Wells’ future darkly twists the utopian socialist vision of Willian Morris’s News from Nowhere:
In the novel, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no marriage or divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.
One of the dark twists reflects what Wells had learned from one of his professors, Ray Lankester:
“Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead to as a rule to Degeneration.” Degeneration was well known in parasites, and Lankester gave several examples. In Sacculina, a genus of barnacles which is a parasite of crabs, the female is little more than “a sac of eggs, and absorbed nourishment from the juices of its host by root-like processes” (+ wood-engraved illustration). He called this degenerative evolutionary process in parasites retrogressive metamorphosis.
When The Time Machine was published in 1895, The Guardian wrote in its review:
The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by HG Wells.
It didn’t occur to me that the subterranean Morlocks were based, in part, on Wells’ own early-life experiences in the working class:
His own family would spend most of their time in a dark basement kitchen when not being occupied in their father’s shop. Later, his own mother would work as a housekeeper in a house with tunnels below, where the staff and servants lived in underground quarters. A medical journal published in 1905 would focus on these living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements. In his early teens, Wells became a draper’s apprentice, having to work in a basement for hours on end.
The 1960 film sheds the socialist-evolution theme of Wells’ novel for a series of vignettes of worse and worse wars, leading humanity to live underground. It’s not clear how the guileless Eloi evolve under those conditions, but they still hypnotically return to the shelters when the air-raid sirens call out.
The Eloi of Wells’ story are childlike, and the 1960 film portrays them as blond, Californian proto-hippies, but Yvette Mimieux, who plays Weena, the one named Eloi, is hardly androgynous.
I started wondering if a modern remake would have reality TV-star Eloi of indeterminate ethnicity, communicating through gestures and phatic expressions.
In the original novel, Wells simply refers to his protagonist as the Time Traveller. The 1960 film has his friends call him George. The name “H. George Wells” can be seen on a brass plaque on the time machine.
This brings us to The Invisible Man, which I also revisited recently, which features a certain Dr. Kemp, whose studies are interrupted by the sound of gunshots:
After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote speculation of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at last over the time dimension, Dr. Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled down the window again, and returned to his writing desk.
Alas, the Yvette Mimieux link fails. (Yvette Mimieux on Getty Images.)
The rule of Degeneration is observable today in large cities of the US.
“Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead to as a rule to Degeneration.”
Sadly, my physical form has degenerated because junk food, refined sugars, and alcohol are terribly affordable in my neighborhood — and the spare time in which I could cook healthier food is frittered away with distractions.
“The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds…”
Three cheers for Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Coming Race! I force myself to read his challenging prose precisely because it is difficult! Not even the considerable pulchritude of Yvette Mimieux could dissuade me from challenging my remaining grey cells with such cerebral hardships!
“…the subterranean Morlocks were based, in part, on Wells’ own early-life experiences in the working class…”
I typically think of Wells as an over-privileged, over-sexed plutocrat who hob-nobbed with over-privileged Fabians who resembled Cecil Rhodes, but apparently Wells was not unacquainted with poverty. I had initially hoped to post some evidence that Wells and Rhodes were acquainted, but I have not found such evidence. Wells “Open Conspiracy” for world government certainly sounds like Rhodes’ plans for an expanded British empire.
The great distinction between man and animal is not in nakedness nor in bipedalism nor in language nor in fire nor in axes or pots or pans or beakers; nay, it is in that, placed in an environment of plenty, the human animal degenerates, whereas man employs his “excess” in ruthless pursuance of the perfection of his line to best commune with the supreme being in holy war.
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