Herbert Sussman
Victorian Science Fiction
Darko Suvin. Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of
Power. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983. xvii + 461pp. $50.00.
The field of Victorian literature, once securely defined in Arnoldian fashion as the
single "great tradition" at whose center are Tennyson and Browning, Dickens and
Eliot, Carlyle and Ruskin, has like so much in our collective past become destabilized,
decentered to reveal instead a multiplicity of traditions and genres--of literature
written for the working class and children, of non-realist forms such as nonsense and
fantasy, even of literature written by females for female readers. For the study of
Victorian literature, the importance of Suvin's work is to reveal the full magnitude of
yet another 19th-century tradition, in particular another nonrealist mode that challenges
the bourgeois male hegemony. For the history of SF, the achievement of this volume is to
map definitively the complex evolution of Victorian SF so that the SF writers of this time
no longer seem unexpected mutations or sports appearing, as Tennyson said of Hallam,
"ere the times were ripe," but as developing within a rich and complex
developmental process in the 19th century. Furthermore, Suvin provides not only a
taxonomy, but also a powerful methodology for evaluating this great mass of what he terms
"paraliterature." Since the volume is divided into two distinct
parts--"Part I: Identification of the Science-Fiction Books and Writers" and
"Part II: The Social Discourse of Victorian Science Fiction: An Interpretive
Essay" based on the bibliographical and biographical data of Part I--I shall consider
each section separately.
The bibliographical section "attempts to record all the first editions of
English-language science fiction (SF) in book form published in and/or registered as
imported into the United Kingdom in the years 1848 to 1900 inclusive" (p. 3). The
entries are listed chronologically, with full bibliographical information, including in
almost all cases identification of pseudonyms and anonymous authors. One of the features
that enables this book to supersede earlier bibliographies is the rich description of each
entry that often places the work within the development of SF in the UK. I will quote one
as an example of the density and the sense of discovery in these annotations:
Lang, Herrmann (pseud.). The Air Battle: A Vision of the Future. London:
Penny, 1859. [ii+] 112 pp.
5,000 years in the future geological and political changes have left the darkskinned
empires of Brazilia, Madeira, and Sahara contending for supremacy in naval and air
battles. Melodramatic love-and-hate plot with nasty Jew and Irishman, comic black servant,
yet also happy ending with racial intermarriage. Nonetheless a remarkable work, not only
historically pioneering but also one of the first narratively successful S-F romances set
in the future.
Read in their chronological order, then, these entries provide a historical narrative
of the development of the form--motifs, influences, sub-genres--for the years covered. One
of Suvin's wisest decisions was to create not a bibliography of British writers of SF, but
of SF published in England in the Victorian Age; for the 19th century, as now, SF was an
international rather than a purely national literary form, although with delays in
transmission between nations. The chronology indicates, for example, that Poe's Tales
of Mystery, Imagination and Humour, containing much of his SF writing published in
the US from 1835 on, did not appear in England until 1852. The inclusion of American and
continental works also places such consummately British writers as Morris, Butler, and
Jefferies within the larger swell of SF in the West and aptly demonstrates one of the
major assertions of the volume, that by the early 1870s SF as a genre had reached a
sufficient mass to achieve intertextuality. To cite one example, Verne's first SF
translation in the UK, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, originally published
in France in 1864, appeared in England in 1872, the publication year of Erewhon.
But there are limits to this mammoth bibliographical enterprise--necessary,
self-imposed, and clearly articulated by Suvin--that point to the need for further
research. First, as Suvin states at the outset, "The reader is hereby duly warned
that this Bibliography has not sought for, nor does it pretend to give, any full overview
of S-F stories in the period covered" (p. 3). The cataloguing of SF short fiction in
this period is a task awaiting a future bibliographer: in the 19th century, as today, the
short story provided one of the major forms for SF, and a study of only book-length works
inevitably slights the contribution of such writers as Conan Doyle.
Second, the criteria for selecting the full-length SF in the bibliography are those
articulated in Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: "SF is
distinguished by the narrative dominance of a fictional novelty (novum, innovation)
validated both by being continuous with a body of already existing cognitions and by being
a 'mental experiment' based on cognitive logic" (p. 86). Using these criteria, Suvin
quite reasonably omits "Nonfiction," the "Nonrealistic Mode,"
"'Naturalistic' Fiction with Minor S-F Elements," "Supernatural
Fantasy," and "The Lost-Race Tale." Although one might quarrel with the
exclusion of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which even Suvin admits is a close call,
these intellectually coherent criteria provide a clear as well as a practical limit to the
bibliographical project, while also suggesting the need for further work at the
boundaries. For example, while the exclusion of works in which SF elements are not
dominant is a perfectly reasonable criterion for a bibliography of SF, Suvin's difficulty
with some test cases like Jekyll and Hyde indicates that the boundaries between
"mainstream" writing and SF were as difficult to define in the 19th as in the
20th century and that Victorianists might pay close attention to the SF context of such
novelists as Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy.
Within these limitations, Suvin achieves a comprehensiveness that enables this
bibliography to supplant earlier works. A comparison with Bleiler's Checklist and
Barron's Anatomy of Wonder shows that for the earliest year of his bibliography,
1848, Suvin lists three additional works: Henry J. Forrest's A Dream of Reform; Alphonse
de Lamartine's France and England: A Vision of the Future; and Charles Rowcroft's
The Triumph of Woman: A Christmas Story. For 1871, the annus mirabilis of
Victorian SF, Suvin adds four books, including The Gorilla Origin of Man: or, The
Darwin Theory of Development, Confirmed From Recent Travels in the New World Called
Muy-me-ae-nia, or Gossipland by His Royal Highness Mammoth Martinet, alias
Moho-Yoho-Me-Oo-Oo, which Suvin rather confidently lists as a pseudonym. Comparison with
I.F. Clarke's Tale of the Future (3rd ea.) for these same years indicates that
Suvin incorporates Clarke's work, but adds no new books in this sub-genre. Thus, in adding
additional works to Bleiler and Barron, and in incorporating the research of Clarke on the
history of the future, this volume achieves its goal of providing what is likely to remain
the definitive annotated bibliography of book-length SF published in the UK from 1848 to
1900.
The "Bibliographical Study" is followed by a "Biographical Study"
providing brief biographical sketches taken from standard sources and a carefully selected
bibliography of secondary literature for each writer listed. These entries fulfill Suvin's
aim of providing the "maximum informativeness" (p. 128) for future scholars and,
with the biographical information, supply the data for the "Interpretive Essay"
that forms the second part of the work.
In analyzing the field of Victorian SF, a field that this volume can be said to
establish as a clearly delineated area of study, Suvin begins not with literary form, but
with the mode of production, looking first to the class origins of the 19th-century
authors of SF, while acknowledging the problematics of the bourgeois notion of the author
as individual creator. The elaborate statistical analysis of Victorian authorship in
general only confirms the received opinion that Victorian literature was produced by the
professional and merchant class. Of more interest to scholars of SF is Suvin's conclusion,
based on the analysis of the social origins of Victorian SF writers, that "SF was at
the time written. . .by people of much the same social origin as the writers of 'high'
literature" (p. 236). Thus we cannot project back into the 19th century the notion of
a separate SF "ghetto"; SF "was not separated into a special enclave by the
writers' social origin" (p. 236).
And yet, the assertion that the producers of SF were part of the bourgeois
literary establishment is contradicted, in part, by the fascinating essay in the volume by John
Sutherland, "Nineteenth-Century SF and the Book Trade." In his analysis of SF as
a commodity, Sutherland notes that "long-established English
publishers...Longmans...Macmillans...Smith Elder ...fought shy of SF" while
"progressive new English publishers, founded in the last three decades of the
century, seem to have embraced it...Heinemann...Edward
Arnold...Hutchinson...Chatto...Lane" (p. 124). Sutherland also notes that SF was
usually published in a single volume rather than in a multi-volume set and
thus--"independent of the standard fiction-supply system"--operated within a
"deviant apparatus" of circulation (p. 125).
This specific contradiction between the high-bourgeois origins of SF producers and the
mildly deviant nature of the distribution system points to the issue at the center of
Suvin's interpretation of Victorian SF--the contradiction of a form written at this
historical moment by bourgeois authors for bourgeois readers that is in its essential
nature subversive of the bourgeois hegemony. To engage this issue of contradiction, Suvin
employs criteria that develop from the theoretical speculation of his Metamorphoses of
Science Fiction. He posits a scale in which the best SF must present a
"novum" that is "significantly different from the relationships assumed as
normal by the text's addressees" (that is, a novum that opposes the bourgeois
hegemony of Victorian England) and that this novum be presented as a "coherent
universe" with "logical stringency and consistency" (p. 306).
Having developed criteria that fuse the formalist and the ideological-- criteria with
which I would agree--Suvin turns finally to the literature, or paraliterature, itself. He
divides Victorian SF into periods--1848-1870, "The Phase of Inception"; and
1871-1885, "The Phase of Constitution. " He does not consider the period
1886-1900, but sets this as another task for himself and other scholars. I would agree
with this periodization of Victorian SF on the basis of the publication record. Certainly
1871-72, with the publication of The Coming Race, The Battle of Dorking, and
Erewhon, marks a point at which SF accumulates a mass sufficient to become
self-referential. But I do have reservations about attributing the cause of these literary
phenomena too specifically to socio-political events. In marking the shift in SF in 1871,
Suvin notes as "the immediate stimuli...the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris
Commune" as well as "deeper reasons . . . in a crisis of confidence in societal
values and stability which. . . began already during the economic boom of the early 1870s,
predating the onset of the 1873-1896 economic depression" (p. 325). Such
special pleading, especially since any moment during the Victorian era can be seen within
any particular historical narrative as indicating a "crisis of confidence, "
suggests the danger of creating exact relations between literary productions, particularly
book-length fictions, and social change.
Furthermore, Suvin's method leaves unexamined the question of why these bourgeois
writers in attacking the hegemony turned to the literary form of SF at this historical
moment rather than to other powerful forms available in their culture, such as the
secularized sermon employed by Carlyle and Ruskin or the realist novel used so powerfully
by Dickens. This question, a specific case of the more general difficulty facing any form
of social analysis that attempts to explain why a particular artistic form emerges at a
specific historical moment, might be better engaged by a more formalist theory of the
genre, one that would look to the emergence of future histories in the late 18th century,
and to intellectual history covering such familiar topics as secularization, evolutionary
thought, and shifts in the time scale.
Yet by focusing on the tension between the sense of otherness intrinsic to SF and the
conservative tactics of "neutralization...of the subversive novum" (p. 348),
Suvin produces a brilliant set of interpretative essays on the SF of 1848-1885. To a
Victorianist, the model of attraction/ repulsion to the subversive indicates another way
in which Victorian SF participates in more general patterns of l9th-century literature. We
can think of Darwin publishing The Origin of Species in 1859, then withdrawing to
a secure invalidism while Huxley and others fought out the religious and ethical
implications. Or of Walter Pater publishing his nihilist "Conclusion" to The
Renaissance in 1873, then suppressing this statement in the second edition.
Furthermore, Suvin's attention to contradiction provides a theory to account for the
troubling indeterminacy of many major works of Victorian SF, such as Erewhon, and
for the intellectual incoherence of others, such as The Coming Race. Indeed
Bulwer's text provides Suvin with a telling example of this characteristic "
neutralization " of otherness, here of the truly alternative vision of sexual freedom
for women. The female of the Vril-ya "wears wings habitually while yet a virgin--. .
. in the boldness and height of her soarings, not less than in the grace of her movements,
she excels the opposite sex. But from the day of marriage she wears wings no more, she
suspends them with her own willing hand over the nuptial couch. " Suvin acutely
comments, "This revealing fragment fully confirms the equation of sex, freedom, and
energy in [The Coming Race], and my diagnosis of uneasy fascination issuing in
erotically and politically obscurantist invalidation" (p. 348).
The interpretative essays are filled with such fine insights. Of particular interest
are the analyses of Poe's use of the hoax to subvert the new dominance of the media in
bourgeois society; of Verne's adaptation of the imaginary journey to valorize movement
itself within the quantified time and space of l9th-century consciousness; of the The
Battle of Dorking as a warning, similar to that of books on World War III in our own
militarized society, from one member of the imperial military to others of the need for
"preparedness"; of the political subversiveness of Flatland, an unduly
neglected work of analogical SF. I would only disagree with his high estimation of
Jefferies' After London for showing a truly alternative society, since the work
appears to me to employ the codes of Victorian medievalism and Whig history to see history
repeating predetermined patterns in moving from the dark ages to "civilization."
As I have noted, Suvin provides a powerful methodology to explain and evaluate
Victorian SF by focusing on the tension between the subversive potential of SF and the
constraints of the bourgeois hegemony. But if Suvin fully documents this system of
constraint in the texts and in the mode of production of Victorian SF, questions arise
about the other side of the equation --and here is another field for future work--about
how all that is subversive, all that Suvin calls the "novum," can come into
existence within the hegemony. How do we account for Bulwer- Lytton, an aristocrat and
sometime chief executive officer of the British Empire, writing a book suggesting the
virtues of social community and female sexual freedom? Or why does Butler, the
paradigmatic rentier, publish a satire suggesting the destructive power of
technology and valorizing a primitive physicality?
Such questions about radical breaks with the dominant structures of feeling are
inevitably slighted by concern with hegemonic power, but Suvin's volume suggests some
approaches that a future analysis of this issue might consider. It appears that the
authors of much of the best SF were, in a variety of ways, outside the tight world of
English middle-class life. Suvin notes, for example--although he sees this only as an
unexplained anomaly--that a disproportionate number of SF authors were either Anglo-Indian
or had lived abroad for much of their lives, like Butler in New Zealand. Perhaps this
statistical divergence suggests a group of people who through personal exposure to
societies radically different from bourgeois England were able to escape the pervasive
ethnocentrism of the Victorians and seek literary forms that could, without subverting
fully the ethos of imperialism, valorize alternative worlds. Others identified them-
selves by opposition to the middle class. As Suvin notes, Poe defined himself as a
Southern aristocrat. Jefferies saw himself as a countryman who, like Hardy, chronicled the
destruction of traditional agricultural life by capitalism. Morris, although he continued
to live on unearned income throughout his life, identified himself, of course, with the
socialist cause; and his major work of SF, News from Nowhere, which, I feel, most
fully achieves the dramatization of a true alternative society, was published in a
periodical addressed to other socialists. Indeed, as Sutherland notes in his essay, there
is a strong correlation between the originators of SF and the early socialists. Here,
Wells, the son of upper servants and a socialist in his early years, is the prime example.
But to raise such questions is to indicate the value of Suvin's study in opening
avenues for future work. For this is the rare book that both makes available the materials
of a field of study and provides a powerful methodology for analyzing this field. All
future historians of SF and of Victorian literature will be deeply indebted to Suvin's
work.
Back to Home