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H.G. Wells – Nerd Icon

H.G. Wells – Nerd Icon

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You’ll forgive, I hope, the ramblings of a recently completed English Lit student as he goes a little old school. Hebert George Wells, known by his preferred writing name H.G. Wells is a figure that has immeasurably impacted the world of literature, not least of all in the world of Science Fiction. While I hesitate to call him the Father of Science Fiction (a lofty title as easily ascribed to Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe or Hugo Gernsback), without his engagements with the genre, I can’t imagine our notions of time travel or alien invasion in fiction would be nearly as well defined without his contributions. I ought to warn readers, this is very much an opinion piece, describing my personal reasons for admiring Wells and should not be taken as either objective biography or the opinions of the Arcade as a whole.

Wells began his life in humble surroundings, born in a worn down china shop run by a disinterested father. Joseph Wells was by all accounts more interested in professional cricket than maintaining his shop, which rapidly became a problem when he broke his hip in 1880, forcing young ‘Bertie’ to seek work in a draper’s, a profession which did not agree with him. Later on, despite his love of books and scholarship obtained to study at the Royal College of Science, Wells rapidly became more interested in his extra-curricular activities as a journalist and political activist, causing him to leave university without a degree after failing Geology. I take this as a heartening reminder that the path to the success isn’t always as direct as we hope.

warofthew

What I find most astounding about H.G. Wells is the remarkably compressed period of time under which he wrote his strongest literary works. From the age of 29 to 32, he wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. Wells remained humble about these masterpieces, claiming to have simply updated traditional Gothic tales and referring to his stories as ‘Scientific Romances,’ but the ideas contained in these works should not merely be considered creatively brilliant, but strikingly radical. The ideas of biologist Charles Darwin, despite shaking Creationist notions,would be largely utilised to consolidate Victorian confidence in their supremacy. Later theorists used the evolution theory to construct incredibly complicated hierarchies of humankind with relation to the animal kingdom, which conveniently placed the white British male at the top of both civilisation and biology, justifying his position as imperial ruler of the world.

However, The Time Machine suggests that the dominant intellectual culture is destined to evolve into weak, sickly, simple beings who are unable to physically fend for themselves. The Island of Dr. Moreau furthers this hypothesis, noting that a few surgeries are all that is needed to remove the distinction between a Hyena and a well-spoken human.

The War of the Worlds was inspired due to the extermination of the Tasmanian people by British settlers, as his brother contemplated whether ‘civilised’ humanity would fair much better than the Tasmanians should an invading force of technologically advanced beings suddenly land and begin attacking. Indeed the narrator of the text asks us “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence…Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” The Martian invasion’s largest function is to shock humankind, but more implicitly the dominant imperial centre of England, out of its complacent feelings of superiority. Interestingly while thinking of evolution, the Martians present a horrifying potential future for mankind, having evolved into large octopus-like creatures “They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs.” Evolution has prioritized the intellect so thoroughly that bodily mobility and “sentiment” such as mercy, empathy or pity have been entirely purged from the species (one cannot help but see the inspiration for the Daleks here.)

El-tiempo-en-sus-manos

Isaac Asimov once remarked that science fiction is largely similar to any other novel but with one crucial difference: the hero is not simply an individual but the entire human race. With regards to Wells, I cannot help but see this inverted, as mankind is both the protagonist and the antagonist of his work. His books present dire warnings of the hazards attendant to cultural and intellectual overconfidence, encouraging a sobering collective look inward. I think as phenomena such as GamerGate force us to ponder how much politics should impact the nerd sphere, I find it interesting to reflect how politically engaged one of the figureheads of sci-fi was. Wells made no secret of his strongly progressive, socialist politics, putting his money where his mouth was by joining the League of Nations (during his membership he even visited Vladimir Lenin to encourage friendly relations between the two countries) and running for parliament twice.

His writing is far more in the way of utopian pamphlets than science fiction, but the latter genre was very much connected to the ambitions of the first, fearing the deployment of scientific progress for more mercenary goals. Through his fiction, he predicted the use of tanks, chemical weapons, the air force, and ultimately even the atomic bomb. I leave you with a rather grim anecdote I found in my research. The historian Ernest Barker met a sick, ageing Wells in 1939. Wells had lost the audience that, during the 1920s and early ’30s, made him the most celebrated and influential English intellectual of his time. Europe was plummeting, again, into war – a war he had warned against for two decades. Barker asked Wells how he was: “Poorly, Barker, poorly,” said Wells. “I am composing my epitaph.” And what would that be? asked Barker. “Quite short, just this – God damn you all: I told you so.”

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