Distrust That Particular Flavor

And now, walking to school, past the house where I had discovered World War II, I passed the post office, newly marked with metal signs bearing the black-and-yellow Civil Defense symbol used to indicate fallout shelters. Sirens were tested regularly, along with something called “the system,” and the dial of my first transistor radio was marked, twice, with that same symbol, indicating the two frequencies set aside for Civil Defense.

Freed by Wells and his literary descendants to roam, in my imagination, up and down the timeline, I had stumbled upon World War III, and the end of civilization.

Wells had discovered the end of civilization long before me. It must have seemed that it kept coming back throughout his life to oppress him, the vision of cataclysm and systemic collapse, fueled by some basic immaturity of the species — to bring an end, at least temporarily, to modern history and technological progress. He must have expected it constantly, through World Wars I and II. He would have been terribly aware of it looming again, in the years immediately before his death, with the military use of atomic energy an established fact.

In 1905 he had imagined it arriving with the military use of aerial bombs against civilian targets, but then he would see zeppelins bomb London, and after that the Blitz, and then the advent of the German rocket bombs. In The Time Machine, wars are a thing of the immemorial past, something necessarily transcended on the way to some safer, more rational basis for society.

None of which mattered to me as I cringed my way through the heating up of the Cold War, expecting any moment the wailing of the sirens that would call us all into the basement of the post office. The television dramatization of Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, a popular novel set in a small Florida town in the immediate aftermath of nuclear war, had sealed my fate. Something akin to Sartre’s dictum that hell is other people was dawning on me, and part of the cloud of constant secret terror I inhabited was some conviction that my neighbors, confined in what I imagined as the stifling darkness of a Civil Defense fallout shelter, would prove to be my own personal Morlocks.

The appeal of The Time Machine for me, then, became one purely of escape. I longed for Wells’s ellipsis, the long blur forward, “night follow[ing] day like the flapping of a black wing.” I longed to find myself on the far side of whatever terrible, inevitable history was about to happen. I saw, with utmost clarity, the World War II howitzers, on the town’s courthouse lawn, dusted with the falling detritus of Chicago, and the sky above glowing with a new and deadly clarity.

I didn’t understand that Wells himself had written a more thorough end to humanity, in The Time Machine, than any I imagined descending on America as I knew it. The perversely enjoyable melancholy that pervades the garden of the Eloi emanates not from the hidden underworld of the Morlocks, nor from their grisly symbiosis with their former masters, but from the exquisite and utterly deliberate job of world- wrecking Wells has performed for us. Writers before and after Wells have enjoyed the heady pleasures of reducing the great monuments of their day to imaginary ruin, but few have attained the degree of symbolic elegance, nor the convincingly forlorn realism, of the Palace of Green Porcelain.

The Palace proves to be the ruin of a museum. A single humble box of safety matches, preserved in an airtight glass case, is the treasure the Time Traveler takes with him from that museum of man. A last working token of technology: light and destruction both, in a palm-sized packet. Matches, camphor, and a heavy lever broken from a nameless piece of machinery, to serve as club and pry bar.

He leaves the museum with the tools of his early ancestors: fire and the club.

I had my own ancient tool of destruction, and taught myself, crouching in secret places, to disassemble it, my impossible, scary, secret provision from history. I lightly oiled the parts and hid them separately, wrapped in rags. This being Virginia in the early 1960s, I easily obtained a box of ammunition, alarmingly heavy finger-thick shells with bullets the color of a new copper penny.

I possessed the pistol, it seemed to me, much as the Time Traveler possessed his matches and his makeshift club, though far less purposefully. He leaves the Palace of Green Porcelain with a plan, and I had no plan, only a global and unexpressed terror of impending nuclear war, and of the end of history, and the need to somehow feel in control of something.

Three years into my discovery of history, it was announced that Soviet ballistic missiles had been deployed in Cuba. My encounter with history, I absolutely knew, was about to end then, and perhaps my species with it.

In his preface to the 1921 edition of The War in the Air, Wells wrote of World War I (still able to call it, then, the Great War): “The great catastrophe marched upon us in daylight. But everybody thought that somebody else would stop it before it really arrived. Behind that great catastrophe march others today.” In his preface to the 1941 edition, he could only add: “Again I ask the reader to note the warnings I gave in that year, twenty years ago. Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’ (The italics are mine.)”

The italics are indeed his: the terminally exasperated visionary, the technologically fluent Victorian who has watched the twentieth century arrive, with all of its astonishing baggage of change, and who has come to trust in the minds of the sort of men who ran British Rail. They are the italics of the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever, the less evolved. And they are with us today, those italics, though I’ve long since learned to run shy of science fiction that employs them.

I suspect that I began to distrust that particular flavor of italics when the world didn’t end in October of 1962. I can’t recall the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis at all. My anxiety, and the world’s, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on, so much of it, and sometimes today the world of my own childhood strikes me as scarcely less remote than the world of Wells’s childhood, so much has changed in the meantime.

I may actually have begun to distrust science fiction, then, or rather to trust it differently, as my initial passion for it began to decline, around that time. I found Henry Miller, then, and William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others, voices of another kind, and the science fiction I continued to read was that which somehow was resonant with those other voices, and where those voices seemed to be leading me.

And it may also have begun to dawn on me, around that same time, that history, though initially discovered in whatever soggy trunk or in whatever caliber, is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries.

This is a much more directly autobiographical piece than I’m ordinarily prone to, and the result of a failed project. I had been commissioned to write an introduction for a new edition of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and found myself unable to complete it to what I imagined would be the publisher’s expectations. It was supposed to be about Wells, not about me, yet this personal narrative kept shouldering aside my not very effective attempts to sound like an academic historian of science fiction (probably because I am so thoroughly not that).

Will We Have Computer Chips in Our Heads?

MAYBE.

But only once or twice, and probably not for very long.

The cyberpunk hard guys of science fiction, with their sharp black suits and their surgically implanted silicon chips, already have a certain nostalgic romance about them. Information highwaymen, cousins of the “steam bandits” of Victorian techno-fiction: so heroically attuned to the new technology that they have laid themselves open to its very cutting edge. They have become it; they have taken it within themselves.

Meanwhile, in case you somehow haven’t noticed, we are all of us becoming it; we seem to have no choice but to take it within ourselves.