Friday short fiction #22: dream voyages
Thomas Cole The Architect's Dream 1840
After a couple of rather cinematic dreams earlier this week (I shan't bore you with them) and with little enough time for much more in the way of reading, this ended up being a week for revisiting four timeless stories of dream-based science fiction and fantasy. I've long considered the first three to be very much 'of a piece', and the fourth is simply an expression of a kind of logic that was (and sadly still is) way too far ahead of its time.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' (1877)
After a chance encounter with a mysterious young girl on the streets of St. Petersburg, a man who considers himself a failure falls asleep and dreams his own suicide before being transported to a distant planet, where people possess an innocence once found in the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Adam. But coming from Earth with all its industrious striving for advancement, the Ridiculous Man himself has becomes a vector for the types of progressive thinking that will upset this society's harmony and his arrival soon infects the very people he admires, with his ideas of progress and all its accompanying jealousies. Based on the imagined Utopias popular among French Socialists of the 1840s, biographer Joseph Frank describes 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' as Dostoevsky's "most vibrant and touching depiction of his positive moral-religious ideal, expressed far more convincingly in this rhapsodic and 'fantastic' form than anywhere else in his work." It's a poetic rejection (or at least a questioning) of the Enlightenment, and I when first read this about ten years ago I was rather taken by it, although re-reading it this week its appeal has somehow diminished for me.
Hermann Hesse, 'Strange News from Another Star' (MÄRCHEN, 1919)
This possesses all Hesse's trademark earnestness, and displays his discomfort with the militarism of his native Germany (he became a naturalised Swiss in 1923), being written sometime in the aftermath of WW1. After a devastating earthquake, a teenage boy is despatched by his town to appeal to his King for more flowers with which to bury their dead, but his journey becomes a dreamlike visit to another world where he witnesses the results of an unceasing war. The parable of course implies that the dreamed-of world is the Earth as this is implicitly a pacifist story, and to a greater degree is also an appeal for the need to overcome ignorance, see a bigger picture and consider some previously unthought-of possibilities.
H.G. Wells, 'A Dream of Armageddon' (BLACK AND WHITE: A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED RECORD AND REVIEW, MAY-JUNE 1901)
A man gets on a London-bound train and recounts the tragedy of his continuing dreams of being an influential politician in a Utopian future, where his refusal to prevent a coming World War means he will lose everything. There's quite a bit of typically Wellsian vision at work here (eg. the future use of aircraft for warfare), but when tangled with Wells's own pacifism a more complex picture emerges, particularly with his support for the Allies in fighting World War 1. This re-emerged in his fiction more than twenty years later when he inverted this story for the novel The Dream in 1924, in which a man from a Utopian future dreams the life of a soldier fighting against the Germans, which is something I would like to read someday.
Favourite short story of the week: Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, 'Sultana's Dream' (THE INDIAN LADIES' MAGAZINE, 1905)
The structure of this memorable story is simple and straightforward enough (although to describe it merely as a lengthy infodump would be to do it a debilitating disservice), being essentially a quick tour of a female Utopia as dreamed by a Calcutta lady who has fallen asleep while lamenting the condition of Indian womanhood. It has plenty going for it besides some real and actual scientific speculation: it's recognised as being explicitly the first piece of feminist science fiction, as well as being an early example in the long history of Bengali science fiction, little-read in the West. And if there were ever a collection of notable non-violent SF, this deserves to be the story that would lead the rest.