Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships

     Ever since its first publication, H G Wells’ The Time Machine has fascinated readers and writers with the notion of being able to travel to the past and the future. Various writers have played with Wells’ original idea: I once admired Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine, which managed to combine elements of the original novel with the same author’s The War of the Worlds, but last time I read it, I found it rather disappointing. Roland Wright’s A Scientific Romance is another favourite, which weaves in elements of and characters from Wells’ original story. And now, I’ve finally read Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships, which Arthur C Clarke lauds on the cover as being almost better than the original.

One of the problems with time travel is that it’s the concept that’s most interesting; secondary are the epochs a writer chooses to visit, and often the plot only comes third. Baxter is hooked on the idea that the very invention or discovery of time travel begins to alter the future as soon as the first journey takes place – link to Ray Bradbury’s ‘butterfly effect’ here – and so Wells’ traveller has set in motion multiple worlds and multiple possibilities, along with the idea that it’s therefore impossible to go return to a time one has already visited, and for it to remain the same as ‘last time’ (if you see what I mean). And this is the start of the hero’s problem, as he wishes to return to the future some 800,000 years hence, the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, and save Weena…

So, attempting to return to Weena’s world, our hero is stopped half a million years into the future in a different world where Morlocks are the future of humanity and have incredibly advanced technology; one of them becomes his time-travelling companion for the remainder of the novel. They return to a different and earlier England and meet the hero’s younger self, are transported to a version of 1938 where the Great War is still going on and both sides are using time travel to try and defeat each other, which leads to our travellers spending some time in the Palaeolothic era, where another future track is seeded by a group of colonists from 1938 who remain behind, and create an astonishing future, while destroying their home planet through global warming…

We get imagined utopias in the far future, warnings about our own present, glimpses from Wells’ other novels where he imagines warfare in the future as well as world government, and an overlap with Olaf Stapledon’s famous Last and First Men, when Baxter also tries to imagine the remote future of our species, or at least what it may become.

There is also a meta-narrative here of course, in that Baxter is not only playing with Wells’ original narrative in his novel, but of course also has all the ideas that other novelists have come up with and explored in terms of time travel available to him… There is so much crammed in here; while it’s an enjoyable yarn, at times it feels a bit ‘Boys’ Own Paper’-ish, and at others it feels almost chaotically out-of-control.

I have realised how long it is since I read Wells’ original tale and feel I ought to go back to it; I do feel that Baxter has achieved a tour-de-force here, and am tempted to agree with Arthur C Clarke’s judgement. I have always been intrigued by time travel tales. Given the choice, I’d want a brief and safe trip back to the time of Bach and Shakespeare, and maybe a visit to ancient Rome; not sure about the future… Where and when would you go?

Christopher Priest: The Space Machine

     I obviously liked this novel, for this is the fifth time I’ve read it (over a period of 40 years, mind). It’s a tribute to the lure of H G Wells’ two novels which are archetypes of science fiction, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Priest has played deftly with the two novels, as did Ronald Wright in A Scientific Romance, though now I think I prefer the latter’s riff on Wells’ creation…

Deviously, Priest firstly gets his hero and heroine together, and then through the use of a prototype time machine manages to get them to Mars: as he is writing in a pseudo-nineteenth century style and vein, as well as pastiching Wells’ novels, obviously it’s a Mars as was imagined at the end of that century, with canals and cities and humanoid Martians, divided into two species, rather as the Morlocks and Eloi 800,000 years in Earth’s future in Wells’ original novel.

What we gradually realise as they explore the planet and learn about it, is that they have arrived there in the time leading up to the projected invasion of Earth which Wells described; Mars is a worn-out planet gradually becoming a wasteland unable to support its inhabitants (now where have we come across that before?) and so its masters are seeking pastures new. Priest develops and fleshes out the ideas only hinted at by Wells, especially the monsters’ need to feed on human blood, and their powerful weaponry.

The story struck me, this time around, as a bit plodding and woodenly crafted. Our plucky pair – in a nineteenth-century swashbuckling manner, stow away on the first spaceship of the Martian invasion of Earth, and of course are unable to do anything when they arrive back home; the invasion proceeds very much as Wells describes it, and the pair encounter a philosopher among the destruction and chaos of south east England, who turns out to be none other than Wells himself, of course, and he finds their tale very far-fetched.

It’s a competent yarn, much more War of the Worlds than Time Machine, and I think I can dispense with a sixth reading…

True escape from lockdown…

Finally some suggestions for the science fiction readers among you, when true escapism is what you crave…the top five science fiction novels in my list.

     Austin Tappan Wright: Islandia. I came across this years ago, when I was researching my master’s thesis at the Science Fiction Foundation, in its previous existence in Barking. It’s a door-stopper (1000+ pages) of a utopia from the earlier decades of the twentieth century, set in a land on Earth but not the Earth as we know it, and at risk because of the machinations of the world we know. Someone from our world explores and grows to love the place… pure escapism, and surprisingly addictive, I have found.

Arthur C Clarke: The City & The Stars. I’ve always felt this to be his best, streets ahead of Childhood’s End, which others have seemed to prefer. It’s stunningly ambitious, for in a sense the humans on Earth in a thousand million years time have what is basically eternal life, as they are captured and encoded in a huge computer, and are regularly brought back to life, re-created, for another existence (an idea which quite appeals to me – at least I’d get all my reading done, then). There are only two settlements left on the planet in the remote future, this one with built-in eternity, and another, which is much closer to our lives at the moment: contact between the two must take place, and contact with an intelligence from another world, too.

     Walter M Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz. In almost apocalyptic times, the ‘best’ of apocalyptic novels, though completely without any hope at the end. A few survivors eke out a basic existence on the scraps of our world after a nuclear war; civilisation is preserved by an order of monks, and over centuries rebuilds itself until, inevitably, history repeats itself. A creation of the doom-laden Cold War years, it remains a masterpiece among many novels with a similar premise, for its unusual take on survival after armageddon.

Mary Shelley: The Last Man. Miles better than Frankenstein, less hectic in its pace, this is a very relevant tale for the moment, set in a republican England of the late twenty-first century (though not one which we would anticipate today) where a deadly disease gradually wipes out humanity until, as the title suggests, there is finally only one person left. It’s romantic in its notions and in its sweep, as well as playing to everyone’s megalomania: what would you do, and where would you go, when you are the last person left?

     Ronald Wright: A Scientific Romance. This is an excellent late twentieth-century take on HG Wells’ The Time Machine, which takes the traveller north from London to Scotland, where in the far future a world closely resembling that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth seems to have evolved. There have been a number of novels which have played with Wells’ original idea, and this one is an extremely good and cleverly devised tale; I hesitated between it and Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine, which manages to blend The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds very skilfully.

If you have been moved or inspired to read any of the novels on any of my lists while you have been in lockdown, which not take a few minutes to say what you thought, in a comment at the end?

H G Wells: Star-Begotten

Another book bought twenty years ago and not yet read… and I can see why. Just a bit of tidying-up in my SF collection and this pot-boiler from late in the writer’s career can definitely go. He still has a bee in his bonnet all those years after The War of the Worlds.

The narrative style irritates, for a start: that of a slightly superior parent talking patronisingly to a child. And then there’s the plot – or total lack of it, for it’s no more than a series of conversations, that grow ever more didactic, and insane. It’s the story of a rather dull bourgeois man, who grows up questioning the world as a boy – as most children do – and this spirit is inevitably squashed out of him by all the usual pressures: growing up, study, work, family and so on, turning him into a conformist like everyone else.

Among his circle of friends, he latches on to the idea that cosmic rays are being deliberately directed at Earth by Martians – probably – who are seeking to convert the Earth and its inhabitants slowly and gradually into creatures more like themselves, in order to take over our planet, having failed with their direct invasion tactic; there are backward self-references to his own novel here, as well as to Olaf Stapledon‘s rather more serious work Last and First Men. His hero is clearly certifiable, as are the friends with whom he colludes, and yet the idea spreads and has its brief moment of media fame; he spends time ‘researching’ his idea, and even goes as far as to suspect his newborn son and his wife of being Martian changelings…

But, if you have reached this point thinking, why is lit.gaz wasting time even writing about such tosh, pause for a moment and reflect that Wells hasn’t completely lost the plot: there are several quite clever twists in the thinnish plot. Researching his crackpot thesis, he meets schoolchildren – whom he suspects of being changelings – who are exactly the same as he was at that age; we make the connection, even if our hero doesn’t, right until the very end of the novel, when he is about to crack up.

And again, although I wondered initially how Wells could waste his time with such meanderings in 1937, he does explore the idea, still relevant today, that humans have lost their grip as a species, that the world is now too complex by half for us to know what we are doing to it or ourselves, and certainly not to be in control of much of it. What does the future hold for us? Wells visualises a new kind of human, superseding all the baggage of the past, rather than one galloping towards the horrors that would arrive two years later. But interestingly, too, fake news rears its head: when the crazy Martian takeover by cosmic rays theory goes public, the notion that the media can and will be used to tell a credible public anything and to manipulate them shamelessly, is there, eighty years before our time…

It’s not a good book; it was a waste of eyeball time, as I like to put it. And yet, the Wellsian prescience is still there, and the notion of our limitations as a species is stronger now than eighty years ago, I think.

The end of the world

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is, I suggested in my last piece, possibly the first disaster novel. I found myself wondering why it should appear at that particular moment, why she should come to consider the prospect of something more powerful than humankind bringing our species to its end.

H G Wells did something similar when he faced the world with Martians in The War of the Worlds; humanity was saved not by our efforts or powers but by microbes. M P Shiel considered the destruction of the human race in The Purple Cloud near the beginning of the twentieth century. But it’s only really since the invention and first use of nuclear weapons that the apocalyptic novel has come into its own.

And Shelley’s novel is different in another way: she kills off all of humanity bar one: Verney is the last man and has the two final chapters of the book to try and begin to come to terms with this; even Shiel’s hero, if my memory serves me correctly, eventually finds a companion, of the opposite sex, too, so that all can begin again. But to be the last one? Of course, never to be certain, too, for in the vastness of the world how could a single man ever check the entire rest of the planet to be sure? Why would one waste time and sanity searching?

There is a power and an attractiveness in the concept, surely, as Shelley realises, for every reader can and surely will substitute her/himself for the hapless hero of her novel: what would we do in the circumstances? Where would we go? Would we travel or settle? How might we retain our sanity? At the end of the novel, Verney sets off in his little boat to circumnavigate the Mediterranean, clinging for safety to the coastline, hoping against hope that he might meet someone…

When I was teaching, there was a novel (written for teenage readers) by Robert O’Brien called Z for Zachariah, about a young girl who is perhaps the only survivor of a nuclear and biological war which destroys the USA, apart from her small valley with its own isolated microclimate which protects her from fallout and the rest: she must survive on her own, and the focus is on the practicalities of this, a factor which occurs not at all to Mary Shelley: everything in her novel is there for the taking… In class we would explore for a while the logistics of survival – water, food, clothing, shelter, health and sanity, and whether it would all be worthwhile; we had some very interesting discussions; no two classes ever reacted in the same way, and there were many interesting and creative responses to the end of O’Brien’s novel.

There is wonderful material for fantasy in the idea that one could have the whole world to oneself: choice of house or home, country; one could go anywhere and help oneself to anything one needed, indulging oneself materially, at least. One could go on an orgy of destruction as did Shiel’s hero… and one would have, in the end, to face the same question as did Defoe’s isolated hero with only a small island for his home: what is the point of it all? Defoe’s hero turns to his God for help and reads his Bible – which of course he rescued from the wreck – nowadays we, I think, are probably more likely to revel in playing God in such circumstances…

Post-apocalyptic futures…

I’ve been thinking about the taxonomy, or classification, of various types of what might loosely be called science fiction, in the light of earlier posts on this blog. There are differences and overlaps to consider, before I come on to today’s topic.

For instance, some utopias and dystopias might also be classified as alternative futures: Ernest Callenbach’s visions of California turning itself into an independent state run along ecological lines (Ecotopia, and Ecotopia Emerging) might have been considered alternative futures in the 1970s when they were written. Many dystopias are clearly also alternative futures, or were when they were first written. And I suppose the argument might be made that all utopian visions are alternative futures, although that doesn’t actually get us any further.

But then it seemed to me, as I thought first about Richard Jefferies’ After London (see the preceding post) that the classification also needs to take post-apocalyptic visions into account, as many of these may also be alternative future scenarios…

Enough theorising, time to consider some of my favourite examples. One of the best science fiction novels ever (see my listings pages) is Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, also one of the most pessimistic visions of humanity I can call to mind. Hundreds of years after a nuclear war, monks – still the repositories of knowledge – preserve the relics of the ancients (us) as civilisation slowly and painfully rebuilds itself, over many centuries, until it reaches such an advanced state that it can once again build nuclear weapons. And yes, da capo. Double post apocalypse yes, dystopia? I’m not sure. in M P Sheil’s The Purple Cloud, poisonous gases wipe out humanity permanently; in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, it’s only temporary.

Apocalyptic scenarios were very popular in the 1950s and 1960s when consciousness of the fact that our species had reached such a high point in its development that it was now capable of not only destroying itself, but possibly most life on the planet, gradually dawned on writers. Not all visions used nuclear war as the trigger, in George Stewart’s Earth Abides it’s a disease, in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids it’s genetically-engineered plants plus laser weapons in space, though in The Chrysalids there has been nuclear war and attendant mutations.

Wyndham and JG Ballard are perhaps the obvious masters of the post-apocalyptic in different ways, although Christopher Priest, with The Death of Grass and The Empty World, rates a mention. All of these writers bring to science fiction, and to post-apocalyptic writing as a new genre, a consciousness of the ultimate fragility of our species, and indeed, of sentient life. Perhaps the first to consider this in a scientific fashion was HG Wells in The War of the Worlds, and interestingly Christopher Priest provides a marvellous twist on this story and on The Time Machine in his wonderful novel The Space Machine.

However, this is all to view everything from a twentieth century perspective, where science fiction itself is a recent notion, allowing us to ignore or forget writers from longer ago who also considered such notions, which brings us back to Jefferies, and of course, to Mary Shelley and The Last Man, which still gets my award for one of the best post-apocalyptic novels, for who can resist her fantasy of having the whole world to oneself to do with what one likes (with only oneself for company)?

Ronald Wright: A Scientific Romance

My post on dystopias (24 July) sent me back to apocalyptic fiction, as I thought it would, and firstly to another re-read of Wright’s splendid A Scientific Romance.

Writers’ fascination with HG Wells is easy to understand: his two novels, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are early masterpieces of speculative fiction. Christopher Priest wove the two plots together marvellously in his tribute The Space Machine, which I also thoroughly recommend. Wright’s take is different: Wells’ machine is scheduled to re-appear at the end of 1999 and does so, and is taken possession of by another traveller who ventures five centuries into the future…

The novel was written in 1998; the threat of BSE and CJD as well as HIV (don’t medics and scientists love acronyms!) inform Wright’s future, as well as the effects of climate change; civilisation apparently collapsed in the mid 2040s; after a melancholy exploration of the remains of the land, he comes across a small group of survivors clustered together, clinging on to the remains of civilisation on the shores of Loch Ness…

One could, uncharitably, argue that there’s nothing original here: he’s lifted the concept from Wells, and imitated 19th century apocalypses like Mary Shelley‘s The Last Man and Richard Jefferies‘ After London, or MP Shiel‘s The Purple Cloud (and re-visiting this one is next on my list), and Wright acknowledges these in his notes. And yet, it’s a stunningly good novel – first novel – which won awards when first published.

It’s framed well, by an expired love triangle remembered with fondness by one of the members addressing the others; it’s erudite, abounding in references to texts from the past as he writes about our vanished present which has become a lost past in the year 2501; it’s for our times not the 1820s or 1880s or 1900s: it gains n some of its power from the aspects of our very own lives that we can see becoming our nemesis in the near future. For a genre that often leaves characterisation very thin, Wright does well: his central characters do come to life and haunt us. I think in my league table he comes pretty close to A Canticle for Leibowitz.

After the Apocalypse…

Thinking about utopias and dystopias in recent posts reminded me of post-apocalyptic scenarios. It might seem as if that particular strand in literature must be a relatively recent one, in that only since the invention of nuclear weapons have we been forced to accept the possibility that we could annihilate ourselves as a species.

But no: back to Mary Shelley, author of the more famous Frankenstein. She wrote a novel which I think I prefer, because it’s rather less frantic and over-written than the former – The Last Man, which describes just that situation: a plague gradually kills off all human beings save one, who travels through the empty and deserted remains of civilisation, reflecting on his fate. It’s an astonishing effort of the imagination, and deserves a wider audience. Early in the twentieth century, in The Purple Cloud, M P Shiel imagines a similar series of events.

Perhaps because we are such a social species, writers have striven to imagine the opposite. Perhaps because we are a warlike species, they have sought to imagine us ultimately defeated, by greater forces than ourselves – H G Wells could have had us completely annihilated by the Martians in The War of the Worlds, but chose not to, developing a different message for the human race by pointing out the fragility of any organism when faced by unknown microbes or bacteria.

And then there’s the fantasy element, as we read any of these novels: what would I do in that situation? What if I had the world to myself, all its resources and riches: how would I play with them all? Where would I go? Shelley’s hero wanders through the beautiful places of Europe…

John Wyndham imagines a combination of elements dealing the death-blow to humanity in The Day of the Triffids: another warning about humans over-reaching themselves. Deadly plants which can communicate with each other wipe out the blinded human race, except for a small enclave which retreats to the Isle of Wight, there to exercise constant vigilance against the dreaded weeds.

One of my favourite tales is Earth Abides, by George Stewart: a storyfrom the 1950s again sees humans almost wiped out by a plague; there are some survivors, but what interests Stewart is how they would struggle to survive in small numbers, with their limited and compartmentalised knowledge, how much they would need to re-discover and re-invent in order to sustain civilisation, and how inevitably with the passage of time and generations, so much knowledge and ability would be lost, and the gradual sinking into primitiveness and savagery would be hard to avoid. It’s a poignant tale, perhaps somewhat dated now, but good for making one think about the fragile veneer of civilisation…

I think the best, and most harrowing and haunting, at least to my knowledge, has to be Walter M Miller‘s A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s set in a remote, post nuclear holocaust future where a bastardised version of the Catholic Church strives to preserve the knowledge of the past in its monasteries; slowly and painfully, civilisation is re-established, but only for humans to gradually and inevitably make the same ghastly mistakes all over again: nuclear weapons are re-invented and wreak their horrific toll once more. Such a pessimistic vision of the species and its history could only have come out of the 1960s, with the threat of annihilation hanging over the world. It’s beautifully written, painfully described, and leaves us with no hope.

But now, I’m off to re-read a novel from the 1990s: A Scientific Romance, by Ronald Wright, in which a Wellsian time machine maroons a traveller in a post-apocalyptic Britain…