The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe

THE SCIENCE FICTION OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

EDGAR ALLAN POE was born in Boston in 1809, the son of itinerant actors. Both his parents died within two years of his birth. Edgar was taken into the home of a Richmond merchant, John Allan, although he was never legally adopted. Poe’s relationship with his foster-father was not good and was further strained when he was forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia because Allan refused to finance him. After a reconciliation, Poe entered the Military Academy at West Point in 1830; he was dishonourably discharged in January 1831. It was a deliberate action on Poe’s part and again was largely due to Allan’s tight-fistedness. His early work as a writer went unrecognized and he was forced to earn his living in newspapers, working as an editor in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. He achieved respect as a literary critic but it was not until the publication of The Raven and Other Poem in 1845 that he gained success as a writer. And, despite his increasing fame, Poe remained in the same poverty which characterized most of his life. In 1836 he married his cousin, Virginia, who was then fourteen; she died eleven years later of tuberculosis.

Poe’s life and personality have attracted almost as much attention as his writing, and he has been variously pictured as a sado-masochist, dipsomaniac, drug addict and manic depressive. There can be little doubt that Poe was a disturbed and tormented man, and like so many of his characters, often driven to the brink of madness. Writing of the effect of Virginia’s death, Poe said: ‘I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank… my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity.’ Poe died a few years later in 1849 and was buried in Baltimore beside his wife.

HAROLD BEAVER retired from the chair of American Literature at the University of Amsterdam in 1988. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Warwick. He is the author of a collection of essays The Great American Masquerade and a study of Huckleberry Finn. His other editions for the Penguin Classics are Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories and Redburn, as well as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

The Science Fiction of
Edgar Allan Poe

Collected and edited with an
Introduction and Commentary by
Harold Beaver

BookishMall.com

BookishMall.com

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4V 3B2

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

This selection first published 1976

24

Introduction and Commentary copyright © Harold Beaver, 1976

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192206-5

Contents

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Bibliography

MS. Found in a Bottle

The Unparelleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion

A Descent into the Maelström

The Colloquy of Monos and Una

A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

The Balloon-Hoax

Mesmeric Revelation

The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade

Some Words with a Mummy

The Power of Words

The System of Dr Tarr and Prof. Fether

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe

Mellonta Tauta

Von Kempelen and His Discovery

Commentary

Appendix 1748–1848: Select Chronology of post-Newtonian Science in the Century preceding Eureka

Introduction

ELECTRO-CHEMISTRY dominated the early nineteenth century. Galvani and Watt, Volta and Ohm, Ampère, Bunsen, Morse – its pioneers embedded their very names into the language. Sir Humphry Davy’s researches led to the isolation of potassium and sodium in 1807; of calcium, barium, boron, magnesium and strontium in 1808. His assistant Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and developed the first dynamo. It was the age of voltaic cells, electrodes, Leyden jars, piles, conductors, ions, insulation, electric circuits, batteries, generators, dynamos, condensers, galvanometers. The fundamental nature of all matter, it became apparent, was electrical.

Coleridge proclaimed:1

In short, from the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of mathematical formulae. And now a new light was struck by the discovery of electricity, and, in every sense of the word, both playful and serious, both for good and for evil, it may be affirmed to have electrified the whole frame of natural philosophy. Close on its heels followed the momentous discovery of the principal gases by Scheele and Priestley, the composition of water by Cavendish, and the doctrine of latent heat by Black. The scientific world was prepared for a new dynasty; accordingly, as soon as Lavoisier had reduced the infinite variety of chemical phenomena to the actions, reactions, and interchanges of a few elementary substances, or at least excited the expectation that this would speedily be effected, the hope shot up, almost instantly, into full faith, that it had been effected. Henceforward the new path, thus brilliantly opened, became the common road to all departments of knowledge: and, to this moment, it has been pursued with an eagerness and almost epidemic enthusiasm which, scarcely less than its political revolutions, characterize the spirit of the age.

Even electrical and nervous phenomena were linked. That, too, was a tenet of the age – one of Sir John Herschel’s four determinants of electromagnetism. For what of ‘Animal Magnetism’? Had not Mesmer taken Paris by storm with his ‘magnetic’ cures? Coleridge continued: ‘reproduction corresponds to magnetism, irritability to electricity, and sensibility to constructive chemical affinity’.2 No wonder Poe was fascinated.