Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind
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Let us look briefly at a couple of Wells’s stories that deal with the same theme as Un autre monde: “spontaneous” physical mutations that lead to new perceptual capacities, capacities that attract scientific speculation, even manipulation by science. The opening sentence of “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes” (1895) prejudges the events to follow from a “common sense” point of view: “The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited” (430). It is Dr. Wade who will pronounce science’s final judgment on the “case” of Davidson, a scientist who, while working with electromagnetic equipment in his laboratory during a lightning storm, believes his eyes, his organs of sight, have been altered. Unable to see what is physically in front of him, Davidson claims instead to see a strange seascape, a barren island with penguins, animals that exist only on the other side of the world. As Davidson slowly recovers normal sight in the familiar world of his friends, the narrator ponders the possibility that Davidson’s is “perhaps the best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.” This appears to be confirmed when a dinner guest, Atkins, shows the recovered Davidson a photo of the ship H.M.S. Fulmar. Although this ship has never been out of the South Seas, Davidson recognizes it as the ship he saw: “And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was seized, H.M.S. Fulmar had actually been off a little rock to the south of Antipodes Island” (439). As explanation, Dr. Wade posits the Fourth Dimension much discussed in The Time Machine. Now, however, it is question of a spatial dimension, as in Heinlein’s story “And He Built a Crooked House”—a “fold” in space, whereby Davidson, “stooping between the poles of the big electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements” (439). Wade’s conclusion, that it might be possible to “live visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another” is dismissed by the narrator as “fantastic,” as another dubious claim for déjà vu. He permits himself to make fun of Wade, who has “even made some experiments in support of his views, but so far . . . has simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs” (440).
Unlike Rosny’s mutant, Davidson’s change is temporary, and he recovers normal sight. Yet there is a much more troubling aspect to Davidson’s description that goes unnoticed by the narrator. One incident in particular suggests there is more involved in Davidson’s “mutation” than just seeing in one world and physically being in another. He describes a sightless ride around London in a bath chair, during which he experiences the tactile experience of entering water: “Very slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water crept up to my eyes. Then I went under and the skin seemed to break and heal again about my eyes.” He is “seeing” here with his entire physical being, and what he “sees” is not of the world of contemporary London: “A horror came upon me. Ugh! I should have driven right into those half-eaten . . . things” (437). It is hard to dismiss this, as the narrator does with Davidson’s sight at a distance, as a “mental aberration.” For what Davidson describes is not simply a mutation; it is a devolutionary process. For now new eyes appear to be developing in a new body, while this body, at the same time, appears to sink back into primal ooze. The Traveler in The Time Machine, published the same year, witnesses a similar horrific scene of devolving life forms. But whereas the Traveler observes, Davidson appears to participate, as mutating flesh, in a process of reversion to a primordial state.
Wells engages in a clever subterfuge here. The narrator can dismiss Dr. Wade’s four-dimensional explanation of Davidson’s new visual powers, both because they prove temporary (an “aberration”) and because they appear to be just another example of discredited paranormal occurrences. Science can dress up phenomena like vision at a distance with fancy theories, but this only renders science more suspicious. What Davidson describes in his London trip, however, is not an “out-of-body” experience. It is more like a slippage in evolutionary space-time, as if a modern man were asked to relive in the flesh an early stage in his development. The changes Rosny’s mutant undergoes are complex, but generally progressive, as his sense of sight undergoes further specialization. Davidson’s eyes, however, reverse the process of sensory differentiation. The reader shares Davidson’s horror as he slides bodily down the evolutionary scale into those half-eaten things. Nothing however is irreversible. He is, like the Traveler returning to comfortable Richmond, happy to regain his sight, and to share in the narrator’s mockery of Dr. Wade’s experiments. Better blind dogs than Davidson’s lost eyes.
“The Plattner Story” (1896) again begins with a skeptical narrator prejudging the facts in another strange case: “Never were there seven more honest seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner’s anatomical structure, and—never was there a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell” (441). Plattner, a language teacher at a small school in the south of England, appears to be a mutant, whose “entire body has had its left and right sides transposed.” Indeed, unless a mutation has occurred, “there is no way of taking a man and moving him about in space, that will result in our changing sides” (443). This could only occur if we accept the fourth-dimension idea rejected by Davidson’s narrator. Plattner’s body would have been taken “clean out of ordinary existence . . . [and turned] somewhere outside space” (444). Davidson feels himself sliding into a new body and world; Plattner physically enters another world and returns. Because this other world appears to be the mirror inversion of ours, his return leaves its mark on his physical body, inverting his organs. It is as if Davidson’s plunge into primal ooze returned him to this world an amphibian.
Plattner comes and goes somewhat like the Time Traveler. He disappears for about a week, then suddenly reappears, in a strawberry patch: “collarless and hatless, his linen was dirty, and there was blood on his hands” (448). His account of how he enters the “other world” seems as fantastic as his altered anatomy is verifiable. He describes being given a “greenish powder” by one of his students. When he mixes this with other substances in his chemistry classroom, there is an explosion, and he vanishes. This may seem farcical, but surrounding events prove uncanny. During his absence, members of the community experience dreams: “In almost all of them, Plattner was seen, sometimes singly, sometimes in company, walking around through a coruscating iridescence” (447). Plattner’s story confirms this. He describes a world where shades watch humans as if from the other side of a mirror. Theirs is a world of black buildings, lit by a green sun, inhabited by drifting “things”: “They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they had the appearance of human heads beneath which a tadpole-like body swung” (454). Plattner physically inhabits this world, but at the price of inverting his organs.
How does Plattner’s other world compare with that of Rosny’s Moedigen? Plattner’s figures, suggesting the degenerate Eloi, or even the Martians of The War of the Worlds, remain distortions of the human form. There is no such mirror relation between the Moedigen and humans. The Moedigen are beings of very different form, who evolve to their own rhythm. Plattner’s creatures, in their dark streets and sunken church, cling to the form of living humans. Plattner’s listeners open their minds to the existence of his other world only if it is seen in terms of conventional myths: these shapes are souls of the dead, ghosts of human regrets, shades of opportunities not taken, “Watchers of the Living.” On the other hand, Rosny’s figures are interesting because they have no ties whatsoever with their human observers. Natural creatures, evolving in a space never before perceived by humans, the Moedigen are of concern to Rosny’s observers precisely because they are new, unmythified beings. The humans have no precedents that help them predict what the Moedigen will do or can do. Mirror images always depend on the beings that project them. Plattner’s creatures seem to be less-than-human inhabitants of a lesser world on the other side of the mirror of life. Plattner returns to the normal world, but unlike Davidson,
he is permanently altered, his inner organs forever inverted. But what is the consequence of this? No one, short of an X-ray machine, can see it. Nor does what happened have any evolutionary consequence. It simply contains the warning that we may be, instead, secretly devolving. What science sees as breakthrough to another dimension may offer evidence that we are, beneath the uneventful surfaces of our lives, to the contrary losing our central place in the scheme of things. For Rosny, mutation provides the means of accessing new worlds, of advancing science. Wells uses it to warn his Victorian readers that the cracks in their teacups may indeed be lanes to the land of devolutionary death.
“The Crystal Egg” (1897) is not a story of physical alteration of senses or body, but it puts its protagonist in a situation very similar to that of Rosny’s narrator in Un autre monde. Mr. Cave, the proprietor of a curiosity shop, discovers he can see into another world by means of a crystal egg that mysteriously appears on his shelves one day. Cave hopes to investigate this world, but his greedy wife and sottish in-laws keep him from doing so. He takes his egg and finds sanctuary in the laboratory of Mr. Wace, a “young scientific investigator” with a “particularly lucid and consecutive habit of mind.” Like Rosny’s Dr. Van den Heuvel in Un autre monde, Wace proceeds to deal scientifically with a phenomenon that appears fantastic to the average person: “Directly the crystal and its story came to him, and he had satisfied himself, by seeing the phosphorescence with his own eyes, that there really was a certain evidence for Mr. Cave’s statements, he proceeded to develop the matter systematically.” Drawing Mr. Cave into the light of reason, he takes notes (“as a science student [he] had learned the trick of writing in the dark”) and makes careful descriptions of the “other world” (674).
Like the Time Traveler, Wace proceeds by gathering data, formulating hypotheses, and then correcting these as new data are observed. His first description reminds us in fact of the Traveler’s first, mistaken, view of the Eloi: “Incredible as it seemed to Mr. Wace, the persuasion at last became irresistible, that it was these [butterfly-winged] creatures who owned the great quasi-human buildings and the magnificent garden that made the broad valley so splendid” (674). Further investigation leads, however, here as in The Time Machine, to discovery of sinister doings beneath the placid surface. For both watchers become convinced that “the crystal into which they peered . . . stood at the summit of the end-most mast on the terrace, and that on one occasion at least one of these inhabitants of this other world had looked into Mr. Cave’s face while he was making these observations” (674–75). The egg is a two-way glass, which allows the others to scrutinize our world as well. Where, then, is this other world located? And why do they need to see us?
Rosny’s narrator remarks that the Moedigen go about their strange business totally oblivious to us. Their doings in their world may impact what we do in ours, but there is no clear line of cause and effect. There is clearly no invasive intent. In Wells’s story, however, written a year before The War of the Worlds, the beings observed show themselves hostile to humanoid forms. Wace detects “two small moons” in the otherworldly sky, and surmises that the scene witnessed is on the planet Mars. Along with “winged Martians” they observe “certain clumsy bipeds, dimly suggestive of apes, white and partially translucent . . . and once some of these fled before one of the hopping, round-headed Martians. The latter caught one in its tentacles, and then the picture faded suddenly.” Then an ominous “vast thing” appears: “As this drew nearer, Mr. Cave perceived that it was a mechanism of shining metals and extraordinary complexity” (676). This is a preview of The War of the Worlds, with its large-headed Martians and their machinery of destruction.
In Rosny, observation of the other world is the main goal; it will continue to be maintained, by other generations of mutants, beyond the life of the narrator. But in Wells, the window suddenly closes; Mr. Cave dies, and Wace learns too late that the egg has been sold to a “tall, dark man in grey” who subsequently disappears. Wells’s tales of evolutionary alterations in sense organs culminate with the crystal egg. Indeed, none of Wells’s mutations have any lasting physical significance. The reversal of Plattner’s organs serves no real purpose. Seen from the exterior he remains, for the narrator, a normal human, neither an “advanced being” nor an oddity: “He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane from the Nordau standpoint” (443). The reference is to Max Nordau’s Degeneracy, a popular manual for identifying physical and mental “deviants.” Davidson’s altered eyes are a temporary anomaly. The crystal egg, finally, is an external device of suspicious origin. It disappears, leaving doubts as to its existence, and the record of a series of observations that just as well could be figments of the human imagination.
Wells’s idea of evolution, it seems, did not encompass the possibility of such spontaneous mutations ever happening in the span of human time. In a late work on evolutionary theory, The Science of Life (1932), written with the biologist Julian Huxley, Wells asserts: “The crises of Evolution, when they occur, are not crises of variation but of selection and elimination; not strange births but selective massacres.”14 As an evolutionist, Wells’s idea of humanity is conventionally pessimistic. Mankind’s sole hope for development comes not from nature but from acts of conscious mind, from education rather than mutation. His stories and novels, however, reveal just how feeble those acts of mind generally are. In contrast, Rosny’s vision remains positive, in the sense that despite cases of “selective massacre” like that of the Xipéhuz and, at the other end of the scale, of carbon-based life forms in La Mort de la Terre, the force of life itself endures, capable of vital transformations that continue the adventure of sentience.
Rosny offers a positive view of the birth of the mutant in Un autre monde. Here, what is essentially a variant human species, born of man and woman, makes use of human intelligence to adapt and survive. Un autre monde can be seen, in fact, as a Lamarckian response to Wells’s Huxleyan belief that on the human time scale, meaningful mutations do not occur. Rosny’s protagonist may at first call himself a “monster,” because of his violet skin and opaque eyes. Yet he quickly qualifies this statement. He realizes he is not the conventional “freak,” born with gills, fins, or animal ears. His differences (which he clearly understands) are in fact alterations of normal human senses that, when placed in a positive context, become assets. If he cannot see colors in the normal spectrum, he sees a whole range of colors in the ultraviolet that are black to the normal human eye. He cannot see through ordinary glass or crystal, but he does see through other materials that humans see as solid. He speaks so fast that normal human ears cannot distinguish his thoughts. Writing also proves too slow to capture them. Yet this can be an asset, for if speed of speech indicates speed of thought, he thinks much faster than the normal human. Once science understands that these altered faculties can be used for research purposes, the problems that remain become purely technical. A phonograph is devised to record his speech and play it back at normal speed. He is taught shorthand. In the manner of Asimov, physical obstacles are overcome by means of human ingenuity. Evolution in this story is a matter of increments. And if the potential of these “small” changes is misunderstood, or rejected out of fear, humankind will stagnate. Wells is pessimistic about evolutionary “leaps.” He is ultimately pessimistic about mankind’s ability to change the course of things at all. Rosny, on the other hand, is optimistic about science’s acceptance of small, often overlooked changes, and about its ability to adapt to new challenges.
Prehistory and Alternate Evolutions
Rosny is the clear inventor of “prehistoric fiction.” After his early publication of the strikingly original Les Xipéhuz in 1887, he continued to produce novels of this sort, and they sustained his reputation in France long after the vogue of naturalism had subsided. Notable among these works are Vamireh, 1892), La Contrée prodigieuse des cavernes (The Prodigious Land of Caverns, 1896), La Guerre du feu (The War for Fire, 1911), Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat,
1920), and Les Conquérants du feu (The Conquerors of Fire, 1929). In all these tales, Rosny explores the possibility of alternate evolutionary lines for life on Earth. These range from unknown species like the Xipéhuz to various known forms of fauna (the cave lion) and even flora. In his story “Le Voyage” (1897) contemporary explorers discover a region “lost to time” where a race of elephants has evolved a civilization that parallels human development. In the late novel L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle (The Astounding Voyage of Hareton Ironcastle, 1919) explorers discover what proves to be an alternately evolved race of intelligent trees.
Wells, in contrast, though writing in the wake of Lyell and the evolutionists, never seriously considered prehistoric reconstructions. His Time Traveler is believed to visit the past but, significantly, there is no record of it. Wells did, however, touch on the possibility of alternate evolutions. Stories like “In the Avu Observatory” (1894) and “Aepyornis Island” (1894), in what appears to be a parody of the “lost race” narrative, often humorously describe modern explorers’ or scientists’ brushes with prehistoric relics come to life. Nonetheless, a couple of Wells’s stories do merit comparison with Rosny’s stories of alternate evolution—most notably with the paradigm he creates in Les Xipéhuz. In Wells’s one specifically prehistoric tale, “A Story of the Stone Age” (1897), he does attempt, after a fashion, to reconstruct a prehistoric landscape of competing species, among which mankind wins the day. In his stories “In the Abyss” (1896) and the later “Empire of the Ants” (1906), mankind comes upon rival species that, like the Xipéhuz, could be alien but are more likely products of Earth evolution.