“A Story of the Stone Age” shows Wells to be well aware of the incongruity of such narratives, and in fact making fun of the artifice. On the surface, the story recounts a very Rosnyan subject: the evolutionary rise of mankind out of a pool of competing species. The story suggests that during the formative time depicted, species other than homo sapiens evolved skills that, like those of the Xipéhuz, might have made them masters of the Earth. This possibility is treated whimsically, however. Wells’s talking cave bears (unlike Rosny’s talking birds in La Mort de la Terre) are not creatures of a well-extrapolated evolutionary scenario. They are fairy-tale entities, beings from animal fables. And there are deeper ironies yet in the way the story is told. The first lines read like a Walter Scott narrative calling attention to its own artifices: “This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we now call it) to England.” The narrator identifies himself as contemporary, thus unable to know time before the memory of man. Nor does the smattering of science he admits to justify the smug tone of his “reconstruction”: “Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand years—if the reckoning of geologists is correct” (360). The reader soon sees that this narrative, which has begun so portentously, is in fact another Victorian “educational” tale for young women, if a rather odd one: “She was stiff, but not as stiff as you would have been, dear young lady (by virtue of your upbringing), and as she had not been trained to eat at least once in every three hours . . . she did not feel uncomfortably hungry” (366).
The content of this story, however, does not fit the stated moralizing framework. Its theme is neither the triumph of rational method and human courage, as in Les Xipéhuz, nor the rise of homo sapiens as a tool-using animal. The tools humans use in this story are not fire or some other “good” for mankind; as in the first tableau of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, mankind’s advancement in this tale is due to its discovery, and savage use, of superior weapons. The irony goes deeper yet: when the nasty, brutish protagonist Ugh-lomi kills bear and lion and a rival chieftain, his actions do not advance humanity in any way. Instead, he merely takes the place of the leader he slays: “Thereafter for many moons Ugh-lomi was master. . . . And in the fullness of time he was killed and eaten even as Uya had been slain” (417). In contrast with Rosny’s work, this tale presents the “evolutionary” process the way Kubrick presents the human odyssey in 2001: as a biological cycle in which nature is always red in tooth and claw and mankind the worst predator of all. It is classic Wells.
In the tale “In the Abyss” (1896), Wells has his skeptical narrator describe what appears to be the discovery of an alternate evolutionary species. Then again, this story could simply be the delusion of a man trapped for long hours in a bathyscape. The deep-sea explorer Elstead tells of falling on top of an undersea city inhabited by intelligent hominid-like creatures: “It was a strange vertebrated animal. Its dark purple head was dimly suggestive of a chameleon, but it had such a high forehead and such a braincase as no reptile ever displayed before; the vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being” (503). This species breathes water, and has a “dark purple head” that resembles, however dimly, that of a reptile. Elstead’s description focuses, however, on the species’ high forehead and large braincase, “the vertical pitch of the face,” as marks of its affinity with homo sapiens. Its affinity may even be with posthuman creatures, as we are close here, in terms of Wells’s fiction, to the invasion of large-headed, humanoid Martians in The War of the Worlds.
Though the narrator remains skeptical, he notes that science has strong arguments supporting the validity of Elstead’s tale: “Startling as is his story, it is yet more startling to find that scientific men find nothing incredible in it. They tell me they see no reason why intelligent, water-breathing, vertebrated creatures, inured to a low temperature and enormous pressure . . . might not live on the bottom of the deep sea” (507). The narrator seems to lean, however, toward another interpretation of Elstead’s experience. Elstead describes being towed in his machine into a building at the center of this undersea “city” that appears to be a place of worship. As with cargo cultists, these undersea beings seem to worship the wreckage that falls on them from human shipwrecks. The walls of their “temple” are made of “water-logged wood, and twisted wire rope, and iron spars and copper, and the bones and skulls of dead men” (506). Whatever degree of civilization these beings have achieved, the narrator finds a way to cast them as superstitious inferiors, and by the same token to reinforce his unthinking sense of man’s superiority. For he is flattered to think that these undersea creatures worship human relics, and may in fact see men as gods: “We should be known to them . . . as strange meteoric creatures, wont to fall catastrophically dead out of the mysterious blackness of their watery sky” (508). These misbegotten beings bear resemblance to the creatures under Moreau’s “law” in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Indeed, the narrator’s comments hint at the same human vanity that drove Moreau to experiment cruelly with “lesser” forms of life. In Wells’s tales, his narrators generally hold to the norm; as representatives of what for his time was seen as normative humanity, these narrators occupy the middle ground between the devolved monsters below us in the abyss and the evolved Martians of The War of the Worlds who observe us with their “cool intelligences” from on high.
In Wells’s tales of discovery of what seem to be alternately evolved sentient species, the scientific picture remains clouded. The focus shifts instead to the fragility of the human condition, the mediocrity of normative humanity. Rosny’s treatment of the same sort of discovery stands out in contrast. The Xipéhuz can be called “strange meteoric creatures” only if we see them through the eyes of the superstitious nomads, who sacrifice themselves to them in suicidal manner. The true approach to this phenomenon—as validated by human history—is Bakhoun’s objectivity, the observation and analysis of the facts before him. The same is true for the protagonist of Un autre monde, and of Targ as he faces the question of the ferromagnetics in La Mort de la Terre. Rosny’s figures exist to observe, and thrive or perish by their observations. They possess neither ulterior motives nor emotional flaws that might deflect them from this primary task.15
In situations where humans encounter alternately evolved beings, Wells invariably refers to them as “aliens.” This dichotomizing of “aliens” and humans implies that there is something called human nature, and that it is a constant fact, unchanging in its endless opposition to the “other”—whether it be the alternately evolved beings, animals, or inferior humans. All of Rosny’s works feature encounters between humans and alternately evolved species, yet neither is ever treated as a static entity. Rosny may offer an example of human “advancement” in Les Xipéhuz. But he immediately puts this idea, like every other abstraction, in evolutionary brackets. Bakhoun displays the quality—the inquiring rational mind—that ultimately leads homo sapiens to master its environment; but Rosny also invokes the dynamics of evolution in order to imagine new life forms that will challenge humankind’s sense of its unique destiny. Humans do triumph in this narrative. Bakhoun represents an evolutionary “leap” from superstitious nomad to sedentary, rational man. But Rosny will show in La Mort de la Terre that he understands this “evolved” humankind to be one that in turn will pass: for Targ, cleverness and practical reason are no longer enough to overcome the forces of evolutionary transformation. Rosny does not allow serendipitous events to save humankind. He refuses to invoke a deus ex machina, like the Earth microbes that save humans from annihilation in War of the Worlds.
Bakhoun, then, is not “representative man.” He is simply one of many possible stages in human development. His qualities are still recognizable in Heinlein’s “special” man, who, when his peers succumb to terror, calmly studies the nature and habits of the enemy, and then acts effectively. Bakhoun, in a sense, is the ancestor of a figure like Sam in Hei
nlein’s novel The Puppet Masters (1951). But whereas Heinlein makes his special being the human archetype, ready to act in any day and age, Rosny places Bakhoun in a broader, pluralistic context. First of all, the Xipéhuz are not the parasitic “slugs” of Heinlein’s novel. Their forms have beauty to the human eye. In addition, they appear to observe a chivalrous code of conduct, sparing women and children in otherwise ferocious attacks. Finally, in good evolutionary terms, it is Bakhoun’s altruism in recognizing their beauty and nobility that leads to his defeating them. For the secret to human victory here is, as much as anything, Bakhoun’s respect for the adversary, his realization that there are higher evolutionary processes at work than simply human survival. The Xipéhuz teach Bakhoun many things. Most of all, they reveal that they (and no doubt many other species) are worthy to displace us, thus that such displacement is not a “bad” thing in itself, merely a viable option in the evolutionary course of things, which says that there can be neither communication nor compromise between two competing species, only territorial struggle to the death.
In a scenario repeated in many later SF novels, Bakhoun makes use of human cunning and courage—“low technology” and high mobility—to defeat the enemy’s superior “firepower.” Bakhoun annihilates the Xipéhuz, but at the cost of tremendous human loss. As in Heinlein, mankind has defeated a monolithic force through the fragile agility of the individual human mind and spirit. Quite unlike Heinlein, however, is Bakhoun’s final lament at the condition of life itself, where an element of design seems to enter the picture: “For now that the Xipéhuz have perished, my soul misses them, and I ask of the Unique One what Fatality has wished it that the splendor of life be soiled by the blackness of Murder?” Bakhoun’s experience has taught him to think not in terms of tribes or species, but in terms of life in the broadest sense. The Xipéhuz do not appear to be carbon-based life forms. Yet they share with humans the common goal of the advancement of life as opposed to death. It is this primary struggle of life against death that seems to define Rosny’s ecosphere in general. Even so, Rosny’s idea of evolutionary struggle evolves significantly from Les Xipéhuz to La Mort de la Terre. For in this work, perhaps his greatest, Rosny redefines equality of species not in terms of battlefield victory but as a matter of subtle balance and imbalance of resources. What is more, we now see, in Targ’s final gesture, the possibility that there might be communication between competing species. There might, in fact, be the possibility of transhuman progression, some sort of bridge from the human species to the life form that succeeds it. Rosny implies that the human faculty of mind Descartes sees as unique in the universe not only might have come to us from elsewhere but also might evolve, via the human bridge, beyond carbon life into new and unknown regions.
Tales of the End of Human Time
It seems obvious to compare La Mort de la Terre and Wells’s Time Machine. Indeed, at first glance, Rosny’s title seems to fit Wells’s story better than his own. For in the eyes of Wells’s Traveler, the death of all the life forms that have culminated in mankind is the death of the Earth. Rosny’s Targ, however, comes to a very different realization. The Earth that sustains life as he knows it passes. But the same Earth abides to sustain a new species, the ferromagnetics. This difference is fundamental.
Both works are alike, however, in that they take their protagonist, and the reader, physically to the end of human time. For Wells’s Traveler, time travel is no longer the purview of armchair dreamers or Merlin’s spells, for he builds a machine that lets him travel a material time line. The evolutionary journey becomes, for him, a physical voyage that takes him to the entropy beach, where he witnesses firsthand the waning of vital energy, the recession of life forms. He becomes, in a sense, a Last Man in the flesh. Yet his voyage remains, in terms of his travels, a classic one because he returns to where he started. Once back in his time and place, the Traveler is no longer the Last Man; he is now instead an actor who plays the part of Last Man, a role he has incarnated in the flesh for a biological week and no more. The evolutionary voyage has left physical marks on his clothes, but there is no change in his material body. In contrast, the evolutionary voyage of Rosny’s Targ is that of all carbon-based life forms, and it is without return. Last Man Targ bears, along with all of his species, the physical marks of a long agony—large chests to process rarified air, narrow abdomens from lack of food. These changes are irreversible; Targ cannot simply change his clothes.
A point of comparison and contrast between these two works is their recreation, in the context of evolutionary theory, of the story of humankind’s mythical beginning—that of Adam and Eve. Since it invented this story, Western humanity has dreamt of an arcadia or golden age, a new Garden of Eden, where somehow time is stopped, perhaps even the inevitable end of things is reversed. For Wells, this end of things is entropy; for Rosny, it is ecodisaster. These different designations are essential if we are to understand each author’s sense of beginnings and endings. For both writers, some form of millennial pause is possible. But the end remains inexorable; there is no cycle of time, no regeneration of humankind and nature. Both pauses must, by the logic of evolution, come to the same conclusion. The nature of the Edenic moment, however, differs greatly between Wells and Rosny. For Wells’s Traveler, finding a future Eden appears to be a psychological necessity. This proves, in the end, a delusion, swept away by the iron logic of evolution. For Rosny’s Targ, however, Eden is a physical possibility, born of a resurgent genetic line and a fortuitous discovery of water that allows it to exist, and made conceivable through human ingenuity and technology. Eden for Rosny is the reawakened potential of experimental science, a potential that is soon dashed by physical forces beyond human control.
The Traveler’s time machine opens the entire future to scientific investigation. A curious traveler would hop around, studying the development of certain phenomena, much as Bakhoun studied the Xipéhuz. Wells’s Traveler, however, roars off impetuously into the future and comes to what appears to be a random stop in 802,701CE. Moreover, he stays with the Eloi and Morlocks for most of his narrative. Why does he do so? If we remember that time is a dimension of his consciousness, it is possible that he wished to land in this future, his hand guided by some deep prelapsarian desire. Indeed, his first thought on arriving is that he has found a postindustrial Eden in this lush Thames valley of the future. The verdigris-covered Sphinx he first encounters ought to have warned him that physical time is also present in arcadia. On an unconscious level, however, he seems to dismiss his training as an observer, to deny the evolutionary vision that has brought him to the future in the first place. Through a series of painful corrections, he reluctantly comes to see the hidden horror behind the Edenic vision he obviously prefers to see.
Evolution posits irreversible, nonpurposive change through time. The future is, by nature, neither predetermined nor predictable; it must always be different, new. In spite of this (or perhaps because of it), many in Wells’s England feared that if mankind, then considered to be at its apogee, poked too far into the future, it would find degeneracy, devolution. Thus the initial reaction of the Traveler on entering his brave new world: “What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race . . . had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?” (25). When he spies the Eloi, however, he is almost too glad to confirm the opposite. He finds attractive, carefree beings, who live in communal dwellings. They cavort and play. He sees the dream of a “communist” commune of his time come true.
The Traveler is too keen an observer, however, to give in totally to wishful thinking. He notes that Eloi buildings show signs of disrepair. But if these people do not work, where do they get their food and clothes? There is not simply peaceful cohabitation of species here, for plants and weeds grow untended, chaotically. He chooses however to ignore these details for another one that points, this time, toward utopia in evolutionary terms. The Eloi are oddly a
like physically. Might this not be the result of man’s mastery of nature, where variations and “accidents” have been eliminated, and no contagious diseases remain? There are no more pests, no more need to toil, to “struggle” in the Darwinian sense. Again, to whatever extent he is seduced by this arcadian vision, the Traveler remains enough of a scientist to sense a darker truth behind the Eloi facade. In conquering nature, mankind may have conquered itself: “I thought of the physical slightness of these people, their lack of intelligence . . . and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong . . . and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions” (39). He begins to realize he is in the future, and it is a time of winding down, not of genesis. Yet even in the act of admitting so, the Traveler’s vision remains clouded by elegiac regret. He retains his Eden in a lament for Eden lost.
To recreate Eden, we need a man and a woman. The Traveler is given his Edenic chance when he returns and finds his machine missing. Thinking he can never return home, he now becomes free to make this new world his own, to make himself Adam within it. Thus the meeting with Weena is significant, for she is his potential Eve. In fact, a certain “back to the Garden” symbolism surrounds their meeting. When he spies Weena drowning in a stream, and no Eloi attempting to rescue her, he “slips off” his clothes and wades in to save her. Having seen by now the lack of vigor of the Eloi, he thinks he has found in Weena something different, an atavism among a weakened gene pool: “I had got such a low estimate of their kind that I did not expect any gratitude from her. In that, however, I was wrong” ([58]). If gratitude is still present among these degenerates, there must be nobler sentiments yet. The dream is rekindled.
Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind Page 5