Cyrano de Bergerac: Grandfather of Voyages Extraordinaires

Though regarded as the father of Scientific Romances, and therefore the grandfather of Science Fiction, Jules Verne was not without his antecedents. Going far back, very far, into the earliest of literature that could be considered a forerunner of the genre, Verne looks to a fellow countryman. He is none other than the man most famous for his nose, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Published posthumously in 1657, de Bergerac was the first Frenchman to take a fantastic journey to the Moon. The Other World: The Societies and Governments of the Moon is one of the first of the Enlightenment satires that would evolve, over the following centuries, into Voyages Extraordinaires.

The advent of the Enlightenment provided two of the most fundamental ingredients to speculative fiction. The first was a fresh breeze of scientific inquiry borne out of Galileo's celestial discoveries. Through the use of his telescope, Galileo was able to chart the motions of Jupiter's moons and Venus' phases, overturning the Aristotelian model of a geocentric cosmos. Johannes Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo, wrote up his scientific speculations in a novel entitled Somnium, published in 1634. In Somnium, an Icelandic sleeper is spirited away by lunar demons through magical processes during a solar eclipse. From his vantage point on the Moon, he is able to observe the phases of the Earth in a rousing defense of Copernican astronomy.

The second ingredient was a heady air of liberty that allowed social critics to write freely their observations on humanity. The new worlds opened up to the imagination by Galileo's telescope provided the perfect staging ground for commentary. Like much Science Fiction ever since, alien races become proxies for our own foibles and models for our own possibilities. De Bergerac's Other World is one such tale.

Cyrano de Bergerac lived fast and not for very long. He died at the age of 36 by a freak accident, after a falling beam in a friend's house crushed him and left him too sickly to survive an onslaught of disease. Before that, he was a renowned duellist and soldier during the Thirty Years War. He was a poet and possibly homosexual, which leaves open the question of the famous Roxane, for which was supposed to hold a torch. Like many details of de Bergerac's life, the love triangle between him, Roxane and Christian was fabricated by playwright Edmond Rostand. This includes his nose, which by accounts was large but not of the size suggested in later legend. Most likely, de Bergerac's great romance was with fellow libertin writer and poet Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, after which the two viciously attcked each other with the quill. Besides writing public satirical tracts against each other, de Bergerac went so far as to send florid death threats.

De Bergerac, like so many "Freethinkers", was a better believer in Reason than a user of it. Nevertheless, he was a biting critic of his times. Making use of Galileo's new worlds, he took a fanciful visit to the Moon to observe the customs of its strange people. Like Kepler and author Bishop Francis Godwin before him, de Bergerac was less concerned with a credible means of getting to the orb. Kepler's man was kidnapped during an eclipse, and Godwin's arrived on an airship pulled by geese. De Bergerac had a slightly more difficult time of it. His first attempt was to use bottles of dew attached to his person. As the morning light rose, so too would the dew, carrying him along. This fails and lands him, thanks to the Earth's rotation, in New France, the colony of Quebec. In Quebec - which at the time of publication was on the eve of its 50th anniversary and is today the oldest continued permanent settlement in North America - de Bergerac fashioned an airship that also failed. Finally the airship was converted into a rocket, intended for the St. Jean Baptiste Day celebrations, which conveys him to the stars.

Once on the lunar orb, Cyrano makes a series of startling discoveries: the Moon is, in fact, the Garden of Eden. After nourishing himself on the Tree of Life, he encounters Elijah and learns the history of Biblical spacefarers. Banished because of their culinary oversight Adam and Eve literally took flight to Earth. Enoch, on the other hand, was taken up to the Moon by bottling the smoke of a pious burnt sacrifice. Noah's daughter simply washed ashore after absconding with the Ark's lifeboat. Elijah used a golden chariot of his own construction, repeatedly tossing a magnetic ball into the air and letting the chariot soar upwards towards it, repeating the process until he arrived.

These are not the Moon's only inhabitants, however. After taking a bite from the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, with its ambiguous mix of omniscient fibre and ignorance-inducing peel, de Bergerac is introduced to spacefarers from the Sun who have set up their colony on La Lune. He is a bit more comfortable with these Rationalists than he is with the Biblical prophets. Godwin's astronautical pioneer also makes an appearance, when he is mistaken for a type of monkey and de Bergerac mistaken for a female of the species.

Several authors followed in the footsteps of de Bergerac. Voltaire elicited the help of aliens to satirize human self-importance in the face of a vast cosmos. Simon Tyssot de Patot critiqued religion and the arts via a lost world in 1710's Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Massé. Louis-Sébastien Mercier visited L'An 2440. Jonathan Swift took Gulliver around the planet to its many strange and varied societies. Baron Munchausen himself visited Diana several times. Washington Irving used The Conquest of the Moon as a parable of American expansionism. Fellow American George Tucker took the first steps in transforming these satires into Scientific Romances by taking a great deal more care in making plausible the means by which his persona took A Voyage to the Moon in 1827. Then there was Poe, and Verne.

De Bergerac was at work on a second story - The Societies and Governments of the Sun - when he passed away. What remains are muddled tales about his nose and his love life, and a classic ancestor to Scientific Romances. Disney recognized his contribution in the program Man in Space, where a history of rocketry includes an interlude from The Other World animated by Ward Kimball. Karel Zeman also paid respects to the poet by including him as one of the denizens of the moon, along with the explorers of Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Baron Munchausen in the film Baron Munchausen (1961).

For us, the intrepid Donald Webb has provided an English translation and annotations to The Other World: The Societies and Governments of the Moon.

Space Travel in 1918

The following excerpt from a 1918 children's encyclopedia shows the immense distances of celestial objects by how long it would take for them to be reached by a flying machine travelling at a whopping two miles a minute. Click for a larger image.

John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds

Some people, despite their topmost efforts, celebrity, or wealth in life, are best remembered for the manner of their death. John Jacob Astor IV is one such man: a millionaire born to a wealthy American dynasty, he graduated Harvard and obtained a rank of colonel in the Spanish-American War to become the richest man to die aboard the Titanic.

Born to the blue-blooded Astor family in 1864, John Jacob inherited the best possible circumstances for the time. He went to the best schools and utilized the skills learned there to increase his wealth through real estate. He built New York's famous Astoria Hotel, which adjoined to the hotel built by and named for his cousin, William Waldorf Astor. With this wealth he indulged his love of invention, patenting a type of bicycle brake, a turbine engine, a pneumatic road improver, and a means of producing gas from peat moss. In 1898 he joined the ranks as a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish-American War, whereupon he fought in Cuba. As a celebrity capitalist, he was no stranger to scandal: Astor divorced his wife of 18 years to marry 18 year old Madeleine Talmadge Force in 1911. Shunned and gossiped about, the pair went on a tour of Europe and Egypt in the company of Molly Brown, herself a nouveau riche outside of the aristocratic cliques of New England society. Madeleine became pregnant on the trip and they were forced to return home aboard the most luxurious ocean liner ever built. Madeleine made it back to New York. John did not.

John Jacob Astor is also notable for having tried his hand at writing a Scientific Romance in the style of Jules Verne, entitled A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future. This 1894 novel is a work of retro-futurism, being set in 2088, and exposes Astor's fixation on the issues of his time as only a work charting the future course of humanity can reveal. The first two-thirds wax on history and exploration from the very defined perspective of a millionaire capitalist, and the last third expands into a strange but sympathetic treatise on philosophy, morals and life after death.

A Christmas Dinner with the Man in the Moon

Could there be any more pleasing a Christmas dinner than one spent in the mansions of the Moon's prime minister? Or a more charming Christmas evening that one spent with Uncle Jack telling you about it? Thus comes Washington Gladden's delightful tale of a trip to the lunar surface aboard the Great Aerial Line, the ways of life of its inhabitants, and a scientific mystery that the arrival of earthlings has solved.

A Christmas Dinner with the Man in the Moon was published in the December 1880 edition of St. Nicholas Magazine and is presented here in full, with original illustrations by Victor Nehlig. Gladden, a Congregationalist minister most famous as a pioneer of the Social Gospel movement, a unionization advocate, and anti-segregationist, was also an author of hundreds of poems, stories, and religious tracts. A Christmas Dinner with the Man in the Moon resurfaced in Gladden's 1894 anthology Santa Claus on a Lark: and Other Christmas Stories. Click on each page for a larger version.

Merry Christmas!

George Chetwyn Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space

Quite often, both the chief delight and the greatest challenge of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances is the quality of the language. Earnest, effervescent, sometimes overwrought 19th century prose can, in the right hands, not only describe the scene with vivid intensity but convey the mood of overstuffed Victorian formality. In less capable hands they are a mulch of jagged cliches, stilted dialogue, and bizarre Eurocentric racial attitudes. Thankfully George Chetwyn Griffith was a much more accomplished writer than many. Granted, he certainly has his share of melodrama, unrealistic conversations, and objectionable views towards the ethnic characteristics of Martians (as well as clumsy prose: "I wonder if the descendants of the ancestors of the future human race on Saturn will invent anything like a suitable language."). Nevertheless, Griffith's background as a journalist prepared him to deliver his forays into Scientific Romance with the pitch of a Jane Austin novel set in space.

For your consideration, this extended excerpt from the opening chapter of his 1901 novel A Honeymoon in Space, in which "the tall athletic figure and the regular-featured, bronzed, honest English face" of Rollo Lenox Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, Baron Smeaton in the Peerage of England, and Viscount Aubrey in the Peerage of Ireland, appears in his flying machine to whisk Miss Lilla Zaidie Rennick and her chaperone away from a trans-Atlantic steamer on its way to an arranged marriage of economic convenience...

Mrs. Van Stuyler was shaking in every muscle, afflicted by a sort of St. Vitus' dance induced by physical fear and outraged propriety. Quite apart from these, however, she experienced a third sensation which made for a nameless inquietude. She was a woman of the world, well versed in most of its ways, and she fully recognised that that single bound from the bridge-rail of the St. Louis to the other side of the clouds had already carried her and her charge beyond the pale of human law.

The same thought, mingled with other feelings, half of wonder and half of re-awakened tenderness, was just then uppermost in Miss Zaidie's mind. It was quite obvious that the man who could create and control such a marvellous vehicle as this could, morally as well as physically, lift himself beyond the reach of the conventions which civilised society had instituted for its own protection and government.

He could do with them exactly as he pleased. They were utterly at his mercy. He might carry them away to some unexplored spot on one of the continents, or to some unknown island in the midst of the wide Pacific. He might even transport them into the midst of the awful solitudes which surround the Poles. He could give them the choice between doing as he wished, submitting unconditionally to his will, or committing suicide by starvation.

They had not even the option of jumping out, for they did not know how to open the sliding doors; and even if they had done, what feminine nerves could have faced a leap into that awful gulf which lay below them, a two-thousand-foot dive through the clouds into the waters of the wintry Atlantic?

They looked at each other in speechless, dazed amazement. Far away below them on the other side of the clouds the St. Louis was steaming eastward, and with her were going the last hopes of the coronet which was to be the matrimonial equivalent of Miss Zaidie's beauty and Russell Rennick's millions.

They were no longer of the world. Its laws could no longer protect them. Anything might happen, and that anything depended absolutely on the will of the lord and master of the extraordinary vessel which, for the present, was their only world.

"My dearest Zaidie," Mrs. Van Stuyler gasped, when she at length recovered the power of articulate speech, "what an entirely too awful thing this is! Why, it's abduction and nothing less. Indeed it's worse, for he's taken us clean off the earth, and there's no more chance of rescue than if he took us to one of those planets he said he could go to. If I didn't feel a great responsibility for you, dear, I believe I should faint."

By this time Miss Zaidie had recovered a good deal of her usual composure. The excitement of the upward rush, and what was left of the momentary physical fear, had flushed her cheeks and lighted her eyes. Even Mrs. Van Stuyler thought her looking, if possible, more beautiful than she had done under the most favourable of terrestrial circumstances. There was a something else too, which she didn't altogether like to see, a sort of resignation to her fate which, in a young lady situated as she was then, Mrs. Van Stuyler considered to be distinctly improper.

Griffith was most famous in his day for his political novels of future war, such as Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893) and Olga Romanoff (1894). Pure cosmic explorations were more rare, and he restrained himself from the socialist revolutionary views that he injected more freely into his war books. These views likely limited his appeal in the United States, but perhaps enhanced his appeal in the milieu of public debates between Victorian-Edwardian England's intelligentsia. Between 1893 and 1895 he was considered the most popular English writer of Scientific Romances, until Wells usurped him.

A Honeymoon in Space was originally serialized in Pearson's Magazine as Stories of Other Worlds, before being collected into a single volume in 1901. The change in title is significant. Though still suggesting considerable adventure and wonder, the idea of a honeymoon also implies a certain comfort and familiarity... A domestication of outer space. While his protagonists Lord and Lady Redgrave are exploring uncharted territory, Griffith is not. Based on popular conceptions of cosmology and evolution in his day, Griffith retreads the ground of the celestial spheres as a study in the pathways of human development. 

The Future of the Earth, According to Cosmo

The Future of the Earth by Nobel Prize-winning Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was originally published in the March 1918 volume of Cosmopolitan. As futurism, it is not very specific with technological, social, or evolutionary hypotheses. But in the context of the Great War raging on around it, it is a marvelous sermon. "It is well, sometimes," he says towards the end of his article, "to tell ourselves, especially in these days of distress and discouragement, that we are living in a world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer to its beginning than to its end." It is advice still worth heeding. 

Accompanying the article is a magnificent illustration titled The Earth with the Milky Way and Moon by Wladyslaw T. Benda.

The Great Moon Hoax

Of all the giants of scientific endeavour, perhaps none are as significant to history as Sir John Herschel. Already an accomplished astronomer and natural philosopher - having written A preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy in 1831, which in turn inspired many scientists including a young Charles Darwin - Herschel departed for South Africa in 1833 in order to chart the courses of the southern stars. It was there that he developed his greatest invention and made the greatest discovery in the history of the human race.

The report delivered by the New York Sun on Tuesday, August 25th, 1835. Its announcement read:

In this unusual addition to our Journal, we have the happiness of making known to the British publick, and thence to the whole civilized world, recent discoveries in Astronomy which will build an imperishable monument to the age in which we live, and confer upon the present generation of the human race a proud distinction through all future time. It has been poetically said, that the stars of heaven are the hereditary regalia of man, as the intellectual sovereign of the animal creation. He may now fold the Zodiack around him with a loftier conscientiousness of his mental supremacy.

It is impossible to contemplate any great Astronomical discovery without feelings closely allied to a sensation of awe, and nearly akin to those with which a departed spirit may be supposed to discover the realities of a future state. Bound by the irrevocable laws of nature to the globe on which we live, creatures "close shut up in infinite expanse," it seems like acquiring a fearful supernatural power when any remote mysterious works of the Creator yield tribute to our curiosity. It seems almost a presumptious assumption of powers denied to us by divine will, when man, in the pride and confidence of his skill, steps forth, far beyond the apparently natural boundary of his privileges, and demands the secrets and familiar fellowship of other worlds.

We are assured that when the immortal philosopher to whom mankind is indebted for the thrilling wonders now first made known, had at length adjusted his new and stupendous apparatus with the certainty of success, he solemnly paused several hours before he commenced his observations, that he might prepare his own mind for discoveries which he knew would fill the minds of myriads of his fellow-men with astonishment, and secure his name a bright, if not transcendent conjunction with that of his venerable father to all posterity.

And well he might pause! From the hour the first human pair opened their eyes to the glories of the blue firmament above them, there has been no accession to human knowledge at all comparable in sublime interest to that which he has been the honored agent in supplying; and we are taught to believe that, when a work, already preparing for the press, in which his discoveries are embodied in detail, shall be laid before the public, they will be found of incomparable importance to some of the grandest operations of civilized life.

Well might he pause! He was about the become the sole depository of wondrous secrets which had been hid from the eyes of all men that had lived since the birth of time. He was about to crown himself with a diadem of knowledge which would give him a conscientious pre-eminence above every individual of his species who then lives, or who had lived in the generations that are passed away. He paused ere he broke the seal of the casket which contained it.

To render our enthusiasm intelligible, we will state at once, that by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and entirely new principle, the younger Herschel, at his observatory in the Southern Hemisphere, has already made the most extraordinary discoveries in every planet of our solar system; has discovered planets in other solar systems; has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon, fully equal to that which the naked eye commands of terrestrial objects at the distance of a hundred yards; has affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what order of things; has firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena; and has solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.

This understandably florid prose led to the news of the greatest discovery by the accomplished Herschel: life on the moon!

An illustration of Herschel's discoveries.

These fantastic revelations by advanced telescope technology were, of course, a hoax. The perpetrator seems to have been reporter Richard Adams Locke, in a publicity stunt for the Sun. By the sixth and final installment on August 31, 1835, the public was inflamed, Edgar Allan Poe was incensed, Jules Verne was inspired, and the Sun's readership was permanently inflated. Herschel was said to have been amused by the whole thing. The Great Moon Hoax was to the 19th century what Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast was to the 20th, and what the entire "fake news" dilemma is to the 21st.

Celestial Visions of the Reutlinger Photography Studio

Of the photography studios of Paris during  La Belle Époque, perhaps none were more famous than Reutlinger. Started in 1850 by Charles Reutlinger, the studio quickly rose to prominence as photographer to the stars of the theatrical stage. The business passed to Charles' brother Emile in 1880, and from him to his son Léopold in 1890. Under Léopold's initiative, the studio branched out to a brisk and creatively fruitful trade in fanciful postcards blending true photography with interesting backdrops, frames, and effects. Among the most provocative of his subjects were renditions of women among the celestial bodies. The following is a selection of Reutlinger postcards...