Green Planets (8 page)

The Utopians' manipulation and regulation of their natural environment demonstrates their scientific prowess. In
The War of the Worlds
, scientific knowledge and technological skill were not enough to ensure victory for the Martians, but
Men Like Gods
restages the contest between nature and the scientific knowledge of an advanced civilization, this time with a different outcome. Shortly after the arrival of the human beings from 1920s London in Utopia, it becomes apparent that they have unwittingly introduced earthly germs to Utopia and that these germs have the potential to cause deadly plagues among the Utopians, who, having long ago eradicated all the harmful germs of their own planet, have no natural immunity to these or any other diseases. In an inverted repetition of the alien invasion scenario from Wells's earlier novel, the more belligerent members of the Earthling party regard their fortuitous biological advantage as a weapon to be employed in the seizure of this newfound planet. Ultimately, however, the Earthlings' hopes for conquest by way of disease are disappointed. The Utopians successfully isolate the disease germs introduced by earthly humans and through vaccination neutralize the threat that they pose. The disease bacteria that function as the unexpected agents of humanity's salvation in
The War of the Worlds
become in
Men Like Gods
mere “poisons” that serve no useful purpose and cannot withstand Utopian science.
³³

In
The War of the Worlds
, humans and Martians alike exist at the mercy of natural forces on both the microscopic and macroscopic level, beset on one scale by disease germs and on another by the cooling of the sun and planetary climate change. In
Men Like Gods
, however, the Utopians are no longer constrained by these forces but are instead masters of them. First hypothetically and then practically, Wells raises the possibility of limits to the Utopians' power, only to dismiss this possibility: surveying the order of Utopia, Barnstaple asks, “Might not some great shock or some phase of confusion still be possible to this immense order? … Might not the unforeseen be still lying in wait for this race? … No! It was inconceivable. The achievement of this world was too calmly great and assured.”
³⁴
Barnstaple's confidence in the indomitability of the Utopians is subsequently confirmed when, confronted by the beginnings of a potentially global epidemic, “the science and organization of Utopia had taken the danger by the throat and banished it.”
³⁵
Wells likewise presents the Utopians as masters of natural forces on a macroscopic level. When Barnstaple asks a Utopian scientist if his people do not fear, as the people of Earth fear, “that at last there must be an end to life because our sun and planets are cooling,” the Utopian responds, “Perish! We have hardly begun! … Before us lies knowledge, endlessly, and we may take and take, and as we take, grow.”
³⁶
By this, Barnstaple is convinced that the Utopians, and by extension the future inhabitants of Earth, will one day “lift their daring to the stars” and thus escape the end that must eventually await all life on a slowly cooling planet.
³⁷

The Utopian conviction that scientific mastery of nature and physical laws makes it possible for humanity to permanently escape extinction promotes an attitude toward other organisms wholly different from that depicted in
The War of the Worlds
. In Wells's earlier novel, human beings' recognition of their animal condition and their sense that all organisms face the threats of competition, subjugation, and extinction led to a sense of identification and sympathy with the nonhuman world. In
Men Like Gods
, however, the idea of extinction or subjugation as a shared threat is replaced by an assurance that by taking control of nature for themselves and meting out extinction to
other
species as they see fit, human beings can ensure their own survival (and dominance) as a species. The sense of identification and sympathy with other species suggested in the earlier novel is replaced by a divisive, dismissive, and hierarchical attitude that aims to elevate human beings above the natural world and results in a program of calculated control and extermination.

This divisive and dismissive attitude is made apparent not only through the practical program of control and eradication to which organisms are subjected
in
Men Like Gods
but also through the metaphorical use of animals in the novel. Animals categorized as pests and targeted for extermination are employed as embodiments of the qualities that Utopians wish to eradicate from their society. The Utopian Urthred states, “The gnawing vigour of the rat, … the craving pursuit of the wolf, the mechanical persistence of wasp and fly and disease germ, have gone out of our world…. We have obliterated that much of life's devouring forces. And lost nothing worth having.”
³⁸
As a convert to Utopian values, Barnstaple similarly expresses his disgust with earthly society through a series of animal comparisons. He criticizes the “parasitic host of priests” that governs earthly morality, compares the squabbles of his fellow travelers to “a dog-fight on a sinking ship,” scorns an Earth woman in his traveling party as “an unintelligent beauty-cow,” denounces the “trampling folly” of Earth's political leaders, and declares that “the aggressive conqueror, the grabbing financier, the shoving business man, he hated as he hated wasps, rats, hyenas, sharks, fleas, nettles and the like.”
³⁹
He asserts that were he to tell the people of Earth of his experiences in Utopia, “They would not believe it…. They would bray like asses at me and bark like dogs! … So they must sit among their weeds and excrement, scratching and nodding sagely at one another, … sure that mankind stank, stinks, and must always stink, that stinking is very pleasant indeed, and that there is nothing new under the sun.”
⁴⁰
The attribution of animal characteristics to human beings in
Men Like Gods
is wholly disparaging, tempered by no redeeming sympathy with the animal. To align oneself with the animal here is to reject the possibility of progress and to associate oneself with stupidity, violence, and filth.

These derogatory animal analogies culminate in Barnstaple's expression of something akin to revulsion for the human inhabitants of his own time and place, whom he describes as “that detestable crawling mass of un-featured, infected human beings.”
⁴¹
Barnstaple can envision only two possible outcomes to the standoff between the Earthlings and the Utopians: “Either the Utopians would prove themselves altogether the stronger and the wiser and he and all his fellow pirates would be crushed and killed like vermin, or the desperate ambitions of Mr. Catskill [the British war secretary] would be realized and they would become a spreading sore in the fair body of this noble civilization.”
⁴²
Whatever the outcome, the Earthling party consistently appears pestilent and pernicious to Barnstaple. Whereas in
The War of the Worlds
the narrator's experience of being treated as an expendable or exploitable creature causes him to accord new value to other animals, in
Men Like Gods
Barnstaple's comparison of human beings to despised animals leads him to suggest that human beings too warrant
extermination if they impede or endanger progress. While human vulnerability promotes identification and sympathy with the animal, knowledge and power engender a dispassionate, impersonal, and controlling attitude toward nature that in turn promotes a dangerous disregard for human life. Thus, unexpectedly, Wells's “pessimistic” early novel produces an impulse toward cross-species identification, while his more “optimistic” later novel produces a fantasy of total control through exterminative violence that is predicated upon anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism.

The contrasting resolutions to comparable scenarios presented in
The War of the Worlds
and
Men Like Gods
suggest that the early twentieth century's growing understanding of the interrelationships between organisms and their environment produced a new sense of power over nature that countered evolutionary anxieties regarding the dethronement of human beings but also potentially diminished the sympathy with the nonhuman that this sense of dethronement had made possible. This shift is made most evident through the contrasting perspectives on extinction that Wells's two novels offer. Between the publication of
The War of the Worlds
and of
Men Like Gods
, extinction, in Wells's mind, went from being feared as a threat to human survival to being viewed as a phenomenon to be harnessed by human beings so that they might decide for themselves the composition of “nature.” Subsequent works of
SF
seem inclined to move away from the exterminatory optimism of Wells's early twentieth-century novel. Olaf Stapledon's
Last and First Men
(1930), for example, depicts the extermination of the indigenous species of other planets as the inhabitants of Earth spread outward through the solar system, but the book offers no explicit commendation (or condemnation) of this process. C. S. Lewis's subsequent
Space Trilogy
(1938–45) vehemently denounces from a Christian theological perspective such human presumption. Wells's
Men Like Gods
preserves a historical moment in which ecological knowledge was seen as a means of increasing human beings' ability to use and control nature and thus suggests the complex and variable aims, affiliations, and justifications of ecology over the course of its development as a discipline.

Notes

1
. H. G. Wells,
The War of the Worlds
(Cherrybrook, NSW: Horizon, 2009), 169–70.

2
. Ibid., 62.

3
. Ibid., 34.

4
. Ibid., 74–75, 202.

5
. Ibid., 178.

6
. Ibid., 104, 100.

7
. Ibid., 1.

8
. Ibid., 61.

9
. Ibid., 169.

10
. Ibid., 175.

11
. A. D. Boney, “The ‘Tansley Manifesto' Affair,”
New Phytologist
118, no. 1 (1991): 3–21, and Peder Anker,
Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

12
. Frederick Frost Blackman et al., “The Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching,”
New Phytologist
16, no. 10 (1917): 242.

13
. Ibid., 246, 243.

14
. Ibid., 243.

15
. Ibid., 247.

16
. Julian Huxley, introduction to
Animal Ecology
by Charles Elton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), xiv, xv, xiv.

17
. Charles Elton,
Exploring the Animal World
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933), 66.

18
. Blackman et al., “Reconstruction,” 249.

19
. H. G. Wells,
Men Like Gods
(New York: Macmillan, 1923), 51.

20
. Ibid., 92.

21
. Ibid.

22
. Ibid.

23
. Ibid., 94.

24
. Ibid., 165.

25
. Ibid., 92.

26
. Ibid., 93.

27
. Ibid., 91, 93.

28
. Ibid., 17.

29
. Ibid., 260, 170.

30
. Ibid., 34.

31
. Ibid., 307.

32
. It is possible to exaggerate the gap between Wells's view and Carson's. In
Silent Spring
, Carson sought to promote awareness of the dangers of the synthetic chemical pesticides used to eliminate pest species, but she did not reject the notion of pest control altogether. She asserted the importance of eliminating insect disease vectors such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and her condemnation of the overuse of synthetic pesticides such as DDT arose in part from the fact that the overuse of these chemicals allowed species to develop a resistance to these substances, which jeopardized future efforts to fight insects. Nevertheless, she recommends interference in natural processes only in extreme cases, stating, “All this is not to say that there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects” (Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
[New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002], 9).

33
. Ibid., 198.

34
. Ibid., 173–74.

35
. Ibid., 252.

36
. Ibid., 301, 303.

37
. Ibid., 314–15.

38
. Ibid., 104–5.

39
. Ibid., 168, 195, 230, 230, 205.

40
. Ibid., 308.

41
. Ibid., 285.

42
. Ibid., 204.

2

Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age

MICHAEL PAGE

In the 1974 anthology
Before the Golden Age
, Isaac Asimov writes of
The Man Who Awoke
series of stories by Laurence Manning: “In the 1970s, everyone is aware of, and achingly involved in, the energy crisis. Manning was aware of it forty years ago, and because he was, I was, and so, I'm sure, were many thoughtful young science fiction readers.”
¹
At the time of Asimov's writing, ecology as a topic in the cultural conversation and in
SF
was on an upswing. Books like Paul Ehrlich's
The Population Bomb
, Gordon Rattary Taylor's
The Biological Time Bomb
, Roberto Vacca's
The Coming Dark Age
, Frank Herbert's
New World or No World,
and the Club of Rome's
The Limits to
Growth
were reaching wide audiences. In
SF
, several anthologies focused on ecological issues, including Fred Pohl's
Nightmare Age
, Tom Disch's
The Ruins of Earth,
Terry Carr's
Dream's Edge
, Harry Harrison's
The Year 2000,
and Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd's
The Wounded Planet
—as did numerous novels, notably Ursula Le Guin's
The Word for World Is Forest
, Frank Herbert's
Hellstrom's Hive
, Philip Wylie's
The End of the Dream
, John Brunner's
The Sheep Look Up
, and films like
Soylent Green
,
Silent Running
,
Logan's Run
,
Phase IV
, and
Zardoz
. Carr remarks in the introduction to
Dream's Edge
that “concern for the problems and prospects of our earthly environment come naturally to writers and readers of science fiction—it is as intrinsic to the genre as knowledge of physics, chemistry, the workings of politics and human psychology.”
²
Herbert similarly writes in the introduction to
The Wounded Planet
that ecology was the “hot gospel blasting at us from all sides … ecology as a phenomenon reflects a genuine underlying malaise…. The species knows its travail. This shines through every bit of ecological science fiction I have ever read.”
³
For Herbert,
SF
writers and ecologists are fellow travelers.