Tales of Mystery and Imagination; or, What is the first SF novel?

What is the first Science Fiction novel?

This question was raised in an interesting article by one Jim Harris at Auxiliary Memory (found here http://jameswharris.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/the-time-machine-by-h-g-wells/) where he argues that THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells is the first science fiction novel properly so called.

Let me quote his words, so as not to mislead:

I agree in part and disagree in part. What would I consider the first science fiction novel properly so called? That depends on what I consider the boundaries of science fiction to include.

Let us look to Mr. Harris to see where he puts the bounds. Mr. Harris takes pains to distinguish science fiction strictly defined from the loosely defined, which he calls a catch-all phrase rounding up such diverse tales as the extraordinary voyages of Jules Verne (what we would now call “technothrillers”) or the atmospheric weird tale of Mary Shelly of a modern Prometheus, creating life with the divine spark of science. Science fiction truly defined, says Mr. Harris, is about seeing the future through the lens of science—he places FRANKENSTEIN and WAR OF THE WORLDS into the category of horror stories: monsters up from the grave or monsters down from outer space.

He says:

He concludes that, among the various contenders for “first” SF books, THE TIME MACHINE takes the laurels, on that grounds that other, earlier books, including those by Wells himself, did not use scientific concepts as the lens to examine the ultimate future of mankind, whereas this book did.

I agree with him that there is a core definition of SF and a periphery. Core SF or Hard SF is the center of a sprawling mansion with many rooms, chambers, corridors and nooks, and the passages connecting it to the houses of fantasy and horror are so many and so well used that we are better off merely speaking of Core SF as one chamber in the sprawling, Gormenghastian pile. What are the characteristics defining this core?

The first characteristic is the one discussed by Mr. Harris. (Here again I agree with him.) I interpret his phrase “matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis” to refer to what others writers have called the “sense of deep time.”

Mr. Harris uses his phrase to distinguish speculations about mere current trends from speculations about the nature of ultimate human evolution. An example of speculations about mere current trends might be the BATTLE OF DORKING, an 1871 novel telling of an invasion of England by Prussians, and the seminal novel in the “future war” genre popular just after the Franco-Prussian War. This genre was the Victorian equivalent of something like Tom Clancy’s RED STORM RISING—clearly speculative, clearly taking place in the future, and clearly not science fiction, since it proposes no changes from the time in which it was written, except perhaps obvious applications or existing technology. The setting is the future, but the future is not distant and is not strange. To be invaded by Prussia is a pedestrian event in earthly history; to be invaded by Mars is a flight of fancy into the unearthly.

What is deep time? It is the remote future, the far future, the ultimate end of things. Certain science fiction books have an atmosphere of immensity of geologic ages of time provoking a sense of awe and wonder: CITY AND THE STARS by Arthur C. Clarke has it; and so does STARMAKER by Olaf Stapledon; THE NIGHT LAND by William Hope Hodgson; THE MOON ERA by Jack Williamson (albeit set in the past rather than the future); HOTHOUSE by Brian W. Aldiss; CATCH A FALLING STAR by John Brunner. In more fanciful works, THE DYING EARTH by Jack Vance has this sense of deep time, and SHADOW OF THE TORTURER by Gene Wolfe; but most of all THE TIME MACHINE by HG Wells has it and invented it. It is the idea that the universe around us in not parochial and comfortable, that mankind is not the special or favored darling of Creation, but that the unlit and unilluminable vastnesses both of time and of space stretch as gulfs to every side.

The sense of deep time is a sense of cosmic immensity.

This “sense of deep time” is the particular emotional mood of science fiction that Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong: Earth is not the center of the universe. Mr. Harris does not say so, but I think his stance implies—and even if it does not, I will bold enough to offer as an independent proposition—that a sense of cosmic estrangement is central to science fiction. Call this our second characteristic of core SF.

The sense is never absent from science fiction, not even in the most formulaic pulp, of a window being flung open into the remote unknown, other planets, other years, other dimensions—the planet Barsoom, the planet Mongo, the Twenty-Fifth Century, the utopia in a parallel world discovered by Mr. Barnstaple. It does not matter which way the window opens. Our hero can depart the fields we know by any means, realistic or not, the astral projection of John Carter of Virginia, or the space-rocket of Hans Zarkov, or the suspended animation of Buck Rogers, or falling through a dimensional warp while motoring on holiday. Or something from the Otherworld can intrude here, either as an elf or as a goblin, the peaceful big-eyed E.T. of Steven Spielberg or monstrous big-toothed Alien of H.R. Geiger. Whether repellent or attractive, dangerous or benevolent, does not matter: but it must be strange rather than mundane, if it is serious science fiction and not merely satire.

(The inhibitors of Otherworld can have been living among us for years, all unseen, like “the People” from a Zenna Henderson tale, the eternally-dueling immortals from HIGHLANDER, the eternally-hungry Vampires from Anne Rice. But even if the immortals among us are as native to Earth as we are, and not from the planet Zeist in any way, they or their realm still must be strange to us, or else is it not science fiction.)

I speak of it as a window rather than a door, because the emotional implication of the thrill and giddiness of discovering the unknown is better likened to flight than to a pedestrian walk. The sensation of encountering a new idea, a new truth, a deeper understanding, is so often likened to soaring or taking wing that the primary visual image used to adorn paperbacks and pulp magazines of science fiction and fantasy is one of flight: when people speak of the future, they speak first of rocketships, winged jets, jetpacks, skyscrapers, and yes indeed, flying cars. Merely look at a set of old pulp covers and notice how many things are aloft. This is partly for the denotation that the stories may be about aerospace, but I suggest it is partly for the connotation: science fiction is a genre of soaring ideas.

I note also that Mr. Harris uses an odd circumlocution “matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis” to refer to the Shape of Things To Come, but does not say, for example, “biblical book of Revelations”, which foretells in cryptic and jarring oriental imagery the tale of the end of creation. I cannot speak for Mr. Harris, but let me just say on my own behalf that I would have used a similar circumlocution, had I been saying what I think he is saying: because the Apocalypse of St. John does not contain that sense of cosmic immensity and cosmic indifference found in THE TIME MACHINE—With apologies to my Christian friends, the Apocalypse strikes a modern reader as parochial to its time: it speaks of the downfall of the Roman Empire, and describes the clashes of armies still equipped with horses and chariots: even if the horses have the heads of lions and breathe out fire and brimstone. The visions of St. John do not carry that sense, found in any science fiction story, that the future will be alien from the past, a country strange to us because science has made it strange. Far from being indifferent to human fate, the Apocalypse is about judgment, a judgment wrathful enough to blot out suns and moons, and turn the waters of the world to blood, and the wrath is not directed at the sins of dolphins or Martians or elves or other inhibiters of creation, but at men. It is a man-centered account of the universe: anthropocentric. The events foretold are not set ages and ages after the lands of Europe and North Africa have fallen like Atlantis and Lemuria into the sea, and other continents, lost in the mists of future aeons, Gonwonlane and Xothique, have risen in their places: emphasis is that this vision will come to pass very soon indeed. The Book of Revelations does not take place in “deep time.”

Just to forestall an argument: I am not here claiming that the Book of Revelation is science fiction. I am saying the opposite—certain essential features of science fiction, that sense of cosmic immensity and indifference, the discovery that the Tomorrowland is a strange country, is here absent.

Let us not pass by without noticing I introduce here a third characteristic, which grows out of the second: merely being strange and vast is not enough. Horror stories and fairy tales are filled with huge and strange imaginings. The sense that the present is different from the past is one which was pressed in on the minds of the common man during the industrial revolution: they saw how scientific inventions from the locomotive to the incandescent light had changed their lives remarkably from those of their grandfathers, and not the type of change brought about merely by war or pestilence—not merely the grindstone of history grinding out human tears. History had turned a corner: things were different now to their root. The speculation that the future would be as changed in their grandchildren’s time provoked the curiosity of the common man, and made the future a setting fit for tales of speculation and adventure set out for public consumption—and not just any future, where England invades Prussia or Prussia invades England, and everything else stays pretty much the same, but the specific type of a future: one of either progress and evolution brought on by science, as in the great airships held aloft by gravity repellor rays of the Mongols of the Twenty-Fifth Century; or one of regress and devolution brought on by science, as in the troglodyte cannibal Morlocks of A.D. 802701. In either case, science will make tomorrow strange.

And just to forestall any argument about religious writing as literature, I hasten to add that non-religious writing, even if set in the future, if it lacks the essential quality of science fiction, the notion that science will make the future a strange country, then it is not science fiction. I hold up the satire by G.K. Chesterton, NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL, set in the far-futuristic year of 1984, as an example of non-science-fictional futurism. The author there sets his events in the future because the unexplored islands of Utopia and Lilliput were already occupied by the inventions of other authors. Instead he selected an unexplored date on the calendar. The denizens of 1984, despite that they live decades from now, still wear top hats and carry walking sticks and ride in horse-drawn handsome cabs just as we do. In other words, the Notting Hill of the 1984 of Chesterton is not a speculation about the future, it is merely the place he sets the figurines of exaggeration of what he wants to mock in the current day.

The setting of Mr. Chesterton’s satire is not central to the conceit of the book. Let us contrast this with George Orwell’s NINETEEN-EIGHTY FOUR, where the book’s horrific message was that Soviet-style totalitarianism, with all its acrobatic mental dishonesty (Newspeak and Doublethink) and all its surveillance-state intrusiveness (Thought Police and telescreens and eternal reminders that Big Brother is Watching) could quite easily be imagined as evolving out of the current (in 1948) social and political milieu within the next forty years. Both books are obviously written for their current audience, but Orwell’s book lacks fangs if it not set in a time and place (near-future England, otherwise known as Airstrip One) which by their very nature carry the message that we cannot and dare not look at the hideous events seen in Russia and tell ourselves “It can’t happen here” or “it can’t happen soon.” Ergo the setting—here, and soon— is central.

If the dismal events befalling Winston Smith had been set in a current time but on an unexplored island, Utopia or Lilliput, the point is dulled. What invites this book into the Science Fiction genre is its reliance on technological and social changes that, while they did not happen, could have done (and could yet). The book-writing machinery that Julia tends in the Fiction Department, for example, lends verisimilitude to the tale by being or seeming to be a possible outgrowth of present technology. The oppressive government lends verisimilitude to the tale by being or seeming to be a possible outgrowth of current social and political trends, particularly trends in the misuse of language as a tool of propaganda.

Thus we have three characteristics of SF, but we have not defined SF.

My own definition of science fiction, for what it is worth, is that science fiction is the mythology of a scientific age.

A myth is an artistic investigation, playful or serious, of an idea or a truth; a myth is an attempt to capture an image that portrays a sense of life— to capture a mood. The mood of the scientific age is a sense of discovery, that is, of coming across the unknown that is wondrous, but which makes sense and hence is linked by what is known. (1) On a thematic level, this mood of discovery involves the three elements mentioned above: a sense of cosmic immensity and cosmic indifference, a sense of cosmic estrangement, and a sense of the strange changes tomorrow brings. (2) Artistically, this mood of discovery means the craft or cunning of a science fiction writer rests on scientific digressions or references for an illusion of realness, its verisimilitude. (3) Emotionally, the mood of discovery is a sense of wonder.

As a myth, a science fiction yarn could or should contain all the same tropes, and use all the same story-telling tools as other myths and tall tales. Note, for example, how myths and SF tales both tend to be centered on concept (a man walks into hell to rescue his bride, whom he can lead out if only he never sees her, but a single unwary glance over his shoulder as he steps into the sunlight foils him) and both tend to be short on characterization (notice how little we know of the Time Traveler—not even his name).

On a thematic level, “Cosmic Immensity” reflects the discovery that earth is lost amid astronomical gulfs of space and geological epochs of time.

“Cosmic Indifference” here means that the universe is natural rather than supernatural, and will take no note of our passing: the tale takes place in a philosophically naturalistic universe of the scientific world view (albeit an anthropocentric cosmos can be reintroduced in an SF tale if it is given a scientific veneer—see for example “The Weapon Shop” by A.E. van Vogt, where a doomed time traveler, and not a natural process, creates the planets of solar system).

“Cosmic estrangement” refers to a window opening between the fields we know and some other world, or seeing a strange visitor from another world among us.

“A sense of change” reflects the idea that tomorrow will be a country different from the present, whether more pleasant or less, utopia or hell, but in any case alien to us, and the strangeness will be due to scientific progress. Buck Rogers waking in the Twenty-Fifth Century will wake amid a strange land, even as our present would be a strange land to any Rip van Winkle waking suddenly among us.

As a matter of artistic craft, the difference between science fiction and other myths is that science fiction stories properly so called must take place in the setting of a scientific world-view. In the same way that a sea-story like MOBY DICK relies on digressions about the details of whaling to create verisimilitude (a feeling that the story could happen at sea), science fiction stories rely on digressions about the details of science to create verisimilitude (a feeling that the story could happen in a real, but unexplored part of the strange and vast universe discovered by the scientific revolution).

This does not meant the writer is restricted only to what science has actually discovered (albeit, of course, “hard” or “Campbellian” SF calls upon real science to lend an atmosphere of verisimilitude) but that when the writer introduces fantastic and supernatural elements, he paints them as if they could exist in the scientific world view: so that a friendly genii becomes instead Mentor of Arisia, an alien being from an ancient and highly-advanced planet; the black arts of magic become the technology of parapsychology; a helpful wizard becomes Obi-Wan Kenobi, the practitioner of a form of psychic disciplines, and the spirit world becomes “the Force” described in a scientific metaphor as an “energy field binding the galaxy together”, and so on.

By this account, the difference between the Time Traveler of Wells voyaging into the future, and the Scrooge of Dickens voyaging into the future, is that Scrooge, because he is escorted by the ghost of Christmas Future, is in a ghost story, a fairy tale, whereas the Time Traveler, because he is seated on the saddle of a time-traveling mechanism, is in a science fiction story—even though, empirically speaking, there are more people alive today who have seen ghosts (or claim to have) than there are who have seen time machines (or claim to have).

No one with a straight face will say one is more unlikely or unrealistic than the other, but time machines are machines, and hence a myth we can tell about science, whereas the Three Spirits of Christmas are ghosts, and hence are myths we can tell about Christmas. A time machine is a fantastic vehicle ergo a member of the same group of beings as an Ironclad steamship, a heavier-than-air flying machine, a submersible, or a moon rocket: whereas the ghost of Christmas Future is a member of same order of being as Hamlet’s father when he appears to Hamlet, Caesar when Anthony sees him before Philippi, or Achilles when Odysseus sees him in Hades as a shade. The first group is unique to the industrial revolution; the second group has been with us always.

On the emotional level, note how many an early pulp sci-fi magazine summed up in its title in one word the mood of science fiction: these are tales of wonder. They are astounding, amazing, tales to astonish, weird tales, tales of the unknown. I would add that SF strictly defined derives its wonder from the natural wonder of scientific speculation, rather than from, for example, the wonders of a tale of Scheherazade. If you have been puzzled why science fiction readers glide so easily into nearby genres of fantasy, fairy tale, horror and weird tales, or even adventure fiction set in the medieval, classical or prehistorical world, it is because these are sources of wonder, whereas lonely-heart romances, pirate stories, and westerns are not. The common element between loose and strict science fiction is not the mental exercise of speculation—neither the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs nor the Conan stories of Robert E Howard contain the least particle of speculation about anything—it is the mood of wonder.

Science Fiction loosely defined, which includes fantasy, is any tale of wonder; science fiction strictly defined is any wonder-tale deriving its wonder from the scientific world view. The sprawling mansion of SFF is all the mansions of wonder; the central nave of SF is the nave of scientific wonder.

I say “scientific wonder” and not merely “scientific progress”— to buttress this, let me point out that if Captain Nemo had invented, using the same futuristic technology he used to invent his Nautilus, a factory or a fuller’s mill, there would have been just as much scientific speculation as Jules Verne (who is quite careful about such things) took pains to put into TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. But the crucial scenes where the submersible passes across the ruins of Atlantis, or fights a giant squid, or passes under the Isthmus of Panama, or where Nemo plants his black flag on the ice of the Antarctic, where no man has ever set foot before—in other words, the scenes of wonder—would have been missing, and hence the tale would not have been what I would call science fiction. If mere non-existent gadgetry made a story science fiction, then a fair number of technothrillers and spy novels would be included.

I emphasize the mood of science fiction is one of discovery, and discovery includes elements of strangeness and wonder, but that particular kind of wonder that makes a kind of sense, or appeals to the reason. For example, in HG Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS, when the Martians invade the earth, they are not simply an invasion of blood-drinking demons. Wells used the scientific knowledge of his day, which speculated that Mars was an older planet than Earth; by Darwinian ideas (still new when Wells wrote), this implies a more highly evolved form of men might live there; by Victorian ideas, this implies men less physically brutal and more cerebral than Englishmen, even as Englishmen were thought to be less physical and more cerebral than Neanderthals; which implies a more developed machine culture, so that the Martians are little more than brains with hands, carried about by machines; and this machine culture was one that had wiped out all microbes and dangerous bacteria from their planet, for the same reason Englishmen wiped out all lions and bears in England—because such things are hazardous. The Martians drain their victims of blood, not because they are vampires, but because their science allows them to inject the nutriments directly into their own veins, bypassing an atrophied digestive system.

If I may spoil the surprise ending of the book, it turns out that even the highly advanced Martians, with their minds immeasurably superior to Man, though as mortal as his own, cannot escape the pitiless and iron law of Darwinian selection. The Martians perish on the Earth simply because they have been adapted to the bacteria-free conditions of Mars. So the Martians are strange and wondrous (that particular type of wonder called horror), and are perfect representatives of the unknown, but not just any unknown—the Martians both in their superiority and their downfall make a kind of sense, since both their superiority and their downfall are due to Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest. Martians are not merely monsters, they are monsters of scientific evolution, monsters that make sense. This is science fiction.

I would be so bold as to announce that the movie version of the same story by George Pal is not science fiction—or, at least, not “hard” SF—since in the movie the Martians are slain, not by an implication of Darwinian evolution, but by the divine intervention of God, who, in His infinite wisdom, placed bacteria upon the Earth for just this reason. I am not saying it is a bad film, and I am not saying seeing the Hand of God in events is not a correct perception, but I am saying that the sense of wonder which comes from a supernatural story is not the same as the sense of wonder which comes from a scientific speculation story. Martian invaders slain by the same archangel who slew the myriads of Sennerachib occupy the outer mansions of SFF, not the inner core.

This definition of science fiction points to the scientific and industrial revolution that overwhelmed the Western World after the Renaissance as the source of science fiction.

Several revolutions combined to create the particular mythic atmosphere of SF. The oldest is the Copernican Revolution, including the discovery of the Galilean Satellites of Jupiter. After that, the heavenly bodies were no longer wandering stars or the concentric spheres of Dante, but planets are now material places, worlds like earth, and if inhabited, have spring and autumn as we do. Next was the development in geology, which made ridiculous the calculations of Bishop Ussher that the world started in 4004 B.C., but instead opened the vistas of time immeasurably backward, to Neolithic and Paleolithic men, ancient mammals of the Ice Ages, and the true-life monsters we call Dinosaurs, and still further back, to a lifeless world of volcanism and roaring oceans beneath primordial skies of eternal cloud. The other great revolutions in thought were ushered in by Darwin, who argues against the special creation of species, and hence implies mankind (like other beasts) to be the plastic product of inhuman evolutionary forces; by Freud, who argues that the human character is shaped by unconscious forces beyond our understanding or control; and (for better or worse) by Marx, who argues that every aspect of human life is governed by the materialistic dialectic of inhuman and unconscious historical forces, driven by economic factors.

Oddly, I propose we can account for the enduring popularity of HP Lovecraft (who, by any fair standard, was an eccentric writer of wretched juvenile pulp, full of overblown purple prose, adroit at neither plot, nor tension, nor mood, nor characterization) only by saying he captured explicitly the mood of science fiction better than his contemporaries: his stories, no matter how weak in craftsmanship, resonate with that chilling sense of cosmic immensity, or cosmic indifference, which the Copernican revolution first ushered into the awareness of Western men. (I say “Western” because such notions are found anciently in the East—I suggest that the endless kaplas of the eternal reincarnations of the eternal worlds of the Hindu and the Buddhist contain that same sense of soul-obliterating cosmic vastness.)

It is almost with a sense of giddiness, as if we ride a roller-coaster, that the modern mind beholds the centers of the universe jerked out from under our feet: Copernicus says our world is not the center of the universe, Darwin implies our race is not the special culmination of creation, Freud says the content of our character is an accident of subconscious forces, Marx says men do not shape history, history shapes men, and our social-political institutions are a by-product of as an evolution as blind and remorseless as that which turned apes into us. So neither our world, our race, our souls, nor our societies are central to anything: we have been flung to the periphery of the cosmos. HP Lovecraft, gripping white-knuckled the balustrades of history, stares into this abyss and is terrified, whereas Olaf Stapledon, seeing the same deadly vastness, the same inhuman machinery of evolution and destruction, salutes its darkness with a mystical joy .

My point here is that we science fiction people like that sensation of giddiness when the universe is jerked from its center. To look at old familiar things with new eyes, and see them as suddenly strange, is what separates true science fiction from mere adventure tales set in a futuristic or extraterrestrial setting. When used more thoughtfully, those estranged eyes can then look back to earth and tell us something new about the human condition: I seem to recall that most of the first season episodes of STAR TREK were actually contemplations on what it means to be Man.

To deflate an argument before it begins, I am not calling SF Marxist (or Freudian, or Darwinian)—but I am asserting that supernatural concepts like “fate” or “destiny” have no place in the scientific world view, whereas the idea that men are plastic and shaped by the evolutionary pressures of history does have a place. Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION embraces a view of history as a scientifically determined set of natural forces—and this is the view of history popularized by Marx (though, to be fair, he filched it from Hegel). Hari Seldon organizing events to bring about the inevitable Second Galactic Empire rests on a notion of history like that of Lenin organizing events to bring about the inevitable world socialist revolution—naturally, Seldon foresees the rise of an Imperial Monarchy rather than an anarchist communal utopia, but neither man relies on a supernatural view of history, such as the books of the Sybil foretelling the rise of the son of Aeneas. There are no “chosen ones” in science fiction—there are only genetic-bred superhumans, like Paul Mu’ad-dib or Kimball Kinnison, and they are selected by eugenics, picked by Arisians, or by Bene Gesserit, not picked by the Norns.

So, in sum, my definition of science fiction is that it is the mythology of a modern age, which, as a central feature of the tale, presents a wonder-tale of the unknown that relies on scientific speculation in order to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude.

Now, my definition slightly differs from Mr. Harris’ definition of science fiction, and, by no coincidence, I have to award the laurels of “first true science fiction novel” to a different work by a different author.

My candidate:

THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET by Edgar Allen Poe.

This novel has one of those delightfully longwinded subtitles favored by previous generations, whose effect is to remove any major surprises from the narrative:

I can just imagine if, say, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, had been graced by a similar subtitle:

What is the narrative about? Well, if the subtitle did not tell you, the novel is broken into two stories completely disconnected from each other.

The first story is a sea story, about youth who, against his parent’s wishes, but with connivance of his friend, stows away himself and his family dog in a fume-ridden and claustrophobically cramped coffin-shaped box in the hold of the Grampus. While he is buried alive in this hold, and suffering from semi-comatose periods of delirium due to the unhealthy fumes, unbeknownst to him, a bloody mutiny erupts on deck, and everyone but his friend is killed. He is trapped, isolated, forgotten, and unrescued, dying slowly of famine. The two manage to overcome the mutineers—Pym (whom none of the mutineers know is aboard) dresses up as a corpse and scares them, because criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, and this allows the friend to get the jump on them, but then a storm blows the masts and rudders from the ship, and the survivors slowly die of starvation, thirst, and exposure. He is once more trapped, forgotten, unrescued and dying slowly of famine. There is some cannibalism, and not the friendly Michael Valentine Smith kind either, a stabbing murder, a lingering death, and once or twice ships pass nearby and do not rescue them, either because the crews are indifferent to human life or because they are filled with rotting and swollen plague-corpses. The crew dies, the friend dies, and the family dog dies.

Pretty typical Poe, if you ask me. I was expecting someone dressed as the Red Death to show up any moment with a bottle of Amontillado in hand, bury the main character alive again, or stick him under a bladed pendulum or throw him into a maelstrom or something.

The second story starts when the survivor is rescued by the sloop Jane Guy, which then sails toward the Antarctic Circle. Now the proceedings gets weird. It turns out that any ship breaking through the ice beyond the 87th parallel runs into an area of warm ocean, where the water is milky, and covered with ash and steam, and lights shine up from the deep. A doglike-catlike chimera with startlingly white fur, with red teeth and red nails is to be found in the islands in that part of the world (albeit apparently never alive—Pym encounters them only as corpses). There is a race of men inhabiting the unearthly island of Tsalal, who are not just black-skinned, like a Negro or Dravidian, but black-toothed, and dressed in all dark furs, and entirely devoted to dark deeds.

Even the trees, rocks and water are odd. Allow me to quote at length:

The native chieftain and his soldiers put on a show of friendliness, lure the captain and crew into a narrow pass, and topple the easily-crumbled cliffs onto them. The narrator Pym and one other fellow named Peters survive, but (of course) are buried alive (again) in a system of caves.

These caves form long passages which seem to be some form of pre-Arabic cursive writing, which spells out an unreadable warning. The two survivors watch from a cave mouth as the dark-clad men of Tsalal beach the Jane Guy and light the ship afire, which their primitive minds take to be a living creature. They are not far wrong: the ship retaliates (as it were) when the powder magazine ignites, decimating the natives with flame and shrapnel while in the midst of their victory dance.

For the third time Pym is trapped, forgotten, unrescued and dying slowly of famine. Pym and the other fellow starve for a while, and then are discovered: while fleeing, they steal a canoe, and, kidnapping one of the natives (named Nu-Nu), they put to sea. With little or no provisions, no sextant, and no compass, and no ability to repass the zone of ice surrounding the warm ocean of the Antarctic, the two men and their captive press ever southward, toward the pole. So we then have a fourth period of being trapped, isolated, and dying of famine.

Here, at the risk of seeming impudent, I give the concluding and enigmatic paragraphs of the work in their entirety:

The narrative breaks off at that point, and there is a note from Poe explaining that Arthur Gordon Pym passed away before he could reveal how he traveled back from the South Pole or what the meaning was of the unfathomable titanic figure whose cloaked form rose above them.

It is the kind of ending we professional writers in the field call a “total cheat.” That is the technical name for it, when you put your first person narrator in a situation where he cannot possibly return to this world, and then abruptly end the affair with no explanation of anything.

All I can say is, that must have been one remarkably rapid passing away, if Mr. A.G. Pym did not have time even to croak out a quick explanation of how he traveled 9365 miles while naked an unprovisioned in a canoe occupied by two corpses: perhaps he was narrating while strapped beneath a swinging bladed pendulum, and could only blurt out 150 pages worth of words (including a digression on the proper harvesting of salt water crustaceans) before the extremely rapid fall of the deadly blade silenced him prematurely.

Had I been Mr. Poe, I might have asked Mr. Pym that question first: “My dear Mr. Pym, your neighbors report that on the midnight of October 31st of 1829, a gigantic yet shrouded figure taller than any human and whiter than snow, riding a chariot of fire, descended with a tumultuous noise through the clouds of a thunderstorm, flattening nine acres of oak, ash, and other strong and ancient trees; and the awful noise of his coming was heard as far away as Kingsport, 60 miles hence. The figure was carrying you in the palm of its titanic hand in a coffin made of white crystal and filled with flowers from the planet Venus, and with you were five albino penguins larger than dray horses, a shoggoth from John Carpenter’s THE THING, the wreckage of a time machine made of Cavorite, and a member of the Great Race of Yith, a rugose cone who is currently engaged as your valet. Then a voice like thunder spoke out of the moon, called the giant white figure by the name MELCHISEDECH, and swept him up into outer space by means of a tornado of fire, taking with him the screaming body of your neighbor Wilbur Whateley. I was wondering if you would begin your narrative with an account of these singular events—but, oh, wait! I would much rather hear about your relationship to your uncle, and why he toyed with the idea of disinheriting you if you pursued a career of a sailor at sea. My readers are much more interested in those details. And tell us your opinion of the proper means of harvesting of sea crustaceans.”

THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM is Poe’s only novel-length work. It is (as I said above) an inconsistent work, filled with more than the ordinary number of continuity slips (what we in the field call “Homer’s nods”) and the first part of the narrative is a story with no relation to the second part. This may be the reason why Poe is known for his short fiction.

However, the edition I read should deserve an award for the most worthless and mind-bogglingly stupid footnotes and endnotes in the fields of literature. The editor delighted in putting forth the most farfetched interpretations, unsupported by anything in the narrative, for symbolic meanings of names and places and objects. For example, when the narrator comes upon a canoe, which are designed with prows at both ends, the editor intrudes a footnote to point out that the narrative itself has certain symmetries of form at the opening and ending! Therefore the reference to the canoe is a reference to the book in which the canoe appears! Or, for example, when Poe is using the colors white and black to refer to (what seems to me, at least) fairly transparent Christian symbols of salvation and damnation, the editor barges in with a footnote to say the narrative is all about racism. I take this not as a sign that the editor has any particular insight into Poe, but rather than the editor has a particular interest in racism, and no particular interest in Christianity.

You may be wondering, dear reader, in what way, shape or form the THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM can be counted as science fiction.

That I will answer in one word: infodumps.

Yes, Edger Allen Poe, master of the craft of writing, has decided, in this fictional narrative to lend an air of verisimilitude to the odd and unearthly and horrific proceedings by adding long Melville like (or Heinlein like) mini-lectures on various aspects of the science of sailing, including the proper stowage of cargo, the dangers of grain in the hold, and, most importantly for my point here, Poe gives a mini lecture on the discoveries of Antarctic exploration of his current time.

Poe quotes the account of Captain James Weddell, whose log states that although he was frequently hemmed in by ice before reaching the seventy-second parallel, yet, upon attaining it, not a particle was to be discovered, and that, after the seventy-fourth parallel, no ice fields. “It is somewhat remarkable that, although vast flocks of birds were seen, and other usual indications of land, and although, south of the Shetlands, unknown coasts were observed from the masthead tending southwardly, Weddell discourages the idea of land existing in the polar regions of the south.” This means that even the oddity of finding an expanse of warm water beyond the ice-fields is not a complete invention.

Antarctica had not yet been discovered. Poe lived in a world where the South Pole might have been merely an oceanic ice cap like the North. Or, if we believe Arthur Gordon Pym, it may have been a warm region, flowing with strange waters, not to mention a gateway into some unearthly Otherworld or Afterlife.

I call this science fiction because the voyage to the Antarctic was a voyage, in Poe’s day, was a real but unknown place, a place just off the edge of the map, just as a the Moon, real but unknown, was just off the edge of the map in the days of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Poe had all the scientific information about the most recent expeditions, and how far they had penetrated, and what they had found, to color his narrative, and he used the real findings of his current science to establish an atmosphere of realism. The point of establishing an atmosphere of realism is to establish by contrast an atmosphere of unrealism.

In this case, it was an air of scientific realism that was being sought—whether we agree that this is a true science fiction story would depend, at least in part, with our interpretation of that very enigmatic very last line. Coming across hooded and gigantic angel (or whatever) pale as Antarctic snow, looming from beyond the Veil separating the human world from the Great Beyond—may place this story merely in the broader definition of science fiction, where Mr. Harris puts monster stories and other oddities. But the sense of cosmic immensity, estrangement, discovery, wonder and awe with form the very core of science fiction are not absent from that line.

About John C Wright

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

September 4, 2009 @ 9:57 am

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