Science Fiction gets up to speed

kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies, victorian era, collections

I grew up reading Victorian-era science fiction and semi-fantastic fiction. Tales by Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and others of the era filled my imagination. Upon reading Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Science Fiction, edited by Michael Sims, I find myself amused at my reaction to language that now seems stilted and wordy. Such writing was the magic carpet of my imagination in my pre-teens and teens.

This nGram chart shows a trend that explains much of it:

From Project Gutenberg I downloaded the text to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. About 0.73% of the words are "which" (~770/106,000). His style of writing (or the English translation thereof) was entirely typical of the first half of the 1800's.

In the early 1900's Ernest Hemingway went on a "which hunt" in his writing, practically eliminated coordinating clauses, and transformed English language style. The Old Man and the Sea, ¼ as long as 20,000 Leagues, contains just 13 instances of "which", or 0.05%. As the chart shows, most writers of the late Twentieth Century, though their writing is briefer than Victorian-era writing, still use "which" about five times as much as Hemingway did.

Syntax and style aside, when the ideas are compelling, I am still drawn along, and thoroughly enjoy the story. The book introduced me to a dozen writers of the era that I hadn't heard of before. I find a few just too boring, but Grant Allen ("The Thames Valley Catastrophe") and E. Nesbit ("The Five Senses"), in particular, produced compelling writing to clothe their unique ideas.

The collection shows the roots of the several sub-genres of science fiction. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was not the first tale of scientific hubris and its penalty, but it is easily the keystone of the genre. By the way, I suspect nearly everyone has seen the Hollywood version of Frankenstein, with a nearly mute, grunting "monster", but how many know that most of the book is written as the narrative of the creature to its creator, Victor Frankenstein? Similarly, while early movies about Tarzan have Johnny Weismuller saying little more than "Me Tarzan, you Jane", the Tarzan of the book (Lord Greystoke) was a very literate, multi-lingual sophisticate. But that's the trouble with early fiction. The narrators and characters are wordy and even erudite, and if scriptwriters put in all the authors' dialogue, a typical Tarzan flick would last 4-5 hours.