ABSTRACT
Despite the Chevalier's pseudonymous claim to "strict veracity", Ghost Land is certainly fiction and almost certainly written by Emma Hardinge Britten, a leading nineteenth-century Spiritualist with interest in a wide-ranging set of occult beliefs. Ghost Land thus displays two common perceptions of the unknown that have proved productive for the Science Fiction (SF) mode. In the first, Louis's clairvoyance reveals physical corners of the universe with the vast scope of galactic exploration that would emerge as one of the defining features of SF in the inter-war period. In the second, the novel connects to the longstanding obsession with alterity that science fiction inherited from its gothic ancestors, an engagement with otherness that is defined, in part, by the incomprehensible strangeness of the alien and its realm. Many of the envisioned possibilities of mediumship were theorised with language and assumptions that stemmed from technological advancement.
