When we think of science fiction as social critique,
one figure towers over the early greats:
H.G. Wells.
He showed us what science fiction could be,
why it was important,
why it might not be just a momentary
novelty to be discarded, but a vital addition to the pantheon of literature.
Jules Verne proved that a science fiction writer could be commercially successful,
but the literary world saw Vern as a failure.
At the time, his works were rejected as clunky pop fiction with little lasting merit,
and he was even denied entry to the Académie Française.
H.G. Wells, on the other hand, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times,
and even in his own day, he was considered an important writer and a social critic,
so much so that even while he lived
there were those who
bemoaned the fact that his later work never quite reached the heights of his early novels.
So what was the difference between Vern and Wells?
It was that HG Wells used his prose like an axe,
hacking away at what he saw as the injustice in the society around him.
He wore his politics on his sleeve
and made no bones about his hope that technology and science would lead
humankind to a better world.
He was the one to really introduce us to the idea that science fiction could be used to make an
extrapolation of the present,
that it could be used to take the course of humanity and push it to the hyperbolic extreme,
to speculate, if we just keep going like we're going,
what will happen?
This can perhaps be seen best in one of his most famous novels,
the Time Machine,
where a time traveler heads to the distant future only to find humanity
bifurcated into two distinct races:
the fragile, elfin, wastrel Eloi
and the brutish, savage hard-working Morlocks.
The Eloi live on the surface of the world in complete freedom from labor,
clothed and housed by the work of the Morlocks.
They have a childlike intellect, and they spend their days in leisure.
The Morlocks run the machinery of the world, buried below the surface of the Earth.
Generations underground make them shun bright light,
but on moonless nights, they will come up to feed on the Eloi.
And the time traveller believes that this is the far distant consequence of the world of today.
The upper class has degenerated to become the Eloi
through millennia of leisure and surviving off the labor of the working-class,
who, in turn, have made the long, slow slide to being the Morlocks,
debased by hundreds of thousands of years of menial labor
and limited access to the world of the imagination or the intellect.
It was this worldview Wells would espouse again and again
because he was a socialist.
He saw the way of the future as a socialist one, with better distribution of wealth and education.
He felt that in writing science fiction, he could help bring this about.
He could point out the inequities to the masses
and highlight the injustice to the elite
without using any direct form of condemnation that might bring a complete knee-jerk rejection of his ideas.
He does this again in what might today be called his anti-libertarian novel
The Invisible Man,
in which he gives an individual
what should be one of the greatest super powers, invisibility,
and the will to exploit it fully for personal gain.
Only to, in the end, show that he is powerless without society.
In the end, the Invisible Man,
finds himself lower than the poorest workers because his rejection of society for personal strength
leaves him weaker than the meanest of us.
War of the Worlds, on the other hand, is a much subtler novel.
It is perhaps the most nuanced of Well's works.
It's a statement against colonialism and the idea of Social Darwinism,
which was all the rage at the time.
After all, what better argument against Social Darwinism
then to take the people who think they are at the top of the chain,
put something above them,
and then ask,
"how much do you like this idea now?"
But it's much more ambiguous about things like religion and the role of the military,
especially in a particularly heroic scene where a British naval ship
sacrifices itself so that refugees might escape the conquering Martians.
But no matter how you view it, War of the Worlds is a novel of big ideas that forces the reader to
reconsider how they think about the world they live in,
especially with the way that it suggests
microbes would outshine all of humankind's most powerful defenses.
And this is one of the huge contributions Wells brought to science fiction.
He was perhaps the king of the Big Idea,
the notion that science fiction should be grounded in the exploration of something larger,
that it wasn't just the
including of science as part of a story that made a science fiction tale worth the telling.
This is going to have echoes throughout the entire history of sci-fi.
In fact, this notion of the Big Idea may be the thing that,
more than spaceships, more than robots or laser guns, typifies science fiction as a movement.
Nearly all of the writers
we're gonna cover in this overview will take this lesson from Well's work.
Nearly all of what we today consider truly great sci-fi, adopt this maxim.
Wells also offered a narrower but perhaps
no less important lesson for future science fiction writers.
It was his dictum that the power of science fiction was to make them magical, believable.
He knew that invisibility or
time-travel weren't actually scientifically possible,
but they were good lenses for allowing him to examine society,
so he created the parallel pillar to Verne's rigorous, detailed hard-science fiction,
and I'm not gonna call it soft sci-fi because I think most science fiction
from Dune to Ender's Game falls into this category.
This was a pillar in which any technical
discussion of the mechanisms or workings of the technology
were simply there to aid the reader in suspending disbelief,
because once the reader bought in, the author could get on with the real work of exploring the Big Idea.
The (?) of Wells contains a good half dozen other works
that had a huge impact on later authors, like the Island of Dr.
Moreau, with its clear descendants in the works like that of Cordwainer Smith and
the Shape of Things to Come,
whose echoes can be seen in Asimov decades later.
But we're gonna end this on what many might consider one of Wells' lesser
contributions, Little Wars, which, given this channel and its pedigree,
I figured we kind of have to mention it. If you like Warhammer or Forty K,
or even Dungeons and Dragons with its origins in the miniatures game Chainmail,
then you should give a quick nod to Wells because besides being the great progenitor of social sci-fi,
he also released one of the earliest
mass-market rule systems for tabletop wargaming
In the book Little Wars, an odd addition to the bibliography of this renowned pacifist,
and with that, we leave you.
We have just raced through two of the early giants of science fiction,
and next episode, we'll start looking at some of the largely forgotten works that turned out to be
a huge influence on some of science fiction's most well-known authors.