O'BRIEN, Fitz-James

(1828-1862)

   Irish-born US writer, active from his arrival in New York in 1852 until he died of an infected wound in the Civil War. FJO contributed numerous poems and minor stories to the magazines, but his importance rests on a handful of brilliantly original sf tales, which were influential not only on subsequent sf but also on the development of the short-story genre.His finest work is "The Diamond Lens" (1858), a long, precisely detailed story about a SCIENTIST who invents a supermicroscope and is then consumed by his morbid love for a beautiful woman he perceives living in an infinitesimal world inside a drop of water (GREAT AND SMALL). What Was It? A Mystery (1859 Harper's; 1974 chap) tells of anencounter with an invisible being whose nature remains an enigma, although a plastercast made while the creature is chloroformed reveals it as a hideous diminutive humanoid (INVISIBILITY). These two stories, his best known, are both set firmly in mid-19th-century New York, and helped establish a mode of sf characterized by surface realism. In a similar vein was the earlier "The Bohemian" (1855), in which the narrator's passionate love for gold fatally induces him to have his fiancee mesmerized in order to reveal the whereabouts of a treasure. "From Hand to Mouth" (1858) is a remarkable surrealistic fantasy in which a man sits in the Hotel de Coup d'Oeil surrounded by disembodied but living eyes, ears, mouths and hands. In "The Lost Room" (1858) a strange house, whose intricate "corridors andpassages, like mathematical lines, seemed capable of indefinite expansion", becomes the scene of an orgy by six male and female "enchanters" who apparently succeed in kidnapping the narrator's room intosome other world or DIMENSION. "The Wondersmith" (1859) is notable in the history of sf, despite its fantastic framework, for its extended descriptions of an army of miniature automata. The posthumous "How I Overcame my Gravity" (1864), though marred by the use of dream, isotherwise a singularly modern piece of sf: its core is a detailed description of suborbital flight achieved with the aid of gyroscopic stabilization. The great strength of FJO's sf is its inventiveness, which also became its greatest weakness whenever he allowed ingenuity to dominate the fiction. "The Diamond Lens" remains a masterpiece because he subordinated his brilliant invention to a profound exploration of the diseased psychology of one of the main figures of his age, the would-be lone genius of scientific creation.FJO's works have been collected in various posthumous editions: Poems and Stories (coll 1881) ed (sometimes damagingly) by poet and reviewer William Winter (1836-1917), a member with FJO of the Pfaff's Cellar literary circle in New York; The Diamond Lensand Other Stories (coll 1885); What Was It? and Other Stories (coll 1889); Collected Stories by Fitz-James O'Brien (coll 1925); The Fantastic Talesof Fitz-James O'Brien (coll 1977). These were all superseded by The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien, Volume One: Macabre Tales (coll1988) and The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien, Volume Two: Dream Stories and Fantasies (coll 1988), both ed Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950- ), which assembles some previously uncollected work and presents well known texts in their original magazine versions.

   HBF

   See also: HISTORY OF SF.