The Mark of the Beast: The Early Science Fiction

Abstract

The term’ scientific romance’ is a good indicator of what the books it describes contain. Like the more recent ‘science fiction’ it yokes together two apparent opposites: science and art, knowledge and fantasy. In Wells’s scientific romances, man is both a questing spirit trying to break through the barriers of material reality and an imperfectly intelligent animal shaped by the forces of nature. The heroic spirit seizes on the power of science as a means to free itself, but as the consequences of Wells’s ‘impossible hypothesis’ are explored (Literary Criticism p. 241), finds itself disappointed or even deconstructed into a terrifying bestiality. Robert P. Weeks has claimed that disentanglement from an imprisoning reality, followed by exhilaration, then disillusionment or defeat, is the basic plot behind all Wells’s fiction (Critical Essays pp. 25–31). It informs his non-fictional writings too. Nowhere, however, is it more intensely expressed than in The Time Machine. Into this, his first book-length story, Wells poured ideas and obsessions he had nursed for years, working over the text again and again till it rang true.¹²