Joshua Fagan
Columbia University
Abstract
Though the futurist work of H.G. Wells boldly imagines a future beyond the narrow insularity and single-minded devotion to selfish profit that he loathed in his Victorian milieu, his images of the future remain tinged by anxious fears of societal degeneration. His famous The Time Machine relies on a rigid dichotomy. The Time Traveller’s predictions for a utopian future are false, and he reacts with horror at the absolute disintegration of his reductive exploitations, not seeing the new opportunities the distant future offers. Octavia Butler, conversely, provides a path forward: not through antagonizing the strange and unprecedented, but through accepting it. Her story “Amnesty” is an effective counter to Wells, demonstrating the new epistemological possibilities and opportunities that emerge when dogmatic, Wellsian conceptions of the future are transcended.
Keywords: HG Wells, Octavia Butler, Epistemology, Futurity, Estrangement
While H.G. Wells ascended to become England’s foremost futurist by the close of the nineteenth century, his opinions on the future were not blithely optimistic. He was, undoubtedly, an emphatic advocate for progress, a Fabian socialist who saw civilization as progressing relatively linearly from the sectarian, superstitious hierarchies of the past to the universalist, rationalist social structure he believed would exist in the future. Works like The Outline of History and A Modern Utopia chart a teleological destiny for humanity: where mystified, insular bands of foragers over time create societies of increasing sophistication, tolerance, and investigative capacities. Still, simply because the history of the world was one of progress did not mean progress would continue unabated, or that social change would necessarily lead to predictably utopian results. Fin-de-siècle anxieties of languid enervation and amoral ruthlessness dim and unsettle his optimism about civilizational progress.
Works like The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau portray a sharp disconnect between the breathless progress of technology and the fraught prospect of moral improvement, but The Time Machine is particularly astute in how it depicts both the expression of utopian hopes and the unmaking of those hopes through confrontation with a broad and vast evolutionary-geological perspective that regards all abstract, deterministic historical frameworks with indifference. Wells could separate the optimistic future for which he yearned with what Robert Philmus calls the “dark potentialities of the human species” (27). This fundamental tension inspired later authors to echo or revise it, with Octavia Butler’s work being particularly notable in its lucid investigation of the possibilities that become available only through transcending the binary between utopian dreams and the lurid forces threatening those dreams.
While Wells rejected the racialist and nationalist assumptions of works like Thomas Macaulay’s The History of England, the basic shape and pattern of his historical framework in The Outline of History is not significantly different from that of Macaulay. It is a largely linear, distinctly nineteenth-century worldview, to the extent that an admiring review of Outline in 1921 explicitly compares Wells to Hegel, arguing that Wells is the first author since Hegel to write “universal history” with “such a profound purpose” (Charles Wells 484). In place of Macaulay’s defense of imperialism and British hegemony is the empiricist, dispassionate assertion by Wells that humanity is a single “animal species in a state of arrested differentiation” and that “all races are more or less mixed” (Outline 110). Social progress was for Wells fundamentally tied to scientific progress, yet scientific progress was not a guarantee of social progress. While Wells remained committed to a fundamentally evolutionary perception of social change, in which innovation and new ideas drove the expulsion of backwardness and base prejudices, he remained astutely aware of the innate unpredictability of evolution, as did “Darwin’s bulldog” T.H. Huxley, who taught Wells and broadly shaped his intellectual framework of evolutionary ideas.
The Wellsian worldview should not be reduced to a mere reiteration of Huxley’s ideas, but the two shared a fundamental pessimism about the equation of evolution with a linear system of progress. In this, they differ significantly from Darwin, who remained largely optimistic about the creative power evolution unleashed. Unlike Darwin, who came from a relatively privileged background, both Huxley and Wells originated from the writhing masses of English society. Wells in particular experienced the squalid underside of Victorian society firsthand, working the most miserable years of his life as a draper’s assistant. The alienated, profit-centric ruthlessness of Victorian England was for Wells both a symbol of the provincial, tribalistic backwardness he thought continued to plague English society and an emblem of how merely trusting to the popularly accepted definitions of what progress entailed was insufficient. Though not entirely free from the taint of eugenicist thinking that colored many Fabian conceptions of social progress, he exhibited extreme skepticism toward narrowly mechanistic and utilitarian expectations of what evolution and progress entail, opining that advocates of progress should “set aside at once all the nonsense about the human stud farm” (Mankind in the Making 145). The primary problem with this kind of thinking for Wells is that it substitutes the insular application of norms regarding how humanity should be for the true work of science, meaning the disinterested creation of understanding through skillful observation. As Wells and Huxley astutely understood, determining a single standard of fitness, as the social Darwinists would do, is far more difficult and restrictive than doing the same for the varied and cosmopolitan condition of modern society.
A defining characteristic for Wells in the gradual progress of history is the movement from an insular repetition of conformity to more open, pluralistic consideration of competing, even opposing, values. He views as essential deviations from the “blind obedience of the common life” (Outline 843). Yet this commitment to the value of the individual consciousness did not lead him to embrace the self-interested, grasping hyper-individualism common among Victorian industrialists and social-Darwinist thinkers. From Hegel and other nineteenth-century historical critics, Wells inherited the conception that organized society is as much of a productive innovation as any philosophical idea or piece of technology. It encourages ascension beyond merely fulfilling selfish individual caprices, toward working for the betterment of groups of people with varied histories, values, and interests. A democratic and pluralistic society requires the replacement of loyalty to specific sects and sub-groups not with loyalty to profiteering and short-term economic gain, but with the liberation of the masses from “economic constraints that distorted their environment and stymied their potential” and into an educational system that emphasizes “human betterment” to allow the development and flourishing of the individual in a robust, societal context (Hale 21, 46). What Wells encourages is neither conformism nor the dissolution of the social fabric, but rather the creation of a non-sectarian sense of unity and mutuality that requires the “subordination of egotism and the suppression of extremes of uncorrelated individual activity” (The Science of Life 877). Such a future for Wells is possible, but it is precarious. Leaving that future to the social Darwinists, with their subordination of organic discovery, contemplation, and connection to the laws of breeding livestock, would be disastrous.
The anxiety Wells expresses regarding the precarity of his ideal future results, however, in his embrace of a similarly reductive viewpoint that transcends the coarse materialism of the eugenicists but is equally teleological. Wells advocates repeatedly in his writings, perhaps most intensively in A Modern Utopia, for his idea of the World State, which as Michael Sherbourne argues, is “an undemocratic one-party state” (165). Calling Wells an authoritarian is unnecessarily inflammatory. More accurate would be to describe him as similar to the Time Traveller in The Time Machine: yearning for a future that confirms his expectations, increasingly gloomy about the potential for society to evolve in a grotesque direction that is contrary to those expectations, and largely unwilling to look for any productive conception of relationality in a wild, unknown world that refuses to fit any previously constructed patterns or frameworks. The Time Machine is emblematic of both the fecund potential and the underlying problems of early science fiction’s epistemological horizons.
Viewing Octavia Butler’s fiction in relation to this tension in The Time Machine, between earnest hope in a future free from the narrowly commercialist provincialism of the present and alienated, disillusioned anxiety about the future, allows for the conception of a path beyond this binary. To say that Butler “solves” this tension is to submit to a mechanistic conception of logic that both authors reject, but her work in its contemplation and toleration of possibilities that Wells disdains soars beyond the epistemological horizons of The Time Machine into new and different ways of knowing and understanding. What makes Butler’s revision and reinterpretation of the anxiety undergirding The Time Machine compelling is that it accepts that anxiety instead of attempting to dissipate it. “Bloodchild,” for instance, depicts a warped future where instead of ascending to the stars in a moment of unity and utopian optimism, a portion of humanity becomes subordinate to an alien species in a distant corner of the universe. For Wells, such a fate would be calamitous, as he adheres to a conception of history that is not merely “a compilation of historical facts” but rather a “tracing of the thread of human progress toward the one great goal of human history-peace” (Charles Wells 484).
Butler’s perspective is more ambiguous, detailing the opportunities for compromise and reconsideration that can only exist after the abandonment of grand, unifying narratives of the type Wells promotes. What Butler provides is not a metaphysical, allegorical, Hegelian competition between two forces, and indeed, she is emphatic in asserting that “Bloodchild” is not a story about slavery (“Bloodchild” 30). Instead, it is a narrative that deflates the teleological view of space travel that colors many early perspectives of space travel in speculative fiction, such as the optimistic stories of Jules Verne or the planet-hopping explorations of Star Trek. This is a view that presents space exploration as a symbol of civilizational maturation, the transcendence of myopic selfishness in favor of unity, science, and curiosity. Butler explicitly presents “Bloodchild” as being opposed to this Star Trek view of exploration, instead investigating colonists placed in a submissive, even degraded, position and contemplating the possibility of finding peace in an “unusual accommodation” (32). As Elyce Helford lucidly argues, “Bloodchild” depicts the attempt to negotiate a mutually beneficial arrangement when confronted with the possibility of a desolate future in which humans are “little more than pets or breeding stock” (263). What is a dystopian end in the paradigm Wells creates is for Butler a beginning, a threshold to new opportunities for interaction and connection that extend beyond the binary paradigm Wells envisions.
Even more so than “Bloodchild,” Butler’s late-period story “Amnesty” explicitly considers reconciliation and negotiation in the aftermath of confronting an unknown, disorienting presence. After landing on Earth, a group of otherworldly lifeforms, the Communities, begin a series of abductions. They kidnap a young girl named Noah for a dozen years, conducting experiments on her and exposing her to a miserable, Hobbesian environment of struggle and survival, before mysteriously releasing her. Noah eventually reveals that there was a coordinated, nuclear assault on the Communities after they established their colonies, only for the Communities to miraculously prevent the weapons from detonating. As Noah states, “It was a short, quiet war” between the world superpowers and the Communities that ended in human defeat (184).
On initial appearance, this scenario is not so different from the dystopian situation presented in The War of the Worlds. An unknowable, inscrutable force invades Earth and subjects its inhabitants to seemingly arbitrary whims, resulting in the degradation of basic freedoms and liberties. Such a depiction of a macabre, functionalist future combines the overly mechanizing, reductive viewpoints of the social Darwinists with the unraveling of any coherent epistemological certainty or stable personal identity that is characteristic of Joseph Conrad, who dedicated his novel The Secret Agent to Wells. Works like War of the Worlds or The Time Machine might appear different from the utopian plan for the future Wells favored in Outline, but these are two sides of the same Huxley-esque contemplation of the dangers and opportunities of evolution and technological progress unbound from pre-existing social mores. For both Huxley and Wells, science is “a useful tool which, wielded by intelligent, benevolent rulers, could make man stable, happy, and collectively free” (McFarland 45). In opposition to these goals is reductive scientific positivism, where civilization becomes monstrous and degraded by its devotion to a narrow, rapacious conception of evolutionary processes, abandoning society and communality for what Huxley calls “fanatical individualism” (239). This binary, while useful in its condemnation of atomized alienation and tribalism, is limited in that it only promotes two distinct, absolute options. In the case of The Time Machine, there is either the Time Traveller’s ideal future or the predatory relationship between the uncivilized Morlocks and the effete, enervated Eloi. Butler in “Amnesty” confronts a similar dichotomy, interrogates the anxieties that undergird the rhetorical appeal of such a dichotomy, but ultimately presents a glimpse of the potential to achieve a level of intersubjectivity that exists beyond this dichotomy.
As Julian Lucas describes, a “cardinal sin in Butler’s universe” is “expecting your way of life to go on forever.” The dystopian vision of War of the Worlds is as reductive as the utopian vision of Star Trek. Neither extreme allows space for new methods of understanding and interaction, the building of unforeseen connections and ways of knowing between ostensibly estranged forces. What interests “Amnesty” is how a relationship that begins in exploitation and suffering can, without becoming ideal, evolve into a mutually beneficial arrangement. Like in Wells, there is a mire of dread surrounding the futility of human ambition and the reduction of humanity to a subordinate role. Wells presented his visions, even in more optimistic works like A Modern Utopia, as being relatively grounded compared to what he considered the unrealistic, whimsically pastoralist views of his fellow Fabian writer William Morris, and Butler does not retreat into blithe, reassuring platitudes regarding the relationship between humanity and the Communities. The Time Traveller, discovering the truth about the Morlocks and the Eloi, ascribes nightmarish, world-historical significance to it, lamenting that civilization has “long since passed its zenith and passed into decay” (84). Butler’s response to absolutist presumptions like this is to condemn them not for being too dour, but for being too reductive.
When asked if she forgives the Communities for abducting her and subjecting her to such strife, Noah responds, “They haven’t asked for my forgiveness and I wouldn’t know how to give it if they did” (168). The Time Traveller desires to achieve absolute, factual certainty. He approaches the strange environment he discovers with the mechanistic, observational rigor characteristic of positivist thinking, believing that if he studies the external details he sees closely enough, he will be able to arrive at hypotheses that, when applied, make his experiences entirely unambiguous and intelligible. This strategy slowly degrades throughout the narrative before entirely disintegrating when the Time Traveller proceeds into the distant future, when the Eloi and the Morlocks have decayed into dust, replaced by strange species the Time Traveller cannot quite comprehend, even on a basic, descriptive level. What he sees is a “monstrous, crab-like creature” with “vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime” (138). His descriptions are flailing and feverous, nihilistic horror overwhelming observational discipline. The replacement of a coherent vision of progress with atavism and squalor is already bleak, but the replacement of even that grotesque, bifurcated society with the inscrutably strange and essentially unknowable is profoundly demoralizing. The Time Machine begins with an intellectual dinner party, an emblem of sophistication and erudite discussions of progress and knowledge, but the narrative ends with the undermining of that certainty and elegance, which appear as a tenuous façade over a yawning abyss of looming dread. “Amnesty” takes the enigmatic, disruptive unknowability that ensconces the final chapters of The Time Machine and engages with it more productively. The replacement of essentialist, teleological narratives with a sense of inescapable mystery and wonder can be a source of “perverse security and peace” (172), as Noah describes the process of being “enfolded” by the Communities.
There is no central riddle in “Amnesty,” no puzzle that a sharp mind can solve to unlock the absolute truth about the Communities: how they view humanity, why they chose to come to Earth, even what exactly they are. What they resemble more than the Eloi and Morlocks is the crab-like creature that the Time Traveller views as ghastly, largely because it differs so profoundly from any concrete conception of the future he had in the past. The presence of this creature emblematizes not merely the threat of degeneration and de-evolution that pulsates throughout the narrative, but also the dread of the inscrutable and uncertain. In “Amnesty,” there are opportunities in uncertainty. Beyond the limiting horizons of viewing the Communities as saviors or conquerors, there are unforeseen opportunities that neither species could have anticipated. Unlike the standard Star Trek conception of aliens as vaguely humanoid, the Communities are so foreign to routine, normalized assumptions about intelligent life, to the extent that Noah admits, “They’re not like anything that any of us have ever known” (162). The act of interrelating with the Communities innately creates estrangement, as it forces the reconsideration of assumptions about the difference between the individual and the group, and even about the creative process of evolution.
This estrangement erodes the potential for the methodical certainty the Time Traveller valorizes, but it creates new opportunities for connection. Unlike the humans who tortured her, perceiving her as a traitor, the Communities learn from their mistakes and discover the utility, and even pleasure, that interrelating can provide. That the process of the Communities enfolding humans can provide satisfaction to both sides is a possibility that fit into neither side’s abstract, anticipatory plans about the future, and yet it provides a foundation for closeness and understanding. As Noah ambivalently says, “The Communities feel better when they unfold us. We feel better too. I guess that’s only fair” (180). This arrangement is not ideal, and it does not erase the suffering the Communities inflicted, but it is a positive option emerging from a fraught, ostensibly alienating situation. While the Time Traveller rejects the enigmatic strangeness of the crab-like creature, Noah is consistently, if cautiously, willing to productively engage with the enigmatic strangeness of the Communities. Sorrel, one of the candidates Noah instructs, attaches utopian, New-Age projections to the Communities, and Noah pointedly opposes this fatuous behavior. Butler contrasts the over-simplified sentimentalism of Sorrel with the steely resolution of Noah, who works with the Communities not for the sake of payback or any merely egotistical caprices, but because her experiences disillusioned her from viewing either her own government or the Communities as the kind of symbolic, metaphysical forces that comprise the conception of history Wells emphasizes. Butler here “upends the idea of ontological fixity” (Pickens 168), undermining the teleology of the Wellsian vision, where every major historical moment has ritualistic significance in either forwarding or degrading humanity’s journey of progress.
She is able to see the tension with the Communities as it actually is, without distorted and self-serving projections, and she is thus able to gain consolation from interacting with the Communities. This equivocal attitude toward the Communities, guided by sincerity and curiosity divorced from grand historical narratives, is what part of what Jim Miller refers to when he discusses Butler’s narrative mode as one of “post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past” (336). For Butler, utopias are “ridiculous,” not only because they require a level of unflinching perfection far beyond the capacities of civilization, but also because they would “be so overspecialized that any change we might introduce would probably destroy the whole system” (“Interview” 69). Utopia, as Butler discusses eloquently in “The Book of Martha,” is necessarily a foreclosure of the unpredictable possibilities of the present in favor of a rigid, fixedly deterministic perception of what should be eternal. There would be no potential for an alien invasion in a utopia, but there would also be no potential for the kind of unexpected pleasures of the enfolding process.
What ultimately separates Noah from the recruits she interviews is her willingness to look at the Communities themselves instead of an overwrought narrative about the significance of the Communities’ presence on Earth. Unlike “Bloodchild,” which despite its philosophical focus is a conventionally structured narrative, “Amnesty” is primarily a series of dialogues between Noah and the applicants, in which she both defends her ambivalent attitude toward the beings that kidnapped her and implores the applicants to accept the new opportunities the Communities offer, not because the Communities are ideal, but because hiding behind simplistic narratives prevents the confrontation with new and productive opportunities. Some of those she addresses have an attitude like that of the Time Traveller, unable to react to the Communities without revulsion. Others, like Sorrel, have an attitude like that of William Morris or Wells at his most idealistic, excited about the transcendent wonder of a future with the Communities, and Noah is, interestingly, most irritated by Sorrel, having to suppress “an urge to hit” her (182). The disintegration of the Wellsian binary between transcending materialistic factionalism and devolving into catastrophe and apocalypse is necessary for Butler.
Whatever the future will be, it will differ substantially from the present, and judging the future by the absolutist, Hegelian narratives of the present only prevents the future from being comprehended organically, without artifice. This future is confusing and imperfect and fragmented, but it also unleashes opportunities that the Time Traveller and his creator could not have foreseen.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. “Amnesty.” Bloodchild and Other Stories. 2nd ed, Seven Stories, 2005, pp. 148-186.
—. “Bloodchild.” Bloodchild and Other Stories, pp. 1-32.
—. “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” In Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, ed. Larry McCaffery. U of Illinois P, 1990, pp. 54-70.
Hale, Piers J. “Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. William Morris, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 43, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–66.
Helford, Elyce Rae. “‘Would You Really Rather Die than Bear My Young?’: The Construction of Gender, Race, and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Bloodchild.’” African American Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 1994, pp. 259–71.
Huxley, T.H. “Evolution and Ethics.” In The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880-1900. Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 238-240.
Lucas, Julian. “How Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Sex and Survival.” The New Yorker, 8 March 2021.
McFarland, Michael. “Wells’s Early Fiction: The Seeds of Utopian Nightmare.” Interpretations, vol. 5, no. 1, 1973, pp. 44–50.
Miller, Jim. “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, pp. 336–60.
Philmus, Robert M. “Revisions of The Future: The Time Machine.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 28, no. 1, 1976, pp. 23–30.
Pickens, Therí A. “Octavia Butler and the Aesthetics of the Novel.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 167–80.
Sherborne, Michael. H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life. Peter Owen, 2010.
Wells, Charles L. “Mr. Wells and History.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 29, no. 4, 1921, pp. 483–91.
Wells, H.G., Huxley, Julian, and Wells, G.P. The Science of Life. Cassell & Co., 1931.
Wells, H.G. An Outline of the Future. 3rd ed., Macmillan, 1921.
—. Mankind in the Making. Chapman and Hall, 1914.
—. The Time Machine. Heinemann, 1895.
Joshua Fagan specializes in American and British literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at Columbia University. His current project focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and impermanence in the aftermath of Darwin and nineteenth-century industrialization. His essay on the relation between the premodern and naturalistic transcendence in Robert Frost’s poetry was published in The Robert Frost Review.
[Volume 5, Number 1, 2023]
