Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

1: Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells

Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism of H. G. Wells christina alt Over the course of his long writing career H. G. Wells passed through alternating periods of optimism and pessimism in his views of humanity, science, and the future of the earth. In his late-Victorian works of scientific romance, he reveals a pessimistic attitude arising in part from evolutionary ideas circulating at the time. In The Time Machine he expresses anxieties over devolution; in The Island of Doctor Moreau he warns of the dangers of scientific overreaching and suggests the ineffectuality of human attempts to intervene in evolutionary processes; and in The War of the Worlds he challenges assumptions of human primacy and dominance by introducing a threat to humanity in the form of a highly evolved Martian competitor. These works taken together convey a sense of human beings existing at the mercy of natural processes beyond their control. However, as the twentieth century began, Wells found reason for new optimism, as evidenced by works such as Anticipations, A Modern Utopia, and Men Like Gods. One factor contributing to this modern optimism was the emergence of new scientific disciplines that promised to provide new ways of understanding and intervening in natural processes. Ecology was one of these emerging disciplines; however, perhaps unexpectedly, given current popular conceptions of ecology, in the early twentieth century the optimism engendered by the growing understanding of the relationships between organisms and their environments manifested primarily as a new confidence—even arrogance—in humanity’s ability to exert control over the natural world. In fact, Wells’s use of ecological ideas in his early twentieth-century works of SF suggests that in the early stages of its development as a discipline, ecology helped to restore the confidence in human dominance that had been unsettled by evolution’s revelation of humanity’s animal origins. 1 26 Arc Adi As And ne w Je r u sAl e m s To illustrate this claim, I will compare the attitudes and actions toward the natural world depicted in Wells’s late-Victorian novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, with those represented in his early twentieth-century novel Men Like Gods, published in 1923. These two novels are useful texts to consider in an exploration of Wells’s changing views of science and nature because they center on similar scenarios. In both novels, terrestrial human beings encounter a more advanced species or culture that possesses greater scientific knowledge and technological skill than they themselves; in both novels, the advanced culture endeavors to exert control over the natural world through the management or extermination of other life forms; and in both novels, a struggle between the terrestrial human beings and the alien culture ensues and is ultimately decided in a contest between nature (in the form of disease germs) and biological science . However, despite the similar scenarios considered in these two novels, the resolutions that they offer differ dramatically, registering the shift in attitude that Wells underwent in the intervening quarter century. The War of The Worlds The War of the Worlds famously describes the invasion of Earth in the closing years of the nineteenth century by a highly evolved and technologically advanced Martian species seeking a new planet to colonize as their own more distant planet grows cold. The Martians plan to first subdue human beings by force, destroying their homes and decimating their population, and then to cultivate the human species as a form of livestock and a food source. The threat to human dominance posed by the arrival of the Martians causes the human narrator of the tale to experience “a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.”1 The War of the Worlds thus dramatizes the ways in which the promulgation of evolutionary ideas in the Victorian period stripped humans of their sense of special status as beings deliberately set above the rest of creation, leading them to recognize themselves as animals and, moreover, as animals subject to competition for their place in the hierarchy of nature and for their survival as a species. In an extension of this argument, Wells’s allusion to the obliteration of the indigenous people of Tasmania by European invaders alongside his references to the extinction of...