ESC: English Studies in Canada

Physician holds together so well testifies to Goellnicht’s seriousness of intent and his determination — evident throughout the book — to show that the Apollonian ideal of the physician-poet, who heals human suffering with words, did actually encourge Keats to bring his scientific and his literary ambitions into harmony. Medical science, as Goellnicht presents it, does not murder to dissect, nor thwart and stifle poetic creativity; rather it stimulates and nourishes the imagination with the encyclopaedic knowledge poets have always delighted in. Probably no reader of this book will be entirely con­ vinced by every interpretation Goellnicht offers (I for one am not persuaded by the suggestion on 218 that the “Phantoms pale” in Hyperion (I, 1 . 255) are a “surrealistic vision of cadavers rising from demonstrating tables” ). Nevertheless, one finishes Goellnicht’s book with a real sense of having learned something useful about Keats, and of having progressed in one’s understanding of his work. NOTES 1 “ Introduction: Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keats,” in TwentiethCentury Interpretations of Keats’s Odes, ed. Jack Stillinger (Englewood Cliffs, N .J.: Prentice-Hall, ig68), p. 2. 2 Keats the Poet (Princeton, N .J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 23. 3 The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1958), 1, 184. 4 Quoted by Sperry, p. 16. a n t h o n y j. harding / University of Saskatchewan David Ketterer, The Science Fiction of Mark Twain (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1984). xxxiii, 385. $27.50 Mark Twain, the novelist of the Mississippi, a writer of science-fiction? Scepticism is a natural response to David Ketterer’s title, but there is really no cause for surprise. Twain was a reader of popular science, he shared the American passion for invention and often seemed to equate technical ad­ vance with moral improvement. He was a representative man of the nine­ teenth ceutury, the first technological century, which saw the invention of science fiction as we now recognize it. Early in his career, he tried his hand at the humorous newspaper hoax, a form which often dealt with preposterous inventions or discoveries. “Earth­ quake Almanac” (1865) offers a day-by-day forecast of the fall earthquake season for San Francisco. He experimented with futurism in 1874, in a humorous letter to Howells dated 16 November 1935, describing an Ameri­ 360 can Empire, ruled by O’Mulligan the Second, with a titled aristocracy and an established church. In the same letter, he predicts air travel and universal telepathic communication. “The Curious Republic of Gondour” (1876) presents a Utopia in which some of the faults of American democracy are cured. “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” (1877) narrates a courtship and marriage carried out entirely by long-distance telephone. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) introduces backward time travel. In Tom Sawyer Abroad, a story reminiscent of Jules Verne, Tom and Huck and Jim seize control of a super-balloon from its crazed inventor (a typical mad scientist), and sail over Africa in it. In “The Great Dark,” written in 1898, a ship with its crew and passengers is reduced to microscopic size and voyages across a drop of water, doing battle with the protozoans which inhabit it. “ From the London Times of 1904” (1898) hypothesizes television. All versions of the “Mysterious Stranger” story present contact between humans and an alien being possessed of superhuman powers. “The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire” (1901-02) is a dystopian exercise in future history, describing an America returned to the Dark Ages under a religious dictatorship. Shorter pieces echo the theme — the self-destruction of the American Republic, in accordance with the inexorable cycle of history. “ Sold to Satan” (1904), proposes unexpected uses for radium and polonium, the most recently discovered elements. “ 3,000 Years Among the Microbes” (1905) recounts the experiences of a human being (named Huck Finn!) transformed to a cholera germ and inhabiting the body of an aged tramp. Ketterer prints the majority of these pieces, and if we read Mark Twain’s Science Fiction through, we are sure to encounter unfamiliar works. “ Cap­ tain Stormfield’s Visit to...