Adventure classics -- In the heart of the beast

The Island of Dr. Moreau

by H.G. Wells

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In deciding to devote the month of July to a discussion of classic science fiction I find myself searching, not for the first time, how to describe this genre. Two modern practitionerst, Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, famously disagree on every criteria except one -- the ability of all not-quite-real fictions to tackle subjects too sweeping for mere realism to address.

I’m going to say I know science fiction when I read it, so I can shoehorn the social commentary of H.G. Wells’ 1896 work, The Island of Dr. Moreau, as well as dystopian near-futurism, humor, and a bit of space opera into a single category for this month’s discussions.

Wells opens The Island of Dr. Moreau with the hyperrealism beloved by writers tempting us to believe their outrageous stories -- an introduction by a supposed relative of the narrator, Edward Prendick, supplying dates, latitude and longitude, and name of the ships whose wreck opens Prendick’s adventure.

Prendick is then rescued by a sinister vessel carrying a cargo of exotic animals and two passengers -- failed medical student Montgomery and his strange companion. Once arrived at its destination, Prendick is forced to disembark also, landing on a remote island governed by the notorious Dr. Moreau.

Moreau’s specialty of vivisection -- surgery conducted for experimental purposes -- has made him persona non grata in Europe. Although Prendick professes to have studied biology with Darwin’s advocate, T.H. Huxley, at first he shows no interest in the happenings of Dr. Moreau’s laboratory, simply trying to ignore the sounds of agony from the experiments and completely failing to connect them with the island’s odd-looking inhabitants.
But when the nature of the screams changes from animal to human, Prendick believes Moreau is trying to transform human beings into beasts. Fearing he is intended as one of Moreau’s victims, Prendick flees -- and at last learns the true nature of the experiments. Dr. Moreau, like Dr. Frankenstein before him, is trying to create not beasts, but human beings, this time from surgically-modified animals. And yes, he cuts and stitches creatures who never existed, such as a mock-satyr, just because he can.

“An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters,“ Atwood writes in Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, “keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of humankind: science.”

“We do not recommend The Island of Dr. Moreau to readers of sensitive nerves,” a contemporary reviewer in April 11, 1896, edition of The Spectator magazine stated, with no apparent understanding that Wells’ book was anything more than a protest against vivisectionism. This, however, doesn't unexplain the story's power to transcend its time.
 
Atwood attempts an explanation, comparing the story to the tale of another shipwreck survivor, The Ancient Mariner, “which revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature and concludes that this proper relation is one of love.” The Island of Dr. Moreau also contemplates this relationship, but with a twist.

Prendick first saw the beast people of Dr. Moreau as degraded humans. At the end, he finds himself unable to see his fellow human beings as anything other than degraded beasts. The curse he lives under is more terrible than the Ancient Mariner’s wanderings -- the inability to love either humanity or Nature.

For a discussion of science fiction between master practitioners Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, see “Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin debate science fiction” at http://io9.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction and hubris with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon.)

Adventure classics -- Harmony in a watery world

A Wizard of Earthsea

by Ursula Le Guin

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In the section on Taoism in his classic of comparative religion, The World’s Religions, Huston Smith discusses the philosophy of Lao-tzu, but admits to a sharp contract between philosophy and “the Taoism that surrounded me as a boy in China: its submergence in augury, necromancy, and superstition” -- the sophisticated overlaying the shamanistic.

As the daughter of pioneering anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, Ursula Le Guin is no novice to the many forms religion can take. She eclectically included both sophisticated and primal versions of a fantasy world’s form of Taoism in the first book of her Earthsea series, 1968’s A Wizard of Earthsea.

Le Guin’s fiction always has room for strange worlds -- planets of perpetual winter or those where a “year” lingers for a lifespan. So why not conjure a world consisting almost entirely of water?

For a watery world, Earthsea is surprisingly cozy, comprised of a central archipelago and scattered outlying islands -- the Outer Reaches -- all located in the planet’s northern hemisphere. There are no known continents, although at one point young Ged, the story’s protagonist, discusses that possibility.

During a voyage, Le Guin writes: “Ged broke his silence, saying, ‘Do you hold with those who think the world is all landless sea beyond the Outer Reaches, or with those
who imagine other Archipelagoes or vast undiscovered lands on the other face of the world?’”

His friend and fellow wizard Vetch replies, deadpan, “I hold with those who think the world has but one face, and he who sails too far will fall off the edge of it.”

Earthsea is a world permeated not only by water but by magic. Many even of its untrained inhabitants have innate magical abilities such as those of the countrified weatherworkers. This is Earthsea’s relatively benign primal form of its of Taoism.

But as Ged learns at the central school for magic -- a place very unlike Harry Potter’s Hogwarts -- “the true wizard uses such spells only at need, since to summon up such earthly forces is to change the earth of which they are a part.” While good wizards strive to maintain harmony with the earthly forces, evil ones can bring on catastrophes by unbalancing the forces.

In particular, raising spirits of the dead is something even the greatest hesitate to do. Until Ged, goaded by a jealous fellow student, calls up the spirit from Earthsea’s earliest mythology and tears open the fabric of the universe.

Pursued by a being who slips through the tear, Ged at first flees across land and sea from his destiny. Resigned at last to the impossibility of escape, and with some double-edged advice from a dragon, he turns on his pursuer. But can he survive his confrontation? Or dare to name the force he has brought into the world?

Le Guin first wrote the Earthsea books as a trilogy, with Wizard followed in 1971 by The Tombs of Atuan and in 1972 by The Farthest Shore. Then, in 1990, she issued a fourth book, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea. And despite the subtitle, a fifth, The Other Wind, followed in 2001.

I’m tempted to say she may not be finished with the cycle yet. See her site,
www.ursulakleguin.com/ , for additional information and her own audio reading from the original Earthsea book.

(Next Wednesday -- Adventure classics’ month of sea stories concludes with one of the greatest, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.)