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Scientific Romance

Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Theme.

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Many terms have been applied to the constantly mutating braid of stories loosely enclosed in this encyclopedia under the rubric of science fiction (or sf) (see Definitions of SF; Fabulation; SF Megatext). Three of the strands that make up sf as a whole are relevant here. Proto SF represents a loose but extremely useful hindsight omnium gatherum term for a wide range of texts from periods long past, from which contemporary forms variously grew; Genre SF increasingly (though not exclusively) applies to the "classic" sf of America in the twentieth century, and is applied here in a manner normally consistent with a default understanding of its beginning with Hugo Gernsback (see also Scientifiction) ; and Scientific Romance here applies mostly (though not exclusively) to a loosely-defined form of sf commonly found in the UK from the late nineteenth and through first half of the twentieth century, though examples of the form continue to appear into the twenty-first. (The term Planetary Romance, a form of words that suggests similar definitional intent, is used in this encyclopedia primarily to specify a venue distinct from Terra where various kinds of sf can be set and flourish, including genre sf and the Scientific Romance, as well as Space Opera.) In his Yesterday's Tomorrows: The Story of Classic British Science Fiction in 100 Books (2020), Mike Ashley properly uses the term science fiction (or sf) to oversee the wide range of texts covered in his conspectus, many but not all of them Scientific Romances, almost all of them novels, many of them listed in this entry.

With respect to the years of Jules Verne's prime and into the twentieth century, much French sf may fairly be thought of in terms of the Scientific Romance; an emphasis in this encyclopedia on British iterations of the form does not represent a repudiation of this communality. But there is no clear mutual agreement on the terms of that conversation. As Ashley notes, Jules Renard's essay, "Du roman merveilleux-scientifique et de son action sur l'intelligence du progrès" ["Of the Marvellous-Scientific Novel and its Influence on the Understanding of Progress"] (October 1909 Le Spectateur), associates the "roman merveilleux-scientifique" with H G Wells, distinguishing it from Verne's "marvel" novels: a suggestion which, however persuasively put, leads into complexities beyond the reach of this entry. It may be enough here to clock the roman scientifique's cousinly links to the Scientific Romance, to note that they are not entirely synonymous, and to add that the roman scientifique is similarly folded into French Fantastika.

The roots of what became the UK Scientific Romance are buried deep in texts here referred to as Proto SF [which see for a more extended presentation; for Horizon of Expectations and Taproot Texts see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the map of potential harbingers of the full form begins to become more detailed, full of both dead-ends and aperçus: a jostle of perspectives in the light of which it is not entirely frivolous to note that Lord Byron's "Darkness" [1816] significantly adumbrates the Scientific Romance, decades before any book was so named; it is also easy to identify aspects of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols) – its retrospective narrative; the Frankenstein Monster himself with his dream that Enlightenment Bildung applies to him; the prolepses of something like Evolution – that also adumbrate the full form, as does The Last Man (1826). Soon enough, the term itself, variously understood, begins to appear: in Charles Dickens's description (24 March 1866 All the Year Round) of Henri de Parville's Un habitant de la planète Mars: roman d'anticipation (1865); in the anonymously written "Some of our Social Philosophers" (15 June 1866 The New York Nation), which applies the phrase to Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (1861 2vols); and in James de Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (written 1860s; 1888), where a character in the Club-Story frame describes the manuscript's tale as "scientific romance". But these, it should be remembered, are descriptive phrases, not defining phrases.

Much more significant is C H Hinton's use of the term for several of his books, including two collections of Scientific Romances (colls 1886 and 1898) which mix speculative essays and stories; it was an innovation soon picked up by reviewers and essayists, and was widely applied in responding to the early novels of H G Wells, which became the key exemplars of the genre, disregarding Wells's own initial resistance to the term. Despite its obvious applicability to his work, and its increasing use elsewhere in the early twentieth century, he tended unusefully to lump his sf and fantasy novels together as "fantastic and imaginative romances", but eventually, in The Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells (omni 1933), an omnibus which contains most of his best-known sf novels, he did much, even if in arrears, to secure the term's definitive status in the UK (it might be noted that the following year in America, where neither "science fiction" nor "Scientific Romance" had yet become familiar terms, this omnibus was retitled Seven Famous Novels). Most of the later speculative fiction excluded from the omnibus – from The War in the War (1908) and The World Set Free (1914), then onward to the pessimistic tales of his last years, including The Holy Terror (1939) and others – can be understood as further explorations in the possibilities of the form.

The term did not at first "compete" in the definition tourney. It may be that the only conspicuous early use of "Scientific Romance" in contexts where "science fiction" might normally be expected was in the version of Ben Abramson's bibliography appended to J O Bailey's seminal Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (1947), where authors from Jonathan Swift to Mary Shelley to E E Smith to Clifford D Simak are listed as authors of "Scientific Romances": but Bailey sidesteps any attempts at heuristic speciation by never using the term "science fiction" at all. Contrariwise, tales circa 1900-1935 included in the Radium Age series edited by Joshua Glenn, seem to be referred to there as "proto sf" or "radium age sci-fi", on the unusual argument that the Scientific Romance ended in 1900. None of the titles included in that series are referred to in this encyclopedia by either label.

In his Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (1985), Brian M Stableford convincingly expanded his analysis of the nineteenth century origins of the term in order to compare and contrast the evolving and (until the 1940s) increasingly distinct UK and US traditions of sf (see first paragraph above, and next paragraph below). He subsequently and enormously expanded his assay as The New Atlantis: A Narrative History of the Scientific Romance (2016 4vols). This encyclopedia treats the work of at least 200 authors in terms consistent with, and evolved from, the premises suggested in The New Atlantis.

Ultimately "Scientific Romance" may be understood through a range of descriptors, none of which in isolation defines the form in its complex multi-causal maturity. But a fundamental shaping distinction between the two main twentieth century forms of sf in English helps point the road. The shaping world-event for the Golden Age of American Genre SF was the ongoing flood of World War Two, with its storyable disasters and heroic triumphs of the Technological Sublime as signalled by a constant flow of Inventions; contrastingly, the Scientific Romance took definitive shape in the aftermath of World War One and the Spanish flu, events giving ample context to any sense that, for Scientific Romance authors, the twentieth century was not going to end well (see Optimism and Pessimism) and that, as with British culture overall, the Great War, in which the British army suffered almost 900,000 fatalities, would be the defining experience for the twentieth century.

Stableford himself nowhere provides, nor do we suggest here, any single necessary condition that a text must meet to be described as an example of the form. In this encyclopedia, in language as consistent as possible with Stableford's, the Scientific Romance can be delineated through a polythetic list of characteristics, the whole comprising a unsiloed spectrum or fuzzy set without strict definitional boundaries, presented here in no particular order: 1 by a tendency to unfold narratives characterized by long evolutionary perspectives (see Decadence; Devolution; Evolution), perhaps the most famous single example being Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930); 2 by a focus on long vistas brooded upon by meditative deuteragonists (see New Zealander; Religion; Ruins and Futurity) whose relationship with much more active protagonists (ie dictators and plutocrats) is subaltern; but to whom, 3, a melancholy dissent is sometimes offered, typically in hindsight, often after the false culture Hero's death; 4 by a sense that tales in this mode hover at the brink of conveying negative lessons about the Evolutionary fitness of Homo sapiens to dominate the future (see again Optimism and Pessimism); 5 by a conveying of the news of things to come through a manuscript conveyed backwards to us, and which makes up the bulk of the novel; 6 by a near absence of tales set in the vast extrovert space-operatic reaches of the galaxy (see Space Opera), though visits by mentor figures from other planets – Alien sages and/or Secret Masters from Mars – are not infrequent, and Invasions from space may occur; 7 by an absence of much sense of any penetrable frontier or portal and 8 by an expectable scarcity therefore of the kind of Pulp-magazine-derived Hero designed to penetrate Space Opera country beyond the wall or through the portal; 9 by, it follows, a fatal scarcity of venues or actants necessary to implement the monomyth -– the story of the male hero's journey into an unknown territory, his transformative victory-and-revelation in the new land, and his monarchical return with gifts – as popularized by Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), a narrative model deeply influential upon American Genre SF; 10 by stories where the Invention of a Scientist or Mad Scientist or ingenious young entrepreneur tends to be used not as a sign of Manifest Destiny to come, but as a blackmail Weapon to create universal peace (see also Pax Aeronautica), or simply to take over the world; 11 by, it follows, a persistent deprecation of Technological fixes, which are seen as futile, or snares; 12 by a sense, particularly acute among the large cohort of Scientific-Romance authors devastated by active service during World War One, that the establishment nostrumizing of Religion and Politics had been discredited for good in the aftermath of that planetary trauma, and that anything remotely and speciously resembling "progress" was fated to end in Dystopia or World War Three,; and 13 might fairly be described Satirically by an observer (see 2, 3, 4 above) attentive to the sham of things (see also Martian); 14 by a sense that the tale is being delivered from a podium, quite possibly within a Club Story frame, with the significance of the narrative passed on to us in hindsight by an almost visible lecturer, whose performance may deliberately fall short of the charismatic, as might be said of an author like Arthur C Clarke, though not of Brian W Aldiss; 15 by a sense that any intellectual discourse shaping a tale may be – as most famously in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) – subject to a dramatic debate, which the Devil often wins; 15 by a sense that if a tale is to end positively, its cast may come to rest in a Pastoral world conceivable as sufficient unto itself, rather than as a place to regroup in before re-entering the fray of the world; 17 by a cumulative sense that the tale being told, and the pessimism almost universally expressed about the course of history to come, are normally meant for and targeted to adult readers, and not as fiction for the young (see Boys' Papers; Children's SF; Edisonade): this boundary marker, though at times indistinct, impacts on any selection of relevant texts to enumerate or discuss; and 18 helps explain the typical scientific romance's lack of patriotism.

Exact figures are a matter of judgment, but of the more than 150 authors of the fantastic in English who as adults had experienced and survived the Great War, usually in active service, a significant number came to publish Scientific Romances, mostly in the years before World War Two; many of these tales were implicitly or explicitly Dystopian, and in this sense contrarian to any "official" version of the world which proclaimed that the War had Ended War. Their authors cumulatively represent the Scientific Romance at its most successful and popular, an accomplishment proclaimed mainly in hindsight if only because the term itself was only applied intermittently during this period.

Examples of a cataract of texts so multiply labelled are suggested here with some caution; but at the same time it may be a useful critical act to attempt to provide a definitional nest for a wide range of tales, which may not be as miscellaneous as they may have seemed at some point. Excluding late titles from earlier authors like H G Wells (see above) or Alfred Ollivant, examples of the Scientific Romance from this flush period between the wars – some deeply moving, some inane, many (though not all) written by male survivors of active service in the Great War, or women survivors of active immersion in a convulsively changing world – are surprisingly numerous. Not all may consciously or conspicuously expose some stigmata of that traumatic conflict, but a nuance of trauma arguably infuses even the most benevolent of these tales: so many of them, in the end, after the devastating lessons learned, so distrustful of the future.

Books published to the end of the 1920s [for missing subtitles see individual entries] include Owen Gregory's Meccania, the Super State (1918), Rose Macaulay's What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (1918), Oliver Onions's The New Moon (1918) Martin Swayne's The Blue Germ (1918), David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), Edward Shanks's The People of the Ruins: A Story of the English Revolution and After (1920), Marie Corelli's The Secret Power (1921), Cicely Hamilton's Theodore Savage (1922), P Anderson Graham's The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923), Ronald A Knox's Memories of the Future (1923), E V Odle's The Clockwork Man (1923), Martin Hussingtree's Konyetz (1924), at least two stories in Hugh Kingsmill's The Dawn's Delay (coll 1924), Victor MacClure's The Ark of the Covenant (1924), Lance Sieveking's The Ultimate Island (1924), J Lionel Tayler's The Last of my Race (1924), S Fowler Wright's The Amphibians (1924) and later works, Geoffrey Faber's Elnovia (1925), Bohun Lynch's Menace from the Moon (1925), Gregory Baxter's Blue Lightning (1926), Guy Dent's Emperor of the If (1926), Shaw Desmond's Ragnarok (1926), Charlotte Haldane's Man's World (1926), the Earl of Halsbury's 1944 (1926), C E Jacomb's And a New Earth (1926), Muriel Jaeger's The Question Mark (1926), William Gerhardi's Jazz and Jasper: The Story of Adams and Eva (1928), Francis D Grierson's Heart of the Moon (1928), Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928) and companion volumes, Edmund Snell's Kontrol (1928), Robert Nichols and Maurice Brown's drama Wings Over Europe (1929), Edward Knoblock's The Ant Heap (1929), Roland Pertwee's MW.XX.3. (1929), Owen Rutter's Lucky Star (1929), Neil Bell's Precious Porcelain (1930) and The Gas War of 1940 (1931), both as by Miles, and William Penmare's The Man Who Could Stop War (1929).

The 1930s saw an even larger number of releases: Bernard Newman's The Cavalry Came Through (1930), set in the Great War and couched, unusually for a Scientific Romance, as an Alternate History, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and other tales of Evolutionary perspective, Aelfrida Tillyard's Concrete: A Story of Two Hundred Years Hence (1930), Lionel Britton's Hunger and Love, Etc (1931), John Hargrave's The Imitation Man (1931), Stephen King-Hall's Post-War Pirate (1931) and others, Walter Owen's genre-rimming The Cross of Carl (1931), Charles Duff's Mind Products Limited (1932), George C Foster's Awakening (1932), John Gloag's Tomorrow's Yesterday (1932), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Harold Nicolson's Public Faces (1932), James Ray's The Scene Is Changed (1932), Graham Seton's Eye for an Eye (1932), Francis H Sibson's The Survivors (1932), George Slocombe's Dictator (1932), Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality (1933), John Collier's Tom's A-Cold (1933), John Kendall's Unborn Tomorrow (1933), M E Mitchell's "Yet in my Flesh –" (1933), Thomas F Tweed's Rinehard (1933), Osbert Sitwell's Miracle on Sinai (1933), C S Forester's The Peacemaker (1934), James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1934), F G Hurrell's John Lillibud (1934), Alan Llewellyn's The Strange Invaders (1934), J Leslie Mitchell's Gay Hunter (1934), Leslie Reid's Cauldron Bubble (1934), Dennis Wheatley's Black August (1934), T H White's Earth Stopped (1934), Stella Benson's Mundos: An Unfinished Novel (1935), F Le Gros Clark's Between Two Men (1935), James Corbett's Devil-Man from Mars (1935), Geoffrey Dearmer's They Chose to Be Birds (1935), Harry Edmonds's The Professor's Last Experiment (1935), Susan Ertz's Woman Alive (1935), Elizabeth Kay Gresswell's When Yvonne Was Dictator (1935), Claude Houghton's This Was Ivor Trent (1935), Joseph O'Neill's Land Under England (1935), Herbert Read's The Green Child: A Romance (1935), Barrington Beverley's The Space Raiders (1936), A G MacDonell's Lords and Masters (1936), Joseph Macleod's Overture to Cambridge (1936), John Palmer's The Hesperides: A Looking-Glass Fugue (1936), Wayland Smith's The Machine Stops (1936), Barbara Wootton's London's Burning (1936), Geoffrey Household's The Third Hour (1937), F L Lucas's The Woman Cloaked with the Sun and Other Stories (coll of linked stories 1937) which climaxes in the End of the World, Storm Jameson's The World Ends (1937) as by William Lamb, A M Low's Mars Breaks Through (1937), William J Makin's Murder at Full Moon (1937), C S Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and (more comprehensively) its second sequel, That Hideous Strength (1945), Andrew Marvell's Minimum Man: Or, Time to Be Gone (1938) and others, H M Raleigh's The Machinations of Dr Grue (1938), Philip George Chadwick's The Death Guard (1939), R C Sherriff's The Hopkins Manuscript (1939), Herbert Best's The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940), Ian MacDougall's A Trip to Venus (1940), Alfred Noyes's The Last Man (1940), Donald Suddaby's Lost Men in the Grass (1940) as by Griff.

Later examples from authors who experienced the Great War include J Jefferson Farjeon's Death of a World (1948), Robert Graves's Watch the North Wind Rise (1949), Ronald Fraser's Beetle's Career (1951) after many fantasies, Lord Dunsany's The Last Revolution (1952) and The Pleasures of a Futuroscope (written 1955; 2003), Charles Morgan's The Burning Glass (1953), L P Hartley's Facial Justice (1960), Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), J B S Haldane's The Man With Two Memories (1976), Owen Barfield's Night Operation (1983-1984 Towards; 2008); and others.

It should be noted that the proportion of women authors of Scientific Romances, certainly over the significant decades separating the two great twentieth-century world wars, is notably greater than those conspicuously engaged in American Genre SF a few years later (see Feminism; Women SF Writers). Those with entries in this encyclopedia (most already mentioned above) include Stella Benson, Margaret Maud Brash writing as John Kendall, Katharine Burdekin, Sarah Campion, Susan Ertz, Elizabeth Kay Gresswell, Charlotte Haldane, Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Jaeger, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Naomi Mitchison, E Arnot Robertson, Vita Sackville-West, Aelfrida Tillyard, E H Tisot writing as William Penmare, and Barbara Wootton.

The nonfiction works of authors like J D Bernal and Haldane – both of which appear in the To-day and To-morrow series, short texts of speculative nonfiction that share tone and content with much Scientific Romance – were directly influential on the form during the 1920s. It might also be suggested that the greatest author of the nonfiction Scientific Romance was Arnold J Toynbee (1889-1975) for the deterministic cycles into which he fit past history in A Study of History (1934-1954 10vols) (see Pseudoscience) and Civilization on Trial (1948), in which he used his model to forecast our fate.

A few more recent writers have found the term a convenient rubric for off-piste works, or for subversive presentations of a clearly faux nostalgia, many Steampunk tales in particular commodifying the visions of the classic Scientific Romance into boutique shop windows bricolaging the arcade of the past. Michael Moorcock's Nomad of the Time Stream sequence, beginning with The Warlord of the Air: A Scientific Romance (1971), both exemplifies and critiques this tendency. Authors taking more general inspiration from the form include George Orwell for Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Arthur C Clarke for Childhood's End (1954), Gore Vidal for Messiah (1954), Ian Watson for The Embedding (1973) and many subsequent tales, Christopher Priest for The Space Machine (1976), Brian Stableford for The Walking Shadow (1979), whose subtitle, added later, is "A Promethean Scientific Romance", and his Emortality sequence, and many others, Kim Stanley Robinson for The Memory of Whiteness (1985), Red Moon (2018), and The Ministry for the Future (2020), Brian W Aldiss for the Helliconia series, Ronald Wright for A Scientific Romance (1997), which he explicitly links to Richard Jefferies's After London; Or, Wild England (1885) and H G Wells's The Time Machine (1895), along with several other cites, Adam Roberts's Thought Experiment novels beginning with Salt (2000), Stephen Baxter's Evolution (2002), and in fact almost all his work. More recent examples, from non-UK authors, include Joanna Kavenna's The Birth of Love (2010) and A Field Guide to Reality (2016), where discourse governs storyline; and Steven Erikson's first non-fantasy novel, Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart: A Novel of First Contact (2018), which clearly amalgamates topoi from both sf and the Scientific Romance. [BS/DRL/JC]

see also: Forgotten Futures.

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