The Complete Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Illustrated Collectors Edition) (SF Classic)
Historical Reviews
“He is, perhaps, the most original writer that ever existed in America. Delighting in the wild and visionary, his mind penetrates the inmost recesses of the human soul, creating vast and magnificent dreams, eloquent fancies and terrible mysteries.”
– George Lippard, 1843
“Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power.”
– James Russell Lowell, 1845
“The writings of Mr Poe are a refreshment. . . . His narrative proceeds with vigor, his colours are applied with discrimination, and where the effects are fantastic they are not unmeaningly so.”
– Margaret Fuller, 1845
“You might call him ‘The Leader of the Cult of the Unusual’.”
– Jules Verne, 1864
“An enormously talented writer.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1873
“Through many a year his fame has grown,—
Like midnight, vast, like starlight sweet,—
Till now his genius fills a throne,
And nations marvel at his feet.”
– William Winter, dedication of the Poe Memorial in Baltimore, 1875
“Hunger was ever at his door, and he had too imperious a desire for what we call nowadays the sensational in literature.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, 1875
“Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demonic undertone behind every page — and, by final judgement, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.”
– Walt Whitman, 1882
“This marvelous lord of rhythmic expression.”
– Oscar Wilde, 1886
“The human mind became, in his estimation, a treasure-house of undreamed-of possibilities, which was but the poet’s version of the value of the individual.”
– The Atlantic Monthly, 1896
“Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1909
“Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries produced only beauty.”
– George Bernard Shaw, 1909
“Was ever any story-teller so versatile as Poe within his chosen field, so generally perfect in execution? Was any other nineteenth century writer so prepotent, so fertile in suggestion, so dominant over those who came after him?”
– The New York Times, W. H. Babcock, 1909
“The directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in either America or England.”
– T. S. Eliot, 1919
“Poe is hardly an artist. He is rather a supreme scientist.”
– D. H. Lawrence, 1919
“By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story.”
– Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories, 1926
“Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beaconlights in the province of the short story. . . . Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.”
– H. P. Lovecraft, 1927
“It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.”
– Alfred Hitchcock, 1960
“His portraits of abnormal or self-destructive states contributed much to Dostoyevsky, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his tales of the future lead to H. G. Wells, his adventure stories to Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson.”
– W. H. Auden, 1966
Biography
Edgar Allan Poe
Painting by Oscar Halling
Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, to Elizabeth and David Poe. After the mother’s death, different families cared for the Poe children. Edgar was taken in by Frances and John Allan of Richmond, Virginia, and was renamed Edgar Allan. The tobacco merchant never legally adopted the boy.
Edgar attended school in Richmond and, in years 1815-20, in Scotland and England. Afterwards, Edgar resumed studies in Richmond, and entered University of Virginia in 1826, excelling in ancient and modern languages.
Although now wealthy, Allan refused to provide Poe with full funds for the university. To meet expenses, Poe gambled, adding to his difficulties. Unable to continue at Virginia, he enlisted, in 1827, in the U.S. Army, and was posted at Fort Independence, Boston Harbor. During this time his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, appeared, without winning attention. A second, in 1829, won a favorable review. By the time Poe published his third, in 1830, he had withdrawn from the military, and John Allan, already unsupportive, had severed relations.
Poe began residing in Baltimore with paternal aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, whom he would marry. After having stories published by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, Poe found significant affirmation of his talent when, in October, 1833, his story “MS. Found in a Bottle” won the $50 first prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter.
Poe soon began his association with The Southern Literary Messenger, in which “Hans Phaall” appeared. He served as editor and chief book-reviewer, resigning in 1837 over salary. After moving to New York, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published by Harper’s. In 1839, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two volumes.
In 1841 Poe became an editor of Graham’s Magazine, which published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” his first “tale of ratiocination.” Poe oversaw the magazine’s rapid rise in readership, before his resignation in 1842. In that year Virginia burst a blood vessel, from which she would never fully recover; and Poe met Charles Dickens. The following years saw alternations between artistic success and personal decline. In 1843, “The Gold-Bug” won for Poe a $100 prize from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. His 1844 hoax in the New York Sun about the first balloon-crossing of the Atlantic added to his fame.
He joined the New York Evening Mirror staff, and in its pages, in 1845, published “The Raven,” to great acclaim. He assumed editorship of the Broadway Journal that year, then ownership. Illness and hardship forced him to cease publication by 1846. The Poe household suffered greatly that year and the next, when Virginia died. Despite suffering from grave illness himself, Poe began work on cosmological theories, resulting in 1848’s Eureka.
Financial and resulting mental instability plagued Poe to the last. He was found delirious outside a polling booth in Baltimore, on October 3, 1849, possibly a victim of political hazing. He died October 7. His reputation nearly died as well, blackened by Rufus Griswold’s slanderous obituary.
Mark Rich
September 2009
Contents
Historical Reviews
Biography
To Science (A Poem)
Introduction
The Complete Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe
Shorter Works
1 MS. Found in a Bottle
2 The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion
3 The Island of the Fay
4 The Colloquy of Monos and Una br />
5 Astounding News! (The Balloon-Hoax)
6 A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
7 Mesmeric Revelation
8 The Power of Words
9 The Facts of M. Valdemar’s Case
10 Some Words with a Mummy
11 A Prediction
12 Mellonta Tauta
13 Von Kempelen and His Discovery
Longer Works
14 The Unparalleled Adventures of Hans Phaall
15 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
16 Eureka: A Prose Poem (Excerpts)
Appendix
Report on Poe’s Lecture on “The Universe”
Obituary
A Poem To Science
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Has thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
– Edgar Allan Poe, 1829
Introduction
Poe’s Speculative Futures
Two centuries after his birth, Edgar Allan Poe enjoys widespread and well-deserved fame for his tales of satire and black humor, his tales of mystery and detection, and his tales of terror.
Without Poe’s “tales of ratiocination,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could never have created the character of Sherlock Holmes in the way he did. Without Poe’s poetry and fiction, Surrealism in France might have starved and withered for lack of adequate nourishment. Without Poe’s criticism, T.S. Eliot’s critical authority might never have achieved its crusty maturity.
And without Poe’s stories of the “speculative future,” Jules Verne would never have become the Jules Verne whose name still sells books – he of Around the World in Eighty Days and A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Many of Verne’s best-loved novels – his most imaginative and forward-looking – were directly inspired by Poe’s ideas; and most if not all were influenced by his example.
Given that the first American science fiction magazine’s masthead featured an image of Jules Verne reaching skyward from the grave, it seems doubtful Amazing Stories would have turned out to be the same, had Verne not produced his substantial body of imaginative work. And if Amazing Stories would have been different – if it, indeed, would have come into existence at all in the absence of Verne – what might have become of American science fiction as a whole? Would it have taken root with the vitality that it did?
Verne was an inspiration to American writers to work out the logical implications of their own most far-reaching dreams – thanks to Poe.
★ ★ ★
As would later writers of the imagination, Poe looked both to the near future and the far.
As a careful observer of scientific and technical progress, he imagined practical inventions nearly within reach – as in his story for the New York Sun, in 1844, describing a powered balloon flight across the Atlantic.
“If (as some assert) the ‘Victoria’ did not absolutely accomplish the voyage recorded,” Poe would write later of the hoax, “it will be difficult to assign a reason why she should not have accomplished it.”
His near-future imaginings addressed geography and travel, as did his early story “MS. Found in a Bottle.” This particular story offers more than geographical adventure, however – for its narrator encounters an immense sea-going vessel unknown to Poe’s world, embodying a strange conception: an ocean-going ship that may have been literally alive. Poe’s considerably longer story of exploration, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” exerted special influence upon Verne, with its hauntingly strange ending at the Pole.
Poe was aware his efforts were new, in imaginative story-telling. Others before him had written imaginative journeys – even to the moon, which Poe tackled in “Hans Pfaall.” In moon journeys before his, Poe wrote, “the aim is always satirical; the theme being a description of Lunarian customs as compared with ours. In none, is there any effort at plausibility in the details of the voyage itself. ... In ‘Hans Pfaall’ the design is original, inasmuch as regards an attempt at verisimilitude, in the application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit,) to the actual passage between the earth and the moon.”
Poe tackled many themes that would become commonplace in later imaginative fiction. Of the several stories describing global cataclysm in astronomical terms, the earliest was “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” – notable not only for its realistic depiction of cosmic catastrophe, but also for the notions that inspired Verne’s more comic Doctor Ox’s Experiment.
Some of Poe’s speculations may greatly surprise the reader, because of their Modern flavor. In one essay, “The Island of the Fay,” written to provide text beneath an illustrative plate, Poe describes our planet as “one vast and sentient whole,” anticipating the 20th-century Gaean theory. Just as startling is Poe’s statement and elaboration on the Butterfly Effect – “no act is without infinite result” – in “The Power of Words.” Poe imagined a future in which mathematicians would have full computational command of this effect – not anticipating, at least within this story, the wrench Chaos theory would throw into such works. This same story concludes, as hinted by its title, at the understanding that provided the underpinning for 20th-century Teilhardian notions, the literal “power of words.”
Even more astonishing are some of his astronomical speculations – which, for instance, come circling near the concept of the black hole in “Mesmeric Revelation.” In the amazing Eureka, Poe goes further and arrives, purely by means of logic, at the idea that such a compressed “unity” would be beyond the realm of matter. The notion of the Universe arising from such a “unity” – and then of there existing an oscillating relationship, between Universe and Unity – will further surprise those who regard such ideas as purely of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Poe was naturally interested in marvelous inventions, as well. Magnetically-powered ocean liners, high-speed trains, skyscrapers, and trans-oceanic cables were among them. Most impressively, however, is Poe’s realization that for a journey to be undertaken, in a practical way, beyond Earth’s atmosphere, some means of hermetically sealing the traveler in against airless space was necessary, along with some means of propagating atmosphere within the enclosed vehicle. Poe’s was a concept – a purely rational one – that anticipated the practical reality of the space capsule, and the philosophic notion of the ecosphere.
Poe held no spiritual beliefs, and looked down upon the “mystical” practices enjoying popularity in his time. Even so, he applied the same approach of verisimilitude, and of the hoax, in speculating about mesmerism as if factual. His use of religious notions, such as God or Angel, are also, as the reader will discover, rational and materialist.
★ ★ ★
The text-versions in this volume have been restored to close to their original published form, insofar as was possible. While there may be some youthful excesses – as in the comparative measure of “a million times” in one story, which Poe later and more cautiously revised to “a hundred times” – they reflect a youthful exuberance of expression worth preserving. Some original spellings (and all original word choices) are retained for their evocation of Poe’s times, as well.
Mark Rich
September 2009 r />
MS. Found in a Bottle
1935 illustration by Arthur Rackham
One (1833)
MS. Found in a Bottle
“A wet sheet and a flowing sea.” – Cunningham
Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodise the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. Beyond all things, the works of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age – I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the ravings of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.
After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18––, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I went as passenger – having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me like a fiend.