Land of the Giants: Size and Scale, Macroscopy and Microscopy in the Landscapes of Science Fiction

A Landscape of the Idea and the Idea of a Landscape

Juxtapositions of size persist as a recurrent element in the landscapes of science fiction. In Johannes Kepler's Somnium, a narrative published in 1634 (1967: vii) but probably written 25 years earlier, the narrator describes a flight 'as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas' (1967: 16) to the small world of Levania (the Moon) which is inhabited by giants. Edward Rosen (1967) renders Kepler's original Latin thus:

The whole of Levania does not exceed fourteen hundred German miles in circumference, that is, only a quarter of our earth. Nevertheless, it has very high mountains, as well as deep and wide valleys; to this extent, it is muych less of a perfect sphere than our earth is. Yet it is all porous and, so to say, perforated with caves and grottoes everywhere [...] these recesses are inhabitants' principle protection from heat and cold [...] Whatever is born on the land or moves about on the land attains a monstrous size. Growth is very rapid. Everything has a short life, since it develops such an immensely massive body. (1967: 27)

It is the seeing of discrepancies of scale in landscapes that are either miniaturized or outsized that introduces overtones of the uncanny or estrangement: the everyday rendered extraordinary and fantastical. Simple shifts in scale are a form of transformation which simultaneously preserves the particular iconicity of a representation, whilst fundamentally transforming the viewer's relationship with it. Shifts in scale are, arguably, a primal form of manipulation; children famously ignore perspective, to draw large those things which dominate their lived experience. Dramatic differentials in scale appear repeatedly in the landscapes of science fiction, either in their embodied form, as giants or more commonly as artefacts constructed by humans or alien others. A subcategory of this sense of the alien could be described as that of 'humans made alien by the passage of time': the trope of the Ozymandian artefact, originating in the distant past – particularly the pre-historic or the post-historic future. The manner and circumstances in which giants are located in science fiction originates in their place within an Arcadian 'landscape of the idea' and inversely, it is through the giant that an idea of landscape is constituted.

In his story The Other World: The States and Empires of the Moon, sometimes published as Journey to the Moon (1654), Cyrano De Bergerac's narrator is captured by beast-men – giants who lope and gallop on all fours – and taken to their city. The landscape of Cyrano's novel is simultaneously that of the Moon and also that of the Book of Genesis: for Cyrano suggests that the stories of the Creation, the Noachic flood and the Earthly paradise are those of interactions between the Earth and our satellite world, whose denizens, reciprocally, regard the Earth as their satellite.

Despite the ostensible familiarity of the biblical/lunar landscape – it is, apparently, that of his religious schooling – Cyrano's narrator finds he does not easily fit in. First castigated by Enoch the Just and expelled from the Garden of Eden, the Narrator's capture by giants takes place in the unknown terrain beyond, when the certainties of the Earthly paradise have been taken from him, reminding us, perhaps, that encounters with new landscapes inevitably raise doubts about belonging.

Cyrano's giant lunar captors make sport of him, attaching him to a lead for the entertainment of a baying mob. A bystander – a visitor from the Sun – eventually speaks to him in Greek, reminding him that much the same would happen to one of the beastmen should he find himself caught by humans. The ensuing dialogue further inscribes Cyrano's Moon as a mirror world to our own, and, mutatis mutandis, the passage between the two involves chiastic cross-overs and inversions. In the sky, we find the grounds of the Earthly Paradise; whilst the human qualities the solar visitor values are not the power and glory of kings, but the humility of hermits. In the Lunar landscape, sexual symbolism of the Narrator's world is likewise reversed or questioned: he is mistaken for the female of his species by his captors and ordered by their King to sleep with another captive man, in the hope they might mate; at court he finds Lunar aliens hanging metal phalluses on their belts as signs of fertility and life, instead of the death-symbolizing swords preferred by their Earthly counterparts.

A Freethinker, a materialist and a lover of both sexes, before becoming a writer, Cyrano had himself, famously, been a brave and adventurous soldier. His short life – he died at the age of 36 – was one that challenged both the territorial and the social precepts of a changing world, and encountered various ambitious constructions designed to reflect upon or effect such changes (from Atomist philosophical circles to the cannon, siege engines and explosive mines at the Siege of Arras). As in his personal life and his writing, so elsewhere: in general, it might seem that European landscapes of the seventeenth century are ones of inversions and reversals – a continent wracked by wars, popular insurgencies and autocratic reaction made all the more vicious by developing pyro-technologies. Intriguingly – but not unpredictably for a student of the materialist philosopher Pierre Gassendi – Cyrano proposes that stories of supernatural phenomena such as 'shades [...] spectres, and phantoms' are, in fact, remembered past visits to Earth by these alien visitors from the Sun, who live for 'three or four thousand years'. Cyrano's worldview is one that therefore recognizes the power of Ur-myths.

Not surprisingly, given such a terrain of refractions and reversals, in Cyrano's Journey to the Moon, we find the figure of Diogenes referenced. An emphasis upon presentation of the historical event rather than the representation of history itself, reflected in the extolment of the hermit, similarly finds accord with the actions of the Cynics of the ancient world, who often sought to performatively invert or reverse the accepted orders, values and hierarchies of the world around them. The Cynics preferred action over theoretical reflection and an ascetic life of truth and virtue over the acquisition of wealth and power. In a fabled encounter between Diogenes and Alexander the Great, wherein,...