I’ll try to restate my main point (also made in some ways by Maria) as yet another version of Arthur C. Clarke “Any sufficiently civilised magic is indistinguishable from technology”. It’s only towards the end of the book as Strange gets out of control that the revolutionary possibilities of magic become apparent, and these are (I think) very different from the revolutionary possibilities of steam. A sequel that showed this could greatly affect our reading of JSAMN, I think.

IIRC, the main points of the discussion had much to do with the book as fitting into the sf subgenre of alternate history and the relationship of magic in that world to industry inours and the grey area that lies between. But I could be wrong. I’m just a damned medievalist. I just kind of thought that the essay was not about whether or not John was right to follow the ‘Frankenstein is the first real sf’ route.

Goethe’s Faust? HP Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University? Asimov’s Foundation? Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness? Clark’s idea itself didn’t seem hugely innovative to me, though the execution was good.

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.

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.

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.”

No, the difference comes from that Shelley is a Romantic, and Romanticism comes not from the impact of the Industrial Revolution perse, but from Rousseau in an ultimate sense. Yes, certainly Romanticism has a fundamental relationship with the Industrial Revolution, but Romanticism predates the Industrial Revolution. Rousseau’s conflict is with commerce as a whole (or the concept of “sweet commerce” in the Enlightenment), but not particularly with factories – since there largely weren’t that many dark, Satanic mills in France and Switzerland yet. Not that Rousseau would have been fond of the Industrial Revolution.

I hope we’re all in agreement that Shelley’s novels are signficantly different from the other proto-SF candidates mentioned above, that this difference reflects, at least in part, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, and that lots of subsequent writing is in the tradition inaugurated by Shelley. I’ll use the term Shelleyite fiction to describe this body of literature.

Now, let me restate my initial claim. In a sense (for example the sense used by Brian Aldiss), all science fiction is Shelleyite fiction.

Of course, you can use different definitions that push the starting date back earlier, but then, the same is notoriously true of the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Newcomen was an almost exact contemporary of Swift for example.

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.