The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (16 page)

In the meantime, the new SF literary tradition continued to expand itself and its sense of its own powers. Just as Wells was readying himself to become a unique new SF writer, so was a readership being prepared to accept and appreciate a writer like Wells when he was finally ready to step on stage.

Perhaps the most significant element in this expansion, the harbinger of the new universe, was a sudden broadening in the time scale of SF. Previously, science fiction had been a literature of the present, the era of modern science. During the late Eighties and early Nineties, this changed radically. SF followed up the lesson of “The Battle of Dorking” by invading the Future, the territory of the utopian story, and taking it over. In the same way, it moved into the past, the land of ancient myth and legend, and tossed fantasy out.

There was a final flowering of the utopian story at the end of the Nineteenth Century, so that between 1888 and 1895 as many utopias were published as in all the previous part of the century. But most of this work was intended to either support or refute one book, Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, 2000-1887
(1888). The particular importance of this novel is that it marks the capitulation by the utopian story to the forces of science.

To all obvious surface appearance,
Looking Backward
is another typical utopian story. The main character is hypnotized because of a sleeping problem, falls into a slumber in 1887 and makes the conventional transition to the Future. There, as usual, he is cosseted and made much of, lectured at length, and shown the wonders of the Perfected Society.

What is different is that the central transcendence of this Perfected Society is technological industry, and not the rational soul. The ingenious argument of
Looking Backward
is that machine society, hideous in Bellamy’s time and apparently growing ever more so, would one day complete itself, cast off its disguise and reveal itself as true utopia:

The movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had been so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity. Early in the last century [i.e., the Twentieth] the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were entrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit.
¹⁰⁸

It would happen as simply as this: First the government would nationalize all business and industry. Then everybody in society in a condition to serve would be drafted into the industrial army.

Everyone is content in Bellamy’s utopia. Life is simple. Life is fair. And there is only the least hint of coercion:

“. . . To speak of service being compulsory would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness. Our entire social order is so wholly based upon and deduced from it that if it were conceivable that a man could escape it, he would be left with no possible way to provide for his existence. He would have excluded himself from the world, cut himself off from his kind, in a word, committed suicide.”
¹⁰⁹

This has a somewhat awful ring to our ears. From our later perspective we can recognize Bellamy’s society in
Looking Backward
as the Twentieth Century totalitarian state, the industrial dictatorship, only defined as benevolent and altruistic and painted with a smiling face. But even if we are able to resist its charms, we still must recognize what a powerful and overwhelming vision this was in its own time.

Looking Backward
was a radical and shocking new point of view, both enthusiastically accepted and desperately resisted. The story was controversial because it symbolized the shift from a faith in rational quasi-materialism and the soul to a belief in scientific materialism and the powers of technology.

The reactions to Bellamy were immediate. The American politician and writer Ignatius Donnelly, for instance, doubted the sudden overnight capitulation by the bosses of society and the subsequent transformation into an egalitarian society in which all would be equally draftable. In his novel
Caesar’s Column
(1890), published under the pseudonym Edmund Boisgilbert, Donnelly foresaw a technological future completely dominated by the trusts, with society divided between the wealthy few and the oppressed masses. A revolt against this tyranny is unsuccessful, hundreds of thousands of people are killed, and the hero and his friends must flee to another continent to make a stab at starting civilization afresh.

For his part, William Morris, the British painter, designer, poet and fine printer, called
Looking Backward
“a Cockney paradise”
¹¹⁰
—a vulgar vision of the triumph of machine culture. In answer to it, he wrote
News from Nowhere
(1890), in which a dreamer departs from the blighted England of the late Nineteenth Century and finds himself in a transformed world, peaceful and green and devoted to handicrafts. It is essentially the medieval world, but sanitized of religion and ignorance.

But there is a crucial difference between Morris’s
News from Nowhere
and Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
which shows where the true power of active conviction lay. In
Looking Backward
—in keeping with the new doctrine of scientific materialism—it is the narrator’s body that travels forward in time to the year 2000. When, near the end of the story, he briefly believes himself back in 1887, that proves to be only a nightmare from which he awakens.

In Morris’s book, however, the sleeper travels to the new society not in body, but as a dreamer in spirit. It is not a specific future year that he travels to, but “nowhere,” a land without a location. And when the book is over, the dream is ending. This sleeper will awake to find himself back amidst the horrors of 1890.

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.