Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ Wells imitated her method some decades later, to good effect. She appeals to scientific evidence for the veracity of her tale.

      It is no accident that Mary Shelley’s introduction to the anonymous 1818 edition of the novel begins with a reference to one of the most respected scientific minds of her day, Dr Erasmus Darwin. Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, and early propagandist of evolutionary theory, was referred to by S. T. Coleridge as ‘the most original-minded man in Europe’. The opening words of the Introduction are ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr Darwin, and some of the psychological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence’. Thus Mary Shelley makes it clear that the first aspect of her novel which she wishes to stress is the scientific-speculative one.

      This is the most revolutionary departure of Frankenstein. This is the one which separates it most markedly from any preceding Gothic novel (another factor being the absence of simpering heroines). We must not ignore a further novelty. The monster in his isolation operates as a criticism of society, as later does Wells’s The Invisible Man and the central figure in Vonnegut’s Galapagos. When the monster cries ‘I am malicious because I am miserable’, this atheistic note echoes the central blasphemy of Frankenstein’s diseased creation. SF was to become a refuge for anti-religious and anti-establishment thinking, and some criticism of society is present in most successive SF, save in the trivial examples of Instant Whip.

      In his edition of Frankenstein, Leonard Woolf argues that the novel should not be considered as SF, but rather as ‘psychological allegory’.^[16] This is like arguing that Red Dust is not SF because it is about terraforming. There is no reason why both books should not support both functions. The strength of SF is that it is not a pure stream.

      David Ketterer, who has written perceptively about Mary Shelley’s novel,^[17] agrees with Woolf, while saying that the concerns of Frankenstein might more broadly be described as ‘philosophical, alchemical, and transcendental, than psychological or scientific’. Ketterer also argues that Frankenstein cannot be described as SF.^[18]

      Arguments against Frankenstein being SF at all rest on very uncertain ground. Not only is there Mary Shelley’s own intention, as expressed in her Introduction, but her sub-title points to where she believes its centre to lie; she is bringing up-to-date the myth of Prometheus. Her fire comes down from heaven. It was an inspiration—and one that Universal Studios would later make much of—to utilize the newly captive electricity as that promethean fire. Later generations of writers, with neither more nor less regard for scientific accuracy, would use ‘the power of the atom’ with which to energize their perceptions of change. Nowadays, telepathic superpowers get by under the name of SF and cyberpunk passes for prophesy.

      The argument against Frankenstein’s being the first novel of SF could be more convincingly launched on other grounds, historiological ones. The more any subject is studied, the further back its roots are seen to go. This is true, for instance, of the Renaissance, or the Romantic movement. So perhaps the quest for the First SF Novel, like the first flower of spring, is chimerical. But the period where we should expect to look for such a blossoming is during the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps just after the Napoleonic Wars, when changes accelerated by industry and war have begun to bite, with the resultant sense of isolation of the individual from and in society. This sense of isolation is a hallmark of Romanticism, displayed in the opening paragraph of that milestone of Romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions: ‘I feel my heart and I know men. I am not like others whom I have seen; I dare believe that I am not made like anyone else alive’.

      This is the region of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley found an objective correlative for the cold intellectual currents of her day. It has maintained, and even implemented, its power to our day.

      We need to resist a temptation to classify rigidly, thinking to achieve intellectual clarity by so doing. There is no contradiction involved in regarding this remarkable transitional novel as a Gothic story, as one of the great horror stories of the English language, and as the progenitor of modern SF.^[19]

      Nobody seeks to argue that Frankenstein is not a horror story. The influence of the movies has greatly persuaded us to concentrate on the horror aspect. Yet the movies have always cheapened Mary Shelley’s theme. The creature is usually turned into a dotty bogeyman, allowed only to grunt, grunt and destroy. It is presented as alien to humanity, not an extension of it.

      Mary Shelley depicts the creature as alienated from society. Just when we have learned to fear the creature and loathe its appearance, she shows us the reality of the case. This is no monster. It is a lost soul. Above all things, it wishes to reverence its absent creator.

      Every good Frankenstein-watcher has his own opinions about the monster. It is the French Revolution, says Suvin. It is Percy Bysshe Shelley, says Christopher Small. It is an hermaphrodite, says William Veeder. It and Victor are two different modes of one consciousness says Mary K. Patterson Thornburg.^[20] I have come to believe that the stricken creature is Mary herself, that she found in the monster a striking objective correlative for her misfortunes at birth. Later in her career, in her other SF novel, she projects herself as Verney, the Last Man in a world of death wandering alone without a soulmate.

      The novel is firmly anti-alchemy. The science is not very clear—impossible, if you like—but it is science as perfectly distinct from alchemy, although Mary was writing some years before the word ‘scientist’ was coined. As for the philosophical and transcendental qualities, they arise from the central science-fictional posit, just as they do in Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and rule the novel out of the SF stakes no more than does Woolf’s psychological element.

      If I were rewriting BYS now, I should qualify Frankenstein’s pre-eminence by allowing more discussion of the utopianists of eighteenth-century France, and such works of the Enlightenment as Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1770).^[21] The hero of this work wakes up seven centuries in the future, to a world of scientific and moral advance. But between such examples and later ones come the guillotines of the French Revolution, to deliver a blow to pure utopianism from which it has not recovered. The prevailing tone was to be set, at least in the Anglo-American camp, by the glooms of Gothic-Romanticism. As Bruce Sterling says, the colour of SF is noir.

      I began by saying that the question of function was involved with the question of origin. To regard SF as co-existent with literature since Homer is to bestow on it no function not also operative in literature; which contradicts the experience of most of us who enjoy both literature and SF.

      To regard SF as ‘all starting with Gernsback’ is to impoverish it to an unfair degree. SF then becomes a kind of gadget fiction, where every story more than ten years old is hailed as a ‘Classic’, and reputations can be made by rewriting one’s previous story ad infinitum. SF may be a microcosm, but it is larger than a back yard.

      To speak practically, one has to consider how best to introduce historical SF to new readers or students. Should one confront them with Homer’s Odyssey, Mercier’s Year 2440, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the wretched crust of Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+? I trust that the answer is obvious.

      It was a passage in BYS concerning Hugo Gernsback which most offended readers. This, it appears, was what Sam Moskowitz was attacking me for at the Lunacon. Later, the enthusiast David Kyle took me to task for saying that Hugo Gernsback was arguably one of the worst disasters ever to hit the SF field. Well, admittedly I stated the case strongly in order to be heard above the sound of choristers praising Old Uncle Hugo, but there was truth in what I said. Ten years later, I would parse the remark: worse disasters have struck since, notably commercial exploitation.

      Kyle’s СКАЧАТЬ