THE CHEMICAL WEDDING
BY CHRISTIAN ROSENCREUTZ

By Johann Valentin Andreae

New edition by John Crowley

Illustrated by Theo Fadel

Small Beer Press

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For one of its newer releases, Small Beer Press of Easthampton has reached back to a tale first published in Germany in 1616.

“The Chemical Wedding” was originally attributed to one Christian Rosencreutz, or “Christian of the Rose-Cross,” but the actual author was Johann Valentin Andreae, a Lutheran minister who wrote pastiches of popular books about “secret knowledge” of that era.

Here in the 21st century, fantasy and science fiction writer John Crowley, who teaches English at Yale University, has offered a fresh interpretation and edit of “The Chemical Wedding” to mark the book’s 400th anniversary.

It’s a story, he argues in an introduction, that can be called the world’s first science fiction novel, as it explores the medieval science of alchemy and is “a marvelous adventure rather than simply a parable or an allegory or a skit or a thought-experiment.”

“The Chemical Wedding” begins with the first-person narrator, Christian, receiving an invitation to a royal wedding from a mysterious woman with large wings that are “full of eyes like peacock’s.” He’s thrilled, believing he must be one of a select few to get such an invite, and he also feels a sense of destiny, as he’d had a “vision” of this wedding several years earlier.

Once he arrives at the castle where the wedding is to take place, though, Christian finds himself in stranger and stranger circumstances: He gets weighed on a giant scale to prove his worthiness, watches a stone lion sculpture come to life, puzzles over numerous mysterious signs in the castle, and spies a naked Lady Venus in one room, fast asleep.

The narrator and other guests also find themselves tested on their ability with alchemy and their interest in the subject. As such, some scholars have wondered if the story was intended to be an allegory on alchemy, which in its day was considered a serious science — Isaac Newton was a believer in it — that many believed could change the world and bring peace to Europe, so often plagued with war.

“Whether you consider ‘The Chemical Wedding’ a religious text, a morality tale, or a work of science fiction … the fact that it remains so rich in interpretations is one of its greatest strengths,” writes one critic. “Its original uncanniness is only heightened by Crowley’s new edition.”

WORDS ARE MY MATTER: WRITINGS
ABOUT LIFE AND BOOKS, 2000-2016

By Ursula K. Le Guin

Small Beer Press

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In a career spanning over half a century, Renaissance woman Ursula Le Guin has published more than 60 books including fiction and nonfiction, poetry, fantasy and children’s literature. She’s also piled up numerous literary awards, such as a Library of Congress Living Legends award.

“Words Are My Matter,” published by Small Beer Press, collects a broad range of essays, speeches, book reviews and other writing by Le Guin since the turn of the millennium. It’s the kind of book you can open at random and find a thoughtful and sometimes hard-edged piece of writing.

In one short essay, she writes of how she learned to write science fiction from reading Virginia Woolf, simply because the imaginative worlds Woolf constructed in “Orlando” and “Flush” were so vivid and well written. In “The Death of the Book,” she argues that e-books are less of a threat to the traditional model than many believe.

“I believe there will continue to be, as there has long been, an obstinate, durable minority of people who, having learned to read books, will go on reading them — however and wherever they can find them, on pages and screens. … Which is why it seems a good idea, rather than mourning their death, to rejoice that books now have not one but two ways of staying alive, getting passed on, enduring.”