The Apocalyptic Fables of H. G. Wells

Abstract

In his book Going to Miami (1987), which is about the futuristic ethnic and cultural mix that has developed in Miami as a result of Cuban and Latino immigration, David Rieff expresses his outrage at having to share his flight from Kennedy to Miami with two students from the University of Miami, a ‘muscular-looking, blond-downed’ white boy and a ‘tall black girl’. Although the boy is reading Dubliners, Rieff is convinced from overhearing their slangy conversation that ‘the copy of Joyce was a bit of protective coloration’ and that the students have ‘a collective IQ barely above room temperature’. Indeed, they remind him of the post-apocalyptic world divided between ‘the perfectly formed, brainless Eloi’ and ‘a hideous, competent tribe of subterraneans, the Morlocks’, in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. As Rieff notes, ‘The Morlocks look after the Eloi, and intermittently, pause to eat them, a perfectly sensible arrangement which the traveller (played by Rod Taylor in the fifties film) screws up. These kids across from me, incapable of uttering a humane sentence, were Eloi. There was nothing whatsoever in their heads and … I wanted to eat them.’¹