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  • Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press by Will Tattersdill
  • Scott Radunzel (bio)
Will Tattersdill, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Pp. x + 220, $99.99 (cloth).

“Is it light?”

“No.”

“Is it electricity?”

“Not in any known form.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

This exchange comes from Wilhelm Röntgen’s interview in Pearson’s Magazine in April 1896, which recounts his discovery of a new kind of light, imperceptible to the naked eye, that when passed through the body could photograph bones: the x-ray (95). At the fin de siècle, scientific exploration and discovery were a significant preoccupation among Victorian readers and writers, who encountered literature, science, and satire within the same journalistic spaces.

In his introduction to Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press, Will Tattersdill confesses that the “first comma in this book’s title is there on purpose” (i). Since dedicated science fiction magazines did not yet exist, writers like H. G. Wells turned to general-interest magazines to publish their novellas and short stories. Within the pages of mass-market publications, accounts of scientific discoveries, political satires, and detective stories found a home alongside science fiction speculations about Mars, polar exploration, and time travel. By studying a broad range of popular magazines, Tattersdill successfully recognizes the “fertile dynamic between [End Page 259] voices—‘science’ and ‘fiction’—traditionally regarded as estranged from one another” (2). Indeed, the proximity of these two distinct subjects within the pages of fin de siècle general-interest magazines fostered the creation of science fiction literature as we know it today.

Although the works of H. G. Wells play a prominent role in Tattersdill’s book, he also provides a guide for exploring other writers considered influential in the development of early science fiction. Tattersdill’s research will be of interest to a variety of readers. Scholars of science fiction will recognize the names Patrick Parrinder, Mark Bould, Sherryl Vint, Roger Luckhurst, and Matthew Beaumont. Periodicals scholars will recognize the names Laurel Brake, Richard Menke, Dallas Liddle, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Mark Turner, and James Mussell. Tattersdill does not simply echo these voices but instead builds upon and sometimes challenges their perspectives in order to convey his vision for how general-interest magazines of the fin de siècle contributed to the emergence of science fiction as a new literary genre.

Tattersdill successfully argues that the inclusion of early science-based narratives within mass-market publications allowed science fiction to thrive and to eventually become a distinct genre. In the introduction, “Material Entanglements,” he lays out the theoretical framework of his study, examining “strands” of popular writing, “understanding them and the mechanisms which govern them as broadly analogous and scrutinizing each through the lenses of genre theory” (2). He argues against the reductive two-cultures model of intellectual discourse while focusing on how the “enrolment” networks of human and nonhuman elements allowed science and fiction to merge within a single vessel: the general-interest magazine (2).

Chapter 1, “Intrinsic Intelligibility: Communications with Mars, and between Disciplines, in the Pages of the Magazines,” focuses on a close reading of a single article, Francis Galton’s “Intelligible Signals between Neighbouring Stars” (Fortnightly Review, November 1896). This chapter analyzes Galton’s piece as an “exchange between the supposed opposites ‘science’ and ‘fiction,’” while highlighting how the article would fall apart without the confluence of the two (31). Tattersdill was right to include the article in the book’s first chapter. Although not as famous as his half-cousin Charles Darwin, Galton was himself an eminent scientist and inventor who made important contributions to anthropology, statistics, meteorology, and eugenics, while finding time to invent an early model bicycle odometer and a handheld heliostat—a signaling device that pushes sunlight towards designated targets. Tattersdill uses the heliostat as an instrument to introduce the Mars craze of 1892, which nicely links to the blending of popular science and sensationalism found in Galton’s article. Tattersdill’s study successfully showcases how Galton’s scientific writing would have been [End Page 260] unpublishable without the inclusion of “fictional...

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