Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (51 page)

I found the granaries of Rome well stored with grain, and particularly with Indian corn; this product requiring less art in its preparation for food, I selected as my principal support. I now found the hardships and lawlessness of my youth turn to account. A man cannot throw off the habits of sixteen years. Since that age, it is true, I had lived luxuriously, or at least surrounded by all the conveniences civilization afforded. But before that time, I had been “as uncouth a savage, as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome”—and now, in Rome itself, robber and shepherd propensities, similar to those of its founder, were of advantage to its sole inhabitant. I spent the morning riding and shooting in the Campagna—I passed long hours in the various galleries—I gazed at each statue, and lost myself in a reverie before many a fair Madonna or beauteous nymph. I haunted the Vatican, and stood surrounded by marble forms of divine beauty. Each stone deity was possessed by sacred gladness, and the eternal fruition of love. They looked on me with unsympathizing complacency, and often in wild accents I reproached them for their supreme indifference—for they were human shapes, the human form divine was manifest in each fairest limb and lineament. The perfect moulding brought with it the idea of colour and motion; often, half in bitter mockery, half in self-delusion, I clasped their icy proportions, and, coming between Cupid and his Psyche’s lips, pressed the unconceiving marble.

I endeavoured to read. I visited the libraries of Rome. I selected a volume, and, choosing some sequestered, shady nook, on the banks of the Tiber, or opposite the fair temple in the Borghese Gardens, or under the old pyramid of Cestius, I endeavoured to conceal me from myself, and immerse myself in the subject traced on the pages before me. As if in the same soil you plant nightshade and a myrtle tree, they will each appropriate the mould, moisture, and air administered, for the fostering their several properties—so did my grief find sustenance, and power of existence, and growth, in what else had been divine manna, to feed radiant meditation. Ah! while I streak this paper with the tale of what my so named occupations were—while I shape the skeleton of my days—my hand trembles—my heart pants, and my brain refuses to lend expression, or phrase, or idea, by which to image forth the veil of unutterable woe that clothed these bare realities. O, worn and beating heart, may I dissect thy fibres, and tell how in each unmitigable misery, sadness dire, repinings, and despair, existed? May I record my many ravings—the wild curses I hurled at torturing nature—and how I have passed days shut out from light and food—from all except the burning hell alive in my own bosom?

I was presented, meantime, with one other occupation, the one best fitted to discipline my melancholy thoughts, which strayed backwards, over many a ruin, and through many a flowery glade, even to the mountain recess, from which in early youth I had first emerged.

During one of my rambles through the habitations of Rome, I found writing materials on a table in an author’s study. Parts of a manuscript lay scattered about. It contained a learned disquisition on the Italian language; one page an unfinished dedication to posterity, for whose profit the writer had sifted and selected the niceties of this harmonious language —to whose everlasting benefit he bequeathed his labours.

I also will write a book, I cried—for whom to read?—to whom dedicated? And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote, dedication to the illustrious dead. shadows, arise, and read your fall! behold the history of the last man.

Yet, will not this world be re-peopled, and the children of a saved pair of lovers, in some to me unknown and unattainable seclusion, wandering to these prodigious relics of the ante-pestilential race, seek to learn how beings so wondrous in their achievements, with imaginations infinite, and powers godlike, had departed from their home to an unknown country?

I will write and leave in this most ancient city, this “world’s sole monument,” a record of these things. I will leave a monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man. At first I thought only to speak of plague, of death, and last, of desertion; but I lingered fondly on my early years, and recorded with sacred zeal the virtues of my companions. They have been with me during the fulfilment of my task. I have brought it to an end—I lift my eyes from my paper—again they are lost to me. Again I feel that I am alone.

A year has passed since I have been thus occupied. The seasons have made their wonted round, and decked this eternal city in a changeful robe of surpassing beauty. A year has passed; and I no longer guess at my state or my prospects—loneliness is my familiar, sorrow my inseparable companion. I have endeavoured to brave the storm—I have endeavoured to school myself to fortitude—I have sought to imbue myself with the lessons of wisdom. It will not do. My hair has become nearly grey—my voice, unused now to utter sound, comes strangely on my ears. My person, with its human powers and features, seem to me a monstrous excrescence of nature. How express in human language a woe human being until this hour never knew! How give intelligible expression to a pang none but I could ever understand!— No one has entered Rome. None will ever come. I smile bitterly at the delusion I have so long nourished, and still more, when I reflect that I have exchanged it for another as delusive, as false, but to which I now cling with the same fond trust.

Winter has come again; and the gardens of Rome have lost their leaves— the sharp air comes over the Campagna, and has driven its brute inhabitants to take up their abode in the many dwellings of the deserted city—frost has suspended the gushing fountains—and Trevi has stilled her eternal music. I had made a rough calculation, aided by the stars, by which I endeavoured to ascertain the first day of the new year. In the old out-worn age, the Sovereign Pontiff was used to go in solemn pomp, and mark the renewal of the year by driving a nail in the gate of the temple of Janus. On that day I ascended St. Peter’s, and carved on its topmost stone the aera 2100, last year of the world!

My only companion was a dog, a shaggy fellow, half water and half shepherd’s dog, whom I found tending sheep in the Campagna. His master was dead, but nevertheless he continued fulfilling his duties in expectation of his return. If a sheep strayed from the rest, he forced it to return to the flock, and sedulously kept off every intruder. Riding in the Campagna I had come upon his sheep-walk, and for some time observed his repetition of lessons learned from man, now useless, though unforgotten. His delight was excessive when he saw me. He sprung up to my knees; he capered round and round, wagging his tail, with the short, quick bark of pleasure: he left his fold to follow me, and from that day has never neglected to watch by and attend on me, shewing boisterous gratitude whenever I caressed or talked to him. His pattering steps and mine alone were heard, when we entered the magnificent extent of nave and aisle of St. Peter’s. We ascended the myriad steps together, when on the summit I achieved my design, and in rough figures noted the date of the last year. I then turned to gaze on the country, and to take leave of Rome. I had long determined to quit it, and I now formed the plan I would adopt for my future career, after I had left this magnificent abode.

A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer, and that I would become. A hope of amelioration always attends on change of place, which would even lighten the burthen of my life. I had been a fool to remain in Rome all this time: Rome noted for Malaria, the famous caterer for death. But it was still possible, that, could I visit the whole extent of earth, I should find in some part of the wide extent a survivor. Methought the sea-side was the most probable retreat to be chosen by such a one. If left alone in an inland district, still they could not continue in the spot where their last hopes had been extinguished; they would journey on, like me, in search of a partner for their solitude, till the watery barrier stopped their further progress.

To that water—cause of my woes, perhaps now to be their cure, I would betake myself. Farewell, Italy!—farewell, thou ornament of the world, matchless Rome, the retreat of the solitary one during long months!—to civilized life—to the settled home and succession of monotonous days, farewell! Peril will now be mine; and I hail her as a friend—death will perpetually cross my path, and I will meet him as a benefactor; hardship, inclement weather, and dangerous tempests will be my sworn mates. Ye spirits of storm, receive me! ye powers of destruction, open wide your arms, and clasp me for ever! if a kinder power have not decreed another end, so that after long endurance I may reap my reward, and again feel my heart beat near the heart of another like to me.

Tiber, the road which is spread by nature’s own hand, threading her continent, was at my feet, and many a boat was tethered to the banks. I would with a few books, provisions, and my dog, embark in one of these and float down the current of the stream into the sea; and then, keeping near land, I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean, pass Naples, along Calabria, and would dare the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis; then, with fearless aim, (for what had I to lose?) skim ocean’s surface towards Malta and the further Cyclades. I would avoid Constantinople, the sight of whose well-known towers and inlets belonged to another state of existence from my present one; I would coast Asia Minor, and Syria, and, passing the seven-mouthed Nile, steer northward again, till losing sight of forgotten Carthage and deserted Lybia, I should reach the pillars of Hercules. And then—no matter where—the oozy caves, and soundless depths of ocean may be my dwelling, before I accomplish this long-drawn voyage, or the arrow of disease find my heart as I float singly on the weltering Mediterranean; or, in some place I touch at, I may find what I seek—a companion; or if this may not be—to endless time, decrepid and grey headed—youth already in the grave with those I love— the lone wanderer will still unfurl his sail, and clasp the tiller—and, still obeying the breezes of heaven, for ever round another and another promontory, anchoring in another and another bay, still ploughing seedless ocean, leaving behind the verdant land of native Europe, adown the tawny shore of Africa, having weathered the fierce seas of the Cape, I may moor my worn skiff in a creek, shaded by spicy groves of the odorous islands of the far Indian ocean.

These are wild dreams. Yet since, now a week ago, they came on me, as I stood on the height of St. Peter’s, they have ruled my imagination. I have chosen my boat, and laid in my scant stores. I have selected a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare—But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me—and in any port I can renew my stock. I form no expectation of alteration for the better; but the monotonous present is intolerable to me. Neither hope nor joy are my pilots—restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on. I long to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day’s fulfilment. I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that the elements can assume—I shall read fair augury in the rainbow— menace in the cloud—some lesson or record dear to my heart in everything. Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—the LAST MAN.

Science fiction was born in 1818 with Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, but it was a monstrous and premature birth. Monstrous, because of the novel’s subject matter (a reanimated being stitched together from pieces of corpses) and genre affiliations (the simultaneous embodiment and repudiation of science fiction, gothic fiction, and travel narratives). Premature, because half a century would pass before noteworthy successors appeared in the British book market.

Literary critics who label
Frankenstein
as the first science fiction novel tend to justify this claim in one of two ways: they emphasize either the novel’s specific rhetorical effect on the reader, or its portrayal of potential future scientific advances. Those who emphasize rhetorical effect usually build on Darko Suvin’s influential definition of science fiction as producing “cognitive estrangement.” By creating an imagined world different than our own, science fiction renders our own world strange and unfamiliar, and asks us to question and rationally evaluate norms that we usually take for granted (Suvin 6–7). Mary Shelley’s novel invites readers to scrutinize, rather than unquestioningly accept, a number of physical laws and social practices. Victor Frankenstein’s creation imaginatively extends Romantic-era science and questions the methods and responsibilities of reproduction. The creature’s earliest experiences of the natural world, such as learning that birds sing and fire is hot (130), highlight the inductive inferences underlying common assumptions. The creature later notices the strangeness and injustice “of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood” (145). Most obviously, the novel invites readers to contemplate the origin of evil and the relationship between misery and immoral behavior, though different readers have arrived at starkly different answers.1

Judgments about the novel’s moral complexity sometimes influence judgments about its balance of the gothic and science fiction. In Darko Suvin’s view, the two genres are fundamentally opposed, both because the gothic features “arbitrary supernatural phenomena” and “anti-cognitive laws” rather than rational extensions of physical laws and historical contingencies (8), and because gothic literature aligns the physical laws governing the world with a simplistic ethical framework of poetic justice.
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In the case of
Frankenstein
, Suvin argues that most of the novel is “in the tradition of the Gothic story, in which the universal horror and disgust at [Victor’s] creature would simply prefigure its behavior and its hideous looks testify to its corrupt essence” (129). The creature’s narrative, however, separates physical appearance from moral essence, prevents the reader from engaging in the easy moralizing encouraged by much gothic literature, and moves the novel toward true science fiction (Suvin 129–30).

Other readers tie
Frankenstein
to the gothic by interpreting the creature as Victor’s doppelgänger, his dark double acting out Victor’s worst, repressed urges. Some of the novel’s supernatural metaphors make this gothic motif quite explicit: Victor says of his creature, “I considered the being whom I had…endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror,…nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me” (104). Crucially, though, such rhetoric remains metaphorical, not literal, and Mary Shelley both invokes and rejects the supernatural world of the gothic. This technique recurs in Shelley’s portrayal of Victor’s education: as Paul Alkon notes, “Victor Frankenstein’s progress…from childhood dabblings in alchemy and magic to adult use—and misuse—of science, takes…her book over the border from fantasy to science fiction” (30).

This brings us back to the second basis for claiming
Frankenstein
is the first science fiction novel—its grounding in, and imaginative extension of, science and technology. From this perspective, the opening sentence of Percy Shelley’s preface to the novel becomes crucial: “The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.” The novel’s allusions to Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, and Luigi Galvani connect its improbable events to serious speculations about the physical world. This is consistent with Joseph D. Miller’s suggestion that fantasy fiction, including gothic fiction, “is distinguished from science fiction on the basis of the author’s willingness or unwillingness to ground plot elements in some simulacrum of physical law” (25). Miller’s qualification that science fiction uses a simulacrum of physical law is important, though. Many works of science fiction blur or omit the details of the science they invoke, or depict events or inventions that prove to be impossible in actuality. Ultimately, the factual accuracy of the scientific and technological developments portrayed is less important than the rational exploration of the consequences of those developments (Aldiss 11; Alkon 5–6), or the rhetoric through which such developments are portrayed as if real (and hence subject to rational scrutiny) (Attebery 107; Bagwell 40–41). In Frankenstein, Victor’s rejection of alchemy in favor of science presents Victor’s experiment as real, and the novel focuses much more on its consequences than on the experiment itself. Yet paradoxically, while Frankenstein’s novelty and its status as science fiction depend upon “its rejection of the supernatural” (Alkon 2), in the end the novel seems to reject science as well, or at least to issue a very strong warning against the consequences of science. As Paul Alkon describes Frankenstein’s legacy, “Mary Shelley embodied what now seems the central myth for an age wherein the unparalleled creativity of science threatens the world with unprecedented disasters” (9).

Just as Mary Shelley invokes gothic conventions but rejects their supernatural underpinnings, and invents science fiction but rejects the allure of science, so too does she incorporate and discard the genre of travel narrative. As Carl Freedman astutely observes, “Frankenstein…marks the end (or at least obsolescence) of one genre even as it inaugurates another. Captain Walton, who initially appears to be the protagonist of the work, is in fact the hero of an old-fashioned travel narrative.…Frankenstein[’s] emergence as protagonist transforms the narrative into a predominantly science-fictional one” (49). Yet travel narratives do not completely disappear when Walton stops describing his voyage to the arctic and starts recording Victor’s story. The creature’s tale constitutes an important and lengthy travel narrative, but readers may not recognize it as such because the creature describes the basic conditions and customs of Europe, which are new to the creature but likely well-known to many of Shelley’s readers. The creature’s story transforms the travel narrative by having a strange character explore a familiar environment, rather than having a familiar traveler explore a strange environment. In so doing, the central episode of the novel induces cognitive estrangement “by inviting readers to see their own world as it appears to an intelligent alien,” as it appears, that is, to the creature (Alkon 34). The creature’s existence, though, does not depend on the logic of a traditional travel narrative, in which he may have been discovered in a region previously unknown to European explorers but “assumed to have always existed in pretty much the [same] condition” (Freedman 49). Rather, as Carl Freedman observes, “such an experiment as Frankenstein’s is a concrete possibility for the (near) future,” and Victor “is concerned with pushing back the frontiers not of space but of time” (49).

Science fiction’s typical orientation toward the future becomes much more overt in Mary Shelley’s
The Last Man
. Published in 1826 and set in the closing years of the twenty-first century, it imagines the plight of the sole survivor of a world-wide plague. Shelley was not the first to address this theme, but her predecessors were either less detailed or less secular. Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (1816), Thomas Campbell’s “The Last Man” (1823), and Thomas Hood’s “The Last Man” (1826) are relatively short poems. Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel
The Last Man
(1805, first English translation 1806) imagines a future suffering from infertility and exhausted natural resources, yet attributes this to God’s desire to hasten the Last Judgment, which God further encourages by sending Adam to convince the last fertile couple to refrain from reproducing. In Shelley’s novel, humanity ends not through Biblical apocalypse but rather through natural means, and Shelley traces the social and psychological consequences of the dwindling population in great detail.

After Mary Shelley’s two founding contributions to science fiction, the genre-in-formation largely languished in Britain until the early 1870s.
³
In the interim, though, influential works of science fiction appeared in America and France, courtesy of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. Poe’s “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) presents an end-of-the-world scenario more extreme (though less secular) than Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. The story is a dialogue between two spirits in the afterlife, one of whom describes the end of humanity in a world-wide conflagration triggered by the Earth’s passage through an oxygen-rich comet. The story gestures toward both contemporary scientific theories about comets, and Biblical prophecies of the world’s destruction through fire. A less ambiguous instance of science fiction is Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), which is set in the distant future, imagines advances in balloon and rail travel technology, and refers to a dystopian form of socialism which considers individual lives worthless. It also highlights the difficulties involved in one historical period attempting to understand another (through the narrator’s comic distortions of historical figures in Poe’s present and past). Through these techniques, Poe both provides models for subsequent time travel fiction (Suvin 142), and divorces technological advancements from moral progress (Alkon 103). Balloon travel also features prominently in Poe’s “Hans Phaall—A Tale” (1835),4 this time to convey the title character to the moon. In this tale, the science-fictional elements (a newly discovered, extremely light gas and detailed discussions of the distance to the moon, Earth’s appearance from space, and the mechanisms of travel) are mixed with indications that the story is a hoax (Phaall begins his journey on April Fool’s Day) or fairy tale (characters named Grimm and Rub-a-Dub). A mixture of science fiction and fantasy is also evident in Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which depicts Pym’s travels towards the South Pole and his encounter with an extremely dark-skinned race in a land where the color white is unknown. These features are estranging, but a cognitive approach to them is disrupted by the novel’s heavy symbolism and abrupt ending.

Indeed, both Poe and Verne have been criticized for producing little or no cognitive estrangement, and hence failing to write serious science fiction. Darko Suvin labels Poe as “adolescent” for his sensational and inconsistent subject matter and his morbid style (141), and calls Verne’s works “juvenile” for their easily digested introduction of one imagined invention at a time and their emphasis on the thrill of adventure (152). In general, these authors fare better when their science fiction is judged based on the incorporation of probable technology and important sci-fi motifs. The appeal of advanced technologies of travel, and the debt to travel narratives of adventure in exotic locales, are clear in several of Poe’s works, but they become dominant in Jules Verne’s science fiction. The titles of some of Verne’s earliest novels make this obvious:
Five Weeks in a Balloon
(1863),
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864),
From the Earth to the Moon
(1865), and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
(1870). Paul Alkon is not alone in saying of Verne, “Travel through space rather than time is his specialty. With him readers explore on land, under water, and in the air” (58–59). In Journey to the Center of the Earth, the protagonists travel across and below the Earth’s surface, via steamboat, raft, and rope ladder. Their journey downward is overtly indebted to actual mid-nineteenth-century scientific debates about the origin of the Earth’s internal heat, and whether or not the Earth’s temperature rises closer to its center. As they travel deeper underground, they encounter older rocks and fossils, as well as living animals thought to be extinct; in a sense, the Earth itself becomes a time machine, and traveling through space enables an exploration of the past (Suvin 149).

Journey to the Center of the Earth
was first translated into English in 1872, just as Britain saw a resurgence of science fiction with the publication of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s
The Coming Race
(1871), George Chesney’s
The Battle of Dorking
(1871), and Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon
(1872). In
The Coming Race
, the narrator travels underground to discover not the past, but a possible future, in the form of a technologically advanced utopian society that has mastered all forms of energy through mechanical innovations and Lamarckian evolution. Bulwer-Lytton combines these scientific motifs with estranged, satiric views of gender and democracy.
Erewhon
similarly combines social satire, evolutionary thought, and exotic travel, but Butler imagines a technophobic, dystopian society in an isolated valley in New Zealand. The Erewhonians imprison the sick but try to cure criminals, and they have deliberately rejected the advanced technology they once possessed out of fear that machines will evolve and enslave humans. By pushing seemingly logical positions to absurd extremes, Butler produces cognitive estrangement, but his satiric targets are so numerous and his irony so layered that it becomes difficult to assess his intent. George Chesney’s message in The Battle of Dorking is much clearer: he warns against Britain’s military unpreparedness, and invents the “future war” genre, by recounting Germany’s invasion of Britain from the perspective of a defeated British soldier. The narrator omits any explicit mention of the victors’ nationality because he is telling his experiences to his grandchildren living under a German regime, but Chesney’s readers must infer this based on seemingly casual details, setting a precedent for science fiction that gradually and indirectly hints at the fictional world’s rules and conditions.