Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 422 pages
Published 2013

Acquired December 2016
Previously read May 2017
Reread November 2019

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

I used to say Ancillary Justice was the best sf novel of the last five years... until I realized it was over six years old. Oh well. But as soon as I was assigned an sf creative writing course, I knew this would be the novel I would teach. I really like the way it handles worldbuilding, and the way it makes something new of old sf tropes. For example, in an essay on John Scalzi's Whatever, Leckie points out that the idea of an evil empire reusing corpses of conquered people as soldiers is an sf staple... but the story of Justice of Toren is an interesting twist, because once "liberated," her body doesn't have any desire to go back to who she was, because she doesn't remember being that person. She is Justice of Toren.

I also like the way she handles exposition. We talked about Jo Walton's concept of "incluing" a lot in my class; Leckie argues in an essay of her own that the infodump has its place, and sometime it is better to tell than show. On the one hand, the first few pages of Ancillary Justice throw a lot of stuff at you, to my students' consternation. What's a Radchaai? A segment? How can the narrator be a "piece of equipment"? On the other hand, come chapter 2, we get some clear-cut explanations: "Nineteen years, three months, and one week before [...], I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna" (9). And then the narrator just spells out a lot of stuff for us. What's a troop carrier? What's Shis'urna? How do the ships communicate? All just told, because we need to know.

But she keeps dropping in little details she doesn't entirely explains; at one point, she mention "gates" and I asked my students what this meant. To my surprise none of them knew! Leckie is, of course, banking that you have enough previous knowledge of sf to know that one from context. But it's also not important on p. 9, and when it becomes important (when Justice of Toren enters gate space on p. 217), the narrator just tells us what a gate is and how it works. The notorious gender stuff is largely done through incluing, on the other hand, maybe meant to indicate just how much it's second (or first?) nature to our viewpoint characters. I also really liked the quick switching of viewpoints in ch. 2 to explore how the ancillaries work, though this requires some effort from the reader (as Walton discusses in her examination of incluing); if you don't pay close attention, you'll be more confused, not more elucidated by the time this part is over. Leckie is really good at this kind of thing. (Except when it comes to the structure of the Radchaai military vessels, which confused my students, and confused me when I tried to explain it; I had to pull up a chart from the Internet to get it all straight.)

It's always been interesting to me that the story's play with gender-- which got all of the press when it came out-- is actually sort of irrelevant. Compare The Left Hand of Darkness, which is largely about Genly Ai's discomfort with the unusual form of gender he encounters on Gethen. But you could delete the lack of gender in Radchaai civilization from Ancillary Justice, and in terms of plot and character, I think it would basically be the same novel. The "Big Idea" of the novel is about colonization and the ways other cultures are absorbed and assimilated and disposed of.

We did explore how readers react to the lack of explicit gender information on the characters. Most, like myself, filled in information based on guesswork and, to be honest, stereotypes. I imagined Awn as female (because she seems young and innocent), Skaaiat as male (because she is a bit of a "player" with Awn), Dariet as male (because she's in a position of authority and commanding), Isaaia as female (because she's snobby and reads as "bitchy"). On the other hand, I always perceive Seivarden as female even though we're explicitly told he's male! I think it's because of the snobbishness? I'm not sure. Most of my students did similar categorization; others had different reasons. One said she liked imagining all of Anaander Mianaai's bodies as female just because women evil overlords are so rare in science fiction. Some students didn't categorize at all: one just took all the female pronouns at face value and thought of everyone as a woman. I said I wished I could do the same, but some things were too ingrained and you can't entirely control your imagination.

So why is this aspect of the novel there? This is what I demanded my students tell me, but there are a couple reasons I had in mind. One is that the Radchaai can't be entirely about the Big Idea, because then they become one-note. All the tea stuff, though fun, creates a parallel to the British Empire, reinforcing the imperialist critique running through the novel. The gender system is largely orthogonal to the issues of colonialism and classism in the novel, thus making the Radchaai a more complex, fleshed out society. Utterly evil in some senses, but highly progressive in others.

The second is that it does reinforce the novel's themes. In a large part, this is a novel about judging people not by who they are, but by how they act. Anaander Mianaai misjudges Justice of Toren; Seivarden misjudges Breq; Breq misjudges Seivarden; the Radch misjudges entire civilizations. It's about how you need to take the action that is most good, not the action that is expected. The reader doesn't make these misjudgements because the reader doesn't have Radchaai classism culturally ingrained. But the reader does make a whole different series of misjudgements because they have an entirely different system of gender culturally ingrained. To read Ancillary Justice successfully, you have to learn to overcome your own preconceptions about how the world works-- just as the characters did.

(Oddly, this did expose to me that the character who most learns the central lesson of the novel isn't the protagonist; Breq occasionally misjudges, but usually reserves judgement until she sees people act. Breq already knows all this. It's Seivarden who learns this lesson, and Seivarden who thus changes the most across the course of the novel. Which is probably why Seivarden is my favorite character in the trilogy.)

Review: Shadows Beneath by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler

Hardcover, 366 pages
Published 2014

Acquired October 2019
Read December 2019

Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology
edited by Peter Ahlstrom

When I was teaching my science fiction creative writing class this fall, I found myself skimming the transcripts of the podcast Writing Excuses for writing exercises to do in class, or just insights. I still haven't really listened to the podcast, but I found it interesting enough to see if they'd done a textbook: there's definitely a market for a good sf writing textbook as far as I can tell. They haven't exactly, but they have published this, and I was intrigued enough to pick up Shadows Beneath.

Shadows Beneath contains one short story apiece by each of the podcast's four co-hosts. In addition to all the stories, though, each is usually accompanied by:

• transcripts of brainstorming sessions (from Writing Excuses episodes)
• early drafts
• transcripts of critique group sessions (also from WX episodes)
• "Track Changes" versions between the first full draft and the final draft
• essays about the process of writing the stories

It's great stuff. It made me wish I had assigned this as a textbook, and if I ever get to teach the class again, I might just. The strength of the book is that it lets you see experienced writers get at some of the more ineffable parts of the writing process. How do you go from an idea to a story? How do you decide what's important in the revision process? It made me think we ought to have spent more time on brainstorming and revision in class.

It's also of benefit that these are just four very solid stories. Of Kowal, I expected that on the basis of other work I've read by her, but I'd never read anything by Brandon Sanderson or Dan Wells before, and the only thing by Howard Tayler I've ever read (Schlock Mercenary) is awful.

Kowal's "A Fire in the Heavens" is neat, but hard to discuss without spoiling what I think ought to remain unspoiled. But suffice it to say, it's a good example of a "first contact" story. The revision is really neat: there's a lot of small alterations that improve the story (things like having the main characters pick a port from a map, rather than just blunder into the closest one), but also a big chunk added into the middle of the story (that it's impossible to imagine not being there, but it worked pretty good without it).

Wells's "I.E.Demon" was my favorite, a fun story about a group of soldiers in Afghanistan who discover that their new I.E.D.-neutralizing device actually runs off demonology... when it malfunctions. Quick and breezy and delightful in the way it thinks through the implications of it all. The revisions are useful, too: there's an abandoned first draft that takes way too long to get to the point, demonstrating how important it is to get a short story to its crisis point quickly. (It also shows the importance of voice, going from third to first person.)

Tayler's "An Honest Death" was pretty good, though I found the ending a little rushed. A company making immortality drugs finds itself being shook down by Death! The story's told from the perspective of the CEO's security guy, as he tries to figure out if that's really what's going on. Like "I.E.Demon," it has strong use of voice and character; I believed in this guy. The concept is neat, even if it took me a couple reads to get the ending. Again, the revisions were instructive.

Sanderson's "Sixth of the Dusk" was my least favorite; I more admired it than enjoyed it, though that might have just been the headspace I was in. Reading the revisions substantially improved my opinion of it, however, as it was interesting to see how Sanderson made the piece much more thematically rich through revision with just a few alterations to most of the story-- and completely redid the ending to bring things full circle in a much more compelling way. The alien biology concepts were really cool.

Incidentally, I think you can classify all four stories here as science fiction, even if they seem fantasy-ish in some ways. There's no magic in "A Fire in the Heavens"; it just takes place on another world with different astronomical principles. "I.E.Demon" has a demon in it, yes, but beyond that it functions like one of those old sf "problem stories" proceeding from the premise that demons are real; a competent man has to be clever to get out of a dangerous situation. "An Honest Death"'s ending makes it clear that we're not looking at Death Death per se, but a more sfnal take on the idea. And thought "Sixth of the Dusk" apparently takes place in Sanderson's Cosmere fantasy universe, on its own, it seems to be science fiction: everything can be explained by weird alien biology and extraterrestrial technology.

And the title is aptly chosen. It's a phrase from Sanderson's story, but it applies fairly literally and also metaphorically to all four. There's literally dangerous things below the surface in the stories by Wells (the demon), Tayler (Death), and Sanderson (sea creatures), and all four stories are about something that was simple but turns out to be much more complicated.

But the title also describes the book's insight into the writing process: as per the cover, we normally just see the poised little boat on the surface, sailing perfectly, and miss the shadows beneath: the false starts, the bad ideas, the arguments, the self-doubt. I've published over 150,000 words of fiction, but I still felt like I learned something from reading this book about how writers write, and I suspect you will too.

Review: The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Neil Clarke

Trade paperback, 599 pages
Published 2019 (contents: 2018)
Acquired July 2019
Read August 2019

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 4
edited by Neil Clarke

So for the science fiction creative writing class I'm teaching this fall, I wanted a source of short fiction. A lot of the thinking behind my class has been motivated by contemplating what would have helped me at my students' stage of development. I know that when I first started mailing short sf out to magazine, I piled up rejections very quickly. Looking back, it's pretty obvious why. At age 20, my understanding of sf was largely informed by two things: film and tv (especially Star Trek) and sf novels I read when I was a kid (so mostly ones published before I was born). I had no sense at all of what science fiction in the year 2005 was like, and was just churning out sub-Star Trek stories. No wonder I got rejected! So I want my students to see what is happening in print science fiction now. We're only a week in, and it's clear they all have a strong understanding of the genre from film and tv... but even the writing majors have clearly read little written sf. To provide such an overview, I decided to assign the most recent volume of Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year. I've never read any of his anthologies before, but based on the stories from Clarkesworld that I've read, he has a sense of good sf that accords with my own, and he always has sensical things to say on Reddit.

I read the whole anthology the month before classes began. I was impressed. Often, when I review "best of" anthologies, I go story by story and mark each story "thumbs up" (feels like it belongs), "thumbs sideways" (I'm neutral), or "thumbs down" (I don't see why this is here), but at twenty-nine stories, this would get to be a very long review very quickly! But what I can say is that I would stack many of these up against what made the short fiction ballots for the Hugo Awards this year. S. Qiouyi Lu's "Mother Tongues," for example, is better by far than anything that did make the ballot in Best Short Story, with its clever use of the second person and typography. (It did make the longlist, but was pretty far down in fourteenth.) And even though I did really like the Best Novelette ballot this year, Ken Liu's "Byzantine Empathy" would have been a worthy addition to it. There were only two stories both on the Hugo shortlist and in this book, both strong: "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller and "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth" by Daryl Gregory. I was also pleased to see Vandana Singh's "Requiem" here, which I nominated, but did not even make the longlist. The advantage that Clarke has over the Hugos is that he clearly reads everything, whereas the Hugos are biased toward free-to-access e-magazines. "Mother Tongues" is from Asimov's, which used to dominate the Hugo ballot but now barely gets a look in; "Byzantine Empathy" is from an original print anthology series; "Requiem" is from a single-author collection (an impressively deep cut, I felt).

I speaks highly that I put all but eleven of them on the syllabus for my class. I put every story I liked on the syllabus, and a few more that I didn't like, but felt were doing something interesting. Just some quick notes on a few other stories here:

• Kelly Robson's "Intervention" (from the anthology Infinity's End) takes place in the same world as her Hugo-nominated Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, and like it, is good at unspooling an sf backstory.
• Alyssa Wong's dark "All the Time We've Left to Spend" (from the anthology Robots vs. Fairies) is a great example of exploring character through an sf lens.
• There are two different stories about people being trapped in smart houses, Madeleine Ashby's "Domestic Violence" (from Slate) and Elizabeth Bear's "Okay, Glory" (from the anthology Twelve Tomorrows), but they're very different, and both very good.
• Vanessa Fogg's "Traces of Us" (from GigaNotoSaurus, an e-mag that just does one story per month) is an interesting example of generic crossover, as it's both a romance and hard sf.
• I wasn't super into Nick Wolven's "Lab B-15" (from Analog), but it's a great example of how to slowly reveal a plot, where each answer just leads to more questions.
• Yoon Ha Lee's "Entropy War" (from the anthology 2001) isn't a proper story, but a set of rules for a dice game! I think I liked it, but I am curious to see what my students will think.

There's a wide diversity of storytelling styles and subgenres here, and it convinces me that short sf is a thriving field. I also really liked Neil Clarke's introduction on the state of sf in 2018. I'm glad my gamble paid off, and I will be picking up future (and past!) volumes in this series for sure.

Review: The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells by Ben Bova

Trade paperback, 275 pages
Published 2016 (originally 1994)
Acquired July 2019
Read August 2019

The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells by Ben Bova

Based on my short-lived career as an author of mediocre Star Trek tie-ins, I've been assigned to teach a science fiction creative writing class this fall. So, I cast about for a textbook, and after skimming through a couple, decided upon this one, which was focused and straightforward and had some good insights. Bova has had a long career as an sf writer (beginning in 1959, and he had a new novel out this year!), but more importantly he had a strong stint as an editor at Analog (1972-78) and Omni (1978-82). It mostly focused on short fiction (ch. 3-14), though it also touches on novel writing (ch. 15-16, 18).

The book emphasizes four aspects of writing: character, background, conflict, and plot. For each of these aspects, Bova spends a chapter setting up general principles ("theory"). Then, he includes one of his own short stories. Finally, a third chapter explains how that story embodied the principles he set up ("practice"). It's a nice format, let down slightly that (on the basis of this book, at least; I haven't read much by Bova), he's a fairly middling sf writer. Three of the four stories here were good ideas, but coolly written; Bova has set-ups and ideas that could make you feel, but don't. One, "Crisis of the Month," is decidedly poor. However, they are useful at illuminating his ideas, and my plan is to pair his ideas with stories from The Best Science Fiction of the Year for 2018. I like his ideas, especially his take on how to write interesting characters. I do wish he spent more time focusing on what specifically is science fictional in each of the four categories: the background section does this the most, but a lot of his advice is fairly generic to all short fiction.

All that said, if you want a book about writing science fiction and just science fiction, it appears to be one of the strongest out there. My perusal on Amazon was not very promising; a lot of his competitors are unfocused (taking in many speculative genres) or spend a lot of time on basic elements of writing (which Bova assumes one already knows, and is how I would prefer to tackle my class), or just are chaotic (the table of contents for Jeff VanderMeer's Wonderbook, for example, overwhelmed me, though I might take a second look at it). It's not a perfect book, but I suspect it will teach well-- Bova has a very straightforward writing style, very businesslike-- which is the point for me. I guess we'll see this fall!

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Doctor Edred Fitzpiers, Surgeon (The Woodlanders, 1886-87)

Trade paperback, 360 pages
Published 2009 (originally 1886-87)
Acquired January 2010
Previously read February 2010
Reread May 2019

The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

"There is a surgeon lately come—and I have heard that he reads a great deal—I see his light sometimes through the trees late at night."
     "Oh yes—a doctor—I believe I was told of him...... It is a strange place for him to settle in."
     "It is a convenient centre for a practice, they say. But he does not confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates theology, and metaphysics, and all sorts of subjects." (56)

This is where it all started for me, you know. Way back in 2010, as a second-year graduate student, I read this novel for the first time in a seminar on Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf. I was intrigued by its depiction of a scientist, and how that scientist's behavior outside of science seemed to be affected by his scientific training. I went seeking a source that could tell me more about this-- and I never found one. So now I am writing one, revising my dissertation project into an academic monograph. One of the sample chapters I want to send in with my proposal is the one that includes The Woodlanders, and I haven't read the book since I took that class almost ten years ago, and now I need to revise it. I am sure that that part of the book needs work, since I have (hopefully) advanced as a writer and scholar in the past ten years.

What I had not remembered is how much Fitzpiers is an off-stage presence at the beginning of the novel. It initially seems like it might be about Marty South, daughter of a rural woodsman, but soon focuses on Grace Melbury, daughter of a timber-merchant, and whether she should marry Giles Winterbourne, another local woodsman, now that's she's been elevated by a middle-class education out of town. Fitzpiers is spoken of from p. 8 onwards, glimpsed on p. 60, but does not properly appear until p. 92, almost a third of the way through the novel. We hear a lot about him before he appears so, as in the above quotation. We're told he reads Spinoza (45), and that he has widespread interests (56), and that he has paid the Melburys' servant, Grammer Oliver, ten pounds so that he can have her brain after she dies-- he is intrigued because her head is the size of a man's (46). The locals both do and do not trust this highly educated doctor, whose like they don't normally see in a place like Little Hintock. Some think he studies black arts and sold his soul to the devil... but they kind of like that, because the worse the person, the better the doctor! (28) The other local doctor is so nice, he won't even give you foul-tasting medicine, so obviously it's not actually doing anything.

But it turns out that a bad man is a bad doctor. Like other too-educated surgeons in rural communities (e.g., Thurnall in Two Years Ago, Lydgate in Middlemarch), he struggles to build much of a practice; he's certainly no Mr. Gibson from Wives and Daughters. When he suggests treating Marty's father, who is being driven mad by a tree, by chopping down the tree, Marty's dad dies. Worse than the outcome of the experiment is his highly casual reaction to the loss of a man's life, as he seizes the opportunity to ask Giles about a hot chick he saw the other day:

Nothing seemed to avail. Giles and Fitzpiers went and came; but uselessly. He [Mr. South] lingered through the day, and died that evening as the sun went down.
     "Damned if my remedy hasn't killed him!" murmured the doctor.
     Dismissing the subject he went downstairs. When going out of the house he turned suddenly to Giles and said, "Who was that young lady we looked at over the hedge the other day?"
     Giles shook his head, as if he did not remember. (94)

Later, Fitzpiers gets some of Mr. South's brain, and it's while looking at a sample of it that Grace first starts to fall for him!

Fitzpiers's case is more complicated than many of the ones I look at, though, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Fitzpiers is a would-be scientist, but as I've said, his interests are diverse: he also studies philosophy, and French romances, and so on. This dilettantism is what's consistent across both his personal and intellectual lives. He wants to do experiments, but cannot follow them through to completion. He falls in love with Grace, but is interested in not only her. Does this mean Hardy thinks he would be a better person if he stuck to science? Then it would seem that science is not the culprit, not entirely, but I don't find this entirely satisfying. Which I guess is appropriate, because the end-- where Fitzpiers resolves to stick to Grace this time-- is not entirely satisfying either.

Review: Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler

Trade paperback, 746 pages
Published 2007 (contents: 1987-89)
Previously read September 2005–May 2007
Acquired June 2016
Reread May 2019

Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler

Way back in summer 2016, when I taught my class on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic literature, one of the novels I elected to teach was Octavia Butler's Dawn. As a piece of postapocalyptic literature, it's even bleaker than most. So many postapocalyptic stories seem bleak, but in the long run cop out on that, probably because of what Claire Curtis says, that "[t]hey provide both the voyeuristic satisfaction of terrible violence and the Robinson Crusoe excitement of starting over again" (6). There's a weird sort of utopian optimism that underlies the postapocalyptic story, even, say The Walking Dead, where things go round and round and never get resolved... but everyone in the book seems to think they will.

This is true of African-American apocalypses as well. This is not my area of expertise, but there's a great article on the topic by Houston Baker called "Freedom and Apocalypse: A Thematic Approach to Black Expression." Baker says that denied access to their own ancestral mythology, African-Americans had to make use of Christianity's, but that wasn't exactly readily available either: "The black folk on small farms, on large plantations, and in the cities of America, having effectively been isolated from West African culture, were denied meaningful participation in white culture by proscriptive and dehumanizing laws. […] The isolated black folk looked to religion as a unifying myth that could provide social cohesion" (43-4). One thing that resonated, though, was the apocalypse, which is when that unification and cohesion would come to pass: "The end of the old earth and the descent of the final destroying fires […] was an event […] all black men could look to with Christian joy and with a firm confidence that freedom would follow" (49).

There's nothing like that in Dawn. Humanity has been destroyed by nuclear war, and the survivors are only alive by the grace of the Oankali, a race of aliens who need our genetic material to survive. But humanity has no desire to learn from its mistakes-- the people in this book are distrustful, carrying forward all the same hatreds and prejudices that doomed humanity the first time around. Lilith cannot convince anyone else of what she thinks because she is black and a woman. And freedom has not followed, because now the Oankali are here, ready to use our bodies as raw material for their own development. In some ways the Oankali are superior, because they don't murder or fight... but they also are completely self-interested as a species, and there are some obvious parallels between what they do to humanity and what America did to black folk. The "final destroying fires" haven't made anything better.

One aspect of the African-American apocalypse that Baker identifies is the trickster, who is able to manipulate the apocalypse: "in the earliest folk art of the black American, the etiological animal tale, we find the expression of revolutionary social and religious concerns. The psychical identification of the slave with the trickster made it possible for the folk to depict apocalyptic events that would punish their white oppressors" (49). I don't know if Butler knew she was doing this, but Lilith feels like a rebuttal to this trickster tradition. She comes up with these plans and ideas, and things always fall apart. The Oankali outmanuever her, or her fellow humans self-sabotage. In the end, she cannot do anything other than succumb. But maybe life as an Oankali slave is better than as a free human? It's a trite question, but Butler is good at utterly reserving judgement. One never feels that an action is supposed to be "good" or "bad" in her novels' moral universe, it simply is. Dawn is a sharply observed, astounding achievement, a discussion of what it means to be human that pulls no punches, and certainly one of the bleakest pieces of postapocalyptic literature ever written. None of the optimism seen by Curtis or Baker is present.

Dawn was the only Xenogenesis novel I taught that summer. Some of my students were intrigued by it; others baffled. That's a success in my book, but I'm not sure I did the book justice. It's complicated in a way that defies easy discussion. Anyway, I had ordered the collected edition (retitled Lilith's Brood in 2000) since a new copy of it is cheaper than a new copy of Dawn on its own, and I eventually got around to rereading the last two installments of the trilogy.

I found Adulthood Rites and Imago disappointing compared to the first book. Don't get me wrong, they're very good, but Dawn is on a whole other level. The complexity of character, the bleakness, the astute observations of human nature that drive Dawn just aren't in Adulthood Rites and Imago, thanks to their focus on Oankali constructs. I did enjoy Imago more, in taking us into the head of the first construct ooloi (it's the only book in the series written in the first person), and being pretty unsettling in doing so, as you're essentially rooting for its main character to change other character's desires for its own advantage. It's presenting very matter-of-factly, but if you think about it, it's pretty unsettling; you end up hoping that the last enclave of free humanity on Earth will give itself up to alien control! It is all to easy to empathize with the colonizer over the colonized, even when your own people are the colonized.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Sir Willoughby Patterne (The Egoist, 1879)

Trade paperback, 606 pages
Published 1978 (originally 1879)
Acquired January 2019
 Read February 2019

The Egoist by George Meredith

'The world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have chasms; but is not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire the mountain and the glacier because they can be cruel, seems to me . . . And the world is beautiful.'
     'The world of nature, yes. The world of men?'
     'Yes.'
     'My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ballrooms.'
     'I am thinking of the world that contains real and great generosity, true heroism. We see it round us.'
     'We read of it. The world of the romance writer!'
     'No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am sure we weaken ourselves if we do not.' (100)

This book was recommended to me by a graduate student I met at NAVSA; when I told him about my project on Victorian scientist novels, he asked if I had read The Egoist. I had not. I had actually never read any George Meredith, as far as I know. Now that I have read it, George Meredith strikes me as one of those Victorian novelists we are probably better off not reading. The Egoist is supposedly about the necessity of comedy to puncture egoism-- but it strikes me as something of a bad idea to begin your supposed paean to comedy with an incredibly unfunny and overly pedantic explanation of why humor is important.

Anyway, there are moments of what I'm interested in in this overly long and tedious novel, but there are better examples. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a man of science, sort of vaguely defined-- I don't think we ever learn what kind of science he actually does even though he's in his laboratory a lot of time-- and this does affect his romantic relationships. His egoism means he always needs to get his way, is always trying to bend his fiancée to his will. Science doesn't seem to be to blame though, because even though he's in the laboratory so much, he supposedly mostly does it because science is popular; his true passion is sport (46). On the other hand, his devotion to the laboratory is more complete than that of his rivals (71), so even if it's not his passion per se, he throws himself into it.

There is an emphasis on how he sees the world; as my epigraph above indicates, he doesn't see the world the same as his fiancée Clara, because his perceptions come from science, while hers come from ballrooms and romances. The biggest consequence of his egoism seems to be that he thinks he understands himself more than he actually does understand himself. That seems a scientific problem-- the scientist has to have the ego to believe they understand the world better, and that ego is not always warranted-- but other Victorian scientist novels deal with the topic better than Meredith does. Stay away if you can.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Doctor Antomarchi, Psychiatrist (The Rose and the Key, 1871)

Hardcover, 395 pages
Published 2007 (originally 1871)
Borrowed from the library
Read February 2019

The Rose and the Key by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

"You can't explain, or deny it—I am to infer that," persisted Antomarchi; "you can't."
     "I can't—can I?—I can't—oh! what is it?—I feel so strangely." She shook her ears as if a fly was humming at them, and lifted her pretty fingers towards her temple vaguely. (344-45)

This incredibly dull novel focuses on a young woman who is wrongfully committed to a mental asylum (as the Victorians were always worried about); I read it as part of my project on Victorian scientists, curious about Doctor Antomarchi, the overseer of the asylum. Antomarchi might write some of the best papers in scientific journals (179), but he doesn't do much science-y stuff on the page. Mostly he's a malevolent mesmerist, as in the above passage, where he won't let our young hero say that she's not really suicidal, thanks to the malign power of his gaze. The actual asylum part is interesting, but it's just the last hundred pages or so in a four-hundred-page novel. Nothing that interesting happens prior to that; just people dancing and arguing. Not worth it at all.

(The introduction to my Valancourt edition is weird, spending dozens of pages telling you about Irish political history before it even gets to the novel. Establish a context for me to care before you begin going on about this! I tuned out long before she made any kind of claims about why knowing Irish political history would enhance my interpretation of the novel.)

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Dean Winnstay, Naturalist (Alton Locke, 1850)

Trade paperback, 452 pages
Published 1983 (originally 1850)
Acquired January 2019
 Read February 2019

Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography
by Charles Kingsley

'Mak a style for yoursel, laddie; ye're na mair Scots hind than ye are Lincolnshire laird: sae gang yer ain gate and leave them to gang theirs; and just mak a gran', brode, simple, Saxon style for yoursel.' (99)

Was Charles Kingsley a two-hit wonder? The more I read the more I wonder. The Water-Babies was good, and I appreciated Two Years Ago, but none of the other novels I've read by him have done much for me. Or anything really. There's fertile ground in Alton Locke, a first-person narrative of a cockney tailor's ascent to poetry and political revolution, but like Hypatia, so much of it is boring tedium where nothing happens.

He does meet a man of science, though, the Dean of a Cambridge college, who both wants to teach Locke science and to experiment on him scientifically. I like that he says, "the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way" (167)-- never was the project of the scientist in the scientist novel so clearly expressed; the man of science is a microcosm for science, and the novel is a microcosm of the universe. But though it might apply to scientist novels, Alton Locke is not one, and thus have little to recommend itself to me, and honestly, it has little going for it for others, too.

(I do like Kingsley's political stirrings, especially the Chartist Scot quoted above, but there's just so much other stuff that's just not interesting.)

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Sir Dunstan Gryme, Toxicologist (The Azrael of Anarchy, 1894)

Trade paperback, 173 pages
Published unknown (originally 1894)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2019

The Azrael of Anarchy by Gustave Linbach

[H]e seized the invalid's wrist, and bluntly demanded his letters, putting into the contact of his fingers and the glance of his eye all the hypnotic force he could command.
     For a second or two Lady Ellice passively resisted the influence; then she succumbed.
     [...]
     Before he left he administered a dose of medicine to Lady Ellice with his own hands, winning the nurse's admiration for his care.
     That night the Lady Ellice Bruce-Smith died. (76-7)

This short work of proto-science fiction is somewhat inaccurately described by John Clute in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: the main character is Sir Dunstan Gryme, M.D., the son of an English army-surgeon and an Indian princess. Raised by his mother to hate England, he mixes European medical training with "Asiatic ingenuity," training as both a physician and an occultist (20). He can hypnotize people, and he has also devised an array of deadly poisons. He belongs to a group of anarchists, but unlike the scientists in the anarchists of George Griffith, he's not there because he believes in the cause, but because he sees an opportunity: when they topple the government, he will become Dictator of the Empire.

Mostly the book follows Sir Dunstan as he constantly bamboozles everyone around him, serving as personal physician to royalty, helping commit anarchist bombings, raping sick women with his hypnotic powers. When a cholera epidemic hits England, Sir Dunstan is appointed Special Royal Commissioner for fighting it, and uses this as an opportunity to spread the disease; suddenly the novel lurches from an occult thriller into an apocalyptic one.

It's not a great book, and probably not even a good one, but it is above average for this sort of thing ("this sort of thing" being somewhat wretched in general, in my experience). Sir Dunstan doesn't really qualify as a scientist, though; the emphasis of the narrator is definitely on his occult, "Asiatic" aspects. Racial crossing turns out to be dangerous because Hindoo nefariousness ends up mixed with European competence. He doesn't really see the world scientifically, only as a self-interested seeker of vengeance on an entire society.

Most sources (including the SFE) say Gustave Linbach is a pseudonym for an unknown author, but I discovered a 27 Nov. 1895 article from The Sketch digitized in Google Books that reveals the book was a collaboration between Henry Edlin, a librettist, and Charles L. Carson, editor of The Stage, a theatrical periodical.  Truly I have solved a great literary mystery here.

(Google Books also reveals that Sir Dunstan appears in a Kim Newman novel, Angels of Music, alongside a number of other nefarious fin de siècle characters like L. T. Meade's Madame Sara, but Newman consistently misspells his name "Sir Dunston." I suspect this is because Jess Nevins misspells the name the same way in the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, so I guess we can conclude Newman did not actually read Azrael of Anarchy. To be fair, the only way to do so is an extortionately priced print-on-demand reprint from the British Library; I got my university library to buy a copy.)

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Hypatia, Mathematician (Hypatia, 1853)

Hardcover, 438 pages
Published 1968 (originally 1852-53)
Acquired and read January 2019

Hypatia by Charles Kingsley

"Have I not an intellect, a taste, a reason? I could appreciate what she said.—Why should not my faculties be educated? Why am I only to be shut out from knowledge? There is a Christian Gnosis as well as a heathen one. [...] Is not my very craving for knowledge a sign that I am capable of it?" (131)

Hypatia, the late Roman-era Alexandrian mathematician, is often called an early female scientist, so it seemed like it behooved me to read the novel about her by Charles Kingsley, a man who did write two proper "scientist novels" (Two Years Ago and The Water-Babies). In terms of my project on Victorian scientists, I needn't've bothered. Hypatia as Kingsley tells it might be a mathematician and a philosopher, but she is no scientist-- she is never shown observing the world or engaging in experiment. Mostly the focus is (as in the above quotation, from a young Christian monk who wants to study under her) on her moral instruction.

In terms of reading a good book, I needn't've bothered, either. It was supposedly Queen Victoria's favorite Kingsley novel, which surely correlates to why I dislike it: it's boring and rambly and Kingsley never really makes anyone who doesn't care about hating Catholics care about what's going on. There are a couple good jokes (I don't know why he threw a gang of murderous Vikings into the mix, but I love it), but on the whole, it's one of those books where masses of pages go by and you don't know what's printed on them because you don't care to. This could be the material for a good novel, but alas, it is not.

Review: Septimus by William J. Locke

Hardcover, 315 pages
Published 1909 (originally 1908-09)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2019

Septimus by William J. Locke

"Here we are in the middle of a Fairy Tale. What are the Powers of Darkness in your case, Sir Red Cross Knight?"
     "Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy," said Sypher savagely. (54)

I read this novel as part of my project to read all the remaining Victorian scientist novels. It's not Victorian, though, and Septimus Dix is an inventor, not a scientist. There's no indication of scientific training or scientific research; he designs things (mostly weapons, but occasionally other things, though only the guns are practical). He is certainly an absent-minded inventor, seemingly even a savant, as it seems like the gun designs just kind of come to him, but he doesn't view the world differently because of his scientific perspective. (He definitely views it differently, though. He's a very odd duck.)

Still, I'm glad I read it because it was delightful. Serialized in American Magazine from May 1908 to June 1909 under the title Simple Septimus, the novel follows four people: the inventor Septimus, the patent medicine hawker Clem Sypher, the would-be actress Emmy Oldrieve, and the Zora Middlemist, the imposing young widow who ties them all together. Zora is Emmy's sister, Clem's muse, and Septimus's idol; her husband died just six weeks into their marriage because he was an alcoholic, and she swore off men and marriage only to draw into her orbit two of the oddest men who had ever been.

The book is aimless at times, but usually fun, and occasionally insightful and heartfelt. Septimus and Clem are perfectly ridiculous characters. Septimus, for example, hired a burglar as butler, but doesn't worry because one can't burgle a place if one lives in it, so he has nothing to fear; Septimus spends most of the year away from home, though, because he's afraid he gets on the butler's nerves, and he hates causing offense. Clem sells patent medicine, but unlike Edward Ponderevo in Wells's Tono-Bungay (serialized at almost exactly the same time), Clem earnestly believes in his medicine, and considers himself a Friend of Humanity for hawking it incessantly.

Septimus falls in love with Zora, Clem thinks Zora is his muse, Emmy gets in trouble by way of an extramarital affair, and basically this constellation of characters interact back and forth for 300 pages in increasingly weird circumstances. Over the course of the novel, they all grow up a little bit, thanks to the influence of the others; four people who had each removed themselves from humanity in some kind of way end up discovering the salvation than can only come from contact with other humans.

The one-volume publication was one of the ten bestselling books of 1909 in the United States (Locke himself was a British colonial), but as far as I know, it has mostly been forgotten in the present day and age, so I'm glad my incessant search for scientists in British literature brought me to it, and I'm sad I have to remove it from my list of them.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Professor Fontaine, Chemist (Jezebel's Daughter, 1880)

I was about to say today's Unreality SF review (the Gothic audio drama Blind Terror) isn't like today's book review at all, but I guess there is some similarity between Wilkie Collins and Gothic audio drama.

Trade paperback, 266 pages
Published 2016 (originally 1879-80)
Acquired and read January 2019

Jezebel's Daughter by Wilkie Collins

‘I can understand the murderess becoming morally intoxicated with the sense of her own tremendous power. A mere human creature—only a woman, Julie!—armed with the means of secretly dealing death around her, wherever she goes—meeting with strangers who displease her, looking at them quietly, and saying to herself, “I doom you to die, before you are a day older”’ (77)

I read this book afraid it would contain a female scientist. Not only have I previously published a claim that that was first done in a later novel, but that later novel was also by Wilkie Collins; it seems rather embarrassing to overlook one Collins novel in the rush to establish the importance of another. Somehow, I did not hear of this novel until much more recently. I am safe, however. Jezebel's Daughter is about a woman using scientifically created poisons, but she herself did not create them. Madame Fontaine's late husband was a genius chemist, but she can do nothing more than follow the directions for administering and curing poison he left behind; she cannot even create more of them.

Professor Fontaine dies on the first page of the novel, however, meaning that there is nothing here that will really factor into my project on fictional Victorian scientists. What we hear of him, though, bears many traces of the stereotypical scientist. Madame Fontaine at first loved her husband, and pinned her hopes on him having a distinguished career, but even though he was a medical doctor, he gave it up for a life of experimental science, which had much less social possibility. She bemoans to a friend, "you have married a Man! Happy woman! I am married to a Machine" (75). At the height of his ambition, he becomes what she calls an "Animated Mummy," so lean and dirty is he as he neglects almost everything in his pursuit of chemical discoveries (75).

There's also a Hungarian chemist, never named, but described as "the most extraordinary experimental chemist living" and "[t]he new Paracelsus" (74). He's the one who bequeaths the formulas for the poisons to Professor Fontaine, and he's the one who inspires Professor Fontaine to sink his whole career into experimental chemistry. But he commits suicide, seemingly for scientifically logical reasons: "After giving it a fair trial, I find that life is not worth living for. I have decided to destroy myself with a poison of my own discovery. [...] [M]y body is presented as a free gift to the anatomy school. Let a committee of surgeons and analysts examine my remains. I defy them to discover a trace of the drug that has killed me" (76). He feels like a forerunner for Doctor Nathan Benjulia in Heart and Science (1882-83), a vaguely foreign, sinister, Godless presence lurking at the margins of the novel and enabling some of its darkest moments, but not directly involved in the main plot. (Unlike in Heart and Science, where the villainous Mrs. Gallilee admires Benjulia, Madame Fontaine plainly disapproves of the Hungarian.)

This novel also feels like a forerunner for Heart and Science in its exploration of female villainy. Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is a strange mix of femininity and anti-femininity. She departs from social mores, but one sense the novel doesn't entirely disapprove of her: it's set in 1828, but narrated retrospectively from the time of publication (1879-80), and the narrator occasionally comments that things were different for women then, they had less options. (The narrator's aunt is the director of a trading company that employs many women, and this is figured as unusual.) So when Madame Fontaine poisons people, you can kind of understand where she's coming from in a society often arrayed against women, as the epigraph above reveals, or the following delightfully villainous speech: "Power! […] The power that I have dream of all my life is mine at last! Alone among mortal creatures, I have Life and Death for my servants. […] What a position! I stand here, a dweller in a popular city—and every creature in it, from highest to lowest, is a creature in my power!" (145)

Like Mrs. Gallilee, Madame Fontaine is pursuing motherly ends through un-motherly means. She simply wants her daughter to be happy-- but is willing to stop at nothing to make it happen. But also like Mrs. Gallilee, she's often obsessed with the appearance of propriety over actual propriety; she refuses to moderate her spending when the family coffers begin running low, insisting it is simply not done, and she must live in the manner to which she has become accustomed. It is a monstrous femininity, its strengths and weaknesses all magnified to dangerous proportions. If you've already read Heart and Science, then, Jezebel's Daughter very much comes across as the dry run for it; in a sense, Heart and Science just takes the husband's scientific sensibility and transfers it to his wife; Mrs. Gallilee is everything Madame Fontaine is with the addition of seeing like a scientist.

Jezebel's Daughter is like Heart and Science in one final way: it is very much minor Collins. There's none of the thrills or mysteries of The Woman in White or The Moonstone or No Name to be found here. It has its moments, but Collins can do better.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Michael Graham, Philosopher ("Stella," 1895)

PDF eBook, 177 pages
Published 1895
Read January 2019

Stella and An Unfinished Communication: Studies of the Unseen
by C. H. Hinton

"But I thought, Stella, that the forbidden tree was the tree of knowledge."
     "That was Adam's tree, Hugh! There were two trees in the garden of Eden, a big one for Adam, and a smaller one near it for Eve. Her tree was the tree of being seen and known. When she ate that kind of fruit, she became visible, she was no longer as she was meant to be." (32)

This book contains two novellas by Charles Hinton, a mathematician who coined the word "tesseract." The first, "Stella," is the reason I read it, a story of scientific invisibility that predates H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man (1897). Michael Graham is our man of science, but it's kind of borderline as an inclusion in my project, because 1) we never actually see his point-of-view, as he's dead by the time the story begins, and 2) I don't think he's ever actually described as a scientist or a man of science.

Spoilers head, though this is one of those books you won't see much of a reason to read if you don't know some of them. Graham was actually a philosopher trying to figure out how to create altruistic people; he determined that adults cannot be adapted to new moral codes because their minds formed around old ones, and it's even difficult to raise children because the environment of society will impose itself on them (23). So he decided to raise a child in absolute secret. His theory became that he needed to find out what the soul did when the most fundamental self-regarding impulses were denied (48). For boys, that's taking things, but for girls, that's being seen. It's impossible to stop a boy from wanting things (because then he will die), but it is possible to stop a girl from being seen if you adjust her index of refraction! So he raised a girl named Stella from birth in a state of invisibility.

The book is narrated by Hugh "Steddy" Stedman Churton, a lawyer sent to wind up Graham's affairs. While staying in Graham's old house, he meets and falls in love with Stella; eventually, Stella is kidnapped by a medium looking to use her to enhance his bogus seances.

It's a strange book, but a very enjoyable one. There's a certain weird logic to Graham's ideas, and Hinton is surprisingly good at depicting the tension between different ideas; this isn't one of those Victorian books where someone expounds a theory and you're clearly meant to take their side. Graham's ideas are weird, of course, but Churton's insistence that Stella needs to be visible and marry him feels very small-minded. He's unwilling to open himself up to the strange possibilities that the universe has to offer beyond our dimension, and he clearly doesn't value women when he can't see how attractive they are. Additionally, though the novella is obviously exploring the way women need to be seen, I don't Churton ever recognizes his need to be seen, but he definitely has one too.

The novella is only 107 pages long, and I zipped through it in a couple sittings. I think it helps that Hinton clearly has a sense of humor and of adventure. The joke on p. 105 made me laugh aloud.

There are some other men of science in the book, too. Frank Cornish is Churton's friend and Graham's nephew who gets an M.D., but spends his time researching, not in medical practice; he helps Churton figure out some of the science behind Stella's invisibility. There's also "Professor C——", a chemist who helps Churton track down Stella. Churton gets Professor C—— to help him because of his love of experiments; Churton says, "he possessed in a marked degree that ardour for experiment which becomes a second nature with scientific men" (61). However, there's one point where Churton and Professor C—— probably could have rescued Stella earlier but C—— wastes time asking her questions about coefficients (65).

I don't think it will make it into my project, because the science is mostly, well, invisible, but it will make it onto my list. Thanks to Elizabeth L. Throesch's book on Hinton for alerting me to its existence.

Additionally, the book contains another novella by Hinton, "An Unfinished Communication," about a man who goes to see an "unlearner." It starts out funny, with some good jokes, but quickly becomes ponderous, and I stopped putting the work into figuring out what was going on.

Review: The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

Trade paperback, 319 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1857)
Acquired December 2018
Read January 2019

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

I said to myself, [...] 'Look at the sooty smoke in that hollow, and know that there is your post! There you cannot dream, you cannot speculate and theorize – there you shall out and work!' (48)

I read this novel as part of my project to read all the remaining Victorian scientist novels. I actually wasn't sure if the eponymous professor actually was a scientist; the article I had read had been vague and a quick search didn't turn up any specific answers, so I just went and bought the book and read it to find out.

William Crimsworth is at first a clerk (that's when he utters the above) and later in fact a professor of English in Belgium, so no scientist. He only gets the gig because any vaguely educated English-speaking person could do it. But the book is filled with that other thing I am obsessed with in literature: observation. Crimsworth's friend Hunsden the tradesman, in particular, is always watching Crimsworth and drawing conclusions, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. At one point, Crimsworth observes Hunsden observing him, though he gets it wrong (255); Hunsden is not as perceptive as Crimsworth had perceived. And as a teacher Crimsworth must observe his class, which only gets harder once he picks up a job at a girls' school, full of hot young teenagers.

I didn't think there was much of a story here to be honest. Crimsworth falls in love with a would-be governess sitting in on his classes; they marry and live highly successful lives. A couple temptations are thrown in Crimsworth's way, but he overcomes them all with ease, so there's not much in the way of compelling struggle. He does kind of start from misery, but his ascent out of it is relatively unbroken.

I mostly think the book is an excuse for Brontë (as in Villette) to practice her most annoying writing tic: dialogue in untranslated French. Thank God for the end notes, but sometimes I got too tired to flip to the end and read them. I don't think I missed much.

The Scientist in Victorian Edwardian Literature: George Ponderevo, Chemist and Engineer (Tono-Bungay, 1909)

Trade paperback, 414 pages
Published 2005 (originally 1908-09)
Acquired December 2018
Read January 2019

Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells

'I believe the time has come for flying to be possible. Real flying!'
     'Flying!'
     'Up in the air. Aeronautics! Machine heavier than air. It can be done. And I want to do it.'
     'Is there money in it, George?'
     'I don't know nor care! But that's what I'm going to to do.' (203)

One could write a whole book just on H. G. Wells novels featuring scientists who are married, I suspect. Though Tono-Bungay is probably a good book, it has little to offer the dedicated H. G. Wells reader. I saw elements of many of Wells's domestic novels in it: Love and Mr Lewisham (1899-1900), Ann Veronica (1909), The History of Mr Polly (1910), The New Machiavelli (1910), and Marriage (1911-12). Not to mention aspects of Wells's own life, as well as resonances with The Time Machine (1895), The First Men in the Moon (1900-01), and The War in the Air (1908). Like so many of Wells's other domestic novels, a man from a lower-class background seeks a scientific career, has an affair during a disintegrating marriage, and has his career aspirations derailed by the social exigencies of modern England. To be fair to Wells, though, all of the domestic novels I listed above (except for Mr Lewisham) were written later; I just happened to have read them first. The angle of Tono-Bungay itself does yield something new, and the scenes between George Pondervo and his uncle were usually the best parts.

George Ponderevo ends up apprenticed to his uncle, who is a chemist (in the sense of being a pharmacist). Edward Ponderevo is always trying to sell people things they don't need, because the difficulty of being a chemist is that people only need stuff when they're sick. He comes up with the quack tonic Tono-Bungay (Edward Mendelson's introduction says it's basically Coca-Cola), which soon becomes a huge success. George doesn't contribute to the drink, but he runs his uncle's manufacturing concerns, keeping the production line efficient with his analytical mind. As the Ponderevos expand the commercial empire more and more, becoming more and more successful, George gets married, has a marriage disintegrate, throws himself into his work, takes up inventing heavier-than-air flight, and goes on an expedition to an African island seeking radioactive minerals. It is, perhaps, more capacious than most of Wells's domestic novels, with the effect that it doesn't quite cohere. I like many of the parts, but the whole left me cold.

George has a scientific mind, as the novel reminds us on several occasions, but like a lot of Wells's protagonists, he struggles to apply it. He has a (supposedly) scientific theory of society but I'm not sure what good it does; he never gets the science degree he wanted because he gets demoralizes and basically flunks out before he goes to work for his uncle; his flying machine is of limited success; he ends his career helping design battleships that the British government doesn't want to buy. And, of course, the world is too complicated to apply science to it in any real useful way, something I think Wells eventually forgot: "The perplexing thing about life is the irresoluble complexity of reality, of things and relations alike" (195).

George occasionally glimpses truths, though; I found a section where George compares the radioactive decay of "quap" to the potential end of the world really effective: "I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry rotting and dispersal of all our world. [...] I do not believe this can be the end; no human soul can believe in such an end and go on living, but to it science points as a possible thing, science and reason alike" (329-30).

The scene where George, without any emotion at all, kills a native on the quap island to keep his expedition's presence a secret, is also really interesting. George himself doesn't understand the importance of the moment, but he clearly knows it is important, because he included it in his account of his life. To me it points toward a fundamental theme throughout Tono-Bungay (and Wells's other fiction, domestic and sf alike): the alienating nature of modernity. We meet these people so different to us from fantastic places, and all we can think to do is kill them to make ourselves richer. We have this wonderful chemical sciences, and what we invent with them is a "medicine" that no one actually needs. We can almost build flying machines, but no government will fund their development. We know so much about sex, but we teach none of it to our men and women.

Uncle Edward is a great character, too, and the ever-increasing accounts of his ridiculous ambitions (he tries to buy the British Medical Journal at one point, so that it will run articles favorable to Tono-Bungay) are just good fun to read about even as they appall. I loved that his never-finished mansion included a billiards room with a glass ceiling placed beneath the ornamental lake. Some, like Adam Roberts, say he is a Dickensian character, and I agree.

Adam Roberts calls Tono-Bungay a "rich and brilliant novel" and I don't know if I can quite bring myself to agree-- maybe I would have thought so if I'd read it where it belonged in Wells's own development as a writer, as he did-- but like the best Wells, it speaks to both its own moment and to our moment. But it's ambitious and interesting and I think helps make the case (as my colleague Cari Hovanec sometimes does) for H. G. Wells as a modernist writer.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Doctor Gabriel Lamb, Medical Psychologist (The Octave of Claudius, 1897)

PDF eBook, 324 pages
Published 1897
Read December 2018
 

The Octave of Claudius by Barry Pain

"I want to know how this research is going on, and how it will end."
     "It will go on and end in the service of humanity. If I gave you the details, I think that you would regard me rather as a quack than as a doctor—a quack with the restless ambitions of a mad man." (101)

The characters speaking in my epigraph above are the two central figures of this novel: Claudius Sandell, a would-be novelist, and Gabriel Lamb, a doctor who's ended his private practice to devote himself purely to research. Claudius's life has reached a low point, and he almost dies on the street, penniless and homeless, but for the ministrations of Lamb. Claudius is initially willing to do anything for Lamb, and ends up promising to serve him the rest of his life in exchange for eight days of freedom: eight days where Lamb will give Claudius £1,000 per day to use as he pleases.

You might guess that Lamb has nefarious motives, otherwise there wouldn't be a plot, and you'd be right. Lamb is clearly intended as a critique of the motivations and practices of vivisectionists, who claimed to be causing pain for the greater good of humanity. Sometimes, anti-vivisection novels criticized this as a self-serving lie; these men are just out to cause pain and/or for their own self-interest, and vivisection furthers those goals (e.g., Heart and Science, The Beth Book). Sometimes, anti-vivisection novels were willing to believe this was true, but explored the harm it causes regardless (e.g., The Professor's Wife).

It's hard to put Lamb in The Octave of Claudius in either category. He definitely sees the world differently than other people; in one scene, he looks out his window at London: "Each man of them is nothing as an individual. Charles Peace and William Shakespeare were both accidents" (101). When he explains why he gave up his practice, he says, "I asked myself if that kind of thing [helping an individual patient] was science as I loved it—if it really assisted the great cause of humanity for which alone I live. I gave up my practice. I study the individual man only when he is likely to throw light on the aggregate. I never work on behalf of the individual" (22-3). If it was just down to his conversations with Claudius, I'd be inclined to believe him. He's going to have to leave the country to do what he wants to Claudius; he'll never get acclaim for what he learns within his lifetime, but he's okay with this if it helps humanity in the long run: "I certainly have my reward. You have noticed, perhaps, that only people with imagination lay down wine. The old man in his cellar, storing the vintage that he knows he cannot live to drink, tastes in that moment all its unborn perfections that one day his grandson overhead will praise" (100).

But one of the other key characters in the novel is Lamb's wife, Hilda. They used to have a good marriage, but it fell apart at some point, apparently after the death of their only child; now Lamb tells her, "My interest in you is largely scientific" (33). But when Hilda gets hysterical at one point, he beats her with a whip, literalizing the metaphorical connection between vivisection and domestic abuse I've noticed in The Beth Book and Lynton Abbott's Children. Lamb claims to take no pleasure in what he does to Claudius, but it's impossible to read what he says and does to Hilda and not believe that he doesn't derive satisfaction from it. So he might genuinely be doing terrible things to further the human race... but he clearly also has failed as a husband, which thus means he's failed in one of his most basic ethical obligations according to the Victorians.

Like a lot of these anti-vivisection books, it's not great-- basically everything Claudius does when Lamb is not present is dead boring, especially his dull romance-- but it contains fascinating nuggets of how science and scientists were seen in the late Victorian period. I'm very glad I took the time to read it, and I feel like it ought to make it into my book.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Professor Eric Grant, Physiologist (The Professor's Wife, 1881)

PDF eBook, 167 pages
Published 1881
Read December 2018
 

The Professor's Wife: A Story
by Leonard Graham

"What are you talking about, Eric? What can you mean? Have I vexed you?"
     "No, my darling. I am a wretched actor, Beatrice. I ought not to let you see—I am—out of temper tonight," finished Eric, trying to laugh, holding her close to him in a hunger of love, as he accused himself. (112)

This short novel (novella?) mostly focuses on Beatrice Egerton, a young orphan raised by her uncle. While visiting her cousins, Beatrice meets two men of science: the pugnacious, musical, cold, humanitarian Eric Grant and the sensitive Bertram D'Eyencourt. Both men are physiologists, but they take very different approaches to their subject. Grant is the "arch-vivisector," reviled by anti-vivisectionist reformers for the cruelties her pursues in the name of science. Bertram has no ability for practical work; all of his science comes in the form of observation and theorizing. Yet the two men are great friends (Grant saved Bertram's life) and work together, and both men fall in love with Beatrice. Beatrice previously knows of Grant from a book he wrote about his wartime medical humanitarian work, and she accepts his proposal, becoming the "professor's wife" of the title.

Much of the novel is taken up by Grant defending his vivisection; he tells Bertram, "Life is not made up of strawberry cream. Someone must do the painful part of progress" (26). He refuses to tell Beatrice exactly what the study of physiology entails, even once they're married, because she is too pure to know about the horrors of vivisection. So far, so familiar-- it's not too far off others anti-vivisection/scientist novels I've looked at, like Heart and Science and The Beth Book. It also reminds me of Hardy's The Woodlanders.

But there are some important differences that make it really interesting. One is that its vivisectionist genuinely loves his wife. Yes, Grant won't tell her what he does because he knows she'll disapprove, but bound up in it is a real (if patriarchal) desire to protect her. He really struggles with the decision to essentially live a lie: "There was no one to see him in the hour of his fierce struggle between his passion for knowledge and his love. No voice poke audible words of counsel or of warning. The powers of good and evil strove with him in silence" (73). Evil ends up winning.

Some of his intellectual beliefs are sympathetic, too, at least to a modern reader; Grant is a Darwinist (54), and he's more of a feminist than any other character in the book, telling a skeptical Beatrice, "you will see the disabilities of women removed, and the professions thrown open to them; as they ought to be" (37). I don't know enough about Leonard Graham to know if we're meant to sympathize with Grant or Beatrice in these debates (according to At the Circulating Library, no one knows anything about him at all, even whether or not "Leonard Graham" was his real name), but even if we're meant to side with Beatrice (which seems likely), Grant's perspective is rendered with intellectual honesty; he's no strawman.

Unlike some other literary vivisectors, he's not a hypocrite; he really does believe he's doing good by vivisecting, and he doesn't just want to cause pain. As the novel goes on, Beatrice learns more and more about what he does behind the closed door of the laboratory, but Grant won't confirm anything outright, even as she keeps meeting more and more anti-vivisectionists.

Don't read on if you think you'll actually read this book, because its best part was a surprise. (But there's little danger of you reading it, I suspect.) Beatrice comes down with some kind of nervous disease, only vaguely described, and Grant hides it from her, which is where my epigraph comes from. He despairs that the science he's studied his own life cannot do anything for her: "What is our science worth?" (111)

She ends up dying, but after she dies, Bertram discovers that in her final days of life, Grant experimented on her! Not vivisection, but he "induc[ed] abnormal sensibility and play[ed] upon it" (154), because the opportunity represented by her condition was too good to pass up (156). He didn't cause the illness or anything, but with his typical pragmatism, decided that if she was ill, he couldn't miss the opportunity to learn more about the human nervous system!

Bertram breaks off their friendship, becoming a committed antivivisectionist, and Grant ends up spending the rest of his life alone, with nothing but science. The novel's final lines are, "After his wife’s funeral, he resumed his classes and delivered his lectures as usual. The only change visible in him was a growing hardness and indifference, which there was nothing in his inner or outer life to soften. He had buried his one year’s love, and his one friend had left him. From henceforth, his powers were concentrated on science" (158).

So probably not a great book, but a surprisingly interesting one because of how multi-faceted its depiction of a vivisectionist is. I think I'll need to incorporate it into my book.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Archibald Thorpe, Geologist (Wooers and Winners, 1879)

PDF eBook, 310 pages
Published 1880 (originally 1879)
Read December 2018
 

Wooers and Winners; or, Under the Scars: A Yorkshire Story, Vols. I–III
by Mrs. G. Linnæus Banks

Allan's letter had set the scientific enthusiast thinking for the time being; but the lines of thought crossed and diverged, and soon his fears for his stepson were lost in the reminder of his other promise to Honest John, and in the gathering up of ideas and the marshalling of facts for the lectures to be written. (1: 226-27)

I've set a goal for myself this winter break of reading all the Victorian scientist novels I've never got around to, or discovered after reading for my exams and dissertation, because my aim is to submit a book proposal soon, and I want to make sure I haven't missed anything important before I do my revisions. That leads me to this clunkily titled novel, which was serialized in 1879 and published in three volumes in 1880.

Mostly it's a tale of a cluster of connected characters with, as the use of "wooers" indicates, some emphasis on who is engaged to whom. One character, Mr. Archibald Thorpe, is a man of science, specifically an amateur geologist; he's not a focal character, but his children and step-children are (he's the "scientific enthusiast" in the above quotation). To be honest, it's all terribly tedious. I didn't care about any of these characters or who they married or who they stole from or where they went to school. Like a lot of mediocre novelists, Banks manages to spin very little incident out into hundred of pages.

My own interests didn't even find very much to work with, because Mr. Thorpe's scientific perceptions very rarely entered into the book at first, until all of a sudden at the end of the first volume, where someone tells him something about his stepson Allan he really ought to have noticed before: "Mr. Thorpe, who had more knowledge of plants and stones than of humanity, opened his eyes in amazement" (1: 219). The narrator later amplifies this by saying, "why should a man, pondering the occult secrets of creation, be expected to note the actions or development of young people, even though one should be his own? The fossilized past had a more intelligent voice for him than had the human present" (1: 301). Like Swithin St. Cleeve in Hardy's Two on a Tower (published three years later), Thorpe's focus on cosmic immensities makes it difficult for his vision to alight upon particularities, only in this case, it's deep time, not deep space, that has trained his vision.

Mr. Thorpe is kind of your typical abstracted scientist who cares little for day-to-day matters (his stepdaughter basically has to raise his daughter for him when his wife / their mother dies), though when he's recruited to give geological lessons to the general public, he actually acquits himself fairly well. (Unlike Margaret Hale's father in the television version of North and South, also set in the North.) But speaking to and understanding the general public is a very different thing from his own children: "intent on the enlightenment of the masses, his mental vision had so wide and comprehensive a range, it is small wonder the inconsiderable individual on his own hearthstone were overlooked" (1: 301-02). So three hundred pages and nearly one volume in, I finally got excited by the book.

PDF eBook, 300 pages
Published 1880 (originally 1879)
Read December 2018
 

Unfortunately, that's pretty much it for interesting things done by Archibald Thorpe. He largely sits out the second volume, which focuses on his boring children and stepchildren. He does pop up at its end again to be chastised by his stepdaughter for the fact that he is a bad candidate for sitting vigil at the bedside of his dying stepson: "Your mind would be lost among the stalactites and stalagmites of our caverns… in search of something rare and fresh for your collection, when Allan might want his pillow eased, or his shoulders covered, or his physic administered" (2: 205). But that's about it, and don't we know how bad men of science are at dealing with people by now?

Allan's near death (he's about to be buried when his sister realizes he's still breathing, very faintly) is the highlight of volume II, but again it's a small chuck of a large stretch. Volume III is the dullest part of the whole novel, focusing more than any other volume on "wooing" (I'm not sure where "winning" comes in), though we do learn than a man of science makes a better mine owner than someone trained in classical literature, because as Martin (Mr. Thorpe's ward) tells us, literature "foster[s] the romance in my nature" too much (3: 108).

PDF eBook, 286 pages
Published 1880 (originally 1879)
Read December 2018
 

By this point, Mr. Thorpe himself has pretty much vanished. And then he does so literally; one day he goes off on a geological expedition into a cave he's discovered, and he just never comes back! (3: 242-43) This seems like it could be exciting-- how far will a man's devotion to science take him?-- but it's told to us in retrospect without any detail. So much for a guy who had been a principal character.

So, all in all, not a particularly good novel, and from my perspective, not a particularly interesting one, either. Archibald Thorpe definitely fits into my general theory of the vision of the Victorian scientist, but he's so generic that he doesn't tell us anything new that we couldn't find in better novels by better authors.