Verne and Wells

It doesn't always feel that I do subjects justice on the Quirky Muffin. Sometimes something promising gets shrunk or cranked out due to time constraints or just wanting to go to sleep and be done with the day. Not this time.

Jules Verne pioneered science fiction in a few of his Extraordinary Voyages stories. He did it unwittingly and comparatively seldom but he travelled to the centre of the Earth and sent ships around the moon. His influence was enormous and his most famous stories are clearly adventures as opposed to horrors or tragedies. Years after Verne's prime and death, John Dickson Carr declared adventures impossible to write as the World Wars had made the planet too small for anything or any journey to be romantic, but he forgot that stories didn't need to be realistic to be stories, and that adventures could still work in other more speculative kinds of fiction. Adventure would go on, and they would be repopularised by Star Trek of all things, a clear successor to the wanderlust of Jules Verne's novels as well as the daring exploits of Horatio Hornblower. Star Trek was positive where so much other science fiction was dystopian and that was why it was popular. In America they freed science fiction from the shackles of horror and it prospered.

How had science fiction become so shackled to horror and dystopian visions of the future? Perhaps one of the main reasons was the grand success of H.G. Wells, who coupled fantastical ideals to catastrophic events. His journeys inevitably saw the protagonist go too far and retreat stumbling while the problem either crumbled away of its own causing or simply ended in tragedy as in the case of 'The Invisible Man'. These landmark stories coupled horror to grand speculative ideas and they remain coupled to this day. In Britain we never had Star Trek of our own, but instead had Doctor Who, which of course is steeped in rich layers of body horror and monsters almost every episode. We were never really liberated, and nothing has ever challenged Doctor Who as THE British science fiction program.

In Star Trek and Doctor Who do we essentially see the duelling spirits of Verne and Wells, grappling over how we should approach stories and ideas ahead of their times? I can not even attempt to disguise my lack of interest in the Wells stories, being as they are so dismally pessimistic. Why read along to the desolation of Britain under alien invasion when you can travel under the oceans for twenty thousand leagues or discover the Lost World with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Is this the juvenile and immature choice to make? Perhaps, but it is definitely the most enjoyable choice.

It certainly feels as if Wells is felt everywhere except in Star Trek, as if those bold voyages are the only place for some kind of Verne-ian ideal to prosper openly. Perhaps the 1960s were the only time when such a series could launch into the popular culture and become an archetype to test time itself? Only the primal idea of Superman even seems to approach that optimism, defeated though it has been in recent incarnations.

Despite all this, and the dreariness of the sci-fi landscape as a whole, you can't help but admire HG Wells for the impact his style and works have had, from The Twilight Zone to Doctor Who to Farscape and beyond. He created modern science fiction. Jules Verne inspired Star Trek though, and for that he's the winner in my eyes.

O.