When his originality has not been ignored, it has been undermined. H. Bruce Franklin is the most recent to launch a two-pronged attack. The first concerned his themes:12

Rarely in Poe’s science fiction does one find science itself as a subject and nowhere does one find any kind of true scientist as a consequential figure.

But precisely this respect for the ‘true scientist’ and his ‘science’ is what Poe himself, again and again, rejected: ‘merely scientific men’ he called them, to be trusted with nothing but ‘scientific details’:13

Of all persons in the world, they are at the same time the most bigoted and the least capable of using, generalizing, or deciding upon the facts which they bring to light in the course of their experiments.

Which makes nonsense of Franklin’s second objection – the matter of treatment: 14

But if science fiction is merely a popularizer of science rather than the literature which, growing with science, evaluates it, and relates it meaningfully to the rest of existence, it is hardly worth serious attention.

Very little science fiction, of course, could pass that exacting test. But who would claim that ‘Mesmeric Revelation’, Eureka, or ‘Mellonta Tauta’, for example, are ‘popularizers’? Their very role, successful or not, is the exact opposite: to evaluate scientific method and technological achievement, by confronting both with a vision of life (‘Out of Space – out of Time’) 15 in its widest spiritual dimensions.

Poe’s ‘Sonnet – To Science’,16 written while only twenty, begins:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

But it was not science he abhorred so much as the triumph of mechanical reason, confirmed by technical progress. In ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ Monos denounces ‘the harsh mathematical reason of the schools’,17 sweeping aside the ‘rectangular obscenities’ with which technology has littered our globe. Poe used speculative theory from the start to frustrate technological methods and aims. Each ‘advance in practical science’ meant ‘a retro-gradation in the true utility’. Industrialization led only to regimentation; regimentation to that ultimate disease of the ‘poetic intellect’, the expropriation of the imagination. A pure mathematics – blending calculation with the ideal – of the circle, the sphere,18 the oval, of the curving arabesques that spiral through dreams and the screwed form of a helix (as on a watch-spring or electromagnetic coil of wire), controlled his visionary quests.

One critical fight he was intent on waging :19

The mistake… of the old dogma, that the calculating faculties are at war with the ideal; while, in fact, it may be demonstrated that the two divisions of mental power are never to be found in perfection apart. The highest order of the imaginative intellect is always preeminently mathematical; and the converse.

His fascination with lunar investigation, sound and colour, the cosmology of Newton, von Humboldt, and Laplace, was a cult of homage to pure science. ‘Poe was opening up a way,’ wrote Paul Valéry, ‘teaching a very strict and deeply alluring doctrine, in which a kind of mathematics and a kind of mysticism became one…’ 20 The beauty of number was that point, that configuration, where mathematics and mysticism met.

Something of this ambivalence, ever since, has haunted science fiction. Itself an offshoot of gothicism, the new genre was to evoke a horror both of the future and of the science which could bring that future about. By identifying with the collapse of technology, it was already critically undermining that technology. Yet its only appeal was to science. It had nowhere to turn but to science for its salvation. The fiction, then, was that somehow science must learn to control its own disastrous career. Poe too – quite self-consciously, of course – was working in this gothic vein. Within his husk of mathematics, as often as not, lurks an old-fashioned kernel of magic. In a sense, he recreated all the traditional feats of magic in pseudo-scientific terms (of galvanism and mesmerism). Alchemy became the synthetic manufacture of ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’; resurrection of the dead, the time travel of ‘Some Words with a Mummy’; demonic possession, the hypnotic or ‘magnetic relation’ of ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’; apocalyptic vision, the cataclysmic fire of ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion.’ Just as the pseudo-scholarship (in antiquarian statutes and genealogies) of Scott, or gothic elaboration of Hawthorne, was part of an attempt to make the imaginative spell more potent, more binding, so Poe’s detailed and mathematical science intensifies his imaginative fusion with the occult.

There is far more of literary burlesque, of outright parody, in all this than Sam Moskowitz, for example, or H. Bruce Franklin,21 appeared to realize. Yet clues abound. Those zany, zestful surfaces are all deceitful. The reckless playfulness invades even the august vision of Eureka. For his science ultimately is admitted to be a kind of hoax; his fiction openly and ironically conceived as a lie. Like Lucian, in his True History, he might have declared : 22

The motive and purpose of my journey lay in my intellectual restlessness and passion for adventure, and in my wish to find out what the end of the ocean was, and who the people were that lived on the other side.

But what he contrived was the inversion of romantic fiction from the antiquarian hoax (of a Chatterton or Macpherson) into a futuristic hoax. It proved a brilliant reversal of time-scale, made possible by the wide-spread willingness of an ever-proliferating, journal-reading, stock investing, news addicted, male and female public to be duped.

‘His purpose in the hoaxes,’ Constance Rourke astutely remarked, ‘was to make his readers absurd, to reduce them to an involuntary imbecility. His objective was triumph…’ 23 Or in Poe’s own caustic words :24

Twenty years ago credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic; now the case is exactly conversed.

‘Hans Pfaall’ stands in a direct line of descent from the pseudo-scientific ‘Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus’ : the literary hoax from the start was bound up with literary burlesque. Compared to Queen Anne’s England, however, Jacksonian America presented even more fertile ground: 25

As the tall tale came into its great prime in the early ’30s a sudden contagion was created.