Missing Links: Genre, Evolution, and Jack London’s Before Adam

The development of genres is a story we often tell using the metaphor of evolution. We do so in part because we recognize a strong parallel between genre and species: both are systems of classification we have invented in order to make sense of a profusion of items—texts or bodies. Of course, the word “genre” has its etymological roots in the Latin “genus,” the word Linneaus chose for the order of life above species. How we have constructed these systems can at times seem arbitrary and even deficient for understanding the complex and changing items under analysis. Why draw the lines here and there and not elsewhere? Does the empirical drive to classify obscure more than it reveals? Yet at the same time we remain committed to notions of genre and species because they allow us to talk about patterns across individuals. We see the configurations they offer as yielding insight that cannot be obtained by analyzing an individual in isolation. Genre and species are fundamentally relational categories; they emphasize interconnection as much as they do definition. The study of evolution (both of species and genres) is also largely retroactive. We understand species and genres by tracing their histories; our position is often in the present looking back. And just as in evolutionary histories, the process of tracing a literary genre’s development over time uncovers gaps in its fossil record, missing links. Missing links are objects defined by their absence, whose absence also renders the links between species invisible, or at least unverified. The recovery of missing links allows us to see the interconnections between species, or between genres. In this essay, I propose that the connection between literary naturalism and science fiction is one of these lost relations. I find evidence of literary naturalism and science fiction’s kinship in a relic of literary history: Jack London’s novel Before Adam (1907). This “fossil,” which itself takes up the idea of the missing link as the subject of its work, suggests a close, and overlooked, connection between the evolution of the genres of literary naturalism and science fiction.

This connection has been neglected for two reasons. The first is that literary naturalism has frequently been understood as not being “scientific” enough. This view has prevented scholars from taking seriously literary naturalists’ claims that they were incorporating scientific subjects and methods in their work. Second, scholars have historically taken a rigid approach to the definition of “science fiction” as a genre. Some date the origins of science fiction to 1929, when the term “science fiction” was used by Hugo Gernsback in his Amazing Stories. By this account, science fiction and literary naturalism are separated by time. Other scholars, such as Darko Suvin, have marked the boundaries of science fiction in looser, more complex ways. In “What Is and Is Not an sf Narration,” Suvin lists works commonly “mistaken” for science fiction; by his criteria, many works written in the late nineteenth century that blurred the boundaries between science and literature are not rightly science fiction.¹ These classifications have obscured the real and fundamental bond between literary naturalism and science fiction.

In what follows, I argue that literary naturalism and science fiction share the same goal: to create new literary forms that would incorporate contemporary scientific ideas and methods. Jack London’s Before Adam does exactly this by turning to Darwinian theories of evolution and the missing link. The novel describes a modern narrator who, in his dreams, relives the experiences of his pre-human ancestor, a missing link between human and animal. As I explain, the missing link was a subject of fascination and speculation for scientists, writers, and the public at the turn of the century. The missing link was frequently imagined as an amalgam of human and ape, a hairy beast whose bones would substantiate the theory of evolution, and human-animal kinship specifically. Unlike many of his peers, however, London attempted in Before Adam something unusual: he tried to describe what it was to be a missing link. The novel avoids static representations of the physical appearance...