The Road to Science Fiction Read online

  The first is that males and not females do the child-bearing. Marriage is with males, and there isn’t even a word for “woman.” Men under twenty-five are the wives, men over, the husbands. The embryo is carried not in the belly but in the calf. Once conception takes place, the calf swells up; after a due period of time it is cut open and the child, not yet alive, extracted. Life is induced by placing the child, mouth wide open, toward the wind. It’s my opinion that the Greek word for calf, which literally means “belly of the leg,” came to us from the moon, since there the calf and not the belly serves as the region of gestation.

  I shall now describe a second phenomenon which is even stranger, namely the race called “tree people.” The procreation of tree people is as follows. A man’s right testicle is cut off and planted in the ground. This produces a huge tree of flesh with a trunk like a penis. It has branches and leaves and, as fruit, bears eighteen-inch acorns. When ripe, these are gathered, the shells cracked open, and men are hatched from them.

  Moonmen have artificial penises, generally of ivory but, in the case of the poor, of wood; these enable them to have intercourse when they mount their mates.

  They never die of old age but dissolve and turn into air, like smoke.

  The diet is the same for everyone: frog. Every time they light a fire they grill frogs on the coals because there’s such a plentiful supply of these creatures flying about. While the cooking goes on, people seat themselves in a circle around the fire as if at a table and have a banquet sniffing in the smoke that’s given off. Frogs provide their food; for drink they compress air in a cup to produce a liquid resembling dew.

  They don’t urinate or defecate. They have no rectal orifice so, instead of the anus, boys offer for intercourse the hollow of the knee above the calf, since there’s an opening there. A bald pate or no hair at all is considered a mark of beauty: they can’t stand men who wear their hair long. (Among the inhabitants of the comets, on the other hand, the opposite is true, as some natives who were visiting the moon informed me.) They do, however, wear beards which grow a little above the knee. Their feet terminate in a single toe, and they have no toenails. Above the rump grows a cabbage which hangs down like a tail; it’s always ripe and doesn’t break off even when they fall on their backs.

  Their nasal discharge is a very bitter honey. When they work or exercise they sweat milk from every pore; by adding a few drops of the honey, they can curdle this into cheese. They make oil not from olives but onions, a rich grade that smells as sweet as myrrh. Their vines, which are plentiful, are a water-producing variety since the grapes are a form of hailstone; it’s my theory that, when the wind blows and shakes the vines, the clusters burst and this produces hail on earth.

  They use the belly as a pocket, putting into it whatever they need to carry with them, for it can be opened and closed. No liver is visible inside, only a rough, furry lining; infants consequently snuggle in there during cold weather.

  The wealthy wear clothes of flexible glass and the poor of woven copper. The country is rich in copper; it’s worked the way we work wool, by being soaked in water.

  I am going to describe the kind of eyes they have, though I hesitate to do so since you’re sure to think I’m lying. They have removable eyes: whenever they want they take them out and keep them safe until they need them; then they put them back and have sight again. Many who have lost their own borrow other people’s, and some men, all well-to-do of course, own a good supply of spares. Everybody has ears of plane-tree leaves except the men hatched from acorns; theirs are of wood.

  Another marvel I saw was in the royal palace. Here there is an enormous mirror suspended over a rather shallow well. If you stand in the well, you hear everything said on earth; if you look at the mirror, you see each city and nation as clearly as if you were standing over it. When I took a look, I saw my own homeland and my house and family; I can’t say for sure whether they saw me.

  Any person who doesn’t believe that all this is so need only go there himself. He’ll quickly discover I’m telling the truth.

  When the time came, we bid farewell to the king and his court, embarked, and set off. Endymion gave me as a goodby gift two glass and five copper shirts and a suit of lupinehusk armor, all of which I left behind in the whale. He also sent a thousand of the Buzzard Cavalry to escort us for the first fifty miles. On the way we passed a number of other countries but didn’t stop till we came to the Morning Star, which we found in the course of being colonized. Here we disembarked and took on water. Boarding ship again, we entered the Zodiac and passed the sun close to port, almost touching the shore. We didn’t land, although my men were very anxious to, because the wind was foul. We could see, however, that the countryside was green and fertile, well-watered, and full of good things. The Cloud-Centaurs, who are in Phaëthon’s pay, spotted us and came after our ship but, on learning we were protected by the treaty, turned back. Our Buzzard Cavalry escort had left us earlier.

  We continued sailing that night and the next day and, toward evening, when we had already begun the slant down to earth, arrived at Lampville. This city is located in mid-air halfway between the Pleiades and the Hyades, at a much lower altitude than the Zodiac. On going ashore, we found no humans but only great numbers of lamps scurrying about or lounging around the main square and the waterfront. Most were small, the lower classes as it were; a few, the rich and influential, were conspicuously bright. The lamps had each their own house and bracket, bore names the way we do, and were capable of speech (we heard them talking). They did us no harm but actually offered hospitality; we, however, were afraid, and not one of us had the courage to accept their invitations to dine or spend the night. Downtown they have a city hall where the mayor, sitting in judgment all night, calls up each lamp by name. Those who don’t answer are considered deserters and receive the death penalty, namely snuffing out. We stood around watching the proceedings, listening to the lamps defend themselves and submit their reasons for being late. At one point I recognized my own lamp. I spoke to it and asked how things were back home, and it gave me a full account.

  We stayed the night there and the following day raised sail and set off again. By this time we were down among the clouds. We sighted Cloud-cuckooland and wondered about it but couldn’t put in because of an unfavorable wind. We did receive word, however, that Jay Crow was on the throne. I was minded how people had foolishly been skeptical of what the playwright Aristophanes had written; he was a wise man who told the truth. Two days later we could see the ocean clearly. No land was visible except, of course, the islands in the air, and these now had a fiery bright aspect. On the third day, toward noon, the wind slackened off to a gentle breeze, and we landed on the surface of the sea. The moment we touched water we went hysterical with joy; we celebrated as best we could under the circumstances and then jumped overboard for a swim since the day was calm and the sea smooth. . . .

  Strange Creatures and Far Traveling

  Like the Roman gods, much of Roman literature seemed to follow Greek models, for example the Aeneid, the Latin Odyssey, by Vergil (70–19 B.C.). Aeneas was a mythical Trojan prince who fled with his followers from the fall of Troy and made his way around the Mediterranean to Italy, where his descendants founded Rome. The epic contains a celebrated episode in which Aeneas descends into the underworld to consult with his dead father, Anchises, which inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  Elements of the fantastic continued to be represented in Roman narratives of various kinds. One example is The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses of Apuleius (A.D. second century), in which the hero is changed into a donkey and experiences various misadventures. Gilgamesh and the Odyssey were prototypical travel stories. Herodotus (c. 480-425B.C.), the Greek “father of history,” carried on the tradition, describing not only his authentic travels but also fabled countries that lay beyond the realm of human experience and their strange inhabitants: the Ethiopians, who lived beyond the mountains at the source of the Nile; the Sycthians, who lived
beyond the Euxine Sea; and the Hyperboreans, who lived at the back of the North Wind.

  These classical fancies would be adopted by later fantasy writers, particularly the heroic fantasy school created by Robert E. Howard. Howard introduced Conan the Conqueror with the following epigraph attributed to “The Nemedian Chronicles”:

  Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamt of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamara with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom, of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholics and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

  In another sense, the Ethiopians, the Scythians, the Hyperboreans were aliens—strange creatures, not quite human, fascinating but possibly dangerous, who live in places hard to find and difficult to reach. The Romans picked up the old Greek stories and added their own embellishments. Their storytellers described the Fortunate Isles, where there were men with elastic bones and bifurcated tongues; the island of Panchaia, where incense grew; the valley of Ismaus, where the feet of wild men turned inward; Albania, where albinos lived; a place inhabited by hermaphrodites. And they told of the Arimaspi, who passed their lives fighting for gold with griffins in the dark; of the Psyllians, whose bodies were poisonous to snakes; of a race of fascinators who used enchanted words; of women who killed with their eyes. . . .

  Some of the fascination of the alien would be taken over by later science fiction as authors dealt with the possibilities of other ways of existence, other ways of behaving, other ways of appearing. To that would be added a more important consideration: how will humanity relate to aliens, and how will they and humanity interact? The sense of wonder eventually gives way before the wonder of sense.

  After the fall of Rome, literary concerns were lost in the general concern for staying alive; the only significant literary effort was to preserve and copy classical manuscripts. But oral literature was reborn, chiefly in the form of epics about the deeds of heroes, such as the eighth-century Beowulf and the twelfth-century Nibelungenlied or the French romance cycle of Charlemagne typified by the Song of Roland. The twelfth century also provided the first great literary treatment of the Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes, and of Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Most of these stories involved dangerous journeys, battles with other men and with monsters or dragons, and sometimes a quest for something transcendent; these elements too would be reflected in later science fiction.

  Meanwhile, in the developing Arabic civilization that gave Europe much of its mathematical knowledge, other kinds of legends were being accumulated that would not be translated into English until the nineteenth century under the title of The Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights. From them later writers would get the fantasy stories of Ali Baba, Aladdin and his magic lantern, and Sindbad and his fabulous voyages, flying carpets, rocs, and all.

  Dante (1265–1321) summed up the medieval Christian attitude toward the natural and the supernatural in his great work, The Divine Comedy (c. 1307-1321), in which Vergil escorts the poet on a tour of the Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice escorts him through Heaven. Meanwhile the small world of Europe was suddenly expanded by the return of Marco Polo from China to Venice in 1295, with information about a fantastic civilization to the east, as rich and almost as strange as any imagined in the Greek and Roman travel stories.

  In the fourteenth century Boccaccio (1313-1375) wrote his Tales and then, after the outbreak of the Black Death in Europe, his Decameron, and the great travel book of the late Middle Ages, The Voiage and Travaille of Sir John Mandeville, became popular all over Europe.

  Ostensibly the account of the travels of one Sir John Mandeville (or Maundeville), Kt., but probably a collection of old and new travel stories put together by an anonymous compiler, the book is subtitled, “which treateth of the way to Hierusalem; and of marvayles of Inde, with other ilands and countryes.” One of the earliest editions in English contained the following information:

  Here begynneth the book of John Maundeville, Knyght of Ingelond, that was y bore in the toun of Seynt Albons, and travelide aboute in the world in manye diverse contreis to se mervailes and customes of countreis, and diversiteis of folkys and diverse shap of men, and of beistis, and all the mervaill that he say he wrot and tellith in this book. . . .

  The sample that follows illustrates the appeal of the book and the manner in which fact and fancy are mingled.

  From The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville

  CHAPTER XVIII

  OF THE PALACE OF THE KING OF THIS ISLE OF JAVA—OF THE TREES THAT BEAR MEAL, HONEY, WINE, AND VENOM; AND OF OTHER WONDERS AND CUSTOMS, IN THE ISLES THEREABOUTS

  Beside the isle I have spoken of, there is another great isle called Sumobor, the king of which is very mighty. The people of that isle made marks in their faces with a hot iron, both men and women, as a mark of great nobility, to be known from other people; for they hold themselves most noble and most worthy of all the world. They have war always with the people that go all naked. Fast beside is another rich isle called Beteinga. And there are many other isles thereabout.

  Fast beside that isle, to pass by sea, is a great isle and extensive country, called Java, which is near two thousand miles in circuit. And the king of that country is a very great lord, rich and mighty, having under him seven other kings of seven other surrounding isles. This isle is well inhabited, and in it grow all kinds of spices more plentifully than in any other country, as ginger, cloves, canel, sedewalle, nutmegs, and maces. And know well that the nutmeg bears the maces; for right as the nut of the hazel hath a husk in which the nut is inclosed till it be ripe, so it is of the nutmeg and of the maces. Many other spices and many other goods grow in that isle; for of all things there is plenty, except wine. Gold and silver are very plentiful.

  The king of that country has a very noble and wonderful palace, and richer than any in the world; for all the steps leading to halls and chambers are alternately of gold and silver; and the pavements of halls and chambers are squares of gold and silver; and all the walls within are covered with gold and silver in thin plates; in which plates are inlaid stories and battles of knights, the crowns and circles about whose heads are made of precious stones and rich and great pearls. And the halls and the chambers of the palace are all covered within with gold and silver, so that no man would believe the richness of that palace unless he had seen it. And know well that the king of that isle is so mighty, that he hath many times overcome that great chan of Cathay in battle, who is the greatest emperor under the firmament, either beyond the sea or on this side; for they have often had war between them, because the great chan would oblige him to hold his land of him; but the other at all times defendeth himself well against him.

  After that isle is another large isle, called Pathan, which is a great kingdom, full of fair cities and towns. In that land grow trees that bear meal, of which men make good bread, white, and of good savour; and it seemeth as it were of wheat, but it is not quite of such savour. And there are other trees that bear good and sweet honey; and others that bear poison, against which there is no medicine but one; and that is to take their own leaves, and stamp them and mix them with water, and then drink it, for no medicine will avail. The Jews had sent for some of this poison by one of their friends, to poison all Christendom, as I have heard them say in their confession before dying; but, thanked be Almighty God, they failed of their purpose, although they caused a great mortality of people. And there are other trees that bear excellent wi
ne.

  And if you like to hear how the meal comes out of the trees, men hew the trees with a hatchet, all about the foot, till the bark be separated in many parts; and then comes out a thick liquor, which they receive in vessels, and dry it in the sun; and then carry it to a mill to grind, and it becomes fair and white meal; and the honey, and the wine, and the poison, are drawn out of other trees in the same manner, and put in vessels to keep. In that isle is a dead sea, or lake, that has no bottom; and if anything fall into it, it will never come up again. In that lake grow reeds, which they call Thaby, that are thirty fathoms long; and of these reeds they make fair houses. And there are other reeds, not so long, that grow near the land, and have roots full a quarter of a furlong or more long, at the knots of which roots precious stones are found that have great virtues; for he who carries any of them upon him may not be hurt by iron or steel; and therefore they who have those stones on them fight very boldly both on sea and land; and, therefore, when their enemies are aware of this, they shoot at them arrows and darts without iron or steel, and so hurt and slay them. And also of those reeds they make houses and ships, and other things, as we here make houses and ships of oak, or of any other trees. And let no man think that I am joking, for I have seen these reeds with my own eyes many times, lying upon the river of that lake, of which twenty of our fellows might not lift up or bear one to the earth.

  Beyond this isle men go by sea to another rich isle, called Calonak, the king of which has as many wives as he will; for he makes search through the country for the fairest maidens that may be found, who are brought before him, and he taketh one one night, and another another, and so forth in succession; so that he hath a thousand wives or more. Thus the king has many children, sometimes a hundred, sometimes two hundred, and sometimes more. He hath also as many as fourteen thousand elephants, or more, which are brought up amongst his serfs in all his towns. And in case he has war with any of the kings around him, he causes certain men of arms to go up into wooden castles, which are set upon the elephants’ backs, to fight against their enemies; and so do other kings thereabouts; and they call the elephants warkes.