Vance’s protagonist, Kirth Gersen, belongs to the genre of emissary characters. Gersen when still a child narrowly escaped but also witnessed the murder and enslavement of his parents and siblings. Raised by his grandfather to be the avenger of the outrage, Gersen exists outside the law. His existence thus has a fugitive quality; he resembles, among others, Northwest Smith, although he is more a pursuer than pursued. The Demon Princes is a vast passacaglia in prose, repeating the basic plot five times while varying the details; and when the last evildoer tastes his just desert, the effect is not unlike that in the last act of Rameau’s Zoroastre. Vance, like Moore or Smith, also shapes many a lapidary sentence; the artifice of his prose is, however, by no means detrimental to his story telling, but rather serves it. In the extravagant epigraphic apparatus of his novelistic Pentateuch, Vance quotes Spengler: “Everything of which we are conscious… has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol.”47
Science fiction is not only a large archive of prose narrative; it is also, in the twentieth century, a large archive of the painterly art. Here too on inspection an identifiable baroque subcategory emerges into view. The instances of Frank R. Paul (1884–1963) and Virgil Finlay (1914–1971) compel the interpreter, however, to invoke a musical as much as a pictorial vocabulary; their art, like baroque art generally, must be understood, like Symbolist poetry, as synesthesia. Spengler sees synesthesia as the essence of Western or Faustian Art. According to Spengler, by the mid-sixteenth century, with music taking the lead, “the great task [of the arts] was to extend the tone-corpus into infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone”; Spengler adds that the trend is visible “in oil painting from Titian onwards.”48 Leonardo, for example, “reveals aerial secrets with every line,” having been “the first…to set his mind on aviation” and to want “to lose [himself] in the expanse of the universe.”49 Paul’s suites of back-cover illustrations for Amazing, appearing serially in the early 1940s, show their creator working at the highest levels of imagination and execution.
Paul’s “Cities” suite ranks above the others, with “Crystallis, Glass City on Io” (July 1941), “Quartz City on Mercury” (September 1941), and “Golden City on Titan” (November 1941) being especially noteworthy. Paul does in oils what the prose artists do in words with their detailed invocations of alien and exotic architecture; he continues a painterly tradition of architectural fantasy going back to Alain Maillet and the Brueghel Family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Virgil Finlay worked almost entirely in chiaroscuro, using the stippling technique; he placed a good deal of his work in Weird Tales. Finlay’s art while nominally illustrative remained largely independent of any text however much a given item from his hand might complement and elevate its text. In Finlay, the Faustian aspiration of sounding the infinite becomes infinitely eroticized—as happens also in Poe, Baudelaire, and Moore—under the image of the Eternal Feminine. It is the Eternal Feminine who, in Goethe’s famous words, zieht uns hinan or “draws us on high.” In the Faustian world-experience, according to Spengler, “Being appears as pure efficient Space… sensually felt.”50 Spengler’s words describe Finlay’s illustrations for otherwise entirely forgotten stories by Arthur Stringer and Harry Bates. For Stringer’s “Woman Who Couldn’t Die” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries October 1950), Finlay supplies a transfigured female nude whose subtle body is indistinguishable from starlight; while for Bates’ “Triggered Dimension” (Science Fiction Plus December 1953), he superimposes the upper body of a female nude over the image of a dynamo, in a realization of the chapter on “The Virgin and the Dynamo” from Henry Adams’ Education (1918).
Finlay’s understanding of Western science must have been convergent with Spengler’s, who wrote: “Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture ‘advances,’ this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite.”51
It would be a shame to take leave of the topic without at least mentioning cinema. One of the earliest and greatest of all science fiction films fairly begs the description baroque—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). In Lang’s masterpiece, whose final action occurs among the flying buttresses and towers of a Gothic cathedral, science intermingles with alchemy and magic while acts of primitive sacrifice happen among the ornate subterranean engines that power the city. Metropolis is a study of chiaroscuro in motion. The aptly named Maria, duplicated by the Faustian scientist-magician Rotwang as the robot, exercises her feminine power to transfix the hero, Freder, and (quite literally) to draw him on high.
Notes
1 Jorge Luis Borges (translated by A. Hurley), A Universal History of Iniquity, Penguin 2009, 4.
2 4.
3 4.
4 Oswald Spengler (translated by C. F. Atkinson), The Decline of the West, Vol. I, Form and Actuality, Knopf 1932, 239.
5 239.
6 The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (edited by H. Beaver), Penguin 1976, 1.
7 1.
8 1.
9 1.
10 Charles Baudelaire (translated by P. E. Charvet), Selected Writings on Art and Literature, Penguin 1992, 185.
11 220.
12 Baudelaire, 185.
13 Poe, 227.
14 212.
15 70.
16 70.
17 91 & 90.
18 90.
19 91.
20 92.
21 92.
22 Clark Ashton Smith (edited by D. E. Schultz and S. Connors), Collected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, Arkham House 2003, 135.
23 Clark Ashton Smith (edited by S. Connors and R. Hilger), The End of the Story (Collected Fantasies, Vol. I), Nightshade Books 2006, 264.
24 100.
25 107 & 105.
26 102.
27 116.
28 Clark Ashton Smith (edited by J. Vandermeer), Lost Worlds, University of Nebraska 2006, 107-108.
29 98.
30 Clark Ashton Smith (edited by S. Connors and R. Hilger), The Vintage from Atlantis (Collected Fantasies, Vol. 3), Nightshade Books 2007, 242.
31 241.
32 243.
33 34.
34 38.
35 38.
36 Paul Mark Walker, Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach, Eastman Studies in Music 2000, 7.
37 Catherine Louise Moore (Introduction by C. J. Cherryh), Northwest of Earth, Planet Stories 2007, 18.
38 The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 83.
39 Northwest of Earth, 36-38.
40 92.
41 Selected Writings on Art and Literature, 54.
42 Catherine L. Moore, Judgment Night, Paperback Library 1965, 22.
43 34–35.
44 Gale E. Christianson, “Kepler’s Somnium: Science Fiction and the Renaissance Scientist,” Science Fiction Studies, March 1976.
45 Stephenson, Bruce, The Music of the Heavens: Kepler’s Harmonic Astronomy, Princeton University Press, 1994, 126.
46 Kitty Ferguson, The Music of Pythagoras, Walker and Company 2008, 274.
47 In Jack Vance, The Demon Princes, Vol. I, Doherty (Orb) 1997, 73.
48 The Decline, Vol. I., 230, 231.
49 279.
50 398.
51 399.
* * * *
Thomas F. Bertonneau has published widely on such subjects as modern poetry, the American novel, literary theory, religion and literature, anthropology and literature, music and literature, the history of conservative thought—and science fiction. Bertonneau is co-author with Kim Paffenroth of The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction (2006); his article on Walter M. Miller’s short fiction appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 2008. Bertonneau has been a visiting professor at SUNY Oswego since 2001. He is affiliated with the R
ussell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and is a regular contributor to The Brussels Journal.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
(1797–1851)
Despite two parents whose writings were famous (or notorious), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley didn’t receive much of a formal education, though she was constantly exposed to her well-connected political journalist father William Godwin’s social circle, which included such notable figures as essayist Charles Lamb, critic William Hazlitt, and renowned English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Shelley also benefited from the informal practice of reading her mother’s books and from writing stories from an early age. At ten years old Shelley had her first poem published. After her mother’s death her father, desperate for money, released old love letters revealing a history of her mother’s affairs and an illegitimate child. Not surprisingly in reaction to the scandal and her father’s betrayal, Shelley rebelled, running away with and marrying Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was seventeen. (She’d met him a year before through her father’s social circles. He already had a wife at the time.)
As the story goes, Shelley’s best known work Frankenstein was written under unusual circumstances, beginning with a challenge by Lord Byron when the Shelleys visited his summer house in Lake Geneva. Bad weather at the time initiated a ghost story challenge, and Mary delivered a short story which later became the famous novel. Brian Aldiss and others have argued that Frankenstein is the first SF novel. Detractors point out that while the story does include common SF ideas, those ideas weren’t really used in a science fictional way. And some feel that perhaps Frankenstein is a horror story or fairy tale, and the science fictional aspects are merely coincidental.
Shelley’s husband was assumed to have written the novel as it was published anonymously in 1818, and so the authoress suffered a lack of recognition early in her career. After the deaths of three of her four children, Shelley suffered a nervous breakdown in 1819. Shelley’s husband had frequently and openly cheated on her (not surprisingly, given how they met). Shelley nearly died from a miscarriage in 1822, and soon after her husband drowned in a sailing accident later the same year.
After her husband’s death Shelley continued to write professionally, publishing Valperga in 1824, The Last Man (which is more clearly science fiction than Frankenstein) in 1826, and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck in 1830. Two of her novels are supposed to have been semi-autobiographical, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). In 1831 Shelley made the curious decision to go back and revise Frankenstein, republishing a more conservative version of the novel under her own name and weeding out what she saw as weaker writing of her younger days. (The original edition is less polished, but much stronger in many ways.) After this move Shelley began to gain recognition, as the second edition was quite popular. Along with many shorter works and poems that appeared in journals and magazines, Shelley worked as an editor, putting together the first authoritative edition of her husband’s poetry in 1839. She was only fifty-three when she died of a brain tumor.
THE LAST MAN, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
First published in 1826
I awoke in the morning, just as the higher windows of the lofty houses received the first beams of the rising sun. The birds were chirping, perched on the windows sills and deserted thresholds of the doors. I awoke, and my first thought was, Adrian and Clara are dead. I no longer shall be hailed by their good-morrow—or pass the long day in their society. I shall never see them more. The ocean has robbed me of them—stolen their hearts of love from their breasts, and given over to corruption what was dearer to me than light, or life, or hope.
I was an untaught shepherd-boy, when Adrian deigned to confer on me his friendship. The best years of my life had been passed with him. All I had possessed of this world’s goods, of happiness, knowledge, or virtue—I owed to him. He had, in his person, his intellect, and rare qualities, given a glory to my life, which without him it had never known. Beyond all other beings he had taught me, that goodness, pure and single, can be an attribute of man. It was a sight for angels to congregate to behold, to view him lead, govern, and solace, the last days of the human race.
My lovely Clara also was lost to me—she who last of the daughters of man, exhibited all those feminine and maiden virtues, which poets, painters, and sculptors, have in their various languages strove to express. Yet, as far as she was concerned, could I lament that she was removed in early youth from the certain advent of misery? Pure she was of soul, and all her intents were holy. But her heart was the throne of love, and the sensibility her lovely countenance expressed, was the prophet of many woes, not the less deep and drear, because she would have for ever concealed them.
These two wondrously endowed beings had been spared from the universal wreck, to be my companions during the last year of solitude. I had felt, while they were with me, all their worth. I was conscious that every other sentiment, regret, or passion had by degrees merged into a yearning, clinging affection for them. I had not forgotten the sweet partner of my youth, mother of my children, my adored Idris; but I saw at least a part of her spirit alive again in her brother; and after, that by Evelyn’s death I had lost what most dearly recalled her to me; I enshrined her memory in Adrian’s form, and endeavoured to confound the two dear ideas. I sound the depths of my heart, and try in vain to draw thence the expressions that can typify my love for these remnants of my race. If regret and sorrow came athwart me, as well it might in our solitary and uncertain state, the clear tones of Adrian’s voice, and his fervent look, dissipated the gloom; or I was cheered unaware by the mild content and sweet resignation Clara’s cloudless brow and deep blue eyes expressed. They were all to me—the suns of my benighted soul—repose in my weariness—slumber in my sleepless woe. Ill, most ill, with disjointed words, bare and weak, have I expressed the feeling with which I clung to them. I would have wound myself like ivy inextricably round them, so that the same blow might destroy us. I would have entered and been a part of them—so that
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
even now I had accompanied them to their new and incommunicable abode.
Never shall I see them more. I am bereft of their dear converse—bereft of sight of them. I am a tree rent by lightning; never will the bark close over the bared fibres—never will their quivering life, torn by the winds, receive the opiate of a moment’s balm. I am alone in the world— but that expression as yet was less pregnant with misery, than that Adrian and Clara are dead.
The tide of thought and feeling rolls on for ever the same, though the banks and shapes around, which govern its course, and the reflection in the wave, vary. Thus the sentiment of immediate loss in some sort decayed, while that of utter, irremediable loneliness grew on me with time. Three days I wandered through Ravenna—now thinking only of the beloved beings who slept in the oozy caves of ocean—now looking forward on the dread blank before me; shuddering to make an onward step—writhing at each change that marked the progress of the hours.
For three days I wandered to and fro in this melancholy town. I passed whole hours in going from house to house, listening whether I could detect some lurking sign of human existence. Sometimes I rang at a bell; it tinkled through the vaulted rooms, and silence succeeded to the sound. I called myself hopeless, yet still I hoped; and still disappointment ushered in the hours, intruding the cold, sharp steel which first pierced me, into the aching festering wound. I fed like a wild beast, which seizes its food only when stung by intolerable hunger. I did not change my garb, or seek the shelter of a roof, during all those days. Burning heats, nervous irritation, a ceaseless, but confused flow of thought, sleepless nights, and days instinct with a frenzy of agitation, possessed me during that time.
As the fever of my blood encreased, a desire of wandering came upon me. I remember, that the sun had set on the fifth day after my wreck, when, without purpose or aim, I quitted the town of Ravenna. I must have been very ill. Had I been possessed by more or less of delirium,
that night had surely been my last; for, as I continued to walk on the banks of the Mantone, whose upward course I followed, I looked wistfully on the stream, acknowledging to myself that its pellucid waves could medicine my woes for ever, and was unable to account to myself for my tardiness in seeking their shelter from the poisoned arrows of thought, that were piercing me through and through. I walked a considerable part of the night, and excessive weariness at length conquered my repugnance to the availing myself of the deserted habitations of my species. The waning moon, which had just risen, shewed me a cottage, whose neat entrance and trim garden reminded me of my own England. I lifted up the latch of the door and entered. A kitchen first presented itself, where, guided by the moon beams, I found materials for striking a light. Within this was a bed room; the couch was furnished with sheets of snowy whiteness; the wood piled on the hearth, and an array as for a meal, might almost have deceived me into the dear belief that I had here found what I had so long sought—one survivor, a companion for my loneliness, a solace to my despair. I steeled myself against the delusion; the room itself was vacant: it was only prudent, I repeated to myself, to examine the rest of the house. I fancied that I was proof against the expectation; yet my heart beat audibly, as I laid my hand on the lock of each door, and it sunk again, when I perceived in each the same vacancy. Dark and silent they were as vaults; so I returned to the first chamber, wondering what sightless host had spread the materials for my repast, and my repose. I drew a chair to the table, and examined what the viands were of which I was to partake. In truth it was a death feast! The bread was blue and mouldy; the cheese lay a heap of dust. I did not dare examine the other dishes; a troop of ants passed in a double line across the table cloth; every utensil was covered with dust, with cobwebs, and myriads of dead flies: these were objects each and all betokening the fallaciousness of my expectations. Tears rushed into my eyes; surely this was a wanton display of the power of the destroyer. What had I done, that each sensitive nerve was thus to be anatomized? Yet why complain more now than ever? This vacant cottage revealed no new sorrow— the world was empty; mankind was dead—I knew it well—why quarrel therefore with an acknowledged and stale truth? Yet, as I said, I had hoped in the very heart of despair, so that every new impression of the hard-cut reality on my soul brought with it a fresh pang, telling me the yet unstudied lesson, that neither change of place nor time could bring alleviation to my misery, but that, as I now was, I must continue, day after day, month after month, year after year, while I lived. I hardly dared conjecture what space of time that expression implied. It is true, I was no longer in the first blush of manhood; neither had I declined far in the vale of years—men have accounted mine the prime of life: I had just entered my thirty-seventh year; every limb was as well knit, every articulation as true, as when I had acted the shepherd on the hills of Cumberland; and with these advantages I was to commence the train of solitary life. Such were the reflections that ushered in my slumber on that night.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 40