Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  Poe’s ornate sentences and anti-positivist leaps of logic validate Borges’ observation on the epistemology of the baroque. The classical age condemned the baroque age for its dubious syllogisms, especially for those rooted in Scholasticism, which argued that things in the City of Man are analogous to things in the City of God. Aristotelian though it tended to be, Scholasticism nevertheless incorporated what Poe calls “the majestic intuition of Plato,” and it understood that the cosmos resonated with “the μoυσίχή” [music] that only a finely attuned “moral sense” can apperceive.21

  II.

  The rubric of the baroque in science fiction entails at least one imbroglio. Poe, the true atavus of the science fiction genre, while baroque in style and temperament, is nevertheless not central to any contemporary understanding of that genre, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells having usurped that station. Yet Poe inspired a multitude of followers not only directly but also indirectly via the curious roundabout of French Symbolist poetry. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), and M. P. Shiel (1865–1947) were more or less direct successors of the master. So also were the members of a coterie of American writers who, notwithstanding their connoisseurship of Poe, followed the quirky ambition of translating the poetic sensibility of Baudelaire—along with that of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1897) and Paul Verlaine (1844–1896)—into fantastic narrative. The Symbolist school, beginning with Baudelaire, revered Poe, just as it revered the writers of the French Baroque. The American Symbolist-imitators for their part drew additionally on two quirky themes that originally became topical in the seventeenth century. Atlantology was one; the theory of cycles of civilization, of an unknown history before history, was another.

  The notion that a high civilization might also be a precarious one in its final dazzling efflorescence before catastrophic dissolution appears in Poe’s “Colloquy of Monos and Una.” The associated idea that our own civilization might not be the first to perfect science and technique, and that it will not be the last, appears famously in Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1720) and, less famously but more provocatively, in Olof Rydbeck’s Atland eller Manheim (four volumes, 1679–1702).

  The Dean of Atlantologists Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) owed much to Vico, Rydbeck, and Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Donnelly’s Ante-Diluvian World (1882) and Ragnarok (1883) popularized the idea that the known ancient civilizations stemmed from a prehistoric high civilization of which those historic ones were mere paltry survivals. C. J. Cutcliffe-Hyne’s Lost Continent (1899) tells a sword-and-sandals story set in the decadence of Atlantean civilization and reaches its climax with the famed cataclysmic disappearance of the accursed island-kingdom. The subgenre of Atlantean fantasy reached perfection, however, in the authorship of the Californian Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), who once wrote to Lovecraft regarding Donnelly that The Ante-Diluvian World struck him as being “quite solidly done.”22 Smith often added to the Atlantean formula another baroque trope, the Faustian alchemist or necromancer. An Anglophone Symbolist who idolized Baudelaire, Smith created variants of Atlantis. His “Poseidonis” stories take place among the degenerate polities of the last-surviving splinters of the “Lost Continent,” whereas his “Zothique” stories have for their milieu the dusky geography of earth’s remote future.

  Even when Smith spins an extraterrestrial yarn, his interest lies in archeological survivals. Smith’s stories, most of them published in Weird Tales beginning in 1930, continue in prose the import of his early Baudelairean poems, evoking fantastic landscapes and architectural imagery using the Gallic resources of English with an occasional Saxon archaism for heightened flavor. Religious turmoil, inquisition, transcendent yearning, and exile structure the tale frequently.

  In “The Monster of Prophecy” (1929), in Smith’s own summary, “A starving poet who is about to throw himself into the river… is approached by a stranger who befriends him and afterwards introduces himself as a scientist from a world of Antares.”23 In one of his first glimpses of the Antarean civilization, Alvor, the world-weary poet, sees “a perspective of hills and plains all marked out in geometric diamonds and squares and triangles, with a large lake in their midst,” while “far in the distance, more than a hundred leagues away, were the gleaming domes and towers of some baroque city, towards which the enormous orb of the sun was now declining.”24 The use of the adjective baroque implies less than does Smith’s evocation of twilight (elsewhere dawn) and distance, typical qualities of seventeenth century landscape painting, according to Spengler; typical qualities of Symbolist verse, and the symbols par excellence of Faustian yearning. Alvor’s sojourn on the alien world amounts to “an experience beyond the visionary resources of any terrestrial drug,” part of which is the poet’s awareness “of an unimaginably old and alien…life.”25 The Antarean scientist tells Alvor: “We are a very old people,” among whom “religious sentiment and veneration of the past have always been dominant factors.”26 Alvor soon finds himself the object of priestly inquisition and ends up an asylum seeker among another Antarean people who “had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.”27

  In the “Poseidonis” story “The Death of Malygris” (1934) Smith describes the master necromancer’s chamber: “Everywhere, by the light of opulent lamps…were tables of ebony wrought with sorcerous runes of pearl and white coral; webs of silver and samite, cunningly pictured; caskets of electrum overflowing with talismanic jewels; tiny gods of jade an agate; and tall chryselephantine demons.”28 The Baudelairean piling-up of luxuriant and luminous figures aims at overloading the readerly imagination so as to simulate rhetorically what Baudelaire himself, in the poem “Correspondences,” referred to as “l’expansion des choses infinies… qui chantent le transport de l’esprit et des senses.” The botanical imagery in another “Poseidonis” story, “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” (1931), strives towards the same Symbolist effect. The only two survivors of “Poseidonis” arrive on Venus where they experience “torrid heat… dazzling color… overwhelming perfume”; they see “flowers everywhere… of unearthly forms, of supermundane size and beauty and variety, with scrolls and volutes of petals many-hued” that exhale “perfumes…like elixirs and opiates.”29 The phenomena in “Malygris” and “Sfanomoë” dazzle their respective protagonists immediately before they nastily die, Smith having borrowed the Baudelairean assumption that violently overloading the sensorium likely entails the (sacrificial) demise of the subject-percipient.

  Balcoth, the sculptor-protagonist of “The Plutonian Drug” (1934), tells the pharmacist-physician Manners that in his “romantic days” on provocation by “Gautier and Baudelaire” he had experimented with mind-altering pharmacopeia, such as “cannabis Indica”; whereupon Manners convinces him to try “Plutonium,” the story’s titular substance.30 Dr. Manners recommends “Plutonium” over “cthini” and “mnophka,” two other extraterrestrial narcotics, for its lack of a “bad aftermath” and as the stimulus to awaken “some rudimentary organ” with the resultant “metamorphosis of sensations.”31 Ingesting the potion, concocted from fossilized vegetation immensely old, Balcoth finds himself drawn down into a Poe-esque “whirlpool of prismatic splendor” out of the “infinite chaos” of which emerges coherently an “infinite vista.”32 Balcoth, like the characters in “Malygris” and “Sfanomoë,” must pay with his life.

  Philip Hastane, narrator of “Beyond the Singing Flame” (1931), makes the transition from a lonely ridge high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to an unknown world, the most remarkable feature of which is the sacred flamboyance of the title, the object of fervent worship in a phantasmagoric city of “solemn architectural music.”33 Alien beings venerate the Flame, which Maelström-like compels its devotees to throw themselves into its maw. Hastane taking the plunge malgré lui grows conscious of “god-like union with the flame”; he reports latterly that, “every atom of [his body] had undergone transcendental expansion.”34 Not perishing, but like Poe’s Eiros and Charmion entering a
higher order of existence, Hastane immediately confronts “endless avenues of super-prismatic opal and jacinth, arches and pillars of ultra-violet gems, of transcendent sapphire, of unearthly ruby and amethyst, all suffused with a multi-tinted splendor.”35

  III.

  Weird Tales served as the main venue of baroque science fiction although most critics regard that magazine as something other than and inferior to a science fiction periodical. To the extent that John W. Campbell’s vision defined the genre then perhaps Weird Tales really was not science-fictional. Nevertheless, Lovecraft published there, who admitted no supernatural elements in his fiction, along with Smith and Robert E. Howard. Indiana born Catherine L. Moore (1911–1987), linked to Lovecraft through her correspondence with him, seems however closer to Smith than to H. P. L. in more ways than one, beginning with her interest in intensely visual figuration, often architectural or ornamental, voluntary derangement as an antidote to unbearable ennui, and the emissary protagonist, all of which one can only classify as Symbolist. Now Symbolist aesthetics is related to baroque aesthetics, both by direct affiliation (Swedenborg to Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and in view of a persistent determination on the part of the individual artist to fill his canvas with detail and to impregnate every detail with meaning. The non-baroque artist regards his baroque co-practitioner as decadent, extravagant, self-indulgent, illogical, and repetitious—someone who pushes too many adjectives against his nouns. The baroque artist sees his critic as a Calvinist and a prude.

  Moore’s Northwest Smith, like Poe’s narrator in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” fulfills the roles both of pursuer and pursued; he too is fugitive, freethinking, not at all prudish, and never a Calvinist. He sits in bars viewing the traffic like a Baudelairean flaneur, consumes potions like a shaman, plumbs the depths of despair and ecstasy, and, last but not least, acts a knight-errant in defending victims against the sacrificial madness of crowds, hierarchies, and cults.

  “Shambleau” (1934), the first of the Northwest Smith stories, is entirely fugal, nearly to the point of being, as Spengler might put it, more a musical composition than a literary text. But more than that: An extraordinary improvisation in the rhetoric of synesthesia. And more yet again than that: A moral tale. A brief discussion from Paul Mark Walker’s Theories of Fugue (2000) seems apposite to “Shambleau”: “The Latin noun fuga, meaning ‘flight’ or ‘fleeing,’ is related to both the Latin verbs fugere, ‘to flee,’ and fugare, ‘to chase.’ The vernacular equivalents are chace and caccia, nouns that likewise designate a chase or hunt.”36 “Shambleau” commences with a pursuit, one that could equally well find its context in the Simplicius narrative, with a crowd chasing the eponymous Shambleau the way a posse of Lutheran bullyboys might harass a suspected witch. “Into [Smith’s] range of vision flashed a red running figure, dodging like a hunted hare from shelter to shelter in the narrow street.”37 Commentary on “Shambleau” recognizes it as Moore’s variant of the generic vampire story; no one seems to have noticed that the tale is also a reworking of “A Descent into the Maelström.” That the mob’s quarry, the Shambleau, initially occupies the position of a victim moves Smith to protect her; she then gradually fascinates him, she drawing him to her despite himself the way the Maelström draws Poe’s narrator, inexorably.

  Once the Maelström grips Poe’s narrator in its eddying clutches, panicked anticipation gives way to “the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself” so that the subject “positively felt a wish to explore its depths.”38 Once Smith crosses the threshold of the vampire’s lethal allure, his attitude too alters unexpectedly. In musical terms, he has come to the stretto of the experience, a gesture regularly repeated in Moore’s tales of her tough-guy character. While the creature drains Smith of his life-energy, he perceives that “somehow there was beauty in it,” a luster “like the depths of a jewel,” a “blazing darkness,” and a “devouring rapture.”39 Only his partner’s timely intervention saves Smith, who says that being ingested felt inebriating, like the action of a drug; Moore’s prose makes it equally clear that submission to the monstrous hunger provoked in the victim strong erotic pleasure. In “The Scarlet Dream” (1934), a shimmering swatch of red fabric pulls Smith into an extra-dimensional bubble, where “the sky was a great shawl threaded with lightning that shivered and squirmed as he watched,” and where the twilight was “cloudy…blurred with exquisite patches of green and violet…in a land where the air was suffused with colored mists.”40 The ambiance turns sinister, but of such impressions, ambiguous though they are, Smith remains a connoisseur. He likes to stand, as one might say, on the lip of the volcano spinning on his heel; he likes to drink segir, the Venusian whiskey.

  Moore’s colorist penchant derives from her Symbolist sensibility. A passage like this one from Baudelaire’s “Salon of 1846” would not be out of place in one of Moore’s stories: “Let us imagine a beautiful expanse of nature where the prevailing tones are greens and reds, melting into each other, shimmering in the chaotic freedom where all things, diversely colored as their molecular structure dictates, changing every second through the interplay of light and shade, and stimulated inwardly by latent heat, vibrate perpetually, imparting movement to all the lines and confirming the law of perpetual and universal motion.”41 In Moore’s novel Judgment Night (1943), Juille, the Amazonian warrior-princess of planet Ericon, visits the pleasure-satellite Cyrille, where everything is elaborate trompe-l’oeil. Juille has recourse to Cyrille in part so that she might “relax…the rigid self-consciousness” of her usual demeanor.42 The relaxation entails some erotic license. Thus with a companion Juille lulls in the spell of “distant music” while contemplating “great shining rosettes of light, shimmering from red to blue to white again in patternless rhythms” and a vista of “stars [that] blazed like great fiery roses against the dark.”43 Judgment Night concludes in an Armageddon of galactic civilizations with an apocalypse of resurgent gods, who announce a new age.

  Planet Stories, in publication from 1939 to 1955, also served as a venue for the baroque in science fiction, most especially in the planetary romances that Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) destined for that gorgeous periodical. The notion of the plurality of worlds, which provides the premise of planetary romance, stems—this fact should by now be unsurprising—from seventeenth century. Kepler’s Somnium (1610), with its depiction of exotic flora and fauna of the moon, qualifies, in Gale. E. Christianson’s phrase, as “the fons et origo of modern science fiction.”44 Equally antecedent to planetary romance are the Cosmotheoros (1695) of Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) and the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757). “Plurality” is as much a theological conviction as it is a scientific principle. God would never have fashioned the stars and their undoubted planets leaving them untenanted; but rather he will have fashioned them to be the mansions of the plenteous and varied humanities that thrive and proliferate, reflecting His divine reason and dignity, throughout the universe. Brackett, like Moore and Smith, often employed in her stories long, quasi-archaic periods and psychedelic imagery.

  IV.

  Hindemith’s Kepler opera Die Harmonie der Welt (1957) has the right to be considered under the rubric of the baroque in science fiction. Like Hindemith’s earlier opera Mathis der Maler (1934), Harmonie der Welt takes place during the Reformation in the time of the religious wars, the fanaticism and violence of which threaten the protagonist. Hindemith portrays Kepler as a heroic anti-modern figure whose advocacy of Copernican cosmology entails the preservation of an essentially religious and mystic view of existence. The opera’s central metaphor, “The Harmony of the Worlds,” comes from Kepler’s treatise Harmonices Mundi (1619), in which, among other tasks that he set for himself, Kepler tried to reconcile elements of Ptolemaic cosmology with what were by then the certainties of Copernican cosmology, such as Heliocentrism and non-epicyclical orbital relations between the planets and the solar primary. Kepler sought to preserve the Pythagorean idea, incorporated
by Ptolemy, of a celestial harmony or “Music of the Spheres.” This would be the same “μoυσίχή” to which Poe refers in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” Bruce Stephenson writes, in The Music of the Heavens (1994), how Kepler took for granted that “if God had become man on Earth, then from Earth man should surely be able to detect the outlines of the great design of creation,” even to the point of apperceiving the celestial harmony.45

  In Kitty Ferguson’s summation in The Music of Pythagoras (2008), Kepler believed in “a mysterious inherent connection between human souls and the underlying pattern of the universe.”46 Die Harmonie der Welt, in which Hindemith has his usual recourse to baroque musical procedures, ends in an extended, magnificent passacaglia in which Kepler, completing Harmonices Mundi, has a mystic vision of the intelligible universe, with the planets and stars wheeling about him.

  Some actual baroque, as distinct from neo-baroque, operas have science-fictional qualities. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s allegorical operas from the middle of the eighteenth century deserve attention in this regard, most notably Castor et Pollux (1733), Zoroastre (1749), and Les Boréades (1763). These are all re-imaginable as Weird Tales narratives, especially Zoroastre, with its earthly battle between the forces of good and evil (Zoroastre himself and the wicked Abramane) backed up by the cosmic battle of the rival Manichaean deities. Rameau (1683–1764) published a theory of harmony as metaphysically complex as Kepler’s and garnered the nickname “The Newton of Music.” Some science fiction novels have baroque-operatic qualities, outstandingly the five installments of the Demon Princes by the redoubtable Jack Vance (born 1916). The five separate titles—The Star King (1964), The Killing Machine (1964), The Palace of Love (1967), The Face (1979), and The Book of Dreams (1981)—stage an elaborate revenge drama set against a galactic scene resembling Europe’s patchwork of republics and principalities at the time of the Reformation.