Documents in the History of Science Fiction
The reviews printed below were sent to us by John Eggeling of Phantasmagoria Books, 8
Colwell Road, East Dulwich, London SE22.
Percy Greg. Across the Zodiac: The
Story of a Wrecked Record. Two volumes. Trübner & Co., 1880. [From The
Saturday Review, February 14, 1880, pp 219-20].
Of late years there has been a notable
revival of the fashion of producing imaginary travels and adventures in which the field of
the writer's fancy or satire is enlarged by calling up visions of regions or worlds
outside our real experience as to inhabitants, situation in space, or both. The late Lord
Lytton amused himself for a while with concealing the authorship of The Coming Race,
a very successful work of the kind. Then came Mr. S. Butler's Erewhon--also
issued anonymously at first--which, if not equal to The Coming Race in
workmanship and semi-poetical imagination, must be allowed, we think, to excel it in
humour and originality of conception. M. Jules Verne has shot up two Americans and one
Frenchman from the earth to the moon, which they failed to hit by no fault in their
arrangements or calculations, but by the perturbation due to an unmannerly and
unaccountable meteorite which crossed their path, so that they fell back into the sea;
where the cylindro-conical shell, being of course hollow to hold them and their
provisions, floated with ease and security till a rescue expedition which had been wildly
taking soundings all over the ocean at last found them playing dominoes. The story is told
with a most ingenious combination of American vastness, French airiness, and minute
scientific plausibility. But an attempt to trace all the literature of this class, even in
the last ten or twenty years, would be as tiresome as (with all respect for the splendid
poetical qualities shown by Victor Hugo in the passage) Don Ruy Gomez's catalogue of the
portraits of his ancestors is found on the stage. "J'en passe, et des meilleurs"
can hardly be our phrase; for we think we have named the best recent specimens. A very
curious monograph might be produced by any qualified worker who would follow up the
parentage of these books through Voltaire's Micromegas, Gulliver, Rabelais,
More's Utopia, and back to Lucian, if not further; it might be difficult to stop
short of the Odyssey. In any case, we must now pass on to the latest comer now
before us. Mr. Percy Greg has given two whole volumes to a course of adventures in Mars.
We are disposed to affirm as a general proposition that the length of two volumes is too
much for an exercise of fancy of this kind; but we are unable to deny in this case that,
notwithstanding its length, the tale of unearthly adventure is made to maintain its
interest. The work shows great powers of description, no small constructive imagination,
and the general merits of practised and forcible writing; against which there are to be
set two grave drawbacks--an almost entire absence of humour, and the presence of obtrusive
moral. Mr. Percy Greg seems to have chosen pessimism as a profession, and he descants on
his theme with all that exquisite relish which appears to sweeten a settled conviction
that the world is in a thoroughly bad way, especially when one has the power of compelling
attention by expressing it in elegant language. The state of Mars, as described in the
record of Mr. Greg's imaginary adventurer, appears to show in a parable what mankind have
to expect, or may plausibly be represented as having to expect, from the further progress
of science. It is curious that in this book, as in The Devil's Advocate, the
author has used a form of writing most effectually fitted to conceal the extent to which
he believes in his own prophecies.
His tale purports to be the translation of a MS.
written in Latin of a medieval style and in a strange cipher, the sole coherent relic of a
quasi-meteoric catastrophe witnessed by an ex-Colonel of the Confederate army on an
unknown island in the South Pacific. We are left to infer that this was the final wreck of
the extra-terrestrial voyager and his aerial craft. The circumstances account for a good
many lacunae in the MS., which have a way of occurring whenever an exact statement is
demanded by the context. As for the traveller, his origin and country on this earth are
left in much obscurity. The best conjecture we can piece together is that he is an Italian
soldier of fortune who has served in India under Mahometan princes, and more or less
conformed to Islam; at least he invokes Allah in the course of one desperate encounter.
Yet he holds strongly to European ideas of morality and family institutions. Where or how
he got the scientific knowledge and command of material resources necessary for the
construction of his flying-machine is wholly unexplained. It would seem that he had no
family ties, and was in no hurry about returning to the earth within any particular time;
for he finds no serious difficulty in marrying a wife in Mars. The date of his journey is
laid about 1830, for some reason which likewise does not appear. Five-and-thirty years
have to be accounted for between his leaving the earth and his disastrous return; and the
time covered by his sojourn in Mars, though we have not calculated it, can in any case be
only a small part of this. Perhaps the rest will be filled up in a possible continuation
of which Mr. Greg speaks. These remarks are of course pedantic; but we have a purpose in
making them. It seems to us that the introductory machinery of Across the Zodiac
is an example of a fault extremely difficult to avoid in this kind of writing. It is
elaborate, and yet vague; it is always raising questions of detail which it does not even
pretend to satisfy. The safer way, which Mr. Greg has presumably spurned as too easy, is
to deal in sweeping assertions and invent the first reason that comes to hand for not
giving particulars. The telling of impossible things, with a show of minute and probable
explanation is an art of itself, and a very difficult one. We are not sure, indeed, that
Swift is not the sole master of it. Mr. Greg's middle course neither satisfies the
imagination nor leaves it free; we have a feeling of being imposed on.
Lord Lytton's "Coming Race," it may be
remembered, were of gigantic stature, were generally admirable if not very interesting,
had advanced far beyond us in science, and also cultivated mesmerism and other branches of
so-called occult knowledge. In the population of Mars the stature is diminutive, and the
other qualities are unequally divided between two factions. The majority are slaves of
science. They have lost all religion, all public spirit, a good deal of their morality,
and most of their interest in life. Disease and old age, as we understand them on the
earth, have been abolished for centuries, yet the people somehow die of no other apparent
cause than being tired of living. A century or two of communism which preceded the reign
of science has thoroughly disgusted them with politics, and the whole planet is under an
enlightened despotism. After abolishing the subjection of women for a time, and greatly
misliking the experiment, they have reverted to polygamy. They practise infanticide in
moderation, but disapprove of euthanasia on the ground of its obvious inconvenience. They
cannot understand how anybody should find any pleasure in dangerous pursuits, or be
willing to incur danger to save another from it. But there is a minority which in secret
maintains different principles. This body has preserved traditions of spiritual and
transcendental doctrine, and has cultivated the practical application of them to the point
of making itself extremely formidable. If any of the profane attempt to do a mischief to
the Order or betray its secrets, they die suddenly, or go mad, or fall off a housetop. It
fares with them as with the sceptics once mentioned by a South-Indian villager to a
Government official. Some men had been now and then known, he said, to express doubt if
there were any such person as John Company; but of such it was always observed that
something bad soon happened to them. Specimens of these mysterious powers are given in the
course of the story; and we fail to perceive, notwithstanding an attempted explanation,
what was to prevent the Order from subduing the whole planet. The terrestrial voyager is
admitted into this society, and by family interest (his Martial father-in-law being the
chief man) attains high rank in it, on which the romantic part of the story depends. We
shall not further disclose it than by saying that at the end of the book there is an
attempted revolution, and a fight quite as lively as terrestrial ones; though, as the
traveller notes, it is very ill conducted, in consequence of the art of war having been
forgotten for many centuries. The terrestrial visitor flies away after seeing the triumph
of his surviving friends assured, and putting a final touch to it by letting down his
air-ship so as to crush a considerable number of the profane mob.
The appliances of life in Mars are described in
much detail and with great ingenuity. As for the science, we find it rather disappointing.
The phonograph and telephone are in common use, and electricity has superseded all other
motive powers. But it is not economically applied, if we may credit the traveller's
statement that the heat produced in the working of the electric engines used on board ship
is sufficient to warm the interior of the vessel in passing through cold regions. We hear
very little about the scientific methods and theories of the Martians. Here are a few of
the things which we conceive they ought to have done in all those centuries of
uninterrupted scientific progress. They ought to have carried the treatment of problems in
physics, by both analytical and graphical methods, to a point far beyond our terrestrial
mathematicians; and, as a consequence of this, conceptions which among us are reserved for
the higher mathematics would be part of the common stock of all educated people and be
familiarly used in conversation. They would be in possession of a complete symbolical
logic (the more necessary because having only one language would make their verbal
reasoning very liable to fallacies), and they would have reduced statistics to a deductive
science. They would have decomposed most of the so-called elements; the study of molecular
chemistry would have led to the invention of new mathematical methods, and these again to
new physical researches; and some Martial Laplace might have established his fame by a
classical treatise on the constitution of an atom. The traveller, however, does not seem
to have informed himself much about science in the abstract; or perhaps his purely
scientific notes were in another book, which was destroyed. In short, there runs through
the whole work the feeling we have already expressed, that it is both too much and too
little. The Martians, or Martialists, or whatever it should be, are too like terrestrial
men. There is really no reason, save the want of a sufficient undiscovered continent, why
the adventure should not as well have taken place on the earth. Nor is there any that we
can see why Mr. Percy Greg should not write an interesting and successful terrestrial
romance if he chose; which, after all, is a more legitimate and enduring form of literary
art.
There are one or two other fictions of the
Utopian class which we should like just to mention. One is, like Mr. Greg's, a prophecy of
the triumphs of science; but, unlike Across the Zodiac, it is the work of a man
who saw the day of science coming, and was in nowise afraid. We mean the splendid fragment
of Bacon--unhappily but a fragment--entitled The New Atlantis. Another is an
anonymous book, called Adventures in the Moon and Other Worlds (London, 1836),
excelling in the qualities of humour and a light hand, which we rather miss in Mr. Greg's
work. It is almost forgotten now; but its merit is very great. At the time it was thought
by some good judges worthy of Peacock. We may also mention a very recently published
little volume, Erchomenon; or, the Republic of Materialism (Sampson Low &
Co.), in which the conditions of the society described are in some respects curiously like
those of Mr. Greg's Martialists; only the scene is laid in the England of six hundred
years hence, to which the narrator is transported in a dream. The last piece of the kind
we wish to note is contained in a few pages of Sir Humphry Davy's Consolations in
Travel, and is distinguished by the success with which unlikeness to terrestrial
conditions, yet within the general laws of the solar system, is indicated. The narrator
falls into a vision in which he is transported to Saturn by a powerful and beneficent
guide, who is manifest to him only as a voice. The inhabitants are creatures with six
wings, brilliantly coloured, and furnished with convolutions of tubes which are the organs
of senses unknown to dwellers on the earth. Their habitations are suspended in the air and
moveable, and they can direct them at will to various regions of the atmosphere for
pleasure or research. Strife is unknown to them, their passions are few, and their only
ambitions are intellectual. In this pure and noble exercise of scientific fancy there is a
very different sort of pleasure from any that can be found in Mr. Percy Greg's powerfully
and studiously disagreeable picture of the institutions and manners of Mars.
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