H. G. WELLS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

On 24 January 1902 H. G. Wells delivered a lecture to the Royal Institution, whose text was subsequently published under the title, “The Discovery of the Future.” The lecture was, in effect, a series of afterthoughts to his pioneering work of futurology, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Human Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901), which was by then entering its fifth edition. Wells began the lecture by describing two types of mind, whose outlook on life is sharply contrasted:

It will lead into my subject most conveniently to contrast and separate two divergent types of mind, types which are to be distinguished chiefly by their attitude towards time, and more particularly by the relative importance they attach and the relative amount of thought they give to the future of things.

The first of these two types of mind—and it is, I think, the predominant type, the type of the majority of living people—is that which seems scarcely to think of the future at all, which regards it as a sort of black non-existence upon which the advancing present will presently write events. The second type, which is, I think, a more modern and much less abundant type of mind, thinks constantly, and by preference, of things to come, and of present things mainly in relation to the results that must arise from them. The former type of mind, when one gets it in its purity, is retrospective in habit, and it interprets the things of the present, and gives value to this and denies it to that, entirely with relation to the past. The latter type of mind is constructive in habit; it interprets the things of the present and gives value to this or that, entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen.

While from that former point of view our life is simply to reap the consequences of the past, from this our life is to prepare the future. The former type one might speak of as the legal or submissive type of mind, because the business, the practice, and the training of a lawyer dispose him towards it; he of all men must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself. The latter type of mind I might for contrast call the legislative, creative, organising, or masterful type, because it is perpetually falling away from respect for what the past has given us. It sees the world as one great workshop, and the present as no more than material for the future, for the thing that is yet destined to be. It is in the active mood of thought, while the former is in the passive; it is the mind of youth—it is the mind most manifest among the Western nations; while the former is the mind of age—the mind of the Oriental.

Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. And the creative mind says, We are here, because things have yet to be.13

Wells goes on in his talk, as one might expect, to champion the second kind of thinking—the kind of thinking which is future-orientated. He concedes that this kind of mental orientation is more difficult to support than the other, pointing out that we have certain knowledge of the past, thanks to memory and history, but none of the future. He goes on to suggest, however, that although we can have no insight into the future which resembles memory, we might be able to provide something which could bear analogy with history. He backs up this suggestion with the argument that much of what we know of the past comes not from recorded memories but from inferences drawn from discovered data—he refers, of course, to the revelations of what were in his time emerging sciences: geology, archeology and palaeontology. Given that our knowledge of the past is inferential, he says, can we not hope to infer some knowledge of the future from relevant data?

Wells had already begun, in Anticipations, to practise what he preached in this lecture, and all his subsequent futuristic speculations—including those cast as fiction—were constrained by his futurological ambitions. He devoted himself ever more intently to the business of attempting to predict the actual course of events which would emerge from the confusion of possibility.

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Anticipations and “The Discovery of the Future” marked a crucial change of direction in the character of Wells’s thought and work. The lecture was delivered shortly after the publication of the last of his classic scientific romances, The First Men in the Moon—which had been preceded by The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and three collections of short stories, all issued between 1895 and 1901. “The Discovery of the Future” can be seen in retrospect as the crucial punctuation mark which put a stop to that phase of his career, which had celebrated a rather different “discovery of the future.”

A century has now passed since the first book publication of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. A similar span of time separated the young Wells (who was then in his late twenties) from the era in which the Comte du Buffon and Georges Cuvier had first proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the history of the Earth had to be reckoned in hundreds of millions of years rather than in mere thousands, and that the human species was a very recent arrival on the prehistoric scene. Many people realized that those discoveries about the past ought to make us think differently about the future but Wells was one of the first writers to begin the work of exploring the possible futures which could now be glimpsed in the mind’s eye. In order to pursue this quest he came up with the ingenious idea of equipping the hero of his story with a machine to transport him through time.

The speculations about man’s future which formed the basis of The Time Machine were first set out in 1888 in a series of essays called “The Chronic Argonauts” in the students’ magazine of the Royal College of Science, The Science Schools Journal, which Wells had founded. There was also a intermediate version serialized as “The Time Traveller’s Story” in The National Observer in 1894 before a version closer to the book text appeared as a serial in The New Review between January and May 1895. The book itself followed immediately thereafter.

Between the first and second published versions of The Time Machine Wells had been pursuing his literary ambitions by publishing brief essays on scientific matters in various periodicals, most importantly The Pall Mall Gazette and The Saturday Review. The popular magazines of the day were engaged in fierce competition for market space and were avid to try out any material that might catch the public fancy; Wells cultivated both novelty and extravagance in a series of speculative flights of fancy which extrapolated items of scientific possibility or mildly controversial propositions to some gaudy extreme.

Among Wells’ essays of this period were “The Dream Bureau” (PMG 25 Oct. 1893), “The Man of the Year Million” (PMG 6 Nov. 1893), “Angels, Plain and Coloured” (PMG 6 Dec. 1893); later endeavors in the same vein included “The Limits of Individual Plasticity” (SR 19 Jan. 1895) and “Intelligence on Mars” (SR 4 Apr. 1896). Following the spectacular success of The Time Machine Wells began systematically to use the ideas explored in such essays as the bases for plots. Although he never wrote a story about dream-addicts ordering a night’s entertainment from a catalogue, or the man of the year million lying helplessly in his nutrient tank, the essay on angels provided him with the central motif of The Wonderful Visit (1895), in which an angel from the Land of Dreams is shot down by a sporting vicar. The essay on “plasticity” was the basis for The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), in which the eponymous surgeon remakes animals in the image of man and tries (unsuccessfully, in the end) to provide them with the essentials of moral law and the. The essay about intelligent life on Mars was the seed of The War of the Worlds (1898), in which the inhabitants of a resource-depleted Mars decide that they will claim the treasures of the earth.

Within three years Wells had developed a method of procedure that laid the foundations of a whole new genre of fiction. The reviewers of the day labelled it “scientific romance”—a label which Wells initially adopted, then discarded, but finally accepted when Gollancz issued an omnibus edition of his most notable speculative novels as The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells in 1933. By that time, however, a new label had been imported from America, and the sheer weight of the material which flooded the British market after World War II ensured that the American label—”science fiction”—would eventually become definitive.

There had, of course, been many tales of the future published before 1895. Many future Utopias had appeared, and the fledgling genre of future war stories had enjoyed a considerable vogue in Britain since George Chesney’s remarkable essay in alarmism, The Battle of Dorking, had appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1871. What Wells initially did, however, was markedly different from what anyone had done before. He set up the whole spectrum of rapidly-advancing scientific discovery as a generator of possibilities, each one of which might contain the germ of a story. The Utopian writers were interested in designing the ideal society and the writers of future war stories were interested in describing the next war, but Wells produced a way of working which tacitly accepted that the future was an infinite array of competing and conflicting possibilities. From this cloud of potential the course of history would be precipitated by the complex interaction of circumstance, chance and choice.

Wells never devoted himself exclusively to this method of working. He had other ambitions, and he knew that he would not be taken seriously by literary critics unless he wrote “real” novels like Love and Mr Lewisham (1900). For a brief period, though, he made spectacular progress within the genre he had pioneered. As well as the novels mentioned above he produced three more full-length scientific romances and a host of shorter works. The Invisible Man (1897) is a fine thriller which has frequently been adapted for the stage, the cinema, and TV, cleverly exploiting the special effects of all three media. When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) is a story of future revolution precipitated by the revival of a man placed in suspended animation in our own day. The First Men in the Moon (1901) is a classic tale of two unlikely friends who employ an anti-gravity device to transport a space-capsule to the moon. The best of his early short stories were collected in three volumes: The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895), The Plattner Story and Others (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899), the last consisting entirely of scientific romances.

After 1895 Wells never ventured quite as far into the future as he had in The Time Machine. The Time Traveller promises at the end of the book that he will come back and tell the people who have listened to his story about his further adventures, but Wells never used his fictitious machine again. He seems, in fact, to have begun to move almost immediately towards the conclusion that he reached and clarified in “The Discovery of the Future”: that he had found a better method of exploring the future—one which could not see nearly as far, but which had the compensating advantage of greater accuracy. It was this new method which he set out, and tried to justify, in his lecture.

* * * *

Although Wells continued to write futuristic fiction after composing his lecture for the Royal Institution, it was never quite the same in its nature. The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, published in 1904, begins as a robust scientific romance, but is soon diverted into another channel, and concludes with the creation of a race of human giants who are a crystallization of Wells’s notion of the future-orientated mind: the exponents of a new wisdom and a new spiritual strength. Virtually all Wells’s subsequent speculative fiction was to focus in like fashion on the contrasts between the men of his own world and hypothetical New Men who would—or, at least, should—ultimately replace them and become the custodians of progress.

Wells was to go on to write several more Utopian novels, including A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), and the quasi-documentary, The Shape of Things to Come (1933), which formed the basis of the famous film Things to Come (1935). He also began writing future war stories, anticipating the advent of the tank in “The Land Ironclads” (1903), revising his early scepticism about the usefulness of aircraft in war in The War in the Air (1908), and designing a peculiar kind of atom bomb in The World Set Free (1914). (He also prepared a revised version of When the Sleeper Wakes in 1910 called The Sleeper Awakes to take aboard his second thoughts about aerial warfare.)

As a predictor of things to come Wells scored more successes than any of his contemporaries, and his record remains second to none, but the simple fact is that no predictor is or ever will be capable of calculating the actual course of future events. The confluence of circumstance, chance and choice is far too complicated, and contains far too many unknowns, to be reduced to mere calculation. By injecting futurological concentration and Utopian scheming into his futuristic fiction Wells hoped to make it more serious, but all he succeeded in doing was filling it with failed guesses—some of which would, in time, come to seem silly.

Wells was to coin many names for the hypothetical “new men” who would conclusively set aside the follies of he present. They were New Republicans, Samurai, or Men Like Gods; they were members of a Open Conspiracy or servants of an Air Dictatorship. In his more modest representations they are enlightened contemporaries, intellectuals who have heeded the Wellsian message; in his more fantastic parables they are men miraculously transformed, perhaps by the gases of a marvellous comet or cosmic rays beamed at Earth by Martians—but either way, the future is theirs. His most elaborate futuristic fantasy of the period between the two world wars, The Shape of Things to Come ends with the following statement:

By means of education and social discipline the normal human individual today acquires characteristics without which his continued existence would be impossible. In the future, as the obscurer processes of selection are accelerated and directed by eugenic effort, these acquired characteristics will be incorporated with his inherent nature, and his educational energy will be released for further adaptations. He will become generation by generation a new species, differing more widely from that weedy, tragic, pathetic, cruel, fantastic, absurd and sometimes sheerly horrible being who christened himself in a mood of oafish arrogance Homo sapiens.14

Once Wells was well into this second phase of his career as a futurist he developed a certain distaste for the products of his earlier phase. He began to make unkind comments about his own early scientific romances, and his introduction to an omnibus issued under the title Scientific Romances in 1933 is remarkably condescending toward them, suggesting that they were exercises in youthful exuberance, not to be taken too seriously. The majority of readers have never agreed, and those early works are still read very frequently, while hardly anyone would bother to look at A Modern Utopia or Men Like Gods, let alone The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind or The Open Conspiracy.

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The difference between Wells’s two discoveries of the future can be seen in an observation made by the French writer Anatole France, in his excellent philosophical novel The White Stone (1905). This novel, like Wells’s lecture, is basically a discussion of whether, how and to what extent we can anticipate the future, and its conclusions are much more pessimistic than Wells’s.

When men try to conjure up visions of the future, France suggests, they can usually do no more than project their own hopes or fears into its hypothetical space, building from them images of Utopia or nightmare which, though they pretend to be futuristic, are all too firmly anchored in the present. Thus, France’s own vision of a Marxian Communist state of the future is ironically and modestly juxtaposed with a story in which Roman intellectuals in exile, who encounter St. Paul on his travels, see no future in this Christian craziness, but look forward instead to a regeneration of the glory of the empire under its cultured and charismatic new emperor: Nero. In coming to this pessimistic conclusion, however, France notes one remarkable exception to his rule about futuristic visions: the early H. G. Wells, who is nominated by France as the only man ever to have journeyed imaginatively into the future without deciding in advance what he would find. Unfortunately, by the time France published this compliment it had ceased to be true. By 1905 Wells had rediscovered the future, and he was bent on revealing it rather than exploring it.

Wells’s second discovery was, of course, an unwitting and unfortunate reversion to an earlier way of thinking. Men have always been interested in the future, and throughout history there have been individuals who were prepared to organize their actions entirely in respect of possible future rewards. All the literate societies which have passed on their ideas to us had their images of the future: images of the temporal future, which were Utopian in kind, and images of the spiritual future, which were eschatological in kind. Different societies in different eras varied quite markedly in the degree of their optimism or pessimism in respect of these different images, but pessimism in respect of the first has always been compensated by an increase of faith in the second. Where belief in worldly progress waned, faith in the possibility of a future life beyond this one waxed. Almost throughout the recorded history of the Western world, men have believed that the future could be known, and their own fate determined by inference from the relevant data.

Wells was born at an important time in the history of ideas. The traditional faith which provided the data from which knowledge of the future could supposedly be inferred was in a state of terminal decay. The validity of the account of the nature of the world contained in the Bible had been devastated by discoveries in those sciences which Wells cited as the sources of our true knowledge of the past. Geology, archeology, and palaeontology pointed to an account of the world very different from the one contained in the Book of Genesis, and Charles Darwin had published an account of the origin and nature of man which decisively challenged traditional ideas of the relationship between men and God. It is significant that the force of these new ideas came to Wells himself with the shattering impact of a sudden enlightenment, when he attended lectures by Thomas Henry Huxley at what was then the London School of Normal Science in he late 1880s. This severance of the relationship between man and God was of fundamental importance with respect to the ideas about the future possessed by ordinary men and women. If religious faith had been mistaken in its account of human creation and human nature, then it might also be wrong in its account of human destiny. The future, which had been known in terms of Heaven and Hell and the return of Christ to Earth to institute his Millennarian reign, was now unknown again. The ancient discovery was abolished, and in its place there was a void.

The inevitable result of this devastation of the eschatological image of the future was a renewal of interest in the temporal image of the future. There grew up in Europe several kinds of futuristic fiction, which claimed attention precisely because of this new uncertainty. Movements calling for various kinds of political reform began to produce images of the future reflecting their ambitions and their anxieties. Their ambitions were reflected primarily in Utopian fantasies of society improved by technological innovations and democratic reorganization. Their anxieties were reflected in fantasies of future war and natural catastrophes. By the 1890s, when Wells began to write prolifically, these subspecies of speculative fiction were merging into the new genre of scientific romance, which was for a while taken up and promoted by the editors of the new middlebrow periodicals that flourished in the period. The origins of the genre in this particular kind of crisis is evident in the fact that many of the early contributors to the genre were the sons of clergymen who were converted to freethought: examples include George Griffith, M. P. Shiel, William Hope Hodgson, J. D. Beresford, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, and Grant Allen.

The future that these writers discovered was a future that had not the protective armor of destiny. It was a future that could not be contained within any particular vision, but which could only be exemplified by the sum of them all: it was a future in which there were many possible worlds, desirable and undesirable, probably much altered and possibly quite bizarre. The significance of Wells as a trend-setter and major inspiration to other scientific romancers lies in the spectacular open-mindedness of his early fiction. He used the future not simply as an arena into which he could extrapolate his prejudices, but as a space in which he could carry out bold thought-experiments, testing hypotheses by extravagant display. No one else was ever as good at seizing upon tiny windows of possibility opened by scientific theory or technological expertise and projecting through them powerful searchlights to explore their possible implications, unhindered by the choking constrictions of belief. Wells became the great pioneer of hypothetical fiction, which began the vital work of making clear what a vast range of alternative possibilities the future might hold. He and those who joined him in the writing of scientific romance were the men who realized how extraordinary the future might be; how dramatically the life of men might be transfigured, in many possible ways, by new discoveries in science or by interaction with strange things that might already exist—the product of their own processes of evolution—in other parts of the universe.

The change that overtook Wells in 1902, however, reflected a change that could be seen in the genre as a whole. Anxiety about the future took a much firmer hold in Britain than hope for the future. This is not to say that scientific romance became entirely pessimistic, and certainly not to suggest that futurological speculation ceased to be constructive, but where optimism survived it was a defensive kind of optimism, fully aware of a series of threats which loomed over contemporary men and threatened to overwhelm them before they could discover any temporal salvation to replace the abandoned Christian paradise. Certainly, the two major writers of scientific romance who came to prominence after 1902 but before 1914—Hodgson and Beresford—were conspicuously more pessimistic in their fiction than Griffith, Wells, or Shiel. Even Shiel, whose major works were published after the turn of the century, exhibited a rather peculiar species of defiant optimism which exhorted passionate faith in progress no matter what horrors the future might bring; the moral of his most famous work, The Purple Cloud (1901), is that one must believe in the positive thrust of progress even if civilization is obliterated and almost the entire population of the world annihilated. The best of the scientific romances which Wells wrote after 1902, The War in the Air, is a novel which parades an anxiety about the destruction of civilization in uncompromising form, and in other similar fictions—including The World Set Free and The Shape of Things to Come—Wells readily accepts such appalling destruction as part of the price of progress.

The force of this anxiety is easy enough to detect in stories of natural catastrophe and future war. The smallness and insignificance of the world of man had been made clear by sciences which had revealed the true size of the universe and the true antiquity of the earth. Now that the God of the Old Testament was no longer credited with responsibility for visiting floods and plagues upon His people, He could no longer be credited with responsibility for protecting them either. The march of science was seen to be giving men command of ever greater forces, but there were many reasons for supposing that men would rather use those forces to destroy than to create.

The Great War, when it came in 1914, reinforced these anxieties very powerfully. It obliterated one species of optimism that had flourished beforehand: the idea that if men were to fight a new and horribly destructive war, then it would be the final war—the war that would end war. This was the kind of slogan under which the Great War was marketed to those who were recruited in hundreds of thousands to fight in it and die in it, but it quickly came to be seen as a sick joke. The lesson of the Great War, as far as the kind of British mind that was orientated to the future rather than the past was concerned, was that civilization was very fragile, and that contemporary men were living on the lip of an abyss, into which their whole world might easily be plunged by the recklessness of fools. Those future-orientated men who took as their mission the mapping of an historical course by which men might be navigated to a safer world knew well enough how hazardous that course might be, and how desperate their task had become—but they found it hard to find an audience. Scientific romance waned in popularity after the war, and it seemed that many people had taken a different lesson from the horrors of the war—the lesson that the kind of thinking which brooded too much on the future was too difficult and uncomfortable to be borne.

* * * *

Even before the war H. G. Wells had been prepared to imagine himself a sighted man in a country of the blind, unable to convince his contemporaries of the narrowness of their sensations. Afterwards, he found his efforts to awaken others from their willful lack of foresight so difficult that the characterized the new era as the Age of Frustration (a title which he applies to it in The Shape of Things to Come and explores more fully in a most peculiar book called The Anatomy of Frustration). Other writers of scientific romance echoed this notion, and Wellsian Frustration is acutely obvious in the writings of men who began to produce scientific romances in the period between the wars, including Neil Bell, S. Fowler Wright, John Gloag, and Olaf Stapledon.

The literary response to this Age of Frustration was mixed, but predominant among its moods were a fierce, cynical irony and an angry pessimism. The future war stories published between the wars present a whole series of images of mankind bombed back to the stone age, which develop a terrible fascination as they revel in the details of mass destruction.

At one extreme the scientific romance of the period between the wars was fatalistic almost to the point of nihilism. In the words of Neil Bell:

And when he was nineteen the War of 1914-18 came, and he went through that long infamy, and came out with no shred or tatter of his former illusions to cover his nakedness.

“Everything failed the common man in that testing,” he said. “The church of God, that should have held itself aloof and denounced the rottenness of it all, failed to make that gesture, and setting itself rather to fan the flames, sealed its own fate in the hearts of the men who fought. We saw incompetence that slaughtered thousands shielded by the privilege of birth or wealth or political pull; we saw lying, treachery and greed enthroned and triumphant; we saw lust and cruelty shrieking from safe places the hatred that was unknown to the men who stumbled blindly in the bloody quagmires of mud and pain and hopelessness…

“And so we emerged from that struggle believing in nothing, hardly in ourselves.”15

And in the words of S. Fowler Wright:

We are looking at a civilisation without control, and without the freedom that control gives. We are a nation of slaves, and slaves to a tyrant that we cannot kill, being beyond our reach. Our new rulers are the aggregate folly and the aggregate weakness of mankind. Comfort and cowardice are the new gods.16

Where writers sought for hope—as they all did, in their various ways—they sometimes found it in the idea of a cyclical history, whereby civilization would destroy itself utterly over and over again only to be rebuilt anew, much as every dark night is followed by a new dawn. If this cycle were to be broken, though, the writers of scientific romance could imagine that break only in terms of some radical transformation of human nature—the replacement of Homo sapiens by a new and finer species. This image recurs in the work of all the major and several of the minor writers of the period, most obviously in the work of Stapledon, who chronicled the history of a whole series of human species in Last and First Men. The most misanthropic writers of the period could hardly wait for their contemporaries to be hustled off the stage of history and replaced, and the most extreme works of this kind reached a fine pitch of hysteria. The following is from This Was Ivor Trent by Claude Houghton:

And then I turned and saw—You! Your figure was shrouded, but your face was fully revealed. It was the countenance of a new order of Being. I knew that a man from the future stood before me.

Terror overwhelmed me—then. But I do not fear you—now.

I stretch out my arms and invoke you:

Come!

I do not know whether you stand on the threshold, or whether unnumbered ages separate us from you. I only know that you must be: that you are the spiritual consciousness made flesh: that you are the risen man and that we are the dead men. Yet, in us, is the possibility of you.

We are the Old—the dying—Conscious-ness. You are the New—the living—Consciousness. We have violated earth. You will redeem it. We descend the darkening valley of knowledge. You stand on the uplands of wisdom. We are an end. You are a beginning.

If you are a dream, all else is a nightmare. But I have seen God’s signature across your forehead.

Come!

More and more fiercely we deny our need of you. We say you are a fantasy, a lie, an illusion. We madden ourselves with sensation; drug ourselves with work, pleasure, speed; herd in the vast sepulchres of our cities; blind our eyes; deaden our ears; cling to our creed of comfort (Comfort! the last of the creeds!); sink day by day in deeper and deeper servitude to our inventions—hoping to numb the knowledge of our emptiness; striving to ease the ache of separation; trying to evade your challenge; seeking to deny our destiny.

Come!

The martyred earth waits for you. Daily, our darkness deepens. Secretly, all are afraid. None knows what to do. To underpin, to patch up, to whitewash sepulchres—these are the substitutes for action. To shout, to boast, to nickname bankruptcy. Prosperity—this is the substitute for leadership. We have glorified ourselves, magnified ourselves, made gods of ourselves. We have served Hate, Greed, Lust. and now darkness deepens around us. And we are afraid.

Come!

Lacking you, there is no solution to any one of our problems. Possessing you, no problems exist. If it be madness to believe in you, the sanity which denies you is a greater madness.

But we who have lived on substitutes; we who have plumbed the abyss of ourselves; we who have glimpsed the magnitude of man’s misery—we do not deny you.

From the midnight of madness we stretch out our arms to you.

Come!17

As the thirties progressed it became increasingly obvious to the future-orientated mind that the new war was imminent, and that some kind of radical change in human affairs was easily imaginable. A kind of summary of the ambitions and achievements of scientific romance was provided by Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker (1937), in which a man walking alone on a hillside after quarrelling with his wife attempts through a series of visions to place his predicament in its true context, bracketing it within the real dimensions of space, time, and metaphysics, and returning finally to the lonely hillside, where he must decide how he, as an individual, is to orientate himself in respect of a terribly threatening future:

It seemed that in the coming storm all the dearest things must be destroyed. All private happiness, all loving, all creative work in art, science and philosophy, all intellectual scrutiny and speculative imagination, and all creative social building; all, indeed, that should normally live for, seemed folly and mockery and mere self-indulgence in the presence of public calamity. But if we failed to preserve them, when would they live again?

How to face such an age? How to muster courage, being capable only of homely virtues? How to do this, yet preserve the mind’s integrity, never to let the struggle destroy in one’s own heart what one tried to serve in the world, the spirit’s integrity?

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy.18

* * * *

World War II, when it actually arrived, proved a little less terrible than the writers of scientific romance had feared. Poison gas was not used, and the tactics of Blitzkrieg failed to destroy civilization. In the manner of its ending, though, the war disqualified the optimism which might otherwise have been fostered by its failure to obliterate civilization. The advent of the atom bomb seemed to confirm all the long-standing fears about man’s capacity for world destruction, and revelations of the crimes committed in Germany’s concentration camps and death-camps did nothing to assuage fears about the vulnerability of Homo sapiens to the corruptions of brutality.

The inevitable reaction to the lesson of World War II was a brief intensification of cynicism and pessimism—a combination best exemplified by what might be considered the last of the great scientific romances, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Wells, nearing the end of his life, did not need to wait for Hiroshima to come to his own conclusions about the implications of the new war. In 1945 he published his final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, which he introduced with the following paragraph:

This little book brings to a conclusive end the series of essays, memoranda, pamphlets, through which the writer has experimented, challenged discussion, and assembled material bearing upon the fundamental nature of life and time. So far as fundamentals go, he has nothing more and never will have anything more to say.19

He went on to make the following deliberately casual claims:

Our universe is not merely bankrupt; there remains no dividend at all; it has not simply liquidated; it is going clean out of existence, leaving not a wrack behind. The attempt to trace a pattern of any sort is absolutely futile.

This is acceptable to the philosophical mind when it is at its most philosophical, but for those who lack that steadying mental backbone, the vistas such ideas open are so uncongenial and so alarming, that they can do nothing but hate, repudiate, scoff at and persecute those who express them, and betake themselves to the comfort and control of such refuges of faith and reassurance as the subservient fear-haunted mind has contrived for itself and others throughout the ages.

Our doomed formicary is helpless as the implacable Antagonist kicks or tramples our world to pieces. Endure it or evade it; the end will be the same, but the evasion systems involve unhelpfulness at the least and in most cases blind obedience to egotistical leaders, fanatical persecutions, panics, hysterical violence and cruelty.

After all the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel or mean or cowardly. Such things are also in his own make-up in a large measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his strength. He would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack. But this is a matter of individual predilection for everyone to decide for himself.

A series of events has forced upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out. The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other better animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in more and more swiftly upon mankind.

That new animal may be an entirely alien strain, or it may arise as a new modification of the hominidae, and even as a direct continuation of the human phylum, but it will certainly not be human. There is no way out for Man but steeply up or steeply down. Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.20

In this fashion, the future discovered by Wells and his contemporaries reached virtual closure, recapitulating by analogy the journey made by the Time Traveller in The Time Machine—who witnessed the death of the human species, and of the earth itself, at the end of an historical sequence which the younger Wells had regarded only as a flight of serious fancy.

* * * *

Wells’s earlier discovery of the future did not, however, go to waste. He may have forsaken it in favor of another, far narrower, discovery and he may have inspired the majority of his fellow Britons to do likewise, but the method which he employed for eight or nine years to generate scientific romances on a wholesale basis was taken up by others. Although the British tradition of scientific romance owed more to the twentieth century Wells than to his nineteenth century forbear, American science fiction took both its inspiration and its method from the work which Wells did between 1893 and 1901.

The United States of America had joined the Great War late, and turned out to be its only winner. America, unlike so many European nations, was not threatened by invasion. Although its people suffered some shortages and deprivations, these were nothing like the sufferings of Europe in their scale or their intensity. To cap it all, America inherited the economic hegemony of the world as a result of the destruction of Europe as a financial and industrial hub of world affairs. While Europe struggled to rebuild in the 1920s America enjoyed a spectacular boom, and although Americans had then to agonize along with everyone else when the great Depression of the 1930s followed the Wall Street Crash, there remained an essential optimism in America which contrasted starkly with the urgency of the Age of Frustration which had Britain in its calamitous grip.

By virtue of these different circumstances, the American writers of science fiction discovered a future very different from that discovered by British scientific romance. Most importantly, American science fiction retained its openness, its clear consciousness of a huge range of future alternatives. The vast vistas of space and time which had so excited and inspired the young H. G. Wells came, in later years, to overawe and frighten writers of British scientific romance—to make them aware of the smallness of man and the vanity of human ambition. Even in the future envisaged for humankind in Last and First Men, which extends over thousands of millions of years, men do not break out of the cage of interstellar space surrounding the solar system. In American science fiction, by contrast, that bubble was soon and effortlessly pricked, so that the entire galaxy quickly became a playground for pioneers and adventurers.

In American science fiction the world might be threatened by all manner of powerful new weapons, wielded by men or by vicious alien beings, but civilization never trembled on the brink of a bottomless abyss, because there was an indomitable faith in science fiction that human ingenuity could and must prevail. Science fiction writers produced their anxious stories, and even some stories of future worlds from which humans had disappeared, but their tales of terrible hazards and elegiac fantasies of the end of the human story had neither the cynicism nor the urgency of parallel images in British scientific romance. In science fiction, such stories were naive in a good as well as a bad sense of the word. They were usually ill-designed, clumsy, and sketchy in literary terms, but they were also wide-eyed, celebrating the wonder of discovery and extrapolation in a way that British scientific romance very rarely did. Science fiction in the twenties and thirties was mostly facile, but for all its precision, scrupulousness and literary sophistication, British scientific romance had lost something important when it lost its own facility.

The consequence of all this was that in the years immediately following Wells’s death, the future was effectively discovered all over again in Britain. The dissolution of British scientific romance into American science fiction was eventually to bring about a fruitful cross-fertilization. All speculative fiction is inherently both serious and playful, but between the wars American science fiction had almost surrendered all claim to seriousness while British scientific romance was crucially inhibited by doubts about the propriety of playfulness. After 1947 speculative fiction in Britain and America began to recover a balance between seriousness and playfulness which permitted them to enter into a synergistic relationship, and this has been greatly to the benefit not only to the literature of speculation but to the flexibility and enterprise of that kind of mindfulness which is orientated towards the future and its opportunities rather than towards the past and its prohibitions.

The achievement of this balance by the best of modern speculative fiction should allow us to appreciate the element of folly in Wells’s conversion to the project of discovering an actual and inevitable future instead of a future pregnant with many and varied possibilities. We must remember, though, that such a project is not as entirely ridiculous as fiercer critics than I have made it out to be.

The most scathing of all demolitions of the futurological project actually appeared before Wells delivered his lecture on the discovery of the future: it is to be found in the opening chapter of G. K. Chesterton’s futuristic fantasy The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), which suggests that history is engaged in a never-ending game of “Cheat the Prophet,” perversely determined to defy our anticipations with arbitrary shifts. This is untrue. The whole basis of rational thought—the power which makes us human—is our ability to anticipate the probable outcomes of different actions, and thus to choose between them.

What Wells says about the kind of mindfulness which is orientated toward the future is well worth attending to, and he is quite right to suggest that if we insist on being mindful of the future only in a narrow and personal sense then we are guilty of a great cowardice and a great irresponsibility. The fact that we cannot discover by inference a future history which is already mapped out for us does not mean that we should be in any way less mindful of the future, nor does it mean that we have a license to play carelessly with whatever fantastic future scenarios we can make plausible.

* * * *

It is good that many others followed where H. G. Wells led—and it is good that they followed up on both his discoveries of the future, eventually bringing them back together again, reuniting them in the modern genre of post-World War II science fiction. This genre—whose foundations Wells laid twice over—has blossomed into a vast industry, whose imagery has become an intrinsic element of modern popular culture. Dozens of invisible men have followed where the luckles Griffin led; hundreds of ambitious scientists have set out as Dr. Moreau did to remake and remould the flesh which is our natural heritage; thousands of alien invaders have fallen upon the earth like Wells’s Martians from the great wilderness of space; tens of thousands of astronauts have set forth like Bedford and Cavor into that same wilderness in search of alien landscapes and alien societies.

H. G. Wells was one of the first men fully to appreciate that if we are careful enough in our reasoning, and bold enough in our vision, we may be able to foresee at least some of the possibilities and threats which lie in wait for us as technology advances and the world changes. Although the actual shape of things to come is yet to be determined by the combined effects of our ambitions, our actions and our discoveries, and cannot possibly be determined as would-be prophets hope to determine it, the investigation of its myriad its possibilities remains an intellectually worthwhile activity. It also remains an exciting activity, which carries with it a very special thrill. That is why Wells’s scientific romances are entitled to be considered highly significant texts—perhaps more significant than anything else he wrote. By their example, they helped to promote a new way of looking at the world, and a new way of thinking about the world.

The invention of a time machine was a bold stroke of the literary imagination. Wells knew perfectly well, of course, that the machine was purely and simply a literary device, incapable of realization, just as he knew perfectly well that an invisible man would be blind (because light which passed straight through him would be unable to excite the retinas of his eyes). He also knew, however, that the real “time machine” was the human imagination itself, and that if one had to invoke the image of a machine in order to make the products of the imagination seem more solidly dependable than “mere dreams,” such an invocation was entirely justified.

The possible futures mapped out by the time machine of the imagination require constant revision and updating to take in our real discoveries, but it is vitally important in a world like ours that we never lose sight of them. It is far more useful to know what might happen than what must happen, because knowing all the things which might happen offers us a chance to choose which of those things we want to happen, and which ones we desperately want to avoid. It is, in fact, more important to know about the things which we definitely do not want to happen, but which might if we cannot take steps avoid them, than it is to know about the things which we would quite like to happen. We must first of all avoid destroying ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be destroyed; only when we have done that can we think sensibly about making the world better. This is why so many of the futures glimpsed through the time machine of the imagination are horrible and frightening; their purpose is to frighten us into taking care that we will not let such futures sneak up on us while we are not paying attention.

In the pages of modern science fiction stories, the time machine of the imagination is now operated simultaneously by thousands of writers working in dozens of different languages. It has to be, because as time goes by the pace of change speeds up, and many more possibilities come into view: many more dangers and many more threats, but also many more opportunities. We already know, a mere hundred years after Wells wrote his classic essay, that the future his time traveller saw is a mere phantom which cannot come true. We now know the secrets of the genetic code, and we have every reason to suppose that we will become masters of our own future evolution, and of the evolution of all life on earth.

The great adventure in which our children, and our children’s children, will take part, is greater than anything H. G. Wells could imagine; but because he showed us the way to do it, we can imagine it, and we should certainly try as hard as we can to foresee all of its possibilities, good and bad. The future is yet to be made as well as discovered, by ourselves, our children and our children’s children. Whatever power of choice we can exercise will depend on the extent and on the cleverness of our mindfulness. For this reason, we must do everything that actually is within our power to do what Wells asked of us, and discover what we can of the futures which are presently vying to be made by the collaborative decisions of contemporary men and women.

13 Wells, H. G. The Discovery of the Future. London: Unwin, 1902, p. 1-3.

14 Wells, H. G. The Shape of Things to Come. London: Hutchinson, 1933, p. 428.

15 Bell, Neil. The Seventh Bowl. 2nd ed. London, Collins, 1934, p. 67-68. (The first edition was issued under the pseudonym “Miles”.)

16 Wright, S. Fowler. Power. London: Jarrolds, 1933, p. 25.

17 Houghton, Claude. This Was Ivor Trent. London: Heinemann, 1935, p.321-323.

18 Stapledon, Olaf. Star Maker. London: Methuen, 1937, p. 333.

19 Wells, H. G. Mind at the End of Its Tether. London: Heinemann, 1945, p. v.

20 Ibid., p. 17-19.