H.G.

Wells and the Liberating Atom

Author(s): David Seed
Source: Science Fiction Studies , Mar., 2003, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 33-48
Published by: SF-TH Inc

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 THE LIBERATING ATOM 33

David Seed

H.G. Wells and the Liberating Atom

The discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s and the construction of the atomic
bomb in the 1940s were both accompanied by ambivalent perceptions of the
nature of radiation. Was it a constructive or a destructive force? Was it a
liberating agency or an uncontrollable fury? At an Atomic Energy Committee
meeting of 1949 at which the hydrogen bomb was being considered, one
member commented of the Bomb's monstrous potential that "we built one
Frankenstein" (Reid 172). And in his study The Nuclear Muse (2000), John
Canaday has shown how the Manhattan Project scientists drew on a wide range
of literary narratives to encode their activities and thereby "exert control over
unsettled and frightening circumstances through symbolic forms of language"
(142). Yet the uses of radioactivity in a super-weapon were a concern long
before 1945, and, from the beginning, loss of control over this new force was
seen as a problem.
This essay considers early nuclear narratives characterized by discontinu-
ities that reflect the authors' difficulty in containing or expressing the nuclear
subject. Beginning with H.G. Wells's The World Set Free (1914), atomic war
is imagined as causing massive destruction; but more importantly, this subject
also causes a rupture in the narratives themselves, introducing gaps that it
becomes an important part of the plots to bridge over. Again and again in the
period following World War II, novels dealing with nuclear war are set in a
future whose "past" has to be painstakingly reconstructed by regaining access
to history. Typically, these novels are retrospective, setting up a future vantage
point from which to examine how events have developed from the readers'
present to the postwar era of the narratives' "present."
Spencer Weart points out that nuclear energy tales typically focus on some
"tremendous forbidden secret": because they deal with one of the most hidden
aspects of nature, they emphasize an "attack upon the secret things in search
of mastery" (55). Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom (1895), the first novel
to depict an atomic weapon, describes the attempts to destroy the world by one
Herbert Brande (probably named after Ibsen's obsessed idealist in Brand
[1866]), a scientific genius whose talents include telepathy. The novel is
narrated by Arthur Marcel, a young medic whose interest in Brande is
stimulated when Brande tells him roundly that "The Universe is a mistake!"
(1). For the rest of the novel, Marcel tries to prevent Brande from putting his
destructive plan into practice. The action of Cromie's story emphasizes not the
technology of Brande's weapon but Marcel's investigation of the mentality and
motives that seek nuclear destruction.
Brande's logic runs as follows: the atom is the smallest unit in nature but
it can be destroyed. Nature is therefore destructible. In fact, strife is a principle

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34 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

of nature, since this is the way life itself emerges. Brande's fantastic dream is
to merge humanity back into the matrix of protoplasm. This "nirvana," as he
calls it, represents a kind of atomic mysticism: he doesn't see himself as
killing, only as returning humanity to the life-pool in the universe. Comparing
himself to earlier seekers after the principle of life, he uses a characteristic
Victorian image, that of attaining the heights: "But we know more than they.
We have climbed no doubt in the footholds they have carved, and we have
gained the summit they only saw in the mirage of hope" (118). Although he
describes himself as a scientist, Brande actually leads a cult of devoted
followers very much like those in J.B. Priestley's T7he Doomsday Men (1938).
Whereas Priestley's physicist-hero sets up an enormous secret installation in the
Mojave Desert, Cromie's has chosen a deserted Pacific island. The motivation
of Priestley's scientist is unclear, but he declares that he wants to perform "one
last triumphant stroke, one supreme act of defiance" in deciding the moment
of humanity's exit (207). And shortly before Brande detonates his device, he
too declares his intention in ringing tones: "I stand ... I may say with one foot
on sea and one on land, for I hold the elemental secret of them both. And I
swear by the living god-science incarnate-that the suffering of the centuries
is over, that for this earth and all that it contains, from this night and for ever,
Time will be no more!" (177-78).
In both novels, the discovery of atomic fission licenses a scientist to
determine the destiny of the human race. The Promethean dream is to control
one of the forces in the universe and, more importantly, to control or erase
time. We cannot imagine Brande having a dream of the future, because his
intention is to wipe the future out. We believe in his destructive capacity
because he gives a trial demonstration of his atomic weapon that vaporizes a
French fishing fleet that happens to be in the area at the wrong moment. In
both The Crack of Doom and The Doomsday Men, the planned use of a new
weapon is represented as a symbolic rupture of nature that is also reflected in
the novel's topography. In Cromie's novel, the site for trial is a quasi-volcanic
eruption on an island; in Priestley's it is an ancient fissure in the Mojave
Desert. Brande never admits any bounds to his experiments, but fortunately our
plucky medic-narrator sabotages his scientific formulae and limits the explosion
to the island. In the dramatic climax, the narrator and his companions flee this
island as it is erupting. The analogy with a volcano contains Brande's device
within known nature; it is shared by the engineer in Karel (-apek's Krakatit
(1925), who names his own super-explosive after Krakatoa. Brande presents
his research through lectures that grimly predict the demise of the human race;
(-apek's protagonist dreams of following in the steps of Ernest Rutherford, the
Nobel Prize-winning chemist.
All these narratives express anxiety over human control of the explosive
process, an issue that apparently did not concern the physicist Frederick Soddy,
one of the first proponents of the new science. In a book of lectures, The
Interpretation of Radium (1909), Soddy waxes enthusiastic about radioactivity
because it seems to offer an unlimited source of energy. True, he briefly
mentions the possibility that fission might produce an "explosive incomparably

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 THE LIBERATING ATOM 35

more powerful in its activities than dynamite," but he quickly moves on to

consider radium's more benign implications. "In the background," he declares,
"there has always been the tacit assumption that the supply of fresh energy is
only apparently inexhaustible, and that in some remote future a time will at
length arrive when the supplies of fresh energy are exhausted and all things will
come to a stop and remain at rest for ever" (Radium 33). This entropic end to
everything is similarly approached by Wells's Time Traveller when he
glimpses the cosmic sunset far into the future of The Time Machine (1895).
Soddy perceives a tension between the upward ascent of progress and the
decline of a "slowly dying world"; radium helps to resolve that tension by re-
authorizing progress as entering a whole new phase and indefinitely deferring
any final ending: "We find ourselves in consequence of the progress of
physical science at the pinnacle of one ascent of civilisation, taking the first
step upwards out onto the lowest plane of the next" (246). Radium offers
humanity release from the perception that the Darwinian "struggle for existence
... [is] a permanent and necessary condition of life," for in Soddy's view this
struggle is a passing phase. Beyond it he foresees the "unlimited ascent of man
to knowledge, and through knowledge to physical power and dominion over
Nature" (8). Soddy is not giving a dispassionate account of scientific discovery
but rather a "message of hope and inspiration" (247), for "radium has taught
us that there is no limit to the amount of energy in the world available to
support life" (249). For Soddy, radium revives a grand narrative of human
progress toward ultimate knowledge and control that is quite independent of
social and industrial developments. The Interpretation of Radium, however,
only glances at the application of this energy as an explosive.
Radium's potential for destruction is the central issue in The World Set
Free. Wells's novel of 1914 might seem to belong with The War of the Worlds
(1898) and The War in the Air (1908) as forming a trilogy about modem
weaponry.1 This is how Roslynn Haynes takes them when she argues that all
three novels "warn of the levels of violence to which warfare must inevitably
escalate if the resources of technology are turned simply to the task of
producing the most efficient weapons possible, without heed to the morality of
their use" (78). Yet such an approach oversimplifies the works concerned and
ignores the fact that The World Set Free is the only novel of the three not to
have "war" in its title; it carries the subtitle A Story of Mankind. In fact, the
novel is divided into four phases: prophecy, application, war, and an aftermath
of world government. Wells, who admired Soddy's book, wrote him into the
narrative as Professor Rufus, who declares in a lecture that radioactivity signals
the "dawn of a new day in human living" (World 23).2 The opening part of the
narrative is set in 1914, the reader's present. In part two, as one reviewer
noted, Wells goes "back to the future. "3 The third phase, covering the 1930s,
arrives when a visionary scientist discovers a method of releasing and
controlling atomic energy, with the result that coal, for instance, disappears as
a fuel. As these changes take place, Wells's (Soddy's?) utopian hopes for social
transformation start to take on a more sombre tone, because for every advance
there is an unexpected problem. The abolition of coal, for instance, cleans up

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36 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

the environment but throws thousands out of work. By the end of this third
section, society has become more polarized than ever before by rapid techno-
logical change. At this point the action moves into open warfare.
An atomic war breaks out in the mid-1950s that shatters European society.
Wells's description of what he calls the "last war" (a variation on a catch-
phrase-the "war to end all wars"-that he helped to popularize to his later
embarrassment) is the first fictional description of nuclear war and, as Charles
Gannon has noted, establishes the "narrative imagery" of the later genre (37).4
Wells introduces the war with a statement about its sheer illogicality: "Viewed
from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is difficult to follow
the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the
middle decades of the twentieth century" (World 56). The war between Central
Europe and the Allies is presented as the inevitable outcome of early twentieth-
century nationalism. In a preface he wrote in 1921 for the Collins reprint
(1924), Wells states his thesis clearly: "because of the development of scientific
knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no
longer possible in the world.... [T]o attempt to keep on with the old system is
to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race
altogether" (Preface 9). In the novel, the irrational nature of the orgy of
destruction that takes place is reflected in the very absence of build-up, the
absence of any stated, specific cause.
The World Set Free is a complex, layered narrative. Wells constantly shifts
his voice and therefore his perspective. At some points he tells the "story" of
mankind; at others he describes scientific experiments. Occasionally, he offers
eyewitness accounts of particular events. For John Canaday, this strategy is
central to the novel's purpose, since "mixing different narrative modes ...
invokes their various representational conventions, expectations, and standards
of interpretation" (231). This in turn reflects a "desire to unsettle the
assumptions" associated "with a conceptual stasis that in his view had trapped
humanity in a savage and self-destructive ignorance" (231). At the heart of
Wells's self-conscious narrative lies the mystery of the bomb, which is referred
to but never fully described: "It is a remarkable thing that no complete
contemporary account of the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are
of course innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from these that
subsequent ages must piece together the image of these devastations" (World
137). The typographical sign of the discontinuity in Wells's text is his use of
ellipses to emphasize the fragmented memories and traces of the bombs. The
whole account is written with an ironic consciousness of a posterity that might
or might not find the resulting ruins of interest.
The reader is given vivid but isolated images or episodes, as when a target
(a palace in Berlin) is described by the bombardier looking down on the scene
from his plane: "it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano.
In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil
splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them [the two
airmen] like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish people clearly,
or mark the bomb's effect upon the building until suddenly the fagade tottered

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 THE LIBERATING ATOM 37

and crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water"(71). Wells

anticipates several of the post-World War II conventions that were to become
familiar in nuclear war novels: the targeting of a building symbolic of a regime
or nation, the representation of apparently solid structures as totally vulnerable
to the atomic blast, and the problem of locating a witness. Shortly after this
description, the two airmen themselves are blasted into smithereens. There is
a hint, too, of guilt in the phrase "like an accusation." Cromie chose a title
linking the super-weapon with Hell. Wells continues this strategy, but separates
the construction and use of atomic bombs from any individual, dispersing evil
into collective, national courses of action. He anticipates one designation of the
hydrogen bomb in his phrase "Hell Bomb," and describes the atomic bombs
that explode over Holland as "falling like Lucifer in the picture" (86),
breaching the dykes and causing a new flood of Biblical proportions.5
Contemporary reviews agreed that these sections are the most powerful in the
novel: C.L. Graves in the Spectator commented appreciatively on Wells as a
"past-master in the conduct of the debacle, an expert in Armageddons" (837).
The depiction of widespread destruction as a kind of sublime spectacle has led
Paul Brians, the historian of this sf subgenre, to argue that nuclear war
narratives are closer to the disaster genre than any other type of sf (3).
However demonically the atomic bombs are described, the sequel to the
conflict is described as a "wave of sanity," as Wells later wrote in his 1934
Experiment in Autobiography (569). In the wake of the war, a small number
of idealistic leaders form a world government that is achieved with amazing
speed. Indeed, the only serious obstacle is presented by the King of the Balkans
(the "Slavic fox") who tries unsuccessfully to retain two atomic bombs for his
own purposes. With this ultimate change in world politics, it only remains for
a Russian sage, Karenin, to construct a liberationist narrative and point a rather
disturbing moral. He stresses how diseased the world had been and therefore
how much it needed its atomic medicine. His metaphor of illness in effect
dehumanizes the expendable masses into corruptions of the ideal body politic,
as reconstituted by a right-minded elite. Switching the metaphor, Karenin
insists that the bombs "burnt our way to freedom" (176)-except, we might
object, for the unnamed masses who were slaughtered in the process. They
were dispensable, Karenin implies, and with one eye on postwar city planning,
he declares that "the great hole in the east of London scarcely matters" (172).
Wells clings to his central notion of liberation, but he is hostile to the
burgeoning growth of modern London, which is referred to as a place of sin
and disorder positively crying out for "purging"; in this, Wells shares a general
identification of the city with corruption that Martha Bartter has shown to be
characteristic of nuclear war fiction (148-49). Karenin's words strike an
incongruously optimistic note after the spectacle of mass destruction. J.R.
Hammond has complained that the "transition from world war to reconstruction
is unconvincing" and has argued that through Karenin Wells is "counselling the
reader not to pay too much regard to a mood of despair" (1 10, 1 11).
Soddy recoiled in horror at the thought of nuclear weaponry when he saw
the actual destruction being caused by the First World War (Weart 29). But

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38 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

Wells does not seem to have had second thoughts about his novel, although he
felt that the war was a "revelation of the profound instability of the social
order."6 Although atomic war is a disaster, Wells sees a beneficial side: "The
catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses
and economic relations shook them also out of their old established habits of
thought.... [Tihey were released from old ties" (158). The final death of
Karenin, in which he symbolically merges himself into the sun, appears to hav
a symmetrical relation to the novel's opening ("The Sun Snarers"). But in fact
the conclusion leaves many questions unanswered. Will humanity's drive for
knowledge take them into space? Will the old political rivalries continue? Wells
recognizes that a super-weapon raises special problems of control, not to say
monopoly. Even just two devices (as Wells's Balkan king well knows) could
produce enormous destruction.
Narratives from the interwar period attach far more importance to this
question of rogue ownership than to the technology of such weapons.7 Upton
Sinclair's 7he Millennium (play, 1914; novel, 1924) blatantly uses a super-
explosive as a narrative device. A scientist discovers an element called
"radiumite, " warns the world that he cannot control it, and promptly goes ma
detonating this substance and killing off the entire world's population in a fl
of blinding light-all, that is, except eleven survivors who then set up a
cooperative commonwealth in the Hudson Valley. Sinclair uses the super-
weapon to produce new circumstances that make absurd the persistence of class
attitudes in his survivors-hence his subtitle, A Comedy of the Year 2000. In
Karel (apek's Krakatit (1925), the inventor of the new device, who idolizes
Ernest Rutherford (1908 Nobel laureate for Chemistry), has a hallucinatory
perception that "Everything is an explosive." As he explains to a companion:
"Every thought is a sort of explosion inside the head. When you give me your
hand, I feel as if something is exploding inside you" (15). The engineer Prokop
has internalized the notion of nuclear fission so completely that it has
destabilized his sense of reality. Because he totally identifies with his weapon,
Prokop himself becomes a valuable military commodity for which rival nations
vie.
The actual use of such a weapon stays in the future of (.apek's narrative.
But in Captain S.P. Meek's "The Red Peril" (1929) and Philip Frances
Nowlan's Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928-29, assembled as a novel in 1962),
atomic technology has been applied to guns, transport, searchlights, and so on.
In Meek's story, when war breaks out between the Allies and the Soviet Union,
the planes of the former carry "vacite" and "uranite" bombs, presumed to be
irresistible. But then it is discovered that the Soviets have even bigger and
better bombs; their threat can only be countered with great difficulty. In these
instances, the super-weapon is shown to have unexpected consequences, for the
sanity of its inventor and for the arms race. It was not until the end of World
War II, however, that these possibilities were explored substantially. Wells did
live to see his speculations on atomic bombs put into practice over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, and a few recorded comments suggest that he shared the postwar
gloom over the fact that the only tried and tested nuclear technology was that

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 THE LIBERATING ATOM 39

of the atomic bomb. When asked about the new bomb, he is reported to have
said that "This can wipe out everything-good and bad-in this world"
(Dickson 362). We do not know much more than that about his reaction, excep
for a tantalizing memo from 1946 that is held in the Wells archive at the
University of Illinois: "Mr H.G. Wells is working very hard upon the scenario
of a film to be called The Way the World is Going. It is The Shape of Things
to Come brought up to date with the new ideas and curiosities due to the
popularization of the ideas of the disintegration of the atom and the atomic
bomb. He thinks it urgently necessary to dispel many short-sighted, cruel and
dangerous misconceptions of the significance of these things" (Smith, vol. 4,
531). Did Wells intend to revise the presentation of the bomb that he made in
The World Set Free? We may never know.
Not surprisingly, Hiroshima brought a surge of new interest in Wells's novel
of 1914. Excerpts were reprinted in the press, and an article in The Nation even
made it sound as if Wells had singlehandedly devised the Manhattan Project:
"Of course it was H.G. Wells who first perfected the atomic bomb and put it to
work" ("P.K." 154).
Wells's former mentor Frederick Soddy likewise lived to see the use of the
atom bomb, and his postwar narrative The Story of Atomic Energy (1949) still
retains some of his early excitement over what he calls the "sublime conception
of energy" (Atomic 35). Yet his enthusiasm is now heavily offset by what he
perceives to be the political betrayal of World War I and even more by the
looming post-World War II threat of the Bomb. In 1949, he already takes the
post-nuclear future as a consensus image. "It is universally agreed, " he declares
grimly, "that, unless positively prevented, the new destructive weapon may
destroy anything that can be called civilisation, and again reduce human life on
this planet, if it survives at all, to a primitive type of economy, maintained by
scattered groups of individual families living directly by cultivation of the soil"
(Atomic 124). This is a far cry from Soddy's optimism at the turn of the century
and in fact sketches a scenario that was repeatedly used by subsequent nuclear
war novels. Looking back on his previous hopes, he reflects that lethal radiation
makes the application of nuclear technology totally impractical for ships or
planes, thereby denying the second phase of The World Set Free. What emerges
most strongly from Soddy's coda is the difficulty he has in imagining any benign
future for humanity. The open perspectives of potential progress that he
imagined in 1909 have been replaced by a cautious sense that atomic energy
"has not yet advanced beyond the purely scientific stage far enough to warrant
any forecast of its technological possibilities" (154).8 Soddy's evident
disillusionment over the application of atomic energy approaches the pessimism
informing the second part of The World Set Free.
Apart from the obvious reaction that Wells "got it right" in 1914, there is,
through the expatriate Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, a close historical
connection between 7he World Set Free and the historical development of the
atomic bomb. Wells and Szilard met briefly in 1929, when Szilard told Wells
that he was contemplating going into nuclear research as the only way to achieve
interplanetary travel. Szilard read The World Set Free in 1932 and was struck

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40 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

by its war sections. "This book made a very great impression on me," he
recalled, "but I didn't regard it as anything but fiction" (Weart and Szilard 16).
The following year, Szilard conceived the notion of a chain reaction, and
because Wells had given him such vivid images of its military applications, he
hurriedly patented his idea. He later recorded that "all the things which H.G.
Wells had predicted appeared suddenly real to me" (Lanouette 179). Presum-
ably, this included the latter's accounts of mass destruction.
The connection between Wells's novel and Szilard's research gives us an
unusually direct case of fiction influencing scientific research, which would in
turn help to realize that fiction. But the connection has an added dimension: after
the dropping of the atomic bombs, Szilard turned away from nuclear research
and became an ardent campaigner for their control or abolition. Frustrated in his
attempts to convince the President and other politicians, Szilard turned to writing
science fiction stories about the danger of the bomb. Two of these displace
Szilard's concerns about a rational nuclear policy to the inhabitants of another
planet. (In this way, the narrative rupture referred to at the beginning of this
essay is, in the postwar period, made spatial as well as temporal.) "Report on
'Grand Central Terminal"' (written in 1948) is a mock-anthropological report
compiled by a crew on arrival in New York from another planet. Their first
reaction is one of astonishment: "You can imagine how shocked we were when
we landed in this city and found it deserted.... [I]t turns out-as you have
undoubtedly heard-that all life is extinct on this planet" (143).9 Now clearly th
is not an alien voice-the speaker has no problems understanding what a city
is-but rather is a projection of rational enquiry forward to a point after the
demise of humanity. The purpose of the investigation is to ask how such a
catastrophe could have occurred, a question all the more difficult to answer
because Szilard has retained the concrete signs of human culture intact while
erasing human presence.
In "Calling All Stars" (written in 1949) the narrative consists of a radio
message sent into space by the ultra-rational inhabitants of a planet near our
own. The message is a query about what they have seen: "We observed on Earth
flashes which we have identified as uranium explosions" (Szilard 135). The
message is a double enquiry: is there life on Earth and, if so, how could such
massive explosions have been caused? There is a deep pessimism underlying this
story, which ends on a note of doubt as to whether there are any minds "capable
of receiving this message," an obvious reference to the receptivity of Szilard's
readers. In these stories, Szilard invites us to speculate (posthumously) on how
any apparently intelligent species could have destroyed itself. Atomic war is
presented as creating a hiatus in the stories between what is being described and
the intelligence implied in the act of description.
Szilard himself campaigned for international arms control. Like Olaf
Stapledon, he saw disarmament as the only hope against the common danger
confronting humanity in 1945. Stapledon wrote that "Never before has so grim
a danger threatened the human race as a whole" (207). Szilard's use of the
perspective of extraterrestrials articulates the same desire for a perspective
beyond local and national interests.

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 THE LIBERATING ATOM 41

In The World Set Free, Wells combines eyewitness accounts of atomic war
with a retrospective, longer view on events. After 1945, most novels dealing
with nuclear war pursue one or the other effect. Examples of eyewitness
narratives would be Philip Wylie's Tomorrow! (1954) and Pat Frank's Alas,
Babylon (1959). Those novels that set up future retrospective points of view
engage in a form of speculative reconstruction in their attempts to bridge over
the gap between pre- and postwar society. Wells anticipates this concern when
he describes the destruction of cultural centers: "Within these areas perished
museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces and a vast
accumulation of human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy
of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine" (World
139). The tentative nature of the comment is ironic. Wells invites readers to
imagine a future point when the prized centers of culture have become reduced
to ruins that might (only "might") stimulate interest.
Wells opens up the possibility of a kind of reading through cultural
archaeology that several post-1945 novels were to pursue. Robert Crossley has
described a long tradition of references to museums in sf: "the science-fiction
museum invites the reader to become a tourist and to peer into the glass case in
wonder and often in alarm at an object that collapses distances of time and
space, disorients and displaces the observer" (99). If we take the museum to be
a repository of the past, apart from the perspective effects that Crossley usefully
identifies, there is the factor of control of access. In Edgar Pangborn's Davy
(1964), museums have survived a war that otherwise has devastated the US,
offering at least potential access to prewar history. In Frederik Pohl's and Cyril
M. Kornbluth's more dystopian Search the Sky (1954), by contrast, the
protagonist reaches a post-holocaust Earth where access to the old city-i.e., to
the archive embedded within the narrative-is forbidden. Nevertheless, once the
protagonist penetrates the "Surplus Information Repository," the result is
immediate access to the past: "Exploring room after room, he realized slowly
that he was stripping off history in successive layers" (127).
The texts embodying the suppressed history in Search the Sky clarify matters
for the protagonist: he understands the archive. But in Leigh Brackett's The
Long Tomorrow (1955), in which nuclear war has thrown the US back to a pre-
industrial, pre-urban state, the archive is difficult to access both physically and
conceptually. Brackett describes a society run along strictly religious lines: the
catastrophe is moralized as a just punishment for humanity's sins. In this regime,
it is a sin to ask about the "Destruction" and what went on before it, and a sin,
too, to read books. The authorities, in other words, have institutionalized a
recoil from history that the narrative attempts to reverse. The boy protagonist
Len sets off across country in search of a mysterious and legendary place called
Bartorstown. In order to counteract society's absolute separation between before
and after, Brackett revamps the familiar narrative pattern of the Bildungsroman.
Len is not simply searching for experience but trying to locate a suppressed
history. When he reaches Bartorstown, an underground complex in the Rockies,
his entry symbolizes his new-found access to science, technology, and history.
The complex combines laboratories, a generator, and an archive composed of

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42 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

a computer data-bank and also a picture specially mounted for a three-dimen-

sional effect: "It was a terrible picture. It was a blasted and fragmented
desolation, with one little lost building still standing in it, leaning over as though
it was tired and wanted to fall" (173). It is never spelled out, but this picture
resembles one of the famous panoramic photographs of Hiroshima. The reader's
recognition implicitly contrasts with Len's wondering but uncomprehending
gaze, as it ranges round the room. In order to construct an identity, he attempts
to situate himself in history and by so doing he practices an imperative stated by
a character in A.E. Van Vogt's Empire of the Atom (1957): "We should be
attempting to piece together the past, with a view to discovering the nature of
the destructive forces that were long ago loosed upon this planet"(67).
This notion of piecing together is concentrated into the last sections of The
Long Tomorrow, otherwise a quasi-realist narrative based on Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn (1884). The more sophisticated novels of nuclear war,
however, reflect the difficulty of constructing a unified explanation, instead
emphasizing discontinuities, multiple historical allusions, and word-play. Aldous
Huxley's Ape and Essence (1949), for example, assembles a series of framing
devices around its core narrative, which focuses on a film script saved from
incineration. Even the script is generically unstable and shifts constantly between
documentary, masque, ritual drama, and farce. Huxley opens his cinematic
narrative with a mock-Darwinian expedition of rediscovery from New Zealand
(which has survived World War III unscathed) to the US. Its head botanist, Dr.
Poole, is taken captive and questioned by the "Chief," who is astonished to hear
that steamers still exist:

"Steamers?" the Chief repeats, his face alight with interest. "You still have
steamers? But that must mean you didn't have the Thing?"
Dr. Poole looks puzzled.
"I don't quite catch your meaning," he says. "What thing?"
"The Thing. You know-when He took over." (51-52)

Huxley creates a black comedy by avoiding what was quickly to become a

cliche in post-holocaust fiction, namely the reversion to the primitive. He
makes no distinction between the speakers' registers, only between their shared
referents. Nuclear war is referred to through an arbitrary term that Poole only
gradually comes to understand, since it designates at once the war and a "take-
over" by the Devil. Intellectually, Poole is no match for Huxley's Arch-Vicar,
the commentator equivalent in dramatic force (but not sentiment) to Wells's
Karenin, who presents both Poole and the reader with an ironically inverted
grand narrative of progress in which current circumstances are only the logical
outcome of earlier tendencies. Wells's own primary narrator struck a similarly
sardonic note in describing atomic war as the "crowning triumph of military
science" (73).
One of Huxley's other ironic effects is to introduce a naturalist as if he is
about to investigate a pre-cultural landscape, when from the reader's
perspective it is a post-cultural one. Poole's investigation is in turn burlesqued
in the activities of the novel's "grave-diggers," who merely open up graves in

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 THE LIBERATING ATOM 43

order to scavenge for valuables. In a crudely materialistic way, these figures

enact a consciousness of the historical traces embedded in the landscape.
Transpose this activity into the act of reading, and the processing of post-
nuclear narratives may involve a kind of textual archaeology.
"Ancient" artifacts are likewise linked to future events in Walter M.
Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). As the novel opens, a novice in a
monastic order stumbles across a half-buried fallout shelter in the American
desert. Inside, he finds jotted notes-"pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels
- bring home for Emma "-and a circuit diagram, all of which he takes to be the
relics of a saint (33). Clearly, Miller is exploiting the reader's historical sense
here to recognize a version of the early Middle Ages (a new present) being
overlaid on the familiar language of 1950s America, which has become a new
past. The novel then traces out the revaluation of these recovered artifacts
through a sequence of episodes recapitulating Western history and culminating
in the convergence of historical and narrative moments in a new present in
which nuclear war breaks out afresh. Because of the enormous time-span
covered by the novel, no single character pushes the narrative forward. Instead,
Miller shows history to be a script over which human agents have virtually no
control and which plays itself out as a kind of destiny. Because every episode
in the novel contains echoes of earlier texts, events, or images, repetition
becomes a key narrative effect. When Miller's new "moderns" reflect that "it
was inevitable, it was manifest destiny ... that such a race go forth to conquer
stars," he parodies this sentiment through a rival version of destiny that is not
at all manifest and that climaxes in the destruction (again) of most of humanity.
By displacing technological artifacts into a reverted future in which characters
no longer have the means to decode them, Miller positions the reader as a
helpless witness to human error and misperception. He introduces the new
modern era in the third section of his novel with a theatrical performance,
implying that his human figures are merely enacting the words and movements
prescribed by an absent author.
One of the most radical treatments of this grim subject has been Russell
Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), which depicts a nuclear aftermath as a new
iron age and which, like A Canticle for Leibowitz (which Hoban has said
exerted an important influence on his novel), reflects history through the traces
of a vanished prewar world. Hoban has explained that his characters'
"language would encapsulate history and experience they knew nothing of. So
they talk about 'blips' meaning anything symbolic, anything that referred t
something else" (Kincaid 8). The novel is set in Kent: the new center is in fact
a very old one-"Cambry" (Canterbury). But Hoban's is no Canterbury Tale:
the notion of linear progression to a definite goal (the pilgrimage pattern) is
replaced with a circular structure. Riddley circles nearer and nearer to a point
that can be read either as a spiritual goal or as ground zero in a nuclear blast.
As he laboriously progresses in understanding, he declares: "My head begun
to feal like it were widening like circels on water" (120).
Although machines and other objects are dug up out of the landscape, these
acts of excavation reflect a condition of language whose deformnities verbalize

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44 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

a kind of collective mutation resulting from nuclear war. In one of the best
commentaries on this novel, Jeffrey Porter has argued that in both Miller and
Hoban characters are trying to "rescue surviving texts and rediscover lost
meanings" (452). The physical feature of a nuclear aftermath-mutation-thus
is transferred to language itself. As we find in Miller, there are verbal traces
of the lost technological era when that war took place. And there is a reason
why the novel's foregrounding of language diverts the reader's attention from
physical movement; Hoban defines it when commenting on the nuclear war
film Threads. "The question is not whether we're bound for Hell: Hell is
where we are. The question is whether we want to get out of where we are,
whether we're so full of our large death that we have forgotten about life."10
The unwavering focus on the here and now in Riddley Walker functions as an
invitation to the reader to construct alternative narratives out of Riddley's
words.
Hoban has pointed out that the latter's "riddling is an attempt to understand
things, his history and his own situation," cautioning that understanding is
never totally achieved.11 When Riddley reaches Canterbury, we are told that "I
knowit Cambry Senter ben flattent the werst of all the dead town senters it ben
Zero Groun it ben where the wite shadderd stood up over every thing" (159).
Hoban's "distorted" spelling enables him to pun on such words as "wite,"
which could be read as signifying that the white shadow of death had stood up,
or that the "wight shadowed" in the famous image of Hiroshima-in which a
man standing near ground zero had his shadow imprinted on stone steps-is
being referred to. The allusions to death have scarcely been made before a rival
image of vitality is given: a group of dogs starts circling Riddley. The punning
and allusions here include a complex play on presence and absence that has
been helpfully analyzed by Peter Schwenger (30-44). In this novel we, like the
narrator, read among possible meanings.
In The World Set Free, Wells depicted such a powerful negative spectacle
of death and destruction that he had to introduce a wise commentator to make
the point that the war is a necessary ordeal in humanity's progress. Hoban, by
contrast, describes the energy coming out of the "Littl Shynin Man the
Addom" as emanating from a primal act of muirder. The pun on "Adam" and
"atom" suggest that the core event of releasing the atom is at once a birth and
a death. Hoban presents a post-holocaust world in which the connections
between present and past, words and referents, have become so severely
disrupted that such connections can only be approached, never achieved.
Riddley becomes an itinerant storyteller without developing any conception of
history.
The challenge of connecting the pre- and post-holocaust worlds is equally
central to Kim Stanley Robinson's The Wild Shore (1984). In his doctoral thesis
on Philip K. Dick, Robinson notes how often Dick uses "atomic war to
disengage history and allow Dick to take it where he will" (28). Robinson
describes different forms of searching in his own novel, including opening
graves to see what they contain, geographically exploring post-holocaust
California, and above all telling stories, a preoccupation of his young

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 THE LIBERATING ATOM 45

protagonist, Hank Fletcher. Robinson's narrative self-consciousness is less

flamboyant than either Miller's or Hoban's, but in its way is just as complex.
Drawing, like Hoban and Brackett, on Huckleberry Finn, Robinson names one
of Hank's early companions "Tom," a character who embodies knowledge both
of literature and geology. Storytelling tantalizes Hank throughout the novel
with its promise of meaning but also with its ambiguity. Similarly, history is
constantly referred to but often dismissed, with one character insisting "enough
of history.... What's important is here and now" (Wild 102). The novel sets up
a tension between a concern with history and the present immediacy of
storytelling. At one point, Hank meets a "bookmaker" who is reinventing the
printing process, an episode that echoes A Canticle for Leibowitz. Here Hank
sees a book written by "Glen Baum," an obvious echo of the author of The
Wizard of Oz (1900). Baum's book is described as a travel narrative that
includes a period in Russia and that raises doubts about whether that country
started the nuclear war of 1984: the date itself is yet another pointed echo. We
thus have once again a complex layering of a nuclear narrative that foregrounds
its own fictive processes. At the end of the novel, Hank raises and then thwarts
an expectation of resolution: "now I know this is the part of the story where the
author winds it all up in a fine flourish that tells what it all meant.... Here I've
taken the trouble to write it all down, and now I'm done and I don't have a
dog's idea what it meant" (Wild 370). In Huckleberry Finn, which Robinson
is clearly drawing on in his conclusion, Twain inverts conventional presump-
tions of falsehood by showing that Huck's "stretchers" and fictions carry far
more authenticity than Tom Sawyer's supposed truth. The Wild Shore,
however, presents a more complex layering of fiction and historical reference:
the recovery of a coherent historical narrative seems well-nigh impossible.
Shortly before his death, H.G. Wells published a short booklet, Mind at the
End of its Tether (1945), which expressed his despair not only at being unable
to predict future developments but also at being unable to see any meaningful
continuity in history: "Events now follow one another in an entirely untrust-
worthy sequence. No one knows what to-morrow will bring forth, but no one
but a modern scientific philosopher can accept this untrustworthiness fully" (6).
This was not written, as some critics have supposed, under the impact of
Hiroshima, but more generally as a reaction to World War II. Nevertheless,
Wells's gloom at this stage in his career recapitulates the sense of collapse
registered decades earlier by his delegated narrator, Frederick Barnet, in 7he
World Set Free. There, atomic war also causes Barnet to lose his sense of
narrative. A loss of explanatory connection is signalled in a loss of story, and
this is not surprising given the ambiguity of Wells's central image of radiation
as one form of the sun's energy. David Dowling has rightly noted that the
opening of Wells's novel "directly links literacy and nuclear power" (46); but
he does not pursue the tension implicit in the title of that opening section, "The
Sun Snarers." Snaring is one expression of the scientific enterprise of
discovering and using atomic energy, but there is a fundamental contradiction
between the notion of the sun as an inexhaustible source of energy and the
various tropes (snare, harness, etc.) used within the novel to contain that

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46 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 30 (2003)

energy. This contradiction persists into the last pages, when Karenin addresses
the sun in a high rhetoric that attempts an Ahab-like defiance of his own
mortality and reduces the sun to an impotent giant: "Very soon now, old Sun,
I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach you and I shall put my foot on
your spotted face and tug you about by your fiery locks" (190). This bravado,
of course, absurdly ignores the scale and mystery of the sun. As the source of
all power, especially, in this context, of atomic energy, the sun dwarfs any
form of verbal expression. In Wells's novel, as in later novels of nuclear
holocaust, atomic energy not only challenges humanity's capacity to control its
force but also challenges the linguistic and narrative resources used to describe
the rupture caused by nuclear war.

NOTES
1. Wells was well aware of how new technology could change the paradigm of war;
he designed The War in the Air (1908) to demonstrate how air forces would replace the
notion of war fronts with that of areas.
2. Wells responded to Soddy also in revising his statement in The Discovery of the
Future (1902) that the "most insistently convincing" nightmare is the extinction of life
in a far-future ice age. In 1925 he added a footnote: "the discovery of radio-activity has
changed all that" (34, 37).
3. Cf. Guedalla. Cuttings of reviews of The World Set Free are held in the Wells
collection in Bromley Public Library, London.
4. Gannon also discusses Wells's anticipations of the question of international
control, the scale of such wars, radiation sickness, and other related issues.
5. The Hell Bomb was the title of the journalist William L. Laurence's 1951 book
about the atom bomb. For the apocalyptic context of these allusions, see Patrick
Parrinder.
6. Soddy's comments of 1915 are quoted in Weart, Fear 29; see also Wells,
Experiment in Autobiography 569.
7. Albert I. Berger has argued that during the period between the world wars,
nuclear power was used in science fiction as a "metaphor for an unlimited human
technological capability" (125).
8. The 1985 film Back to the Future opens with a mid-fifties film of a nuclear
explosion that graphically counters the verbal promises in the soundtrack that "the
potential for good of this force outweighs its potential for evil. A vital source of energy
that may someday replace that created by coal or even conventional electric power"
(Gipe 2). Such promises are also cited in Robert Graves's Seven Days in New Crete
(1949), with a skepticism similar to Soddy's.
9. For additional discussion of Szilard's stories, see my "Leo Szilard and the Cause
of Rational Disarmament."
10. Cf. Hoban, "It cancels...," interview with The Listener.
11. Russell Hoban, personal interview, March 8, 1998.

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ABSTRACT
Although the discovery of radium was promoted by the physicist Frederick Soddy as a
major advance in human development, the narratives that describe its application stress
its negative and destructive potential. H.G. Wells's The World Set Free writes Soddy into
the optimistic phase of the narrative and offers the first fictional account of nuclear war,
setting a pattern for more sophisticated subsequent nuclear war novels in that the
destructive force of the super-weapon is so massive that it undermines novelists' capacity
to produce coherent narratives. This proposition is tested out on a series of postwar
writers, including Leo Szilard (who knew Wells's original novel), Walter M. Miller, Jr.,
and Russell Hoban.

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