The Magical-Industrial Revolution

earlier version of a sentence intruding on paragraph 8…”to spare a young woman from death…”

The movies are a really bad guide to Tolkien.

The reactionary content isn’t in the theoretical absense of themes pertinent to moderns, but in the normative content: romanticism, heroism, elites = good; rationalization, industry, upsetting the apple cart = bad. It’s the same principle that makes Star Wars reactionary, even if it’s dressed in lots of technology.

It seems to me that LOTR, a tale whose hero conspires to defeat the military-industrial war machine by renouncing personal power, should not be so wholly dismissed as reactionary. Moreover, I wouldn’t categorize the Hobbits as elites.

The fading of the romantic elites is seen as a given in Tolkien, however, as inescapable as sunset. It is not a future that any of the heroes are even capable of returning to if they wanted to- indeed, the only way to live in this past is to effectively die (leaving with the Elves.) The elites are important, but they are not all- indeed, left to their own devices, they probably would have fucked everything up.

Tom Shippey’s Tolkein: Author of the Century makes a pretty solid case that LOTR is basically Tolkein’s reflections on World War I, which he fought in, combined with his interest in the literature of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse.

The ultimate hero of LOTR is a common man, a hobbit; kings and wizards and elves all, in the end, are side-shows to Frodo’s struggle with the temptation of power, and if you read the Silmarillion, Tolkein typically depicts the elites as a pack of morons who self-destruct repeatedly because of their hubris.

But it is strongly romantic in the sense of longing for days gone by, but marked also by a sense that actual return to those days is impossible. There’s an overarching sense of decline which can be staved off, but not stopped.

Tolkein was decidedly anti-industrial; he loved nature and disliked cities and industrial development for tearing that up.

“In a sense, science fiction is all about the Industrial Revolution. The genre begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. Among the layers of meaning that can be read into this work the most obvious, pointed to by the subtitle, is an allegory of the Industrial Revolution, unleashing forces beyond the control of its creators. In one form or another, this has remained the central theme of the genre.”
“In a sense” Yes, in the sense you wish to establish for your argument. This must be the archetypal straw man.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell gives the alternate history wheel a new spin, by imagining a starting point at which alternate and real histories have converged. Clarke’s Georgian England is just like the real thing, but has a history in which magician-kings ruled the North until some time in the 14th century.

How would you compare JS&MN to Orson Scott Card’s (ultimately disappointing for me – I was only able to finish the 3rd book before getting turned off Card) Alvin Maker series? The history there sort of dips in and out of ‘our’ timeline, with very different events leading to essentially identical trends and dynamics. Of course, Card’s point (as far as I could tell) was to demonstrate that Mormonism would have emerged even in an alternate America…

Does anyone want to address the issue that Sci-Fi clearly pre-dates the industrial revolution?

I think that it’s fundamentally a bit off to look at JSAMN as an alternate history, and the reason for this comes down to the authorial intention of the implied author (not the narrator, the person who supposed wrote the book within the world of JSAMN, but the author that seems to have intentions that we create from reading the book). JSAMN needs to have the setting that it does because its implied author seems to want to write in the style and setting of Jane Austen. Therefore it must appear to start in a historically recognizeable place. But, as I wrote in the comments to Maria’s essay, the author is seemingly not interested in letting the ahistorical elements that are introduced change the setting in any meaningful way except just at the end of the book, since that would require a change in style. Therefore, this isn’t an alternate history (which would be a subgenre of SF); it’s a fantasy. As I’ve already written, I think this is a weakness of the book. Imagine that, say, you want to write just like Tolstoy, except with magic. So you re-write _War and Peace_, except that the magic involved somehow doesn’t change any of the types of social relationships or events, which are by your choice of style immutable. It’s pastiche-y, really not much different in kind from the many imitators of Tolkien who have elves leaving the world and going to the West because that’s what elves do. It just seems much better because of the talent of the author and because there are far fewer Austenites than Tolkienites.

“Arguments about origins can never be settled, but the view that Frankenstein is the first real work of SF is fairly widely held, notably by Brian Aldiss. I think this view is right, others are free to differ, but I don’t see the need to rehash the argument here.”

Well, yes, you most certainly do need to establish this point since if Frankenstein isn’t the first SF work (instead – if the first SF work appeared many decades or centuries earlier), then there’s no real connection between scifi and the industrial revolution.

Which there isn’t. Because, intellectually, what’s powering the industrial revolution is the combination of science harnessed by government and commerce. Hoardes of Enlightenment thinkers had been advocating precisely that decades before anything like it came into any actual reality. We should remember that Swift’s Laputa is a satire on previous scientific utopias – the first one of which is Bacon’s New Atlantis. This makes sense, since Bacon was among the first to promote science as the integral part of a post-Machiavellian political regime.

Calling “Frankenstein” the “first science fiction story” is absurd any way you slice it. First in the sense of the commercial genre for which that name was invented? Certainly not; it didn’t become a recognized commercial genre until the early twentieth century, and when it did, it didn’t take “Frankenstein” as an exemplar — it took the “future war” stories of the turn of the century, Wells, Verne, and that long line of fake-exposition which stretches to Defoe at least. First to parlay aspects of what some critics find in later examples of that commercial genre? Certainly not; such aspects can be found farther back and more widely spread. (Did Margaret Cavendish write the first virtual reality story?) But while we’re playing this game, I’ll plug my plug for “The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins” by Robert Paltock.

Here’s an origin myth of my own: the prevalence of the Shelley thesis says more about academia than about science fiction or Shelley. That cranky notion, held more-or-less solely by Aldiss, had the good fortune to be included in the most readily available one-volume survey of the genre for many years. Professors who wanted to teach a single semester of Sci Fi gratefully turned to it in lieu of surveying the field themselves. The lure of easy expertise turned Aldiss’s eccentricy into received wisdom.

The rich ground Clarke and many others are working, however, represents the meeting of two other types of not-much-influenced-by-Frankenstein fantasy.

One, the “decline of magic” strand, was primarily triggered by colonialism. England as world power wipes out a population (purportedly) for its vile supersititons; English writers then mope about not getting to have their magic cake with their imported tea. (This strand is still alive and sickmaking in the narrative convention that any spooky thing attempted by someone of African, Caribbean, or Native American origins will work, so long as it doesn’t involve achieving economic or political parity.)

The other, the “magic is real” strand, follows from the decline of protosciences like alchemy, astrology, and necromancy into pseudosciences. It’s not motivated by factory toddlers coughing to an early grave or by vanished green fields but by the dream that a poet could engage in spiritual struggle while blowing things up real good.

Both strands can be found, neatly separated, in W. B. Yeats’s stories.

More particularly, Clarke’s novel might be viewed as a weighty response to two decades’ worth of Anglophile Regency-or-thereabouts fiction which I’ve sometimes heard called “fantasy of manners.”

“One, the “decline of magic” strand, was primarily triggered by colonialism. England as world power wipes out a population (purportedly) for its vile supersititons; English writers then mope about not getting to have their magic cake with their imported tea. (This strand is still alive and sickmaking in the narrative convention that any spooky thing attempted by someone of African, Caribbean, or Native American origins will work, so long as it doesn’t involve achieving economic or political parity.)”

Interestingly, the usually submerged colonialist subtext of these stories is made explicit in the early zombie masterpiece film “I Walked with a Zombie” by that forgotten master Val Lewton and his merry crew of B-filmmakers.

“It might be helpful to resolve the Frankenstein arguments to note that James, in Science Fiction in the 20th Century, divides sf into three main subgenres: he places Frankenstein as one of the first examples of the third subgenre, ‘Tales of Science,’ but the others mentioned above (Swift, e.g.) fit into the other two subgenres (‘The Extraordinary Voyage’ and ‘Tales of the Future’). If we were to follow this schema, which makes a lot of sense, people could stop worrying about Frankenstein’s relative place and talk about Clark’s book.”

The original post was NOT “I love this book! Let’s talk about the book”. The original post’s thesis was that Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell stood in a fundamental relationship to Frankenstein because all scifi MUST have a close link to Frankenstein (because Frankenstein is claimed to be the orginator and exemplar of the genre).

Anyway, since the Laputa (or Flying City) section of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a “Tale of Science” (as is Bacon’s New Atlantis), again, Frankenstein is not particularly new in that regard.

BB, I was gonna be all snarky about how I never said it was startlingly innovative all by itself in its bare bones regardless of the fascinating flesh I just said it wasn’t based on Frankenstein, but anyone who references two Leiber novels is a pal of mine, so put it there!