Anna Kahn considers what a Robert Browning science-fiction story might be. Read on to find out more, then read “My Next Duchess,” in our [May/June issue, on sale now], for their take on the idea.
Anna Kahn
If you take the view that all of science fiction is a guessing game, a series of unfurling answers to a series of expanding what-if what-if what-ifs, with nothing held for certain except (maybe) some of the laws of physics, you can have an awful lot of fun. “My Next Duchess” contains a set of what-ifs about the possibilities of drone manipulation, sure, and artificial intelligence, and the vengeance of women, but it’s mostly an exploration of “what do I reckon the Victorian poet Robert Browning would have done with the modern-day idea of a spaceship, and how can I best rip that off?”
An unabashedly incomplete biography of Browning, stripped down to the parts I find personally interesting: grandson of an enslaver, son of an abolitionist, famously and delightfully uxorious towards Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, fascinated with the macabre.
I first encountered him during GCSE English, under a teacher about whom the best that can be said is that the school did at least fire her after that first year instead of waiting any longer. About the only productive thing that happened in her classroom was one of my classmates drafting and redrafting the stencil of the rose vines for my upcoming second back tattoo.
This teacher’s selections from the syllabus options were chock full of violence and misery: a Guy de Maupassant story about an old woman draping strings of sausages around a dummy to train an attack dog to murder her son’s murderer; “The Yellow Wallpaper”; an abundance of Edgar Allan Poe; Lord of the Flies; the script of Psycho; and three beautiful jewels from Robert Browning, poems examining the act of murder at varying levels of proximity: “Porphyria’s Lover”, “The Laboratory”, and “My Last Duchess”. I remain unconvinced that this was a sensible range of texts for thirty highly-strung fifteen-year-old girls. On one hand the thought of another two years of this level of misery was enough to stop me from doing English A Level, and on the other I was somewhat disappointed to grow up and find that there is really quite a lot of quote-unquote serious literature in which nobody murders anybody, and even some in which nobody dies at all.
Maybe because he was presented to me in conversation with the madness of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s wallpaper and Poe’s exfiltrated heart still sounding off under the floorboards, Browning’s poems seemed to me firmly entwined with the speculative. I could not have pointed you towards any specific element in any specific poem to justify this, but I felt it. He had a lovely, relaxed way with meter, at times fully inside it and at times tugging it about, syncopating it. Something of the speculative writer’s refusal to tell a story as it ought to be told according to conventional reality there? Maybe, maybe not.
Often he’d take the faintest whiff of a story from a throwaway medieval source and willfully invent whatever he wanted around it. This is exactly what he did with Alfonso II d’Este the Duke of Ferrera, the speaker of “My Last Duchess”, who did exist but who is generally held not to have murdered his wife Lucrezia. In the poem, the Duke shows an unnamed and unspeaking envoy his art collection, including a portrait of the Duke’s also-unnamed, discretely-executed (so Browning has it) wife, before ushering the envoy downstairs to discuss the dowry for his next (also unnamed) wife.
Maybe because he was presented to me in conversation with the madness of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s wallpaper and Poe’s exfiltrated heart still sounding off under the floorboards, Browning’s poems seemed to me firmly entwined with the speculative.
And this is where we pick up in “My Next Duchess”, except instead of medieval Italy we are in space, where the duke (who this time is the only unnamed one) is sounding off about that same art collection, unaware that he is surrounded by some very angry women, not all of whom are human, but all of whom wish him harm. We move from there.
Browning loved writing murders. He wasn’t picky about the method: poison, strangulation, blades. Neither was he picky about the framework: execution, assassination, duel, crime of passion. I had simultaneously plenty of options and very few options for where this story could end up, is what I’m saying. Browning could also tend towards the catty (“Surely to spit there glorifies your face” is one of my favorite lines from “To Edward Fitzgerald”, a vicious diss track of a poem written after Fitzgerald was rude about Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s death) which gave me free reign to be much meaner than I usually am—to, instead of trying to find the heart of my unnamed duke, or some kind of redeeming feature, just slag him off. Dipping back into Browning reminded me that sometimes villains can just be villains.
I think I could make a more rigorous academic case that Browning would be writing horror if he were writing now, but the advantage of writing fiction back towards the question of a dead writer, rather than an essay, is that there is no need for evidence. I can tell you that my specific Browning, as I have absorbed him, would absolutely be writing science fiction today, and you aren’t allowed to argue with me, because I am the one writing the story. To me, Browning’s relationship to history, mining it for the one particular detail that resonated with him and inventing whatever he needed to create a story around it, is often the modern science fiction writer’s relationship to science. The relationship of his acquisitiveness to his inquisitiveness persists in any edition of Analog you might pick up.
So, what does Browning in a spaceship look like? There has to be foul play afoot, certainly. There needs to be some kind of corruption or imbalance of power. There should be some kind of depiction of a man who is lying to himself about his place in the world and the consequences of his actions. So far so Robert Browning, but not so far very spaceship. Browning would, I think, be fascinated by all the new ways we’ve come up with to harm ourselves and each other since his death. So: drones holding shapes that look like people. So: carbon-printed soldier-spies, and, because I think that Browning would genuinely be delighted that the role of carbon-printed soldier-spy could now be available to a woman, let’s make that carbon-printed soldier-spy a woman.
Whack that all into a blender with the original poem, add in Arabic and Hebrew names because after all I am also part of this creation and so my people are damned well going to space. Whizz it up, pour it out, let it set, and there you have “My Next Duchess”. Not exactly what Browning would have written, because I am not a medium (which is good, since Browning despised mediums), but as close as I am bothered about getting: shaped by the past, interested in the future, and thoroughly, thoroughly macabre.
The Astounding Analog Companion 