Antebellum Tech Bro

You pick up one of those glossy technology magazines, the kind that “bring you the future.” There’s a feature about a planned Mission to Mars. Expectations are electric; it’s finally happening. The talk is all of new worlds and new life forms. It’s the greatest scientific story of the age—or any age. Sure enough, a few months later, you read about the voyage. It’s an incredible tale. The mission lost its way and was almost completely wiped out, several of the crew perishing en route. The survivors managed to reach Mars, however, and explore the planet’s surface, and were dazzled by the marvels and aliens they found there. But the mission ended in mystery when the crew encountered a bizarre, almost mystical force: either some kind of meteorological phenomenon or, according to some, even an apparition. No one can explain what happened. It’s a miracle anyone survived to tell the tale. A few weeks later, you learn that the narrative you read was a complete and utter fabrication. Of course it was. Yet your mind is still spinning from the stories you read and you’re still thinking: what if? Edgar Allan Poe pulled a stunt very like this in the early nineteenth century, not about a trip to Mars, but concerning the United States Exploring Expedition to the Pacific, authorized by President Andrew Jackson. Strangely, Poe first promoted the “Ex Ex” as a serious scientific endeavor in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe worked as the Messenger’s scientific correspondent, reviewing new science and technology for the American reading public. In 1838, however, he published the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, an anonymous travel saga that essentially imagined what happened on the Ex Ex as a tale of the supernatural—even before the expedition sailed—subverting the very idea of rational scientific exploration in the process with a story about the incomprehensibility of nature. John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night explores this contradiction in Poe’s engagement with science: the earnest scientific popularizer was also a visionary prankster. The same man who brought antebellum readers