Francis Ambrose Ridley 1977
Source: Pamphlet published in 1981 by the Museum of Labour History, Limehouse Town Hall, London E14. The text was first published as ‘Early Speculations About Selene’, New World Antiquity, Volume 24, nos. 11 and 12, November and December 1977. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Dedicated to CH Cleaver.
The extraordinary essay into the realms of science fiction by FA Ridley reveals a hidden, almost mystical side to our author. Well established as an historian and authority on political and ecclesiastical affairs – equally at home ‘in heaven as on earth’ – FA has only twice ventured into the world of fantasy, science fiction.
The first venture was in 1926 when he wrote The Green Machine – a much praised novel published by Noel Douglas – and this at the beginning of his formidable literary career. Now, at the zenith of his long, creative journey, we have this delightful Lunar essay. This essay has to be seen as the appetiser for the massive, as yet unpublished novel he has now completed: The Planet Beyond Pluto. We are confident that FA Ridley’s powerful intellect has yet more to offer his ever receptive and widening circle of readers and admirers!
Ellis S Hillman, Science Fiction Foundation
The earliest speculative work about the Moon, in reality a combination of fantasy and science fiction, was by Lucian of Samosata (120 – 185 AD), a Roman citizen, author of De Syria Dea, the best work on Baalbek. His True History, written about 170 AD, was a satire on the extravagant stories related by his contemporaries, intended to outdo them all. Whether Plutarch’s On the Apparent Face in the Moon’s Orb, written about 100 AD, is not really its predecessor, remains an open question.
Part of the True History deserves to be classified as science fiction. This is where the narrator is suddenly snatched up by a whirlwind and thrown into a water spout that dumped him upon that ‘shining island’, the Moon. He arrived at an exciting moment in the political evolution of our satellite, when Endymion, King of the Moon, had just declared war upon Phaethon, King of the Sun. The objective of this war of the worlds has a curiously modern ring. The Lunar monarch, as he informed his terrestrial visitors, had ‘assembled all the poor people in my dominion, proposing to send a colony to inhabit Venus the Morning Star’, because it was entirely deserted. However, this laudable design of the Moon monarch to cure his economic depression by this planned emigration was furiously opposed by Phaethon, the King of the Sun, who also wanted Venus for a colony: presumably for the same reason. As a result of this clash between the Lunar and Solar empires, a ferocious conflict followed; described by Lucian in picturesque and extravagant detail. He conjured up all sorts of monsters, from giant unicorns to enormous ostriches with feathers as long as spears, which they presumably used in the battle. After numerous and bloody conflicts, the Sun eventually prevailed. The Lunar monarch did homage to his Solar counterpart, paid tribute and gave hostages. By a pleasant diplomatic touch, Venus was divided between the two contestants and the poorer citizens of both Sun and Moon were given free access to its deserts. Certainly, the conclusion of this celestial exhibition of economic imperialism appears to compare favourably with that of its more recent successor, the Treaty of Versailles. After the conclusion of hostilities, our historian did not prolong his stay in heaven, but, politely rejecting an invitation to visit the Sun, returned to Earth, passing en route the Moon and the famous ‘cloud-cuckoo-land’, the city of the birds, of Aristophanes. The rest of the True History need not concern us, as its sequel transpired on earth, beneath the sea where Lucian encountered a whale that far surpassed Jonah’s Leviathan since it swallowed not merely the crews of the ships, but the ships themselves.
Lucian was perhaps the last of the secular authors of antiquity; at any rate I have no evidence of any successor in the field of science fiction. Neither in the Middle Ages, to which the heavens conveyed a theological rather than the scientific meaning. (Compare St Ambrose of Milan: ‘The motions of the Sun, Moon and planets are of no concern for our salvation.’) With the Renaissance, man’s eyes turned skyward again. By the end of the sixteenth century, the heliocentric theory of Copernicus (1473 – 1543) began to agitate the more advanced minds of the era. This was so in England in particular, where the relatively free intellectual climate of Elizabethan England made this country the headquarters of Copernican study in the still speculative era between the initial publication of the ‘magnum opus’ of Copernicus in 1543 and its empirical proof by Galileo after 1609. During this period, the Italian Copernican thinker Giordano Bruno visited England and strove unsuccessfully to convert the scholastic world of Oxford, already the ‘home of lost causes’, to the new astronomy. Two scientific geniuses, Leonard and Thomas Digges, went far beyond Copernicus, who held that the Sun was the centre of the universe, by boldly proclaiming that our Sun was merely an ordinary star. Among the English converts to this heliocentric astronomy was also a clergyman, Francis Godwin (1562 – 1633), who later became Bishop of Hereford and an eminent ecclesiastical historian. At the end of the century, Godwin wrote his Man in the Moone. This little work enjoys the double distinction of being the first science fiction story in English, and also that of being probably the first defence of Copernican astronomy by a Christian bishop. Godwin, it may be noted, had been a student of Christ Church, Oxford, when Giordano Bruno had made his premature effort to convert the university to the Copernican ideas. Hence the future bishop may have been influenced by the then revolutionary ideas of this great Italian thinker, which included the viability of the other worlds. Had Godwin’s Roman opposite numbers only had the good sense to follow his example, the famous clash between scientific discovery and organised religion might have been avoided: Galileo versus the Inquisition (1616 – 33).
Godwin’s pioneer story, unlike that of Lucian, was a good example of science fiction. From internal references, it appears to have been written between 1596 and the death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1603, as the narrator described the battle fought in the West Indies between the English and the Spanish fleets in the former year. ‘The Man in the Moone’, the Lunar monarch, sends his greetings to the Queen Elizabeth, ‘the most glorious of all women’, a Lunar compliment that would have surely delighted the heart of the Virgin Queen had she survived. As it was, the work was published posthumously in 1638. Galileo and Copernicus had been condemned by Rome in 1633, but their telescopic discoveries had enormously increased popular interest in astronomy, and Godwin’s little work benefited accordingly. Twenty-five editions appeared between 1638 and 1768. Between 1638 and 1659, Godwin’s story was successfully translated into French in 1648, Dutch in 1651 and German in 1659. It probably influenced Cyrano De Bergerac (1619 – 1655) in his L'Autre Monde, and the still more famous Gulliver’s Travels of 1725 by Jonathan Swift, particularly since Swift was related to Godwin.
The full title of Godwin’s work is The Man in the Moone Or the Discovery of a Voyage Thither. It began with a Robinson Crusoe-like touch when the Spanish hero is attacked by the English in St Helena and takes refuge in an obscure area of that still unknown island. Here he trains a flock of wild gansas or swans, and eventually trains them to fly in formation along with a kind of an aerial chariot destined to carry him back to Spain. But his aerial steeds, so to speak, take the bit between their teeth, and hijack him to the Moon. As the Lunar orb comes nearer and larger, while the Earth waxes fainter, Godwin’s hero relieved the monotony of the long enforced trip by meditating upon the twin problems presented by the still unfashionable but increasingly convincing Copernican astronomy; and by the further problems of the Earth’s magnetic field, in reference to which Godwin delivers himself of a dissertation on Copernican astronomy and the views expressed by Dr Gilbert in his De Magnete in 1601. By the time Domingo reached his Lunar destination he had pronounced decisively in favour of Copernicus and his heliocentric theory and against the then orthodox Ptolemaic astronomy. Incidentally, it was perhaps as well for him that his geese took him to the Moon and not to Spain, where such views would have attracted the attention of the Inquisition.
Once arrived upon the surface of our satellite, our hero found himself caught up into a Utopia, a Lunar world of incredible perfection and of even more incredible boredom (why is it that in nearly all Utopias virtue and dullness appear to be synonymous?). In short the Moon was the garden of Eden before the Fall! Crime was unknown and (a pleasant touch) there were no lawyers. But this Lunar Eden, unlike its terrestrial prototype, was immune from the frailty of Eve. For it was entirely monosexual (woman being unknown). The sexual habits of the Selenites were consequently somewhat grotesque, which perhaps explains why the Bishop did not publish his book in his lifetime. However, the presence of a heroine in any science fiction story surely marks the exact dividing line between the science and the fiction. Politically, the Moon was ruled by a feudal oligarchy with a Grand Lunar named Irdonozur, with 30 vassal princes, each with 24 feudal barons. He was a descendant of a long line of Lunar monarchs who had reigned over our satellite for precisely 3777 years, and was as virtuous and as dull as his surroundings. A Lunar Adam before the Fall, endowed with every conceivable virtue. As a theologian, our future Bishop of Hereford probably agreed with his famous Anglican contemporary Robert South, who went on record with a notable pronouncement: ‘Aristotle was but a wreck of an Adam.’
It is scarcely surprising that surrounded by the seraphic boredom of this celestial paradise, both Domingo Gonzales and his wild geese began to long for the more familiar fleshpots of earth. Accordingly, they sought and obtained permission to depart from their Lunar host, and presently took off for Earth, making their entry into the Earth’s magnetic field armed both with the science of Copernicus and Gilbert and also with the perhaps still more potent aid of a magic jewel presented to Gonzales upon his departure. Assisted by these potent allies, the goose-drawn chariot proceeded through space and finally stopped upon a high mountain in China. After sundry adventures Gonzales made his way home to Spain and presumably lived happily ever after. A comparison could be made between Man in the Moone and the Sommium, an almost contemporary work by Kepler, a major piece of science fiction and the only one written by a great astronomer, also published posthumously (1634).
In 1865, the French writer Jules Verne, the Prophet of the Space-Age, published his From the Earth to the Moon, and in 1870 followed it up with a sequel, Round the Moon. Both books received immediately international acclaim and may be said to have inaugurated that modern literary sub-species known as ‘science fiction’. These works, like their successors in this field, took into account both the new technological conditions introduced by the industrial revolution, as also the Copernican universe that two and a half centuries of telescopic research since Godwin and Galileo had revealed in place of the closed universe of earlier astronomy. Thus, Verne had no need whatever of whirlwinds, etc, to transport his space travellers from Earth to the Moon. By 1865 such primitive devices were no longer necessary in that ‘century of stupendous progress’, as the nineteenth century has been aptly termed.
Like his modern successors, Verne employed technological means to transport his pioneer astronauts to and around the Moon. In his first volume that ends with a take-off from Earth, and finally leaves their projectile hurtling around the Moon, the decisive ‘thrust’ into space is given by a giant gun specially constructed by Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club at the conclusion of the American Civil War, which ended in the year of publication. This means of transport was obviously defective, since as one of his editors pointed out, ‘the discharge would not merely have crushed the projectile, but would also have vaporised it’. At the same time, it at least belonged to the dawning technological age. It represented a great advance upon Lucian and Godwin. Verne also knew enough of modern astronomy not to create imaginary Selenites as his earlier predecessors had done. Since 1865, the surface of the Moon was well enough known to realise the sheer impossibility of living organisms inhabiting that arid wilderness.
Verne’s most notable successor in this field, HG Wells, made an attempt to revise the Selenites in his story The First Men in the Moon, written in Verne’s lifetime. By 1865 fiction in the person of Verne had reached exactly the identical point reached in fact more recently by Apollo VIII at the end of 1968! But then Verne was ‘with it'! A pioneer of flight in this world as well as to the Moon. It was one of his disciples who fought the first aerial battle in recorded history, fighting with and intercepting a German balloon while flying in despatches to Paris during the Franco – German War of 1870 – 71. It is interesting to know that Jules Verne himself lived long enough to witness the first flight of the Wright Brothers in a heavier-than-air aeroplane, which marked a decisive step forward on man’s eventual road to the Moon and the planets. Verne died in 1905, and if there is one man who deserves the honorific title of the ‘prophet of the space age’ it was precisely Jules Verne, who was of Polish descent.
In Verne’s pioneer masterpieces the primary interest is not the Moon nor any imaginary Lunar inhabitants. The Endymions of Lucian and the Lunar Emperors of Godwin had long since been relegated to mythology. Verne’s interest was in the would-be explorers of the Moon and in their backers in the ‘Baltimore Gun Club’ which both sponsored and fired off the Lunar trip, to whom the hitherto impassable gulfs of space represented merely so many obstacles to be overcome by Yankee ingenuity and by Yankee technique. The dramatic heart of Verne’s story beats on this Earth: the Moon is merely its predestined goal: ‘To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’ A very modern attitude? Surely in the light of the recent Apollo flights, Verne qualified for authentic prophetic status with the following observations published in 1865: ‘As for the Yankees, they had no other ambition than to take possession of this new continent of the sky, and to plant upon its highest elevation the star-spangled banner of the USA.’ Evidently, President Andrew Johnson of 1865 was not all that different from President Lyndon Johnson of a century later.
Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the Sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy ivory chair,
State in wonted manner keep,
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Earth, let not thy envious shade,
Dare itself to interpose,
Cynthia’s shining orb was made,
Heaven so clear when day did close,
Bless us then wish wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.
Lay aside thy silver bow,
And thy crystal shining quiver
Give unto the flying hart,
Space to breath, how short so ever,
Thou that makes a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright.
By Ben Jonson, who died in the year that the Man in the Moone was published.
Twas lunic, and the empty scapes
Did shriek as if to pierce the fasty black,
Intanjubble were the moooving shapes
And the volo-henges formed a vasty pack.
By Ellis S Hillman