I sought out this specific collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories because they were gathered, ordered, and edited by Ursula K. Le Guin. I had read a few of Wells’s longer stories (War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine), but I read them as entertainment, not as literature. I don’t mean that with any kind of judgment. Wells writes entertainingly and to entertain, and to read a story to hear a good yarn is a perfectly legitimate enterprise. I just mean that I hadn’t paid any attention to Wells as an artist, making artistic decisions. Coming to these stories in this collection through the eyes of Le Guin is like taking a small course on Wells as a writer, or seeing his works through the eyes of friend. It shaped the way I see and understand Wells’s writing.
Instead of presenting the 26 short stories, spanning 40
years of Wells’s life, in chronological order, from the first written to the
last, Le Guin has grouped the stories by genre: “Because almost all Wells’s
stories are genre stories and because I value them as such, I arranged them,
not chronologically, but in sections by kind.
Each section has a brief introduction, discussing what kind of stories
they are, where this kind of story came from and what it may have led to” (xii). It is a clever way to group an artist’s work,
and it makes you conscious of how each story relates to the other stories
within its grouping, and of course, how blurry and artificial those lines are
in the end. Her first grouping is not by
any larger-recognized genre that I’m familiar with: “In one way or another all
the stories in this section have to do with what somebody sees” (italics
in original, 3). And while these first 7
stories are built around gifted vision, Le Guin uses the category to set the larger
theme that she sees running through all of Wells’s work: his incredible ability
to bring a scene, a landscape, a person, a world to life. It was a joy to slow down and see how
effectively and efficiently Wells could describe a thing, especially in a world
that predates big cinema. So often when
I read 21st century novels, I can feel the writer writing for the
big screen, or even for the prestigious small screen. Wells had no such experience with cinematic
scenes of war or romantic lighting or catastrophic destruction, and yet his
descriptions bring those very things to life.
Here’s a small taste, from “A Dream of Armageddon” (grouped by Le Guin
in “Technological and Predictive Science Fiction”). In it, a man and woman are
feeling a war-torn part of the world. They are resting for a moment when war
planes fly over-head, firing indiscriminately (and this was written before
World War I, even before the Wright Brothers had been to Kitty Hawk): “Overhead
in the sky flashed something and burst, and all about us I heard the bullets
making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly thrown. They chipped the stones
about us, and whirled fragments from the bricks and passed . . .” (194). You can hear and see it like it were on a
screen before you, and yet it is all a part of his finely-tuned imagination.
I was struck by how modern Wells’s language felt, especially
given that some pieces were nearly 125 years old. Both the general sentences and the dialogue
are vibrant and present, alive and human.
I realized that one of the reasons he reads so quickly and easily is
that his language is unobtrusive. His words
give you the image, create the feeling, propel you forward, and then disappear. The world is alive and the people
understandable and the situations both human and intriguing.
There are a few stories that I found hard to stomach for
their racism. Le Guin tries to smooth
over the issue by noting that “the writer’s sympathy is with the black man,”
but that is an unfortunately facile way to apologize for the problems at its
root. She suggests that the problem with
“The Lord of the Dynamos” is essentially the use of the N-word, but the
problems are much deeper. Even if Wells
expresses sympathy for Azuma-zi, there is a world of racist assumptions and stereotypes
propping Azuma-zi up.
I found “The Country of the Blind,” the story that concludes
the collection, to be fascinating in that it seems to make an argument
unintended by the author and unrecognized by the editor. The story involves an isolated people in a
small valley of the Ecuadorean Andes.
For whatever reason, the environment his led to all the inhabitants, for
generation after generation, to become or be born blind. One day, a mountain climber from Bogota accidentally
finds himself stranded in the valley. He
initially thinks his gift of sight will make his superior to, and a natural
leader of, the blind people, but he finds that the world and life they have
built favors blindness and he is outmatched by them. Because he talks of things they cannot
comprehend, they consider him a lunatic, heretical, and an idiot. He is dependent on them for survival, living
entirely in their world, and he submits himself to their ways. The story is supposed to be about how a
visionary is stifled and dismissed among the ignorance of the masses who are
unable to even understand the language of the visionary. And to that end, the story is effective. But Wells undercuts this idea by having the
seeing man be such an arrogant fool. First, Bogota (the name the blind people give
him) is a rich mountain climber, indulging in his own abilities, not trying to
improve the world in any way. Second, the near-immediate thought that Bogota
has once he discovers where he is, is the refrain “In the country of the blind,
the one-eyed man is king.” And his expectation
is not to serve or help anybody, but the rule over them. He comes into the village like an empirical
force, learning nothing of the local culture or their ways and assumes they are
childish and ignorant and in need of his wisdom and experience. My sympathies were entirely with the blind
folk. Wells showed that if the world
were set up with differing abilities in mind, that there is no actual handicap
to blindness, that in fact there are advantages and special gifts that come
with it. It is living in a seeing world
that refuses to accommodate blindness that disadvantages the blind person.
Like all of us, Wells is blind to his own assumptions, and
when they stick out so apparently to me as they do in these last two stories I
describe, it is a little painful. But I have discussed only the two stories
that are problematic, so please don’t let those two stories dissuade you from
reading the other 24 presented in this collection. In fact, I would definitely recommend “The Country
of the Blind” because there is a lot of thought in it, and even when it has
sour tastes, there is a lot to relish.
Wells has a lot of interesting approaches to interesting topics. Some tales are like Twilight Zone episodes,
and some are unlike anything I’ve read before, artful and contemplative and
unexpected. “Under the Knife” and “The Star”
are two that come to mind. H.G. Wells
touches upon nearly everything that will be the stuff of science fiction
throughout the 20th century. Strange magic shops (“The Magic Shop”),
body switching (“The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”), seeing through time and
space (“The Crystal Eggs”), new technology making war more horrifying still (“The
Land Ironclads”), oversized beasts (“The Valley of the Spiders”), underwater
discoveries (“In the Abyss”), the nature of the soul and out of body
experiences (“The Stolen Body”), and so much more. All told from interesting, human perspective
with thoughtful explorations of what these things mean for the world.
This collection is a delight, and having Le Guin’s guiding voice
to move through them is a treat.
