“The Pitiless Judgement of Time”: Human Extinction in the Evolutionary Tragedies of H.G. Wells

Abstract

Since the first wave of Wellsian scholarship emerged in the 1960s, The Time Machine has been interpreted in light of H.G. Wells's various scientific obsessions, resulting in a wealth of interdisciplinary studies that have probed the relationship between the author's early fiction and Victorian science. Yet despite the critical consensus that the author's work incorporated insights culled from modern science in significant ways, scholars have not done enough to examine how Wells's wide-ranging early engagements with the sciences were often underwritten by a single conceptual concern: the speculative possibility of human extinction. Reading key fictional and non-fictional documents from the author's Victorian period, and culminating in an in-depth analysis that situates The Time Machine as a response to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, this essay argues that scholars have not only failed to reckon with the centrality of human extinction to Wells's work and thought but have also tended to ignore the tragic dimensions that undergird his early writing, often despite explicit evidence that Wells viewed his fiction as contributing to the tragic mode. Working against this tendency, this essay argues that Wells offers a revised, post-Darwinian form of tragedy that directly confronts the existential precarity of the human species.