Stranger Than We Can Imagine (17 page)

The first science fiction story is often said to be Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818), because it was a story about a monster that was
neither natural nor paranormal, but which had been explicitly created in a laboratory.
Frankenstein
was about the desire to play God and the discovery that this robs you of your humanity. It is perhaps no surprise that Shelley’s story was so popular in the twentieth century.

More typical examples of early science fiction arrive in the later part of the nineteenth century. The
Voyages Extraordinaires
series of adventure stories by the French writer Jules Verne included fantastic machines such as Captain Nemo’s magnificent submarine the
Nautilus
. Such technology, the stories warned, would be dangerous in the wrong hands. The turn-of-the-century novels by H.G. Wells also warned of the dangers of technology becoming a catalyst for overreaching ambition, from the unnatural biological experiments in
The Island of Doctor Moreau
(1896) to the tragic fate of
The Invisible Man
(1897).

Wells’s work pioneered the use of science fiction to critique current social problems.
The War of the Worlds
(1898) depicted England invaded by a race of beings, in this case Martians, who were determined, cruel and who possessed technology which was greatly superior to that of the invaded natives. Wells found that he could use this imaginative type of speculative fiction to present England with a new and disturbing perspective on its own colonial history. Even the ending of the story, in which the advanced invaders were stopped by native diseases, echoed the experiences of the British Empire. Social criticism was also evident in his 1895 novel
The Time Machine
, which explored the implications of social inequality. He projected the separation of the underclass and the privileged elite into a nightmarish far future, where they had evolved into two separate species, each horrific in its own way. Science fiction may have talked about the future, but its power lay in what it said about the present.

Late nineteenth-century science fiction may have been European and troubled by the implications of technology, but early twentieth-century science fiction was very different. Science fiction became American, and optimistic. Future technology was no longer
the harbinger of nightmares, but something positive and exciting. While Europe collapsed into industrialised warfare and introduced chemical weapons, tanks and aerial bombardment to world history, Americans dreamt about potential technology and found it all hugely thrilling.

This attitude is evident in the forty
Tom Swift
books, written by various ghostwriters under the pseudonym Victor Appleton between 1910 and 1941. Tom Swift, the son of an industrialist, is a gifted mechanic and inventor with a spirit of adventure and a plucky ‘can-do’ attitude. He is, as the English comics writer Alan Moore has noted, ‘carefully depicted as a healthy macho male who’s handy with his fists and whose scientific genius is mostly innate and self-taught without the need for any sissy book-learnin”. Each
Tom Swift
book details his adventures with a particular machine. They started out realistically, in books such as
Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle
and
Tom Swift and His Motor Boat
(both 1910), but quickly became more imaginative, such as the later titles
Tom Swift and His Sky Train
(1931) or
Tom Swift and His Magnetic Silencer
(1941). Some of these inventions were prophetic, including his invention of a proto-fax machine in
Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone
(1914). Modern tasers were inspired by
Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
(1911), their trademarked name being an acronym of Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.

This adventurous and optimistic take on invented technology quickly became the overriding attitude of early twentieth-century science fiction. Film and comic-book characters such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were no-nonsense, all-American heroes who achieved their goals through action, bravery and whatever advanced technology happened to be lying around. They espoused individualism and held out the promise of an exciting future, as long as enough clear-sighted individuals did the right thing and built it.

These idealised attributes were not unique to stories of the future. They were also present in the cowboy stories which were at the height of their popularity during the same period. The romanticized
version of the American frontier story began around the 1880s, when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show made repeated tours of Europe to great acclaim, and the dime novels of writers like Ned Buntline helped mythologise the lives of men like Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok. This was, noticeably, the period immediately after the frontier was tamed. The way of life that Buffalo Bill’s show depicted was being replaced by the advance of law and civilisation, yet the myth of the Old West was becoming increasingly attractive, both in the US and beyond.

Beneath the genre trappings, Westerns and early science fiction stories were remarkably similar.
Star Trek
’s creator Gene Roddenberry famously sold his series by describing it as ‘
Wagon Train
to the stars’, a reference to the long-running TV cowboy series. Secretly, he had more ambitious and progressive plans for it. ‘Westerns were big and I wanted to sell [
Star Trek
to the network],’ Roddenberry said in 1988. ‘I said, “Look fellas, it’s little more than a western. They have spaceships instead of horses and zap-guns instead of six-shooters, but it’ll be familiar.” ‘And unfortunately, they gave me the money and a set of good actors and a director, and I just went ape! They didn’t get what they asked for or what we’d agreed on. They were naturally very upset.’ Roddenberry’s progressive aims were apparent when he threatened to walk away from the show unless Nichelle Nichols was cast in the role of Communications Officer Uhura, at a time when a black actress would not be cast in the role of a significant authority figure on American television. But while Roddenberry had a vision of the future above and beyond that described in his initial pitch,
Star Trek
was still a show about exploration and the frontier. America’s mythologised past was powerful enough to also work as a mythologised future.

Many parts of the world had functionally equivalent versions of ‘cowboys’, from the
llaneros
on the Colombian Plains to the horsemen of Andalusia or the ranchers of the Australian outback. But these didn’t grab the imagination in quite the same way as American cowboys. There was a magic ingredient in the American story
that elevated it above stories of those similar lifestyles.

The myth of the Old West was a celebration of the power of the individual. It was a life free from state authority, where men had no lords or masters. People were considered equal and followed a clear moral code that prioritised reputation over wealth. The existence of a separate Native American population fed into this. Individualism requires a gulf between the self and the ‘other’, which the cultural differences between the existing and the colonising populations helped emphasise.

The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has highlighted the striking difference between the myths of the American and Canadian frontiers: ‘One is a myth of a Hobbesian state of nature mitigated only by individual and collective self-help: licensed gunmen, posses of vigilantes and occasional cavalry charges. The other is the myth of the imposition of government and public order as symbolised by the uniforms of the Canadian version of the horseman-hero, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.’

The logical end point of the idealised individualism of the Westerns genre was The Man With No Name, a character portrayed by Clint Eastwood in three films directed by Sergio Leone in the 1960s. This character was admired by the audience because he was so isolated and unattached to the wider community that he didn’t even require a name. Like so many twentieth-century icons, his isolation was the cornerstone of his appeal.

A nation formed under the dream of a utopian future did not restrict its national myth to stories of its past. Not only did it invent new stories, it also mastered new mediums to tell them with.

Film had been born in the late nineteenth century. There wasn’t a single inventor who could claim responsibility, but instead an accumulation of breakthroughs from inventors working independently around the world in working-class locations such as Brighton and Leeds in England, Lyon in France or New Jersey in the USA. By the start of the twentieth century filmmakers had learnt that they could cut between different shots without confusing the audience
and were starting to experiment with techniques such as focus pulls and close-ups, but it still wasn’t clear what direction the fledgling medium was going to develop in.

Cinema ultimately became a populist medium, arguably the most popular of the twentieth century, democratically supported and shaped by means of ticket sales. But it could easily have developed into a more elitist, highbrow art form. The great advances made by Russian, French and Italian filmmakers in the early decades of the century seemed to point in that direction. A film such as Giovanni Pastrone’s
Cabiria
(Italy, 1914) towered over most films of the period, in both ambition and technical expertise.
Cabiria
depicted the destruction of the Roman fleet at the siege of Syracuse, the eruption of Mount Etna and Hannibal’s trek across the Alps with elephants. It took six months to shoot, at a time when most films were completed in a few days. The monumental sets and huge crowd scenes still impress a hundred years later. In contrast, American cinema found initial commercial success by filming boxing matches, such as 1897’s
The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight
, which remained a mainstream form of entertainment in the eyes of American audiences from that point on.

A number of events conspired to shift the centre of the film world away from Europe and towards California. The First World War destroyed much of Europe along with its economy and industry. The development of ‘talking pictures’ in the late 1920s gave the English-speaking film industry access to a larger world market than that of the French or the Italians. A third factor was the growth of Hollywood itself. It was a location which offered the reliable sunlight the industry needed and a relaxed, idyllic lifestyle that appealed to movie stars, which the industry increasingly depended on.

The American movie industry’s move from the East Coast to California was in part promoted by patent disputes. The intention was to get as far away as possible from the lawyers of the MPPC, or Motion Picture Patents Company. The MPPC claimed intellectual ownership of the sprocket holes which mark the edges of each roll of film, and wanted to be handsomely rewarded. Considering the
twenty-first-century industry’s love of intellectual property, it is an irony that Hollywood itself was founded in the spirit of intellectual piracy.

From the very start, cinema and science fiction complemented each other wonderfully. Filmmakers knew that they needed to offer something beyond that which could be experienced by a trip to the theatre, so their ability to conjure fabulous visual special effects was clearly something they should exploit. Perhaps the most famous silent film is
A Trip to the Moon
, which was made by the French conjuror, showman and theatre impresario Georges Méliès in 1902. The film tells the story of six adventurous astronomers who build a rocket and fly to the moon. The team is led by Professor Barbenfouillis, which translates as Professor Messybeard. On the moon the adventurers are wowed by many wonders, including an appearance from the Moon goddess Selene, before being attacked by a race of alien insects and narrowly escaping back to earth.

The image of Professor Messybeard’s rocket ship embedded in the eye of the Man in the Moon is only one of the many extraordinary visual images in that seventeen-minute film, but thanks to its simplicity, originality and humour it has become an icon of early cinema.
A Trip to the Moon
is considered so important to cinema history that it was the first film to be classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Film. It was clear from the very start, then, that cinema and science fiction would have a fruitful relationship.

The German expressionist masterpiece
Metropolis
, directed by Fritz Lang in 1927, is another example of this perfect marriage between medium and message. At its heart
Metropolis
was a loose version of the
Frankenstein
story. Much of the visual imagery we associate with
Frankenstein
, particularly the mad scientist’s laboratory with its crackling electricity and strange machines, originates in this film and not in Mary Shelley’s book. Its most famous scene depicts a lifeless female robot, built by a broken-hearted inventor named Rotwang, being given life as an evil double of the kindhearted heroine Maria.

Metropolis
is a film packed with insights into the psyche of the
late 1920s. The visual design of this future city is a wild and uninhibited expression of modernist architecture. The unease about the dehumanising effect of industrialisation is apparent in the scenes of workers toiling away inside giant machines. The gulf between the drudgery of the workers and the luxurious lives of their rulers, at a time when labour-led revolutions still seemed a real possibility, is one of the key threads in the plot. Equally significant is the libidinous character of the female robot, which seduces the citizens of Metropolis into decadence and hedonism. As Gene Roddenberry would later realise, it was possible to use science fiction to talk about contemporary issues with a frankness that would have been unacceptable in more realistic narratives. All you had to do was distract the censor with the odd flying car.

The ambition of
Metropolis
was something of an anomaly in the story of early science fiction film. Early American science fiction cinema was more typical. This was concerned with populist adventure rather than bold artistic statements. It was typified by the films of Buster Crabbe, the Olympic Gold-winning swimmer who went on to play the roles of both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. These films did not portray the future as a utopia, exactly, but it still seemed an exciting destination.