Errant Natures and Wayward Bodies in Late-Victorian Speculative Fiction

Adrian Tait argues that late-Victorian stories represent an important but still neglected part of a green literary tradition, setting up a dialogue with modernity that is no less relevant today.

Late-Victorian literature is full of fascinating examples of what was then called the “scientific romance,” an emerging form of science or speculative fiction whose concern with the liveliness – or “agentiality” – of the nonhuman animal and more-than-human, natural world today makes it particularly noteworthy. In a succession of short stories and novels, many now forgotten, writers such as Grant Allen, John Davidson, George Griffith, and Henry Marriott Watson dramatized the possibility that “Nature” had not been “conquered” by industrial modernity, but might instead be reacting to it with an unexpected dynamism. Long before environmental issues such as climate change came to the public’s attention, they asked whether humankind might one day inadvertently create existential threats to its own survival. In so doing, these pioneers of sf depicted their world in terms that anticipate the recent new materialist focus on a mutable and dynamic reality, responsive and perhaps resistant to human endeavor.