On the 23 of January, Bloomsbury Academic published a lost piece of Scottish and transatlantic literary history, recovered as part of an ongoing project based at the University of Dundee: The Essential Robert Duncan Milne: Stories by the Lost Pioneer of Science Fiction: Robert Duncan Milne: Bloomsbury Academic
This collection co-edited by Dr Keith Williams, Reader in English, University of Dundee, with Science Fiction programme graduate Ari Brin, based in California, showcases the writing of Scottish-born Robert Duncan Milne (1844-99), a forgotten pioneer. Milne was hailed as the first full-time science fiction writer in America. This critical edition – the first in 126 years – constitutes the most expansive collection of Milne’s writing ever published, placing his life, works and themes into their historical, literary and scientific contexts. Astonishingly prescient, Milne makes clear the often-obscured contribution of both Scotland and California in the development of the science fiction genre.
Milne was born in Cupar, Fife, but emigrated to California in 1868. He became a science fiction pioneer after many itinerant adventures in the American West (which he also wrote about), publishing mostly in San Francisco’s Argonaut and Examiner periodicals from 1879. His contribution to Early science fiction was greater than Scottish contemporaries Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was often compared to Jules Verne’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s, but disappeared into oblivion after Milne died prematurely.
A gifted Classics scholar destined for the clergy as son of Cupar’s Episcopalian rector, Milne attended Glenalmond College, then the University of Oxford where he encountered the evolutionary thought which challenged the theological cosmology of his upbringing. Milne’s stories often ‘scientise’ themes from Classical myth, folklore and Scottish gothic fiction. He speculated about electromagnetic forces, imagining technologies overcoming distances in space and time. In 1881 he wrote about time-travelling as cinematic experience before H.G. Wells. Milne foresaw today’s tele-presencing, remote visualisation, satellite phone systems, climate change, scientific terrorism and cryogenics. He also wrote on: alien life; molecular resurrection; forensic technology; identity theft and personality exchange; lost advanced civilisations; revival of extinct species; etc. Milne’s ideas anticipate today’s networked, online, media-driven world.
Milne was republished round the world, though rarely if ever in Scotland. His story about reviving an ancient iceman unintentionally became an international hoax. Because of Milne’s trademark documentary plausibility, it was taken as an eye-witness report. Enthralled by progress, Milne nonetheless cautioned about disruptive technologies turned to sinister ends, such as universal surveillance, criminality and drone warfare. Ironically, modernity cut Milne’s career short. A high-functioning alcoholic, who never gathered his work into book form, he was killed by one of San Francisco’s new electric cable cars, just before the dawn of the new century which his science fiction did so much to foresee.
The Essential Robert Duncan Milne features a foreword by Ken MacLeod, Scotland’s leading contemporary science fiction writer, as well as illustrations by comics artist, Norrie Millar (who is also working with Professor Chris Murray and Keith Williams to adapt Milne’s work into graphic novel form). It contains a critical and historical introduction, ‘The Ghost of Futures Past’, and is organised into Thematic Clusters, which showcase many aspects of Milne’s pioneering themes:
- ‘The Artificial Eyes and Ears of Science: Early Imaginings of Global Telecommunication Systems and Surveillance Devices’;
- ‘Science Fiction Crime Stories: The Impact of Technology on Human Matters and “Karmic” Justice in the Modern Age’;
- Scientizing Spiritualism: Stories of Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, and Teleportation’;
- ‘Bodies without Limits: Stories of Transfusions, Youth-Elixirs, and Radical Surgeries’;
- ‘Apocalypse and Things to Come: Visions of Possible Futures’.
Featuring around a third of Milne’s science fiction stories, it is hoped that this will be the first of several volumes which will finally give him his rightful place in the Scottish and transatlantic literary canon.
A Milne comics anthology produced by Keith Williams and Chris Murray is now available here.