IT is extraordinarily difficult to write interesting stories that are not mainly about human beings or animals. There have been very few novelists capable of transforming a scientific idea into a romantic creation. Even the most successful practitioner of scientific fiction can only hope for ephemeral popularity, for science is progressing so rapidly that the fantastically remote speculation of yesterday becomes the commonplace actuality of to-day.
IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN
once observed that there is a part of the human mind which hungers and thirst after marvels, and in all ages imaginative intellects have fed that appetite through fantastic stories and poems, through myths and religions. Our minds are so compartmental that credibility is not important; the minimum requirement is only that the story shall command belief within its own setting for the duration of its telling. The modern craze for superman fantasy proves how small a part credibility need play in the popularity of romantic marvels.
A few authors aimed at a high degree of scientific plausibility or at least of scientific consistency. In considering the ancestry of the scientific romance it is necessary to seek much farther back than Jules Verne, where most critics begin. The Greek Lucian and the Roman Apuleis, within their very limited experience, wrote consistent fantasies. Rabelais and Swift worked out their absorbing romances with scientific coherency.
Robert Paltock published in 1751 the truly remarkable "Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins," telling of the country of Graundevolet, which is inhabited by winged beings. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and "the Last Man" are remarkably suggestive of H. G. Wells, exhibiting the same kind of power of making the impossible seem true by basing it upon the logic of science. Nor is Mark Twain's "Yankee in the Court of King Arthur" altogether outside the line of succession.
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THE immediate precursor of H. G. Wells, whose teeming brain transfigured the scientific novel, was Jules Verne. The immense vogue of Verne in the eighties and nineties of last century is now only a memory; the wonders of actual accomplishment have eclipsed the printed page. It is almost impossible to-day to obtain a story by Jules Verne in either bookshop or lending library, although at the end of last century he enjoyed a world-wide reputation.
Having regard to the state of scientific knowledge of his time, Verne must be credited with a great imaginative power, and his geographical and mechanical pertinacity gave an ingenious verisimilitude to his voyages and inventions. But the characters in all his tales are without a drop of human blood; his novels are the experiences of convenient automata. His rivals understood this defect, and Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells saw to it that scientific adventurers were also human beings. The present eclipse of Jules Verne, however, tends to make us forget that this man of fantastic vision forecast electric lighting, submarines, powered airships and television.
In 1805 H. G. Wells published "The Time Machine." It was a short tale of sixteen chapters, written in a cunningly quiet style, and all the more striking by its avoidance of "sensationalism." The book was a landmark and a masterpiece. Arising from the problem, "Can an instantaneous cube be said to exist?" Wells first propounded the idea that time was the "fourth dimension," and then proceeded to voyage into the future along the time track. So apposite is the story that "The Time Machine" is often referred to in popular introductions as the theory of relativity. Its publication heralded the true genius of scientific romance, who could expand fantastic mathematical and mechanical ideas into novels of the utmost artistry.
Wells tells us in his "Experiment in Autobiography" that he thoroughly enjoyed writing "The Time Machine," and its success led him to exploit this vein most profitably for several years. His next book, "the Wonderful Visit," was stimulated by a chance remark of Ruskin that if an angel appeared on earth it would certainly be slaughtered by somebody. In Wells' fantasy the angel, brought down by the gun of a country parson, lives among men in utter amazement at our manners and morals. Next year appeared "The Island of Dr. Moreau," describing how a super-vivisectionist accelerates the process of evolution to make a man out of a beast in a few days. Pigs, bulls and dogs undergo this transformation, and only by a constant repetition of the law (reminiscent of Kipling) can the all-too-human creatures be kept under control.
Wells was now writing short stories as well as novels, and all critics seem to agree that the short story was the form of literary art in which Wells excelled. He published several collections within a few years, the first being "the Stolen Bacillus." Scientific fantasies came just as quickly; "The Invisible Man" is a distressingly logical tale of corporal invisibility in a bruising and hurtful world; "The War of the Worlds" tells of an invasion by Martians; "The First Men on the Moon" is less interesting; "The War in the Air" now seems baby-play beside its terrible actuality.
"The Food of the Gods," showing that if men can be made gigantic by the aid of scientifically adjusted food, so will the rats and wasps that feed on the remnants, was the last of Wells' spontaneous flights of scientific fancy. The truth is that he always wrote with critical and didactic undertones, unlike Verne, who was never interested in human idealism. As Maurois puts it: "Jules Verne sought to prove nothing, whereas in Wells the marvellous is always Utopian and satiric in essence, and there is always a moral intention."
Wells was particularly disappointed that his readers could not discern in "The Food of the Gods" the symbolic rejection by the world of man made perfect. "It ended," he wrote, "in the heroic struggle of the rare new big-scale way of living against the teeming small-scale life of the earth. Nobody saw the significance of it." So he threw off his remaining speculations and prognostications in the didactic "Anticipations," which proved so remarkably far-sighted that he has been called "England's first Prophet Laureate." Then he turned to his great novels of commonplace life, and to much more obvious Utopian propaganda. But he never ceased to believe (except possibly at the very end) that man would be saved through science because He was essentially knowledge-loving and perfectible. This doubtful optimism, which Norman Nicholson in "Man and Literature" compares with the heresy of Pelagianism, is implicit in many of his scientific romances.
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THERE have been other exponents of the scientific fantasy in succession to H. G. Wells. One calls to mind that Fowler Wright, J. D. Beresford, Conan Doyle and even Kipling occasionally dabbled in the dangerous but fascinating art. Two more recent books are outstanding. They are, of course, Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men." Huxley's work is more encyclopaedic in its range than anything attempted by Wells and his predecessors. It poses for humanity, as Wells never did, the terrible problem of a scientifically conditioned universe, in which the man of human sympathies and imaginative mind would become an outcast and an object of unutterable despair.
Olaf Stapledon has a vision which is even more ingenious and daring than that of Huxley. He tells us the history of galaxies and covers aeons of time which made the A.D. 802,701 of "The Time Machine" seem almost to-morrow. "Last and First Men" was undoubtedly a brilliant tour de force, but its super-abundance of material is almost certain to bring on a degree of mental indigestion. Both Huxley and Stapledon surpass Wells in profundity, but they cannot approach his power to tell a story. In the words of H. E. Bates: "H. G. Wells will always remain a great story-teller perhaps a great kidder would be better, a man who succeeded in telling more tall stories than any other writer, and yet, by a genius for binding the commonplace to the most astronomical exploration of fancy succeeded in getting them believed."
Advocate (Burnie, Tas. : 1890 - 1954), Saturday 26 April 1947, page 4
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