LAUSR

science so much as a scepticism of the totalising world view which accompanies it’ (120); his point is not that fiction and science always have to cooperate harmoniously, but that periodicals, now as then, are capable of holding conflicts in suspension. Chapter four links late nineteenth-century Arctic exploration with scientific and imperial concerns, as these are enacted in the periodical press. Both fictional and non-fictional material, for example, arose to fill the temporal gap left by Nansen’s departure into the Arctic (1893–1896). John Munro’s ‘How I Discovered the North Pole’, for example, functions as a fantasy of British polar success as balloons equipped with automated cameras overtake Nansen’s Fram, locked in the ice, while George Griffith’s ‘A Corner in Lightning’ is used to probe the vulnerability of a detached, depoliticised science to the agenda of entrepreneurial speculation. In this chapter, the argument also moves on from the organising structures of periodicity, widening its scope to gesture towards the emergence of genre SF soon to follow in the early twentieth century. The Arctic, Tattersdill puts forward, became an imaginative a gateway to the stars for SF; the Pole’s association with astronomical marvels and its cartographic blankness made it a powerful imaginative space, discernible, for example, in resemblances between the lunarscape of Wells’ First Men on the Moon and ideals of the Arctic’s white expanses of ice. Amongst the many strengths of Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-siècle Periodical Press are its insights into the continuity of its historicised arguments with the modern moment. Not only, it suggests, might attention to at fin-de-siècle periodicals help to answer doubts about the value of the humanities, or indeed about academe in general, but the role of the press in the generation of truths about politics or science and the ideological importance of interdisciplinary literacy in the education system are also signalled. The book is persuasively and engagingly written by an author whose sense of humour is never far from the surface. This accessible book speaks, as the author makes clear, to the interests not only of those concerned with periodical history but also scholars of SF and literature and science, while encouraging readers to think productively about relationships between these fields.