The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (17 page)

It was too much for him. In May 1893, Wells collapsed again, coughing blood. It became clear to Bertie that he would have to give up teaching.

It was in this moment of awfulness and desperate need that things finally began to fall into place for H.G. Wells. It was as though it were necessary for him to be shaken violently, spun out of his course, flogged within an inch of his life, and then stopped dead in his tracks, in order for him to
perceive
what it was that he really needed to do.

What he did immediately after his collapse was to travel to the seashore to recover. While he was there, Wells picked up a lending library copy of
When a Man’s Single,
a novel by J.M. Barrie, later to write
Peter Pan.

In this book, one character explains to another in passing how it is possible to write saleable sketches out of the commonest elements of everyday experience. A light dawned. Wells set the book down and straight away on the back of an envelope wrote the first draft of an article entitled “On the Art of Staying at the Seashore.”

And Barrie’s advice proved accurate. This facetious little trifle sold immediately to the
Pall Mall Gazette,
a newspaper.

Wells had been aiming his work at the literary magazines and failing. Now he began to write humorous trifles for newspapers and popular magazines. And he found his work instantly in demand. Before the end of 1893, he had sold more than thirty chatty articles.

The newspapers and magazines for which Wells had begun to write were a new publishing phenomenon of the Nineties, a second-order result of the same Age of Technology that had produced Wells himself. It was as simple as this: In order to manufacture and maintain the complex new machinery of the day—such as high-speed presses—it was necessary to educate the poor and ignorant. It was as part of this upgrading process that Wells had received his own education.

Wells says, “The Education Act of 1871 had not only enlarged the reading public very greatly but it had stimulated the middle class by a sense of possible competition from below.”
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A new and broader reading audience had now graduated from boys’ papers and penny dreadfuls—the British equivalent of the dime novel. It was seeking more meaty fare. Suddenly, then, there were new publications everywhere, and new forms of publication including the all-story pulp magazine and the middle-class popular magazine.

Wells hit this new expanded marketplace just at the moment that it first came into being: “New books were being demanded and fresh authors were in request. Below and above alike there was opportunity, more public, more publicity, more publishers and more patronage.”
¹¹⁵

Bertie was the rare writer jumped up out of the narrow twilight area between the working class and the new expanded middle class and able to speak to both. A man like Wells was actively needed by the new publications, who were ready to swallow almost any piece of work that he could hand them. And there is no doubt that if Wells had cared to stick at this point he could have had a fine extended career as a light humorist.

As it was, Wells became freed to make his own life. At the end of 1893, he walked away from a situation he didn’t like one last time. He separated from his wife Isabel and moved in with his former student Amy Catherine Robbins. As Wells himself noted, it was an act that had more than a touch of Percy Shelley eloping with Mary Godwin about it, as though what had once been the behavior of the radical aristocracy had over the course of eighty years come trickling down to the lower classes. Even so, it was still a chancy and disgraceful act, all the more so because Shelley had not had to earn a living, while Wells did.

Wells continued to beaver away industriously. He had all the ready markets available to him that poor Edgar Allan Poe had lacked. In the course of 1894, he sold at least seventy-five articles. He wrote about anything and everything: colds, swearing, his father as a cricket player, his uncle the one-armed con man. And everything that he turned out was snatched right up. In his autobiography, Wells says, “I was doing my best to write as other writers wrote, and it was long before I realized that my exceptional origins and training gave me an almost unavoidable freshness of approach. . . .”
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Some of what he wrote was more seriously intended, in much the same vein as his first essay, “The Rediscovery of the Unique.” These speculative pieces were often based on pet ideas that Wells had dreamed up in some form in the
Science Schools Journal
or tried out before the Debating Society.

In 1893, there was “The Man of the Year Million.” In this essay, published in the
Pall Mall Budget,
there is a disquieting vision of mankind in the far future:

There grows upon the impatient imagination a building, a dome of crystal, across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid, and in this plunge and float strange beings. Are they birds?

They are the descendants of man—at dinner. Watch them as they hop on their hands . . . about the pure white marble floor. Great hands they have, enormous brains, soft, liquid, soulful eyes. Their whole muscular system, their legs, their abdomens, are shrivelled to nothing, a dangling, degraded pendant to their minds.
¹¹⁷

This was the first appearance of the Big Brain theme, which would haunt science fiction for the next fifty years. What an awful and gleeful suggestion for Wells to make: that our children might not be the clean-cut citizens of the Perfected Society at all, but instead might evolve into revolting creatures with no resemblance at all to present humanity, great thoughtful sacs of brain matter hopping about on their hands.

Not at all the sort of material one would guess as having wide popular appeal. But this was no ordinary time. This was the
fin de siècle.

This phrase of the day means no more than “the end of the century,” but it was pronounced, understood and felt as though it meant the end of the world. There was a great weariness to be felt in society. Victoria had been queen of England for more than fifty years . . . it seemed forever. Everything was infinitely old and tired and decadent. This was the period of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, strange twisted neo-Romantics who appeared, blossomed briefly like pale lilies of the night, and died.

The very same decade was also called the Gay Nineties, as though the only reasonable thing to do in view of all that tosh about the end of the world was to sing, dance, make merry and hail the birth of the new. It was an era of radical, forward-looking men, the decade of the rise of George Bernard Shaw and the Fabian Socialists. There was a great receptivity to news of science and to speculation about the future.

Bertie Wells was a man made for this moment. Such was the darkness, the confusion and the fever of the Nineties that it was not always possible to tell at the time what was decadent and what was farseeing. The two seemed almost the same—intertwined, intermingled, impossible to clearly distinguish.

Which was Wells, a decadent or a prophet? He was neither, he was either, he was both. He couldn’t know.

He’d been held down, held back all his life, and he was filled with a towering rage. He was a sick man, a tubercular case living with another tubercular case. A man uncertain even of seeing the dawn of the new century. He might well be another decadent, another strange twisted harbinger of doom.

But at the same time, he was a man newly set free. A man with a head full of the
damndest
notions, ideas that he had been carrying around for years and incubating with no one to hear them. And now people were ready to hear them. He would live forever!

And so you have an article like “The Man of the Year Million,” simultaneously serious and humorous, promising and horrifying, decadent and prophetic. The perfect expression of Bertie Wells—and a mirror for the
fin de siècle.

In 1894, Wells published many articles of a similar sort. Among them was an alternative view of mankind’s fate. In “The Extinction of Man,” instead of seeing Big Brain as man’s future, Wells suggested that we might be overtaken and replaced altogether by crustaceans, cephalopods, ants, or bacilli:

We think, because things have been easy for mankind as a whole for a generation or so, we are going on to perfect comfort and security in the future. We think that we shall always go to work at ten and leave off at four and have dinner at seven forever and ever. . . . Even now, for all we can tell, the coming terror may be crouching for its spring and the fall of humanity be at hand. In the case of every predominant animal the world has seen, I repeat, the hour of its complete ascendance has been the eve of its entire overthrow.
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Also in 1894, there were two essays on alternatives to our familiar carbon-based form of life—“The Living Things That May Be” on silicon-based life, and “Another Basis for Life” on inorganic quasi-living systems. In that year, Wells even dug up his old school masterpiece,
The Chronic Argonauts,
and rewrote it for the fifth time. It was published as a series of seven unsigned articles on the theme of time travel.

In these early essays, from “The Rediscovery of the Unique” in 1891 to the variously titled pieces on time travel in 1894, Wells set down all of the major questions and themes that he would explore in his scientific romances: “Science” both as the limited state of man’s knowledge and as the larger questions posed for man by nature; the vast, promising and threatening new universe of time and space; alternative forms of life; possible successors to man; most important of all, the future prospects of mankind, either extinction by some more ruthless race of beings or an ending as the alien and inhuman Big Brain.

And it was while he was in this acute state of readiness and rehearsal that Wells at last was solicited to write science fiction stories by two different editors. First, Lewis Hind—who later said, “I touched the button only”
¹¹⁹
—commissioned Wells to write short stories with scientific themes for the
Pall Mall Budget.
Wells began with a story entitled “The Stolen Bacillus,” and sold no less than five SF stories in 1894. When the
Budget
soon failed, it was no matter. There were other and better-paying markets ready to buy this kind of work.

Far more important, W.E. Henley, the editor at
The National Observer
who had published Wells’s time travel articles, wrote to him to say that he was starting a new magazine. He proposed to Wells that he rewrite his articles as a serial story for this magazine,
The New Review,
and offered him the tempting sum of 100 pounds to do it.

The effect was something like the effect on Jules Verne when Pierre Hetzel suggested that he take his history of ballooning manuscript and turn it into a balloon adventure story. In a period comparable to the few weeks of fevered writing that it took Jules Verne to produce
Five Weeks in a Balloon,
Wells went off on vacation and in two weeks wrote
The Time Machine
—a story to which all previous SF was but a predicate.

As a serial story,
The Time Machine
attracted all the attention that Henley could have wished. As a book—one of four that Wells published in 1895, including
The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
—
The Time Machine
made a name for Wells. If he had died then and there, instead of continuing to write for another fifty years, Wells would still be remembered for
The Time Machine.
It is an amazingly original story.

It begins with two framing chapters. But even here we are dealing with something strange and new.

The story opens: “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”
¹²⁰
We are in the middle of an intellectual discussion after a dinner party. And already, by beginning the story at all, we have accepted that there is a man who can travel in time.

Very shortly, he is informing the party of the nature of the universe they live in: “ ‘There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.’ ”
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And before the first chapter is done, he has brought out a model time machine. The toy is “a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance.”
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A crucial lever is pressed by one of his guests, the toy becomes indistinct, and then disappears.

The guests are then shown the not-quite-complete Time Machine itself. This is a classic bit of science-beyond-science. The Time Machine is described in terms that are simultaneously vague and concrete. There is a saddle to sit upon and levers to push. It is like the toy, but larger:

Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawed out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.
¹²³

On any level of exact description, this is so vague as to amount to hocus-pocus. Quite exasperating, if you care about specificity and fact. But not important if what you really care about is traveling in time.

Late in life, in 1903, Jules Verne allowed himself to be drawn out on the subject of Wells, and a measure of exasperation did escape from him as he commented on
The First Men in the Moon
(1901), misremembered in the heat of the moment as a story about Mars:

I do not see the possibility of comparison between his work and mine.  . . . I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon ball, discharged from a cannon. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation.
Ça, c’est tres joli,
but show me this metal. Let him produce it.
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