“Memoirs From a Journey with the Flying Fish ‘Prometheus’” (original: “Erindringer fra en Reise med Flyvefisken ‘Prometheus’”) was written by Vilhelm Bergsøe and first appeared in Illustreret Tidende nos. 537-539 (Jan. 9-23, 1870). Bergsøe (1835-1911) was a Danish author who is best-known for his From the Piazza del Popolo (original: Fra Piazza del Popolo, 1866), a novel about an Italian monk. Bergsøe also wrote at least one mystery among his other novels.

“Prometheus” is set in 1969, a century after its composition, and is a letter written from William Stone, the story’s main character, to an unnamed friend. Stone is a Dane working for a company which is digging an undersea tunnel from Denmark to Sweden. He is invited to Panama to view the opening of the new Panama canal, and is given the opportunity to fly to Panama on the new airship Prometheus, the latest in American aeronautical technology. The Prometheus is a large cigar-shaped dirigible with wings and propellers. The Prometheus flies by sinking itself under water, then propelling itself into the air and flapping its wings, and crashing down into the water at its destination. The inside is modeled on a nautical ship; the plane has several decks and individual cabins for each passenger.

Stone travels to the city of Køge and is given a tour of the Prometheus by its pilot, Captain Bird, before the Prometheus takes off for Panama. One of the passengers is Anna Blue, with whom Stone is in love. The Prometheus takes flight, but before the ship heads for Panama Captain Bird flies it over London, which years before had been destroyed during a war with the United States. During the ship’s nighttime trip over the Atlantic Ocean the Prometheus flies through an electrical storm. The Prometheus is struck by lightning, damaging one of the wings and causing the other to fall off. The airship begins to disintegrate and the passengers, who are equipped with parachutes, either jump or fall out, but Captain Bird’s only thought is to save himself and Miss Blue. Stone falls from the Prometheus and awakens in a tree in Madagascar, where he is cared for by a native tribe. In a postscript to the letter Stone mentions that he has received a telegram from Anna stating that she landed safely, and that the two of them will wed.

“Prometheus” is one of the first nineteenth century science fiction novels about powered flight. The modern vogue for stories about flight began in the seventeenth century, during the reign of Louis XIV in France. Many French authors wrote voyages imaginaire, tales designed to entertain the public about voyages to imaginary lands. Many of these were about travel into space, using such methods as wild geese and gunpowder-filled rockets, but the 1783 manned flight of a hot air balloon by the Montgolfier brothers created a taste for stories about travel by balloon. This lasted for decades, and Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (original: Cinq Semaines en Ballon, 1863), sparked a new round of stories about balloon travel in the 1860s. Stories about powered flight began appearing in the 1840s; perhaps the earliest was J.L. Riddell’s Orrin Lindsay’s Plan of Aerial Navigation (1847), in which a combination of mercury, steel, and magnetic fields which produces anti-gravity. But while Lindsay’s may have been the first nineteenth century science fiction story about powered flight, most stories and novels following Lindsay ignored the concept of powered flight in favor of either balloons or anti-gravity, with anti-gravity stories usually being about space flight rather than flight around the Earth. It was not until the 1870s that authors began describing aircraft which relied on powered flight for their motive force. “Prometheus” was one of the first, followed by Lord Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Mór Jókai’s A Novel of the Next Century (1872-1874), The Frank Reade Adventures (1876-1899), and then, in 1886, Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror, which was more influential than all the preceding stories combined.

Bergsøe also anticipated the work of Jókai, Wells, and other science fiction writers by making “Prometheus” about more than just the Prometheus and its trip. While the majority of the story is about the invention of the airship and the trip, Bergsøe spends a significant amount of space focusing on science fictional inventions, including explosives so powerful they could dislodge the earth from its orbit and send it into a different solar system. Bergsøe also describes the world of 1969. The United States is the most powerful country on Earth. It has conquered South America and Great Britain in a war, and during the trip the narrator sees London from the air; the city remains devastated by the aerial bombing it suffered during the war. Southern Europe has sunk into a state of poverty and destitution; Denmark alone among the European states is wealthy and powerful.

“Prometheus” precedes “The Battle of Dorking” as a Future War story, although Bergsøe’s intent is different from later Future War writers. Bergsøe’s reference to a London destroyed by aerial bombardment is an early use of the idea of aerial bombardment being a part of Future War. The idea had been present, if rarely used, in futuristic literature since Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” (1842), which spoke of “the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.”¹ In 1859 Herman Lang wrote The Air Battle, a novel set in 6900 A.D. in which future civilizations war over slavery, using vast air navies of enormous aircraft which are powered by new energy sources and are armed with super explosives. But Bergsøe was the first to present aerial bombardment as taking place in the near future. He was also the first to hint at the dangers which war from the air posed to civilians.

Lastly, “Prometheus” is also one of the first science fiction stories to use a canal across Panama as part of the plot. Although the Panama Canal was not completed until 1914, American and European businesses had carried out surveys for potential canals from the 1840s. By 1870, interest in a potential canal across Panama, at the time owned by Colombia, was high.

Print: Ann Vandermeer and Jeff Vandermeer, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors & Artists. New York: Harper Voyager, 2011.

¹ Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” in The Princess, Maud, Locksley Hall, and The Talking Oak (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1890), 39.