Wells, “The Star”; Du Bois, “The Comet”

Unit 3

Pulp Fiction and the Golden Age of SF

Today’s authors

• H. G. Wells (1866–1946)
• W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

Two writers, two years apart in age, both writing catastrophe — and arriving at almost opposite conclusions about what a catastrophe reveals.

Before the pulps

The commercial ground was prepared by general-interest fiction magazines:

• Munsey’s Magazine (1889–1929) — Frank Munsey’s experiment in cheap mass-market publishing
• The Argosy (1888–1929) — all fiction, all genres, and the direct ancestor of the pulps

Wells’s early run

Four ground-breaking books in four years:

Reading notes: “The Star”

• “The archetypal Wells story concerns the eruption of the extraordinary into the ordinary.”
  Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 185.
• To make his scientific romances believable, Wells integrated the advanced technologies of his day: increasingly powerful telescopes, cameras, the spectroscope, the telegraph.
• Reflecting Wells’s devotion to science and logic, it is only with the arrival of the master mathematician that anyone understands the true consequences of the new body in the sky.
• Most of the story is an exercise in mounting suspense as the star inexorably approaches; the rest is a surprisingly objective account of the natural disasters its proximity causes — anticipating today’s appetite for disaster narrative.
• Why does Wells, in the final paragraph, suddenly introduce a literally alien perspective on the events we have just watched?

W. E. B. Du Bois

“The Comet” (1920)

Du Bois beyond fiction

Best known for The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935) — sociology, history, and political argument.

“The Comet” appears in Darkwater (1920), a collection mixing essays, poems, and fiction.

Reading notes: “The Comet”

• As a Black intellectual in an era of rampant discrimination and segregation, Du Bois knew that every time he put pen to paper he was making a political statement.
• The setup resembles Wells and also uses third-person narration — but is strongly focalized through Jim, a working-class African American man in New York who appears to be the sole survivor of a poison gas released by a passing comet. The result is a fine example of the urban uncanny: bustling streets and businesses now silent.
• Nightmare though it is, Jim quickly sees opportunities that did not exist the day before: he can eat in restaurants that would have refused him, drive where he likes.
• When Jim meets another survivor — Julia, a wealthy young white woman — neither immediately registers the other’s race. Their racial and class differences seem unimportant now, suggesting such distinctions were never more than social constructions, and cease to exist when society does.
• The scene in which the two almost become lovers (p. 60) would have been highly controversial. But note that even as Du Bois imagines a world where race and class no longer matter, he falls back on stereotypical gender norms — Julia as a new Eve.
• When Julia’s family finds them, and they learn the gas affected only New York: what is immediately assumed about Jim? How does Julia’s behavior change?
• The politics can be read optimistically — racism is only a social construction — or pessimistically: racism is so embedded in American society that only the end of the world could erase it.
• What is the effect of Jim’s wife and dead child appearing at the very end?

Two catastrophes

For Thursday

• “The Plant Men” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (BBCF 475)
• “The Conquest of Gola” by Leslie F. Stone (BBSF 98)
• “September 2005: The Martian” by Ray Bradbury (BBSF 164)