H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (review)

H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays is a collection of ten essays, most of them original to this volume. Taken together, H. G. Wells's Fin-de-Siècle (reviewed in this issue) and H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays provide a comprehensive overview of recent Wells scholarship by some of the most eminent and prolific Wells scholars writing today, several of whom appear in both collections. The theme of interdisciplinarity suits Wells particularly well, as Steven McLean points out in his introduction: "From the very outset of his intellectual career, Wells was a polymath" (1). Interdisciplinary Essays originated with the 2006 "H. G. Wells: New Directions" symposium, an event sponsored annually by the H. G. Wells Society. Indeed, New Directions might have been a more fitting title for the collection since several of the articles are literary analyses and not, strictly speaking, interdisciplinary. Ironically enough, literary analysis, particularly of Wells's later fiction, is highly innovative given the common assumption in Wells scholarship over the past few decades that the quality of Wells's fiction sharply declined in the twentieth century. Hence, under any title, these literary approaches are welcome additions alongside their interdisciplinary counterparts.

The organization of the book loosely follows Wells's career, literary and otherwise, beginning with "Early Romances." In "What the Traveller Saw: Evolution, Romance, and Time-Travel," Sylvia A. Pamboukian gives a compelling demonstration of Wells's unique contribution to the time travel genre as seen within the context of evolution. Unlike other contemporaneous stories of time travel, such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), The Time Machine takes the issue of evolution seriously, projecting far further into the future than other writers had done. Moreover, Wells presents a much bleaker picture of the evolutionary process: rather than a growing perfection of the species, as found in W. H. Hodgson's A Crystal Age (1887), for example (set several thousand years in the future), Wells shows the degeneration and final extinction of Homo sapiens. Pamboukian concludes that in The Time Machine "evolution itself dominates as the only inexorable and inescapable power before which knowledge, invention, and all human endeavours are futile" (21). Steven McLean's essay "Animals, Language, and Degeneration in The Island of Doctor Moreau" (the only essay in the collection to have been previously published in its present form) examines how Wells addresses contemporary debates about "the relation between humans, animals and language" (25). Contrary to the reigning theory that human beings were the only animals who had language, espoused by experts such as Max Muller and C. Lloyd Morgan (whom Wells reviewed in 1894), Moreau can be read to suggest that in language, as in all else, no bright line divides beasts and humans; they occupy positions on a linguistic continuum, what McLean calls "a great chain of articulation" (27). Simon J. James's article, "Fin-de-Cycle: Romance and the Real in The Wheels of Chance," shifts gears, as it were, to examine Wells's views on the genre of romance as revealed in his novel about cycling. James argues that Wells both uses and subverts romance conventions in order to critique formulaic, escapist romance, which "cheaply amuses, and saps the desire to make the real world better instead" (35). Rather than the standard happy ending, the novel concludes on a somber note that emphasizes the inequities of the socioeconomic and class barriers separating the hero and heroine. In the final essay of this section, "Alien Gaze: Postcolonial Vision in The War of the Worlds," Keith Williams situates Wells's famous invasion romance within the context of the late nineteenth-century technological advances in optics coupled with the fears of an "alien gaze" such advances made possible. Williams cites the example of Professor Jadadis Chunder Bose of Calcutta, who invented an "electric eye" able to detect certain kinds of radiation. "The imaginative implications of an Eastern Professor's 'Marvelous Discovery,'" Williams writes, "disturbed the once impenetrable superiority and self-belief of...