The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  Far more important, W.E. Henley, the editor at The National Observer who had published Wells’s time travel articles, wrote to him to say that he was starting a new magazine. He proposed to Wells that he rewrite his articles as a serial story for this magazine, The New Review, and offered him the tempting sum of 100 pounds to do it.

  The effect was something like the effect on Jules Verne when Pierre Hetzel suggested that he take his history of ballooning manuscript and turn it into a balloon adventure story. In a period comparable to the few weeks of fevered writing that it took Jules Verne to produce Five Weeks in a Balloon, Wells went off on vacation and in two weeks wrote The Time Machine—a story to which all previous SF was but a predicate.

  As a serial story, The Time Machine attracted all the attention that Henley could have wished. As a book—one of four that Wells published in 1895, including The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents—The Time Machine made a name for Wells. If he had died then and there, instead of continuing to write for another fifty years, Wells would still be remembered for The Time Machine. It is an amazingly original story.

  It begins with two framing chapters. But even here we are dealing with something strange and new.

  The story opens: “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”120 We are in the middle of an intellectual discussion after a dinner party. And already, by beginning the story at all, we have accepted that there is a man who can travel in time.

  Very shortly, he is informing the party of the nature of the universe they live in: “ ‘There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.’ ”121

  And before the first chapter is done, he has brought out a model time machine. The toy is “a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance.”122 A crucial lever is pressed by one of his guests, the toy becomes indistinct, and then disappears.

  The guests are then shown the not-quite-complete Time Machine itself. This is a classic bit of science-beyond-science. The Time Machine is described in terms that are simultaneously vague and concrete. There is a saddle to sit upon and levers to push. It is like the toy, but larger:

  Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawed out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.123

  On any level of exact description, this is so vague as to amount to hocus-pocus. Quite exasperating, if you care about specificity and fact. But not important if what you really care about is traveling in time.

  Late in life, in 1903, Jules Verne allowed himself to be drawn out on the subject of Wells, and a measure of exasperation did escape from him as he commented on The First Men in the Moon (1901), misremembered in the heat of the moment as a story about Mars:

  I do not see the possibility of comparison between his work and mine. . . . I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon ball, discharged from a cannon. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça, c’est tres joli, but show me this metal. Let him produce it.124

  But this was not completely appropriate or just. If we were to place Wells’s Cavorite, the anti-gravity metal, beside Captain Nemo’s special private brand of electricity which no one else will ever discover, which of the two would we choose? Is Verne’s Moon Cannon to be preferred to Wells’s Time Machine? All of this various science-beyond-science is imaginary. All of it is presented in terms that are somewhere crucially vague.

  Once again, we should remind ourselves that fact and plausibility are not the same. And if we are to take The Time Machine as our example of Wells’s methods, in the first chapter he has more than established plausibility. He has presented us with an introduction to a time traveler. He has given us a philosophical rationale, shown us a scale model, tested the model’s powers, permitted us to clamber about on an almost-complete machine, and even shown us a brief glimpse of the blueprints. In terms of plausible demonstration, as opposed to exact description, Wells could hardly have given us more. If we are disposed to believe him, we will surely believe.

  In a second interview, given in 1904, Verne volunteered additional comment on Wells, this time not only more admiringly—“There is an author whose work has appealed to me from an imaginative stand-point, and whose books I have followed with considerable interest”125—but also more acutely. This time Verne said:

  I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge. . . . The creations of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, belong unreservedly to an age and a degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I will not say entirely beyond the limits of the possible. Not only does he evolve his constructions entirely from the realm of the imagination, but he also evolves the materials of which he builds them.126

  This is much closer to the mark. Part of what separates Verne and Wells is the generational difference between the two in their understanding of the meaning of the word science. To Verne, it was still known things and their extension. To Wells, science was the vast unknown.

  In the second chapter of The Time Machine, a week has passed and another dinner party assembles. The host, the Time Traveller, is missing, however. And then he staggers in, dirty, rumpled and haggard. After a drink, a change of clothing, and dinner, he shares his story, the central narrative.

  And this is where the true difference between Verne and Wells becomes unmistakably apparent. Verne, at his most adventurous, used super-scientific vehicles to cruise the fringes of the World Beyond the Hill, spy out transcendence, and then retreat. Wells is out to use the Time Machine as a device of convenience to take us into a realm of wonder like nothing we have ever seen before, a truly alien realm.

  The first, and major, stop that the Time Traveller makes is in the year 802,701 A.D. And this in itself is a sign of Wells’s power and confidence. He has leaped completely out of the religious frame of time that presented the world as having been created only 4000 years before Christ. He has stridden far into the future, well beyond the seven-hundred-year utopian projections of Memoirs of the Year 2440 and the one-hundred-year projections of Looking Backward. In one giant step, he has moved fully eight hundred thousand years beyond the present moment into territory never previously imagined.

  On the one hand, the Time Traveller carries with him his utopian expectations of “great and splendid architecture”127 and “a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity.”128 On the other hand, he brings his fin de siècle fears with him: “What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?”129

  When the machine finally stops, the first thing the Time Traveller sees is a statue of a White Sphinx. Like the sphinx of ancient mythology, this statue has been set here to ask us to ponder on the riddle of the nature of man.

  All around is a pastoral landscape to all appearances not unlike the best hopes of a William Morris: “The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither.”130

  The inhabitants of this green and pleasant land are the Eloi. These are little people, beautiful, charming, delicate and graceful. But they have no more intellect than a five-year-old child, and they are completely lacking in creativity. They are content to romp and play, and to live in the ruins of colossal buildings.

  What has happened? The Time Traveller’s first theor
y (soon discarded) is that he is in the decayed remains of Utopia. Nature has been completely conquered, but through lack of the grindstone of pain and necessity to keep it keen, mankind has grown dull.

  Then the Time Machine is stolen, dragged by someone within paneled doors in the pedestal of the statue of the Sphinx. At first, the Time Traveller is thrown into total panic, fearing that he may be stranded in this beautiful but alien world. But then he calms himself. He counsels himself to be patient: “Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.”131

  What bravery! What courage! What a change from the Romantic hysteria of Jules Verne’s Axel or Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. This is a completely new human temperament revealing itself.

  What the Time Traveller soon learns is that the Eloi are not the only inhabitants of this future world. Living underground are dull-white ape-like creatures which remind him of human spiders:

  Gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.132

  And so we have a dual human future—child man or monster man. Again we must ask, what has happened in the gap of eight hundred thousand years to produce this strange situation?

  The Time Traveller arrives at a new theory, which he says specifically he has never seen in any utopian book—though we have seen something like it in the novel Caesar’s Column. He guesses that the contemporary struggle between Capital and Labor has continued through the ages. The rich got richer. The poor were shoved underground to tend the machinery of society:

  So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Havenots; the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.133

  The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid. The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor. But neither is quite human any more, neither the “frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry”134 nor “the white Things of which I went in terror.”135

  Then the Time Traveller discovers a grim fact. The Morlocks are meat eaters, and the meat they eat is the Eloi. Are the Eloi, the more attractive remnant of man, nothing but cattle? And the Morlocks, are they cannibals?

  It is the Time Traveller’s final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality. But he concedes that even this theory may be wrong.

  The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything. We do not know what has happened. We cannot know. The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery.

  All we can be certain of here is our experience. We have had revealed to us a world constantly alien, constantly strange. A world that no expectation is equal to.

  This is that place of dark and hideous mysteries on the outer reaches of the Moon where Poe never permitted himself to arrive. This is the underground wonderland that Verne entered once, but then found too overwhelming. This, beyond doubt, is the World Beyond the Hill, the place where anything can happen.

  The Time Traveller seizes an opportunity to recover his machine. Beating off Morlocks, he pushes at the levers of his vehicle and presses on into the Future.

  On and on he goes into remote time, finally stopping at a moment when the Earth has become tidally locked and the sun hangs permanently red and sullen in the sky. There is lichen growing, and the Traveller sees a huge white butterfly and monstrous crabs on the shore of an oily sea.

  Once more he pushes on into time, stopping thirty million years from now. The Earth is closer to the sun now, and the sun is a larger and duller red. An eclipse is beginning. The wind is bitter cold. The Time Traveller sees green slime and a tentacled thing flopping in the blood-red water. Then dread overtakes him at last and he returns to tell the tale to his dinner guests in our own time.

  And what is the nature of the tale we have been told? It is an evolutionary nightmare. It is nothing less than the same dream that Axel had while sailing the underground sea in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth—that strange overpowering “prehistoric daydream.”

  Axel saw himself as slipping backwards in time and witnessing the creation of things as though it were a disappearance: the mammals gone, then the crustaceans, then the zoophytes, finally the granite rocks melting and the Earth itself being volatilized. The Time Machine presents the same materials as Axel’s dream, but not as a wrong-way vision of the past—as a picture of the coming devolution of things: mammals gone, monster crabs gone, finally the green slime will go, too, and the ultimate fate of the Earth will be to fall into the sun and be consumed.

  But in The Time Machine, these events are not merely the stuff of passing reverie. They are witnessed. They are experienced. Such is the unprecedented power to do of the super-scientific ivory-and-nickel machine that we were allowed to examine from so many different angles in the first chapter!

  The day after the Time Traveller unfolds his tale, he disappears again into the vast reaches of time. Nothing further is heard from him. The narrator of the framing story is left to wonder about the Traveller’s fate—and ours:

  Did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story.136

  And so, in a flurry of final questions, mixed emotions, and ambiguities, The Time Machine—this deep and subtle story—comes to an end. Leaving us to ponder:

  Is frankly hideous Victorian machine-civilization the peak and glory of mankind’s achievement? Or is there to be some more worthwhile future for mankind in that “vast ignorance” that extends between now and the year 802,701, some better time in which Victorian riddles have been answered and wearisome Victorian problems solved? Is it to such a place that the Time Traveller has aimed his machine?

  Probably not—if what the narrator of the framing story says in this final paragraph is true. If the Time Traveller indeed “thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind” even before his adventures began, then he is unlikely to have sought out some more perfect society in which to end his days. Indeed, it would seem that we have been misled throughout the story by the Time Traveller’s talk of utopian expectations.

  We have to ask why the Time Traveller built his machine in the first place. How did he conceive of it? What did he expect to prove by it?

  And the answer we are forced to give is that he built the Time Machine, a scientific device, in order to travel outside utopian time—historical time—into the vast unexplored expanses of scientific time. The Time Traveller set out in the first place to discover not-utopia, and he succeeded.

  The deliberate result of the adventures of the Time Traveller has been to trash all of the things that earlier generations had come to think they knew about the Future. From being a place of rational perfection, the Future has been turned into a blackness and a blankness lit only in a few casual places. We are reminded of the match that is struck at the conclusion of “The Rediscovery of the Unique”
only to reveal a greater darkness looming all around us.

  Wherever we may have thought ourselves to be when the Time Machine first picked us up, it has set us down in the new stark and beautiful scientific universe of space and time. How frightening! Because if there is one thing that the Time Machine has demonstrated to us that is beyond doubt, it is that this new scientific universe of millions of years of time-to-come is a transcendent realm of wonder.

  All of the marvels that we have seen, it can generate. And more.

  Our ultimate conclusion must be that the Time Traveller has conceived and built his machine and traveled astraddle it into the Future because he is a scientific mystic. The hypothetical advancement of mankind—in which he does not believe—means nothing at all to him beside the mysteries of unknown time and space. He is willing to sacrifice the stale promise of a safe, easy and happy rational future for mankind for the wonderful and dreadful uncertainties of alien future time—the Future conceived as the World Beyond the Hill.

  Here we have a step in the history of SF comparable to Mary Shelley’s quickening of the dead with the power of science-beyond-science. A story character has scouted far ahead into the Future on a super-scientific vehicle and found there neither God nor perfected man, but destruction, devolution and doom—and the promise of wonder.

  But where Victor Frankenstein struck his spark of life and then ran away and hid under the bedclothes from what he had done, the Time Traveller is prepared to accept the consequences of his actions, no matter how dread. Like some sterner-nerved Axel, he is willing to cast himself into the volcano, return to tell us the tale—and then throw himself back in again.