TWAIN, Mark

   Pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), US writer and humorist. It is often not appreciated, although Philip Jose FARMER makes him the central character of his RECURSIVE The Fabulous Riverboat (1971), that a significant portion of MT's output - including what is at least his second-best novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889; vt A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur 1889 UK) - may be classified as sf.Some of Edgar Allan POE's sf was humorous but MT, drawing on the traditions of the literary hoax and the tall tale, was the first US writer fully to exploit the possibilities for HUMOUR of sf, inaugurating a rich but narrow vein that finds its current apotheosis in the work of Kurt VONNEGUT Jr.One of MT's notebooks indicates that, like Poe, he wasinterested in the possibilities of ballooning, and in 1868 began a story about a Frenchman's BALLOON journey from Paris to a prairie in Illinois, leaving it unfinished because of the US publication of Jules VERNE's Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; trans "William Lackland" as Five Weeks in a Balloon 1869 US). However, he returned to the topic in an unpublishedmanuscript entitled "A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage" (1876) and in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), in which the hero crosses the Atlantic byballoon and ends up in Cairo.Also essentially humorous is a skewed UTOPIA, "The Curious Republic of Gondour" (1875), in which certain classes ofpeople, including the more intelligent, have more votes than others (cf Vonnegut's antithetical "Harrison Bergeron" [1961]). An equally skewedview of another ideal state is offered in Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (written 1870s or later; 1909). This materialist heaven is locatedin interstellar space, through which Stormfield sails with an increasing number of companions rather in the manner of the narrator in Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR MAKER (1937). To begin with, Stormfield races a comet, anot unlikely invention for a writer whose arrival and departure from Earth coincided with the timetable of Halley's Comet (a fragment from the 1880s is entitled "A Letter from the Comet"). MT's interest in astronomical distances, evident elsewhere, is particularly apparent here.A parallel interest in vast temporal perspectives and geological ages is conspicuous in the many pieces that constitute MT's down-home version of the Genesis story, including his practical speculation concerning the daily lives of ADAM AND EVE in "Papers from the Adam Family" (written 1870s or later;1962) and "Letters from the Earth" (written 1909; 1962). A considerably darkened sense of time and cyclical history informs "The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire" (written 1901-2; 1972), MT's horrific butuncompleted vision of a future, 1000 years hence, in which Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science rules the world, and MT himself, the potentialsaviour, is confused with Adam; MT's acerbic views on Eddy (1821-1910) are fully presented in his Christian Science (1907).Given his fascination with time and history, it is not surprising that MT's best and most influential work of sf, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, should be concerned with TIME TRAVEL. The tale which seems to have inspired A Connecticut Yankee, Max ADELER's "Professor Baffin's Adventures" (1880),is an implicit time-travel story, but Twain's novel may be the first genuine time-travel story (the destructive ending takes care of the anachronism issue) and certainly established the pattern for that kind of sf (predominantly US) in which the hero, more or less single-handedly, affects the destiny of an entire world or Universe (cf L. Sprague DE CAMP's LEST DARKNESS FALL [1941]). While writing A Connecticut Yankee, MT,who like his Promethean hero was gripped by the march of invention - his own inventions included a history game and a notebook with ears, and he anticipated radio and tv - became disastrously involved financially with the Paige typesetter. That was one reason why A Connecticut Yankee is the transitional work between the light and the dark in MT's corpus. Many of the gloomy, quasi-Darwinist, philosophical ideas explored in such non-sf works as What is Man? (first version written 1898; 1906) - the answer being a machine - and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (written 1897-1903; fraudulent composite text 1916; 1969), which claimthat everything is determined and that reality is all a dream anyway, figure prominently in A Connecticut Yankee.The same ideas pervade MT's explorations in microcosmic worlds (GREAT AND SMALL) in 2 extended but unfinished works: "The Great Dark" (A.B. PAINE's title; written 1898; 1962) is about an apocalyptic voyage in a drop of water (cf Fitz-JamesO'BRIEN's "The Diamond Lens" [1858]), while the narrator of "Three Thousand Years among the Microbes" (written 1905; 1967), reduced to microscopic size by a wizard, explores the world-body of a diseased tramp, Blitzowski (one of the inhabitants is called Lemuel Gulliver, and theinfluence of Jonathan SWIFT is otherwise apparent); it is implied that the Universe we inhabit is actually God's diseased body. (This kind ofmacrocosm/microcosm relationship is hinted at in MT's 1883 notebook outline for what, in anticipation of the GENERATION-STARSHIP theme, might best be called a generation-iceberg story.) In The American Claimant (1892): Colonel Mulberry Sellers claims, among other inventions, to haveperfected the "Materializer", which can reconstruct the dead from whatever original atoms remain, and to be able to affect the climate by shifting sunspots.If travel or communication can be managed instantaneously (and in A Connecticut Yankee and the microscopic-world stories the transference isindeed instantaneous), it seems logical that some loss of faith in the physicality of existence might occur, augmenting MT's notion that reality is insubstantial, a vagrant thought, a dream. In this connection, and as evidence of MT's concern with psychic possibilities (including the whirligig of schizophrenia), we should note the essays "Mental Telegraphy" (1891) and "Mental Telegraphy Again" (1895), which argue for the realityof ESP. Reference is made to the English Society for Psychical Research, and it is suggested that something called a "phrenophone" might communicate thoughts instantaneously just as the telephone communicates words. In "From the 'London Times' of 1904" (1898) - a newspaper hoax like "The Petrified Man" - another futuristic invention, called the"telelectroscope", a visual telephone, is used seemingly to disprove a murder. But it is precisely the divorce between image and reality afforded by this kind of instantaneous communication which causes ontological anxiety, and so the suspected murderer is executed anyway.

   DK

   About the author: The Science Fiction of Mark Twain (coll 1984) ed David KETTERER; New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, andAmerican Literature (1974) by David Ketterer; "An Innocent in Time: Mark Twain in King Arthur's Court" by Philip Klass (William TENN), Extrapolation \#16, 1974; "Hank Morgan in the Garden of Forking Paths: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as Alternative History" by William J. Collins, Modern Fiction Studies \#32 (1986); "'Professor Baffin's Adventures' by Max Adeler: The Inspiration for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?" by Ketterer, Mark Twain Journal (1986); Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind (1988) by Sherwood Cummings; The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction (1990) by Bud Foote; the Mark Twain entries in Science-Fiction: The Early Years (dated 1990 but 1991) by Everett F. BLEILER.

   See also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EDISONADE; HISTORY OF SF; MUSIC; POCKET UNIVERSE; SHARED WORLDS.