Literary Wonderlands Read online

  The continuing social importance of this world, as well as its literary brilliance, has led to many famous stage productions in modern times, but The Tempest has also been translated into various media beyond the stage. Scenes have been painted, by artists including Hogarth, Fuseli, and Millais; Ariel’s songs have been given new music; more than forty operas have been composed on the basis of the play; among the poems inspired by it are Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864) and W. H. Auden’s Freudian “The Sea and the Mirror” (1944); and its television and screen adaptations are numerous.

  This vast legacy of influence is one clue to the enduring importance of The Tempest. By creating this “other” world, both familiar and alien, Shakespeare explored many of the most important problems that the nation faced at a period of exploration and discovery, and, prophetically, that it still faces today—race, sex, colonization, and the experience of “otherness.”

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC

  A VOYAGE TO THE MOON (1657)

  Cyrano de Bergerac’s fictional Moon, a paradise inhabited by natives, five humans, and a Tree of Knowledge, challenged the orthodoxies of contemporary astronomy and the Christian religion.

  Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55) was writing his Voyage dans la Lune, and its sequel, L’Histoire des États et Empires du Soleil not long after Rome had condemned the idea of a sun-centered universe as heretical, and one of his purposes was clearly to support the arguments of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. The Moon and Sun are worlds like our own, and he knows, because he has been there.

  In this first-person science fiction, Cyrano’s mode of transport blends old and new. His first idea is to strap bottles of dew around himself, since dew is sucked up by the Sun. This expedient only gets him as far as French-speaking Canada however, and he eventually reaches the Moon by rocket-assisted takeoff, coupled with the attractive power of the Moon on the beef marrow that he has coated himself in to relieve the bruises from previous efforts.

  Cyrano’s main innovation is as a comic satirist. On the Moon, everything is topsy-turvy—people put their hats on and sit down to show respect, the worst punishment that can be inflicted is to be sentenced to die a natural death of old age, and the mark of a gentleman is not a sword but an erect metal phallus hung from the belt. More fancifully, the Moon people, who are eighteen feet long but walk on all fours, are separated by class in their very means of communication—conversing in music if upper class, and by gesture if lower.

  The intrepid explorer also discovers that while the moon’s inhabitants have an elaborate cuisine, they actually live off the aroma of cooking food. They also have long noses, like Cyrano himself, which they can use as sundials and their currency is poetry—a sonnet buying dinners for a week. Free love is not only practiced, but compulsory.

  However, although comedy was possibly his main aim, Cyrano also deserves some reputation as a prophet, having foreseen the concept of the audiobook, as well as something like germ theory, with his attempt at an explanation of the nature of light. When he encounters an atheist, however, orthodoxy reasserts itself, for the atheist and Cyrano are both snatched up by a devil and carried off toward Hell. Cyrano luckily cries out “Jesu Maria!” at which the devil drops him back on Earth. His later History of the Sun is a similar mix of hits and misses.

  Since writing his fantastical tales of space exploration, Cyrano de Bergerac’s works have been often mentioned in accounts of imaginary moon voyages (of which there are many), and in histories of science fiction. He has inspired many since, but his main influence may well be on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, here) in which Gulliver, finding himself stranded in an alien land, similarly combines observation with comic surprise.

  MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE

  THE DESCRIPTION OF A NEW WORLD, CALLED THE BLAZING-WORLD (1666)

  A lavish fantasy and early form of science fiction that critiques seventeenth-century scientific theories while bounding between elaborately depicted parallel worlds.

  In his famous diary, Samuel Pepys records that on May 30, 1667, Margaret Cavendish (1623–74) visited the Royal Society, an unusual invitation that was a testament to her status as a wealthy, titled woman with a keen interest in science. There was of course no question of her contributing her own research or even merely joining their discussions at that time (in fact, women would have to wait until 1945 to be elected Fellows). In 1667, the idea of a woman interested in exploring scientific ideas being taken seriously could only take place in the realm of fiction.

  The Blazing-World is a narrative companion to Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, a more serious critique of the latest developments in science and technology. Observations challenges science’s claims to understand all Nature, and is critical of new technologies developed to further scientific research. Her concern is less about extending the frontiers of science itself, but more the arrogance that accompanies scientific accomplishments. If we think we can know everything through science, then whatever cannot be proven scientifically could be deemed to have no value.

  The Blazing-World begins with a young, unnamed woman, abducted aboard a ship by a merchant who desires her. They are shipwrecked in a storm, but she and a handful of the crew survive in a lifeboat. All the men succumb to the cold, leaving the woman entirely alone. After a series of encounters with Bear-men—intelligent beings who resemble bears—Fox-men, Bird-men, and Satyrs, she is brought to the Emperor by mermen with green skin. The Emperor, believing the woman to be divine, marries her. The woman, hereafter designated “the Empress,” undertakes to learn all she can about her new home, and sets out to establish a number of learned societies. The bulk of the story consists of dialogues with these societies, as she seeks answers to questions about the laws of nature in the Blazing-World.

  The world itself is a group of archipelagos within interconnected networks of rivers and oceans. There are numerous cities, each made out of a different kind of material, including “some not known in our world,” but all built in the style of classical Rome. The Imperial Palace in the Imperial city of Paradise is, like the city itself, made of gold and decorated with precious stones. The inhabitants are both humans and intelligent animals—each animal having its own specialized branch of learning. From the explanations given by various scientists of the learned societies, the Blazing-World either operates upon radically different laws of physics to our world, or the scientists are spectacularly incompetent, providing odd explanations for natural phenomena that were understood even in Cavendish’s time.

  After an extended survey of all learning, including conversations with spirits about supernatural knowledge, the Empress composes “a Cabbala”—a compendium of the entirety of the esoteric knowledge. She finds her amanuensis in Cavendish herself—as “The Duchess”—who is able to visit the Empress in “spirit form.” The Duchess invites the Empress to leave her physical body and visit Welbeck, her own estate in Nottinghamshire, and the two become “dear Platonick friends.”

  In the brief, second part of the work, the Empress learns that her native country (the fictional Kingdom of Esfi) has come under attack. The Duchess persuades the Empress to muster the forces of the Blazing-World to aid in the fight. The Empress calls her architects and engineers—who happen to be giants—to build, with the Duchess’s direction, submarines to transport the forces through the gap between the Blazing-World and ours. The Empress then manages to rally the forces of her own country to victory.

  The Blazing-World is one of the very first works of science fiction, and undoubtedly the only example published by a woman in the seventeenth century. Cavendish’s vision of interconnected other worlds has proven influential in the development of science fiction, but her vision of a woman who effortlessly rises to absolute power through the accumulation of knowledge has been more recently embraced by scholars of feminist literature. Virginia Woolf refers to Cavendish in A Room of One’s Own (1929); more recently Siri Hustvedt uses the text (and its title) to illus
trate her story of a woman painter taking on misogyny in the New York art establishment.

  1701–1900

  2 SCIENCE & ROMANTICISM

  The Industrial Revolution coincided with the heights of Gothic fantasy producing scientific miracles and a terrible fear of the unknown.

  JONATHAN SWIFT

  GULLIVER’S TRAVELS (1726)

  This classic satire follows the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver among the miniature Lilliputians, the philosophizing Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos, and portrays a comic yet steely reflection of mankind.

  The Anglo-Irish essayist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) is regarded today as the leading satirist in the English language, and his sardonic style is so ingrained that his name has become an adjective. The influence and import of his classic parody Gulliver’s Travels is immeasurable and it has been continuously in print since its first publication.

  The first two “travels” of Lemuel Gulliver are mirror images of each other. In the first the inhabitants of the island of Lilliput are very small, about six inches high. In Brobdingnag they are very large, about seventy feet high; Gulliver, having once been a giant, becomes like a doll. His third voyage takes him to the flying island of Laputa, the land beneath it (Balnibarbi), the nec-romancers’ island of Glubbdubdrib, and the kingdom of Luggnagg, with its immortal but senile “struldbrugs.” On his fourth voyage Gulliver is marooned on the land of the Houyhnhnms, intelligent horses, which is also inhabited by the Yahoos—a dirty, dangerous, and unteachable parody of humanity.

  Throughout, Swift mingles marvels with satire, the latter eventually all but taking over. As a result, his first voyage has remained the best-known and the most popular for adaptations. Much of the account of the Lilliputians deals with the details of scale: How Gulliver is fed, how they try to control him, what feats he performs for the king and his court. Apart from scale, however, the land of the Lilliputians seems virtually identical with England. It has cows, sheep, horses, trees, and vegetation, all scaled down like the Lilliputians themselves, and a social system that parallels and parodies Swift’s contemporary Britain.

  Brobdingnag gives rise to similar, if inverse, effects, with Gulliver in serious danger from mastiff-sized rats, flies as big as birds, pet cats like lions, and dogs the size of elephants. Swift, moreover, seems to equate size with virtue. While the Lilliputian court is essentially ridiculous, providing in its faction-fighting a satirical image of British court-society, in Brobdingnag the satire comes from Gulliver’s attempts to impress the Brobdingnagian king with his accounts of British power and skill. Even his account of gunpowder only makes the king contemptuous of the uses to which it is put.

  [T]hey have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to being a rational creature.

  Many have thought that in the third voyage Swift’s satire goes well astray. The Laputians on their floating island, held aloft by a giant lodestone or magnet, respect only mathematics and music, and are totally impractical. Some are so absent-minded that they have to employ “flappers,” who pat their ears and mouths gently to signify that it is time to listen or to speak. Their subjects on the island below are even worse, having begun to imitate the Laputians and set up an “Academy” for all kinds of ludicrous scientific experiments, distilling sunbeams from cucumbers, reconstituting dung into food, and inventing a universal language that would have no words, and communicate only by things. Swift was here satirizing the Royal Society, founded in 1660. One of its founders, John Wilkins, had indeed written an Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), and the Society’s insistence on using objective language for describing experiments has since been accepted worldwide.

  In the fourth voyage, finally, Swift’s own misanthropy seems to have infected Gulliver. The Houyhnhnms (pronounced “Whinnn-im” in imitation of a horse’s neigh) are polite, intelligent, virtuous, while the Yahoos are unspeakably vile. At the end, Gulliver, once again returned home, can hardly bear the company of his own species, including his wife, and sits talking to his horses for hours every day. Scholarship varies as to how seriously we should take his critiques of humanity.

  Gulliver’s Travels has given rise to several films and TV adaptations—including the animation Laputa: Castle in the Sky by acclaimed Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki—and Lilliputians appear in several comic books and novels.

  Other Swiftian concepts reappear throughout science fiction. The animated American TV series Land of the Giants ran from 1968–70, which led to three novelizations by Murray Leinster. Laputa is remembered in James Blish’s Cities in Flight tetralogy (1955–62), where a rogue city does what the Laputians sometimes threaten to do, and “makes the sky fall.” The Houyhnhnms appear in John M. Myers’ novel Silverlock (1949), and “struldbrugs” appear at the end of Frederik Pohl’s Drunkard’s Walk (1960), long-lived and senile as in Gulliver’s Travels, but according to Pohl a secret society controlling human affairs.

  LUDVIG HOLBERG

  THE JOURNEY OF NIELS KLIM TO THE WORLD UNDERGROUND (1741)

  Sometimes described as the first science-fiction novel, this subterranean adventure was the first to explore ideas of a hollow Earth.

  Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) is often referred to as the “father” of Danish and Norwegian literature—and his writing encompassed a wide range of fields. However he is best remembered for his satirical plays and for his creation of a “hollow Earth” in The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground.

  The text recounts, as the title suggests, the adventures of one Niels Klim who, after his rope gives way while exploring a cave, falls to the center of Earth, where a solitary planet rotates around a subterranean sun. The first adventure is set in Potu, a utopian land inhabited by intelligent and mobile trees. Since Klim’s legs allow him to move faster than the trees, he is commissioned to make a tour of the entire planet of Nazar and report back to the king. The planet is only about 600 miles in circumference, and his trip takes him two months instead of the two years it would take a tree. The narrative turns from utopia to satire as Klim visits the different provinces of Nazar. The descriptions of these countries—inhabited by different species of trees that speak the same language as the Potuans—are very brief, and most present satirical sketches of alternative societies. In Quamso everyone is happy, healthy, and bored; in Lalac, where there is no need to work, everyone is unhappy and sickly; in Kimal the citizens are wealthy, and spend their time worrying about thieves; and the “land of Liberty” is at war.

  From the inner planet of Potu, Klim travels next to the underside of the Earth’s crust, carried by a giant bird. His adventures begin in the kingdom of Martinia—a country of intelligent but capricious apes preoccupied with fashion. He makes a fortune by introducing wigs to the Martinians. From social satire the book now becomes fantasy as Klim is taken on a trading voyage to the Mezandorian islands, which lie across a vast sea and are inhabited by fabulous creatures, beginning with a country of jackdaws at war with their neighbors the thrushes, and a malodorous land of creatures who speak “a posteriori,” as well as a country of string basses who communicate by music.

  After a shipwreck he finds himself in a remote country inhabited not by intelligent animals or trees, but by primitive humans, who, of all the creatures of the subterranean world, “alone were barbarous and uncivilized.” Klim sets out to redress the situation, intending that they “would recover that dominion which Nature has given to man over all other animals.” Using his knowledge he manufactures gunpowder and conquers, one by one, all the countries of the firmament. Klim’s many conquests lead him to see himself as the “Alexander of the Subterranean world,” and he becomes a tyrant. When his subjects rebel, he is forced to flee; looking for shelter, he falls into the same hole through which he had previously fallen, thus returning to Norway.

  Holberg’s text is the first portrayal of a hollow Earth, but there is little evidence
to suggest where this idea came from. As he is falling, Klim makes a reference to accounts of an interior realm, but without any details: “I fell to imagining that I was sunk into the subterranean world, and that the conjectures of those men are right who hold the Earth to be hollow, and that within the shell or outward crust there is another lesser globe, and another firmament adorned with lesser sun, stars, and planets.” But who are “those men” and why did they hold Earth to be hollow? Some have pointed to the astronomer Edmond Halley’s “concentric spheres” theory of the interior of the Earth (1692)—but Holberg’s inner world is not a set of globes but a single planet circling an inner sun as well an inhabited inner crust—significant features of subsequent subterranean fictions, but not part of Halley’s scheme. Like many other early utopias and satirical works, Holberg is indifferent to the physical details of the imaginary world. Klim was written at a time (1741) when the popular travel narratives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had evolved into the imaginary voyages of the eighteenth century, allowing writers to visualize political and social alternatives while skirting the interdiction of speculation by passing it off as an authentic narrative.

  CHARLES KINGSLEY