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H. G. Wells
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 H. G. Wells is simply the most important writer to influence both directly, through his works, and indirectly, through the
other major writers in his tradition, the course of science fiction in its formative decades. Brian W. Aldiss has called him "the
Shakespeare of science fiction." The implications of Darwinian evolution and social criticism are the major themes of his works and his
principal novels, The Time Machine
(1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896),
The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the
Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and
The First Men in the Moon (1901), together with five collections of short stories later combined as
The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927). He was a popular and influential intellectual throughout the first half of the 20th
century, devoted to the idea of human progress.
Although he lived until 1946, he was never personally associated with genre science fiction; nonetheless many of his
stories were reprinted in the early years of Amazing Stories as paradigms of the new kind of fiction which editor Hugo Gernsback wished
to bring forth. He called himself a Scientific Romancer early in his career, and was certainly the pinnacle of that genre that
preceded science fiction and existed parallel to it into the 1940s in the works of Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley, E. Zamiatin, Karel Capek,
and George Orwell (to name only the five most important writers influenced by Wells' early works). No major writer in the early
decades of science fiction was so isolated as to be unaffected by Wells, and it is certainly recognized that Campbell and Heinlein as
writers were particularly and enduringly immersed in his intellectual attitudes and literary techniques, and helped bring them into
conventional usage in the genre.
"The Land Ironclads" (1903) is a vision of future tank warfare. It is part of a significant tradition of future war fiction
that began in the 1870s and flourished between 1890 and 1914 (and continues to this day outside the genre boundaries of science
fiction in such works as The Third World
War (1978) and the recent "techno-thriller" subgenre). One of the hallmarks of this type of
fiction is the invention of a new and terrible weapon. It is also, like Kipling's "With the Night Mail," part of the subgenre of
"invention fiction" that thrived in the late 19th and early 20th century, the age of wonderful new machines that were transforming the world
for better or worse. These two genres were often combined in stories of new war machines or of the invention of "the weapon to
end war."
But Wells went beyond the normal bounds of invention fiction (as he had in his earlier Scientific Romances) and future
war fiction (generally set the day after tomorrow and devoted to warning the reading public of some imminent political danger in the
real world) into a vision of a transformed world, in which young urban engineers conquer pastoral, chivalric warriors through science
and technology. This is the story in which Wells could claim to have invented something real (as later, the bazooka was invented in
the original Buck Rogers story in Amazing). It is specifically notable that Wells was proud of his invention, with the same attitude
that Campbell later encouraged in Golden Age writers. In Wells'
Experiment in Autobiography, he reminisces about visiting the front lines
in World War I: " . . . an old notion of mine, the Land Ironclads, was being worked out at that time in the form of the Tanks, and it
is absurd that my imagination was not mobilized in scheming the structure and use of these contrivances." He goes on to deplore
the use of the tanks "timidly and experimentally," when they were "of immense value as a major surprise that might have ended the war."
Critic John Huntington points out (in The Logic of
Fantasy, 1982), that "The Land Ironclads" represents a significant transition
in Wells' fiction and thought, from the "artistic" (as in the time machine, Cavorite, invisibility) to the realistic. Wells here focused
on the possible and the practical in his invention and envisions its use with crushing, even inhumane, logic: it solves the problem and
the forces of technology win. Huntington faults the fiction because the land ironclad fails to function symbolically; it is a
literal, mundane tool, murderously efficient. But in this Wells becomes most significantly a forefather of hard sf. While this story is
less aesthetically satisfying than many of his earlier fictions, it is clearly an intellectual model for the hard sf of the 20th century.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.