Resurrecting the Science Fiction of a Nineteenth-Century Lincolnite

My name is Dr Keith Williams, Reader in English at the University of Dundee. I write as a Lincoln alumnus, completing my DPhil in 1991. I have news which may surprise and enthrall you, regarding another former student at Lincoln who matriculated to read Classics in 1862. His name was Robert Duncan Milne (1844-99). I am leading a project to research and re-publish the ‘lost’ work of this prolific science fiction writer. Milne was born in Cupar, in the ‘Kingdom of Fife’, Scotland, about ten miles from where I am writing, but emigrated to America in 1868. He published some sixty-plus science fiction stories, some multi-part and of novella length (as well as scientific articles and autobiographical sketches) in San Francisco periodicals, before being killed in a traffic accident. Although Milne’s career was cut short, our archival research has discovered that he was one of the most significant pioneers of the science fiction genre. He wrote more within it in the 1880s and ’90s than more famous Scottish contemporaries, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. If you factor Milne back into science fiction history, then Scotland’s contribution in the early period expands very significantly. In January 2025 we are publishing what we hope will be the first volume of several critical editions of his work, edited by myself and my former PhD researcher, Ari Brin: 'The Essential Robert Duncan Milne: Stories by the Lost Pioneer of Science Fiction: Robert Duncan Milne (Bloomsbury Academic)'.

Milne became a Science Fiction pioneer after numerous itinerant adventures in the ‘Wild West’ as barman, cook, shepherd and tramp, publishing over two decades from 1879 to 1899, mostly in San Francisco’s The Argonaut and Examiner. Sam Moskowitz, one of the few twentieth-century historians of the genre to have been aware of Milne at all, credited him as America’s first full-time SF writer.[i] However, his work and reputation have disappeared into virtual oblivion. Milne’s origins and early life gave no signs of what he was to become. A gifted Classics scholar destined for the clergy as son of an Episcopalian rector, Milne attended Trinity College, Glenalmond, Perthshire, then the University of Oxford. However, he encountered the evolutionary thought which challenged the theological cosmology of his upbringing and left Lincoln College in mysterious circumstances, without finishing his degree (excessive drinking and traumatic family breakup may have been contributing factors). Milne’s stories often ‘scientise’ archetypal themes from Classical myth, folklore and Scottish gothic fiction, as well as the Spiritualist movement of the time.

At Dundee’s SF Programme, we have been conducting a major research project—including a PhD thesis, a new critical anthology and graphic novel retelling of Milne’s stories in visual form—to show he is a kind of missing link between Scotland and the origins of modern SF, but also a significant figure in SF history internationally. Milne drew on the work of nineteenth-century Scottish and American physicists and inventors such as James Clark Maxwell, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alwa Edison into the possibilities of electromagnetic forces and new communications media. He used this to imagine technologies for overcoming global distances in space and time. Hence Milne’s ideas anticipate today’s networked, online, media-driven world in the age of the telegraph and the infancy of the telephone.

You can listen to Ari Brin and Keith Williams' new podcast about the life and works of Milne at Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever podcast series.

Milne wrote about visual time-travelling as a form of cinematic experience before H.G. Wells in ‘The Palaeoscopic Camera’ (1881) and ‘The Eidoloscope’ (1890). He also foresaw: forms of ‘tele-presencing’ and devices for teleportation and telekinesis (in his ‘Professor Vehr’ sequence of stories (1885)); remote surveillance (‘The Aerial Cone Reflector’ (1881)); worldwide satellite phone communication (‘The Great Electric Diaphragm’ (1879))—not to mention catastrophic climate change (‘Into the Sun’ (1882) and ‘The World’s Last Cataclysm’ (1889)); scientific terrorism and drone warfare (‘The Awful Cataclysm in Ireland’ (1885) and ‘A Question of Reciprocity’ (1891)); cryogenics (‘Ten Thousand Years in Ice’ (1889)) and molecular re-engineering of the body (‘A New Palingenesis’ (1883)). Milne also wrote on: alien life forms (‘A Peep at the Planets’ (1881)); scientific immortality (‘The Man Who Could Not Die’ (1885)); identity theft and personality exchange (‘A Modern Proteus’ (1888) and ‘Brain Transference’ (1891)); lost worlds and the rediscovery of extinct species (‘The Hatching of the Iguanodon’ (1882)); even a technological future after his own medium as writer (‘The Passing of the Printing Press’ (1898)).

Moskowitz credited Milne as the driving force at the heart of a West Coast SF movement including Ambrose Bierce, Gertrude Atherton and Jack London and as more prolific than East Coast pioneers such as Edward Page Mitchell or Brander Matthews. At the time, his fiction was compared with Edgar Allan Poe’s for its creative imagination and with Jules Verne’s for its technical plausibility. Milne’s ideas, as subsequently realised by engineers and technologists, have fundamentally shaped the world we now live in. The Milne story that first presaged Wells’s visualisation of time travel is one of his most remarkable: ‘The Palaeoscopic Camera: How Dead Walls Reveal the Scenes and Secrets of the Past’. It is a fictional take on one of San Francisco’s most famous citizens, pioneering photographer and fellow British emigrant Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s animal locomotion studies had only just used the camera as a machine to see movements too fast for the naked eye and reanimated them by projection, inspiring the invention of the cinematograph in 1895 by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis. Milne seized the idea that photography can reveal things otherwise invisible in time and reimagined Muybridge’s process as a fantastic technology that can unearth events from the remote past and replay them as film-like moving images in the present. Thus he anticipated cinema as a medium for visual time travelling in 1881 years before Wells or the Lumières. As Milne’s journalist narrator describes looking through the camera’s viewfinder:

Scene succeeded scene with such exact and wondrous alternation of form and subject that my attention was spell-bound, and I scarcely knew whether I was gazing at reality or not. Color, form, expression of countenance, habitude of dress, demeanor, gesture – all were there, limned to the life.

Milne was read widely in the US and republished around the world, including continental Europe, England and Wales, and as far away as Australia and New Zealand, though rarely if ever in his native Scotland, alas. His cryogenics story, ‘Ten Thousand Years in Ice’, in which a survivor from an ancient, advanced civilisation is revived in the present, unintentionally became one of science fiction’s great literary hoaxes. Because of the documentary plausibility which became Milne’s trademark style, readers of the Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd took the translation for a scientific eye-witness report. This anticipated the ‘realism of the fantastic’ so often employed in modern SF and particularly associated with Wells’s The War of the Worlds. The 1938 radio adaptation notoriously panicked listeners in America by transferring such techniques into broadcast media, as if the drama were a series of live news flashes.

Though generally enthralled by scientific wonders, Milne’s narrators, like Wells’s, are not simply gung-ho optimists about technological progress. They often sound cautionary notes about the double-edged potential of new inventions or processes to disrupt human life and be turned to sinister ends. In ‘The Eidoloscope’, for example, Milne imagined the possibility of replaying any action or event from the past on a kind of monitor. It raises concerns about universal surveillance and an end to privacy altogether. Similarly, in ‘A Question of Reciprocity’, Milne foresees unmanned aircraft steered by remote control. He signals how destructive this might be in the wrong hands when a helicopter armed with bombs is used to blackmail San Francisco by a foreign power. In ‘The Awful Cataclysm in Ireland,’ a nitro-glycerine powered drill bores through earth’s crust, deliberately creating an artificial volcano and tsunami more devastating than Krakatoa’s recent eruption. In ‘The Centenary of the Elixir’ (1889) psychic time travel reveals a precarious future for humankind: the ironic result of a longevity serum derived from animal glands threatens mass extinction for other species through unsustainable consumption.

Through his writing, Milne created numerous imaginary technologies. Some were close to feasibility, others, way ahead. Ironically, scientific modernity cut Milne’s own career short. A high-functioning alcoholic, his life was terminated on 15 December 1899 when he stumbled in front of one of San Francisco’s new electric cable cars on the corner of Market and Montgomery streets. Thereafter his reputation was virtually buried with him. He had never gathered his work together into a published volume in his lifetime and no one thought to do so until Moskowitz’s 1980 selection of eleven stories (now also a rarity).[ii] The time has come to honour this transatlantic pioneer in his homeland and instate him in his rightful place in the SF canon. We hope our new critical edition of around a third of Milne’s stories will finally begin this process and ensure this ‘ghost of futures past’ will never fade into oblivion again.

References

[i] Sam Moskowitz, Science Fiction in Old San Francisco, Volume I: History of the Movement, 1854–1890 (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant Publishers, 1980), p.249.
[ii] Only selection of eleven stories appeared 81 years after Milne’s death - Sam Moskowitz (ed.) Science Fiction in Old San Francisco, Volume II: Into the Sun and Other Stories by Robert Duncan Milne (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant Publishers, 1980.