Worlds Enough and Time: The Fantastic Afterlives of “To His Coy Mistress”

Reception studies of Marvell have examined his political and high-cultural legacies but neglected, comparatively low-cultural prose genres such as science fiction and fantasy. Between 1950 and 2020, “To His Coy Mistress” was by far his most influential work in these realms, generating thirty-five titles—two of them including Marvell’s name, one making him a character in the story. Most treat the poem as a romance in embryo, with sublimely vast scales of time and space subtending the adventures, separations, and reunions of loved ones. In short, the Coy Mistress is thought to give in. As a group, these texts mark out a new subfield and provide a case study in reception, engaging with the poem in ways ranging from the superficial to the modest to the substantive. Implicitly treating “To His Coy Mistress” as a thought experiment not unlike those of science fiction—and sometimes even as protoscience fiction—they raise questions about intertextuality, de-metaphorization, realism, and science in both early modern and modern literature; about the survival of the former in the latter; and about the methodology of reception study itself.

the pseudonym "Andrew Marvell," drawing on the persona of Marvell the Whig patriot and opponent of absolutism (now updated to include 1930s fascism) and inaugurating the Marvell-in-SF phenomenon. 5 John Crowley's time-travel story, Great Work of Time (1989), rethought the "Horatian Ode"'s line, reimagining the act of "ruin[ing] the great work of time" as the act of ending an alternate British Empire in an alternate timeline. 6 But the more modest remit of this article is the set of thirty-five SF/F works after 1950 that trade on the lines, subject matter, and the author of that one poem: "To His Coy Mistress" (hereafter "TCM"). Most of them (25) quote a phrase from it in their titles.
Of those twenty-five, most (17) feature some variant of "world enough and time"-the distant runners up being "vaster than empires and more slow" (3); "vegetable love" (2); and "time's winged chariot," "before the flood," and "a fine and private place" at one apiece. Two actually include the poet's name: Brian Aldiss's "Marvells of Utopia" and Alfredo Véa, Jr.'s La Maravilla.
Our opening examples establish a sliding scale of engagement with Marvell's poem, from 1) superficial engagement (Simmons), to 2) modest engagement (Dick), to 3) substantive engagement (Moorcock). While all three tend to involve some form of a romance plot set against the vastness of space and time, in Category 1 (superficial engagement) Marvell serves as mere ornament, as means to an end. The SF/F writer quotes his poem in a title or epigraph, rather than the main text, without creating characters, plots, or settings directly reminiscent of "TCM." Quoting the poem adds a touch of witty class to work not otherwise implicated in literary history by knowing reference to earlier canonical works in non-fantastic genres. 7 In some cases, the writer appears to quote Marvell only because previous SF writers have quoted him, not as a result of independent and sustained reading of Marvell's oeuvre. Category 2 (modest engagement) involves quoting "TCM" in the text itself and then integrating the poem somehow into character, plot, or setting-often in a way that expands the poem 5 "Andrew Marvell" (pseudonym of Howell Davies ), Minimum Man (1938;London: Science Fiction Book Club, through some degree of literalization or de-metaphorization. The writer clearly knows the poem and responds in some meaningful way (sometimes parodically), 8 treating Marvell as more than ornament by extending or rethinking his subject matter. Just shy of a storm, works in Category 3 (substantive engagement) make Marvell more of an end than a means. They take "TCM"'s propositions seriously, not just regarding it as a flight of fancy but using quotation as a springboard to examining and commenting on it or him at length and to extending some key character or idea in a significant wayoften by thorough-going, sometimes irreverent literalization.
In the varied reception of "TCM" and its gnomically suggestive lines, sublimity overshadows irony. 9 Marvell comes across for the most part as a comparatively de-politicized, de-queered, and de-ironized poet of romance and the Sublime. Writers of SF see themselves as the cheeky ironists, cleverly taking the poet out of context.
When they acknowledge his irony, it becomes a challenge to outdo him-their greatest irony being the application to a galactic future of a poem from the obscure past of a single planet. Virtually all fantastic co-optations of Marvell's "TCM" depend on its hint of romance in both senses: love and adventure. 10 In "TCM," SF/F writers glimpse a buried narrative in which after eons of flirting and pursuit from one end of the Earth to 8 For parody, see John Sladek's nonsensical, Oulipo-style rewriting of "TCM", "Down His Alarming Blunder" ("Had we but will at least, and locks, / More blueness, Mr President, were no warranty. / We would talk now and butter that time / To feel and smell our daily suspect's file. / You by the wasted Senate's grille / Should quasars prove: I by the side / Of brain would depreciate"), in Maps, ed. David Langford (London: Gollancz, 2011), 162, as well as his passing reference to "TCM" in a parody of Robert Heinlein's Puppet Masters and Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon: "The Transcendental Sandwich," in The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (Frogmore: Panther, 1973), 121 ("the syllogistic properties of an Andrew Marvell poem"). Cf. Michael Bishop's more respectful imitation of "TCM" in "For the Lady of a Physicist" (1978), in Blooded on the other, the man and woman finally consummate their love. 11 This interpretation of Marvell's meta-carpe diem poem as a romance in embryo was suggested in 1950 by the subtitle of Robert Penn Warren's historical novel World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel; 12 and whether later SF/F writers knew the book or not, it drew a reasonable inference, demonstrating that for many modern readers the poem's genre and tone have loomed larger than its meta-dimensions and politics, sexual or otherwise.
What makes this study distinctive? For starters, it targets references rather than allusions: works that quote Marvell's poem verbatim, often at length. Rather than seeking similarities of subject matter, plot, character, or setting and only then claiming them as allusions to Marvell, it investigates those elements only when invited by direct quotation. 13 Second, while there has been significant work on Marvell's reception in the political and high-cultural realms, 14 virtually no one studying literature after 1900 has 11 Building on Darko Suvin's magisterial Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, I define science fiction as a narrative that creates an otherworld different in scientific and technological ways from the author's own objective world at the time of writing, usually an otherworld of the future. See Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), viii, 7-8. Cf. Roberts,Science Fiction,4,[7][8]. For most SF critics, science fiction includes alternate history (e.g., Westlake's World Enough), even though its otherworld may not differ significantly from that of the author in scientific or technological respects and may even lie in the past. Fantasy, by contrast, creates an otherworld different from the writer's own in terms of magic rather than science, often in a setting resembling our past (e.g., medieval Europe). Cf.
Attebery, "Romance." Around the time of Grierson's and Eliot's lionization of Marvell, the latter's affinity with fantasy was signaled by the inclusion of a passage about fairies from "Damon the Mower" (stanza 8) in an anthology of "fairy poetry": The Book of Fairy Poetry, ed. Dora Owen (London: Longmans, 1920), 161. 12 Robert Penn Warren, World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel (New York: Random House, 1950). 13 To put the problem into perspective, take the following passage from Sinclair Lewis's anti-fascist near-future dystopia: It Can't Happen Here (1935). One character tries to convince a man to have an affair with a woman: "There's not going to be much time for coyness and modesty," says the former. The narrator describes the man's half-hearted agreement as a result of his being "depressed at seeing a little more of his familiar world slide from under his feet as the flood [of fascism] rose." See Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (1935;New York: Signet/Penguin, 2014), 128. Do the words "coyness," "modesty," and "flood" signal an allusion to Marvell's poem? Possibly. But without some broader hint in the form of Marvell's name or an uninterrupted quotation of a phrase or couplet from "To His Coy Mistress"-or even in the form of significant sections of the novel being devoted to erotic matters, which is not the case-it seems doubtful. Likewise, it seems incidental that the protagonist of Judith Merril's short story "That Only a Mother" (1948)  looked beyond the poetry of Eliot, Ashbery, MacLeish, and company at pop-cultural prose genres such as science fiction and fantasy. 15 Third, while broader study of the reception of early modern English texts in Anglophone SF/F is in its infancy, some work has been done on Shakespeare, 16 a little less on Milton, 17 but, as we've seen, none on Marvell. By comparison, there seems to be no existing work on Donne and SF/F. 18 Finally and implicit in the previous points, I capture many more SF/F works than have previous studies of early modern authors' reception: not just a single work or writer but an entire field of Marvell's respondents.
In the interests of treating the texts within illustrative categories while placing them on a spectrum that acknowledges the messily analog nature of reality, what follows is a survey organized in order of increasing engagement, beginning with Category 1 (Superficial Engagement), continuing with Category 2 (Modest Engagement), and ending with Category 3 (Substantive Engagement). The same principle holds within categories, moving in Category 1, for example, from most superficial to least superficial. This taxonomy, rather than a chronological or thematic one, has the advantage of privileging Marvell's influence and reputation rather than the workings of SF/F, while allowing room within and between categories for consideration of chronological change and thematic continuity. The Conclusion argues that these texts implicitly treat "To His Coy Mistress" as a thought-experiment not unlike those of science fictionand sometimes even as proto-science fiction-raising questions about intertextuality, de-metaphorization, realism, and science in both early modern and modern literature, along with the survival of the former in the latter.

Category 1: Superficial Engagement
If texts and authors have a Nachleben or afterlife, it seems appropriate in the nuclear age to consider their half-lives, full-lives, and even quarter-lives in SF. Category 1 consists 15 We should also note that C.S. Lewis addressed a fine poem "To Andrew Marvell," Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (1964;New York and London: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) of quarter-lives: stories quoting Marvell in paratexts such as titles and epigraphs but nowhere else. Most works in this category spotlight love and time, neglecting "TCM" and assuming that "world enough and time," if taken literally, implies a hyperlongevity or immortality with an attached love story. Except for their titles and this general assumption, they fail to engage more deeply with the poem's details or subject matter. At the upper end of the category (least superficial engagement), the authors register the awe and wonder of a narrative unfolding over such a vast scale, while beginning to question the bliss of immortality.
Sean O'Brien and Gustavo Bondoni only quote "TCM" in their titles. O'Brien's short story "World Enough and Time" (1997) imagines love without longevity or immortality.
In a mildly dystopian future city, two awkward teens fall for each other against all odds. 19 The Argentinian Bondoni's speculative short story "But World Enough" (2011) imagines the opposite: immortality without love. The Devil offers a Hollywood actor a Faustian bargain: if he manages to seduce a woman who appears to be a reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, he will live forever; if he fails, his soul will belong to the Devil for eternity. He fails. 20 A group of other SF/F tales tackles both love and immortality. Aaron Sapiro's selfpublished erotic fantasy novel World Enough and Time (2018) does little more than depict love and sex among a family of immortal gods and mortals, headquartered at Princeton of all places, with trips and reunions across the continent and universe but no more specific thematic affinity with Marvell's poem. In this case, however, one of the mortals has the good fortune to be turned into an immortal. 21 Like O'Brien and Bondoni, Sapiro appears to imitate other SF writers rather than Marvell himself. As do Gillian Horvath and Donna Lettow, who published a series of outtakes from Highlander, a fantasy TV series from the 1990s featuring the adventures of a handsome Scot and his fellow immortals. In the 1995-6 season, these two members of the show's writing team produced extra, unfilmed material, verging on soft porn, that chronicles the love life on present-day Earth of one of these immortals (Methos) and his mortal lover (Alexa), who soon dies. They dubbed these works "World Enough and Time," "World than that Marvell's love poem also has a seduction narrative and it sounded classy to reference it. A similar situation of love between mortal woman and immortal man obtains in another fantastic genre: horror. World Enough and Time (2015), the sixth and final installment in V.M. Black's bestselling Cora's Bond vampire series, neither quotes "TCM" nor engages specifically with its subject matter, other than the general idea of a heterosexual couple overcoming significant obstacles. It chronicles the relationship between a female college student and an effectively immortal billionaire vampire as they prepare for their wedding, replete with sex scenes and the kidnapping and rescue of her best friend from the clutches of an evil group of rival vampires. Cora remains young as long as her lover sucks her blood. 23 Marginally higher on the scale of engagement stand texts that pay greater attention to Marvell. Ben Jeapes's young adult novel Time's Chariot (2000) is a fairly conventional time-travel yarn in which good and bad factions in a time-police organization do battle in the past(s) and one pair of lovers makes it through obstacles to marriage. A second, unmarried couple-a pair of time cops-braves various adventures, solves an apparent murder mystery, and makes it back to the future. Some of the time police appear immortal insofar as they live briefly and discontinuously over millennia, but all that really distinguishes Time's Chariot from works discussed in previous paragraphs is the novel's epigraph: lines 21-4 of "TCM": "But at my back I always hear … Deserts of vast eternity." 24 If a number of tales hint at troubles caused by the mismatch between mortal and immortal, others warn more directly of the discontents of love-cum-immortality. As the first to sound this alarm, John B. Rosenman's short story "World Enough, and Time" (1993) (with careful comma) merits higher placement in Category 1. Rosenman imitates Swift (with his immortal but miserable Struldbruggs) by positing that having enough world and time might, in fact, be too much. In his story a man rendered immortal by technology is miserable and rude to his mortal wife and son because they are only the latest in a long string of families he has outlived and mourned. He can't operate with anything short of a hard emotional shell. 25 23 V.M. Black, World Enough and Time: Cora's Bond-Book 6 (Washington, DC: Swift River Media, 2015). 24 Ben Jeapes, Time's Chariot (Oxford and New York: David Fickling Books, 2000). For other SF novels with epigraphs from "TCM" but little more, see Donald M. Kingsbury, The Moon Goddess and the Son (Baen Books, 1986), 402 (epigraph to chapter 61); Greg Bear, Moving Mars (New York: Tor, 1993), 253 (epigraph to Part Three); Damien Broderick, Transcension (New York: Tor, 2003) (epigraph to chapter 1). 25 John B. Rosenman, "World Enough and Time" (1993), in More Stately Mansions: The Collected Works of John B. Rosenman (Portland, Oregon: Dark Regions Press, 1999), 86-103. For the Struldbruggs, see Book 3 of Gulliver's Travels. Erica Ruppert's "World Enough, and Time" (2018) (again with comma) displays the problems of immortality sans lover or mind. A new anti-aging technique makes people effectively immortal by using stem cells to program the body constantly to renew itself. However, this technique borders on cancerous cell growth, and many who opt for it undergo brain damage and become vegetables, but without vegetable love. The protagonist falls in love with and then abandons one of the victims when she becomes one. 26 While not otherwise quoting Marvell amidst its many literary references (such as chapter titles from Shakespeare, Swift, and Proust), Joe Haldeman's Worlds Enough and Time (1992)  Earth for a university education in the final days before nuclear war destroys most of humanity. Making it back to her intact World above the world, she is separated from her new husband. In the ensuing events, she and the other New New Yorkers survive religious fanatics and escape on a new artificial World streaking out to the stars and weathering the usual problems in a generation-starship narrative: scarcities of various sorts. Among the stars O'Hara encounters more powerful alien races, one of which subjects her to a series of trials that transport her instantaneously across the galaxy, including back to Earth. By the end of the trilogy she has inadvertently founded a new religion and is hagiographically biographed by an effectively immortal AI copy of herself. The Marvell tag in the novel's title calls attention to both the sublime vastness of the setting's space (the galaxy) and time (a narrative taking place over more than a century) and to the various romance plots, involving journey-quests and reunions. The  An outlier in this category is Sarah Hoyt's vaguely alternate history/fantasy short story "But World Enough" (2007), in which Hannibal's rise and fall are explained by recourse to the following supernatural explanation. In his drive to conquer Rome, the goddess Tanit strings him along with the equivocal promise that he "will create a great empire, an empire that will mold all of the future … you will be remembered forever.
Immortal." 28 She fails to say that the empire (the "enough" of a "world" in the title) will be Scipio's Rome rather than Hannibal's Carthage. To the extent that there is love here, it is Hannibal's love for the goddess and, thus, for empire-nothing more. A greater outlier because tagged to a different line in "TCM" is "Before the Flood," Toby and feeble sitcom on the BBC, Comrade Dad, satirically imagined a rundown near-future Britain that the Soviets have invaded and turned into a communist puppet state rife with inefficiency, corruption, and material privation-perhaps a Tory riposte to anti-Thatcherite SF like Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta . One episode, titled "Vegetable Love," features the proletarian protagonist's teenage son falling in love with a flute-playing girl at school, Comrade Dad himself in flagrante delicto with his wife, and scenes from the collectivist community garden where he works, replete with potatoes and other vegetables. 30 Because this silly comedy only makes a halfhearted attempt to take on Marvell's subject matter in a marginally SF/F setting by depicting humans in love among the vegetables, rather than some more literal sense of "vegetable love," I discuss Comrade Dad before more substantive works in this and the next category. Not only can Coker recite it, but he can be recognized as reciting it: the novel's protagonist, a biologist, replies, "Now you quote Marvell to me." The episode also hints at the opportunity the disaster provides to begin with a blank slate and rethink "the English caste system." 32 Coker is a proletarian class-climber with a patina of education, not quite our sort in comparison with the university-educated narrator. If these first two works quote Marvell without advertisement in a title, Michael Westlake quotes him in both title and text. World Enough (2009) offers a quietly good alternate history of the twentieth century, created by historical inflection points 33 at which the novel's world branched off from our own: 1) a comparatively low sea level makes it possible to travel on land from England to France; 2) Jesus-based Christianity never catches on, only Mary-based "Virginity." As a result of these and other forks in the time-stream, an Anglophone United States of Africa replaces our USA as the dominant superpower, competing with a capitalist rather than communist Russia; and an American war of independence in the 1940s replaces World War II, with Japanese, French, and German colonizers kicked out of North America. The late appearance of certain technologies-petrol, electricity, nuclear weapons-makes this on balance a better world than our own, at the very least a "world" good "enough" in its own right.
Westlake may also suggest his alternate world as "enough" for readers in some sensesubstantial, thought-provoking, satirical of our own world. In creating it, Westlake pays silent tribute to alternate histories like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1963), Vladimir Nabokov's Ada (1969), and John Crowley's Great Work of Time (1989). 34 In the final paragraph an oblique echo of "TCM" hints at these meta-generic issues of alternate history and time travelers potentially changing past and future. Instead of an omniscient narrator, the novel consists entirely of the points of view of the four protagonists (two white women from Russia, two black men from Africa). In the novel's final sentences, the troubled but poetic narrator Padua Latrosian, a famous chanteuse reminiscing in her old age, sums things up thus: Lately, in the run-up to this journey, I've been inclined to think of our past as delta country, where the fast upstream current turns sluggish, an intricacy of branching channels between shifting banks, neither land nor water, a domain of undecidability in which nothing is ever quite what you remember it as being. Not a forgetting exactly, more like a ceasing to care. Mood counts for a lot.
[…] The future will take care of itself. Time's on our side, in this floating world. Enough. 35 With only one other exception, the book barely refers to its title, mostly via our (by now familiar) romance plot on a sublimely vast scale. 36 That scale encompasses most of the twentieth century (ca. 1938-2009), and time is played with and prolonged in 33 See David Langford, "Jonbar Point," in Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jonbar_point. 34 Westlake,World Enough,240. 35 Ibid., 349 (my italics). 36 Ibid., 333-7. a certain sense, because one of the four narrators, the biologist Katerina Latrosian (Padua's sister), discovers an age-defying drug called Freeze that prolongs life almost indefinitely. However, when it emerges that the side effects include infertility and dementia, the drug is banned. The vast geographic scale is the whole globe-"world enough" in that sense-amid constant shifting of the geopolitical tectonic plates.
The romance structure includes the four protagonists (the two Russian sisters, the two African best friends) falling in and out of love with each other in various combinations, having kids, separating, and reuniting multiple times as they traverse four continents. The men come between the sisters, and vice versa. The spy-and chess-master Nick Quaque (pronounced "quake" to emphasize potential geopolitical earthquakes) is the partner of both Padua and Katerina, with the latter of whom he has two daughters. Katerina loses Nick to Padua in Israel and doesn't see either of them for ten years; he is eventually murdered by Israeli spooks. 37 Million M'Loy, his fellow African spy, has a son with Padua. But in the closest approach to a "TCM" moment, Million asks Katerina to marry him. Although they have known each other for more than fifty years, she demurs, "I need to think about it. It's a little sudden." He teases her, "Sudden? […] Half a century, sudden?," warning that if she waits any longer, she will be "shacked up with an ambulatory vegetable" because he will soon succumb to Freeze-induced dementia. This would be the downside of "vegetable love": only loving like a vegetable. Still teasing, Million tells her, "All the time in the world, my love." However, before she agrees to marry him, Katerina is gunned down by "anti-Freeze" activists and dies in his arms. 38 To emphasize the sisters' bond, the novel begins with the narrative of one (Katerina) and, after her death, ends with that of the other (Padua). In a sense, the sisters' love constitutes the most important relationship within the love square-with fights, betrayals, separations, and difficult reconciliations. That this is a form of family romance is made clear by the fact that Padua considers it (almost) "incestuous," 39 with their common husband, Nick, as the man passed between women. As suggested above, Million is also passed between them, but without marrying Katerina. By novel's end, only two of the four protagonists survive-Padua and Million-the latter having lost most of his mind to Freeze. The final pages of the book describe Padua journeying to see Million in North America. 37 In this world Israel is located not in the Levant but in Germany. 38 Westlake, 335-6. 39 Ibid., 291.
What sets our next two works apart is their wider diffusion. The largest audiences for a reconsideration of Marvell in an SF setting may well have been the viewers of two TV series: Doctor Who and Star Trek. In a 2017 episode of Doctor Who entitled "World Enough and Time" (Episode 10.11), a spaceship gets stuck near the event horizon of a black hole-too weak to pull itself away, too strong to be sucked in. Since the vessel is a 400-mile-long, 100-mile-wide cylinder, relativistic time-dilation effects make time pass far more slowly at the top of the ship near the black hole. Years pass at the bottom of this 1100-floor colony ship, away from the black hole, while only minutes pass at the top. In a jam-packed and moving narrative that sprawls over this and the next and final episode of Season 10 (Episode 10.12), the Doctor tries to rescue the ship, only to lose his longtime companion, Bill Potts, her humanity extinguished when she is turned into one of the original Cybermen (a longtime menace in the Doctor Who franchise). When Bill is at first wounded and being whisked off by unknown enemies, the Doctor tells her, "Wait for me," 40 like the male suitor of Marvell's "TCM." Ten years later, after being turned into a Cyberman, Bill tells the Doctor accusingly, "I waited for you," but you never came. 41 More importantly, it turns out that the person who helped create the Cybermen is an earlier incarnation of the Doctor's nemesis: a fellow Timelord known only as the Master-formerly male, but now in female form and called "Missy." The Doctor and Missy have reunited in a parody of a lovers' reunion, and it turns out that they have been attracted to each other for some time now. The two hold hands and dance. As the Doctor puts it, "She was my man-crush"; "We had a pact, me and him. Every star in the universe, we were going to see them all." 42 In the next, equally affecting episode, just as Missy is about to reject evil and help the Doctor, an earlier male incarnation of the Master appears and kills his later female self before she can join the Doctor to fight the Cybermen-but not before this reunion of the Master's two selves is cast as similar to that of lovers. Missy refers to the Master as "Dearest," and the latter admits to having a hard-on for her. 43 Yet just when the Doctor has reunited with the Master, and the latter's two incarnations have reunited with each other, all goes to hell. Fortunately, although the Doctor has also lost his other beloved, his dear friend Bill, to the Cybermen process, they are briefly reunited when Bill's alien girlfriend, Heather, appears from nowhere and turns her back into a human, whisking her off somewhere (probably to Earth). All of this heralds the imminent regeneration 40 Steven Moffat, "World Enough and Time," Doctor Who, new series, Season 10, Episode 11 (BBC, aired 24 June 2017). 41 Moffat, "The Doctor Falls," Doctor Who, new series, Season 10, Episode 12 (BBC, aired 1 July 2017). 42 Moffat, "World Enough and Time" and "The Doctor Falls." 43  An announcement that a shuttle has arrived and Captain Sulu will "have time" for something (as yet explained) prompts him to remember an incident on the Enterprise years earlier, most of the episode consisting of a flashback that campily pastiches the original series. In the flashback the Enterprise is trapped in a "transversal rift" between universes. Ensign Sulu and an attractive young computer scientist named Chandris are sent on a mission to the wreck of a nearby Romulan ship in hopes of finding data that will help the Enterprise escape. In the wreck they find the data, but an accident occurs that sends Sulu and Chandris to another universe, where time passes more quickly than in our own. For thirty years, they are marooned on an abandoned planet that they dub Caliban, where they fall in love and raise a daughter. Fifteen years in, Chandris dies.
Meanwhile, time has passed more slowly in our universe, and when the Enterprise tries to beam Sulu and Chandris back aboard from the Romulan derelict, only Sulu arrives, now thirty years older. Eventually, the Enterprise manages to beam his daughter, Alana, aboard as well, though only partially, since she was born in and ultimately cannot leave the other universe. A way is found to recover the data from the Romulan ship, but it can only work if Sulu agrees to allow himself and his daughter to be destroyed: his earlier, younger self, with a memory of the Romulan data, must be recreated from the transporter's memory banks, but with no memory of the thirty years with wife and daughter on Caliban. Sulu and Alana do the noble thing and sacrifice themselves, and the Enterprise regains the data and escapes the rift. Back in the present, after Captain Sulu finishes remembering what he can of these events, news arrives that his daughter and newborn granddaughter have just arrived by shuttle on the Excelsior-a different daughter from a different wife, since his previous wife and daughter disappeared in the recovery of the Romulan data thirty years before.
Sulu reunites with his current daughter and granddaughter as, effectively, substitutes for his lost family: they christen his new granddaughter "Alana" after his lost daughter.
The episode's Marvellian title highlights Sulu's acquiring two wives and two heteronormative families over great expanses of space and time-a delicious irony given George Takei's well-known homosexuality. The romance structure of the story (and thus of the story many SF writers glimpse in "TCM") is thrown into relief by references to The Tempest, Shakespeare's best-known romance. It turns out that in her youth, Sulu's first wife, Chandris, had acted in a production of that play, which became But what connects the episode to "TCM" and "world enough and time" is that we have just seen all the main features of the romance genre: fantastic adventures in space and time; loved ones separated and reunited. Sulu reconnects with both of his families, the crew of the Enterprise, and his earlier and alternate selves. lived for more than a century but remains young because she has stayed on the ship traveling at near-light speed for most of that time. Jeremiah Brown, another employee, falls in love with her and, when the current cruise ends, asks her to return with him on yet another cruise and by implication be his love/wife. But like Marvell's poem, the novel ends before we hear her answer. However, the story suggests that she might well accept. At one point in their courtship, Katherine and Jeremiah are forced to hide together, shoulder to shoulder, in a supply closet while someone else, unaware of them, Henry, a curator at the Newberry Library whose time-traveling gene causes him to be jerked away from and returned to her, repeatedly and unexpectedly sending him naked to all sorts of places in the Midwest, past and future. So repeated are the separations and reunions-literally dozens of them-that the novel comes close to parodying romance's episodic structure while managing to preserve its affective charge. Their final but brief reunion comes at the end of her long life, after a gap of 46 years. When they first sleep together in Henry's apartment, a volume of Marvell presiding over them from a bookshelf, Henry prefaces it all with a toast "To virginity" (she has saved herself for him) and recites the opening line of "TCM." 48 "World enough and time" reappears in a second toast at the novel's center. Making a pilgrimage with Clare at Christmastime to the family home in Michigan, Henry asks her parents for her hand.
In a toast she stands up and pledges "To happiness. To here and now," and he "gravely replies, 'To world enough and time.'" Clare's "heart skips," and she wonders "how he knows, but then" she realizes that "Marvell's one of his favorite poets and he's not referring to anything but the future." 49 In other words, Henry has traveled there and knows they will be married for sixteen years. Years later, as Henry vanishes before their eyes for the final time, he tells both Clare and their daughter, "Love you … Always … If Niffenegger's time-traveling hero lacks time, the next two short stories return to the SF trend of assuming that there is "world enough and time," although the immortality they promise seems flawed because virtual. The comic SF/F writer Terry Pratchett's "#ifdefDEBUG + 'world/enough' + 'time'" (1990) features a VR-environment designer and his wife who attain immortality by uploading themselves as viruses into the cyber-world. Written before the internet arrived in full force in the late 1990s, this story presupposes a society with a smaller version than we have today, but with many people isolated in their homes playing various sorts of video games and running VR simulations that require potentially hackable software. The arresting title translates the mathematical logic of Marvell's "Had we but world enough and time" into something resembling the computer programming language known simply as C. As the computer scientist Aaron Block describes it, software designers using C would make two versions of their [new] program: a "release" version and a "debug" version. The "debug" version would typically run slower than the "release" code but […] include additional information for the developer to help them track down mistakes. To indicate that a particular segment of code was for the "debug" version [,] they would include the line #ifdef DEBUG before the debug code. They would end the segment with the line #endif.
Pratchett's title also "mixe[s] in another technique from […] C called 'String concatenation,'" which "lets you combine multiple strings of characters together to produce one giant string. You join them together by using the + symbol." But since this command could not run as an actual computer program or subcommand, the whole title constitutes a species of techno-babble. 51 As playful computerese, however, "#ifdefDEBUG + 'world/enough' + 'time'" boils down to a mathematical or geometrical version of the major premise of the syllogism implied by the poem ("If + space + time" or "If there were enough space + time"), setting up a program to run in which two people have enough space and time to go through all the motions of love. The "#ifdefDEBUG" command makes it a better "debug" program: a slower, more thorough, more interesting, and better version of the original one, the "release" program that is real life, in which two people hope they have enough space and time to flirt and court before consummation. The lack of the expected "#endif" at the end of the string means that the program never stops running and the couple 51 Aaron Block, personal email, 13 January 2020. Cf. Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall: 1988), 77, 191-2, 198. never stops pursuing and loving each other. The debug feature makes it possible for the program not just to keep running, but to be infinitely updated and improved. The erotic hunt would never get old, and the bodies of the lovers would never age because they would be virtual. Essentially, the fantasy involves staying within the parameters of the first and third verse paragraphs of "TCM" without taking in the second. Marvell's poem provides not just the title for this quest and reunion story but is quoted at suitable intervals to remind us of its relevance, sometimes in subtly gruesome ways. For example, the evil vampire Bal cements his abusive relationship with Dicey by seductively reciting the final lines of "TCM": He was speaking quietly; passionately, '… Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run.' He stopped speaking. She continued staring at him, waiting for more words, magic words, book words; but none came. He was silent. She felt his power when he spoke these words to her from the poetry books; but she felt it tenfold when he stopped the flow of words, kept the words from her. It made her neck tingle, the way it tingled just before his lips touched it. She thought she must be going mad.
"How old were those words?" she asked him.
He smiled distantly. "Six hundred years. And still potent." The warm flush around her throat spread down to her breast; lower. She could feel her breath quickening. She brought up her hands, circled his powerful biceps with her fingers. Involuntarily, he flexed. She continued hanging on. They continued walking. 54 In sum, he courts her successfully, using Marvell. But unlike Marvell's coy mistress, Dicey (as a slave) has no right of refusal. Gone are the truly mutual pleasures most SF/F writers have seen in the poem. Now it becomes the instrument of slow murder: Dicey will soon be drained of blood and life.
The poem reappears during another jaded and miasmic quicksand of an episode. In a digression of sorts, a group of self-identified sirens entraps the three questers in a ruined city for what seems like a night but turns out to be three months. In the course of it, Beauty commits passionate adultery with Jasmine-cheating on his wife and in a sense on his best friend, Josh. Near the end, a semi-malevolent cyborg named Janus uses Marvell to seduce all three of them into staying in this pocket of time and reality, replete with hallucinogenic drugs. But Jasmine resists: "Stop being so coy," Jasmine snapped. "We're leaving. Now. With Joshua." "Coyness is our prerogative in this universe-here there is world enough, and time, for all things." He bowed slightly. He walked away. 55 In effect, this episode stays true to the romance genre as a whole, in which questers are sometimes sidetracked by seductive women, though the genders are reversed here.
It is also true to Marvell's poem, with its refusing addressee: Jasmine refuses a man's advances. In the end of "TCM" we don't know whether the woman gives in; and here, acting on behalf of herself and two men, she certainly doesn't. by Verity Latham, a recent PhD in "Marvell studies" who devotes her spare time to Greenpeace-style activism. While helping her slightly mad scientist of a father and his team investigate the meteors, she shelters one of the aliens, who assumes the form of a tree outside their Nun-Appleton-like country house. 61 The latter then assumes human form, donning the name "Andrew Green" in a clear nod to Marvell and his green world and thoughts. Green goes on to become President of the eco-group Greenworld (with a sly pun on Northrop Frye's "green world" of Shakespearean comedy), 62 an organization staffed with the other shape-shifting aliens. Romance blossoms between Verity and Andrew as she rescues him from a CIA agent posing as one of her father's assistants. As part of his cover, the agent memorizes Marvell's "The Garden" and recites the familiar lines from "TCM" in an attempt to seduce her, even though he thinks that "this Captain Or is he a separate but attached supplement, hooked into the network? We never find out. Whatever the case, the story quotes "TCM" in the penultimate paragraph:

Category 3: Substantive Engagement
The people of the Survey team walked under the trees, through the vast colonies of life, surrounded by a dreaming silence, a brooding calm that was half aware of them and wholly indifferent to them. There were no hours. Distance was no matter. Had we but world enough and time … The planet turned between the sunlight and the great dark; winds of winter and summer blew fine, pale pollen across the quiet seas. In the final words of the story, Osden is "left as a colonist," yes, but the planet has really colonized him. 67 His crewmates lack the openness and courage to take the same leap into embracing and merging with the truly other: a different species.
In addition, Le Guin has lovingly rethought "The Garden"'s famous crux: "Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade" (47-8), lines in which Marvell achieves an overwhelming plenitude of meaning that defies paraphrase.
They mean everything one can reasonably posit, and at the same time none of it. As such, they create a subject-object problem similar to that in "TCM"'s phrase "vegetable love" (love for a vegetable, or a vegetable's love of something else?). Is the "green thought" about green things and greenness (with "green" as the object of "thought"what a thinker thinks about)? Or is the thought itself green in some way, a subjective lens through which to perceive objects in the world? Le Guin opts primarily for the latter, but in true Marvellian fashion includes both.
For when the survey team decamps to a continent on the other side of the planet, the team members notice that the plants seem aware and afraid of them here too. Only then do they realize that the plants form a single, trans-oceanic network connected by spores and water: "It's all one," Osden said. "One big green thought. How long does it take a thought to get from one side of your brain to the other?" "It doesn't think. It isn't thinking," Harfex said, lifelessly. "It's merely a network of processes. The branches, the epiphytic growths, the roots with those nodal junctures between individuals: they must all be capable of transmitting electro-chemical impulses. There are no individual plants, then, properly speaking. Even the pollen is part of the linkage, no doubt, a sort of windborne sentience, connecting overseas.
But it is not conceivable. That all the biosphere of a planet should be one network of communications, sensitive, irrational, immortal, isolated. …" "Isolated," said Osden. "That's it! That's the fear. It isn't that we're motile, or destructive. It's just that we are. We are other. There has never been any other." "You're right," Mannon said, almost whispering. "It has no peers. No enemies.
No relationship with anything but itself. One alone forever. Ironically more alive than some of the humans, the plant network is mostly green as subject of thought, the consciousness doing the thinking. But since up till now the network has never encountered any life separate from itself, the superorganism has, in effect, only been able to perceive its own green self. Until the human investigators have arrived, there has only been a single subject and object; and this fundamental narcissism recalls that of "The Garden," "TCM," and other parts of Marvell's involuted poetry.
Thus, the network is truly "Vaster than empires, and more slow": planet-wide and therefore bigger than any of the empires on Earth in Marvell's time; slow-growing and slow-perceiving, but stable. Apropos communicating with it, the ship's psychologist asks, "What can a single human brain achieve against something so vast?" The commander replies, "A single human brain can perceive pattern on the scale of stars and galaxies … and interpret it as Love." And who is its lover if not Osden? The commander "look [ed] at Osden's face, the ugly white mask [of its skin] transfigured, eager as a lover's face." 69 That's why he stays, paradoxically able for the first time to connect fully with another being, beyond the mental din created by his own ability as an empath, which makes him unable to shut out others' thoughts. Better still, Osden and the network are effectively immortal. In words we have just seen: "There were no hours. Distance was no matter.
Had we but world enough and time … The planet turned between the sunlight and the great dark; winds of winter and summer blew fine, pale pollen across the quiet seas." 70 Winter or summer, the network is here to stay. There is an almost infinite dilation of time-comparatively infinite as perceived by a normally short-lived human; and the scale of the physical space is vast enough for a stationary human and set of plants confined to one planet. Osden has given up spacefaring and even humanity in return for immortality-physical immortality, not virtual or literary immortality. 71

If Wilder and Le Guin offer tribute stories that sympathetically analyze and extend
Marvell's oeuvre, our final four works also pay tribute without slavishness, but move beyond the boundaries of mere vegetable love. We begin with A Fine and Private Place (1960), the debut novel of the fantasy writer Peter Beagle, best known for The Last Unicorn, because as the first fantastic novel to use a tag from "TCM," it focuses, like Aldiss, on that poem alone, rather than both "TCM" and Marvell himself, as our 69 Ibid., 970-1. 70 Ibid., 973-4 (Le Guin's ellipsis). 71 This eternal union is signaled by Le Guin's slip in the introduction she wrote for the novelette in 1975. Marvell's phrase in "TCM" is "My vegetable love" (11), but Le Guin misremembers it as "Our vegetable love," eschewing individuality for community: The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Short Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 148. next two works do. An otherwise realist novel set in contemporary New York but with accents of fantasy and Gothic (a talking raven, a man who communicates with the dead), A Fine and Private Place provides the sole example of an SF/F title quoting this phrase from "TCM." Its affinities with our SF works lie in the following. Quoting the whole couplet in the novel's epigraph ("The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace," [31-2]), Beagle treats Marvell's lines as a challenge: how can I prove him wrong and write a story about people literally embracing in a grave?
Beagle cheats slightly by imagining not a grave but a graveyard in the Bronx, and by imagining a person (Jonathan Rebeck) who hides there for almost twenty years, never going outside its walls and, significantly, its iron gates (cf. Marvell's "iron gates of life" [44]). For untold reasons (this is fantasy, after all), he can talk to the souls of the newly buried dead, as well as to a hilariously cantankerous raven (shades of Poe) who cracks jokes and steals food for him-simply because that's what ravens do. 72 So much for "private." The cemetery is "fine" because it houses beautiful Greek revival mausolea where Rebeck sleeps every night, dodging cemetery staff. But their time together proves limited because Michael's body will soon be exhumed and transported to another cemetery, and since the whimsical and unexplained rules governing this quiet, unhurried novel dictate that the spirits of the dead can only communicate with each other within the bounds of a single cemetery where their bodies are buried, this news leads to a full-blown crisis, declarations of love, and many failed attempts to wring spiritual hands. In the end Rebeck and Gertrude conspire with a cemetery guard to move Laura's body to accompany Michael's in the new cemetery.
All is well, even though Michael's and Laura's souls still can't physically embrace. In the contact zone that is Buckeye Road, that boy is a Mexican Yaqui American named Beto (short for Alberto, similar to the author's name) who grows up in an adobe house on a site once inhabited by an Irish couple named Maybelle (like Marvell) whose husband read Marvell's poems to his wife. When he died, Wysteria Maybelle burned down the house, leaving little except the charred cover of Marvell's collected poems. 81 In the adobe house built on its ruins, the at times difficult relationship between Beto's Spanish grandmother (Josephina, a witch) and his shaman-like Yaqui Mexican grandfather (Manuel, another name similar to Marvell) involves a love described in terms of "TCM," which engages the whole romance complex we have seen at work in other Marvell adaptations. Beto's abuela desires a time dilation like that in "TCM"'s imagined courtship, which would extend her time with her husband-or rather her experience of that time, its intensity-before his inevitable death. As Manuel is dying, Josephina leans over and tells him, "Cielo [Heaven] […] I know we will embrace there.

As serious literary fiction like
[…] You by the Yaqui and I by the Tagus or by the desert wash, ages beyond the flood.
[…] Espérame, wait for me. I am only moments behind you"-an imitation of lines 5-8 of "TCM." 82 After Manuel has been dead for some time, she senses that he has returned in the form of a hawk and asks, "But is he accessible to me? He's back already. He's supposed to wait for the conversion of the Jews." 83 Mostly set in the colonia, a liminal space devoid of government, plumbing, and electricity but filled with a glorious mixture of races, cultures, and genders-the novel features apparent trips through space and time, as well as the supernatural (magic and spirits), and, most important, families separated and reunited. 84 In terms of trips and the supernatural, both sides of Beto's heritage involve visionaries who "travel" in spirit to past and future, and in the case of his grandfather, to other places south of Arizona.
In a peyote-fueled coming-of-age ceremony, Beto himself appears to morph into a hawk flying over the desert. Like a prophet, Josephina travels in time to see her own and others' futures. As for families separated and reunited, there are many instances in Beto's nuclear family. For most of the book he is brought up by his grandparents-until his mother (Lola) shows up after Manuel's death to take Beto away to work in the fields of California (more of the georgic). The mother-son separation of Beto's early years now gives way to a grandmother-grandson separation, Beto never reuniting physically with his abuela, though he does spiritually to a certain extent. As for abuela herself, marriage has separated Josephina from her own family in Spain, which disowns her for marrying an Indian. Finally, even within that marriage lies a kind of separation The latter, an Irish widow and madwoman whose words consist solely of Marvell's poetry or iambic verse inspired by it, is separated from her Marvell-reading husband by death and mourns him by naming all of her gaggle of dogs after figures in Marvell's poetry: for example, Thyrsis and Dorinda from the eponymous dialogue. As she and her canine entourage pass by, Beto hears her mutter, "'World enough and time. '" 85 Once again, just as Wysteria's surname recalls the poet's, her given name sounds vaguely pastoral and thus appropriate to a writer of so many pastorals and meta-82 Ibid., 238 (Véa's italics). 83 Ibid., 253 (my italics). 84 On the liminal, see Carlston, "'Making the Margins Chaos,'" 117, who also cautions that the novel is both romantic (by which she means nostalgic for the semi-utopia that is Buckeye Road) and anti-romantic (113). On the kind of ontological uncertainty or "hesitation" that marks these and other events in the novel as fantastic, see Todorov,Fantastic,25,33,157. 85 Véa,La Maravilla,267,110,165. Wysteria Maybelle's Irishness also recalls the "Horatian Ode," discussed at several points in the novel. But the main Marvellian subtext, as Nigel Smith has suggested, 87 is the Mower sequence. After all, this carnivalesque colonia on the edge of a vast southwestern desert is a place where dirt-poor agricultural workers live and play in their few spare hours, and where there is also work done by the people who serve them: food-truck workers, bar and general-store owners, prostitutes, the minister, and wives. This reference to the Mower poems' georgic world of work, love, and love as work manifests itself most clearly in Beto's mother removing him to California, not to liberate him from agricultural work and poverty and educate him in hopes of a better life, but to transfer him to another scene of agricultural exploitation-only a slightly better one with higher pay, pursued from crop to crop. Suffusing this world is Andrew Marvell's ambiguous presence: both seductive and oppressive; the sign of rich white Anglo culture and of the ethnic and racial subalterns in the US who act as the counterparts of Marvell's subalterns-the mowers, the shepherds, the Irish "raped" by Cromwell, 88 the children like T.C., the women with and without voices, the fawn, and perhaps even the patronage-seeking poet himself. However, in the vibrant mix of cultures that is Buckeye Road, the English and Irish diasporas are just two out of many.  Moorcock's The Whispering Swarm (2014), with which we began, offers perhaps the best indication of Marvell's continuing relevance to writers of fantastika because it refuses to confine itself to quoting or examining his writings, but makes Marvell one of its principal characters, featuring him quoting or formulating his own poems, principally "TCM" and the "Horatian Ode." For example, when questioned about his 89 Ibid., 277, 264, 285-quoting "TCM" (21), possibly mediated by The Waste Land, with its burlesques of "TCM": T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Michael North (New York and London: Norton, 2001), p. 11, ll. 185-6, 196-7. 90 Véa, La Maravilla, 74. politics, Captain Andrew Marvell admits to being "a Parliament's man" but offers a measured, judicious assessment of Charles I worthy of the author of the "Horatian Ode": Fool that he is, like all Stuarts, possessing more arrogance than sense, he persists in betraying his word and making war on his own subjects. He honestly believes he's God's chosen. And I choose not to question God. Yet there's still some hope of his finding nobility and sanity within that sea of hard-headedness, self-doubt and boyish need he calls a mind, but I fear it will not be. A hardhead he'll remain until the conversion of the Jews! Yet Marvell quotes "TCM" rather than the "Ode." Or rather, this off-the-cuff comment may represent material eventually to make its way into "TCM," just as the rest of the speech will be versified after the Regicide as the central section of the "Ode.  Anderson's SF/F novel A Midsummer Tempest (New York: Ballantine, 1974). 95 Smith,Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, him from the clutches of Cromwell's men back into the safety of Alsacia, and eventually back to his wife and kids in 1970s London. 97  You have a friend in me"-partly because, as he says, Moorcock is "a hothead but he's neither villain nor traitor." As the latter admits, this was "Not something I could easily argue against." 99 In effect, Moorcock identifies with Marvell as the poet of ambivalence and ambiguity in the "Horatian Ode" and a precursor of modernity-at the very least of modern politics as a Cromwellian republican, but also as a mercenary who will change sides and fight for the highest bidder. This Captain Marvell is really an amalgam of the poet and of the fantasy-spinning writer who grew up admiring the Marvel Comics character.  Moorcock, ed. John Davey (1978;London: Saga, 2016), 388. 99 Moorcock,Whispering Swarm,430,388,455,477. rewriting of Marvell's poem, since its two unnamed lovers are the "Marvells" in question, apparently a once-married couple with the last name Marvell. It is the year 3000, and the couple appears to have lived for almost a millennium because of "nanoservants in their blood"; but now, for undisclosed reasons, they are "becoming ready for euthanasia." 101 Before they die, they reunite before some form of TV camera: They had been lovers centuries ago. Circumstances had caused them to part for different regions of the galaxy.
[…] But something in their love was timeless.
[…] So now the two aged lovers were called upon, from their different regions of the system, to converse together for the peepers. They met and embraced-not without the trace of tears. Millions watched. 102 They have thus separated to different parts of the galaxy rather than "TCM"'s Earth, now embracing not in the grave but on Mars.
Then the lovers quote the poem to each other, hinting perhaps that it played a part in their earlier courtship and relationship: "I admit I had forgotten you for a whole century," she said. "I regret it. Forgive me!" "'A hundred years should go to praise thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze,'" he quoted, with a smile.
She gave her old creaking laugh. "'An age at least to every part, And the last age should show my heart.'" "What marvellous memories we have!" "Marvellous indeed!" 103 Note the alteration of "your heart" to "my heart," and the repeated punning on Marvell's name: "marvellous" (with double "l"). The story ends with more slightly what makes this so clearly a meta-tale referencing both "TCM" and the romantic SF/F stories it spawned are the following remarks. The woman calls their relationship "a glorious and grand story, very surprising to those who were alive to play a part in it." The man suggests its link to the "glorious and grand" story of humanity's expansion to the stars, which took place over the same thousand-year period: "'Breaking away from Earth helped the process of clarification,' he said. 'The Earth was supposedly haunted by-oh, ghouls and ghosts, elves, gnomes, fairies, angels … All those fantasy creatures besetting early human life. I suppose they were born of dark forests and old houses, together with a general lack of scientific understanding.'" 105 In the new galactic utopia, science and science fiction have replaced fantasy, fairy tales ("dark forests"), and the Gothic ("old houses"). In effect, the genre of science fiction is a species of utopia. With a smile the story parodies the trend of writing Marvell-titled SF stories with the same romance formula.

Conclusion: "Six Hundred Years and Still Potent"
Although his history is off by a century, the twenty-fourth-century vampire in Kahn's World Enough, and Time gets something right when he brags that Marvell's seductive words are "Six hundred years" old and "still potent." 106 In witnessing the generative power of Marvell's most famous lyric after almost four centuries, this survey of major and minor writers of science fiction and fantasy has identified a new subfield by bridging two different areas of study: Marvell/early modern studies on the one hand and science-fiction/fantasy studies on the other. By way of conclusion I hazard a few remarks about both sides of the divide as well as the bridge itself. While I concentrate on science fiction, much applies to fantasy as well.
First, the Marvell side. We have watched one interpretive community reading an early modern poem. This is not so different from studies of readers' marginalia in Shakespeare folios or early editions of Paradise Lost-or, for that matter, of Restoration adaptations and postcolonial performances of The Tempest. Authors of SF/F are readers before they are writers, and their co-optations of "TCM" collectively offer an 104 Ibid., 191 (italics and ellipses in the original). 105 Ibid., 190-1 (italics in the original). 106 Kahn,World Enough,and Time,184. interpretation that privileges the poem's content over the poet's biography and that emphasizes romance, the Sublime, and, I would add, imperialism. After all, "TCM" contains the word "empire," assumes the existence of empires smaller than a planet, and joins the "Horatian Ode" and "Tom May's Death" in thinking about empire. Many of our SF tales (e.g., Star Trek and Le Guin) accept this invitation and assume human expansion to the stars, implicitly justifying that expansion by proposing it as an exciting adventure of exploration underpinned by humanity's awe at the size, age, and complexity of the universe. Romance and sublimity underwrite empire, and a number of our fantastic plots explicitly evoke empire: Crowley, Westlake, Hoyt, Kahn, Véa ("Cromwell raped Ireland"), and even Comrade Dad (the Soviet Empire). In effect, our writers identify aspects of "TCM" that current Marvell criticism has underappreciated.
Others include space, time, nature, longevity, immortality, materialism, and science itself-as well as iconoclasm of a non-literary sort.
As for iconoclasm, we have grown used to calling the poem innovative in terms of literary history, on which it performs a number by going meta-about genre and tradition. But our SF writers notice something else: the maneuver the poem performs by adding space to time in the recipe for carpe diem. By adding space and multiplying both space and time, Marvell does trump predecessors by spying a bigger picture (the genre and its limitations) and indicating that something might lie outside it. But for SF writers, his speaker's imagination seems limited, in turn, by merely thinking on a planetary and Christian scale. There are other planets and galaxies out there, and much longer timescales on which to visit and interact with them. Science and scientific thinking far outweigh literary and religious competition. SF writers may consider Marvell a kindred spirit because the twentieth-century academy designated him, along with Donne and company, as a Metaphysical poet with interests in the New Science. 107 Even though recent criticism might regard the Metaphysical as a problematic category because insufficiently historicized, our writers may be justified for another reason in seeing affinities between "TCM" and their own work. Adam Roberts has argued that SF emerged (or re-emerged) in the seventeenth century because of the convergence of the New Science and Protestantism, both of which turned a skeptical eye toward previous metaphysical and religious claims about the nature and workings of the universe. Crucial to his argument are Protestant countries like Britain and texts like Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), which Marvell recalls in his reference in The Rehearsal Transpros'd to Godwin's moonbound geese. 108 If "TCM" trails clouds of the New Science's glory-less obviously than, say, "The Definition of Love"-it contributes to Roberts's case by asking us to see the poem as proto-SF. To be clear, "TCM" isn't SF or proto-SF, but our SF writers effectively treat it as an ancestor of their work. Certainly, its deep structure of logical, geometrical proof displays proto-scientific reasoning of a whimsical sort. The "if" is crucial here. SF writers have found "TCM" welcoming because at a fundamental level it performs a thought experiment, a "what if?"; and thought experiments are the substance of SF.
What if a man and woman could flirt for centuries across the entire planet? What would be the consequences? Which leads to my next point.
This meeting of Marvell and SF also reveals something about the latter: about SF's tendencies toward literalization and intertextuality. In "TCM" our writers sense an implicit challenge, saying essentially, "Marvell, you presented vast space-time as fiction, whimsy, metaphor, surmise; we will take you on by taking you seriously and making that space-time real, non-metaphorical." Rosalie Colie showed us long ago that Marvell's poetry literalizes metaphors, un-or de-metaphoring language by turning hyperbole and conjecture into physical fact. 109 "TCM" does some of the same, seizing upon the idea of time as a subset of the metaphorical barrier or distance between lovers (of space, in other words), and then imagining a literal space between them as they take up positions on different sides of the planet and delay sex. This has proved irresistible to SF/F writers, who run riot with literal suns, planets, space, and time, playing out narratives of love, war, and expansion against their backdrop. But literalization also beckons because of its centrality to the genre, in a way not true of others, such as epic, pastoral, lyric, comedy, tragedy, and the realist novel. Literalization is a tool in the kit of each of those genres, to be sure, but by no means the only or essential one. By contrast, science fiction and fantasy are premised on making the speculative real-the speculative including the imaginary, the fictive, the hyperbolic, and the metaphorical. through allegory and satire. 111 Literalization and the refusal of circumlocution and flowery language characterize much scientific discourse, and while much SF presents techno-babble and pseudo-science, its outlook is resolutely materialistic, scientific, realistic. Moreover, it's a question not just of de-metaphorization or de-figuration but of de-fictionalization. The larger tendency to de-fictionalize, to make fiction real is also present in narratives, such as Dick's Counter-Clock World and Kahn's World Enough, and Time, that insist on treating "TCM" as a genuine tool of seduction. "TCM" has to have been part of a successful seduction in the past, they think, and must be quoted in future ones. The coy mistress will continue to give in.
Insight into SF's intertextuality is our other gain. We are more than prepared to regard this variety of genre fiction, rather than mainstream literary fiction, as internally intertextual, referring to earlier texts within the genre, but not so much to those outside. Questions of value pervade considerations of Marvell and SF, and so much of the academy's previous contempt depended on a mischaracterization of SF as formulaic and lightweight, written by simple, comparatively uncultured authors for simple, uncultured, and young readers. Part of the case against reading and studying SF rested on the claim that its alleged ignorance of the great works of the Western canon signified its anti-intellectual, escapist immaturity. Not only did SF supposedly refuse to place itself in conversation with those earlier works and thus the real world; in spinning weird tales of tentacled aliens menacing weak, busty women, it ducked weightier questions.
We know better. Our Marvelliana demonstrate that SF has also displayed an external intertextuality, engaging with texts outside the borders of SF, in sometimes significant ways. This matters because one account of SF has proposed that it depends on what Damien Broderick calls the "megatext," the tradition of previous SF texts from the 1920s on (and even from Mary Shelley on, if we accept another critic's account). 112 According to Broderick, the latest SF text is only comprehensible to readers with knowledge of the genre's conventions: the tropes and mindset of previous SF. Indeed, what sets SF apart from earlier genres, he thinks, is its dependence on its own intra-genre tradition-in a way that epic, tragedy, pastoral, the realist novel, and co. are not. His case loses steam if epic becomes the genre of comparison, or even pastoral; but he makes a good point about SF's insular tendencies. Nevertheless, our texts cast the genre as not quite so insular. SF has and does engage meaningfully with outside, non-SF texts. In fact, its focus on openness in general (the openness of the scientific method to new data and ideas; the openness of the human species to expansion outside our planet) should and does find a correlative in an intertextuality open to texts outside the genre, especially How does SF/F's use of Marvell compare to its use of Shakespeare and other early moderns? Before answering the question, we should acknowledge that while Shakespeare and Milton have probably had a greater impact than Marvell on SF/F, the short lyric that is "TCM" has punched far above its weight and approached the influential status of one of the Bard's plays. From the vantage point of Marvell studies and Marvelliana, SF/F's use of Marvell differs in degree rather than kind from its use of Shakespeare. The principal difference is that SF/F seems at least as, if not more interested in the author than his works: Shakespeare as a person vs. The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In SF/F that engages his work, Shakespeare turns up more often as a character, and SF/F obsesses about finding the "real" people and stories behind his writings, showing an exact arrow of causation between people and situations Shakespeare personally encountered and their appearance in thinly veiled form in his dramas. 113 Yet the fact that Moorcock's Whispering Swarm provides the lone example of a similar engagement with Marvell the person 114 indicates that SF/F tends to focus on Marvell's text-a text timeless and revelatory of nature and human nature. 115 To the extent that SF/F writers have cared about Marvell himself, other than to see him as a representative Renaissance love poet, it's all about his name. The simple fact is that marvel is a synonym for wonder, that category and effect so important to SF. 116 Thaumaturgy is, of course, a facet of much Renaissance literature; Shakespeare's romances arguably depend upon it. But it is the central draw of SF and, for many, of science. Musing in 1927 on religion, science, and humanity's future, the biologist J.B.S.
Haldane observed: one of the essential elements of religion is an emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole. As we come to realize the tiny scale, both temporal and spatial, of the older mythologies, and the unimaginable vastness of the possibilities of time and space, we must attempt to conjecture what purposes may be developed in the universe that we are beginning to apprehend. Our private, national, and even international aims are restricted to a time measured in human life-spans.
'And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.' 117 Haldane instinctively turns to Marvell to describe wonder and the Sublime. Davies's books engage with Marvell the person rather than his works, but they differ from the many SF tales that make Shakespeare a character and speculate about how he might have composed his works or might react to the future when drawn there by time travel. Wilder's alien "Andrew Green," while drawing on his "green" poetry and suggesting that its implied author was a nature poet, is not really a portrait of Marvell. 115 There is a similar case to be made about Milton in SF/F, with writers paying more attention to Paradise Lost than to its author. Peter Ackroyd's alternative history/biography, Milton in America (London: Vintage, 1996), is probably the exception rather than the rule-a rule better represented by Ursula K. Le Guin's Paradises Lost (2002), Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (1995Materials trilogy ( -2000, and Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013) have been approached from the other direction in an exercise of source rather than reception study-the two sides of intertextuality's coin. What if? Had I viewed it from the opposite direction, I would have placed SF front and center and discussed Marvell as just one material in its mighty weave. From this perspective his name and poem might shout to be heard above the voices of Shakespeare, Milton, and others-early modern and modern, in and outside fantastika-as well as other seemingly less literary concerns: for example, the place of history and politics in SF.
But once again, questions of value raise their heads, and in this universe, in this place and time, I have chosen to privilege Marvell over SF. I have assessed the relevance of this spectacular poet to two comparatively low-cultural prose genres in the twentieth century and beyond. This involves adjacent questions about the relevance in our highly presentist day not just of our guy, Andrew Marvell, or of early modern England, but of literature and English themselves. Wyndham and Kahn are right: at times civilization itself seems at stake. This is one of the reasons why I care about relevance and engagement. With any luck, in 2250 someone other than a vampire will celebrate "TCM" as "six hundred years old and still potent," and her song will echo many times down through the millennia. At the very least, almost four hundred years after Marvell's birth I hope to have opened up a conversation about the scientific realism, romantic sublimity, and proto-imperialism of "To His Coy Mistress," as well as SF and its strategies of representation and extrapolation.