Early Science Fiction: Lunar Geese and Blazing Worlds

We often think of science fiction as a particularly modern genre of storytelling, born of the science and technology of the electronic and digital age.  But speculative fiction goes back centuries, back to the beginning of what we now call the Scientific Revolution of the 1600s.  On today's show, we look at two of the foundational books in the genre: Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moon and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World.  May the Force be with us!

Links to Texts:

The Man in the Moon: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46591/pg46591-images.html

The Blazing World: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51783/pg51783-images.html

Transcript

Greetings, Earthlings!  Welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, beaming to you out of the third stone from the sun, in the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.  On today’s transmission, we’re going to boldly go where few classic literature podcasts have gone before.  We’re going to look at the dawn of English science fiction.

Yes, I of course understand that Captain Kirk’s famous dictum contains a grammatical error – the split infinitive.  Lemon-sucking elementary school teachers would have preferred that he said “boldly to go” or “to go boldly.”  Apart from it being an entirely preposterous rule, I don’t reckon the phrase would be as universally recognizable as it has become if we kept strictly to the Warriner’s rules. 

This may seem odd to some listeners: are we not still dawdling about in the 17th century?  The age of sailing ships and horse-drawn transportation?  Primitive medicine and disputes over the geocentric and heliocentric models of the universe?  Cavalier poetry and witch hunts?

Well, yes, yes we are.  And the century was all those things, but also many more.  Among them, it saw the first flowering of what we now call speculative fiction, more commonly known as sci-fi.  Nowadays, of course, we think of sci-fi as embracing sophisticated technological advancement, bleeding-edge science, and instantly obsolete special effects.  When we think of the origins of sci-fi today, our minds may go to 19th century French writer Jules Verne, whose novels 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth predicted some real-life technologies.  A good candidate for the first sci-fi movie is 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, directed by Georges Méliès, which tells the story of a group of astronomers who travel to the moon in a rocket ship. The more Anglophilic may support H.G. Wells at the turn of the last century, with his War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.  The hipster-geeks among you are smirking at such basic examples.  The real start of speculative fiction is surely Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein is a touchstone of Western literature and whose The Last Man may be the first apocalyptic sci-fi.

We will, in the fullness of time, give a look-in to Mr. Wells and we’ll certainly study Ms. Shelley’s monsterpiece – pretty sure I’ll give The Last Man a miss, though.  I just read it about a month ago and, well, if Barney and Grimace had a paintball fight in a Welch’s bottling plant during a royal coronation, it’d still be less purple than Shelley’s prose in that novel.  But even the Romantic 19th century is not the very root of science fiction in English.  I will posit that the dawn of this genre rose during the Stuart dynasty of the mid-1600s.  And one doesn’t have to jigger our understanding of sci-fi to make the claim: we’re still dealing with speculative fiction that exploits up-to-the-minute science and technology – we just have to rid ourselves of the notion that only the 20th and 21st centuries had up-to-the-minute science and tech.

The intellectual climate of the European 17th century is often called the Scientific Revolution.  I guarantee that there are historians who bridle at my use of this term, just as historians like to bridle at any convenient heuristic, like the Renaissance or the Classical Period or whatever.  Yes, they are broad terms that in no way account for the infinity of contradictions and cross-currents that the generalizing narrative makes.  But, you know, they’re convenient for conversations whose provenance is not actually those cross-currents.  So, we’ll say the Scientific Revolution and, when I recall its many accomplishments to your memory, I think you’ll agree that it’s a perfectly suitable time for speculative fiction.

At the very dawn of the century, William Gilbert discovered the Earth’s magnetic field.  1608 sees the first use of an optical telescope, and two years later Galileo charts the phases of Venus, indicating that the Earth is not the stationary center of the Universe.  In between, Kepler proposed the first two laws of planetary motion.  Napier uses logarithms for calculation, Harvey discovers blood circulation, Boyle makes a gassy law.  Robert Hooke discovers the cell, Newton defines the spectrum of light and describes gravitation as a fundamental force.  And there’s tons of other things, too.

So I’m going to make a claim that, while not extraordinary, is somewhat contentious.  So far as one can identify the origins of any artistic or intellectual movement, I’m throwing my hat in the ring for Bishop Francis Godwin’s “The Man in the Moon, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales” as ground zero for English sci-fi.  The good bishop of Llandaff and of Hereford was, by the by, the great uncle of Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift, who will feature prominently in future episodes.  Godwin shuffled off his mortal coil in 1633, and “The Man in the Moon” was published posthumously in 1638.  Conjectures on the date of composition have varied, but most now reckon he wrote it in the late 1620s.

It’s a strange and whimsical little work, with a lot of what we’d now call maybe “postmodern artifice” that may strike the reader as somewhat anachronistic at first.  For example, Godwin adopts a persona, that of Spanish adventurer Domingo Gonsales, and writes as that character, presenting the narrative as the work of Gonsales.  Later published editions begin by setting historical contexts, identifying the island of St. Helena (where Gonsales essentially begins his history) noting its importance as a way-station for English ships travelling round the Cape of Good Hope for India and the site of Captain Munday’s victory over the Dutch.  We get the geographical coordinates of the island and a description of its topography, climate, flora, and fauna.  All this is to set the following tale firmly in a real, material, concrete world.  Its style apes the travel literature of the time, reinforcing the authenticity of the wonders to come.

Those wonders, of which I’ll give the quick and dirty momentarily, are interspersed with comments, speculations, and arguments concerning the scientific debates of the day – primarily what was called the “new astronomy,” that is, the Copernican view of a heliocentric planetary system, as well as the contested ideas about lunar habitation sparked by recent publications of classical works in that idiom by Plutarch and Lucian.  So Godwin takes great pains to set his story in a concrete world with describable facts and vigorous scientific debates.  Into that world he inserts Domingo Gonsales, who is a bit of a scoundrel, really. 

Let’s do that quick and dirty:

Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard of noble birth from Seville, recounts his family’s history and pedigree as well as his life as a soldier abroad.  He manages to accrue a respectable fortune from his exploits, but upon returning to his home country, but “at length a quarrel arising between me and Pedro Delgades . . . grew so high that when no mediation of friends could prevail, we two went alone with our swords into the field, where it was my chance to kill him.”  Gonsales flees Spain, leaving his wife and children behind, and after more exploits, takes ill on a return voyage, and is marooned by the crew on the island of St. Helena, where he develops an interest in an unusual species of bird called gansas— “huge flocks of a kind of wild swans . . . having one claw like and eagle, the other like a swan. . . being strong and able to continue a great flight.”  Gonsales devises a flying machine harnessed to these birds, which can lift him into the air.  Quite a resourceful fella.

Obviously, he decides to return to Spain using his gansas, but turns out it’s their migratory season, and they migrate – wait for it – to the moon.  Yep.  Gonsales is unexpectedly carried far beyond Earth’s atmosphere. After a twelve-day journey, he lands on the Moon, where he discovers an advanced utopian society of tall, peaceful, and wise lunar inhabitants, living harmoniously, possessing superior knowledge and a deep understanding of nature and the cosmos. Gonsales observes their customs, which contrast with the corruption and strife of European societies.

However, due to differences in language and culture, Gonsales cannot remain indefinitely. Eventually, he returns to Earth, crash-landing in China, where he is captured and interrogated. The novel ends with his fate uncertain, as his extraordinary tale is met with skepticism.

So, there you have it – first sci-fi story in English.  Now, as I indicated above, there are those who dispute this designation.  Some critics argue that it is firmly in the tradition of utopian literature, others that it seems more like a romance, and still others that it is part of the picaresque tradition (which is an episodic narrative style with a charming but often roguish hero).  Fine – they can stake their claims, carving up the literary territory ever finer in order to defend their specialization.  But if you handed this book to any undergrad and said, “What kind of story is this?” – the kid’s gonna say sci-fi.  And, when deciding questions like this, the general reader is pretty trustworthy.

Because in addition to space travelling geese, cosmic demons who steal your lunch, and super-sized lunar civilization, which seem firmly in the sci-fi wheelhouse, Godwin (or Gonsales) also treats us to some rather accurate scientific speculations.  To wit: Gonsales verifies that gravity decreases as one moves away from the Earth:

neither I, nor the Engine moved at all, but continued still, as having no Manner of Weight. I found then by Experience, what no Philosopher ever dreamt of, namely, that those Things we call heavy do not fall towards the Center of the Earth as their natural Place, but are drawn by a secret Property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather something within it, as the Load-stone draweth Iron, which is within the Compass of its attractive Beams.

Gonsales then also notes the increase of speed and then verifies, by experience, the Copernican model:

I observed three Things very remarkable, one that the farther we went the less the Globe of the Earth appeared to us, and that of the Moon still larger: Again the Earth, which I had ever in mine Eye, seemed to mask itself with a kind of Brightness like another Moon, and as we discern certain Spots or Clouds as it were in the Moon, so did I then see the like in the Earth; but whereas the Form of these Spots in the Moon are always the same, these on the Earth seemed by Degrees to change every Hour; the Reason whereof seems to be, that whereas the Earth according to his natural Motion (for such a Motion I am now satisfied (he hath according to the Opinion of Copernicus) turns round upon her own Axis every four and twenty Hours from West to East).

And it’s here that Gonsales begins a very Baconian dispute with some imagined interlocutors:

How much this disagrees with what our Philosophers teach in the Schools is evident: But alas, how many of their Errors hath Time and Experience in this our Age, and among other vain Conjectures, who hath not hitherto believed the upper Region of the Air to be very hot; as being next, forsooth, to the natural Place of the Element of Fire; meer Vanities, Fancies and Dreams: For after I was once free from the attractive Beams of that tyrannous Load-stone the Earth, I found the Air altogether serene, without Winds, Rain, Mists or Clouds, neither hot nor cold, but constantly pleasant, calm and comfortable, till my Arrival in that New World of the Moon as for that Region of Fire, our Philosophers talk of, I heard no News of it, mine Eyes have sufficiently informed me there is no such Thing.

So we have some lovely fiction and some groovy science.  To that, Gonsales does indeed add a good deal of utopian romance, and we get a sense of that toward the end of that excerpt, in which he notes the serenity of the environment once he has escaped the tyrannical Earth.  He describes the lunar people as very tall – twice the average human height – and all dressed alike: “their Shape and Countenance pleasant, and their Habit hardly to be described; for I never saw either Cloth, Silk, nor other Stuff, like that whereof their Cloths were made.”  They hold learning in great esteem, have a complex history and mythology, seem to be Christians, and live for thousands of years.  All material wants are supplied by the superiors in exchange for easy and pleasurable labor; they are monogamous with no sexual jealousy; murder is unheard of, indeed, impossible, because their medicine can cure any wound, even “though a Man's Head be cut off, yet if within three Moons it be joined to the Carcase again, and the Juice of a certain Herb there growing applied, it will be so consolidated, as the wounded Party shall be perfectly cured.”  The people have a pleasant disposition and loathe all vice.  Any children who show any disposition away from “Love, Peace, and Amity” are quickly rid of.  And in a very clever way: 

Though it is true likewise that some are of a better Disposition than others, which they discern immediately at their Birth; and because it is an inviolable Law amongst them that none shall be put to Death; therefore perceiving by their Stature or some other Signs, who are like to be of a wicked and debauched Humour, they send them, I know not by what Means, into the Earth, and change them for other Children, before they have either Opportunity or Ability to do amiss among them.

They transport their jerks to Earth!  That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?

But, you know, even in this Paradise, Gonsales longs for his children and his wife, so he saddles up the gooses and flies back home, using a magic stone from the Lunar chief to ease the landing.  But, he puts down in China, where he is apprehended and taken to their leader.  The interesting things about this little China interlude at the end is that it seems Gonsales sees China as perhaps the closest Earth civilization to that of the Lunars: beautiful, musical language, just and benevolent rulers, pleasure gardens.  It somehow feels removed from the noxious influence of the Earth Gonsales described as he broke free from the atmosphere on his way to the Moon.  Maybe a bit of orientalizing here – a European casting the exotic East as an earthly utopia.  But he still wishes to get back to his family, and then the book ends.  We never know if he makes it home.

pause

The utopian fantasy sketched by Godwin in “The Man in the Moon” – tracing, as it does, back to Sir Thomas More’s eponymous Utopia (which we discussed in episode 34) plays a central role in the other great proto-science-fiction story of the 17th century: “A Description of a New World, called The Blazing World,” published in 1666 by the Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish.  After some prefatory material, including an opening sonnet and a letter to the reader suggesting they also consult her nonfiction work, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, the text is presented in three major sections: the Romancical, the Philosophical, and the Fantastical.  From her earliest writing, she evinced a deep interest in natural philosophy (what we now call science) and, in particular, chemistry.  Of note: she was one of the first women to attend a Royal Society meeting – probably a bit awkward with all those quarrelling big-wigs.  Nonetheless, she persisted, arguing that female intelligence was of a different, though no less sophisticated, order – that it was capable of a fantastical quality uncharacteristic of hairy men.  For this she earned the disapprobation of famous diarist Samuel Pepys (who we shall meet in an episode anon) but the praise of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who too shall grace us with his presence in an upcoming show.  In “The Blazing World,” we can see evidence of a social philosophy that would have pleased the author of Leviathan.  

Let’s start with another quick and dirty:

The Romancical section begins with a young woman, who has spurned her lover, gathering seashells on the beach (a la Newton?) when she is kidnapped by a merchant and a group of traders. The gods, in grave disapproval, whip up a storm that blows their ship toward the North Pole, where, after everyone else freezing to death, she discovers a gateway to another world – the Blazing World.  This passage is never really described – unlike Godwin, Cavendish expands little effort to situate her story in a familiar, tangible world.  In a remarkable turnabout of fortune, the inhabitants proclaim the young woman Empress, commanding an array of creatures and nations, including humanoids, talking animals, and rather technologically advanced beings, each representing a different mode of intellectual or physical existence: Bear-Men hybrids become her experimental scientists; Lice-Men her mathematicians; and Bird-Men her astronomers.  The Philosophical section presents her reign in this utopian world, focused on the progress of wisdom, exploration, and scientific experimentation. The final Fantastical section looks at the growing friendship between the Empress and her new scribe.  Who is this scribe?  Well, let me tell you.  At one point, Empress imposes a new religion on the populace and seeks to produce her own mystical text, supposedly similar to the Jewish Kabbalah. Interesting thing about that, though, is that when she consults the spirits in a sort of seance, they suggest that the best way to get her ideas out is to employ a scribe, and after she dismisses such candidates as Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and More, as fine ingenious Writers, but yet so self-conceited, that they would scorn to be Scribes to a Woman," they heartily suggest: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle:

But, said they, there's a Lady, the Duchess of Newcastle; which although she is not one of the most learned, eloquent, witty and ingenious, yet she is a plain and rational Writer; for the principle of her Writings, is Sense and Reason, and she will without question, be ready to do you all the service she can.

So, Cavendish throws some shade on the misogyny of the leading lights of her contemporary intelligentsia while managing a keen bit of self-promotion, not to mention a, like, inverted parallel (if that’s a thing) to Godwin’s creating a persona as author of “The Man in the Moon.” Also of note here: despite the spirits’ recognition of gender biases among material beings – which must be governed by “sensitive and rational corporeal motions” – they themselves are without sex: “The Spirits told her, that there was no difference of Sexes amongst them; but, said they, we will choose an honest and ingenious Spirit, and such a one as shall so resemble your soul.”  

Despite having dismissed Hobbes, who, as I said earlier, was nonetheless a Cavendish stan, the Empress accedes that a utopian world must be ruled as a monarchy, agreeing 

That as it was natural for one Body to have but one Head, so it was also natural for a Politick body to have but one Governor; and that a Common-wealth, which had many Governors was like a Monster with many Heads. Besides, said they, a Monarchy is a divine form of Government, and agrees most with our Religion: For as there is but one God, whom we all unanimously worship and adore with one Faith; so we are resolved to have but one Emperor, to whom we all submit with one obedience.

Very Hobbesian, that, as we shall see, who held in Leviathan that only a mighty monarch can spare society from chaotic destruction.  Cavendish’s empress has “absolute power to rule and govern that world as she pleased.”

Which brings up another notable feature in Cavendish’s imagined world: social class and economics.  It should surprise none of my listeners that the Duchess was staunchly Royalist during the Civil Wars and that her politics were quite conservative.  While she may appear to modern readers as broadminded and feminist, her class politics were decidedly traditional.  The Blazing World’s Empress presides over a rather hierarchical society and social class seems not so much determined by wealth, but by physical appearance, with the rather self-flattering assumption that the upper classes are by nature the more beautiful.  Indeed, the role of gold in the Blazing World is restricted to decoration: we get profuse references to golden ships, a city built of gold, and a sumptuary law that prevents the lower and middling sorts from wearing gold.  There’s an amusing passage in which the Empress asks if alchemists in the Blazing World have been any more successful than those in her own.  The Worm-Men say they believe gold can be manufactured, but that metals like tin, iron, and lead could not.  She gets rather cross:

Then I perceive, replyed the Empress, that your judgments are very irregular, since you believe that Gold, which is so fixt a Metal, that nothing has been found as yet which could occasion a dissolution of its interior figure, may be made by Art, and not Tin, Lead, Iron, Copper or Silver, which yet are so far weaker, and meaner Metals then Gold is. But the Worm-men excused themselves, that they were ignorant in that Art, and that such questions belonged more properly to the Ape-men, which were Her Majesties Chymists.

The Empress, in her new world, has the power to shape knowledge and apply it to pragmatic social improvement, which contrasts the often rigid and exclusive scientific institutions of the time, largely controlled by male intellectual elites, which sidelined women and unconventional thinkers. Thus, in The Blazing World, science is not only a domain for men but also a space where women, particularly the Empress, can assert authority and make decisions. Left unexamined, of course, is the problem of class privilege and other cultural boundaries that deny access and authority to non-elites. 

The book ends with the Duchess and the Empress (in spiritual form inhabiting the Duchess’s body) visiting England in time to defend the Duke in a court case.  Of course, the outcome here is inconclusive (as earthly justice always is) and the women part.  We then learn that the land from which the Empress was originally taken has been invaded by a devastating army.  She comes like an angel, clothed in fiery light from special gemstones, to “deliver them out of the hands of their Enemies: Neither would she return into the Blazing-World, until she had forced all the rest of the World to submit to that same Nation.”

In the end, the women separate, the Empress returning to the Blazing World to restore it to balance, rescinding her religious innovations.  There follows an epilogue to the reader, in which Cavendish speaks in her own voice (though still referring to herself in a very self-aggrandizing 3rd person), justifying the preceding fancy:

By this Poetical Description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World . . . which Creation was more easily and suddenly effected, than the Conquests of the two famous Monarchs of the World. Alexander and Cesar. . . But I esteeming Peace before Warr, Wit before Policy, Honesty before Beauty; instead of the figures of Alexander, Cesar, Hector, Achilles, Nestor, Ulysses, Hellen, &c. chose rather the figure of Honest Margaret Newcastle.

I like the distinction here between being a mere ruler (like the Empress, and I suppose Alexander and Caesar) and being an Authoress, which seems much more like a creator god.

And, like, how sci-fi is that, right?  The actual creation of new worlds, new realities.  New ways to imagine liberty, new ways to wield power.  We’ve seen that tension in Cavendish’s work – her chafing at hidebound sexism but blithely accepting class hierarchies.  I think a lot of sci-fi, even modern stuff, wrestles with those tensions – stories intended to celebrate difference and advocate tolerance, like Star Trek, also operate on colonial schema.  Human beings, as the most advanced tool-using animals, are also the most bound up, almost ontologically, with our tools.  Our science and technology have always been fundamental to our ways of being human, so each advance in those fields brings with it the anxiety of balancing the pursuit of development with the retention of tradition.  Artificial intelligence and social media are the most obvious modern examples of how science has upended notions of what it means to be human, but we shouldn’t imagine that we are the first generation to wrestle with this question.  The telescope and the Copernican system, displacing as they did the Christian God’s creation as central to the cosmos, must have blindsided the early modern mind.  Who are we then, if not the center and pinnacle of creation?  Little wonder that science fiction should arise at a time of such anxiety.

So, there you go – the earliest sci-fi in the language.  Hope you enjoyed our journeys to other worlds.  Feel free to reach out with comments and questions.  Please tell your friends about the show and, if you’ve a moment, please leave a 5 star review.  I’d really appreciate it.  Also, please remember that this is a listener-funded podcast – I make maybe a dollar and change a month from advertising – so if you’re having a good time, please consider supporting the show with a financial gift.  Thank you very much.  I’ll be back in a couple weeks.  Till then, live long and prosper.