The Time Machine

The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells

            It’s been a long time since I’ve written about a book. The truth is the last few months in my life have been very hectic. I moved, which was way more complicated and stressful than it needed to be, and I’ve been working a lot, up to six or seven days a week sometimes. I’m also “working” on my “novel” (barf) and I have other things to do and since I can’t fit everything into one day I often have to choose one or the other. Unfortunately the ol’ book blog, and books in general, have often been the “other”. I was also briefly in jail (violence against cops) and hospitalized, for a spell, with a prolapse of the face. The surgeons had to staple it back on. And on top of that I’m constantly tired.

            In between reading The Third Reich and The Time Machine I wasted a bit of forever struggling to get halfway through one really awful book (To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf), which I had planned to write about here because I was really looking forward to reading it since it’s a really famous beloved classic but god, it was so horrifyingly bad. As bad as Pride and Prejudice. I tried and tried and eventually I had to move on. One day I’d like to finish it so I can tell the world about how shitty it was and is. Really drained me. I almost swore to never read another book again in my life, that’s the level of repulsion I felt. It was in a way like a really painful break-up. You feel murdered, betrayed and obliterated for a few months or so but then you realize you’ve got to pick up the pieces of yourself so you pour the bottle down the kitchen sink and take a long hot shower and put on some pants and go back outside.

            So to wash the taste of Virginia Woolf out of my mouth I read The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and The Time Machine, which is the book I’m going to talk about first, mostly because I feel like it was more the medicine I needed, and I just finished it last night, so it’s still fresh in my head, and because I feel like I have more to say about it.

            I’m really ashamed of myself for not reading this book when I was in middle school. When I was thirteen. There was an overlong and tragic period in my life (years 10-15, probably older really) where I was into painfully sad and dorky nonsense like Dungeons and Dragons and trashy fantasy novels. I was obsessed with knights and castles and troll-slaying and all the other trappings of the really awful trashy fantasy novel. I suppose that I was enamored with the idea that somewhere out there was a world that was more fantastic and heroic than this real world, hostile and pitiless, that I found myself imprisoned in. Which is how it felt at the time. All those years wasted trapped indoors brain-damaged by escapist fantasy books with embossed lettering and an elf on the cover. So many hours of pointless unhappy teenaged masturbations spent friendless doing nothing but sitting on my stupid ass. I never had the fortune of having a guide to tell me to read this and don’t read that, an older friend or brother to hold my hand and make sure I don’t make bad choices. Those are only in movies, I guess. Of course my parents were no help, but that’s another story for another time.

            The Time Machine would have been such a great gift for a lonely, unhappy and angry teen such as the one I was for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that it would have lifted me up from the ghetto of fantasy and into the paradise of science fiction. Though I wasn’t savvy enough to think of it at the time I’ve developed a pretty good working idea on why the science fiction genre is superior to the fantasy genre, and why I think it’s better for our society in general. Indulge me for a moment here while I talk about what is quite possibly the least important topic in the history of humankind. It’s pretty simple: fantasy promotes fascism and sci-fi does not. This is not to say that all fantasy is fascist and all sci-fi isn’t but I think it’s generally true. Fantasy is about characters who are empowered by their birthright with mystical abilities or portentous destinies and who have to use these gifts to save the world on behalf of the little ones, the uninteresting and faceless peasants (so basically exactly like racial nationalism). As a whole it's very romantic and unintellectual and mostly a mess of lamely fascistic wish-fulfillment power worship that preys on the weak minds of the lonely, unhappy, powerless and disenfranchised who wish that they, in whatever fashion possible, could one day be a person of consequence instead of what they are, which is a nobody, a zero. I have a roommate who is addicted to that terrible Game of Thrones television show. He watches it all the time and sometimes I hear it when I’m in the kitchen or otherwise puttering around. From what I can tell the show is about two things: objectifying women (by showing some tits so a nerd can beat off or by having the characters engage in really demeaning sex) and searching for newer and more appalling ways to glorify the military and warfare in general. As if the military didn’t get enough congratulations. Game of Thrones not only sucks the military’s dick, it also lets the military cum on its face and probably sticks a tongue up the military’s asshole too, it’s called analingus and it’s something you only do to someone you really like. There are more than enough hawkish cheerleaders out there (a disgustingly large and vocal number really) but you know what doesn’t have enough friends in this world? Liberty, equality and fraternity, that’s what. I also think that Harry Potter is a terrible thing to expose children to.

            A good deal of sci-fi is pro-military and fascist (Orson Scott Card and Starship Troopers I’m looking at you) but the best of it is not. Science fiction is a lot like punk rock in one respect, in that they are both at their core anti-establishment. And if it’s not anti-establishment then it’s not punk rock. Likewise with sci-fi. There is a sort of anti status quo spirit that’s really important to sci-fi. I think a good thing to compare something like Game of Thrones to would be the original series of Star Trek. Game of Thrones is a world where the protagonists are depraved militaristic aristocrats who command armies to burn and pillage and the common man is just a powerless, voiceless plaything in the dramas between the vain and power-hungry elite. And these are the people you’re rooting for! You are literally asked to arbitrarily pick one violent slave owner over another. Just flip a fucking coin. So in that respect it’s exactly like the real world, and the viewer is being brainwashed and preconditioned into seeing one fascist autocrat as his buddy, instead of some other fascist autocrat. In Star Trek, by contrast, the crew of the USS Enterprise live in a democratic utopia where technology, science and rationality have ameliorated the physical and material needs that keep so many today in poverty and want. Everyone is educated and nobody is exploited. The society is completely equal. One of my favorite things about the original series is that nobody on that ship is drawing a paycheck. Everyone in Starfleet is there because they want to be there, on a mission of exploration, to expand the borders of the knowable, to show us back here on the merciless and inhospitable Earth what exactly the human spirit is capable of. It would be a good standard for our species to hold itself to. A nice, reasonable and completely realistic set of goals. The polar opposite is something like Harry Potter where technocrats who are born better than us save the day.

            Back on topic: I was really impressed by The Time Machine. I adored it. It isn’t really a fantastic work of art by any stretch of the imagination but I don’t think that things like plot, characterization or more technical aspects of writing are especially important when talking about sci-fi. What’s important in sci-fi is the clarity of future vision. And ho boy does Herbert “Groovy” Wells ever have a clear future vision. The Time Machine is about a future where the class system (a very real and pervasive problem right here today) is a tumor that has gone unaddressed for so long that in the intervening years humanity has undergone radical speciation. It’s a world where the upper and lower classes have devolved into semi-intelligent animals that prey on each other in some form of mutually symbiotic class cannibalism. It’s fantastic. When talking about sci-fi it’s important to know the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction. “Hard” sci-fi is more grounded in the materialistic and mechanistic realities of the universe. “Soft” sci-fi is more often about society and the organisms that make it up. I like both but I’m definitely more in love with the latter. I’m less interested in how the space rocket gets to Mars than in what happens to us when we get there. I was surprised by how soft The Time Machine was. Since it’s a book about a Victorian Brit building a time machine, which will never be possible in Victorian Britain or anywhere else, I suppose that I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I guess I think of hard sci-fi as being more traditional or old-fashioned, though I don’t think that’s really true at all. The Time Machine like a socialist pamphlet with a thin veneer of science fiction, which is more than all right in my book. In fact I’d prefer to read much more of this sort of thing during my lifetime if at all possible.

            I’ve also developed a system for cataloging sci-fi, a system of my own invention, which I think works out great. I draw a distinction between what I call “kinky” and “non-kinky”. Non-kinky sci-fi asserts that our future is basically bright and that through cooperation we can conquer the outer and inner spaces, that good things are in store for us and that technology will make us better men, et cetera. Think Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and 2001. Kinky sci-fi sees our civilization as a sham, sometimes our whole reality as a sham, and our species as barely intelligent predators who will eat each other alive if given half a chance. William S. Burroughs (though as I’ve said before fuck that guy), Thomas Pynchon, Phillip K. Dick, Neuromancer and Mad Max are all kinky. One is not superior to the other and both have their merits, mountains and valleys and all that. One is just more cynical, but given the sort of person I am (given to long bouts of pessimism and misanthropy, mostly work-induced) I more often feel myself drawn to the kinky kind. It also tends to be a bit more avante garde, experimental and over all better written than the non-kinky sort. Maybe a good way of summarizing it is that non-kinky sci-fi is for ideas and kinky is for feelings. One is the brain and one is the heart. Or the gut. Whichever you prefer. I was pleasantly surprised by how kinky The Time Machine was. The last few chapters are reminiscent of a really lurid H.P. Lovecraft story, where under the dark red light of a bloated and dying sun all that remains of life on Earth is foul lichens and sinister crustaceans that graze on the shores of a black and motionless sea. It’s a very cynical view of our future. I wasn’t at all expecting that.

            I was also struck by how bad of a writer H.G. Wells is. He’s sort of a gifted storyteller and passionate future prophet but an awful writer. Phillip K. Dick is a poor writer too but in neither case do I feel that the author’s clumsiness at all detracts from my enjoyment. When I read this kind of book I don’t worry about plot or consistency or poetry or anything, I just strap myself in and enjoy the ride. I will say that the one thing that really grated on me about this book is that H.G. Wells writes as though someone gave him a thesaurus as a birthday gift and he up and decided to marry the fucking thing. One of my least favorite things that writers do is when I can very physically sense that they looked up fancy-pants words to season their writing with when older and simpler words would probably go down much easier. Here’s a selection of painful ten-dollar words from the very first paragraph: expounding, recondite, incandescent, trammels, paradox, and last but not least, fecundity. Jesus Howard Christ. At no point in The Time Machine does his infatuation with the thesaurus ever abate. There's a paragraph towards the end of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima where Mishima or his translator decided to use the word "adumbrate" or some derivation thereof about a thousand times. It's not a long paragraph but man does it hurt like a kick in the teeth. "Adumbrate" is a word with several different meanings, all of them poetic and flavorful and simpler on their own so why not just go with one of those? Faulkner does it too, and both Mishima and Faulkner are a thousand times better prose writers than H.G. Wells so I guess it's a mistake even a master is capable of, and I suppose what do I know, they're writers who are immortalized in culture and I'm just some dork sitting in his tiny room thinking about the stutter steps of more interesting writers than I'll ever be.  It’s not a deal-breaker but in my sort of clumsy mental manifesto about writing I envision writing as an Occam’s Razor where the simplest and most soulful is the best and there isn’t anything simple about “fecundity” or “recondite”. The goal isn’t to dazzle me with pretentious diction. The goal is to sear my balls off with your irradiated and lysergic vision of the future where in the shadow of the crumbling ruins of human civilization our brain-damaged and mutated descendants barely cling on to whatever meager, pitiful shreds of their humanity remain.

            So to wrap this puppy up I guess what I’m trying to say is that I really love the science-fiction genre and I wish that I had understood why I like it and why it is good earlier in my life. It plays all the right notes for me. Could talk about it for days, and believe me, if you get me going I will. Sometimes I feel bad for my poor coworker, who is also a book reading type, and has to hear about this sort of shit all day long. Poor guy. I was so happy when they landed that one-ton metaphor on Mars just a while back. If something had gone wrong I would’ve cried.