Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The interrelations of literature and science have, over the last couple of decades, become one of the most productive areas of scholarship on the Victorian period. From Gillian Beer's and George Levine's groundbreaking analyses of the shared concerns of Darwinian evolution and the realist novel in the 1980s, to more recent accounts of the interplay between psychology and fiction, practitioners of Victorian studies have discerned numerous critical insights by examining the mutability of scientific and literary vocabularies in a variety of nineteenth-century contexts. It is therefore somewhat surprising that science fiction, a genre actually born in the nineteenth century and which explicitly fuses the literary with the scientific, has been largely overlooked in the burgeoning field of literature and science studies, even while other cognate genres such as the gothic novel or sensation fiction have been increasingly embraced.

Martin Willis sets out to amend this oversight in Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, and, as such, the book is aimed primarily at the breezily contextualizing and interdisciplinary "nineteenth-century scholar" who has hitherto remained sniffily dismissive of the intellectual substance of the science fiction genre. But Willis also seeks to engage—and perhaps educate—the typical "science fiction critic" who narrow-mindedly eschews any detailed consideration of the genre's historical background and instead ranks the success of science fiction novels by whether their account of science is regarded as correct in light of present-day knowledge (2). Such a self-conscious attempt to "speak to two audiences at one time" is, as Willis acknowledges, likely to "engender some moments of schizophrenia," and, as a representative of the first type of reader, I did find much of the book's historical information—especially the section in the introduction mapping the broad contours of nineteenth-century science—overly generalized and lacking in specificity or nuance (3). Despite the inevitable hazards of attempting to accommodate such disparate readerly expectations, however, there are occasions when Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines offers astute new readings of classics of the science fiction genre like Frankenstein (1818), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) for which specialist critics of the field as well as more general exponents of nineteenth-century literature and science scholarship will both be grateful.

Willis adopts Beer's celebrated reciprocal approach to literature and science relations, arguing that science fiction texts do not merely reflect aspects of contemporary scientific thinking in an entirely passive way, but are instead "one of science's most able inquisitors" and actually "contribute to the construction of science within nineteenth-century culture" (234–35). In particular, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines shows how the uncanny stories of E. T. A. Hoffman or novels like Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's L'Eve Future (1886) interrogate, challenge, and subvert the often arbitrary boundaries established between so-called orthodox and heterodox scientific practices that were intended, in part, to ensure that the epistemic authority of certain types of science was not compromised by awkward connections with mesmeric, spiritualist, or other occult phenomena. In Villiers's novel, for instance, the distinctions between electricity's invisible forces and those of psychical power are gradually elided, and the two are finally revealed as virtually interchangeable, affording a fictional analogue, as Willis contends, of the exactly contemporaneous arguments of many members of the Society for Psychical Research. Historians and sociologists of science such as Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch, Roger Cooter, Logie Barrow, Richard Noakes, and Alison Winter have long argued that scholars must focus on the complex debates from which the boundaries between "science" and "pseudo-science" emerged rather than simply taking what in retrospect appear fixed boundaries for granted, and Willis applies this new historiography of the occult sciences to his literary readings of science fiction texts from across the nineteenth century (although, oddly, he cites only the work of Winter). It...