Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  He also wrote one of the earliest precursors of science fiction, lauded by visionaries such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan. Somnium was written in Latin, as were most learned and scholarly works of the day; somnium means “the dream.”

  This manuscript began as Kepler’s scholarly dissertation in 1593. But because of its controversial theories about the arrangement of the planets, his professors persuaded him not to publish it. In those days, insisting that the Sun was at the center of the solar system could land you in some serious trouble. Instead, Kepler continued to work on the manuscript sporadically for the next thirty-seven years.

  At the core of the work is a description of what life would be like on the surface of the Moon. Of course, this was no idle flight of fancy; Kepler drew on his training as a scientist to envision the Moon’s climate, flora, and fauna based on the most advanced scientific knowledge of the day—knowledge that was still considered controversial by many.

  This aspect of the story might well be considered hard sci-fi, drawing as it does on the era’s most accurate knowledge of natural science. But as Kepler continued to work with the manuscript, he cloaked the science fiction in myth and legend, adding the framing story of a dream and a fantastical journey to the heavens.

  In 1976, science historian Gale E. Christianson wrote in the journal Science Fiction Studies: “There can be little, if any, doubt that Kepler selected the framework of the Dream to satisfy two major demands: First, fewer objections could be raised among the ranks of those still within the Aristotelian orbit by passing off this Copernican treatise as a figment of an idle slumberer’s uncontrollable imagination; and secondly, it enabled Kepler to introduce a mythical agent or power capable of transporting humans to the lunar surface.”

  The dream framing begins to feel almost metafictional—perhaps Calvino-esque—in its layers of obfuscation. The story opens in first person, as Kepler writes that he was reading stories of the legends of Bohemia. Then he falls asleep and begins to dream. In his dream he reads a book. And within that book is the actual story, about a young boy named Duracotus.

  One day, Duracotus makes the grievous error of angering his mother Fiolxhilde, who sells him to a ship captain. Duracotus gets seasick and the captain leaves him in the care of real-life astronomer Tycho Brahe, under whom Kepler himself studied for many years. Like Kepler, Duracotus becomes an astronomer and discovers the secrets of the celestial bodies.

  After five years, Duracotus returns home to Fiolxhilde, who has regretted her impulsive child-selling and is pleased to have him back. He tells her what he’s learned about the skies. In turn, she reveals that she has her own knowledge of the heavens, imparted by spirits who can teleport her wherever she pleases. She calls on one of these daemons to transport the two of them to the Moon, aka the island of Lavania and home of the spirits. Soon after, the two of them are borne on the 50,000-mile journey to the Moon. (The Moon is actually considerably farther away than that, but not an awful guess on Kepler’s part, either.)

  Here is where the text turns to science fiction. The rigors of the journey are described in detail. Once they arrive, Duracotus and his mother begin a detailed tour of the lunar satellite—where the extreme temperatures, low gravity, and rocky terrain suggest a very different world than our own. Kepler postulated that the extreme temperatures and low gravity on the Moon would produce totally foreign flora and fauna—for example, he imagined that creatures on the Moon would grow to massive sizes. He imagined that these large, snakelike creatures would spend much of their time roaming in the darkness, eluding the harsh, hot sun that in the unprotected atmosphere would quickly kill them.

  Though now fundamental to science-fiction worldbuilding, at the time these ideas were positively groundbreaking. Christianson writes, “Nearly two centuries before Buffon, Lyell, and Darwin, Kepler had grasped the close interrelationship between life forms and their natural environment.”

  Then the dreamer awakes, and the story is over.

  Kepler began to pass around this manuscript-in-progress to some of his friends and colleagues. In 1611, one of these manuscript copies went missing, and began circulating among people who were less friendly to him. The autobiographical elements were obvious, so, it stood to reason that his real-life mother, Katharina Kepler, probably communed with spirits and demons. One humorous aside in Somnium consolidated the association, as Kepler wrote of the trip to the Moon: “The best adapted for the journey are dried-out old women, since from youth they are accustomed to riding goats at night, or pitchforks, or traveling the wide expanses of the earth in worn-out clothes.”

  In 1615, Katharina was charged with practicing witchcraft. In further damning evidence against Katharina, her aunt had also been accused as a witch and burned at the stake; it was well-known that female pacts with the devil typically ran in families.

  It was a tragic, and ironic, turn of events. Though the mythological aspects of the manuscript might have protected Kepler from the persecution of the Aristotelian astronomers, they exposed his mother to the machinations of the witchhunters.

  Johannes Kepler was the first of many scientists to moonlight as a science-fiction writer. His research offered a scientific foundation for a speculative tale.

  For the next five years, Kepler turned all his attention to clearing Katharina’s name. She spent fourteen months in jail. Finally, she was freed, but the stress of her imprisonment had taken a toll. She died soon after.

  Guilt-stricken by it all and motivated to take a stand, Kepler decided it was time to finally complete Somnium. Between Katharina’s death in 1622 and 1630, he wrote 223 footnotes, which became the bulk of the text and expanded significantly on his scientific theories. In any case, the tides were turning and the Aristotelians didn’t hold the same power they once did. The scientific community was turning toward Copernican ideas such as Kepler’s.

  Though he meant to publish Somnium, he did not have a chance. In 1630, he fell suddenly ill and died. In 1634, his son Ludwig Kepler published the work, less in honor of his father’s wishes and more from financial desperation—Kepler’s widow, Ludwig’s mother, was in dire financial straits.

  As noted, Somnium was originally published in Latin. To this day, English translations remain limited, obscure, and difficult to obtain. Perhaps, in the twenty-first century, this oversight will finally be rectified.

  How Jules Verne’s Worst Rejection Letter Shaped Science Fiction . . . for 150 Years

  French writer Jules Verne (1828–1905) is known for his Voyages extraordinaires, novels that include the classics Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, Verne penned more than sixty of these adventures, laying the groundwork for the highly imaginative narratives of more than a century to come. He has even been called “the father of science fiction.”

  Verne’s novels have inspired many successful films and been translated into more than 140 languages. And his tales of bold exploration have fueled the fantasies and ambitions of real-life adventurers and record-breakers. The famous science-fiction author Ray Bradbury once wrote, “We are all, in one way or another, children of Jules Verne. His name never stops. At aerospace or NASA gatherings, Verne is the verb that moves us to space.”

  So you can imagine the excitement of Verne aficionados, science-fiction fans, and lovers of French literature when in 1989, Verne’s great-grandson discovered the lost manuscript: Paris in the 20th Century, written 126 years before. The manuscript might never have been found if not for the youthful imagination of the younger Verne, who as a child had dreamed about the contents of a locked safe that had been in the family for generations, and the treasures it might contain. “Everyone thought it was empty, but in my imagination it was full of precious stones, gold, and fabulous jewels and strange objects given to or collected by my great-grandfather,” said Jean Jules-Verne.

  As an adult, Jean Jules-Verne hired a locksmith to force open the old safe, revealing its contents. There were no
jewels within. Instead, the safe contained Paris in the 20th Century, a never-before-published novel by the late, great Jules Verne. The book was published in France in 1994, and soon appeared in translation all around the world.

  When manuscripts are discovered under such auspicious circumstances, it’s common to doubt their authenticity. However, this one was easily proven to be a Verne original. The paper, ink, and handwriting matched other Verne manuscripts. Notes from Verne’s editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, were scribbled in the margins, and that handwriting was also authenticated by experts. Most importantly, noted Verne scholar Piero Gondolo della Riva already possessed a letter written by Verne’s editor, rejecting the book in no uncertain terms.

  Émile-Antoine Bayard’s illustrations for Jules Verne’s Around the Moon (1870) are some of the first to depict a technological approach to space travel.

  Verne had already made a name for himself with the swashbuckling adventure stories that he’s still known for today, arming contemporary Industrial Age heroes with futuristic technology and pitting them against the terrors of nature. Paris in the 20th Century was a very different kind of book: a grim vision of the future, both philosophical and prophetic. Verne scholar Arthur B. Evans writes in Science Fiction Studies, “Despite its frequent (very Vernian) detailed descriptions of high-tech gadgetry and its occasional flashes of wit and humor, this dark and troubling tale paints a future world that is oppressive, unjust, and spiritually hollow. Instead of epic adventure, the reader encounters pathos and social satire.”

  Verne’s editor was unimpressed. “I’m surprised at you,” Hetzel wrote. “I was hoping for something better. In this piece, there is not a single issue concerning the real future that is properly resolved, no critique that hasn’t already been made and remade before.” Hetzel called the manuscript “tabloidish,” “lackluster,” and “lifeless.” He told Verne that publishing the book would be a disaster for his reputation.

  Apparently convinced by this litany of discouragement, Verne put the novel aside and returned to writing adventure stories. Instead of Paris in the 20th Century, Verne’s next published novel was Journey to the Center of the Earth, which remains popular with fans even today.

  Édouard Riou illustration from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1863).

  Nevertheless, when Paris in the 20th Century was finally published in the 1990s, contemporary audiences were fascinated by the opportunity to explore Verne’s vision of his future—which, as the book was set in the 1960s, now concerned a time long past. Many of Verne’s predictions of the modern age turned out to be shockingly on-point, both in his depiction of future technology and his vision of future social norms. Film archivist Brian Taves writes, “Virtually every page is crowded with evidence of Verne’s ability to forecast the science and life of the future, from feminism to the rise of illegitimate births, from email to burglar alarms, from the growth of suburbs to mass-produced higher education, including the dissolution of humanities departments.”

  Though its prescience is striking, many readers agreed that as a work of fiction, the novel leaves something to be desired. The story follows a young poet whose talents are deemed worthless by a society that only cares about business and profit. While his misfortunes are distressing, they don’t quite coalesce into a coherent plot; it’s a novel driven by character, written by an author for whom character development was never his strongest suit.

  One thing is certain: In steering Verne away from the literary undertaking represented by Paris in the 20th Century, and back toward a science fiction of exploration and adventure, Hetzel did much more than shape Verne’s career. Voyages extraordinaires became a template for the genre. Science fiction became stories of space, technology, exploration, adventure, frontiers, and conquest, a paradigm that continued for quite some time, and still shapes the genre today. Yet science fiction’s greatest practitioners are often those who view it less as an opportunity for escapism, and more as a framework for imaging the world as it could be.

  CHRISTIE YANT

  Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century

  Steam-powered lawn mowers and plows; surgical and domestic automatons; mail delivered across great distances by a system of canons and wire nets; collapsible tea service; cross-continental travel by portable balloon; irrigation using cloud-capture via electrical machine; fireproof paper and cloaks made from asbestos; the mobile home; the inflatable bed and spring-coil mattress; central air; the ceiling fan; machine-made apparel; the air compressor; the espresso machine; suborbital space flight.

  These are just a few of the innovations imagined in Jane Webb Loudon’s (1807–1858) 1827 novel The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century.

  Born in 1807 to a wealthy Birmingham couple, Jane Webb’s mother died when she was only eight years old, after which she traveled extensively with her father, Thomas Webb. Their travels exposed young Jane to a variety of cultures, languages, and governments. A reversal of fortunes afflicted them before his death in 1824, leaving Jane orphaned and without financial support at the age of seventeen.

  Jane had written some poetry, and hoped that her writing might support her. She published her first book, Prose and Verse, in 1826. Her second book, published anonymously in three volumes when she was twenty years old, was The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century.

  The story commences in the year 2126, under the Catholic reign of Queen Claudia—who, while presiding over a time of peace and prosperity, is not a particularly engaged ruler. England being a matriarchy in this imagined future, two cousins will vie for the future of the throne: Rosabella and Elvira, who are being courted by the sons of nobility, Edric and Edmund. Of the two, Edmund has the greater distinction, having recently returned from a successful military engagement. Edric is ashamed of his own lack of accomplishments, his passions lying in the direction of natural philosophy. Seeking to equal his brother’s fame, with the help of Dr. Entwerfen and his “galvanic battery of fifty surgeon power,” he resolves to reanimate the Pharaoh Cheops.

  Comparisons have been made to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published nine years earlier, and while Frankenstein was almost certainly an inspiration, the similarities are few. In both, the dead are brought back to life via electricity, and the reanimated men certainly make for a gloomy and ostracized pair—but we spend very little time with Loudon’s mummy. Romance, matchmaking, political intrigue, and melodramatic philosophizing make up much of the tale—even the resurrected mummy Cheops adds drama more in his angsty monologuing and meddling in current affairs than in revealing secrets of the grave. Loudon’s future is optimistic and full of imagination, glamour, and humor in equal parts.

  At a richly described formal ball, the women are adorned by headdresses of “capillaries of contained flame”—a precursor, perhaps, to neon. Coffee is served by “a patent steam coffee-machine, by which coffee was roasted, ground, made, and poured out with an ad libitum of boiling milk and sugar, all in the short space of five minutes,” an innovation easily recognizable in every Starbucks today. A moment of slapstick comedy ensues when Dr. Entwerfen’s “steam-powered valet” is sabotaged by the cook, and explodes in the process of brushing down the doctor’s coat, leaving him drenched and scalded.

  Forty-six years before Jules Verne sent Phileas Fogg around the world in a hot air balloon, Dr. Entwerfen made preparations to travel more quickly from England to Egypt by what today we might recognize as suborbital space flight:

  “The cloaks are of asbestos, and will be necessary to protect us from ignition, if we should encounter any electric matter in the clouds; and the hampers are filled with elastic plugs for our ears and noses, and tubes and barrels of common air, for us to breathe when we get beyond the atmosphere of the earth.” “But what occasion shall we have to go beyond it?” “How can we do otherwise? Surely you don’t mean to travel the whole distance in the balloon?”

  Jane Webb’s novel was a success. Her agricultural innovations caught the e
ye of botanist John Loudon, who wrote a favorable review of the book in a gardening journal, and arranged a meeting with the author (presuming the anonymous author to be a man) to discuss the steam-driven plow and lawn mowing machines introduced in the book. They were married shortly thereafter.

  Jane Webb Loudon went on to revolutionize another field: gardening. While helping her husband with his botanical encyclopedia, she realized that no such handbook existed for the layperson, so she wrote one, opening up the hobby of gardening to the British middle class. She then turned her hand to botanical illustration, and became one of the most notable artists in the field.

  She never did return to writing fiction. Today she is best known for her gardening manuals, and is credited with creating the first example of the Mummy trope. But to the science-fiction reader and writer, it’s the many technological “innovations and improvements” she imagined in The Mummy! that are most memorable, and their influence most recognizable in the literature that came after.

  Jane Webb Loudon also popularized gardening as a hobby for young ladies via her accessible and beautifully illustrated horticultural manuals.

  Perhaps the most prescient part of Loudon’s book lies in her own Introduction, in which she shares the dream of a spirit visitation that inspired her to write The Mummy! The dream-spirit’s reassurance to the nascent author may also serve as a guiding light for the literary genre she helped to create:

  “The scenes will indeed be different from those you now behold; the whole face of society will be changed: New governments will have arisen; strange discoveries will be made, and stranger modes of life adopted. . . . Though strange, it may be fully understood, for much will still remain to connect that future age with the present. The impulses and feelings of human creatures must, for the most part, be alike in all ages: Habits vary, but nature endures; and the same passions were delineated, the same weaknesses ridiculed, by Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence, as in after-times were described by Shakespeare and Molière; and as will be in the times of which you are to write—by authors yet unknown.”