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Chapter 1: Introduction Notes Chapter 1: Introduction 1. F. Bacon (n.d.) ‘The New Atlantis’, in H. Morley (ed.), Ideal Commonwealths, 10th edn (London: Routledge, and New York: Dutton), p. 202. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition. 2. G. Claeys (2011) Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London: Thames & Hudson), p. 151. 3. M.I. Finley (1967) ‘Utopianism Ancient and Modern’, in K.H. Wolff and B. Moore, Jr (eds), The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), p. 13. 4. K. Kumar (1991) Utopianism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 54, 59. 5. A. Huxley (1971) Brave New Worldd (London: Folio Society), p. 154. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition. 6. Kumar (1991), p. 55. 7. See E. Hansot (1974) Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press), p. 100. 8. See B. Goodwin and K. Taylor (1982) The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (London: Hutchinson), p. 63. 9. It is sometimes claimed that the whole social structure of Plato’s Republicc is based on a ‘noble lie’. For a brief commentary, see Plato (1987) The Republic, trans. D. Lee, 2nd edn (London: Penguin), p. 177. 10. On politics in News from Nowhere, see R. Levitas (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Societyy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 111. 11. Kumar (1991), p. 55. 12. Goodwin and Taylor (1982), p. 63. 13. L.T. Sargent (2010) Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 104; Kumar (1991), pp. 11–12. 14. H.G. Wells (2005) A Modern Utopia, ed. G. Claeys and P. Parrinder (London: Penguin), p. 11. 15. The exact generic relationship between utopia and science fiction has been much debated, and few would now accept Darko Suvin’s somewhat reductive view of utopia as the ‘sociopolitical subgenre’ of science fiction. See D. Suvin (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press), p. 61; also G. Paschalidis (2000) ‘Modernity as a Project and as Self-Criticism: The Historical Dialogue between Science Fiction and Utopia’, in K. Sayer and J. Moore (eds), Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 35–47; and P.E. Wegner (2014) ‘Utopianism’, in R. Latham (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 573–83. 16. Hansot (1974), pp. 9, 97. 189 190 Notes 17. Ibid., p. 95. 18. T.S. Kuhn (1962) The Structure of Scientifific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). 19. See e.g. C.H. Waddington (1941) The Scientifific Attitude (Harmondsworth: Penguin); B. Russell (1931) The Scientifific Outlook (London: Allen & Unwin). 20. F. Jameson (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 10–11, 184. 21. Jameson’s use of this term perhaps reflects his own disbelief in the ability of modern utopian thinkers to resolve the formal dilemmas of the classical utopia that he outlines: its purported timelessness, and its aim of resolving all political differences and material difficulties while also spurring us into some kind of action. See Jameson (2005), p. xiv. 22. The nineteenth-century satirical utopias such as Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (both published in 1872) are entirely lack- ing in Shelley’s dark romanticism. 23. J.W. von Goethe (1987) Faust: Part One, trans. D. Luke (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). 24. The fellows of Salomon’s House are, in fact, divided into four different cat- egories of specialist, including the ‘interpreters of Nature’, tasked with gener- ating new scientific theories, and the ‘dowry-men or benefactors’, entrusted with translating new discoveries into ‘things of use and practice for man’s life and knowledge’ (210–11). 25. On the role of ‘desire’ in the definition of utopia, see R. Levitas (1990) The Concept of Utopia (New York and London: Philip Allan), esp. pp. 7–8. 26. O. Stapledon (1972) Star Makerr (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 16. 27. K.S. Guthke (1990) The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction, trans. H. Atkins (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press), p. 353. 28. J.B.S. Haldane, ‘Auld Hornie, F.R.S.’, Modern Quarterlyy 4 (Autumn 1946), 32–40. 29. See e.g. R. Coward (1983) Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). 30. V. Nabokov (1980) Lectures on Literature, ed. F. Bowers (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), p. 280. 31. J. Raulerson (2013) Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Centuryy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 4. Chapter 2: Beyond the Telescope: From Astronomy to (Dystopian) Fiction 1. ‘Democritus Junior’ (1879) The Anatomy of Melancholyy (London: Tegg), p. 327; E. Bloch (1986) The Principle of Hope, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight (Oxford: Blackwell), I, p. 12. 2. H.G. Wells (1936) wrote about Burton in the opening pages of The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis (London: Cresset Press); he uses the epithet ‘warehouse-like’ on p. 13. On Burton’s utopianism, see V. Fortunati and R. Trousson, eds (2000) Dictionary of Literary Utopias (Paris: Champion), pp. 49–50. Notes 191 3. O. Stapledon (1972) Star Makerr (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 16. 4. See Bloch (1986), and R.L. Stevenson (1920) ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus), pp. 175–6: ‘Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory’. 5. J. Kepler (1965) Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messengerr, trans. E. Rosen (New York and London: Johnson Reprint), esp. p. 39. See also S.J. Dick (1982) Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kantt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 22, 77. 6. Lucretius (1951) On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 91–2. 7. See Dick (1982), p. 27. 8. D.W. Singer (1950) Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, with Annotated Translation of His Work ‘On the Infifinite Universe and Worlds’’ (New York: Henry Schuman), pp. 54–7; and see also Guthke (1990), pp. 38–41. 9. Singer (1950), p. 45. 10. Ibid., p. 323. 11. Dick (1982), p. 93. 12. ‘Democritus Junior’ (1879), pp. 327–8. 13. Photography largely superseded real-time observation in the late nineteenth century, and the radio-telescope came to dominate the twentieth century. Significantly, in Fred Hoyle’s 1957 novel The Black Cloud, the Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge admits that the only times he actually looks through a telescope are when he has to show visitors round his observa- tory; Hoyle (1960) The Black Cloudd (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 41. Nevertheless, optical telescopes remain necessary for various kinds of astro- nomical observation. 14. I. Calvino (1997) ‘Two Interviews on Science and Literature’, in The Literature Machine, trans. P. Creagh (London: Vintage), p. 31. 15. In John Banville’s historical novel about Kepler’s life (1981), no sooner has the great astronomer started using his new telescope than he begins to grumble about the repeated optical strain of ‘peering into the sky’. J. Banville (1999) ‘Kepler’, in The Revolutions Trilogyy (London: Picador), p. 439. 16. J. Kepler (1967) Kepler’s ‘Somnium’: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy, trans. E. Rosen (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 109n. 17. Quoted in M.H. Nicolson (1960) Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan), p. 26. 18. Ibid., pp. 127–9. 19. I.B. Cohen (1961) The Birth of a New Physics (London: Heinemann), p. 135; G. Galilei (1989) Siderius Nuncius or The Sidereal Messengerr, trans. A. van Helden (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 103–4. 20. Kepler (1967), ‘Introduction’, p. xvii. 21. Ibid., pp. 125, 128. 22. Kepler (1965), p. 28. 23. C. de Bergerac (1976) Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and Sun, trans G. Strachan (London: New English Library), p. 30 (title of ch. 2). 24. Wells owned the 1893 Shilleto edition of Burton’s Anatomy, although it is not known when he acquired it. See D.Y. Hughes and H.M. Geduld, 192 Notes eds (1993) A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds: H.G. Wells’s Scientifific Romance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), p. 195. 25. F. Godwin (1972) The Man in the Moon (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and New York: Da Capo Press), esp. pp. 73, 102–5. 26. J. Wilkins (1973) The Discovery of a World in the Moone (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints), p. 207. 27. Dick (1982), p. 131. 28. On Adams, see M.J. Crowe (1986) The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 202–14; H.B. Franklin (1978) Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Centuryy (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 292–3; Nicolson (1960), pp. 241–2. 29. M.H. Nicolson (1956) Science and Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books), p. 25. 30. Guthke (1990), pp. 232, 239–40, 266. 31. Crowe (1986), pp. 265–7; Guthke (1990), p. 332. 32. Crowe (1986), p. 335. 33. For a full account see R. Crossley (2011) Imagining Mars: A Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), especially chs. 3 and 4. 34. Guthke (1990), p. 356. 35. Among the many scholarly accounts of Mars fiction, Crossley (2011) is now the most authoritative. 36. E. Bellamy, ‘The Blindman’s World’, in Franklin (1978), p.
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