Vintage Visions is a seminal collection of scholarly essays on early works of science fiction and its antecedents. From Cyrano de Bergerac in 1657 to Olaf Stapledon in 1937, this anthology focuses on an unusually broad range of authors and works in the genre as it emerged across the globe, including the United States, Russia, Europe, and Latin America. The book includes material that will be of interest to both scholars and fans, including an extensive bibliography of criticism on early science fiction—the first of its kind—and a chronological listing of 150 key early works. Before Dr. Strangelove, future-war fiction was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Before Terminator, a French author depicted Thomas Edison as the creator of the perfect female android. These works and others are featured in this critical anthology.
Contributors include Paul K. Alkon, Andrea Bell, Josh Bernatchez, I. F. Clarke, William J. Fanning Jr., William B. Fischer, Allison de Fren, Susan Gubar, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Kamila Kinyon, Stanislaw Lem, Patrick A. McCarthy, Sylvie Romanowski, Nicholas Ruddick, and Gary Westfahl.
Hardcover is un-jacketed.
Vintage Visions is a seminal collection of scholarly essays on early works of science fiction and its antecedents. From Cyrano de Bergerac in 1657 to Olaf Stapledon in 1937, this anthology focuses on an unusually broad range of authors and works in the genre as it emerged across the globe, including the United States, Russia, Europe, and Latin America. The book includes material that will be of interest to both scholars and fans, including an extensive bibliography of criticism on early science fiction—the first of its kind—and a chronological listing of 150 key early works. Before Dr. Strangelove, future-war fiction was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Before Terminator, a French author depicted Thomas Edison as the creator of the perfect female android. These works and others are featured in this critical anthology.
Contributors include Paul K. Alkon, Andrea Bell, Josh Bernatchez, I. F. Clarke, William J. Fanning Jr., William B. Fischer, Allison de Fren, Susan Gubar, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Kamila Kinyon, Stanislaw Lem, Patrick A. McCarthy, Sylvie Romanowski, Nicholas Ruddick, and Gary Westfahl.
Hardcover is un-jacketed.
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Overview
Vintage Visions is a seminal collection of scholarly essays on early works of science fiction and its antecedents. From Cyrano de Bergerac in 1657 to Olaf Stapledon in 1937, this anthology focuses on an unusually broad range of authors and works in the genre as it emerged across the globe, including the United States, Russia, Europe, and Latin America. The book includes material that will be of interest to both scholars and fans, including an extensive bibliography of criticism on early science fiction—the first of its kind—and a chronological listing of 150 key early works. Before Dr. Strangelove, future-war fiction was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Before Terminator, a French author depicted Thomas Edison as the creator of the perfect female android. These works and others are featured in this critical anthology.
Contributors include Paul K. Alkon, Andrea Bell, Josh Bernatchez, I. F. Clarke, William J. Fanning Jr., William B. Fischer, Allison de Fren, Susan Gubar, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Kamila Kinyon, Stanislaw Lem, Patrick A. McCarthy, Sylvie Romanowski, Nicholas Ruddick, and Gary Westfahl.
Hardcover is un-jacketed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819574398 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2025 |
| Series: | Early Classics of Science Fiction |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 443 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
ARTHUR B. EVANS is a renowned Jules Verne scholar, and professor of French at DePauw University. He is the general editor of Wesleyan's Early Classics of Science Fiction series, coeditor of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, and managing editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies.
Arthur B. Evans is an emeritus professor of French at DePauw University and winner of the 2014 Cyrano prize for his scholarly contributions to the field of French science fiction. He has published numerous books and articles on Jules Verne and other early writers of French science fiction, serves as the managing editor of Science Fiction Studies and is the general editor of Wesleyan's Early Classics of Science Fiction series.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CYRANO DE BERGERAC'S EPISTEMOLOGICAL BODIES
"Pregnant with a Thousand Definitions"
SYLVIE ROMANOWSKI
The genre that is today called science fiction has its roots in the speculative tales and imaginary voyages of the seventeenth century and before. One early writer who is often hailed as an important precursor to what sf would later become was the French soldier and philosopher Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac. Although better known as the long-nosed and chivalrous hero of an 1898 play by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano was also a daring thinker whose fantastic fictional voyages to the Moon and Sun offered new ways of thinking about humanity and the universe.
This essay originally appeared in SFS 25, no. 3 (November 1998): 414–32.
* * *
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55) wrote two highly imaginative texts of cosmic exploration and travel that defy all attempts at classification. Sometimes collectively entitled L'Autre Monde (The Other World), the two novels L'Autre Monde ou Les Estats et Empires de la Lune (The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon) and Les Estats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun) have been the object of debate and widely differing interpretations. They have been considered as critical and satirical (Mason), libertine (Chambers, DeJean, Spink), materialist and epicurean (Alcover, Laugaa), and hermetic (Gossiaux, Hutin, Van Vledder). Cyrano has been considered both as an epigone of Campanella and late-Renaissance magical thought (Erba, Lerner) and as skeptical and "modern," anticipating the eighteenth-century philosophers (Harth, Prévot, Spink, Weber).Yet Cyrano's texts transcend all these labels. L'Autre Monde explores other spaces, and are themselves situated elsewhere, in another intellectual and critical space that, with Calle-Gruber, Philmus, and Suvin, I will take as belonging to the genre of science fiction: according to Ursula Le Guin, science fiction is defined by "its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences, and technology" (introduction, n.p.).
But which science? In Cyrano's time, the first half of the seventeenth century, this question itself — let alone the answer — would be markedly different from ours. In our time, very specialized scientific fields focus on the many aspects of life and the cosmos: e.g., biology, chemistry, physics — all based on certain commonly accepted quantitative and logical principles born in the seventeenth century: "Science was becoming [in the seventeenth century], and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measurements" (Whitehead 47). In the early seventeenth century, however, the situation was quite different: rivaling methodologies were available to explore the universe, and they were not so cleanly partitioned into highly specialized domains. In Cyrano's time, several types of interpretations of the world competed with and influenced each other in rather complicated ways. Modern science, as we know it and recognize it in the works of its ancestors such as Galileo and Descartes, was actively engaged in debates with other alternative systems of thought — such as atomism, animism, hermetism — that we cannot truly label as "sciences," yet which were seen as viable competitors in the intellectual debates of the period. In a French version of this essay, I called Cyrano's writings, written during this unique period in Western history, not so much science fiction as "savoir fiction" [knowledge fiction] — a phrase impossible to translate into English felicitously.
Cyrano's point of departure in writing these novels was to critique, refute, and mock the traditional religious, Aristotelian, and Church-promoted scientific beliefs considered orthodox in his day and, in so doing, to satirize the society of his time. His eclectic and completely heterodox thought incorporated other competing paradigms: e.g., the mechanistic and mathematical view proposed by Galileo, Descartes, and Mersenne (still very new in his day); the atomistic explanation defended by Gassendi; and the animist, esoteric, alchemist traditions — very ancient but still continuing to enjoy a widespread popularity during the seventeenth century. From the perspective of the modern reader, the latter traditions may not seem worthy of being placed alongside those of mathematical and mechanistic science — oreven on par with certain atomistic views — because our modern science considers itself as deriving exclusively from Galileo and Descartes rather than from the alchemists. But, as strange as animism and alchemy may seem today, in the seventeenth century these systems of knowledge were considered as competitors to Cartesian thought, and it was not clear which kind of science would eventually win out. The alchemists and animists were deemed worthy of serious rebuttal by such scientists as Mersenne, Gassendi, and Kepler. In the upheavals of science in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, alchemy, animism, and atomism must have seemed both interesting and tempting, without there being much means available through which to discriminate completely and persuasively among them. Even Descartes started out as an animist in his early works such as the Cogitationes Privatae. Frances Yates sums up the situation as follows:
Thus in these momentous years when the Renaissance world is cracking and the modern world is rising from its ruins, currents and counter-currents still running strongly out of the past swirl round the protagonists in the epic struggle, the outlines of which are not as yet clear to the spectators. Mersenne and Descartes were suspected of being Rosicrucians because of their recondite interests. And at the same time and place in which Hermetism is in retreat before the onslaughts of Mersenne ... Campanella is prophesying at court that the infant Louis XIV will build the Egyptian City of the Sun. (447)
To a person curious about the science of matter in the early seventeenth century, the "hands-on" experimental activities carried out by alchemists in their laboratories — filled with retorts, ovens, and water baths, where they were busy burning, condensing, fusing, and crystallizing (Holmyard 43–58) — may well have seemed at least as interesting as the telescope or the microscope. Alchemy declined quickly at the end of the seventeenth century under the twin impacts of Cartesianism and Boyle's chemistry, but in Cyrano's time it was still very much alive and was indeed enjoying a last blaze of glory. In the fight against Aristotelian science, the alchemists were the allies of the materialists and other antagonists of Church-supported science in that they "ran counter to the Church in preferring to seek through knowledge rather than to find through faith" (Holmyard 164). Cyrano found fodder for his attacks on orthodox sciences in all the competing sciences of his day, those new and not so new: "in Cyrano de Bergerac's view, Descartes and Campanella and others could appear to be travelling companions ... did they not share in the rejection of a philosophical heritage still firmly implanted in the institution of the school" (Lerner 129). Cyrano was blessed with what Lerner calls a "decidedly ecumenical mind" (129–30) which allowed him widely different points of view — ranging from Pythagoras to Descartes, along with others like Cardan, Campanella, Kepler, and Gassendi. He used these viewpoints in order to provoke his readers into thinking differently about the universe and its inhabitants.
The complete sentence from which my title is taken will furnish the entry point into my description of Cyrano's peculiar enterprise. At the very beginning of his first novel, observing the moon with four companions, the narrator lists several possible descriptions and definitions of the Moon, concluding: "je demeuré gros de mille definitions de Lune dont je ne pouvois accoucher" (I remained pregnant with a thousand definitions of Moon to which I was unable to give birth) (L 359). This statement contains three odd aspects: (1) the narrator is male and pregnant; (2) he has a thousand definitions; (3) he is unable to give birth. The first, a pregnant man, shows a reversal, while the second shows that he is going beyond mere reversals, with no less than a thousand definitions. The third part indicates the inadequacy of language, as he is unable to give birth, to produce one definition, let alone a thousand.
This sentence also indicates an important aspect of Cyrano's vision: the close relationship between the body, knowledge, and statements about knowledge. The narrator's body and all bodies are intimately involved in the production of intellectual knowledge, for the body is not just a metaphor or a representation, but a knower. It is, in short, an epistemological body. While Cyrano is a convinced materialist, explaining all phenomena by the arrangement and movement of particles and atoms, he is also a seeker of purification and enlightenment that necessitate going beyond matter and into the life of the mind. Preoccupied with knowledge of matter and the nature of knowledge itself, Cyrano unites, in my opinion, two views: the materialism of the atomists and the idealism of the animists and hermetics. As Pol Gossiaux says, Cyrano tries to reconcile "his absolute materialism and his absolute animism" (594), though Gossiaux locates the reconciling image in fire, rather than in the body, fire being the traditional means of purification and place of enlightenment in hermetic science. But Cyrano is radically original in making the body the keystone that holds the composite edifice together, the place of juncture of both the materialist and the hermetic visions. Cyrano's two novels can be viewed as a persistent effort to mix, even to reconcile, these two philosophies of the universe, the atomistic and the hermetic, without fusing their identities into some single new vision — his attitude being one of joyful inclusion and bold exploration of both the outer and the inner universes.
Critics of Cyrano's texts, however, have tended to emphasize either one or the other aspect. Madeleine Alcover has viewed Cyrano as a materialist, almost eliminating the hermetic side; others, such as Erba, Lerner, Gossiaux, and Van Vledder, have placed him in the esoteric tradition. I believe that it is more faithful to Cyrano's strange enterprise — as historians of science fiction (Suvin, Philmus, et al.) tend to do when citing him as an early writer in that genre — to assume that he drew on several systems. While the new mechanistic views are given less prominence (despite his defense of heliocentrism at the beginning of Lune and the intervention of Descartes at the end of Soleil), the atomistic-materialist paradigm is adopted by Cyrano along with the esoteric one. In other words, he sought to consider these two explanations together in a unique worldview that had no equal in his time. Cyrano was choosing systems that were truly unorthodox, exploratory, and highly unconventional — but even more unconventional in that he drew upon these different systems at the same time. These twin aspects, which can be grouped as materialist/bodily, and immaterial/animist, come together in Cyrano who uses and sometimes transforms them to suit his own purposes. With the atomistic view, he refutes the Aristotelian tenets, and with the heliocentric view he refutes geocentrism; but he goes far beyond that new science, which was already dangerously unorthodox. He also develops a vision of the world based on a part of the hermetic tradition, which furnishes him with the exploration of an inner enlightenment, both epistemological and philosophical. This tradition, however, is stripped by Cyrano of any belief in the divine or in a Christian God, though not of belief in the soul. Through such reinterpretations, his doubly imaginative vision gives his works a rich and complex thickness that has not lost its appeal for modern readers. Darko Suvin sums up Cyrano by describing his "charmingly whimsical yoking together of elements from disparate fields" (106). I would differ with the idea that this was "whimsical": I believe that Cyrano was playing a very serious game, one which Suvin himself says might have cost him his life, surmising that the writer died young in an act of "political murder by clerical enemies" (106). At stake were vast belief systems (e.g., Christian Catholic orthodoxy, cosmology) and questions no less vast, such as the place of humanity in the universe, the existence of an eternal soul, the possibility of an infinite universe, and the foundations of nature.
If Cyrano wants to jolt readers out of their orthodoxy and complacency, reversals are an obvious place to start: perhaps the Moon is, as he says, a world like ours, and ours a moon for the Moon. This hypothesis produces great laughter among his companions, to whom he replies that perhaps Moon dwellers are laughing just as hard about us. It is shortly after thissentence that he meditates on the thousand definitions of the moon that he is unable to bring forth. Reversals are an easy way to amuse and to unsettle the mind from its usual perspectives, and are used more frequently in Lune than in Soleil. Inanimate objects become animate: books talk (the ancestor of the record player?) and plants talk. Pebbles become soft. Food becomes immaterial, producing no excrement, which might be a definite advantage. Sexual organs are revered as the givers of life instead of being hidden as shameful: one character, a naked man, wears nothing but a belt adorned with bronze likenesses of the male sexual organs, and a scarf sporting a medal with the same image. He explains that sexual organs are to be honored as givers of life, replacing the sword, bringer of death. Besides, such organs bring joy and should not be the object of shame: "Malheureuse contrée où les marques de generation sont ignominieuses et où celles d'aneantissement sont honorables!" (unhappy land, where the insignia of reproduction are shameful, and those of annihilation are honorable) (L417). In a similar vein, the young are revered more than the old, and the son chastises his father rather than the other way around, for the son represents youthful vigor; and there are even houses and walls that move around with their inhabitants (mobile homes?) in this "monde renversé" (upsidedown world) (L 407).
These reversals never fail to amuse, and they carry a subversive charge that is perhaps underestimated in our contemporary era, where multicultural views prevail. In the past, a hierarchized society would be more upset by, say, a carnivalesque reversal of authority and uprisings by the peasants and other lower classes. But reversal is not the most original vehicle of Cyrano's vision of the other world. In Lune and especially in Soleil he uses many other means to imagine and make readers imagine other possibilities of bodily and intellectual existence, and it is to these that I now turn.
The multiplicity of new possibilities emphasizes two aspects of body and mind that Cyrano uses with equal effect: first, matter in its many varieties, and second, the immaterial, which is both transparent and lightweight.
His novels' elaborate descriptions of other worlds seem to imply that one can indeed explore and represent other realities. But this knowledge and understanding will be limited — indeed, severely restricted — by fundamental failings in the sensory apparatus of human beings: only five senses, three faculties of the mind, one or two languages at most, and binary logic. All these capacities are hardly adequate for dealing with the multiple, startlingly different worlds encountered elsewhere in the universe. The difficulty is not rooted in a basic partiality or subjectivity, but in the inadequacy of the tools, mental and physical, at one's disposal. In an age when new technologies and hands-on experiments were becoming more widespread, Cyrano seemingly was fascinated not so much by the new science in itself as by the gap it revealed between types of knowledge — the superior power of experimentation over the unassisted senses. Paradoxically, it seems that the increasing ability to know through mechanical devices made the human sensory apparatus seem all the more inadequate, even as knowledge itself was increasing. Humans are confined by five senses: "Il y trop peu de rapport ... entre vos sens et l'explication de ces misteres," says Socrates' Daimon, who goes on to state: "il y a dans l'Univers un million peut-estre de choses qui pour estre connues demanderoient en nous un million d'organes tous differens" (there is very little relationship between your senses and the explanation of these mysteries; there are in the universe maybe a million things which, in order to be known, would require us to have a million organs, all different from each other) (L 379–80). How can we know these million things, which the Daimon perceives "par les sens qui vous manquent" (by means of the senses you lack) (L 380), if they have to be funneled through a mere five senses?
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface
Sylvie Romanowski, Cyrano de Bergerac's Epistemological Bodies: "Pregnant with a Thousand Definitions" (1998, with an afterword by Ishbel Addyman)
Paul K. Alkon, Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1985)
William B. Fischer, German Theories of Science Fiction: Jean Paul, Kurd Lasswitz, and After (1976)
Josh Bernatchez, Monstrosity, Suffering, Subjectivity, and Sympathetic Community in Frankenstein and "The Structure of Torture" (2009)
Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction vs. Scientific Fiction in France: From Jules Verne to J.-H. Rosny Aîné (1988)
I.F. Clarke, Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871 – 1900 (1997, with an afterword by Margaret Clarke)
Allison de Fren, The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow's Eve (2009)
Andrea Bell, Desde Júpiter: Chile's Earliest Science-Fiction Novel (1995)
Rachel Haywood Ferreira, The First Wave: Latin American Science Fiction Discovers Its Roots (2007)
Nicholas Ruddick, "Tell Us All About Rosebery": Topicality and Temporality in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (2001)
Kamila Kinyon, The Phenomenology of Robots: Confrontations with Death in Karel apek's R.U.R. (1999)
Patrick A. McCarthy, Zamyatin and the Nightmare of Technology (1984)
Gary Westfahl, "The Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe Type of Story": Hugo Gernsback's History of Science Fiction (1992)
William J. Fanning, Jr., The Historical Death Ray and Science Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s (2010)
Susan Gubar, C.L. Moore and the Conventions of Women's Science Fiction (1980, with an afterword by Veronica Hollinger)
Stanislaw Lem, On Stapledon's Star Maker (1987, with an afterword by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.)
150 Key Works of Early Science Fiction
Bibliography of Criticism on Early Science Fiction
Contributors
What People are Saying About This
“This is an important collection of classic pieces of commentary on early science fiction by recognized specialists in the field. It has an international range of topics from Europe to Latin America and explains the complex interaction between literature and both science and technology, and sheds invaluable light on the gradual emergence of science-fiction practices from the seventeenth century up to the period between the world wars. It documents in fascinating detail writers’ responses to change and their different ways of embodying expectation in narrative.”
“This book is like a long-abandoned gold mine. Even its bibliography is one of the strangest things I've ever read.”
“These essays do an excellent job of displaying the breadth and variety of science fiction studies as a field, both chronologically and geographically. They define and articulate the field efficiently and impressively.”
"This is an important collection of classic pieces of commentary on early science fiction by recognized specialists in the field. It has an international range of topics from Europe to Latin America and explains the complex interaction between literature and both science and technology, and sheds invaluable light on the gradual emergence of science-fiction practices from the seventeenth century up to the period between the world wars. It documents in fascinating detail writers' responses to change and their different ways of embodying expectation in narrative."—David Seed, University of Liverpool
"International in scope, Vintage Visions is a treasure house of eye-opening classic essays on science fiction's early history and prehistory. Collectively, the sixteen essayists offer richer, more varied perspectives on the evolving and experimental relationship between fiction and science than any single-author study could provide.""—Robert Crossley, author of Imagining Mars: A Literary History
"These essays do an excellent job of displaying the breadth and variety of science fiction studies as a field, both chronologically and geographically. They define and articulate the field efficiently and impressively.""—John Rieder, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
"This book is like a long-abandoned gold mine. Even its bibliography is one of the strangest things I've ever read.""—Bruce Sterling
"This is an important collection of classic pieces of commentary on early science fiction by recognized specialists in the field. It has an international range of topics from Europe to Latin America and explains the complex interaction between literature and both science and technology, and sheds invaluable light on the gradual emergence of science-fiction practices from the seventeenth century up to the period between the world wars. It documents in fascinating detail writers' responses to change and their different ways of embodying expectation in narrative."—David Seed, University of Liverpool
“International in scope, Vintage Visions is a treasure house of eye-opening classic essays on science fiction’s early history and prehistory. Collectively, the sixteen essayists offer richer, more varied perspectives on the evolving and experimental relationship between fiction and science than any single-author study could provide.”