#71 = Volume 24, Part 1 = March 1997 |
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ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
I.F. ClarkeBefore and After The Battle of DorkingAbstract. --The astounding success of Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871) popularized a new thematic model for futuristic fiction--preparedness for "the next war." The present essay traces the evolution of this fictional theme from its beginnings in several 1793-94 "historical anticipation" plays in France during the French Revolution to the cautionary "future-war" narratives of H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle in the early years of the twentieth century. Particular emphasis is given to the state of European affairs leading up to and immediately following Chesney's tale, to the narrational modes and graphic propaganda used in such stories before him, and to the publishing history of The Battle of Dorking itself. Other authors and works discussed include Maréchal Sylvain's Le jugement dernier des rois (1793), James Gillray's "The First Kiss These Ten Years" (1802), Lous Geoffroy's Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836), Edmund Ruffin's Anticipations of the Future (1860), Abraham Hayward's "The Second Armada" (1871), Augustin Garçon's La Bataille de Londres en 188- (1885), Wells's The World Set Free (1914), Doyle's "Danger" (1914), and George Haven Putnam's America Fallen (1915), among many others. View Accompanying Illustrations.
Christine Kenyon JonesSF and Romantic Biofictions: Aldiss, Gibson, Sterling, PowersAbstract. -- This paper considers modern sf fictions and biofictions featuring Romantic-period writers, including works by Brian Aldiss, Tim Powers, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Amanda Prantera, and Tom Holland. It considers how the identification by Aldiss and others of Mary Shelley as the "founding mother" of sf has generated an interest in the lives of Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and other Romantic-period poets and writers, who have become the subject for time-travel novels and fictions set in an alternate 19th century. It discusses proto-sf themes in Romantic-period works, such as Percy Shelley's and Byron's interest in the theory of Catastrophism. It illustrates the various sf-type angles taken on the reworking of biography by this range of authors, including computer recreations of personality and neo-Gothic interpretations of historical events. It explores the unexpected similarities between biofiction and cyberpunk novels in the treatment of personality, showing how both sub-genres have a postmodern approach to a breaking down of individuality and selfhood. It concludes that Romanticism and postmodernism are the two ends of an arch celebrating human individualism, and that these biofictions link the Neuromancer--or "New Romancer"--and the Old Romancers by both celebrating and driving a postmodern stake through the heart of Romantic biography. David KettererFrankenstein's "Conversion" from Natural Magic to Modern Science--and a Shifted (and Converted) Last Draft InsertAbstract. -- "Write Ch. [3 cancelled]2‡." This puzzling entry in Mary Shelley's journal for 27 October 1816" (the birth date of sf if Frankenstein is indeed the first true example of the genre) is explained as referring to a Last Draft insert headed "Chapt. 2" which describes the first stage of Frankenstein's supposed "conversion" from the ancient philosophers to modern science. This insert, originally intended either as an entire chapter preceding what became Chapter II of Volume I of the 1818 Frankenstein or as the opening section of that chapter, was subsequently shifted back into the preceding chapter. Then, most probably at the Fair Copy stage, it was revised and divided into two portions which replace material in the Last Draft cancelled immediately before and immediately after Frankenstein's description of his witnessing an oak destroyed by lightning. Since the issue of Frankenstein's "conversion" determines the generic identification of the novel as sf (perhaps the first such), and bears on the case for viewing sf generally as a mixed material/metaphysical genre, a detailed analysis of the relevant manuscript and published variants follows. The variant term "natural magic," which appears twice in cancelled form in the Last Draft and nowhere in the 1818, 1823, and 1831 editions, accounts for significant aspects of the published and manuscript texts--the invocation of nature spirits, the term "dÊmon," references to the moon, and various "active," "sublime," landscapes, phenomena, and forces. These "traces" of natural magic significantly counter the impression that, in turning to modern science, Frankenstein entirely forsook the old philosophers. At the same time, the relatively clean writing on the British notebook leaves (the second half of the Last Draft), which seem closer to a previous, now lost rough draft ur-Frankenstein, which the Last Draft roughly copies, than the more heavily revised writing on the Continental notebook leaves, seems also closer to an original more purely gothic and supernatural conception. The overlaid sf conception is largely confined to what appears on the Continental leaves and, especially, the "Chapt. 2" insert on British leaves (and the corresponding 1818 text).
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