Existential Threats. Lisa Vox
in 1901 titled “The Last Days of Earth,” which visualizes the end of the world through a slow freezing. The Earth’s resources, which could have permitted humanity to continue its existence, have all been depleted: “Coal had long since been exhausted, along with peat and wood and all inflammable oils and gases; no turbine could work from frozen seas, no air wheels revolve in an atmosphere but slightly stirred by a faded sun.”82 Some humans flee to other planets, leaving a dead Earth but preserving a remnant of humanity.83 This plotline becomes commonplace in the twentieth-century American scientific apocalyptic.
Not only the British speculated along these lines. During the same time period, the Serbian-born American inventor Nikola Tesla offered novel theories as to how the world could end accidentally as well as purposefully. He suggested that the atmosphere could catch fire: “And who can tell with certitude that periodical cessations of organic life on the globe might not be caused by ignition of the air and destruction of its life-sustaining qualities, accidentally or as a consequence of some accumulative change?”84 Tesla, whose reputation as a mad scientist has grown throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (some blame an experiment of his for the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia), claimed that he could destroy the Earth on his own.85 He reportedly said he could cleave the Earth in two if he could only “obtain perfect mechanical resonance of the earth” by sending vibrations into the ground and accelerating them through dynamite.86 The modern American attribution of an apocalyptic ability to Tesla illustrates both the fear and awe that would later develop in the United States regarding scientific attempts to control nature, as with the bomb.87
Tesla’s boasting had more to do with mastering nature than with generating a doomsday. In general, Americans were not quite ready to engage in the kind of apocalyptic speculation that the British enjoyed, even by the turn of the century. John Ames Mitchell, an editor at Life, offered The Last American (1902) as a vision of the end of the United States by 1990 due to internal corruption in the Donnelly mold. A Persian on an archaeological expedition to the old United States, where no humans any longer live, observes, “They were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell.”88 Unlike Donnelly, however, Mitchell was much more pessimistic; the avarice of the “Mehrikans” results in the complete eradication of the nation: “And their greed, at last, resulted in this war. By means of one-sided laws of their own making they secured themselves a lion’s share of all profits from the world’s commerce. This checked the prosperity of other nations, until at last the leading powers of Europe combined in self-defence against this all-absorbing greed.”89
Despite the moral misgivings of Mitchell, Nathaniel Shaler, an American geologist at Harvard from 1868 until 1906, claimed that science could allow humanity to escape possible threats to its existence. His nonfiction work Man and the Earth (1905) was a contemplation of the future of natural resources. He believed that mankind “is by his intellectual quality exempted from most of the agents that destroy organic groups.”90 While natural resources might be in danger of exhaustion in the future, Shaler was confident that science would be able to revitalize the fertility of worn-out soil and be able to tap into other sources of energy like wind and water when coal and oil are exhausted.91 Addressing the growing fears of environmental degradation that proto-environmentalists like John Muir disseminated, Shaler asserted that nations would embrace the idea of preserving areas of their countryside.92 There were limits to his concern for nature, however. As a neo-Lamarckian evolutionist, he admitted that the progress of humanity might result in the extinction of other species.93 Still, Shaler did not think this should deter humanity from ascending to its destiny, although he argued that humans should strive to preserve some mammals from extinction for scientific study.94 Man and the Earth’s survey of the possible obstacles to human growth concluded with this statement: “There is no reason to forecast the end of this new order until the sun goes out, or the under-earth ceases to renew to the theatre of life.” And that, according to Shaler, is “as remote in the future as the dawn of life is in the past.”95
Like Shaler most Americans continued to express faith that science would solve any emerging problems through World War I. In the two decades before the Great War, Progressive reformers in the United States undertook a reordering of society based on the belief that science could address the ills resulting from rapid urbanization and industrialization. While fear of revolution from below, as Donnelly depicted, motivated some, most reformers were white, middle-class Protestants who believed society could improve with the help of modern social science. On the state and federal level, Progressives pushed for wide-ranging legislation from child labor laws to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906.
Progressivism had a dark side: paternalistic ideas about racial uplift made reformers insensitive to the realities of life for immigrants and the poor. In the opening decades of the 1900s, a eugenics movement cropped up, and it lasted until World War II, with a majority of states passing compulsory sterilization laws aimed at people with disabilities, mental illness, and criminal records, which indirectly targeted minorities and the indigent.96 Sponsors of moral reforms like the “white slavery” law of 1910 and Prohibition in 1919 sought social control, betraying that hidden beneath the American faith in progress was the dread of usurpation.
In contrast to Americans who still expressed faith in a technological future, British fiction writers only became more pessimistic as the science fiction writer and critic Brian Aldiss notes.97 England’s famous mystery writer Arthur Conan Doyle offered up a narrative of the entire end of the world in a 1913 novel. Flammarion had proposed in Omega that a comet passing close to the Earth might result in the death of humanity. This idea inspired Doyle’s The Poison Belt. Its plot concerns the Earth passing through the tail of a comet, resulting in everyone on Earth, except for a group of friends of an incredibly prescient professor, taking on the appearance of death. The group, having survived passing through the “poison belt” because of a supply of oxygen, emerges from Professor Challenger’s house and believes that everyone else has died. Though the death of humanity has appeared to be painless—the poison has the effect of laughing gas—Challenger confesses to his friends that he “could sympathize with the person who took the view that the horror lay in the idea of surviving when all that is learned, famous, and exalted had passed away.”98 The professor is optimistic that evolution would ensure the survival of life on Earth, saying, in spite of the calamity, “you would see some few million years hence—a mere passing moment in the enormous flux of the ages—the whole world teeming once more with the animal and human life which will spring from this tiny root” (the amoeba).99 In the end, everyone wakes up, having experienced a condition the professor names “catalepsy.”100
Despite this exit strategy, this novel’s suggestion that a natural disaster could kill all of humanity—and at any moment—is an important development in how humanity saw nature, a theme that would come to dominate scientific apocalypticism during the last half of the twentieth century. The Poison Belt implied that nature could be indiscriminate in its effects. Aldiss, discussing Doyle’s ending, observes, “After the 1914–18 war, such meek reversions to the prosaic would no longer be possible [for British writers].”101 Nevertheless, in comparison to American visions of the future at the same time, Doyle’s image of a comet potentially affecting everyone on Earth—with no recourse to technological solutions—is much bleaker and anticipates the direction that science fiction would take first in Great Britain and later in the United States after 1945.
Aldiss says of the differences between the British scientific romance and American science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century that “much of the scientific romance had been sturdily dark in tone, just as a robust optimism dominated scientifiction [an American term used prior to “science fiction”]. In part, the marked contrast is attributable to different life-experience in Britain and the United States.”102 World War I couldn’t even the differences between the tones of speculative fiction in the United States, Britain, and Europe. As Aldiss notes, Britain had many more casualties in World War I, and afterward “economic decline in the one country was counterbalanced by economic ascendancy in the other.”103