In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [63]
3. SCIENTIFIC
Wells is acknowledged to be one of the foremost inventors in the genre we now know as “science fiction.” As Robert Silverberg has said, “Every time-travel tale written since The Time Machine is fundamentally indebted to Wells.… In this theme, as in most of science fiction’s great themes, Wells was there first.”
Science fiction as a term was unknown to Wells; it did not make its appearance until the 1930s, in America, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres. Wells himself referred to his science-oriented fictions as “scientific romances”—a term that did not originate with him but with a lesser-known writer called Charles Howard Hinton.
There are several interpretations of the term science. If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells’s scientific romances are by no means scientific; he paid little attention to those boundaries. The “science” part of these tales is embedded instead in a worldview that derived from Wells’s study of Darwinian principles under Huxley and has to do with the grand study that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This, too, may account for his veering between extreme utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man came from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were a profound shock to the Victorian system. Gone was the God who spoke the world into being in seven days and made man out of clay; in his place stood millions of years of evolutionary change and a family tree that included primates. Gone, too, was the kindly Wordsworthian version of Mother Nature that had presided over the first years of the century; in her place was Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw/ With ravine.” The devouring femme fatale that became so iconic in the 1880s and 1890s owes a lot to Darwin. So does the imagery and cosmogony of The Island of Doctor Moreau.
4. ROMANCE
So much for the “scientific” in “scientific romance.” What about the “romance”?
In both “scientific romance” and “science fiction,” the scientific element is merely an adjective; the nouns are “romance” and “fiction.” In respect to Wells, “romance” is more helpful than “fiction.”
“Romance,” in today’s general usage, is what happens on Valentine’s Day. As a literary term it has slipped in rank somewhat—being now applied to such things as Harlequin Romances—but it was otherwise understood in the nineteenth century when it was used in opposition to the term novel. The novel dealt with known social life, but a romance could deal with the long ago and the far away. It also allowed much more latitude in terms of plot. In a romance, event follows exciting event at breakneck pace. As a rule, this has caused the romance to be viewed by the high literati—those bent more on instruction than on delight—as escapist and vulgar, a judgment that goes back at least two thousand years.
In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye provides an exhaustive analysis of the structure and elements of the romance as a form. Typically a romance begins with a break in ordinary consciousness, often—traditionally—signalled by a shipwreck, frequently linked with a kidnapping by pirates. Exotic climes are a feature, especially exotic desert islands; so are strange creatures.
In the sinister portions of a romance, the protagonist is often imprisoned or trapped, or lost in a labyrinth or maze, or in a forest that serves the same purpose. Boundaries between the normal levels of life dissolve: vegetable becomes animal, animal becomes quasi-human, human descends to animal.