SCIENCE FICTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

 

Dr Martin Willis

 

 

For many critics of science fiction, I would be the stooge - the one who forgot to take a step back when the sergeant-major asked volunteers to step forward, the one who drew the shortest of straws from a handful of apparently similar lengths. This is always the role of the speaker invited to talk of nineteenth-century science fiction. Because science fiction never existed in the nineteenth-century; science fiction is the literature of the modern world, of the moment, the now, even the future. There is a quiet assumption that an interest in nineteenth-century SF reveals an out-of-touchness, a stepping away from the vibrant debates of the present to indulge a faintly unrespectable fascination with the long outdated. The scholar of nineteenth-century SF is rather like Middlemarch's awkward academic Causabon, seeking the key to all mythologies in the dead past.

This is often the project of discussions of science fiction in the nineteenth-century; the search for origins in a series of defining ur-texts. And these texts have not changed a great deal since Hugo Gernsback talked of the 'Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells type of story' in the 1920s. Add the maternity of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to this list of father-figures and it is largely complete. Indeed if we do not think outside of these characteristics of the critical debates we could quite easily reproduce the countless articles and book chapters that have said much the same thing for decades.

So let us turn things around a little: let us begin not from within the SF critical canon, but outside it, or on its margins at least, within other genre fictions. If we consider the strangeness of SF's relationship to the nineteenth century as a critic of gothic literature, things would seem rather different. The study of gothic literature has grown as greatly as that of science fiction over the last two decades. Alongside this, there has been enormous growth in those literary artefacts that might be called gothic, or which, we might better say, have been assimilated into the generic canon of the gothic. Now critics of the gothic flinch not at all in calling Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights an example of the gothic, or viewing Dickens' Bleak House as Victorian urban gothic. The same might be said of critics of detective fiction. While it has never been problematic to place the roots of detection in the work of Poe or Conan Doyle, now Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and a host of others are all equally fictions of detection. Why has science fiction not undertaken a similar project of genre gathering? Perhaps SF's own interrogations of colonialism and imperial expansion have, to some extent, situated the genre in ideological opposition to any form of expansionist undertaking. And it would be reasonable to suggest that other genre's attempts to expand their own canons have undermined their claims to be genres at all; if almost anything can be said to be gothic, for example, how is gothic a useful label?

Let us consider then, a field of inquiry that it is the other side of the science fiction coin: the interdisciplinary study of literature and science. These two areas of academic inquiry should be close cousins, but this has not been the case. More interestingly, the study of literature and science is dominated, to an extraordinary degree, by studies of the nineteenth-century. For this community of scholars the Victorian period, in particular, is littered with poetry, novels, short stories and other prose writing in which science plays a key role. To give some examples, the recent British Society for Literature and Science conference hosted presentations on the importance of science in Tennyson, Wilde, Wells, Hardy, Shelley, Carlyle, Dickens, Haggard, and Stoker, and those are just the papers I listened to. Surely it is surprising to discover so much science being imaginatively constructed or re-imagined in fictional contexts across the nineteenth century, and yet not to find science fiction scholarship claiming some of it as examples of its own genre? Why is science fiction so reluctant to engage with nineteenth-century writing, or to see a key period of its own evolution there? For me, it is the problem of how science has been, and to some extent continues to be, treated in SF criticism. I want now to turn to this.

The two keynotes of the early SF debates (in the 1970s) were the boundaries of the science fiction canon and the importance of science as a context for fiction. The views that came to dominate in each of these areas of discussion are that views that have continued to hold sway over contemporary science fiction criticism. In the first, science fiction has come to be seen as a genre that has its beginnings in the early twentieth century with some important precursors in the late nineteenth century. In the second, the importance of science has been relegated to that of a checklist against which the critic can check the correctness of a fiction writer's knowledge of scientific fact. The supremacy of these critical positions has led to a disregard for nineteenth-century science fiction and the history and philosophy of science that was so influential in the creation of these fictions. This is a bold claim to make but it is not made without justification. Although many critics of science fiction (both nineteenth and twentieth century) do recognise the importance of science as a foundation for the work of SF writers very few investigate that science in a sustained and analytical way. Science is viewed by the scholarly community in two ways, neither of which is particularly productive in gaining further insight into the literary text. First, science is considered as 'fact' and the SF text read only to discover if the writer has the facts of science correct. Second, science is seen as nothing more than a chronological checklist of events and discoveries within which the SF text can be placed. In the first instance Arthur C. Clarke is widely considered a 'good' writer of SF as he is remarkably precise in his scientific detail. In the second Aldous Huxley can be seen as a visionary because his Brave New World prefigures many later discoveries in genetic engineering.

That science has been reduced from a vibrant set of political and social cultures to an encyclopaedic entry or a set of facts is in itself surprising. Early science fiction critics - while not investigating the scientific contexts of SF in any detail - were proponents of a critical practice that would include substantial investigation of the scientific influence on SF. In 1976 Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin insisted that:

As the literature of science, science fiction can be most richly experienced if we understand something of science itself - science is of interest not only as a necessary tool in understanding science fiction but as a demonstration of the nature of the materials that originally motivated science fiction.[i]

Although they are rather vague over the "something of science" that critics should understand, Scholes and Rabkin highlight science as an essential element of the SF genre. Patrick Parrinder, an astute critic of the contexts of science fiction, placed Scholes' and Rabkin's view in a historical frame:

The period of ascendancy of the scientific outlook - an ideology justifying scientific research as intrinsic to the nature and purpose of human existence - began with the technological triumphs and the erosion of traditional religious beliefs caused by the Industrial Revolution. The growth of science fiction as a separate genre would be unthinkable without this ascendancy.[ii]

As Parrinder's opinion proves there were critical voices calling for an interrogation of the historical development of science alongside any investigation of science fiction. Yet there still remained some scepticism over the relevance of science to science fiction:

The problems of writing about the relationship between science and science fiction are manifold. It is necessary not only to define one's terms but to dispel the widespread suspicion that the relationship is accidental rather than essential.[iii]

As Parrinder here reveals, the connections between science and science fiction, however often they were paraded by a number of critics, were not readily accepted. Robert Philmus, in his 1971 critical monograph, which we should remember was the first full-length scholarly work on SF, argued that "science fiction, I still maintain, is not as strictly dependent on an extra-literary reality as the extrapolative theory of its nature unavoidably suggests."[iv]

Contemporary SF criticism has accepted Philmus' views more than they have Parrinder's. It has also gone along with Scholes' and Rabkin's assertion that knowing something of science is useful. The "something" has, however, been the scientific fact or the encyclopaedic list. Recent critical readings of science fiction clearly verify this. Gary Westfahl, in a 1996 monograph on hard science fiction, Cosmic Engineers, explains why he will not concentrate on the scientific aspects of the science fiction he aims to discuss:

While my B.A. in mathematics and experience teaching math at the college level arguably provide minimal qualifications, I am not a scientist and do not feel fully qualified to discuss purely scientific issues. My considerations of the complex relationship between science and hard science fiction will be limited to some basic comments about the scientific process and the eventual conclusion that some type of purely scientific evaluation is a necessary element in examinations of hard science fiction.[v]

Westfahl regards science as factual knowledge that is either known or not known. His failure to understand scientific fact makes him, in his own opinion, unable to judge the scientific content of science fiction that deals explicitly with science (as hard science fiction purports to do). Yet Westfahl does not recognise that science is a cultural phenomenon as much as it is a discipline of fact. This failure leads him to make claims for science fiction that are hugely misleading:

I am now prepared to venture a different hypothesis: namely, that despite public pronouncements, science fiction was in fact largely indifferent to science before 1950 and conspicuously tolerated frequent errors and inattentiveness to scientific fact and scientific thinking.[vi]

Westfahl's determination to view science only as fact allows him to cast out all other facets of science employed by science fiction writers. It is historical revisionism to argue that neither Mary Shelley nor H.G. Wells was interested in science even if their scientific facts reflect the understanding of a layperson rather than a scientific specialist. Rather, Westfahl rejects the importance of science's place within the human cultural sphere; one of the key themes of a great majority of science fiction. Even when there is recognition that science takes place within a social and political world it still receives cursory treatment. The publication of a recent collection of essays on disease and medicine in science fiction suggested that a critical renegotiation of the importance of science might be underway.[vii] This was reinforced on the opening page of H. Bruce Franklin's essay on Frankenstein: "To comprehend the relevance of Shelley's achievement to our medical environment today, we need to look at the medical environment of her day, including both its history and its direct effects on her own life."[viii] Yet what followed these introductory remarks was a chronology of obstetrics from the eleventh century to the early nineteenth century that only in the latter stages was made relevant to Shelley's own life, if not her fiction. This encyclopaedic referencing of science is common. Even Thomas D. Clareson, one of the most sympathetic critics to the importance of science, could say firstly that he hoped his work would "help us to understand the manner in which writers have made use of materials which they regarded at the time they wrote as having a basis in science" and then offer nothing more than a chronological list of scientific discoveries as evidence.[ix]

           

The history of science fiction criticism has militated against an extended reading of science fiction and the cultures of science in the nineteenth century. It has denied nineteenth-century science fiction a significant place in the canon and has reduced science to factual knowledge. Even those critics - Patrick Parrinder, Thomas D. Clareson, Eric Rabkin, Robert Scholes and others - who have registered the importance of contextualising science fiction within the scientific culture of its own period have not taken the opportunity to produce a piece of scholarship that reveals the benefits of such investigation. Like Mark Rose, who introduced his own work by stating that "an extended discussion of the milieu - would include - an account both of nineteenth-century science and of the growth of popular interest in science," they offer the opportunity to other scholars.[x] No-one has yet taken up their offer, although recent scholarship has suggested that a return to historical context, at least, is imminent. The recent collection of essays on SF and medicine, despite surveying the field too superficially, did focus on the sciences as an important element in science fiction. In another recent collection, Farah Mendlesohn made an explicit plea for the introduction of "alternative approaches and methodologies to science fiction criticism."[xi] She concludes:

If science fiction is to have a respected place in the canons of the academy - which presumably is a goal shared by all of its supporters - then the genre must be considered as more than a collection of texts aspiring to be recognized for their literary excellence. Today, with science fiction forced to compete within literary criticism on the basis of a value system designed for a very different form of writing, it is imperative that, in at least one area of academic discourse, science fiction should be taken on its own merits and values and examined in its own historical and social context. I contend that historians, not literary critics, are best situated, and most qualified, to make these contributions.[xii]

Mendlesohn's argument is a strong one, based upon a correct reading of the present state of science fiction scholarship. The historical and social contexts of science fiction, which would of course include science itself, have been consistently undervalued in SF criticism. Where Mendlesohn's argument is contentious is in her final statement. It may well be that historians are best suited to discuss history but this does not mean they are best suited to discuss history through the lens of the literary text. Yet historical expertise is essential, particularly in a project such as the present one, where the history of science is given prominence.

Mendlesohn's final comment is actually about the necessity of interdisciplinary study; for her, the disciplines of literature and history. Her certainty about the historian's ability to undertake an interdisciplinary analysis of science fiction is paralleled by Gary Westfahl's certain belief (quoted earlier) that he is not well enough qualified to discuss both literature and science. Yet this belief is founded on an understanding of science as scientific knowledge that exists only within its own limits of inquiry. If science fiction has taught us anything, and I believe it has, it is that science is significant well beyond the boundaries of its own practice, that is has a social and cultural role to play, and that this role can be examined by the literary critic or the historian. Thankfully, science fiction critics are beginning to do this. Roger Luckhurst's 2005 book on science fiction was a specifically cultural history of the genre, placing it within broader social and cultural spheres than it has been before.[xiii] Likewise Adam Robert's History of Science Fiction, published just over a year ago, regards the genre as having a far longer historical evolution than is usually admitted and sees the genre as imbricated in the socio-politics of its time.[xiv]

I would like to turn, in this the final section of my lecture, to some examples of nineteenth century science fiction. These examples will show how science fiction was a vibrant and connected genre - if not consciously so, then certainly conceptually so - and was not only British but pan-European and American. My examples are, by necessity, rather cursorily dealt with, but it is their interconnections, as well as their readings of science, that I wish to highlight rather than their individual production.

The German romanticism E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote two important short stories in the 1810s, "The Sandman" and "The Automata" and is for me a key figure in the emergence of European SF. In both these fictions - the first dealing with alchemy and the mechanisation of the human body, the other with mechanism and mesmerism - Hoffmann explores the boundaries of science as they developed in the eighteenth century. Mixing alchemical and magical/occult traditions with new scientific method, Hoffmann"s fictions explore several different liminal spaces: the permeable boundaries between the historical alchemical traditions and the new science, as well as the relative status of heterodox sciences (in his case mesmerism in particular) that sought to become the scientific orthodoxy. Hoffmann explores this through the human, however. His characters, all either scientists, alchemists, or romance archetypes, are involved in, and their humanity subject to, the struggles for power emanating from scientific practice, experimentation, and its role in society. So, in "The Sandman", Nathanael's obsessive love for the beautiful Olympia, who proves to be an automaton created by a scientist, who may also have mesmerised Nathaniel in order to hide from him Olympia's true nature, leads to his suicide. It is a tale of romance, founded in science and pseudo-science, of which the subject of the tale is the emerging science of mechanics, and the object to explore the effects of reproducing the human body mechanically.

Hoffmann's work was clearly influential on a later romanticist, Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein worked in similar territory. Her choice of science - electricity - may have been different to Hoffmann's, but her exploration of humanity was certainly in parallel to his. Frankenstein also works on the boundaries of scientific research. While Hoffmann was interested in the connections and conflicts between alchemical and scientific traditions, Shelley was fascinated by opposing philosophical positions on electricity. Although far from as clear cut as this in the first decades of the nineteenth century, electrical research could, for today's purposes, be regarded as split between a romantic philosophy of electricity as a life-giving and cosmic fluid, and a materialist philosophy that saw it as a further example of natural power that might be harnessed. These different scientific positions are explored in detail in Frankenstein, but never as scientific tract, always through the human situations of her scientist, Frankenstein, and his electrically-created creature. Shelley's novel, then, is an exploration of science's effects on human society.

Poe's work is once again in the same conceptual territory. In short fiction such as "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" or "The Man That Was Used Up" Poe examines mesmerism and mechanical prosthetics, but with a focus on their immediate effects on the human body. Both Valdemar and General Smith are biologically failing, their natural life adumbrated by declining health and the vagaries of long life. Poe's fictions examine life-enhancement, through suspension in a mesmeric state in the dark gothic "Valdemar" and prosthetic technologies in the comic "Man That Was Used Up". His interest is in how science and technology might alter, enhance, or deconstruct the natural biological body and the implications of his work are as far-reaching as that of Hoffmann or Shelley. However fictionalised is his account of mesmerism, say, it speaks directly to mesmeric beliefs in the 1840s, and while that particular form of scientific investigation has been long disproved, it was current and vital in Poe's time, and posed important philosophical questions for humanity in which Poe intervenes.

Leaping forward to the 1880s, and moving swiftly to France, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's novel Tomorrow's Eve (1886) picks up once again on the science of mesmerism, but also interrogates psychical research, electricity and mechanics. Tomorrow's Eve is one of the several "Edisonades", to borrow John Clute's phrase, of fictions that focus on a fictionalised Thomas Edison. L'Isle-Adam's novel talks directly to the scientific cultures of his time, addressing the complex interaction of central and marginal practices through the image of the artificial human, or cyborg. This cyborg, Hadaly, an inheritor of the fictional automata of Hoffmann's and Poe's tales, is a fusion of spiritualism, electricity and mechanical technologies: Hadaly has a mechanical body, has electrical motive power, and is imbued with the personality of a spirit. All of this is achieved by the fictionalised Thomas Edison, whose power is extended by L'Isle-Adam from creating the light bulb to creating a new version of humanity.  It allows L'Isle-Adam to investigate the relationship between marginal sciences, such as psychical research, with more orthodox experimentation in electricity and mechanical engineering. It does this also by offering a peculiar alternative history for the scientist-inventor, Edison. The novel's key examination is the shifting power relations between the different scientific disciplines in action in the cyborg. These struggles for authority articulate in fiction the very same struggles over what constitutes science and what does not, in late nineteenth-century Europe.

These inter-linked samples of nineteenth-century fictions of science highlight how the conceptualisation of science did coalesce around specific themes and ideas - that is, they reveal generic tropes. They also show how international was science fiction in the nineteenth century - with my examples being drawn from writing produced in Germany, Britain, America and France. They are also, it will not have escaped your notice, all very greatly invested with the tropes of the gothic, too. In this I can be said to follow Aldiss that SF does indeed work on a post-gothic mode. However, I would argue that SF is rarely, in the nineteenth-century certainly, a pure genre, and indeed that very few fictions were. Instead, SF at this time was a series of transformations of earlier generic forms, the gothic, of course, but also realism and romance. This is not leading me to argue that Dickens' Bleak House should be considered science fiction because it deals in part with theories of disease transmission and infection, or that Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes is science fiction because its central character is a geologist.  These realist fictions may deal with science, but only as one of several themes, and not with science as both the fictional subject and object. And it is on this note that I shall finish: that nineteenth century science fiction might be considered as part of the genre if the subject of the fiction is science (or technology or the scientist) and if its object is an interrogation of that science and its role in human culture and society. And there are many examples of just such fictions to be found in the nineteenth century - science fiction scholars need only to look.

 

 

 

©Dr Martin Willis, Gresham College, 8 May 2008

 

 

 

 

[1] Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977): 113-114.

[2] Patrick Parrinder, 'Science fiction and the scientific world view' in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Longman, 1979): 67.

[3] Parrinder, 67.

[4] Robert M. Philmus, Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction From Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970): xiv.

[5] Gary Westfahl, Cosmic Engineers: A Study of Hard Science Fiction (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996): 3.

[6] Westfahl, 63.

[7] Gary Westfahl and George Slusser. eds. No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002)

[8] H. Bruce Franklin, 'The Science Fiction of Medicine' in No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, 11 (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002)

[9] Thomas D. Clareson, Some Kind of Paradise: The Emergence of American Science Fiction (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985): xiv.

[10] Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981): 7.

[11] Farah Mendlesohn, 'Science Fiction in the Academies of History and Literature; Or, History and the Use of Science Fiction' in Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization and the Academy edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, 119 (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002)

[12] Mendlesohn, 124-125.

[13] Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)

[14] Adam Roberts, History of Science Fiction. (London: Palgrave, 2007)

 

 

 

 

 

MODERN BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION

 

Dr Roger Luckhurst

 

Thanks very much.  I just wanted to say what an honour it is to be asked to Gresham College.  Working at Birkbeck College - I always think of Birkbeck as the sort of sullen teenager to Gresham, because we're a mere 175 years old, whereas Gresham is considerably older.

I was thinking this afternoon that the way that this symposium has been structured is kind of heliocentric really. We started with the great star at the centre, Neal Stephenson, we've heard all of these wonderful, very inhabitable, rich planets, and now I'm the outer piece of rock who's going to do an eccentric orbit around and probably get demoted from being a planet at the end!  That's partly because of this title that I was given - "Modern British Science Fiction".  I think we've all had a difficult task to try and condense down, but this is really hard.  Not only is science-fiction a problem, as we've seen, defining it, "British", my god, that's a problem to define and I'm not even going to go there today, but "modern" is possibly one of the hardest words to think about and define, and in many ways, what I'm going to do today is try and think about that word "modern" and what it can do for us, so I'm going to try and do that in 25 minutes.

Okay, what I'm going to do is offer a number of different ways of thinking about that word "modern", and I?m then going to use these ideas to offer some routes through what we might think of as British science-fiction of the last 100 years, offering a spine that can take us from Wells, via Aldous Huxley, through Arthur C. Clarke in the '50s, J.G. Ballard in the '60s, and so on up to the present day.  And as with other speakers, I'm going to end by suggesting that in recent times we've seen a kind of progressive dismantling of rigid genre boundaries, a condition of what has been called the post-genre fantastic, that actually, following on from what Martin was saying, looks very much like the pre-genre fantastic.

So first, let's take aim at that word "modern", because once we break it open, it offers some good clues about the emergence of this literature that we're loosely calling, and worryingly calling, science-fiction.  In proper teacherly mode, I might start etymologically and note that "modern" derives from the Latin meaning "of today".  The modern, in other words, focuses always on the contemporary, on nowness or the Zeitgeist.  Now that is completely unhelpful, until we reflect that a concern with valuing the present, or nowness, over the past, is actually a very new condition.

When the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote "The Painter of Modern Life" in 1863, commanding artists and writers to capture the fleetingness of contemporary urban situation in Paris, it was something of a scandal, just like the paintings of Corbiere, because it threw over the primacy of classical models and the authority of history.  Baudelaire was part of a new movement that valued contemporaneity in art.  We therefore need to realise that a focus on the modern is actually a very modern thing.  Again, this is a tautology - to be modern is modern - unless we break it open a little bit more conceptually.

So I'm going to split this term into three different strands - I know it's late in the day, but take a deep breath!  We're going to call modernity, modernisation, and modernism.  These terms obviously overlap, but they also start to make some useful distinctions.

So, modernity is a term that is often applied to a historical epoch that starts in the 18^th Century.  It is associated politically with the revolutions that bring us the modern broadly democratic nation state, the American and French Revolutions, which overthrow the divine right of kings, feudalism, rule by aristocracy, and so on.  Obviously, we had that revolution here and then we changed our minds!  Modernity is also associated with a philosophical revolution, in which we see the rise of the Enlightenment thinkers who dispense with rational authority and, for some anyway, religious belief for a secular, empirical, broadly scientific rationality.  One thinks here of philosophers like Hume or Cant, but also the emergence obviously of modern scientific theory and practice. Modernity is therefore an outline of a particular epoch that we still occupy, so starting roughly, as John Clute was saying, in about 1750.  It divides us, we might say, from traditional societies.

Modernisation, the second term, has a different emphasis.  It suggests the economic and technological transformation that came with the first Industrial Revolution and with the remorseless assent of the capitalist mode of production from the 18^th Century to the present day.  It was Karl Marx, ironically, who gave us the greatest hymn to the power and energy of capitalist modernisation, this sense of ceaseless drive and change, of constant innovation and transformation, the way that the fabric of the city is always in motion, torn up, rebuilt, thrown over, built again.  Under capitalism, Marx famously said, "All that is solid melts into air."  For Marx of course, this energy was also one that led to economic misery for the majority and a sense of alienation, as authentic life was abstracted into monetary exchange and machines.  In a system driven by perpetual modernising tendencies, the boundaries of the human are being consistently challenged and re-defined.  The experience is always one of flux.

Finally, we associate the term "modernism" much more narrowly with the radical experiment in art that really took off at the start of the 20^th Century, with the avant garde manifestos that denounced all traditional art forms and sought to invent a wholly new basis for aesthetics.  Futurists were followed by Fauvists, Cubists, [?], Dadaists, but the foundations for these attempts to outrage respectable taste were laid by the bohemians and dandies of the 19^th Century, of which Baudelaire was an exemplary figure, suitably diseased with syphilis and sleeping with prostitutes and so on - all these decadent things we'd like to do.

This experimental art had a complex, very complex, relation to modernity and modernisation.  Sometimes, it obsessively celebrated the tearing up of traditions and was in love really with hard, new, shiny technologies and the savagery of modern war, as with the Italian Futurists of course, who composed songs to fast cars and military hardware and demanded, in their famous 1909 manifesto, "burn down the museums".

Just as often though, modernists were appalled by the modern world, and sought to retreat into abstraction, difficulty and elitism, and I suppose one thinks obviously here of T.S. Elliott, who grudgingly announced in 1949 in "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture" that culture had "ceased to exist", or Henry James perhaps, in his late style, his really opaque late style, and his disgust really at American commercialism and mechanical mass culture.

Okay, so this brief excursus gives us some means for thinking about how to define modern science-fiction.  We have to say that science-fiction is a literature of modernity, that is, it is oriented to the present and the future, not the past or traditional or cyclical time, and it's sometimes centrally defined as the bearer of that secular, rationalist, and enlightened philosophy that emerged in the 18^th Century.  This is certainly how big figures of the field like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov define science-fiction, and this insistence on being a literature of critique and scientific rationalism persists into many modern definitions - Darko Suvin being an obvious one.

I think we have to be looser than this.  After all, it is worth pointing out that the 18^th Century culture produced not only the new world of the empirical, realist novel, accumulating details of everyday life to reflect back and render meaningful the real to its middle class readership, but also the weird and disordered underside of modernity that was typical of the gothic romance.  Modernity might have valued rationalism, but it also spawned nightmares of the Sleep of Reason.

More specifically, we might see science-fiction as perhaps the literature that tracks the cultural impact of economic and technological modernisation.  The key works of science-fiction typically condense ambivalent reactions to the unsettling of what it means to be human by new technologically-saturated environments.  The understanding of the human is re-calibrated by scientific breakthroughs, thus giving us a fantasy of galvanic reanimation in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", or the horrors that result from Darwinian spans of time in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine".  But in this regard, science-fiction might best be thought of as a surrogate history of fantasies unleashed by the new technologies of modernisation.  Fears of mechanised culture prompt dystopias that stretch from E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" to present-day narratives of rebellious machines in "The Terminator" or "Battlestar Galactica."

One of the most savage science-fiction satires of the 20^th Century was Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", which took as one of its targets the dreams of Henry Ford, the creator of the first industrial assembly line in his car plants, and he'd used time and motion studies to break down the individual actions of each worker to maximise their productivity.  The assembly line for the Model-T Ford has given us one of the abiding images of technological modernity.  As the critic Peter Wallen comments: "Fordism turned the factory into a kind of super-machine in its own right, with both human and mechanical parts."  In "Brave New World", these principles are extended to every area of human life, including sex and reproduction, thus fulfilling technocratic and eugenic dreams of complete mechanised control over the human.  The only escape from this totalised system seems to be suicide.

The Second World War is another grim stage in the history of modernisation, to some a logical outcome of modernity rather than the irrational departure from it.  The war effort produced an economic regime that bound government, military and factory production into something the Republican President Eisenhower termed, in 1959, "the military industrial complex".

Science-fiction has a weird and convoluted relation to the key technological innovation of the Second World War - the atomic bomb.  Science-fiction is a literature that had dreamed, since the discovery of radioactive energy in the 1890s, of a perfect atomic super-weapon, and envisaged scenarios of total war from the turn of the century.  Once the bomb, in an instant, inaugurated the final extension of technological modernity to cover the globe itself, science-fiction helped embed all those post-nuclear, apocalyptic fantasies that moted the Cold War imaginary in the wake of Hiroshima.  As a literature of modernisation, science-fiction's ambivalence is most explicit in the nuclear epoch.

In British science-fiction, this stretches from the post-apocalyptic fiction of J.G. Ballard to the apparent optimistic, outward-looking science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, and even to the apparent whimsy of something like Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan".

Ballard's early work repeatedly and delightedly destroyed the world, leaving a minority of ambiguous survivors in aftermaths littered with redundant technologies.  Unlike gung-ho American survivalists, those in the ruins seemed only to be shockingly searching for the proper way to die.  Ballard controversially suggested that science-fiction needed to turn its back on outer space and explore the landscape of the traumatised mind.  One story, "The Terminal Beach", was set on Eniwetok, the Pacific island used for atomic testing in the 1940s and 1950s, and suggested that the essential nature of being human had been turned deathly by what the atomic bomb had unleashed.

When Ballard published his autobiographical novel, "The Empire of the Sun", he addressed his own war experience as a child civilian interned in a camp in Shanghai by the occupying Japanese Army.  His extraordinary visions of post-catastrophic landscapes were, he suggested, rooted in his traumatised and disassociated reactions to this imprisonment, defining events he has just returned to recently in his memoir "Miracles of Life".

Arthur C. Clarke would seem to be the absolute opposite of Ballard's dystopian world view, a scientific optimist and lifelong advocate of space exploration from his teenage years in the British interplanetary society as a teenager in the 1930s.  He came to fame in the 1950s as a commentator who conceived of satellite communications that were very soon realised in the early-'60s.  Even so, Clarke's visions of the evolutionary leap of mankind, most famously in "2001", are driven by a desire to transcend the disasters of 20^th Century modernity that culminated in the Second World War.

At the end of "Prelude to Space", from 1953, an elderly man looks back at Earth from the Moon and names everything that has just been escaped.  "Out of the fears and miseries of the Second Dark Age," the book ends, "drawing free from the shadows of Belsen and Hiroshima, the world was turning towards its most splendid sunrise.  After five hundred years, the Renaissance had come again."  Clarke's distant futures are still measured against the crisis that the Second World War induced in modernity. 

Anxieties about total war even haunt Peake's "Titus Groan", published in the late '40s.  The castle of Gormenghast might well be seen as an autonomous, eccentric, fantasy world, or perhaps a distant phantasmagoric account of England as a decaying castle citadel, ruled by pointless and half-forgotten traditions and on the bring of transformation, yet fearful of change.  Peake composed "Titus Groan" in army barracks in various parts of England between 1940 and 1942, waiting to be assigning.  This bizarre, eccentric trilogy takes on a different aspect given the knowledge that Peake travelled across liberated Europe as an illustrator for the War Office in the spring of 1945.  He arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp a few weeks after it had been liberated, with sick and dying former inmates still being treated in the compounds.  Many have read this traumatic experience directly into "Titus" alone, although that might be over-literal. 

My point is simply that the literature of science-fiction doesn't have to deal with the traumas of modernisation directly in its content.  It can also be read as determining the direction of other apparently exotic fictions, such as fantasy.  After all, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" was another book conceived and worked over initially in the trenches of the First World War.  The Orcs mass in territories that bear startling resemblances to No-Man's Land, where, Tolkien commented in his preface, most of his friends and comrades were killed.  Writing to his son during the Second World War, Tolkien lamented, to quote him, that "The first war of the machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter, leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed, and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the machines."

We can follow this determination of the trauma of total technological war into contemporary fantasy works, such as Robert Holdstock's "Mythago Wood" or Graham Joyce's "The Facts of Life".  These are also literatures that reflect on the condition of the human under the relentless turbulence of modernisation exemplified by war.

If this suggests that science-fiction ought to be a significant literature of modernity or modernisation, which I think it certainly is, otherwise I wouldn't be here, it is when we get to modernism, finally, that the problems for the genre begin, for modernism has been crucially defined against the emergence of the kind of mass culture from which genre SF developed in the late-19^th Century and early-20^th Century.  In Britain especially, key modernists, such as Henry James and Virginia Wolfe, explicitly constructed a new, subjective, impressionistic aesthetic of the novel against the crudities, as they saw it, of H.G. Wells' scientific and social romances.   The modernist novel was precisely the opposite of Wells' discursive engagement with modernity and modernisation. 

The war of attrition been Henry James and H.G. Wells was one of the crucial sites where the literary novel came to be defined against low fictions, and Wells has long been understood to have lost this debate, catastrophically, meaning that the Jamesian art of fiction has dominated conceptions of the modern novel ever since.

In Britain as well, there was a certain conflation of writing on technology with a kind of anti-humanism ascribed to technology.  The engineers who became the culture heroes in America and the central figures of early American SF were despised as agents of mechanism and barbarism in England.  Culture was sweetness and light, as Matthew Arnold put it, that transcended the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution: "Choose culture, and not anarchy," the latter, for Arnold, merely another word for mechanism or technology.

Typically then, in Britain, I think, there was a class factor that led to lower cultural valuation of popular genres like science-fiction.  It is artisanal, a product of mechanical reproduction.  It is trade, not refined culture.

So, paradoxically, just as the 20^th Century human experience came to be increasingly enframed by different kinds of technological environment and many critics and philosophers attempted to capture the nature of this new saturation, the very literature that reflected on these changes was cast out of the cultural world as a despised emanation of one critic memorably termed "the spreading ooze of mass culture".

Science-fiction critics and writers used to howl in outrage about this marginalisation - surely the dominant realist novel was unadventurous fodder for the petty bourgeoisie?!  Anyway, realism was merely a recent upstart in the longer history of the romance.  Surely the experimental novel was a sick and decadent expression of the indulgent [?]?  Why go for sick, sadomasochistic fantasies of William Burrows when you can have thrusting virility and quasi-Fascist Fricore of Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers"?  Why didn't people realise this - the idiots?!

But if we shift to think about contemporary British science-fiction, this kind of special pleading doesn't seem to be needed anymore.  As we've heard from nearly everyone today, there is a constant kind of cross-traffic between so-called science-fiction and mainstream writing, and a sense in which the distinctions between gothic, fantasy, detective fiction, science-fiction, have been exploded. 

One picks up, say, Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union", published last year, and you're reading a hard-boiled detective fiction, but also an alternative history, a science-fiction, a political fiction about America, Israel, and the Messiahanism of religious fundamentalism, a treatise on chess, and a knock-about farce, usually all on the same page.

Jonathan Lethem's work does similar things, mixing hard-boiled detective fiction, Phil Dick and science-fiction, precise realism, and dysfunctional superheroes, often in the same text.

These hybrid fictions seem to be edging from what was once called the slipstream and heading for the mainstream to be one of the general conditions of the novel.  What's happened?  What, to frame it in the terms of my debate here, is different about our own very modern modernity?

Well, there are many answers to this question, and not much time.  So let me pick out just two elements.

One I think is the profound shift in our understanding of what might constitute culture.  For much of the 20^th Century, modernism seemed to preserve an elite form of expression that abjected all other forms of culture.  There were massive terrains out there that most critics simply could ignore.  The great tradition, as F. R. Levis sketched it in 1948, included Jane Austin, George Elliott, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence - that was it.  Anything else was irrelevant.  Dickens was "mere entertainment", as he put it.  Virginia Wolfe was "minor fiction", by which I think he meant it was a bit girly!  Anything more mass cultural than that was simply beneath contempt.

However, beginning in the 1950s, thinkers like Raymond Williams redefined the notion of culture in a wider, anthropological sense and began to look, uneasily at first, at different forms of popular and mass culture.  Whether or not you want to call such moves the appearance of post-modernism - personally, I really don't - it is undoubtedly the case that we have seen a fundamental shift in the hierarchies of taste.  It is now okay to write a graphic novel about the holocaust or use comic superheroes to reflect on the consequences of 9/11; indeed, you might win awards for doing so.  Despised genre forms have transcended their bounds and have become organising narratives for a bewildering diversity of cultural experience.  One critic has suggested that science-fiction has become "less like a genre and more like a general mode of apprehension, a way simply of looking at the world".  That suggests a complete opening-out of genre boundaries, or else a shift in the way culture is valued, from vertical hierarchies to horizontal spectra.

Secondly, I think our relationship to science and technology is undergoing change, profound change, as we move through the third technological revolution - the digital one.  It's only 50 years since C.P. Snow delivered his lecture on the two cultures, complaining that liberal humanists who formed the ruling class and much of the intelligentsia were proudly ignorant of even the most rudimentary knowledge of science.  Then, it seemed that technology was "out there", encroaching on the integrity of the human here and that this was to be decried.  Now though, technology is always already here, intimate, soft, interior, the wet-wear prosthetics of I-Pod beads in our ears, laser corrected eyes, gene therapies, regenerating damaged or lost tissue.

According to the science studies guru Bruno Latour, we have shifted from a world where it was easy to work out what belonged to nature and what belonged to culture, and we've entered a much more puzzling, hybrid world, where we are no longer quite so sure what constitutes scientific or cultural phenomena.  For Latour, what he calls "the modern settlement", the division of the world into discrete categories that has dominated scientific and cultural thought from the Enlightenment, has reached a particular crisis because it has had to acknowledge the proliferation of strange, new hybrid objects that confound our categories. 

In particular, the strict quarantine between the categories of the natural and cultural have been thrown into question.  Where precisely does the natural end and the cultural begin with things like ozone holes or global warming or AIDS or epidemics of obesity or epidemics of allergies or hospital superbugs or Asian bird flu or mad-cow disease?  Are these the products of natural or cultural, human or non-human processes?  Is scientific or sociological or cultural analysis of these phenomena better?  These things cannot be simply sorted, that is, categorised or resolved, in any straightforward way.  These hybrid objects, Latour says, have no clear boundaries, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel and their environment.  So Latour suggests that we need to think beyond the binaries that have been unable to grasp this increasingly populated excluded middle, full of things once considered monstrous, things outside the grid.

Another implication of these matters of controversy is that science can no longer keep to the illusion that it is separated from the social world by rigid protocols and strict laboratory regulations.  Scientific practice is now, in fact as it always was, thoroughly social, and thus thoroughly part of an endless debate, contestation and struggle.  We no longer have straightforward matters of fact, but matters of concern, new entities that provoke perplexity and thus speech and debate in those who gather around them and argue over them.

We could also use the terminology of the risk society developed by sociologists like Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens to describe our contemporary condition, where modernisation begins to curl in on itself and generate its own set of problems, its own catastrophes, as systems become ever more complex.  What spins out of these messy disputes is the continuing practice of science of course, but also, rival theories, public debate, disputatious interest groups, and ideological manipulations, and, out of the same bubbling brew as phantasmatic displacements of these debates, also comes the popular fantasies of cyborgs, zombies, augmented vampires, butch iron men, effete hobbits, a delirious productivity of discourse that is part of the melange of contemporary, self-reflexive modernity.

This hybrid world of heterogeneous things, of different kinds of knowledge, surely prompts the kind of hybrid fictions that regularly merge genre elements - the work of Chabon or Lethem, or the writers of the New Weird like China Miéville and M. John Harrison, or novelists like Douglas Coupland or Bret Easton Ellis.

As one final example, let's just take a recent piece of modern British science-fiction that illustrates the kind of manic fusion of elements now taking place.  I'll just say a few words about Justina's Robson's "Keeping It Real".  This novel is set in a near-future where an unknown quantum catastrophe in a particle accelerator has fractured the unity of the space-time of Earth.  This event has erased any stable sense of history; indeed, no one can quite remember what the proper history of Earth is anymore, and it has opened up relations with five parallel orders of reality: the world of elementals, elves, demons, fairies, and the dead.  Different physical laws and social logics exist in each of these spaces, but they are no longer easily separable and bleed into each other. 

The elves - rather pleasingly for someone who hates elves as much as I do - are portrayed as slightly to the right of the Conservative Party, intend on closing their borders to further immigration in order to preserve the purity of the race - they've clearly been reading rather too much Tolkien.  Across these different zones of reality, Robson tracks two hybrid figures, a transgressive miscegenate elf and his female bodyguard, a cyborg fusion of female and heavy weaponry. 

In contrast to the purest elves, the cyborg, Lila, literally embodies the anti-essentialism of cyborg life in a post-Edenic world, even as she struggles to master the tension between flesh and metal interfaces.  Things, therefore, become immensely complicated in "Keeping It Real".  We have a post-human cyborg tramping through a pastoral landscape of fantasy, whilst inhabited by an irritatingly over-talkative spirit of the dead, a mixing up of three different orders of reality in one figure.  Robson's intent in this [jeu d'esprit] is clear in such a scene: science-fiction smashes into fantasy and smashes again into horror.  Robson's quantum bomb is also a generic bomb that blasts holes through the boundaries between science-fiction, fantasy, horror and the gothic.

If this type of work has been called the post-genre fantastic, by Gary Wolfe, then it is worth ending by pointing out where this takes us, and that is not to necessarily a new world, but actually a return to something like the condition of writing before modernism did its sorting, selecting, excluding and judging, that whole apparatus that divided literary fiction from genre writing at the beginning of the 20^th Century.  Perhaps what is most modern about modern British science-fiction then is, paradoxically, its non-modernism, this riotous profusion of invention that tears up boundaries rather than blindly conforming to them.

 

 

 

 

©Dr Roger Luckhurst, Gresham College, 8 May 2008