EDISONADE

   Daedalus was the first inventor hero, but he was also a bureaucrat; and when he built the labyrinth he did so as a wage-slave or sharecropper, on hire to the king. For that reason this entry, which is about a US dream of freelance heroism, cannot be spent defining the "daedalusade". As used here the term "edisonade"-derived from Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in the same way that " ROBINSONADE" is derived from Robinson Crusoe - can be understood to describe any story which features a young US male inventor hero who uses his ingenuity to extricate himself from tight spots and who, by so doing, saves himself from defeat and corruption and his friends and nation from foreign oppressors. The invention by which he typically accomplishes this feat is not, however, simply a WEAPON, though it will almost certainly prove to be invincible against the foe and may also make the hero's fortune; it is also a means of TRANSPORTATION - for the edisonade is not only about saving the country (or planet) through personal spunk and native wit, it is also about lighting out for the Territory. Once the hero reaches that virgin Territory, he will find yet a further use for his invention: it will serve as a certificate of ownership. Magically, the barefoot boy with cheek of tan will discover that he has been made CEO of a compliant world; for a single, revelatory maxim can be discerned fueling the motor heart of the edisonade: the conviction that to tinker with is to own.Daedalus could never, therefore, have starred in an edisonade. Could Thomas Alva Edison himself have done so? Why should we head this entry with his name, rather than that of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who inspired Weldon COBB's To Mars with Tesla (1901), or Hiram Maxim (1840-1916), who inspired George GRIFFITH's The Outlaws of the Air (1895)? It certainly might be claimed that Edison was no more inventive than either of these figures; and he certainly worked for hire. Edison's life and career, when examined, hardly add up to an appropriate model for E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Richard Seaton, the inventor-hero of the Skylark series, who seems almost definitively to embody the dream we are attempting to describe. In his early years, true enough, Edison was a practical professional, a tinkerer of genius, and the inventor (or inspired improver) of a wide range of implements, most of them electrical, from the phonograph to the lightbulb. But, beginning in the 1880s, he transformed himself into an advertiser of genius whose main subject was himself, and from this point the mythopoeic power of the Edison name outstripped that of his rivals, no mean publicists themselves. For nearly half a century, the senatorial Sage of Menlo Park waxed ever greater in the public imagination, writing articles, making speeches, chairing commissions, granting oracular interviews whose subject was, very frequently, weapons he claimed to be about to unveil which would make the USA utterly invincible and war impossible. From 1890 he claimed more than once - or those whom he may have hired to ghost some of his articles claimed - that he had invented devices of war which did not, in fact, exist outside his imagination, or which had been created by others (perhaps his employees). It may be of interest to note that the language in which these claims were made bore a strong resemblance to the urgent telegraphese Mark TWAIN fell into whenever he was expounding a technical notion; much of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) is so couched, and the resemblance between the Boss protagonist of that novel and the self-image of Edison expressed in his writings is most striking. In his later years Edison was, in short, something of a fraud; he may have served as a model when L. Frank BAUM was creating the Wizard of Oz. But this, one might argue, could be precisely the point. It might be relevant to note that not only are edisonades dreams which come true for the protagonist but they also embody the shaping fantasies of that protagonist, who is not in the end as innocent as he seems. Like Edison himself, the hero of the edisonade is at some level, conscious or unconscious, an impostor or confidence-man.The first proto-edisonade was probably the first dime novel (DIME-NOVEL SF) to feature a boy inventor, Edward S. ELLIS's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), and the first edisonade proper was the Tom Edison, Jr. sequence of dime novels (1891-2) by Philip READE. Young orphan Tom (ostensibly unrelated to Thomas Alva) responds to the challenge of his enemies by inventing a succession of ever more impressive devices, most of which double as weapons and forms of self-propelling transport. In these and other similar tales, the presence of the US frontier as a barrier to be penetrated is nearly always evident, though sometimes only subliminally; and the topological similarity between penetrating a frontier and penetrating knowledge through CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the boys' edisonades written at a time when the USA's literal frontiers were only just snapping shut.Oddly enough, however, the first adult novel to make use of Edison was not by a US author at all. VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM's L'Eve future (1886; trans as The Eve of the Future 1981 US; new trans as Tomorrow's Eve 1982 US) introduces a character, Thomas Alva Edison, who rescues a handsome young lord from despair at his fiancee's crassness by providing an impeccable ANDROID duplicate. It may be that Edison the "electrician" was given so significant a role in this tale because electricity itself had an almost occult significance for late-19th-century romantics like Villiers, who in a sense created a decadent version of the edisonade before any adult edisonades had in fact been written. The first adult US example did not, in fact, appear for over a decade. It was not until the newspaper publication of Garrett P. SERVISS's Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898 The New York Journal; 1947), a tale of quite extraordinary thematic clarity, that the native edisonade took on its mature shape - in complete ignorance of Villiers' oblique use of the fabulous inventor. Written as a direct - and consciously US - response to the defeatist implications of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), the tale depicts Edison himself inventing weapons of great power in an unfettered and spunky response to the continuing threat from the external enemies. Armed with a disintegrating weapon and ANTIGRAVITY, and accompanied by most of the world's best SCIENTISTS, Thomas Alva heads to Mars, where he commits triumphant genocide before granting the survivors colonial status. It should be noted that Edison's inventions and his conquest of Mars are both consequences of the actions of others: he and the USA he represents are innocents; they are forced to respond to a wicked world with the Trickster effrontery of their native genius; and afterwards they are forced to become owners of what their genius has conquered.Between Serviss and E.E. Smith, many edisonades repeated the basic story in plots which often represented a US version of the European future- WAR novel. Three can stand as examples. In J.S. BARNEY's L.P.M.: The End of the Great War (1915) a US scientist called Edestone invents enough weapons to defeat the corrupt and aggressive nations of Europe, and to establish a world government; in J.U. GIESY's All for His Country (1915) a young US inventor's gravity-defying airplane is sufficient to defeat Japanese aggressors; and in Cleveland Langston MOFFETT's The Conquest of America (1916) Edison himself reappears as a repository of anti-socialist US virtue and the creator of an invention sufficient to see off the aggressive Germans. In all cases, the aggression is from without; the weapons are invented by a free spirit who is not on hire to a corrupt government; and in the end the world is passed into the ownership of innocent Americans who had wished only to be left alone to enjoy their virgin paradise.This basic story has been an essential shaper of US realpolitik for more than a century, and its manifestations are far broader than those encompassed by the relatively simple edisonade, whose precarious concentration on a tangibly implausible model hero seemed to guarantee its early death as a literary form, though the most famous juvenile edisonade sequence of al - the Tom Swift stories, extending through four series from 1910 into the 1990s - demonstrates how long-lasting and evocative the model has been. But the 43 Doctor Hackensaw stories (1921-5) by Clement FEZANDIE, though amusingly varied in their presentation of the Doctor's scientific feats, seemed more an epilogue than a way forward. As a form suitable for adult reading, the seemingly moribund edisonade was saved by SPACE OPERA. E.E. Smith's Skylark sequence gave Edison the Galaxy as playground and estate, provided an infinity of frontiers to penetrate, territories to stumble into and to claim, and entrepreneurial empires to build in all innocence. The Smithian edisonade remains central to entertainment space opera to this day.It might seem, however, that GENRE SF as a whole outgrew the edisonade by about 1940, when John W. CAMPBELL Jr's GOLDEN AGE OF SF was at its height, and for a few years at least it looked as though hillbilly Tricksters with the Touch had become comic turns whose proper place was in the less serious pages of Unknown and in the light-fingered grasp of such writers as L. Sprague DE CAMP. But a glance at the central male role model promulgated by the core authors of the Golden Age might disabuse readers of this assumption, for the Competent Man is Thomas Alva Edison in sheep's clothing, disguised mainly by his genuine proficiency (because writers like Robert A. HEINLEIN were the first sf authors able actually to convey the feel and describe the process of Higher Tinkering) and by his ability to explain himself. But, in being able to explain himself, the Competent Man of the 1940s, as created by Heinlein and his followers, soon began to advocate his line of thought; as soon as this happened, innocence fled.For, the moment the frank lad of the primitive edisonade begins to have to justify himself, Huck Finn the Trickster becomes a flim-flam man or, even worse, a prophet. L. Ron HUBBARD's Church of Scientology is in truth the Church of Edison. The overbearing protagonist of Heinlein's later novels is in truth the Sage of Menlo Park after one too many interviews. Only the unexamined edisonade is worth reading. Once looked at with an eye to the main chance, it turns sour, self-serving and entrepreneurial, and we find ourselves in the land of some HARD-SF writers of the 1980s, whose protagonists are never poor, and never lose, and never give; nor would it perhaps be stretching the term too far to find in the ruthless protagonists of much SURVIVALIST FICTION ghostly and solipsistic echoes of the edisonades of a more innocent time - when the hero did not have to understand the consequences of his triumphs. Much worse than a Thomas Alva Edison who doesn't know the score is a Thomas Alva Edison who does.

   JC

   Further reading: War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988) by H. Bruce FRANKLIN.