POE, Edgar Allan

(1809-1849)

   US writer, a major figure in US literature and a pioneer of sf. "By 'scientifiction'," wrote Hugo GERNSBACK, "I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story." As a poet, short-storywriter and critic, EAP's influence on world literature has been enormous, though he spent most of his career in the cut-throat world of magazine publishing. He is usually credited as an originator of the detective story and the horror story, an innovator in the areas of psychological realism and poetic form, as well as a precursor of the New Criticism and a strong influence on the French Symbolist movement. In recent years his works have been closely associated with various structuralist and deconstructuralist approaches to literature.Among French appreciators of EAP was Jules VERNE, who found in certain of his pieces a basis for his own "nuts-and-bolts" sf - "The Balloon Hoax" (1844), for example, inspired both Cinq semaines enballon (1863; trans as Five Weeks in a Balloon 1869 US) and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (1873; trans as Around the World in Eighty Days 1874 US) - but it should be emphasized that in EAP's context much ofthe scientific underpinning is of a deliberately specious, hoaxing nature. Another writer of HARD SF, Isaac ASIMOV, created the kind of amalgambetween sf and detective fiction that EAP's work anticipated; but something of the more central, metaphysical and visionary aspect of EAP's writing is captured by two different disciples: H.P. LOVECRAFT and Ray BRADBURY. Paul Valery (1871-1945) defined EAP's sf when he observed: "Poewas opening up a way, teaching a very strict and deeply alluring doctrine, in which a kind of mathematics and a kind of mysticism became one .." What EAP referred to as "the Calculus of Probabilities", a species ofextrapolation in which he and his detective hero, Dupin, were expert, calls for the combined talents of the mathematician and the poet.EAP's corpus is very much of a piece, and to isolate his sf would be significantly to distort both the whole and the part. In fact, no single work can be satisfactorily categorized as sf in any conventional sense - for one thing, the hoaxing quality of many of the tales detracts from the necessary illusion of verisimilitude - but at the same time the underlying rationale is marginally sciencefictional, and by that token so is everything EAP wrote.EAP assumed that the fabric of "reality" constituted a "grotesque" deception imposed by limitations of time and space and by such personal impediments as human reason. This revelation and the concomitant awareness of what may be the true "arabesque" nature of a unified reality are available only to the perspective provided by the "half-closed eye" of the imagination or, in the later works, of intuition.EAP makes clear in "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844; rev 1845) that this visionary arabesque reality is of a material, not a spiritual, nature. It is equivalent to the alternative or additional DIMENSIONS of sf and may be apprehended by strategies which constitute EAP's version of the spacetime warp. The dizzying sensation experienced on entering an EAP room, typically containing a luridly lit, kaleidoscopically fluid assemblage of arabesque furnishings, or in the process of literally falling in such tales as "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (1841), will effect the transition. In the case of most visionary or mystical literature, the experience of a transcendent reality depends upon personal volition (an unreliable programme of fasting or praying) or divine intervention. In EAP's case, as in sf, natural phenomena may effect the transitionaccidentally, and the conditions of such phenomena may be mechanically duplicated.There is a further sense in which all of EAP's work may be regarded as marginal sf. The COSMOLOGY embodied in the late summational treatise Eureka (1848) - a scheme of remarkable prescience (to the point of explaining BLACK HOLES) which has some parallel and perhaps conscious development in the speculation of such writers as Olaf STAPLEDON, George Bernard SHAW and Arthur C. CLARKE - is variously anticipated, whetherdirectly, rhythmically or symbolically, in virtually everything he wrote. To this extent, for example, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) andthe sea tales may be regarded as displaced versions of a kind of literalistic sf, if Eureka (which EAP called a "romance" or a "poem") may be described as that. In Eureka the movement from a grotesque, deceptive "reality" to arabesque reality is correlated with the history of theUniverse moving from its present diastolic state of dispersion to a glorious future state of centripetal collapse into a primal unity, an "Overmind".Although none of EAP's compositions can be fully accounted forby the sf label, some do come closer than others in that they contain specific sf elements. Three poems merit consideration. "Al Aaraaf" (1829; rev 1831; rev 1845), with its astronomical setting and the apparent destruction of the planet Earth, might be related to the post-apocalyptic prose of "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839), in which Earth is destroyed by fire when raped of nitrogen by a passing comet (cf H.G. WELLS's "The Star" (1897) and In the Days of the Comet (1906)). (EAP's "Shadow - A Parable" (1835) and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841) are similarly metaphysical pieces.) A second poem, "The City in the Sea" (1831; rev 1845), is related to various sf-like sunken-city myths."Ulalume" (1847) makes use of astrology and, to that degree, relates to EAP's use of other PSEUDO-SCIENCES in some of his most sciencefictional tales: mesmerism in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844), in "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844) and in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845),and alchemy in "Von Kempelen and his Discovery" (1849). The automaton chess-player invented by (the real-life) Baron von Kempelen and probed by EAP in his essay "Maelzel's Chess-Player" (1836) might be linked tenuouslyto the ROBOTS of sf, while "The Man that was Used Up" (1839) presents a part-human, part-machine being something like a CYBORG. "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842) has humankind destroyed by plague, as in Mary SHELLEY'sThe Last Man (1826) (END OF THE WORLD).EAP's sea voyages, especially "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833) and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1837), seem ultimately oriented towards a HOLLOW EARTH (like Captain Adam SEABORN's Symzonia (1820)). EAP's latter unfinished story was "completed" by various hands: by Jules Verne in Le sphinx des glaces (1897; trans as An Antarctic Mystery 1898 UK), by Charles Romyn DAKE in A Strange Discovery (1899), byH.P. LOVECRAFT in "At the Mountains of Madness" (1936) and by Dominique Andre in Conquete de l'Eternal ("The Conquest of the Eternal") (1947). The most ambitious of the BALLOON tales, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835; rev 1840), is clearly oriented towards outer space; iftaken literally, it is an early example of a MOON voyage. Another balloon story and another hoax, "Mellonta Tauta" (1849; the title is Greek for "these things are in the future"), might better be considered as one ofthe three tales that experiment with the theme of time displacement. "The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845), "Some Words with aMummy" (1845), a reanimation story, and "Mellonta Tauta" demonstrate the inaccuracy of past conceptions of the future, present conceptions of the past and future conceptions of the present, respectively; "Mellonta Tauta" itself presents a UTOPIA as a DYSTOPIA, bears on the theme of OVERPOPULATION, and is among the first of such works to open directly in afuture environment.Nearly all the above stories and the essay Eureka, but not the poems, appear in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (coll 1976) ed Harold Beaver, which has an interesting introduction andcommentary. Beaver also ed a companion volume, the Penguin Books edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1975).A great many of EAP's stories have been filmed, most famously and prolifically by RogerCORMAN.

   DK

   About the author: "Edgar Allan Poe - Science Fiction Pioneer" by Clarke Olney in Georgia Review \#12, 1958; "The Prophetic Edgar Allan Poe" in Explorers of the Infinite (coll 1963) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; "EdgarAllan Poe and Science Fiction" in Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (anth 1966) ed H. Bruce FRANKLIN; "The Influence of Poe on Jules Verne" by Monique Sprout in Revue de Litterature Comparee \#41, 1967; "Edgar Allan Poe and the Visionary Tradition of ScienceFiction" in New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974) by David KETTERER; "Poe, Edgar Allan" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol 2 (1978) by Donald H. TUCK; "The SF Element in the Work of Poe: A Chronological Survey" by David Ketterer, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES \#1, 1974; "Edgar Allan Poe" by E.F. BLEILER in Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (1982) ed E.F. Bleiler; "'Something Monomaniacal': Edgar Allan Poe" in Trillion Year Spree (1986) by Brian W. ALDISS and David WINGROVE; the discussion ofPoe in The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (1990) by John Limon.

   See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); ASTRONOMY; DEFINITIONS OF SF; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; HORROR IN SF; MEDICINE; MONEY; NEW WAVE; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; TIME TRAVEL.