SF Luminaries: Jules Verne

Étienne Carjat: Jules Verne (1884)

It's hard to communicate the strange charm of Jules Verne's books to anyone who wasn't lucky enough to read them at the right age - maybe somewhere between 10 and 17? Their merits are not readily apparent on the surface: clumsy dialogue, ridiculously implausible events, a backdrop of misinformation about virtually every corner of the world ... And yet, and yet ...

Jules Verne: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864 / 1874)

I suppose that my favourite remains Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I loved the characters' long voyage to Iceland before they even started to make their descent in the footsteps of that intrepid 16th century alchemist, Arne Saknussemm. I liked the cryptogram and complex clues they had to solve along the way, and Verne's vision of the Earth's interior was suitably awe-inspiring.

Henry Levin, dir.: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
l-r: Pat Boone, Peter Ronson, James Mason, & Arlene Dahl

It did come as a bit of a shock when I watched the film version of the novel on TV, only to discover that the setting had been shifted from Hamburg to Edinburgh, and a love interest and villainous saboteur added to the plot! It was still fun, but virtually all the complexities which made the novel so rewarding seemed to have been removed.

Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-70 / 1976)

The same, alas, was true of probably his most famous novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The version above, edited by Walter James Miller, restores to the text all the passages generally removed in English translation. The editor points out that there's a simple reason why Verne is regarded as essentialy a children's writer in English whereas his works are taken quite seriously in France: because we're not actually reading the same book.

Richard Fleischer, dir.: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

By comparison with the sins of his various translators, the sins of the above adaptation seem quite venial (though Kirk Douglas's singing is a heavy price to have to pay for admission). James Mason makes an excellent, brooding Captain Nemo, though admittedly the character's Indian heritage is left in the background.

Gary Gianni: Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (2009)

Verne has been quite well served by his various illustrators over the years, however. The above graphic adaptation leans heavily on the brooding, Doré-influenced style of the original nineteenth-century editions. The chapter on Atlantis is one of the highlights of the novel, along with the famous encounter with a giant squid!

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville: Atlantis (1870)

Which brings us to a confession. I'm afraid I have to admit to having read quite a few of Verne's works as Classics Illustrated comics rather than as books. To this day, for instance, I've never actually read Off on a Comet, but the comic below was one of my favourites.

Jules Verne: Off on a Comet (Classics Illustrated, 1959-60)

Others, such as From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon I read both as comics and, subsequently, novels. It all depended on which ones my parents had copies of, and - more to the point - which of them had found their way to the shelves of my Intermediate and Secondary School libraries.

Victor G. Ambrus: Jules Verne's A Long Vacation (1888 / 1967)

After Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the above translation of Verne's Deux ans de vacance [A Two-Year Holiday] was my all-time favourite. I'm not quite sure why. There was a curious atmosphere about the book which seemed to transcend its fairly familiar Robinson Crusoe-esque plot (what the French call a 'Robinsonade'). It helped that the characters were all supposed to be pupils at a school in Auckland, New Zealand who'd ended up on a desert island by mistake - but that wasn't the main reason.

Jules Verne: The Mysterious Island (1874-75 / 1965)

I guess its rather plotless, episodic structure made it seem more like life than some of his more intricately woven stories. Much though I subsequently enjoyed reading The Mysterious Island (in the Airmont Classics edition pictured above), I couldn't believe in it the way I did in A Long Vacation.

Victor Ambrus (1935- )

Recently I made the experiment of rereading the book, having run across a copy in a second-hand bookshop. Its allure had faded somewhat, I must confess, but it was still an interesting and occasionally atmospheric book. Sometimes you do have to encounter a book at the right age for it to leave an indelible impression, though - the Victor Ambrus illustrations still seem as magical as ever to me.

Jules Verne: Les Voyages Extraordinaires. 32 vols (Édition Jean de Bonnot, 1976)

Once or twice I've toyed with the idea of buying a complete set of the Voyages Extraordinaires in French. If I were to ever see such a thing on sale, I suspect I would. Calculating just how much it would cost to have it sent out here (and trying to think where I could possibly put it) has put me off so far, however.

Jules Verne: Les Voyages Extraordinaires. 32 vols (Édition Jean de Bonnot, 1976)

And do I really want to read all of them? Apart from the bona fide masterpieces, some of them can be pretty tough going, I've found. The English translations simply aren't reliable enough to be worth reading en masse, however, so it's a project I'll continue to think about.

Georges Perec (1936-1982)

Georges Perec, probably my favourite twentieth-century French writer, was a Jules Verne obsessive, and constantly made references to him in his works. For Perec, I think Verne represented the storytelling impulse at its most pure and unselfconscious.

Georges Perec: W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975)

In such books as his fictional memoir W, or the Memory of Childhood, Perec interweaves his reconstruction of a (now lost) Verne-like adventure story he wrote as a schoolboy with the dawning awareness of his status as a Jewish child in hiding in wartime France, along with the knowledge he subsequently obtained of his mother's death in Auschwitz.

David Bellos: Georges Perec: A Life in Words (1975)

One reason for the celebrated inaccuracies of Verne's settings - Pacific islands full of kangaroos and Kauri trees, savage tribes in the middle of sober colonial empires - was the fact that they were mostly based on clippings from magazines, collected and classified in an immense set of filing cabinets by the desk-bound Verne, who never actually travelled to any of the places he described in his books.

This may have been one of the reasons why he became an essential alter-ego for Perec. Where the former could welcome Modernity with boosterish enthusiasm, the latter, who sought a not dissimilar refuge in his crossword puzzles and word games, was foredoomed from childhood to be one of its victims.

Peter Costello: Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (1978)

In this Steampunk-infested age, it seems odd that its enthusiasts don't read and talk more about Jules Verne. It's hard to exaggerate his influence on his own time and the progress of Science Fiction over the century to follow.

He's still one of the world's best-known and most translated writers, like it or not, and his swashbuckling approach to narrative can be seen clearly in the early American pulp magazines, as well as in such isolated works as New Zealand's first homegrown SF novel, The Great Romance.

'The Inhabitant': The Great Romance (1881)

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Georges Roux: Hetzel Advertisement (1890)

Jules Gabriel Verne
(1828-1905)

Voyages extraordinaires [published in Verne's lifetime]:


1. Cinq Semaines en ballon. [Five Weeks in a Balloon] (1863)
2. Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras. [The Adventures of Captain Hatteras]. Serialised 1864–5 (1866)
3. Voyage au centre de la Terre. [Journey to the Center of the Earth] (1864)
   • Voyage au centre de la terre. 1864. Les Voyages Extraordinaires. Collection Hetzel. Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1919.
   • Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 1864. Trans. Robert Baldick. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
4. De la Terre à la Lune. [From the Earth to the Moon]. Serialised 1865 (1865)
   • From the Earth to the Moon. 1865. A Digit Book. London: Brown, Watson, Ltd., 1958.
   • Classic Science Fiction: Three Complete Illustrated Novels - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / From the Earth to the Moon / Round the Moon. 1869-70, 1865, 1869-70. Introduction by Alan K. Russell. Castle Books. Secausus, N.J.: Book Sales Inc., 1981.
5. Les Enfants du capitaine Grant. [In Search of the Castaways]. Serialised 1865–7 (1867–8)
6. Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers. [Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea]. Serialised 1869–70 (1869–70)
   • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 1869-70. Illustrated by Peter Henville. 1955. London: The Heirloom Library, 1956.
   • The Annotated Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Ed. Walter James Miller. New York: Thomas J. Crowell, 1976.
   • Classic Science Fiction: Three Complete Illustrated Novels - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / From the Earth to the Moon / Round the Moon. 1869-70, 1865, 1869-70. Introduction by Alan K. Russell. Castle Books. Secausus, N.J.: Book Sales Inc., 1981.
7. Autour de la Lune. [Around the Moon]. Serialised 1869 (1870)
   • Round the Moon. 1869-70. The Royal Series. 1958. London: Ward, Lock & Co., Ltd., 1963.
   • Classic Science Fiction: Three Complete Illustrated Novels - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / From the Earth to the Moon / Round the Moon. 1869-70, 1865, 1869-70. Introduction by Alan K. Russell. Castle Books. Secausus, N.J.: Book Sales Inc., 1981.
8. Une Ville flottante. [A Floating City]. Serialised 1870 (1871)
9. Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais. [The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa]. Serialised 1871–2 (1872)
10. Le Pays des fourrures. [The Fur Country]. Serialised 1872–3 (1873)
11. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. [Around the World in Eighty Days]. Serialised 1872 (1873)
    • Round the World in Eighty Days. 1873. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1956.
12. L'Île mystérieuse. [The Mysterious Island]. Serialised 1874–5 (1874–5)
    • L’île mystérieuse. 1875. Maxi-poche. Classiques Français. Paris: Bookking International, 1995.
    • The Mysterious Island. 1875. Introduction by Raymond R. Canon. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Ltd., 1965.
13. Le Chancellor. [The Survivors of the Chancellor]. Serialised 1874–5 (1875)
14. Michel Strogoff. [Michael Strogoff]. Serialised 1876 (1876)
15. Hector Servadac. [Off on a Comet]. Serialised 1877 (1877)
16. Les Indes noires. [The Child of the Cavern]. Serialised 1877 (1877)
17. Un Capitaine de quinze ans. [Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen]. Serialised 1878 (1878)
18. Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum. [The Begum's Fortune]. Serialised 1879 (1879)
19. Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine. [Tribulations of a Chinaman in China]. Serialised 1879 (1879)
20. La Maison à vapeur. [The Steam House]. Serialised 1879–80 (1880)
21. La Jangada. [Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon]. Serialised 1881 (1881)
22. L'École des Robinsons. [Godfrey Morgan]. Serialised 1882 (1882)
23. Le Rayon vert. [The Green Ray]. Serialised 1882 (1882)
24. Kéraban-le-têtu. [Kéraban the Inflexible]. Serialised 1883 (1883)
25. L'Étoile du sud. [The Vanished Diamond]. Serialised 1884 (1884)
26. L'Archipel en feu. [The Archipelago on Fire]. Serialised 1884 (1884)
27. Mathias Sandorf. [Mathias Sandorf]. Serialised 1885 (1885)
28. Un Billet de loterie. [The Lottery Ticket]. Serialised 1886 (1886)
29. Robur-le-Conquérant. [Robur the Conqueror]. Serialised 1886 (1886)
30. Nord contre Sud. [North Against South]. Serialised 1887 (1887)
31. Le Chemin de France. [The Flight to France]. Serialised 1887 (1887)
32. Deux Ans de vacances. [Two Years' Vacation]. Serialised 1888 (1888)
    • A Long Vacation. 1888. Trans. Olga Marx. Illustrated by Victor G. Ambrus. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
33. Famille-sans-nom. [Family Without a Name]. Serialised 1889 (1889)
34. Sans dessus dessous. [The Purchase of the North Pole] (1889)
35. César Cascabel. [César Cascabel]. Serialised 1890 (1890)
36. Mistress Branican. [Mistress Branican]. Serialised 1891 (1891)
37. Le Château des Carpathes. [Carpathian Castle]. Serialised 1892 (1892)
38. Claudius Bombarnac. [Claudius Bombarnac]. Serialised 1892 (1893)
39. P'tit-Bonhomme. [Foundling Mick]. Serialised 1893 (1893)
40. Mirifiques Aventures de Maître Antifer. [Captain Antifer]. Serialised 1894 (1894)
41. L'Île à hélice. [Propeller Island]. Serialised 1895 (1895)
42. Face au drapeau. [Facing the Flag]. Serialised 1896 (1896)
43. Clovis Dardentor. [Clovis Dardentor]. Serialised 1896 (1896)
44. Le Sphinx des glaces. [An Antarctic Mystery]. Serialised 1897 (1897)
45. Le Superbe Orénoque. [The Mighty Orinoco]. Serialised 1898 (1898)
46. Le Testament d'un excentrique. [The Will of an Eccentric]. Serialised 1899 (1899)
47. Seconde Patrie. [The Castaways of the Flag]. Serialised 1900 (1900)
48. Le Village aérien. [The Village in the Treetops]. Serialised 1901 (1901)
49. Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin. [The Sea Serpent]. Serialised 1901 (1901)
50. Les Frères Kip. [The Kip Brothers]. Serialised 1902 (1902)
51. Bourses de voyage. [Travel Scholarships]. Serialised 1903 (1903)
52. Un Drame en Livonie. [A Drama in Livonia]. Serialised 1904 (1904)
53. Maître du monde. [Master of the World]. Serialised 1904 (1904)
54. L'Invasion de la mer. [Invasion of the Sea]. Serialised 1905 (1905)

Posthumous additions [extensively rewritten or composed by Verne's son Michel]:


55. Le Phare du bout du monde. [The Lighthouse at the End of the World]. Serialised 1905 (1905)
56. Le Volcan d’or. [The Golden Volcano]. Serialised 1906 (1906)
57. L’Agence Thompson and Co. [The Thompson Travel Agency]. Serialised 1907 (1907)
58. La Chasse au météore. [The Chase of the Golden Meteor]. Serialised 1908 (1908)
59. Le Pilote du Danube. [The Danube Pilot]. Serialised 1908 (1908)
60. Les Naufragés du "Jonathan". [The Survivors of the "Jonathan"]. Serialised 1909 (1909)
61. Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz. [The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz]. Serialised 1910 (1910)
62. L’Étonnante Aventure de la mission Barsac. [The Barsac Mission]. Serialised 1914 (1920)


Other novels:


63. Voyage en Angleterre et en Ecosse. [Backwards to Britain]. 1860 (first published 1989)
64. Paris au XXe siècle. [Paris in the Twentieth Century]. 1863 (first published 1994)

Secondary:


65. Costello, Peter. Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.

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Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville: Captain Nemo (1870)

SF Luminaries: H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells (1911)

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said in his rather thin cockney voice, "is this your book?"
"It doesn't matter at all," said Wimsey gracefully, "I know it by heart. I only brought it along with me because it's handy for reading a few pages when you're stuck in a place like this for the night. You can always take it up and find something entertaining."
"This chap Wells," pursued the red-haired man, "he's what you'd call a very clever writer, isn't he? It's wonderful how he makes it all so real, and yet some of the things he says, you wouldn't hardly think they could really be possible. ...

Dorothy L. Sayers: Hangman's Holiday (1933)

So begins the first story, "The Image in the Mirror", in Dorothy Sayer's detective story collection Hangman's Holiday. Lord Peter Wimsey's interlocutor goes on to discuss with him the implications of H. G. Wells's "The Plattner Story", an account of a schoolmaster who gets blown into the fourth dimension and comes back reversed: his left turned to right, his right to left.

The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927)

It's pretty clear that the book they're discussing is the then fairly recently published omnibus edition of The Short Stories of H. G. Wells. What I find most interesting about their conversation, though, is Wimsey's throwaway line about knowing it "by heart".

There was a time when this was my favourite book in the world, and I too knew it virtually by heart. In fact, I had a kind of ritual which involved trying to read the whole thing - all 1100-odd pages - in one day, but it's not an experiment I would really recommend.

H. G. Wells: Short Stories (1952)

By then the stories were so familiar to me that I could practically recite them, racing from The Time Machine:

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.

... all the way through to "A Dream of Armageddon", with its wonderfully poetic last lines:

"Nightmares," he cried; "nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that fought and tore."

H. G. Wells: Complete Short Stories (1970)

Although it was subsequently reprinted under the title The Complete Short Stories, the collection is by no means that - Wells, after all, had another two decades to live when it first appeared.

The 62 stories (and one essay) are divided into five sections, four of which reprint earlier stand-alone collections of Wells's:

• The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents [1895]
• The Plattner Story and Others [1897]
• Tales of Space and Time [1899]
• Twelve Stories and a Dream [1903]

The opening section, The Time Machine and Other Stories, never published separately in book form, contains some of his strongest stories, published piecemeal throughout the 1890s. There are also another five separate stories grouped between sections 4 and 5 (for fuller details, see my breakdown of the contents in the Bibliography below).

John Hammond, ed.: The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1998)

There is, however, another collection entitled The Complete Short Stories. This one was edited by John Hammmond in 1998. As well as all of the stories included in the 1927 collection - with the exception of the short novel The Time Machine - it includes another 22, most of them previously published in Hammond's 1984 collection The Man With a Nose and Other Uncollected Stories of H. G. Wells.

No doubt further stories will continue to surface from time to time (for more information, see the "H. G. Wells Bibliography" page on Wikipedia), but for all intents and purposes, these 84 stories might as well be thought of as the established canon.

As Dave, one of the commentators on this book on Goodreads, informs us:

This collection tied for 4th on the Arkham Survey for Basic SF titles ... behind “Seven Science Fiction Novels” by H. G. Wells (the winner), Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, and Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men”. It also finished 19th on the 1952 Astounding/Analog All-Time Poll.

H. G. Wells: Seven Science Fiction Novels (1934)

Those seven novels were very well chosen. They consist of:

1. The First Men in the Moon [1901]
2. The Island of Dr. Moreau [1896]
3. The War of the Worlds [1898]
4. The Invisible Man [1897]
5. The Time Machine [1895]
6. The Food of the Gods [1904]
7. In the Days of the Comet [1906]

It's hard to imagine a more influential set of titles. Between them they introduced virtually every standard trope of the SF genre as it would develop over the next hundred years: space travel, time travel, alien invasion, utopian futures, genetic manipulation ... pretty much everything except robots (which would be added to the mix by Czech writer Karel Čapek's play R.U.R in 1920).

Karel Čapek: R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (2015)

The dazzling talent of the young Wells seemed destined to sweep everything before it. As C. S. Lewis once quipped, however, as time went on he increasingly "traded his birthright for a pot of message" (if you don't get the pun, it's probably because you weren't brought up on the Authorised Version of the Bible. In the Book of Genesis, Esau trades his birthright to Jacob "for a mess of pottage"). Har-de-har-har. Maybe you had to be there ...

His later work does seem to lack the zest of those remarkable works of his first decade as a writer, but he remains one of the great sages and pathfinders for all subsequent work in the field of Speculative Fiction. The fact that he moved so easily from social satire to straight science fiction to the fantastic and supernatural (something very few of his successors succeeded in doing) meant that he avoided being typecast as a 'genre' writer. Though the sheer clarity and power of his prose also had a lot to do with that.

In 1930 Odhams Press published a 12-volume edition of his selected fiction which covered most of his major work in that form:

Odhams: H. G. Wells Collection (1930)

The H. G. Wells Collection. 12 vols. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930]:

1. The Invisible Man / The Secret Places of the Heart / God the Invisible King (1897, 1922 & 1917)
2. Love and Mr Lewisham / Marriage (1900 & 1912)
3. The First Men in the Moon / The World Set Free (1901 & 1914)
4. Kipps / The Research Magnificent (1905 & 1915)
5. Tono-Bungay / A Modern Utopia (1909 & 1905)
6. The History of Mr Polly / The War in the Air (1910 & 1908)
7. The Sleeper Awakes / Men Like Gods (1910 & 1923)
8. The New Machiavelli / The Food of the Gods (1911 & 1904)
9. The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman / The Dream (1914 & 1924)
10. Mr Britling Sees it Through / In the Days of the Comet (1916 & 1906)
11. Joan and Peter: A Story of an Education / "The Country of the Blind" / "Jimmy Goggles the God" / "Mr Brisher’s Treasure" (1918, 1904, 1898 & 1899)
12. Collected Short Stories (1927)

H. G. Wells: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

I suppose, if I had to choose myself from this gallery of masterpieces, the one I would go for would be The Island of Doctor Moreau. It's been filmed - badly - on more than one occasion (most recently with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando in the principal roles), but the book itself has a haunting, nightmarish quality which completely entranced me when I first read it as a teenager.

John Frankenheimer, dir.: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996)

The figure of the mad scientist, tampering with God's work without fear or scruple, who consequently gets his comeuppance, comes to us straight from Frankenstein, of course. But the colonial setting transfers it into the morally compromised world of the early Conrad: Almayer's Folly (1895), say, or An Outcast of the Islands (1896).

Don Taylor, dir.: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1977)

There are many themes jostling for dominance in this strange early story of Wells's: colonialism and colonial exploitation principal - in my view, at least - among them. One could almost see it as a counterblast to Kipling's Jungle Books (1894-1895). The strange parodic chants the half-animals live by certainly recall some of the stories and songs of Mowgli and his various brethren.

Big Finish: The Island of Doctor Moreau (2017)

The colonial theme continues to recur in Wells's later fiction: in The First Men in the Moon (1901) and - perhaps most explicitly - Tono-Bungay (1909). I suppose the thing which makes Wells's early fiction so durable, in fact, is its refusal to simplify or avoid difficult questions of exploitation and brutality.

Later, of course, when he became a sage, he seems to have felt a responsibility to the 'left' in general which put him in strange company: co-authoring a book with Josef Stalin is not something most of us would want on our CV. Expediency and responsibility choked the initial outrage he felt - as a writer - at injustice and cruelty, just as personal prosperity gradually robbed his social satire of its edge.

The important thing about H. G. Wells, though, is not so much that he went off the rails a bit in his later years, as the extraordinary heights he had to fall from. I would argue strongly that the best place to start is by reading the original edition of The Stories of H. G. Wells, in any of its innumerable reprints. After that, the Seven Science Fiction Novels of 1934 will supply most of the rest of his truly durable work.

H. G. Wells: The History of Mr Polly (1910)

Mind you, this leaves out a number of excellent contemporary novels - Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, for instance. The Sleeper Awakes and The War in the Air should probably have been included among the best of his early Science Fiction novels, too.

Henri Lanos: When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)

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H. G. Wells Memorial Coin (2021)

The recent news that the Royal Mint has just issued a special coin commemorating 75 years since H. G. Wells's death certainly confirms his continuing importance in British (and world) culture. On the other hand, certain errors on the coin - documented at length by various critics - show how little accurate knowledge of his work people actually have:

As the name suggests, the tripod only had three legs in Wells' novel. "How many people did this have to go through? Did they know how to count? Do they know what the "tri" prefix means??" artist Holly Humphries asked on Twitter.

The War of the Worlds (2018)
[Note the three legs and flexible limbs in the illustration above]

Not only this, but the portrait of the 'invisible man' on the coin has also drawn criticism:

Fans were also disappointed by the appearance of a top hat, supposedly in homage to Wells' book "The Invisible Man." The scientist Griffin, the titular Invisible Man, "was no gentleman, and did not wear a top hat," [Adam Roberts, vice-president of the H.G. Wells Society,] said.
"I suspect the designer has been influenced consciously or otherwise by DC Comics' 'Gentleman Ghost' - but he had nothing to do with Wells."

The Invisible Man (1897)

Here, however, I would have to take issue with the critics, whose knowledge of Victorian mores may not be quite so profound as they think. The original drawing above, by Wells himself, in a presentation copy of the book's first edition, clearly shows the invisible man in a top hat.

To complete the hat-trick, another flaw was spotted by Roberts, who said:

"The legend written around the rim of the coin, 'GOOD BOOKS ARE THE WAREHOUSES OF IDEAS', is (though it's sometimes attributed to Wells by various internet quote-sites) not an actual quotation by Wells."

Chris Costello, the coin's designer, remains defiant, insisting that "he was intentionally reinterpreting imagery from Wells' works for a modern audience."

"The characters in 'War of the Worlds' have been depicted many times, and I wanted to create something original and contemporary," he said.
"My design takes inspiration from a variety of machines featured in the book - including tripods and the handling machines which have five jointed legs and multiple appendages. The final design combines multiple stories into one stylized and unified composition that is emblematic of all of H.G. Well's (sic) work and fits the unique canvas of a coin."

I'll certainly grant that the choice of a four-legged tripod is "original" (though possibly somewhat misguided), and I don't think any responsibility can be laid at Costello's door for the probably spurious quotation, so I suppose the whole affair remains more a cause for celebration than carping criticism. I do wish, though, that artists would make a point of always - not just sometimes - reading the books they've been asked to illustrate.

Bernard Bergonzi: The Early H. G. Wells (1961)

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George Charles Beresford: H. G. Wells (1920)

Herbert George Wells
(1866-1946)

Novels:


1. The Time Machine (1895)
   • The Short Stories of H. G. Wells. 1927. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1952.
2. The Wonderful Visit (1895)
3. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
   • The Island of Doctor Moreau. 1896. A Magnum Easy Eye Book. New York: Lancer Books, Inc., 1968.
4. The Wheels of Chance (1896)
5. The Invisible Man (1897)
   • The Invisible Man / The Secret Places of the Heart / God the Invisible King. 1897, 1922 & 1917. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
6. The War of the Worlds (1898)
   • The War of the Worlds. 1898. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
7. When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)
   • When the Sleeper Wakes. 1899. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1906.
8. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900)
   • Love and Mr Lewisham / Marriage. 1900 & 1912. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
   • Love and Mr Lewisham. 1900. Introduction by Frank Wells. 1954. Collins Classics. London & Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1959.
9. The First Men in the Moon (1901)
   • The First Men in the Moon / The World Set Free. 1901 & 1914. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
   • The First Men in the Moon. 1901. Introduction by Frank Wells. Fontana Books. London: Collins Clear-Type press, 1966.
10. The Sea Lady (1902)
    • The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine. 1902. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1948.
11. The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
    • The Food of the Gods. 1904. Introduction by Ronald Seth. Collins Classics. London & Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1955.
12. Kipps (1905)
    • Kipps / The Research Magnificent. 1905 & 1915. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
13. A Modern Utopia (1905)
    • Tono-Bungay / A Modern Utopia. 1909 & 1905. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
14. In the Days of the Comet (1906)
    • Mr Britling Sees it Through / In the Days of the Comet. 1916 & 1906. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
15. The War in the Air (1908)
    • The History of Mr Polly / The War in the Air. 1910 & 1908. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
16. Tono-Bungay (1909)
    • Tono-Bungay / A Modern Utopia. 1909 & 1905. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
17. Ann Veronica (1909)
    • Ann Veronica. 1909. Penguin Books 2887. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
18. The History of Mr Polly (1910)
    • The History of Mr Polly / The War in the Air. 1910 & 1908. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
    • The History of Mr Polly. 1910. Ed. A. C. Ward. The Heritage of Literature Series. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1959.
19. The Sleeper Awakes (1910)
    • The Sleeper Awakes / Men Like Gods. 1910 & 1923. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
20. The New Machiavelli (1911)
    • The New Machiavelli. 1911. Penguin Books 575. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.
21. Marriage (1912)
    • Love and Mr Lewisham / Marriage. 1900 & 1912. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
22. The Passionate Friends (1913)
    • The Passionate Friends. 1913. London: George Newnes, Limited, n.d.
23. The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914)
    • The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman / The Dream. 1914 & 1924. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
24. The World Set Free (1914)
    • The First Men in the Moon / The World Set Free. 1901 & 1914. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
25. Bealby: A Holiday (1915)
    • Bealby: A Holiday. 1915. London: George Newnes, Limited, n.d.
26. [as Reginald Bliss] Boon (1915)
27. The Research Magnificent (1915)
    • Kipps / The Research Magnificent. 1905 & 1915. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
28. Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916)
    • Mr Britling Sees it Through / In the Days of the Comet. 1916 & 1906. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
29. The Soul of a Bishop (1917)
30. Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (1918)
    • Joan and Peter: A Story of an Education / The Country of the Blind / Jimmy Goggles the God / Mr Brisher’s Treasure. 1918, 1904, 1898 & 1899. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
31. The Undying Fire (1919)
32. The Secret Places of the Heart (1922)
    • The Invisible Man / The Secret Places of the Heart / God the Invisible King. 1897, 1922 & 1917. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
33. Men Like Gods (1923)
    • The Sleeper Awakes / Men Like Gods. 1910 & 1923. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
34. The Dream (1924)
    • The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman / The Dream. 1914 & 1924. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
35. Christina Alberta's Father (1925)
36. The World of William Clissold (1926)
37. Meanwhile (1927)
38. Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)
    • Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1928.
39. The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930)
40. The Bulpington of Blup (1932)
41. The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
    • The Shape of Things to Come. 1933. Corgi SF Collector’s Library. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1974.
42. Things to Come: A Film Story Based on the Material Contained in His History of the Future “The Shape of Things to Come.” (1936)
    • Things to Come: A Film Story Based on the Material Contained in His History of the Future “The Shape of Things to Come.” 1935. London: The Cresset Press, 1936.
43. The Croquet Player (1936)
44. Brynhild (1937)
45. Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (1937)
    • Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia. 1937. Sphere Science Fiction. London: sphere Books Ltd., 1977.
46. The Camford Visitation (1937)
47. Apropos of Dolores (1938)
48. The Brothers (1938)
49. The Holy Terror (1939)
50. Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940)
51. All Aboard for Ararat (1940)
52. You Can't Be Too Careful (1941)

Short Stories:


53. The Short Stories. 1927. London: Ernest Benn, 1948:
    
    The Time Machine and Other Stories
    
    
    1. The Time Machine
    2. The Empire of the Ants
    3. A Vision of Judgement
    4. The Land Ironclads
    5. The Beautiful Suit
    6. The Door in the Wall
    7. The Pearl of Love
    8. The Country of the Blind
    
    The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents [1895]
    
    
    9. The Stolen Bacillus
    10. The Flowering of the Strange Orchid
    11. In the Avu Observatory
    12. The Triumphs of a Taxidermist
    13. A Deal in Ostriches
    14. Through a Window
    15. The Temptation of Harringay
    16. The Flying Man
    17. The Diamond Maker
    18. Æpyornis Island
    19. The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes
    20. The Lord of the Dynamos
    21. The Hammerpond Park Burglary
    22. The Moth
    23. The Treasure in the Forest
    
    The Plattner Story and Others [1897]
    
    
    24. The Plattner Story
    25. The Argonauts of the Air
    26. The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham
    27. In the Abyss
    28. The Apple
    29. Under the Knife
    30. The Sea-Raiders
    31. Pollock and the Porroh Man
    32. The Red Room
    33. The Cone
    34. The Purple Pileus
    35. The Jilting of Jane
    36. In the Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story
    37. A Catastrophe
    38. The Lost Inheritance
    39. The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic
    40. A Slip Under the Microscope
    
    
    41. The Reconciliation
    42. My First Aeroplane
    43. Little Mother Up the Mörderberg
    44. The Story of the Last Trump
    45. The Grisly Folk
    
    Tales of Space and Time [1899]
    
    
    46. The Crystal Egg
    47. The Star
    48. A Story of the Stone Age
    49. A Story of the Days to Come
    50. The Man Who Could Work Miracles
    
    Twelve Stories and a Dream [1903]
    
    
    51. Filmer
    52. The Magic Shop
    53. The Valley of Spiders
    54. The Truth About Pyecraft
    55. Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland
    56. The Inexperienced Ghost
    57. Jimmy Goggles the God
    58. The New Accelerator
    59. Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation
    60. The Stolen Body
    61. Mr. Brisher's Treasure
    62. Miss Winchelsea's Heart
    63. A Dream of Armageddon


54. The Complete Short Stories. Ed. John Hammmond. 1998. London: Phoenix, 1999:
    
    The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents [1895]
    
    
    1. The Stolen Bacillus
    2. The Flowering of the Strange Orchid
    3. In the Avu Observatory
    4. The Triumphs of a Taxidermist
    5. A Deal in Ostriches
    6. Through a Window
    7. The Temptation of Harringay
    8. The Flying Man
    9. The Diamond Maker
    10. Æpyornis Island
    11. The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes
    12. The Lord of the Dynamos
    13. The Hammerpond Park Burglary
    14. The Moth
    15. The Treasure in the Forest
    
    The Plattner Story and Others [1897]
    
    
    16. The Plattner Story
    17. The Argonauts of the Air
    18. The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham
    19. In the Abyss
    20. The Apple
    21. Under the Knife
    22. The Sea-Raiders
    23. Pollock and the Porroh Man
    24. The Red Room
    25. The Cone
    26. The Purple Pileus
    27. The Jilting of Jane
    28. In the Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story
    29. A Catastrophe
    30. The Lost Inheritance
    31. The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic
    32. A Slip Under the Microscope
    
    Tales of Space and Time [1899]
    
    
    33. The Crystal Egg
    34. The Star
    35. A Story of the Stone Age
    36. A Story of the Days to Come
    37. The Man Who Could Work Miracles
    
    Twelve Stories and a Dream [1903]
    
    
    38. Filmer
    39. The Magic Shop
    40. The Valley of Spiders
    41. The Truth About Pyecraft
    42. Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland
    43. The Inexperienced Ghost
    44. Jimmy Goggles the God
    45. The New Accelerator
    46. Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation
    47. The Stolen Body
    48. Mr. Brisher's Treasure
    49. Miss Winchelsea's Heart
    50. A Dream of Armageddon
    
    The Door in the Wall and Other Stories
    
    
    51. The Door in the Wall
    52. The Empire of the Ants
    53. A Vision of Judgment
    54. The Land Ironclads
    55. The Beautiful Suit
    56. The Pearl of Love
    57. The Country of the Blind
    58. The Reconciliation
    59. My First Aeroplane (Little Mother series #1)
    60. Little Mother Up the Mörderberg (Little Mother series #2)
    61. The Story of the Last Trump
    62. The Grisly Folk
    
    Uncollected Stories
    
    
    63. A Tale of the Twentieth Century: For Advanced Thinkers
    64. Walcote
    65. The Devotee of Art
    66. The Man with a Nose
    67. A Perfect Gentleman on Wheels
    68. Wayde's Essence
    69. A Misunderstood Artist
    70. Le Mari Terrible
    71. The Rajah's Treasure
    72. The Presence by the Fire
    73. Mr Marshall's Doppelganger
    74. The Thing in No. 7
    75. The Thumbmark
    76. A Family Elopement
    77. Our Little Neighbour
    78. How Gabriel Became Thompson
    79. How Pingwill Was Routed
    80. The Loyalty of Esau Common: A Fragment
    81. The Wild Asses of the Devil
    82. Answer to Prayer
    83. The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper
    84. The Country of the Blind (revised version)

Non-Fiction:


55. Text-Book of Biology (1893)
56. [with R. A. Gregory] Honours Physiography (1893)
57. Certain Personal Matters (1897)
58. Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)
59. Mankind in the Making (1903)
60. The Future in America (1906)
61. This Misery of Boots (1907)
62. Will Socialism Destroy the Home? (1907)
63. New Worlds for Old (1908)
64. First and Last Things (1908)
65. Floor Games (1911)
66. The Great State (1912)
67. Thoughts From H. G. Wells (1912)
68. Little Wars (1913)
69. The War That Will End War (1914)
70. An Englishman Looks at the World (1914)
71. The War and Socialism (1915)
72. The Peace of the World (1915)
73. What is Coming? (1916)
74. [as 'D. P.] The Elements of Reconstruction (1916)
75. God the Invisible King (1917)
    • The Invisible Man / The Secret Places of the Heart / God the Invisible King. 1897, 1922 & 1917. H. G. Wells Collection. London: Odhams Press Limited, [1930].
76. War and the Future (1917)
77. Introduction to Nocturne (1917)
78. In the Fourth Year (1918)
79. [with Viscount Edward Grey, Lionel Curtis, William Archer, H. Wickham Steed, A. E. Zimmern, J. A. Spender, Viscount Bryce & Gilbert Murray] The Idea of a League of Nations (1919)
80. The Outline of History (1920)
81. Russia in the Shadows (1920)
82. [with Arnold Bennett & Grant Overton] Frank Swinnerton (1920)
83. The Salvaging of Civilization (1921)
84. A Short History of the World (1922)
    • A Short History of the World. 1922. Rev. ed. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938.
85. Washington and the Hope of Peace (1922)
86. Socialism and the Scientific Motive (1923)
87. The Story of a Great Schoolmaster: Being a Plain Account of the Life and Ideas of Sanderson of Oundle (1924)
88. A Year of Prophesying (1925)
89. A Short History of Mankind (1925)
90. Mr. Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History" (1926)
91. Wells' Social Anticipations (1927)
92. The Way the World is Going (1928)
93. The Book of Catherine Wells (1928)
94. The Open Conspiracy (1928)
95. [with Julian S. Huxley & G. P. Wells] The Science of Life (1930)
96. Divorce as I See It (1930)
97. Points of View (1930)
98. The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931)
99. The New Russia (1931)
100. Selections From the Early Prose Works of H. G. Wells (1931)
101. What Should be Done — Now: A Memorandum on the World Situation (1932)
102. After Democracy (1932)
103. [with J. V. Stalin] Marxism vs Liberalism (1934)
104. Experiment in Autobiography (1934)
     • Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1886). 1934. 2 vols. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 64-65. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1969.
105. The New America: The New World (1935)
106. The Anatomy of Frustration (1936)
107. World Brain (1938)
108. The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939)
109. The New World Order (1939)
110. Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (1939)
111. The Common Sense of War and Peace (1940)
112. The Rights of Man (1940)
113. The Pocket History of the World (1941)
114. Guide to the New World (1941)
115. The Outlook for Homo Sapiens (1942)
116. The Conquest of Time (1942)
117. [with Lev Uspensky] Modern Russian and English Revolutionaries (1942)
118. Phoenix: A Summary of the Inescapable Conditions of World Reorganization (1942)
119. Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (1943)
120. '42 to '44: A Contemporary Memoir (1944)
121. [with J. B. S. Haldane & Julian S. Huxley] Reshaping Man's Heritage (1944)
122. The Happy Turning (1945)
123. Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945)
124. Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (1975)

Secondary:


125. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester, 1961.
126. Dickson, Lovat. H. G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times. 1969. London: Readers Union Limited / Macmillan and Company Limited, 1971.
127. Ray, Gordon N. H. G. Wells & Rebecca West. 1974. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1974.
128. West, Anthony. H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

•


Anthony West: H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984)

SF Luminaries: Mary Shelley

Richard Rothwell: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1840)

"I write bad articles which help to make me miserable — but I am going to plunge into a novel and hope that its clear water will wash off the mud of the magazines."

- Mary Shelley, Letter to Leigh Hunt

Theodor von Holst: Frontispiece to Frankenstein (1831)

There's a section in an 2016 post of mine entitled "Movies about Writers" which includes some remarks on a subgenre I've called "Byron-'n'-Shelley-'n'-Mary-Shelley" films: ones which concentrate on the infamous "haunted summer" of 1816, which she and her husband Percy spent mostly on the shores of Lake Geneva, hob-nobbing with Lord Byron and his hapless companion Dr. Polidori.

Kenneth Branagh, dir.: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to charting the influence of that rather disturbing meeting of minds on popular culture: fiction as well as cinema. I mentioned there Brian Aldiss's SF novel Frankenstein Unbound (1973), Liz Lochead's Dreaming Frankenstein (1984), and Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard (1989). (I might also have added Christopher Priest's The Prestige (1995) - though this is far more notable in the novel than in Christopher Nolan's 2006 film version).

Michael Sims: Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Science Fiction (2017)

There's also (now) Peter Ackroyd's The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2009) to be considered, along with Stephanie Hemphill's Hideous Love (2013) and Jon Skovron's Man Made Boy (2015). Michael Sims, editor of Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Science Fiction (2017), mentions these and various other titles in his own 2018 article "8 Books that wouldn't exist without Mary Shelley's Frankenstein".

Leslie S. Klinger, ed.: The New Annotated Frankenstein (2017)

When it comes to movies and TV shows based on the book, it's hard to know exactly where to begin. There's a reasonably complete filmography in Leslie S. Klinger's New Annotated Frankenstein, which takes you all the way from James Whale's classic Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to that curious film Gods and Monsters (1998), which purports to recreate Whale's own last days.

The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015-17)

On the small screen, as well as two series of the UK TV series The Frankenstein Chronicles, there have been three series of that strange amalgam of Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Portrait of Dorian Gray, John Logan's Penny Dreadful ...

Penny Dreadful (2014-16)

All of which brings us to the crucial question: what exactly is Frankenstein? I don't mean that perennial confusion about who the title actually refers to: Victor Frankenstein or Frankenstein's monster (the former, of course). I mean, what kind of a book is it?

Peter Fairclough, ed. Three Gothic Novels (1983)

Mario Praz, author of The Romantic Agony (1933), who contributed an introduction to the edition above, is in no doubt. It's a Gothic novel, and offers all of the seductive attributes of that genre. As the article on Gothic fiction on Wikipedia so succinctly puts it:

Gothic fiction tends to place emphasis on both emotion and a pleasurable kind of terror, serving as an extension of the Romantic literary movement ... The most common of these "pleasures" among Gothic readers was the sublime — an indescribable feeling that "takes us beyond ourselves."

"The genre had much success in the 19th century," the article goes on to say, "as witnessed in prose by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein [my emphasis] and the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe ... and in poetry in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mary Shelley, Vol 1 (2010)

The collection above leaves no doubt what area of the literary firmament they see Mary Shelley as inhabiting: the supernatural and weird.

The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mary Shelley, Vol 2 (2010)

But there is, of course, a dissentient vein of opinion on this point. It's hard to say who really started this particular hare, but it's certainly strongly associated with Brian Aldiss, a prolific SF author in his own right, and author of the 1973 history of the genre Billion Year Spree (updated in 1986 as Trillion Year Spree). In a speech made at the launch of a new edition of Frankenstein in 2008, he summarised his views as follows:

Brian Aldiss Billion Year Spree (1973)

... when I was attempting to write [Billion Year Spree], I had to begin at the beginning – as one does. At the same time, there were a lot of people who were very eager to find out who was the ‘Father’ of science fiction, and I was very happy to proclaim that Mary Shelley was the Mother of Science Fiction. It caused a lot of bad blood at the time, but happily it’s been spilt and mopped up now.

... In making this claim, which I took care to buttress with examples, I wanted not only to retrieve the book to current attention in a way that my readers might at first resent but would ultimately profit from, but also to retrieve it from the hands of Universal Studios’ horrific Boris Karloff, because I saw that it was so much more than a horror tale. It had mythic quality ...

The fantastical had been in vogue long before Shakespeare. It was eternally in vogue. Aristophanes’ The Birds creates a cloud cuckoo land between earth and heaven ... Then there’s Lucian of Samosata in the first century of our epoch, who describes how the King of the Sun and the King of the Moon go to war over the colonization of – can you guess? – the colonization of Jupiter ...

Christendom was full of angels and lots of fibs about the planets being inhabited. One’s knee deep in these discarded fantasies, but it was Mary Shelley, poised between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, who first wrote of life – that vital spark – being created not by divine intervention as hitherto, but by scientific means; by hard work and by research.

That was new, and in a sense it remains new. The difference is impressive, persuasive, permanent.

Mary Shelley: The Last Man (1826)

In a sense the whole argument comes down to The Last Man. This dystopian futuristic fantasy is the only other significant exhibit to consider when attempting to decide whether to weight the scales towards "Gothic novelist" or "Mother of Science Fiction" for Mary Shelley. Brian Aldiss, once again, is in no doubt:

As if to prove this unsuspected truth in the same way that a scientist doesn’t announce his discovery until he can repeat it, Mary later wrote another futurist novel, The Last Man.

... [In it] we are asked, for instance: “What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least amongst the many people that inhabit infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity. The visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.”

None of the rest of her seven novels shows any particular elements of speculative fiction: most of them are historical in inspiration, and the others (such as Mathilda, unpublished in her lifetime) tend to be more preoccupied with the complexities of sexual politics.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Jules Verne (1828-1905)

H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967)

Science Fiction has certainly been gifted with quite a number of fathers: Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Hugo Gernsback, to name just the usual suspects. I suppose that I would feel happier to embrace Brian Aldiss's hypothesis if it weren't for the hyper-Gothic tone of Frankenstein in both the 1818 and 1831 versions.

H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)

But then, the same could be said of Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau, or - for that matter - almost all of Poe's fictional output.

It it were just a matter of Frankenstein itself, I think I might still see it as a bit exaggerated - but The Last Man, direct ancestor of such novels as Richard Matheson's I am Legend (1954), George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), Susan Ertz's Woman Alive (1935), and M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901), does lend potent support to Aldiss's argument.

John Martin: The Last Man (1849)

Admittedly John Clute's magisterial Encyclopedia of Science Fiction complicates the issue somewhat by describing the complex backstory of the idea:

Early treatments, often in verse, include Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man: or, Omegarus and Syderia: A Romance in Futurity (1805; trans 1806); Lord Byron's "Darkness" (1816); "The Last Man" (1823), a poem by Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) which inspired John Martin's mezzotint "The Last Man" (1826); The Last Man (1826), an operatic scena by William H Callcott (1807-1882); "The Last Man" (1826), a poem by Thomas Hood (1799-1845) ...

All of these before even mentioning Mary Shelley's novel!

One thing's for certain, Frankenstein seems fated to remain one of those very few works of fiction which transcends the genre it was written in, which taps into some mythic layer of the collective unconscious. Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - they keep on being revised, revisited, reinvented in a constant cycle of desire. Whatever their authors envisaged for them, it's impossible they could have foreseen such a relentless need for this among all the other products of their pen.

Mary Shelley was undoubtedly a genius. Even given her extraordinary background: daughter of two brilliant and intellectually revolutionary parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; married to another genius, Percy Bysshe Shelley; no-one could really have predicted the heights of renown she would reach.

If SF has to have a single ancestor, why shouldn't it be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley? The extent of her influence on the genre then and now certainly makes her well worthy of the honour.

Leonard Wolf, ed.: The Annotated Frankenstein (1977)

•


Reginald Easton: Mary Shelley (1857)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(1797-1851)

Novels:


1. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. London: Printed for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818.
   • Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole; Vathek, by William Beckford; Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. 1764, 1786, & 1818. Ed. Peter Fairclough. Introduction by Mario Praz. 1968. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
   • The Annotated Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. Leonard Wolf. Art by Marcia Huyette. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1977.
   • The New Annotated Frankenstein: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Rev. ed. 1831. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. Introduction by Guillermo del Toro. Afterword by Anne K. Mellor. Liveright Publishing Corporation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Inc., 2017.
   • Making Humans: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein / H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau: Complete Texts with Introduction. Historical Contexts. Critical Essays. 1818 & 1896. Ed. Judith Wilt. New Riverside Editions. Ed. Alan Richardson. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.
2. Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. 3 vols. London: Printed for G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823.
3. The Last Man. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1826.
   • The Last Man. 1826. Introduction by Brian Aldiss. Hogarth Fiction. London: the Hogarth Press, 1985.
4. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830.
5. Lodore. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1835.
6. Falkner. A Novel. 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837.
7. Mathilda. 1819. Ed. Elizabeth Nitchie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.

Travel narratives:


8. [with Percy Bysshe Shelley] History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. London: T. Hookham, Jun.; and C. and J. Ollier, 1817.
9. Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1844.

Children's books:


10. [with Percy Bysshe Shelley] Proserpine & Midas. Two unpublished Mythological Dramas by Mary Shelley. 1820. Ed. A. H. Koszul. London: Humphrey Milford, 1922.
11. Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot. 1820. Ed. Claire Tomalin. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

Journals & Letters:


12. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–44. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
13. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 vols. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Secondary:


14. Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. 1974. London: Quartet Books, 1976.
15. St Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. 1989. London: Faber, 1990.
16. Trelawny, Edward John. Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. 1878. Ed. David Wright. 1973. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

•


Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)