Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Why, then, is the tone of Wells’s own preface to the 1931 Random House edition, here reproduced, so diffident? “It is obviously the work of an inexperienced writer,” he says, barely admitting that “there are still publishers and perhaps even readers to be found for it.” He goes on for two pages in the third person before he breaks down and says “my story,” and then calls it “an undergraduate performance.” Modesty is a fine, rare trait, but this goes too far: he’s behaving as in his own disarming description of his first paper for the Fabian Society, which, he says, he read to his necktie through his moustache. Only at the end of the preface, having thoroughly bashed the story, does he loosen up and call it “his dear old Time Machine.”

  H. G. Wells was an odd man, oddly mixed. Looking at the 1920 portrait of him on the cover of a biography, I see two faces in his face: one likable, warm, and genial, the other tense, keen, and curiously fugitive. His clear gaze seems direct and yet it does not meet you. One should not characterise so very accomplished and complex a life in a word, yet the word that keeps coming to my mind, reading about him and rereading his work, is elusive. Wells is quicksilver: substantial, heavy, brilliant, yet you can’t pin him down. Oh, this is what he is, this is what he’s saying, you think, and then you realise he isn’t.

  Probably he was disposed to be hard on this story, to distance himself from it, because he hoped his reputation would rest on his realistic novels and the social and political thinking embodied in the later, more ideological fictions he called “fantasies of possibility.” And a writer can be pursued by a successful story till he’s sick of hearing about it. Feeling with justification that he had thought hard and worked hard for thirty years to perfect his ideas and his art, he didn’t wish all that to be overshadowed in the eyes of future readers by a story he wrote in a hurry at the age of twenty-eight.

  And yet it seems that his living influence is concentrated increasingly in the early scientific romances, now all a century or more old: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Imagery from these stories, particularly the first two, is so deep in our minds, so common to us, as to be genuinely archetypal, not only as scenes from films but as the far more deeply suggestive and resonant verbal images of the stories themselves. Nobody can write science fiction, or discuss science fiction as literature, without having read them; they are fundamental in a way even Verne is not, though Mary Shelley is. They established certain mythical tendencies in our fiction that we have explored ever since. I do not use the word myth lightly, to mean fantasizing or falsification, but in its proper sense: myth as a necessary story, concerning realities important to a people, and leading to moral perception and interpretation.

  What those moral perceptions consist of can of course be fully stated only in the terms of the myth itself. The story is not a fortune cookie from which a message may be extracted. The perception is the story. The interpretation will vary with the reader and the age.

  So people continue to argue about whether Wells was an optimist or a pessimist, a question which evidently puzzled him too. He loved science, which he met in its most promising and exciting season, the hopeful youth of modern physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology. He wanted to believe that science—reason—would lead mankind to a bright utopia; he worked hard at believing it. But as he said in 1933, “Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace.” It is courageous of him to admit that he did not want to admit it. He was far too honest an artist to hide it. He faced the hideous grimace, and it is that horror of darkness, the vision of “the aimless torture in creation,” that gives the scientific romances their gravity.

  He wrote tales of a hopeful future, such as In the Days of the Comet and A Modern Utopia, the one quite dull, the other falling, as rational utopias do, into intolerable elitism. He also wrote what may be the first genuine dystopia, When the Sleeper Wakes, showing how two centuries of social and technological “progress” lead to the dead end of a totalitarian corporate state. Even such a realistic novel of commonplace contemporary life as Tono-Bungay includes a haunting, terribly prescient vision of radioactivity as an uncontrollable cancer.

  He loved the English countryside that was being built over and despoiled throughout his lifetime, and wrote of it vividly, with a nostalgia that undermined all visions of a rational technocracy. He dreaded the future when he saw it as utterly unmanageable; sometimes he struggled to find political ideologies to manage it, sometimes retreated to the scientist’s stoical acceptance of what must be. He investigated and imagined all kinds of possibilities in his fiction and settled on none. He faced, evaded, repositioned, turned again to face what he feared.

  His impulse, in his life as in his fiction, seemed always to be to disentangle himself, though he tried hard neither to deny nor to betray. This inability or refusal to settle is most striking, perhaps, in his attitude towards time itself. Many of his generation saw themselves, with good cause, as living at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Wells’s fictions exhibit an intense temporal anguish, that of a man who feels he exists “between two times,” pulled both back and forward, at home in neither. The idea of living in two times, of moving back and forth between them, is an almost obsessive theme in his work throughout his whole long career.

  And here it is, in its pure essence, in his first novel.

  I have no idea how old I was the first time I opened the fat dull-green volume called Seven Scientific Romances, or how many times during my childhood and adolescence I reread The Time Machine. The lawn among the rhododendrons under the White Sphinx is as familiar to me as the garden of the house I grew up in. The direct, clear, self-assured cadence of the language (so unlike the pasticheurs’ notion of “Victorian prose”) is still exemplary. Wells’s narrator says of the Time Traveller’s tale, “The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober,” and that is a good description not only of the piece itself, but of the characteristic narrative ploy of science fiction: to be sober in imagining and to tell the incredible credibly.

  Along with the vastly, impossibly paradoxical notion of “travelling” through time as through space, there are quite a lot of lesser incredibilities, among them the Time Traveller’s amazing improvidence. Reading as a child, I didn’t notice, but I find it strange now that he sets off into the future without a notebook, without provisions of any kind, without even putting on outdoor shoes. He has matches in his pocket because he’s a pipe smoker, but I’m not sure he took his pipe (Bilbo certainly would have). “Why didn’t I bring a Kodak?” he asks himself eight hundred thousand years later. Why indeed? And why eight hundred thousand years? Wouldn’t most time travellers be inclined to try a hop of a century to start with, or at most a millennium? The entire history of mankind goes back only about five millennia. He goes forward eight hundred. What ever made him do it?

  There is no answer to that except an aesthetic one, and for me it is complete and satisfactory. He goes so far because the journey itself is so irresistible.

  It is splendidly imagined, that account of the first great time-voyage, when night begins to follow day “like the flapping of a black wing” and the sun starts “hopping across the sky,” and then the Traveller sees “trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away.” And the hills melt and flow, and the sun sways up and down from solstice to solstice . . . No wonder he “flung himself into futurity” with such abandon.

  Again, at the end of his tale, for no rational reason at all he travels yet farther and farther into the future “in great strides of a thousand years or more,” until he arrives at the “remote and awful twilight” of the beach at the end of earthly time. That scene, in its desolate grandeur and inhumanity, is surely the most wonderful passage of pure science-fictional imagination ever written.

  Science fiction is almost the only kind of story that ever really admit
s of a world not dominated by human beings (or gods, animals, or aliens who act just like human beings). To raise one’s eyes, once in a while, to the realms in which human action does not count and human concerns are simply negligible, the limitless universe, Lucretius’s “coasts of light,” may be to glimpse, for a moment, a freedom that exceeds consolation.

  The Time Traveller’s behavior as a human being among the morbid remnants of the species in the year 802,701 is neither wise nor admirable; he not only doesn’t take notes or samples, he mislays his Time Machine, gets his one friend killed, and murders a lot of people more or less unintentionally but with enthusiasm—as if foreseeing the movies he’d soon star in. On the other hand, his gradual understanding via misunderstandings of the flower-children Eloi and then of their ghoulish guardians, and his efforts to understand how humanity came to be so divided and so fallen, are sympathetic and convincing, largely because they remain tentative. His tale leaves us with a great many unsettled and unsettling questions.

  Except for a passage or two of melodramatic violence, it is all done with a light, quick, sure hand. There are many elegantly deft touches, such as the two flowers “not unlike very large white mallows” that are all the Traveller brings home with him, or the sentences describing exactly where the Time Machine is when it comes to rest again in the laboratory and why it is exactly there. Again, such details are of the purest essence of the science-fictional imagination. They are solid, impeccable. The whole garden is imaginary, but the toads in it are real.

  The Time Machine was well named: it has seen three centuries so far without the least sign of aging, its bars of ivory and nickel and rods of rock-crystal intact, its brass rails unbent, its language and vision as fresh as when it set off one hundred and seven years ago. I would envy all who are about to ride it for the first time, if I didn’t know that it’s a journey one can take over and over and always discover something new.

  Wells’s Worlds

  An introduction to my selection of H. G. Wells

  short stories, Modern Library, 2003.

  Herbert George Wells was born in 1866, in the heyday of Queen Victoria’s reign, and died at eighty, just after the end of the Second World War. Like most of us, he experienced what is often dismissed as a science-fictional invention: existence in incompatibly different worlds, time travel to an unknown planet.

  For the last couple of centuries, people who live more than thirty years or so have been likely to realise, suddenly or gradually, that they are strangers in a changed, incomprehensible world: lands of exile for refugees, cities of ruin for those whose nation suffers war, a labyrinth of high technology in which the untrained mind strays bewildered, a world of huge wealth which the poor stare at through the impenetrable glass of a shopwindow or a TV set. From the early nineteenth century on, the whole and single universes of preindustrial societies changed to a multiverse, and the pace of change increased continually.

  Caught in those transformations, H. G. Wells wrote about them all his life.

  He was no passive observer. He worked long and hard to change his world—in the first place, to get himself into a better situation in it. He was born into the servant class in a rigidly hierarchical society, his father a gardener, his mother a personal maid at Uppark, a country house of the gentry. The bright, ambitious boy got himself out of that (but always to look back with love at the lovely rural England of his childhood). He got himself out of apprenticeship to a cloth seller (where he learned a great deal about the lower middle class), and back into school—education, the road up. He won himself a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, where he studied biology under Thomas Huxley and others, and the new universe of science opened out to him along with the social and intellectual realms of professional status. Injury and illness led him from teaching to writing. By his mid-thirties he was an increasingly successful and respected author, building himself a fine new house a world away from the servants’ quarters at Uppark.

  He was ambitious also to improve the world for other people. He became a socialist and briefly a member of the Fabian Society, which wasn’t activist enough for him; he was variously a utopian futurist, a feminist (up to a point), a critic of society, of injustice, of capitalist commercialism, an unsuccessful Labour candidate, a tireless prophet both of cataclysm and of social betterment. In his late seventies, writing Mind at the End of Its Tether, after all the struggles and both the wars, after sticking it out in London through the Blitz, he was still looking for hope for mankind, though he could find it only in the idea of a new humanity, a changed, improved species: “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.”

  Trained as a biologist under a very great teacher, he never wavered in his acceptance of Darwin’s dynamic view of existence: life understood not as a Social Darwinist struggle for mere domination, not as a Christian Darwinist ascent to humanity as a final goal, but life as evolution: necessary and unceasing change. What stays fixed dies. What adapts goes on. The more flexibly it adapts, the farther it goes. Openness is all. Change can be brainless and brutal or intelligent and constructive. Morality enters the system only with the thinking, choosing mind. Wells imagined both dark and bright futures because his creed allowed both while promising neither, and because the eighty years of his life were years of immense intellectual and technological accomplishment and appalling violence and destruction.

  In his lifetime, and in his own eyes, Wells’s important fictional work lay in his realistic novels. Idea-centered, observant of social class and stress, topical, provocative, often satirical, sometimes passionately indignant, books such as Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay are comparable to Bernard Shaw’s plays, though they haven’t worn quite as well. Wells was a quirky, sometimes heavy-handed novelist, and most of his novels, though entertaining and in flashes brilliant, have dated. What has lasted, beyond any expectation of his own and in defiance of all the snobberies of the critics, are his “scientific romances”—novellas and short stories of fantasy and science fiction.

  They were written before the realistic works, most of them before he was forty. His early reputation was founded on them. Later on he was rather dismissive of them, partly no doubt because it galls an artist to hear people forever talk about work done decades ago, partly because he was a demanding self-critic and knew a good many of his early stories were potboilers. Moreover, the modern critical canon excluded all nonrealistic fiction as inherently inferior, and Wells was a self-made man, competitive, edgy about aspersions of inferiority. Possibly he convinced himself that imaginative fiction is less powerful or useful than the fiction of social observation. His training after all was in science, not in art, and scientists are taught to put observation first. But his calling was art, not science, and his nature was that of a visionary, a seer of the unseen, the unobservable. He could never be satisfied by the world as we see it, as it is. He had to change it, reinvent it, or find a new one.

  The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau—these are what the name H. G. Wells means to most of us now, and rightly so. These short novels or novellas established whole genres. They left a set of indelibly vivid images, imageries, archetypes, in the minds of generations of readers—and filmmakers, graphic artists, comic book devotees, TV sci-fi fans, pop cultists, and po-mo pundits.

  Wells wrote science fiction long before it had a name. He called it “scientific romance,” and later “fantasy of possibility”—better names, perhaps, than the one it’s stuck with. His originality and inventiveness were astonishing. Whatever kind of science fiction you look at, you’re likely to find an example of it—a first example of it—among his tales. He didn’t distinguish between science fiction and fantasy because nobody did then or for years to come; but he invented a literature, because he was the first man to write fiction as a scientist. His imagination was formed and informed by the study of biology, a science in its bright dawn of discovery and expansion, and he brou
ght that sense of limitless possibility, both playful and fearful, to his speculations and explorations of other worlds where the mind alone can go.

  And then he turned to social commentary, political exhortation, and programmatic utopias, and stopped writing short stories. Almost all the stories in this volume were written and published in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, before the First World War, many of them before the death of Queen Victoria. Enough to make one reconsider the meaning of the word Victorian.

  Some students of science fiction insist that its particular quality depends on its ideas alone, and that attention to literary considerations apart from clarity and narrative drive, or to character as opposed to stereotype, merely weakens or dilutes it. There are memorable stories to support this view, and Wells wrote several of them. His interest in society and psychology and his high literary standards, however, led him away from such a narrow focus on idea-driven plot.

  Introducing his own selection of his short stories (The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, 1913), he discusses the form and his relation to it. Citing the work of Kipling, Henry James, Conrad, and many others, he calls the 1890s the high point of the short story, speaks of “lyrical brevity and a vivid finish” as its virtues, and sees hyper-aestheticism as the death of it. Chekhov had not yet been translated, to show the limitless possibilities of the form; Maupassant’s bleak, tight, neat tales were the accepted model. Wells could not be comfortable with that. “I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund,” he wrote. “I refuse altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story.” He was surely right to do so; but his almost patronising description of it as “this compact and amusing form” hardly includes Henry James’s, or Kipling’s, or his own best stories, though it describes the lesser ones very well.