Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
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is both a scientist and a literary man, best known in the latter category for books on Shelley and Erasmus Darwin. In his Shelley: His Thought and Work, he speaks of Frankenstein as standing ‘in a unique position half-way between the Gothic novel and the Wellsian scientific romance’. In his Erasmus Darwin (1963), King-Hele is more positive, saying—with reference to Darwin as mentioned in the preface to Frankenstein—that ‘Darwin stands as a father-figure over this first and most famous work of science fiction’.
Having got this far, however, the case has to be argued out at some length.
If we claim as SF anything which includes a departure from the natural order, or which exhibits Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement, we gather to ourselves a great body of disparate material, so disparate that it renders the term ‘SF’ meaningless and the material impossible to study in any effective way.
Beyond this argument of necessity is a philosophical objection to lumping together, say, Plato, Lucian, Paltock, Swift, Poul Anderson and Terry Pratchett. Although sophisticated analysis may reveal what these writers have in common, the sensible reader will be alienated; he will remain aware that the cultural differences are greater than any unifying thread of wonder, speculation, or whatever.
As Darko Suvin puts it, if such books as Hardy’s Two on a Tower and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone are SF just like Wells’s The Invisible Man, then in fact there is no such thing as SF.[14]
That there is a kind of tradition of the fantastic is undeniable, but it does not admit to easy study, possibly because many of the popular texts are missing, as we might imagine that much popular SF (the magazines of the 1940s, for example) would be missing, were it not for a few devoted individuals who defied a general contemporary neglect. Equally, the writers in this tradition had a nose for their predecessors, and generally reveal themselves as familiar with their writings—though to be familiar with was not always the same as to understand. Writers are impatient creatures and take only what they need; thus, H. G. Wells can say that Frankenstein ‘used some jiggery pokery magic to animate his artificial monster’, whereas this is precisely what Frankenstein does not do.
The argument that SF began with Gernsback hardly needs refuting any more; I will detain no one with the obvious counter-arguments. Yet when I wrote BYS, the refutation was necessary, and I had some fun with that old phrase about Gernsback being ‘the father of SF’. Edgar Allan Poe has received the same accolade. This quest for father-figures reached what we hope was its nadir when, in the same year BYS was published, Isaac Asimov wrote one of his Introductions, entitled ‘The Father of Science Fiction’, and nominated John W. Campbell for that role.[15] It was a relief to be able to appoint a mother-figure instead. A relief? An intellectual coup d’etat!
This appointment appeals to female and feminist critics, making SF—for a long while regarded as a male preserve—more open to them. Their scholarship is becoming an increased contribution to the field—and perhaps beyond. One indication of this effect occurs in the latest Frankenstein film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh. Hitherto, the poor creature has been born in a dry Spartan manner upon a slab, the method immortalized in the song, The Monster Mash, where
suddenly, to my surprise,
My monster from his slab began to rise …
In Branagh’s film, amino acids are injected into the creature’s feet and it is born in—or tipped out of—a copper bath full of amniotic fluid, in a striking approximation of a real birth. Child and father (Robert de Niro and Kenneth Branagh) splash together nakedly in the gushing waters. This may not have happened in the book, but it certainly does in the subtext.
The seminal point about Frankenstein is that its central character makes a deliberate decision. He succeeds in creating life only when he throws away dusty old authorities and turns to modern experiments in the laboratory. One of Victor Frankenstein’s two professors scoffs at his reading such ancients as Paracelsus, Agrippa and Albertus Magnus—’These fancies, which you have imbibed, are a thousand years old!’—while the other professor is even more scathing: the ancients ‘promised impossibilities and performed nothing’.
Frankenstein rejects alchemy and magic and turns to scientific research. Only then does he get results. Wells was absolutely mistaken in his remarks about ‘jiggery-pokery magic’; it is jiggery-pokery magic which Frankenstein rejects.
This is qualitatively different from being carried to the moon accidentally by migratory geese, or being shipwrecked on Lilliput, or summoning up the devil, or creating life out of spit and mud. Victor Frankenstein makes a rational decision: he operates on the world, rather than vice versa; and the reader is taken by plausible steps from the normal world we know to an unfamiliar one where monsters roam and the retributions of hubris are played out on a terrifying scale.
I say that the reader is taken by plausible steps. In fact, the interwoven processes of the Frankenstein narrative are better described by Suvin—’the ever-narrowing imaginative vortex …’ etc. (ibid.)
To bring about the desired initial suspension of disbelief, Mary Shelley employs a writerly subterfuge which has since become the stock-in-trade of many SF writers. 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