by Ernest Hogan
At first, I thought A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future would be an example of antediluvian space opera, and it started off with explorers on Jupiter, hunting kaiju-like beasts.
I settled down to enjoy pulpy action and
obsolete science, but then there’s an entire chapter explaining a movement to
straighten the Earth’s axis and the improvements it would cause. Talk about
climate change! Was this humor? Satire?
Turns out it's quite serious.
Taking place in the year 2000, wealthy American entrepreneurs have brought progress to the world. The guys on the expedition, along with developing an interplanetary vehicle that uses a gravity-blocking metal similar to the one in H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon (Journey was published in 1898, H.G.’s book was first serialized in The Strand Magazine from November 1900 to June 1901). The future looks bright and they are willing to take credit for it.
The author, John Jacob Astor IV, of the wealthy Astor family, was such a man, an inventor as well as a real estate developer, investor,and lieutenant colonel in the Spanish-American war. He was also an inventor of, among other things, a “vibratory disintegrator” for producing gas from peat moss. A model for his characters and today’s tech billionaires, he was worth around $87 million ($2.64 billion in 2022 dollars) when he died in the sinking of the Titanic.
In a flashback that gives the backstory of the expedition, the crew sings the praises of progress and capitalism, and the fact that Christianity is dominating the Earth, and white people who speak English are the coming thing:
“English, as we have seen, is already the language of 600,000,000 people, and the number is constantly increasing through its adoption by the numerous races of India, where, even before the close of the last century, it was about as important as Latin during the greatness of Rome, and by the fact that the Spanish and Portuguese elements in Mexico and Central and South America show a constant tendency to die out, much as the population of Spain fell from 30,000,000 to 17,000,000 during the nineteenth century. As this goes on, in the Western hemisphere, the places left vacant are gradually filled by the more progressive Anglo-Saxons, so that it looks as if the study of ethnology in the future would be very simple.”
A variation of the “Vanishing Americans” theory that I kept hearing about when I was a kid. The opposite of the current fears over the Border, and what I once heard a British tourist say in Oaxaca, “They breed like rabbits, you know.”
It’s the colonial mentality that Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti sang about.
Having determined that Venus and Mars are uninhabitable, they set off for Jupiter. That turns out to be a giant Earth, but without gravity like our planet. They see it as ripe for colonization, or development, as they say these days:
“How I should like to mine those hills for copper, or drain the swamps to the south!" exclaimed Col. Bearwarden. “The Lake Superior mines and the reclamation of the Florida Everglades would be nothing to this.”
“Any inhabitants we may find here have so much land at their disposal that they will not need to drain swamps on account of pressure of population for some time," put in the doctor.
Of course, a big planet means big life forms. Soon they are hunting mastodons, dinosaurs, and other creatures that are even larger than they would be on Earth. And the monsters turn out to be good eating.
Imagine the colonies that would come into being: slaughterhouses, strip mines, factories, and suburbs with restaurants and fast food joints specializing in dinosaur steaks, hamburgers, and tacos!
They also find beasts with limbs neatly sliced off, and speculate:
“By all the gods!” exclaimed Bearwarden, “it is easy to see the method in this; the hunters have again cut off only those parts that could be easily rolled. These Jovian fellows must have weapons compared with which the old scythe chariots would be but toys, with which they amputate the legs of their victims. We must see to it that their scimitars do not come too near to us, and I venture to hope that in our bullets they will find their match.”
However, they do not run into the giant Jovian hunters.
If this all wasn’t enough, they go to Saturn, where they find dragons, and the spirits of dead people from Earth. One of the guys finds an old girlfriend from college. Not the afterlife that Christian fundamentalist are hard selling these days, more like the Spiritualism movement of the time. Astor does his best to give it all a scientific rationale.
Before laughing, proto-Afrofuturist Sun Ra always said, straight-faced, that he was from Saturn, one of Ray Bradbury’s most famous stories is “Mars is Heaven,” lots of folks interpreted the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey as being about divine intervention, Gene Roddenberry’s first concept for a Star Trek movie had the Enterprise finding God, and I have personally met people who believe that the occupants of UFOs–excuse me–UAPs are not extraterrestrial aliens, but angels.
People have a way of fitting their spiritual beliefs into whatever futuristic, sci-fi reality they find themselves living in.
Too bad Astor was on the Titanic, his later ideas about the future and space travel would have been amusing.
Ernest Hogan is the Father of Chicano Sci-Fi, his first story collection, Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus is coming soon.
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