Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  By the bright light of the moon we could see that the architecture was simple, and of a character highly gratifying to the eye. All the buildings were of stone, and of good size. We were greatly excited and interested, and proposed to continue our walks until the moon should set, and to return the following morning—“to live here, perhaps,” said Bentley. “What could be so romantic and yet so real? What could conduce better to the marriage of verse and philosophy?” But as he said this we saw around the corner of a cross-street some forms as of people hurrying away.

  “The specters,” said my companion, laying his hand on my arm.

  “Vagrants, more likely,” I answered, “who have taken advantage of the superstition of the region to appropriate this comfort and beauty to themselves.”

  “If that be so,” said Bentley, “we must have a care for our lives.”

  We proceeded cautiously, and soon saw other forms fleeing before us and disappearing, as we supposed, around corners and into houses. And now suddenly finding ourselves upon the edge of a wide, open public square, we saw in the dim light—for a tall steeple obscured the moon—the forms of vehicles, horses, and men moving here and there. But before, in our astonishment, we could say a word one to the other, the moon moved past the steeple, and in its bright light we could see none of the signs of life and traffic which had just astonished us.

  Timidly, with hearts beating fast, but with not one thought of turning back, nor any fear of vagrants—for we were now sure that what we had seen was not flesh and blood, and therefore harmless—we crossed the open space and entered a street down which the moon shone clearly. Here and there we saw dim figures, which quickly disappeared; but, approaching a low stone balcony in front of one of the houses, we were surprised to see, sitting thereon and leaning over a book which lay open upon the top of the carved parapet, the figure of a woman, who did not appear to notice us.

  “That is a real person,” whispered Bentley, “and she does not see us.”

  “No,” I replied; “it is like the others. Let us go near it.”

  We drew near to the balcony and stood before it. At this the figure raised its head and looked at us. It was beautiful, it was young; but its substance seemed to be full of an ethereal quality which we had never seen or known of. With its full, soft eyes fixed upon us, it spoke.

  “Why are you here?” it asked. “I have said to myself that the next time I saw any of you I would ask you why you come to trouble us. Cannot you live content in your own realms and spheres, knowing, as you must know, how timid we are, and how you frighten us and make us unhappy? In all this city there is, I believe, not one of us except myself who does not flee and hide from you whenever you cruelly come here. Even I would do that, had I not declared to myself that I would see you and speak to you, and endeavor to prevail upon you to leave us in peace.”

  The clear, frank tones of the speaker gave me courage. “We are two men,” I answered, “strangers in this region, and living for the time in the beautiful country on the other side of the river. Having heard of this quiet city, we have come to see it for ourselves. We had supposed it to be uninhabited, but now that we find that this is not the case, we would assure you from our hearts that we do not wish to disturb or annoy anyone who lives here. We simply came as honest travelers to view the city.”

  The figure now seated herself again, and as her countenance was nearer to us, we could see that it was filled with pensive thought. For a moment she looked at us without speaking. “Men!” she said. “And so I have been right. For a long time I have believed that the beings who sometimes come here, filling us with dread and awe, are men.”

  “And you,” I exclaimed—“who are you, and who are these forms that we have seen, these strange inhabitants of this city?”

  She gently smiled as she answered. “We are the ghosts of the future. We are the people who are to live in this city generations hence. But all of us do not know that, principally because we do not think about it and study about it enough to know it. And it is generally believed that the men and women who sometimes come here are ghosts who haunt the place.”

  “And that is why you are terrified and flee from us?” I exclaimed. “You think we are ghosts from another world?”

  “Yes,” she replied; “that is what we thought, and what I used to think.”

  “And you,” I asked, “are spirits of human beings yet to be?”

  “Yes,” she answered; “but not for a long time. Generations of men—I know not how many—must pass away before we are men and women.”

  “Heavens!” exclaimed Bentley, clasping his hands and raising his eyes to the sky. “I shall be a spirit before you are a woman.”

  “Perhaps,” she said again, with a sweet smile upon her face, “you may live to be very, very old.”

  But Bentley shook his head. This did not console him. For some minutes I stood in contemplation, gazing upon the stone pavement beneath my feet. “And this,” I ejaculated, “is a city inhabited by the ghosts of the future, who believe men and women to be phantoms and specters?”

  She bowed her head.

  “But how is it,” I asked, “that you discovered that you are spirits and we mortal men?”

  “There are so few of us who think of such things,” she answered, “so few who study, ponder, and reflect. I am fond of study, and I love philosophy; and from the reading of many books I have learned much. From the book which I have here I have learned most; and from its teachings I have gradually come to the belief, which you tell me is the true one, that we are spirits and you men.”

  “And what book is that?” I asked.

  “It is The Philosophy of Relative Existences by Rupert Vance.”

  “Ye gods!” I exclaimed, springing upon the balcony. “That is my book, and I am Rupert Vance.” I stepped toward the volume to seize it, but she raised her hand.

  “You cannot touch it,” she said. “It is the ghost of a book. And did you write it?”

  “Write it? No,” I said; “I am writing it. It is not yet finished.”

  “But here it is,” she said, turning over the last pages. “As a spirit book it is finished. It is very successful; it is held in high estimation by intelligent thinkers; it is a standard work.”

  I stood trembling with emotion. “High estimation!” I said. “A standard work!”

  “Oh yes,” she replied, with animation; “and it well deserves its great success, especially in its conclusion. I have read it twice.”

  “But let me see those concluding pages,” I exclaimed. “Let me look upon what I am to write.”

  She smiled, and shook her head, and closed the book. “I would like to do that,” she said, “but if you are really a man you must not know what you are going to do.”

  “Oh, tell me, tell me,” cried Bentley from below, “do you know a book called Stellar Studies by Arthur Bentley? It is a book of poems.”

  The figure gazed at him. “No,” it said, presently. “I never heard of it.”

  I stood trembling. Had the youthful figure before me been flesh and blood, had the book been a real one, I would have torn it from her.

  “O wise and lovely being!” I exclaimed, falling on my knees before her, “be also benign and generous. Let me but see the last page of my book. If I have been of benefit to your world; more than all, if I have been of benefit to you, let me see it, I implore you—let me see how it is that I have done it.”

  She rose with the book in her hand. “You have only to wait until you have done it,” she said, “and then you will know all that you could see here.” I started to my feet and stood alone upon the balcony.

  *

  “I am sorry,” said Bentley, as we walked toward the pier where we had left our boat, “that we talked only to that ghost girl, and that the other spirits were all afraid of us. Persons whose souls are choked up with philosophy are not apt to care much for poetry; and even if my book is to be widely known, it is easy to see that she may not have heard of it.”

>   I walked triumphant. The moon, almost touching the horizon, beamed like red gold. “My dear friend,” said I, “I have always told you that you should put more philosophy into your poetry. That would make it live.”

  “And I have always told you,” said he, “that you should not put so much poetry into your philosophy. It misleads people.”

  “It didn’t mislead that ghost girl,” said I.

  “How do you know?” said Bentley. “Perhaps she is wrong, and the other inhabitants of the city are right, and we may be ghosts after all. Such things, you know, are only relative. Anyway,” he continued, after a little pause, “I wish I knew that those ghosts were now reading the poem which I am going to begin to-morrow.”

  JUNE 1993

  JULIAN HAWTHORNE

  Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934), the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a more prolific but less polished writer than his father. He wrote a good deal of supernatural fiction, some of which has elements of scientific romance, most notably the multiple personality story Archibald Malmaison (1879) and the occult romance The Professor’s Sister (1888), also known as The Spectre of the Camera. Late in life he published some pulp fiction of a similarly hybrid kind, including the serial novel The Cosmic Courtship (1917).

  “June 1993,” which appeared in the February 1893 issue of Cosmopolitan, is part of a flood of utopian speculations that followed the unexpected but enormous success of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888). Most of the responses focused on the novel’s prospectus for socialist economic reform—far more controversial in rampantly capitalist America than in Europe, where France had a thriving subgenre of anarchist utopian fiction—but Hawthorne focuses on the side-effects of technological advancement. That attention makes his story one of the more interesting nineteenth-century extrapolations of the theory of technological determinism, which holds that the organization of a society is largely determined by the technologies it employs, its politics being a secondary issue.

  “But if, as you assure me,” said I, addressing the intelligent personage with whom I had been conversing, “this is indeed my native land of America, it seems to be strangely altered since last night. What, for instance, has become of the cities? I have been wandering about here for some time, and can see nothing but farm-houses of rather unpretending design, standing, each of them, in the midst of a ten-acre lot.”

  As I spoke, I felt a severe crick in my back.

  My interlocutor smiled. “In what year, may I venture to ask, did you fall asleep?” he politely enquired.

  “In what year?” I repeated. “Why, the same year it is now, I presume—A.D. 1893. Why do you ask?”

  “That explains a good deal, both for me and for you,” was his reply. “We are now in the month of June 1993, so your nap must have lasted a trifle over a century. I congratulate you.”

  “Your statement would probably have aroused my surprise, and perhaps even my incredulity,” said I, “had I not during the last decade or two of the nineteenth century had occasion to read a number of books, all of whose authors had slept during periods of from ten to two hundred years. It is evident that the sympathetic drowsiness caused by their perusal has overcome me to a greater extent than I had supposed. May I, without further apology, request you to enlighten me as to the nature of the changes that have taken place during my unconsciousness?”

  “I applaud your aplomb, my dear sir,” rejoined my companion, with a bow. “It has been my fortune to meet gentlemen in your predicament before, and a good deal of time has usually been consumed in the formality of convincing them that they were really so far ahead of their age as the facts showed them to be. You, I am gratified to see, are ready to start off at score. Would it be indiscreet to enquire whether you, like the rest, contemplate publishing the result of your investigations in the periodicals of a century ago?”

  “You have divined my purpose,” answered I, with a blush. “The fact is, I had promised a certain editor, a friend of mine, to prepare for his magazine a story of what. . . .”

  “I comprehend,” interposed my friend. “It will give me pleasure to enlighten you, and I shall make no charge for my services. At the same time, it would gratify me to know the name of the periodical in which. . . .”

  “With pleasure,” said I; and mentioned it. My interlocutor’s face immediately brightened.

  “Indeed!” he exclaimed; “is that not the first that took up the topic of mechanical flight, and published a number of articles proving its feasibility?”1

  “The very same,” replied I.

  “The magazine in question is still in the apogee of its existence,” he remarked, “and—as perhaps you are not unaware—it had the honor of bringing out the first successful flying-machine. The world owes that magazine a debt never to be repaid; and I need scarcely say that anything I or any of us can do to meet the wishes of its representative of the last century. . . .” He ended with a courteous and cordial gesture that put me completely at my ease.

  “Suppose, then,” said I, “we begin with the disappearance of the cities. How about it? What happened to them?”

  “By way of preparing your mind for comprehension of that point,” said my informant, “you must remember that, even in your day, business men had taken advantage of the facilities—such as they were—of rapid transit, to leave town at the close of business hours, and betake themselves to a building in the suburbs, from ten to fifty miles outside the city limits. In this way they secured a quiet night’s rest and a breath of country air. Now, it is evident that the distance they went from town was dependent solely on the rate of speed at which the trains of that epoch were able to travel. When, therefore, flying-machines were introduced, with a velocity of from seventy-five to one hundred miles an hour, the business man’s dwelling was removed to a corresponding distance, and regions were occupied which had till then been inaccessible. The environs of the great cities were extended to a comparatively vast radius; and in process of time cities were entirely given up to shops and manufactories, and the great bulk of the population slept some hundreds of miles away from them. Every afternoon, flocks of flying-machines set out in all directions for the country; and since the fare, even to the most remote points, was hardly more than nominal, there were very few who failed to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.”

  “In short,” commented I, “distance, within certain large limits, no longer existed?”

  “Precisely! And now came the second step. It was found that the speed of flight rendered the existence of many large towns, comparatively close to one another, superfluous; and it was suggested that all the manufacturing and commercial interests of the nation should be concentrated in a certain limited number of places, the geographical situation of which should be fixed to suit the convenience of the majority. Surveys showed that not more than four of these great centers would be required, and sites were accordingly chosen, two on the sea-coast, eat and west, and two in the interior. In no other part of the continent is there so much as a single village. Every family lives on its own lot of land, averaging about ten acres, and all the old crowding of people together is forever done away with. Each family consists of from five to ten members, who do all their own agricultural work, and make a good deal of their own dry goods and clothing.”

  “You surprise me,” said I. “What time have they left to amuse themselves and cultivate their minds?”

  “More than they ever had in the old times,” was the reply. “You must make allowances for the spread of invention and discovery during the past century, and also for the greater simplicity of the general mode of life, to which I will refer presently. We have long since done away with servants, and with the laboring classes.”

  “That servants should have been extirpated does not astonish me,” I said, “since I find the rest of the human race still in existence; and it was to be expected that the laboring classes would arrive at a point where the working hours would dwindle to nothing, and the pay increase to anyt
hing. But I confess I do find it a little incredible that ladies should have given up shopping; and yet that is the inference your words seem to warrant.”

  “I doubt if you will find a woman in the country who even knows what shopping means,” returned the other, confidently. “It all came about naturally. So long as people herded together in cities, in constant view of one another, the imitative instinct of humanity was constantly stimulated, and that strange form of insanity called fashion was in the ascendant. But with the dispersal of the population, we began to act and think more independently, and each of us fell into the way of wearing such garments as suited us individually, instead of following an example set by some deformed or brainless man or woman in some remote part of the world. Though there is, broadly speaking, a certain uniformity in our male and female costumes, it is the result not of apish imitation, but of the gradual evolution of a dress which is proved to be hygienically and aesthetically the best. There is nothing more to it; and the change is due to the abolition of cities, which, again, is the consequence, as I pointed out, of the invention of human flight. And as shopping was occasioned solely by the demands of fashion, you may now understand why our women know and care nothing about it.”2

  “But what has become of the gregarious instincts of humanity?” I demanded. “I can understand that much is gained in the way of health and independence by your present system of life; but there is an electric sympathy in crowds, of which men, as well as women, are conscious. This ten-acre lot arrangement prevents that altogether, and must lead, I should suppose, to an ever-increasing dullness and lethargy, hostile to intellectual and ethical development. What becomes of music, eloquence, and the drama?”

  “Your exception is well taken,” said my companion. “Human beings do need the occasional excitement of one another’s presence in large numbers; the heights of enthusiasm and conviction would be unattainable without it. At the same time, you must have observed that the habitual dwellers in cities were less sensitive to these stimuli than those who were comparatively unused to them. Habit breeds callousness. The nightly lounge at the theater and the opera, the weekly crowd at church, the parade of the fashionable avenues, the annual thronging to summer watering places, these customs only rendered those who indulged in them insensible to the very benefits they were designed to confer.