Existential Threats - Lisa Vox

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to be coming true.

      The American recovery after the Civil War had misled world observers. If Europeans had paid closer attention to the casualties in the world’s first “great war fought with the tools and weapons of the Industrial Revolution,” maybe they would not have rushed enthusiastically to the front lines in 1914.104 World War I proved that modern technology had permanently changed the rules of warfare. The glory of heroism had always been available to soldiers who could prove themselves through hand-to-hand combat. Tanks, machine guns, poison gases, and submarines delivered mechanized, impersonal slaughter. At least ten million soldiers died, while over twenty million suffered battle wounds out of the sixty-five million who fought in that war.105 President Woodrow Wilson hoped American participation would result in a “peace without victory,” but the carnage blinded the victors with rage, and they merely humored Wilson at Versailles in 1919.

      Even as Wilson failed to sell the American public on the League of Nations—the only part of his vision of a workable peace that survived negotiations—American science fiction writers retained their confidence in a U.S.-led future after World War I. The American intellectual historian Henry F. May suggests that the war undermined the notion of progress, one of several dominating doctrines in the United States prior to the war, for American intellectuals.106 This decline of faith in progress occurred even before Americans entered the war in 1917, as they watched Europe descend into a madness that contradicted the progressive nature of history and the essentially good nature of man.107 Elsewhere, May notes of the postwar period that “American writers had often been discontented yet there was something new in the discontent of the twenties. There was more of it, it was louder and sometimes more weepingly expressed, and it was noticed, and sometimes resented, by the optimistic majority.”108

      Intellectuals like H. L. Mencken and “Lost Generation” authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald represented the rejection of optimism that May describes. The American expatriate poet T. S. Eliot captured the tenor of the period in poems like “The Waste Land” (1922) and “The Hollow Men” (1925). The final line of the latter poem—“This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”—may have been an entropic-inspired commentary on spiritual emptiness, but after 1945, Americans seized upon it as a prophecy of a society in existential crisis from man-made perils. The postmillennialism that had allowed Americans to see the brutal conflagration of the Civil War through to its end was a casualty of natural selection as well as of German higher criticism of the Bible; after World Wars I and II, liberal Christians tended to be amillennialists, viewing the millennium as a spiritual truth rather than a literal one.

      American scientists in popular works on the future of humanity at times approached the pessimism of British and European scientists after World War I, even though, as Aldiss argues, science fiction in the United States remained more optimistic until the 1930s.109 The view that humanity could be displaced depending on the future course of its evolution was central to Stanton Arthur Coblentz’s work The Decline of Man (1925). A journalist and poet, Coblentz used evolutionary theory and language to describe what he saw as the social ills that would fell humankind. He alluded to the implications of Darwinism for the future of humanity, discussing the future in the context of the extinction of other species such as the dinosaurs. Examining the particular aspects of these species that may have made them “unfit” for survival, he concluded that the very same problems plague man.110

      While Coblentz did mention environmental causes of extinction such as climate changes, deforestation, and epidemics, he did not discuss them in any detail. For Coblentz, the social situation of humans would determine whether they could respond and adapt to any such changes.111 He recommended birth control for the poorer classes and eugenics to direct the evolution of humanity so that it could survive.112 In his view, such remedies were vital because, unlike in the past, “it is no longer one race and one civilization that is threatened; it is all races and the civilization of all men.”113 His analysis was a mix of the racial fears of writers like Dooner and the worries over species displacement of Wells and Serviss, showing the connection between the two. The species, for Coblentz, could not survive without making sure “inferior” races did not reproduce.

      The implication of evolution that humanity could be replaced was in direct conflict with the Christian belief that humanity is central to God’s plan for the universe. After World War II, science fiction writers in particular would struggle with the idea that humans were not special. For instance, aliens would either resemble humans or reject Earthlings for being especially destructive toward their planet. In the 1920s, however, speculative fiction in the United States remained on the whole positive in nature, even as nonfiction writers like Coblentz were grappling with the negative ramifications of evolutionary theory. The man who coined the term science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, founded the first magazine dedicated to speculative fiction called Amazing Stories in 1926. Gernsback, an immigrant who came to the United States and became enamored of the American parable of the Edisonian inventor, wanted to publish fiction that would educate readers about science.114 Gernsback had so much faith in the ability of fiction to communicate scientific and technological ideas that he proposed “science fiction writers should be able to take out provisional patents on the devices they predicted in their stories.”115

      Gernsback’s faith in technology led him to announce as editorial policy in 1931 that his magazine would not publish stories in which machines subjugated humans or in which scientists used their power to conquer the world.116 This policy implies that such stories were being written and submitted, though rejected by Gernsback, who had a powerful influence on the development of the science fiction genre in the United States. Despite Gernsback’s power, several works of fiction by both science fiction and mainstream writers appeared in the 1930s that projected current trends into the future and saw disaster. The Great Depression of the thirties may have tempered the optimism of science fiction of prior decades; these works resembled the scientific romances of H. G. Wells rather than the preceding American pulp science fiction.

      Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, writers who collaborated on six books, described a near encounter with human extinction in When Worlds Collide (1932). The League of the Last Days is the name of the group of scientists who determines that two planets are heading toward Earth and that the larger one will smash into Earth. The reaction of the characters to the threat of destruction is similar to the reaction of later atomic-age characters to the threat of nuclear war. One wealthy character becomes enraptured at the news: “Delicious, isn’t it, to think of the end of all this? I feel stimulated, don’t you? All of it—going to pieces! I feel like saying, ‘Thank God!’ I was sick of it. Everyone was. Civilization’s a wretched parody. Evidently there was a just and judging God, after all.”117 Others also conclude that it must be the work of God, punishing humanity for its sins, or proof that humanity is so insignificant as to mean nothing in the larger natural processes of the world, themes that would recur in post-1945 American science fiction.118

      The Earth does not escape destruction, but humans discover that the second planet that passes very close to Earth is capable of supporting life, and a small remnant of humanity is sent there to carry on the species. The survivors decide that they must create a better civilization, saying, “When I recollect the filth of our cities, the greed of individuals and of nations, the savagery of war, the horrors of pauperism permitted to exist side by side with luxury and wealth, our selfishness, hates, diseases, filth—all the hideousness we called civilization—I cannot regret that the world which was afflicted by us is flying in fragments, utterly incapable of rehabilitation, about the sun.”119 In this way the End by natural means leads to a secular millennium, mirroring Christ’s Second Coming and the Final Judgment, followed by an era of peace.120

      Not only science fiction authors expressed anxiety in the 1930s over what the future held. Stephen Vincent Benét, an American poet and author, published a short story in 1937 and a poem in 1938 that imagined wars so devastating that they decimate the human race. Benét’s short story “The Place of the Gods,” in the Saturday Evening Post (later republished as “By the Waters of Babylon”), presaged later apocalyptic fiction about humans eking out primitive existences after a nuclear war. The title of the story

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