Pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), US writer and humorist. It is often not appreciated, although Philip José Farmer makes him the central character of his Recursive The Fabulous Riverboat (July-August 1967 and June-August 1971 If as "The Felled Star" and "The Fabulous Riverboat"; fixup 1971), that a significant portion of Twain'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) – may be classified as sf. Some of Edgar Allan Poe's sf was humorous but Twain, 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 found its twentieth-century apotheosis in the work of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
One of Twain's notebooks indicates that, like Poe, he was interested 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). However, he returned to the topic in an unpublished manuscript entitled "A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage" (1876) and in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), in which the hero crosses the Atlantic by balloon and ends up in Cairo.
Also essentially humorous is a skewed Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour" (October 1875 Atlantic Monthly) as by Anon, in which certain classes of people, including the more intelligent, have more votes than others (compare Vonnegut's antithetical "Harrison Bergeron" [October 1961 F&SF]). An equally skewed view of another ideal state is offered in Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (written 1870s or later; 1909). This materialist heaven is located in 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, a not 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"). Twain'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 Twain's down-home version of the Genesis story, including his practical speculation concerning the daily lives of Adam and Eve in "Papers of the Adam Family" (written 1870s or later; in Letters from the Earth, coll 1962) and "Letters from the Earth" (written 1909; in Letters from the Earth, coll 1962). A considerably darkened sense of time and cyclical history informs "The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire" (written 1901-1902; in Mark Twain's Fables of Man, coll 1972), Twain's horrific but uncompleted vision of a future, 1000 years hence, in which Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science rules the world, and Twain himself, the potential saviour, is confused with Adam; Twain'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 Twain's best and most influential work of sf, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, should be concerned with Time Travel via Timeslip. The tale which seems to have inspired A Connecticut Yankee, Max Adeler's "Professor Baffin's Adventures" "Professor Baffin's Adventures" (in Beeton's Christmas Annual, anth 1880; vt "The Fortunate Island" in The Fortunate Island and Other Stories, coll 1882), 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: a classic Genre SF example is L Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall (December 1939 Unknown; exp 1941; rev 1949). While writing A Connecticut Yankee, Twain, 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 Television – 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 Twain'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 claim that everything is determined and that reality is all a dream anyway, figure prominently in A Connecticut Yankee.
Further notable posthumous collections are Letters from the Earth (coll 1962) edited by Bernard DeVoto, Which was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years (coll 1967) edited by John S Tuckey, Mark Twain's Fables of Man (coll 1972) edited by John S Tuckey, and The Science Fiction of Mark Twain (coll 1984) edited by David Ketterer.
The same ideas pervade Twain's explorations in microcosmic worlds (> Great and Small) in two extended but unfinished works. "The Great Dark" (written 1898; in Letters from the Earth, coll 1962) – so titled by A B Paine rather than Twain – is about an apocalyptic Fantastic Voyage in a drop of water –recalling Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens" (January 1858 Atlantic Monthly). The narrator of "Three Thousand Years among the Microbes" (written 1905; in Which was the Dream?, coll 1967), reduced to microscopic size by a wizard (> Miniaturization), explores the world-body of a diseased tramp, Blitzowski (one of the inhabitants is called Lemuel Gulliver, and the influence of Jonathan Swift is otherwise apparent); it is implied that the Universe we inhabit is actually God's diseased body. (This kind of macrocosm/microcosm relationship is hinted at in Twain'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 have perfected 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 is indeed instantaneous), it seems logical that some loss of faith in the physicality of existence might occur, augmenting Twain's notion that reality is insubstantial, a vagrant thought, a dream (> Perception). In this connection, and as evidence of Twain's concern with psychic possibilities (including the whirligig of schizophrenia), we should note the essays "Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History" (December 1891 Harper's) and "Mental Telegraphy Again" (September 1895 Harper's), which argue for the reality of 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" (November 1898 The Century) – a newspaper hoax like "The Petrified Man" (4 October 1862 The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise) – another futuristic Invention, called the "telelectroscope", a visual telephone or videophone, 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/DRL]
see also: Edisonade; History of SF; Meme; Pocket Universe; SF Music; Shakespeare; Shared Worlds; Worldcon.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
born 1835
died 1910
works
about the author
- David Ketterer, editor. The Science Fiction of Mark Twain
(North Haven, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1984) [nonfiction: anth: hb/] - David Ketterer. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1974) [nonfiction: hb/Larry Hoffman]
- Philip Klass (William Tenn). "An Innocent in Time: Mark Twain in King Arthur's Court" (December 1974 Extrapolation #16) [pp17-32: mag/]
- William J Collins. "Hank Morgan in the Garden of Forking Paths: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as Alternative History" (Spring 1986 Modern Fiction Studies #32) [pp109-114: mag/]
- David Ketterer. "'Professor Baffin's Adventures' by Max Adeler: The Inspiration for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?" (Spring 1986 Mark Twain Journal) [pp24-34: mag/]
- Sherwood Cummings. Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Bud Foote. The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1990) [hb/nonpictorial]
- Everett F Bleiler. Mark Twain entries in Science Fiction: The Early Years (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991) [nonfiction: dated 1990 but published 1991: hb/nonpictorial]
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