by James Gunn
Animula (let me now call her by that dear name which I subsequently bestowed on her) had changed her position. She had again approached the wondrous forest, and was gazing earnestly upwards. Presently one of the trees—as I must call them—unfolded a long ciliary process, with which it seized one of the gleaming fruits that glittered on its summit, and, sweeping slowly down, held it within reach of Animula. The sylph took it in her delicate hand and began to eat. My attention was so entirely absorbed by her, that I could not apply myself to the task of determining whether this singular plant was or was not instinct with volition.
I watched her, as she made her repast, with the most profound attention. The suppleness of her motions sent a thrill of delight through my frame; my heart beat madly as she turned her beautiful eyes in the direction of the spot in which I stood. What would I not have given to have had the power to precipitate myself into that luminous ocean, and float with her through those groves of purple and gold! While I was thus breathlessly following her every movement, she suddenly started, seemed to listen for a moment, and then cleaving the brilliant ether in which she was floating, like a flash of light, pierced through the opaline forest, and disappeared.
Instantly a series of the most singular sensations attacked me. It seemed as if I had suddenly gone blind. The luminous sphere was still before me, but my daylight had vanished. What caused this sudden disappearance? Had she a lover or a husband? Yes, that was the solution! Some signal from a happy fellow-being had vibrated through the avenues of the forest, and she had obeyed the summons.
The agony of my sensations, as I arrived at this conclusion, startled me. I tried to reject the conviction that my reason forced upon me. I battled against the fatal conclusion,—but in vain. It was so. I had no escape from it. I loved an animalcule!
It is true that, thanks to the marvellous power of my microscope, she appeared of human proportions. Instead of presenting the revolting aspect of the coarser creatures, that live and struggle and die, in the more easily resolvable portions of the water-drop, she was fair and delicate and of surpassing beauty. But of what account was all that? Every time that my eye was withdrawn from the instrument, it fell on a miserable drop of water, within which, I must be content to know, dwelt all that could make my life lovely.
Could she but see me once! Could I for one moment pierce the mystical walls that so inexorably rose to separate us, and whisper all that filled my soul, I might consent to be satisfied for the rest of my life with the knowledge of her remote sympathy. It would be something to have established even the faintest personal link to bind us together,—to know that at times, when roaming through those enchanted glades, she might think of the wonderful stranger, who had broken the monotony of her life with his presence, and left a gentle memory in her heart!
But it could not be. No invention of which human intellect was capable could break down the barriers that Nature had erected. I might feast my soul upon her wondrous beauty, yet she must always remain ignorant of the adoring eyes that day and night gazed upon her, and, even when closed, beheld her in dreams. With a bitter cry of anguish I fled from the room, and, flinging myself on my bed, sobbed myself to sleep like a child.
VI
THE SPILLING OF THE CUP
I arose the next morning almost at daybreak, and rushed to my microscope. I trembled as I sought the luminous world in miniature that contained my all. Animula was there. I had left the gas-lamp, surrounded by its moderators, burning, when I went to bed the night before. I found the sylph bathing, as it were, with an expression of pleasure animating her features, in the brilliant light which surrounded her. She tossed her lustrous golden hair over her shoulders with innocent coquetry. She lay at full length in the transparent medium, in which she supported herself with ease, and gambolled with the enchanting grace that the nymph Salmacis might have exhibited when she sought to conquer the modest Hermaphroditus. I tried an experiment to satisfy myself if her powers of reflection were developed. I lessened the lamp-light considerably. By the dim light that remained, I could see an expression of pain flit across her face. She looked upward suddenly, and her brows contracted. I flooded the stage of the microscope again with a full stream of light, and her whole expression changed. She sprang forward like some substance deprived of all weight. Her eyes sparkled and her lips moved. Ah! if science had only the means of conducting and reduplicating sounds, as it does the rays of light, what carols of happiness would then have entranced my ears! what jubilant hymns to Adonaïs would have thrilled the illumined air!
I now comprehended how it was that the Count de Gabalis peopled his mystic world with sylphs,—beautiful beings whose breath of life was lambent fire, and who sported forever in regions of purest ether and purest light. The Rosicrucian had anticipated the wonder that I had practically realized.
How long this worship of my strange divinity went on thus I scarcely know. I lost all note of time. All day from early dawn, and far into the night, I was to be found peering through that wonderful lens. I saw no one, went nowhere, and scarce allowed myself sufficient time for my meals. My whole life was absorbed in contemplation as rapt as that of any of the Romish saints. Every hour that I gazed upon the divine form strengthened my passion, a passion that was always overshadowed by the maddening conviction, that, although I could gaze on her at will, she never, never could behold me!
At length, I grew so pale and emaciated, from want of rest, and continual brooding over my insane love and its cruel conditions, that I determined to make some effort to wean myself from it. “Come,” I said, “this is at best but a fantasy. Your imagination has bestowed on Animula charms which in reality she does not possess. Seclusion from female society has produced this morbid condition of mind. Compare her with the beautiful women of your own world, and this false enchantment will vanish.”
I looked over the newspapers by chance. There I beheld the advertisement of a celebrated danseuse who appeared nightly at Niblo’s. The Signorina Caradolce had the reputation of being the most beautiful as well as the most graceful woman in the world. I instantly dressed and went to the theatre.
The curtain drew up. The usual semicircle of fairies in white muslin were standing on the right toe around the enamelled flower-bank, of green canvas, on which the belated prince was sleeping. Suddenly a flute is heard. The fairies start. The trees open, the fairies all stand on the left toe, and the queen enters. It was the Signorina. She bounded forward amid thunders of applause, and, lighting on one foot, remained poised in air. Heavens! was this the great enchantress that had drawn monarchs at her chariot-wheels? Those heavy muscular limbs, those thick ankles, those cavernous eyes, that stereotyped smile, those crudely painted cheeks! Where were the vermeil blooms, the liquid expressive eyes, the harmonious limbs of Animula?
The Signorina danced. What gross, discordant movements! The play of her limbs was all false and artificial. Her bounds were painful athletic efforts; her poses were angular and distressed the eye. I could bear it no longer; with an exclamation of disgust that drew every eye upon me, I rose from my seat in the very middle of the Signorina’s pas-de-fascination, and abruptly quitted the house.
I hastened home to feast my eyes once more on the lovely form of my sylph I felt that henceforth to combat this passion would be impossible. I applied my eye to the lens. Animula was there,—but what could have happened? Some terrible change seemed to have taken place during my absence. Some secret grief seemed to cloud the lovely features of her I gazed upon. Her face had grown thin and haggard; her limbs trailed heavily; the wondrous lustre of her golden hair had faded. She was ill!—ill, and I could not assist her! I believe at that moment I would have gladly forfeited all claims to my human birthright, if I could only have been dwarfed to the size of an animalcule, and permitted to console her from whom fate had forever divided me.
I racked my brain for the solution of this mystery. What was it that afflicted the sylph? She seemed to suffer intense pain. Her features contracted, and she even writh
ed, as if with some internal agony. The wondrous forests appeared also to have lost half their beauty. Their hues were dim and in some places faded away altogether. I watched Animula for hours with a breaking heart, and she seemed absolutely to wither away under my very eye. Suddenly I remembered that I had not looked at the water-drop for several days. In fact, I hated to see it; for it reminded me of the natural barrier between Animula and myself. I hurriedly looked down on the stage of the microscope. The slide was still there,—but, great heavens! the water-drop had vanished! The awful truth burst upon me; it had evaporated, until it had become so minute as to be invisible to the naked eye; I had been gazing on its last atom, the one that contained Animula,—and she was dying!
I rushed again to the front of the lens, and looked through. Alas! the last agony had seized her. The rainbow-hued forests had all melted away, and Animula lay struggling feebly in what seemed to be a spot of dim light. Ah! the sight was horrible: the limbs once so round and lovely shrivelling up into nothings; the eyes—those eyes that shone like heaven—being quenched into black dust; the lustrous golden hair now lank and discolored. The last throe came. I beheld that final struggle of the blackening form—and I fainted.
When I awoke out of a trance of many hours, I found myself lying amid the wreck of my instrument, myself as shattered in mind and body as it. I crawled feebly to my bed, from which I did not rise for months.
They say now that I am mad; but they are mistaken. I am poor, for I have neither the heart nor the will to work; all my money is spent, and I live on charity. Young men’s associations that love a joke invite me to lecture on Optics before them, for which they pay me, and laugh at me while I lecture. “Linley, the mad microscopist,” is the name I go by. I suppose that I talk incoherently while I lecture. Who could talk sense when his brain is haunted by such ghastly memories, while ever and anon among the shapes of death I behold the radiant form of my lost Animula!
The Indispensable Frenchman
If the writers who have contributed to the development of science fiction up to the second half of the nineteenth century had decided to write something else instead, conceivably science fiction would have developed much the same. That cannot be said about Jules Verne (1828–1905). Paradoxical as it may sound, Verne was greatly influenced by writers who preceded him; the technology that fueled his novels was not visionary, yet what he wrote about and the way he wrote about it was indispensable to the evolution and popular acceptance of the new literature of science and technology.
Verne was born into an age when engineers were reshaping the world, most dramatically in transportation. They were making the world a smaller place, and a more convenient place for man. Previous generations had taken what nature made available. They had built their cities on seacoasts or on rivers because water transportation was cheap. Now engineers began dredging canals where rivers did not run (the Bridgewater Canal in England was completed in 1761, the Erie Canal in the United States in 1825, the Suez Canal in 1869), and where canals were not feasible, they built railways (beginning in 1825 in England, in 1830 in the United States). Steamboats turned the crossing of the Atlantic into a two-week jaunt. The transatlantic submarine cable was completed in 1866 and brought Europe and the United States into instantaneous communication.
Distant parts of the world were being explored: dark Africa, strange islands, the frozen wastes of the Arctic and the Antarctic; explorers were the heroes of the age. New sources of energy and materials were being developed. The age of chemistry was beginning with the creation of chemical fertilizer and plastics. Electricity was being applied to a variety of marvelous mechanisms—phonographs, electric lights, street railways—and it soon would replace steam as the new scientific miracle.
Verne, the son of a lawyer, himself educated as a lawyer, was a man of his times, fascinated by geography and invention, but instead of turning to a career in science or engineering, he wrote about the romance of science and technology. His early ambition was to write for the stage, and his father supported him for some years while he wrote plays and librettos, none of which brought him fame or wealth. Finally Verne married a young widow with two daughters, persuaded his father to buy him a seat on the Paris Stock Exchange, and apparently settled down to a middle-class career. But he continued to write, working early in the morning until the exchange opened at ten.
He was an admirer of James Fenimore Cooper, of Sir Walter Scott, of Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, but particularly of Poe, who enjoyed a greater reputation in Europe than in the United States. The engineering excitement of the times and Poe’s example (“The Balloon-Hoax”) combined with Verne’s friendship with a balloonist to produce a book about ballooning. At the suggestion of the man who would become his lifelong publisher, Jules Hetzel, Verne reworked the book into a novel. It was published in 1863 as Five Weeks in a Balloon and launched Verne on a career of writing two books a year for the rest of his long life.
His first book was an adventure story—a voyage extraordinaire, as Verne called his scientific romances, most of which were journeys of one sort or another—but it was only remotely science fiction; ballooning was eighty years old in 1863, and Verne’s balloon was only an improved model, just as his submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was only an improved model of submarines already in existence. Verne’s next book was science fiction without a doubt: A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864); it was inspired by Holberg’s book and by new discoveries in geology. Then came From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel (although he made his impatient readers wait five years to find out what happened to the travelers in his projectile), Round the Moon (1870).
Verne spent most of his life writing about one unusual journey after another, many of them science fiction as well. The best known of these were Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and its sequel, The Mysterious Island (1875), Hector Servadac, or Off on a Comet (1877), Robur the Conqueror (1886), and The Master of the World (1905). He also wrote other kinds of fiction, including Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), which made his fortune, Matthias Sandorf and Michael Strogoff, but aside from the first of these it is for his science fiction that he is remembered today.
Verne wrote simple stories about uncomplicated people. His ideas were not particularly original; most of them he got from authors he admired. His plots consisted of abductions, searches, mysteries, and ambitious undertakings; the events of the stories were often marked by accident and coincidence (which he considered to be evidence of divine intervention in human affairs). He was commended by Pope Leo XIII for the purity of his writing.
Verne was tremendously popular in his own time, and he created a mass audience for suspenseful stories in which travel was a principal motif, but the mechanism of travel belonged to the technology of the future. He was the second of the two writers Gernsback pointed at in 1926 when he told his readers what he was going to publish in Amazing Stories.
Because he devoted most of his career to writing science fiction (and made a fortune at it), Verne can be called the first science-fiction writer.
From Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
BY JULES VERNE
CHAPTER X
THE MAN OF THE SEAS
It was the commander of the vessel who thus spoke.
At these words, Ned Land rose suddenly. The steward, nearly strangled, tottered out on a sign from his master; but such was the power of the commander on board, that not a gesture betrayed the resentment which this man must have felt toward the Canadian. Conseil interested in spite of himself, I stupefied, awaited in silence the result of this scene.
The commander, leaning against a corner of the table with his arms folded, scanned us with profound attention. Did he hesitate to speak? Did he regret the words which he had just spoken in French? One might almost think so.
After some moments of silence, which not one of us dreamed of breaking, “Gentlemen,” said he, in a calm and penetrating voice, “I speak French, English, G
erman, and Latin equally well. I could, therefore, have answered you at our first interview, but I wished to know you first, then to reflect. The story told by each one, entirely agreeing in the main points, convinced me of your identity. I know now that chance has brought before me M. Pierre Aronnax, Professor of Natural History at the Museum of Paris, intrusted with a scientific mission abroad; Conseil, his servant; and Ned Land, of Canadian origin, harpooner on board the frigate Abraham Lincoln of the navy of the United States of America.”
I bowed assent. It was not a question that the commander put to me. Therefore there was no answer to be made. This man expressed himself with perfect ease, without any accent. His sentences were well turned, his words clear, and his fluency of speech remarkable. Yet I did not recognize in him a fellow-countryman.
“You have doubtless thought, sir, that I have delayed long in paying you this second visit. The reason is that, your identity recognized, I wished to weigh maturely what part to act toward you. I have hesitated much. Most annoying circumstances have brought you into the presence of a man who has broken all the ties of humanity. You have come to trouble my existence.”
“Unintentionally!” said I.
“Unintentionally?” replied the stranger, raising his voice a little; “was it unintentionally that the Abraham Lincoln pursued me all over the seas? Was it unintentionally that you took passage in this frigate? Was it unintentionally that your cannon-balls rebounded off the plating of my vessel? Was it unintentionally that Mr. Ned Land struck me with his harpoon?”
I detected a restrained irritation in these words. But to these recriminations I had a very natural answer to make, and I made it.