Trips to the Moon

Lucian of Samosata Trips to the Moon (160AD)
Just to get the moaning over and done with, I think this is the fourth book I've bought from Ron Miller's Black Cat Press and the high quota of typos is beginning to annoy. Whilst it's fucking great to be able to get one's mitts on the kind of obscure and peculiar historical material in which Black Cat specialise, you would think someone might have bothered proof reading the things before loading the files up to Lulu. Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+ had presumably been prod-uced by sub-mitting an old copy of the book through some sort of op-tical character recognition soft-ware resulting in weirdly hyphenated words occurring mid-sentence all the way through, former page numbers popping up mid-paragraph, and so on. In addition to this, I gather that whatever files were submitted to Lulu were almost certainly some Microsoft abomination - as opposed to a proper PDF - which can always be relied upon to change its mind about formatting at last minute when submitted to print on demand publishers, meaning

shitloads of

wonky paragraph breaks. It's not a massive problem, and doesn't really have to detract from the text or the pleasure of reading it, but it's kind of irritating, as is the fact of the footnotes to True History beginning at number seventeen and then even missing out a few of the associated explanations.

Lucian's True History, as reproduced herein, is reputedly the oldest surviving text which can be termed science-fiction by some definition, that definition being that it describes, amongst other things, a voyage to the moon made by a sailing boat full of philosophical types swept up in that general direction by the wind. Brian Aldiss discounts this as science-fiction due to the absence of anything pretending to be scientific even by second century terms, but Jesus - I'm not convinced it's really worth having the argument given the entirely unscientific science-fiction which has been written over the years, some of it by Brian Aldiss. I realise Frankenstein qualifies by virtue of medical details, but technology was never really the point of that story any more than it is of True History.

The point of True History is revealed in Lucian's Instructions for Writing History which is also handily reproduced herein.

In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable; and flattery is disgusting to all readers, except the very dregs of the people; good judges look with the eyes of Argus on every part, reject everything that is false and adulterated, and will admit nothing but what is true, clear, and well expressed.

I get the impression that by this juncture Lucian had sat through one too many accounts of mighty warriors kebabing a hundred enemies with the single toss of a spear, and thinking something akin to fuck it, but in Greek or possibly Syrian, wrote True History thus inventing sarcasm. Absurdity is piled high, one ludicrous development after another, and so our lunar voyage is followed by excursions to an island made of cheese and inside a whale in which the ship finds itself trapped. It's comical, presumably intended to shame historians of the day into behaving themselves, and is a lot of fun even with my scant understanding of the philosophical giants out of whom Lucian seems to be taking the piss in the closing pages.

Also included is Lucian's Icaro-Menippus - a Dialogue in which Menippus takes to the air by the same means as Icarus, meets the Gods, and hears how they apparently regard most of the philosophers and theologians who follow them as a bunch of clowns. I'm not quite sure why Lucian specifically recruited the satirist who unwittingly lent his name to the genre of Mennipean satire for his tale, at least not beyond his quite obviously being a fan, but it places True History firmly in a tradition which led to Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels, and others - in case that much wasn't obvious. In other words, it more or less does what science-fiction is supposed to do, even by the terms of Brian Aldiss; and it's a thumping good read, in case I haven't made that clear.

Ralph 124C41+

Hugo Gernsback Ralph 124C41+ (1911)
As editor and publisher of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback - whose name is to this day honoured in the Hugo awards - was either the father of modern science-fiction, or the worst thing that ever happened to the genre. With this latter stance championed by Brian Aldiss, it's difficult to resist the temptation of taking the opposite position just for the sake of it, but much as it pains me to admit, he does have a point:

Gernsback's segregation of what he liked to call scientifiction into magazines designed to contain nothing else, ghetto-fashion, guaranteed the setting up of various narrow orthodoxies inimical to any thriving literature. A cultural chauvinism prevailed, with unfortunate consequences of which the field has yet to rid itself. Gernsback, as editor, showed himself to be without literary understanding. The dangerous precedents he set were to be followed by many later editors in the field.

Gernsback's brand of science-fiction typically starred the inventor as hero, a scientific superman saving the day and getting the girl usually by agency of something involving a special kind of radio wave or newly discovered energy source. It is at worst, simple-minded Victorian utilitarianism, as Aldiss states, and arguably a fairly direct ancestor to the hard science-fiction of Asimov, Clarke, Baxter and the like. On the other hand, the success of Gernsback's magazines did a great deal to popularise at least their own version of the genre, bringing in a great many new writers and ultimately expanding the field to something broader than just the stuff of which Brian Aldiss approves.

Ralph 124C41+ is one of only two novels written by Gernsback, and certainly evidence of his being without literary understanding in so much as it is essentially a series of droning predictions, descriptions of weather control technology and other marvels of the year 2660 strung upon a thoroughly flimsy narrative. Our Ralph, the world's most celebrated inventor, falls in love with a woman encountered during a wrong number. Their first date is a tour of futuristic power plants, industrial farms, floating cities, and so on, with the lucky, lucky girl presumably enraptured by Ralph's lengthy descriptions of how these things work.

'The evolution of letter-writing has been a slow and painful one. Our remote ancestors, many thousand years ago, carved their letters in stone slabs. Later on, the more civilised Egyptians wrote their letters upon papyrus. Still later, upon the invention of paper and ink, communications and letters could be written much better and faster in that improved manner. Later still, the typewriter came into use.'

What a silver-tongued fox he is, to be sure.

Gernsback's intentions are clearly educational, predictive, and populist rather than literary, and although here he apparently foresaw both The Flintstones and the Discovery Channel, it's quite surprising how spectacularly he failed to predict much of anything else. Whilst admittedly there's one device here which sounds like radar, and another which suggests a photoelectric cell, Gernsback falls on his arse time and again, not least because he doesn't even seem to have been paying much attention to early twentieth century science, let alone its possible future. In one rather gruesome passage a dog is revived from death by means of blood transfusion from a goat - all of which suggests that Gernsback, like Ridley Scott, probably thought The Island of Doctor Moreau was a novel about medical advancement. Haematology may have been rudimentary in 1900 by comparison with today, but it was definitely better than whatever Ralph was working with in this novel. Even more implausible - and I would have thought distinctly lacking in romance - is the restaurant at which our two lovebirds have their feeding tubes inserted.

While eating they reclined in the comfortably upholstered leather armchair. They did not have to use knife and fork, as was the custom in former centuries. Eating had become a pleasure.

'Do you know,' said Ralph, 'it took people a long time to accept the scientific restaurants. At first they did not succeed. Humanity had been masticating for thousands of years and it was hard to overcome the inherited habit. However, people soon found out that scientific foods prepared in a palatable manner in liquid form were not only far more digestible and better for the stomach, but they also did away almost entirely with indigestion, dyspepsia, and other ills, and people began to get stronger and more vigorous.'

...and of course we get a lot of energy from all those turbines at the Diarrhoea Energy Plant. I found it difficult to read this passage without being reminded of that Simpsons episode in which Mr. Burns explains how ever since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun...

Once Gernsback has run out of things to explain, he tags on a bit of story involving the improbable kidnap of the soon to be Mrs. 124C41+, and although there's no scene in which a grinning top-hatted villain ties her to a railway line to a soundtrack of frantic piano music, it sort of feels like there is.

In summary, the story is utter crap, and the writing is fucking terrible; and yet I can't help but admire and enjoy this book somehow, even beyond being well-disposed to anything shunned by Brian Aldiss. For all of it's many, many, many, many, many, faults, Ralph 124C41+ is written with such obvious enthusiasm and delight in its own droning testimony that it generally avoids becoming boring, and the sheer novelty of science as written in Gernsback's world of screwy pre-Einsteinian physics is surprisingly engaging. It may be terrible as science-fiction, but it's nevertheless a fascinating glimpse of something or other, and mere low-brow heritage is not in itself sufficient reason to dismiss this peculiar historical artefact, the relic of an age in which man dared to dream of meals unsullied by the misery and inconvenience of cutlery and mastication.

This is available from Black Cat Press for which you should find a link somewhere on the right-hand side of this page.

Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon

Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon (1844)
Like one of those political cartoons from a 1930s Punch Magazine - Head Chef Neville Chamberlain carrying a massive Mussolini faced pie to an oven upon which is written fiscal compromise whilst a cat wearing a Union Jack waistcoat says it will be interesting to see how this turns out - it's roughly possible to appreciate the wit of this tale without having the faintest idea what it refers to. Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon was originally published in two parts in the July and August 1844 issues of The Southern Literary Messenger, a monthly periodical based in Virginia and possibly best known for Edgar Allan Poe having been its most famous editor and contributor. The identity of the author of this tale, anonymously attributed to an Aerio-Nautical Man, appears to have been lost, but never mind. At a mere twenty-two pages, it's a slim volume, but nevertheless has more than enough going on to justify this reprint by Ron Miller's consistently wonderful Black Cat imprint.

Satirical tales of fantastic trips to the moon and the inevitably comedic accounts of the people living there have been around at least since Lucian of Samosata's True History of the second century, and the narrator of this one effects his incredible journey by means of a hitherto unknown science, called Aeriotism, or the faculty of self-suspension in the air. This he achieves by basking in the admiration of his fellows to such a degree as to cause his head to expand and become lighter than air, as you do, and without too much faffing about with the sort of details he doesn't seem to think would interest us, there he is on the moon.

The moon is of course populated by people who, like ourselves, sprang from the line of Adam and Eve and were almost certainly around during the construction of the Tower of Babel. Their societies - divided mainly into handily illustrative republics and monarchies, an old world and a new world - serve to hold a comic mirror to our own, or specifically to our own as of 1844. Unfortunately my understanding of American history is so limited as to render much of the detail thematically bewildering, although the narrative remains nevertheless entertaining for such devices as magnetically driven sailing ships, lunar provinces where citizens make their own money, and the Isle of Engines which seems to be an amusingly disparaging parody of England. Clearly much of this would make more sense had I a better grasp of nineteenth century politics, but then it's not entirely inscrutable with passages condemning the practice of slavery, and even predictions such as this one providing a fascinating insight into notions of progress as viewed at the time:

Every day some new science is discovered, which renders easy what was considered impossible before, and I have little doubt that if they continue on for half a century more in the same rapid pace, they will be able to dispense altogether with a Supreme being, and construct not only worlds, but people to live in them, on purely, scientific principles.

It would probably be an overstatement to term Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon a neglected classic, but it's pretty damn sparky, and at such brief length I can think of no good reason why anyone would want to pass on it.

Available from Lulu.

Doctor Omega

Arnould Galopin Doctor Omega (1906)
It's nice to see a ton of vintage science-fiction titles returned to print through Black Cat Press, and Arnould Galopin's Doctor Omega is but one of many, purchased out of curiosity and because I'd actually heard of it. The reason for my having heard of it was a 2003 reprint offered for sale by numerous retailers of Doctor Who fiction. This earlier edition was translated from the French, or specifically adapted and retold as it stated on the jacket by Jean-Marc and Randy L'Officier who had seen in the original novel an apparent precursor to William Hartnell era Doctor Who, and thus was it marketed as a sort of ur-Who, if you will. I was curious, but the suggestion that material had been added in order to emphasise parallels with a 1960s television show annoyed me a little for reasons that should be frankly obvious to anyone with critical faculties - specifically that due to my being a fully grown man I am capable of appreciating written material without requiring that it be tied in to a fucking TV show.

Happily this new edition is a different translation - by renowned artist and author Ron Miller who also appears to be the driving force behind Black Cat - and one which I assume to be faithful to the original, and which makes use of Bouard's illustrations. My one gripe is that this version seems a little typo-prone in places, occasionally yielding sentences like I am you will not regret having taken me along; but on the positive side, the material is otherwise of such standard as to remain enjoyable and surprisingly absorbing regardless.

The main character is a crochety, elderly scientist with white hair who titles himself Doctor, which is as far as the resemblance goes and makes me particularly glad I never bothered with the 2003 edition. More striking is the obvious influence of H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, particularly with space travel effected by means of an anti-gravitic substance, here named repulsite rather than cavorite. Galopin even appears to playfully acknowledge the influence of the Wells novel as Fred, one of his three space travellers, anticipates their arrival on the moon and is repeatedly set straight by Doctor Omega who reminds us that they are in fact heading for Mars. This may be taken as additionally significant in that Doctor Omega reputedly represents the first science-fiction novel to visit the red planet, thus anticipating Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.S. Lewis and the rest. H.G. Wells of course brought his Martians to Earth, and this is perhaps acknowledged in the form of a familiar heat ray device which crops up in the later chapters.

Doctor Omega is a travelogue, visiting a Mars populated with wild and dangerous animals and pseudo-tribal people as though it were a more exotic dark continent. It lacks the politics of Wells or the slightly harder science of Jules Verne, and is thus content to simply present itself as an adventure; and as such it bursts with imagination and is hard to fault. Why anyone would feel the need to "improve" on this by adding references to a television show is beyond me.

Available here.