Looking Backward is a serious attempt at prophecy. News from Nowhere is only a vote of no confidence in the present.
In spite of protests like Caesar’s Column and attempted exceptions like News from Nowhere, after Looking Backward it became clear that technology had taken over the future of the utopian story. The barbarians now ruled Rome.
Henceforth, to the extent that utopias would continue to be imagined, they would be imagined as technologically perfected societies. Protests against industrial utopia became centered in the dystopian story, which conceded that metal-and-glass techno-paradise would be the society of tomorrow, but reserved the right to complain about it. It seemed that either you liked this world-to-come or you didn’t, but either way, scientific utopia was the only Perfected Society that could be.
At precisely the same time that science overthrew the utopian future and placed itself in charge, it also made a move on the more-or-less historical territory of legendary fantasy. The most striking example of this process is to be found in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), in which a practical and unsentimental American machinist and superintendent of labor is struck a blow on the head which returns him to the days of Camelot. Twain’s character dubs himself “The Boss” and sets out to take over this medieval world and industrialize it, pitting guns and railroads against knights in armor and the magic of Merlin.
And time and time again in this story, it is technology that triumphs: “Somehow, every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de-rol got left.”111
In effect, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is the new voice of scientific materialism informing legendary fantasy that it must pack its bags and quit history. No more stories would be allowed like The Castle of Otranto, set in the Twelfth Century and featuring ghosts in conformity with the fantastic beliefs of the period. Like the future, the past was now the province of science. Magic and superstition must vacate.
This eviction from familiar imaginative quarters can most easily be traced in the sonorous romances that William Morris, the author of News from Nowhere, wrote during the later years of his life. The first ones that he produced, such as The House of the Wolfings (1889), were legendary tales set in remote historical times in Northern Europe. The last few, like The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World’s End, published posthumously in 1896, were more frankly magical. But as their titles suggest, they were set outside history and geography in some imaginary region whose relationship to our ordinary world was not plausibly fixed. Full-blown magic was now permitted to exist only in such nonce worlds.
The Victorians were as fascinated by ancient civilizations and prehistory, lately uncovered by science, as the Romantics had been by the Middle Ages. As magic and legend were nudged and shoved and pushed out of history, stories invoking technology rushed in to replace them. In H. Rider Haggard’s classic lost race novel She (1887), for instance, a goddess-like woman surviving from ancient times is discovered ruling a native tribe in present-day Africa. But those powers that have sustained her so long, at first seeming to be magic and sorcery, are ultimately revealed instead to be a kind of science:
I started back aghast, and cried out that it was magic. . . .
“Nay, nay, O Holly,” she answered, “it is no magic; that is a fiction of ignorance. There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the secrets of Nature.”112
The prehistoric past of dinosaur bones, Neanderthal skeletons and stone axes was, of course, the natural property of science, which had discovered them. The first stories set in the Stone Age appeared at just this same time, Andrew Lang’s “The Romance of the First Radical” in 1886, and Henry Curwen’s Zit and Xoe in 1887. The invariable subject of stories like these was the invention of civilization and material culture.
This great broadening of the SF canvas, this extension into the past and into the future, made a true master of space and time like Wells possible. It was a writer writing with a conscious knowledge of what he was about who would produce in 1897 novelets with the parallel titles “A Story of the Days to Come” and “A Story of the Stone Age.” Not at all by accident, “A Story of the Days to Come” concerns a failed attempt to escape from the grip of metal-and-glass techno-utopia. And “A Story of the Stone Age” is about the invention of the first stone club by a brainy caveman of fifty thousand years ago, out to increase his power to survive through technological innovation.
But those stories were the work of the mature Wells, the one man who could look at the new scientific universe without blinking. That Wells would be the first writer since Jules Verne in Journey to the Centre of the Earth to penetrate into an undoubtable transcendent realm. That Wells would be the envisioner of powerful and dangerous alien creatures. But before Bertie, the young would-be SF writer, could become that Wells, it was necessary for him to suffer and fail some more, to suffer and fail until he had nothing at all to lose.
When Wells left Normal School in 1887, he returned to teaching as the most obvious way of making a living. But a crushed kidney from a kick received on the soccer field plus signs of tuberculosis soon sent him back to Up Park for an extended period of recuperation.
There he attempted a social novel called Lady Frankland’s Companion and managed to write some 35,000 words before it got set aside incomplete. He sponged off friends, and earned small money writing and answering science questions for boys’ papers.
After more than a year of illness and indecision, Wells found another teaching position. Teaching science would be his main occupation for the following four and a half years.
In all this period of six years after leaving school, Wells’s one writing success would be a speculative essay, “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” written at Christmastime 1890 at Up Park, two months after Wells finally got his degree in zoology from London University through examination. “The Rediscovery of the Unique” was bought by the legendary editor Frank Harris and published in the Fortnightly Review in July 1891. What is most interesting about this essay is that in it “science” stands both for the knowledge of man and for the great unknowns lying beyond him. The essay concludes:
Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room—in moments of devotion, a temple—and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated—darkness still.113
In 1893, two years after this solitary essay was published—six full years after he had dropped out of Normal School—Wells’s situation was considerably more desperate than it had ever been before. He had not sold any further writing, though not from want of trying. And his personal life was suddenly extremely burdensome.
Wells had married his cousin Isabel in 1891 out of need and frustration. But the marriage had not proven satisfying to him. Isabel was unresponsive both sexually and intellectually. Wells had now fallen in love with one of the new forthright young women of the Nineties, Amy Catherine Robbins, one of his cram college students.
In early 1893, Wells’s mother lost her position as housekeeper at Up Park. And his older brother Fred was fired from his job in a drapery shop in order to make way for his employer’s son. Suddenly, Bertie Wells, not yet 27, was the sole financial support for his entire family.
It was too much for him. In May 1893, Wells collapsed again, coughing blood. It became clear to Bertie that he would have to give up teaching.
It was in this moment of awfulness and desperate need that things finally began to fall into place for H.G. Wells. It was as though it were necessary for him to be shaken violently, spun out of his course, flogged within an inch of his life,
and then stopped dead in his tracks, in order for him to perceive what it was that he really needed to do.
What he did immediately after his collapse was to travel to the seashore to recover. While he was there, Wells picked up a lending library copy of When a Man’s Single, a novel by J.M. Barrie, later to write Peter Pan.
In this book, one character explains to another in passing how it is possible to write saleable sketches out of the commonest elements of everyday experience. A light dawned. Wells set the book down and straight away on the back of an envelope wrote the first draft of an article entitled “On the Art of Staying at the Seashore.”
And Barrie’s advice proved accurate. This facetious little trifle sold immediately to the Pall Mall Gazette, a newspaper.
Wells had been aiming his work at the literary magazines and failing. Now he began to write humorous trifles for newspapers and popular magazines. And he found his work instantly in demand. Before the end of 1893, he had sold more than thirty chatty articles.
The newspapers and magazines for which Wells had begun to write were a new publishing phenomenon of the Nineties, a second-order result of the same Age of Technology that had produced Wells himself. It was as simple as this: In order to manufacture and maintain the complex new machinery of the day—such as high-speed presses—it was necessary to educate the poor and ignorant. It was as part of this upgrading process that Wells had received his own education.
Wells says, “The Education Act of 1871 had not only enlarged the reading public very greatly but it had stimulated the middle class by a sense of possible competition from below.”114 A new and broader reading audience had now graduated from boys’ papers and penny dreadfuls—the British equivalent of the dime novel. It was seeking more meaty fare. Suddenly, then, there were new publications everywhere, and new forms of publication including the all-story pulp magazine and the middle-class popular magazine.
Wells hit this new expanded marketplace just at the moment that it first came into being: “New books were being demanded and fresh authors were in request. Below and above alike there was opportunity, more public, more publicity, more publishers and more patronage.”115
Bertie was the rare writer jumped up out of the narrow twilight area between the working class and the new expanded middle class and able to speak to both. A man like Wells was actively needed by the new publications, who were ready to swallow almost any piece of work that he could hand them. And there is no doubt that if Wells had cared to stick at this point he could have had a fine extended career as a light humorist.
As it was, Wells became freed to make his own life. At the end of 1893, he walked away from a situation he didn’t like one last time. He separated from his wife Isabel and moved in with his former student Amy Catherine Robbins. As Wells himself noted, it was an act that had more than a touch of Percy Shelley eloping with Mary Godwin about it, as though what had once been the behavior of the radical aristocracy had over the course of eighty years come trickling down to the lower classes. Even so, it was still a chancy and disgraceful act, all the more so because Shelley had not had to earn a living, while Wells did.
Wells continued to beaver away industriously. He had all the ready markets available to him that poor Edgar Allan Poe had lacked. In the course of 1894, he sold at least seventy-five articles. He wrote about anything and everything: colds, swearing, his father as a cricket player, his uncle the one-armed con man. And everything that he turned out was snatched right up. In his autobiography, Wells says, “I was doing my best to write as other writers wrote, and it was long before I realized that my exceptional origins and training gave me an almost unavoidable freshness of approach. . . .”116
Some of what he wrote was more seriously intended, in much the same vein as his first essay, “The Rediscovery of the Unique.” These speculative pieces were often based on pet ideas that Wells had dreamed up in some form in the Science Schools Journal or tried out before the Debating Society.
In 1893, there was “The Man of the Year Million.” In this essay, published in the Pall Mall Budget, there is a disquieting vision of mankind in the far future:
There grows upon the impatient imagination a building, a dome of crystal, across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid, and in this plunge and float strange beings. Are they birds?
They are the descendants of man—at dinner. Watch them as they hop on their hands . . . about the pure white marble floor. Great hands they have, enormous brains, soft, liquid, soulful eyes. Their whole muscular system, their legs, their abdomens, are shrivelled to nothing, a dangling, degraded pendant to their minds.117
This was the first appearance of the Big Brain theme, which would haunt science fiction for the next fifty years. What an awful and gleeful suggestion for Wells to make: that our children might not be the clean-cut citizens of the Perfected Society at all, but instead might evolve into revolting creatures with no resemblance at all to present humanity, great thoughtful sacs of brain matter hopping about on their hands.
Not at all the sort of material one would guess as having wide popular appeal. But this was no ordinary time. This was the fin de siècle.
This phrase of the day means no more than “the end of the century,” but it was pronounced, understood and felt as though it meant the end of the world. There was a great weariness to be felt in society. Victoria had been queen of England for more than fifty years . . . it seemed forever. Everything was infinitely old and tired and decadent. This was the period of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, strange twisted neo-Romantics who appeared, blossomed briefly like pale lilies of the night, and died.
The very same decade was also called the Gay Nineties, as though the only reasonable thing to do in view of all that tosh about the end of the world was to sing, dance, make merry and hail the birth of the new. It was an era of radical, forward-looking men, the decade of the rise of George Bernard Shaw and the Fabian Socialists. There was a great receptivity to news of science and to speculation about the future.
Bertie Wells was a man made for this moment. Such was the darkness, the confusion and the fever of the Nineties that it was not always possible to tell at the time what was decadent and what was farseeing. The two seemed almost the same—intertwined, intermingled, impossible to clearly distinguish.
Which was Wells, a decadent or a prophet? He was neither, he was either, he was both. He couldn’t know.
He’d been held down, held back all his life, and he was filled with a towering rage. He was a sick man, a tubercular case living with another tubercular case. A man uncertain even of seeing the dawn of the new century. He might well be another decadent, another strange twisted harbinger of doom.
But at the same time, he was a man newly set free. A man with a head full of the damndest notions, ideas that he had been carrying around for years and incubating with no one to hear them. And now people were ready to hear them. He would live forever!
And so you have an article like “The Man of the Year Million,” simultaneously serious and humorous, promising and horrifying, decadent and prophetic. The perfect expression of Bertie Wells—and a mirror for the fin de siècle.
In 1894, Wells published many articles of a similar sort. Among them was an alternative view of mankind’s fate. In “The Extinction of Man,” instead of seeing Big Brain as man’s future, Wells suggested that we might be overtaken and replaced altogether by crustaceans, cephalopods, ants, or bacilli:
We think, because things have been easy for mankind as a whole for a generation or so, we are going on to perfect comfort and security in the future. We think that we shall always go to work at ten and leave off at four and have dinner at seven forever and ever. . . . Even now, for all we can tell, the coming terror may be crouching for its spring and the fall of humanity be at hand. In the case of every pr
edominant animal the world has seen, I repeat, the hour of its complete ascendance has been the eve of its entire overthrow.118
Also in 1894, there were two essays on alternatives to our familiar carbon-based form of life—“The Living Things That May Be” on silicon-based life, and “Another Basis for Life” on inorganic quasi-living systems. In that year, Wells even dug up his old school masterpiece, The Chronic Argonauts, and rewrote it for the fifth time. It was published as a series of seven unsigned articles on the theme of time travel.
In these early essays, from “The Rediscovery of the Unique” in 1891 to the variously titled pieces on time travel in 1894, Wells set down all of the major questions and themes that he would explore in his scientific romances: “Science” both as the limited state of man’s knowledge and as the larger questions posed for man by nature; the vast, promising and threatening new universe of time and space; alternative forms of life; possible successors to man; most important of all, the future prospects of mankind, either extinction by some more ruthless race of beings or an ending as the alien and inhuman Big Brain.
And it was while he was in this acute state of readiness and rehearsal that Wells at last was solicited to write science fiction stories by two different editors. First, Lewis Hind—who later said, “I touched the button only”119—commissioned Wells to write short stories with scientific themes for the Pall Mall Budget. Wells began with a story entitled “The Stolen Bacillus,” and sold no less than five SF stories in 1894. When the Budget soon failed, it was no matter. There were other and better-paying markets ready to buy this kind of work.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 14