Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  The change that overtook Wells in 1902, however, reflected a change that could be seen in the genre as a whole. Anxiety about the future took a much firmer hold in Britain than hope for the future. This is not to say that scientific romance became entirely pessimistic, and certainly not to suggest that futurological speculation ceased to be constructive, but where optimism survived it was a defensive kind of optimism, fully aware of a series of threats which loomed over contemporary men and threatened to overwhelm them before they could discover any temporal salvation to replace the abandoned Christian paradise. Certainly, the two major writers of scientific romance who came to prominence after 1902 but before 1914—Hodgson and Beresford—were conspicuously more pessimistic in their fiction than Griffith, Wells, or Shiel. Even Shiel, whose major works were published after the turn of the century, exhibited a rather peculiar species of defiant optimism which exhorted passionate faith in progress no matter what horrors the future might bring; the moral of his most famous work, The Purple Cloud (1901), is that one must believe in the positive thrust of progress even if civilization is obliterated and almost the entire population of the world annihilated. The best of the scientific romances which Wells wrote after 1902, The War in the Air, is a novel which parades an anxiety about the destruction of civilization in uncompromising form, and in other similar fictions—including The World Set Free and The Shape of Things to Come—Wells readily accepts such appalling destruction as part of the price of progress.

  The force of this anxiety is easy enough to detect in stories of natural catastrophe and future war. The smallness and insignificance of the world of man had been made clear by sciences which had revealed the true size of the universe and the true antiquity of the earth. Now that the God of the Old Testament was no longer credited with responsibility for visiting floods and plagues upon His people, He could no longer be credited with responsibility for protecting them either. The march of science was seen to be giving men command of ever greater forces, but there were many reasons for supposing that men would rather use those forces to destroy than to create.

  The Great War, when it came in 1914, reinforced these anxieties very powerfully. It obliterated one species of optimism that had flourished beforehand: the idea that if men were to fight a new and horribly destructive war, then it would be the final war—the war that would end war. This was the kind of slogan under which the Great War was marketed to those who were recruited in hundreds of thousands to fight in it and die in it, but it quickly came to be seen as a sick joke. The lesson of the Great War, as far as the kind of British mind that was orientated to the future rather than the past was concerned, was that civilization was very fragile, and that contemporary men were living on the lip of an abyss, into which their whole world might easily be plunged by the recklessness of fools. Those future-orientated men who took as their mission the mapping of an historical course by which men might be navigated to a safer world knew well enough how hazardous that course might be, and how desperate their task had become—but they found it hard to find an audience. Scientific romance waned in popularity after the war, and it seemed that many people had taken a different lesson from the horrors of the war—the lesson that the kind of thinking which brooded too much on the future was too difficult and uncomfortable to be borne.

  * * * *

  Even before the war H. G. Wells had been prepared to imagine himself a sighted man in a country of the blind, unable to convince his contemporaries of the narrowness of their sensations. Afterwards, he found his efforts to awaken others from their willful lack of foresight so difficult that the characterized the new era as the Age of Frustration (a title which he applies to it in The Shape of Things to Come and explores more fully in a most peculiar book called The Anatomy of Frustration). Other writers of scientific romance echoed this notion, and Wellsian Frustration is acutely obvious in the writings of men who began to produce scientific romances in the period between the wars, including Neil Bell, S. Fowler Wright, John Gloag, and Olaf Stapledon.

  The literary response to this Age of Frustration was mixed, but predominant among its moods were a fierce, cynical irony and an angry pessimism. The future war stories published between the wars present a whole series of images of mankind bombed back to the stone age, which develop a terrible fascination as they revel in the details of mass destruction.

  At one extreme the scientific romance of the period between the wars was fatalistic almost to the point of nihilism. In the words of Neil Bell:

  And when he was nineteen the War of 1914-18 came, and he went through that long infamy, and came out with no shred or tatter of his former illusions to cover his nakedness.

  “Everything failed the common man in that testing,” he said. “The church of God, that should have held itself aloof and denounced the rottenness of it all, failed to make that gesture, and setting itself rather to fan the flames, sealed its own fate in the hearts of the men who fought. We saw incompetence that slaughtered thousands shielded by the privilege of birth or wealth or political pull; we saw lying, treachery and greed enthroned and triumphant; we saw lust and cruelty shrieking from safe places the hatred that was unknown to the men who stumbled blindly in the bloody quagmires of mud and pain and hopelessness…

  “And so we emerged from that struggle believing in nothing, hardly in ourselves.”15

  And in the words of S. Fowler Wright:

  We are looking at a civilisation without control, and without the freedom that control gives. We are a nation of slaves, and slaves to a tyrant that we cannot kill, being beyond our reach. Our new rulers are the aggregate folly and the aggregate weakness of mankind. Comfort and cowardice are the new gods.16

  Where writers sought for hope—as they all did, in their various ways—they sometimes found it in the idea of a cyclical history, whereby civilization would destroy itself utterly over and over again only to be rebuilt anew, much as every dark night is followed by a new dawn. If this cycle were to be broken, though, the writers of scientific romance could imagine that break only in terms of some radical transformation of human nature—the replacement of Homo sapiens by a new and finer species. This image recurs in the work of all the major and several of the minor writers of the period, most obviously in the work of Stapledon, who chronicled the history of a whole series of human species in Last and First Men. The most misanthropic writers of the period could hardly wait for their contemporaries to be hustled off the stage of history and replaced, and the most extreme works of this kind reached a fine pitch of hysteria. The following is from This Was Ivor Trent by Claude Houghton:

  And then I turned and saw—You! Your figure was shrouded, but your face was fully revealed. It was the countenance of a new order of Being. I knew that a man from the future stood before me.

  Terror overwhelmed me—then. But I do not fear you—now.

  I stretch out my arms and invoke you:

  Come!

  I do not know whether you stand on the threshold, or whether unnumbered ages separate us from you. I only know that you must be: that you are the spiritual consciousness made flesh: that you are the risen man and that we are the dead men. Yet, in us, is the possibility of you.

  We are the Old—the dying—Conscious-ness. You are the New—the living—Consciousness. We have violated earth. You will redeem it. We descend the darkening valley of knowledge. You stand on the uplands of wisdom. We are an end. You are a beginning.

  If you are a dream, all else is a nightmare. But I have seen God’s signature across your forehead.

  Come!

  More and more fiercely we deny our need of you. We say you are a fantasy, a lie, an illusion. We madden ourselves with sensation; drug ourselves with work, pleasure, speed; herd in the vast sepulchres of our cities; blind our eyes; deaden our ears; cling to our creed of comfort (Comfort! the last of the creeds!); sink day by day in deeper and deeper servitude to our inventions—hoping to numb the knowledge of our emp
tiness; striving to ease the ache of separation; trying to evade your challenge; seeking to deny our destiny.

  Come!

  The martyred earth waits for you. Daily, our darkness deepens. Secretly, all are afraid. None knows what to do. To underpin, to patch up, to whitewash sepulchres—these are the substitutes for action. To shout, to boast, to nickname bankruptcy. Prosperity—this is the substitute for leadership. We have glorified ourselves, magnified ourselves, made gods of ourselves. We have served Hate, Greed, Lust. and now darkness deepens around us. And we are afraid.

  Come!

  Lacking you, there is no solution to any one of our problems. Possessing you, no problems exist. If it be madness to believe in you, the sanity which denies you is a greater madness.

  But we who have lived on substitutes; we who have plumbed the abyss of ourselves; we who have glimpsed the magnitude of man’s misery—we do not deny you.

  From the midnight of madness we stretch out our arms to you.

  Come!17

  As the thirties progressed it became increasingly obvious to the future-orientated mind that the new war was imminent, and that some kind of radical change in human affairs was easily imaginable. A kind of summary of the ambitions and achievements of scientific romance was provided by Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker (1937), in which a man walking alone on a hillside after quarrelling with his wife attempts through a series of visions to place his predicament in its true context, bracketing it within the real dimensions of space, time, and metaphysics, and returning finally to the lonely hillside, where he must decide how he, as an individual, is to orientate himself in respect of a terribly threatening future:

  It seemed that in the coming storm all the dearest things must be destroyed. All private happiness, all loving, all creative work in art, science and philosophy, all intellectual scrutiny and speculative imagination, and all creative social building; all, indeed, that should normally live for, seemed folly and mockery and mere self-indulgence in the presence of public calamity. But if we failed to preserve them, when would they live again?

  How to face such an age? How to muster courage, being capable only of homely virtues? How to do this, yet preserve the mind’s integrity, never to let the struggle destroy in one’s own heart what one tried to serve in the world, the spirit’s integrity?

  Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy.18

  * * * *

  World War II, when it actually arrived, proved a little less terrible than the writers of scientific romance had feared. Poison gas was not used, and the tactics of Blitzkrieg failed to destroy civilization. In the manner of its ending, though, the war disqualified the optimism which might otherwise have been fostered by its failure to obliterate civilization. The advent of the atom bomb seemed to confirm all the long-standing fears about man’s capacity for world destruction, and revelations of the crimes committed in Germany’s concentration camps and death-camps did nothing to assuage fears about the vulnerability of Homo sapiens to the corruptions of brutality.

  The inevitable reaction to the lesson of World War II was a brief intensification of cynicism and pessimism—a combination best exemplified by what might be considered the last of the great scientific romances, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Wells, nearing the end of his life, did not need to wait for Hiroshima to come to his own conclusions about the implications of the new war. In 1945 he published his final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, which he introduced with the following paragraph:

  This little book brings to a conclusive end the series of essays, memoranda, pamphlets, through which the writer has experimented, challenged discussion, and assembled material bearing upon the fundamental nature of life and time. So far as fundamentals go, he has nothing more and never will have anything more to say.19

  He went on to make the following deliberately casual claims:

  Our universe is not merely bankrupt; there remains no dividend at all; it has not simply liquidated; it is going clean out of existence, leaving not a wrack behind. The attempt to trace a pattern of any sort is absolutely futile.

  This is acceptable to the philosophical mind when it is at its most philosophical, but for those who lack that steadying mental backbone, the vistas such ideas open are so uncongenial and so alarming, that they can do nothing but hate, repudiate, scoff at and persecute those who express them, and betake themselves to the comfort and control of such refuges of faith and reassurance as the subservient fear-haunted mind has contrived for itself and others throughout the ages.

  Our doomed formicary is helpless as the implacable Antagonist kicks or tramples our world to pieces. Endure it or evade it; the end will be the same, but the evasion systems involve unhelpfulness at the least and in most cases blind obedience to egotistical leaders, fanatical persecutions, panics, hysterical violence and cruelty.

  After all the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel or mean or cowardly. Such things are also in his own make-up in a large measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his strength. He would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack. But this is a matter of individual predilection for everyone to decide for himself.

  A series of events has forced upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out. The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other better animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in more and more swiftly upon mankind.

  That new animal may be an entirely alien strain, or it may arise as a new modification of the hominidae, and even as a direct continuation of the human phylum, but it will certainly not be human. There is no way out for Man but steeply up or steeply down. Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.20

  In this fashion, the future discovered by Wells and his contemporaries reached virtual closure, recapitulating by analogy the journey made by the Time Traveller in The Time Machine—who witnessed the death of the human species, and of the earth itself, at the end of an historical sequence which the younger Wells had regarded only as a flight of serious fancy.

  * * * *

  Wells’s earlier discovery of the future did not, however, go to waste. He may have forsaken it in favor of another, far narrower, discovery and he may have inspired the majority of his fellow Britons to do likewise, but the method which he employed for eight or nine years to generate scientific romances on a wholesale basis was taken up by others. Although the British tradition of scientific romance owed more to the twentieth century Wells than to his nineteenth century forbear, American science fiction took both its inspiration and its method from the work which Wells did between 1893 and 1901.

  The United States of America had joined the Great War late, and turned out to be its only winner. America, unlike so many European nations, was not threatened by invasion. Although its people suffered some shortages and deprivations, these were nothing like the sufferings of Europe in their scale or their intensity. To cap it all, America inherited the economic hegemony of the world as a result of the destruction of Europe as a financial and industrial hub of world affairs. While Europe struggled to rebuild in the 1920s America enjoyed a spectacular boom, and although Americans had then to agonize along with everyone else when the great Depression of the 1930s followed the Wall Street Crash, there remained an essential optimism in America which contrasted starkly with the urgency of the Age of Frustration which had Britain in its calamitous grip.

  By virtue of these different circumstances, the American writers of science fiction discovered a
future very different from that discovered by British scientific romance. Most importantly, American science fiction retained its openness, its clear consciousness of a huge range of future alternatives. The vast vistas of space and time which had so excited and inspired the young H. G. Wells came, in later years, to overawe and frighten writers of British scientific romance—to make them aware of the smallness of man and the vanity of human ambition. Even in the future envisaged for humankind in Last and First Men, which extends over thousands of millions of years, men do not break out of the cage of interstellar space surrounding the solar system. In American science fiction, by contrast, that bubble was soon and effortlessly pricked, so that the entire galaxy quickly became a playground for pioneers and adventurers.

  In American science fiction the world might be threatened by all manner of powerful new weapons, wielded by men or by vicious alien beings, but civilization never trembled on the brink of a bottomless abyss, because there was an indomitable faith in science fiction that human ingenuity could and must prevail. Science fiction writers produced their anxious stories, and even some stories of future worlds from which humans had disappeared, but their tales of terrible hazards and elegiac fantasies of the end of the human story had neither the cynicism nor the urgency of parallel images in British scientific romance. In science fiction, such stories were naive in a good as well as a bad sense of the word. They were usually ill-designed, clumsy, and sketchy in literary terms, but they were also wide-eyed, celebrating the wonder of discovery and extrapolation in a way that British scientific romance very rarely did. Science fiction in the twenties and thirties was mostly facile, but for all its precision, scrupulousness and literary sophistication, British scientific romance had lost something important when it lost its own facility.