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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul (1913)
Though produced in Italy rather than France, this 1913 film nonetheless captures the spirit of Albert Robida's bizarre misadventure through the worlds of Jules Verne. Unfortunately, this particular version smuggled online has Italian intertitles and Spanish subtitles, so we wish you the best of luck in interpreting what is going on. Even if you can't get the text, there are still a hearty helping of visuals like divers being swallowed by whales and a war between airships.
Monday, November 16, 2009
The Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul (1879)
Noting that Albert Robida's great strength as a futurist was in his keen satirical mind, it is unsurprising that his first foray into Scientific Romances was a parody. Published in 1879, the full French title of the work is Voyage Très Extraordinaires De Saturnin Farandoul Dans Les 5 ou 6 Parties Du Monde Et Dans Tous Les Pays Connus Et Même Inconnus De M. Jules Verne. This translates roughly as "Very Extraordinary Voyage of Saturnin Farandoul in 5 or 6 Parts of the World and in Every Country Even Known and Unknown to Mr. Jules Verne". If the title and its contents weren't epic enough, the volume came it at 800 pages with some 450 illustrations.
Over the course of his adventures, the titular character not only travels to various exotic locales known and unknown to Verne, but also meets characters introduced to us by the great Frenchman. Saturnin runs afoul of Captain Nemo and has exploits with Philias Fogg, inbetween being raised by monkeys, nearly eaten by cannibals, briefly converting to Mormonism and fighting a war in the air.
The ERBzine, devoted to all things Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs, hosts a partial translation by Brian Stableford. Mr. Stableford has been working on a thorough translation eventually to be made available, but for the time being has gifted the world with those portions of Robida's work that were themselves already translated into English for publication in the magazine Puck through 1880. It still provides us with a good taste of what the rest of the story has in store, and you can read it for yourself here.
With the advent of the silver screen, the appeal of Saturnin Farandoul's exploits were not lost. In 1913, a silent film version was produced in Italy, complete with Mélièsian effects.
Over the course of his adventures, the titular character not only travels to various exotic locales known and unknown to Verne, but also meets characters introduced to us by the great Frenchman. Saturnin runs afoul of Captain Nemo and has exploits with Philias Fogg, inbetween being raised by monkeys, nearly eaten by cannibals, briefly converting to Mormonism and fighting a war in the air.
The ERBzine, devoted to all things Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs, hosts a partial translation by Brian Stableford. Mr. Stableford has been working on a thorough translation eventually to be made available, but for the time being has gifted the world with those portions of Robida's work that were themselves already translated into English for publication in the magazine Puck through 1880. It still provides us with a good taste of what the rest of the story has in store, and you can read it for yourself here.
With the advent of the silver screen, the appeal of Saturnin Farandoul's exploits were not lost. In 1913, a silent film version was produced in Italy, complete with Mélièsian effects.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
L'Aquarium de Paris
The common wisdom is that museums, zoos and such things are boring... Cases upon dreary cases, cages upon dreary cages, lined up one after the other in an endless row. It is astonishing to consider how persistant this antiquated idea has been - both within museums and within perspectives on museums - given that the tide turned over a century ago. What we might consider an innovative and immersive educational experience was pioneered at the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Half a century before at the first Great Exhibition, an aquarium was built according to the classic model. The Crystal Palace Aquarium was a fully Victorian affair, filled with rows of glass aquaria set on brass pedestals, in wallpapered halls with velvet drapes around the windows. The aesthetic sense of such an aquarium was the bringing of the natural world into the drawing room, conforming to and displaying in the organized patterns of Linnean classification. This aquarium signified the victory of the industrial order over the rest of the world, where all things were processed and put in a ledger of scientific and economic facts. Like the rest of the Great Exhibition, romance had very little place in the ordered world of the British Empire.
The Crystal Palace Aquarium was spectacularly repudiated by the aquarium at the Paris Exposition. Though like the Great Exhibition the Paris version was a celebration of French industry. However, it also indulged in the romanticism of the French people, including such attractions as Albert Robida's Mediaveal celebration Le Vieux Paris. Coming out of the late Victorian Gothic Revival ethos, L'Aquarium de Paris was an ultimate expression of the grotto aesthetic and the polar opposite of the Crystal Palace's elegant drawing room.
An article of the time described the aquarium thusly:
This description is not complete. As visitors descended the faux-rocky steps into the cavernous aquarium, they saw the central feature of a sunken vessel. Surrounding this, set into the textured stone walls imitating the moist, dripping, mossy atmosphere of an underwater grotto are the glass aquaria. These featured not only the array of creatures themselves, but ghost sirens projected into the aquaria by "Pepper's Ghost" effect.
Predictably, William Alford Lloyd, superintendent of the Crystal Palace Aquarium, was beside himself. He labelled this grotesque (grotto-esque) architecture the product of an "evil hour" appeasing "inartistically educated lifes". His was the Platonic objection, carried into the 19th century by John Ruskin, that imitation was two steps removed from a thing's ethereal perfection of form and therefore both immoral and in bad taste. However, in the margins of the Crystal Palace guidebook where Lloyd wrote those words, a visitor scribbled "the Crystal Palace Aquarium is as plain and unattractive as a barn."
Half a century before at the first Great Exhibition, an aquarium was built according to the classic model. The Crystal Palace Aquarium was a fully Victorian affair, filled with rows of glass aquaria set on brass pedestals, in wallpapered halls with velvet drapes around the windows. The aesthetic sense of such an aquarium was the bringing of the natural world into the drawing room, conforming to and displaying in the organized patterns of Linnean classification. This aquarium signified the victory of the industrial order over the rest of the world, where all things were processed and put in a ledger of scientific and economic facts. Like the rest of the Great Exhibition, romance had very little place in the ordered world of the British Empire.
The Crystal Palace Aquarium was spectacularly repudiated by the aquarium at the Paris Exposition. Though like the Great Exhibition the Paris version was a celebration of French industry. However, it also indulged in the romanticism of the French people, including such attractions as Albert Robida's Mediaveal celebration Le Vieux Paris. Coming out of the late Victorian Gothic Revival ethos, L'Aquarium de Paris was an ultimate expression of the grotto aesthetic and the polar opposite of the Crystal Palace's elegant drawing room.
An article of the time described the aquarium thusly:
The Aquarium de Paris is devoted to the wonders of the deep. There is shown in minature the bed of tropical ocean and Polar sea. Mackerel, whiting and other familiar fish, as well as representatives of the turtle and the octopus, have found their way to the centre of Paris, to add to the gaiety of nations, and it is anticipated that by bringing water from the sea, and with the aid of an elaborate system of filtration, they, or at all events, most of them, will be kept alive until the Exhibition comes to an end. By an ingenious system of lights a submarine volcano is shown in full eruption, and to complete the picture of deep sea marvels there lies in the ocean bed the wreck of a good ship, with divers hard at work sending the cargo to the surface. In order that details may not be wanting to give reality to the scene, oysters and other shell fish, as well as anemones and sponges, have been collected by the designers of this unique aquarium, whose work of preparation extended over several years.
This description is not complete. As visitors descended the faux-rocky steps into the cavernous aquarium, they saw the central feature of a sunken vessel. Surrounding this, set into the textured stone walls imitating the moist, dripping, mossy atmosphere of an underwater grotto are the glass aquaria. These featured not only the array of creatures themselves, but ghost sirens projected into the aquaria by "Pepper's Ghost" effect.
Predictably, William Alford Lloyd, superintendent of the Crystal Palace Aquarium, was beside himself. He labelled this grotesque (grotto-esque) architecture the product of an "evil hour" appeasing "inartistically educated lifes". His was the Platonic objection, carried into the 19th century by John Ruskin, that imitation was two steps removed from a thing's ethereal perfection of form and therefore both immoral and in bad taste. However, in the margins of the Crystal Palace guidebook where Lloyd wrote those words, a visitor scribbled "the Crystal Palace Aquarium is as plain and unattractive as a barn."
Monday, November 9, 2009
Le Vieux Paris
If Albert Robida was among the most successful of French futurists, it was because he was a conservative and cynical man. For him, the age of industrialization certainly carried promise, within folds of which came the deep absurdity of human life. He could easily predict battleships and televisions and shortened hemlines, but more than that, he could realistically predict how such technologies would be most likely used by projecting the foibles of his fellow citizens. He was living amidst the collapse of the traditional order and the wholesale willingness of people to go with technology and industrialization despite its costs on the soul, family and countryside. It is little wonder that he looked upon the modern era as the glorious ship of French history, bedecked with Gothic spires and piloted by a genteel beauty, sailing down the Seine while the bloated age of heavy industry sprawls along the shoreline.
Robida was as much a chronicler of the past as of the future. In 1895 he wrote and illustrated Paris from Century to Century, and a year later, The Heart of Paris. The pinacle of his efforts was the exhibit Le Vieux Paris - Old Paris - at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In the wake of the destruction of many of Mediaeval Paris' historic buildings in the modernization of the city and the development of its broad thoroughfares, a version in miniature was rebuilt along the bend of the river by Pont de L'alma.
Old Paris was not simply a location, but an attitude, a zeitgeist amongst Parisians at the turn of the century. This Mediaeval world of guilds and universities spoke to everything that the intellectuals and poets of the day felt had been lost in the tumults of the French and Industrial Revolutions (not to mention the mid-century loss of the Franco-Prussian War). When the spectre of "modernization" threatened the mighty Cathderal Notre Dame de Paris herself, Victor Hugo put pen to paper. Over the winter of 1830/31, Hugo sequestered himself away, save for nightly visits to the cathedral, and in summer of 1831 saw the publication of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris. This sprawling epic set at the close of the Middle Ages set in motion a 19th century Gothic Revival that included the 1845 restoration of the cathedral, which had been violated in the course of the French Revolution.
Interest was renewed in the places, things, stories and people of the Middle Ages. Gustave Doré lent his considerable talents to both Joseph-Francois Michaud's History of the Crusades and Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King in 1875. The Louvre opened its wing of Mediaeval art in the 1890's. Progressive Republicans and Catholic conservatives fought over who owned the 13th century, though both agreed it was worth owning. In 1909 Joan of Arc was beatified within the halls of Notre Dame, and in 1920 canonized as a saint. Through the century, from the advent of modernity to defeat by the Prussians to the turn of the century, the French took to a common Mediaeval mythology to bolster their sense of identity. Essentially, the fin de siècle recreated the French Middle Ages.
The irony was undoubtedly not lost on Robida, who easily satirized the consumptive and ridiculous habits of his fellow Parisiens. Nor was the opportunity lost on him either. Adrien Mithouard argued that the Gothic was not a bygone historical era but a frame of mind, a view of the world, that could be resurrected from its subtle dormancy whenever the conditions were right or necessary. This passion for the Middle Ages presented Robida with the chance of rebuilding it along the Seine in a kind of nostalgic theme park prefiguring the castles of North America by half a century.
One guidebook described La Vieux Paris as where
Peasant fingers perhaps... The irony of Le Vieux Paris was that, as a critique of modernism, it was a thorough expression of it. Shoppes lined the thoroughfare of the Mediaeval city in miniature, selling both handcrafted gifts but also copious numbers of Robida portfolios. One could purchase Le Vieux Paris Guide: Historic, Scenic & Anecdotal for 80 cents, which provided maps, sketches and informative text. For quite a bit more, one could buy the Le Vieux Paris: Studies and Original Drawings, a collection of 50 concept sketches, color plates and still photos. One of the most ingenious was Gazette du Vieux Paris, a newspaper printed on vellum at the exhibit itself. Fourteen issues were printed, each sharing news, gossip and illustrations dealing with different periods of Mediaeval French history. At the end of the Exposition, all fourteen were bound together in a handsome volume.
Le Vieux Paris was one of the most successful exhibits at the Exposition, a paradox in plaster. Bemoaning the passing of antiquated guilds, it provided goods for purchase by the hungry and affluent middle class looking for material splinters of a past way of life. The whole exhibit was nested into an Exposition intended to glorify the progess and industry of turn-of-the-century France. It was a respite from the modern age made possible by it.
Robida was as much a chronicler of the past as of the future. In 1895 he wrote and illustrated Paris from Century to Century, and a year later, The Heart of Paris. The pinacle of his efforts was the exhibit Le Vieux Paris - Old Paris - at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In the wake of the destruction of many of Mediaeval Paris' historic buildings in the modernization of the city and the development of its broad thoroughfares, a version in miniature was rebuilt along the bend of the river by Pont de L'alma.
Old Paris was not simply a location, but an attitude, a zeitgeist amongst Parisians at the turn of the century. This Mediaeval world of guilds and universities spoke to everything that the intellectuals and poets of the day felt had been lost in the tumults of the French and Industrial Revolutions (not to mention the mid-century loss of the Franco-Prussian War). When the spectre of "modernization" threatened the mighty Cathderal Notre Dame de Paris herself, Victor Hugo put pen to paper. Over the winter of 1830/31, Hugo sequestered himself away, save for nightly visits to the cathedral, and in summer of 1831 saw the publication of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris. This sprawling epic set at the close of the Middle Ages set in motion a 19th century Gothic Revival that included the 1845 restoration of the cathedral, which had been violated in the course of the French Revolution.
Interest was renewed in the places, things, stories and people of the Middle Ages. Gustave Doré lent his considerable talents to both Joseph-Francois Michaud's History of the Crusades and Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King in 1875. The Louvre opened its wing of Mediaeval art in the 1890's. Progressive Republicans and Catholic conservatives fought over who owned the 13th century, though both agreed it was worth owning. In 1909 Joan of Arc was beatified within the halls of Notre Dame, and in 1920 canonized as a saint. Through the century, from the advent of modernity to defeat by the Prussians to the turn of the century, the French took to a common Mediaeval mythology to bolster their sense of identity. Essentially, the fin de siècle recreated the French Middle Ages.
The irony was undoubtedly not lost on Robida, who easily satirized the consumptive and ridiculous habits of his fellow Parisiens. Nor was the opportunity lost on him either. Adrien Mithouard argued that the Gothic was not a bygone historical era but a frame of mind, a view of the world, that could be resurrected from its subtle dormancy whenever the conditions were right or necessary. This passion for the Middle Ages presented Robida with the chance of rebuilding it along the Seine in a kind of nostalgic theme park prefiguring the castles of North America by half a century.
One guidebook described La Vieux Paris as where
are seen the quaint steep-roofed, half-timbered houses which still linger in some of the remote corners of France; the richly-wrought, antique weather vanes forming an attractive picture from the river; a castle with its donjon and moat just as it might have stood 'in the brave days of old'; tidy little shops filled with the deft creations of peasant fingers, with peasants themselves and townspeople, living as nearly as possible, in costume and occupation, the old fifteenth century days again.
Peasant fingers perhaps... The irony of Le Vieux Paris was that, as a critique of modernism, it was a thorough expression of it. Shoppes lined the thoroughfare of the Mediaeval city in miniature, selling both handcrafted gifts but also copious numbers of Robida portfolios. One could purchase Le Vieux Paris Guide: Historic, Scenic & Anecdotal for 80 cents, which provided maps, sketches and informative text. For quite a bit more, one could buy the Le Vieux Paris: Studies and Original Drawings, a collection of 50 concept sketches, color plates and still photos. One of the most ingenious was Gazette du Vieux Paris, a newspaper printed on vellum at the exhibit itself. Fourteen issues were printed, each sharing news, gossip and illustrations dealing with different periods of Mediaeval French history. At the end of the Exposition, all fourteen were bound together in a handsome volume.
Le Vieux Paris was one of the most successful exhibits at the Exposition, a paradox in plaster. Bemoaning the passing of antiquated guilds, it provided goods for purchase by the hungry and affluent middle class looking for material splinters of a past way of life. The whole exhibit was nested into an Exposition intended to glorify the progess and industry of turn-of-the-century France. It was a respite from the modern age made possible by it.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Locomotionisme
A satirical invention by Albert Robida:
Locomotionisme- Le Moteur A Voile: Locomotionism, Saving safety and cleanliness. No possible explosions. Oil, electricity and steam have many disadvantages, we count on the next Paris Marsailles race to triumphantly show the advantages of our engine.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Thomas Edison's L' Exposition Universelle de 1900 à Paris
In 1900, Thomas Edison sent his kinetoscope cameras to the Paris Exposition Universelle to capture the excitement of the city of lights. This is a special compilation of that footage that we have put together into a short film, including the Eiffel Tower, Moving Boardwalk, the Seine, Champs de Mars, Champs Elysees and more sights of the city.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Voyages Extraordinaires and the Spirit of Wonder
On this second anniversary of Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age we feel that it's worth once more reiterating the raison d'etre of our efforts and tackle its antithesis. Cynicism has numerous and varied forms by which is can creep up on us. In so doing, it deprives us of one of the most important, human and humane faculties with which we have been blessed: the spirit of wonder.
This past April, io9 commentator Charlie Jane Anders asked Is "Sense Of Wonder" Just A Code For Returning To Childhood?. A bit ruefully, Anders asks if the invocation of "wonder" is really just a call to regress to a childlike stage of innocence,
The problem with this, as Anders describes it, is that we can't - and more importantly shouldn't - remain children forever. The genuine problems of society are too grave to be dealt with by a band of Lost Boys living starry-eyed in a perpetual Neverland. Again,
For some, this isn't just an issue over what kind of Sci-Fi books one prefers reading, but rather a problem with the whole genre. Around the same time as Anders published her io9 article, one user of The Steampunk Forum launched a seasonal complaint that Science Fiction was distracting from going out and living life. Worse yet, indulging this Science Fiction is leading people to play make-believe in a way that devalues the efforts and status of those for whom Steampunk is a daily lifestyle. Ultimately, Science Fiction... any fiction... infantilizes.
More recently yet, Tor.com's Steampunk Month made a pretty consistent effort of degrading mere "Neo-Victorians" whose primary interest in Scientific Romances is not to work out race, gender and class conflicts. It seems that some are simply not Punk enough for Steampunk, even sullying it for real, true Steampunks. This is all quite understandable given how dreary the genre has become. "Dirty mecha", even dirtier characters, and abysmal dystopian worlds where ideas like "beauty", "sublimity" and "wonder" exist only as vestiges of colonial privilege for which one should feel ashamed.
How easy it would be to descend into cynicism. I can feel it rattling the bulwarks even as I write this piece, and more than once over the past two years have I felt the urge to throw up my hands in the face of such cynicism. When it is not only your interest in the genre that is coming under criticism by the hipsterati, but the very genre itself, one almost has to ask what makes it worth it anymore. Why perilously throw oneself into a twice-weekly defense of stolid Neo-Victorianism and naive appreciation of wonder?
Perhaps - by inclination, disposition or simple pathology - we cannot help but? Perhaps it is the nature of wonder that it forces us to reject the cynical approach of being too good, being too cool, or being too grown up for a genuine sense of wonder. God forbid that Scientific Romances should be reduced to little more than fashion and a wistful idea of what state the world ought to be. The last thing they should become is a lifestyle or, even worse, a movement! Rather, they have far greater reach as a worldview, as an antidote for viewing the world as it actually is in all its beauty and majesty and wonder.
This brings us back around to the criticism of Anders, that Science Fiction - or Scientific Romances before them - in fact does not equip us to grapple with the messy realities of the world as it actually is. She quotes from Nancy Kress, who meditated on the fancy of fictional pirates versus the horrifying reality of machinegun-toting criminals off the coast of Somalia:
The application to any tale of rollicking airship pirates or swashbucklers of the Caribbean is obvious.
Against this I respond that hearty Scientific Romances remind us not to fall into the trap of thinking that the outrageous, disgusting and fearful are more real than the beautiful, majestic and wonderful. It is the old cynic's smirking and lazy belief that because there is evil, God and good must not exist; that because all men be liars, there must be no such thing as truth. Is there any question about why Steampunk worlds (and contraptions) have become so horribly ugly and utilitarian? This was one of the greatest weapons that C.S. Lewis' Screwtape felt the hordes of Hell could employ: convincing humanity that demons were real and angels were not.
Quite deliberately, I think, Scientific Romances seek out the beautiful, majestic and wonderful as an antidote against cynicism. Before being commandeered, air-pirate-like, by begoggled fetish girls and DIY contraptors calling themselves "Punk", Victorian Science Fiction was a unique intersection of the romance of nature and science embodied in history through the lens of 19th century aesthetics. They spoke of exploration and progress without abandoning memory and tradition. To work from Jules Verne's intention, these were works of discovery with the capacity of teaching us something directly or opening our minds with a sense of wonder receptive to learning.
Verne took us around the world in the astonishingly rapid pace of 80 days and he took us thousands of leagues beneath the ocean waves. Conan Doyle took us deep into the Amazonian jungle to make a study of prehistoric life. Georges Méliès and Karel Zeman alike romanced us with the moon and stars. From the Sakura Wars franchise, one could derive a whole course in studying Japanese history, geography, mythology, spirituality and pop-culture. One would have to, simply to understand it. James Gurney worked from the highest order of palaeontological information in creating the fantastical Dinotopia, and even brainless eye-candy like Wild Wild West put Will Smith and a giant metal tarantula against the backdrop of historical events.
Anyone criticizing such enjoyments as infantile, effete or classist simply does not know what they are for. Nor does it stop with our tastes in novels, films and comic books. These things all point to the endless wonders of Creation and compel our active involvement. The closest kin to The Lost World is not a story about a dystopian future with mind-controlled dinosoldiers, but the local zoo. The nearest ally to A Trip to the Moon is your own city's astronomical society. Indeed, head outdoors, travel, gaze at the stars, with your anthology of Verne stories in hand!
However, all that said, H.G. Wells still terrified us with the horror of Martian invasion. Walt Disney took a travelogue of the Seven Seas and turned it into a meditation on atomic power. Scientific Romances have never shied away from addressing important and topical issues, nor should they. It would be impossible to discuss "the romance of nature and science embodied in history through the lens of 19th century aesthetics" without being conscious of the forces of history, positive and negative.
In fact, Scientific Romances beget a quite peculiar mindset. In order to fully enjoy them, one must be completely aware of their biases. We must be able to recognize the colonial impetus of Prof. Challenger and Captain Nemo, in order that we can study, understand and, if necessary, compartmentalize them. Otherwise, the romance of these stories would be buried beneath layers of uncomfortable Western guilt. Nor can we ignore bias in modern variations. Some people have criticized Dinotopia's utopian civilization. One of the biggest faults of Steampunk fiction is the tendency to fetishize the roguish poverty of the underclass and liberal characters without a serious examination of their own ugly side. A proper novel of the type wouldn't simply side with the suffragettes, but point out how temperance and eugenics were part and parcel of their recipe for social improvement. One of the feathers in the cap of Wild Wild West was its refusal to whitewash post-war racism. When faced with the genuine literature of the era, those sorts of facts are inescapable.
Furthermore, where would the Nautilus be without the conflicted, tortured specimen of humanity at her helm? What would a trip to the Lost World be without a young man gaining wisdom and strength from the journey? It is only when we feel ourselves to be too good and too cool for the masses of humanity that we forget how wondrous and amazing and frightening and awful each individual person's life is. It is only by losing our spirit of wonder at each person being made in the image of God Herself that we can presume to look down on them as worthless sheep.
G.K. Chesterton articulated this supreme value of fiction, scientific or otherwise:
There is wonder in each life and each tree, crying out from the mountaintops and the ocean depths and the billions of nebulae in the celestial spheres. The whole cosmos is full of more wonders than we can comprehend, an infinite pantheon spanning from the smallest child to the largest galaxy. Cynicism is the chronic condition of mistaking our own narrowness for a narrowness on the part of the cosmos, as though we were too great to be contained by it. One of the great gifts of Scientific Romances is to reopen our minds with the immensity of these wonders. It is to reclaim the gift of an amazing life in an amazing world.
This past April, io9 commentator Charlie Jane Anders asked Is "Sense Of Wonder" Just A Code For Returning To Childhood?. A bit ruefully, Anders asks if the invocation of "wonder" is really just a call to regress to a childlike stage of innocence,
It's a cliche to say "The Golden Age of science fiction is 14." When you're young and wide-eyed, all the universe's brilliance seems overwhelmingly new and awesome. Stories of exploration and conquest of the universe are fresh and thrilling, and the space hero's exploits feel like a proxy for your own process of finding your place in the world. It's the most awesome thing in the world, and you can keep experiencing that kind of excitement over and over again throughout your life - I still watch the original Star Trek on DVD and get a little thrill of excitement (mixed with nostalgia) again.
But "sense of wonder," to me, is another way of talking about a child's awe at the amazing bounty of creation. And I can't help but wonder, when I hear people pining for "sense of wonder," if they're really just wishing for the return of childhood innocence. The phrase "sense of wonder," itself, evokes a sense of wide-eyed awe, a childlike amazement.
The problem with this, as Anders describes it, is that we can't - and more importantly shouldn't - remain children forever. The genuine problems of society are too grave to be dealt with by a band of Lost Boys living starry-eyed in a perpetual Neverland. Again,
But here's the thing: growing up is important. We can't hold onto our innocence forever. Not that you can't stop and admire the awesomeness of the universe, of course — that never really goes away... But I often think people who talk about "sense of wonder" are clamoring for more than just an appreciation of how cool space is, how amazing huge machines can be. They want that awareness of scale — the realization of how small we are and how big the universe is — to dominate, maybe even to drive the narrative. And in turn, that sense of bigness can obscure, or prevent, an awareness of how messy and complicated human beings are, and how likely we are to make a mess.
For some, this isn't just an issue over what kind of Sci-Fi books one prefers reading, but rather a problem with the whole genre. Around the same time as Anders published her io9 article, one user of The Steampunk Forum launched a seasonal complaint that Science Fiction was distracting from going out and living life. Worse yet, indulging this Science Fiction is leading people to play make-believe in a way that devalues the efforts and status of those for whom Steampunk is a daily lifestyle. Ultimately, Science Fiction... any fiction... infantilizes.
More recently yet, Tor.com's Steampunk Month made a pretty consistent effort of degrading mere "Neo-Victorians" whose primary interest in Scientific Romances is not to work out race, gender and class conflicts. It seems that some are simply not Punk enough for Steampunk, even sullying it for real, true Steampunks. This is all quite understandable given how dreary the genre has become. "Dirty mecha", even dirtier characters, and abysmal dystopian worlds where ideas like "beauty", "sublimity" and "wonder" exist only as vestiges of colonial privilege for which one should feel ashamed.
How easy it would be to descend into cynicism. I can feel it rattling the bulwarks even as I write this piece, and more than once over the past two years have I felt the urge to throw up my hands in the face of such cynicism. When it is not only your interest in the genre that is coming under criticism by the hipsterati, but the very genre itself, one almost has to ask what makes it worth it anymore. Why perilously throw oneself into a twice-weekly defense of stolid Neo-Victorianism and naive appreciation of wonder?
Perhaps - by inclination, disposition or simple pathology - we cannot help but? Perhaps it is the nature of wonder that it forces us to reject the cynical approach of being too good, being too cool, or being too grown up for a genuine sense of wonder. God forbid that Scientific Romances should be reduced to little more than fashion and a wistful idea of what state the world ought to be. The last thing they should become is a lifestyle or, even worse, a movement! Rather, they have far greater reach as a worldview, as an antidote for viewing the world as it actually is in all its beauty and majesty and wonder.
This brings us back around to the criticism of Anders, that Science Fiction - or Scientific Romances before them - in fact does not equip us to grapple with the messy realities of the world as it actually is. She quotes from Nancy Kress, who meditated on the fancy of fictional pirates versus the horrifying reality of machinegun-toting criminals off the coast of Somalia:
When I was a kid, sometime back in the Triassic, I read a story about the hi-jacking of a space ship by rebel freedom fighters. I can't remember the name of the story or the author... What I do remember was my fifteen-year-old sense of awe: Something that really huge could just be stolen?
Now that Somalian pirates have actually stolen a huge oil tanker, holding 25 people hostage and using organized crime as the transfer point for millions of dollars in ransom, my visceral response is not "awe." Outrage, disgust, fear are closer.
The application to any tale of rollicking airship pirates or swashbucklers of the Caribbean is obvious.
Against this I respond that hearty Scientific Romances remind us not to fall into the trap of thinking that the outrageous, disgusting and fearful are more real than the beautiful, majestic and wonderful. It is the old cynic's smirking and lazy belief that because there is evil, God and good must not exist; that because all men be liars, there must be no such thing as truth. Is there any question about why Steampunk worlds (and contraptions) have become so horribly ugly and utilitarian? This was one of the greatest weapons that C.S. Lewis' Screwtape felt the hordes of Hell could employ: convincing humanity that demons were real and angels were not.
Quite deliberately, I think, Scientific Romances seek out the beautiful, majestic and wonderful as an antidote against cynicism. Before being commandeered, air-pirate-like, by begoggled fetish girls and DIY contraptors calling themselves "Punk", Victorian Science Fiction was a unique intersection of the romance of nature and science embodied in history through the lens of 19th century aesthetics. They spoke of exploration and progress without abandoning memory and tradition. To work from Jules Verne's intention, these were works of discovery with the capacity of teaching us something directly or opening our minds with a sense of wonder receptive to learning.
Verne took us around the world in the astonishingly rapid pace of 80 days and he took us thousands of leagues beneath the ocean waves. Conan Doyle took us deep into the Amazonian jungle to make a study of prehistoric life. Georges Méliès and Karel Zeman alike romanced us with the moon and stars. From the Sakura Wars franchise, one could derive a whole course in studying Japanese history, geography, mythology, spirituality and pop-culture. One would have to, simply to understand it. James Gurney worked from the highest order of palaeontological information in creating the fantastical Dinotopia, and even brainless eye-candy like Wild Wild West put Will Smith and a giant metal tarantula against the backdrop of historical events.
Anyone criticizing such enjoyments as infantile, effete or classist simply does not know what they are for. Nor does it stop with our tastes in novels, films and comic books. These things all point to the endless wonders of Creation and compel our active involvement. The closest kin to The Lost World is not a story about a dystopian future with mind-controlled dinosoldiers, but the local zoo. The nearest ally to A Trip to the Moon is your own city's astronomical society. Indeed, head outdoors, travel, gaze at the stars, with your anthology of Verne stories in hand!
However, all that said, H.G. Wells still terrified us with the horror of Martian invasion. Walt Disney took a travelogue of the Seven Seas and turned it into a meditation on atomic power. Scientific Romances have never shied away from addressing important and topical issues, nor should they. It would be impossible to discuss "the romance of nature and science embodied in history through the lens of 19th century aesthetics" without being conscious of the forces of history, positive and negative.
In fact, Scientific Romances beget a quite peculiar mindset. In order to fully enjoy them, one must be completely aware of their biases. We must be able to recognize the colonial impetus of Prof. Challenger and Captain Nemo, in order that we can study, understand and, if necessary, compartmentalize them. Otherwise, the romance of these stories would be buried beneath layers of uncomfortable Western guilt. Nor can we ignore bias in modern variations. Some people have criticized Dinotopia's utopian civilization. One of the biggest faults of Steampunk fiction is the tendency to fetishize the roguish poverty of the underclass and liberal characters without a serious examination of their own ugly side. A proper novel of the type wouldn't simply side with the suffragettes, but point out how temperance and eugenics were part and parcel of their recipe for social improvement. One of the feathers in the cap of Wild Wild West was its refusal to whitewash post-war racism. When faced with the genuine literature of the era, those sorts of facts are inescapable.
Furthermore, where would the Nautilus be without the conflicted, tortured specimen of humanity at her helm? What would a trip to the Lost World be without a young man gaining wisdom and strength from the journey? It is only when we feel ourselves to be too good and too cool for the masses of humanity that we forget how wondrous and amazing and frightening and awful each individual person's life is. It is only by losing our spirit of wonder at each person being made in the image of God Herself that we can presume to look down on them as worthless sheep.
G.K. Chesterton articulated this supreme value of fiction, scientific or otherwise:
Romance seeks to divide certain people from the lump of humanity, as the statue is divided from the lump of marble. We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer. Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who tell us the time, strangers who remark on the weather, beggars, waiters, and telegraph-boys — instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one so impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life, and demanding a larger sphere. Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to. All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions. What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity: people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humourist, or a murderer, or a man who has seen a ghost.
I do not believe that there are any ordinary people. That is, I do not believe that there are any people whose lives are really humdrum or whose characters are really colourless. But the trouble is that one can so quickly see them all in a lump, like a land surveyor, and it would take so long to see them one by one as they really are, like a great novelist. Looking out of the window, I see a very steep little street, with a row of prim little houses breaking their necks downhill in a most decorous single file. If I were landlord of that street, or agent for that street, or policeman at the corner of that street, or visiting philanthropist making myself objectionable down that street, I could easily take it all in at a glance, sum it all up, and say, “Houses at £40 a year.” But suppose I could be father confessor to that street, how awful and altered it would look! Each house would be sundered from its neighbour as by an earthquake, and would stand alone in a wilderness of the soul. I should know that in this house a man was going mad with drink, that in that a man had kept single for a woman, that in the next a woman was on the edge of abysses, that in the next a woman was living an unknown life which might in more devout ages have been gilded in hagiographies and made a fountain of miracles. People talk much of the quarrel between science and religion; but the deepest difference is that the individual is so much bigger than the average, that the inside of life is much larger than the outside.
There is wonder in each life and each tree, crying out from the mountaintops and the ocean depths and the billions of nebulae in the celestial spheres. The whole cosmos is full of more wonders than we can comprehend, an infinite pantheon spanning from the smallest child to the largest galaxy. Cynicism is the chronic condition of mistaking our own narrowness for a narrowness on the part of the cosmos, as though we were too great to be contained by it. One of the great gifts of Scientific Romances is to reopen our minds with the immensity of these wonders. It is to reclaim the gift of an amazing life in an amazing world.
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