wildmen who first developed the materials of science-fiction-literature-to-come were rebels against the Age of Reason. They doubted social progress, rejected perfection, and assiduously sought the irrational. The utopian Future—the heartland of rational perfection—was the last place they would find what they were looking for.
There is one Romantic document that is sometimes offered as a proto-SF story with a setting in the Future—Edgar Allan Poe’s sketch “Mellonta Tauta” (1849). The story takes the form of a letter supposedly written on board the balloon Skylark on April 1, 2848, while the balloon is crossing the Atlantic.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 10
