Realism and Phantasm of Settlement, Survival

Part one

French cover, wikimedia

While looking forward to auditing a science fiction course at Signum University, I began listening to the audio (public domain) Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, translated from the original by F.P. Walter in the 1990s. How did Jules Verne learn the voluminous content of the seas? I’m astonished by how much was known of life and geology under oceans, and along coastal margins, in the 1860s; mystified, even perplexed, about how such a mass of information, was gathered and classified. This would be a study for historians of marine life and topography. How did pre-1860s do all that deep-sea enviro-measuring, weighing, gathering, naming cataloging—without the data aggregators and scientific underwater sleuthing technologies we have today?

For the first time, I also began reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (my secondhand yellowing 1970 paperback). Conversely to Twenty Thousand Leagues, this SF, originating in the late 1940's, surprised me with its dearth of scientific knowledge and applied science. Canals on Mars (after such had been largely debunked but still popular), rocket ships with hardly a nickel’s worth of genuine applied science, an impossible physical setting for human bodies. —Bradbury means it humorously, satirically, even ironically at times.

And with an abundance of weirdness. It is far more weird than scientific. Irony, as some of my friends know, generally bypasses my funny bone (and my awareness). But, I don’t mind obvious satire with the obligatory touch, or even infusion, of affection. Feeling narrative, even authorial, affection, that's what gets me chuckling, laughing. I stress that it is affection on the part of the writer ... I’m still thinking about Ray Bradbury’s sense of humor. But his science? I have to think hard—too hard, and right now I can’t research that....

But that’s what Dr. Amy Sturgis at Signum is for. I was looking forward to her lectures because, having taken her degree in intellectual history, she may fill us in on how Jules Verne and 19th-century society made those discoveries. She may say just how much real science went into Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Her enthusiasm, and historic science and literary knowledge, make for a fascinating online learning experience.

I did manage to think up a way in which Martian Chronicles are at least quasi scientific: in their exploitation of the paranormal. Would-be scientists, and scientists using the methods of science, have tried to understand extrasensory perception, mesmerism, telepathy, prediction, astral-projection, and other extra-material events and experiences—whether real or merely claimed ... since before Conan Doyle and Houdini. There’s a lot an SF writer can do with all this, and not be strictly accused of no science. Plenty there for the fiction part of the genre, of course.

first edition dust jacket, wikimedia

(More on realism and Phantasm to come.)