Lisa Swanstrom

Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica

I open with an image of Talos, the bronze giant of Greek mythology, because the story of Talos, ancient as it is, contains several features of what we today call science fiction: advanced technology that disrupts recognized scientific borders; a specialized, scientific knowledge of the natural world that yields amazing results; and a fantastic flavor that allows for the suspension of disbelief while at the same time permitting the marvelous to unfold.

The advanced technology comes in the form of Talos, a bronze giant fashioned by Haphaistus. Although Talos predates our word "robot" by over two thousand years, his body, a combination of organic properties and animated bronze, is an early fantasy of what we might now term cyborg.

Talos meets his end when Medea slips him a sleeping philter and cuts him in his only weak spot--a single vein that runs from neck to ankle. Medea, with her esoteric knowledge of potions, poisons and deadly flora, reveals a specialized knowledge of the natural world. Nature is her laboratory, and her spells and rituals reflect a systematic approach to nature that is suggestive of what we might now call scientific experiment.

And the fantastical flavor is maintained throughout: a talking ship, a powerful sorceress, a doomed love affair, and the golden fleece all work together to form a skene of marvelous happenings.

The story of Talos, then, seems to provide a nice starting point for discussing science, literature, and science fiction, which, even in its most contemporary and cutting edged form, shares with the literature of antiquity a prodigious scientific curiosity and imagination.

Francis Bacon's Novum Organon, 1620

Edited by Lisa Jarding and Michael Silverthorne

The Great Renewal:

With his Novum Organon (the New Tool, a name which builds upon Aristotle's work, the Organon, or the "instrument for rational thinking" xii), Bacon attempts to move away from the dominant mode of scientific inquiry, i.e., logical interrogation. Rather, it his goal to introduce a new method of experimentation: inductive reasoning, a system that is based upon the examination and tabulation of raw sensory data.

Whereas the logical syllogism of the ancients bears out its own premise, Bacon's method probes the premise itself and demands a return to "the raw evidence of the natural world" xii. Bacon argues that currently man's intellect is like a "magnificent palace without a foundation" (2) and maintains throughout the Novum Organon a belief in progress and the goodness of humanity (e.g. 3).

Bacon also undermines the notion of biblical knowledge as is usually portrayed--i.e., as the sinful cause of man's expulsion from paradise in the book of Genesis. Rather than discussing Adam and Eve's disobedience in eating from of the tree of knowledge, Bacon emphasizes "The pure and immaculate natural knowledge by which Adam assigned appropriate names to things" (12). Here Bacon celebrates knowledge (in the form of naming) as an early system of taxonomy, rather than a wicked pursuit.

Bacon's system of induction, a possible pre-cursor to modern statistics, favors observation, experiment, and the formulation of tables that document similarities and differences between data sets. To provide an example of this mode of inquiry, Bacon probes the nature of heat by providing a summary of positives (instances where heat occurs), negatives (instances that negate or undermine the positives), and, finally, a more streamlined summary of what heat might be said to be, based upon what has either been affirmed or negated by his tables. Bacon warns, however, that the road to inductive reasoning is frequently barricaded by illusions or "idols" that hamper observation. He dubs these illusions the idols of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace, and the theatre.

Several portions of the Novum Organon read like prophetic passages of future works. Bacon presages Borges' short story, <<Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos>> when he writes, "the fabric of the universe…is like a labyrinth." He also foreshadows Katherine Hayles' work on "posthuman" philosophy when he calls for a "true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculties (whose sad and unhappy divorce and separation have caused all the trouble in the human family)" 12. Hayles' project to move beyond the mind-body split of Cartesian dualism could easily be seen as coming out of a marriage of empirical (bodily perception) and rational faculties (the mind). Yet perhaps his most tangible prophetic moments occur when he makes steps towards a contemporary scientific method (hypothesis, experiment/observation, result/conclusion).

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

I enjoyed Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, but am I correct to read it as a black-and-white parable that outlines the dangers and wickedness inherent in the pursuit of technological knowledge? Faust, after all, through his contact with Mephistopheles, learns to manipulate "lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters" (115) (writing and geometry); to "subdue the elements" (119) (a knowledge of weather patterns/meteorology); and how to re-route a river (116) (irrigation); and is subsequently damned to hell.

I have not read Goethe's Faust, but I believe it has a different ending? At any rate, it is interesting to contrast the idea of the goodness of knowledge that is maintained throughout Bacon's Novum Organon with its antithesis in Marlowe's play.

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

If, with the Novum Organon, Bacon suggests that his inductive method will open up the doors of science, which will in turn contribute towards the overall improvement and goodness of man, Jonathan Swift, who comes over one hundred years later, holds views towards science and its gadgetry that are more circumspect, more cautious, and at times outright antagonistic. In Gulliver’s Travels the negative aspects of technology seem to outweigh the positive ones, although, somewhat paradoxically, some of the concepts that Swift ridicules throughout the text are the same scientific principles that underpin the genius of his satire, namely, notions of perspective and proportion, as well as methods of observation and analysis.

Book One: A Voyage to Lilliput

With his journey to the land of the Lilliputs, Gulliver explores the fantasy of an extremely distant perspective. He views the tiny Lilliputs as if he were seeing them through the far end of a telescope, frequently emphasizing the direct ratio of differences between him and them . Because Gulliver cannot participate physically with the Lilliputs–and least in the same physical manner, as physical equals–he is at leisure to observe them, help them when he might, and document their behavior.

Book Two: A Voyage to Brobdingnag

The same play with perspective and proportion is inverted with Gulliver’s travels to the land of the giant Brobdingnags. The Brobdingnags are to Gulliver what he is to the Lilliputs. He is able to see them as though with a microscope; he comments on their giant pores, their mountains of food, and their exaggerated physical characteristics. Yet as distasteful as the physically excessive Brobdingnags are to Gulliver, he forms a powerful bond with the young girl who is charged with his care and with the members of the royal court. Additionally, by emphasizing the disturbing physical features of the Brobdingnags, (as well as his own exaggerated bodily functions in his Voyage to the Lilliputs, during which he micturates upon the burning castle of the tiny queen, to her great disgust and dismay) it seems that Swift foreshadows Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque as an equalizing and empowering experience for the common people.

Book Three: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Lugg-Nagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan

In this section, Swift departs from his study of opposing perspectives and instead focuses upon another set of polarities: unchecked scientific "progress" contrasted with numenistic excess; that is, the hyper-rational with the hyper-irrational. The floating island of Laputa (a sort of pre-modern pre-cursor to the Death Star) contains a society that is literally made up of people whose heads are in the clouds. With an emphasis on pure mathematics and music, the people of Laputa devote little attention to the expressive potential of language or spontaneous acts of speech. Indeed, the notion of the "flapper," a strange device which helps retrieve the Laputans from the twists and turns of their abstract thoughts and returns them to the physical demand of vocal/verbal expression, is oddly suggestive of mechanized behavior, in that an inorganic tool is required to elicit a human response.

The metropolis of Balnibarbi offers little reassurance in terms mechanical progress. The machine for the improvement of the arts and science is a comedic nightmare of "progress" and "efficiency" (196).

Glubbdubdrib, on the other hand, has little to do with scientific curiosity. Instead, the inhabitants of this territory are magicians (and the name "Glubbdubdrib" itself means the "Island of the Sorcerers"). They are most proficient at necromancy, and it is through this art that Gulliver is able to view a parade of historical greats, including Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and Pompey, in a scene that has much in common with Odysseus’ journey to the underworld in Book XI of the Odyssey (On a side note, it is interesting that while Gulliver’s Travels parallels Homer in many ways, Gulliver’s motivation for traveling is essentially opposed to Odysseus’; i.e., while Odysseus wants desperately to return to Ithaca, Gulliver wants nothing more than to leave home).

Book Four: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms

With the Houyhnhnms, at least, technology is kept in balance. Here technology is used in moderation, in order to aid in the harvest of food, and is not celebrated and investigated for its own sake, as it is with the academicians of Balnibarbi.

General Comments:

While Swift takes a skeptical view towards technology throughout Gulliver’s Travels, he balances his skepticism with a Gulliver’s use of his own gadgets (his perspective/glasses/watch) and admiration for the machines of the Liliputs.

Perhaps the most consistent scientific strategy that Swift employs, however, is his method of catalogue and observation. Although Swift pre-dates Darwin by a century, his method of collecting ethnographic data--i.e. his pains to discuss the habits of culture with the objectivity of an ethnographer in the field–is very similar to the tone Darwin maintains (and later, Wells and Lytton) throughout the Voyage of the Beagle.

Shakespeare’s Tempest

The character of Prospero offers a nice contrast to the Dr. Faustus character, in that, while Faustus uses devilry to pursue knowledge and loses his soul in the process, Prospero conjures and controls spirits with the result of his emancipation from the island and the recuperation of his title, the rightful Duke of Milan.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1816)

Because Shelley's novel is so canonical to the science fiction genre, so embedded in popular culture, so fascinating in terms of scientific discovery, and so rich with varying veins of thematic metals, it seems fruitful to identify and summarize a few branches for possible/future literary metallurgy:

A Feminist Argument:

In her introduction the Pocket Books' (Simon & Schuster) edition of Frankenstein, Anne K. Mellor describes the work as "a novel about having a baby," comparing Frankenstein's creation of the monster with Shelley's own experience of giving birth to a daughter (Clara), only to have her perish two weeks later. While this is an interesting argument--one that supposes a sort of "Venus envy" (i.e. "womb" envy) on the part of Frankenstein, it also seems to shortchange other, overarching ideas present in the feminist movement. That is to say, while Mellor suggests that Shelley's creation of the monster is a metaphor for the feminine potential to give birth, and therefore one that privileges a "female" perspective, this treatment reduces the idea of what is female to biology. This reduction is problematic to other (and, I think, opposing) feminist viewpoints, which suggest that the concept of what is "female" is fluid and predicated upon social constructions, rather than biological norms.

That said, the ideas of creation and birthing are interesting motifs in science fiction film and literature. I am thinking specifically of Koontz' Demon Seed, which forms the basis of the 1977 film, in which an artificial intelligence takes a woman hostage in her own house in order to impregnate her with its advanced progeny (if rape and artificial insemination can be read as "advanced"). Additionally, I have some ideas about the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) that might relate to feminist theory (or at least provide an extended pregnancy metaphor, along Mellor's lines), but I'm not sure they're fully formed yet (like the larval pod people that grow at night, sans fingerprints, sans souls, still a little soupy). I am thinking of the external and plant-like womb that grows without the necessity of a female body.

Intertextuality:

It is hard to avoid making comparison's between Shelley's Frankenstein and ETA Hoffman's "Sand-man" (1817). In both works, a fixation upon a technological/scientific marvel interrupts the domestic tranquility of an otherwise harmonious social unit. In the "Sand-man," Nathaniel becomes beguiled by the beautiful Olympia, who is no more than an amalgam of clockwork and wood, and loses the love of Clara due to his mad ramblings. In Shelley's novel, Victor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with his "creature," a monstrous collage of many men, who later murders Victor's bride Elizabeth. Additionally, the epistolary format of Frankenstein is echoed in Hoffman's narrative.

Shelley also references directly Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, (56) a novel which suggests that certain technological advancements are nothing more than products sold by a shill to a gullible crowd (I am thinking of Moses' purchase of the "gross of green spectacles").

Science

The reference to Buffon on page 36 is fascinating, not only as a pre-cursor to Darwinism, but as parallel to Frankenstein's discoveries. Just as Buffon suggests that species change manifests as de-generation (brought about by environmental factors), Frankenstein's discovery of life-giving properties does nothing to advance the progression of humanity. Indeed, the monster is a case study for the dominance of nurture over nature, in that he is initially filled with goodwill but becomes poisoned due to environmental factors.

Social Responsibility:

Shelley's comparison of Frankenstein to Prometheus is an ironic one. Whereas Prometheus' gift of fire is a boon to mankind, Frankenstein's monster is its curse. Furthermore, while Prometheus remains tied to Mount Caucasus while his liver is plucked at by eagles, in order to atone for his transgressions, Frankenstein shirks all responsibility for his creation. It is only after the monster has murdered all of Frankenstein's loved ones that Frankenstein makes any motion to move against it.

The Environment:

In addition to feminist themes and intertextual references, Frankenstein reveals an inherent tension between the environment and technology. That is to say, while the monster represents, in a sense, the apex of scientific achievement and human reason, he is at the same time forced to behave like an animal, a being dependent upon the environment without the buffer of home or hearth.

Sympathy for the Devil:

Similar to Polyphemus, who is a vegetarian before introduced Odysseus and thus the pleasures of eating human flesh, the monster in Frankenstein is loathe to eat flesh, subsisting instead upon "bread, cheese, milk, and wine," and confesses his distaste for wine (108). Somehow the vegetarian diet conveys a sense of innocence, even as both Polyphemus and the monster commit murder.

Additionally, the monster professes his sympathy and sadness in regards to the native Americans, saying he "wept…over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants" (124). Both the vegetarianism and sensitivity for the plight of the indigenous serve to evoke sympathy for the monster.

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter"(1845); "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"(1841)

Poe's Dupin, featured in "The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" paves the way for Wilkie Collins' Moonstone (1868), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (who makes his first appearance in 1887 in "A Study in Scarlet") and the recent best-selling novel The Alienist (2002), by Caleb Carr.

What is singular about the "Murders in the Rue Morgue," particularly, is that in addition to being a first-rate and innovative detective story, it provides us with a preface to the work in the first few pages, one which outlines a new type of investigative method.

Dupin and Psychoanalysis

Poe writes of his detective: " Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself in to the spirit of his opponent…etc)" Thus it is the detective's duty to take on the role of the Other, which might account for his aloof sexuality and mercurial temperament.

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce: Was it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim descent from a monkey?

Thomas H Huxley: If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

--Anecdote of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, from the American Scientist Online:

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871)

The overarching argument that Darwin makes in his Origin of Species is that life forms are not divinely conferred nor independently fashioned from species to species. Rather, it is Darwin's claim that all life on earth stems from a common ancestry that has undergone gradual change over time and individuated into current species due to certain variables which have shaped them. Darwin, in fact, claims that there is no such thing as a "species," per se, but that what we would define as a species is a merely a population average of certain traits. Such traits as those that are diverse and adapted appropriately towards the environment are those that will survive:

Darwin also states that competition between varieties will end in one species or another becoming extinct.

H.G. Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

Darwin's influence shows clearly through Wells' prose. However, While Darwin’s view of nature is startling, it is also optimistically oriented towards progress. At the end of the Origin of Species Darwin writes:

Wells' views are less optimistic than Darwin's, aligning more with the perspective of T.H. Huxley, who writes in Evolution and Ethics:

Wells also writes of devolution in many of his works, using Hesiod’s Ages of Man as a metaphor for the ongoing decline of civilization in the Time Machine.

In Works and Days, lines 109-180 (approx. 700 BCE), Hesiod describes the degeneration of the ancients into the five ages of man:

1. Golden race "lived like gods without sorrow…and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint."

2. In the time of the Silver race, a child was brought up at his good mother’s side a hundred years, an utter simpleton. But when full grown…lived only a little time and that in sorrow because of their foolishness, for they could not keep from sinning and from wronging one another, nor would they serve the immortals, nor sacrifice on the holy altars…

3. The Bronze race sprang from ash-trees, they loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence; they ate no bread, but were hard of heart like adamant, fearful men.

4. (Hero) Zeus made yet another, the fourth, which was nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men who are called demi-gods…Grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them.

5. Iron: Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them.

Hesiod suggests that this degeneration will get worse and worse until even children will be born with gray hair.

In Time Machine, the Time Traveler identifies the Eloi as living in a "Golden Age," (37) and when we see the falsity of this assessment, we nevertheless witness a pattern of degenerative evolution that makes even the Iron Race look tame. Wells does pattern this degeneration after Darwin's notion of natural selection, however, in that he shows evolution taking place over time

Similarly, the notion of entropy and degeneration is present in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Just as the Eloi and Morlocks represent products of devolution in the Time Machine, Moreau's "Beast Men" similarly exhibit degenerative qualities.

Moreau says of his creations: "And they revert As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again…They go. I turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them…(118)

Useful Background Information on Wells:

Wells is born in 1866, seven years after the publication of the Origin of Species, to a working class family. When he is 14 he is apprenticed to a draper, but in 1883 he wins a scholarship and grant to attend the Normal School of Science in South Kengsington. At the NSS he studies under and is greatly influenced by "Darwin’s Bulldog," T.H. Huxley. At the Normal School he also begins writing fiction.

After publishing short stories, reviews, and a biology text book, Wells publishes The Time Machine in 1895, followed quickly by The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896.

Wells has strong feelings regarding class disparity, but ultimately rejects Marx, saying in Experiments that there might have been "creative revolution of a far finer type if Karl Marx had never lived" (Williamson 28).

Instead, Wells joins the Fabian movement in 1903 ("The society is named after Fabius Cunctator, a Roman general famous for avoiding direct battle with Hannibal; instead favoring quick, minor attacks, and thus avoiding defeat" (Fabian Movement web source). He argues with George Bernard Shaw, however, who is also a member, and publishes the New Machiavelli in 1911 as a response to Shaw and the Fabians. To add to the controversy surrounding his association with the Fabians, Wells has romances with Rosamund Bland and Amber Reeves, who are both daughters of prominent members of the movement.

Wells dies in 1946.

The above background information, culled from a variety of sources, is interesting in that the issues that interest Wells in his personal life are also issues that emerge in his writings. Indeed, it is hard to read either The Time Machine or The Island of Doctor Moreau without considering the topics of class disparity and evolution.

Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1899:

While working as "The Boss" (Head Superintendent) of a munitions factory in Connecticut, the narrator of Twain's novel brawls with a man named Hercules and loses. Twain writes:

It was during a misunderstanding conducted with crowbars with a fellow we used to call Hercules. He laid me out with a crusher alongside the had that made everything crack, and seemed to spring every joint in my skull and make it overlap its neighbor. Then the world went out in darkness...(5)

When he wakes, he finds that he has somehow traveled back in time and East in space and arrived at King Arthur's Court in Camelot, circa 528 A.D. Although initially daunted, "The Boss" quickly makes a position for himself in this world by predicting an eclipse and blowing up a structure with gun powder. It is through his knowledge of technology that The Boss finds security, even as he changes the culture of those around him.

In addition to questioning the role of modern technology in the natural world, Twain, like Sir Francis Bacon, satirizes the syllogistic logic that exists before the "Novum Organon." Of his frustrating encounter with Morgan Le Fay, the boss grumbles: "It was the stubborn unreasoning of the time. It was useless to argue with her. Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff. And her training was everybody's. The brightest intellect in the land would not have been able to see that her position was defective (87).

Twain also touches upon Darwin when he describes human ancestry as "a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitable developed... " (91)

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, 1985.

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