Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
In an earlier essay in these pages, I commented on the manner in which Louis Figuier, the editor of the popular science magazine La Science Illustrée, introduced a feuilleton section to the magazine under the rubric roman scientifique [scientific fiction] in which, between 1888 and 1905, he published dozens of exemplary texts mapping out the genre to which he thought that title appropriate. I also commented then on the fact that the label did not catch on elsewhere, perhaps because other editors did not think such a genre label necessary but perhaps also because they were aware that the phrase had been used in other contexts with different connotations and thought it ambiguous.
Like its closest English language analogue, “scientific romance,” the phrase roman scientifique first appeared in the latter half of the eighteenth century, where it was used to refer to ideas in science that were thought to be or had turned out be scholarly fantasies. The earliest uses that show up by searching for the term in Google Books are dated between 1750 and 1754, but all the references from that period refer to an observation by Elie-Catherine Fréron, referring to the theory of gravity. Other early uses include a footnote in a scientific encyclopedia to the entry on phlogiston and several sources citing Jean-Baptiste Delambre’s scornful dismissal of a supposed calculation of the date of the Biblical Deluge by the astronomer William Whiston.
The term was employed by Honoré de Balzac in 1836 with reference to the New York Sun “Moon Hoax,” which was equally sensational when reprinted in France, and Camille Flammarion employed it in the same context in 1864. It was still being used in the 1860s to refer to scientific texts, but it began to be used increasingly in that decade to refer to works of fiction, including works by Léon Gozlan, Henri Rivière, and, not unnaturally, Jules Verne. Indeed, throughout the 1870s, the term was used almost exclusively to refer to Verne’s scientifically and technologically enhanced adventure stories, considered archetypal of a new kind of fiction. But in the 1880s, competition was joined when critics began to refer to the works of Émile Zola as “romans scientifiques”—a term which the author was happy to accept on the grounds that his “Naturalist” fiction was typified by its employment of a scientific method of character analysis, based on the study of the influences of heredity and environment in shaping individual behavior. The subsequent conflict of reference might have been one of the factors that prevented Figuier’s championship of the term as a genre label from being more widely adopted.
Zola’s notion of Naturalist roman scientifique was not very conducive to the development of speculative fiction although there are elements of scientific and futuristic speculative fiction in some of his later novels, most notably Le Docteur Pascal (1893; tr. as Doctor Pascal) and Fécundité (1899; tr. as Fruitfulness). It is worth noting, however, that only a small minority of Verne’s “romans scientifiques” are speculative; many of his adventure stories feature scientifically inspired projects and methodical scientific thinking while remaining naturalistic (with a small n). Neither characterization of roman scientifique, therefore, referred specifically to speculative fiction, and both covered a good deal of fiction that was naturalistic but employed a method or subject matter that was in some sense—at least ostensibly—“scientific.”
It is worth noting, too, that Figuier was not the first Frenchman to attempt to map out a potential genre of “scientific fiction” and that the first man to do so made his bid before Verne or Zola had appeared on the literary scene. Verne’s early work was, in fact, contemporary with a considerable boom in the popularization of science, which lent a new lease of life to a number of writers who had been involved in that kind of work for some time. The writer who had made a more significant contribution than any other to the use of fictional devices in the popularization of science prior to 1860 was S. Henry Berthoud, who had been publishing popular science articles in newspapers for many years, often using the pen-name “Dr. Sam.” One effect of the new fashionability of the popularization of science was to allow Berthoud to compile a four-volume set of his relevant work as Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam [Sam’s Scientific Fantasies] (1861–2).
Like roman scientifique, “fantaisies scientifiques” had been used previously to refer to scientific ideas, but, perhaps oddly, not in the same pejorative fashion. Uses from earlier in the century referring to Galileo and Bernardin Saint-Pierre are at least neutral, if not actually complimentary. Berthoud’s attempt to adopt the phrase as a genre label (which he first floated in an article bearing the title that appeared in his regular slot in La Patrie in 1859) did not catch on any more than Figuier’s did, but the range of work that he grouped under it is nevertheless interesting. Many of his fantaisies scientifiques are really essays rather than stories, many of the stories merely feature encounters between characters and odd phenomena of natural history, and others are items of historical fiction featuring actual scientists as characters; only a tiny minority include any speculative component.
Although forgotten today, Berthoud had begun his career as a member of the Romantic Movement of the 1830s; modern literary historians only tend to remember him as a friend of Honoré de Balzac, but he was also a pioneer of the conte cruel and a folklorist of some significance. In the latter respect, his record is blurred by the fact that he was one of the great pioneers of “fakelore,” routinely passing off as adaptations of folktales stories that he had invented. Some of his most notable “scientific fantasies” use similar narrative deception, pretending to refer to actual events in the lives of real scientists but actually fantasizing freely about their achievements and their fate.
If one adds Berthoud’s characterization of “fantaisies scientifiques” to the two different definitions of “romans scientifiques” that became current in the latter half of the century, however, one of the most striking things about the putative genres thus defined is how little speculative fiction they contained. This is of some significance in the way modern literary historians look back at that material, because, although the American genre of “scientifiction” first defined in America in the late 1920s adopted Jules Verne as one of its primary exemplars and H. G. Wells (whose speculative fiction was also a tiny fraction of the entire spectrum of his works) as the other, it was a genre that focused exclusively on speculative fiction.
The fact that scientifiction’s successor, “science fiction,” won the labeling prize, eventually being imported into both Britain and France as a standard term, has inevitably led to “historians of science fiction” considering examples of both British scientific romance and French roman scientifique as “proto-science fiction,” as if they were mere halting steps in a “natural” pattern of progress—but that is a highly misleading way to look at them, in that they had their own interests and agendas and were actually oriented in markedly different directions. There is a great deal of fantaisie scientifique and roman scientifique which is clearly not “proto-science fiction” but which is nevertheless part and parcel of those potential and evolving genres. From the viewpoint of “historians of science fiction,” such material is bound to seem marginal and perhaps even eccentric or perverse, but the perspective changes if one attempts the thought experiment of forgetting the victory of “science fiction” in the labeling stakes and looks at the French fledgling genres in their own terms.
Even the handful of Henry Berthoud’s stories that do contain a speculative element—including the magnificent “Voyage au ciel” (1841; tr. as “A Heavenward Voyage”)—have much more in common with the ones that do not than with the kind of speculative fiction that eventually became established in British scientific romance before being plundered by American science fiction. Their primary interest and focus is not on the hypothetical inventions that their central characters make but on the alleged psychology of scientific research and discovery; many can be seen in retrospect as closely akin to Zolaesque character analyses. Berthoud’s other stories featuring imaginary scientists who make hypothetical inventions, including “Le Maître du temps,” (1844; tr. as “The Master of the Weather”) and “Le Second Soleil” (1862 in Fantaisies scientifiques but probably first published c1845; tr. as “The Second Sun”), are identical in tone and rhetorical inclination to stories he wrote in which real scientists are deployed as characters in fictitious analyses of their obsessive quests and the manner in which other members of society react to them in consequence. The most striking of these include “Le Fou” (1844; tr. as “The Madman”) and “Le Chaudron de Bicêtre” (1845; tr. “The Cauldron of Bicêtre”), the former featuring the British inventor Sir William Congreve and the latter Salomon de Caus, extrapolating Dominique Arago’s claim that the latter ought to be reckoned as the true inventor of the steam engine.
Berthoud might have taken these literary experiments of the 1840s much further had the market been more receptive to work of that adventurous nature, but even the scant sympathy they did receive was comprehensively demolished before the decade’s end. Although he did not share the ardent Republican sympathies of many of his Romantic contemporaries, Berthoud’s career was similarly interrupted by the upheavals connected with the 1848 revolution and the coup d’état of 1851, and for much of the 1850s he worked almost invisibly as a science correspondent for two daily newspapers, including La Patrie. It was there that he developed the persona of “Dr. Sam” in order to develop a chatty style of reportage that made regular and routine use of fictional methods of dramatization—a policy he continued in the 1860s by which time he was best-known as a writer of didactic fiction for children. Many of his works for children can be regarded as a subset to his endeavors in the popularization of science, most notably L’Homme depuis cinq mille ans [Humans over Five Thousand Years] (1865), which is bracketed by the earliest substantial prehistoric fantasy based on paleontological evidence and Berthoud’s only wholehearted futuristic vision.
The legacy of Berthoud’s preoccupation with the allegedly peculiar psychology of scientists and the manner in which it tends to alienate them from their fellows with dire consequences for the sociology of science was significantly echoed in the work of other writers who began writing scientifically informed fiction in the 1860s, including—and in no uncertain terms—Jules Verne. Beginning with Professor Lidenbrock in Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; rev. 1867; tr. as Journey to the Centre of the Earth), Verne presented a whole series of character studies of eccentric scientists who could have stepped straight out of one of Berthoud’s stories. There was, of course, far more to Verne’s work than that, but the fraction of that “far more” that dealt with innovations such as the super-submarine Nautilus and the space-gun Columbiad was actually not that large. It might have been far larger had the publisher who had Verne under long-term contract, P.-J. Hertzel, not insisted that he put the brakes on that aspect of his work, but whoever was responsible, the fact is that the science that looms largest in Verne’s work and became titanic in the subgenre of “Vernean fiction” that his work inspired—lavishly represented in the Journal des Voyages et des aventures de terre et de mer (1877–1949)—was not an innovative science but an exploratory one: geography.
“Vernean fiction” routinely features innovative vehicles such as submarines and flying machines, but they mostly feature as facilitating devices enabling newcomers to participate in the heroic age of exploration that was in its heyday at the time to reach the remote areas that still contain unknown and mysterious terrains. That heroic age was in its decadence, of course, already giving way to an age of tourism, but that only served to sharpen the passionate element of the drive to reach the regions where Cook’s Tours could not yet go and see them before their imagery was spoiled by the gaze of gawkers. Some such stories, of course, found improbable monsters that were and remain wholly fictitious, but many were not merely content to but primarily interested in depicting the wonders of nature, especially wonders of recent discovery or recent explanation.
Familiarity with more accurate data has now made much Vernean fiction seem primitive or ludicrous, of little or no interest as “proto-science fiction,” but it was never trying to be “proto-science fiction.” From the viewpoint of the archeology of the imagination, it remains interesting as unique testimony to lost horizons of possibility that have been long eclipsed by brute reality and more sophisticated biological and ethnographic theory. The non-speculative aspects of fantaisie scientifique and roman scientifique fed through into many of the works featured in Figuier’s feuilleton series, not merely as specific topics of individual stories but as a routine background feature of the genre of roman scientifique as Figuier conceived it. Inevitably, whenever post-Zolaesque Naturalist novels featured scientists—as they occasionally did—they too had the same fascinations as Henry Berthoud and drew upon the same assumptions and prejudices.
Figuier did broaden out the scope of Vernean fiction considerably during the decade and a half that he was running his feuilleton, but it was not until he began publishing translations of work by H. G. Wells in some profusion in the late 1890s that the extra breadth took on the additional scope that had already been introduced into the British genre of “scientific romance”—which was itself markedly different from the scope that was subsequently added to the combined influences of Verne and Wells. Because of the crucial role eventually to be played in the evolution of American science fiction by the myth of the Space Age, the most conspicuous difference between that genre and earlier analogues that has leapt to the eye of historians insistent on regarding those other genres as “proto-science fiction” has been the relative lack of interest of roman scientifique and scientific romance in space travel. Because H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon became crucial exemplars for science fiction, it has always been possible for those considering them as “proto-science fiction” to regard them as more significant exemplars in the tradition of scientific romance than they turned out to be. Even though the former was one of the translations Figuier featured in his feuilleton series, it is obvious from the most cursory examination of the rest of his series that interplanetary fiction was even less significant in roman scientifique than it was in scientific romance. Indeed, the only other item of interplanetary fiction that Figuier published was another translation from the English of a series of stories by W. S. Lach-Szyrma published in Cassell’s Magazine.
Among the early Vernean writers recruited by Figuier was Alphonse Brown, who, in addition to the Vernean novel, “Un Ville de verre” (1890–91; tr. as City of Glass), published “Les Insectes révélateurs (1889; tr. as “The Tell-Tale Insects”), an early story of forensic entomology, and “Les Tribulations d’un pécheur à la ligne” (1891; tr. as “The Tribulations of an Angler”), a love story in which a young artist wins over an angling-addicted potential father-in-law by cultivating an interest in ichthyology that carves him a path to the fisherman’s heart. Neither story can be reckoned as “proto-science fiction,” although the first is ancestral to the forensic science detective stories that pullulate nowadays. The latter story is perhaps more remote from proto-science fiction than anything else Figuier published under the roman scientifique rubric although Paul Combes “Les Mines d’or du Bas-Meudon (1898; tr. as “The Gold Mines of Bas-Meudon), which is about a well-intentioned scam backed by scientific expertise, ran it close.
A more unusual early recruit to the edification of the fledgling genre was Camille Debans, a popular writer who, like Alphonse Brown, had previously published feuilletons in the Journal de Voyages. Debans’s earliest contributions to Figuier’s feuilleton were “Histoire d’un tremblement de terre” (1892; tr. as “The Story of an Earthquake”) and “L’Île en feu” (1893; tr. as “Fire Island”), both of which are naturalistic dramas featuring supposedly realistic and scientifically informed accounts of dramatic natural phenomena. Although Debans did go on eventually to write some wholeheartedly speculative fiction for the slot, Figuier also elected to reprint his Journal des Voyages story “Un duel à vapeur” (JdV 1892; SI 1895; tr. as “A Steam Duel”), a pastiche of American tall tale fiction in which two engineers encounter numerous amusing snags while trying to settle a quarrel by crashing their locomotives into one another.
The last cited Debans story appeared in La Science Ilustrée immediately after a reprint of Jules Lermina’s “Le Clou” (1870; SI 1895; tr. as “The Nail”), a story featuring the solution of a crime by an amateur detective, using the method of deductive reasoning allied with a certain intuitive psychological insight. As it was a reprint, Figuier must have sought it out as a significant example of what he considered “scientific fiction” to be, and he had previously done likewise by reprinting Victorien Sardou’s similarly inclined story, “Le Perle noire” (1862; SI 1892; tr. as “The Black Pearl”), in which a scientist puts a police detective in the shade in a contest of observation and logic. He had also reprinted La Ville enchantée (1885; SI 1894; tr. as The Enchanted City) by “M. Prévost-Duclos” (military historian Eugène Hennebert), in spite of the fact that it had been constantly in print for ten years, presumably because, out of all the Vernean African adventure novels Figuier could have chosen to reprint, that was the one most closely fitting his notion of roman scientifique; it is not speculative although it makes much of the enormous utility of scientific knowledge, technological expertise, and logical thinking in perilous situations.
Figuier subsequently returned twice to the Lermina collection from which he had taken “Le Clou,” once to abstract an obvious “proto-science fiction” story but on the other occasion to reprint “Les Fous” (1869; SI 1903; tr. as “The Lunatics”), an interesting exercise in the subgenre of “psychological case-study” fiction. Figuier also published another story based on contemporary psychology in “Les Huit cents doubloons de Springfield” (1894; tr. as “Springfield’s Doubloons”) by Georges Price, which is particularly notable in featuring a very intensive analysis of the supposed psychology of two obsessive scientists.
The only contribution made to Figuier’s series by the prolific popularizer of science Camille Flammarion was “La Fin du monde” (1893–1894; tr. as “The End of the World” in Cosmopolitan, and as part of Omega: The End of the World), which is an account of a hypothetical scientific conference summoned to discuss the possibility of the Earth being struck by a comet. Flammarion had been using fictitious devices and frameworks of various kinds to dramatize scientific ideas for didactic purposes since the 1860s, and this particular device echoes one used by his chief rival as a popularizer in the 1860s, Henri de Parville. Parville had published a newspaper hoax about the discovery of a “Martian mummy” inside a crashed meteorite, which proved so popular that he was forced to spin it out by detailing a scientific conference convened to assess the find and discuss its implications. That had been published in book form by P.-J. Hetzel as Un habitant de la planète Mars (Le Pays 1864; book 1865; tr. as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars) and its relative commercial failure along with that of Prodigieuse découverte (Revue moderne 1865; book 1867; tr. as “A Prodigious Discovery”) by “X. Nagrien” (Armand Audoy) might have helped convince Hetzel that his prize author ought to apply the soft pedal to the speculative elements in his work.
The broadening process to which Figuier subjected roman scientifique in the pages of La Science Illustrée, although far more modest in its scope that the subsequent development of “science fiction” and oriented in a different direction, was not happening in isolation, and whether his label stuck or not, there were many other writers interested in developing fiction with a scientific infusion. Perhaps inevitably, the Zolaesque notion of roman scientifique also underwent a broadening process as scientists began to feature more frequently as specimens to be placed under the Naturalist microscope—or, as it had become by the 1890s, the neo-Naturalist microscope, Zola’s interest in hereditary and environmental factors having been supplemented and largely displaced by character analyses based in academic psychology.
One of the most interesting instances of a neo-Naturalist novel with a scientific component is André Couvreur’s Le Mal nécessaire (1899; tr. as The Necessary Evil), which analyzes the character and describes the havoc wrought by a ruthless and unorthodox surgeon named Armand Caresco. Although interesting in its own right as a distinctly shocking novel, it is of particular interest in the present context because Couvreur went on to write a sequel to it, Caresco surhomme (1904; tr. as Caresco, Superman) which is wholeheartedly and flamboyantly speculative in making Caresco the presiding genius of a utopia in which surgical engineering plays a very striking role. Couvreur subsequently became a regular writer of boldly ambitious speculative fiction, elaborately chronicling the exploits of the brilliant but somewhat unhinged Professor Tornada.
The most intense of all the neo-Naturalist analyses of the supposed psychology of scientific research is André Beaunier’s L’Homme qui a perdu son moi (1911; tr. as The Man Who Lost Himself), which has some marginal speculative content although its intensive focus is on the psychological, social, and philosophical demands placed on practitioners by scientific research and theorization. In the context of the present discussion, however, the most interesting case-study is a writer who considered himself a diehard neo-Naturalist, although he was a regular contributor to the Mercure de France, which took over the reprinting of H. G. Wells’s work from La Science Illustrée. His regular presence in the magazine’s pages might not be irrelevant to the fact that the Mercure never used roman scientifique as a descriptive term for its Wells translations—and, indeed, published an article that coined and attempted to popularize a new genre term, roman merveilleux-scientifique [scientific marvel fiction] instead. That label was enthusiastically taken up by Maurice Renard but never made any further headway.
The neo-Naturalist writer in question, “Gaston Danville” (Armand Blocq, 1870–1933), was the younger brother of Paul Blocq (1860–96), a colleague of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière and the author of several books on neuropathology. Danville became a contributor to the Mercure in its second year of publication, and his early contributions to the magazine resembled the standard exercises in Symbolist prose-poetry favored therein, appearing alongside work of that sort by Remy de Gourmont, Jules Renard, and Saint-Pol-Roux. The series he began to develop therefrom, collectively entitled “Contes d’Au-Delà” [“Tales of the Beyond”], initially seemed a natural development in terms of the elaboration of their narrative method and concern but soon struck out into uncharted literary territory.
Danville’s novels—Les Infinis de la chair [The Infinity of the Flesh] (1892), Vers la mort [Toward Death] (1897), Les Reflets du miroir [The Reflections in the Mirror] (1897), L’Amour magicien [Love, the Magician] (1902), and Le Parfum de volupté [The Perfume of Sensuality] (1905)—all carried forward the project that he had begun in the “Contes d’Au-Delà,” as he explicitly stated in the preface to the first of them, which explained the theory behind the story series and advanced the claim that it would attempt to take the Naturalist cause to a new but logical extreme. The novels do not appear to have enjoyed much success, and such celebrity as Danville retains is almost entirely based on his non-fiction book La Psychologie de l’amour [The Psychology of Love] (1903), which went through numerous editions and was still in print when he died. But his fiction remains interesting if only because it affects to embody and illustrate the same positivistic psychological theories contained in his non-fiction.
In Danville’s view (doubtless assisted by his brother), his fellow neo-Naturalists and the writers of contemporary crime fiction who were taking an intense interest in the psychology of murder were behind the times, routinely clinging, tacitly or explicitly, to scientific theses he considered to be obsolete. He wanted to take his place within—or perhaps to constitute in its entirety—a new avant garde, producing literary works explicitly based in up-to-date psychological theory, which would analyze sexual attraction, criminal impulses, and artistic creativity as well as more mundane questions of remembrance and reflection in the light of contemporary, positivist psychological theories. In that context, calling his works “contes d’au-delà” was deliberately deceptive and challenging because the fundamental assumption of the stories is that what lies “beyond” human consciousness is not the supernatural but the unconscious, the source of all our mental illnesses and delusions
Many of the short stories Remy de Gourmont published in the Mercure alongside Danville’s are “contes d’au-delà” in the perfectly straightforward and commonly understood sense that they are blithely supernatural even when their motifs are evidently symbolic of erotic or violent urges. Danville’s characters are similarly haunted, but their hauntings are not merely symbolic. Their apparitions are straightforwardly delusory, and although that does not prevent them from seeming real to the deluded protagonists, in exactly the same way that the symbolic supernatural devices in Gourmont’s stories seem real to his characters, the underlying rhetoric of their presentation is essentially different.
The fact that Danville was insistent in basing his accounts of delusion and obsession on what he took to be sound theories of positivistic psychology did not, of course, prevent him from writing horror stories or delicate erotic fantasies; indeed, it is arguable that it added an extra dimension of cruelty to his contes cruels and an extra dose of intensity to his eroticism. Although Gourmont, like Danville, was fascinated by the manner in which erotic impulses occasionally led to suicide and homicide, Danville’s interest in delving into the psychology of suicide and murder was much more intently focused than Gourmont’s. Danville (né Blocq), more than any other writer of his era, was a direct ancestor of his near-namesake Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, and of writers of such post-Psycho extravaganzas as the works of Thomas Harris. His work is elementary by comparison, but that is the whole point of it: he was, indeed, consciously establishing elements and laying foundations, in exactly the same way that Alphonse Brown’s “Les Insectes révélateurs” was laying foundations for a different wing of modern crime fiction.
In theoretical terms, naturally enough, Danville’s work was unable to be any more sophisticated than the prevailing ideas of its era, and the psychologists on whose work it is based—primarily Théodule Ribot, of whom Danville’s brother Paul Blocq was a dedicated disciple—have long since fallen out of fashion. Danville’s fiction is therefore bound to seem primitive to the modern reader in its use of the terminology of “hysteria” and its development of such recently hatched notions as that of the “doubling” of the personality, but his stories were genuinely experimental in their day, not merely in their supposed scientific basis but their situation in the forefront of the literary avant garde of their era.
Only a small minority of Danville’s stories feature scientists as characters because he is much more concerned with examining the psychology of lovers and criminals, but it is worth noting that when he does bring scientists into the foreground, his analysis of their typical psychological characteristics does not differ significantly from Samuel Berthoud’s or Jules Verne’s—or indeed from the analyses presented by the other authors mentioned. Further examination of the works included in Louis Figuier’s feuilleton series confirms that they do not break the pattern. Whether one considers the original fiction that Figuier presumably commissioned from established writers such as Louis Boussenard’s two stories featuring the pseudonymous scientific genius Monsieur Synthèse (1888–89; tr. in Monsieur Synthesis) or the reprints he chose such as “Le Microbe de Professeur Bakermann (1885; SI 1892; tr. as “Professor Bakermann’s Microbe”) by “Charles Epheyre” (Charles Richet, the physiologist and future Nobel Prize–winner), their analysis of the psychology of their central characters is very much in the Berthoudian tradition. When Epheyre wrote another story specifically for Figuier, “Le Mirosaurus” (1893; tr. as “The Mirosaurus”)—yet another item that does not qualify as “proto-science-fiction”—he concentrated more on the sociology of science than the psychology of its practitioners, but that too was an extrapolation of one of Berthoud’s central concerns.
From the viewpoint of “historians of science fiction,” therefore, a significant fraction of Figuier’s roman scientifique, almost all of Berthoud’s fantaisies scientifiques, and almost all Naturalist and neo-Naturalist roman scientifique seems to be “marginal,” because it is neglectful of what eventually came to be the core and perhaps the whole of “science fiction.” From the viewpoints of Henry Berthoud, Émile Zola, and even Louis Figuier, however, it was the speculative elements of scientific fiction/fantasy that were marginal while the beating heart of all three putative genres was human psychology, both in the insights that science could provide thereinto and in terms of the psychology of scientific endeavor.
From the viewpoint of “historians of science fiction,” that intensive interest and its products tend to be reduced to a single dimension as a vast series of accounts of “mad scientists.” Some of its most spectacular examples do indeed feature scientists who are insane, and a further fraction details processes by which scientists are driven insane by the way that their unsympathetic neighbors treat them, but those stories cannot qualify as the core of the core. Insofar as any substantial consensus or nucleus can be detected, it makes more sense to consider that nucleus as an exploration of the assumption that dedication to science is actually a special and perhaps higher form of sanity than that allegedly possessed by what might be called—to borrow a term from another context—the “neurotypical” members of society.
It goes without saying, of course, that across the entire spectrum of “scientific fiction” in which the principal focal point is not the inventions that scientists might develop in future but the processes by which they might invent them and introduce them to the world, the picture offered is bleak. Not all the scientists depicted contrive to hang on to their alternative sanity, but even those who do and do so triumphantly, very rarely get any joy out of it. The conclusion many of the core stories of roman scientifique and fantaisie scientifique draw is that it is a terrible thing to be sane in a “neurotypical” world—or, as Ecclesiastes puts it, “In much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
When one bears in mind that La Science Illustrée, like Samuel Berthoud’s newspaper columns and P.-J. Hetzel’s “family magazines,” was supposed to be popularizing and advertising science as an intellectual glory and the motor of progress, it is perhaps remarkable how very bleak their contents seem once they begin to delve imaginatively beneath the surface of the social and personal processes of invention and discovery. Nor is that something entirely associated with the naturalist core of roman scientifique; wholehearted specimens of ambitious speculative fiction that Figuier commissioned, such as Albert Robida’s brilliant anticipation of “La Vie électrique” (1891; tr. as Electric Life) tend to end up with denouements exactly similar to “Le Mirosaurus.”
Some such denouements, including Epheyre’s, Robida’s, and André Couvreur’s, are carefully undermined by humor, in contrast to the earnest tragedies favored by Henry Berthoud, André Beaunier, and Gaston Danville, but the humor cannot cancel out the fact that the obvious implication of all such analyses appearing in either species of roman scientifique is that the only sensible courses of action for a sane human being forced to live in neurotypical society to take are either to stay well away from science, scientists, and the products of their labor, or, if they really must get involved, to cultivate a very thick skin, a deeply cynical philosophy, and a caustic sense of humor. That is certainly not because scientists are essentially mad or essentially bad, but because they are essentially dangerous to know and because such knowledge is particularly dangerous to their own self-awareness, regardless of their rationality or good intentions.
Perhaps that is not the kind of message that popularizers of science ought to have been delivering to their customers, and perhaps that is why P.-J. Hetzel and Louis Figuier, after flirting with roman scientifique, decided that it would, on the whole, be better not to bother with it any longer. Dr. Sam never gave up, but his reward for that was utter obscurity—which would certainly not have surprised him, given that it was the invariable fate of any character in his work who contrived to survive death or ignominy.
Can “historians of science fiction” reasonably claim that their own genre, even while carefully driving the core concerns of roman scientifique beyond its margins, has actually succeeded in providing science and scientists with a better, healthier, and more desirable image? Has it even contrived to do as much for its own image? And if not, why not? Mercifully, as I am nowadays a specialist historian of roman scientifique, I can leave such questions for others.
Brian Stableford lives in Reading. A sampler of the works of S. Henry Berthoud is Martyrs of Science and Other Victims of Devilry and Destiny (Black Coat Press 2013). A sampler of the work of Gaston Danville is The Anatomy of Love and Murder: Psychoanalytical Fantasies (Borgo Press 2013). The showcase anthology The Conqueror of Death and Other Stories from La Science Illustrée (Black Coat Press, 2013) is advertised on its cover—by the publisher, not the editor—as a collection of “proto-science fiction tales,” but that is a blatant lie.
I only ever thought of "Science Fiction" as meaning "Fiction about Science".
Plenty of modern SciFi isn't really speculative either, but more characteristic of a Scientific Romance. Like Superhero Comics and Movies.
Posted by: JaredMithrandir | 11/20/2014 at 06:09 AM