Tyree's Tuppence

by Tyree Campbell

The Eloi And The Morlocks

One of the perks of being an editor is that sometimes I get to read some really good stuff.  As a fan [and writer] of science fiction, I like good stuff that takes place in the future.  Sometimes the venue is a short story--Cyril Kornbluth's "Not This August" comes immediately to mind, mostly because I just finished reading it--and sometimes it is a much longer piece, a novel or at least a novella.  The longer pieces are perhaps the more interesting, because they provide space for the development of whole societies, entire futures.  They enable the writer to create, if he or she wishes, dystopias.

What's a dystopia?

Well, it's a utopia on steroids.  It's . . .

Okay, let's start at the beginning:  a utopia is an ideal society.  Utopias have appeared in literature for centuries.  The word itself was first coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More [the central figure in the movie A Man For All Seasons, btw], and actually means "nowhere" [from the Greek "ou," meaning "not," and "topos," meaning "place"][and "Erehwon," which is "nowhere" backwards, was the title of a Samuel Butler satire].

Where was I?  Oh, yeh . . .

The concept of a utopia has been around for far longer than the word.  Plato's Republic describes one, for example.  Millennia later, Karl Marx's brand of communism was supposed to create a workers' utopia, failing because of, among other things, human foibles, such as the insatiable lust for power.  Psychologically speaking, it's that particular foible which leads, in literature, to the development of dystopias.

You're probably familiar with several novels of dystopias.  The four that come immediately to my mind are:

We, by Evgeniy Zamiatin, published in 1924

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932

Anthem, by Ayn Rand, published in 1946

1984, by George Orwell, published in 1948

[Orwell, btw, selected 1984 as the title by reversing the last two digits of the year in which he completed the manuscript][there will be a quiz].

I should add parenthetically that Huxley wrote his BNW before the development of the atomic bomb.  He was profoundly moved and disturbed by the bomb, which altered his [and, for that matter, our] outlook on the future.  In 1948 he wrote a play titled Ape And Essence as something of a replacement for BNW. 

Some students of dystopic literature [would they be called dystopiophiles?] have shown that Zamiatin's novel greatly influenced Orwell and, to a lesser extent, Huxley.  In their view, We may be regarded as the direct ancestor of the great XX Century dystopic novels.  And all four of these novels are or ought to be regarded as science fiction [okay, or speculative fiction].  In each case, the author looked at the world he or she knew and said, "If This Goes On---"

I would suggest that almost all futuristic science fiction novels are dystopic in one way or another.  SF writers create the worlds of their vision as these derive from their contemporary milieux.  What makes the novel truly dystopic is the emphasis placed on the future society.  If the society is background to the story--see many novels by Jack Vance, frex--the novel is not dystopic.  It's a fine line in some cases, but a dystopic novel ought to have its society as the central figure around which the protagonists revolve, and story conflict ought to put the protagonist in confrontation with society [e.g., Rand's Anthem or L.A. Story Houry's Urbania]--or with an antagonist who is representative of that society, such as O'Brien in 1984 or Sol Thatcher in The Guardener's Tale.

Other conflicts are possible, of course:  frex, a sector of outer space that is run by a league of corporations who tolerate local planetary authorities so long as the profits keep rolling in, rather as Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth did in The Space Merchants [ahem, and as I did in The Dog at the Foot of the Bed].  For the most part, societal conflicts in SF have positioned the poor and powerless against the rich and powerful.  Think Charles Dickens with phasers.

Well . . . it's been said that the poor will always be with us.  But that's just a corollary to the basic statement, which is:  all society is generally divided into two classes:  the haves, and the have-nots.  It's been that way for millennia.  And there are always far fewer haves than have-nots.  It's been that way for millennia, too.

So what happens If This Goes On---?

One of the Old Masters of Science Fiction provided an answer to that question back in 1895, in a short novel titled The Time Machine.  Through the eyes of his Time Traveller, H. G. Wells took his readers to the year 802,701, when society had evolved to comprise two groups:  the pale and frail Eloi, and the dark and ravenous Morlocks.  [Psst!  Wanna see a Morlock?  Go look at the cover of John Bushore's novel Friends In Dark Places.  That's a Morlock][no, not the little girl, the other one].  The Eloi are the poster children for Listlessness, Helplessness, Beauty, and Fatalism.  The Morlocks are archetypical bad guys:  Klingons on PCP.  You'll recall the scenes and events of the story.  The nocturnal Morlocks hunt Eloi and feast on them.  Morlocks are the dark shadow, the price the Eloi must pay for their lives of leisure and beauty.

Well . . .

Where did the Eloi and Morlocks come from?

Wells himself was a socialist.  He believed, like so many of the PC crowd today, that humanity could be perfected if only it could be compelled to conform to his views.  But this socialism was tempered by his view of history, in which humanity is anything but perfect or perfectable.  He was, perhaps, a rational socialist:  a rara avis indeed.

As a socialist, Wells had a ready grasp of the class system, the elites, the poor, the powerful and the powerless.  He supposed, in The Time Machine, that the Eloi derived from the rich and leisure society, the upper classes, and that after mighty years they finally drove their poorer, laboring brethren out of the light of day into a subterranean existence.  Thereafter, the Eloi existed in the manner to which they had become accustomed, laughing, playing, and eating fruit, all the while serving as fattened cattle for the unwashed Morlocks, who rose in the dark to feed on them.

The society of The Time Machine is an example of a dystopia:  a seemingly ideal society with a skeleton in its closet.  But which of the two groups truly owns the skeleton? 

Is it not possible that the Morlocks are the rich and powerful, driven underground by the have-nots by means of . . . oh, say, a seriously reformist government elected by those have-nots, or by PC run amuck?  Marx would likely agree that the rich and powerful Morlocks had long been accustomed to feeding upon the labor and production of the Eloi.

Perhaps the Eloi derive from religious perfection.  Having taken control of the daylight, the [insert religion here] Eloi have driven the heathen Morlocks out of the realm of their God--but at a horrible cost, of which they are blissfully unaware.

One might even inject ethnic and cultural considerations into the origins of the Eloi and the Morlocks.  The Eloi are very pale [Caucasian?], the Morlocks dark [Third World?]. 

Interestingly, neither the Eloi nor the Morlocks appear to have a hierarchy.  Weena, an Eloi female, is a central character in the novel for several archetypical reasons:  as a female, she evokes sympathy; as a female, she holds the promise of sexuality as it might be expressed with the Time Traveller; and someone has to explain to the Time Traveller what's going on in this world, and it might as well be her.  But it's the Time Traveller who looks for hierarchies--for leaders.  The Eloi and the Morlocks, for some reason, don't need them.

Weena, in fact, encounters the Time Traveller only because the TT, a Victorian gentleman, cannot abide the accidental death of someone without trying to assist.  See, Weena has fallen into the river.  Ignoring her plight, the other Eloi yawn, peel bananas, and regard the esthetic beauty of a butterfly's wing.  Weena herself is pretty much resigned to her fate.  Poop happens, you know.  But the TT was there to save the day, and was rewarded appropriately by Weena with fruit and leis.  So Weena stands out, by gender and by name.  She's a literary convention, nothing more than that.  She's not a leader, despite the recent remake of the movie.

There's an excellent short story by James Van Pelt, "What Weena Knew," which is Weena's take on the encounter with the Time Traveller.  The story includes a bit of cultural contamination, as if to say that the Eloi and the Morlocks are not necessarily the end result of the evolution of humanity.

Where did they come from, and where are they going?  In one form or another, we are the future Eloi and Morlocks.  Hard to tell, now, which is which.  Maybe the difference depends on our vision of the deep future. 

Where are we going?  How will we get there?  What will we find when we arrive?

Hopefully, as sentient beings, we'll find the answers to those questions.  Hopefully, science fiction will be our reference material.

Past Tuppence:
December 2006
September 2006
June 2006
March 2006
December 2005
September 2005
June 2005
March 2005
December 2004
September 2004
June 2004
March 2004
December 2003
September 2003
June 2003
March 2003
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
June 2002
April 2002
February 2002
December 2001
October 2001
August 2001

Read more from Tyree Campbell in any of the following:

The Dog at the Foot of the Bed
by Tyree Campbell

Wondrouse Web Worlds Vol. 6

The Martian Women
by Tyree Campbell

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 5

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 4

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 3

Sex and the Single Alien
An anthology

Nyx
A novel by Tyree Campbell

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 2