Garrett P. Serviss's Masterwork: "The Second Deluge"
By Joseph Wrzos
Over the centuries a good many authors have borrowed -- for their own special literary purposes -- the widely circulated Biblical story of Noah and the Flood. In the nineteenth century, for example, there was Mark Twain's eruptive "Letters from the Earth" (posthumous publication of which his daughter blocked, judging the text atypical of her father's true beliefs, but she finally relented in 1962), in which Satan -- corresponding with some archangel friends -- charges the Creator with apparently not having the foggiest notion of how to construct a practical ark ("it had no rudder...no sails...no compass," etc.) and with leaving the refinements to Noah, who knowing even less about such matters, understandably made a botch of it. Warming to his subject, Satan goes on to accuse God of sparing the patriarch and his family (all of them "full to the eyebrows" with microbes) not because of Noah's righteousness but just to make sure that future generations of mankind would not be spared the debilitating effects of disease.
With no trace of Twain's vitriol but with equal ingenuity, Edward Page Mitchell (1852-1827), an editor of the New York Sun and occasional contributor of anonymous science fiction to its pages, also made good use of the Noachic account. According to the Mitchell version, "The Story of the Deluge" (New York Sun, April 28, 1875) (1), Noah kept a log, recently translated, in which he laments some of the trials of life aboard an ark. One entry reveals that the last pterodactyl had been eaten the day before; another, that the bitter ale and mastodons were now also all gone -- such references to now extinct species slyly twitting the reliability of the original account. However, since the piece was intended for a newspaper audience presumably much more interested in the political fauna of its own day than in deluvian speculations, Mitchell also provided a few subtle barbs for the then Senator from Maine, the Honorable Hannibal Hamlin (Lincoln's running mate in 1860). According to the startling revelations in "The Story of the Deluge," the Senator could apparently trace his ancestry back to one of the passengers on the ark, Habl Hamin, a victim of scurvy so severe that Noah had to put him ashore in the vicinity of what is now Maine, where he could seek some relief by subsisting on huckleberries. After a period of convalescence, the castaway went inland, founded a village (naming it after himself), and immediately ran for some public office. His descendants, presumably, have been doing the same ever since.
As both Twain and Mitchell showed, at least in the short narrative form, the Story of the Flood was an ideal subject for satirizing faith (by juxtaposing Darwinian theory and Scriptural claim) or for gibing at local politicians. But in 1911, the basic idea of a deluge powerful enough to engulf the entire world -- not just, as legend had it, such relatively limited areas as the Mediterranean Valley, or Georgia and the Caspian region (2) -- would receive what is considered to be its definitive treatment in science fiction. For in that year journalist, astronomer, lecturer and science-fiction novelist Garrett P Serviss's The Second Deluge began to run serially in Frank A. Munsey's Cavalier magazine.
By the time Serviss began writing The Second Deluge, it was ca..1910, the same year witnessing the death of Mark Twain and the passage of Earth through the tail of Halley's Comet, accompanied by sensational and -- as it turned out -- unfounded predictions of cosmic doom disseminated by the press. None of these lurid accounts could have come from the Serviss pen, since he was too well qualified to confuse journalistic fancy with scientific fact.
Born on March 24, 1851, in Sharon Springs, N.Y. (and descended from a long line of pre-Revolutionary settlers in the Mohawk valley), Garrett Putnam Serviss was educated both at Cornell and Columbia University, receiving from the latter the degree of LL.B. But young Serviss never practiced law, preferring journalism and science instead, particularly astronomy, a boyhood passion that he apparently developed while going out to bring in the cows beneath the starry -- still unpolluted -- skies above his father's farm. Both of these interests he combined by writing popular articles on astronomy and other scientific subjects, first for the New York Tribune, then for the New York Sun, where he served (between 1882 and 1892) as editorial writer and night editor at the same time that E.P. Mitchell, a long-time friend, was employed as editor and occasional contributor of seminal science fiction.
So popular did Serviss's astronomy articles become -- they were published anonymously, a policy which occasioned much reader speculation as to the true identity of the "Sun's Astronomer" -- that by 1892, then in his forties, he decided to give up the steady grind of journalistic deadlines for the more lucrative schedule of the lecture platform, where (with the aid of elaborate lantern slides) he proved to be equally effective at popularizing the study of astronomy across the land. At the same time he managed to find time to make several trips to Europe (echoes of which can be detected in the "Paris Under the Sea" and the "French Pyrenees" sections of The Second Deluge). Indefatigable, apparently, he also continued writing articles and books (primarily on astronomy); taught an astronomy course evenings in the public schools of New York; and -- in collaboration with S.V. White, a fellow enthusiast -- founded the American Astronomical Society, whose initial members sometimes met at the Serviss home to peer through the telescope he had installed for study of the stars.
Much more significantly, by the turn of the century Serviss began adapting his considerable imaginative gifts and scientific interests to purely fictional forms, to what is now called science fiction but which Serviss himself probably thought of as scientific romances. In Other Worlds (3) (one of his more popular works on astronomy, still in print as late as 1932), he revealed that he was thoroughly familiar with much of the science fiction available in his own day, both the "classics" such as Lucian and the "moderns" like H.G. Wells, for whose War of the Worlds (1897) Serviss wrote his own sequel, (4) in which earth retaliates against the Red Planet before it can mount a second invasion force and finish what it had started on its first strike at our world. He also disclosed some of his own theories on what made for good science fiction, emphasizing the sf writer's obligation to make effective use of the hints provided by modern science as a guide for speculation and to lend verisimilitude to his narrative.(5)
Serviss continued to make good use of the hints offered by contemporary science whenever he again turned his pen to a new piece of science fiction. In The Moon Metal (1900), for example, the basic premise is that to replace gold (suddenly too plentiful) as a standard of international currency, a new metal, artemisium, is secretly (by means of a matter-transmission device) beamed down from the moon. However, in time, the substitute metal also loses its value because too many learn the process for producing it and flood the market. In A Columbus of Space (1909), even more originative, an atomic-powered spaceship reaches Venus and finds two humanoid cultures, the one on the light-side going mad once in a lifetime when the cloudy atmosphere thins enough to admit the full force of the sun's high-intensity rays -- a theme foreshadowing the basic concept in Isaac Asimov's brilliant novelet, "Nightfall" (Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1941).
Innovative and convincing as his earlier science fiction was, near the end of his career, as an sf writer at least, Serviss began what he might well have thought of as his magnum opus. In The Second Deluge (1911), he would fuse all his passion for astronomy, all his faith in reason and science, and level a critical eye at mankind's irrationalities when poised on the edge of doom. And he would do so not by recycling the tale of Noah's ordeal humorously or anachronistically (as Twain, Mitchell, and a host of others did), but by posing a simple question which few, if any, had asked before him: Assuming the First Deluge to have been worldwide, instead of local and historically exaggerated, when the Lord ordered all the "fountains of the great deep" to break up and "the windows of heaven" to open (a directive resulting in forty days and forty nights of continuous downpour), precisely "where" did all that water really come from, and precisely how much of it was needed to drown the entire world?
Instead of speculating on that question from a terrestrial viewpoint, however, it was typical of Serviss, oriented toward the starry skies and the future shocks in store for man, to hypothesize on a cosmic scale. To consider the possibility that the enormous quantities of water required to do a thorough job ("quintrillions of tons" of it, as Cosmo Versal, Serviss's Scientist-as-Noah, estimates) might have come from the depths of space in the form of a giant spiral nebula consisting of watery vapor on a collision course with Earth. And if -- at the Lord's behest or through the vagaries of an indifferent universe -- such a catastrophe had indeed occurred 6,000 years ago, could it not conceivably happen once again, perhaps on an even greater scale? If so, despite the Lord's covenant never again to "curse the ground any more for man's sake" (even deity can have a change of heart) the next time there might be absolutely no warning to anyone at all!
As a scientist, Serviss would, of course, have admitted the possibility of a nebular flood or some such similar catastrophe looming into earth's pathway through space. (Fresh in his thoughts, at the time he was working on the story, must have been the sight of Halley's Comet fanning out across the evening sky, amid all the hue and cry from press and public.) He would also have recognized
that in the case of a watery nebula, invisible to the naked eye and to telescopic observation, the only kind of person likely to be on guard against such an impending cataclysm would a scientist, not the Establishment professional, who tends to see the past in the future, but the maverick (someone like Cosmo Versal or Serviss himself), who tries to glimpse the future in the future.
Besides recognizing that the story of a truly cosmic deluge, one still allowing for the possibility of survival by a few, would best be unfolded in a future setting, Serviss -- like most visionaries -- probably could not resist opting for tomorrow because it also allowed him to express, by indirection, some of his discontent with his own time, a period for the most part no more partial to reason and science than our own. True, in his portrait of tomorrow (ca. A.D. 2000, as he envisioned it almost a century earlier), he does foresee some progress, mostly
geopolitical, such as the attempts to set limits for weapons of war. Submarines, for instance, have been outlawed as too destructive for conventional warfare,
and the dropping of explosive bombs by aerial navies has been prohibited by international agreement. Serviss's A.D. 2000 is also a time of high-speed travel by giant and small-scale "aeros" that fly swiftly between the great cities of the globe. Genetics has also made some significant advances in the production of experimental breeds of king-size livestock such as the great Australian rabbit (edible) and the giant California cow, which yields twenty times the quantity and equal the quality of the best milk produced by any of our own breeds. And in the Sahara the percentage of the world's arable land has been increased considerably by the reclamation of large areas converted into viable farming communities.
Offsetting these signs of progress, however, are some disturbing indications that A.D. 2000 could also be a time of backsliding. For in the earlier part of the century, although a "Second Revolution" had swept away rampant capitalism and corrupt government, establishing -- in their place - "reforms in business methods and social ideals," on the eve of the Great Nebula's arrival, the pendulum had begun to swing back. Monopoly was burgeoning once more, moral laxity again began to settle in "high places," along with a never quite satisfied itch to revive full-scale wars that really meant business. Worst of all -- from the viewpoint of Cosmo Versal (and Serviss) in the very teeth of the scientific evidence that Doom bore down upon them, the great majority of mankind -- despite the scares engendered by the Three Signs of the approaching flood (heat, storm, darkness), all predicted by Versal -- persisted in taking their cue from bewildered and frightened world leaders, who publicly advocated calm but privately made secret preparations, just in case. As for Cosmo Versal and his nagging predictions, obviously, though brilliant in his own way, on the question of the nebula, the man was something of a fool, a fit subject for burlesque in the music halls. In the world of tomorrow, then -- in the Serviss view -- prophets will still be without honor, even on their own planet.
It is this world that Serviss, somewhat like his "predecessor" (if we think of the creator of fictional worlds as a kind of demigod in his own right), chooses to wipe out, except for about three million Americans (he can be forgiven his touch of chauvinism) who are spared when Pike's Peak and vicinity are thrust above the rising flood by subterranean activity (the batholite, as Professor Pludder, Serviss's stereotype for the Establishment scientist, explains it). These survivors, however, are leavened by the hand-picked thousand Versal set out with in his ark, though the number aboard the ship had been slightly augmented by the addition of some "undesirables" whom the great scientist, humane despite his genius, could not bring himself to consign to doom.
In this respect, the tempering of genius with compassion, the readiness to adapt to the contingencies of changing circumstance, particularly when brought about by the unexpected intrusion of random factors, Cosmo Versal (who did, after all, spare the corrupt industrialist, Amos Blank, when he had it in his power not to) is somewhat like the man who created him. Both of them remaining productive even unto their final years -- and each lived a long time -- Versal, spending the rest of his days "inventing" a New America on top of Pike's Peak, Serviss, his imagination still keen, writing productively and ingeniously, even to the end, apparently. For at the age of 77 (he would die a year later, on May 25, 1929), just before sailing to Europe, one more time, when accosted by reporters eager for an interview, the veteran journalist cordially obliged. Feeding their need for "copy," he speculated on the possibility of using dirigible balloons to place huge telescopes at altitudes high enough to reduce atmospheric interference with astronomical observation.
But if Serviss were (somehow) alive today, still granting interviews and speculating under analogous circumstances (perhaps on TV), he would certainly substitute the term satellite for dirigible balloon, but most likely not mention the subject at all, knowing full well that the Hubble Telescope had been placed into orbit more than a decade earlier. Still, considering his track record, Serviss would probably manage to come up with something else completely original for getting us closer to the stars that had fascinated him ever since boyhood. An idea that most of us probably couldn't even begin to guess at. For that is the fundamental difference between foresight on the genius level and the hindsight of those who miss the Ark in every age.
Footnotes:
1. Reprinted in the Crystal Man, Landmark Science Fiction, by Edward Page Mitchell, collected and with a biographical perspective by Sam Moskowitz (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday and Co., 1973).
2. H.G. Wells, The Outline of History (N.Y., Macmillan Co., 1927), p. 248.
3. Garrett P. Serviss, Other Worlds (N.Y., D. Appleton and Co., 1901), p. 2.
4. Garrett P. Serviss, Edison's Conquest of Mar*, published serially in the New York Evening Journal, Jan 12 - February 10, 1898, and subsequently in book form by Carcosa House (Los Angeles, 1947).
5 - Serviss, Other Worlds, p. 2.
The foregoing, in its original form, served as the introduction to the 1947 reprint edition of Serviss's The Second Deluge copyrighted by Hyperion Press. The revised version of that piece is reproduced here by permission of the author.
Copyright 2001 by Joseph Wrzos
The cover image of Fantastic Novels shown is of the July 1948 issue, which reprinted The Second Deluge (most likely in abridged form). If you have available a cover scan for any of the Cavalier issues that included The Second Deluge and would be willing to share them, The Pulp Rack would like to post them with this article.
Links:
The Second Deluge, from the Classics of Science Fiction series published by Hyperion Press, is listed at Amazon.com. Click here.
Columbus of Space, another entry in Hyperion Press' Classics of Science Fiction series, is also listed at Amazon. Click here.
Posted by ds at November 27, 2002 03:13 PM
