Scientific Romance Read online

  Two years later, another associate of the Movement, Louis Geoffroy, invented another new genre in his Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1832, Histoire de la monarchie universelle (tr. as The Apocryphal Napoléon), which describes how Napoleon, after thrashing the Czar’s armies in the Russian Campaign, goes on to conquer the entire world, stimulating a rapid scientific advancement far in excess of the one to which our depleted history was restricted.

  Further significant contributions to the fledgling genre were made in France by S. Henry Berthoud, Joseph Méry and Léon Gozlan, and the Romantic Movement still had sufficient impetus in the 1860s for Jules Verne to become a late recruit, his literary ambitions initially being nurtured under the wing of Alexandre Dumas. Indeed, before making his crucial breakthrough with Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon), Verne had written a thoroughly Romantic and decidedly lachrymose roman futuriste, Paris au XXe siècle (1863, pub. 1994; tr. as Paris in the Twentieth Century). However, the publisher who took him under contract, P.-J. Hetzel, not only refused to publish the work but advised Verne to bury it forever, and it did not see the light of day until 1994, when it finally reached print.

  The satirical elements of Romantic futurism were carried forward by numerous French humorists, who found futuristic and technological speculation a fruitful resource. There is a larger component of comedy in the French genre than the British one, although the American genre took similar inspiration from Poe—who was almost alone in constituting the American Romantic Movement—and there is a strong affinity between French and American scientific romance in their comedic element. Inevitably, that element shows up more prominently in the present showcase anthology, which is necessarily restricted to short fiction, than the earnest Vernian element or the future war fiction so vital to the British genre, which is almost entirely exemplified by novels.

  The sampler included herein is thus a slightly distorted view of the contents of the three parallel genres, but I have attempted to offer some compensation for that by including a chronological appendix of longer works produced in the same period, from Edgar Allan Poe’s initial experiments to the outbreak of the Great War. Although it does make perfect sense to employ roman scientifique and scientific romance as a descriptive term for material published after 1918, especially in Britain and France, where the American notion of “science fiction” only made slow inroads prior to the Second World War, there is a sense in which the genre had lost some of its impetus by then, and had markedly changed direction.

  That transformation came about partly because the popular magazines that had provided an arena for enthusiastic experimentation before the war had completed their investigation of the pattern of audience demand, and had come to the conclusion that scientific romance would never be able to compete with crime fiction and love stories in terms of widespread popularity, and partly because the after-effects of the war and the manner of its fighting had left a lingering disenchantment with the idea of scientific progress, quashing much of the exuberance of fiction dealing with such themes. The scientific romance genre continued to produce works of great brilliance in both Britain and France, but they were mostly marginal to the literary marketplace, and those that were not frankly alarmist were esoteric in their appeal.

  The following collection, therefore, offers a few examples from the period of the genre’s first emergence, before focusing its principal attention on its heyday, when scientific romance was in its most enterprising and exciting phase. Contemporary readers, who can hardly help seeing the genre as an ancestor of science fiction, will inevitably be struck by the difference between the two genres, one of which is particularly conspicuous. The influence that science fiction took from scientific romance was broad, but it had a focus on four works in particular: Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, and Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon. Although very popular, these works were not typical of the genre of scientific romance, and had only a limited influence within it, but they became the most important foundation-stones and models of science fiction; the most enthusiastic and inventive recruits to the new genre soon gave great prominence to the notion that space travel would be a central element of the future development of civilized societies.

  The reasons for that conviction include the enthusiastic advent of rocket research alongside the early development of the science fiction magazines in the 1930s, and also reflect the fact that science fiction took up where the quintessentially American genre of the western had been forced to leave off, replacing the tamed frontier of the West with the “final frontier” of interplanetary space, to which the fundamental project of adventurous pioneering and colonization could be conveniently exported. Europe did not have such a ready-made attraction to the mythology of an impending “Space Age,” and roman scientifique and British scientific romance remained much more firmly anchored to the Earth in envisaging potential futures.

  To diehard science fiction fans, that restriction of attention on the part of scientific romance might seem like a failure of imagination, but to the practitioners of French and British futuristic fiction it seemed like common sense and justified prudence. For a while, in the late 1960s, when it briefly seemed that a Space Age might actually be beginning, science fiction boomed; now, fifty years later, the myth has been severely tarnished, and science fiction is in evident decline. In consequence, it might well be the case that the achievements of scientific romance can now be assessed more fairly, and its merits more accurately judged, in terms of its philosophical acumen as well as its entertainment value.

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (US)

  S. Henry Berthoud

  A Heavenward Voyage (France)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  The Artist of the Beautiful (US)

  Fitz-James O’Brien

  What Was It? (US)

  Eugène Mouton

  The End of the World (France)

  James Clerk Maxwell

  A Paradoxical Ode (After Shelley) (UK)

  Edward Page Mitchell

  The Ablest Man in the World (US)

  Ernest d’Hervilly

  Josuah Electricmann (France)

  Grant Allen

  The Child of the Phalanstery (UK)

  John Davidson

  The Salvation of Nature (UK)

  J.-H. Rosny

  Tornadres (France)

  Charles Epheyre

  Professor Bakermann’s Microbe (France)

  Edgar Fawcett

  In the Year Ten Thousand (US)

  Émile Goudeau

  The Revolt of the Machines (France)

  Ambrose Bierce

  For the Akhoond (US)

  Frank R. Stockton

  The Philosophy of Relative Existences (US)

  Julian Hawthorne

  June 1993 (US)

  Jerome K. Jerome

  The Dancing Partner (UK)

  Camille Debans

  The Conqueror of Death (France)

  H. G. Wells

  The Star (UK)

  George Griffith

  A Corner in Lightning (UK)

  Walter Besant

  The Memory Cell (UK)

  Jack London

  The Shadow and the Flash (US)

  Edmond Haraucourt

  The Gorilloid (France)

  William Hope Hodgson

  The Voice in the Night (UK)

  Maurice Renard

  The Singular Fate of Bouvancourt (France)

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Horror of the Heights (UK)

  Appendix:

  A Chronology of the Most Important Longer Works of Scientific Romance Published between 1830 and August 1914

  THE CONVERSATION OF EIROS AND CHARMION

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the most innovative and a
dventurous writer active in the United States in the nineteenth century. Perennially at odds with his hard-headed adoptive father, John Allan, and completely unappreciated by his contemporaries, he lived in abject poverty and misery, and died in mysterious circumstances of an illness that his physicians could not diagnose. Ever infected by what one of his stories called “The Imp of the Perverse,” Poe had appointed as his literary executor his arch-enemy, the appalling Rufus W. Griswold, who made far more money out of Poe’s works than Poe had contrived to do in his lifetime, did everything humanly possible to blacken his reputation and diminish his genius, added insult to injury by foisting the name of his adoptive father permanently upon his byline, but lent ironic impetus to his peculiar legend.

  Poe experimented with many different narrative strategies and a wide range of subject matter, inventing the detective story and modern horror fiction, and also publishing several works that can now be seen as important exemplars for the subsequent development of scientific romance, including the long “prose poem” Eureka (1848), which developed contemporary cosmological theory in a rhapsodic manner. “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835), a farcical and satirical depiction of a voyage to the moon by balloon, was rapidly outshone by the New York Sun’s “Moon Hoax,” which Poe thought partly inspired by his own story. He added a prefatory note to the book version arguing, tongue-in-cheek, that the time was ripe for the insertion of more verisimilitude into accounts of imaginary space travel—which turned out to be one of the true words spoken in jest that are considerably rarer than proverbial wisdom suggests. Poe’s own literary hoaxes included an account of a transatlantic crossing by balloon and, more interestingly, a mock-scientific account of the employment of hypnotism to preserve a man’s consciousness after death, nowadays known as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845).

  “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) is a dramatization of contemporary ideas regarding the nature of comets and the perennial fascination of the question of what might happen if the Earth were to have a close encounter with one. It illustrates the difficulty of devising appropriate narrative viewpoints for the telling of such stories, solving the problem in this instance with characteristic flamboyant originality. It also includes an oblique, ironic reflection of the notoriety of the preacher William Miller, who published numerous articles during the 1830s supposedly based on calculations derived from Biblical prophecies. Predicting the end of the world in 1844, Miller attracted large numbers of followers, who, undeterred by the failure of the prediction, founded the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which now has millions of members, and still expects the end of the world any day now.

  I will bring fire to thee.

  —Euripides, Andromache

  EIROS

  Why do you call me Eiros?

  CHARMION

  So henceforward you will always be called. You must forget, too, my earthly name and speak to me as Charmion.

  EIROS

  This is indeed no dream!

  CHARMION

  Dreams are with us no more; but of these mysteries anon. I rejoice to see you looking lifelike and rational. The film of the shadow has already passed from off your eyes. Be of heart, and fear nothing. Your allotted days of stupor have expired; and, tomorrow, I will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence.

  EIROS

  True, I feel no stupor, none at all. The wild sickness and the terrible darkness have left me, and I hear no longer that mad rushing, horrible sound, like the “voice of many waters.” Yet my senses are bewildered, Charmion, with the keenness of their perception of the new.

  CHARMION

  A few days will remove all this; but I fully understand you, and feel for you. It is now ten earthly years since I underwent what you undergo, yet the remembrance of it hangs by me still. You have now suffered all of pain, however, which you will suffer in Aidenn.1

  EIROS

  In Aidenn?

  CHARMION

  In Aidenn.

  EIROS

  Oh God! pity me, Charmion! I am overburdened with the majesty of all things, of the unknown now known, of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.

  CHARMION

  Grapple not now with such thoughts. Tomorrow we will speak of this. Your mind wavers, and its agitation will find relief in the exercise of simple memories. Look not round, nor forward, but back. I am burning with anxiety to hear the details of that stupendous event which threw you among us. Tell me of it. Let us converse of familiar things, in the old familiar language of the world which has so fearfully perished.

  EIROS

  Most fearfully, fearfully! this is indeed no dream.

  CHARMION

  Dreams are no more. Was I much mourned, my Eiros?

  EIROS

  Mourned, Charmion?—oh, deeply. To that last hour of all, there hung a cloud of intense gloom and devout sorrow over your household.

  CHARMION

  And that last hour—speak of it. Remember that, beyond the naked fact of the catastrophe itself, I know nothing. When coming out from among mankind, I passed into night through the grave—at that period, if I remember aright, the calamity which overwhelmed you as utterly unanticipated. But, indeed, I knew little of the speculative philosophy of the day.

  EIROS

  The individual calamity was, as you say, entirely unanticipated; but analogous misfortunes had been long a subject of discussion with astronomers. I need scarce tell you, my friend, that even when you left us, men had agreed to understand those passages in the Holy Writings which speak of the final destruction of all things by fire as having reference to the orb of the earth alone. But in regard to the immediate agency of the ruin, speculation had been at fault from that epoch in astronomical knowledge in which the comets were divested of the terror of flame.

  The very moderate density of these bodies had been well established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites of Jupiter without bringing about any sensible alteration either in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets.2 We had long regarded the wanderers as vapory creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our substantial globe, even in the event of contact. But contact was not in any degree dreaded; for the elements of all the comets were accurately known. That among them we should look for the agency of the threatened fiery destruction had been for many years considered as an inadmissible idea. But wonders and wild fancies had been, of late days, strangely rife among mankind; and although it was only with a few of the ignorant that actual apprehension prevailed upon the announcement by astronomers of a new comet, yet this announcement was generally received with I know not what of agitation and mistrust.

  The elements of the strange orb were immediately calculated, and it was at once conceded by all observers that its path, at perihelion, would bring it into very close proximity with the earth. There were two or three astronomers of secondary note who resolutely maintained that a contact was inevitable. I cannot very well express to you the effect of this intelligence upon the people. For a few short days they would not believe an assertion which their intellect, so long employed among worldly considerations, could not in any manner grasp. But the truth of a vitally important fact soon made its way into the understanding of even the most stolid. Finally, all men saw that astronomical knowledge lied not, and they awaited the comet.

  Its approach was not, at first, seemingly rapid; not as its appearance of very unusual character. It was a dull red, and had little perceptible train. For seven or eight days we saw no material increase in its apparent diameter, and but a partial alteration in its color. Meanwhile the ordinary affairs of men were discarded, and all interests absorbed in a growing discussion, instituted by the philosophic, in respect to the cometary nature. Even the grossly ignorant roused their sluggish capacities to such considerations. The learned now gave their intellect, their soul, to no such points as the allaying of fear, or to the
sustenance of loved theory. They sought, they panted, for right views. They groaned for perfected knowledge. Truth arose in the purity of her strength and exceeding majesty, and the wise bowed down and adored.

  That material injury to our globe or to its inhabitants would result from the apprehended contact, was an opinion which hourly lost ground among the wise; and the wise were now freely permitted to rule the reason and the fancy of the crowd. It was demonstrated that the density of the comet’s nucleus was far less than that of our rarest gas; and the harmless passage of a similar visitor among the satellites of Jupiter was a point strongly insisted upon, and which served greatly to allay terror.

  Theologists, with an earnestness fear-enkindled, dwelt upon the Biblical prophecies, and expounded them to the people with a directness and simplicity of which no previous instance had been known. That the final destruction of the earth must be brought about by the agency of fire, was urged with a spirit that enforced everywhere conviction; and that the comets were of no fiery nature (as all men now knew) was a truth which relieved all, in a great measure, from the apprehension of the great calamity foretold.

  It is noticeable that the popular prejudices and vulgar errors in regard to pestilences and wars—errors which were wont to prevail upon every appearance of a comet—were now altogether unknown. As if by some sudden convulsive exertion, reason had at once hurled superstition from her throne. The feeblest intellect had derived vigor from excessive interest.

  What minor evils might arise from the contact were points of elaborate question. The learned spoke of slight geological disturbances, of probable alterations in climate, and consequently in vegetation; of possible magnetic and electric influences. Many held that no visible or perceptible effect would in any way be produced. While such discussions were going on, their subject gradually approached, growing larger in apparent diameter, and of a more brilliant luster. Mankind grew paler as it came. All human operations were suspended.