Ancient
Science Fiction
by
Barry Baldwin
Was
there any? Arthur Koestler claims Kepler’s
Somnium for the first real science fiction.
Kingsley Amis too rules out Lucian (‘too
comic’), but also disqualifies Kepler’s
‘fantasy.’ For Brian Aldiss,
Somnium ‘is straightforward non-utopian
astronomical exposition, and science fiction
no more began with Lucian than space flight
with Leonardo.’ While Aldiss grants
that science fiction owes much to the Greeks,
Amis derides this classical pedigree as
scornfully as Aphra Behn’s gibe at
‘reading foolish books, Lucian’s
lofty traveller who flew to heaven.’
Classicists themselves are divided. Bryan
Reardon, Lucian’s foremost translator,
insists the True History is not science
fiction - ‘there’s no science
in it.’ But recent articles by Fredericks
and Swanson argue that it is, while Lucianist
Graham Anderson suggests ‘the key
criterion is whether ancient concepts of
scientific activity are upheld, and in this
sense the label does seem admissible.’
What is science fiction? The term, a stray
1851 use by William Wilson apart, comes
from the 1920s. Graeco-Roman portmanteau
terms are ‘apista’ and ‘mirabilia’
- Astonishing Things. Aldiss calls it ‘the
search for a definition of man’s status
in the universe, characteristically cast
in the Gothic mould.’ Arguing that
science and scientists are not integral,
Amis suggests it is ‘prose narrative
of a situation that could not arise in our
world, but one hypothesised from some innovation
in science, whether human or extraterrestrial.’
The definitions by Aldiss and Amis paradoxically
open the door to acceptance of ancient science
fiction; Anderson’s kicks it in. Kepler
would have agreed. His Somnium was published
in 1634, the year of Hicks’ first-ever
English translation of the True History;
Lucian himself twice used this title. The
hero is Duracotus, a Romanesque name suggesting
toughness. He lives in Thule, the ancient
brand name for mysterious remoteness. His
demon guide is precedented in Byzantine
fiction. Unseen beings whispering encouragement
come from Lucian and The Alexander Romance
; nowadays we have the Taelons in Earth:
The Final Conflict. Kepler’s giant
lunar life forms and topography are likewise
classical. One numerical item stands out.
The moon’s Volva is 15 times larger
than the lunar surface, the temperature
is 15 times hotter than Africa. The philosopher
Philolaus (5th c. BC) calculated that lunar
plants and animals were 15 times the size
of earthly ones; his contemporary, Herodorus,
claimed that moon women lay eggs which hatch
children 15 times bigger. Philolaus also
figured a lunar day equals 15 earthly ones;
Kepler has the same equation. Herodorus
was an historian of sorts: when Aristotle
quotes his notion that vultures come from
the moon (in Lucian, tri-headed buzzards
constitute the lunar police), it is in a
work of serious science, the History Of
Animals.
Kepler’s hero is dazed by opiates
to protect him from the force of initial
acceleration, thereby anticipating modern
suggestions that astronauts be anaesthetised
during blast-off. Not an ancient consideration,
though in Plato Er’s journey to Hades
is accomplished under suspended animation.
Koestler commends Kepler for postulating
zones of zero gravity - ‘that nightmare
of science fiction.’ So, unconsciously,
does Lucian, who knew nothing of gravity
beyond Aristotle’s notion that heavy
objects fall to Earth’s centre, light
ones to its periphery.
‘All
Kepler’s works were cathartic; it
was only fitting that Somnium should end
with a fantastic flourish’ (Koestler).
We don’t know if True History was
Lucian’s last book; it is certainly
his most enduring.
Ancient imaginations were honed by different
but convergent factors. Classical mythology
provided a pervasive science fiction backdrop
with its monsters (e.g. Medusa, recycled
in Star Trek and Dr Who ), demons (mothers
threatened their children with Empusa and
Lamia), and such superheroes as Perseus
who outwitted Medusa and saved the naked,
spread-eagled (shades of Madonna) Andromeda
from a sea-serpent, zooming around with
winged sandals and a cloak of invisibility
(before Wells, Klingons, and Romulans).
It is dangerous to generalise about other
people’s beliefs, and we don’t
know how many ancients took their mythology
seriously: both for believers and sceptics,
it was always there.
It also spilled into real life. Many authors
collected ancient Forteana. These were significantly
popular in Lucian’s time. His Roman
contemporary, Gellius, describes their diet
of Scythian cannibals, Dog-Headed folk,
One-Eyed Giants, Monopods, fast-running
creatures with backward-turned feet, and
the denizens of ‘remote Albania’
whose hair turned white in childhood. Another
stock-in-trade was multiple births of often
Fellini-esque freaks and sex changes, usually
women into men. Another contemporary, Phlegon,
concentrated on these in his Book Of Wonders,
along with women producing snakes, homosexuals
having babies, and a 100-cubit coffin with
matching-size corpse that was 5000 years
old at death.
Mythology and Mirabilia co-existed with
scientific theorising. Ancient astronomy
was based on naked-eye observation. Telescopes
were within Lucian’s imagination,
but he credits them to lunar, not terrestrial,
technology. The ancients were confined to
5 planets (nothing beyond Saturn), a handful
of stars, also comets and meteors, of which
they were understandably afraid. Still,
their minds were not so confined. Along
with Herodorus and Philolaus, the pre-Socratic
thinkers Anaxagoras, Democritus (of atomic
theory fame), and Xenophanes speculated
about the moon. Some thought it inhabited;
all envisaged giant lunar topography. Pythagoras
was more off-beat: though featuring in all
histories of ancient science, he claimed
previous existence in the Trojan War, conversations
with demons, and a visit to Hades. In his
poem On The Nature Of Things, the Roman
Lucretius (1st c. BC) accepted other worlds
containing different life forms. A century
later, Seneca mentions fellow-Stoics’
belief that the sun was also inhabited,
a fantasy brought to literary life by Lucian,
who would have savoured the joke about the
Irish astronaut planning to visit the sun
- at night!
Aldiss and Amis miss all this, as they do
Plutarch’s essay The Face In The Moon
(AD 72), which encapsulates ancient lunar
theories; Kepler translated it just before
his death. Plutarch waxes on lunar topography,
also Aristotle’s tentative belief
in life there, adding ‘there is much
talk on this, serious and frivolous,’
disdaining a tale that a man once fell from
the moon to earth. He combines, as does
Lucian, lunar topics with tales of a remote
continent, thought by Kepler and others
down to Mair (1909) to be America.
Another Lucian contemporary, the astronomer-geographer
Ptolemy, poetically combines science and
humanism:
I am merely mortal,
But when I see the stars,
I feel like an immortal,
With Jupiter and Mars.
Homer’s Odyssey is familiar: the one-eyed
giant Cyclops (his grisly blinding copied
in a dire 1950s Hollywood version), cannibalistic
monster Laestrygonians, 12-headed doglike
Scylla (ridiculed by Lucretius), Circe’s
man-into-pig enchantments until baffled
by Odysseus’ ‘moly’ drug
(holy-moly?), and his descent into Hades
to converse via magical aids with the dead.
This last motif would become regular in
both serious and light literature: Virgil,
Lucian, Timarion, Dante, down to Stan Lee’s
comic-book Superheroes and the second Bill
and Ted film. Some include Christ’s
Descent into Hell in this panorama; Acts
contains a number of supernatural happenings
geared to the immediate needs (escape, food,
etc.) of that book’s human heroes.
However, writers ignore the Iliad’s
descriptions (Book 18) of self-propelling
wheeled tables and ‘golden maidservants
who resemble real girls, not only speaking
and moving, but endowed with thought and
trained in handiwork.’ These pre-Capek
robots sound like the ‘droids’
Captain Kirk was forever falling in lust
with. True, they are invented by Hephaestus,
god of technology: what counts is that the
human Homer could visualise such things.
Three Aristophanes plays (5th c. BC) offer
comic science fiction, a genre extending
via Lucian and Timarion through Rabelais
and Swift down to Hitch-Hiker’s Guide
and Red Dwarf. In Peace, a war-weary-citizen
flies to heaven on a giant dung-beetle to
bring her down. Birds has two Athenian ‘drop-outs’
establishing their utopian CloudCuckooLand.
In Frogs, Dionysus descends to Hades to
fetch back the best dead poet to earth.
Plato’s Atlantis story may be a cautionary
tale to unite Sicilian Greeks against Carthaginian
invasion. His Atlanteans do not have lasers,
as in their woeful Steeve Reeves cinematic
incarnation; but the herds of elephants
on this remote northern island are no less
surprising. For building and cognate technology,
much is made of a mysterious metal, ‘orichalcum’,
described as ‘more precious than everything
save gold, nowadays only a name.’
Plato’s Er tells how his soul left
his body and travelled to Hades where he
saw the infernal sights before returning
to life. His economic mode of travel suggests
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter,
who simply gazes up at Mars and finds himself
on its surface after brief interplanetary
commute. Plato’s Bellowing Chasm prefigures
the booming Time-Portal in Star Trek’s
City On The Edge Of Forever.
Theopompus, Plato’s contemporary,
included in his (fragmentary) historical
works a sea-serpent attacking ships and
the advent of a Satyr. He also developed
a full-blown utopia beyond the ocean where
two cities, Eusebes (Pious) and Machimos
(Warlike) have lifestyles un-Greek and unlike
each other. Machimos doesn’t invade
Eusebes; it once invaded the Hyperboreans
(a much-mentioned Greek fantasy race) but
withdrew on learning they were the happiest
people on earth. Compare Wells’ gentle
Eloi and savage Morlocks (Time Machine),
also the three contiguous rival societies
of Robert Heinlein’s Coventry. Theopompus
also conceived Anostos (Place Of No Return)
in Africa, where trees by the Rivers of
Grief and Pleasure bore fruit that caused
its eaters to transmogrify into weeping
babies and dissolve.
Another contemporary, Ctesias, was anciently
celebrated for his India, a book crammed
with monsters, giants, pygmies, dog-headed
men, wondrous minerals, and bizarre sexual
practices. Ctesias is one of two authors
invoked by Lucian; the other, a merchant-writer
Iambulus (date uncertain), described a utopian
island whose inhabitants’ split tongues
permit simultaneous conversations and whose
tortoises’ blood serves to re-attach
severed limbs.
In 1st c. AD Rome, the novelist Petronius
included werewolves and witches in his Satyricon.
Belief in werewolves is ridiculed by the
Elder Pliny as typical Greek nonsense -
Herodotus had long ago publicised the lycanthrope
Neuri tribe. Pliny the Younger offers serious
accounts of haunted houses and chain-clanking
ghosts; so does his friend, the historian
Tacitus. The Byzantine Psellus (11th c.)
describes the repertoire of a father-and-son
magician team in Lucian’s day: necromancy
and saving a Roman army by contriving a
humanoid clay figure which fired ‘unstoppable
shots’ at the enemy.
Antonius Diogenes (date uncertain) penned
a voluminous novel Wonders Beyond Thule.
The surviving fragments have various adventurers,
including a woman, Derkyllis (not Xena!).
A female protagonist is unusual, but Derkyllis
is more than a wimpy companion in Dr Who:
her lone exploits include Hades. Antonius
dedicated the novel to his sister, while
Ptolemy Chennus consecrated his book of
wonders to his ‘Learned Mistress.’
This all tempers Amis’ contention
that women do not go in much for science
fiction. The men visit both sun and moon,
the latter briefly compared to ‘a
bare earth’.
In the spirit of ‘To Boldly Go...,’
Lucian sails with fifty comrades to explore
the mysterious ocean beyond the Pillars
of Hercules. An immediate storm drops them
on an island after 79 buffeting days where
giant footsteps and a plaque attest that
Hercules and Dionysus got that far. Temptations
include a wine river and the Vine Women
- Wells adapted these for his Flowering
Of The Strange Orchid - whose kisses are
sweet but two sailors who assault them are
trapped by their erect penises which take
root. The others re-embark, only to be flung
high by a whirlwind and higher by a sail-bellying
gale. After seven aerial days, they land
on the great shining Moon. Hardly have they
taken this giant step for ancient mankind
when they are hauled off by tri-headed vulture
police to their leader, Endymion.
This amiable alien enlists our heroes in
his war against the Sun King and his Ant-Dragons,
the prize being the Morning Star. Both sides
muster armies of allies from the Great Bear
and other stars such as GrassPlume-Riders,
Flea-Archers, Sky-Mosquitoes, and Giant
Spiders who spin a Tholian-like web between
Moon and Venus. The obligatory fights of
Japanese movie monsters are already in place.
The Sun army prevails, Endymion sues for
peace, a treaty is made dividing up the
Universe between them.
Lucian now has leisure for lunar sociology.
Moonites are all-male: lunar man is born
of man. Lacking genitals and anuses, they
have no lavatorial functions. Sexual intercourse
is achieved through the knee’s hollow
by dint of artificial organs - the first
cyborg prosthetics - made of ivory or wood.
Old Moonites don’t die, they simply
dissolve into the aether, like Star Trek’s
Apollo. They sweat milk, their nasal drip
is honey, their eyes are removable. Such
attributes put George Lucas’ creatures,
also the gallimaufrey (apts, banths, siths,
etc.) of Burroughs’ Mars, quite in
the shade.
Leaving the Moon, they observe solar habitations,
re-provision on Venus, pass by CloudCuckooLand,
and visit Lychnopolis (Lamp City) before
re-entry into the ocean where they are promptly
engulphed by a 250-mile-long whale, in whose
belly dwell entire cities of fellow-swallowees.
After two years of incarceration, they torch
the monster’s innards and escape.
They next encounter a frozen ocean, Cheese
Island, and aquaplaning Cork Men before
entering Hades where the heroes and villains
of mythology are witnessed, plus a Bill-and-Ted-style
interview with Homer to determine if he
actually wrote the Iliad and Odyssey.
After leaving here, they variously elude
the Pumpkin-Pirates, a gigantic kingfisher
resembling Sinbad’s Roc, and the Ass-Leg
Cannibal Women (shades of the 1959 classic,
Leech Woman) before reaching their original
transatlantic destination. What happens
next, Lucian does not tell. The last sentence
promises a sequel, never written - the 17th
c. Spaniard Francisco Reguera remedies this
in a still unpublished continuation. Maybe
George Lucas should have heeded Lucian and
quit while ahead.
In Lucian’s other science fiction,
IcaroMenippus flies to heaven seeking both
cosmology and human moral perspective. The
Nekyomanteia finds the same hero in Hades
looking for a code of living: satire against
philosophers and the rich adorns the usual
mythological fun. Two other dialogues (Descent
and Charon) have similar settings and themes.
In The Lover Of Lies, Lucian like a modern
tabloid has his cake and eats it, ridiculing
tall tales of (e.g.) exorcisms, poltergeists
and people who ‘die’ and return
with revelations from ‘the other side’
by spinning out countless such dossiers.
The Alexander Romance (unknown author and
date) was antiquity’s ‘best-selling
novel’: 80 versions in 24 languages
rival the Bible’s diffusion. One segment
comprises Alexander’s adventures at
the world’s end, very similar to earlier
stories. We note its Plant-Men - 24 cubits
tall, 2 cubit neck-span, belligerent killers
with saw-like arms and hands - for comparison
with Burroughs’ Plant-Men in Gods
Of Mars : 12 feet tall, large feet, razor-like
talons.
Two anonymous Byzantine fictions, Timarion
(12th c.) and Mazaris (15th c.), involve
trips to Hades. The former’s plot,
a man taken before his time, anticipates
Heaven Can Wait . Timarion is snatched from
his sick-bed by two black-robed demons who
whirl him through the air and down a dark
pit to iron-gated Hell, whence after winning
permission to continue living he re-enters
his body via nose and mouth. The setting
is a pagan-Christian jumble: Cerberus, Minos
sharing judgement with a Byzantine emperor,
much bright white light, infernal punishments
such as Nero forever shovelling excrement.
The Mazaris uses the underworld setting
for its hero to settle old scores with pre-deceased
enemies. There is much Lucian in these novelettes,
as in another anonymous Byzantine dialogue
in Hades between Charon, Hermes, and the
just-arrived Alexander the Great.
One Byzantine also paved the way for modern
sword-and-sorcery fantasy, with a dash of
soft porn, in the rare shape of a verse
novel, Callimachus And Chrysorrhoe (14th
c.), where hero finds heroine hanging naked
by her hair from the battlement of a magic
castle of an ogre-dragon whom he kills after
an improbable pole-vault over the walls.
The finale has him ravish her after bathing
together, both acts in defiance of Byzantine
morality. Carnality apart, this unexpectedly
anticipates John Carter and Deja Thoris
in Burroughs’ Martian chronicles.
Quipped Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest:
‘SF’s
no good,’ they bellow till we’re
deaf.
‘But
this looks good’ - ‘Well, then,
it’s not SF.’
Lucian began the True History with a cod
debate on what’s good and fun in literature,
and in Hades commissioned this couplet from
Homer:
One Lucian, whom the blessed gods befriend,
Observed what’s here, and back home
did wend.
_______________
Further Reading:
Aldiss, B., Billion Year Spree: The True
History Of Science Fiction (1973, repr.
as Trillion Year Spree in 1986)
Amis, K., New Maps Of Hell (1960)
Behn, A., Emperor Of The Moon (1687)
Fredericks, A., ‘Lucian’s True
History As Science Fiction,’ Science
Fiction Studies 3 (1976), 49-60
Green, R., Into Other Worlds: Space-Flight
In Fiction From Lucian To Lewis (1957)
Grove, P., The Imaginary Voyage In Prose
Fiction (1941)
Koestler, A., The Sleepwalkers (1959)
Luce, J., The End Of Atlantis (1969)
Romm, J., The Edges Of The Earth In Ancient
Thought (1992)
Swanson, R., ‘The True, The False,
and The Truly False: Lucian’s Philosophical
Science Fiction,’ Science Fiction
Studies 6 (1979), 228-39
Annotated English translations of Antonius
Diogenes, Lucian, and The Alexander Romance
are most conveniently found in (ed.) B.
Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels
(1989). Timarion is translated with full
commentary by B. Baldwin (1984), Mazaris
by A. Smithies (1975), Kepler’s Somnium
by E. Rosen (1967).
Ancient
Science Fiction
© 2006 by Barry Baldwin
|