Classic Tales of Science Fiction & Fantasy

INTRODUCTION

A Genre for the Times

Every semester, when discussing the history of pop culture, I tell my students to pay attention to the people with three names, who are sometimes known only by their initials: H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the like. The literary giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are taken more seriously. They garner more critical acclaim and are more often read in schools; but the writers of adventure stories from this period have had a far greater effect on our culture, even now, than Edith Wharton, William Makepeace Thackeray, or Mark Twain.

The stories in this book represent classic tales of science fiction and fantasy. By fantasy we do not mean high fantasy like that of J. R. R. Tolkien, or sword-and-sorcery stories like those of Robert E. Howard. We mean stories of the fantastical, the horrific, and the supernatural. In many of these stories, science and the supernatural are linked.

The Victorian age was one of the most forward-thinking periods in history (in some ways, more forward-thinking than our own). The development of steamships and railroads; photography; and advances in chemistry, electricity, and weaponry all came about between 1837 and 1901, during the reign of Queen Victoria of England. Scientific inquiry opened up new ways to look at both the past and the future. It makes sense that with the prominence of science on the culture of Europe, there would quickly follow science fiction.

Science is frightening. It tears down nearly every old belief and notion (a major theme in H. G. Wells’s works). Anything that can’t be verified by scientific inquiry is cast aside. Our place in the universe—believed for so long to be at the center of creation—becomes insignificant under the lens of science. This causes cultural tension, the feeling that things are changing too rapidly, the feeling that perhaps we are not created in God’s image after all—that perhaps there is no God (or, as Professor Challenger says of his conversation with the Brazilian priest in The Lost World: He proved a very argumentative fellow, who took it absurdly amiss that I should point out to him the corrosive effect which modern science must have upon his beliefs). All of these stories reflect the tension created by the pursuit of scientific discovery—the hope that we will find the cure to all that afflicts mankind versus the fear of what we might discover or unleash.

This book begins in the Victorian era, in 1858, and extends well past it, all the way to 1928, and these tensions are evident. Two things stand out. The first is how these works not only use science to tell the story, but also use the story to teach us about science: microscopy, paleontology, immunology, geology, archaeology: all are explained (if sometimes not accurately) in detail as part of the tale. The second is the number of authors here who were also social activists—Bellamy, Wells, London, and Gilman—and who used science fiction to describe either their perfect utopia, or else the downfall of industrial capitalism.

Fitz James O’Brien,

The Diamond Lens (1858)

Fitz James O’Brien was born Michael O’Brien in 1828, in County Cork, Ireland, and was raised in Limerick. He emigrated first to London, where he published some stories and edited a journal. It is believed that at some point he served in the British Army. In 1852 he emigrated to America, first to Washington, D.C., and then New York City. Upon arriving in New York, he devoted himself entirely to writing. He was a successful essayist, playwright, and poet, but his great importance is as a short-story writer. He sold to numerous publications, including Harper’s, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair. He was a prominent member of the famous bohemian circle that met regularly at Pffaf’s Beer Cellar, the center of New York’s literary scene.

In 1862, eager to see action in the Civil War, O’Brien obtained a commission as a lieutenant on the staff of General Frederick Lander, commander of the Union forces in western Virginia. He distinguished himself in the Battle of Bloomery Gap, but was wounded a few days later. He was given a company of thirty-five cavalry and sent to rustle a hundred head of cattle from the enemy, but they were set upon by 150 Confederates under a Colonel Ashley. Instead of fleeing with his smaller force, O’Brien led a charge. According to eyewitnesses, the charge was so fierce that the Confederates believed there must be a reserve nearby, and fell back. O’Brien and Ashley ended up facing off at twenty paces; they fired three shots each. Ashley’s second shot passed through O’Brien’s shoulder, shattering his scapula, while O’Brien’s third shot killed his opponent. O’Brien managed to rally his troops to fight on until another officer saw how badly wounded he was and relieved him to seek a surgeon. He died of tetanus six weeks later in Cumberland, Maryland. His body was taken to Brooklyn, and he was buried with military honors in Greenwood Cemetery.

Although nearly forgotten today, O’Brien is one of the most significant figures in the history of nineteenth-century American literature. His mixture of science and the fantastic anticipated the development of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He wrote the first story that could be called a robot rebellion, the first invisible man story, and even some of the earliest gothic erotica.

The Diamond Lens is a fabulous story. It was a favorite of H. P. Lovecraft (making it a fitting start to this collection). It has the qualities of good horror writing as well as science fiction, and would work well as an episode of The Twilight Zone. The murderous protagonist Linley is an early version of the mad scientist. It is a well-established science—microscopy—that leads the protagonist to his madness. He is already a megalomaniac before he begins his experiment, but he builds a microscope more powerful than any other in the world, and what he sees deep inside a drop of water drives him truly insane. I had penetrated beyond the grosser particles of aqueous matter, beyond the realms of infusoria and protozoa, down to the original gaseous globule, into whose luminous interior I was gazing as into an almost boundless dome filled with a supernatural radiance.

Jules Verne,

A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)

It’s not for nothing that Jules Verne is considered (along with H. G. Wells) the father of science fiction. He is primarily interested—particularly in this story—in science, and in using fiction as a teaching tool. He was born in Nantes, France, in 1828. His father, Pierre, was a successful lawyer, and expected his eldest son to take over his practice one day. Dutifully, Verne went to law school in Paris, and graduated with his license to practice in 1851. By then, however, his literary career had begun. His first success came in the theater. He wrote a play with his new friend Alexandre Dumas, fils (the son of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers), which was produced at the Théâtre Historique. In 1862 Verne submitted his manuscript for a serialized novel called A Voyage in a Balloon to Victor Hugo’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel.

Hetzel had been planning to launch a magazine called Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, which would instruct people on geography and science by entertaining them with fiction. In Verne, Hetzel found a perfect author for his project, and signed him to a long-term contract that required Verne to deliver three manuscripts a year. Hetzel’s major project was a series of Fantastic Voyage novels that would teach readers science through stories about travel. In keeping with this theme, Verne wrote his most famous novels: A Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Verne’s work was originally dismissed as children’s fiction, not serious literature. It gained critical acceptance in the United States before it did in France. Even now, French scholars and critics are reluctant to label his work as science fiction, as genre fiction is still not considered literary in France.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth is, at heart, a travelogue. Verne carefully describes a journey that starts on the surface of the globe, penetrates it, and returns. Of character there is a great deal, and a great deal that is interesting; but of plot there is very little other than travel. The point of the book is to describe what the travelers see. Verne is enamored of lengthy descriptions and lists. That’s his idea of exposition. Not surprisingly, his characters ramble: but this allows him to cram the book full of scientific facts and theories. One of his most clever devices is that the first half of the book is a travelogue of an alien land, but one that is real and accessible: Iceland. As it moves to a travelogue of the subterranean world, the transition is seamless.

The best writing in this book comes in the form of the relationship between the narrator, Axel, and his uncle, the brilliant and eccentric Professor Liedenbrock. As with so many great sidekicks—Agent Scully, Dr. Watson, Colonel Pickering—Axel is the skeptical counterpart to the unstable genius of his companion—the voice of incredulity and awe who brings an awareness of the sublime to balance out the hyperrational savant. Because, like Dr. Watson, Axel provides the narrative voice, he is also the voice of the reader, expressing the reader’s doubts and the reader’s fascination. Their arguments about scientific theory, their explanations to each other about their surroundings, form the scientific core of the book. They are also funny— especially Axel—and extremely entertaining.

It is, in the end, a book about spelunking—the greatest spelunking adventure imaginable.

Edward Bellamy,

Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888)

Born in Massachusetts in 1850, Edward Bellamy was to become one of the most influential political figures in American socialism. His biography reads like that of many other authors of his day. Like Verne, he first studied law. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, he developed a sickness, tuberculosis, that prompted him to move to the tropics. Like Mark Twain, he spent time as a journalist in Hawaii. Most important, like H. G. Wells, he became an ardent and influential socialist thinker. Until the publication of Looking Backward, Bellamy was a literary toiler, putting out fairly unremarkable work. Looking Backward was to make him one of the most popular writers in the world.

Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a condemnation of nineteenth-century industrial society and an expectation of a coming socialist utopia. Julian West is a traveler from 1887. In the nineteenth century, West was a scion of a wealthy Boston family, blissfully unaware of the horrors that keep his family’s wealth in place. Placed in a state of suspended animation, West awakens in the year 2000 to find that the world is now a socialist society. All private property has been nationalized. Crime is treated as a disease, not an evil. Everyone gets a free college education, works in a career designed to serve the good of everyone, and retires at the age of forty-five. The book uses a common conceit. It is written as an explanation to people at the beginning of the twenty-first century of what life was like at the end of the nineteenth but, in order not to bore readers too much, it is structured as a romance, telling the story of how West is put to sleep, awakens, and falls in love with the great-granddaughter of his now long-dead fiancée.

Looking Backward was an incredibly popular and influential book. In its time, it was surpassed in sales only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. It sparked a number of social clubs dedicated to seeing its principles to fruition, and inspired several utopian socialist communities. But reading it today is odd. It is an incredibly hopeful tale, but looking back today and seeing that its anticipated utopia never came to pass—but in places where it was tried, terrible atrocities occurred—is rather disheartening.

H. G. Wells,

The War of the Worlds (1897)

Although remembered today as the other father of science fiction, during his lifetime Wells was known as a political theorist, and rivaled George Bernard Shaw as the most well-known literary figure in the world. His Outline of History was the standard history text in the English-speaking world for decades, and is one of the most widely read history books of all time. Wells is said to have been the inspiration for the idea of the atomic bomb. He helped write the charter of the League of Nations. A committed socialist in favor of a one-world government dominated by intellectual elites, Wells often used his fiction to either anticipate what such a government would look like, or to demonstrate why he thought such a government was necessary. Wells’s scientists, whether mad or benign, are always superior to everyone around them, and Wells has little tolerance for the uneducated masses, at least in his fiction. Nonetheless, he was a staunch critic of the Soviet Union, and when he traveled there and wrote about it, he stressed what an utter failure the experiment was turning out to be. Wells was rather embarrassed by the five scientific romances for which he is now known. He wanted his more serious work to make an impact—though even in the 1930s with the postapocalyptic The Shape of Things to Come, he returned to science fiction to speculate about the future of humanity.

He was born in 1866 in Bromley, County Kent, England. His parents were shopkeepers, but the shop was never successful, and they were always poor. In 1874 a broken leg confined Wells to bed for several months. He began to read voraciously, and from this time came his love of books and his desire to be a writer. He was sent away to school but, after suffering a broken thigh, his father could no longer afford to pay his expenses. Wells’s mother was forced to go back to working as a chambermaid, and he was apprenticed to a draper, which he hated, and later to a chemist, which he didn’t like much more. He spent his free time in the library reading Plato and Sir Thomas More. Eventually in 1883, he found a position as a pupil/teacher at Midhurst Grammar School, and the next year he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science to study biology. It was here that he founded the Science School Journal, which published his short story The Chronic Argonauts, the first version of what was to become The Time Machine. He also joined the debating society and started his long advocacy for socialism. He sold several short stories between 1888 and 1894, and then, in 1895 he sold The Time Machine as a serialized novel for 100 pounds.

Wells was an incredibly prolific writer, penning fifty-two novels and hundreds of short stories, essays, articles, and works on nonfiction, all of which, in one way or another, reflected his thinking of socialism, pacifism, and sexual liberty and equality.

Thanks to Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg, The War of the Worlds is among the best-known science fiction novels of all time. It is also one of the most creative and original stories ever written. Never before had anyone considered the possibilities of an invasion from outer space. Never before had someone suggested that humans might not be the strongest and smartest species in the universe. To the Victorians, having conquered most of the world and proven that they themselves were the pinnacle of evolution, the idea that an alien species might come along and treat them as they had treated the native inhabitants of Australia or South Africa was, quite frankly, revolutionary. In The War of the Worlds, Wells accurately predicts the possibilities of tank warfare, air warfare, and chemical warfare. It is a gripping story of near defeat and the breakdown of society. Even today, after thousands of alien invasion stories have been produced, Wells’s tale about an unforgiving and incomprehensible war is powerful and scary. The sections about the retreat from London, especially the chapter titled Thunder Child, are among the best things ever written about the plight of war refugees. The description of the ram steamer, plowing ahead at full steam toward the Martian tripods, is one of the most exciting passages ever written in the English language.

Edgar Rice Burroughs,

A Princess of Mars (1912)

Without Edgar Rice Burroughs there may very well have been no Star Wars. There are essentially two great styles in science fiction: the philosophical science fiction descended from H. G. Wells, and the pure adventure science fiction descended from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter books. When he was writing the screenplays for Star Wars, it was to John Carter that George Lucas turned for inspiration. The desert planet, the hero’s extraordinary abilities, the strange beasts and aliens, the evil cult, the speeders, and the sword fights all find their antecedents in John Carter’s Barsoom.

Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875 and grew up in nearby Oak Park. His father, George Tyler Burroughs, was a Civil War major and successful businessman who had made a fortune as a whiskey distiller in Chicago. The younger Burroughs’s desire was to be a soldier as well. He attended military school and took (and failed) the entrance exam for West Point. He eventually served an enlistment in the 7th Cavalry, but was medically discharged in 1897. He married his childhood sweetheart, worked briefly at his father’s firm, but then left and began years of struggle at low-wage jobs. He was working as a pencil sharpener when, after reading some pulp fiction magazines, he declared that he could write better stories—and if people got paid for writing this rotten stuff, then he could certainly get in on the action.

To Burroughs, writing was a business and nothing more. He did not see himself as being at the forefront of a great literary movement, nor did he see science fiction as an opportunity to ruminate on the human condition, nor as a means to promote his visions of a pacifist-socialist utopia (he was anything but). To Burroughs, it was all about money. Nonetheless, Burroughs—far more than Wells or Verne—launched the entire space adventure tradition.

Tarzan was even more influential from a business standpoint, in that it laid the groundwork for the merchandising that made Lucas and Disney so wealthy. Seeing the incredible popularity of the ape man, Burroughs wanted to exploit him in every medium that he could—books, comic strips, film, toys, etc. Others advised against it, but Burroughs went ahead and created a multiplatform business that became the formula for Disney’s and, later, Lucas’s success.

But it was the popularizing of science fiction as pure adventure, putting it in the same category as pirate stories, westerns, and chivalric romances, where Burroughs made his biggest impact. Astronomers, writers, filmmakers, and astronauts have all listed the John Carter stories as the inspiration for their careers. Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, called Burroughs the most influential writer in history.

John Carter, a former Confederate captain prospecting for gold in Arizona, hides from some Apaches inside a sacred cave and falls asleep. When he wakes up, he has been transported to Mars, a strange desert planet the locals call Barsoom. He is captured by a warlike race called the Tharks, giant green monsters with four arms and huge tusks. They take him as a slave, but because of the lighter gravity and atmosphere on Mars, Carter has immense strength compared to the Tharks, and can leap 150 feet. Thanks to a nursemaid named Sola and his Martian guard dog Woola, Carter learns their language and customs, and becomes a member of the tribe and a great warrior. When the Tharks capture Dejah Thoris, the beautiful humanoid princess of Helium, he comes to her aid, and he and the Tharks join a war between two cities of the Red (humanoid) Martians.

A Princess of Mars is perhaps the most exciting story in this collection. Although we now know what the surface of Mars is like—that it is uninhabited and that the atmosphere won’t support human life—none of that was known in Burroughs’s time, and his vision of Mars (or Barsoom) is based on the speculations of nineteenth-century astronomers, who proposed that Mars was a dying planet. Unlike the celestial invaders of The War of the Worlds, Burroughs’s fantastic creations have recognizable emotions and motivations. They have passion, and they share their passions with the hero. Considering that Burroughs once dreamed of being a soldier, it is not surprising that the primary plot device in A Princess of Mars is violence. It is filled with epic battles and heroic combats. Enemies must be defeated, the princess rescued, and Mars saved. Only the greatest warrior—a Confederate captain from Virginia—is heroic enough to get it done.

Arthur Conan Doyle,

The Lost World (1912)

The creator of the most popular and well-known character in English fiction (with the possible exception of Hamlet) was every bit as fascinating as his literary creations. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, were he worked under Joseph Bell, who was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. He was a professional athlete, one of the first people to introduce skiing to a mass audience, and a first-rate rugby player and cricketer. Like Dr. Watson, he was a military doctor, serving in (and writing about) the Boer War. He worked for a while as a harpooner and ship’s doctor on a whaler, and then opened an optometry practice. His practice was never a success, and to support himself, he published short stories and serialized novels, the most successful of which were about his unique new detective, Sherlock Holmes. Even without Holmes, Doyle would have been an important writer. He created a number of good medieval romances (which were his favorite of his own books—he detested Holmes) and also another character, equally as interesting and as fascinating as Holmes: Professor Challenger. At the time of his death in 1930, Doyle was considered the most popular English writer since Shakespeare.

When reading The Lost World after A Journey to the Center of the Earth, one is struck by how similar they are. They have the same setup. Both tales revolve around an eccentric genius driven to prove his theories. They are both exploration stories. In both of them, a long-lost land where dinosaurs have survived to the present day is found. As with geology and geography in A Journey to the Center of the Earth, the book goes out of its way to accurately describe elements of zoology, anthropology, and paleontology (sometimes erroneously but within the accepted science of the times). Most striking of all, both stories are narrated by an incredulous younger man who accompanies the older professor on the prompting of a woman, one with whom he is passionately in love, and to whom he must prove himself worthy. They represent the chivalric romance rewritten for the scientific age.

Unfortunately, a product of its imperialist times, The Lost World is also savagely racist and colonialist. The black porter Zambo—and even his name—represents the worst of racial stereotypes. The natives—grinning, fawning, or scheming—are portrayed just as badly. When it comes to the prehistoric ape men encountered on the plateau, things really go off the rails. Slavery and genocide are the natural and justifiable ends of conflict between superior and inferior people; or as the character Sir John says, For my part I have a score to settle with these monkey-folk, and if it ends by wiping them off the face of the earth, I don’t see that the earth need fret about it.

Nonetheless, The Lost World is a great adventure, and in some ways is superior to A Journey to the Center of the Earth. It has a plot. It has twists and turns and excitement beyond simply seeing something odd or experiencing a natural phenomenon that might kill you. Its characters are deeper and have more relatable motivations. Most of all, it has Professor Challenger, one of the iconic characters of science fiction. The structure of The Lost World is much better as well. Each chapter is written as a dispatch. The first paragraph always foreshadows the climax. It reads much like letters from the front would read: A terrible thing happened today, followed by a chapterlong telling of the tale. It’s an excellent structure because, like the Sherlock Holmes novels (and most of the novels in this volume), The Lost World was serialized, so each chapter had to be a self-contained story, but one that ends with anticipation of what is to come. Doyle was a master of the form, and managed to pack tons of action into just a few pages, always keeping readers on the edges of their seats.

Jack London,

The Scarlet Plague (1915)

Jack London was a particular type of writer and a particular type of success. Most of his stories were built around a violent masculinity. His style was harsh and uncompromising, anticipating the naturalism of Hemingway and Steinbeck. His best-known short story, To Build a Fire, is about the senseless demise of a tenderfoot in the Yukon as witnessed by his dog. It is still one of the best stories about death ever written.

London was born John Griffith Chaney in 1876, in San Francisco. His mother, Flora Wellman, was descended from one of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony families. His father was probably an astrologer named William Chaney. Disavowed by Chaney, and with his mother deranged, London was raised by a former slave named Virginia Prentiss. In his youth London was a factory worker, an oyster pirate, a boxer, a longshoreman, a prospector, a war correspondent, and a hobo. Although he traveled the world, he always returned to the Bay Area as his home. He lived to only forty years of age. He suffered from numerous diseases and chronic pain, he took morphine, and was an alcoholic. He died at his ranch north of San Francisco of a drug overdose, which many at the time believed was a suicide.

London is one of the most successful fiction writers of all time. Like most of the authors in this volume, he sold his stories through magazines, and he became fabulously wealthy as a result. Nonetheless, like Wells and Bellamy, he was a socialist, and most of his stories are from a socialist point of view. His is a more militant, aggressive socialism. If Bellamy and Wells were intellectuals who got their socialism from books, London got his from the docks. He viewed socialism from the vantage of a factory worker and deckhand, and saw work as a cruel trap. Writing was his salvation.

London wrote several science fiction stories, of which The Scarlet Plague is the best.

In the story, an old man wanders a forest trail with his grandson. They encounter a grizzly bear that threatens them but leaves them alone. The old man laments that once, there were no bears here. They are on Geary Boulevard, near the end of the streetcar line (now bent and twisted), within sight of what was once the Cliff House, in the ruins of the city that is still, somehow, called San Francisco (interestingly, that area is the site of the only protected ruins in San Francisco today). They come to a meadow on the edge of a beach, where they join the man’s other two grandchildren (probably the site of the old windmill in Golden Gate Park). There the grandchildren beg him to tell them, once again, the story of the Scarlet Death. It is the story of the end of the world, brought about by a terrible plague, as viewed by the only surviving faculty member from the University of California at Berkeley— an English professor, now bent with age and wearing only a goatskin. His grandsons tease and torment him, but he teaches as though at his lectern.

London’s story of the postapocalyptic Bay Area makes an interesting counterpoint to Looking Backward. Both are told as a reflection. Both describe the end of industrialized society from a socialist point of view—but where Bellamy’s world evolved peacefully into a socialist utopia, London’s took another path. The society described by the old man to his three grandsons, one they cannot comprehend, was an oligarchy. By the twenty-first century, the world is ruled by a cartel of industrialists. All workers are now slaves and are horribly abused. The wealthy are so far above them that one lady would not even accept her own dropped parasol from the hand of one of her servants, and had the man fired for offering it to her. When the Scarlet Death hits in 2013, society breaks down almost instantly, and the workers rebel against their former masters. In the end, only one person out of every million survived. Humanity has devolved into a few scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers. The long-lost world described by the old man—of money, learning, leisure, germs, airships, gunpowder, and above all social stratification—is totally incomprehensible to his savage grandchildren. It’s a powerful read from a great storyteller.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

Herland (1915)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860. Her father, the well-known librarian and editor Frederic Beecher Perkins, abandoned Charlotte and her mother Mary when Charlotte was an infant, and she was raised by her famous aunts Catharine Beecher, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Gilman was one of the most important feminists of the early twentieth century, and her life and death was a series of progressive ideas in action. She married the artist Charles Walter Stetson in 1884, and left him in 1888. They were eventually divorced, an almost unheard-of thing at the time. Even more unusual was that she allowed their daughter Katharine to live from time to time with Stetson and his second wife, with whom she remained friends, because she believed they had a right to one another’s love. Later, she married her first cousin Houghton Gilman. She was active in many feminist organizations and causes, and her writings reflect her ideals of women’s rights and social justice. A longtime advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, she committed suicide while suffering from breast cancer.

With a journey up a mysterious river, the refusal to reveal the site’s location, the anthropological commentary, and the natives who tell rumors of a land of terrible women, Herland is a clever mirror of The Lost World. Three men who could best be described as charming, cocky, and decidedly masculine go off in search of a mythical land of terrible women, where no sensible man dares to go. They are masculine in the same way as the intrepid explorers of The Lost World, except their masculinity is comical, and leaves them entirely unprepared for the world and the women they encounter. Locked into their stereotypes of women, and sure of their own sense of superiority, they expect to find either a group of petty, gossiping shrews or else a regimented colony of nuns. They are sure there will be no invention or progress. What they discover instead is perfection: a beautiful, well-ordered world, lovely buildings, fine landscaping, and women so calm and self-assured they seem alien to the three men. This all-female utopia has no war, no poverty, no want of any kind. Removed from the aggression and subjugation of men, the women have created a peaceful, prosperous, and cooperative world.

And a funny one. The comic potential of a world turned upside down, of confident men completely unprepared for the presence of competent women, never lets the reader down. After the utopia of Looking Backward, the dystopia of The Scarlet Plague, and the chivalric heroism of The Lost World, Herland is a marvelous, witty commentary on the forms that science fiction takes when written by, for, and about men.

Philip Francis Nowlan,

Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928)

The defining element of Philip Francis Nowlan’s life is how unremarkable it was. Born in Philadelphia in 1888, he attended the University of Pennsylvania and joined the Delta Epsilon fraternity. After graduation, he went into the insurance business, taking a job at Wagner and Taylor Insurance Agents. He married Theresa Junker, and together they had ten children. One remarkable thing in this history was that, while in college, he was a member of the Mask and Wig Society, the University of Pennsylvania’s theatrical club. He performed in several of their productions, including Herr Lohengrin: An Opera Bluff in Two Acts, and took on the role of Wendy Darling in A Travesty of Mr. J. M. Barrie’s Fantastic Play: "Peter Pan." He also wrote quite a bit. He penned skits for the Mask and Wig Society, and wrote articles on business and advertising. These obviously served him well when he left the insurance business to become the financial editor of the Philadelphia Ledger. Then, in 1928, he changed science fiction forever.

If A Princess of Mars was the first step in the creation of the space opera, then Armageddon 2419 A.D. was the second. Nowlan’s first attempt at a science fiction novel turned out to be a book that would influence popular culture for decades, and act as a transition between science fiction’s formative era, when styles and themes were being experimented with, and its later period as an established genre and pop-culture phenomenon.

Nowlan doesn’t focus too much on character development, and his plot is straightforward and formulaic. He is enamored of lists and facts, and in this way it reads like Verne, dispassionately explaining the things the hero encounters and the science (or pseudo-science) behind them, rather than concentrating on action as in the exciting adventures penned by Doyle and Burroughs. As with Doyle, there’s a casual racism to this story that is disturbing to modern readers, but it is less prominent.

Nowlan uses the same device as Bellamy: The hero, a World War I veteran and successful businessman named Anthony Rogers, falls asleep in 1927 and wakes up far into the future, in this case 492 years. After a series of wars, the world has been conquered by the Han dynasty of Mongolia, who control amazing science and technology. Americans are living in scattered forest gangs, which he compares to the feudal society that surrounded Norman lords. They have passed through the stages of devolution that London wrote about in The Scarlet Plague, from scattered individuals, to loose groups of hunter-gatherers, to cohesive tribes. They have developed a kind of socialism, in that there is no private property wealth, but they have a fierce devotion to individual liberty and personal possessions. The Han have no need of either forests or labor, so they mostly leave the Americans alone. The Americans have been waiting for centuries to band together and throw the Han out of America. Rogers becomes the leader and hero they have been waiting for.

Nowlan’s creation was so popular it dominated science fiction for decades— on radio, in serials, on television, with toys, and especially in comic strips. He was praised by real astronauts, parodied by Daffy Duck, and entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for amazing gadgetry. Nowlan, like Burroughs, was a businessman first, and exploited the popularity of his hero in every medium he could. It was not until the comic strips that Anthony Rogers became known by his now-famous nickname, Buck.

H. P. Lovecraft,

The Dunwich Horror (1928)

When I was seventeen, I took an overnight trip on a bus. A friend of mine had given me a collection of short stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and I brought it along to read on the way. The first story in the collection was The Haunter of the Dark. It was a tale of an evil god who inhabited a dark crystal and could only be kept at bay by light. When the power goes out in the town, the evil is let loose. It was the spookiest thing I’d ever read. When I’d finished I tried to nap, but couldn’t—I was scared. I looked out the window at the streetlights, the headlights of passing cars, and the lights from distant towns, wanting them all to stop rushing by and shine right on me. Unable to sleep, I did the absolute worst thing I could have done: I turned on my reading light and read the next story in the book.

H. P. Lovecraft was born 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. He was sickly and seldom went to school, but was a voracious reader. When Lovecraft was three, his father was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Lovecraft himself struggled with mental illness and parasomnia as an adult, and became a recluse. Most of his socialization came through reading and corresponding. After a critical letter he wrote was published in Argosy in 1913, Lovecraft was invited to join the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), a group that produced and distributed amateur magazines and fostered communication among amateur writers and readers. Lovecraft began publishing poetry and short stories through the UAPA and started what grew to be a voluminous correspondence with many aspiring writers, including Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard. When he was thirty-three years old, Lovecraft married Sonia Greene, a haberdasher seven years older than he was, and moved to Brooklyn. When her business collapsed due to a bank failure, Lovecraft tried to support her, but his writing did not earn enough money. His attempts to work regular jobs only proved that he was unemployable. Eventually, Sonia had to move to Ohio for a job, and Lovecraft, after living miserably alone in Brooklyn, returned to Providence. It was here that he concentrated on horror stories based on an idea he had developed in the UAPA, his Cthulhu Mythos. These included The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Dunwich Horror. The Cthulhu stories are truly unique. The central idea is that, thousands of years ago, two cosmic armies, interdimensional beings so powerful that on Earth they would be gods, struggled for control of the universe. Those loyal to the god Cthulhu, a giant with a humanoid body, bat wings, and an octopus-like head, lie in a state of eternal sleep at various places on Earth while their monstrous servants try to awaken them. The central theme of the stories— and what makes them so horrifying—is the complete irrelevance of humans. The gods don’t give people a second thought, and when humans come into contact with the gods, they are invariably driven insane.

Not surprising for a fictional universe created essentially in a serial magazine, Lovecraft encouraged other authors to write stories about his characters, so the Cthulhu Mythos grew vast during Lovecraft’s lifetime, and continues to this day. The Haunter of the Dark was actually a sequel to a story by Robert Bloch called The Shambler from the Stars, and long after Lovecraft’s death, Bloch wrote a sequel called The Shadow from the Steeple. Dozens of authors, including Neil Gaiman, August Derleth, Terry Pratchett, and Stephen King, have written Cthulhu stories. The heavy metal bands GWAR and Metallica have recorded songs about Cthulhu. It appears in several games, including Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons and Dragons. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories are actually part of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Lovecraft created one of the great franchises in pop culture today, but he was never able to earn a living from his writing. In fact, some of his most popular stories emerged only after his death; he never even tried to sell them. At the end of his life he suffered from stomach cancer, which left him malnourished. He died in Providence in 1937. Every year, Lovecraft fans gather to celebrate the anniversaries of his birth and his death. He is celebrated by philosophers, critics, scholars, gamers, fans, and goths—a weird, postmodern intersection of highbrow literary concerns and lowbrow pulp fiction, of serious philosophical inquiry with graphic horror.

The word that best describes the writing of H. P. Lovecraft is heavy. Dense might also be accurate, if not for its connotations synonymous with dull or stupid. It is heavy in the sense that it is thick—thick with imagery and mystery and terror. It is the mystery that pervades. Some of it is so odd that the mystery isn’t really ever revealed because it can’t be described. Lovecraft acknowledges halfway through the book that it is a weak device (he calls it trite) to say that a thing is indescribable. If a thing can’t be described, then the author is being lazy—except in Lovecraft’s case, he does make an effort to describe it. Those efforts, however, fall short, because the human mind cannot truly perceive anything beyond three dimensions, and if Lovecraft is fascinated with any science, it is extradimensional geometry. It can’t be comprehended, so it can’t be described, and so the thing’s indescribability is its distinguishing feature.

There are other ways in which The Dunwich Horror is thick: it is thick with ideas, with descriptions, and especially with atmosphere. Taking place in one of those creepy New England backwaters about which Stephen King also writes, peopled with inbred yokels and crawling with demons both real and imagined, the story builds an atmosphere that is oppressive and addictive. It is probably the most readable of Lovecraft’s stories, and also the most vivid. The albino mother, her hell-spawn son, the ugly villagers, even the ghostly whip-poor-wills, which have an odd spiritual role to play, are so real that they will haunt your nightmares for days after reading the story.

A Lasting Influence

Star Wars, Star Trek, the works of Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, fan conventions, Superman, the Apollo moon landing: all of these things owe their inspiration to the stories in this book. Whether looking toward the future, speculating about technology, or contemplating the vastness of outer space, science fiction examines humanity’s relationship with change. It frightens but it also inspires. The authors whose works are featured in this book take the question What if? and milk it for every possibility. What if women ruled the world? What if dinosaurs still existed? What if disease wiped out most of humanity? What if aliens from Mars attacked us? In doing so, these writers created an industry— one of the most popular genres in both film and literature, and one that continues to carry us into the future. Science fiction is not about what is, but about what might be. It speculates about what we may yet discover, the horrors we might unleash, the heights to which we might climb. Good science fiction is also immensely entertaining. All of the stories in this volume fit that description. Above all else, they are really fun to read.

Michael A. Cramer, PhD

Brooklyn, New York

March 8, 2016

THE DIAMOND LEN

S

Fitz James O’Brien

I

From a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been toward microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes that intervened between that promise and his departure.

Meantime, I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest resemblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon, and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as bull’s-eyes were ruthlessly destroyed in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvelous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha’s spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties—in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

At last the promised instrument came. It was of that order known as Field’s simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could not have been selected. Accompanying it was a small treatise on the microscope—its history, uses, and discoveries. I comprehended then for the first time the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments. I felt toward my companions as the seer might feel toward the ordinary masses of men. I held conversations with nature in a tongue which they could not understand. I was in daily communication with living wonders, such as they never imagined in their wildest visions. I penetrated beyond the external portal of things, and roamed through the sanctuaries. Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce and protracted as those of men. In the common spots of mould, which my mother, good housekeeper that she was, fiercely scooped away from her jam-pots, there abode for me, under the name of mildew, enchanted gardens, filled with dells and avenues of the densest foliage and most astonishing verdure, while from the fantastic boughs of these microscopic forests hung strange fruits glittering with green and silver and gold.

It was no scientific thirst that at this time filled my mind. It was the pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed. I talked of my solitary pleasures to none. Alone with my microscope, I dimmed my sight, day after day and night after night, poring over the marvels which it unfolded to me. I was like one who, having discovered the ancient Eden still existing in all its primitive glory, should resolve to enjoy it in solitude, and never betray to mortal the secret of its locality. The rod of my life was bent at this moment. I destined myself to be a microscopist.

Of course, like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer. I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantage of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schultz, Dujardin, Schact, and Schleiden were then entirely unknown to me, or if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches. In every fresh specimen of cryptogamia which I placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was as yet ignorant. I remember well the thrill of delight and admiration that shot through me the first time that I discovered the common wheel animalcule (Rotifera vulgaris) expanding and contracting its flexible spokes and seemingly rotating through the water. Alas! As I grew older, and obtained some works treating of my favourite study, I found that I was only on the threshold of a science to the investigation of which some of the greatest men of the age were devoting their lives and intellects.

As I grew up, my parents, who saw but little likelihood of anything practical resulting from the examination of bits of moss and drops of water through a brass tube and a piece of glass, were anxious that I should choose a profession. It was their desire that I should enter the counting-house of my uncle, Ethan Blake, a prosperous merchant, who carried on business in New York. This suggestion I decisively combated. I had no taste for trade; I should only make a failure; in short, I refused to become a merchant.

But it was necessary for me to select some pursuit. My parents were staid New England people, who insisted on the necessity of labour, and therefore, although, thanks to the bequest of my poor Aunt Agatha, I should, on coming of age, inherit a small fortune sufficient to place me above want, it was decided that, instead of waiting for this, I should act the nobler part, and employ the intervening years in rendering myself independent.

After much cogitation, I complied with the wishes of my family, and selected a profession. I determined to study medicine at the New York Academy. This disposition of my future suited me. A removal from my relatives would enable me to dispose of my time as I pleased without fear of detection. As long as I paid my Academy fees, I might shirk attending the lectures if I chose; and, as I never had the remotest intention of standing an examination, there was no danger of my being plucked. Besides, a metropolis was the place for me. There I could obtain excellent instruments, the newest publications, intimacy with men of pursuits kindred with my own—in short, all things necessary to ensure a profitable devotion of my life to my beloved science. I had an abundance of money, few desires that were not bounded by my illuminating mirror on one side and my object-glass on the other; what, therefore, was to prevent my becoming an illustrious investigator of the veiled worlds? It was with the most buoyant hope that I left my New England home and established myself in New York.

II

My first step, of course, was to find suitable apartments. These I obtained, after a couple of days’ search, in Fourth Avenue; a very pretty second floor, unfurnished, containing sitting-room, bedroom, and a smaller apartment which I intended to fit up as a laboratory. I furnished my lodgings simply, but rather elegantly, and then devoted all my energies to the adornment of the temple of my worship. I visited Pike, the celebrated optician, and passed in review his splendid collection of microscopes—Field’s Compound, Hingham’s, Spencer’s, Nachet’s Binocular (that founded on the principles of the stereoscope), and at length fixed upon that form known as Spencer’s Trunnion Microscope, as combining the greatest number of improvements with an almost perfect freedom from tremor. Along with this I purchased every possible accessory—draw-tubes, micrometers, a camera lucida, leverstage, achromatic condensers, white cloud illuminators, prisms, parabolic condensers, polarizing apparatus, forceps, aquatic boxes, fishing-tubes, with a host of other articles, all of which would have been useful in the hands of an experienced microscopist, but, as I afterward discovered, were not of the slightest present value to me. It takes years of practice to know how to use a complicated microscope. The optician looked suspiciously at me as I made these wholesale purchases. He evidently was uncertain whether to set me down as some scientific celebrity or a madman. I think he was inclined to the latter belief. I suppose I was mad. Every great genius is mad upon the subject in which he is greatest. The unsuccessful madman is disgraced and called a lunatic.

Mad or not, I set myself to work with a zeal which few scientific students have ever equaled. I had everything to learn relative to the delicate study upon which I had embarked—a study involving the most earnest patience, the most rigid analytic powers, the steadiest hand, the most untiring eye, the most refined and subtle manipulation.

For a long time half my apparatus lay inactively on the shelves of my laboratory, which was now most amply furnished with every possible contrivance for facilitating my investigations. The fact was that I did not know how to use some of my scientific implements—never having been taught microscopies—and those whose use I understood theoretically were of little avail until by practice I could attain the necessary delicacy of handling. Still, such was the fury of my ambition, such the untiring perseverance of my experiments, that, difficult of credit as it may be, in the course of one year I became theoretically and practically an accomplished microscopist.

During this period of my labors, in which I submitted specimens of every substance that came under my observation to the action of my lenses, I became a discoverer—in a small way, it is true, for I was very young, but still a discoverer. It was I who destroyed Ehrenberg’s theory that the Volvox globator was an animal, and proved that his monads with stomachs and eyes were merely phases of the formation of a vegetable cell, and were, when they reached their mature state, incapable of the act of conjugation, or any true generative act, without which no organism rising to any stage of life higher than vegetable can be said to be complete. It was I who resolved the singular problem of rotation in the cells and hairs of plants into ciliary attraction, in spite of the assertions of Wenham and others that my explanation was the result of an optical illusion.

But notwithstanding these discoveries, laboriously and painfully made as they were, I felt horribly dissatisfied. At every step I found myself stopped by the imperfections of my instruments. Like all active microscopists, I gave my imagination full play. Indeed, it is a common complaint against many such that they supply the defects of their instruments with the creations of their brains. I imagined depths beyond depths in nature which the limited power of my lenses prohibited me from exploring. I lay awake at night constructing imaginary microscopes of immeasurable power, with which I seemed to pierce through all the envelopes of matter down to its original atom. How I cursed those imperfect mediums which necessity through ignorance compelled me to use! How I longed to discover the secret of some perfect lens, whose magnifying power should be limited only by the resolvability of the object, and which at the same time should be free from spherical and chromatic aberrations—in short, from all the obstacles over which the poor microscopist finds himself continually stumbling! I felt convinced that the simple microscope, composed of a single lens of such vast yet perfect power, was possible of construction. To attempt to bring the compound microscope up to such a pitch would have been commencing at the wrong end; this latter being simply a partially successful endeavor to remedy those very defects of the simplest instrument which, if conquered, would leave nothing to be desired.

It was in this mood of mind that I became a constructive microscopist. After another year passed in this new pursuit, experimenting on every imaginable substance—glass, gems, flints, crystals, artificial crystals formed of the alloy of various vitreous materials—in short, having constructed as many varieties of lenses as Argus had eyes—I found myself precisely where I started, with nothing gained save an extensive knowledge of glass-making. I was almost dead with despair. My parents were surprised at my apparent want of progress in my medical studies (I had not attended one lecture since my arrival in the city), and the expenses of my mad pursuit had been so great as to embarrass me very seriously.

I was in this frame of mind one day, experimenting in my laboratory on a small diamond—that stone, from its great refracting power, having always occupied my attention more than any other—when a young Frenchman who lived on the floor above me, and who was in the habit of occasionally visiting me, entered the room.

I think that Jules Simon was a Jew. He had many traits of the Hebrew character: a love of jewelry, of dress, and of good living. There was something mysterious about him. He always had something to sell, and yet went into excellent society. When I say sell, I should perhaps have said peddle; for his operations were generally confined to the disposal of single articles—a picture, for instance, or a rare carving in ivory, or a pair of duelling-pistols, or the dress of a Mexican caballero. When I was first furnishing my rooms, he paid me a visit, which ended in my purchasing an antique silver lamp, which he assured me was a Cellini—it was handsome enough even for that—and some other knick-knacks for my sitting-room. Why Simon should pursue this petty trade I never could imagine. He apparently had plenty of money, and had the entrée of the best houses in the city—taking care, however, I suppose, to drive no bargains within the enchanted circle of the Upper Ten. I came at length to the conclusion that this peddling was but a mask to cover some greater object, and even went so far as to believe my young acquaintance to be implicated in the slave-trade. That, however, was none of my affair.

On the present occasion, Simon entered my room in a state of considerable excitement.

"Ah! Mon ami! he cried, before I could even offer him the ordinary salutation, It has occurred to me to be the witness of the most astonishing things in the world. I promenade myself to the house of Madame——. How does the little animal—le renard—name himself in the Latin?"

Vulpes, I answered.

Ah! Yes—Vulpes. I promenade myself to the house of Madame Vulpes.

The spirit medium?