![Illustration from Albert Robida's 'Le vingtième siècle [The twentieth century]' (Paris, 1880s) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)](https://i0.wp.com/hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2016/03/fantasticworlds05.jpg?resize=700%2C558&quality=100)
Illustration from Albert Robida’s ‘Le vingtième siècle’ (‘The twentieth century,’ Paris, 1880s) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)
WASHINGTON, DC — Science fiction rose to prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when authors like H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Mary Shelley imagined the extraordinary possibilities of advances in technology and exploration. Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780–1910, on view in the newly renovated Smithsonian Libraries Gallery at the National Museum of American History, centers on this era of change and the dreams both dark and hopeful it inspired.
Curated by Kirsten van der Veen and Doug Dunlop, the exhibition is small, but ambitious. Everything from the laying of the transatlantic cable to the popularity of home aquariums is touched on, with plenty of early robots, airships, and Arctic explorers in between. The emphasis of the exhibition is on books, with some objects from the Smithsonian joining in the busy glass boxes in the dark gallery. It’s a shame there aren’t more of these objects though, as some are just teased in photographs, like an unsettling mechanized “creeping baby doll” from 1871 held by the museum.

One of the earliest aerial views of Earth, from Thomas Baldwin’s ‘Airopaidia: Containing the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion from Chester, the Eighth of September, 1785’ (London, 1785) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, gift of the Burndy Library) (click to enlarge)
A coinciding online exhibition explores the ideas more thoroughly, with better room for text than the gallery walls. Nevertheless, the physical iteration of Fantastic Worlds includes many beautiful and rare books from the Smithsonian Libraries, such as Rudyard Kipling’s 1909 With the Night Mail — set in the year 2000 in a world populated by airships, its deep blue cover showing a dirigible soaring amid the stars — and Thomas Baldwin’s 1875 Airopaidia, which features some of the first aerial illustrations of the Earth.
Arranged in seven sections, including “Age of the Aeronaut” and “Terra Incognita,” Fantastic Worlds compares concrete science to the fiction it influenced. Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, with its reanimated corpse, followed physician Luigi Galvani’s experiments with the “animal electricity” he perceived when his charged scalpel touched a dead frog’s leg and made it kick, and coincided the rise of electrical shocks used for medical treatments in the 19th century. Jules Verne channeled the doomed Franklin expedition to the Arctic in his 1864 The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, although in that tale his fictional crew found a volcano at the North Pole instead of resorting to cannibalism. A few years later, Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea delved into pioneering ocean exploration, with Captain Nemo’s submersible the Nautilus inspired by the author’s viewing of a French submarine at the Paris Exposition of 1867.

Objects related to flight in ‘Fantastic Worlds’ (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

R.M. Ballantyne’s ‘The Battery and the Boiler, or Adventures in the Laying of Submarine Electric Cables’ (New York, 1883, left) and a transatlantic cable souvenir made by Glass, Elliot & Co., and Tiffany & Co. (right) in ‘Fantastic Worlds’ (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
Strangely for an exhibition at an institution of US history, much of the work is European, and it would have been interesting to explore how even American writers not generally inclined to write fantasy were experimenting with science fiction narratives. For example, Jack London wrote The Iron Heel (1908), musing on a future United States where democracy had turned to oligarchy, and Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court involved time travel.
However, one of the most fleshed out incidents — the “Great Moon Hoax” of 1885 — was based in New York City. Richard Adams Locke with The Sun newspaper published fictional reports from real British astronomer John Herschel that he had spotted life on the moon, specifically “manbats.” It was intended as satire, but the public loved it so much that, according to the Smithsonian, “the Sun’s owner would not allow Locke to expose the truth.” As an odd footnote, none other than horror and mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe had penned his own moon hoax before The Sun, and was outraged at what he perceived as plagiarism. Like much of Fantastic Worlds, the incident pivots at the intersection of science and fiction, at a time when both fields were looking to a future that would surely be just as wondrous as it was strange.

A medical induction coil by Benjamin Pike Jr. (New York, 1850) on view in ‘Fantastic Worlds’ (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
![Sheet music for “Northward Ho!, or, Baffled, Not Beaten” (London, 1879) with words by Commander John P. Cheyne; music by Odoardi [i.e. Odoardo] Barri (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)](https://i0.wp.com/hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2016/03/fantasticworlds01.jpg?resize=700%2C946&quality=100)
Sheet music for “Northward Ho!, or, Baffled, Not Beaten” (London, 1879) with words by Commander John P. Cheyne; music by Odoardi [i.e. Odoardo] Barri (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries). Cheyne was a veteran of three Arctic expeditions that searched for the missing explorer John Franklin and his crew. His lecture tour and the song publication were aimed at gaining public support.

“Frank Reade, Jr. and His Engine of the Clouds” (New York, 1903), from ‘Frank Reade Weekly Magazine’ (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, gift of the Burndy Library). The ‘Frank Reade Weekly Magazine’ was a popular series of dime novels, starring Reade as a brilliant, world-traveling inventor.

Illustration from Albert Robida’s ‘Le vingtième siècle: la vie électrique’ (‘The twentieth century: the electric life,’ Paris, 1893) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)

Harry Kennedy, ‘The Flying Man, or the Adventures of a Young Inventor,’ from The Boy’s Star Library (New York, 1891) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)
![Illustration from Leopoldo Galluzzo's 'Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herschel [Other lunar discoveries from Signor Herschel]' (Naples, 1836) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)](https://i0.wp.com/hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2016/03/fantasticworlds07.jpg?resize=700%2C844&quality=100)
Illustration from Leopoldo Galluzzo’s ‘Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herschel’ (‘Other lunar discoveries from Signor Herschel,’ Naples, 1836) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)

Gustave Doré’s illustration of a ship sailing to the moon from ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ (London, 1867) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries)

Illustration from Asa Smith’s ‘Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States’ (New York, 1849) (courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, gift of the Burndy Library)
Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780–1910 from the Smithsonian Libraries continues through February 26, 2017, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (1 West 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC).
super cool. also, contemporary art could use some more science fiction — that is, looking forward, not backwards (shows about “the archive”, constant nods to modernism, reappraising histories, the (re)making of familiar objects, etc. here’s to the future!