Abstract
If science consisted simply in the expression of boundless curiosity, then Robert Burton, the scholarly recluse who wrote under the name ‘Democritus Junior’, would be one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Few books can boast a greater or more miscellaneous mass of information than Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which includes — more or less incidentally — a sketch of the author’s ideal society together with a critique of existing utopias, such as those of Campanella and Bacon. Burton was fascinated by contemporary scientific debates and it was this that led him to report Kepler’s speculations, set out in the Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (1610). Thanks to its use in abridged form as an epigraph to H.G. Wells’s alien invasion narrative The War of the Worlds (1898), the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter is perhaps the only element of Burton’s vast, ‘warehouse-like’ text that has remained current for modern readers.2
But who shall dwell in these vast bodies, earths, worlds, ‘if they be inhabited? rational creatures?’ as Kepler demands, ‘or have they souls to be saved? or do they inhabit a better part of the world than we do? Are we or they lords of the world? And how are all things made for man?’
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
we need the most powerful telescope, that of utopian consciousness …
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1954–59)1
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Notes
O. Stapledon (1972) Star Maker (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 16.
See Bloch (1986), and R.L. Stevenson (1920) ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus), pp. 175–6: ‘Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory’.
J. Kepler (1965) Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, trans. E. Rosen (New York and London: Johnson Reprint), esp. p. 39.
See also S.J. Dick (1982) Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 22, 77.
Lucretius (1951) On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 91–2.
D.W. Singer (1950) Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, with Annotated Translation of His Work ‘On the Infinite Universe and Worlds’ (New York: Henry Schuman), pp. 54–7; and see also Guthke (1990), pp. 38–41.
I. Calvino (1997) ‘Two Interviews on Science and Literature’, in The Literature Machine, trans. P. Creagh (London: Vintage), p. 31.
J. Kepler (1967) Kepler’s ‘Somnium’: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy, trans. E. Rosen (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 109n.
Quoted in M.H. Nicolson (1960) Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan), p. 26.
I.B. Cohen (1961) The Birth of a New Physics (London: Heinemann), p. 135;
G. Galilei (1989) Siderius Nuncius or The Sidereal Messenger, trans. A. van Helden (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 103–4.
C. de Bergerac (1976) Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and Sun, trans G. Strachan (London: New English Library), p. 30 (title of ch. 2).
F. Godwin (1972) The Man in the Moon (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and New York: Da Capo Press), esp. pp. 73, 102–5.
J. Wilkins (1973) The Discovery of a World in the Moone (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints), p. 207.
On Adams, see M.J. Crowe (1986) The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 202–14;
H.B. Franklin (1978) Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 292–3; Nicolson (1960), pp. 241–2.
M.H. Nicolson (1956) Science and Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books), p. 25.
B. Pascal (1961) The Pensées, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 57.
R. Burns (1950) ‘To a Louse’, in Poems, ed. L. Brander (London: Oxford University Press), p. 106.
Quoted in Sir D. Brewster (1855) Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh: Constable), ii, p. 407.
H. MacPherson (1933) Makers of Astronomy (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 145, 229.
T. Hardy (1999) Two on a Tower: A Romance, ed. S. Shuttleworth (London: Penguin), esp. pp. 249–50.
J.B.S. Haldane (1927) Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus), pp. 1, 286.
H.G. Wells (2005) The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. P. Parrinder (London: Penguin), p. 131.
H.G. Wells (1898) ‘From an Observatory’, in Certain Personal Matters (London: Lawrence & Bullen), pp. 265, 266.
I. Asimov (1971) ‘Nightfall’, in R. Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame (New York: Avon Books), p. 145.
H.G. Wells (2007) ‘Under the Knife’, in The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, ed. P. Parrinder (London: Penguin), p. 79.
T. de Quincey (2003) ‘System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes’, in Works, ed. F. Burwick (London: Pickering & Chatto), xv, p. 404.
O. Stapledon (1976) Nebula Maker (Hayes: Bran’s Head Books), pp. 6, 19.
H.G. Wells (2005) The War of the Worlds, ed. P. Parrinder (London: Penguin), p. 7.
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Parrinder, P. (2015). Beyond the Telescope: From Astronomy to (Dystopian) Fiction. In: Utopian Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456786_2
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