John Buchan and Space

Despite numerous accomplishments in his lifetime – as a publisher, historian, politician and statesman – John Buchan (1875 – 1940) is chiefly remembered now as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Usefully, in an introductory note to the now-classic espionage-thriller, Buchan explained his goal of delivering a story “where the incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible”. Raymond Chandler once declared that to be the perfect formula for a thriller; arguably, it’s also an apt definition for the most successful supernatural stories.

Buchan had always been attracted to old legends and secret places, whether in the Scottish Borders of his early childhood, the wilderness of Southern Africa, or the rolling Oxfordshire countryside in which he later settled. Buchan’s lifelong fascination with the mysterious, uncanny and inexplicable is most obviously seen in his many overtly supernatural short stories, but even his novels repeatedly reflect a core belief in the underlying fragility of our civilisation, and of other realities lurking in the chaos beyond.

“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.” Those words may have been put in the mouth of the principal villain of The Power-Room (1916) but the concept they describe echoes across most of Buchan’s fiction.

It’s a particularly brutish barbarism, for example, which we’re shown in “No-Man’s Land” (1899), in which an Oxford scholar discovers Ancient Picts living underneath some remote Scottish hills. Yet, keeping within those “borders of the possible”, Buchan ensures that their survival isn’t down to some fantastical device. His university education (first at Glasgow, then Oxford) may have been in the classics, but he was interested in the latest scientific ideas of his time: and, by implication, that meant writing what the American editor and scholar Everett F Bleiler described as “an early example of Science Fiction”.

Which brings us to Space. First published in May 1911, the story may now appear somewhat convoluted in its telling, but when you consider the quality of the prose and its core idea of strange and desolate alien dimensions barely glimpsed through mathematics, then it isn’t just among the purest examples of Buchan’s writing you can possibly read. It’s also, surprisingly perhaps, pure Science Fiction!