Science Fiction: A Critical Guide

Patrick Parrinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book, first published in 1979, presents a portrait of science fiction as a distinct form of serious and creative literature. Contributors are drawn from Britain, America and Europe, and range from well-known academic critics to young novelists. The essays establish the common properties of science fiction writing, and assess the history and significance of a field in which critical judgements have often been unreliable. The material ranges from the earliest imaginative journeys to the moon, to later developments of British, American and European science fiction.

Part I

Early landmarks: from the beginnings to 1900

The literary background to science fiction

Mark R. Hillegas

I

Any discussion of science fiction before Verne and Wells must necessarily begin with some agreement about the term itself. There have, over the years, been many attempts at a definition, but in my judgement the broadest, most accurate, and most comprehensive remains that of Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell (1961). At the heart of his definition is the concept that science fiction is a kind of narrative derived from ‘some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology’. Contrasted with science fiction is fantasy, which pays no lip-service to fact but involves instead the supernatural or at least the obviously impossible. Science fiction according to this definition is not possible until the world-view shifts from a supernatural explanation of phenomena to a rational explanation based on known or hypothesized laws of the universe. The two forms are not always pure - fantasy can have science-fiction elements and science-fiction fantasy elements. Also to be emphasized is the fact that writers of science fiction have often drawn on literary traditions of fantasy.

response to the first scientific revolution, chiefly the new astronomy. Three voyages to other worlds, out of many, deserve particular attention: Kepler’s Somnium (1634), Bishop Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and Sun (1656). The classic, comprehensive treatment of early ‘cosmic voyages’ is Marjorie Nicolson’s Voyages to the Moon (1948), to which, like all subsequent writers on the subject, I am greatly indebted.

Before turning to the first attempts in the seventeenth century at anything like science fiction, a few earlier works need to be discussed as a contrast with the new kind of imagination that begins with the first scientific revolution. Two works of Lucian, the second-century Syrian who wrote satires in Greek, illustrate the contrast. The first is his True History, which interestingly was initially published in English translation in 1634, the year Kepler’s Somnium appeared in Latin. Mostly it is satiric fantasy, with a great deal of what today would be called obscenity. The True History involves a journey to the moon, but it is entirely an accident - Lucian’s ship is picked up by a typhoon, whirled around at high speed, and lifted 1,800,000 feet into the sky. From there on he just sails to the moon: ‘On the eighth day we sighted what looked like a big island hanging in mid-air, white and round and brilliantly illuminated, so we steered towards it, dropped anchor and disembarked.’ Presto, the mariners are on the moon. It is a delightful book, and includes a meeting with the Greek heroes, a conversation with Homer (who had not been blind after all), and a giant whale whose stomach is inhabited. Besides an Island of the Blest, there is also an Island of the Damned, where the worst punishment is reserved for those who had written Untrue Histories. ‘As my conscience was absolutely clear in that respect’, writes Lucian, ‘I was able to watch the poor fellow’s sufferings without any serious fears for my future.’

The second, shorter work of Lucian’s - its first paragraph is used by Wells as an epigraph to The First Men in the Moon (1901) - is the Icaromenippus. This time the traveller goes to the moon by design, having rigged for himself the wing of a vulture and that of an eagle. Besides Lucian, one might perhaps mention as in a sense predecessors of science fiction, various medieval visions of the heavens, the fantastic journeys of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, or Astofo’s visit to the moon in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

Another work - not science fiction - which inaugurates a tradition and also stands as part of the background to a good deal of science fiction is More’s Utopia (1516). A diversely interpreted work, Utopia makes little sense unless one sees it as a kind of fiction, as C. S. Lewis pointed out in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. It is, he wrote, ‘a holiday work, a spontaneous overflow of intellectual high spirits, a revel of debate, paradox and (above all) of invention’, a work looking forward to Gulliver’s Travels but standing a long distance from Plato’s Republic. In Book II, More’s traveller, Raphael Hythloday, describes a democratic yet paternalistic agrarian society set on a crescent-shaped island, impregnable to foreign attack. In this communal state, people move at regular intervals between cities and farms, and food is stored in great warehouses, so that no utopian need suffer starvation. Diversity of religious belief is permitted; gold and silver are despised and used for chamber pots and the chains of prisoners; and all people wear the same coarse clothing. But some of its features, such as slavery for the punishment for crime (including adultery) and restrictions on travel, would be repugnant to us today. Details from Utopia turn up in works as different as Wells’s The First Men in the Moon and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948). utopian (and the mirror image, dystopian) elements are, of course, an important strand in much science fiction, particularly in the twentieth century.¹

Kepler’s Somnium is the first major example of anything like science fiction, and it is not science fiction in any way approaching pure form. In a dream the hero of the story, Duracotus, is transported to the moon by demons. But even in this supernatural journey there is some attention to scientific detail, notably the effects of gravitation and rarefied air in space. With the description of the moon and its inhabitants, we get what Kepler the scientist considered possibilities, though they seem utterly fantastic to us. (The conception of the moon appears to have had some influence on Wells’s First Men in the Moon, and at one point Wells mentions Kepler.)

Kepler’s moon is very briefly described, and then not too clearly. There are two halves to the moon: the Subvolva, which I take to be the hemisphere facing the earth, and the Privolva, the side we never see. For all the moon, ‘Whatever is born on the land attains a monstrous size. Growth is very rapid. Everything has a short life, since it develops an immense body.’ The Privolvans are apparently nomadic - some walk on very long legs (which may suggest the sorns of C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, 1938) - some have wings to fly, others use boats, and all can apparently survive long periods under water. The Subvolvan hemisphere is more settled, equivalent to our ‘cantons, towns, and gardens’.

Several details, as I have noted, suggest The First Men in the Moon. One sounds like the dawn of a lunar day witnessed by Cavor and Bedford;

If anything is exposed during the day, it becomes hard on top and scorched; when evening comes, its husk drops off. Things born in the ground—they are sparse on the ridges of the mountains — generally end their lives on the same day, with new generations springing up daily.

The caves in which some of the inhabitants hide from the sun during the lunar day are another detail that dimly foreshadows The First Men in the Moon. All in all, though, I have a feeling that Wells’s indebtedness to Kepler is fairly slight.

Much more coherent and very charming is the next significant moon voyage, Bishop Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, published four years later. It is the story of a shipwrecked Spaniard, Domingo Gonsales, who discovers birds, called ‘gansas’, which he trains to carry him into the air. They are rather strange birds: ‘one foote with Clawes, talons, and pounces, like an Eagle, and the other whole like a Swan or water fowle’. Escaping from savages on an island, the hero ascends into the sky: ‘It was my good fortune that they tooke all one way, although not just the way I aymed at.’ The birds, to his surprise, migrate to the moon. One of the most effective sections of the journey is the sight of the earth hanging in space:

Then I should perceive a great shining brightness to occupy the roome, during the like time (which was undoubtedly none other than the great Atlantick Ocean). After that succeeded a spot almost of an Ovall form, even just such as we see America to have in our Mapps. Then another vast cleernesse, representing the West Ocean; and lastly a medley of spots, like the Countries of the East Indies. So that it seemed unto me like no other than a huge Mathematical Globe, leasurely turned before me, wherein successively all the Countries of our earthly world within the compasse of 24 howers were represented to my sight.

What he sees leads Domingo to defend the Copernican theory.

Journeying for about twelve days (and without hunger, a common experience of many early space travellers), he finds himself hurtling towards the moon: ‘Then, I perceived also, that it was covered for the most part with a huge and mighty Sea.’ His description of the moon as he makes his approach seems to be fairly close to what observers in the seventeenth century had thought they had seen through their primitive telescopes.

When Domingo lands, he naturally discovers that the moon is inhabited. His description, though brief, portrays a simple utopian world. There is no waste of anything ‘necessary for the use of man’; food of all sorts grows without labour; clothing, housing are provided virtually without labour, and that ‘as it were playing’. All the women are extraordinarily beautiful, and no man desires any other than the one he has known. Naturally, there is no crime; the people, ‘young and old, doe hate all manner of vice’. Occasionally, imperfect children are born, but they are shipped off to America.

The next major journeys to other worlds are Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and Sun. The voyages, of which the first is the most interesting, are only marginally science fiction - chiefly they are satiric fantasies and delightful as such. Cyrano’s first attempt to reach the moon is by a rather novel means. He fastens about him a number of bottles of dew, and, naturally, since dew rises, so does he. High above the clouds, he discovers he is not heading towards the moon, so he breaks some of the bottles of dew and lands instead in Canada. There he constructs another machine, activated by a spring; and, on his first attempt at launching from a rock, lands with a crash, bruising himself badly. Back in his room, he greases himself all over with beef marrow and returns to his machine, to which soldiers have attached firecrackers. He jumps into his machine to break off the fire-crackers, but it is too late, and he finds himself shooting into the air. Eventually the firecrackers give out, but Cyrano keeps on going, since the moon in waning quarter sucks up the marrow of animals, and that is what he is covered with. Touch-down is in the Earthly Paradise, where Cyrano falls on the Tree of Knowledge. Briefly he joins the select company there of Adam, Eve, Enoch, Elijah, and Saint John the Evangelist. All goes well until he gets into an argument with Elijah, eats of the Tree of Knowledge, and finds himself suddenly in a land of beast men who walk on all fours. And so it goes. There is very little science in the voyage, except Cyrano’s advocacy of the Copernican theory and speculation about a plurality of worlds. There are, however, some interesting inventions among the inhabitants of the moon, including movable houses and talking books.

For his Journey to the Sun, Cyrano constructs a more elaborate device, a 6-foot-tall box topped by a glass icosahedron. It is not exactly clear how the device is propelled; apparently it drives air out the top and sucks air in at the bottom. Meanwhile, though, it works, and Cyrano goes on a very long journey to the sun, giving him a chance to expound the Copernican theory. He lands first on one of the sunspots, which are actually little worlds circling the sun - a very good place to leave him.

A work that has had considerable influence on science fiction is, of course, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), though except for the Voyage to Laputa, it is not itself science fiction. Instead it is a brilliantly satiric and ironic extension of travel literature, and something of the tone of the work lives on in many subsequent science-fiction stories and novels. Few, I think, would dispute that the most influential incident in the book is poor, bluff, not-too-bright Gulliver’s inadvertent revelation of the depravity and cruelty of Western civilization in his interview with the King of Brobdingnag. After all that Gulliver has to tell about ‘conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments’, the king offers his famous judgement: ‘I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.’ One of the most important places where the incident reappears is in Wells’s The First Men in the Moon in Cavor’s interview with the Grand Lunar - except for his physics, Cavor is about as bright as Gulliver. It also appears again four decades after Wells in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, in the interview with the Oyarsa of Malacandra.

The only real science fiction in Gulliver’s Travels is the Voyage to Laputa in Book III. Set adrift because of treachery, Gulliver lands on the island of Balnibarbi, only to discover ‘a vast opaque body between me and the sun, moving towards the island’. This is the Flying Island of Laputa, and Marjorie Nicolson has argued that Swift’s use of it is a moon voyage in reverse. Laputa, whose underside is adamantine, is powered by a giant magnet. With the Laputans, who are impractical mathematicians lost in abstract thought, Swift is making fun of knowledge which brings no practical human benefit.

Much more important as science fiction is Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752), which was influenced by Gulliver’s Travels (Voltaire admired Swift greatly and knew him during his four-year exile in England). The hero, an inhabitant of Sirius who is 120,000 feet tall, travels to our solar system with the aid of his ‘marvellous knowledge of the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s introduction
• Part I Early landmarks: from the beginnings to 1900
• Part II Two formative traditions
• Part III Science fiction today: aspects of a contemporary literature
• Notes on the editor and contributors
• Index