The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall by Edgar Allan Poe (1835)

I read a few stories by Poe in my twenties, but only a few of them, so I’m filling in the gaps now. I’ve just finished “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” which I had not heard of before, even though it’s one of the first ever science fiction stories. I enjoyed it a lot, not particularly because of its literary merit — although I do think it’s quite good — but because there’s something odd about it that I’m trying to put my finger on.

It purports to be about Hans Pfaall, a “mender of bellows” in Rotterdam who suffers poverty when demand for his services dries up (which he somehow blames on political radicalism). Hounded by his creditors, he decides to kill himself, but then, on discovering some books on mechanics and “Speculative Astronomy,” he decides instead to escape his debts by building a balloon and travelling to the Moon. After five years he sends a letter to Earth by balloon — delivered by a homuncular creature claimed in the letter to be a resident of the Moon — to tell everyone what he’s been doing. But later we find out that Pfaall has in all likelihood been hanging out on Earth with his cronies the whole time, sailing around the world and getting drunk back in Holland. The story of the Moon voyage contained in the letter was an elaborate scheme to fake Pfaall’s disappearance.

On top of that, Poe apparently meant the story as a hoax. This is hard to understand now, not only because he undermines the hoax at the close of the frame narrative but also because the story of the Moon voyage itself is incredible, and is introduced in an obviously comedic manner. My resulting confusion is part of what I’m trying to work out here.

I saw a Goodreads review that included this comment:

I’m blown away by how many modern concepts are in this 19th century story.

My feeling is the opposite: I’m blown away by how outdated the story is. And for me, this is part of what makes it so fascinating and charming. Science fiction progressed beyond this stuff more than a century ago. Where can we find, today, stories about balloon rides to the Moon and diminutive extra-terrestrial men who wear “sky-blue satin, with tight breeches to match, fastened with silver buckles at the knees.” Certainly not in science fiction. Who even writes about the moon these days?

The story is intentionally comic, but there’s something weird and unnerving as well. It has some touches of horror: the description of the hero’s physical distress on his way out of the atmosphere is quite gruesome, and on the dark side of the Moon there are “dark and hideous mysteries.” But it’s more than that. It feels like a glimpse into a lost world, and it was quite hard for me as a reader to get my bearings. What is the balance here between serious scientific speculation and satire, or between scientific romance and pure comedy, or between thriller and hoax?

Poe spends interminable paragraphs on scientific description which is ultimately boring and unclear — do these passages reflect Poe’s genuine interests or is he satirizing something? He cannot be satirizing Verne, since the direction of influence was from this story to Verne. Explicitly, he seems to be targeting “speculative astronomers,” those who would speculate about men on the Moon. But this wouldn’t justify the pains to which Poe goes in order to make the balloon journey seem scientifically explicable, in what has now become the conventional mode of hard science fiction. Even if it’s not the very first SF story, it might be the first hard SF story.

What makes it more than comedy is Poe’s serious enthusiasm. We see this in the science, in the excitement of the journey itself, and also in his imaginative descriptions and his wonder in the face of nature and the cosmos:

The view of the earth, at this period of my ascension, was beautiful indeed. To the westward, the northward, and the southward, as far as I could see, lay a boundless sheet of apparently unruffled ocean, which every moment gained a deeper and a deeper tint of blue and began already to assume a slight appearance of convexity. At a vast distance to the eastward, although perfectly discernible, extended the islands of Great Britain, the entire Atlantic coasts of France and Spain, with a small portion of the northern part of the continent of Africa. Of individual edifices not a trace could be discovered, and the proudest cities of mankind had utterly faded away from the face of the earth. From the rock of Gibraltar, now dwindled into a dim speck, the dark Mediterranean sea, dotted with shining islands as the heaven is dotted with stars, spread itself out to the eastward as far as my vision extended, until its entire mass of waters seemed at length to tumble headlong over the abyss of the horizon, and I found myself listening on tiptoe for the echoes of the mighty cataract. Overhead, the sky was of a jetty black, and the stars were brilliantly visible.

Incidentally, you can see from this quotation that here Poe is writing in his relatively restrained, prosaic style, which to me is far more gripping than his Gothic mode, which gets too declamatory for my taste.

Literary liminality

The story is interesting also because of what it lets us see: the attitudes and the state of knowledge of Poe’s contemporary society; the state of literature at the time; and the origin of modern science fiction. But most of all, I think, what I like is that it lets us see these things only dimly, giving it an unintentionally mysterious and alien quality for readers today (at least this reader).

But that’s too vague. I still haven’t got to the bottom of my fascination. What is it, exactly, that makes it weird and haunting? I’m going to make a move now which is liable to make some people groan, since it risks being a cliché: one way of looking at the story is through the lens of liminality, specifically that of liminal spaces, which can be applied metaphorically to the aesthetic of the story. As I alluded to above, it occupies an uncertain area somewhere between, on the one hand, sincerely executed adventure, scientific romance, and scientific speculation; and on the other hand, cynical comedy and satire.

Furthermore, I suspect that the weird quality I’ve detected is a result of the story’s position at the beginning of a line of literary descent, and at the beginning of the process of technical innovation and industrialization that ushered in what we now call the modern world: we are familiar with the elements — scientific speculation, space travel, little aliens, satire — but they seem off-balance to us where we are now, at the other end of that line. There is an eerie liminality in the story’s uncertain place between the pre-modern and the modern. It lies in a literary uncanny valley.

I googled “literary uncanny valley” out of curiosity and found that SF writer John Scalzi had had a similar idea, which actually puts some more meat on the bones of my thesis:

Individual writers aside, nearly all “Golden Age” science fiction is in a sort of literary “uncanny valley” right now, as it’s too old to reflect the current world and its values, but too new to be situated “in its time,” the way, say, Austen (or Wells, Verne or Shelley) is.

— https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1375066545894854656

Obviously he’s applying it to a later period, but it’s the same idea.

Hollow Earth

Wikimedia Commons

Before I conclude, it’s worth noting Poe’s flirtation with the Hollow Earth theory. A few days after he sets off, Hans Pfaall passes high above the North Pole:

Northwardly from that huge rim before mentioned, and which, with slight qualification, may be called the limit of human discovery in these regions, one unbroken, or nearly unbroken, sheet of ice continues to extend. In the first few degrees of this its progress, its surface is very sensibly flattened, farther on depressed into a plane, and finally, becoming not a little concave, it terminates, at the Pole itself, in a circular centre, sharply defined, whose apparent diameter subtended at the balloon an angle of about sixty–five seconds, and whose dusky hue, varying in intensity, was, at all times, darker than any other spot upon the visible hemisphere, and occasionally deepened into the most absolute and impenetrable blackness. Farther than this, little could be ascertained.

Here he’s describing a hole at the North Pole, which according to the theory opens into the Earth’s hollow interior. He had already incorporated this in his 1833 story, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and would return to it again in 1838, in his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Apparently some critics have claimed that in these stories Poe was satirizing the theory, and that in his adventure stories in general he was satirizing speculative science, but I don’t buy it: it seems clear to me that he was genuinely into this stuff.

To conclude: the story is a curiosity of the best kind and, aside from the skippable boring bits, powerfully written and great fun. Recommended.