Woah, woah!
Okay, (continues in next shot, not pause here) we are not doing this...
whatever this is.
Go on.
Let them go.
I have got to be more careful with what I read to these kids.
We've been studying a lot of Edgar Allan Poe lately, and I think it's getting to them.
Thank goodness not everything Poe wrote was so dark.
In fact, some of his most interesting work-and some of the work he was most passionate about,
was science fiction.
A big thanks to Curiosity Stream, and our new streaming service Nebula for making this
video possible!
Also, a big thanks to all our Patreon supporters as well.
We love you.
When I think of Edgar Allan Poe, I think of darkness, mania... despair.
The fiction that made Poe famous is the stuff of pained souls.
The conquering worm of death, the sound of guilt like a beating heart beneath the floorboards,
the haunting raven come to tell you that what once was shall be... nevermore.
Poe had a way of translating inner turmoil into romance...
But it's not the only thing he was romantic about.
Beneath the shadowy exterior, his works are full of wonder, and curiosity, and speculation...
about science.
That's right, the father of Gothic Horror spent a lot of his time writing science fiction.
To Poe, there was perhaps nothing more poignant in the world.
So deep was his spiritual connection to it that some have called him an "angel in the
machine"; a romantic voice, ascending from the newly-built apparatus of scientific study.
And, now that I've spent a whole bunch of time reading his work and thinking about it,
yeah!
I agree.
In fact, reading it has reminded me why I love fiction so much as a medium.
There is a lot to learn from this side of Poe... but it might take you a while to find
it.
The first time you read one of his sci-fi shorts, you might not even realize you're
reading science fiction.
These stories are full of the most bizarre, unscientific things.
Technological hoaxes, post-apocalyptic conversations between the spirits, babbled theorems from
the mouths of the dying, apocryphal additions to old wonder tales, and much... much more.
And although Poe does try to rationalize everything and explain the speculative science behind
it, the majority of the time his ideas are so wild, the science is more an excuse than
a legitimization.
He's not really making predictions-he's extrapolating in the wildest ways imaginable.
My favorite example of this is his story The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.
It's about a man who comes across a book of esoteric scientific theory, which inspires
him to build a hot-air balloon which can take him to the moon.
He constructs the massive thing singlehandedly (somehow), and shockingly, it works.
Along the way, he learns a lot of... very interesting things.
For instance, that the moon only looks pale and featureless in the sky because it's far
away, and that the Earth from a similar distance would look much the same; that meteorites
are simply volcanic rock spewed up from the moon's extremely volatile surface; that there
are tiny moon-people with big, ugly, round heads whose spirits are linked one-to-one
with the people of Earth; and my favorite, and most convenient of all: he brings a cat
on board with him, which just so happens to be pregnant-a fact he was somehow unaware
of-and the cat has kittens, giving him the chance to confirm his theory that creatures
born at a higher altitude will be physiologically adapted to those conditions.
Note, in case you need it: none of this is true.
This is a classic wonder tale.
An adventure story.
Hans Pfaall might as well have flown to the floating island of Laputa, or the lost city
of El Dorado.
But for so many of these strange ideas, Poe makes a genuine effort at scientific explanation.
Not just lamp-shading, not justification to encourage the suspension of disbelief-a genuine
attempt to reconcile these fantasies with the sciences of his age.
At times these explanations become so meticulous, you forget you're reading a piece of fiction
and not a longform crackpot hypothesis.
And if his intent with these walls of text wasn't already clear, he makes it clear after
the story in the form of a several-page-long "editor's note", in which he refers to himself
in the third person as "the author" (as if he's not the one writing the note) and compares
his story to another author's journey-to-the-moon tale.
Throwing irony to the wind, he says that although his story is obviously not meant to be taken
seriously... it's also more technically sound than the other author's?
He uses more... believable... science?
Hard... to see how that would matter... if your story isn't meant to be taken seriously...
This is a theme in his science fiction, and one of the things that distinguishes him from
other writers.
Poe was so often chasing the fa ade of scientific rigor.
He would launch into long explanations of the philosophy and the mechanics of his fiction,
just to make sure the audience knew he'd put the proper amount of thought into it.
In his words "these conditions themselves have been imposed upon (him), as necessities,
in a train of ratiocination as rigorously logical as that which establishes any demonstration
in Euclid."
I guess he... really thought he needed to do this.
To be fair, in some of his stories it makes a little more sense.
Especially in the ones about the popular pseudosciences of his time.
He wrote about things like alchemy, mesmerism, galvanic reanimation, and in those contexts,
the over-explication actually helps-lends the fantastic and air of rationality.
Probably the best example is The Balloon-Hoax, which was so convincing that not even the
publisher realized it was a fake account and had to release an apology to their readers
soon after.
Really, this isn't so far from what modern fiction writers do.
Sometimes you need to lend your ideas a little plausibility before the audience will buy
into your lies and enjoy the actual story.
The difference here is that, on some level, Poe seemed to believe his own lies.
And...
I don't think that means he was crazy.
Remember, Poe was writing science fiction in the first half of the 19th century, before
science fiction really existed.
It was a very... unstable period for science.
The industrial revolution had arrived in North America, and times were
changing.
Printing and production were more accessible than ever, which meant the average person
could easily access new scientific information.
It also laid the groundwork for people like us who would come way later and do very relevant
things like, oh, say... create an adorable taleoid keychain and sell it in the Tale Foundry
store?
Links in the description.
They are... so cute, they make the real taleoids a little jealous.
The world Poe lived in was the world of manifest destiny, an age of amateurs, where you were
absolutely encouraged to lie... if you could get away with it.
Newspapers in the 30s and 40s were rife with fantastic accounts of balloon journeys, strange
deaths, unlikely automata, trances, plagues, and more.
As the electro-chemical revolution changed the country and the world, demand for scientific
rigor changed with it.
There was a new demand for authenticity.
For a time, this was a bit of a sore spot for Poe.
At the age of 20, he wrote the poem Sonnet-To Science, which reads:
"Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?"
At first the growing empiricism of his age seemed to gnaw at his "poet's heart", but
eventually he came to a sort of peace with this.
In his thirties, he wrote the short story The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,
which is one of my favorites.
In it, Poe continues the story of One-Thousand-and-One Nights, but this time Scheherazade has a different
sort of tale to share.
It Chronicles a journey across the modern world, attempting to articulate the many scientific
developments that have occurred.
But even after all the fantasies she's shared over the first thousand nights, this is the
tale that proves too difficult to believe, and she's finally put to death.
Sort of a love letter from Poe to science-that technology is even more fabulous than the
most unbelievable fiction.
I think it's safe to say that by this point in his career, the love of science had colonized
him.
And I don't use that term lightly.
His very outlook on creativity seems to have been altered as a result.
Listen to what he said the very same year: "It may be demonstrated, that the two divisions
of mental power (the calculating faculties and the ideal) are never to be found, in perfection,
apart.
The highest order of the imaginative intellect is always pre-eminently mathematical, or analytical;
and the converse of this proposition is equally true."
A complete reversal of the feelings he once harbored.
Science had become not only a companion to his creativity, but an absolutely essential
part of it.
One could never be perfect, complete, without the other.
And I think this might be why we see some of those attempts to rationalize stories that
are already otherwise too fabulous to be realistic-an attempt on Poe's part to create a more perfect
harmony between the science and the fiction; to create a "perfect imagining".
In my opinion, the stories he comes closest to achieving this with are the stories that
spend more time exploring his imagination than the rationale behind his imagination.
Mesmeric Revelation is a story that does this in such a strange, profound way, it's... hard
to forget.
It involves a man on his deathbed who agrees to be hypnotized before he passes on.
Instead of dying, he begins to speak in a voice not his own, and to explain the workings
of the universe.
At one point he describes how matter at the sub-atomic level becomes so "rarified" that
it coalesces into one "absolute mass" which he describes as "God."
I love this, because it's Poe caught in the act of exploring spiritual ideas-they just
happen to blossom from a scientific place.
This streak of creative freedom found in scientific discovery only grew as time went on.
His last ever major work, the piece he thought of as his magnum opus, "more important than
Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity" is titled Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual
Universe-or, more simply, Eureka: a Prose Poem.
And it is perhaps the strangest thing he ever wrote.
I'd describe it as something between a longform sermon and a comprehensive theory-of-everything,
but I'm not even sure that does it justice.
Over the course of the piece, he openly mocks classical thinkers like Aristotle, Epicurus,
Francis Bacon, Euclid, and Kant, seeming to suggest his own logical methods are superior.
He claims to have intuited, without any scientific backing whatsoever, that the universe is finite,
that it came from a single "primordial particle", that what Newton called "gravity" is nothing
more than the attraction of every atom to all the other atoms it once shared an identity
with, and... so much more.
It's honestly amazing to read, just for the sheer audacity of it.
From the perspective of an audience member, it's... very hard to tell what he meant by
writing this thing.
His tone fluctuates throughout, from that of a humble artist seeking merely to share
his inspiration, to the blistering invective of a critic, to the fevered prophecy of a
man possessed.
But I find the most meaningful sentiment in the entire 44,000-word book to come right
at the beginning, in his introduction.
He says: "To the few who love me and whom I love-to those who feel rather than to those
who think-to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities-I
offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds
in its Truth; constituting it true.
To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:-let us say as a Romance; or, if I be
not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem."
I don't think he really meant this piece to be a legitimate proposal about the nature
of the cosmos.
I think he meant for it to be something evocative, to make the reader feel the romance he felt
in formulating these thoughts.
To me, this reads so much like his other pieces of science fiction, and his description of
it as an "art product alone" makes me think that he sort of thought of it in the same
light.
To Poe, science fiction wasn't a simple matter of storytelling-it was a matter of expressing
the only truth he knew outside the realm of empirical information: that it inspired him.
That science made him dream.
In a way, this is what all of us fiction-writers do.
We can't create anything from nothing.
The very act of imagining requires substance; observation.
Fiction is what we do as creative beings living in a material reality.
We correlate its parts, we envision possibilities, we wonder at impossibilities.
We lie our way to the truth.
And that's what I feel more than anything else reading Poe's science fiction: an unabashed
love for the way we use our creativity to fill the gaps.
In his work, we can see with a rare clarity... how an angel might emerge from within the
machine.
And... that would be where the video ends... except...
I have more to say.
This is a really interesting topic to me, and when it came time to trim down the script...
I couldn't quite let it all go.
I had to keep a full version of the video out there somewhere.
It seemed right.
Luckily, there is a place where we can share that stuff.
Where we don't have to worry about streamlining our content so that it's a perfect fit for
attention spans and algorithms.
I'm talking about our new streaming platform, Nebula.
Youtube is a weird place for educational content.
It's hard to be as honest and open as you want to be while trying to satisfy the algorithm
and trying to dodge some kind of terrible fate like channel-wide demonetization.
So, a bunch of us educational creators got together and made our own platform where we
don't have to worry about all of that.
You can find all our videos there ad-free, and full of additional content we normally
have to cut out for Youtube.
Including the extended version of this video.
And we're not the only ones.
The same is true for so... many... other... amazing creators.
It's a safe haven for the material we wish we could share here.
And the best part is that you don't even actually have to pay for Nebula if you don't want to.
The good people at Curiosity Stream want to make sure we indie creators will always have
this special space, so they've decided to foot the bill for Nebula for anyone who signs
up with them.
Get a year of Curiosity Stream, and you get a year of Nebula for free.
If you like highly-produced documentaries-the kind you can sit back and listen to for hours,
soaking up information you never knew how much you needed to know-I cannot recommend
Curiosity Stream enough.
It's got thousands of titles, including videos about everything from prehistoric aquatic
monsters to the cutting edge of modern science.
I touched on the weird period of American science Poe lived through in this video, but
there's so much I had to leave out.
But Curiosity Stream has a documentary that would have made Poe proud.
The Story of Electricity chronicles the origins of the technology that changed our world,
and, in proper poetic terms, how it is the energy of life.
Watch this, and you'll catch a glimpse of what so captivated Poe back in the day.
Maybe you'll even want to write about it yourself!
Go satisfy your curiosity.
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Before we wrap up, I'd like to give a quick thanks to all the helpful humans who support
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All those words you see scrolling in the background of these videos?
Those are actually the names of our Patreon maintenance crew, without whom this show would
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And... that's it for this video!
There's usually a few weeks between uploads, so if you want more Tale foundry in the mean-time,
come join our community!
We have a discord server that's basically like a big family of creatives-a lot of love,
there.
We also run writing groups on Twitch every week, if you want to get some practice in!
You can find links to all of it in the description.
Hope to see you there!
Until then, thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
I'll see you...
next time.
Bye!