Week 2: In the Beginning – Mary Shelley and H G Wells
Speakers:
Since they have volunteered to go first, please don’t give them a hard time
Modern science fiction is said to begin with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus in 1818. Shelley was in her late teens when she wrote the novel, yet the story contains a huge amount of different themes and ideas still relevant today. This durability can be seen through countless reworkings, from Kenneth Brannagh and Hammer Horror, to the Goosebumps series of children’s books and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wells was also a pioneer of his time, and books such as The War Of The Worlds (1898) and The Time Machine(1895) drew visionary pictures which fascinated and terrified their audiences. 40 years later, the Orson Wells radio version of War of The Worlds caused mass panic across America when it was first broadcast. Both authors wrote at times when society was changing rapidly. For Shelley, The Romantic Era was a period of intellectual upheaval, promoting new thoughts about women, society, and science. Wells too belonged to an age where technology and science were developing rapidly. However despite these advances, underlying the ideas of progress and liberation were fears that these developments were dangerous and alarming, a concern reflected in both books.
Shelley and Wells were responsible for many of the central themes of science fiction:
The monster and it’s maker, time travel, degeneration of the human species, fears that technology will take over, the mad (?) scientist, alien invasion, and the self-sacrificing hero.
Main texts
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, (PF79700 Fra, see also V 0952/3, V1040; http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/other/ebooks/frank10.txt,
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengS.browse.html)
Nightmare - the Birth of Horror; Frankenstein (A/S office)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (A/S office)
The Time Machine H.G. Wells (A/S office, PF 86600 Tim, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengW.browse.html http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/other/ebooks/timem10.txt)
Related material
The X-Files - A
post-modern Prometheus
Any of the 116 filmed versions of Frankenstein! One is on the same tape as the programme about it mentioned above.
The War of The Worlds, H.G. Wells (A/S office, PF86600, V0582, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengW.browse.html
http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/class/sf/books/wotw)
The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells (PF 86600 Isl, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengW.browse.html; http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/other/ebooks/dmoro10.txt)
movie, A/S office
The Invisible Man H.G. Wells (PF 86600 Inv, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengW.browse.html; http://wiretap.spies.com/ftp.items/Library/classic/invisman.txt)
The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells (PF 86600 Fir, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengW.browse.html)
Bookmark biography of Wells (V2526/2527)
The Professor Challenger Stories (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, the Land of Mist, the Disintegration Machine, When the World Screamed) (PF85903; http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/other/ebooks/lostw10.txt)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, PF85000; V2666, V1079
The History of Mr. Wells, Michael Foot, PF86601 Foo
Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, Patrick Parruder, PF86601 Par
Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture, Jon Turney, 1998, Q930 Tur
Discussion
Topics/Essay Questions
· Identify some of the descendants of the classic texts of Wells or Shelley. How and why do you think that these classic stories developed in the way that they did?
· To what extent did Frankenstein’s monster become the archetype of monsters for the first half of the twentieth century?
· How have cultural concerns affected the changing nature of Frankenstein monsters?
· Who is the greater monster, the Morlocks, the Eloi, or the Traveller? (Use examples to demonstrate your argument).
· Look again at Wells’ views on eugenics in the context of the Eloi and the Morlocks of The Time Machine.
Quotes
“Science as the creator of monsters is the myth on which Mary Shelley founded science fiction early in the nineteenth century, and a continuing theme. In the middle of this century, our Frankenstein was usually atomic war and its spawn of hideous and/or supernaturally gifted mutants.
H.G.Wells’ Scientific Romances and a number of his short
stories set an intellectual, ethical and aesthetic standard that serious
science fiction still honors. His themes are far too complex to go into here,
but it is worth noting that practically everybody’s idea of what a time machine
is comes from The Time Machine, and
that the themes and imagery of that tale and of The War of the Worlds and The
Invisible Man have been reworked right through the twentieth century
without wearing out at all. Freud invented the unconscious; Wells put the
Morlocks into it; even the Marxists couldn’t get them out.” (Ursula LeGuin’s
introduction to the Norton Book of
Science Fiction)
“Later on I wrote a fantasy called The Time Machine in which a machine
travels through time. It was entirely fantasy, and the reader was bluffed past
the essential impossibility of the proposition entirely for the sake of the story....”
H.G. Wells, The Conquest of Time.
“Frankenstein was a mixture of Mary’s personal traumas, her concern that Percy Shelley’s overreaching could lead to disaster, her reading of Paradise Lost and attempts to make contact with her parents - William Godwin who had disowned her, and Mary Wollstonecroft, who had died giving birth to her - plus her understanding of the then current debates about “vitalism” and the origin of the life principle itself”
“Over time, though, Frankenstein has turned into a reworking of Faust and an allegory of the social responsibility of science”
Christopher Frayling, Sunday Times, 8 December 1996.
“Shelley intuited the power of a threat that would come to seem graver as time went by. In a world where industrial and technological change was already apparent, one sphere of existence was exempt. the natural world, although it could be reshaped by physical onslaught on the land, was not yet open to technological manipulation. the forms and varieties of creatures, the hierarchy of species, the biological imperatives of existence, were fixed points in a changing world”
Jon Turney, Times Higher, 3 April 1998