Science & Moonshine

PILGRIMS THROUGH SPACE AND TIME (341 pp.)--J. O. Bailey--Argus ($5).

Pavements were rippling like thin ice on a pond. Steel and stone buildings trembled in a portentous wind. The sky sizzled as though tons of bacon were frying in an apocalyptic pan. "Obviously, men," gasped the Professor, "the Katz-Alpha-Ogallala nebula is approaching the earth at terrific speed, just as I predicted. We have not a moment to lose." The atom-powered space ship was ready and waiting in Joe's Parkview Garage, and off they zoomed to safety on the planet Mars, where there are marvels enough to fill a year's issues of Flabbergasting Stories.

Test Tube Frolics. So-called scientific fiction of this sort is not the private property of pulps and comics. As Author Bailey shows in this survey of the literary imagination frolicking among test tubes and cam shafts, Tarzan, Superman and even Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle are novices and newcomers in the field.

The first yarn in English about an interplanetary voyage was Bishop Godwin's Man in the Moone (1638), in which birds called "gansas" dragged an astounded visitor there in a dozen days. Another early example was Holberg's Journey to the World Under Ground (1742)--a world of clockwork ships, male prostitutes and learned monkeys. The anonymous Aerostatic Spy (1785) described a balloon trip around the globe.

Utopians as grave as Sir Thomas More, satirists as great as Jonathan Swift dealt with imaginary men and inventions. Samuel Butler (Erewhon), William Dean Howells (A Traveler from Altruria), H. G. Wells (The Empire of the Ants) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) also mixed science and moonshine for purposes of their own.

Waddling Blockhouses. One conspicuous fact is that the literary imagination at its most fantastically "scientific" peaks has often been overtaken if not outdistanced by science itself. Examples:

P:Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) described "portable electric lights" 15 years before Edison made his incandescent bulb work.

P:H. G. Wells's The Land Ironclads (1903) tells of a machine resembling a cross "between a big blockhouse and a giant's dishcover" clanking over trenches on caterpillar-like feet, firing automatic weapons as it goes. Tanks were first used at the battle of the Somme (1916).*

P: Wells's The World Set Free (1914) is even more prescient. It describes a war in which "most of the capital cities of the world" are destroyed by atomic bismuth bombs, with "millions of people" dead or dying amid complete chaos.

*Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up tanks in the 16th Century. Wrote the painter of The Last Supper: "These take the place of elephants. . . . One may hold bellows in them to spread terror among the horses of the enemy, and one may put carabiniers in them to break up every company."

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