Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century

by Howard Bruce Franklin (editor)

s/t: An Anthology
In this first new edition since 1978, H. Bruce Franklin has made major revisions & additions, including a new section displaying remarkable contributions to science fiction by 19th-century American women. Future Perfect now offers a stunning perspective on the relevance of 19th-century science fiction in the dawn of the 21st century, illustrated by wonderfully enjoyable stories by obscure figures & by well-known authors.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Science Fiction Fantasy, Anthologies

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[David Agranoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of my reference and non-fiction book reviews are generally going to be shorter but this is not your typical history book about the science fiction genre. The split is about 50/50 between history and context and actual Science Fiction stories from the 19th century, some having been written 50 to 70 years before Hugo Gernsbeck gave the genre as a marketing name. While some of the names such as Edgar Allen Poe is known for writing gothic and horror, and well his detectives his story ‘Mellonta Tauta’ about a hot-air balloon ride a thousand years in the future was a revelation.
The same with a robot story by Moby Dick author Herman Melville, decades before that was a term. Time travel stories and weird fiction tales by greats like Nathaniel Hawthorne. I personally enjoyed the historical non-fiction context a little more than the actual stories. Let's get into the idea that these are actually SF because those who like to narrow genre definitions will think so.
It is true none of these are as clear early examples as HG Wells or Frankensteins and of course The Blazing World' by Margaret Cavendish a SF novel from the 17th century if we are going to spilt hairs. You can’t read those Poe and Melville stories and not acknowledge them as SF retroactively. Let's be real.
The author of this book just recently and sadly that is how he got on my radar when he recently passed away. Seemed like a scholar who was doing really good work. He was known as a cultural historian and not so much a SF guy. He had almost twenty books as editor or author. His histories of the Vietnam War and the movements against it were the books he was most famous for. Two books I really NEED to check are Countdown to Midnight, an anthology of SF stories about nuclear war released in 1984, and his Bush-era book Crash Course to Forever War.

Good stuff. Anyone who is serious about the study of science fiction should have this on their shelf.

[Ed Erwin]

A nice collection of 19th century stories from the USA that resemble what we later came to call Science Fiction. (Some more so than others.) Of course they weren't called that at the time. They were just "fiction" and were published in mainstream magazines by respected authors. It was only later when SF started being seen as junk for kids that mainstream authors and publishers turned away from it.

I didn't re-read the stories I'd read before, and the new "discoveries" were mostly duds. My favorite "discovery" here is the Jack London story "1000 Deaths". It may have been his first published story and it is a gruesome little tale of a mad scientist, possibly influenced by "Dr. Moreau". The Ambrose Bierce tale "Psychological Shipwreck" didn't appeal to me much, but it and his other stories are interesting as a precursor of "Weird" fiction. Other pleasant discoveries were FJ Stimson's "Dr. Materialismus" and JD Whelpley's SF-inflected detective story "Atoms of Chladni".

I skipped the 3 the Hawthorne stories but have fond memories of them and recommend them to anyone who hasn't read them already. I've never thought of them as exactly SF, but they are close enough that they made High School English class more interesting to me back when I was young. But since they are so long, the editor should have picked only two and put in some other things.

The only story that didn't seem like SF or proto-SF to me is Melville's story "Bell Tower" since a humanoid statue as part of a mechanical clock is not in any way a "Robot" to me.

[Leothefox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anthologies are basically always an uneven and frustrating reading experience. They can be worthwhile if you wind up discovering good stuff on the way that you weren't aware of before, but the book is still a mixed bag in the end. What makes this one a little tougher than the usual is that editor H. Bruce Franklin does not settle for merely writing an introduction, but keeps up a color commentary throughout the book. He does this, not merely for the different sections of different kinds of science fiction, but also for each new author in each section. This might have been fine, if he didn't also insist on completely dissecting each story before it was presented, basically blowing it at the beginning and deflating any potential impact. I started reading this one with a second bookmark and only reading his author comments after having read the stories they applied to. Perhaps this is meant as more of an academic tool, but he really sabotaged his own book with that.

Okay, the important thing is the stories, and let's start with the good, we get three Edgar Allan Poe stories, including one set in 2848, we get Jack London's “A Thousand Deaths”, a Twain Story set in 1904, Ambrose Bierce, a comical Washington Irving story about invaders from the moon, Fitz O'Brien's “The Diamond Lens”, and this weird J.D. Whelpley story which gives some shine to a device we would all consider mundane today.

What went wrong? There's Edward Bellamy's brainless utopianism, William Harben almost earning the same distinction, Thomas Wentworth Higginson being a proto Arthur Machen, Melville somehow cranking out a tired genre sample in the genre's infancy, Frederic Jesup Stimson being very crusty and yet timid in “Dr. Materialismus” (try saying that fast), and Stanley Waterloo with the absurdly terrible reactionary bloodbath “Christmas 200,000 B.C.”

In the middle we get Nathaniel Hawthorne, who almost nails the flavor a few times, although it was disappointing for me to see how far below “Young Goodman Brown” these fell.

Hawthorne, however, nearly did a thing which Fitz James O'Brien did do, which was to recall the sense of disquieting oddity that marks Robert W. Chambers' work, which, to me, is about one of the best things you can do. There's something extraordinary about seeing the psychological destruction of a protagonist and having it stem from a very weird source. I mean, the guy falls in love with a woman he sees in a microscope slide!

I'd like to bring up Edward Bellamy again, because this taught me that he is not merely one of the many famous dead speculative authors of his century, but is, in fact, godawful. “Looking Backward” may well have caused a huge sensation, but now I feel like any effect would evaporate merely from thinking about it. Listen at this: a man is shipwrecked and washes up on an island, where an old man who can barely speak lets him know that he has come among a telepathic race that has lost the power of speech. Also, this: a man in an observatory writes down his account of looking through the telescope and meeting the psychic denizens of Mars... now, call me shallow, but these are both setups which might have yielded amazing tales of romantic adventure from the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs... in the hands of Bellamy, they are preachy conversations.

What bugs me about this? In “Blindman's World” the Martians, and all sentient beings everywhere, I guess, pity the human race of Earth because we don't have precognition. Now, this is not merely the ability to sometimes look to the future, but to always know and remember everything in the future! We mere human suck cuz we don't know everybody we're gonna meet before we meet them and we don't know how we're gonna die. Bellamy paints this is making life completely joyful and carefree and misses one crucial point: such a race would never have to make a decision about anything ever. Life would just be some crap that happened to you, preset and with no agency. A creature that does not have to decide does not have to think, and a species that never thinks would have no intelligence. Is this hard?

Now, was it fun seeing conflicting utopias and hearing weird speculations? Sure, much of the time. My beef is that Franklin didn't fill out his categories very well, and his own commentary destroyed the effect.

Had this been a Dover collection it would have just had a nice punchy prologue by E.F. Bleiler and better cover art. Catch up, Oxford!

If you choose to read this, don't read any text outside the stories.

[Steve Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories:

The Birthmark *****
The Artist of the Beautiful ****
Rappaccini's Daughter ****
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains ***
The Fact in the Case of M. Valdemar *****
Mellonta Tauta *****
The Bell-Tower **
Dr. Materialismus *****
The Atoms of Chladni ***
A Thousand Deaths *****
The Monarch of Dreams **
A Psychological Shipwreck ***
To Whom This May Come *****
The Blindman's World *****
The Men of the Moon *****
The Diamond Lens *****
Four-Dimensional Space ****
Mysterious Disappearances ****
From "Four-Dimensional Space" ***
Christmas 200,000 B.C. *****
From the "London Times" of 1904 ***
In the Year Ten Thousand *****

Essays:

Introduction ****
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Science Fiction ***
Edgar Allan Poe and Science Fiction *****
Automata *****
Herman Melville and Science Fiction ***
Humans as Machines ****
Marvelous Inventions ****
Medicine Men ****
Jack London and Science Fiction ***
Into the Psyche ****
Thomas Wentworth Higginson and His Dreamer ****
Ambrose Bierce and Science Fiction ***
Edward Bellamy and Science Fiction *****
Space Travel ****
Washington Irving and Science Fiction *****
Fitz-James O'Brien and Science Fiction ***
Dimensional Speculation as Science Fiction ****
Time Travel *****
Beyond the Past *****
Mark Twain and Science Fiction ***
The Perfect Future ****

[Steven Dufour · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought a used copy of this book on Amazon for my research in editing the Wikipedia article on science fiction. I got it for a good price since it seemed like lots of used ones were for sale there. Interesting material and some good stories. The editor/author seems to be a Marxist and this colors his perspective on things. Most of the stories are of the "mad scientist" type, with some utopias and dystopias as well. By limiting his field of view to the United States before 1900 he excludes Jules Vern, HG Wells, and most of what is commonly considered actual science fiction. Worth reading if you are interested.

[SciFi Pinay · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The most brilliant prognostications of the past have, ironically, little immediate relevance to the present human situation; we... may admire their brilliance but only from our superior position in later time--to look back upon them, no matter how admiringly, is to look down upon them."

So I try not to, but alas, I am a product of my time! My faves:

The Artist of the Beautiful (Nathaniel Hawthorne): "When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality."

Rapaccini's Daughter (Nathaniel Hawthorne): as Bell Biv DeVoe has sung, 'That girl is poison!'

Dr. Materialismus (Frederic Jessup Stimson): "You, who make all to a number, as governments do to convicts in a prison... You confound man's highest emotions with the tickling of the gray matter in his brain..."

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (Edgar Allan Poe): mesmerism/hypnotism as a 19th century palliative method to ease the dying into passing on, but a man has a peculiar physiological response

To Whom This May Come (Edward Bellamy): a man stranded on an island with a telepathic race has more freedom among the mind-readers; "What stronger testimony could there be to the instinctive consciousness that concealment is debauching, and openness our only cure, than the world-old conviction of the virtue of confession for the soul, and that the uttermost exposing of one's worst and foulest is the first step toward moral health?"

The Blindman's World (Edward Bellamy): a man experiences astral travel and meets prescient Martians, who pity Earthlings as "a race doomed to walk backwards, beholding only what has gone by, assured only of what is past and dead"

The Diamond Lens (Fitz-James O'Brien): An obsessed 'microscopist' kills an acquaintance after the ghost of Leeuwenhoek told him how to build the 'perfect' microscope, then he falls in love with a microbe that looks like a hot girl lol!

In the Year Ten Thousand (William Harben): apparently the future is telepathic, vegetarian and crystal houses; "Immortality... must be love immortal."

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

First I want to mention that the definition of science fiction that is operation in this book includes things I would not have thought of, like communicating with the dead and psychic powers. So that was interesting.

Secondly, I'll say that the stories themselves are a mixed bag. Most of them don't totally work for me as stories, and some are barely stories- but some are so over the top that I couldn't help liking them. For example, in one of them, this guy is instructed by a long-dead scientist during a séance to get a big diamond and run electricity through it to make a special microscope, and then- OK, I just clicked on the spoiler button, because I have to tell the rest- he murders his neighbor to get the diamond and then he makes said microscope and then he falls in love with a very small person who lives in a drop of water who he's only able to see through the microscope and then he leaves the drop of water on the microscope so he can keep looking at her but the water evaporates and she dies and he goes crazy. I have to say I was carried away by the strangeness here.

In addition to the one I just described, here are some other images that will stick with me: the mechanized butterfly made by a watchmaker in one of the Hawthorne tales; Melville's doomed bell-ringing automaton; Washington Irving's Martian invasion, with all its parallels to colonizers' real-life invasion of this continent; a woman who goes to Mars in her dreams and finds that male and female roles are totally reversed on that planet; and Mizora, a woman-only society at the center of the earth (strange since I just also read Herland.)

[The other John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one took forever to read, almost three months. That's what happens when you pick up another book before finishing the first. Anyway, the book is subtitled "American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century--An Anthology." You can tell by the phrasing that this is an academic book. But even though Franklin reads like the college prof that he is, he picked out some fine tales for his examples. I loved reading these stories--to catch a glimpse of the worldview of the authors as well as to smile at the glimpses of "the future" offered in some of the tales. (I wonder if some reader in 2101 will likewise chuckle over the writings of Asimov, Clark, Niven and Ellison.) Like a good anthology, I enjoyed perusing the tales and like a good literary survey, it made me want to go out and read some more of the authors featured. This one's going on my shelf, and if you like history and science fiction, I recommend you do the same.

[Ronn · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are many 19th century authors that I love, but this anthology is for the most part, a collection of the ones that I dont. With the exception of Misters Poe and Twain, these stories are nearly unreadable, especially Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jack London. I remember reading Hawthorne's 'The Birthmark' in grade school; I didnt remember it being nearly as horrendous as it seems to me now. Added to the fact that the 'protagonist' is a completely awful human being [as they are in many of these stories], it is a mystery to me in this day and age how this came to be a classic.

The two stars are for Poe and Twain alone. Even though the theme of the collection is a worthy one, the rest of the book was not worth my time.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have the original edition from 1966.

This is one of my most favorite books ever. I love all the stories. I think these are my favorite stories from Nathaniel Hawthorn, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.

I highly recommend this book. It's remarkable what these writers dreamed up.

I want to find the new edition with the extra stories!

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's science fiction, 19th science fiction at least, taken seriously by someone outside the field. I'd read some of these stories before, but many were new and some of the commentary was interesting.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most beautiful stories you will ever read.

This anthology covers the whole range of fears about and hopes for the future.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction F9967 1995