H.G. Wells's Science Fiction: The Cyborg Visual Dromological Discourse

Abstract

H. G. Wells, as the forefather of science fiction, has used the relative notion of time in his stories such as Time Machine (1895). Speed is the initiator of a discourse in which humans are floating and moving ahead and has become one of the main “discourses” of the human being. Paul Virilio's theory of “dromology”, "vision machine" and “virtual reality”, along with "the aesthetics of disappearance" are applied in criticizing the novel scientific discourse by Wells who engenders a machinic, in the Deleuzian sense, and a cyborg discourse, through which he connotes the imperial narratives and the dromocratic powers. The usage of the Cyborg discourse by Wells in his science fiction stories has been to emphasize how the dromological and vision discourses are the prerequisite to the panoptical discourse through the microscopic and telescopic visions. It is concluded that the splintering frame is the created visual frame in the Wellsian science fiction.