Thursday, November 6, 2014


The Earliest Sci Fi?  Part II

                Most sci fi enthusiasts look back to H. G. Wells or Jules Verne as the founder of the genre, but its roots actually lie in 17th century France.  An excellent place to begin is with the strange novel The Estates and Empires of the Moon and The Estates and Empires of the Sun published anonymously in 1657 and 1662.  Known by various other titles in translation and sometimes under the collective title The Other World, these visionary books are the work of Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, a swordsman and philosopher generally recognized as the main figure in Edmond Rostand’s 19th century drama of the same name.  The real Cyrano was much more complex than Rostand’s long-nosed matchmaker, however.  Besides his reputed skill with a blade (rumors once had him taking on a mob of about 100 enemies at the Tour de Nesle), Cyrano was a daring thinker, frequenting the most daring and dangerous free-thinking circles of his age and excelling in theatre as well as in fiction. Many of his favorite authors, such as Bruno, Pico, and Cardano, had been banned by the church and sometimes arrested by the Inquisition.  Thus, it was for good reason that he did not publish his science fiction during his lifetime, but instead circulated it in samizdat-fashion as manuscripts among his trusted friends. 
                Amazingly, Cyrano boldly advanced into both hard (technological) and soft (intellect-oriented) science fiction.  His protagonist (anonymous in the first volume and dubbed with the anagram Dyrcona in the second) becomes interested in space travel after a night on the town with some drinking buddies and has a holographic close encounter associated with a passage in the works of the Italian scientist Cardano.  He ponders different means of achieving flight and first attempts to ascend with the aid of a matter-phase-transformation device based on evaporation.  This contraption actually sends him aloft, but not far enough, since he lands unexpectedly in early Quebec.  Trying a different kind of machine, he accidentally discovers the power of rockets and launches himself into space during a Midsummer celebration.  When he reaches the Moon (Cyrano precociously describes the Moon’s own gravity field), he is surprised to meet a succession of other earthly visitors, all figures from the Bible, who have preceded him.  Their methods of propulsion are all different from his own and range from the most fanciful (taking advantage of high water during the Deluge) through the metaphysical (prefiguring the astral projection in Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series) and including the most interesting to our time (a device based on electromagnetism).  However, terrestrial ex-pats are not the Moon’s only inhabitants in Cyrano’s universe, and he soon falls into the hands of an indigenous race of intelligent centaur-like creatures.  Soon after, he makes friends with an entirely different kind of life form, a long-living “corpse parasite” that reanimates and inhabits the dead bodies of other species, imparting wisdom through his cadaverous disguise.  Such a bizarre possibility has been revived often in sci fi, from the comical zombies in Ed Woods’s Plan Nine From Outer Space to the character of Jadzia Dax in Star Trek : Deep Space Nine.  The equine Selenians have quite a few technical wonders of their own, including entire cities that can move in sync with the weather.
                Perhaps the most interesting forecasts in Cyrano’s work concern not technology, but biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics.   The Selenians place the newcomer in a most awkward encounter situation, since they are reluctant to consider him an intelligent being.  Instead they try to turn him into a pet and to breed him with a Spanish gentleman who has already fallen into their clutches.  Their ambiguous relationship may be an original incidence of gay issues in outer space.  Eventually, with the help of his shape-changing friend, “The Demon of Socrates,” the protagonist shakes off the assigned identities of an ape or a bird and convinces the Selenians that he possesses something approaching their intelligence.  As he masters their musical language, he discovers that the Selenians enjoy an almost Utopian existence, complete with nearly free sex, a highly regulated and ridiculous form of warfare, and an advanced form of homeopathic medicine.  He becomes especially intimate with one of the females in the royal court – an implication of the first interspecies sexual encounter in the history of science fiction.  As the first volume reaches a crescendo of religious satire, the protagonist is whisked back to Earth in mysterious fashion, but later, once again with the assistance of the Demon of Socrates, he navigates to the vicinity of the Sun in a spacecraft of alien design that is apparently proton-powered. 

                There is a new translation of Cyrano’s work by Sophie Lewis, under the title Voyage to the Moon, that makes it more accessible to twenty-first century readers than those of Lovell, Aldington, or Derreck.    Hopefully, it will bring new awareness to sci fi followers of the contributions of this great pioneer who acted as a major influence on the 19th century masters who launched the genre in popular fiction among the English-speaking reading public.  

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