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DR. FEELSGOOD or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Future
- 2. My primary source is of course, The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. It is a story about the
dark future awaiting mankind and one man’s fear of inevitable societal atrophy. Wells’
protagonist, aptly named, The Time Traveller, uses a device he created using theoretical
scientific principles and laws of the metaphysical world, specifically, the fourth dimension. By
building an engine that can access what he refers to as the 4th dimension, or the time dimension,
the Time Traveller is able to transport himself forwards in time to the year 802,701. He debates
internally over what may have happened to humanity over that much time and fears they have
become savage or “less human” than they were in the Victorian age. “What might not have
happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into common passion? What if in this interval the
race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and
overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old world savage animal, only the more dreadful
and disgusting for our common likenessa foul creature to be incontinently slain.” This
assumption that humans will become more advanced or more powerful or even more terrifying
than we are now is a common trope in science fiction. Isaac Asimov’s collection of novels and
films like Equilibrium and Blade Runner depict advanced human societies possessing
supernatural powers like immense physical or psychological strength or advanced technology.
There are also depictions of advanced alien races that predate humanity. Films such as
Prometheus suggest humans were artificially inseminated onto the Earth and that our several
million years of existence is a mere momentary blink to other races that dwarf us in every way.
In almost any case, humans of the current age are inferior to humans and aliens from other times.
Wells takes the story in a different direction, however, having the Time Traveller come
upon two races dwelling in what used to be the Valley of the Thames: the eloi and the morlocks.
- 3. Both of these humanoid species are smaller than humans today and more primitive in many
ways, suggesting future human derivatives will not be more advanced or evolved but in fact less
developed. This may have created a fear in those writers who read Wells so great that they
refused to design futures where humans crumbled or society fell to ruin. The morlocks are
savage and vicious as the Traveller predicted but the eloi, who seem to more closely resemble
humans, are simpletons with low attention spans and no sense of purpose or knowledge of
struggle. They have no technology, only soft pillows to lay upon in between eating and
lovemaking sessions. The morlocks don’t put much effort into what they do either, emerging
from their underground lairs at night to prey upon defenseless eloi. The Traveller was wrong and
is perhaps more horrified by this discovery than he would have been had he been right. There is a
desire among humans to always seek the better version of ourselves. To discover that there is no
better version than what already exists would be akin to discovering that there is no God and
aliens are not really hiding among us. To have this knowledge would mean total loneliness and
pointlessness to existence. The Traveller escapes the Morlocks and travels billions of years into
the future to find the earth a dying vestige of its former lush, harmonic self. Wells makes note of
the sun having degraded to a monstrous red giant, nearing its own demise as well. As he sits on
the beach, looking out across the blasted landscape, he comes to the realization that there is no
great society awaiting us in the distant future and that all of life will simply turn to dust in the
sun, itself changing into a more savage version of itself as it approaches its own death. “A horror
of this great darkness came on me.” The point of including this even more depressing final act to
the already sad story is to show the relativity and more importantly the futility of all life as
readers understand it. The issues, politics, the lives we take so seriously and care so much about
- 4. mean nothing to the universe. Our hopes and dreams, our sacrifices; nothing will be remembered
in the future. The earth will still turn to a dry, salty rock in the wake of a magnified crimson sun
and anything you think you think will survive the test of time will have already become dust.
Wells tells us this depressing fact in order to tell us not to take ourselves so seriously.
The reason I chose this as the primary text for my term paper originally had nothing to do
with the themes present in the story, however it did have everything to do with Wells’ choices as
far as theoretical science is concerned and the public reaction to his description of time
travelling. What I have come to realize about The Time Machine is that it may have been the
most honest future ever dreamed by mankind. It is fully devoid of hope for salvation ala space
travel and it lacks the arrogance of technological and biological advancements we have come to
associate with futurescapes. This possible truth is irrelevant, however, for our purposes today.
What we can know of the future is that it is coming, nothing more. What is important relative to
the present is the science behind this story and how it may have affected the course of history.
On page 6 of the Norton Critical Edition, The Traveller references Simon Newcomb, “professor
of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University,” who gave an address at the New
York Mathematical Society in December 1893. He proposed at the time that a 4th dimension not
only existed but could be accessed if scientists were able to consider it properly. The Traveller
takes this theory and expands on it claiming that Time is the fourth dimension and that he has
developed a machine that can travel along this line of space. He describes this travelling as a
movement of the mind similar to the body going forward or backward but on a different line than
we are aware of. “Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are
passing along the TimeDimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as
- 5. we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.” The
Traveller goes on to claim that people can move their bodies as well as their minds through the
4th dimension. After this loose explanation, The Traveller presumably uses his machine to travel
through time and return with the tale of his experiences. The experience he describes is really
what I am after as far as my larger paper is concerned. On page 17 he describes the following
sensations: “There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback of a helpless
headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash...I saw the sun
hopping swiftly across the sky...Presently, I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of
night and day merged into one continuous greyness.” The traveller describes fast forward
motion, being able to see the world around his “time zone” pass by him even though the machine
remains in the same place and a blurring of light as he nears his destination. Despite travelling
along an axis previously unknown to mankind his description is almost exactly like travelling
from place to place in the three dimensions we currently know about, albeit a bit faster. This was
one of the earliest extradimensional reports to be given in literature. It was fictional and based in
theory and imagination only, but it was solid enough to be reproduced again and again by the
literary descendants of Wells.
What we are after here is really two parts to the same whole: the science influence and
the social influence of The Time Machine. Nicholas Ruddick, a scholar who released his own
edition of H.G. Wells famous novella, included a comprehensive study of The Time Machine’s
relevance over the past 106 years (from 2002) and how it holds up as one of the founding tent
poles of the scifi genre even before “scifi” was a term. Upon reading the review of Ruddick’s
work there is one sentence that sums up what the Time Machine has meant to the history of
- 7. humanity as we know it out of the picture entirely in his future. Intelligence lost and the planet
has swallowed its creations back before dying itself. This is very negative. Most future tales have
social problems related to class or race or a threat to the planet but they are never devoid of
human life. In every depiction, we are still there, perhaps fighting in the ruins of a world under
siege, but we’re still there. In Wells's Scientific Journal, he says himself, “The toneless glare of
optimistic evolution would then be softened by a shadow; the monotonous reiteration of
‘Excelsior’ by people who did not climb would cease; the too sweet harmony of the spheres
would be enhanced by a discord, this evolutionary antithesis degradation.” What he’s saying
here is that there is so much emphasis, because it is “sweeter”, on a humanity that advances and
changes for the better over time that there needs to be a dissenting voice that says, “But what if
the future sucks?” He wanted to be the man who posed the more honest picture of the future
where humanity falls away and returns to the dust as all things do when he knew the common
line of thought was the opposite. This is similar to the belief in UFOs and God as an almighty
entity that we cannot understand but feel is real and with us. We cannot fathom nothingness. It
was Goethe who argued that humans carry their immortality within them, meaning that we are
incapable of considering ourselves as “not there”. This is also known as the mortality paradox.
Because Wells was willing to broach the subject of human nonexistence he created a need for
reaction in others to say, “No, we will not go quietly into the night. We will endure and evolve
but most importantly we will endure.”
So then what of the technology? Does social change follow technology or the other way
around? One could posit that the technology of writing advanced with the dawn of science
fiction but was only able to flourish in the wake of Victorian social change. Wells was not an
- 9. story. The Time Machine’s plot is comprised mostly of The Time Traveller’s adventure in the
jungle of the future, attempting to save eloi from Morlocks and escape the hell he stepped into
alive. On page 52 of the novella, he enters the Palace of Green Porcelain and the story changes to
a reverence of times past before returning to the events at hand. He goes on to posit on page 61
that, “Once, life and property must have reached absolute safety...No doubt in that perfect world
there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had
followed.” He is talking about 800,000 years; how could he possibly guess at what life was like
for any span of time? If it were 2,000 years maybe even 5,000 but 800,000? Almost an entire eon
has passed and one man speculates on the entire middle and end? It makes little sense, which is
why I gather most of his descendants refused to go so far.
Simon Newcomb was a scientist who lived during the victorian age and he had a theory
that there is a 4th dimension that can be accessed by humans if they learn how to conceive it, that
is to say, how to conceptualize it. He claimed this dimension existed on a level of consciousness
that people had not been able to reach with the brain power and technology available to them but
they could do it if they were willing to consider the world in four dimensions. Wells references
Newcomb’s work in his novella as a background principle for how his protagonist’s time travel
device works. The Time Traveller explains this on page 6 of the Norton Critical Ed., “‘Professor
Simon Newcomb was expounding on this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month
or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a
figure of a threedimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions
they could represent one of four if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?’” This
oversimplified explanation of a metaphysical principle is based in real scientific theory but only
- 10. useful in terms of fictional work. However, this concept of traversing alternate dimensions or
discovering new ones that exist around us feeds the genre for an entire century to come. Writers
like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King used the idea of alternate dimensions heavily in their work.
The description of the actual time travel itself has also been replicated or rather recycled by other
writers and film directors. “The tinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful
to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darkness, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her
quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on,
still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the
sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight;
the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon a fainter fluctuating
band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the
blue.” The idea that we could see time passing at increased rates comes from this novel. The
Time Traveller’s description suggests that if time travel was invented in real life that a human
could perceive and comprehend the world around them as they moved through time. This would
mean that they still existed on the 3 dimensions we know of and be aware of their surroundings
whilst moving along a plane that exists in an extrasensory manner. In other words, how does the
brain even register what it is seeing in a timetravel situation? A concept like this would be
amorphous if not for Wells’ description. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? One the one hand,
because of this man the media world has an idea of what this theoretical experience looks like as
well as a way to discuss it and use it in literature and film. On the other hand, the concept of
“going forward,” “speed,” “seeing time move,” the ways that Wells describes them has created
the experience in ways people could and can understand. This contradicts The Traveller’s own
- 11. statement: “if they could only conceptualize the thing,” by giving readers a description that exists
in known spacetime: the three dimensions. By describing a principle that relies on
outsidethebox consideration in terms we can understand already Wells effectively crippled our
ability to “conceptualize the thing” in the way it needs to be in order to achieve it. This is a
theory, however, so don’t take this casual observer’s word for it. William T. Ross’s review of
Warren Wagar’s H.G. Wells Traversing Time (2005), confirms that Wells was drawn upon in his
time by other writers and even scientists for ideas. “But the more vexing question is how much
of the work is really history. There is little contextualization of Wells’s ideas and few attempts to
deal with the immediate popularity or lack thereof of individual ideas. So we get very little sense
of who among other thinkers of the time latched onto Wells’s latest rumination or proposal and
found themselves sympathetic, or which of his ideas had real‐world effects. (To use a bizarre,
sensational, and yet germane example, which Wagar does supply unsensationally, Leo Szilard
got the idea for the atomic bomb after reading Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free, in
which Wells, sure enough, has a nuclear device.) Once he became well known, Wells was
constantly approached by editors for journalistic essays. And he often complied.” Wagar was a
devotee of Wells’ work and wrote a compilation of Wells’ “greatest hits” having to do with time
travel and the future of humanity. Ross makes the distinction, however, that Wagar was highly
critical of Wells as well as enamored with him, so the assessment of Wells having affected
reallife science is not just false praise. It seems farfetched that one man’s contribution would be
considered so heavily and have such farreaching effects many years in the future, but this is not
an isolated example. Linus Pauling, a chemist who holds the shared title with Marie Curie for
most Nobel Prizes (one in 1954 for Chemistry and one in 1962 for peace efforts) was a scientific
- 12. celebrity who convinced the world that mass doses of Vitamin C could cure cold symptoms and
even serious illness. He is the reason why we still take vitamin supplements today in high
quantities believing they will prevent or treat diseases and even cancer. Wells was no different;
his theories, though fictional, led to advances in technology and created the concept of time
travel as we understand it today.
Wells said himself, however, “we have no reason at all to expect life beyond this planet.”
The author’s assessment of mankind’s expectation of the future resonates throughout media but
is made painfully simple by his words. “The presumption is that before [man] lies a long future
of profound modification, but whether that will be, according to present ideals, upward or
downward, no one can forecast.” Wells warned us not to be naive in our assumption that
humanity will get better, though we desperately want to believe it will. What he did give us is the
simplified version of a much more difficult equation. He told readers that they could achieve
what they could imagine and that the future could be changed for the better by actions taken in
the present. That is why in his released version The Time Traveller returns to the future, because
even though he has seen the end of all things he will not give up hope that he can beat
inevitability. The future is not fixed, it waits for us to discover it. That was Wells’ message to his
readers and to the science fiction lovers of this day and age. What we do with that information
only the us of the future will know.
