The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  And in that isle there is a great wonder; for all kinds of fish that are there in the sea come once a year, one kind after the other, to the coast of that isle in so great a multitude that a man can see hardly anything but fish; and there they remain three days; and every man of the country takes as many of them as he likes. And that kind of fish, after the third day, departs and goes into the sea. And after them come another multitude of fish of another kind, and do in the same manner as the first did another three days; and so on with the other kinds, till all the divers kinds of fishes have been there, and men have taken what they like of them. And no man knows the cause; but they of the country say that it is to do reverence to their king, who is the most worthy king in the world, as they say, because he fulfils the commandment of God to Adam and Eve, “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth”; and because he multiplies so the world with children, therefore God sends him the fishes of divers kinds, to take at his will, for him and all his people; and thus all the fishes of the sea come to do him homage as the most noble and excellent king of the world, and that is best beloved of God, as they say.

  There are also in that country a kind of snails, so great that many persons may lodge in their shells, as men would do in a little house. And there are other snails that are very great, but not so huge as the other, of which, and of great white serpents with black heads, that are as great as a man’s thigh, and some less, they make royal meats for the king and other great lords. And if a man who is married die in that country, they bury his wife alive with him, for they say that it is right that she make him company in the other world, as she did in this.

  From that country they go by the Sea of Ocean, by an isle called Caffolos; the natives of which, when their friends are sick, hang them on trees, and say that it is better that birds, which are angels of God, eat them, than the foul worms of the earth. Then we come to another isle, the inhabitants of which are of full cursed kind, for they breed great dogs, and teach them to strangle their friends, when they are sick, for they will not let them die of natural death; for they say that they should suffer great pain if they abide to die by themselves, as nature would; and, when they are thus strangled, they eat their flesh as though it were venison.

  Afterwards men go by many isles by sea to an isle called Milk, where are very cursed people; for they delight in nothing more than to fight and slay men; and they drink most gladly man’s blood, which they call Dieu. And the more men that a man may slay, the more worship he hath amongst them. And thence they go by sea, from isle to isle, to an isle called Tracoda, the inhabitants of which are as beasts, and unreasonable, and dwell in caves which they make in the earth, for they have not sense to make houses. And when they see any man passing through their countries they hide them in their caves. And they eat flesh of serpents, and they speak nought, but hiss, as serpents do.

  After that isle, men go by the Sea of Ocean, by many isles, to a great and fair isle called Nacumera, which is in circuit more than a thousand miles. And all the men and women of that isle have dogs’ heads; and they are reasonable and of good understanding, except that they worship an ox for their god. And also every man of them beareth an ox of gold or silver on his forehead, in token that they love well their god. And they go all naked, except a little clout, and are large men and warlike, having a great target that covers all the body, and a spear in their hand to fight with. And if they take any man in battle they eat him. The king is rich and powerful, and very devout after his law; and he has about his neck three hundred orient pearls, knotted, as paternosters are here of amber. And as we say our Pater Noster and Ave Maria, counting the paternosters right, so this king says every day devoutly three hundred prayers to his god, before he eats; and he beareth also about his neck an orient ruby, noble and fine, which is a foot in length, and five fingers large.

  And when they choose their king, they give him that ruby to carry in his hand, and so they lead him riding all about the city. And that ruby he shall bear always about his neck; for if he had not that ruby upon him they would not hold him for king. The chan of Cathay has greatly coveted that ruby, but he might never have it, neither for war, nor for any manner of goods. This king is so righteous and equitable in his judgments, that men may go safely through all his country, and bear with them what they like, and no man shall be bold enough to rob them.

  Hence men go to another isle called Silha, which is full eight hundred miles in circuit. In that land is much waste, for it is so full of serpents, dragons, and cockodrills, that no man dare dwell there. These cockodrills are serpents, yellow and rayed above, having four feet, and short thighs, and great nails like claws; and some are five fathoms in length, and some of six, eight, or even ten; and when they go by places that are gravelly, it appears as if men had drawn a great tree through the gravelly place. And there are also many wild beasts, especially elephants.

  In that isle is a great mountain, in the midst of which is a large lake in a full fair plain, and there is great plenty of water. And they of the country say that Adam and Eve wept on that mount a hundred years, when they were driven out of Paradise. And that water, they say, is of their tears; for so much water they wept, that made the aforesaid lake. And at the bottom of that lake are found many precious stones and great pearls. In that lake grow many reeds and great canes, and there within are many cockodrills and serpents, and great water leeches. And the king of that country, once every year, gives leave to poor men to go into the lake to gather precious stones and pearls, by way of alms, for the love of God, that made Adam. To guard against the vermin, they anoint their arms, thighs, and legs with an ointment made of a thing called limons, which is a kind of fruit like small pease, and then they have no dread of cockodrills, or other venomous things. This water runs, flowing and ebbing, by a side of the mountain; and in that river men find precious stones and pearls, in great abundance. And the people of that isle say commonly, that the serpents and wild beasts of the country, will do no harm to any foreigner that enters that country, but only to men that are born there.

  CHAPTER XIX

  HOW MEN KNOW BY AN IDOL IF THE SICK SHALL DIE OR NOT—OF PEOPLE OF DIVERS SHAPES, AND MARVELLOUSLY DISFIGURED; AND OF THE MONKS THAT GIVE THEIR RELIEF TO BABOONS, APES, MONKEYS, AND TO OTHER BEASTS

  From that isle, in going by sea towards the south, is another great isle, called Dondun, in which are people of wicked kinds, so that the father eats the son, the son the father, the husband the wife, and the wife the husband. And if it so befall that the father or mother or any of their friends are sick, the son goes to the priest of their law, and prays him to ask the idol if his father or mother or friend shall die; and then the priest and the son go before the idol, and kneel full devoutly, and ask of the idol; and if the devil that is within answer that he shall live, they keep him well; and if he say that he shall die, then the priest and the son go with the wife of him that is sick, and they put their hands upon his mouth and stop his breath, and so kill him. And after that, they chop all the body in small pieces, and pray all his friends to come and eat; and they send for all the minstrels of the country and make a solemn feast. And when they have eaten the flesh, they take the bones and bury them, and sing and make great melody.

  The king of this isle is a great and powerful lord, and has under him fifty-four great isles, which give tribute to him; and in every one of these isles is a king crowned, all obedient to that king. In one of these isles are people of great stature, like giants, hideous to look upon; and they have but one eye, which is in the middle of the forehead; and they eat nothing but raw flesh and fish. And in another isle towards the south dwell people of foul stature and cursed nature, who have no heads, but their eyes are in their shoulders. . . .

  The Good Place That Is No Place

  Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) wrote his Canterbury Tales about 1387 and Malory his Morte d’Arthur in 1469. They were the last of the great works of the Middle Ages. Both had elements of the fantastic and the supernatural; both were expressions of a
world view that demanded a necessary role for the supernatural. Even before Chaucer, however, indications already were accumulating that this particular world, with its system of obligations and responsibilities, its hierarchies and its divine intervention, was coming apart.

  The Renaissance began in Italy about the beginning of the fourteenth century, a century in which gunpowder was introduced into Europe and initiated the process of turning warriors into soldiers. In England the portent was Roger Bacon (c. 1214–c. 1294), a Franciscan friar who espoused the virtues of natural science, experiment, and direct observation in a period when ignorance was valued more highly than knowledge. Saint Augustine (354–430) wrote, “Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all powers of the human mind.” The only historical novel about Roger Bacon, Doctor Mirabalis (1964, revised 1973), was written by science fiction author James Blish.

  Bacon quarreled with many prominent people, was accused of magic and astrology, and was thrown into prison in 1277, where he remained for fifteen years. On his deathbed he is reputed to have said, “I repent of having given myself so much trouble to destroy ignorance.” But his vision of a future of human accomplishment was like a foreshadowing of science fiction in the Middle Ages, and would largely come true. In one famous letter, he predicted:

  It is possible that great ships and sea-going vessels shall be made which can be guided by one man and will move with greater swiftness than if they were full of oarsmen.

  It is possible that a car shall be made which will move with inestimable speed, and the motion will be without the help of any living creature. . . .

  It is possible that a device for flying shall be made such that a man sitting in the middle of it and turning a crank shall cause artificial wings to beat the air after the manner of a bird’s flight. . . .

  It is possible also easily to make an instrument by which a single man may violently pull a thousand men toward himself in spite of opposition, or other things which are tractable.

  It is possible also that devices can be made whereby, without bodily danger, a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river. . . .

  Infinite other things can be made, as bridges over rivers without columns or supports, and machines, and unheard-of engines.

  Between the writing of The Canterbury Tales and Morte d’Arthur came the invention of the Gutenberg press; it would begin the process of popularizing literature, by making inexpensive copies available to the general public, that would be completed in the nineteenth century by the development of general literacy. Making literature easily accessible also vulgarized it, in the sense that the ability of large numbers of the populace to buy books led to the writing of books for them. Many critics believe that the novel was invented by and produced for the new middle class that arose in the eighteenth century.

  In 1492 Columbus made the first of his world-shaping voyages to the Americas, and Western Europe’s concept of the world was changed—not merely from flat to round but in scope and image. In the new lands that were being discovered and explored were peoples and creatures as strange and as wonderful as any imagined in the medieval travel books, as much wealth as in Cathay and the fabulous kingdom of Prester John, and more land and rivers and mountains and forests than European man could ever explore.

  From this point on, the isolated places of the world where authors would locate their adventures or their better societies would be undiscovered islands—until the process of exploration would leave no places of the world unexplored. Lost civilizations could still be imagined in Africa or at the poles as late as the 1930s (the 1950s in film), but even in the early part of the twentieth century authors were beginning to look toward the planets and other stars for new islands in the sky.

  Rabelais (c. 1495–1553), a Benedictine monk and scholar, criticized society in two important satirical romances with major elements of the fantastic and the grotesque, Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), and gave his name to a kind of ribald humor that would later be called Rabelaisian.

  A few years earlier a work more important in the history of science fiction was created by a scholar and lawyer, a humanist who became a member of Parliament and later Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII, was unable to approve the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and was executed. His story was dramatized on stage and in film in recent years under the title of A Man for All Seasons. Between 1514 and 1516 Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) wrote a story about a perfect society, placed the society on a distant island, and named the island and the story Utopia. He invented the word, combining the Greek words “ou” meaning “not” and “topos” meaning “place.”

  Utopia means “no place,” but because it describes a better way of organizing society, the word has come to mean “the good place” or “the beautiful place” as well—the good place that is no place, an irony implicit in every utopian vision. The irony, of course, is in part the result of narrative necessity: the utopia must be located in a place that is distant and nearly inaccessible or the reader would have heard of it before and its obvious virtues might have been adopted.

  Although More was inspired by the philosophy of Plato and the accounts of travelers like Amerigo Vespucci (1507), his semifictionalized narrative was the start of a new way of organizing and dramatizing an author’s ideas about how to improve human conditions. More’s Utopia had many successors: Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623); Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1624); Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which also provided a starting point for the anti-utopia or “bad place”; Butler’s Erewhon (1872); Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); and Wells’s The New Utopia and many of his other novels. Because science fiction is in large part a social fiction, the utopia and the anti-utopia, or dystopia, have been a persistent theme in science fiction down to the present.

  As man began to change his own way of life, the possibility of changing it for the better became inescapable, as well, eventually, as the possibility that consciously or unconsciously he might change it for the worse. The more interesting part of Utopia, Book II, is narrated to More in Antwerp by Raphael Hythloday, a seaman who, according to More, accompanied Vespucci on his first three voyages and was left behind, at his own request, on the fourth. He set out on a journey of exploration with his companions and eventually reached the island of Utopia.

  From Utopia

  BY THOMAS MORE

  BOOK II

  The island of Utopia is in the middle two hundred miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it; but it grows narrower towards both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent: between its horns, the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about five hundred miles, and is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current, the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbour, which gives all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce; but the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand, and shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one single rock which appears above water, and may therefore be easily avoided, and on the top of it there is a tower in which a garrison is kept, the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel is known only to the natives, so that if any stranger should enter into the bay, without one of their pilots, he would run great danger of shipwreck; for even they themselves could not pass it safe if some marks that are on the coast did not direct their way; and if these should be but a little shifted, any fleet that might come against them, how great soever it were, would be certainly lost. On the other side of the island there are likewise many harbours; and the coast is so fortified, both by nature and art, that a small number of men can hinder the descent of a great army. But they report (and there remains good marks of it to make it credible) that this was no island at first, but a part of the continent. Utopus that conquered it (whose name it still carries, for Ab
raxa was its first-name) brought the rude and uncivilized inhabitants into such a good government, and to that measure of politeness, that they now far excel all the rest of mankind; having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this, he ordered a deep channel to be dug fifteen miles long; and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. As he set a vast number of men to work, he beyond all men’s expectations brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his neighbours who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection, than they were struck with admiration and terror.

  There are fifty-four cities in the island, all large and well built: the manners, customs, and laws of which are the same, and they are all contrived as near in the same manner as the ground on which they stand will allow. The nearest lie at least twenty-four miles’ distance from one another, and the most remote are not so far distant, but that a man can go on foot in one day from it, to that which lies next it. Every city sends three of their wisest senators once a year to Amaurot, to consult about their common concerns; for that is chief town of the island, being situated near the centre of it, so that it is the most convenient place for their assemblies. The jurisdiction of every city extends at least twenty miles: and where the towns lie wider, they have much more ground: no town desires to enlarge its bounds, for the people consider themselves rather as tenants than landlords. They have built over all the country, farmhouses for husbandmen, which are well contrived, and are furnished with all things necessary for country labour. Inhabitants are sent by turns from the cities to dwell in them; no country family has fewer than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. There is a master and a mistress set over every family; and over thirty families there is a magistrate. Every year twenty of this family come back to the town, after they have stayed two years in the country; and in their room there are other twenty sent from the town, that they may learn country work from those that have been already one year in the country, as they must teach those that come to them the next from the town. By this means such as dwell in those country farms are never ignorant of agriculture, and so commit no errors, which might otherwise be fatal, and bring them under a scarcity of corn. But though there is every year such a shifting of the husbandmen, to prevent any man being forced against his will to follow that hard course of life too long; yet many among them take such pleasure in it, that they desire leave to continue in it many years. These husbandmen till the ground, breed cattle, hew wood, and convey it to the towns, either by land or water, as is most convenient. They breed an infinite multitude of chickens in a very curious manner; for the hens do not sit and hatch them, but vast number of eggs are laid in a gentle and equal heat, in order to be hatched, and they are no sooner out of the shell, and able to stir about, but they seem to consider those that feed them as their mothers, and follow them as other chicken do the hen that hatched them. They breed very few horses, but those they have are full of mettle, and are kept only for exercising their youth in the art of sitting and riding them; for they do not put them to any work, either of ploughing or carriage, in which they employ oxen; for though their horses are stronger, yet they find oxen can hold out longer; and as they are not subject to so many diseases, so they are kept upon a less charge, and with less trouble; and even when they are so worn out, that they are no more fit for labour, they are good meat at last. They sow no corn, but that which is to be their bread; for they drink either wine, cyder, or perry, and often water, sometimes boiled with honey or liquorice, with which they abound; and though they know exactly how much corn will serve every town, and all that tract of country which belongs to it, yet they sow much more, and breed more cattle than are necessary for their consumption; and they give that overplus of which they make no use to their neighbours. When they want anything in the country which it does not produce, they fetch that from the town, without carrying anything in exchange for it. And the magistrates of the town take care to see it given them; for they meet generally in the town once a month, upon a festival day. When the time of harvest comes, the magistrates in the country send to those in the towns, and let them know how many hands they will need for reaping the harvest; and the number they call for being sent to them, they commonly dispatch it all in one day. . . .