Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain's America by Nathaniel Williams

Abstract

209 BOOKS IN REVIEW narrative field that may or may not respond differently than sf to a speculativerealist reading. Perhaps it is worth noting that Willems himself remains a relatively “dark” presence in this study. I do not recall a single instance in the text in which “I” appears; the passive voice (“it has been argued”) is prevalent and the author has disappeared. This tempts me to a discussion about the possible connections between the “dark author” and the “dark objects” of his analysis, but I lack space and so will simply note this as something intriguing to think about—among all the other intriguing ideas raised in Willems’s monograph. —Veronica Hollinger, SFS Imperial Fantasies and Biblical Literalism in Technocratic Exploration Fiction. Nathaniel Williams. Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2018. xii+206 pp. $44.95 hc. Although it is widely acknowledged that the dime novel played an important part in nineteenth-century American popular culture and in establishing the antecedents of American sf, Nathaniel Williams’s carefully researched and lucidly presented study, Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America, adds considerable, surprising detail to that claim. Williams’s subject matter is not the dime novel per se, but rather the subgenre of technocratic exploration fiction that flourished largely within that milieu from the 1860s to World War I. The type of story Williams calls technocratic exploration fiction will be immediately recognizable to any reader of early sf. It begins with the invention of a means of transportation and proceeds with the adventures of the inventor and crew in the territory to which the invention gives them access, usually one or another type of frontier. Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) is a familiar, influential early example; E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space (1928) establishes its importance in pulp sf. What is no surprise at all in Williams’s examination of the subgenre is that it often played out imperialist fantasies based on racist assumptions about the non-Western world and its peoples. Williams does add considerable detail and nuance to this aspect of the subgenre’s history. What is more surprising and original in his study, however, is the connection he establishes between these technocratic fantasies and the beginnings of modern American Christian fundamentalism. Where the scientific and technocratic subject matter of the subgenre would lead one to expect secularist views on religion, Williams shows there was instead an abiding concern with supporting literalist readings of the Biblical creation myth and other episodes in the Old Testament. One of the virtues of Williams’s study is his refusal ever to give in to easy generalizations, so this quick summary of the gist of his argument should be understood to give a quite incomplete sense of the fine detail and valuable specificity of his account. He begins with a reading of Edward E. Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), which “established the narrative template for the hundreds of dime novels that followed” (28). Williams’s reading of this novel focuses on the prosthetic character of the eponymous steam man in 210 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) relation to the inventor-genius protagonist, a physically challenged dwarf named Johnny Brainerd. Williams puts the tale in the context of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man Who Was Used Up” (1839) and looks at both Poe and Ellis using Donna Haraway’s well-known “Cyborg Manifesto” as his point of departure. He argues that, while Poe’s satirical short story uses the figure of the cyborg to mock the American reader’s matter-of-fact acceptance of horrific violence and Ellis instead deploys the cyborg largely as an Indian-killing machine on the Western frontier, “the American culture presented by both authors embraces prosthetic technology, at least in part, because it enhances expansionist warfare and material gain” (43). A major turning point in the history of the technocratic exploration subgenre comes with the Frank Reade Jr. novels, beginning in 1876 and ultimately comprising close to two hundred volumes. These are the novels that “make up the...