Some Final Reflections on Speculative Sci-Fi

The Impermanence of Scholarship

Universities are hot beds of scholarship and research in our society. They encourage growth and development of their faculty as well as their student scholars. Universities aggressively seek funding, grants, and royalty fees for intellectual property as well as new discoveries, concepts, and applications of information gained. But where did all the academics go in the future? Strangely, in speculative sci-fi they have gone amiss. I believe this stems from the ruthlessly egalitarian nature of speculative sci-fi literature that emphasizes the dystopian.

For instance, in H. G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine the protagonist steps out of his time machine with wonder and anticipation at meeting people of the future, but he is shockingly disappointed by their intellect: “You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asks me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children” (26). The Eloi people have the intellectual capacity of a Teletubby (comically highlighting the repression of the intellect). The Time Traveller is himself an academic, a scientist, full of curiosity that gives him the drive to explore the future, but what he finds is a future with no need for scholarship:
[I] presently recognized . . . the decaying vestiges of books. [. . .] Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with the keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this somber wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics. (Wells 70)
In the fictitious setting of The Time Machine, there is no need to excel academically because everything is done with perfect equality. The Time Traveller contemplates as to the reason the future is devoid of scholarship: “There is no intelligence where there is no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers” (Wells 81). In an egalitarian society, academic accomplishment is nonessential.

WE, a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, offers a more subtle approach to the suppression of the intellect. Here again, readers notice individual thought, and scholarship is monolithically subjugated. Every person’s ability is used to further enhance the One State (a collective, who only have ambition to promote the group’s imperatives and suppress individuality). A character in the novel named I-330 expresses this attitude aggreviously, “‘Clearly,’I-330 interrupted, ‘to be original means to somehow stand out from others. Consequently, being original is to violate equality . . .’” (Zamyatin 27). In fact, the only true academic in the novel is a poet named R-13, but even his artistic endeavor is repressed by the One State, “Now poetry is no longer a brazen nightingale call. Poetry is a state service; poetry is purpose” (Zamyatin 60). Individual intellectual property has been stigmatized as a form of rebellion against the collective good—breeding inequality. This dystopian inclination to suppress thought for the collective good is peppered through-out the novel WE.

Likewise, Aldous Huxley explores this concept further in his novel Ape and Essence; in this work of fiction, not only are intellectual accomplishments and creative abilities squelched, but also even mere competence is frowned upon. As in The Time Machine, the protagonist of Ape and Essence is a scholar, a botanist with a PhD from New Zealand, who was not affected by the radiation contamination in America. Dr. Alfred Poole is on expedition to America to examine what plant life may still be thriving post-nuclear, but what he encounters is a group of surviving people with the intellect of an ape. Dr. Poole is completely baffled by their lack of enthusiasm for scholarship:
One of the bakers opens a furnace door and starts to shovel the books into the flames. All of the scholar in Dr. Poole, all of the bibliophile, is outraged by this spectacle: ‘But this is frightful!’ he protests. The chief only laughs. ‘In goes The Phenomenology of Spirit, out comes the corn bread. And damned good bread it is. (Huxley 91)
What’s more, the chief of the Belial Church incriminates scholarship for their current plight: “Take scientists, for example. Good, well-meaning men, for the most part. But [Belial] got hold of them all the same—got hold of them at the point where they ceased to be human beings and became specialists. Hence, the glanders [deformities] and those bombs” (Huxley 131).
This oppressive religion prohibited learning for the “public good.” The only concern is to ruthlessly control the people’s minds to submit to the catechisms of the church of Belial. In turn, the people have lost both the ability and motivation to seek out the unknown and promote scholarship; everything they do is for the pleasure of the church.

These dystopian works of fiction suggest stifled scholarship that would be counter-productive to a society. Abilities, accomplishments, and even competence are seen as forms of inequality. The Time Machine portrays future people as completely simple-minded; whereas the novel WE highlights a suppression of the intellect; and in the novel Ape and Essence the characters are driven completely by animal instinct, so much so, that they cannot be bothered with academic pursuits. Thus, the characters in the novels do not impute any importance to scholarship. Conversely, it is intriguing and appropriate that speculative science fiction novels such as these asks readers to first suspend reality for an imagined society of the future, while simultaneously allowing the reader to conceptualize the possible future of our actual society and to assess whether this is a valid concern for our future.

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Huxley, A. Ape and Essence, 1948. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1992.
Wells, H. G., The Time Machine, 1895. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003.
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. WE, 1921. New York: Modern Library, 2006.