Soul of the Future: Realists of the Fantastic

“The oldest, most widespread stories in the world are adventure stories about human heroes who venture into the myth-countries at the risk of their lives, and bring back tales of the world beyond men.”
Paul Zweig

"What is imagination? Perhaps it is a shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul's thought!"
H.Rider Haggard

Our last episode of Soul of the Future linked The Time Machine to other famous works by H.G. Wells, and promised a further link to our contemporary mode of exploring the future. 

By the time he died in 1946, H.G. Wells had authored more than 100 books. In his fifty year writing career, he wrote novels, short stories, essays, newspaper columns, political commentaries, an autobiography and books on science and history—notably the Outline of History, which was an international best seller for decades. He became an inspiration for several generations and famous around the world. He had private audiences in the United States with President Theodore and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in Russia with Lenin and Stalin.

But the novels that remain his best known more than a century later—The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The First Men In The Moon-- were all written in the first decade of his publishing life, and most appeared before the twentieth century began.

For the first 30 years of his career however, none of them was called “science fiction.” The term, and the genre itself, did not yet exist.

Instead Wells was spoken and written about as simply a writer, and his books were evaluated on their merits.  Other writers in particular welcomed him to contemporary literature. Novelist Henry James praised him. Novelist Ford Maddox Ford called him an “Authentic, real Genius. And delightful at that...And all great London lay prostrate at his feet.”

But another novelist came closest to naming the special qualities of these first novels that (together with his short stories) would birth a genre. In a letter praising The Invisible Man, Joseph Conrad began with the salutation: “O Realist of the Fantastic!”

With these early novels and stories, Wells had drawn on particular elements of the ongoing literary tradition, especially prominent in the 19th century: adventure stories and fantastic tales.

Tales of adventure employed techniques of realism (factual detail, description, etc.) not only from the prominent realistic novels of the era (Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and others who were as well known at the time) but from popular non-fiction accounts of explorations in previously unknown parts of the world, culminating in accounts of polar expeditions.

Realistic novels tended to be set in familiar cities and towns, centering on individuals and class differences. Adventure stories were more about remote places and cultural differences, but above all, they concerned human characters in the context of the non-human, especially of nature and natural forces.

Still, they were considered mainstream literature, and their authors included Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped), Rudyard Kipling’s stories set in India, the American frontier tales of James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, and the early sea stories of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad.

These fictions had their roots in some of the oldest stories known, for whatever else they represent, the great mythic tales of Beowulf and Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Song of Roland and the tales of Robin Hood, were grounded in adventure.

By the 19th century, science and technology were becoming elements of adventure. Voyages of the era were often described as scientific explorations, and the thrill of the unknown was likely a factor in the immense popular interest in science throughout the century.

The first popular novelist to place new and imagined technologies at the center of his adventures was 19th century French writer Jules Verne. Among his immense volume of novels and stories were old-fashioned adventure tales, but his phenomenal 54-novel sequence of Extraordinary Voyages employed technologies of the time and of the future in voyages to the moon, the bottom of the sea and the center of the Earth.

The fantastic tale was a second style of story that literary eminence Italo Calvino called "one of the most characteristic products of nineteenth century narrative." There were a few specialists in these tales (  E.T. A. Hoffman, Lewis Carroll and other authors ostensibly writing for children) but almost every prominent literary writer composed at least one, including Henry James, Hawthorne, Balzac, Dickens, Twain, Turgenev and Oscar Wilde ( “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”)

These tales were often visionary, sometimes mystical, and could be read as metaphor or allegory. However many tended towards the Gothic and grotesque (ghost stories or involving gruesome death) as well as the uncanny or apparently impossible. The exemplar of that strain of fantastic tale was Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote stories that would later be considered forerunners of not only the horror genre, but of detective stories and science fiction.

The fantastic tale had roots in the 18th century Wonder Stories in France as well as ancient fables and stories of the gods. It also began to use the possibilities of science to drive the story, most famously in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson. This, too, was a natural outcome, since new technologies often do what had previously been considered fantasy.

Scholar Mark Rose broadens this category by invoking the literary classification called the romance, which emphasizes “marvels and adventures.” Historically these include quest tales and battles with dragons, and sometimes involve magic. Indeed, Wells described his own most famous tales as “scientific romances.”

The major techniques of the adventure story and fantastic tale overlap and interpenetrate. Fantastic tales attempt a background of realism while adventure stories—particularly tales of exploration—feature marvels and wonder.

This 1935 film version was one of many.

By the late 19th century the two forms were beginning to blend, for example in the popular work of H.Rider Haggard. His first novel, King Solomon’s Mine, was basically a tale of adventure, but he soon integrated elements of mysticism and myth in She (and even more prominently in its sequels.)

Of course, Wells also drew from other literary and non-literary works and traditions. As previously noted, Wells himself acknowledged a particular debt to Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels, a kind of allegory or societal critique within a fantastic adventure—all important elements in later science fiction.

Wells also acknowledged his interest in the Romantic poets, especially Shelley, “a poet of science” as Brian Aldiss calls him. It was not until the English Romantics (according to Mark Rose) in the early 19th century that the dominant literary tradition showed much interest in the non-human world. With their evocations of Nature and interest in science, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats and other Romantics saw humanity within the context of Nature and its forces.

H.G. Wells by Yuri Pennenkov, illustration
accompanying Zamyatin essay

But the roots and resulting resonance of his stories go back much farther. In one of the most poetic and acute analyses of Wells’ work, Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin suggests that Wells evokes the woodland tales and magic stories deeply embedded in every known storytelling tradition, and relocates them in the concrete and electric modern cities, burgeoning with technology that performs acts previously viewed as magic.

“The motifs of the Wellsian urban fairy tale are essentially the same as those encountered in all other fairy tales: the invisible cap, the flying carpet” (which is the time machine, Zamyatin noted earlier), “dragons, giants, gnomes, mermaids and man-eating monsters.” Yet Wells’ tales are also scientific: “built upon brilliant and most unexpected scientific paradoxes. All his myths are as logical as mathematical equations. And this is why we, modern men, we, skeptics, are conquered by these logical fantasies, this is why they command our attention and win our belief.”


All of this is to make two related points pertaining to the future. First, that The Time Machine and similar Wells’ tales, now considered classics of science fiction, were seen at the time not as aberrations but as variations, extensions and updating of established forms. They weren’t consigned to the ghetto of a suspect genre. “Because the form had not been named yet,” noted editor and critic Frank D. McConnell, “ it was freer to associate itself with the great mainstream tradition of storytelling.”

The second point is that Wells’ stories did create something new, but it involved a synthesis of past forms and stories, including fable and myth, as well as strong elements of philosophy and what would become anthropology, psychology and sociology.

This synthesis survives to varying degrees and effects in the subsequent outpouring of stories by writers of something they call science fiction. Because of this synthesis, all these techniques, all these approaches, all these stories that in a real sense represent the soul of humanity, are employed in exploring the soul of the future.

With The Time Machine, Wells became (in McConnell’s words) “the sole and powerful creator of a new mode of storytelling: a mode that has increasingly, in all its complexity and in all its crudity, become the distinctive mythology of our time.”

Ironically, the literary and popular acceptance of the kind of storytelling in Wells’ early work tended to mask the identity of this mode. Wells influenced several prominent writers, including George Orwell, C.S. Lewis and perhaps the most obscure innovator and artist who followed in Wells’ footsteps, Olaf Stapledon, creator of Star Maker, the novel that science fiction historian and author Brian Aldiss calls “really the one great grey holy book of science fiction.”

“...Stapledon is the great classical example," Aldiss continues, "the cold pitch of perfection as he turns scientific concepts into vast ontological prose poems, the ultimate sf [science fiction] writer.” ( Stapledon’s influence will be discussed more specifically in the next section.)

These sporadic stories came and went, read and reviewed as individual works, with some commonalities and derivations, but with no special identity separating them from other stories.

It took a brash gadget-crazy American in the late 1920s to revive interest in these early Wells’ works as well as generate a still ongoing rampage of new stories in the genre he helped define, and (eventually) named "science fiction."

To be continued.  Prior posts in this series can be found by following the Soul of the Future label below.