Vacation Stories: Five Science Fiction Tales (review)

Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Vacation Stories: Five Science Fiction Tales.Translated by Laura Otis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xxiii + 245 pp. $19.95 (0-252-02655-1).

It was in 1905, the year before he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with his archrival in neurohistology, Camillo Golgi, that Santiago Ramón y Cajal finally risked publishing these provocative tales. We learn from Laura Otis's excellent introduction that he had actually written these "anti-religious, anti-establishment" stories (p. vii) some twenty years earlier, and they are therefore grounded in the cutting-edge science of the mid-1880s—in bacteriology at the time of Koch, in microscopy, and in hypnosis. Nevertheless, there are many aspects that have a disturbingly perennial relevance, not least the deliberate use of bacterial contamination for revenge.

Cajal's target is less the marvels and methods of science than the minds and machinations of scientists, and there is stringent criticism of those who manipulate scientific knowledge to dehumanize and suppress ignorant people. At the same time, science, used benevolently, represents Cajal's only faith for the future of humanity. These two faces of science recall the "scientific romances" of H.G. Wells, written during the 1890s: both authors were fired by the potential of science to transform and empower society, to liberate it from custom and superstitious fears (in Cajal's case epitomized by the Catholic Church)—but both feared that scientists would use their knowledge to gain power. Of Cajal's five protagonists (all male), two are evil manipulators, driven by sexual jealousy and megalomania; one is a pessimistic misanthropist who learns to become involved in life again; and two are enthusiastic optimists, using their knowledge of science and engineering to banish superstition and usher in a prosperous and confident future.

Yet these stories often have a subtle and original twist. In "For a Secret Offense, Secret Revenge," Dr. Max Forschung (Cajal's Dickensian names represent his characters' obsessions) is not just one of the stock maniacs threatening biological warfare, as found in so many SF stories of the early twentieth century; rather, he uses TB spores to double effect: to incriminate his wife and her lover, and simultaneously to achieve professional fame by resolving a controversial point in bacteriology.

The tales are almost diagrammatic in their didacticism. In "The Natural Man and the Artificial Man" we are given the extremely lengthy life stories of two men, once fellow students. The "Artificial Man," brought up to serve the church and the political regime, is in a state of suicidal depression. The "Natural Man," on the other hand, once a poor shepherd boy with little formal education, has learned to investigate natural phenomena and causality and has become a celebrated engineer. At the end of his story he claims that his success results from his nonbelief in an afterlife. The final moral is explicit: "the world is not yet ready for philosophy or justice. . . . despite the self-proclaimed tolerance of modern times, they only let you use your common sense in the tranquil field of science. . . . it's the only place they'll let us think freely. The apostles of justice will be heard later on, when omnipotent science has lit up all the caverns and dark corners of Nature and the spirit" (p. 242).

Cajal's tone is often bitterly satirical, both about the ignorant masses and about the scientists who exploit them. The archetypal example is the mass hypnotism carried on by Dr. Alejandro Mirahonda, whose "profession and physiognomy were marvellously matched": he has "a large, hairy head housing neural batteries of vast capacity and tension, . . . the tempestuous beard of an angry apostle and . . . pupils that seemed to emit clouds of magnetic effluvia" (p. 39). Thus equipped, he can experiment on gullible townspeople, who are seduced first into morality and then into dissipation. Yet, at its best, science is equated with freedom...