H. G. Wells Read online

  We are given to understand early on how Bedford's crude money-driven instrumentalism makes him prone, like capitalism itself, to treat people as things. When first he meets Cavor, he bullies him and talks to him with the sole intention of turning him into a character in the play we know is only intended to make a fortune. For Bedford, people are instantly subordinate to his profit motive. When the trip to the moon is mooted, he simply does not see the point, until he conceives of it as a commercial opportunity.

  Concomitant with the single-mindedness of the capitalist-venal comes his philistinism and his aggression. For Wells, this kind of capitalism is not only a social, but a psychic disease. When Bedford sees Cavor's Works of Shakespeare, he allows that the playwright ‘knew a little’; for himself, he has forgotten to bring any reading materials, so, rather than Shakespeare, he settles into the magazines andTit-Bits and Lloyds' News (these were not dissimilar to the Cosmopolitan magazine in which First Men was serialized: Wells was not averse to biting hands that feed).

  The constraint of money is stressed in one of the most cheerfully unsubtle pieces of symbolism in the book. Shackled by the Selenites, it takes Bedford some time to realize that he is wearing chains of gold. Bedford has nothing to lose but his chains, but what chains they are.

  What convinces Bedford to support the moonshot is his recollection of ‘the old Spanish monopoly in American gold’. Almost at the metal's first mention, then, it renders his petty capitalist dreams grandiose and imperial. This is spelt out. ‘This is tremendous!’ he shouts. ‘This is Imperial!’ Later, not only is Bedford literally weighed down and hobbled by gold, but it is gold ‘ttwisted around [his] fist’ which takes the book's first Selenite life, in a shocking act, and starts Bedford's murderous imperialist rampage.

  By 1901, when The First Men in the Moon appeared, the realities of imperial conquest were more and more widely known. In 1899 there had been bloody wars in Rhodesia; in 1900–1901 a savage guerrilla war was continuing between the US and Filipino nationalists; the Boer War had commenced in 1899, with the interventions of, among others, Cecil Rhodes; most famously, perhaps, Belgium's bestial depredations in the Congo were the cause of increasing concern. This awareness is reflected in the appearance of more and more fictions of colonial anxiety.

  Perhaps the ne plus ultra of the genre, Conrad's Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899, and a plethora of other works was published in the decade or so either side of the turn of the twentieth century that, to more or less conscious extents, articulated imperialism as a neurosis, a guilt of the times, or, like Kipling's ‘Gunga Din’ (1890), protested too much and overcompensated with their loyal punka-wallahs and native scouts. The literature of the fantastic often expressed this anxiety in particularly lurid form, ranging from the (rare) rugged anti-imperialism of George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution (1892), through M. P. Shiels's Sinophobic The Yellow Danger (1889), to the macho angstlaying of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and H. Rider Haggard's touchingly white-hunter-loyal Zulu Umslopogaas (whose first appearance was in a novel of 1887).

  Wells's critique of imperialism recurs throughout his work. Most obviously, in War of the Worlds, which explicitly refers to the genocide of the native Tasmanians by European immigrants, he writes Britain as the victim of a savage and unstoppable outside invader – a cosmic ‘How would you like it?’ In The First Men in the Moon, imperialism is recast with cruel humour as a cack-handed farrago of greed, idiocy and violence.

  Not only is Bedford's aureate motivation for the voyage continually stressed, his lack of interest in Selenite society and the speed with which he tips over into extraordinarily bloody and ill-planned escapades make the book a comedy of terrors. Intoxicated on lunar fungus, Bedford declaims, ‘We must annex this moon… There must be no shilly-shally. This is part of the White Man's Burden,’ (that last phrase deliberately recalling Kipling's poetic exhortation to American colonialism and the US atrocities that followed) and promptly hiccups. This is imperialism as drunken, rolling stupidity: but stupidity, Wells stresses, drenched in blood.

  Bedford's first idea for how to make Cavor's lunar voyage worthwhile is telling: ‘One might make a book of it perhaps.’ This he does, and it is this book – in all its self-justifying disingenuousness – that we read. In a brilliant strategy, Wells ensures that the book is the gripping story of besieged Englishmen effecting a dangerous and spectacular escape from a community of savages hunting them, and is simultaneously – as are all such violent lullabies, from Zulu to John Carter of Mars to Black Hawk Down – an imperialist lie. In critiquing imperialism with a ripping yarn, Wells also critiques such yarns through the optic of imperialism.

  THE LIMITS OF FABIANISM

  Despite the stress on Bedford's many and symbolic flaws, it would be too easy and pat to have Cavor himself represent a human(e) alternative. He is less obviously objectionable: he is a man driven by scientific curiosity, the desire to expand intellectual horizons, which is a welcome contrast to Bedford's obsessive greed. However, that very intellectualism is itself the source of an attitude that is ultimately equally dehumanizing.

  When Cavor believes that his three assistants have been killed as a result of his researches, he briefly calls them ‘three martyrs’, but is quite unconcerned. Where Bedford is capitalism (of an unsuccessful and petty, then later an imperialist) stripe, Cavor is rationalism of an abstract and abstracting stripe. It is precisely the fact that his search is ‘for knowledge’ rather than ‘for knowledge for society’ that makes him just as instrumentalist towards others as Bedford. It is not only commerce but science, Wells implies, which untethered from social reality reifies human beings with incidental cruelty.

  At the end of the book, Bedford recounts the messages that Cavor has sent from the moon (interrupting them to plead his own case when he does not like his erstwhile companion's tone). The story emerges of Cavor's discussions with the Selen-ites Phi-oo and Tsi-puff (a slip on Wells's part, these names are clearly intended to suggest an emissary in the court of an ‘Oriental’ Emperor, but are Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque, more reminiscent of The Mikado's Pooh-Bah and Pish-Tush than of anything more dignified or alien). When at last Cavor is ushered into the presence of the extraordinary distended-brained Grand Lunar, his descriptions of earth clearly mimic Gulliver's to the King of Brobdingnag: in what he intends to be generous depictions of humanity's actions, our society's politics and war are laid bare as the savageries they are.

  They are unfavourably counterposed to the Selenites' rational, ordered system, in a clear piece of finger-wagging by Wells, whose statist, rationalist and ordering socialism finds a partial expression in the lunar system. However, there is something discomforting about this utopia of order. It is as oppressive as Cavor's own earlier ‘rationality’. Nowhere is this more vividly expressed than in his visit to a Selenite nursery. Having admired the variety of physical forms the Selenites take to perform their allotted task with precision, Cavor sees the process by which such distinctions are achieved.

  ‘… I came upon a number of young Selenites, confined in jars from which only the forelimbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended “hand” in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injection while the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo, unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs of suffering…’ Cavor is loath to admit it, but such ‘glimpses of the educational methods’ affect him ‘disagreeably’.

  The repetition of the term ‘education’ for this brutal stunting drives the satire home. Brilliantly, this satire is aimed at Wells's own society and simultaneously at a supposed ‘rational’ alternative. It is both socialist critique and socialist soul-searching, operating at once to problematize instrumentalism and class-engineering such as underpins much so-called education under capitalism, and also to raise the question, is t
his the apotheosis of the planned alternative? This latter is more troubling for Wells, as his own political theory, expressed in essays such as Mankind in the Making (1903) and novels like The World Set Free (1914), tended towards what he described as ‘outright world socialism, scientifically planned and directed’. If this is the end result of the tendencies in his project, then the ‘rational planning’ he espouses is by no means a straightforward good.

  Wells spent five years in the Fabian Society, the influential moderate socialist group founded in 1884 to campaign for sedate and gradual change, and committed to progressive ideas such as the very ‘rational planning’ that attracted Wells. Though he left in 1908 and was always a more interesting political thinker than many of the snobbish, pedestrian evolutionary socialists in that organization, Wells's own political schemes always retained something of the Fabian notion of state-socialism. Evident in The First Men in the Moon is the extent to which Wells's vision was shot through with a tremendous anxiety about its own predicates. He is agonized by an understanding that Fabianoid thinking, supposedly built on rationality itself, was in fact constructed only on a narrow, psychically parochial form of instrumental rationality. This limited and limiting ‘rationality’ is indelibly stained by the irrationalities of the very capitalism which Fabianism tells off, but ultimately presumes.

  For a thinker of any rigour, that capitalism as a system and the stunted forms of ‘rationality’ that inform it lead to war, starvation and exploitation as inevitably as to advances and enlightenment could not ultimately be explained away as pathologies. This fundamentally undermined a politics predicated on the ineluctable march of reason, as Wells uneasily saw. Wells suffers the crisis of too-intelligent Fabianism.

  The greatest expression of this anxiety came in 1896 in Wells's masterpiece, The Island of Doctor Moreau, an immanent critique of this very ‘rationality’ and its claims to emanci-patory teleology that Wells espoused. In First Men, Wells plays the same anxiety to wrongfoot the reader. The welling up of that ambivalence to ‘rational planning’ makes the satire switchback dizzyingly. Without ever changing its substance, the Selenite society goes from being the utopian foil to our absurdities to being our horizon, the threat of where we are heading. This superb manoeuvre is a testimony not only to Wells's skill, but to the nightmare he could not shake: the doubling-back is not a cheat, but an expression of the contradictions in the very categories of Wells's thought.

  The complexities of the satire that makes First Men more than a simplistic utopia or a heavy-handed ‘warning’ are, then, the product of Wells's inability to solve his political conundrum. The terrible consciousness of that failure casts a darkness over the book's ending. The last lines are suddenly and frighteningly violent: like the return of the repressed, the Selenites come for Cavor, we must assume to kill him, as he scrabbles desperately to send a last message. Learning the truth about us has made the Selenites what Bedford had wrongly held them to be. We create our own bad consciences, our own ‘murderous savage’. ‘Rationality’, in its mooncalf modern form, not only cannot be a force for emancipation, but always contains its own opposite, the opposite that comes for Cavor.

  In Moreau, the collapse of ‘rationality’ is expressed most powerfully in the collapse of language, first into rote-learned chanted hymns and then into the grunts of beasts. That same collapse occurs in First Men, though in a subtler way. Cavor's messages continually break down into snatches through the limits of the transmission mechanism: the rational science is no match for the unknowable – the a-rational – of space, and language struggles to retain integrity. The last words Cavor sends are an attempt to impart the secret knowledge of Cavorite itself. And as the door (we imagine) is broken down and the monsters of the dream of our reason come for him, he types finally ‘Cavorite made as follows: take’, then ‘uless’, then is silent. Bedford muses hopelessly on the meaning of that last, presumably mistyped word – though we know it is probably a contraction of ‘useless’, it remains ultimately opaque.

  ‘Uless’, seemingly the secret of Cavorite itself, the key to knowledge, is collapsed language. At the moment language, the conduit for rationality, should be transmitting the most rational thing of all, it degrades. For Wells there is no worse horror than this, and it is not surprising that the comedy of the book evaporates in those last pages.

  We don't see the death of Cavor. The death of language, though – of rationality itself – occurs before us, on the very page, as we read ‘uless’. Ultimately, all the concrete horrors of politics and economics that Wells scourges in the novel – venality, philistinism, capitalism and imperialism – are manifestations of the terrible autocannibalizing rationality that Wells cannot stop hoping in, but that he knows will fail, that always-already fails.

  China Miéville

  NOTES

  1. Arthur C. Clarke's Introduction to The First Men in the Moon in ‘SF Masterworks’ (London: Gollancz, 2001), p. ix.

  2. Robert H. Sherard, ‘Jules Verne Re-visited’, T. P.'s Weekly, 9 October 1903.

  3. James Gunn, The Science of Science-Fiction Writing (London: Scarecrow, 2000.

  4. Gunn, The Science of Science-Fiction Writing.

  Further Reading

  The most vivid and memorable account of Wells's life and times is his own Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934). It has been reprinted several times. A ‘postscript’ containing the previously suppressed narrative of his sexual liaisons was published as H. G. Wells in Love, edited by his son G. P. Wells (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). His more recent biographers draw on this material, as well as on the large body of letters and personal papers archived at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. The fullest and most scholarly biographies are The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (2nd edn, London: Hogarth Press, 1987) and H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal by David C. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Smith has also edited a generous selection of Wells's Correspondence (4 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Another highly readable, if controversial and idiosyncratic, biography is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (London: Hutchinson, 1984) by Wells's son Anthony West. Michael Foot's H. G.: The History of Mr Wells (London and New York: Doubleday, 1995) is enlivened by its author's personal knowledge of Wells and his circle.

  Two illuminating general interpretations of Wells and his writings are Michael Draper's H. G. Wells (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) and Brian Murray's H. G. Wells (New York: Continuum, 1990). Both are introductory in scope, but Draper's approach is critical and philosophical, while Murray packs a remarkable amount of biographical and historical detail into a short space. John Hammond's An H. G. Wells Companion (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and H. G. Wells (Harlow and London: Longman, 2001) combine criticism with useful contextual material. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, edited by Patrick Parrinder (London: Routledge, 1972), is a collection of reviews and essays of Wells published during his lifetime. A number of specialized critical and scholarly studies of Wells concentrate on his scientific romances. These include Bernard Bergonzi's pioneering study of The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). Peter Kemp's H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) offers a lively and, at times, lurid tracing of Wells's ‘biological themes and imaginative obsessions’, while Roslynn D. Haynes's H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980) surveys his use of scientific ideas. W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) are studies of his political thought and his schemes for world government. John S. Partington has also edited The Wellsian (The Netherlands: Equilibris, 2003), a selectio
n of essays from the H. G. Wells Society's annual critical journal of the same name. The American branch of the Wells Society maintains a highly informative website at http://hgwellsusa. 5 omegs.com

  P.P.

  Note on the Text

  H. G. Wells began writing The First Men in the Moon in late 1898 or early 1899. In August 1898 he spent a month convalescing at New Romney in Kent after being taken ill during a cycling holiday, and a month later he moved a few miles away to Sandgate, where he would live for the next eleven years. Lympne, where the opening chapters of The First Men in the Moon are set, is between New Romney and Sandgate. The germ of Wells's new scientific romance was apparently the character of Cavor, the eccentric scientist. Two completed ‘Cavor stories’ were finished by March 1899, and Wells started to look for publishers for an illustrated serial based on five linked stories. In June he sought scientific advice about the effects of lunar gravity from his friend Richard Gregory, later the editor of Nature. The concluding part of the serial (Chapters 19 to 26 in the final version) was greatly revised and expanded in the summer of 1900. Serial publication began in the Strand Magazine, owned by Sir George Newnes, and in the New York Cosmopolitan Magazine in November. The shorter Cosmopolitan version concluded in June 1901, while the Strand serial ran until August.

  Wells added new material to several chapters for the book versions published in November 1901 by Newnes (London) and Bowen-Merrill (Indianapolis). There are numerous discrepancies between the Newnes edition, which Wells had further revised in page proof, and Bowen-Merrill. Nevertheless, the Bowen-Merrill edition, corrected and slightly revised, became the copy-text for Volume VI of the Atlantic Edition of The Works of H. G. Wells (London: T. Fisher Unwin, and New York: Scribner's, 1924). The Newnes text was frequently reissued under different imprints during Wells's lifetime and beyond.