Science Fiction

The early science fiction stories of H. G. Wells are still great fun to read. The author,H. G. Wells, of such classics as "The Time Machine", "The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "The Invisible Man," is named “father of science fiction”. The “War of the Worlds’’ was being written in 1896. Wells describes his utopias as being instituted after the holocaust of a war, and he has shown the inadequacy of the previous separatist system. In "The War of the Worlds," the benefits of the World State in the efficient organization and development of a society are obviously enormous. There is significant monetary savings due to money, time, men and resources not being devoted to defense systems and warfare. “The War of the Worlds’’ is the story of the invasion of earth by horrible aliens who may be in our future. Wells describes the war between Martians and Earthmen as a war between the comfortable present of suburban English complacency and the world of the future of horrifying technology and inhumanity. It is also a war between the Earth and the planet Mars. Earth wins the war because of the superior complexity of its ecology. In addition,the ecology is the energy of the existence. A plot of “The War of the Worlds’’ is an allegory of the conquest of a primitive society by technologically sophisticated colonists with no respect for culture. England falls to the imperialist Martian’s war machines. In the end, the Martians perish because their organisms possess no antibodies against terrestrial microbes. England is a metaphor referent for modern mankink that is the primitive state of nature. The War of the Worlds is in terms of an allegory of the world’s body. Wells has studied biology under the great Victorian biologist, T. H. Huxley,and Wells had taught science and written scientific articles. Wells came of age at the end of the great Victorian period of scientific optimism. A time of rapid scientific advances had happened in the nineteenth century. Therefore, it is not surprising that Victorian scientists assumed that scientific advancement was progress and that progress was moral. According to Darwin, the theory of evolution was morally neutral and came to apply to social change. Man and his society would go on getting better and better, and science would be the instrument of change. As a biologist, Wells sees us only as one more species that was swept along by the flow of evolution and blind to our nature and our future. As human beings, Wells helps us discover our destiny. He finds a small area of hope that intelligence can free us from the cosmic laws and control all life. Therefore, his early fiction often dramatizes this conflict of hope and fear for the future of man. The idea of progress in the early science fiction storeis is simply one important metaphor. "The War of the Worlds," in which human survival is threatened by invasion from Mars, will be classified as dealing with the external limits. Wells has used his human imaginations. And we, the readers of science fiction stories are invited to suspend our disbelief and embark upon an adventure dealing with events that have not yet happened but which might occur tomorrow. The story begins with a statement that may be untrue but at least plausible. At the beginning of the novel, Wells states: "being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own" (1). The alien biology is introduced in the opening sentence. Wells shows mankind clashing with an alien life form. The ending of the novel is actually an ironic restatement of the main theme. The germs that kill the Martians are simply a “deus ex machina’’ imagined by Wells to make a pleasing conclusion. The novel is constructed with a classic simplicity. As a biologist, Wells views mankind not as the completed achievement of creation, but as one species evolving in competition with others. These species are adapting to the same environmental pressures and making the same hard fight for survival. In the War of the Worlds, the evolution is as a kind of mutation resulting in the confrontation of man with different species. According to Wells, science fiction is the expression during a life crisis to a particular social environment. The Martian’s fighting machines demonstrate the potential for cruelty and exploitation in the human's mind, but it is nevertheless stressed that the Martians are not "evil." The Martians are moral and highly efficient. The Martians are a possible future of mankind. Wells reminds us that for the monstrosity of the Martians must have been humanoid. The future man is presented as a cruel intellectual creature which is all head and no body. Therefore, the invasion of the Earth is literally where the future implodes upon the present. The Martians and their terrible war machines emerge from the cylinder and begin the devastation of the countryside. The Martians, who take the fresh blood of other living creatures and inject it into their own veins, are monsters who prey on the humans they capture. As they make their way to London, it seems as though nothing can stop their progress toward the complete destruction of Earth. The Martians fall victim to simple bacteria and die. Thus the Martians are vampires: ghosts that suck the blood of life and enjoyed from our own world. Wells has used metaphors in a plot that reveals their meaning through dramatic action from the clash of the contradictory attitudes toward progress. The Martians stand for progress. The human characters represent attitudes toward progress from blind ignorance to insure terror. Wells regards the future with a fascinated dread. As a scientist, Wells knows the adaptive change is inevitable. Wells is appalled by the future he foresees of each new figure of terror and death. Biological progress is whatever happens to help a species keep alive and perhaps to multiply. It is always relative to the conditions for survival. Wells uses the same idea at the end of the "War of the Worlds." The Martian invaders, who are less fit to survive than the simplest organism, are the symbol of the ultimate peak of human evolution. Wells staes that,"for my own part, I was much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable development of moral ideas as civilization progressed." He looked back at the days of peace before the invasion of the Martians. In the time after the end of the war, he comments that our views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events. We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding-place for Man. we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. His progressive optimism is not gone; he implies that men may later reach new planets too. He accepts the fact of progress. "The War of the Worlds" also contains striking and indeed prophetic insights such as the picture of modern total warfare. With its panics, refugees, underground hidings, Resistance movements, poison gas, and a “spontaneous” bacteriological weapon. Science is the true demonic master of all the sorcerer’s apprentices in Well’s stories, like Frankenstein or certain folktale characters. They have revealed and brought about destruction and monsters. The Frankenstein stories are even more look to science and technology for the leverage by which human beings can move the world. The basic message is usually, “There are some things that man was not meant to know, Doctor”, there is still an aura of striving, an attempt to achieve greatness. "The War of the Worlds" warns us about all levels of violence to which warfare must inevitably escalate if the resources of technology are turned simply to the task of producing the most efficient weapons possible without heeding the morality of the weapon’s use. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, science fiction began to distinguish itself by its recognition of science and technology as factors molding in our society Science fiction is a kind of prose narrative treating a situation that could not exist in the world that we know. After all, science fiction is the literature of change. All the stories give obtrusive moral advice: tomorrow will be different than today. Science fiction, with its tremendous world view, and with all of time and space to play with, gives its adherents a view that span galaxies and a breath of vision that exposes provincialism and prejudice for the concept that they are. Science fiction novels specially and deliberately look to the future. Writers and readers of science fiction accept as an unspoken premise that what might happen tomorrow is directly related by cause and effect to what is happening today. Wells is the first and the most significant Science Fiction that is based on the vision of the evolutionary socio-biological prospect for mankind. His basic situation is the destruction of the Victorian environment. The framework is set in surroundings such as the small towns and villages of southern England in "The War of the Worlds." As Wells observed, the “fantastic element’’ is “the strange world” that is reached by means of a strange invention into the Victorian world in the guise of the invading Martians. Wells published his first novel, "The Time Machine" (1895). The year 1896 brought "The Island of Dr. Moreau" followed by "The Invisible Man" in 1897. "The War of the Worlds" was published in 1898 and in 1899 Wells published both "When the Sleeper Wakes" and "Tales of Time and Space." In all, Wells published approximately 120 books in his lifetime. Wells died on August 13, 1946, having seen in two world wars. Many of the horrors he had prophesied in his novels. Work Cited The War of the World. H. G. Wells. New York Oxford University Press 1977. Metamorphoses of Science fiction. Darko Suvin. New Haven and London Yale University Press 1979.