Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. And the creative mind says, We are here, because things have yet to be.13
Wells goes on in his talk, as one might expect, to champion the second kind of thinking—the kind of thinking which is future-orientated. He concedes that this kind of mental orientation is more difficult to support than the other, pointing out that we have certain knowledge of the past, thanks to memory and history, but none of the future. He goes on to suggest, however, that although we can have no insight into the future which resembles memory, we might be able to provide something which could bear analogy with history. He backs up this suggestion with the argument that much of what we know of the past comes not from recorded memories but from inferences drawn from discovered data—he refers, of course, to the revelations of what were in his time emerging sciences: geology, archeology and palaeontology. Given that our knowledge of the past is inferential, he says, can we not hope to infer some knowledge of the future from relevant data?
Wells had already begun, in Anticipations, to practise what he preached in this lecture, and all his subsequent futuristic speculations—including those cast as fiction—were constrained by his futurological ambitions. He devoted himself ever more intently to the business of attempting to predict the actual course of events which would emerge from the confusion of possibility.
* * * *
Anticipations and “The Discovery of the Future” marked a crucial change of direction in the character of Wells’s thought and work. The lecture was delivered shortly after the publication of the last of his classic scientific romances, The First Men in the Moon—which had been preceded by The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and three collections of short stories, all issued between 1895 and 1901. “The Discovery of the Future” can be seen in retrospect as the crucial punctuation mark which put a stop to that phase of his career, which had celebrated a rather different “discovery of the future.”
A century has now passed since the first book publication of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. A similar span of time separated the young Wells (who was then in his late twenties) from the era in which the Comte du Buffon and Georges Cuvier had first proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the history of the Earth had to be reckoned in hundreds of millions of years rather than in mere thousands, and that the human species was a very recent arrival on the prehistoric scene. Many people realized that those discoveries about the past ought to make us think differently about the future but Wells was one of the first writers to begin the work of exploring the possible futures which could now be glimpsed in the mind’s eye. In order to pursue this quest he came up with the ingenious idea of equipping the hero of his story with a machine to transport him through time.
The speculations about man’s future which formed the basis of The Time Machine were first set out in 1888 in a series of essays called “The Chronic Argonauts” in the students’ magazine of the Royal College of Science, The Science Schools Journal, which Wells had founded. There was also a intermediate version serialized as “The Time Traveller’s Story” in The National Observer in 1894 before a version closer to the book text appeared as a serial in The New Review between January and May 1895. The book itself followed immediately thereafter.
Between the first and second published versions of The Time Machine Wells had been pursuing his literary ambitions by publishing brief essays on scientific matters in various periodicals, most importantly The Pall Mall Gazette and The Saturday Review. The popular magazines of the day were engaged in fierce competition for market space and were avid to try out any material that might catch the public fancy; Wells cultivated both novelty and extravagance in a series of speculative flights of fancy which extrapolated items of scientific possibility or mildly controversial propositions to some gaudy extreme.
Among Wells’ essays of this period were “The Dream Bureau” (PMG 25 Oct. 1893), “The Man of the Year Million” (PMG 6 Nov. 1893), “Angels, Plain and Coloured” (PMG 6 Dec. 1893); later endeavors in the same vein included “The Limits of Individual Plasticity” (SR 19 Jan. 1895) and “Intelligence on Mars” (SR 4 Apr. 1896). Following the spectacular success of The Time Machine Wells began systematically to use the ideas explored in such essays as the bases for plots. Although he never wrote a story about dream-addicts ordering a night’s entertainment from a catalogue, or the man of the year million lying helplessly in his nutrient tank, the essay on angels provided him with the central motif of The Wonderful Visit (1895), in which an angel from the Land of Dreams is shot down by a sporting vicar. The essay on “plasticity” was the basis for The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), in which the eponymous surgeon remakes animals in the image of man and tries (unsuccessfully, in the end) to provide them with the essentials of moral law and the. The essay about intelligent life on Mars was the seed of The War of the Worlds (1898), in which the inhabitants of a resource-depleted Mars decide that they will claim the treasures of the earth.
Within three years Wells had developed a method of procedure that laid the foundations of a whole new genre of fiction. The reviewers of the day labelled it “scientific romance”—a label which Wells initially adopted, then discarded, but finally accepted when Gollancz issued an omnibus edition of his most notable speculative novels as The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells in 1933. By that time, however, a new label had been imported from America, and the sheer weight of the material which flooded the British market after World War II ensured that the American label—”science fiction”—would eventually become definitive.
There had, of course, been many tales of the future published before 1895. Many future Utopias had appeared, and the fledgling genre of future war stories had enjoyed a considerable vogue in Britain since George Chesney’s remarkable essay in alarmism, The Battle of Dorking, had appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1871. What Wells initially did, however, was markedly different from what anyone had done before. He set up the whole spectrum of rapidly-advancing scientific discovery as a generator of possibilities, each one of which might contain the germ of a story. The Utopian writers were interested in designing the ideal society and the writers of future war stories were interested in describing the next war, but Wells produced a way of working which tacitly accepted that the future was an infinite array of competing and conflicting possibilities. From this cloud of potential the course of history would be precipitated by the complex interaction of circumstance, chance and choice.
Wells never devoted himself exclusively to this method of working. He had other ambitions, and he knew that he would not be taken seriously by literary critics unless he wrote “real” novels like Love and Mr Lewisham (1900). For a brief period, though, he made spectacular progress within the genre he had pioneered. As well as the novels mentioned above he produced three more full-length scientific romances and a host of shorter works. The Invisible Man (1897) is a fine thriller which has frequently been adapted for the stage, the cinema, and TV, cleverly exploiting the special effects of all three media. When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) is a story of future revolution precipitated by the revival of a man placed in suspended animation in our own day. The First Men in the Moon (1901) is a classic tale of two unlikely friends who employ an anti-gravity device to transport a space-capsule to the moon. The best of his early short stories were collected in three volumes: The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895), The Plattner Story and Others (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899), the last consisting entirely of scientific romances.
After 1895 Wells never ventured quite as far into the future as he had in The Time Machine. The Time Traveller promises at the end of the book that he will come back and tell the people who have listened to his story about his further adventures, but Wells never used his fictitious machine again. He seems, in fact, to have begun to move almost immediately towards the conclusion that he reached and clarified in “The Discovery of th
e Future”: that he had found a better method of exploring the future—one which could not see nearly as far, but which had the compensating advantage of greater accuracy. It was this new method which he set out, and tried to justify, in his lecture.
* * * *
Although Wells continued to write futuristic fiction after composing his lecture for the Royal Institution, it was never quite the same in its nature. The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, published in 1904, begins as a robust scientific romance, but is soon diverted into another channel, and concludes with the creation of a race of human giants who are a crystallization of Wells’s notion of the future-orientated mind: the exponents of a new wisdom and a new spiritual strength. Virtually all Wells’s subsequent speculative fiction was to focus in like fashion on the contrasts between the men of his own world and hypothetical New Men who would—or, at least, should—ultimately replace them and become the custodians of progress.
Wells was to go on to write several more Utopian novels, including A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), and the quasi-documentary, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), which formed the basis of the famous film Things to Come (1935). He also began writing future war stories, anticipating the advent of the tank in “The Land Ironclads” (1903), revising his early scepticism about the usefulness of aircraft in war in The War in the Air (1908), and designing a peculiar kind of atom bomb in The World Set Free (1914). (He also prepared a revised version of When the Sleeper Wakes in 1910 called The Sleeper Awakes to take aboard his second thoughts about aerial warfare.)
As a predictor of things to come Wells scored more successes than any of his contemporaries, and his record remains second to none, but the simple fact is that no predictor is or ever will be capable of calculating the actual course of future events. The confluence of circumstance, chance and choice is far too complicated, and contains far too many unknowns, to be reduced to mere calculation. By injecting futurological concentration and Utopian scheming into his futuristic fiction Wells hoped to make it more serious, but all he succeeded in doing was filling it with failed guesses—some of which would, in time, come to seem silly.
Wells was to coin many names for the hypothetical “new men” who would conclusively set aside the follies of he present. They were New Republicans, Samurai, or Men Like Gods; they were members of a Open Conspiracy or servants of an Air Dictatorship. In his more modest representations they are enlightened contemporaries, intellectuals who have heeded the Wellsian message; in his more fantastic parables they are men miraculously transformed, perhaps by the gases of a marvellous comet or cosmic rays beamed at Earth by Martians—but either way, the future is theirs. His most elaborate futuristic fantasy of the period between the two world wars, The Shape of Things to Come ends with the following statement:
By means of education and social discipline the normal human individual today acquires characteristics without which his continued existence would be impossible. In the future, as the obscurer processes of selection are accelerated and directed by eugenic effort, these acquired characteristics will be incorporated with his inherent nature, and his educational energy will be released for further adaptations. He will become generation by generation a new species, differing more widely from that weedy, tragic, pathetic, cruel, fantastic, absurd and sometimes sheerly horrible being who christened himself in a mood of oafish arrogance Homo sapiens.14
Once Wells was well into this second phase of his career as a futurist he developed a certain distaste for the products of his earlier phase. He began to make unkind comments about his own early scientific romances, and his introduction to an omnibus issued under the title Scientific Romances in 1933 is remarkably condescending toward them, suggesting that they were exercises in youthful exuberance, not to be taken too seriously. The majority of readers have never agreed, and those early works are still read very frequently, while hardly anyone would bother to look at A Modern Utopia or Men Like Gods, let alone The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind or The Open Conspiracy.
* * * *
The difference between Wells’s two discoveries of the future can be seen in an observation made by the French writer Anatole France, in his excellent philosophical novel The White Stone (1905). This novel, like Wells’s lecture, is basically a discussion of whether, how and to what extent we can anticipate the future, and its conclusions are much more pessimistic than Wells’s.
When men try to conjure up visions of the future, France suggests, they can usually do no more than project their own hopes or fears into its hypothetical space, building from them images of Utopia or nightmare which, though they pretend to be futuristic, are all too firmly anchored in the present. Thus, France’s own vision of a Marxian Communist state of the future is ironically and modestly juxtaposed with a story in which Roman intellectuals in exile, who encounter St. Paul on his travels, see no future in this Christian craziness, but look forward instead to a regeneration of the glory of the empire under its cultured and charismatic new emperor: Nero. In coming to this pessimistic conclusion, however, France notes one remarkable exception to his rule about futuristic visions: the early H. G. Wells, who is nominated by France as the only man ever to have journeyed imaginatively into the future without deciding in advance what he would find. Unfortunately, by the time France published this compliment it had ceased to be true. By 1905 Wells had rediscovered the future, and he was bent on revealing it rather than exploring it.
Wells’s second discovery was, of course, an unwitting and unfortunate reversion to an earlier way of thinking. Men have always been interested in the future, and throughout history there have been individuals who were prepared to organize their actions entirely in respect of possible future rewards. All the literate societies which have passed on their ideas to us had their images of the future: images of the temporal future, which were Utopian in kind, and images of the spiritual future, which were eschatological in kind. Different societies in different eras varied quite markedly in the degree of their optimism or pessimism in respect of these different images, but pessimism in respect of the first has always been compensated by an increase of faith in the second. Where belief in worldly progress waned, faith in the possibility of a future life beyond this one waxed. Almost throughout the recorded history of the Western world, men have believed that the future could be known, and their own fate determined by inference from the relevant data.
Wells was born at an important time in the history of ideas. The traditional faith which provided the data from which knowledge of the future could supposedly be inferred was in a state of terminal decay. The validity of the account of the nature of the world contained in the Bible had been devastated by discoveries in those sciences which Wells cited as the sources of our true knowledge of the past. Geology, archeology, and palaeontology pointed to an account of the world very different from the one contained in the Book of Genesis, and Charles Darwin had published an account of the origin and nature of man which decisively challenged traditional ideas of the relationship between men and God. It is significant that the force of these new ideas came to Wells himself with the shattering impact of a sudden enlightenment, when he attended lectures by Thomas Henry Huxley at what was then the London School of Normal Science in he late 1880s. This severance of the relationship between man and God was of fundamental importance with respect to the ideas about the future possessed by ordinary men and women. If religious faith had been mistaken in its account of human creation and human nature, then it might also be wrong in its account of human destiny. The future, which had been known in terms of Heaven and Hell and the return of Christ to Earth to institute his Millennarian reign, was now unknown again. The ancient discovery was abolished, and in its place there was a void.
The inevitable result of this devastation of the eschatological image of the future was a renewal of interest in the temporal image of the future. There grew up in Europe several kinds of futuristic fiction, which claimed attentio
n precisely because of this new uncertainty. Movements calling for various kinds of political reform began to produce images of the future reflecting their ambitions and their anxieties. Their ambitions were reflected primarily in Utopian fantasies of society improved by technological innovations and democratic reorganization. Their anxieties were reflected in fantasies of future war and natural catastrophes. By the 1890s, when Wells began to write prolifically, these subspecies of speculative fiction were merging into the new genre of scientific romance, which was for a while taken up and promoted by the editors of the new middlebrow periodicals that flourished in the period. The origins of the genre in this particular kind of crisis is evident in the fact that many of the early contributors to the genre were the sons of clergymen who were converted to freethought: examples include George Griffith, M. P. Shiel, William Hope Hodgson, J. D. Beresford, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, and Grant Allen.
The future that these writers discovered was a future that had not the protective armor of destiny. It was a future that could not be contained within any particular vision, but which could only be exemplified by the sum of them all: it was a future in which there were many possible worlds, desirable and undesirable, probably much altered and possibly quite bizarre. The significance of Wells as a trend-setter and major inspiration to other scientific romancers lies in the spectacular open-mindedness of his early fiction. He used the future not simply as an arena into which he could extrapolate his prejudices, but as a space in which he could carry out bold thought-experiments, testing hypotheses by extravagant display. No one else was ever as good at seizing upon tiny windows of possibility opened by scientific theory or technological expertise and projecting through them powerful searchlights to explore their possible implications, unhindered by the choking constrictions of belief. Wells became the great pioneer of hypothetical fiction, which began the vital work of making clear what a vast range of alternative possibilities the future might hold. He and those who joined him in the writing of scientific romance were the men who realized how extraordinary the future might be; how dramatically the life of men might be transfigured, in many possible ways, by new discoveries in science or by interaction with strange things that might already exist—the product of their own processes of evolution—in other parts of the universe.
Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Page 10