Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
H.G.WELLS’ SPECULATIVE WORKS
Last posting I considered what I called H.G.Wells’ Contemporary Social Novels, that is, novels which deal with England as it was at the time Wells was writing, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This posting I’m looking at what I loosely call his “speculative” works - a vague and nebulous term indeed, but I’m trying to shoehorn together those books where Wells was writing about a possible future, or was presenting what he imagined to be philosophical ideas in the form of polemic. As I noted in my last posting, I have read much of Wells’ science-fiction over the years, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, When the Sleeper Wakes, The Food of the Gods, and more. With the possible exception of Kipps, these are the works for which Wells is still best-known to the general reading public. But in this posting, and choosing only those books that happen to be on my shelves, I deal with two science-fiction books, one polemic, and one predictive view of what Wells obviously thought would be a plausible future.
The situation: through a series of accidents, the one-time medical student Edward Prendick finds himself on an isolated island run by Dr. Moreau, a vivisectionist who had fled London years before, after a medical scandal. Moreau’s accomplice is a thuggish and alcoholic man called Montgomery. Prendick is shocked and disgusted to find on the island creatures that seem half-human and half-other species – puma or swine or wolf or ape. They can talk in a primitive way, they walk on their hind legs, but they are clearly not fully human. Prendick accuses Moreau of turning human beings into beasts; but it’s the other way around. The “Beast Folk” are brute beasts into which Moreau has infused human qualities, in an attempt to produce a superior (and pacifistic) human race. One of the humanoid creatures teaches the others “the Law” as laid down by Moreau. They are not to walk on four legs, they are not to eat flesh, they are not to drink water by crouching near pools and lapping it up etc. etc. After they chant each of these laws the beasts say “Are we not men?” Of course Dr.Moreau’s experiments eventually go catastrophically wrong, but I won’t spoil it all by saying how.
The Island of Doctor Moreau has the great merit of not outlasting its welcome,
unlike some of Wells’ “serious” novels, such as the tiresome The New Machiavelli. The Island of Doctor Moreau runs to a trim 150 pages in the
edition I read. The horror comes through the sense of menace that Prendick
feels early in the novel when he walks through the island’s forest, and is
stalked by a creature which he cannot determine is human. Wells, an excellent
story-teller when on form, understands that the greatest horrors are things not
quite seen – a concept that by now has often been used to advantage in
innumerable horror films. Later in The
Island of Doctor Moreau, there are also explicit descriptions of the
deformed and vivisected beasts, the horror here being that they are like us
inasmuch as they have at least some
human characteristics. This leads us to consider that we too have swinish or
wolfish or other animalistic characteristics. As I read, I couldn’t help
feeling that this was like a reversed version of the Circe sequence of the Odyssey where men are turned into
beasts. Or perhaps like Swift in Gulliver’s
Travels, suggesting how differently we could be seen from a non-human
perspective. Some critics have gone so far as to compare The Island of Doctor Moreau with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but I think that’s stretching it a bit.
The Island of Doctor Moreau has some Victorian features. Its introduction purports to be a genuine manuscript written by Edward Prendick. It deals with a topic that was very much discussed in the 1890s – how ethical was vivisection? Wells, in effect, projects a phenomenon of his own day, as he did in The Time Machine where the effete Eloi and the brutish Morlocks are projections of current class struggles. The Island of Doctor Moreau mines a vein of horror that had preceded Wells – exactly ten years before it appeared, Robert Louis Stevenson had already published his Dr.Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which also dealt with an obsessive man trying monstrous experiments with the human form. And going back earlier than the Victorian age, way back in 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein had a man creating a human monster. Like Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau is very imprecise about how the scientist’s experiments work. There is vague talk about vivisection and the use of a serum, but remember, while the science of genetics was already underway by 1896, nobody then knew about DNA. It’s not surprising that Wells couldn’t know what is now known in the field of human biology. Even so, this short novel resonates as a fable for a time like our own, when human beings are less squeamish about altering radically the human metabolism.
And, again as in Frankenstein, there is the big question about how much power human beings should exercise over the natural order. In Frankenstein, the Monster asks “Why did you make me?” as if addressing a god. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the “Beast Folk” regard Moreau as a god, the Lawgiver, the force that has made them. Should human beings set themselves up as gods?
The War of the Worlds still stands as Wells’ most admired science-fiction, but The Island of Doctor Moreau has a large cult following. For the record The Island of Doctor Moreau, has been filmed three times. I am told that the early 1930s version, called Island of Lost Souls, was appropriately eerie and unsettling with Charles Laughton as Dr Moreau, but as yet, I have never seen this film. I have, however seen the two later versions. The 1977 version of The Island of Doctor Moreau was simply boring and un-nuanced, with a solemn Burt Lancaster as Moreau. The 1996 remake was a complete disaster in every respect, a rambling script, an emphasis on shock and blood-and-guts, and an over-the-top camp performance by Marlon Brando as Moreau. It had a huge budget, but fittingly it was a complete box-office flop.
Idiotic little footnote: I was greatly amused that throughout this novel, Wells spells “dinghy” as “dingey”. Or was this the standard spelling over a century ago?
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In great contrast, much of The First Men in the Moon (first published 1901) reads as if it were meant tongue-in-cheek. I have said that The History of Mr Polly is, in my opinion, the most amusing and jolly of Wells’ “contemporary” novels. I rate The First Men in the Moon as his most amusing and jolly science fiction, even if The War of the Worlds is a much better novel. I say this in the awareness that The First Men in the Moon does have moments of horror and what I can only interpret as a tragic ending.
The jollity comes from the delightful contrast of the two protagonists. Cavor is a rather dotty scientist so determinedly fixed on the idea of discovering scientific truth that he is highly impractical in more mundane matters. Bedford, who narrates the story, is a sheer opportunist, thinking of nothing other than making a profit out of Cavor’s experiments and discoveries. Cavor has invented a substance called Cavorite, which is able to defy gravity and thus lift heavy bodies into outer space. Cavor and his workmen build a solid sphere, which allows Cavor and Bedford to fly to the moon. Of course and inevitably, this means much fudging by Wells when it comes to explaining how exactly this works.
But no matter. The two of them get to the moon and – surprise – the moon proves to have a breathable atmosphere. In due course, Cavor and Bedford discover that there is a huge subterranean civilization on the moon, consisting of large intelligent insect-like creatures whom Cavor names Selenites. Their civilization is highly compartmentalised. Every Selenite is bred and specialised for a particular function – herders of beasts, scientists, administrators, guards etc. – so that each caste of Selenite has its own particular shape. Wells is obviously thinking of ants or bees with their specialised workers, soldiers, drones etc. but with intelligence equal to human beings. I won’t go into Cavor’s and Bedford’s various fights with, and escapes from, the Selenites. Enough to say that, through a series of misadventures, Cavor is stranded on the moon and only Bedford makes it back to Earth. Through the (in 1901 extremely novel) medium of radio waves, Bedford receives a few messages from Cavor, describing in detail how Selenites live, before the messages fade out. The implication is that the Selenites are blocking Cavor’s broadcasts so that the secret of Cavorite will not get back to Earth and therefore the moon will not be invaded by other earthlings. The horror of the tale lies in the more grotesque habits of the Selenites and the tragedy in Cavor’s being stranded in an alien and hostile world.
In terms of real science – and what we now know of the moon – Wells gets some things right. There is weightlessness for the two explorers as they travel through outer space. They are able to bounce about on the surface of the moon, as real astronauts eventually did, because of the moon’s weaker gravitational pull. But, quite apart from the whole Selenite civilization, there are the purely fantastical details. The moon has a breathable atmosphere and blue skies. Snow falls on the moon. In Chapters 7 and 8 the initial descriptions of the moon’s surface are vivid to the point of being hallucinatory – wonderful descriptions of a non-existent landscape and Wells at his best.
Then there is the sheer tongue-in-cheek. Cavor and Bedford consume lunar plants which make them happily inebriated. There is deliberate satire when Cavor, in one of his broadcasts, gives an elaborate description of a Selenite parade before the Grand Lunar, the ruler of the moon. This clearly mocks the pomp and pageantry of official parades before royalty on Earth. And for the sake of his story, Wells displays sheer impertinent cheek when he allows Bedford, with no understanding of how to steer the sphere, to land back on Earth almost exactly where he set out from, in dear old England where he blithely explains to the unbelieving that he’s just been to the moon. Surely we are meant to laugh, just as we do when we realise what a swine the narrating Bedford is. He reacts callously to the fate of somebody who has inadvertently been carried off into outer space by the Cavorite-fuelled sphere.
Interesting Footnote: Jules Verne, who lived to read Wells’ novel and who died in 1905, took exception to The First Men in the Moon. He pointed out that when, way back in the 1860s, he wrote his own moon-travel books From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, he had used a real and existing form of locomotion to get his heroes into space. He had them travel in a bullet-shaped missile shot into space from a huge gun. As has often been pointed out, the pressure involved in such a technique would immediately crush the travellers to death. Even so, Verne rightly said that Wells had to invent a non-existent substance to get his heroes on their way, and Verne regarded this as a form of cheating. The irony is that 35 years after The First Men in the Moon was published, the British film Things to Come (1936), based on H.G.Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, had its astronauts shot into space from a huge gun. Before real space-travel began, it would appear that Jules Verne’s technique was still seen as feasible.
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Totally different from the above is First and Last Things, subtitled “A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life”. Not a novel, it is one of Wells’ many polemics. It was published in 1908 but apparently revised in 1917. I judge it from the first edition. To state the obvious, I admire a man who is willing to set out the principles of life by which he abides. We are always in danger of many self-contradictions when we try to sum up our beliefs and moral standards in any detail, so score one to Wells for giving it a go. In a way, Wells’ titles tantalise the potential reader. The very phrases “first and last things” and “a confession of faith and rule of life” immediately suggest Christian piety. Is the agnostic Wells going to preach Christianity? Of course not, but it is interesting to see him in this polemic saying a number of positive things about the church, faith and worship.
He divides his polemic into four long sections.
The first he calls “Metaphysics”, by which he means general principles of epistemology. His general argument is that there is such a thing as objective truth, but such truth cannot be spoken of in terms of absolute certainty. Wells sees standard systems of logic as being misleading. They assume certainty and finality in reasoning. Therefore he argues that real objective truth is more like the science of biology than like mathematics or physics. (At which point I have to note that there is a wide streak of bias here as Wells was trained as a biologist.) Wells says that, working in abstractions, mathematics and physics allow people to assume there are final and definitive answers. But biology works by observation and history (as in the study of evolution) and therefore has a greater understanding of the individuality of things and is able to break down the notion of neat and generalised categories. What Wells concludes from this argument is that while we might allude to categories in our everyday thinking, we should always be aware that our thoughts and beliefs are hedged by uncertainty. Hence his agnosticism. To summarise this argument in one sentence – Wells was an empiricist, not a rationalist.
We then move on to “Of Beliefs”. Says Wells, we have to simply accept the reality and importance of the universe. He believes there is some purpose and order in the universe which we might occasionally and legitimately call God. Religions, however, are simply born out of the desire to simplify. He personally believes in both determinism (in the general forces of nature) and free will (in our personal actions). When he discusses the nature of beauty, he falls back on the idea of its inexplicableness. Human beings he sees as building blocks climbing towards a greater, unified human consciousness. (Which rather contradicts his earlier argument about biological individuality and uniqueness.) He specifically dismisses the idea of life after death and says that Christianity is very attractive to many people and still succours many people, but declares that for him, Christ is too perfect, not human enough, and therefore no guide for him.
The third section “Of General Conduct” is both the longest and the most varied in the topics it raises. It is also the one that falls into much special pleading as Wells justifies his own modus vivendi. Conduct, he says, comes from “faith”, by which he means a set of beliefs. It is, he says, impossible to define distinctly what is good, but we have to consider what benefits society most. (Shades of utilitarianism here, but Wells never uses the word.) So he says that for the common good, Socialism is the most promising doctrine and “We look towards the day… of the organised, civilised world state.” (p.100 of the 1908 edition). Indeed he looks forward to a “conscious synthesis of human thought” and a “World City of Mankind”. But as soon as he mentions Socialism, he runs into trouble because he has to exclude so many forms of Socialism. He rejects the type of Socialism that is controlled by well-to-do middle-class people who think they are raising up their “inferiors”. He rejects Marxism, arguing that the notion of class warfare merely results in one self-interested group fighting another. And he rejects “that furtive Socialism of the specialist which one meets most typically in the Fabian Society” (p.106). (By this stage, Wells had broken with his Fabian pals Shaw, the Webbs and the Reeves-es.). In the end, his Socialism seems to consist of a vague Utopianism built on people being nice and cooperating with one another. Yet, forsooth, he says Socialism must be militant, even if it has to work under current economic systems. So bring on education and propagandising for Socialism. He turns to the plight of women who are (in 1908) economic slaves to their husbands and he considers how their position can be improved. However, his brilliant idea is that, with childbirth being a necessity, an association of eugenically-acceptable people should set up their own system of marriage, whereby women can partner with any number of lovers and receive a state benefit for bringing such healthy children into the world. (Hmm – I think a German regime tried this one in the 1930s.) Wells refutes some of his earlier writings and the idea of having a “new religion”, but then goes into a weird passage saying that all Protestant and dissenting churches should go back into the Catholic church and then reform it from the inside, introducing new doctrines congenial to Wells. On the matter of war, he insists that competition is an inevitable part of human nature and has the benefit of weeding out the eugenically unacceptable. Also, armies are good at teaching men to work for a common purpose and therefore ready them for the coming World State… Young people need guidance. Democracy per se doesn’t work so there is a need for natural aristocrats to take control of things… And then we are into the matter of sex. It’s a necessary force, says Wells, and cannot be controlled by celibacy, but then maybe we should question the current institution of marriage and rapidly he moves into the mode of talking about Free Love and the benefits of polygamy.
He ends this tome with a “Confession” which basically repeats what he has already said – especially on the matter of his own sexual habits, though written in a euphemistic way suiting a 1908 readership.
When I got to the end of First and Last Things, what I most understood was that Wells was an empiricist, a utilitarian, an advocate of eugenics, an atheism-inclined agnostic who sometimes used religious terms, a man who wanted the world to be organised logically, and a man who did not trust democracy. And (despite some protestations to the contrary) he still thought in terms of social management by a small enlightened elite. His attempt at formal logic in the opening section of First and Last Things was largely unrelated to the grab-bag of issues he dealt with in the other two sections. First and Last Things tells us much about his mind and inclinations, but it is not much of a “rule of life”.
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Dear reader, I hope you understand the painful things I sometimes do for you to bring you accurate comments on books. The painful thing I did recently was to read my way through all the nearly 500 pages of H.G.Wells’ fatuous, pompous The Shape of Things to Come (first published in late 1933), one of those ponderous and verbose creations that Wells produced when he was well past his literary prime. Crawling to the end of it was, for me, an extended exercise in literary masochism. Wikipedia informs me that this concoction was a great inspiration to some later science-fiction writers. It was also, very-loosely, the source of the quaintly interesting British film Things to Come, scripted by Wells himself, made in 1936 and which I have seen a number of times – thanks to having a DVD of the film. Would that the book were as short and sprightly as the film.
I think Wells made one big blunder when he wrote The Shape of Things to Come. He sets much of it in the very near future, just a few years after he was writing, which means that the book had in-built obsolescence as many of its “predictions” would very quickly prove to be wrong. Note that I am knowingly using the word “book” rather than “novel”. It has the fictitious premise that it is the “dream book” of a diplomat called Philip Raven, and that it could therefore be seen as a mere speculative dream. But that is as novelistic as The Shape of Things to Come gets. It reads mainly like a dull, generalised history textbook of the future – or at least the future as Wells himself hoped it would go.
I make one thing very clear. I am not belittling Wells for getting many things wrong. Nobody who writes about a supposed future will get it all right. It would be foolish to criticise a writer in 1933 for not foreseeing the rise of computers, the internet, nuclear weapons, global warming and current ecological concerns, the impact of second- and third-wave feminism, and many other current realities. But he can be faulted for his many prejudices – often amounting to bigotry – and for his ignoring things that were already manifesting themselves in 1933.
To give a quick synopsis of this ponderous, dull text (boy, I’m laying it on, aren’t I?), Book One gives an account of (real) recent history up to 1933. The “Great War” of 1914-18 has almost broken Europe. A great economic depression has overwhelmed the world. Poverty and unemployment are rife. The feeble League of Nations has failed to curb wars. And in Europe dictatorships are flourishing. (Score one for Wells, by the way, for fingering both Stalin and Hitler as totalitarian tyrants.) “Progress comes to a halt.” So in Book Two a massive war breaks out (not too difficult to foresee in 1933, given all that rampant nationalism). The war lasts from 1940 to 1950, and is played out in a very different way from the real Second World War. Wells sees gas as the most lethal and destructive weapon. And after this gargantuan war, there is a horrible plague. The war and ensuing plague are so destructive that the whole world regresses – there are no longer major nations or nation states. The world’s population reverts to living in isolated villages or city states with only local leadership. Modern technology is a rarity. Mass communication has broken down… But in Book Three there is the great hope for the world. Technicians, engineers and especially aviators (still a relatively new and glamorous thing in 1933 when Wells was writing) get together and work out a system of international communication based on flight paths and the building of aerodromes. Gradually the Air Police and then the Air Dictatorship bind the world together again as they begin to construct a World State. Annoying things like religion and unhelpful literature are outlawed. Basic English becomes the lingua franca for the whole world. And of course, there is no such thing as democracy – a silly system which only gets in the way of scientists who know what is good for humanity. Opposition parties? Perish the thought!! They only hinder scientific truth, which is absolute. So, finally, Books Four and Five tell us what the wonderful, desirable world state will look like. There is a period known jocularly as the “Puritan Dictatorship” when the council ruling the World State has to discipline and rein in their cosmopolitan subjects. Wells approves of this severe discipline as a means of making the general populace less self-centred, less frivolous and more ready to serve the state. [NB While criticising Nazis, Fascists and Communists in Book One, Wells approves of their “discipline” as a forerunner of what the World State will need…] When we get past the “Puritan Dictatorship” there is the world made new and perfect. No more wars and national rivalries. No more squabbling democracies. Much “sexual hygiene” and typically Wellsian euphemisms for “free love”. A completely new form of education based principally on science. No more religions and superstitions. Parents forbidden to teach their children anything not approved by the state. Improved medicine so that people are healthier and live longer; but birth control so that the population doesn’t get out of hand. Some concessions to arty people, poets and artists, but just so long as they understand they are working for the World State. And suddenly everyone is more mature and creative. And all under the rule of an elite that knows everything. Wells’ heaven.
To put this whole future “history” in one sentence – a big war wipes the slate clean so that Wells’ idea of a perfect world can emerge.
On at least some things, I would say Wells was more-or-less right. The decay of organised religion in the West has happened and society in the West is far more secular. But Wells, with his dictatorial inclinations, has religion disappearing by forcible suppression or extermination ordered by the almighty state. (Writing at the time when most Muslim countries were still controlled by European imperial powers, Wells could not predict the resurgence of militant Islam.) The tendency for globalism to be at odds with nationalism is also a reality of our times as Wells vaguely predicts, but again, his globalism is enforced from above.
Wells takes scant notice of the rights of women that had advanced considerably even before 1933. Women hardly appear in The Shape of Things to Come, apart from vague references to changed sexual mores and a couple of anecdotes about boudoir politics controlled by women and the solitary tale of a woman aspiring to be an artist. He has no sense of how finite natural resources on Earth are, and hopes for a future where engineers dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to extract fuel. While there is the occasional nod to Asia and the Americas, his plan for the World State assumes that Europe and European ideas will be the arbiter of the new civilisation. Africa is mentioned only in passing once or twice. Wells does not consider, and certainly does not foresee, the break-up of European hegemony and the de-colonisation of much of the world. Indeed, his vision is so blind to different ethnicities and cultures, and requires such complete uniformity to one state, that (in a two-page tirade that come very close to being anti-Semitic) he berates Jews for clinging to their one god and seeking a homeland.
Most repellent, though, is his doctrinaire hatred of democracy. The world is to be controlled by a small body of scientific “experts” who know what is best for the unscientific crowd. This oligarchy may not be questioned. Far more than his admirers might like to admit, Wells was influenced by the totalitarian powers that were taking hold in 1933. His is a naïve latter day Positivism, wherein science solves all problems and there is no room for culture other than the sterile culture he has devised in his head.
Final comment on H. G. Wells: As well as having a number of books by Wells on my shelves, I also have a number of those old “Writers and Their Work” pamphlets, which used to be produced by the British Council. One of them, published in the early 1950s, is about H.G.Wells and was written by the now-forgotten journalist Montgomery Belgion. Most of what Belgion says in his 30-page essay is commonplace stuff – how he [Belgion] had greatly admired Wells’ early novels when he himself was a young man, but how Wells’ best novels were written early in his career, in the 1890s and early 1900s, and his later work was of little literary value; how Wells’ early science-fiction remains the most popular part of Wells’ output; and how most of Wells’ serious “predictions” about society were fallacious. But he does make one interesting comment. He says that he thought of part of Wells as being “Baby Wells”, that is, like an overgrown baby who thinks, as infants do, that only he himself really exists and that other people are mere adjuncts to his being. Correctly, Belgion points out that not only are all the main characters in Wells’ novels really projections of himself (often little more than thinly-disguised autobiography), but that the other characters in his novels are there only as supports to the main character and do not exist when the main character is not thinking about them. This trait, says Belgion, carries on into what Wells regarded as his rational plans for a better world. Wells’ prophecies always rely on a small elite, being of the same mind as Wells, neatly organizing and ordering the world. They are, in short, mere enlargements of Baby Wells. Quite so.
H.G.Wells had much imagination and great power as a storyteller. When he is in comic vein and when he is writing science fiction he is a master. In adolescence and now approaching old age I have greatly enjoyed reading much of his work. But when he sets himself up as a sage he fails miserably. His idees fixes become obsessions and his direct social commentary is facile. A child throwing blocks around to reorganise the world.
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