Origins of Futuristic Fiction (review)

REVIEWS 77 richest of these studies, in its density of allusion to disciplines and fictions. Every page invites reflection and even when this reflection brings dissent, the book is usefully provocative. But it needed a self-denying ordinance, to place fictional works and their authors at the centre. Bender has helped me to see why the Scriblerians did not write novels and to see the novel in a variety of new lights. The section on Joseph Wright's The Captive and Sterne, with the commentary on A Sentimental Journey, is dazzling in what it says about the Journey and what it could say for the narrator and reader of Tristram Shandy. I wanted the first chapters recast and an ending which would underline the characteristic shape of eighteenth-century fiction, as the chief work of imagination of which the modem penitentiary is an analogue. Not, I think, a consequence. Patricia Brückmann Trinity College, University of Toronto Paul Alkon. Origins ofFuturistic Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. xii + 342pp. US$30.00. Historians of science fiction are now in general agreement that the first work to satisfy all the criteria necessary for the genre is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1816). Paul Alkon's book deals with the development of a sub-species of the genre that he classes as "futuristic fiction"—works set at some future date that combine elements of prediction, social commentary and/or satire and some attempt at a plausible and realistic story. Books of this type differ from earlier utopis such as Thomas More's in being displaced in time rather than space and in the degree of fictional realism that they incorporate, and they culminate for Alkon in such twentieth-century works as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Alkon traces the origins of this style of writing to a group of largely forgotten seventeenth and eighteenth-century French and English works that are little read, even by specialists, today. His candidate for the first author to combine story and prophecy in an aesthetically satisfying and self-conscious manner ( or, as he puts it himself on p. 264, to create "a novel whose elements all worked coherently to elicit a sense of the marvellous within a plausible framework of realistic future setting and action") is Félix Bodin in Le roman de l'avenir (1834). Another potential candidate, Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), is somewhat cursorily set aside as being too secular and realistic, and thus presumably not "marvellous" enough, though this is an objection that could equally well be made to Nineteen Eighty-Four itself. Beginning his detailed analyses with Jacques Guttin's Epigone (1659), Alkon examines the various, initially unrelated, elements that gradually cohered over almost two centuries to create Bodin's book and its innumerable successors. 78 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Though Epigone shows little attempt at plausibility or serious prediction in its use of a future setting, it combines aspects of the already moribund heroic or fantastic romance with Utopian and satiric elements. The purely apocalyptic religious writings of the seventeenm and eighteenth centuries offered little scope for fictional treatment, dealing, as they did, with the fate of humanity as a whole rather than the irrelevant concerns of individuals; but Thomas Burnet's influential The Sacred Theory ofthe Earth provided both "scientific and religious extrapolation" in its examination of the past and the inevitable future of the planet. The "secularization of apocalypse" began only in the early nineteenth century, when works like Shelley's The Last Man and Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le dernier homme (1805) presented their accounts of the final days of the human species from the perspective of the individuals concerned. Grainville's work in particular operates both on a day-to-day human time scale and the mythic overall time of apocalypse. Meanwhile a whole series of eighteenth-century works had attempted to imagine what their own societies might be like on a time scale ranging from a few decades into the future to several centuries. Few of these, however, were able to envision anything radically different from their own present: the anonymous Reign ofGeorge VI, 1900-1925 (1763) notoriously does little more...