Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

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  April 7.—Continued last night our astronomical amusements. Had a fine view of the five Neptunian asteroids, and watched with much interest the putting up of a huge impost on a couple of lintels in the new temple at Daphnis in the moon. It was amusing to think that creatures so diminutive as the lunarians, and bearing so little resemblance to humanity, yet evinced a mechanical ingenuity so much superior to our own. One finds it difficult, too, to conceive the vast masses which these people handle so easily, to be as light as our own reason tells us they actually are.

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  April 8.—Eureka! Pundit is in his glory. A balloon from Kanadaw spoke us to-day and threw on board several late papers; they contain some exceedingly curious information relative to Kanawdian or rather Amriccan antiquities. You know, I presume, that laborers have for some months been employed in preparing the ground for a new fountain at Paradise, the Emperor’s principal pleasure garden. Paradise, it appears, has been, literally speaking, an island time out of mind—that is to say, its northern boundary was always (as far back as any record extends) a rivulet, or rather a very narrow arm of the sea. This arm was gradually widened until it attained its present breadth—a mile. The whole length of the island is nine miles; the breadth varies materially. The entire area (so Pundit says) was, about eight hundred years ago, densely packed with houses, some of them twenty stories high; land (for some most unaccountable reason) being considered as especially precious just in this vicinity. The disastrous earthquake, however, of the year 2050, so totally uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for it was almost too large to be called a village) that the most indefatigable of our antiquarians have never yet been able to obtain from the site any sufficient data (in the shape of coins, medals or inscriptions) wherewith to build up even the ghost of a theory concerning the manners, customs, &c., &c., &c., of the aboriginal inhabitants. Nearly all that we have hitherto known of them is, that they were a portion of the Knickerbocker tribe of savages infesting the continent at its first discovery by Recorder Riker, a knight of the Golden Fleece. They were by no means uncivilized, however, but cultivated various arts and even sciences after a fashion of their own. It is related of them that they were acute in many respects, but were oddly afflicted with monomania for building what, in the ancient Amriccan, was denominated “churches”—a kind of pagoda instituted for the worship of two idols that went by the names of Wealth and Fashion. In the end, it is said, the island became, nine tenths of it, church. The women, too, it appears, were oddly deformed by a natural protuberance of the region just below the small of the back—although, most unaccountably, this deformity was looked upon altogether in the light of a beauty. One or two pictures of these singular women have in fact, been miraculously preserved. They look very odd, very—like something between a turkey-cock and a dromedary.

  Well, these few details are nearly all that have descended to us respecting the ancient Knickerbockers. It seems, however, that while digging in the centre of the emperors garden, (which, you know, covers the whole island), some of the workmen unearthed a cubical and evidently chiseled block of granite, weighing several hundred pounds. It was in good preservation, having received, apparently, little injury from the convulsion which entombed it. On one of its surfaces was a marble slab with (only think of it!) an inscription—a legible inscription. Pundit is in ecstacies. Upon detaching the slab, a cavity appeared, containing a leaden box filled with various coins, a long scroll of names, several documents which appear to resemble newspapers, with other matters of intense interest to the antiquarian! There can be no doubt that all these are genuine Amriccan relics belonging to the tribe called Knickerbocker. The papers thrown on board our balloon are filled with fac-similes of the coins, MSS., typography, &c., &c. I copy for your amusement the Knickerbocker inscription on the marble slab:—

  This Corner Stone of a Monument to

  The Memory of

  GEORGE WASHINGTON

  Was Laid With Appropriate Ceremonies

  on the

  19th Day of October, 1847

  The anniversary of the surrender of

  Lord Cornwallis

  to General Washington at Yorktown

  A. D. 1781

  Under the Auspices of the

  Washington Monument Association of

  the city of New York

  This, as I give it, is a verbatim translation done by Pundit himself, so there can be no mistake about it. From the few words thus preserved, we glean several important items of knowledge, not the least interesting of which is the fact that a thousand years ago actual monuments had fallen into disuse—as was all very proper—the people contenting themselves, as we do now, with a mere indication of the design to erect a monument at some future time; a corner-stone being cautiously laid by itself “solitary and alone” (excuse me for quoting the great American poet Benton!), as a guarantee of the magnanimous intention. We ascertain, too, very distinctly, from this admirable inscription, the how as well as the where and the what, of the great surrender in question. As to the where, it was Yorktown (wherever that was), and as to the what, it was General Cornwallis (no doubt some wealthy dealer in corn). He was surrendered. The inscription commemorates the surrender of—what? why, “of Lord Cornwallis.” The only question is what could the savages wish him surrendered for. But when we remember that these savages were undoubtedly cannibals, we are led to the conclusion that they intended him for sausage. As to the how of the surrender, no language can be more explicit. Lord Cornwallis was surrendered (for sausage) “under the auspices of the Washington Monument Association”—no doubt a charitable institution for the depositing of corner-stones.—But, Heaven bless me! what is the matter? Ah, I see—the balloon has collapsed, and we shall have a tumble into the sea. I have, therefore, only time enough to add that, from a hasty inspection of the fac-similes of newspapers, &c., &c., I find that the great men in those days among the Amriccans, were one John, a smith, and one Zacchary, a tailor.

  Good-bye, until I see you again. Whether you ever get this letter or not is point of little importance, as I write altogether for my own amusement. I shall cork the MS. up in a bottle, however, and throw it into the sea.

  Yours everlastingly,

  PUNDITA.

  ON THE BAROQUE IN SCIENCE FICTION, by Thomas F. Bertonneau

  In the 1954 Preface to his Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges defined the baroque as “the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature.”1 The baroque is therefore a self-conscious style par excellence. According to Borges’ definition: “The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous”; and “this humor is unintentional in the works of Baltasar Graciàn but intentional, even indulged, in the works of John Donne.”2 In the manner, then, of seventeenth-century church architecture—it might be in Spain or Bavaria—the spirit of the baroque piles ornament relentlessly on ornament, while cultivating trompe-l’œil for its illusion of depth, and while obsessively re-cuing every curlicue in anticipation of the fractal geometry of a Mandelbrot algorithm. The baroque in music refers to the fugal style, in which again the artist, preeminently J. S. Bach, raises self-imitation to a structural principle. Yet fugue also refers to a state of social disintegration and to an accompanying panicked mentality that drives forth the individual refugee from the incendiarism and bloodletting of civic breakdown. Europe’s baroque centuries saw the religious wars, Puritanism, agitation of the protesting masses, and the inevitable massacres, for which music offers a counterpart in the stretto of the fugue. Here the competing voices figuratively tear the subject to shreds in an aesthetic refinement of the Dionysiac sparagmos.

  The novel arises with the baroque, in the Simplicius and Eulenspiegel narratives, in picaresque, and in the moralizing abyss of Don Quixote, where Part One is a topic of discussion, mostly inane, among the characters in Part Two. The baroque therefore peculiarly trumps th
e modern in its exploitation of formal complexity; the modernist writers might match, but they never excel, their two- or three-century precursors in self-allusion and abyssal autoscopy. Indeed, the Parisian Symbolists, those first modernists, remained keenly aware of their debt to the seventeenth century “Parnassians,” Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé assiduously practicing the sonnet, as though writing in the time of Louis XIII. Later Max Reger (1873–1916) and Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) mimicked baroque-era models in music, as did M. C. Escher in graphic media. Borges, in his Preface, “would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage of art,” a stage which some would call decadent.3 Borges notes that the eighteenth century, which coined the term baroque, considered the seventeenth century, which invented the style, to have been in bad taste. Borges fails to deny this charge, whereby one might consider that he adds it to the repertory of the baroque, as perhaps a studious awkwardness or an occasional deliberate pedantry in the articulation.

  In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler says that the Western baroque strove towards the dissolution of genre in a movement of synesthesia: “Painting becomes polyphonic, ‘picturesque,’ infinity-seeking,” while “the colours become tones” and “the art of the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal.”4 Again, “the background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance.”5

  I.

  A baroque spirit pervades the creativity of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), arguably the innovator of the science fiction genre. Indeed, Poe’s oeuvre, in which his science fiction stories play a central role, constitutes a gigantic baroque structure comparable in its unity-in-variety to an instance of Palladian architecture or an extended variation-composition by Bach. Poe himself, increasingly aware of that unity-in-variety, planned his extravagant, speculative prose poem Eureka (1848) to be the belated theoretical foundation of what had come before it, subsuming all earlier productivity in its paradoxical reconciliation of Epicurean atomism with a distinctly Neoplatonic version of Plato’s Timaeus-cosmology. In Eureka, applying Spengler to Poe, one might say that “the background…gains a preponderant importance,” but in Poe’s oeuvre many other baroque traits lend character to the individual stories. In the early “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), for example, the first-person narration begins with an announcement of emissary status corresponding to the fugal, or centrifugal, or fugitive theme that belongs at once to the Simplicius story and to contrapuntal music. “Of my country and my family I have little to say,” Poe’s narrator reports; “ill usage and length of years have driven me from one, and estranged me from the other.”6

  Mental exhaustion overwhelms Poe’s narrator, a self-reported condition that reappears as an exegetical trope in the prose of H. P. Lovecraft (1897–1937), often cited as Poe’s successor, and in that of Clark Ashton Smith. A student since youth “of the German moralists”—presumably Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and F. W. J. Schelling—who admires their “eloquent madness,” Poe’s narrator remarks of his own intellect its “Pyrrhonism” or ultra-skepticism and its “aridity”.7 He has relentlessly, systematically worked through the litany of received wisdom, critiquing each tenet of standing doctrine only to reject it, on “the principles of science.”8 By an uncanny reciprocity, which makes him both pursuer and pursued, the narrator senses himself the prey of “a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me like a fiend,”9 and which precipitates him geographically where he already is philosophically—irretrievably at sea. The final image of “MS,” an all-devouring whirlpool into which the enigmatic ghost ship must plunge, becomes a Leitmotif of the Poe-esque, recurring in “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841) and, as a cosmological Ur-Phenomenon, in Eureka. Baudelaire wrote of Poe that, “The opening passages of [his] writings always have a drawing power without violence, like a whirlpool,” the image corresponding to what the Symbolist calls the American’s “nervous tension”; to which Baudelaire adds, “the reader, as though in the grip of vertigo, is impelled to follow the author in his inviting deduction.”10

  Poe’s interest in science is really his connoisseurship of the seventeenth-century natural-philosophical systems, such as those of Johannes Kepler (1671–1630) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), which carried over into the “Age of Enlightenment” select traits of Scholasticism and Neo-Platonism. In Eureka, Poe praises Kepler for having “guessed, that is to say…imagined” that the planetary orbits corresponded to the dual foci of a parabola and not to the long-assumed single focus of a true circle; and he lavishly distinguishes thinking in modo Kepleriano from what he calls thinking “Ram-ishly” and “Hog-ishly,” terms which belong to an elaborate lampoon of Aristotle and Francis Bacon.11 As Borges writes, “the baroque is intellectual.” Poe is an intellectual, sometimes shading into a wit; but he is a wit who elaborates his jokes exhaustively, the way that Bach exhausts the self-referential B.A.C.H. motif in The Art of the Fugue. Baudelaire remarked Poe’s “knowledge of the harmonic terms of beauty,” but also his “hideous logic” and his ability “to express grief by laughter.”12 Eureka begins in laughter, in the topsy-turvy rhetoric of a letter from the year 2848, and finds its climax in the annihilating “Oneness” into which the universe, as Poe argues, must inevitably collapse once its property of attraction overcomes its property of radiation so that the former resolves the multiplicity of divided atoms back into its primal de-ontological unity.13 Poe describes the mental tone attendant on imagining these events as the equivalent of what would be felt by a man who balances on the lip of a volcano “whirling on his heel.”14

  Cosmic vertigo attends the pyrotic end-of-the-world in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), one of Poe’s short stories in the form of a Platonic dialogue. Prototype of the fin-du-monde genre, and generically affiliated with Reformation-era apocalyptic, “Eiros and Charmion” records the death of humanity when, the chemistry of a comet’s tail withdrawing nitrogen from the earth’s atmosphere, the concentration of oxygen incites the stretto-like global spontaneous combustion of living matter. Eiros, the narrator, describes “a combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate… the entire fulfillment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.”15 Yet there is a narrator. The “furious delirium” and “wild lurid light” of what seemed the last moment were not extinction, but rather translation to a non-supernatural higher realm, “Aidenn,” where the “conversation” occurs.16

  In the cosmology of Poe’s Eureka, as in that of Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia (1747), the soul ascends through a hierarchy of dimensions, the lower being grossly material with the higher tending towards pure spirit. Poe, however, like Epicurus, distinguishes spirit from matter only by the fineness of its atomic basis, a notion foreign to Swedenborg. In “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), another Platonic dialogue, Monos details the post-mortem decay of his interred corpse and the liberation from fleshly trammels of the finer spiritual part of his existence. But the real interest in “Monos and Una” lies in the glimpse of industrial futurity and the defense of imagination against the scorn of a merely utilitarian logic.

  The world of the twenty-fifth century is, as Monos remembers it to Una, one of triumphant “Democracy” and “huge smoking cities…innumerable,” in which a few prophet-critics had “ventured to doubt the propriety of the term ‘improvement,’ as applied to the progress of our civilization.”17 Monos says: “Occasionally the poetic intellect—that intellect which we now feel to have been the most exalted of all—since these truths which to us were of the most enduring importance could only be reached by that analogy which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic.”18 The “utilitarian” minded majority insisted, however, on the sole epistemological legitimac
y of its own “infantine imbecility,” as Monos calls it; that insistence issuing fatally in “a diseased commotion, moral and physical.”19 The malady of manic agitation increased as humanity “grew infected with system, and with abstraction” until the afflicted social order fulfilled the law that, “widest ruin [is] the price of the highest civilization.”20