Cavor describes the Selenite civilization as a scientific dystopia, an anthill society in which different varieties of Selenite are shaped to different specialized purposes. Eventually, after his language has been learned, Cavor is taken to meet the Grand Lunar, the great dominating creature who rules the Moon. The Grand Lunar is a featureless brain-case many yards in diameter. Under interrogation, Cavor tells this being about human disunity and belligerence—and then fears he has said too much. The book ends with a disruption of Cavor’s messages, and Bedford’s image of an embattled Cavor overwhelmed (yet again!) by Selenites.
What has really happened on the Moon? Despite Bedford’s dire suspicions, we cannot know—and lacking his anti-gravity sphere, neither can Bedford. It is all left a mystery. But we are entitled to feel that one interview with the likes of the Grand Lunar has been more than enough for Wells. He dares imagine no more and must abandon poor Cavor to his fate, whatever it may be.
It is apparent that Wells went through some sort of major crisis of faith around the turn of the century. Just what was his relationship to be with a Science that he found both promising and threatening?
Modern science, we may recall, grew out of the Seventeenth Century decision to investigate the world of matter and set the spiritual realm aside. And, for all the increase in its scope and power, the science of the late Nineteenth Century still resolutely held itself apart from those values considered to belong to the domain of spirit—love, honor, idealism, and morality.
There was no problem with this arrangement for as long as science continued to recognize that religion had its own right and truth. But as science and religion began to draw apart, science became increasingly committed to a narrow and mechanistic philosophy which perceived the universe as a great machine and man, at best, as an animal. It was these images of meaninglessness and amorality that troubled Wells.
As we have seen, real doubt about the effects of science is expressed in The First Men in the Moon. Moreover, the scientific civilization of the Selenites, with its extremes of overspecialization and personal limitation, is regarded with considerable uneasiness.
Most of all, it is by no accident that the Grand Lunar—like Wells’s other superior aliens, the Martian invaders—should appear in the guise of our hypothetical descendant, Big Brain. Seemingly, Wells thought that man might survive in a hostile universe by becoming scientific, but feared that this might come at the cost of turning into some repulsive, inhuman, unsympathetic and overwhelmingly powerful creature before whom Wells could not even justify present humanity.
Wells resolved his crisis by giving up his extremes of philosophical question and doubt, and by reaffirming the power of science as the immediate practical method to be pursued in the name of survival. Pursue science and don’t think too much about the more distant mysteries. That was a decision completely in keeping with the new practical human-centered Edwardian spirit.
During the Edwardian decade, Wells turned his considerable energies to the criticism and reform of society along more scientific lines. He wrote futurological forecasts; his first great success of the Twentieth Century was a pioneer work of prediction entitled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901), which earned him an invitation to join the radical Fabian Society. He wrote comic social novels in which society was taken to task for wasting the potential of people who looked like alternate versions of the younger H.G. Wells. He wrote serious social novels in which society was taken to task for not cooperating with the desires of the present H.G. Wells. And he wrote inspirational utopian novels in which the limitations of present human nature and the benightedness of present human society were overleaped completely. Wells even tried and failed to take over the Fabian Society and turn it from vain theorizing to practical action.
In his autobiography, Wells makes a comment on the universe of space and time revealed by modern physics. It seems to capture the thinking behind his decision at the turn of the century to abandon scientific wonder stories in favor of social reform:
In brief I realize that Being is surrounded east, south, north and west, above and below, by wonder. Within that frame, like a little house in strange, cold, vast and beautiful scenery, is life upon this planet, of which life I am a temporary spark and impression. There is interest beyond measure within that house; use for my utmost. Nevertheless at times one finds an urgency to go out and gaze at those enigmatical immensities. But for such a thing as I am, there is nothing conceivable to be done out there. Ultimately, those remote metaphysical appearances may mean everything, but so far as my present will and activities go they mean nothing. The science of physics shrinks to the infinitesimal in a little sparkling flicker in a glass bulb or whirls away vastly with the extra-galactic nebulae into the deeps of space, and after a time I stop both speck-gazing and star-gazing and return indoors.150
During the Nineties, H.G. Wells felt an urgent need to go out and gaze at the enigmatical immensities. But at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, he ceased speck-gazing and star-gazing and returned indoors to work. It would be others than Wells who would conceive what was to be done by men out there in the larger world.
The most urgent problem presented to the heirs and successors of Wells was that of adjusting to the new universe of space and time. Scientific materialism might be acknowledged as the new order of the day, but still that took a considerable amount of getting used to—like a swimmer acclimating himself to the chill and power of the ocean by degrees.
There were two aspects to this problem. One was the vast indifferent power of the great cosmic ocean. How large, remote, awful and uncaring the great meat-grinding universe of space and time appeared! Wonderful the enigmatical immensities might be, but what did they have to offer to humanity except the certainty of disaster and doom? It was this humanly irrelevant universe that H.G. Wells had turned back from.
The other and reciprocal aspect of the problem was the denial of innate human specialness and superiority. How insignificant man seemed when measured beside the immensity of space and time! And this huge, overwhelming universe, so far beyond mankind, seemed to demand animal behavior from humanity. Its highest values were not love and morality, but survival by any means and at any cost. How humiliating to man’s pretensions!
Both aspects of the problem—the chilly remoteness of the universe, and mankind’s limited nature—can be seen in a highly influential essay by Bertrand Russell published just after the turn of the century. “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903) may be taken as a credo of the new faith of scientific materialism.
The essay opens with a parable, a first attempt at an expression of man’s true cosmic position. It is a cruel little fable of limitation and futility supposedly told by Mephistopheles to Faust as a history of creation.
It begins with a bored God, weary of worship by the angels to whom he has given endless joy. Ah, but then this God has a thought: “Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured?”151
And so he creates a mad, monstrous world full of creatures breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away, a world whose ultimate product is Man, touched with the power of thought and “the cruel thirst for worship.”152
The fable ends:
And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula.
“Yes,” he murmured, “it was a good play; I will have it performed again.”153
But even this nihilistic little fantasy of human torture, humiliation and destruction allows humanity some purpose. It capitalizes the name of Man. It puts him at the center of the play. God may be shallow, stupid and sadistic, but mankind still has some importance to him, some amusement value that at least ensures that the play will be performed again.
This parable is at best a first approximation for Russell. It captures something
of the Edwardian attitude. But it doesn’t fully express the true situation as Russell understands it, so immediately on concluding his little fantasy, he discards it in favor of another vision which he suggests is like it, but is both more awful and more accurate. After the God of Mephistopheles murmurs his intent to repeat his comedy, Russell says:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.154
Wow! With this as the new standard of belief, it is no wonder that acclimatization was necessary. Russell’s image of meaninglessness could haunt a science fiction writer born a generation after this essay was first published, and still seem a thorny problem to an adolescent born two generations later.
And yet, even in as bleak and awful a statement of the human situation as Russell’s, there is still some mitigation. The name of Man is still capitalized. And the remainder of the essay is a call in the style of Thomas Huxley for mankind to resist the hostile universe and continue to assert human moral values. The essay concludes:
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gates of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.155
In the Edwardian decade there was a strange confidence in the powers of humanity, that weary but unyielding Atlas, a sense that even though the solar system might die and all of Man’s achievement be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins, still there was a proudly defiant element in Man that was superior to this rude treatment and would prevail. This unreasonable confidence was shared by nearly everyone, regardless of their other beliefs. It might be called a common denominator of the period.
The given bases for Man’s presumed superiority to the rest of material creation varied widely. The basis might be found, for instance, in a reaffirmation of traditional religion. In an SF story, a scientific probe might be imagined as peering two thousand years into the past and confirming the existence and miraculous nature of Jesus. Or occultists might write of scientific demonstrations of the existence of the soul. Humanists might assert the special worthiness of human morality, while pure materialists might suggest that the difference that made humanity superior was based in human intelligence. But all Edwardians were agreed that something about Man justified giving him that capital letter and setting him apart and above the rest of creation.
Edwardian SF stories say, yes . . . but. Yes, the cosmic night is dark . . . but still somehow Man will prevail, even though the universe grinds his bones.
Edwardian SF stories are like the endings of Wells’s great scientific romances of the Nineties. Time and again, Wells would present the darkest visionary implications of the new universe—but then draw back, soften them, even contradict them. In The Time Machine, a sweep of time-to-come is revealed that is so vast that it makes man’s civilization seem nothing more than a foolish heaping. But the narrator concludes: “If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” In The War of the Worlds, the technologically advanced Martians may yet return and wipe us out. But there is the counterweight of that dim and wonderful vision of mankind “spreading slowly from this little seed-bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space.” And in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the entire novel is a demonstration to the narrator that he and his fellow men are nothing better than poor tortured half-human animals. But still he says, “It must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope or I could not live.”156
Similarly, Edwardian SF might admit—or half-admit—that time would bury all human accomplishment, that humanity might well be in jeopardy from cosmic indifference or cosmic hostility, and that mankind was only an animal. And still, Edwardian SF would cross its fingers, close its eyes, and hope. Somehow, human specialness would justify itself and win through.
The one clear exception to this Edwardian sentimentalization of Man was the tales of an Irish nobleman, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany. This was one writer who would not deny the true relativity of man. Was the human situation awful, grotesque, and richly humorous—no better than a cosmic joke? This young soldier, at least, this veteran of the Boer War with its concentration camps and other harbingers of atrocity to come, was one person able to stand up and state the facts.
Dunsany was a strange fringe writer. He was an aristocratic debunker of aristocratic pretensions writing during the last happy decade that aristocratic ideals were to know. But even as his stories took Man down a peg, they themselves were a very special and superior kind of writing—glittering, colorful, cynical little fantasies set off in a special secondary universe, a nonce world like the settings of William Morris’s last stories. The location of Dunsany’s tales is sometimes given as “the little kingdoms at the Edge of the World,”157 sometimes as “the Third Hemisphere.”158
What makes Dunsany special—one of the very few Edwardians to have an influence on the later development of SF—is that while there is no apparent modern human science in his fantasy stories, nonetheless they are steeped in the new scientific philosophy. More than any other imaginative fiction of their time, they are built on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.
Indeed, Dunsany’s stories resemble nothing else so much as that first approximation of the human situation, that opening parable of human futility, torture and doom by Bertrand Russell in “A Free Man’s Worship.” The similarity between Dunsany and Mephistopheles’ fable of human creation and human fate can be seen in this passage from a typical early Dunsany story:
“ ‘Once I found out the secret of the universe. I have forgotten what it was, but I know the Creator does not take Creation seriously, for I remember that He sat in Space with all His work in front of Him and laughed.’ ”159
Everywhere in Dunsany there is a seeking after gods. But the gods that are found are invariably cruel, or trivial, or false, and have nothing to offer to their human worshipers except suffering, disillusionment and death.
The title of Dunsany’s collection Time and the Gods (1906) tells the true story. “Time” is one of the names of the vast and chilly god of science. So great is the power of the new science that even in the alternate universes of fantasy, time still holds sway. Time turns lesser gods into monkeys and mankind into an insect.
Dunsany was a mocker of idols—and the Edwardian
exaltation of Man was an idol. Holding onto the belief in the innate specialness and superiority of humanity was a form of self-flattery, an easy way out of the dilemmas posed by the new scientific universe. Pretending that humanity was already Man was a way of avoiding the true hard facts of the matter.
Dunsany saw through that. His stories were specifically aimed to kill illusion. Would you put your faith in gods? After reading Dunsany, you must spit on all monkey gods. Would you take comfort in mankind’s special superiority? After reading Dunsany, you must know man for what he really is, a pretentious, self-deluded piss-ant.
Lord Dunsany was not a highly popular writer. His unique combination of elitist artistry and mockery of the pretensions of Man made him a special taste. It seems no wonder that he had to pay for the publication of his first book.
If Dunsany had an effect on later writers and has continued to be read, it is largely because the history of the Twentieth Century has been a confirmation of Dunsany’s criticism of human pretension.
The idea of innate human specialness and superiority—usually expressed and understood as the supposed superiority of some class or race or nation—would receive a terrible put-down in the Great War. It would be further humiliated in the Great Depression and be definitively discredited in World War II.
It was bound to happen. There was a fundamental incompatibility between the new scientific universe of space and time and outworn elitist principles ultimately based in the old idea of the rational human soul, that last wispy remnant of the long-rejected spirit realm.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 17
