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The monster is, of course, more interesting than Victor. He has the vitality of evil, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost before him and Quilp in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop after him, eloquent villains both. It is the monster that comes first to our minds, as it was the monster that came first to Mary Shelley’s mind. The monster holds its appeal because it was created by science, or at least pseudoscience, rather than by any pacts with the devil, or by magic, like the Golem.
The point about discussing where science fiction begins is that it helps our understanding of the nature and function of SF. In France in pre-Revolution days, for instance, several books appeared with Enlightenment scenarios depicting a future where present trends were greatly developed, and where the whole world became a civilized extension of the Tuilleries. The best-known example is Sebastien Mercier’s L ‘An 2440, set seven centuries ahead in time. The book was translated into several foreign languages.
Mercier writes in the utopian tradition; Mary Shelley does not. Here we see a division of function. Jules Verne was influenced by Mercier, and worked with ‘actual possibilities of invention and discovery’. H. G. Wells was influenced by Frankenstein, and wrote what he called fantasies—the phrase set in quotes is Wells’s, who added that he ‘did not pretend to deal with possible things.’ One can imagine Mary Shelley saying as much. With her, the impossible inner life found tongue.
As Muriel Spark says, Mary in her thinking seems at least fifty years ahead of her time.
She captured the Irrational, one of the delights and torments of our age. By dressing it in rational garb and letting it stalk the land, she unwittingly dealt a blow against the tradition to which Mercier was heir. Utopia is no place for irrationality.
Other arguments for the seminal qualities of Frankenstein are set out more fully in Trillion Year Spree. In sum, Victor Frankenstein is a modernist, consciously rejecting ancient fustian booklore in favour of modern science, kicking out father figures. His creation of life shows him further usurping maternal power, invading what was previously God’s province—the role medicine has played since Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. Victor and his monster together function as the light and dark side of mankind, in a symbolism to become increasingly comprehensible after Mary Shelley’s death.
As befitted an author writing after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Industrial Revolution was well under way, Mary Shelley deals, not merely with extrapolated development like Mercier before her, but with unexpected change—like Wells after her. Above all, Frankenstein stands as the figure of the scientist (though the word was not coined when Mary wrote), set apart from the rest of society, unable to control new forces he has brought into the world. The successor to Prometheus is Pandora. Excepting H. G. Wells, no other writer presents us with as many innovations as Mary Shelley.
In the year 1818, when Frankenstein was first published, news reached England of a terrible epidemic which had broken out in India. The inhabitants of the district concerned died or fled. The disease moved from Calcutta, its traditional capital, to march on Delhi and Bombay. It advanced beyond the confines of the subcontinent, and in 1821 crossed the Arabian Sea to cause such havoc that the bodies of the dead were too many to bury. It moved towards Tehran and Basra, and up the Tigris to Baghdad.
By 1822 it had spread by caravan to Southern Russia. Meanwhile, it engulfed Burma, Siam, and the Philippines. It entered the portals of the vast hunting grounds of China. Its name was Cholera.
After a lull came a second pandemic. The scourge appeared in Moscow. It moved along the Danube, infecting a quarter of a million people in Hungary alone within a three month period. Cracow fell to the invader, as did Warsaw and Riga.
As it travelled along the Baltic, it was still making its visitation in the Middle East. In Cairo and Alexandria 30,000 people died in a day. By 1831 cholera raged all over Europe. In the exceptional summer of that year, the disease crossed the North Sea to cause the famous Sunderland outbreak; from Sunderland it spread to London and elsewhere.
Plagues, epidemics of various kinds, have been a source of superstitious and religious fear through the centuries. Plague is the hero of The Last Man. Mary Shelley’s novel, when published in 1826, was topical, and scarcely more sensational than the facts.
Yet the Hogarth Press edition in 1985 was the first reprint in England of this important novel. Almost no-one had read it; histories of literature fail to mention it. After a slow beginning, it has all the magic of a tumbled landscape by J. M. W. Turner—a painter whom Mary Shelley admired, who died the year she did. Why such astounding neglect?
Indifference may be ascribed in part to male chauvinism, in part to the snobbishness of critics. Other factors working against her have been Mary Shelley’s own self-effacing character, and the eclipsing fame of those surrounding her.
The tangle of relationships following William Godwin’s second marriage forms a marked part of the first volume of The Last Man. Mary acquired a step-mother, step-brother and step-sister, and in due course a half-brother. Her confusion of mind was not helped by Godwin’s neglect (‘He never caressed me …’). Godwin became preoccupied with the publishing firm which he and his new wife, a good businesswoman, were establishing. When Mary was ten, the ménage moved into Skinner Street, to live above the publishing shop. Skinner Street was close to Smithfield Market and Newgate Prison, an area then notorious for a variety of iniquity; the ominously named street had been so christened by reason of its relationship with the nearby market.
Mary Shelley had her escapes from Skinner Street—to a school in Ramsgate, to a friend of her father’s near Dundee (then a seven-day sea voyage away). She remembered Scotland with affection; its wildness is recaptured in the early pages of The Last Man; but she would have felt too the chill of isolation which, experienced unrelievedly in childhood, frequently persists in adult life.
The landscapes of Scotland and Switzerland are put to good use in The Last Man: landscapes of chaos and grandeur. Mary’s language, though it is the high-flown prose of Romantic sensibility, carries with it a modern apprehension that nature offers no refuge, being somehow implicated in disaster.
‘Old towns are always dirty’, said Claire Clairmont, dismissively cheerful. Mary Shelley and Claire had grown up in a time of war and destruction; for them, catastrophe formed part of the natural order. All of Mary Shelley’s novels are to a large extent autobiographical; although The Last Man is a symbolist drama, its drama reflects suffering seen or endured. In many of its aspects, The Last Man is a transposition of reality, rather than pure fantasy.
During the eight years Mary and Shelley spent together, they were generally short of money, on the move and hungry. She was generally pregnant. But even the equable period of their relationship seemed to have fate against it. 1816 was known as ‘the year without a summer’. Following the eruption of the volcano Tamboro in the East Indies, dust penetrated the stratosphere and deflected sunlight from the Earth. All over Europe, grain harvests and vintages were late. Rainfall was heavy. Weather anomalies were blamed for the typhus epidemics and that great cholera outbreak of 1818. The decade from 1810 to 1819—the decade in which Thackeray and Dickens were born—was the coldest in England since the 1690s. The phenomena in The Last Man appear less freakish when we recall the actual phenomena of Mary’s lifetime.
Among these manifestations are a wind (Chapter V) raging for four months without cease. It is the occasion for one of Mary’s finest apostrophes, written, no doubt, with Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind in mind. Less scientifically, a black sun rises in the west and eclipses the ‘parent of day’, to the understandable terror of all who behold it. Such celestial effects were taken over wholesale by the painter of apocalypse, John Martin, whose watercolour, ‘The Last Man’, was painted only a few years after the novel was published.
Mary Shelley follows up her divine portents with speculations on human arrogance, in a passage which begins, ‘What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.’ The inner voice is calling again, many miles from Mercier’s utopianism.
The Last Man was published anonymously, as being ‘by the author of Frankenstein’. Its reception was mainly cold. When the name of Shelley was mentioned in reviews, Shelley’s father, tiresome old Sir Timothy, cut Mary’s allowance.
Muriel Spark claims of The Last Man that it is not typical of anything written in the nineteenth century or earlier; nor can it be placed in any existing category. Nevertheless, it comes towards the end of a considerable series of romantic tales and poems about ‘the last man’ which probably commenced with Le Dernier Homme (1805) by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Granville, where the world is brought to a close by secular, rather than religious, means. Byron’s striking poem, Darkness (1816, ‘the year without a summer’), must also have had its effect on Mary Shelley. Her novel, however, represents a culmination of this lineage, as Frankenstein does of the Gothic.
The twentieth century, engendering a fresh set of anxieties, released a fresh set of similar apocalypses—such as M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), in which the sole survivor of a poison gas roams the world setting fire to great cities. An American commentator, W. Warren Wagar, speaks of The Last Man as ‘an event of high significance in the history of secular eschatology, and in the history of the secularization of Western consciousness itself’.
The Last Man is set in the future, the late twenty-first century—a bold stroke for 1826; it contrasts elaborate schemes for the establishment of a utopia on Earth—or in England at least—with an unforeseen disaster which involves all mankind. Mankind’s plans are disrupted by something unanticipated and hostile. It is a prescription which looks forward to H. G. Wells and the crowded SF publishers’ lists of the present day.
Nevertheless, one sees Muriel Spark’s difficulty, and one sees why The Last Man has been so long neglected. It is a non-Gothic. Terror is not its raison d’être. Like a concerto, it comes in three movements, and the movements are at odds with each other. The first movement is of great length, almost a social novel in itself; the second movement concerns the coming of the plague and the liberation of Constantinople by Lord Raymond; and the third is almost a travel diary alarmingly dominated by the mathematics of diminishing numbers. Also, Mary’s prose, sinewy a decade earlier when she began to write Frankenstein, here runs a little to fat. A modern reader must accustom him- or herself to it.
To find one’s way through The Last Man, it should be remembered that portraits of those Mary knew and loved best—almost all of them dead by 1826—are presented in thin disguises. The last man himself, Lionel Verney, is Mary herself. Shelley is Adrian, made Lord Protector of England, the legislator acknowledged. Byron becomes Lord Raymond, liberator of Constantinople. Others in the cast include the dead children such as Clara, and Claire Clairmont, although the resemblances are not always one-to-one. An assortment of relations and relationships harks back to the unhappy muddle of Mary’s childhood. Still, one often wishes for more conversation and fewer descriptions, and altogether less rhetoric.
Mary enlivens the text with the occasional cameos. The astronomer, Merrival, who happily discusses the state of mankind ‘six thousand years hence’, while his wife and children starve, presents a less favourable aspect of Shelley. The Countess of Windsor (Mary was serendipitous in alighting on the name of Britain’s future ruling house) may represent the cantankerous father, Sir Timothy Shelley, who put so many obstacles in Mary’s way.
The name of Raymond occurs in Caleb Williams, where Godwin’s Raymond is a kind of eighteenth-century Robin Hood. In that novel, a ‘malignant contagious distemper’ carries off Mr Clare, the one good man, opening the gate to the endless injustice with which that novel concerns itself. Mary Shelley shows the influence of her father also in depicting England evolving peacefully from a monarchy into a republic; civil war threatens but is averted, thanks to the British aversion to violence, except in speech, and to ‘the absence of the military’.
Nor does Shelley’s voice go unheard, even from the early pages. When Adrian befriends Lionel, to bestow on the latter ‘the treasures of his mind and fortune’, this informal education recalls Mary’s own, as well as that of the awakening of Frankenstein’s monster’s intellect.
Once the plague, ‘this enemy to the human race’, gets under way, the novel acquires tension. Here Mary Shelley shows a command of large movements, of political designs and human traits, particularly of forms of ambition, which only a good understanding of the world can encompass. Muriel Spark speaks of Mary’s Platonism, especially in her reading of The Republic, as giving the novel ‘a philosophical unity very rarely achieved in a work of so comprehensive a range’. We are better equipped than Mary’s first readers to appreciate the comprehensiveness of the catastrophe.
As the multitudes of mankind are reduced to one, Lionel is revealed as the perennial outsider of no fixed spiritual address. As he begins, so he ends. Apart from the brief happiness of his marriage to Idris, he remains eternally alone. Mary Shelley’s own story underlies her invention.
If some of the miseries of The Last Man flow from Mary’s own harsh experience, so, paradoxically, does the note of tranquillity on which the novel ends. Solitude is not the worst of enemies. Mary Shelley always pined for Italy. During the time she was creating her novel, she was writing of England in a letter to Teresa Guiccioli, ‘Happiness for me is not to be found here; nor forgetfulness of Troubles; I believe that in Rome, in the delightful life of my soul, far from woes, I would find again the shadow of pleasure’ (Letters, Vol I). In the same year, she tells Leigh Hunt, ‘I think of Italy as a version of Delight afar off’. In Italy and Rome her story ends: calamity has given way to catharsis.
Frankenstein finishes on a sombre note, with the words ‘darkness and distance’. The Last Man also concludes with distance; but here distance is coupled with light, the glorious light of the south, and of ‘the spicy groves of the odorous islands of the far Indian ocean’. As long as life remains, there is light.
The novel was not the dominant literary form in the 1820s it was soon to become. Scott and Peacock were publishing, but the luminaries of the 1840s were still below the horizon. Gothic was going out of vogue.
It was a transitional period. Mary Shelley is a transitional novelist of stature, particularly when we consider a recent critical judgment that ‘prose fiction and the travel account have evolved together, are heavily indebted to each other, and are often similar in both content and technique’.
This is perfectly exemplified in Mary Shelley’s two best novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. In both, travel and ‘foreign parts’ are vital components.
In Mary Shelley,
William Walling makes a point which incidentally relates The Last Man more closely still to the science-fictional temper. Remarking that solitude is a common topic of the period and by no means Mary’s monopoly, Walling claims that by interweaving the themes of isolation and the end of civilization, she creates a prophetic account of modern industrial society, in which the creative personality becomes more and more alienated.
Tales and Stories by Mary Shelley were collected together by Richard Garnett and published in 1891. A more recent collection is noted below. Her stories are in the main conventional. Familial and amorous misunderstandings fill the foreground, armies gallop about in the background. The characters are high-born, their speeches high-flown. Tears are scalding, years long, sentiments either villainous or irreproachable, deaths copious, and conclusions not unusually full of well-mannered melancholy. The tales are written for keepsakes of their time. Here again, the game of detecting autobiographical traces can be played. One story, ‘Transformation’, sheds light on Frankenstein—but not much. We have to value Mary Shelley, as we do other authors, for her strongest work, not her weakest; and her best has a strength still not widely enough appreciated.
In the course of eight years, between 1814 and 1822, Mary Shelley suffered miscarriages and bore four children, three of whom died during the period. She travelled hither and thither with her irresponsible husband, who probably enjoyed an affair with her closest friend, Claire. She had witnessed suicides and death all round her, culminating in Shelley’s death. It was much for a sensitive and intellectual woman to endure. No wonder that Claire Clairmont wrote to her, some years after the fury and shouting died down, saying ‘I think in certain things you are the most daring woman I ever knew’ (quoted in Julian Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1889).
Certainly in literature Mary Shelley was daring. She found new ways in which to clothe her powerful inward feelings.
II (#ulink_8dfca0ef-8cf9-5ad5-9f17-830e725d7948)
New ideas in science are often followed up swiftly by science fictions which utilize or even examine them. The story may be successful even if the original idea is less so. The theory of ‘continuous creation’, so attractive in essence, posited by Fred Hoyle, had to give way to the Big Bang theory of creation. That theory is itself now being challenged.
Literary ideas are less subject to acid tests, more subject to fashion and changing taste.
To put forward a more personal view of Frankenstein, I would say that I seized upon this novel at the inception of Billion Year Spree because I needed to do something more than write a history of science fiction, and of the hundreds of thousands of books and stories I had read. I wished also to render SF more friendly towards its literary aspects. It is a battle needing to be fought; for still these days one sees reviewers and others use the adjective ‘literary’ pejoratively. SF is not separate from ordinary literature: merely apart. A means of distinguishing the best of it definitively from the writings of Herman Melville, Angela Carter, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Hermann Hesse has yet to be formulated.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, SF is not a literature of prediction, although some may see it in this light, although guesses may turn out to be proved accurate later. A scone, for all the currants in it, remains ineluctably a scone, not a currant. How many times have I been forced to say as much in television interviews? It makes no difference. Those who do not know SF well believe in the prediction theory. I am a literary sort of chap, and must fight my corner.
What SF can do well—it is what Wells does, and the precept is worth following—is take a new theory and dramatize it. James Lovelock’s Galia hypothesis of the biomass of the planet conspiring towards its own survival conditions overtook me with excitement. Was it true? It deserved to be, so beautiful was it. It was adopted with Lovelock’s agreement as one of the bases for my Helliconia novels of the 1980s.
My preference remains for the printed word, despite all that the movies, TV, and Nintendo can do. Billion Year Spree and its successor bear witness to that. There is a density to a page of text lacking even in radio (where you cannot turn back to check) and certainly in TV, where pictures so often get in the way of text; I like my coffee black, not served up as an ice cream.
Billion Year Spree proved an asset to many scholars. It gave them carte blanche not to have to study texts a million miles from the real thing unless they wished; they could narrow their sights on Frankenstein and all the amazements which have poured forth since. That proved to be good news.
The success of the volume meant that I was called upon to update it in the 1980s, when the field had greatly expanded and its parameters became even more blurred than previously. I could not manage the task without my colleague, David Wingrove, the most diligent collaborator a man could wish for. So we produced Trillion Year Spree in 1986, with the able editorial assistance of Malcolm Edwards, then at Gollancz. Trillion Year Spree won a Hugo. What follows is an account of the earlier ground-breaking volume, and some of its rivals.
But first, a story. The scene is the main convention hall of a science fiction convention, Lunacon, held in the crumbling Commodore Hotel, New York, in 1975. Famous critic, fan and collector, Sam Moskowitz, is holding forth from the platform. Fans are slouching around in the hall, sleeping, listening or necking. I am sitting towards the back of the hall, conversing with a learned and attractive lady beside me, or else gazing ahead, watching interestedly the way Moskowitz’s lips move. In short, the usual hectic convention scene.
Fans who happen to be aware of my presence turn round occasionally to stare at me. I interpret these glances as the inescapable tributes of fame, and take care to look natural, though not undistinguished, and thoroughly absorbed in the speech.
Later, someone comes up to me and says, admiringly, ‘Gee, you were real cool while Moskowitz was attacking you’.
That is how I gained my reputation for English sang froid. The acoustics in the hall were so appalling that I could not hear a word Moskowitz was saying against me. To them goes my gratitude, for my inadvertent coolness in the face of danger may well have saved me from a ravening lynch mob.
Few reviewers stood up in support of my arguments in Billion Year Spree. Mark Adlard in Foundation was one of them.
Yet it appears that some of my mildly ventured propositions have since been accepted.
Sam Moskowitz, of course, was pillorying me on account of heretical opinions in BYS. I did not gather that he said anything about my major capacity as a creative writer. One unfortunate effect of the success of BYS, from my point of view, is that my judgements are often quoted but my fiction rarely so, as though I had somehow, by discussing the literary mode in which I work, passed from mission to museum with no intermediate steps.
Such is the penalty one pays for modesty. I mentioned no single story or novel of mine in my text; it would have been bad form to do so. Lester del Rey, nothing if not derivative, repays the compliment by mentioning no single story or novel of mine in his text,
though to be sure, disproportionate space is devoted to del Rey’s own activities.
This particular instance can perhaps be ascribed to jealousy. To scholarly responses we will attend later.
First, to rehearse and repolish some arguments advanced in Billion Year Spree, in particular the arguments about the origin of SF. On this important question hinge other matters, notably a question of function: what exactly SF does, and how it gains its best effects.
BYS was published in England and the US in 1973, the English edition appearing first, from Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
The book took three years to write. I had no financial support, and was assisted by no seat of learning. I favoured no clique. I used my own library. I consulted no one. Really, it was a bit of a gamble, since I have a wife and children to support by my writing. But there were two best sellers to fund the venture (The Hand-Reared Boy and A Soldier Erect). I looked both inward to the SF field itself and outward to the general reader, Samuel Johnson’s and Virginia Woolf’s common reader; I wished to argue against certain misconceptions which vexed me, and I hoped to demonstrate what those who did not read SF were missing.
There was no history of science fiction in existence. I wrote the sort of book which it might amuse and profit me to read.
Of the two initial problems facing me, I overcame the second to my satisfaction: how do you define SF, and what are its origins? Obviously the questions are related. My ponderous definition of SF has often been quoted, and for that I’m grateful, although I prefer my shorter snappier version, ‘SF is about hubris clobbered by nemesis’, which found its way into The Penguin Dictionary of Modem Quotations. The definition in BYS runs as follows:
Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.
Not entirely satisfactory, like most definitions. It has the merit of including a consideration of form as well as content. On the whole, criticisms of this definition have been more effective than those directed at my proposals for the origins of the genre.
It needs no great critical faculty to observe that most SF is not about ‘a search for the definition of man’; it is about telling a story to please the reader—and in that it is no different from any other literature. Only when SF texts are piled together do we see a common restlessness about where mankind is heading through its own blind efforts. More questionable is that phrase about the Gothic mould.
I am not one hundred per cent sure about the phrase myself, but this much is clear: I got it from Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler writes the kind of criticism one can read with enjoyment, unlike most of the criticism which originates from within the orbit of SF academia. Fiedler has this to say of the Gothic mode, following on a discussion of Monk Lewis’s The Monk of 1976:
The major symbols of the gothic have been established, and the major meanings of the form made clear. In general, those symbols and meanings depend on an awareness of the spiritual; isolation of the individual in a society where all communal systems of value have collapsed or have been turned into meaningless clichés. There is a basic ambivalence to the attitude of the gothic writers to the alienation which they perceive. On the one hand, their fiction projects a fear of the solitude which is the price of freedom; and on the other hand, an almost hysterical attack on all institutions which might inhibit that freedom or mitigate the solitude it breeds … The primary meaning of the gothic romance, then lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central theme of fiction … Epater la bourgeoisie: this is the secret slogan of the tale of terror. (Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960))
Spiritual isolation, alienation—these lie also at the heart of SF, like serpents in a basket.
Fiedler defines the sort of fiction that most of my admired contemporaries were writing. I saw in them, too, a reflection of my own responses to society which prompted me towards science fiction. The love of art and science I developed as a child was a rebellion against the smug bourgeois society in which I found myself. Art and Science were what They hated most. In this way, I reinforced the solitude I felt. This also: I merely wished to épater society, not overthrow it; the satirist needs his target.
This stinging function of SF was always apparent, from the days of Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, like its progenitor, Caleb Williams, contains more punitive litigators than punitive monsters within its pages), through H. G. Wells, and Campbell’s Astounding, until the time when I sat down to write BYS in 1970. During the 1970s and 1980s, SF became widely popular, widely disseminated. Its sting has been removed. The awful victories of The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars have brought—well, not actually respectability, but Instant Whip formulas to SF. The product is blander. It has to be immediately acceptable to many palates, some of them prepubertal. Even the sentimentality of such as Spider and Jeanne Robinson’s ‘Stardance’ is not considered too sickly sweet for consumption. As Kurt Vonnegut ripened on the tree and fell with a thud to earth, so too did the nutritive content of SF.
The nutritive content has been fixed to suit mass taste. Nowadays the world, or solar system, or the universe, or the Lord Almighty, has to be saved by a group of four or five people which includes a Peter Pan figure, a girl of noble birth, and a moron, a Forrest Gump of some kind. The prescription thus incorporates an effigy for everyone to identify with. In the old days, we used to destroy the world, and it took only one mad scientist. SF was an act of defiance, a literature of subversion, not whimsy.
Notice Fiedler’s comment on the basic ambivalence which gothic writers feel towards their alienation. Leaving aside Instant Whip SF, one can perceive an ambivalence in science fiction which goes deep—perhaps one should say an ambivalence which is the subject. The emphasis of this ambivalence has changed over the years. Gernsback’s Amazing was decidedly technocratic in bias, and purported to demonstrate how the world’s ills could be solved by increased applications of technology—a reasonable proposition, if a century late—yet large proportions of the fiction concerned experiments etc. which went terribly wrong. Hubris was continually clobbered by nemesis.
Another fundamental ambivalence is less towards technology than towards science itself. Even technology-oriented authors like Arthur C. Clarke show science superseded by or transcended by mysticism and religion; such surely is the meaning of his most famous short story, ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. It is not science but the fulfilment of religion which brings about the termination of the Universe. The world ends not with a bang but a vesper.
Another ambivalence is the attitude of writers and fans to SF itself. They declare it publicly to be far superior to any possible ‘mimetic’ fiction; yet privately they laugh about it, revel in the worst examples of the art, and boast of how little SF they read.
SF is a function of the Gothic or post-Gothic. So, for that matter, are the novels of Peter Straub, and they also—in such examples as the tantalizingly named Ghost Story—bestraddle customary definitions of the ghost stories and mainstream literature.
What I wish I had altered was the final word of my definition, to have said not ‘mould’ but ‘mode’.
One of the difficulties of defining SF springs from the fact that it is not a genre as such, just as the absurd category ‘Non-fiction’ is not a genre. Taking my cue from Rosemary Jackson,
I suggest that our problems in the area of definition will be lightened if we think of SF as a mode. Jackson says, ‘It is perhaps more helpful to define the fantastic as a literary mode rather than a genre, and to place it between the opposite modes of the marvellous and the mimetic’.
This may not help with the question of to what extent SF is a department of fantasy; ‘fantasy’ as a literary term, like ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’, has come through usage to be defaced; but it helps us to appreciate SF as the obverse of the realistic mode, and to see that SF can itself assume various generic forms. There is, for instance, a fairly well-defined category of ‘disaster SF’ and this in itself can be subdivided into cautionary disasters (like 1984) and into what I have termed ‘cosy catastrophes’ (such as The Day of the Triffids), in which the hero ends with the power and the girl, and is personally better off than he was at the beginning. No form which includes more than one genre can itself be a genre.
The relevant dictionary definition of ‘mode’ is ‘A way or manner in which something takes place; a method of procedure’, and ‘A manner or state of being of a thing’.
While my critics argued, as well they might, with the BYS definition of SF, they rarely advanced a more convincing alternative. The same must be said for the response to my proposal for a great SF progenitor.
My search for ancestors went back no further in time than Frankenstein. The wide acceptance of this proposal by academics may have been prompted by relief—a sensible relief occasioned by their therefore not having to teach Gilgamesh, Dante and Otis Adelbert Kline to their classes.
One sees that this argument of origins can never be definitively settled, for conflicting genres have contributed to the modern mode. But it is an argument worth pursuing, just as palaeontologists and others pick over the so far insoluble question of the early origins of mankind.
When first claiming for Frankenstein a pre-eminent role, I intended to put forward an argument, not an avowed truth. In particular, I wished to present a counter-argument to those two entrenched views which claimed either that SF was as ancient as literature itself or that ‘it all began with Gernsback’. Some commentators managed to hold both assumptions at the same time. No names, no pack drill.
Claims for the pre-eminence of Frankenstein had been advanced before I wrote—rather long before, in one case. Rosalie Glynn Grylls’ Mary Shelley: A Biography (1938) is sympathetic to the author, less sympathetic to her most distinguished book. Grylls does, however, say in one of her appendices that it ‘is the first of the Scientific Romances that have culminated in our day in the work of Mr H. G. Wells’. This claim is advanced because of its ‘erection of a superstructure of fantasy on a foundation of circumstantial ‘‘scientific’’ fact’. These remarks are made only in passing. Grylls finds the novel ‘badly dated’.
Desmond King-Hele is both a scientist and a literary man, best known in the latter category for books on Shelley and Erasmus Darwin. In his Shelley: His Thought and Work, he speaks of Frankenstein as standing ‘in a unique position half-way between the Gothic novel and the Wellsian scientific romance’. In his Erasmus Darwin (1963), King-Hele is more positive, saying—with reference to Darwin as mentioned in the preface to Frankenstein—that ‘Darwin stands as a father-figure over this first and most famous work of science fiction’.
Having got this far, however, the case has to be argued out at some length.
If we claim as SF anything which includes a departure from the natural order, or which exhibits Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement, we gather to ourselves a great body of disparate material, so disparate that it renders the term ‘SF’ meaningless and the material impossible to study in any effective way.
Beyond this argument of necessity is a philosophical objection to lumping together, say, Plato, Lucian, Paltock, Swift, Poul Anderson and Terry Pratchett. Although sophisticated analysis may reveal what these writers have in common, the sensible reader will be alienated; he will remain aware that the cultural differences are greater than any unifying thread of wonder, speculation, or whatever.
As Darko Suvin puts it, if such books as Hardy’s Two on a Tower and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone are SF just like Wells’s The Invisible Man, then in fact there is no such thing as SF.
That there is a kind of tradition of the fantastic is undeniable, but it does not admit to easy study, possibly because many of the popular texts are missing, as we might imagine that much popular SF (the magazines of the 1940s, for example) would be missing, were it not for a few devoted individuals who defied a general contemporary neglect. Equally, the writers in this tradition had a nose for their predecessors, and generally reveal themselves as familiar with their writings—though to be familiar with was not always the same as to understand. Writers are impatient creatures and take only what they need; thus, H. G. Wells can say that Frankenstein ‘used some jiggery pokery magic to animate his artificial monster’, whereas this is precisely what Frankenstein does not do.
The argument that SF began with Gernsback hardly needs refuting any more; I will detain no one with the obvious counter-arguments. Yet when I wrote BYS, the refutation was necessary, and I had some fun with that old phrase about Gernsback being ‘the father of SF’. Edgar Allan Poe has received the same accolade. This quest for father-figures reached what we hope was its nadir when, in the same year BYS was published, Isaac Asimov wrote one of his Introductions, entitled ‘The Father of Science Fiction’, and nominated John W. Campbell for that role.
It was a relief to be able to appoint a mother-figure instead. A relief? An intellectual coup d’etat!
This appointment appeals to female and feminist critics, making SF—for a long while regarded as a male preserve—more open to them. Their scholarship is becoming an increased contribution to the field—and perhaps beyond. One indication of this effect occurs in the latest Frankenstein film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh. Hitherto, the poor creature has been born in a dry Spartan manner upon a slab, the method immortalized in the song, The Monster Mash, where
suddenly, to my surprise,
My monster from his slab began to rise …
