FANTASTIC VOYAGES

   The fantastic voyage is one of the oldest literary forms, and remains one of the basic frameworks for the casting of literary fantasies. Of the prose forms extant before the development of the novel in the 18th century, the fantastic voyage is the most important in the ancestry of sf (PROTO SCIENCE FICTION). Among others, Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634), Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627), Tommaso CAMPANELLA's City of the Sun (1623) and CYRANO DE BERGERAC's Other Worlds (1657-62) all take this form, as do the oldest of all works which can be claimed as ancestors of sf: the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, from the third millennium BC, and HOMER's Odyssey, from the first.The fantastic voyage continued to dominate speculative fiction and the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE long after the rise of the novel, whose basic pretence was the painstaking imitation of experience (what the critic Ian Watt calls "formal realism"). It is partly because of this formal separation of speculative literature from the development of 19th-century social literature that there remains something of a gulf between speculative fiction and the literary MAINSTREAM today. The first sf story cast in the form of a novel was Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818), but there were very few comparable works written in the succeeding century. The bulk of Jules VERNE's imaginative work falls in the category of voyages imaginaires, and many of H.G. WELLS's scientific romances adopt a similar form. Among the important fantastic voyages which today may be classified as sf are: The Man in the Moone (1638) by Francis GODWIN, Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan SWIFT, Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (1741 in Latin; exp 1745; trans as A Journey to the World Under-Ground 1742 UK) by Ludwig HOLBERG, A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New Planet (1813) by Willem BILDERDIJK, Symzonia (1820) by Adam SEABORN, A Voyage to the Moon (1827) by Joseph ATTERLEY, Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK) and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea 1872 UK) by Jules Verne, and Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy GREG. These voyages took their heroes over the Earth's surface, into worlds underground and beneath the sea, to the Moon and to other planets. Important new scope for the fantastic voyage was revealed in the last few years of the 19th century by H.G. Wells in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), which opened up the limitless vistas of the future to planned tourism, and by Robert W. COLE in The Struggle for Empire (1900), the first major interstellar adventure story. These new imaginative territories were to prove immensely significant for 20th-century imaginative literature. The fantastic voyage has, of course, also remained central within the literature of the supernatural imagination, much of which was also ill adapted to the form of the novel. As supernatural fantasy has been influenced and infiltrated by the scientific imagination it has been the fantastic voyage, far more than any other narrative form, that has provided a suitable medium for "hybrid" works; thus a considerable number of 20th-century fantastic voyages are difficult to classify by means of the standard genre borderlines. In this no-man's-land within the territories of imaginative literature exist virtually all the works of writers such as William Hope HODGSON, Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and A. MERRITT, and various individual novels of note: Frigyes KARINTHY's Gulliverian Voyage to Faremido and Capillaria (1916 and 1922; trans omni 1966), David LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), Ruthven TODD's The Lost Traveller (1943), the title story of John Cowper POWYS's Up and Out (coll 1957), The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster (1929-) and Michel Bernanos's The Other Side of the Mountain (1967; trans 1968).When Hugo GERNSBACK first demarcated sf as a genre in the 1920s he co-opted Verne, Wells and Merritt, and also Ray CUMMINGS, author of fantastic voyages into the atomic microcosm (GREAT AND SMALL). It was not long before E.E. "Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946) took PULP-MAGAZINE sf, at FASTER-THAN-LIGHT speeds, into the greater Universe beyond the limits of the Solar System. Other milieux were quickly introduced. Edmond HAMILTON's "Locked Worlds" (1929) adapted the notion of PARALLEL WORLDS from supernatural fantasy, and the first pulp sf voyages into a future replete with ALTERNATE WORLDS were undertaken in Jack WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME (1938; 1952). A significant refinement in the interstellar fantastic voyage, the GENERATION STARSHIP, was introduced a few years later, most significantly in Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Universe" (1941).Voyages into the "inner spaces" of the human mind had also long been commonplace in supernatural fantasy, but a sciencefictional jargon of support for such adventures was slow in arriving. Notable early examples are "Dreams are Sacred" (1948) by Peter Phillips and "The Mental Assassins" (1950) by Gregg Conrad (Rog PHILLIPS).Most of these milieux were reachable only by means of literary devices whose practicability was highly dubious if not flatly impossible. Space travel was the one hypothetical variant of the fantastic voyage into which it was possible to introduce rigorous attempts at realism (SPACESHIPS), although the technologies involved have inevitably became dated with the passage of time. Notable attempts from various periods include Verne's De la terre a la lune (1865) and Autour de la lune (1870), Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY's Beyond the Planet Earth (1920 Russia; trans 1960), Laurence MANNING's "Voyage of the Asteroid" (1932) and Arthur C. CLARKE's Prelude to Space (1951). The purely facilitative character of devices like TIME MACHINES and interdimensional portals should not, however, be deemed to disqualify them as means to be deployed in serious speculative fictions; indeed, they are vitally necessary.The opening up of these vast imaginary territories gave sf writers limitless scope for invention. There is no speculation - whether physical, biological, social or metaphysical - that cannot somehow be made incarnate and given a space of its own within the conventions of sf. Voyages into fluid worlds where anything and everything may happen - where the characters become helpless victims of chaos or godlike creators - may be envisaged, as in M.K. JOSEPH's The Hole in the Zero (1967), as may voyages into mathematical abstraction like "The Mathenauts" (1964) by Norman KAGAN. Sf has drawn up a framework of conventions and a vocabulary of literary devices which not only makes such adventures conceivable but renders them relatively comfortable. It is a potential that sf writers have, for various reasons, been greatly inhibited from exploiting to the full, but they have - whatever their failings-established significant signposts within all these hypothetical realms.At its simplest the fantastic voyage is a set of episodes whose function is simply to present a series of dramatic encounters, but it is rare to find the form used with no higher ambition than to offer a pleasant distraction. Many voyages which pretend to be doing that - like Lewis CARROLL's Alice books - actually present worlds whose bizarre aspects reflect the real world ironically and subversively. The same is true even of many relatively crude pulp sf stories like Francis STEVENS's The Heads of Cerberus (1919; 1952), Garret SMITH's Between Worlds (1919; 1929), John TAINE's The Time Stream (1931; 1946) and Stanton A. COBLENTZ's Hidden World (1935 as "In Caverns Below"; 1957), and in such unconvincing films as VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) and FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966). In very many cases the fantastic voyage has allegorical implications, which are most obvious when the voyage is also a quest, as it very often is in modern genre fantasy, which tends to follow the paradigm of J.R.R. TOLKIEN's The Lord of the Rings (3 vols 1954-5). The quest may be for a person, an object or a place, but the movement through a hypothetical landscape is usually paralleled by a growth towards some kind of maturity or acceptance in the protagonist's mind. The growth is towards self-knowledge or CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH in the psychologically oriented variants which lie within or close to the borders of sf; examples include Rasselas (1759) by Samuel JOHNSON, Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship US) by Brian W. ALDISS, The Drowned World (1962) by J.G. BALLARD and INVERTED WORLD (1974) by Christopher PRIEST. In stories of this kind the relationship between the environment of the story and the inner space of the protagonists's psyche is often complex and subtle; in the work of Philip K. DICK, from Eye in the Sky (1957) to A SCANNER DARKLY (1977), characters are continually forced to undertake nightmarish journeys into milieux where the distinction between real and unreal is hopelessly blurred and their personal inadequacies are painfully exposed.Any list of notable fantastic voyages in modern sf is necessarily highly selective, but some of the most important and interesting which have appeared since 1926 are as follows: The World Below (1929) by S. Fowler WRIGHT, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) by C.S. LEWIS, The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-50; fixup 1950) by A.E. VAN VOGT, Big Planet (1952; 1957) by Jack VANCE, "Surface Tension" (1952) by James BLISH, MISSION OF GRAVITY (1954) by Hal CLEMENT, The City and the Stars (1956) by Arthur C. CLARKE, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967) and NOVA (1968) by Samuel R. DELANY, Picnic on Paradise (1968) by Joanna RUSS, Space Chantey (1968) by R.A. LAFFERTY, Tau Zero (1970) by Poul ANDERSON, Downward to the Earth (1970) and Son of Man (1971) by Robert SILVERBERG, RINGWORLD (1970) by Larry NIVEN, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972; vt War of Dreams) by Angela CARTER, Hiero's Journey (1973) by Sterling E. LANIER, Orbitsville (1975) by Bob SHAW, GALAXIES (1975) by Barry N. MALZBERG, ENGINE SUMMER (1979) by John CROWLEY, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) by Douglas ADAMS, The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) by Gene WOLFE, The Void Captain's Tale (1983) and Child of Fortune (1985) by Norman SPINRAD, The Travails of Jane Saint (1986) by Josephine SAXTON and HYPERION (1989) by Dan SIMMONS.

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