The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  “Squirrels in a cage,” he mutters. “That’s all we are. Squirrels in a cage He’s going twice as fast as us. Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we’ll take steps that will amaze you. We’ll Joshua you!”

  Yes, that is our dream: to turn all earth into the Vale of Ajalon at our pleasure. So far, we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes. But some day—even on the Equator—we shall hold the Sun level in his full stride.

  Now we look down on a sea thronged with heavy traffic. A big submersible breaks water suddenly. Another and another follows with a swash and a suck and a savage bubbling of relieved pressures. The deep-sea freighters are rising to lung up after the long night, and the leisurely ocean is all patterned with peacock’s eyes of foam.

  “We’ll lung up, too,” says Tim, and when we return to the c. p. George shuts off, the colloids are opened, and the fresh air sweeps her out. There is no hurry. The old contracts (they will be revised at the end of the year) allow twelve hours for a run which any packet can put behind her in ten. So we breakfast in the arms of an easterly slant which pushes us along at a languid twenty.

  To enjoy life, and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning half a mile or so above the dappled Atlantic cloud-belts and after a volt-flurry which has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discussed the thickening traffic with the superiority that comes of having a high level reserved to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) the morning hymn on a Hospital boat.

  She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us and we caught the chant before she rose into the sunlight. “Oh, ye Winds of God,” sang the unseen voices: “bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever!”

  We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her great open platforms they looked up and stretched out their hands neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of the night, all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and vanished, her song continuing. “Oh, ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever.”

  “She’s a public lunger or she wouldn’t have been singing the Benedicite; and she’s a Greenlander or she wouldn’t have snow-blinds over her colloids,” said George at last. “She’ll be bound for Frederikshavn or one of the Glacier sanatoriums for a month. If she was an accident ward she’d be hung up at the eight-thousand-foot level. Yes—consumptives.”

  “Funny how the new things are the old things. I’ve read in books,” Tim answered, “that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to the tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist ’em into sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we’ve added to the average life of a man?”

  “Thirty years,” says George with a twinkle in his eye. “Are we going to spend ’em all up here, Tim?”

  “Flap ahead, then. Flap ahead. Who’s hindering?” the senior captain laughed, as we went in.

  We held a good lift to clear the coastwise and Continental shipping; and we had need of it. Though our route is in no sense a populated one, there is a steady trickle of traffic this way along. We met Hudson Bay furriers out of the Great Preserve, hurrying to make their departure from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets. We overcrossed Keewatin liners, small and cramped; but their captains, who see no land between Trepassy and Blanco, know what gold they bring back from West Africa. Trans-Asiatic Directs we met, soberly ringing the world round the Fiftieth Meridian at an honest seventy knots; and white-painted Ackroyd & Hunt fruiters out of the south fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites. Their market is in the North among the northern sanatoria where you can smell their grape-fruit and bananas across the cold snows. Argentine beef boats we sighted too, of enormous capacity and unlovely outline. They, too, feed the northern health stations in ice-bound ports where submersibles dare not rise.

  Yellow-bellied ore-flats and Ungava petrol-tanks punted down leisurely out of the north, like strings of unfrightened wild duck. It does not pay to “fly” minerals and oil a mile farther than is necessary; but the risks of transhipping to submersibles in the ice pack off Nain or Hebron are so great that these heavy freighters fly down to Halifax direct, and scent the air as they go. They are the biggest tramps aloft except the Athabasca grain-tubs. But these last, now that the wheat is moved, are busy, over the world’s shoulder, timber-lifting in Siberia.

  We held to the St. Lawrence (it is astonishing how the old water-ways still pull us children of the air), and followed his broad line of black between its drifting ice-blocks, all down the Park that the wisdom of our fathers—but every one knows the Quebec run.

  We dropped to the Heights Receiving Towers twenty minutes ahead of time, and there hung at ease till the Yokohama Intermediate Packet could pull out and give us our proper slip. It was curious to watch the action of the holding-down clips all along the frosty river front as the boats cleared or came to rest. A big Hamburger was leaving Pont Levis and her crew, unshipping the platform railings, began to sing “Elsinore”—the oldest of our chanteys. You know it of course:

  Mother Rugen’s tea-house on the Baltic—

  Forty couples waltzing on the floor!

  And you can watch my Ray,

  For I must go away

  And dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!

  Then, while they sweated home the covering-plates:

  Nor-Nor-Nor-Nor-

  West from Sourabaya to the Baltic—

  Ninety knot an hour to the Skaw!

  Mother Rugen’s tea-house on the Baltic

  And dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!

  The clips parted with a gesture of indignant dismissal, as though Quebec, glittering under her snows, were casting out these light and unworthy lovers. Our signal came from the Heights. Tim turned and floated up, but surely then it was with passionate appeal that the great tower arms flung open—or did I think so because on the upper staging a little hooded figure also opened her arms wide toward her father?

  In ten seconds the coach with its clerks clashed down to the receiving-caisson; the hostlers displaced the engineers at the idle turbines, and Tim, prouder of this than all, introduced me to the maiden of the photograph on the shelf. “And by the way,” said he to her, stepping forth in sunshine under the hat of civil life, “I saw young Williams in the Mark Boat. I’ve asked him to tea on Friday.”

  The Father of Modern Science Fiction

  The accomplishments of earlier authors and the gathering scientific and social forces for change seemed to meet in the person of one small, perceptive Englishman, Herbert George Wells. He was born in Bromley, Kent, a few miles from London, in 1866, just a couple of years after Jules Verne’s first science-fiction novel was published, and he died, a famous and wealthy author, in 1946, having seen science fiction become a genre and having seen the world realize several of science fiction’s dreams and fears.

  His father was a gardener and a part-time professional cricket player; his mother was a ladies’ maid. When they were married, they bought an unsuccessful crockery shop called Atlas House, where the young Wells was born and grew up, and where his mother, concerned with seeing her children placed in some secure occupation, tried to apprentice him as a draper and as a pharmaceutical chemist.

  Wells attributed his escape from his mother’s conventional Victorian world to two broken legs: when he broke his own, at a youthful age, his father introduced him to the splendor of books; his father’s broken leg ended his cricket-playing career and the sale of cricket equipment in the crockery shop. That was the only thing that sold, and his mother became housekeeper at Up Park. Books were available in the Up Park library for Wells to read, and money was available to send Wells on in school.

  Wells had a quick mind that enabled him to master subjects easily on his own, and
eventually to write on almost any subject, including science, history, and economics. His ambition to write was well timed; as he put it in his autobiography, “The habit of reading was spreading to new classes with distinctive needs and curiosities. . . . New books were being demanded and fresh authors were in request.”

  Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. He lasted three years. The first was a formative period of studying biology under the great Thomas H. Huxley, the champion of Darwinism. Darwin, whose Origin of the Species was published in 1859, created a great furor over the Western world with his theories, and through Huxley was a major influence on Wells. In his second and third years, Wells studied physics and geology, finally dropping out with a complaint about poor teaching. Later he won his degree in biology by examination. He worked briefly for a correspondence college and wrote a biology textbook before he turned to a full-time career in writing.

  Article writing came first, a couple of metaphysical speculations in 1891; then he realized that success lay in writing about more commonplace topics. In 1894 he began writing what he called “single sitting stories” using his special knowledge of science, culminating in the publication of his novella The Time Machine in 1895, which he had been working at in various forms since his Normal School days. It was an immediate success. In addition to his short stories, he began producing a novel a year. They were called scientific romances and included The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and The First Men in the Moon (1901).

  They made his reputation, The War of the Worlds in particular; it was reprinted around the world, often serialized in newspapers with the location for alien depredations changed to the region it was being published, as Orson Welles in his 1938 broadcast changed the location to New York and George Pal in his 1953 film version changed it to Los Angeles. With his personal success assured, Wells turned to writing other kinds of books: contemporary novels such as Kipps (1905), Ton-Bungay (1909), Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1915), and Joan and Peter (1918); and encyclopedic works such as The Outline of History (1919), The Science of Life (1930), and The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (1931).

  But perhaps his greatest concern was for improving the condition of humanity. He had attended meetings of the Fabian socialists while attending the Normal School; as a successful author, he became a regular member. The Fabians believed that the new affluence produced by industrialization could be distributed more efficiently so that poverty and hunger could be ended. Wells called for “an open conspiracy” among people of good will to set up a new world order, and he described it in such books as A Modern Utopia (1905), The World Set Free, (1914), Men Like Gods (1923), and The Shape of Things to Come (1934).

  Wells did not think his scientific romances belonged to the Jules Verne tradition, and rejected attempts to call him “the English Jules Verne.” Verne’s work, he said, “dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery. . . . But these stories of mine . . . do not pretend to deal with possible things; they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field. They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter Schlemil and the story of Frankenstein.” His special favorite was Gulliver’s Travels.

  Wells’s technique was to introduce one fantastic element, strange property, or strange world and show how ordinary people react to it. He wrote: “The thing that makes such imaginations interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human. . . . For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly, he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis. He must trick him into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds.”

  Ideas exploded in his stories. Some he adapted from the work of others. Most seemed original: time travel by machine, invisibility through chemicals or by speed of motion, attack by extraterrestrials, specialization through biology, superman, parallel worlds, warfare using tanks or airships, the atomic bomb, world catastrophe, alien influences on human evolution, man-eating plants, celestial bodies coming close to earth, interplanetary television, prehistoric people, conquest by ants, attack by sea creatures. . . . His particular concern was evolution: perhaps human evolution isn’t over, or other creatures, such as ants or giant squids, may evolve into competitors.

  By his techniques and by the number and excitement of his ideas, Wells broadened the audience for science fiction, just as Verne had done before him. Wells, with his critical mind and his superior writing skills, carried science fiction to heights it had never reached before and would seldom reach afterward.

  He was the third writer Hugo Gernsback pointed to when he wanted to define what he was going to publish in his new magazine: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”

  The Star

  BY H. G. WELLS

  It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint, remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind.

  Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it.

  On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. “A Planetary Collision,” one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine’s opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of the world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague, of some imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see—the old familiar stars just as they had always been.

  Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The winter’s dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen g
oing to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen—and out at sea by seamen watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky!

  Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star.

  And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together, and a hurrying to and fro to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of world. For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was had been struck, fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.