At the beginning of Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal science fiction story, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” the puffs of smoke from the onlookers’ cigars foreshadow the clouds through which a marvelous hot air balloon will soon ascend to the moon.
These puffs of smoke foreshadow not only the events of Poe’s story, but the future of science fiction in America.
Indeed, science fiction is one of America’s contributions to world literature.
Despite the side road into realism that William Dean Howells initiated with novels such as The Rise of Silas Lapham, and the continuation of this route through writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser in the 1920s, all the way to John Updike and even to Vladimir Nabokov (who sat on a bus to snatch snippets of dialogue from middle school girls for a few realistic sections of Lolita), nevertheless, American fiction’s main highway travels not through realism, but through the marvelous.
When Massachusetts was a tangled wilderness full of frights, Washington Irving was writing of headless horsemen; and Edgar Allan Poe was writing of pits and pendulums; Mark Twain was writing of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court; and Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing of a vision of the scarlet letter on the heart of the Reverend Dimmesdale.
The United States is often considered a land of practicalities, of no-nonsense commerce. The magnificent Henry James saw his country in this way: a nation of shopkeepers, concerned mostly about money and the next invention.
But at the heart of the American literary tradition are marvels such as Huckleberry Finn’s wild ride down a river.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon. Consider reading it because you might like it.