A great time capsule of this important period in sci-fi history
Though examples of science fiction can be found as far back as ancient times, it was during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when this genre became popular and plentiful. Before the term “science fiction” gained widespread use in the 1920s, literary critics commonly referred to speculative fiction based on scientific concepts as “scientific romance.” In the book Scientific Romance: An International Anthology of Pioneering Science Fiction, published in 2017, editor Brian Stableford presents 27 short stories that exemplify the era of scientific romance. For the most part, the quality of the volume’s selections is very good. Reading this book is like opening an entertaining and educational time capsule of this pioneering period in science fiction.
In his introduction to the book, Stableford gives an overview of the origins of the scientific romance genre and its heyday from the 1830s up until World War I. It must be noted that in this case “International” only includes writings from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Stableford obviously reads French and is quite knowledgeable in the history of French literature. I don’t think he translated the French works for this volume, but he does supply helpful footnotes that provide historical context and explain difficulties of translation.
Due to their influential talents and prolific output, the undisputed giants of this era were Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. This volume does not contain an entry by Verne, likely because he didn’t write any stories short enough to fit. Wells is represented by his excellent apocalyptic vision “The Star” from 1897. Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle were also prominent authors in this genre, and Stableford includes their stories “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” and “The Horror of the Heights,” respectively. Readers of classic literature will also recognize familiar names such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (“The Artist of the Beautiful”), Ambrose Bierce (“For the Akhoond”), and Jack London (“The Shadow and the Flash”), as well as several regular contributors to the American and British pulp magazines. One of the best things about this volume, however, is that it draws attention to French writers with whom English-language readers are likely to be unfamiliar, such as S. Henry Berthoud, Charles Epheyre, Émile Goudeau, and Camille Debans. Stableford provides brief but valuable biographical introductions to each story, often referencing a few other works by each author for further reading.
The diverse range of topics these authors cover represents the scientific concerns of their times. The ideas around which these stories revolve include future utopias, the end of the world, artificial intelligence, automatons, alien life forms, evolution, eugenics, microbial disease, climate change, and human immortality. The protagonists of these tales invent flying machines, weather control devices, invisibility potions, and a method for creating artificial memories. Many of the authors take a humorous or satirical approach to their sci-fi visions, with some hilarious results.
This collection is published by Dover Books, a company known for its inexpensive, no-frills volumes of public domain material. It is therefore a pleasant surprise that Scientific Romance is such a well-edited collection. Stableford has done a great job of not only selecting the stories but also of educating the reader on the history of this literature. One could find these stories online for free, but Stableford’s knowledge adds value to the reading experience. Not every story in this collection is a masterpiece, but overall the outstanding entries far outweigh the mediocre.
Stories in this collection
The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion by Edgar Allan Poe
A Heavenward Voyage by S. Henry Berthoud
The Artist of the Beautiful by Nathaniel Hawthorne
What Was It? by Fitz-James O’Brien
The End of the World by Eugène Mouton
A Paradoxical Ode (After Shelley) by James Clerk Maxwell
The Ablest Man in the World by Edward Page Mitchell
Josuah Electricmann by Ernest d’Hervilly
The Child of the Phalanstery by Grant Allen
The Salvation of Nature by John Davidson
Tornadres by J.-H. Rosny
Professor Bakermann’s Microbe by Charles Epheyre
In the Year Ten Thousand by Edgar Fawcett
The Revolt of the Machines by Émile Goudeau
For the Akhoond by Ambrose Bierce
The Philosophy of Relative Existences by Frank R. Stockton
June 1993 by Julian Hawthorne
The Dancing Partner by Jerome K. Jerome
The Conqueror of Death by Camille Debans
The Star by H. G. Wells
A Corner in Lighting by Gorge Griffith
The Memory Cell by Walter Besant
The Shadow and the Flash by Jack London
The Gorilloid by Edmond Haraucourt
The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson
The Singular Fate of Bouvancourt by Maurice Renard
The Horror of the Heights by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Nothing if not critical
Given the macabre tales he wrote, and the rumors (some of them unfounded) of his alcoholic lifestyle and erratic behavior, it is easy to imagine Edgar Allan Poe as a deranged recluse shut up in a garret with no friend but his pen. On the contrary, however, Poe was a hard-working author and an active member of the literary community. In addition to his poetry and fiction, Poe penned many essays, articles, and reviews for literary journals. In 1846, for a magazine called Godey’s Lady’s Book, Poe wrote a series of articles entitled “The Literati of New York City,” in which he profiled various men and women of letters, critiqued their work, and even described their physical appearance and personalities. In 1850 these profiles, along with other articles of literary criticism by Poe, were collected in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, Volume III, under the collective title of The Literati. This volume is also included in the Delphi Classics ebook collection Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, published in 2011.
Of the roughly 75 writers critiqued by Poe, only a few still stand as household literary names today: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Fenimore Cooper, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens. Habitual readers of classic lit will likely recognize several others, but most of Poe’s contemporaries have largely faded from memory. Probably about three-quarters of the authors Poe discusses are poets first and foremost, though Poe does cover some novelists and short story writers as well. His view of the New York world of letters is even broad enough to include journal editors, a physician who gives scientific lectures, and clergymen who write religious works. About a quarter of the authors are women, several of whom garner high praise from Poe. From his descriptions, Poe seems to have been acquainted with many of these figures, though he makes it hard to tell which may have been friends and which enemies.
The fact is, whether reviewing an ally or a foe, Poe could be a brutal critic. He frequently asserts that a critic is not obligated to point out the merits of a work of art or literature but is duty-bound to point out its faults. In other words, even if Poe likes your work, he’ll still harp on your shortcomings. Though he says Longfellow may be America’s greatest poet, Poe still considers him overrated and spends a large, tedious portion of the collection accusing Longfellow of plagiarism. Poe proclaims Richard Henry Horne’s epic poem Orion to be the greatest poem ever written, but only after having spent about 15 pages lambasting Horne’s grammar, rhyme, meter, and imagery. With fans like Poe, who needs enemies? The only writer who gets unequivocal praise is Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was still relatively unknown at the time, and Poe thought he was greatly underrated. Though a born Bostonian, Poe has little regard for his fellow Bay Staters, the Transcendentalists, whom he regards as the “merest nobodies, fatiguing even themselves.”
As a fan of 19th century literature, I was hoping Poe’s critical essays might turn me on to some lesser-known fiction writers. Since Poe focuses so much on poetry, however, that hope didn’t really pan out. The sheer quantity and length of these essays was more than I bargained for, but I still found them interesting and educational. The Literati really provides the reader with a glimpse of Poe’s idiosyncratic personality and venomous sense of humor, but most fans of Poe’s fiction would find these articles irrelevant to an appreciation of his stories. Those studying poetry, however, would do well to read Poe’s criticism, if for no other reason than to learn how not to write verse.
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One big bad apple spoils the bunch
The Mad Scientist Megapack, published in 2014, is one of many inexpensive ebook fiction collections compiled by Wildside Press. Like many of the books in Wildside’s Megapack series, this one is a mixed bag of classic literature, vintage pulp fiction, and more recent contributions from contemporary science fiction writers. The Megapacks often mix short stories and novellas with full-length novels, a strategy which doesn’t always pay off. This volume, for example, consists of a single novel that takes up a whopping 35% of the ebook file, followed by 22 pieces of short fiction. If you’re going to devote so much space to one work, the novel in question better be a pretty good one, but unfortunately David V. Reed’s Myshkin is not. This 1953 book is about an inventor who creates a device strikingly similar to today’s 3D printers, but then uses it for unethical purposes, the results of which ultimately come back to haunt him. While the premise is interesting, the book is a tedious and nonsensical string of poorly written dialogue and bad jokes, and I greatly regret the time I spent reading it. By contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a classic mad scientist tale well worth reading, is the second-longest selection in the book but still less than a third the length of the interminable Myshkin.
These megapacks are so cheap there’s hardly any point asking whether they’re worth the money, but is this one worth your time? For most of the stories here, the answer is probably no. This is not one of Wildside’s better compilations. About a third of the selections, however, are good enough to make this collection worth checking out. “Food for Thought” by Jack Dolphin, for example, is an excellent story told in the form of transcripts from an inquiry investigating the disappearance of an oceanological expedition. It delivers great sci-fi suspense that calls to mind the ‘80s horror movie The Thing. Matthew Johnson’s “Public Safety” is a delighfully innovative murder mystery that takes place in New Orleans. This New Orleans, however, exists in an alternate world where the French Revolutionary government of 1793 never ended and apparently the U.S. never bought the Louisiana Purchase. What a fascinating concept and a pleasant surprise!
Of the older authors, H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “Herbert West—Reanimator” is a great horror story that really pushes the boundaries of creepiness for 1922. Hugh B. Cave’s “The Corpse on the Grating” is another fine horror tale similar in style and subject matter to Lovecraft’s entry. Clark Ashton Smith also delivers a diabolical yarn, “Devotee of Evil,” about a mysterious modern-day alchemist attempting to distill the pure essence of evil. In Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved,” a mad doctor discovers how to accelarate human evolution. Meanwhile, on the kitschy side, “Dr. Varsag’s Experiment” by Craig Ellis is exactly the kind of enjoyably dumb, corny weirdness one might expect to encounter in a volume of this title.
Another selection worth mentioning is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 story “The Birthmark,” but despite the author’s reputation it’s a pretty mediocre and predictable affair. All in all, there’s a fair amount of drivel in this anthology, but if you like pulpy sci-fi the selections mentioned above are sure to satisfy. As for the rest, you might be thinking, well, as long as I’ve bought the thing I might as well read it all. While that’s an admirable attitude, for god’s sake skip Myshkin.
Stories in this collection
(Some novel-length works have been reviewed individually. Click on titles below.)
Myshkin by David V. Reed
A Light That Shamed the Sun by C.J. Henderson
Incomplete Data by H.B. Fyfe
The Corpse on the Grating by Hugh B. Cave
The Cosmic Teletype by Carl Jacobi
Monster Kidnaps Girl at Mad Scientist’s Command by Lawrence Wyatt-Evans
Great Minds by Edward M. Lerner
The Man Who Evolved by Edmond Hamilton
No Guts, No Glory by Edward M. Lerner
The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith
Song of Death by Ed Earl Repp
Status: Complete by Leslie J. Furlong
Food for Thought by Jack Dolphin
Dr. Varsag’s Experiment by Craig Ellis
Public Safety by Matthew Johnson
The World in a Box by Carl Jacobi
Machine Record by Theodore Cogswell
The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herbert West—Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft
Zapt’s Repulsive Paste by J.U. Giesy
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Man Who Stopped the Earth by Henry J. Kostkos
Sympathy for Mad Scientists by John Gregory Betancourt
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