A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  ‘The cheerful ceremony of opening the new Incineration Hall was performed an hour ago in Manchester by the Lord Doctor of Manchester, attended by the Mayor. It is a magnificent building, with a furnace capable of reducing twelve bodies at a time to ashes, which, after a certain period, will be used in the manufacture of water-filters for the drinking-fountains of the town. It is especially fortunate that the Hall can be employed at once, since the number of persons despatched by Euthanasia has been so great during the past week all over the country that the other Cremation establishments have proved inadequate to dispose of the corpses with sufficient rapidity.’

  ‘An Important addition has been made to that instructive place of public amusement, the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park: a department to contain those species of animals which are rapidly dying out in Europe. Among these are the Ass, the Fox, the Dog, the Hare, the Pheasant, and Partridge. In this age of Science it is, of course, impossible to go on employing a creature like the Donkey, proverbial for its intellectual deficiency, and we have no regret that only two pair of animals of the species (both in the Regent’s Park collection) now survive in England, though a few are said to linger in Egypt. Connected with the dog there are so many traditional records of sagacity, having a certain scientific interest in connection with the form and size of its brain, that we should have been glad if a more complete collection of the varieties could have been preserved. However, the Foxhound, the Greyhound, Setter, and Pointer, seem all to have become extinct within about thirty years of the repeal of the Game Laws and the consequent cessation of field sports; and several of the more favoured kinds of dogs – Italian Greyhounds, Toy Terriers, Pomeranians, and Poodles – were, it is said, privately destroyed by the hundreds by their owners, who disgracefully sought to withdraw them from the researches of physiologists.

  ‘The remaining kinds have been perhaps rather recklessly used by vivisectors, whose ardour in the noble cause of science has caused them to experiment, on an average, on about 14,000 dogs apiece, and the result has been that we only find at present twelve animals surviving, of whom nine belong to the class Mongrel. One noble old Newfoundland, who would have greatly graced the collection, was drowned by his owner last year under interesting circumstances. After rescuing a physiologist’s son from drowning, the animal itself was so exhausted that its breathing and other symptoms suggested to the physiologist the scientific interest in watching it slowly drowning in a suitable vessel, where all the conditions of that death could be accurately investigated on so large a scale as that of a full-sized dog. The learned gentleman accordingly drowned the animal in a tub in his physiological laboratory as soon as his son was sufficiently recovered to witness the instructive and entertaining spectacle. The dog, when withdrawn half dead for a moment from the water, attempted to lick the boy’s face; the child was weak enough to implore his father to spare it, but the learned gentleman of course pointed out to the boy the folly of such a request, and the experiment was completed. We trust to see this young gentleman hereafter as sound and eminent a physiologist as his distinguished father.’

  After some five columns more of similar Intelligence, the Age of Science proceeds to give its readers a few Reviews of Books. The brevity of the remarks vouchsafed to these productions seems to indicate that no great importance is attached to Literature properly so called, but only to treatises on Physical Science. The Notices run as follow:

  ‘REVIEWS. We do not usually in the Age of Science intrude on the province of the sixteen leading daily Scientific Newspapers devoted to critical notices of the books which pour from the press on Electrology, Physiology, Astronomy, Geology, &c. We are tempted to depart from our rule, however, so far as to offer our need of applause and congratulation on the publication of the last of the six splendid volumes forming the magnificent monograph on Cheese-mites, and the still more costly and exhaustive treatise on the great mystery of the Formation of Dust in Disused Apartments.

  ‘In the inferior non-scientific walks of Literature we find that no Histories have been published during the last twelvemonth, and only one Historical Essay, namely The Fall of the Church of England, by the late (and last) Dean of Westminster. The author of this book composed it, we are informed, during his retirement in the Isle of Anglesea, whither, like most of the clergy, and the Druids in former ages, he retreated after the great victory gained by Science, when the Cathedrals and Churches were made over by Parliament to the Medical Profession. The Dean traces the fall of the Anglican Establishment to the folly of a party in the Church, who, in an age of doubt and transition, when religion needed to be presented in its most spiritual shape, made it appear by their practices a matter of rites and forms altogether childish. We are persuaded, however, that the abolition of the Churches was due to a deeper and more widespread cause – namely, the growth of that sound philosophy which recognises Matter as containing itself the germ and potency of every form of life, and, of course, dismisses the dream of a Soul in man, which might enjoy existence after death. As soon as this great truth had had time to penetrate the minds of the masses, the collapse of Religion obviously became imminent.

  ‘FICTION. The Precession of the Equinox, and other Tales, by Wilkinson Collinson, Esq.: This is a highly sensational story, and will sell like wildfire at the bookstalls. The interest of the plot turns on the phenomenon in question, but embraces subsidiary problems respecting the sun’s path through the Zodiac. Daniel Allround, by George Evans: The chief attraction of this book lies in the abstruse technical terminology which the author has employed to illustrate profound observations of men and things, but too much space is lost by delineations of characters without tracing them to the laws of heredity. Edwin and Angelina, By J. Fitzparnell: The author of this charming novel has afforded his readers a perfect study of the effects of each of the passions – Pity, Sympathy, Regret, Disappointment, Hope, and Love – on the various glands which they respectively affect. The lucid explanation of the physiological reasons why Mothers love their children is particularly valuable, as calculated to explode the last stronghold of the superstitious reverence which was once paid to parents among semi-civilised nations.’

  After these critical Notices of Books, the Age of Science proceeds to offer the following remarks on the Theatre:

  ‘At this season in former times, when boys were foolishly allowed to leave school for the holidays, the theatres (as some of us are old enough to remember) were much frequented, and were principally used for a silly kind of entertainment called Pantomimes. Of the three theatres in London which continue to be devoted to some sort of dramatic performance, and have not been transferred into Lecture Halls, one only (the Gaiety) seems successful this winter. Crowds attend every night to witness School, a piece in which there is no folly of love-making, but the anxieties of a Competitive Examination for Honours in Science are finely realised. A tragic interest is imparted to the plot by making the hero become insane just as he has achieved the object of his ambition.

  ‘At the Haymarket there has been a failure which we fear will result in the ruin of the lessee. This enterprising gentleman imagined it might be possible to revive in these days an interest in some of the old plays once popular in this country, and after (it appears) long consultation and deliberation, determined to bring The Merchant of Venice upon the boards. It was hoped that the proposal of one of the characters of the piece, named Shylock, to cut a pound of flesh from another, and the discussion whether this could be done without the effusion of blood, would excite the interest of the spectators. Unfortunately, as the author of the drama (Shakespeare, we are informed) stops short at the very crisis of the physiological experiment, and allows the intended subject to escape, the audience not unnaturally have exhibited disappointment, and the piece has been pronounced a failure.’

  In the Age of Science, there are no less than fifty pages devoted to announcements and puffs of the most astonishing variety, including hundreds of articles whose names and uses are at present quite unknown.
Of advertisements of servants and other persons requiring employment we have not found a single instance, but there were at least twenty columns of invitations to ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ to act in the capacity of housekeeper, steward, superintendent of the house, or some equally well-sounding office, the remuneration offered being at the lowest, it would seem, about £200 a year, with ‘the use of a steam carriage’, and ‘every other luxury desired’. We must, however, leave the columns of Advertisements for future examination, and proceed to give an account of the more important Law and Police Reports.

  It seems that, by 1977, it had become necessary to hold assizes in at least twenty towns and villages in every county; and that the judges were incessantly occupied with cases of robbery, garrotting, arson, rape, stabbing, poisoning, and a number of offences with new names, of whose nature we can merely guess, such as ‘Debarrassing’, ‘Morbifying’, ‘Disbraining’, ‘Petroleumisation’, ‘Electroding’ and ‘Mesmeraciding’. For all these crimes the same class of penalties are allotted; the convicted persons are invariably sentenced by the presiding judge to so many weeks’ or months’ detention – not in prison, but in the Penal Hospitals of their respective towns or villages. The principle on which crime is thus visited appears from the addresses of several of the magistrates, who remark that the ‘diseased minds’ of criminals ‘obviously require careful medical treatment’. In numerous cases, as the offenders have been sentenced many times previously, the judge speaks of their crime as exhibiting ‘an intermittent fever’ of homicidal rage, or of covetousness. Extradition treaties have apparently been abandoned, and thanks to the invention of the aero-magnetic propeller, criminals of every country routinely take refuge in the neighbouring state to escape detention in the Penal Hospitals.

  A very different method of treatment, however, is adopted towards another class of offenders, whom it would appear the authorities in the Age of Science are determined to put down in grim earnest. That our readers may not suppose we mistake the sense of the amazing paragraphs in which these new features of English legislation appear, we quote them as they stand in the Age of Science, pp. 63 and 64:

  ‘POLICE. At the Mansion House this morning, 79 men and 140 women were summoned for the non-attendance of their boys under two years old at the Public Infants’ Science Classes in the new kindergarten in the Tower. Various pleas were, as usual, put forth by the defendants, purporting to prove in some cases that the children were ill with small-pox and scarlet fever, and in several instances that they were dying or dead. Mr Alderman Busby remarked that “if they were to listen to such pleas, children would grow up to three or four years old without learning even the rudiments of astronomy or palaeontology”. He ordered all the fathers to be publicly flogged, and the mothers to receive each a dozen stripes of the birch privately. [Similar judgments are recorded at several other police-courts in London and the provincial towns.]

  ‘Considerable excitement prevails just now in many of our large towns in consequence of the needful, but somewhat troublesome, formalities required by law before any trade or handicraft may be exercised. Blacksmiths’ apprentices, we are told, very generally resent the necessity of passing their proper examinations in Metallurgy before they are qualified to shoe a horse; and the Artificial Flower Makers constantly evade attendance at the lectures on Botany, given expressly for their benefit. The candidates for licenses as Cabdrivers have more than once exhibited signs of discontent, when rejected on the grounds that they failed to answer some of the simplest examination questions on the principles of Mechanics applied to Traction, and on the correlation of Heat and Motion.

  ‘A strike (it is even rumoured) is impending among the stonemasons and bricklayers and slaters in a certain large city, because the Police, at the order of the Magistrates, having brought up several members of those trade-unions to the Local Examining Board for inquiry, it was elicited that none of them had acquired a competent knowledge of Geology in general, nor even of the formation of the strata of rocks wherewith their proper business is concerned. These difficulties were to be anticipated in the progress of Scientific knowledge among the masses, and we earnestly hope that no proposal to relax the late very wise legislation will be made in Parliament, but rather to reinforce the existing Acts by severer penalties upon ignorance and inattention. Who can for a moment think, for example, of allowing his shirt to be washed by a person who knows nothing of the chemistry of soap, blue, and starch? Or his dinner cooked by a man who (however skilled in the mere kitchen art of sending up appetising dishes) is totally ignorant of how much albumen, salts, and alkalies go to the formation of vegetable and animal diet?’

  These citations now complete, we must conclude this imperfect but thoroughly reliable account of the remarkable journal of 1977, whose discovery has been the glorious first-fruits of the Prospective Telegraph. Nevertheless, it would ill become any of us who have the privilege to live in this enlightened age to entertain a shadow of a doubt that our Scientific method is the right one, and that by-and-by (while we respectfully wait the results of their experiments) our great medical men will discover the proper remedies for murder, rape, and robbery. For our own part, it is superfluous to assure our readers, we retain unwavering, unbounded faith in the resources of Science to provide a perfect substitute for Religion, for Conscience, and for Honour.

  The Story of a Star

  Æ (GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL) (1894)

  Religion and mysticism, though at first

  glance incompatible with the supposed

  ‘rationality’ of science fiction, have always

  informed the genre to one degree or

  another, in stories that directly engage

  with spiritual conundrums, make use

  of religious imagery, or rely upon moral

  codes derived from religious doctrine.

  A follower of the teachings of Russian

  mystic Helena Blavatsky, Irish author

  and artist Æ(George William Russell)

  believed that each solar system was the

  expression of a governing spirit, and with

  recourse to hypothesised powers of the

  mind, he allows his narrator to witness

  these spirits’ life cycles.

  THE EMOTIONS THAT HAUNTED ME in that little cathedral town would be most difficult to describe. After the hurry, rattle, and fever of the city, the rare weeks spent here were infinitely peaceful. They were full of a quaint sense of childhood, with sometimes a deeper chord touched – the giant and spiritual things childhood has dreams of. The little room I slept in had opposite its window the great grey cathedral wall; it was only in the evening that the sunlight crept round it and appeared in the room strained through the faded green blind. It must have been this silvery quietness of colour which in some subtle way affected me with the feeling of a continual Sabbath; and this was strengthened by the bells chiming hour after hour. The pathos, penitence, and hope expressed by the flying notes coloured the intervals with faint and delicate memories. They haunted my dreams, and I heard with unutterable longing the dreamy chimes pealing from some dim and vast cathedral of the cosmic memory, until the peace they tolled became almost a nightmare, and I longed for utter oblivion or forgetfulness of their reverberations.

  More remarkable were the strange lapses into other worlds and times. Almost as frequent as the changing of the bells were the changes from state to state. I realised what is meant by the Indian philosophy of Maya. Truly my days were full of Mayas, and my work-a-day city life was no more real to me than one of those bright, brief glimpses of things long past. I talk of the past, and yet these moments taught me how false our ideas of time are. In the Ever-living yesterday, today, and tomorrow are words of no meaning. I know I fell into what we call the past and the things I counted as dead for ever were the things I had yet to endure. Out of the old age of earth I stepped into its childhood, and received once more the primal blessing of youth, ecstasy, and beauty. But these things are too vast and vague
to speak of, the words we use today cannot tell their story. Nearer to our time is the legend that follows.

  I was, I thought, one of the Magi of old Persia, inheritor of its unforgotten lore, and using some of its powers. I tried to pierce through the great veil of nature, and feel the life that quickened it within. I tried to comprehend the birth and growth of planets, and to do this I rose spiritually and passed beyond earth’s confines into that seeming void which is the Matrix where they germinate. On one of these journeys I was struck by the phantasm, so it seemed, of a planet I had not observed before. I could not then observe closer, and coming again on another occasion it had disappeared. After the lapse of many months I saw it once more, brilliant with fiery beauty. Its motion was slow, revolving around some invisible centre. I pondered over it, and seemed to know that the invisible centre was its primordial spiritual state, from which it emerged a little while and into which it then withdrew. Short was its day; its shining faded into a glimmer, and then into darkness in a few months. I learned its time and cycles; I made preparations and determined to await its coming.