Could there be medieval science fiction?

Tumblr user elucubrare raised a really interesting question:

here is a concept that I’m still trying to flesh out: medieval science fiction.

not, of course, aliens land during the middle ages, though I’ve read and enjoyed that, but something much more difficult to execute, if it’s possible at all: space opera (exempli gratia) as written by Bede or Gildas or Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Knowing me only too well, nickjbarlow subtly suggested that I might have some thoughts on this, with reference to a certain Duchess of Newcastle. I do.

Margaret Cavendish was not medieval, but she was an early modern natural philosopher writing at the dawn of science and she was the first (European) science fiction writer.

The main reason you don’t get medieval science fiction is because there was no science. There was natural philosophy, but the specific way of thinking that we identify as science – the scientific method for acquiring knowledge – simply didn’t exist. (In Europe – it would be very easy to say ‘in the world’ and Europeans do tend to view Europe as the birth place of science, but the truth is I have neither the world history nor the world history of science background to comment on that.)

The early modern period and the birth of science is generally dated to Galileo’s The Assayer, published in 1623.

What was regarded as known prior to this was dominated by the Church. I can’t stress that enough. What Galileo did that was so scandalous was not saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun, it was that he proved it with the scientific method and said that human beings could gain knowledge via this method and not solely from the Church and the Bible. More: humans could gain knowledge that showed the Church and the Bible to be wrong.

The Royal Society, England’s oldest scientific body, was founded in 1660.

Margaret Cavendish wrote The Blazing World in 1666.

That’s why you can’t really get actual science fiction that dates from the medieval period. The (early) modern period is kind of defined by the shift in thinking that allows people to think scientifically and therefore write science fiction – fiction based on the possibilities enabled by scientific discovery or possible scientific discovery. Margaret Cavendish extrapolated from a whole bunch of scientific theories that she was aware of and posited another Earth (an alien world) attached to our Earth at the North Pole. She posited a different ecology for that different world (aliens and xenobiology) based on the different plants and animals found in the so-called New World (full-disclosure, it’s a bit imperialist; she was a duchess writing in seventeenth century England). She posited new and incredible machines created by the natives of that world. This is hard science fiction. The scienciest science fiction.

Now. Can we coherently imagine Bede or Chaucer writing science fiction and what that tale would be like?

Urgh… it kind of breaks my brain a bit, because you probably have to deviate significantly from how they would have been likely to think. There’s a reason people from these periods who wanted to write speculative fiction wrote Arthurian tales or about fairies and other fantastical folk traditions. Partly it’s that it would have been sacrilegious, but partly it’s that Galileo’s achievement was a massive shift in perspective with regard to how people thought. How we think about the ways in which we can gain knowledge has a knock-on effect for how they think about their entire world, including the ways in which they imagine. The very way we defined the possible and the impossible or fanciful changed. It wasn’t defined by the church anymore – knowledge was democratised, but also systematised.

Not that there hadn’t been other ways of thinking about what was known or unknown. That’s one of the oldest discussions in philosophy and dates back to the Ancient Greeks, whose theology was very different. Logic played a significant role, but logic can’t actually tell you very much about what is known about what we now think of as the physical or material world (although those are themselves are modern and early modern concepts – they wouldn’t mean much to Socrates, for whom true reality was the world of the forms). There was also natural philosophy, which Aristotle was a champion of. A Christianised understanding of Aristotle’s teachings dominated the way we thought about what could be known about the natural world (the world we know via our senses) for over a thousand years.

The dominant way of thinking about learning in the medieval period was scholasticism. Scholasticism was characterised by dialectical reasoning – using inference to resolve contradictions. (Note: scholastics were particularly Christian; there was interesting stuff going on in Islamic and Jewish scholarship at this time, too. I don’t know that it was that different for the purposes of our current question – Al-Ghazali, an 11th century Islamic philosopher, was saying stuff that Descartes was still drawing on in the 17th century – but it’s notable that Islamic alchemy was well ahead of what English, Christian scholars knew.)

Could this be used to inspire science fiction… I just… it’s just not very scientific, OK? It’s very a priori (before experience) and based on reasoning from things already regarded as ‘known’. The scholastics got into maths and geometry, and they liked Aristotle to the extent that they could make him seem Christian. Which he wasn’t. So a lot of the natural philosophical thought that we can find in Aristotle and see as a precursor to scientific thinking… just wasn’t there. I am not a medieval scholar, and I’m sure that there were monks studying nature and making observations. But by and large they were looking to reason from those observations in ways that harmonised with Church teaching. Some of that thinking is still genuinely interesting. But it’s not scientific.

It’s not interested in creating new knowledge on the basis of our observations of the world in the way that is central to science fiction.

So… to imagine someone writing proto-science fiction in the medieval period, you really need to imagine a heretic. Chaucer would never have written science fiction. I don’t want to poo-poo the thought – it’s exciting! – but if you want to do it, I’d advise reflecting carefully on who might possibly be thinking in such a controversial way at that time.

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Speculative Fiction 2012 wins British Fantasy Society Award!

I’m super thrilled to say that Speculative Fiction 2012 won the British Fantasy Society Award for Non-Fiction today. As regular readers will be aware, my post, ‘Remembering Margaret Cavendish‘, was published in this volume as one of the fifty ‘best online reviews, essays and commentary’ on the speculative genre in 2012. Obviously, it’s pretty awesome for me to have had my work published in a volume that has won such a prestigious award. And I’m stoked for Margaret Cavendish, as well, who only desired fame, and has been wrongfully denied her place in our memories as the first writer of science fiction (in the European tradition, at least). But more than anything, I’m thrilled for Jared Shurin and Justin Landon, our simply amazing editors.

Jared and Justin collected together a really incredible selection of essays that you really all should read. More than that, they have modestly and generously been consistent in sharing their praise with their contributors, including sending us specially commissioned artwork to commemorate the Hugo nomination. I’ve joked about sharing a 50th of a Hugo nomination, I could joke about sharing a 50th of a BFS Award, but the truth is that this is a really well deserved win for the two of them, without whom the collection would never have come into existence, and without whom my little essay would never have seen print, or had the recognition it has had since. They deserve every bit of this award, and I’m really just stoked that it has come through.

Hugo nomination baby!

Speculative Fiction 2012 has been nominated for a Hugo!

That’s the book in which one of my posts has been published, OMG.

Whilst the nomination is really for our illustrious editors, Justin Landon and Jared Shurin, I am still tickled pink to have my essay included in something that’s been nominated for a Hugo. That’s, like, whoa.

I remember being a lonely geek girl smelling the books in WH Smith, gazing with wide eyes at books with dragons and spaceships that said on them ‘Nominated for a Hugo Award’, and I didn’t really know what that meant, but I knew it was important. The idea that my writing might be in a book nominated for such an award makes me very happy indeed.

I’m tickled pink for me and I’m tickled pink for Jared and Justin and all the other contributors, and I’m tickled for Margaret Cavendish, too – writer of the first science fiction novel whose work is frequently overlooked, and for whom my essay sought to correct an oversight of history. Recognition of SpecFic 2012 gives the essays therein a certain status, and I hope that it adds weight to my words that this should be a thing more people should be aware of, too.

So, anyway, I’m really pleased. Of course, I hope we Jared and Justin win as well, but just being nominated is beyond rad. 😀 😀 😀

Reviewing through the Time Machine: Remembering Margaret Cavendish

Earlier today something came across my tumblr that perpetuated a common myth. Which is to say that ‘Mary Shelley invented science fiction’. Now, if you want to say that ‘Mary Shelley was the mother of science fiction’… OK, there’s probably a case for that. I don’t want to diss Mary Shelley and her achievement, but it’s important not to let Frankenstein eclipse an earlier work by a woman who was at least as revolutionary: The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish.

Artwork used as part of the British Library’s ‘Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it’ exhibition, quote from the The Blazing World; although painting was originally from a Rondo Veneziano album cover.

Written in 1666, and republished in 1668 alongside her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (AKA ‘science’ before there was such a term),The Blazing World was inspired by a visit to the Royal Society (Cavendish was the very first woman to do so). She looked down a microscope and it blew her mind to the possibilities of different forms of life.

The Blazing World is about a woman who journeys to a parallel world before we had a vocabulary for talking about parallel worlds, and before we had even imagined space travel. This ‘twin’ of the Earth was connected at the North Pole. Cavendish’s heroine’s ship is caught in a storm, driven off course, and washed up on this new world. There she encounters strange and wonderful people (before anyone envisioned aliens – although non-human sentient creatures were common in mythology and theology, these are the first I’m aware of whose different physiology is premised on their living in a different physical world). These people elect this strange woman to be their Empress and present to her many scientific marvels (including a submarine). Cavendish uses this set up to satirise her own society and explore a world where a woman was allowed power far beyond what Cavendish herself could hope to attain (even as a duchess with an unusually permissive husband and rare education).

This looks like a pretty clear case of science fiction to me. It not only has the science fiction tropes of soft SF (aliens, parallel worlds, advanced technology), I’d make a case for it being hard SF. The story seems fantastic to the modern eye, and the idea of another world just stuck on top of the Earth just seems bizarre. It’s likely that although Cavendish was permitted to enter the Royal Society and had an understanding of science beyond most people of the time (and certainly most women), she was still merely peeking into a world that she was largely barred from due to her gender. Yet she came away from her experience having gained a new perspective on the world based on scientific evidence and extrapolated a non-actual but plausible (based on the evidence available to her) premise upon which to base a work of fiction designed to transport readers to another world and use that world to make them reflect on this one. Definitions vary, but that sounds like science fiction to me.

Hence: Margaret Cavendish wrote the first work of science fiction, not Mary Shelley*.

The reason I think it is important to remember Margaret Cavendish’s ground-breaking work for the piece of genuinely original, genre-creating art that it is, is that there are reasons we remember Shelley, rather than Cavendish. It wasn’t easy to be a female writer when Shelley wrote, but it was next to impossible when Cavendish did. Writing was principally the preserve of wealthy and educated men. As Virginia Woolf so cleverly observed, it’s very difficult to write if you have no money of your own and no space and time to devote to writing (AKA A Room of One’s Own and £500 a year). You either had to be exceptionally wealthy and well-educated (in which case it would have been scandalous for you to engage in such an activity as a woman) or have a rich patron (which would have been exceptionally rare for a woman to obtain – the only one I can think of is Aemilia Lanyer, who had a female patron). Margaret Cavendish was the former: she was the Duchess of Newcastle, and she was generally judged to be mad. Samuel Peypes called her ‘mad, conceited and ridiculous’, according to Wikipedia (they don’t provide a direct reference for this, but the article does cite an extensive list of academic sources at the end). And I recall a lecture in which it was described how theatre-goers would go to the theatre to watch Margaret Cavendish at the theatre, for she was known for bizarre fashions, including going out in public topless.

Whether she was mad or not is unclear. Anyone reporting on her at the time is likely to have viewed her through the customs of the time. She must have been a real force of personality to achieve all she did, as well as having a very open-minded husband, and it’s clear that in certain ways she was pretty eccentric. But I think it’d take a real force-of-nature-style eccentricity for a woman to be published in the way she was at the time.

On the other hand, I’ve read some of her plays, and they’re pretty bad, it must be said. The Blazing World itself is intellectually exciting, but artistically a bit of a slog. In her defence, it was early long-form prose fiction, so she’d have had little by way of reference points to guide her style, and the idea is as blazing as the title suggests. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s equal to most equivalent works of the time.

Margaret Cavendish was a woman writing with few peers who was ridiculed for writing at all. That is why we have forgotten her. She would never have had the size of audience that was available to Shelley due to the advances in printing, and her writing was hardly likely to have been championed for inclusion in a gentleman’s literary education. She was seen as a curiosity at best. Virginia Woolf speculated of what life would have been like for a sister of Shakespeare, equal to him in talent and determination, but bereft of the opportunities he would have had simply by being male. She imagines an imaginative woman torn apart by passion and despair, shunned by society for rejecting the norms that confine her, ultimately killing herself. I can’t help but feel, reading this fictional account, that there goes Margaret Cavendish, but for her fortune and sympathetic husband. If she was mad (although I suspect she was not), we should not be surprised; and if she was forgotten, we should not be surprised, either. If they couldn’t silence her in life, they were unlikely to remember her in death.

So, I feel it’s important to say: ‘Yes, Mary Shelley was awesome and we should celebrate her epoch defining achievement; but also, no, she did not invent science fiction. Margaret Cavendish did, and more people should know that.’

*Obviously this comes with the caveat ‘that I am aware of’, but I suspect it’s fair. It’s really difficult to distinguish science from philosophy prior to the 17th Century, when Cavendish was writing. The Royal Society for improving Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660. Early modern thinking about natural philosophy is usually dated to have been sparked by Galileo’s work published in his controversial The Assayer (1623), which challenged the idea that the Church was the ultimate source of knowledge**, and birthed a movement towards observational investigation as an approach to finding things out about the world that became what we now call science. I suppose some might want to argue for Utopia, but I don’t see any science fiction elements in it, myself. It’s more of an extended ‘counterfactual’ as we would say in philosophy – or fantastic hypothetical used to explore a philosophical idea. It’s really a discussion of a possibility suggested by political philosophy rather than an extrapolation from empirical observation to non-actual, but physically possible, worlds, peoples, societies, and technologies (which is the definition I would lean towards if we’re discussing works that predate the term ‘science’).

** Wooyay – footnotes within footnotes, very 17th Century. Anyway: it should be noted that observational empirical philosophy of a sort can be dated back to Aristotle. The trouble is, Aristotle’s philosophy and observations became so dominant as to become stagnant dogma, assimilated into Church doctrine and taught in the Schools***.

*** Caveat on a caveat on a caveat: all of this is very euro-centric. I can only apologise for that. My knowledge of Margaret Cavendish comes from my studies for my BA, which even though it was supposed to be ‘English and Related Literatures’, was mostly English or American literature. My knowledge of the development of science and early modern philosophy come from teaching and studying early modern philosophy, but I must confess that English philosophy is still dominated by the analytic tradition, with a side bar on ‘Continental’ (i.e. continental Europe) philosophy, and with the European cannon of philosophy that leads up to the analytic/continental ‘split’. I’ve never been taught any world philosophy and have barely dabbled in it on my own time. I know even less on the relationship between science and philosophy in non-euro-centric cultures. Any comments on the origins of science fiction should thus be seen as comments on a largely european and american tradition.