Edgar Allen Poe means The Tell-Tale Heart to me. For a friend, his favourite poem, The Raven. Gothic horror, dark romanticism. Coming madness. Until this week’s London Review of Books I was unaware that Poe also had a hand in birthing the genre of science fiction.
In 1835 Poe published a story about a man going to the moon in a balloon, where he found a range of wonderful creatures inhabiting the satellite. Not long after, the New York Sun ran a series of stories reporting scientific findings that there were wonderful beasts on the moon. These “findings” were shown to be a hoax, and it was suggested that Poe’s moon exploration story had worked as inspiration, if not raw material, for the paper.
What is made clear from the reception of the tabloid debacle, that these findings had been widely believed, was the lack of scientific understanding among the public. They had not been exposed to much scientific writing of fact or fiction. The word “scientists” was only coined in the 1830s, and was not widely used for decades. Science remained the remit of the leisure classes for some time. Popular science was yet to become a literary field.
Poe, then, was writing what we might call “sci-fi” before many people were writing science. Throughout his life he contributed more science fiction, and on occasion his fiction was mistaken for fact by the masses. Later in his life he embarked on more serious scientific projects. These were largely rejected by the wider scientific community as a little absurd, and even today critics debate whether they were truly intended as sci-fi.
During his lifetime he experiences mixed acclaim. Among his best sellers was a textbook on seashells. Nevertheless, these early attempts at science writing, fiction and fact, introduced many to the subject, paving the way for the behemoth that the genre of science fiction would become.