Vintage Visions: Essays on Early Science Fiction

3 German Theories of Science Fiction: Jean Paul, Kurd Lasswitz, and After (1976)

[ 1 •1• Cyrano de BerGeraC’s ePistemoloGiCal Bodies “Pregnant with a Thousand Definitions” sylvie romanoWski The genre that is today called science fiction has its roots in the speculative tales and imaginary voyages of the seventeenth century and before. One early writer who is often hailed as an important precursor to what sf would later become was the French soldier and philosopher Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac. Although better known as the long-nosed and chivalrous hero of an 1898 play by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano was also a daring thinker whose fantastic fictional voyages to the Moon and Sun offered new ways of thinking about humanity and the universe. This essay originally appeared in SFS 25, no. 3 (November 1998): 414–32. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55) wrote two highly imaginative texts of cosmic exploration and travel that defy all attempts at classification. Sometimes collectively entitled L’Autre Monde (The Other World), the two novels L’Autre Monde ou Les Estats et Empires de la Lune (The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon) and Les Estats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun)1 have been the object of debate and widely differing interpretations. They have been considered as critical and satirical (Mason), libertine (Chambers, DeJean, Spink), materialist and epicurean (Alcover, Laugaa), and hermetic (Gossiaux, Hutin, Van Vledder). Cyrano has been considered both as an epigone of Campanella and lateRenaissance magical thought (Erba, Lerner) and as skeptical and “modern ,” anticipating the eighteenth-century philosophers (Harth, Prévot, 2 ] sylvie romanoWski Spink, Weber).2 Yet Cyrano’s texts transcend all these labels. L’Autre Monde explores other spaces, and are themselves situated elsewhere, in another intellectual and critical space that, with Calle-Gruber, Philmus, and Suvin, I will take as belonging to the genre of science fiction: according to Ursula Le Guin, science fiction is defined by “its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology” (introduction, n.p.). But which science? In Cyrano’s time, the first half of the seventeenth century, this question itself—let alone the answer—would be markedly different from ours. In our time, very specialized scientific fields focus on the many aspects of life and the cosmos: e.g., biology, chemistry, physics—all based on certain commonly accepted quantitative and logical principles born in the seventeenth century: “Science was becoming [in the seventeenth century], and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measurements” (Whitehead 47). In the early seventeenth century, however, the situation was quite different: rivaling methodologies were available to explore the universe, and they were not so cleanly partitioned into highly specialized domains. In Cyrano’s time, several types of interpretations of the world competed with and influenced each other in rather complicated ways. Modern science, as we know it and recognize it in the works of its ancestors such as Galileo and Descartes, was actively engaged in debates with other alternative systems of thought—such as atomism, animism, hermetism—that we cannot truly label as “sciences,” yet which were seen as viable competitors in the intellectual debates of the period. In a French version of this essay, I called Cyrano’s writings, written during this unique period in Western history, not so much science fiction as “savoir fiction” [knowledge fiction]—a phrase impossible to translate into English felicitously. Cyrano’s point of departure in writing these novels was to critique, refute , and mock the traditional religious, Aristotelian, and Church-promoted scientific beliefs considered orthodox in his day and, in so doing, to satirize the society of his time. His eclectic and completely heterodox thought incorporated other competing paradigms: e.g., the mechanistic and mathematical view proposed by Galileo, Descartes, and Mersenne (still very new in his day); the atomistic explanation defended by Gassendi; and the animist , esoteric, alchemist traditions—very ancient but still continuing to enjoy a widespread popularity during the seventeenth century. From the perspective of the modern reader, the latter traditions may not seem worthy of being placed alongside those of mathematical and mechanistic science—or Cyrano de Bergerac’s Epistemological Bodies [ 3 even on par with certain atomistic views—because our modern science considers itself as deriving exclusively from Galileo and Descartes rather than from the alchemists. But, as strange as animism and alchemy may seem today, in...