Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind
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Interestingly, in the minds of modern readers, this barest of hints about Weena still inspires full-blown Edenic scenarios. Two such “readings” are found in George Pal’s 1960 film based on Wells’s novel and the Simon Wells remake (2002). In Pal’s film, the Adam and Eve motif is highlighted by the visual fact that Weena is a beautiful woman. She is, as in Wells’s story, initially an empty vessel. The difference, however, is that Pal’s Traveler reenergizes the beautiful body, and in doing so fashions his own Eve. Ultimately he restores to Weena and her people the capacity to resist, and evil and sin (the deformed Morlocks) are expelled from the land. The Traveler goes back to the present, gathers a set of encyclopedias, and returns to the virgin land (pace Henry Nash Smith), a fresh start, a new Eden. The Simon Wells remake uses a dizzying manipulation of time lines to give the Traveler two possible endings, one humdrum (a staid career with a blond Edwardian wife and a family), the other a new start with a dusky Weena in a future world of lush beauty, over which they rule as Adam and Eve.
Both films end here, giving proof of some deep cultural desire for an Edenic second chance. Both avoid sending the Traveler on to an encounter with a dying Earth. For Wells’s Traveler, however, Eden is ultimately a nostalgic interlude. Once the Traveler is forced to open his eyes to the scientific reality of the situation, his awakening is all the more horrific. Weena is seen as she really is, “a poor mite,” more a domestic animal than a child with promise. After he explores the underground lair of the Morlocks, he can no longer entertain his delusion that he has discovered arcadian innocence. But his thinking remains wishful, and he briefly imagines a sort of capitalist utopia, a world order based on a fragile equilibrium between Carolingian aristocrats and brutish workers. This is the tainted dream of Victorian apologists, the playful gardens and underground workers’ city depicted by Fritz Lang in Metropolis. The Traveler seeks to hold on to this vision, even in the face of evidence that the Morlocks are cannibals. It takes, finally, a Morlock attack to make him see the truth. What he discovers in the ruins of the Green Palace, in the night forest as he flees with club and matches, is raw physical devolution. The Morlocks raise the Eloi for food, Weena is lost, the Traveler recuperates his machine as white hands clutch at him in the dark. Fleeing this world, further flight only takes him to a more horrific future, where mankind has perished, and its Earth dying apace.
Rosny’s Edenic moment resembles that of Wells in that it comes at the end of human history, and seems to offer a final chance to renew humanity. Nonetheless, the difference from Wells, though simple, is fundamental. Because of his time machine, the Traveler is in violation of the process of physical evolution that has shaped the world of Eloi and Morlock. His story of time travel, therefore, is at best an evolutionary romance. He has seen the terrible future; he could have been trapped there. But luck and his fears bring him back to tell his tale. The narrator, on hearing this tale, says that to remain sane, he must assert the Edenic dream at every moment, knowing the end but living every day “as though it were not so.” Another lesson comes clear from the story itself: no time traveler will ever recover Eden lost, for no time traveler can change any part of the time continuum. A time traveler is merely an observer in the stream of time. All glide ghostlike through time; they are Emerson’s bird that never alights. Rosny’s Moedigen may resemble ghosts, but they appear to share a common space-time continuum with humans, thus may be an active element in the ecology of our Earth. The Traveler, however, is in violation of the laws of time everywhere except in his own biological existence, moving inexorably from Eden to end.
In contrast, Rosny’s Targ, by virtue of his evolutionary development, belongs biologically to a far future world. La Mort de la Terre is not a romance but an evolutionary epic. As such, it offers a sweep of time that is neither observed nor remembered but lived, biologically and ecologically, over a vast time line, at the end of which we find Targ and his peers, evolved humans who rightfully call themselves, in a strictly evolutionary sense, Last Men. Long historical analepses in this novella recount the collective wisdom of generations. They tell that life once thrived on sea and land, that humankind ultimately became the master of things. They also detail the logic of evolutionary forces whereby humankind’s rise has created the necessary conditions for its demise: “L’homme capta jusqu’à la force mystérieuse qui a assemblée les atomes. Cette frénésie annonçait la Mort de la Terre.” (Mankind harnessed everything right down to the mysterious force that bound together the atom. This frenzy heralded the Death of the Earth.) For Targ, a man living in this final time, the discovery of a new Eve is neither dream nor desire. It is an atavistic accident to seize on, one that offers the biological possibility of species regeneration.
Targ’s people preside over an empty wasteland without water. They are the final survivors of an “agony” of the human species that has lasted for a span of a hundred thousand years. Over this period humans have adapted, physically and culturally, to severe environmental changes. Human society is now rigidly legislated, and population control has been codified into iron law. These Last Men, said in the opening pages to possess “resigned grace” (“son être exhalait une grâce résignée, un charme craintif”), at first may suggest Wells’s Eloi, an effete and decadent race. But unlike the Eloi, Rosny’s Last Men have technology, developed in humankind’s past, that continues to sustain them, even in their decline. Wells thinks in terms of rupture, of radical rise and fall. Here instead the trajectory is a continuous curve, sloping up and then gradually downward to zero. These people have not lost the marvelous machines in Wells’s Palace of Green Porcelain, their books have not turned to dust. But the fact that Rosny’s humanity has retained them reveals just how insignificant mankind and its machines are when measured against the irreversible changes in the natural environment that are destroying all carbon life on Earth.
There is no need here, as in The Time Machine, to see through a green illusion. Targ’s evolved future world is an antiarcadia by virtue of its sheer physical nature: a harsh desert world where surviving humans are resigned to a slow, inevitable drying up of all sources of water. If one is tempted to see the small number of oases dotted around the desert Earth as utopian colonies, one should look again. True, their inhabitants have mastered agronomy; they have inherited sophisticated communication devices, “planetaries” and “gliders” invented in the past, that allow these islands in the net to interrelate across vast arid wastes. Yet a utopian stasis, set against the larger play of forces, is unsustainable. Targ must literally heed the slightest shaking of the ground. More and more frequent small tremors—“butterflies” in relation to the vaster cataclysms of the past—gradually send the existing water supply deeper and deeper into the ground: “Ainsi, le malheur qui ruinait la suprême espérance n’était pas une grande convulsion de la nature, mais un accident infinitésimal, à la taille des faibles créatures englouties.” (Thus the disaster that destroyed the last hope of mankind was no great convulsion of nature, but an infinitesimally small accident, of the same magnitude as the feeble creatures it engulfed.) Another difference: the iron-based ferromagnetics that stir outside the walls are, unlike the Morlocks, only indirectly born of humankind. Our industry prepared the terrain, and perhaps gave the spark, for their creation. Yet in the large view, they are merely another part of the general transformation of Earth. All the adversarial dualities of human thought simply dissolve into a complex web of cause and effect over which humankind ultimately has no control. The farthest thing from the sparse lives of these Last Men is desire for a golden age. Nor does Rosny need to place a sphinx at the portals of his future to remind us of the ravages of time.
Evolutionary atavisms do occur in Rosny’s terminal world. In Targ and his sister Arva, for example, old human traits of initiative and adventurousness are physically resurgent. Targ is a doer rather than a dreamer, a Bakhoun at the end of human time, a new incarnation of an earlier, now long-forgotten humankind that was willing to struggle against overwhelmin
g odds. Despite this, Targ’s adventure is doomed because the conditions that sustain heroic human activity on the most basic, physical level are no longer present. Given this physical reality, it is all the more poignant that Targ does find, in Érê, a woman in the flesh who is capable of replenishing the Earth with a new race of vigorous humans. She is a new Eve in a world that has long lost the luxury of eschatology, of pondering such things as the “Fall.” Her blond hair merely signals atavistic genes from a heroic past. In her the blond heroine of legend is recast as a genetic gift. And Targ wins her hand with a deed that, if it might long before have been seen as heroic chivalry, is now the product of sheerest physical necessity. In the end, this couple and their family gain their Eden. But it in turn is nothing more than a material enclave, a place temporarily sheltered from change by humankind’s perfect machines. Targ’s colony, technically, could perpetuate itself forever in terms of energy and food; but it is doomed by forces beyond its control. Evolutionary time is an arrow, and what occurred in the beginning of humankind’s history cannot be repeated. Targ and Érê must face their inevitable End.
Is Rosny cruel to suggest the myth of Eden at the end of time, when everything points to the futility of such myths when faced with the iron laws of physical nature? Or is he simply presenting the terminal world in a neutral manner, as a world where all things, even our most sacred stories, are in the end reduced to a common denominator of genetic and biological survival? Either way, or both, Wells’s narrative, however grim, is comforting in comparison, because its subtext remains anthropocentric. It speaks for mankind, not for processes. The Traveler misunderstands the future, not because the physical conditions he faces are so complex as to be ultimately beyond his control,, but because the models he applies are human models: Edenic utopia, the labor-capital equation. A Rosny protagonist would study the Eloi and Morlocks as new facts, as objective phenomena. The Traveler reacts, and his reactions prove all too human. Because he is seeking a human future, he would neither see nor understand a species like Rosny’s ferromagnetics, beings that are chemically variant but still a form of life. When asked to look beyond human time, to a landscape that is empty of human life yet still has living forms in it, his response is to look back in horror, uttering a recessional that traces the process of life back from himself, the Last Man sitting on his machine, through mammalian life, to amphibians, and finally to the primal sea from which these “ancestors” of man first emerged. Just as his physical travel is regulated by the exactly equal stretching forward and backward of Mrs. Watchett, so his journey in evolutionary time comes full circle in himself, and his time—a humanity that, perhaps, never moved from 1895 at all.
How different is the vast evolutionary processional that accompanies Targ’s final moments! Wells’s Traveler, in his vision, moves back along his chain of evolution. In opposite fashion, Axel’s famous dream brings the entire process of evolving life forward to culminate in himself, nineteenth-century mankind at its evolutionary apogee. In contrast, Targ’s vision is unique, because it is not centered in humankind but tells of the rise and fall of all carbon-based life forms: “Il refaisait, une fois encore, le grand voyage vers l’amont des temps. . . . Et d’abord, il revit la mer primitive, tiède encore, où la vie foisonnait, inconsciente, insensible.” (He made, one more time, the grand voyage back toward the beginning of time. . . . And first, he saw again the primeval sea, still warm, swarming with life, unconscious and unfeeling.) Notice that the emphasis is not on ancestral forms of life that lead to humankind but rather on the physical conditions (“la mer primitive, tiède encore” [the primeval sea, still warm]) that result in the creation of carbon-based life in general. In this huge flow and ebb of flora and fauna, of names and learned designations, humankind is dwarfed, its “triumph” merely a brief instant in the history of life on Earth. Rosny gives us instead a vitalist dream of the awakening and proliferation of a plurality of evolutionary forms—iguanodons, cave bears, aurochs. Rosny’s only distinction, in this mighty paean to organic life, is between animate and inanimate things; he sees that all forms of life have emerged from the mineral and must someday return to the mineral. Thus, because the ferromagnetics will abide, humankind’s passing is not the end of life, but only of life as we know it. The single, raw fact is that another form of life inherits our world.
For his time, Rosny’s pluralistic vision is unique in its attempt to create a balanced ecosystem, in which humankind is neither all-powerful nor all-destructive but merely a significant element in a larger equation. True, in Targ’s dream, mankind is called “le destructeur prodigieux de la vie” (the prodigious destroyer of life). But though it ruled and ravaged, in this larger picture mankind is, if anything, only partly responsible for its end. For Rosny, the process of evolution is beyond human power or desire, and humans are neither to be praised nor blamed. Wells, in contrast, seems to place the blame on mankind. In his arrogance as new “scientific” man, the Traveler is the embodiment of the process that leads to the Palace of Green Porcelain. He and his kind write the theories and make the machines that, as we discover, have robbed mankind, and by analogy the Earth, of its vital energy. Man’s society will create the degenerate ecology of Morlocks feeding on Eloi, a cannibalistic machine of diminishing energy that mirrors the final entropy of all life forms. Seen through the eyes of mankind, the future panorama of The Time Machine inscribes a closed circle, where back to the future is now forward to the past. The Traveler’s narrative remains an elegy for mankind trapped between its mythic Sphinx and its modern myth of the culminating ape.
Targ’s vision, on the other hand, has clearly evolved. For example, most of his peers still see the ferromagnetics as vampires, beings who “drink” humans’ blood. For Targ, however, this is like calling humans vampires for breathing air; Targ is able to describe this process as a simple transfer of needed chemical elements. He and his circle have learned the lesson of mankind’s evolutionary adventure: the ferromagnetics are not our enemy but our successor. If we aided in their development, this was unavoidable, as they are a by-product of the same transformation of iron that fueled human industry. Rosny’s humans are presented as like any other population that grows, swells, and ultimately wanes and dies as the elements that sustain it are depleted. The rise of the ferromagnetics is simply another such evolutionary cycle. Despite obvious pangs of sympathy for humanity, Rosny’s narrator strives to present the geological upheavals that destroy carbon-based life as the doings of an indifferent nature.
Rosny’s evolutionary vision was unique for its time. It is still unique today, even in our age of “ecology.” It strives to present human beings engaged in a complex interplay of physical forces, and to do so in as neutral a manner as a human being can. Its approach is systemic, always seeing mankind as part of a larger system in transformation, and steadfastly refusing any theological or teleological subtext. Rosny notes the classic human hubris, and says mankind must bear some responsibility for changing the environment. But mankind is never wholly responsible, and in the end natural selection, seen in the most neutral manner possible, wins out. Nor does Rosny, in the opposite sense, exonerate mankind, making us the victim of hostile forces from without. The superstitious nomads first see the Xipéhuz as hostile invaders. But essentially the Xipéhuz are minding their own business, and merely react to defend their territory. The problem is that their territory, through natural population pressures, is growing, and begins to overlap with human expansion. Mutually impacting populations is the core problem in all three Rosny narratives. And though Rosny must, because he is human, tell these stories from the human point of view, he strives by all means possible to keep to the ecological middle ground, to present the workings of the system without taking sides. This is a very difficult stance to take when the story, as in La Mort de la Terre, is about the demise of humanity along with all accompanying forms of life. Yet the narrator of this novella openly states that the ferromagnetics alone are not the cause, or even the main reason, for huma
nkind’s annihilation: “On ne peut pas dire que les ferromagnétaux aient participé à notre destruction” (One cannot say that the ferromagnetics actively participated in our destruction). Theirs is a life form that, in the classic Darwinian sense, has adapted and survived in a changing environment. Very few writers have wanted to carry the “inconvenient truths” of ecology this far.
Rosny and the Nature of Hard Science Fiction
Hard SF has been defined by Gregory Benford as writing “with the net up,” playing according to the rules of nature rather than to the sentimental desires of human beings. This defines a mode of storytelling that, in an age of modern science in which rational humankind is suspended between material infinities large and small, will not give in to the usual contrivances of conventional suspension-of-disbelief. In theory at least, hard SF does not allow its readers to avail themselves of the various retrieval strategies that might permit them to salvage their sense of humanity as they confront the edge of the abyss, the prospect of humanity’s extinction. If in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus we are told that the final note of Adrian Leverkühn’s cantata, humankind’s last hope for a presence in the material void, resonates endlessly in dark silence, hard SF tells us sound does not carry in the vacuum of outer space.16