British Future Fiction : 1700 -1914

edited by I. F. Clarke (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001, 8 vols.: xxxviii, 439 ; 696 ; 540 ; 701 ; 428 ; 498 ; 598 ; 506 pp, £550)

edited by Gillian Bickley (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2001, xiii, 303 pp, £24)

by Humphrey Hawksley (Pan, 2001, 430 p. £6.99)

reviewed by Andy Sawyer

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This eight-volume collection follows Gregory Claeys’s Modern British Utopias, 1700-1850 (1997: reviewed [by I. F. Clarke] in Foundation 71 (Autumn 1997). Both might be called proto-science fiction, although Clarke’s preface and general introduction tend to skirt around the term, for what some might consider to be irritatingly academic reasons but which have considerable theoretical justification. The preface sets out a number of assumptions which are worth considering. This is future fiction (a term Clarke has always favoured), not science fiction and the apparent terminological nitpick allows us to focus on both form and content. Simply, these are, first, fictions which existed before the term "science fiction" suggested itself to anyone except that lonely pioneer William Wilson; second, they are fictions whose common thread is not science or technology but the Future.

Clarke tells us in his first paragraph that the texts he chooses show how Time replaced Space as the location for an imaginary realm of speculation. One reason for this might be that, with the physical geography of the world increasingly mapped, the location of a Utopia or any sort of "anomalous" place had to move away from the Fields We Know (although "lost race" fictions and conveniently obscure settings in the Poles or the Earth’s Core remained popular settings after the close of the period concerned with here). More specifically, the idea of the future, that, say, a utopia was not something which could be imagined in a symbolic location but actually aspired to and achieved, or that the nature and structures of a society could evolve over time, took over. Even in the anonymous Reign of George VI (1763), which imagines a Twentieth Century in which warfare is still carried on by cavalry and cannon, sea transport by means of sail, offers (what is more important to the author than technological fantasy), political speculation. The old monarchies are basically there, but the shape of Europe has changed over the centuries.

One might go on from here to suggest that as Time replaced Space, so (and this is where science rather than future fiction might crystallise) the Einsteinian space-time continuum has replaced both. A utopian novel such as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is distance in both space and time. Clarke’s avoidance of the term "science fiction" in his short preface is interesting. I am, in general, increasingly intolerant of the avoidance of the term (from within the community as well as without) which still seems to me to be the most convenient umbrella terms for a wide range of concepts and stances concerning speculative fictions about science/knowledge with relationship to human society. But Clarke’s longer general introduction does, however, provide a perfectly good reason for the use of his term. "Future fiction" [he writes] "is the only term we have to cover the immense range of these projects and anticipations -- utopias, dystopias, coming wars, interplanetary journeys, Last Man stories, and the many varieties of science fiction." I would certainly quarrel with "the many varieties". There are certainly varieties of science fiction which are not "future fiction": alternate history, for example, or much fiction involving speculative senses like telepathy (such as Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside). But many of the other categories he cites are only science fiction by a kind of backwards-through-time absorption. By considering the "tale of the future" as a concept we’re free from the tyranny of genre; the Whig interpretation of sf which has it as a focal point of diverse and often competing subgenres. Clarke’s model gives us a way of looking at how the future became an important concept. Just as the past was not the same as the present (which of course was by no means obvious) so the future will be different. The spurs for this are philosophical or political -- the Enlightenment, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution -- rather than a simple response to science and technology, although Clarke does point to specific technologies, such as the Montgolfier balloon of the 1780s and its successors, as sparking off a wave of speculation about the social and military effects of this new mode of transport.

Clarke’s selection and arrangement of texts shows the range of themes within this genre. The first volume, "The Beginnings" contains The Reign of George VI (1763) and Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, first published anonymously in Blackwood’s (1871). As hinted above, the Reign is a political tract rather than a work of speculation. Essentially an account of how the young George VI, in the early years of the Twentieth Century, defeated the old enemies Russia and France, it demands for fuller understanding a rather greater knowledge of the political and military history of the time of George III than most readers nowadays would bring to it, although by reprinting the 1899 C. Oman edition with its helpful introduction and footnotes, Clarke overcomes many of these cultural hesitancies. The Reign’s alternate twentieth century is odd to modern eyes, not so much for its slightly dislocated political geography as that its warfare is still carried out with cavalry and cannon and sail. We might compare this level of speculation with that of William Delisle Hay’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1881) from the second volume, in which we find a much greater degree of extrapolation: new methods of energy such as the "Basilistic Force, "majestic argosies that move through the air", and major political changes. One answer, of course, lies in context. It was surely a mixture of confidence in technological progress and political/racial anxieties which caused Hay to address a Victorian audience from an imaginary vantage-point far in the future, but his invented future, as all are, is one through which we can see his present. By Hay’s time, the essential ingredients of what was still to be called science fiction (that the world, including its life forms, was different and will be different; that science and technology have changed society and could change it further; that political institutions can be transformed by human will and/or the afore-mentioned conditions; and that a number of works of fiction exist in which at least some of these questions have been discussed) were in place. For the author of the Reign, such questions were the province of the other-where of the traditional utopia. The other-when had the more pragmatic function of political propaganda.

Hay’s "Basilistic Force" is almost certainly a nod to Bulwer-Lytton’s "vril", perhaps the only aspect of The Coming Race which is still remembered. One question worth asking is how far The Coming Race (published in 1871 and set in "18--") is future fiction. Clarke answers this by suggesting that Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator is "the prototype of the time traveller". By his physical journey underground, he is also making a symbolic journey into the future when this race of evolved beings will have supplanted us. Immensely popular in its time, The Coming Race is at times tedious reading as we are lectured in true "Utopian travelogue" style about the world of the Vril-ya, although its deconstruction of Victorian ideas of progress and its reassignment of gender roles are still of interest. Bulwer-Lytton is struggling with the form which this new fiction calls for, and we see now, through many examples, that the traveller’s tale or lecture-tour can evade as well as emphasise the contrasts of an alternate society. Nevertheless, we also see here how the narrator is describing a society which is far in advance of his own, charting concepts not clearly understood , and in episodes such as his abortive attempts to use wings, the ponderous comedy of Zee’s infatuation with the narrator, and the increasing sense of peril (". . . it would depend upon the individual temper of some individual sage whether you would be received, as you have been here, hospitably, or whether you would not be at once dissected for scientific purposes.") Bulwer-Lytton gives us a chill forewarning of "our inevitable destroyers". The future is by no means a comfort. Religious millenarianism may bring apocalypse, but at least the chosen will be saved. Here, there are no chosen. There are merely the fittest, those who physically and socially are more effectively shaped by heredity and environment to survive than we are.

Volume two, "New Worlds" explores some further aspects of this anxiety about the future. Hay’s already-mentioned future (a prototype of the future-histories of Wells and Stapledon, with its aerial argosies, undersea cities, and transformation of nations) would make an astonishing source for present-day future-fictions. But while we are shown the Anglo-Saxon hegemony of Europe and the Middle East in a future bubbling with "progress", Hay clearly also wishes to makes his English readers’ flesh creep with his narrative of an Irish revolt in the not-too distant future sparking off a general collapse into anarchy and an eventually restored mini-state, shorn of both Empire and wealth. The racism of Chapter 10, which specifically argues that the "inferior races" of humanity, though divorced from one common stock, are not capable of developing along similar lines, and culminates in an act of Nazi-like genocide; and the system of government which is the apotheosis of the Victorian fashion of putting women upon pedestals as long as they do not worry their pretty little heads about politics, will cause shudders in the soul of every good liberal. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, Three Hundred Years Hence is a remarkable projection of hopes and dreams and a true science-fictional future-history, right down to the conclusion which looks towards expansion into space.

Balancing Hay’s "progress" is the icy pastoralism of W. H. Hudson’s utopian future in A Crystal Age (1887). Clarke draws our attention to the beehive-like structure of the family with one fertile couple, and there is, as in The Coming Race a certain amount of humour in the narrator’s callowness. Sexuality is almost completely hidden within the Families, in contrast with the sensual undertones of William Morris’s News From Nowhere (serialised 1890), too well-known to be included here. Hudson’s destruction of the mechanism he disliked in the Victorian age is echoed in different form in the first novel in the third volume, William Grove’s The Wreck of a World (1889) which moves in an almost opposite imaginative direction towards the speculative creation of a world where machines develop autonomy. The use of steam supplemented by hydraulic, pneumatic, and electric appliances works up to an almost Lovecraftian climax as is revealed to the horrified gaze of an engineer, by the side of one of the half-described miracles of the Machine Age, "ANOTHER ENGINE NEVER MADE BY THE HAND OF MAN!" Unfortunately this climax comes early in the novel, after which, fleeing the victorious machines, the narrator’s band of survivors become a Utopian community in the Pacific. The narrator’s long-lost daughter is found, a rejected suitor goes on a voyage of discovery, and that is about it. Louis Tracy’s An American Emperor (1897) is presented as another novel of mechanistic triumphalism, and does indeed include a vast geo-engineering scheme which results in the creation of an inland sea in the Sahara (also defeating the native inhabitants of the region but they of course are only savage tribesmen and don’t count). But it is more of a hymn to robber-baron capitalism and the American Millionaire rather than mechanism per se: Vansittart is the richest man in the world but the beautiful princess he admires will only accept an Emperor of France. This he sets out to become -- with a romantic twist as the Princess realises that she is really in love with the vacuous Prince Henri (who is the rightful claimant) and Vansittart falls for his best friend’s sister. Interestingly, this is virtually the only presence in this selection of that staple of American future-fiction which was to crystallise in those Heinleinian competent billionaires who buy their way to the moon and beyond.

Volume five, however, possesses similar figures, but they are not competent men. Before we reach them, however, Clarke shows us the debate on "Women’s Rights: Yea and Nay" in volume four. Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man (1882) satirises feminist pretensions in its picture of a world ruled by women in which men are the oppressed class, subject to arranged marriages with elderly harridans and the knowledge of "their proper place". In its inverted picture, though, it cannot help suggesting that Victorian patriarchy could be otherwise, and if Besant is defending the Patriarchy he is also attacking the class system. It is tempting to read this inversion as a class satire aimed in part at his own gender. The Revolution ends with comments about the middle class and the "feeble youths" among them who cannot adapt to change, although all is Royalistically constitutional in the end. In contrast, Henry Robert Samuel Dawson’s Lesbia Newman, despite its hearty nomenclature (surely naming characters Lesbia and Friga must have sounded dodgy even in 1889?) and rather wooden characters offers more of a debate. Beginning as a contemporary novel of upbringing (it is Lesbia’s uncle and guardian rather than any feminist propagandist who argues for women to be brought up with "masculine" liberties) Lesbia Newman soon "gallops off into the future" and presents a somewhat unconvincing picture of feminist liberation linked to the catholic Mary-cult.

Volume 5 ("Women Triumphant"), however, gives us two strong female characters shaping and changing their worlds. Clarke is here selecting from a number of stories which form a sub-genre even as does the better-known "future-war" fiction -- or in fact, he is reminding us that future-fiction is perhaps more a means than anything so reductive as a genre. The anonymously (but almost certainly female) -authored Star of the Morning (1906) is in part a contemporary political novel (there is much about railways and urban poverty as well as "condition-of-women") but it is interestingly framed as a science-fiction text, with a prologue set in 2384 introducing a text written in 1970 or thereabouts fifty years after the events described therein to create a wish-fulfilment narrative placed ambiguously in time. The novel portrays the rise of the actress Karyl Pendragon (surely a reference back to another timeless Pendragon?) who by a combination of force of personality, intelligent manipulation and outright feminine wiles rises to be Queen of England and forces through women’s suffrage and legal reforms for working women. Passionate, vividly depicting the social problems of the early twentieth century, the novel is also somewhat chilling in its solutions. The Sex Triumphant (1909), written by a man (Arthur Charles Fox-Davies), also features a strong-minded woman torn by love and political duty, but there is more of a sense of a mass-movement behind the fight for Suffrage, as well as much amusement as the women exploit for their own ends the inequity of the legal system: the fact that at the time a married woman could not actually be prosecuted for debt (which was deemed to be that of her husband) offers grounds for a combination of economic sabotage and gender war. Like Karyl, Lady Godfrey, one of the feminist leaders, addresses Parliament, but the climax, involving military confrontation and a macabrely literal interpretation of one MP’s claim that the "advantage of [male] sex" incurs the right of legistlation involving chloroform, an operating theatre and two female surgeons is of course the passing of the Suffrage Act. Conveniently for the book’s audience it turns out to be a formality as most women (including the most active leader) choose a domestic life instead.

Volume six, "The Next Great War" focuses upon that major section of the nineteenth century future-fiction, and one which is a feature of many of the texts so far described, the future-war story. The invasion fears which created such stories as Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) are no doubt based upon a multiplicity of causes: the incompetence shown by the British army in the Crimean War and the recent and astonishing German victories in 1870 are no doubt only part of the picture. Sometimes the invader is France, sometimes Germany: that this was not a purely British phenomenon is shown in Clarke’s reprinting of Continental examples in (LUP). Separated from its propagandist motives, The Battle of Dorking, which spawned sixteen reprints of Blackwoods, is an occasionally moving and frequently dramatic story, foreshadowing the Wellsian revelling in destruction of the landscape in The War of the Worlds and the British disaster story, and by no means as purely jingoistic or chauvinist as later examples. Abraham Hayward’s The Second Armada (1871) is a rejoinder to The Battle of Dorking, and in its subtitle "a chapter of future history" we can see a new genre forming. Other stories in this volume rail at the lack of preparation for war of the British military. The refugee scene in William Francis Butler’s conservative anti-capitalist polemic The Invasion of England is reminiscent of Wells. The Siege of London (1884), by the pseudonymous "Posteritas" begins like a history textbook, and only a reasonably detailed knowledge of the later 19th century would suggest where exactly it segues into a future history. Such fact-piling-upon fact sometimes results in a sense of sterility: neither James Eastwick’s The New Centurion (1895) nor Sydney Eardley-Wilmot’s The Next Naval War (1894) are much more than tracts. However, the seventh volume’s future-disasters are remarkable. The Death Trap (1907) of Robert William Cole (the author, according to Clarke, of an "early space opera" in which the benefits of the Empire are taken to the stars) has a Machievellian German Kaiser offering an ultimatum to a British Prime Minister who refuses to read the telegram presenting it until he has finished his golf game. As they always do, the British tars and Tommies fight valiantly but are betrayed by the frivolity and incompetence of their leaders. Horrific scenes of carnage and destruction resulting in guerilla warfare in London are prominent in the novel, and while Britain wins through the efforts of the military dictator Eagleton it is also by means of Japanese aid and the tale ends with a list of the corruptions which have brought the country to this humiliating pass: one of which, interestingly, is the lack of women’s suffrage.

Lloyd Williams’s The Great Raid (1909) combines the melodramatic story of a young man who has ruined himself with an invasion of 100,000 foreigners who have infiltrated Britain in mall groups (carrying their uniforms, arms and ammunition in theor luggage). Among his adventures, Guy is captured by the enemy and escapes in an airship. Interestingly, the pacifist parson Ambrose Mayne is as brave in his way as any soldier, but the novels ends with a call for service and Kipling’s "The Children’s Song" from Puck of Pook’s Hill. The third story in this volume, Under the Red Ensign (1912) is noted as "anonymous" but the author, Spencer Campbell’s, name is on the title page facsimile and the author’s note. Here, the German plot is to use economic as well as military strategies, with hints of treacherous demagogues and strike leaders. More interesting than the secret-agent plot, perhaps, is the preface, where the author disowns animosity towards German, but says that the rivalry between the countries is one of natural competition. The message here, as in so many other examples, is that peace can only be maintained by preparation for war.

The final volume, "The End of the World" offers more apocalyptic stories than in the previous two, from a tradition which Clarke traces from its beginnings with de Grainville’s Le Dernier Homme (1805) or much earlier, if religious apocalypses in prose or art are to be counted. Meditations on the last days or a race or nation are surprisingly common -- not surprisingly as dead civilisations were all around the North European literati on their Grand Tours of the Mediterranean regions -- and this became quite a staple of the Romantic sensibility: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) was the first English prose fiction wording of this theme, but her late husband had already trodden this territory with "Ozymandias". William Deslisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880) is a pulpish account (as told by a New Zealander in 1942) of the last days of London, struck by a deadly fog. John Davidson’s The Salvation of Nature (1891) is another destruction of industrialism in which Scotland is razed and rebuilt as an Arcadian utopia, a recreation ground: until humanity is all but wiped out by a plague which only a proto-Adam and Eve survive. Finally, Robert Hugh Benson’s The Lord of the World is a Catholic polemic from a future-world divided into three superstates run by a Marxist/Masonic hegemony which becomes controlled by the Big Brother-like Felsenburgh, who is Antichrist. There are some interesting science-fictional touches in this future world, including rocket transport and euthanasia for the terminally ill and injured, and Benson’s climax is certainly dramatically the most appropriate choice with which to round off this volume. Mabel Brand, the wife of a British bureaucrat, who reacts to Felsenburgh’s growing apotheosis with at first adoration, and then finally distrust, is the most interesting character, still at the last unable to accept Christianity as an intellectual system, but the novel’s place as a true science-fiction retelling of the Apocalypse is perhaps undermined by its very determination of the truth of its own model. Science fiction speculates: propaganda persuades. Here, as in a number of these texts, there is no room for speculation, for it is the actual Biblical Apocalypse, shorn of its symbolism but nevertheless there, which is being played out. We cannot, without dismissing Benson’s thought-processes entirely, argue with him (although affirmed sceptics might note that the agnostic James Blish offers a similarly attractive picture of his own "Satanic" world in A Case of Conscience while it is possible -- just, and by means of twisting Benson’s logic -- to read the ending of The Lord of the World as the final triumph of Felsenburgh).

What futures do these fictions offer? Very little that is attractive, it has to be said. Even the utopian elements presented to us here are chilling. Yet, ironically, these futures of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century pale in comparison to some of those which science fiction is going to bring us in the coming hundred years. Clarke’s epilogue points to Capek’s RUR as a new chapter in the debate with scientific materialism, while 1945 brought visions of destruction which only Wells, perhaps, of these writers’ co-fantasists could ever have dreamed of. Crude though some of these fictions are, they nevertheless present a fascinating slice of the late-Victorian dreamworld. The price, even for an eight-volume set, takes your breath away, but many of these texts are extremely rare and Clarke’s scholarship offers us a remarkable viewpoint of the way the future has become more and more important as fictional territory.

The texts presented are facsimile copies of the copy-texts (original editions in most cases, except where subsequent editions have informative essays, footnotes, or introductions). Illustrations, however, are not always reproduced. The fact that the sources are not always the first editions means that attention has to be given to the contents pages (where for instance The Reign of George VI is dated 1899). Wells, of course, is the great absence as far as this series is concerned, but there are numerous accessible versions of Wells’s classics and these volumes both contextualise his scientific romances and remind us that he was by no means the only figure to speculate about coming events. Nor, as the example of the "future war" sub-genre shows us, was he the only writer to speculate about the future in order to influence its final shape. If this didactic element is part if the problem, as we see when we read some of the more tedious examples in the sixth volume, it is also part of the interest, as we see in the following fictional invasion of Hong Kong.

The anonymous author of The Back Door, considering the shape of the defences of Hong Kong in 1897, presents a text which was immediately sent to the Colonial Office and which, Gillian Bickley argues, may have influenced the Japanese invasion of 1941. Bickley has done a remarkable job in resurrecting this fiction, which was originally serialised in the South China Mail and issued as a pamphlet immediately afterwards. While this is not the only future-war from a colonial viewpoint (there were certainly Australian examples), Bickley rightly stresses the rarity of this stance: although the wording is ambiguous there is a clear inference that the invasion by the French and Russians is part of the wider downfall of the British Empire, but it is the colonial position of the invasion’s victims which is important. The Hong Kong residents naturally see themselves as central to events, but Hong Kong belongs to the Colonial power. "They face in two directions at once."

The rather slim text of The Back Door is presented with a detailed apparatus of notes and maps, identifying characters and place-names, summarising the relationships between these fictional events and those of 1941, and contextualising the story in the history of Hong Kong. Occasionally, for readers without a background in Hong Kong culture and politics, this overwhelms the text itself: many of the footnotes, for instance, explain rather elementary literary concepts or idiomatic expressions. Nevertheless, this taking such a text to depth and detail is a rather brilliantly fortuitous coda to Clarke’s eight-volume series, for its colonial situation and narrow focus allow Bickley to re-create what such a fiction meant to its audience. More even than most British examples, this is a work which aimed not so much to entertain (although it was clearly meant to entertain as does, for example a roman à clef or fan-fiction or any other fiction which assumes its readers will recognise each other) but to stimulate discussion. In a sense, what we have here is a kind of case-study of what such a text does as a means of communication.

In his introduction, I. F. Clarke suggests that narrative patterns echo The Battle of Dorking and wonders if the author had read William Le Queux’s The Great War in England, published earlier that year. Clearly the author, who may have been a military officer or member of the Hong Kong Police force, knew the colony intimately, for most of the characters are lightly-disguised versions of real people, and there are other detailed contemporary references, some of which, interestingly, may provide clues to two of the main puzzles Bickley leaves unsolved. A somewhat intrusive reference in the last few sentences to "Poor Blobs" might be the act of an author offering a key to his identity: "Blobs" is identified as A. P. Nobbs of the Hong Kong Volunteer Company who is mentioned as contributing to the 1897 Volunteers’ Training Camp Gazette. Bickley points out that "those participating in the camp already knew under what disguised name they featured in The Back Door", which completed serialisation the day before the camp began. However, it could be that "Blobs" was the man’s usual nickname, and that he wrote The Back Door or was well-known by the actual author. Secondly, The Back Door (subtitled "a sketch of what might happen") must be the oddest of "future war" stories, for although the invasion "begins" on 23rd September 1897, the serial was not begun until a week later. Could it be an early example of "alternate history"? It could be, of course, as Bickley suggests that it was written earlier: but it might also be that it was deliberately set by its author in the past because of its real characters, for otherwise many of its readers (presumably including friends and acquaintances) would be reading about their own deaths in the near future.

This is clearly an interesting publication from the viewpoint of Hong Kong studies (and it clearly ought to be mined for colonial attitudes, for one particular aspect) but from the viewpoint of "future fiction" it reminds us of the way that particular discourse becomes almost a natural way of communicating. And this discourse is by no means dead. "Future war" stories are still published and the fact-laden, didactic nature of the form is still present in works like Humphrey Hawksley’s Dragonfire, which separates its scenes of cinematic action with "briefing" sections of historical/political background. Stemming from the recent nuclear testings of India and Pakistan, Dragonfire links the India/Pakistan conflict over Kashmir with the disputes between India and China, which centre upon China’s occupation of Tibet. As the politicians play brinkmanship with each other, the stakes get higher and higher until there is only one way out. The near-future (2007) setting and occasional reminders that while the West was bombing Serbia nuclear flashpoints were coming into being in the East are unsettling, as is the rather un-Apocalyptic tone of the ending. Like most of the similar examples in Clarke’s anthology, there are rarely such things as characters in this novel, which often reads like a dramatisation of its own bibliography; and by the very nature of its intentions it does not even possess the save-the-day-in-time comfort of the cosier technothrillers, but the reader cannot help but be gripped. One hopes that in a century or two, it will be carefully preserved by some incarnation of I. F. Clarke rather than having been absorbed into a more generic pile of radioactive ash.