Dear Diary, I have arrived safely into Gladstone’s bosom – about which more later. I reprint below the script of the talk I just gave to nineteen unfortunate colleagues from around the country. The experience cemented my conviction that reading from printed talks is bad. Thus begins my learning process.
In accordance with the LitSciMed mandate I’ll be blogging from here every day. This talk constitutes today’s post – the other events of today I will cover along with tomorrow’s when I am less completely tired! Goodnight.
Placed by its mere title somewhere on the boundary between Literature and Science, Science Fiction seems a reasonable site for an examination of the relationship between the two. In the period I’m studying, though, Science Fiction was very different to the popular and well-defined genre which we’re all so familiar with today. My work focuses on short fiction published in the periodicals of the 1890s and 1900s – mass readership was still coming to terms with itself, most of what we now think of as the ‘canon’ of Science Fiction was yet to be written, and even the term ‘Science Fiction’ itself would not be coined for another thirty-or-so years. Imaginings of the future were more abstract, harder to pin down, and less frequently materially allied to technological advances. For these reasons and others, scholars of Science Fiction have tended to ignore this period, commenting upon the establishing roles played by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells before commencing their versions of sci-fi’s grand narrative with the 1926 publication of the first magazine devoted exclusively to it, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories.
However, I do not consider myself a Science Fiction scholar. Though I am interested in the history of the genre at this key moment in its development, and though I hope to be able to shed some further light on this under-researched area in the course of my work, I am much more interested in the role that sci-fi played, if any, in mitigating scientific development and the advance of scientific thought to the newly-reading public. The late-Victorian periodical, whose advertisement sections were filled with tantalising images of the latest inventions, mechanical, chemical and medical, and which was itself a product of the latest printing and distribution technologies, was almost a kind of Science Fiction in itself. The public were encouraged to buy into it, and their doing so helped set a precedent for the fetishisation of the new which would be such an identifiable part of the twentieth century to say nothing of the literary culture of the pulp magazines which in the 1920s would become the home of sci-fi for the next three decades.
But the fact that Science Fiction doesn’t have its own dedicated, isolating publication in the 1890s is precisely what I find interesting about it. I speak at a very early stage in my research, but I’ve already found stories about machines to erase memories in between the same covers as ghost tales, interviews with famous writers, travelogues and photography exhibits. It’s not just that they’re in the same place – they’re often written by the same people. Before genre fiction clearly established its borders, before ‘Science Fiction’ was a term, it’s hard to think of it as an inherently different form of writing. It also becomes harder, the more one examines this area, to think of H. G. Wells as a solitary visionary, although his work clearly remains of great significance. One of the reasons he is so attractive to literary historians is that he possesses the same mutability which many of his contemporaries shared – but whilst they moved between as-yet non-existent genre categories like the western, the society romance and the gothic tale, Wells moved slowly into popular science, speculative non-fiction, and modernist writing.
Perhaps this trouble with definitions is what makes sci-fi critics so reluctant to re-popularise some of this material. I have been able to find only two anthologies of periodical sci-fi from this period, both out of print since the ‘70s. I am therefore spending my time with back issues of the larger monthlies in the hopes of finding some previously un-discussed examples. My argument – insofar as I have one at the moment – is that because the establishment of barriers between subject areas, or, rather, the perception of barriers, often belies the quantity of interchanges taking place across them, a study of an area in which these barriers (and indeed, the areas themselves) are far less rigidly defined could be of significant value.
In this respect, I do believe that the conclusions of my research will have a bearing on that more famous and important ‘divide’ of C. P. Snow’s – for, just as genres are solidified by the perception of differences between them, so Literature and Science have slowly come, in the minds of many, to be mutually exclusive. I need hardly devote energy in this setting to a discussion of how misleading and, indeed, how damaging this perception can be.
What I do think it’s worth lingering over is the central question of why that is – not only of why ‘science’ and ‘culture’ are increasingly seen as divorced from each other despite perennial public interest in spaceships, health scares, dinosaurs and medical dramas, but of why it is worth working to develop a more sophisticated view of this supposed bifurcation at all. If we are not to attempt a reclamation of the supposed unitary knowledge of the early nineteenth-century – which, our reading suggests, may well be the product of wishful thinking rather than fact anyway – then we must presume that a more amicable conversation between the two has some profit in it. Put bluntly, can literary study bring anything to this table? Can it ‘help’ science, or any sphere of knowledge outside its own? There is widespread popular belief, after all, that literary study isn’t really capable of ‘helping’ anyone at all.
In the time I have left, I’d like to suggest that the answer to this enormous question may lie in what I described just now as the fact that boundaries between areas of knowledge, once perceived, enact themselves. Snow’s Rede lecture on the ‘Two Cultures’ may have helped to create, or at least exacerbate, a division it sought merely to diagnose – by foregrounding the issue of the boundaries and opening an academic debate on the subject which has lasted fifty years and counting, Snow created some of the cultural assumptions which now lend the division its authentic veneer.
The academic debate is another key part of this, because there is another division at work today – the division between the academies and the public at large. One need look no further than the government’s dismissal of David Nutt, or V. S. Naipaul’s dismissal of literary study (quoted in Sharon Ruston’s article), to see it in action. A public scepticism of science, visible in, for example, the ‘debate’ which continues around climate change twenty years after universal academic consensus on the issue, is infinitely more damaging than the alienation of the literary academy – but both losses of faith are in part the consequence of the perception that academies engage exclusively in irrelevant bickering all the time, and it’s this point upon which the political side of my approach hangs. As literature students, we take for granted our knowledge of the power that metaphors have over society, and of the mechanics which create, enact and eventually disable those metaphors. We understand that fictions such as Utopia, Elizabeth Bennett and, yes, the Martian Invasion have traceable real-world effects, as the metaphors that make them get disseminated and re-interpreted by their readers. This is why we also understand that it doesn’t matter whether or not there are fundamental, mutually excluding differences between science and literature if enough people on all sides believe that there are.
This very understanding, I submit, is what empowers us to be useful – and what lends importance to studies in areas such as ours this week. It seems to me that our enquiry into the crossover areas of Literature, Science and Medicine may as well set its sights on a larger goal than simply problematising these boundaries, although that is of course important work. I don’t say this with any delusions about the social power of criticism. English can’t cure cancer or cool down the earth, but those tasks will be, and are, far harder without a general awareness of the power that social perception has in defining, creating and solving such problems. In other words, English has this potential: to explain the metaphors by which we live.
Science Fiction, of course, is even more highly dependent on metaphor than most other forms of writing – and at this point, I’m struck by the fact that one of its real watershed moments was the serialised publication of a book called The War of the Worlds. The discourses between the academy and the public, between science and literature, between the various genres of writing and between the various critical schools discussing them, have constituted a war for too long. It is my contention that a study which emphasises similarities as well as differences has the capacity to help bring about peace.
Will Tattersdill