The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

  38. (p. 278) No astronomical fallacy is more untenable… than that of the absolute illimitation of the Universe of Stars: Both the dynamic and optical objection is derived from the work of Wilhelm Olbers, the German physician and astronomer.

  Lucretius had posed a naïve, yet compelling question: What would happen if you went to the edge of space and threw a spear outwards. Pascal’s definition of space – as ‘a sphere of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere’ (p. 226) – brilliantly evades the conundrum. But Einstein directly confronts Lucretius by standing Pascal’s definition, as it were, on its head: his universe is ‘a sphere of which the centre is nowhere, the circumference everywhere’. In this finite sphere all possible paths along which matter or radiation can travel are curved paths ‘so that they are infinite in the sense of returning infinitely upon themselves, though finite in the sense of being confined within a determinate volume which is the volume of the universe’ (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, Part III, ch. 2, pp. 153–4).

  39. (p. 280) Each exists… in the bosom of its proper and particular God: Unconsciously echoing the cosmography of the early Ionian philosopher Anaximander, who too ‘declared the innumerable worlds to be gods’ (Aëtius, i, 17.12) which ‘have come into existence by birth, situated in the plane of the earth’s equator at wide intervals’ (Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i, 10, 25).

  40. (p. 282) In guessing with Plato… a demonstration by Alcmœon : cf. ‘The tone metaphyiscal is also a good one. If you know any big words this is your chance for them. Talk of the Ionic and Eleatic schools – of Archytas, Gorgias and Alcmæon.’ (‘How To Write A Blackwood Article’, 1838)

  A pupil of Pythagoras, author of (On Nature, c. 500 B.C.), Alcmæon is said to have been the first Greek to operate on the eye.

  41. (p. 283) Now come the nine Asteroids: The ninth, only discovered in 1848, was left blank in the revised text.

  Today more than 1,500 are recognized. Many asteroids are about a mile or less in diameter and resemble meteorites rather than small planets. Adonis, discovered in 1936, approaches within 1,500,000 miles of the earth; Hermes, discovered in 1937, comes within 485,000 miles.

  42. (p. 283) Neptune, lately discovered… of which as yet we know little accurately: Because of apparent irregularities in the transit of Uranus, both J. C. Adams in England and U. J. J. Leverrier in France independently computed the hypothetical location of another planet that might be influencing it. In 1846, the following year, J. C. Galle in Berlin discovered Neptune at the exact point predicted by Adams and Leverrier. A month later the first satellite, Triton, was also detected.

  43. (p. 283) may not the law of Bode: Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826), founder of the Astronomisches Jahrbuch (1774), who by 1801 had catalogued 17,240 stars and nebulae – 12,000 more than had appeared in earlier charts. In 1772 he devised a formula to express the relative distances of the planets from the sun.

  44. (p. 284) If we ascend an ordinary mountain: These two paragraphs, that tease our imagination with the volume and weight of the Earth, derive almost verbatim – Margaret Alterton showed – from Dr Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher (1826), pp. 17 and 20.

  45. (p. 289) Bessel, not long ago deceased: The great German astronomer, F. W. Bessel (1784–1846). His discovery of the parallax of the fixed star 61 Cygni, announced in 1838, was officially recognized in 1841 as the first fully authenticated measurement of the distance of a star.

  46. (p. 290) the elder Herschel… within the scope of his own telescope: Sir William Herschel’s telescope, erected at Slough in 1789, had a 48-inch mirror and a focal length of 40 ft. He concluded that the whole solar system was moving forward through space, and he could indicate the point towards which it was moving.

  47. (p. 292) In the construction of plot… in fictitious literature: This crucial paragraph – the matrix of Poe’s critical and metaphysical theories – makes its third verbatim appearance in four years. Deriving from an earlier passage among his ‘Marginalia’ (Democratic Review, November 1844), it had been openly quoted the following year to illustrate an essay on ‘The American Drama’ (American Whig Review, August 1845).

  48. (p. 293) the reveries of Fourier: Not the social philosopher, but John Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768–1830), the French physicist noted for his researches on heat and numerical equations.

  49. (p. 293) the hypothesis of Mädler : Johann Heinrich von Mädler (1794–1874), the ‘Mudler’ of ‘Mellonta Tauta’, p. 319.

  50. (p. 296) says Sir John Herschel: In A Treatise on Astronomy (Philadelphia, 1834).

  51. (p. 297) the elaborate calculations of Argelander: Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander (1799–1875), German astronomer, who continued Bessel’s work begun at Königsberg.

  52. (p. 297) Betrachtet man die nicht perspectivischen : Poe did not know any German. This sounding quotation and its translation may have been picked up from a review.

  53. (p. 301) observed in the orbit of Encke’s comet: Though discovered by J. L. Pons in 1818, the comet was named after Johann Franz Encke, the German astronomer who calculated its orbit and accurately predicted the date of its return. cf. ‘Hans Pfaall’, p. 28.

  54. (p. 301) an exceedingly rare but still material medium pervading space: Poe can scornfully dismiss this ‘retarding’ medium, assured that Newton, in the Scholium Generale, had similarly demolished the Cartesian theory of vortices: viz. the view that space is full of a continuous and very subtle matter in constant motion revolving in eddies round every body and that the rotation of planets, for example, is caused by their floating in this subtle medium and being whirled round in the solar vortex.

  55. (p. 304) Of the still more awful Future: Einstein’s argument for the spatial finitude of the universe seems further to corroborate Poe’s vision of its temporal finitude.

  The spectra of the spiral nebulae have revealed facts which appear to show that they are travelling outwards from a common centre, and this has resulted in the theory that the physical universe originated at a date not infinitely remote in the past, in something resembling an explosion of energy which at once began time and began, in time, to generate space.

  R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, Part III, ch. 2, p. 154

  56. (p. 304) with a speed prodigiously accumulative, have been rushing towards their own general centre:

  Einstein’s theory predicted that there must be enough mass within the universe to keep it from flying apart indefinitely. In other words, although all of the galaxies (or clusters of galaxies) are flying apart, as though blown asunder by some primordial ‘big bang’, it appears that they do not have sufficient velocity to escape one another’s gravity. Their dispersal, like the flight of a ball thrown upward, seems to be slowing enough so that it must ultimately reverse itself, initiating a ‘falling back’ that, many theorists believe, will plunge the entire universe into a single black hole.

  Walter Sullivan, ‘A Hole in the Sky’, New York Times Magazine

  (14 July 1974)

  A ‘black hole’ is an assemblage of matter so dense that its gravity is strong enough to prevent anything, including light rays, from escaping. Inside a black hole time and space (as predicted by Einstein) are interchanged. Perhaps we are even now being sucked into the very edge of such a black hole. As Kip Thorne, theorist at the California Institute of Technology, has put it, we are within a universe composed of space and time created by the explosion, ‘and we are trapped inside its gravitational radius. No light can escape from the universe.’

  57. (p. 305) Matter… would disappear, and that God would remain all in all: So retracing his path, Poe rediscovers that goal from which in dreams he had set forth:

  By a route obscure and lonely,

  Haunted by ill angels only,

  Where an Eidolon named Night

  On a black throne reigns upright,

  I have reached these lands but newly

  From an ultimate dim Thule –

  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

>   Out of Space – out of Time.

  Dreamland (1844)

  58. (p. 307) And now – this Heart Divine – what is it? It is our own: At ‘every throb’, another ‘Tell-Tale Heart’:

  And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses? – now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart.

  (1843/45)

  59. (P. 307) We live out a Youth peculiarly haunted: ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…’ The full Wordsworthian note of Intimations was sounded in ‘The Island of the Fay’:

  I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the grey rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, – and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all, – I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole – a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all… whose life is eternity; whose thought is that of a god; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity…

  (1841)

  60. (p. 309) that Man… shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah: cf. :

  The word Jehovah is not Hebrew. The Hebrews had no such letters as J and V. The word is properly Yah, Wah, compounded of Yah, essence, and Wah, existing. Its full meaning is the self-existing essence of all things.

  Pinakidia (1836)

  61. (p. 309) Life within Life… and all within the Spirit Divine: Phrase for phrase the peroration derives from ‘The Island of the Fay’:

  As we find cycle within cycle without end, yet all revolving around one far-distant centre which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose, in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine?

  So question is turned to assertion; rhetorical caution, exultantly to triumph.

  Select Bibliography

  PAUL VALERY, ‘Au sujet d’Eureka’, written as introduction to a new edition of Baudelaire’s translation (Paris: Helleu et Sergent, 1923); reprinted in La Revue Européenne (1923) and Variété vol. 1 (1924), pp. 113–36; translated by Malcolm Cowley in Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé (Princeton University Press, 1972), 161–76

  MARGARET ALLERTON, Origins of Poe’s Critical Theory, University of Iowa Humanistic Studies vol. 2 (1925; New York: Russell & Russell, 1965)

  FLOYD STOVALL, ‘Poe’s debt to Coleridge’, University of Texas Studies in English vol. 10 (1930), pp. 70–127

  GEORGE NORDSTEDT, ‘Poe and Einstein’, Open Court vol. 44 (1930), pp. 173–80

  MARIE BONAPARTE, Edgar Poe, sa vie – son oeuvre: étude analytique (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1933); translated by John Rodker as The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, a Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (London : Hogarth Press, 1949, 1971), ch. 44, pp. 594–636

  CLAYTON HOAGLAND, ‘The Universe of Eureka: a comparison of the theories of Eddington and Poe’, Southern Literary Messenger vol. 1 (1939), pp. 307–13

  ARTHUR HOBSON QUINN, Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), ch. 17, pp. 539–61

  PATRICK F. QUINN, ‘Poe’s Eureka and Emerson’s Nature’, Emerson Society Quarterly vol. 31 (1941), pp. 4–7

  E. H. DAVIDSON, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), ch. 8, pp. 223–53

  CAROL HOPKINS MADDISON, ‘Poe’s Eureka’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language vol 2 (1960), pp. 350–67

  LOUIS BROUSSARD, The Measure of Poe (Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), part 2, pp. 47–104

  JOHN F. LYNEN, ‘The death of the present’, in The Design of the Present: Essays on Time and Form in American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 205–71

  HARRIET R. HOLMAN, ‘Hog, Bacon, Ram and other “Savans” in Eureka: notes toward decoding Poe’s encyclopedic satire’, Poe Newsletter vol. 2 (1969), pp. 49–55

  HARRIET R. HOLMAN, ‘Splitting Poe’s “Epicurean Atoms”: further speculations on the literary satire of Eureka’, Poe Studies vol. 5 (1972), pp. 33–7

  G. R. THOMPSON, ‘Unity, death, and nothingness – Poe’s “romantic skepticism” ’, Publications of the Modern Language Association vol. 85 (1970), pp. 297–300

  DANIEL HOFFMAN, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1972), ch. 10, ‘The Mind of God’, pp. 278–99

  MELLONTA TAUTA

  First published

  Godey’s Lady’s Book (February 1849)

  Prefixed to the original publication was this letter :

  To the Editor of the Lady’s Book:

  I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the ‘Poughkeepsie Seer,’) of an odd-looking M S. which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum – a sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited, now-a-days, except by the transcendentalists and divers for crotchets.

  Very Truly,

  EDGAR A. POE

  The exact date of recovery (February 1848) links ‘Mellonta Tauta’ not to Eureka merely, but to the first public presentation of Eureka in lecture form, as a spoof. For whose was the ironic mask, of this final transformation, but the very seer’s whose platform style had so painfully undermined that lecture? What was Andrew Jackson Davis’s The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and A Voice to Mankind (1847) but a mysterious transcript from a state of trance?

  This final ‘MS. in a Bottle’, dated April Fool’s Day 2848, seems a satirical offshoot of that inspired lecture then, rather than of Eureka where such large chunks are quoted. Intended apparently for the April 1848 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the hoax was expanded to a full-scale satire of mid-Victorian America.

  The eighteenth century already had its anticipations of aeroplanes, even of Anglo-German air-borne combats. Dr Johnson, in Rambler no. 105, allowed the possibility of submarines, but with characteristic scepticism refused to accept long-range weather forecasting or central heating. The French, in particular, had a tradition of forward projectionists that included:

  SEBASTIEN MERCIER, L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (Amsterdam, 1770; translated as Memoirs of the Year 2500, 1772; reprinted Richmond, Virginia, 1799, and Liverpool, 1802);

  RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE, L’An Deux-Mille (1790);

  BARTHELEMY ENFANTIN, Mémoirs d’un industriel de l’an 2240 (1829).

  By mid century the New York emigré paper, Le Libertaire, carried projections by its editor Joseph Déjacque to the year 2858. Another source, used elsewhere by Poe, was Jane Webb’s The Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), a projection of a mere 300 years to A.D. 2126 – to an age of mobile homes (equipped with air-conditioning), climatic control, steam-ploughing, speaking tubes, coffee machines and ‘malleable glass crockery’ (folding to pocket-size when not in use):

  Balloons, propelled by mercury vapour, are, with aerial horses and aerial sledges, the common means of locomotion. Since the whole country is completely excavated, to fall upon the surface of the earth was like tumbling on the parchment of an immense drum… The post is fired in cannon balls, caught by nets and preceded by hollow whistling balls of wood… Quicker messages were sent by heliograph transmission of light and music.

  Poe’s very title had been anticipated by R. F. Williams, for a satire of British moral decline, Eureka: A Prophecy of the Future (1837).

  But all such forecasts were still imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment: just laws, national education, universal brotherhood, polytechnic planning and wealth. ‘Where can the perfectibilty of man stop,’ asked Mercier, ‘armed with geometry and the mechanical arts and chemistry?’ Poe had nothing but scorn for such ‘human-perfectibility’ spokesmen – the ‘wild doctrines’ of Turgot, P
rice, Priestley and Condorcet.* His future is totalitarian and overcrowded. The key is population control. Men as individuals are abandoned; epidemics and wars, welcomed. The sea swarms with ships; the very sky, with balloons. At hundreds of miles per hour hundreds speed by on an aimless excursion cruise. Poe’s millennial ‘Amricca’ (am rich, am rich, am rich) is his final send-up – a Fool’s Day calculus of suicidal, doomsday collapse.

  1. (p. 310) MELLONTA TAUTA: cf. Eureka: ‘my reply is that – I am but pausing, for a moment, on the awful threshold of the Future.’ (p. 275) cf. the epigraph to ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ (p. 361, note 2). cf. H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things To Come (1933).

  2. (p. 310) ON BOARD BALLOON ‘SKYLARK’: To commemorate that hopeful atheist, that visionary of intellectual beauty and ‘the golden years’, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

  Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

  Bird thou never wert,

  That from Heaven, or near it,

  Pourest thy full heart

  In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

  To a Skylark (1821)

  3. (p. 310) one or two hundred of the canaille: French ‘a pack of dogs’: ‘which seems to demonstrate… that democracy is a very admirable form of government – for dogs’ (p. 319).

  4. (p. 311) designated as silk-buckingham, on account of its superior durability: Named after James Silk Buckingham, the Egyptologist, presumably for his ‘escape from death by exposure when he was left in the desert by Bedouin marauders, while… ascending the Nile to Nubia in 1813’ (Burton R. Pollin, ‘ “Some Words with a Mummy” Reconsidered’, p. 63).

  5. (p. 311) Pundit assures me… Pundit knows: Whose very name – and Pundita’s, of course – plays with punning insistence on the punditry of puns.

  6. (p. 312) an Irish philosopher called Furrier, on account of his… cat-peltries: Charles Fourier (1772–1837), the French social philosopher, who taught that industrial communities must be reorganized as a phalanx (an economic commune of 1,620 people) living in a phalanstère (a community centre, or phalanstery). The Transcendentalist commune at Brook Farm had been converted to a phalanx in 1844 and the Harbinger, printed at Brook Farm, became a Fourierist weekly newspaper (1845–9).