
Moritz Kauffmann stated in Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement from Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx (1879) that Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis “embodies Bacon’s visions of the future, and is remarkable not only as a philosophical speculation or scientific romance, but as being the outcome of sane reflection, containing but few, if any, of those chimerical extravagancies to be found in other Utopias. In the description of the conditions of mankind here, we have nothing but the practical results he anticipated from a practical and diligent study of nature according to his own principles.”
Although not intended as such, that brief remark is a neat capsule description of the literary genre of scientific romance, viewed as a species of “philosophical speculation.” Kauffmann was the first person to identify such a genre in English literature and the first to identify New Atlantis as its principal founding text for perfectly good reasons, even though Bacon did not complete the intended work, setting it aside for unknown reasons and leaving it among his papers for posthumous publication in 1627. Even in its incomplete form, however, it is a strikingly original work. Although solidly set in the tradition of images of ideal society descended from Thomas More’s original, it offers a radically different view of the whole prospect of social transformation, stressing the potential contribution to be made to such transformation by science and technology.
The imaginary state in question is located in the “South Sea,” the narrator’s ship having set off from Peru aiming for China and Japan but having been driven northwards by a terrible storm. The strayed sailors find themselves in a Christian country whose inhabitants call it Bensalem, their ancestors having been converted by a miraculous revelation some twenty years after Christ’s death, receiving the scriptures and the gift of tongues at the same time. The island had once participated in a great age of navigation involving numerous kingdoms in the Americas and ill-fated Atlantis, which had been terminated by the sinking of the latter realm.
Much of the text consists of a catalogue of new technologies developed by the scientists of “Salomon’s House,” whose Father is a Scientist-Priest supervising the social and technological applications of a highly sophisticated science. These include among others: biotechnologies for the creation of new kinds of plants, the elaborate transformation of animals, and the development of special foods that increase the strength and solidity of the human body; new technologies for producing heat and manipulating light; “sound-houses” and “perfume-houses” for producing effects perceptible to other senses; “engine-houses” whose mechanical products include guns, explosives, aircraft, submarines and perpetual motion machines; and “houses of deceits of the senses,” where all manner of illusions can be produced and hence revealed for what they are. The text goes on to list various specialist employments associated with gathering information for Salomon’s House but is suspended thereafter, before the narrator can actually visit Salomon’s House and see these wonders in action.
New Atlantis was not the first Utopian novel to credit a hypothetical ideal state with advanced technology or to credit it with institutions designed to foster the further development of science and its practical spinoff—its most notable predecessor in that regard was Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis (written 1602, revised 1612, published 1623; tr. as The City of the Sun), of whose existence Bacon was surely unaware when he wrote his own account—but Bacon went much further than his contemporary and brought his topic into much narrower focus.
New Atlantis did not make its influence felt very rapidly, and 99 years were to pass before the publication of the next significant literary work in English that warrants serious consideration as a scientific romance in Kauffmann’s terms. A continuation was published in 1660, signed “R. H., Esquire,” which does offer some details of what happens in Salomon’s House, but it is more concerned with Bensalem’s peerage and honors system than its technology. An essay by Joseph Glanvill published in 1680, “Antifanatickal Religion and Free Philosophy,” also claimed in its subtitle to be a “Continuation of the New Atlantis” but is nothing of the sort. The anonymous poem The New Atlantis, published in 1687, has no connection at all with Bacon’s text nor has Mrs. Manley’s scandalous satire The New Atalantis (1709). The account of Salomon’s House thus went without any manifest elaboration, and the ideas embraced by the depiction lay virtually fallow, in literary terms, for the remainder of the seventeenth century.
In spite of the sparseness of any direct response, New Atlantis was undoubtedly widely read. Its influence during the century after its publication is difficult to measure, however, and it also difficult to estimate the extent to which it extrapolates ideas that were current in the milieu in which Bacon was operating. James I’s court inventor, Cornelis Drebbel appears to have been working very much in the spirit of Salomon’s House, and his most significant endeavors and discoveries all became manifest in the early 1620s. It was in that period that Drebbel invented an improved compound microscope and an improved thermometer, published a treatise on chemistry that included an account of a new explosive now known as mercury fulminate, began experimenting with submarines, and attempted to develop an air-conditioning system for buildings. Bacon and Drebbel were acquainted and must presumably have talked about the notions contained in New Atlantis, but whether those notions served as inspiration in either direction or merely revealed a similarity of ideas, there is no way of knowing.
Drebbel’s exploits must have encouraged Bacon in his conviction that the plan for Salomon’s House was a good one and that some such institution might be able to deliver on the promises he made on its behalf, and they might have helped other members of James I’s court to think likewise, but there must also have been skeptics convinced that it would all come to nothing. In the wider balance of opinion, the latter party evidently won out, at least in the short term.
Another book roughly contemporary with New Atlantis that shows some evidence of Bacon’s philosophy and method, albeit in a fashion very different from Drebbel’s practical endeavors, is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the fundamental plan of which is organized in a spirit of methodical observation and analysis that is at least mock-Baconian and probably more sincere and earnest than the author’s irrepressible wit and dexterity of thought sometimes makes it seem.
Bacon’s contemporaries also included Bishop Francis Godwin, and Godwin’s Utopian satire The Man in the Moone, posthumously published in 1638 under the by-line of its protagonist, Domingo Gonsales, might owe something to Baconian inspiration although no one knows when Godwin actually wrote his satire, and it might date from considerably earlier than 1627. The novel’s description of a lunar pastoral paradise contrasts markedly with Bacon’s Bensalem, however, and the story’s significance in the context of the evolution of scientific ideas has much more to do with its artful support for the heliocentric theory than any strictly Baconian ideas. The eventually widespread influence of Godwin’s text owes far more to the elegance of its humor than to its underlying philosophy.
It is not easy to find many other signs of activity or thought following up the ideas expressed in New Atlantis in the generation following Bacon’s death. The most obvious reiteration of the accomplishments of Salomon’s House is in the nonfictional works of John Wilkins, especially Mathematicall Magick (1648), which follows up a summary of existing mechanical devices with a remarkable catalogue of potential inventions that might be expected to flow from future developments in technology. Subsequent designers of ideal states, however, mostly ignored its argument that the institutional organization of scientific and technological endeavor might help bring about considerable improvements in society. The best-known British Utopia published in the remainder of the seventeenth century, James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), is entirely concerned with desirable political reforms involving land tenure and democratic elections.
One Utopia that appeared to be intent on continuing Bacon’s train of thought but flattered only to deceive was A Voyage into Tartary (1689), which bore the byline “Heliogenes de L’Epy” but was undoubtedly written by an Englishman. The author’s explicit aim is to describe a society strictly based on Reason which rejects religious revelation and is essentially democratic. Its focal point is the circular city of Heliopolis, strongly reminiscent of Campanella’s City of the Sun, but it has no equivalent of Salomon’s House. Instead—and rather mysteriously—all the technological inventions made by its citizens in the past, including firearms, flying machines, enormously powerful telescopes and microscopes, and accurate chronometers, have been consigned to a museum along with the printing press, having been rigorously excluded from everyday use.
Presumably, throughout the seventeenth century, Bacon’s conviction regarding the scope of the technology that might be spun off from the advancement of scientific knowledge was considered implausible in England in spite of Drebbel’s exemplars—or, at least, far less relevant to the immediate prospects of social progress than political reforms that were not dependent on as-yet-undiscovered principles and processes. A hundred and fifty years were to pass before the advent of “euchronian fiction” obliged the employers of that procedural method to consider seriously the question of what future advances in science and technology might be possible and to what extent they might contribute to the sum of human happiness. In fact, it is not obvious exactly what differences they have made to everyday life in Bensalem. Bacon’s spokesman for Salomon’s House proclaims that the island’s inhabitants are very happy, and those whom the narrator meets endorse the view. However, the truncated narrative never shows the reader that supposed felicity in action, so the contribution made to it by the listed technological wonders is not dramatized and hence not obvious.
The suggestion has been made that Bacon’s intention in writing New Atlantis was not so much to dramatize his ideas about the scope and potential of science conducted according to his principles as to provide a prospectus for an actual institution that he wanted James I to endow: an English equivalent of Salomon’s House. Whether that is true or not, the fact that the king—no fan of governmental bureaucracy—did not oblige would surely not have been altered had Bacon finished and published the book in 1609. Its publication in 1627, however, did encourage some observers to link the eventual foundation of the Royal Society of London by Charles II in 1660 to the plan of Salomon’s House laid out in New Atlantis. John Wilkins was one of the early propagandists for the Society.
The Royal Society initially included poets among its members as well as scientists, and two of the most renowned paid homage to Bacon as one of the key contributors to English science. John Dryden’s “Epistle the Third, To my Honoured Friend, Dr. Charleton” (1663) places Bacon at the head of a triumphant list that goes on to cite William Gilbert, Robert Boyle, and William Harvey. In a similar vein, Abraham Cowley’s “Ode to the Royal Society” (1667) celebrates Baconian iconoclasm, and the manner in which it opened the way to the Tree of Knowledge. It is certainly arguable that the Royal Society did eventually make a significant contribution to the promotion of scientific endeavor in Britain as the enthusiasm echoed by Dryden and Cowley expected, but it did not bear the “ripen’d fruit” to which Cowley looked forward rapidly or prolifically.
New Atlantis was not, however, the only book that Bacon wrote in which he included some prophetic remarks about science and the future, and the much earlier and even more peculiar De Sapientia Veterum (1609; tr. as The Wisdom of the Ancients), which offers new versions of a series of tales adapted from Greek myths, adding “explanations” that convert them ingeniously into allegories of modern philosophy, contains two essays of particular relevance to the future symbolism of scientific romance. The first of them—the longest essay in the book—is “Prometheus, or the State of Man” (chapter XXVI), in which the Titan is held to allegorize “Over-Ruling Providence and ... Human Nature.”
The earliest version of the story of Prometheus that has survived is the brief one contained in Hesiod’s poem Theogony and repeated in a slightly more elaborate form in the same poet’s Works and Days. Theogony relates that, when gods and men had a dispute, Prometheus, “the most glorious of all lords,” was called upon to carve up an ox and divide its meat. For some undisclosed reason, Prometheus tried to fool Zeus into accepting the bones and fat for the gods while leaving the meat, disguised with the hide, for men—but Zeus saw through the ruse and punished Prometheus by binding him with chains and setting an eagle on him to devour his eternally regenerated liver, although he eventually permitted Heracles to free the Titan from his bondage. Also in reprisal, Zeus refused the power of “unwearying fire” to the humans of Earth—but Prometheus, once freed, stole its gleam in a fennel stalk and gave it to them. Zeus then took a further revenge by sending a beautiful woman to Earth, the progenitor of the “deadly race” of women and the source of all evil. The second part of the story is further elaborated in Works and Days where the woman is named Pandora and carries evils in a jar rather than transmitting them through her progeny.
Hesiod’s versions of the story evidently contain a certain amount of literary decoration in addition to traditional folklore, and the story was further embroidered and reconfigured by other Classical writers, most famously in a version usually credited, perhaps mistakenly, to the playwright Aeschylus in a trilogy of which only one volume and fragments of a second survive. In the surviving play, Prometheus Bound, Prometheus reveals that fire was not his only gift to humankind but that he also taught humans the arts of agriculture, writing, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, and architecture—thus being, in effect, the father of science. In this version his punishment comes after the theft of fire, not before it, and is intensified because he claims to know a secret that will lead to Zeus’ downfall but refuses to reveal it in case Zeus might take action to avoid his fate. Although the other plays have not survived, references to the trilogy in near-contemporary sources suggest that in this version of the story, Prometheus does eventually surrender the secret, permitting Zeus to avoid the prophesied misfortune and bringing about a reconciliation between the two of them.
Bacon takes aboard some of the further embellishments of the story, including the notion that it was Prometheus, rather than Zeus—explicitly credited as the creator of humans in Hesiod—who first forged humans out of clay. Bacon, however, suggests that the alleged formation was defective because Prometheus mixed “particles taken from different animals” with the clay and suggests that the Titan’s attempt to improve his workmanship by stealing fire for the usage of his creations also went badly awry for all concerned. In Bacon’s account, ungrateful humans denounce Prometheus to “Jupiter”—for which treachery Jupiter rewards humans with the gift of eternal youth as well although the gift is unfortunately lost. Prometheus, angry with Jupiter, attempts the deception of the ox, prompting Jupiter to punish humankind by sending Pandora to curse them with “all mischiefs and calamities” and then to bind Prometheus to a rock, sending the eagle to devour his continually regenerated liver.
Bacon summarizes all the accomplishments of humankind in the exploitation of nature from the employment of the stars to the calculation of the seasons through agriculture and in the construction of shelters to all manner of productive and locomotive technology, supporting the notion that every human being becomes a microcosm reflecting in miniature the whole of the macrocosm. “Nevertheless,” Bacon adds,
we see that man in the first phase of his existence is a naked and defenceless thing, slow to help himself and full of wants. Therefore Prometheus applied himself in all haste to the invention of fire, which in all human necessities and business is the great minister of relief and hope; insomuch that if the soul be the form of forms and the hand the instrument of instruments, fire may rightly be called the help of helps and the means of means. For through it most operations are effected, through it the arts mechanical and the sciences themselves are furthered in an infinite variety of ways.
This analysis of Prometheus as the symbol and progenitor of human science is given an extra twist in Bacon’s account by the subsequent betrayal of Prometheus by ingrate humans to Jupiter and Jupiter’s rewarding of that treachery. Bacon makes this an allegory condemning human satisfaction with acquired knowledge and wealth and praising the dissatisfaction that causes them to strive for further progress. Further details of the story are recruited one by one to the same cause as exhortations not merely to human effort in general but specifically to effort in the improvement of the technical arts, counseling persistence when experiments initially fail. According to Bacon, the story goes on to evaluate religion and then the morality of everyday life. His interpretation of Prometheus’ punishment suggests that it exposes the dark side of the “forethought” signified by the name itself:
The school of Prometheus on the other hand, that is the wise and fore-thoughtful class of men, do indeed by their caution decline and remove out of their way many evils and misfortunes; but with that good there is this evil joined, that they stint themselves of many pleasures and of the various agreeablenesses of life, and cross their genius, and (what is far worse) torment and wear themselves away with cares and solicitude and inward fears. For being bound to the column of Necessity, they are troubled with innumerable thoughts (which because of their flightiness are represented by the eagle), thoughts which prick and gnaw and corrode the liver: and if at intervals, as in the night, they obtain some little relaxation and quiet of mind, yet new fears and anxieties return presently with the morning.
This image of the “fore-thoughtful class of men” was to be transferred in full to many later images of scientists and inventors bound by their vocation as if to a rock and tormented as if by an eagle. Bacon follows it up after some further elaboration by connecting it to the allegation made in his own version of the story that the punishment of having his entrails continually torn out is specifically linked to the accusation that Prometheus had attempted to ravish Minerva.
The crime alluded to appears to be no other than that into which men not infrequently fall when puffed up with arts and much knowledge—of trying to bring the divine wisdom itself under the dominion of sense and reason: from which attempt inevitably follows laceration of the mind and vexation without end or rest. And therefore men must soberly and modestly distinguish between things divine and human, between the oracles of sense and of faith; unless they mean to have at once a heretical religion and a fabulous philosophy.
That cautionary note must already have seemed urgent to Bacon, and the relevance of the Baconian metaphor of Prometheus being accused—rightly or wrongly—of ravishing Minerva was to increase dramatically in the early days of “scientific romance.”
There are several items in Bacon’s account of the story of Prometheus that do not match up with the traditional sources although they do not give the impression of being added to it simply to support subsequent interpretations within the allegorical reading, and they serve to add to the inventiveness of the essay, which must have seemed spectacular to its readers even by comparison with the eccentricity of some of the other interpretative suggestions. That the essay stimulated imagination is indubitable as it was widely cited by the pioneers of scientific romance in a later era, and they felt free not only to improvise new interpretations of the story but also to make up new versions of it to interpret in a similar fashion. The Prometheus that Bacon handed down to his successors was a remarkably elastic and versatile symbol, well-suited to various analyses of the role that science and technology ought to play in human society and the likely rewards and penalties that might ensure from its pursuit.
As if Bacon’s account of the likely agonies to be suffered by future members of “fore-thoughtful class of men” were not enough to put them off, two chapters later, he added a further symbol to the mix by giving science itself a new emblematic figurehead in the monstrous, mountain-dwelling Sphinx, which lay in wait for passers-by in the highways around Thebes, confronting them with riddles—supposedly supplied by the Muses in this version—tearing them to pieces if they could not answer, before finally being thwarted and killed by Oedipus.
Bacon comments,
This is an elegant fable and seems invented to represent science, especially as joined with practice. For science may, without absurdity, be called a monster, being strangely gazed at and admired by the ignorant and unskillful. Her figure and form is various, by reason of the vast variety of subjects that science considers; her voice and countenance are represented female, by reason of her gay appearance and volubility of speech; wings are added because the sciences and their inventions run and fly about in a moment, for knowledge, like light communicated from one torch to another, is presently caught and copiously diffused; sharp and hooked talons are elegantly attributed to her, because the axioms and arguments of science enter the mind, lay hold of it, fix it down, and keep it from moving or slipping away.... Again, all science seems placed on high, as it were on the tops of mountains that are hard to climb; for science is justly imagined a sublime and lofty thing, looking down upon ignorance from an eminence, and at the same time taking an extensive view on all sides.... Science is said to beset the highways, because through all the journeys and peregrinations of human life there is matter and occasion offered of contemplation....
Science has no more than two kinds of riddles, one relating to the nature of things, the other to the nature of man; and correspondent to these, the prizes of the solution are two kinds of empire, the empire over nature and the empire over man, For the true and ultimate end of natural philosophy is dominion over natural things, natural bodies, remedies, machines, and numberless other particulars, though the schools, contented with what spontaneously offers, and swollen with their own discourses, neglect, and in a manner despise, both things and works....
Bacon was undoubtedly attempting to compliment science in making this quirky summary of its attributes, but he also represented science as monstrous, fearsome, and murderous—not much of an advertisement for a cause to which he was deeply committed. Perhaps he was simply recognizing that the new science, whose principal champion he was to become, frightened a lot of people, and he was trying to persuade them that the fear, although understandable, was unnecessary; at a distance, however, the strategy seems suspect, to say the least. There is no suggestion in the surviving fragment of New Atlantis that the dwellers in Salomon’s House have to suffer the kinds of ordeals to which Bacon’s Jupiter subjected Prometheus and the Sphinx subjected its victims, but it does seem probable in juxtaposing the two works that their vocation might not have been a bed of roses.
Whether or not New Atlantis was planned as a kind of prospectus for an actual institution that Bacon wanted James I to endow, it had no immediate effect. If the essays on Prometheus and the Sphinx in The Wisdom of the Ancients were intended to serve as propaganda urging men to join the “fore-thoughtful class of men” and devote themselves to solving the Sphinxian riddles of science, it is hard to believe that they had much effect, either, and might have been more likely to have had a negative effect rather than a positive one. In retrospect, however, it is evident that New Atlantis also provided a prospectus of sorts for a new kind of philosophical speculation in fictional form: for “scientific romance,” and that The Wisdom of the Ancients made a significant contribution to the symbolism that such a genre might use and also to the deep doubts that such a genre would have to entertain regarding the possible costs of scientific endeavor. That prospectus was not developed rapidly, but when it was eventually developed, it demonstrated in no uncertain terms the extent to which Bacon’s analyses of the possible future of scientific speculation really were prophetic.
Scientific romance had its troubles just as the Royal Society had, but it is arguable that the genre represents Bacon’s true imaginative heritage and that of all the potential functions that New Atlantis might have fulfilled, its role as an inspiration for and exemplar of scientific romance was eventually, if temporarily, the most successful. The elaboration of New Atlantis into a generic gazetteer did not happen rapidly, but it did happen. An entire collaborative endeavor grew up, dedicated not to treating the produce of Salomon’s House as a potential reality but to exploring the possible social consequences of the items in its catalogue, if ever they were to become real, and also to mapping the remoter areas of the imaginary continent and its surrounding waters—where, as ancient maps were wont to put it, “here be monsters.”
Salomon’s House is not merely a fictional institution but a fantastic one. It is not a blueprint for a research institute that might have been set up in the early seventeenth century by a monarch or a philanthropist; it is a daydream, which takes full advantage of the license that daydreams have to be excessive in their claims. It is a facet of an imaginary land, which not only has no actual location on the surface of the Earth but has all kinds of features that differentiate it from the lands that do. It is a Utopia, not only in the sense that it is nowhere but in the sense that it is a better place than those that do exist. It is a philosophical speculation, designed for the purpose of illustrating and dramatizing an argument. That is not a weakness but a particular strength; New Atlantis and Salomon’s House were enabled by their lack of historical basis to play a much more considerable role in the communication, publication, recruitment, and equipment of the future scientific community than any mere description of an existing or practicable institution could possibly have done.
New Atlantis was never finished and could easily have gone unpublished. When it was published, it was offered as a mere curiosity, an addendum to a more serious work, an amusing afterthought or jeu d’esprit. Perhaps it would have made no difference to the subsequent progress of science if the essay never had been published but had remained submerged forever, unseen and unread. Perhaps the same dictates of chance would have produced the same discoveries and communications, publications, and recruitments of an essentially similar sort and thrust—but perhaps not.
In a purely arithmetical sense, New Atlantis only adds one item to the list of “scientific romances” drawn up retrospectively in constructing a narrative history of the Wellsian genre and perhaps not even that, given its fractional nature—perhaps it is only entitled to be considered as a third or a tenth of a full “esthetic unit.” But that is another silly calculation. As a potential source of inspiration, even though that potential was effectively unrealized for a century and more, New Atlantis was immensely important and not only in the sense that people who read it added its ideas to the stock of their wisdom. Although New Atlantis was not and never had been on any world map aiming for geographical accuracy, it eventually became a very significant location in the conceptual map of the world.
Oscar Wilde remarks in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” that
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, because it leaves out the one country in which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.
The case of Atlantis is more complicated, of course, because the principal definitive feature of Atlantis is that it is no longer there. It has sunk, perhaps leaving a few vestiges in the form of fugitive islets, lost colonies, or cities on the sea-bed, but nonetheless it is absents as an integral whole. The principle, however, remains the same. Insofar as it is a Utopia, the absence of a manifest location does not prevent people from going there in the imagination; in fact, it facilitates the possibility. The newness of New Atlantis did not make the imaginative journey in question any easier, but it did make it more tempting.
When Oscar Wilde made that remark about Utopia, which is usually quoted out of context, he did not have a Utopia like Thomas More’s in mind, as the preceding sentences of his essay had made clear: “Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing,” he had written, higher up the page.
On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvelous things for their own joy and the joy of every one else. There will be great storage of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopia?
As things have turned out, of course, the paragraph concluded with that question was an apt analysis of the present and an accurate prediction of the future, but the answer to the question is nevertheless affirmative; the analysis is that of a Utopia, and the particular Utopia in question is New Atlantis. More than any previous Utopia, New Atlantis became the place in which, in Wilde’s terminology, people were continually “landing,” whether they ever read Bacon’s fragment or not, if not in the seventeenth century, then in the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth. And when they got there, they invariably set out to visit Salomon’s House to glimpse not merely the wonders it already contained but the means by which they had come into being and by which further wonders would be produced in future.
In time, entirely appropriately and inevitably, the imaginary geography of New Atlantis expanded far beyond Francis Bacon’s appropriately incomplete sketch-map into a much vaster realm—and, for that matter, a much vaster universe. New Atlantis expanded from an imaginary island into an imaginary archipelago and then an imaginary world: the world of scientific romance and speculative fiction in general. It did not do so, however, as a simple extension of Utopian optimism because it always carried with it the legacy of Bacon’s other prophetic book, The Wisdom of the Ancients, Wisdom observed, in remarkably harsh and sardonic terms, the number of ways in which science resembles the mythical Sphinx and the terrible tendency of men of forethought to be punished for the pains they take in attempting to be benefactors of humankind. In expanding the continent of New Atlantis, scientific romance certainly did not neglect those cautionary notes and frequently raised them to the pitch of hysteria.
That merely serves to remind us, however, that accurate prophecy, like true wisdom, does not come cheap and rarely offers the kind of comfort we would like.
Publication of the revised and expanded version of Brian Stableford’s history of scientific romance, now entitled New Atlantis: A Narrative History of Scientific Romance, was delayed by the unfortunate death of Robert Reginald, its intended publisher, but will hopefully appear some time in 2014 from Wildside Press in four volumes.
Comments