It is also irrelevant. Poe is celebrated as ‘Science Fiction Pioneer’ (in Clarke Olney’s phrase) for being the first ‘to base his stories firmly on a rational kind of extrapolation, avoiding the supernatural’.6 Extrapolation! The very concept, borrowed from statistical projection, is his. Even in the gush of a passionate love letter, in mid-flight, he could declare:7

Think, too, of the rare agreement of name… think of all these coincidences, and you will no longer wonder that, to one accustomed as I am to the Calculus of Probabilities, they wore an air of positive miracle.

For the Calculus of Probabilities had been long familiar to Poe from the work of Condorcet and Laplace, Cournot and Quetelet.

‘All that is necessary,’ taught the Marquis de Condorcet, ‘to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.’ 8 From a mathematical theory of probability he turned to a social mathematics, or calculus of history, to tame the future: ‘a science to foresee the progressions of the human species’. Even future moral data were to be mathematicized. In the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, he charted human development through nine epochs to the French Revolution, predicting in a tenth the ultimate perfection of man. The Marquis de Laplace,9 in Théorie analytique des probabilités (1812) continued his rigorous approach to formulaic, mathematical prediction.

Poe has nothing but scorn for ‘human-perfectibility’ spokesmen like Condorcet. But his ‘C. Auguste Dupin’, master detective, is heir to the great French tradition. He is Poe’s spokesman in praise of ‘the theory of probabilities – that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration’.10 In ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ he expounds, and refines on, its technique:

It is through the spirit of this principle, if not precisely through its letter, that modern science has resolved to calculate upon the unforeseen. But perhaps you do not comprehend me. The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools.

With ‘the Calculus of Probabilities’ it is but a short step from Poe’s Detective to his Science Fiction. For ‘this Calculus’, he explains, ‘is, in its essence, purely mathematical; and thus we have the anomaly of the most rigidly exact in science applied to the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation’.11

What was once stuff for ritual or religious myths, or tall tales for entertainment, was thus transformed by Poe to a new speculative fiction. Utopian voyages had long presented all kinds of rational laboratories; but Sir Thomas More and his successors were concerned with the permutation of mainly moral and political hypotheses. The hypotheses of science fiction were wholly material, whether psychological or technological. Their pragmatic claim was the inevitable change (for better or for worse) of both man’s outer and his inner or spiritual environment. Yet, cast as fantasy, the pressure persisted towards the journal-entry, in the present tense; not to recollection, but lived intensity; not as theoretical exercises, but adventures (in the tradition of Lucian, Swift, Defoe) by sea, land or air, foraging into the unknown.

In 1785 an Oxford printer had published an anonymous shilling pamphlet, entitled Singular Travels, Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Rudolph Erich Raspe, its author, seems oddly to prefigure Poe. An amateur scientist and antiquarian, who had earlier written on volcanic geology and the Ossianic poems, he even became a fellow of the Royal Society (until a German scandal caught up with him). Equally fascinated by Lucian, the Arabian Nights, Captain Cook’s voyages in the South Seas and the ballooning exploits of Blanchard or the Montgolfier brothers, he became an avid reader of Swift and Defoe. An anonymous and penniless hoaxer, he foisted his fantastical tall tales upon the world. Poe’s ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’, however, starting from the same grotesquely exaggerated note, soars, once aloft, into a new and mathematically exacting realm. In that shift, in that unbridgeable gap between the poetic quips of Raspe and the scientific imagination of Poe lay the seeds of the new genre. Both insist on their total veracity; both delight in the elusive antics of the absurd. But while the one dallies solely with metaphoric suggestions, the other explicates, rationalizes, presses inexorably on to hoodwink his bourgeois, materialistic audience. The German concludes his baronial descent of Mount Etna with a plunge through the centre of the earth to the South Seas, adding:

This was a much shorter cut than going round and one which no man has ever before accomplished, or even attempted. However, the next time I do it, I shall endeavour to make proper scientific observations.

The American – as balloonist, sailor or mesmerist – from the start played the experimental, philosophical role: making ‘proper scientific observations’.

But Poe has never been without his detractors.