The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  “The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation of business in a few powerful hands had no effect to check it proves that there must have been a strong economical reason for it. The small capitalists, with their innumerable petty concerns, had in fact yielded the field to the great aggregations of capital, because they belonged to a day of small things and were totally incompetent to the demands of an age of steam and telegraphs and the gigantic scale of its enterprises. To restore the former order of things, even if possible, would have involved returning to the day of stagecoaches. Oppressive and intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations of capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of management and unity of organization, and to confess that since the new system had taken the place of the old the wealth of the world had increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be sure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer, increasing the gap between them and the poor; but the fact remained that, as a means merely of producing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion to its consolidation The restoration of the old system with the subdivision of capital, if it were possible, might indeed bring back a greater equality of conditions, with more individual dignity and freedom, but it would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest of material progress.

  “Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mighty wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without bowing down to a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon as men began to ask themselves these questions, they found the answer ready for them. The movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had been so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity.

  “Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were instructed to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had then organized for political purposes. At last, strangely late in the world’s history, the obvious fact was perceived that no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles to be conducted for their personal glorification.”

  “Such a stupendous change as you describe,” said I, “did not, of course, take place without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions.”

  “On the contrary,” replied Dr. Leete, “there was absolutely no violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it. There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by argument. On the other hand the popular sentiment toward the great corporations and those identified with them ceased to be one of bitterness, as they came to realize their necessity as a link, a transition phase, in the evolution of the true industrial system. The most violent foes of the great private monopolies were now forced to recognize how invaluable and indispensable had been their office in educating the people up to the point of assuming control of their own business. Fifty years before, the consolidation of the industries of the country under national control would have seemed a very daring experiment to the most sanguine. But by a series of object lessons, seen and studied by all men, the great corporations had taught the people an entirely new set of ideas on this subject. They had seen for many years syndicates handling revenues greater than those of states, and directing the labors of hundreds of thousands of men with an efficiency and economy unattainable in smaller operations. It had come to be recognized as an axiom that the larger the business the simpler the principles that can be applied to it; that, as the machine is truer than the hand, so the system, which in a great concern does the work of the master’s eye in a small business, turns out more accurate results. Thus it came about that, thanks to the corporations themselves, when it was proposed that the nation should assume their functions, the suggestion implied nothing which seemed impracticable even to the timid. To be sure it was a step beyond any yet taken, a broader generalization, but the very fact that the nation would be the sole corporation in the field would, it was seen, relieve the undertaking of many difficulties with which the partial monopolies had contended.”

  1 In accounting for this state of mind it must be remembered that, except for the topic of our conversations, there was in my surroundings next to nothing to suggest what had befallen me. Within a block of my home in the old Boston I could have found social circles vastly more foreign to me. The speech of the Bostonians of the twentieth century differs even less from that of their cultured ancestors of the nineteenth than did that of the latter from the language of Washington and Franklin, while the differences between the style of dress and furniture of the two epochs are not more marked than I have known fashion to make in the time of one generation.

  New Magazines, New Readers, New Writers

  As the nineteenth century moved inexorably toward the twentieth, writers of all kinds turned more and more persistently to the writing of stories about science and technology, and about strange phenomena that suggested how much humanity had yet to learn about the universe. Science was providing new insights into the laws of nature such as Pasteur’s work in biology, Hertz’s work on the propagation of radio waves, Roentgen’s discovery of X rays, and Thomson’s discovery of the electron. Technology provided such inventions as motion pictures, the internal-combustion engine, the incandescent lamp, and the phonograph. But each new advance suggested how much remained to be discovered or invented; each new step into the unknown enlarged the view of what was yet to come.

  New writers were coming forward. The growing middle class and the newly literate laboring class not only were demanding magazines to satisfy their curiosity about the world and their tastes in fiction, they were producing writers who would please them. The stories they liked dealt with the way people lived and behaved, and with adventures they could never experience—Wild West stories, war stories, spy stories, pirate stories, foreign intrigues, romances, explorations, and stories of invention and the future. Most of the adventure stories had been foreshadowed by the dime novels that began to be published in the 1860s, followed by boys’ magazines, and then boys’ novels.

  New processes for the printing of newspapers and magazines had made them cheap enough to produce and sell in large quantities: the invention of the rotary printing press in 1846, the linotype and pulp paper in 1884, the halftone engraving in 1886, and such methods of distribution as the railroad, the automobile, the truck, and a nationwide distribution system, as well as the introduction of general advertising to help pay the bills.

  The first general mass magazine containing fiction was published in England in 1891. It soon was followed by others in Great Britain and in the United States. T
he great period of the mass magazine would last for more than half a century before it succumbed to the competition of television for the advertising dollar and for the eyes of the reader. In 1896, the mass magazines would be joined by the pulp magazines, consisting entirely of fiction, and they, in turn, would give birth to the category pulps—the detective, the western, the love story, and finally, in 1926, the science-fiction magazine—before all but the science-fiction magazines expired in the fifties and sixties.

  In addition to the proliferating markets for fiction, the increasing affluence of society provided opportunities for hopeful authors to make a living at their craft. Among those who made the most of their opportunities was a young, lower-middle-class Englishman named Herbert George Wells, and in the United States, Mark Twain, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce. All of them wrote, frequently or occasionally, what would later be called science fiction.

  Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) occasionally produced stories that contributed to the developing literature of science fiction. After serving in the Union army during the Civil War, he became a journalist in San Francisco and a major West Coast literary figure. His stories, collected in such volumes as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), Can Such Things Be? (1893), and In the Midst of Life (1898), exhibited a fascination with the mysterious and the macabre.

  Bierce brought the techniques of realism to the service of the fantastic. He related the strangest of disappearances and the most mysterious of episodes with commonplace people using their everyday language. The tension between the realistic and the fantastic was in great part responsible for the effectiveness of the stories, a lesson in craftsmanship that would be learned by only a few until much later. Many of his stories also had psychological overtones that added to their sense of verisimilitude.

  Among Bierce’s fantastic stories were “A Horseman in the Sky,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “A Psychological Shipwreck,” “Mysterious Disappearances,” and his two famous works of science fiction, “Moxon’s Master” (1909), one of the earliest robot stories, and “The Damned Thing” (1898).

  “The Damned Thing” is typical of a kind of science-fiction story that focuses on a fantastic event that has no explanation except one that science has not yet discovered. The story has its psychological basis in the observed fact that new discoveries about the nature of the universe continue to be made, and the most profound of the discoveries are unpredictable and would have been incomprehensible to an earlier generation. As Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  “The Damned Thing” was not the first story about an invisible creature. Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It? A Mystery” (1859) has already been cited; Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) wrote a similar story, “The Horla” (1887).

  Bierce, who was so fascinated by mysterious disappearances, disappeared mysteriously in Mexico in 1913. The date of his death is only a guess.

  The Damned Thing

  BY AMBROSE BIERCE

  CHAPTER I

  ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS EAT WHAT IS ON THE TABLE

  By the light of a tallow candle which had been placed on one end of a rough table a man was reading something written in a book. It was an old account book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of the candle to get a stronger light on it. The shadow of the book would then throw into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a number of faces and figures; for besides the reader, eight other men were present. Seven of them sat against the rough log walls, silent, motionless, and the room being small, not very far from the table. By extending an arm any one of them could have touched the eighth man, who lay on the table, face upward, partly covered by a sheet, his arms at his sides. He was dead.

  The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke; all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was without expectation. From the blank darkness outside came in, through the aperture that served for a window, all the ever unfamiliar noises of night in the wilderness—the long nameless note of a distant coyote; the stilly pulsing thrill of tireless insects in trees; strange cries of night birds, so different from those of the birds of day; the drone of great blundering beetles, and all that mysterious chorus of small sounds that seem always to have been but half heard when they have suddenly ceased, as if conscious of an indiscretion. But nothing of all this was noted in that company; its members were not overmuch addicted to idle interest in matters of no practical importance; that was obvious in every line of their rugged faces—obvious even in the dim light of the single candle. They were evidently men of the vicinity—farmers and woodsmen.

  The person reading was a trifle different; one would have said of him that he was of the world, worldly, albeit there was that in his attire which attested a certain fellowship with the organisms of his environment. His coat would hardly have passed muster in San Francisco; his foot-gear was not of urban origin, and the hat that lay by him on the floor (he was the only one uncovered) was such that if one had considered it as an article of mere personal adornment he would have missed its meaning. In countenance the man was rather prepossessing, with just a hint of sternness; though that he may have assumed or cultivated, as appropriate to one in authority. For he was a coroner. It was by virtue of his office that he had possession of the book in which he was reading; it had been found among the dead man’s effects—in his cabin, where the inquest was now taking place.

  When the coroner had finished reading he put the book into his breast pocket. At that moment the door was pushed open and a young man entered. He, clearly, was not of mountain birth and breeding: he was clad as those who dwell in cities. His clothing was dusty, however, as from travel. He had, in fact, been riding hard to attend the inquest.

  The coroner nodded; no one else greeted him.

  “We have waited for you,” said the coroner. “It is necessary to have done with this business to-night.”

  The young man smiled. “I am sorry to have kept you,” he said. “I went away, not to evade your summons, but to post to my newspaper an account of what I suppose I am called back to relate.”

  The coroner smiled.

  “The account that you posted to your newspaper,” he said, “differs, probably, from that which you will give here under oath.”

  “That,” replied the other, rather hotly and with a visible flush, “is as you please. I used manifold paper and have a copy of what I sent. It was not written as news, for it is incredible, but as fiction. It may go as a part of my testimony under oath.”

  “But you say it is incredible.”

  “That is nothing to you, sir, if I also swear that it is true.”

  The coroner was silent for a time, his eyes upon the floor. The men about the sides of the cabin talked in whispers, but seldom withdrew their gaze from the face of the corpse. Presently the coroner lifted his eyes and said: “We will resume the inquest.”

  The men removed their hats. The witness was sworn.

  “What is your name?” the coroner asked.

  “William Harker.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “You knew the deceased, Hugh Morgan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were with him when he died?”

  “Near him.”

  “How did that happen—your presence, I mean?”

  “I was visiting him at this place to shoot and fish. A part of my purpose, however, was to study him and his odd, solitary way of life. He seemed a good model for a character in fiction. I sometimes write stories.”

  “I sometimes read them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Stories in general—not yours.”

  Some of the jurors laughed. Against a sombre background humour shows high lights. Soldiers in the intervals of battle laugh easily, and a jest in the death chamber conquers by surprise.

  “Relate the circumstan
ces of this man’s death,” said the coroner. “You may use any notes or memoranda that you please.”

  The witness understood. Pulling a manuscript from his breast pocket he held it near the candle and turning the leaves until he found the passage that he wanted began to read.

  CHAPTER II

  WHAT MAY HAPPEN IN A FIELD OF WILD OATS

  “. . . The sun had hardly risen when we left the house. We were looking for quail, each with a shotgun, but we had only one dog. Morgan said that our best ground was beyond a certain ridge that he pointed out, and we crossed it by a trail through the chaparral. On the other side was comparatively level ground, thickly covered with wild oats. As we emerged from the chaparral Morgan was but a few yards in advance. Suddenly we heard, at a little distance to our right and partly in front, a noise as of some animal thrashing about in the bushes, which we could see were violently agitated.

  “ ‘We’ve started a deer,’ I said. ‘I wish we had brought a rifle.’

  “Morgan, who had stopped and was intently watching the agitated chaparral, said nothing, but had cocked both barrels of his gun and was holding it in readiness to aim. I thought him a trifle excited, which surprised me, for he had a reputation for exceptional coolness, even in moments of sudden and imminent peril.