"The Time Machine" and the End of Man

Author(s): Alex Eisenstein

Source: Science Fiction Studies , Jul., 1976, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jul., 1976), pp. 161-165
Published by: SF-TH Inc

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239020

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 THE TIME MACHINE AND THE END OF MAN 161

forms utopists warn that we cannot have it both ways: the choice is between a safe
and stable society or one that prohibits and inhibits creativity: such is the center
of Anthony Boucher's Barrier. In his society even changes of musical time or key
are prohibited. Thus these iconoclastic writers, debunking the utopian dreams of
the past, proceed to the favored topic of mutilation or its equivalents-brain-
washing, prenatal stunting of the mind, hypnopaedia, lifelong psychological,
conditioning, prefrontal lobotomies. And from all this there emerges the per-
sistent moral that if you gain one thing, you lose another. Voluntary lobotomies
and amputations remove our propensities to evil; but they reduce us to vegetable
existence or to futile and limited pseudo-creativity in harmless areas. All this
eventuates, overtly or covertly, in the doctrine that a utopian society is self-defeat-
ing.
In sum, iconoclasm is the complement of utopianism; overemphasis on utopias
as models must not be allowed to obscure the normative and iconoclastic
functions of utopias. So marked has this iconoclastic nature become in our own
time that, with supreme irony, utopists have now turned on their own genre-or
on the common notion of it-and are increasingly iconoclastic toward the notion
that any ideal society-even an imaginary one-is either possible or desirable.
Utopia is being overturned by its own iconoclasm.

*NOTE. This paper was prepared for Seminar 129 of the 1975 MLA Convention.

Alex Eisenstein

The Time Machine and the End of Man

As many critics have observed, H.G. Wells was preoccupied very early with specu-
lations on evolution, in particular the evolution of Man and the prospects of in-
telligent life, whatever its origins. The Time Machine (1895), The War of the
Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901) are the best known examples
of his interest in such matters, but certain of his shorter works also reflect this
concern. Frequently, Wells would recapitulate and refine his major ideas, min-
ing old essays for new story material or refashioning the elements of one tale in
the context of another; various scholars have explored the interpenetration of
these works in some detail.
In "The Man of the Year Million" (essay, 1893)' and The War of the Worlds,
Wells outlined one model for the ultimate evolution of humankind. In both
works, the culmination of higher intelligence is a globular entity, brought about
by the influence of steadily advancing technology. In each case, it mainly consists
of a great, bald head, supported on large hands or equivalent appendages, with
thorax vestigial or entirely absent. The Martian is a direct analogue of the Man
of the Year Million, as Wells himself indicated by citing his own essay in the body
of the novel (?2:2).2 The Selenite master-race of First Men is a kindred expression
of this vision of enlarged intellect-especially the Grand Lunar, with its enormous
cranium, diminutive face, and shriveled body. Of more special relevance to the
Martians are the malignant cephalopods of "The Sea Raiders" (1896) and "The
Extinction of Man" (essay, 1894), and as well the predatory specimen in "The
Flowering of the Strange Orchid" (1894).
At least one scholar has referred to "The Man of the Year Million" as "anoth-
er version" of The Time Machine, apparently because the domeheads take refuge
underground from the increasing rigors of a cooling surface.3 This connection

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162 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES

is rather tenuous, at best; by such criteria, First Men also might be deemed a vari-
ant of The Time Machine. In fact, the Further Vision of the latter constitutes a
curious inversion of the above essay, but scholars and critics have failed to perceive
this relation. Their failure depends on a more primary error, which is this-the
notion that Man is extinct at the climax of the novel.
That the progeny of Man is not absent from the final moments of the Further
Vision should be evident from a passage that appeared (until recently) only in the
serial version. This deleted episode is a philosophic bridge, a key to what hap-
pens at world's end. It introduces the successors of Eloi and Morlock: a hopping,
kangaroo-like semblance of humanity and a monstrous, shambling centipede.
According to Robert Philmus, "these two species must have descended in the
course of time from the Eloi and the Morlocks; and again the 'grey animal, or grey
man, whichever it was' is the victim of the carnivorous giant insects."4
Philmus accentuates the elements of degeneration and regression in Wells's
Darwinian conjectures; thus he asserts that The Time Machine embodies a vision
of the hominid line "irrevocably on the downward path of devolution."5 The
general validity of this viewpoint cannot be disputed; nevertheless, the extreme
construction he places upon it leads him considerably astray. Though Wells used
terms like "retrogression," "degradation," and "degeneration" in his essays, they
were for him relative terms only. He would hardly have portrayed Man as revert-
ing literally into so primitive a creature; such "devolution," I submit, is not in
the Wellsian mode.
Philmus may have been encouraged in this faulty genealogy by the Travel-
ler's observations of the Elysian world of the Eloi, which seems devoid of animal
life, excepting a few sparrows and butterflies (?4b/288; ?5a/292).6 Of course, this
stricture need not apply to the murky lower world, which could easily harbor all
sorts of vermin. If butterflies prosper above, in a world of flowers, then centi-
pedes should thrive below, in a realm of meaty table scraps and other waste. And
at journey's end, "a thing like a huge white butterfly" makes a brief display, as a
demonstration of what has survived the English sparrow (?11/328).
The Morlocks of Millenium #803, moreover, are not a race destined for per-
petual dominance. This much is made clear by numerous facets of their exist-
ence-their lack of light, the disrepair of much of their machinery, their crude
and inefficient method of harvesting Eloi. Although the Time Traveller refers to
the Eloi as "cattle" and supposes that they may even be bred by the Morlocks
(?7/311), the rest of the book does not show the latter practicing much in the way
of husbandry. Indeed the absence of other land animals in the lush upper world
may well be the result of earlier predations by the Morlocks. So the best as-
sumption is that the relationship between the two races is unstable-that the
Morlocks are depleting their latest dietary resource, which must eventually go
the way of its predecessors.
The kangaroo-beast, therefore, can only be a tribe descended from the Mor-
locks, now scavenging the surface in the long twilight. The irony of the new situ-
ation is evident, and quite typical of the many ironic aspects of the novel: the
hound is now the hare, the erstwhile predator has become the current prey.
The ancestry of this pathetic creature is confirmed by its morphology. Con-
sider the appearance of the Morlock: "a queer little ape-like figure," "dull white,"
with "flaxen hair on its head and down its back" (?5b/299), and a "chinless" face,
with "great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes" (?6/306). Compare that with the Travel-
ler's description of the later species: "It was.. .covered with a straight greyish hair
that thickened about the head into a Skye terrier's mane.... It had, moreover, a
rounded head, with a projecting forehead and forward-looking eyes, obscured
by its lank hair" (325). The ape-like brow-ridge is a tell-tale vestige of the Mor-
locks, as well as the lank hair that now shields the creature's eyes. The shaggy
visage identifies the kangaroo-man as a once-nocturnal animal only recently

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 THE TIME MACHINE AND THE END OF MAN 163

emerged from darkness. Another indicative trait is its rabbit-like feet, which are
compatible with the "queer narrow footprints" of the Morlocks (?5a/292).
From a close inspection the Traveller surmises, the nature of the beast: "A
disagreeable apprehension flashed across my mind.... I knelt down and seized my
capture, intending to examine its teeth and other anatomical points which might
show human characteristics..." (326). He might also be looking for the signs of
yesterday's carnivore.
This Morlock offspring is no longer extant in the climactic scene of the Fur-
ther Vision, but it is not the Last Man observed by the Traveller. He arrives in the
era of the giant land-crabs, then passes on to the time of the great eclipse, where
nothing seems to stir-at first:

I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained.... But I saw nothing moving,
in earth or sky or sea. The green slime alone testified that life was not extinct.... I fancied I
saw some black object flopping about...but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I
judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock.

A neaby planet encroaches on the bloated sun; the eclipse progresses, becomes
total, and then the shadow of heaven recedes:

I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me.... I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return
journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal.... It was a
round thing, the size of a football perhaps...and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed
black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt
I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sus-
tained me while I clambered into the saddle. (?11/329-30)

The kangaroo-men hop about on elongated feet; the men of the year million hop
about on great soft hands; the thing on the shoal hops about on a trailing mass of
tentacles. This similarity in modes of locomotion is hardly a literary accident.
In contrast, the Sea-Raiders never hop, but creep along at a steady pace when
traversing solid ground.
In general form the Last Creature resembles a large cephalopod. Is it a prim-
itive survivor from the ocean deeps, like Haploteuthis in "The Sea-Raiders," or is
it a being like the Martians, the hypertrophic end-product of intelligent life?
Most of the evidence points to the latter-a highly specialized and atrophied
edition of genus Homo. Note particularly the size of the creature; it is about "the
size of a football"-which is to say, about the size of a human head.
The Time Traveller contracts a "terrible dread of lying helpless" in the dying
world soon after he becomes fully aware of the thing on the shoal. There seems
to be a special revulsion attached to this monster, even though it can hardly pose
a real threat to the Traveller. Before it commands his attention, he feels "inca-
pable of facing the return journey"; afterward, the "dread of lying helpless" in its
presence impels him to turn back forthwith. Consciously, the Traveller does not
perceive the human ancestry of this apocalyptic organism, but apparently the un-
conscious realization of its true nature makes him flee the final wasteland. Not
the oppressive conditions, nor the extinction of Man, nor even the approaching
oblivion triggers his retreat; rather, he recoils from the knowledge, however sub-
merged, of what Man has become.
And what has Man become? Certainly not the inflated intellect of a Martian,
nor that of a Sea-Raider, despite the somatic affinities. In one important respect,
the Last Man differs greatly from these other fantastic creations: it is a being
without a face. Even Haploteuthis has a definite, mock-human visage-"a gro-
tesque suggestion of a face." To be sure, the super-minds in the Wellsian canon-
the million-year domeheads, the Martians, the Grand Lunar-all suffer from
facial attrition, yet certain features, especially the eyes, always remain. Not so

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 164 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES

with the fitful creature on the beach; the swollen surface of its body seems utterly
blank, devoid of perceptual apparatus, and its aimless, reflexive actions indicate
that it is virtually mindless. In the end, then, Man has become little more than a
giant polyp.
All these transmuted beings emphasize two primary functions of life: in-
gestion and cerebration. The intelligent Sea-Raiders, for example, come to earth
in seach of a better feed. Both the Martians and the domeheads have actually sur-
rendered their alimentary canals to cortical advances, and the Martians, like the
man-eating squids, also come to Earth for new sustenance. The mindless tropism
of the Strange Orchid impels it to siphon off human blood, whereas the Martians
strive for the same end with a ruthless deliberation.
The ultimate survivor of The Time Machine is not a great brain; as with a
polyp, therefore, all that is left is a great ravening stomach. (For this, too, its size
is appropriate.) Here, in counterpoint to the Martian terror, is the Wellsian im-
age of ultimate horror.
And so we confront a symbolic paradox: the same emblem represents both
the zenith and the nadir of mentality; the opposition of head and stomach, of
mind and body, is fused in this one corporeal form. In Wells's iconography, it
stands for the ultimate degeneration, whether of body or mind. He disapproved
less, we may suppose, of the absolute intellect, reserving his greatest dread for the
other, the mindless all-devouring. Yet there can be little doubt that, despite sar-
donic ambiguities, as in "The Man of the Year Million" and The First Men in the
Moon, he truly preferred neither; his best wish was that Man should master him-
self without ever losing the essence of humanity. To this end Wells devoted most
of his long and active life, even unto Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), where
a faint hope still lingers that some ultra-human entity will arise to survive the im-
pending decline of Homo sapiens. This was Wells's last desperate hope, and a
very feeble one it was; nevertheless, near the end of his life, amid sickness and de-
pression, that glimmer remained. As the nameless narrator of The Time Machine
insists, when faced with the inevitable disintegration of Man: "If that is so, it re-
mains for us to live as though it were not so" (Epilogue/335).

NOTES

1. First published in The Pall Mall Gazette, Nov 9, 1893, this essay, with title changed
to "Of a Book Unwritten," appears in Certain Personal Matters (UK 1897), as does the other
essay mentioned in this paragraph, "The Extinction of Man."
2. Another avatar appears in "The Plattner Story," against a setting remarkably sug-
gestive of the Further Vision. Plattner, who is blown through a fourth spatial dimension,
finds himself on a barren landscape of dark red shadows, backed by a green sky-glow. He
watches the rise of a giant green sun, which reveals a deep cleft nearby. A multitude of bul-
bous creatures float upward, like so many bubbles, from this chasm. These are the "Watchers
of the Living," literally the souls of the dead: "they were indeed limbless; and they had the
appearance of human heads beneath which a tadpole-like body swung" (para. 26). Signifi-
cantly, Wells had referred to his Men of the Year Million as "human tadpoles."
In many respects, this realm of the afterlife is a striking reversal of The Time Machine's
terminal wasteland, yet quite recognizably akin to it.
3. Gordon S. Haight, "H.G. Wells's 'The Man of the Year Million'," Nineteenth-Century
Fiction 12(1958):323-26.
4. Robert M. Philmus, Into the Unknown (US 1970), pp 70-71.
5. Ibid., p. 75.
6. ?7/311 = Chapter 7 in the standard form of the text (i.e., as published in the Atlan
Edition, the Complete Short Stories, and almost all editions since 1924), or Page 311 of Three
Prophetic Novels of H.G. Wells (Dover Publications, 1960). The chapterings of the standard

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 BERGONZI AND AFTER IN THE CRITICISM OF WELLS'S SF 165

and Dover forms (with "a" and "b" added for convenience) collate as follows: la = 1; lb = 2; 2
= 3; 3 = 4; 4a = 5; 4b = 6; 5a = 7; 5b = 8; 6 = 9; 7 = 10; 8 = 11; 9 = 12; 10 = 13; 11 = 14; 12a = 15; 12b = 16;
Epilogue = Epilogue. The deleted passage, pages 325-27 of the Dover text, would appear be-
tween the first and second paragraphs of Chapter 11 in the standard text.

David Y. Hughes

Bergonzi and After in the Criticism of Wells's SF

A review-article

Editorial Note. In the last fifteen years at least fifteen books have appeared in English on
H.G. Wells. Two of these-Richard Hauer Costa, H.G. Wells (US 1967) and Alfred Borrello,
H.G. Wells: Author in Agony (US 1972)-are so riddled with error and so ungrounded in their
interpretations that one can only wonder how they came to be published. One that I have
not read-James P. Wood, I Told You So!: A Life of H.G. Wells (US 1969)-has been de-
scribed to me as an entertaining and unpretentious biography for young people, Ingvar Rakn
H.G. Wells and His Critics (Norway and UK 1962) is invaluable for its record of the ways in
which Wells's books were reviewed in newspapers and magazines through 1920 but is often
untrustworthy, even absurd, in its assessment of those reviews and in its interpretations of
the books. The one translation-J. Kagarlitski, The Life and Thought of H.G. Wells (UK
1966)-suffers grievously from the handicaps pointed out by the translator, Moura Bud-
berg, in her foreword: those of "a critical work...about a writer he [the critic] has never met,
from a country he does not know and the politics of which it may be difficult to understand."
As a dissertation in 1964, Jack Williamson's H.G. Wells, Critic of Progress: A Study of the
Early Fiction (US 1973) was a solid contribution to scholarship, and it remains one of the
best places to begin the study of Wells. Lovat Dickson's H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and
Times (US 1969) has largely been superseded by the MacKenzie biography but remains
valuable for its account of the relationship between Wells and the Macmillans. Patrick
Parrinder's H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (UK 1972) is indispensable as a collection of
reviews and critiques published during Wells's lifetime. Finally, in this rapid survey of the
books 1961-1975 not reviewed in this essay, W. Warren Wagar's H.G. Wells and the World
State (US 1961) is unrivaled (though in my mind not wholly satisfactory) in its treatment of
Wells's social and political thought, and indispensable to any full understanding of Wells.
But with respect to the revival of interest in Wells as a literary artist, Professor Hughes has
surely chosen the six most important books. -RDM.

1. Bernard Bergonzi. The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. UK
1961 ix+226.
2. Mark R. Hillegas. The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-utopians. US
1967 xi+200.
3. Patrick Parrinder. H.G. Wells. UK 1970 viii+120.
4. Robert M. Philmus. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fictionfrom Francis
Godwin to H.G. Wells. US 1970 xii+174.
5. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. H.G. Wells: A Biography. US 1973 xvii+487. Also UK
1973 as The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells.
6. Bernard Bergonzi, ed. H.G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice-Hall,
1976, x+182, $7.95.

1. Fifteen years ago Bernard Bergonzi's The Early H.G. Wells asserted that Wells is "a sym-
bolic and mythopoeic writer" (p 166) who "could be considered an artist" (p 2). This modest

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