The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (15 page)

The nearest that Wells came to any proper education at all was the three years from 1884 to 1887 that he spent at the Normal School of Science, a college for teachers of science in South Kensington, London. Wells arrived at the Normal School by passing a number of exams for his own reasons and winning an unanticipated scholarship.

And for a time he was in his element. Bertie was the prime mover in the establishment of a school magazine, the
Science Schools Journal.
He edited the magazine and contributed a wide variety of material to it. And he took an active part in the Debating Society, experimenting with the utterance of unthinkable ideas.

The best part of his formal education at the Normal School was the first year spent studying biology and zoology under Thomas Huxley, whom Wells admired vastly. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” had become famous as a champion of the theory of evolution. In an 1860 debate that had insured the acceptability of evolution—if not won its immediate acceptance—Huxley had made a monkey out of his opponent, Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce. Huxley was the era’s chief spokesman for the scientific point of view.

Huxley’s influence on Wells was brief but it was crucial. Early in the year, Huxley became ill and soon had to withdraw. It was to be his last year of teaching.

In Wells’s second year, his attention began to turn to his extracurricular activities and his grades slipped badly. In the third year of his three-year course he did so disastrously that his scholarship was withdrawn and he had to drop out of college. Not finishing at the Normal School meant that Wells had unfitted himself for a successful career as a teacher or scientist. To all appearances, he had placed himself on an evolutionary sidetrack.

But appearances—and his own later opinions—to the contrary, in terms of what he would come to make of himself, Wells’s incomplete and one-sided education was exactly the education he needed. The only formal study that made any impression on him at all was the time spent with Huxley—“beyond all question, the most educational year of my life.”
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He revered Huxley as an intellectual giant of the same stature as Plato and Galileo, and he listened enraptured to Huxley’s ideas of evolution. That was the nucleus around which he came to form himself.

Otherwise, Wells was self-taught. Where others had to deal with the burden of a good traditional education, Bertie’s ideas were his own. This gave him a tremendous advantage in comprehending and dealing with the new realities of the Age of Technology.

The change from the Romantic Period to the Technological Age was a very difficult transition for society to negotiate. The Age of Technology was not accepted easily or gladly by most people. In many ways, it was a very bitter pill to swallow.

It was a time of widespread disillusion. Behind the late Victorian world lay all those centuries of thought and toil by Western man in the name of the rational soul and the reformation of society. But what had been the actual worldly result of all that utopian striving? Brutish, boss-ridden, late-Victorian machine civilization.

Was
this
rationality? Was
this
society Utopia?

There was a great revulsion against the artificiality of civilization. Artists and philosophers began to doubt the validity of everything they had been taught about the world, a radical skepticism far beyond any doubts or reservations held by the Romantics. Men could not help but wonder whether the whole impulse toward rationality had not been a delusion.

In this moment of radical doubt, only the new science spoke with certainty. It increasingly seemed that everything that existed had a scientific explanation, a mechanistic cause. But science had nothing to say about morality, justice or higher purpose. Did such things exist? They were not visible in nature. You couldn’t detect the soul with a microscope.

So, at the same time that rationality was doubted, there was great reluctance even among the most radical to abandon the soul and rush to embrace the new science. All of man’s hopes for a more-than-animal existence had been identified with the rational soul for so long. Without that last bit of spirit, the promise of man’s self-transcendence, life could seem to be without purpose or meaning.

Was Western man to be condemned to live out his years in a technological hell with only soulless science to give him comfort? Or was there some vital principle, inaccessible to scientific explanations—a principle which might or might not be called “the soul”—underlying the phenomena of life and consciousness?

In the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century there was a ferocious war between science and the last bastions of rationalized religion. Could the two be reconciled? Must science carry the day? Often this war was fought in public, but the chief battleground was the individual human heart.

Some, like H.G. Wells’s own mother, could simply not accept the new ideas. These people turned off their minds and determined to continue to believe the old beliefs. The end of the Nineteenth Century was a period that saw an outpouring of fervent Christian Fundamentalism. It was an era of evangelists and revival meetings and claims of the literal truth of the Bible.

Other Victorians, like Bulwer-Lytton in
The Coming Race,
attempted to find some ground for the reconciliation of science and spirit, some point of compromise. These men had been raised on the Latin and Greek classics and the Bible. This traditional wisdom was not to be lightly discarded. And so they did their best to accommodate their educations and values to the new facts of science. But this became increasingly difficult to do as the conclusions of science varied more and more from the premises of received religion.

The attachment to morality and the soul was not surrendered easily. The conflict and ambivalence of the moment can be seen written large in the imaginative fiction of Edward Page Mitchell. Mitchell was an American newspaperman who published many anonymous stories in newspaper syndication between 1874 and 1886. Some of Mitchell’s stories were SF and some were not, but most of them were caught up in the debate between spirit and matter.

On the side of spirit, Mitchell wrote stories of séances, the mysterious affinity of twins, and the swapping of souls. On the side of strict materialism, he wrote of matter transmission, of drugs as a source of religious belief, and of an idiot’s brain replaced by a logic machine, “an artificial intellect that operates with the certainty of universal law.”
¹⁰⁴

In Mitchell’s materialistic mood, the thrust of his argument is that man is nothing but matter. The mind is a machine, human personality can be altered by drugs or operations, and the vitality of the body does not depend on a soul or even a brain. The seemingly supernatural can be achieved mechanically. But Mitchell in his stories clearly abhors this materialist philosophy. He is against the mad scientists who propound it.

At the same time, Mitchell had a great interest in the spiritual and occult. He tried over and over again in his fiction to find some loophole in science that would allow room for spirit, some undeniable but anomalous phenomenon that would admit of no material explanation. But the majority of these occult stories end as hoaxes or delusions.

There is a great internal struggle going on in Mitchell. Altogether, he gives the impression of one longing to hold onto spirit but being moved toward the materialist position quite against his will.

The ambivalence of the period can be seen in even so strong a champion of science as Thomas Huxley. Huxley, born in 1825, was raised with conventional religious views which he gradually shed bit by bit in favor of the conclusions of material science. But even he could be sufficiently dismayed by the vision of the universe revealed by science that he could seek to keep a hold on the lifeline of religious morality. Morality without the religious part. Morality standing alone.

Huxley’s scientific convictions forced him to see Evolution as a merciless cosmic process that would eventually doom man to extinction. Morality was man’s one wan hope. In “Evolution and Ethics,” the epitomal Romanes Lecture that Huxley delivered at Oxford in 1893, two years before he died, he said, “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process.”
¹⁰⁵
And he said, “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
¹⁰⁶
In Huxley’s grim view, human ethics was the only countermeasure to Evolutionary Doom.

What a tangle this question of science and human moral purpose was. It took a man like H.G. Wells to cut through the Gordian knot.

Bertie Wells lacked all attachment to traditional society, traditional education and traditional values. His initial assumptions were Thomas Huxley’s reluctant conclusions. It was simple to him:

If this was the universe that science said it was, and there was a conflict between the chilly prospect of human decline and extinction and the old sentimental illusion of human morality and progress, why then,
kill illusion.
Have done with all superstitious nonsense, however comforting. Doubt God. Discard the soul. Face the facts. Look the universe in the eye.

The struggle between science and traditional religion in the last half of the Nineteenth Century was like an arm-wrestling match, with religion on the defensive and science the aggressor with the advantage, piling on the pressure, piling on the pressure. A point came in the late 1880s when religion gave way and science, love it or not, was the clear victor.

Science was bound to prevail. It was the new religion of the day and all the miracles were on its side: high-speed printing, photography, the steamship, the railroad, the telephone, the phonograph, the electric light, the dynamo, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile.

All of these wondrous things had been invented by 1887, a year that we can use as a handy reference point. It was 1887 when Bertie Wells dropped out of Normal School. And by 1887, Edward Page Mitchell had ceased to write his ambivalent imaginative stories, as though the question he had been trying to resolve had been answered for him and there was no need to continue. But more significant of change was a crucial scientific experiment that took place in 1887.

Ever since the time of Newton and the beginnings of Western rational culture, it had been assumed by physics that there was an invisible solid medium through which light waves were transmitted—the “luminiferous ether.”
¹⁰⁷
Ether was the fabric of space. Nineteenth Century interpretations of Newton’s laws of motion assumed this fabric as the reference point against which absolute motion was to be calculated.

In 1887, two American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, attempted to determine the Earth’s motion in relation to the ether. But no matter in what direction they turned their subtle scientific instrument—an interferometer—they found no invisible underlying fixed medium. No ether.

No ether? The fabric of space, the soul-stuff of the universe, the cosmic glue, was instantly dissolved. Western man was thrown into the physical universe that he has inhabited since: relative rather than absolute, irrational, moving in many directions at the same time, particulate, held together by nothing. It is this alien, etherless universe without a soul that Wells would present in
The War of the Worlds.

The shift in balance in the direction of science that occurred in the late 1880s was reflected in a new confidence on the part of SF literature, and in a new receptivity to SF among the reading public. In the late Nineteenth Century, SF was more generally published and read by a broader public than it would be at any time in the next hundred years. Anyone who read at all might read an occasional SF story. There was a great surge in the number of SF stories written, and far more of them than ever before were novels. Perhaps most indicative of the gain in confidence is the fact that more and more of these new stories were published under their authors’ own names, rather than anonymously as had so often been the case in the past.

At the same time that they were becoming more popular, SF stories were also growing far more imaginative and broader in scope. It was as though there was no imaginative possibility too fantastic to suggest as long as it was attributed to the powers of science.

Writers were emboldened to envision more exotic worlds. An increasing number of stories concerned the discovery of strange creatures—prehistoric beasts, or giant spiders, or unknown human species. And, in the name of science, writers were able to posit radical disruptions in the existing state of things. There were stories of catastrophe, and of human collapse into barbarism, even stories of the end of the world.

As a student at the Normal School of Science—later to be called the Royal College of Science, and still later the Imperial College of Science and Technology—young Bertie Wells was as sensitive to the new powers of science as anyone. And he was one of those who aimed to join in the writing of the bold new science fiction.

As he left the Normal School in 1887, Wells contributed a slight sketch to the
Science Schools Journal
entitled “A Tale of the Twentieth Century.” And in 1888—when he was no longer associated with the college—the
Science Schools Journal
still published his incomplete serial story,
The Chronic Argonauts,
Wells’s first attempt at what would eventually become, after seven years and many rewritings, his first great success,
The Time Machine.

SF was burgeoning, but Wells was not yet ready to be part of the process. He was not yet ready to become a successful SF writer.

Before that could happen, it was necessary for three things to occur. Society had to fall into a still more unsettled, intense and questioning state of mind—receptive to Wells’s extreme ideas of the lessons of science. The publishing industry had to alter, and new markets in chronic need of material had to become established. Finally, Wells himself had to mature. His writing abilities needed time to ripen, and he had to grow more desperate.