Shadows of Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy

181 Pages·1995·10.046 MB·English

by  Patrick Parrinder

PATRICI( PARRINDER
Shadows
of the
Future
H. G. Wells, Science Fiction,
and Prophecy
Shadows of the Future
H. G. Wells, Science Fiction,
and Prophecy
Patrick Parrinder
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Shadows of the Future
Utopianism and Communitarianism
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Series Editors
Utopianism and Communitarianism
Lyman Tower Sargent and Gregory Claeys, Series Editors
This series offers historical and contemporary analyses of utopian
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Other titles in the series include:
Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors. David Seed. ed.
Charlotte Perkins Gilmo.n: Her Progress Toward Utopia. with Selected Writings. Carol
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The Concept of Utopia. Ruth Levitas
Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950. Second
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Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias. Qingyun Wu
Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey. 1882-1920. Ellen Eisenberg
Low Living and High Thinking at Modern Times, New York. Roger Wunderlich
Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future. Robert Crossley
Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Barry Chevannes
The Southern Land, Known. Gabriel de Foigny; translated and edited by David
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Special Love/Special Sex: An Oneida Community Diary. Robert S. Fogarty, ed.
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Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Jane Donawerth and
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Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida
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Writin9 the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land ..
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Copyright © 1995 Patrick Parrinder
All Rights Reserved
First Edition 1995
95 96 97 98 99 00 654321,
Published in the United States by Syracuse University Press.
Syracuse. New York 13244-5160. by arrangement with
Liverpool University Press. Liverpool. United Kingdom.
Llbrary of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Patrinder. Patrick
Shadows of the future: H.G. Wells. science fiction. and
prophecy I Patrick Parrinder.
p. cm.-(Utopianism and communitarianism)
ISBN o-BI56-2691-6 (d : alk. paper)-ISBN o-B15 6-0332-0
(pb : alk. paper)
1. Wells. H. G. (Herbert George). 18 66-1946-Criticism and
interpretation. 2. Wells. H. G. (Herbert George). 1866-1946.
Time machine. 3. Science fiction. English-History and criticism.
4. Time travel in literature. 5. Prophecies in literature.
6. Future in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PR5777.P38 1995
823'.912-dc20 95-21827
Manufactured in the United Kingdom
For Jenny
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments viii
Part I: The Impatient Imagination
1. Science Fiction and the 'Shape of Things to Come' 3
2. The Broken Tripod and the Impatient Imagination 18
3. Possibilities of Space and Time (The Time Machine) 34
4. A Sense of Dethronement (The Time Machine
and The Island of Doctor Moreau) 49
5. The Fall of Empires 65
6. New Worlds for Old: The Prophet at Large 80
7. Utopia and Meta-Utopia 96
Part II: Wells's Legacy
8. The Future as Anti-Utopia: Wells, Zamyatin
and Orwell 115
9. From Prophecy to Parody: Science Fiction and
the Scientific Enlightenment 127
Select Bibliography 152
Index 163
Preface and Acknowledgments
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the
mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the
present ...
P. B. Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry'
'With a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into
futurity.'
The Time Machine
This study of Wells and science fiction centres on The Time Machine,
which I believe to be one of the Prophetic Books of the late
nineteenth century, casting its own shadow over futurity. The
theme of time-travelling and the notion of a time machine have
never been more popular than they are at the present day. We still
live under the spell of Wells's century-old invention.
Rather like the Traveller himself, in Shadows of the Future I use The
Time Machine as my base to explore a literary and cultural landscape
in widening circles. In Part I, I consider in successive chapters the
idea of literary prophecy (and its opposite, parody) in relation to the.
science-fiction genre; the continuity and 'life-history' of Wells's
prophetic stance throughout his career; the 'possibilities of space and
time' and the sense of human dethronement in The Time Machine and
The Island of Doctor Moreau; Wells's theory of history in the scientific
romances and his debt (beginning in The Time Machine) to Gibbon's
Decline and Fall; his literary self-definition as a world citizen and his.
imaginative quest for a new world; and the complex composition of
the Wellsian utopia. Part II deals with Wells's influence on two
prominent anti-utopians--Yevgeny Zamyatin and George Orwell
and with his legacy to twentieth-century popular scientific thought
and to British and American science fiction. One further exploration,
of the literal Thames Valley landscape of The Time Machine and its use
as a setting in other catastrophe fictions, can be found in Antia-
PREFACE ix
pations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors edited by David
Seed, a companion volume in the 'SF Texts and Studies' series.
It seems appropriate to offer at the outset three interrelated
propositions which distinguish this book to a greater or lesser extent
from other critical studies of Wells and his science fiction:
1. Though he is a prolific and very uneven writer whose master
pieces were largely written at the beginning of his career, it is
necessary to read Wells extensively as well as intensively in order to
understand his best work. The later writings shed light on the earlier.
To distinguish between the the productions of the 'artist' and those
of the 'journalist', or between the earlier 'imaginative' and the later
'didactic' works (as so many critics have done) has its uses; but it also
blunts curiosity and leads in the end to misrepresentation.
2. Because his best work is assumed to be overby 1910, conventional
literary and cultural histories of the first half of the twentieth century
nearly all underrate Wells's significance. Equally, they overlook the
scientific movement of the time, the connections between fictional
and non-fictional writing, and the emergence of genre science
fiction. Shadows of the Future (especially its final chapter) is thus
offered as a contribution to an unwritten history of modernity and its
cultural discourse.
3. In Wells we have the fullest embodiment of a particular, perhaps
unfashionable, conception of the possibilities of twentieth-century
writing: that of the writer as prophet. Since his death, literary
criticism has largely turned its back on this aspect of his work.
Neither the New Criticism nor its successors such as poststructural
ism and postmodernism have seen literary prophecy as a suitable
object of attention. (F. R. Leavis, who did see it in this way,
condemned Wells and Wellsian prophecy out of hand, and hitched
his star to a rival prophet.) As for biography, the main question in
recent lives of Wells is whether their subject was a true or a false
prophet. He lived and wrote under such intense public scrutiny that
the current biographical controversies on this score are largely a
continuation of arguments begun in his lifetime.
My concern in Shadows of the Future is to show how Wells
developed and explored the literary potential of prophecy in new
ways. As a young writer, he was deeply influenced by Carlyle. He is a
missionary writer and teacher like Blake, Shelley, Carlyle, Emerson,
Ruskin, Arnold, Morris, Yeats, Shaw, Orwell, D. H. Lawrence,
x SHADOWS OF THE FUTURE
Aldous Huxley or Doris Lessing. Like many of these, he came from an
Evangelical Protestant background and devised a post-Christian
gospel of human fulfilment as an encouragement to his hearers lost
in the wilderness. But Wells also found the Carlylean mode of social
prophecy too Hebraic and too loosely metaphorical for his purposes.
He sought to supplement it with the more oracular and Hellenistic
notion of prophecy as the literal revelation of future, events. More
over, his gospel was not primarily one of Work, Art, Culture,
Socialism, Sex, Self-Liberation or even Science, but of the Future
itself and what it could bring. He is closer than the other modern
literary prophets to the Shelleyan ideal of the poet as hierophant of
an unapprehended inspiration, and to the prophetic world-soul of
Shakespeare's Sonnet 104 which dreams obsessively of things to
come.
There is always the probability that revelations about the future
will be deeply unwelcome. Like Shelley with his view of the poet as a
mirror reflecting shadows, Wells knew Plato's parable of the cave
and on one occasion (in 'The Country of the Blind') produced his
own version of it. As a prophet, he is like Plato's prisoner who
stumbles towards the light: he alone understands the real nature of
the flickering shadows that his fellow prisoners see on the walls of
the cave, but he cannot easily communicate his knowledge to them.
There is an element of self-destructiveness involved in taking on this
role, as Wells recognised from The Time Machine onwards. He did not
necessarily expect posterity'S understanding or forgiveness. As Plato
writes in the Republic of his liberated prisoner (I am quoting from
Jowett's translation), 'Men would say of him that he had returned
from the place above with his eyes ruined; and that it was better not
even to think of ascending; and if anyone tried to loose another and
lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they
would put him to death'.
Earlier versions of the following chapters first appeared in Foun
dation (Chapter 5), Science-Fiction Studies (Chapters 7 and 8), and the
Wellsian (Chapter 6, and parts of Chapters 3 and 4). Some material in
Chapter 2 first appeared in Europe. Chapter 6 has also appeared in
The Ends o/the Earth, ed. Simon Gatrell, and Chapter 7 in H. G. Wells
and Modern Science Fiction, ed. Darko Suvin and Robert M. Philmus.
Chapter 9 appears in an earlier form in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide,
ed. Patrick Parrinder. All these pieces have been specially revised for