A century after HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, ERIC KORN asks what happened to sci-fi vision?
HOW the aliens must have hated it, being told for so long that they were a political neurosis. Perhaps it was embarrassment about it that has made them so reclusive. Imagine how we will feel, when we land, Bible in hand (Koran, Book of Mormon, Windows ’95 Handbook) on the howling sands of Alpha Centauri 3A, and the Centaurians glance condescendingly at us and remark to their partners “take no notice, dear, it’s a mere fantastical embodiment of our fears of being overrun by the evil empire of the Xerists”.
There’s a tradition of this: HG Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1897) is still classified as the natural sequel to any of a number of pre-First World War works designed to show that the Prussians are coming. Their message was, mainly, that we had better get busy building Dreadnoughts. It was simultaneously (though I don’t quite see how) a salutary warning not to put your trust in weaponry, in “reeking tube and iron shard”. Because even colonists get colonised.
I still shudder agreeably when I read the opening paragraphs of The War of the Worlds, with those “intelligences vast and cool and unsympathetic”, regarding the earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drawing their plans against us. Independence Day, Hollywood’s latest alien blockbuster doesn’t manage anything quite as scary — though I collected a small frisson from the image of a sizeable spaceship hovering over New York City. Similar big motherships appear over other world capitals — an advance on Wells, who assumed that once you had broken through the defences and got a good grip on Sunbury-on-Thames, the planet Earth was pretty much your oyster.
In Independence Day, providence works its mysteries through a computer virus. In Wells’s novel, it was the bacteria that came through for our team — “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth”. With the latest news from Nasa about organic evidence in meteorites, it looks as if the bacteria might just have been getting their own back for their (probable) extinction on Mars.
I don’t suppose an inventory of the contents of the average modern Earthling’s waking mind today would differ too much from the furniture of a Victorian mind going about its business: mainly transport difficulties, office quarrels and private grief, with about the same amount of sexual guilt and longing. But the twilight mind was very different. The gods and ghosts of the Victorian imagination, the angels and devils (Millais, Dore), the pirates (RL Stevenson, Captain Marryat) and knights in armour and warriors in red coats (Tennyson, Henty) have flickered out — to be replaced by daleks and dinosaurs and Martian militiamen. It was HG Wells, as much as anyone, who cleared out and refurnished our imaginations.
But Wells’s fantastical imaginings were of a piece with his meliorist socialism. You see this nowhere more than his novel about the “boomfood” that turns babies into giants, The Food of the Gods (1904), written as people were thinking seriously about nutritution and its affect on the lives of the poor.
Nowadays, denied the rational divine, we settle for the spooky. The TV show, X- Files, is endlessly seductive because it unites two separate paranoias: They (aliens, teleports, succubi, neanderthals, homicidal tagliatelli) are out there: and They (small town police chiefs, the Pentagon, the White House, your own boss) know about it and aren’t telling. There’s a flipside to the terror; benign and wise beings hover overhead, playing Albinoni very slowly, coming for to carry us home. Today, UFO-logists classify alien intruders, as folk-lorists did before them, into two types: Goblins (small, chubby, earthy, big-eyed, spiteful and lecherous) and Elves (tall, graceful, dome-headed, benign, chaste and wet). We are, in other words, drifting back into the pre-Wellsian realm of dragons and paladins.
In every age, the sleep of reason gives birth to monsters. The bogeyman will get you if you don’t watch out. But reason does need its sleep. No matter how vigorously we patrol the boundaries of rationalism — exposing fake telepaths, straightening out crop circles, silencing the jangle of the old Bermuda Triangle — – sooner or later the sentries grow heavy- lidded and yawn. Suddenly, the spoons are bending and everyone is channeling to Ancient Egypt.
Wells offered rationality as the road to Utopia. He enlivened his sermons with monsters. We’ve chosen to take the monsters and pass on the rationalism. Worse, we blame the scientific rationalist in him for the problems that arise from our ignoring him. We do so at our peril. It would be well to remember this, as we turn away from science — mistrusting it like an alcoholic who goes to a quack because he can’t face his GP — and towards aliens. And Mystic Meg, crystal power and the Toronto Blessing.
Otherwise, we might just end up like Wells’s last Martian, which mewled and died on London’s Primrose Hill, just up from the children’s playground.
Eric Korn is an antiquarian bookseller and a major HG Wells collector