Science fiction authors have often taken locations that were poorly understood at the time and used these for their stories (H.G Wells with Mars for example). Before explorers had charted the Arctic and Antarctic, was there ever a time of such fantasies set in the (then) unknown polar regions?

by Cataphractoi

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ANTARCTICA, PART ONE: TRAVELER'S TALES AND LOST WORLDS

Unsurprisingly, Antarctic literature in general has focused on the "unknown" - even up until today with modern novels from mega-blockbuster authors like Clive Cussler. Yet Antarctic literature broadly evolved from the "traveler's tales" and "lost world" genres of fiction, where the unknown is exciting, into horror - where the unknown is best left unknown.

The evolution of Antarctic literature broadly begins with those aforementioned "traveler's tales". In this genre, the main character typically takes on the role of a diplomat, explorer, or hapless everyman who travels to locations with wildly different customs from his or her own, with the crux of the story often being whimsical comparisons to one's own life that's wrapped into the explorer's narrative. Famous examples include More's Utopia and Gulliver's eponymous travels. For Antarctica, one of the earliest and most well-known examples in traveler's tales is Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). In Poe's only full-length novel, Pym ventures in the southern hemisphere and ends with him and sailor Dirk Peters traveling toward the South Pole. They interact with natives on lands near the continent, explore the vast landscapes, and meet an assumed end during a horrific storm, though the novel anticipates there were more chapters written yet lost (a not-uncommon trope in the genre).

Why don't we see more about Antarctica before the 1800s? To be frank, Antarctic exploration was at its very beginning in this era. One of the earliest known expeditions was a 1768 expedition under James Cook. Initially performed to transport astronomers to Tahiti in observing the planet of Venus, Cook was given sealed orders to sail "directly southward" toward a "reputed" polar continent. He reportedly crossed the Antarctic Circle in 1773, but was met with expanses of sea ice that impeded further progress. In 1820, Nathaniel Brown Palmer - who gave his last name to the namesake "Palmer Land" - sailed with Captain Benjamin Pendleton as part of a fleet of several ships. It is from the Hero - the fleet's scout - that 20-year old Palmer sailed south from the South Shetland Islands in search for new sealing grounds.

In Palmer's diary, he writes:

I pointed the bow of the little craft to the southward and with her wings spread, main sail abeam, and jib abreast to the opposite bow, she speeded on her way to new sealing grounds like a thing of life and light. [...] I cruised for several days in order to satisfy myself it was not an island. I ran into several bays without meeting seals, and headed northward, drifting along under heavy canvas [...] the mist so dense that I could not see lookout on the forecastle.

This is one of the first-ever sightings of Antarctica, approximately mid-November 1820.

At around exactly the same time, Admiral Fabian von Bellingshausen of the Imperial Russian Navy substantiated Palmer's claim despite the thick ice pack. In a meeting between Palmer and von Bellingshausen, after the latter heard of the former's discovery, Palmer writes:

I gave him the latitude and longitude of my lowest point. He rose much agitated, begging I would reproduce my log book and chart. [... He said:] "What do I see and what do I hear from a boy in his teens - that he is commander of a tiny boat the size of the launch of my frigate, has pushed his way to the pole through storm and ice, and reached the point I, in command of one of the best-appointed fleets at the disposal of my august master, have for three long, weary, anxious years sought day and night for."

In 1838, another exploration with five US Navy ships under the command of Charles Wilkes sped forth to Antarctica with orders "to reach the southernmost point possible". It is in this context that we arrive back again to the circumstances behind Poe's story - and the context behind why certain authors would be writing about Antarctica at this time - and, indeed, why exploration and a bit of happenstance would be a useful narrative lens.

Contemporary to Poe's writings is The Monikins by James Fennimore Cooper (kindly referred to me by the mods, which I had forgotten). Written in 1835 - just three years before Poe and 15 years after Palmer's reported sighting - The Monikins is a humorous tale about adventures on an Antarctic archipelago that is inhabited by monkeys and explores the various interactions that Englishmen John Goldencalf and American Noah Poke have (along with gentle pokes at each other's cultural differences). Again, Poe and Cooper both write at the very beginning of Antarctic exploration and also Antarctica itself as a true new world.

Indeed, the mid-1800s and onward is pretty much where we start seeing a variety of exploration-themed stories into unknown areas in general. Though not exclusively Arctic, Journey To the Center of the Earth (1864) may be included - in which the scientists and their Icelandic guide travel through a volcano near the Arctic Circle and merge into a "lost world" with a hollow crust and underground ocean. Of course, it takes some time to get that way, and there are not a few sections that imply the imminent deaths of our heroes only for them to be resolved in the next (serialized) chapter.

An example both of Antarctic literature but in both of these genres occurs with A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), which was written by James De Mille and serialized in Harper's Weekly. At the time, it was compared very strongly to H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) - to the extent that my initial comment conflated the two authors! A Strange Manuscript... envisions an Antarctica that is tropical! De Mille's story gives the reason for this as the land being heated by volcanism that keeps the land warm during Antarctic winters - which is similar to William Hope Hodgson's description of the "air clogs" that heat the Last Redoubt in The Night Land (1912). (Though Hodgson was almost certainly not inspired by Antarctica.)

mydearestangelica

Yes! The earliest, and most prominent example is Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666). Literary scholars still debate whether Blazing World is an early science-fiction work, or just a forerunner. This is because Cavendish places scientific (natural philosophical) theories at the center of her plot, but the theories are disproven today. These two paradigms of natural philosophy were 1) hyperborean polar theory and 2) vitalism. I'll focus on the first, because early modern polar theory inspired a bunch of proto-science-fiction/ "Lost World" polar fiction narratives!

Hyperborean polar theory actually originated in ancient Greece. Pythas, an explorer and early geographer, recorded a journey in 330 BCE, from what's now Northern France to one of the Faroe Islands, or Iceland, or Greenland. On this island, Pythas spoke with locals who warned him of another land, a day's sail north: a land that seemed solid, but was a frozen ocean, where "man could neither walk nor sail," and that was filled with dangerous bears. Pythas' descriptions of this land were picked up by Greek geographers. They used three names to describe this Northern land of frozen sea: Thule (the land beyond all lands), Arktikos (of the great bears), and Hyperborea (the place above Borea).

Borea was the god of the North Wind and of cold. Many early Greek philosophers tried to combine climate theory with Pythas' polar account. They thought the world would be divided into specific climes (think: biomes) regulated by different temperatures. And, as they tried to make sense of magnetic forces, they came to believe that the Arctic pole contained a rich, ice-locked oasis called Hyperborea. Somewhere beyond the ice, snow, and fearsome bears, there lay a temperate oasis of fertile land, warm breezes, and "the oldest and wisest people in the world." The poet Pindar speculated that these people were of "sacred blood," and lived in an immortal, utopian society free from war, disease, or old age.

During the Renaissance, these theories were discovered and resurrected by early modern Europeans. Climate theory became incredibly influential until the eighteenth century, but Hyperborean polar theory was always contested. It did find popularity among two different groups of people, though: fiction authors, and polar explorers. Even after climate theory had been largely displaced by biological theories of human difference, Hyperborean polar theory kept popping up in fiction, and among sailors going North. By the mid-nineteenth century, British nautical writings in particular discuss the Hyperborean theory of the "open polar sea": somewhere beyond the freezing ice lay balmy seas, fertile islands, and maybe even a lost civilization. The open polar sea theory underpinned the much more mainstream theory of the Northwest Passage, which became a kind of nautical Holy Grail for British navigators and cartographers in the nineteenth century. And Hyperborean polar fiction persisted until the early twentieth century, when it morphed into Lost World adventure stories and cosmic horror.

Blazing World is the first big success of Hyperborean polar fiction. In it, a beautiful young woman is kidnapped by a wicked suitor, who flees her family's wrath by sea. There are nautical misadventures, and eventually the heroine, the wicked suitor, and some henchmen end up in a small boat heading into the Arctic circle. Luckily for the heroine, the suitor and henchmen freeze to death while her astounding virtue protects her from freezing and starvation. (Or, Cavendish hints, maybe it's something else!) The heroine reaches Hyperborea, and realizes that it's not just a utopian oasis. It's a portal of sorts to another dimension, where a second globe planet sits pole-to-pole with Earth. They're arranged like two apples, with both Hyperboreas functioning as aligned portals. The heroine crosses into the other world-- the Blazing World-- and has many adventures. She's eventually crowned as royalty-- the text suggests that she or a female ancestress originated from Blazing World.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hyperborean polar fiction changed to reflect Romantic ideas about Nature's crushing sublimity. For example, Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket describes a trip to Antarctica, and the discovery of a similar oasis peopled by semi-immortal noble savages. The flora, fauna, and geology of Too-Wit's island is alien and fantastic. Like good colonial explorers, Pym and the captain of his ship trade with this people and record their existence. But the natives ambush and kill everyone except Pym and his friend. Pym flees further south, and everything-- the mist, the sea, the sky-- starts greying out, or turning milky-white. An Elder Thing-like hooded figure passes them. They start changing. Finally, they reach the terminus of the Southern Pole: a sanity-destroying cataract of white... stuff... which parts to admit them into an unknown place. The conflicting postscripts state that Pym died or went insane, leaving behind only some cryptic hieroglyphs. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym invokes but subverts all the tropes of Hyperborean polar fiction: the polar oasis is at the South Pole, not the North; the semi-immortal natives are cult worshippers, not noble savages; the oasis is ultimately a mind-breaking portal to Somewhere Else, not a refuge from the wilderness; and Pym ultimately can't interpret his experience of sublimity.

Other authors, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, used Hyperborean polar fiction to critique obsession and hubris in scientific exploration. In "The Captain of the Pole-Star" (1883), the ship's captain insists on sailing to Hyperborea. The narrator, the ship's surgeon, documents the captain's slow descent into madness as the ship becomes icebound and Hyperborea can't be found. And, of course, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) opens with Captain Robert Walton sailing north to find Hyperborea. He encounters a strange, raving man (Victor Frankenstein) on the Arctic ice sheet, rescues him, and records the mad doctor's story. Captain Ahab, the monomaniac captain of the Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, also seeks the open polar seas. He crushes his sailors' fantasies of a lost civilization, but insists that the balmy polar sea is the birthing-ground of sperm whales. His fantasy of Hyperborea is a warm sea, a break in the ice, where infinite numbers of whales are ripe for the taking.

By the early twentieth century, Lost World fiction was coming into its own. Victorian Lost World polar fiction, like James de Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), had codified some of Pym's innovations alongside the Victorian adventure romance's fascination with evolution and prehistoric creatures. So, the civilization in the oasis of the pole typically had death cult natives, dinosaurs or other extinct creatures, and new kinds of jewels or precious metals. Frank Savile's Beyond the Great South Wall (1908), Willis George Emerson's The Smoky God (1911), and Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Land that Time Forgot (1924) all imagine other regions at the North Pole, or inside the Earth but the entrance is in the balmy oasis of the North Pole, where evolution works differently.

But the proto-cosmic horror of Pym also inspires H.P. Lovecraft to develop his globe-spanning mythos. In fact, his earliest short stories, such as "The Mysterious Ship" (1902), consistently build on classic Hyperborean polar fiction. He imagines a lost civilization at the Pole. Lovecraft's "Polaris" (1918) is set within that civilization, and anchors Hyperborean civilization to the Old Ones mythos. (Later, in the 1970s, Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean cycle fleshes out this premise). Lovecraft's twist on Hyperborean polar fiction isn't just that the unknown god who inspires the natives to kill the explorers is, in fact, a real entity. He makes the Hyperboreans the narrators, and describes their civilization, politics, wars, and religions in semi-familiar terms. The truly strange beings are nonhuman aliens.

Hyperborean polar fiction gradually vanished over the twentieth century, as popular awareness of Antarctica as a continent increased. It became less and less plausible to imagine the Northwest Passage, the open polar sea, or Hyperborea, so authors moved on, speculating about other far-away places where fantastic creatures might exist.

tl;dr : Yes, Hyperborean polar fiction was an important genre that kick-started science fiction, and then influenced Lost World and cosmic horror genres.