Abstract
In the late nineteenth century, evolutionary theory and the emergent “epistemic virtue” of objectivity come to shape not only the deterministic logic of naturalism, but also the otherworldly permutations of fantasy and science fiction, which register a scalar shift in humanity's relationship to a more expansive space and time—and to human interiors suddenly accessible in a range of new ways.5 Science fiction (initially styled “scientific romance” at the time of Verne and Wells, later “scientifiction” by the trendsetting American periodicals edited by Hugo Gernsback and turned into “science fiction” proper by successors like John W. Campbell) explores the nonhuman within human existence—it is a crucial bellwether of changing human relations to the object as well as the animal world. Registering the immensity of alien space and time even within the putatively knowable human realm, sublimates or sublimely displaces ordinary human agency within a vaster cosmos.8 Simultaneously, the new/old genre of prose fantasy (sparked by the strange world-making late romances of William Morris, and then theorized by J. R. R. Tolkien as “subcreation” or the making of “secondary worlds”) offers the marvelous as an exemplary subset of human life, life as it might be lived without the impedances of material actuality.9 Naturalism, fantasy, and science fiction seem intuitively to be wildly disparate from one another—yet the fin de siècle efflorescence of enchanted and speculative tales is fueled by the same concerns about the insistent actuality of the material world as is disenchanted and determinist naturalism.Notes 1. [...]early twentieth-century speculative fiction of Wells and his ilk may be linked to the experimental, off-kilter realism of late George Eliot and Henry James.
