The shock of the new and the different also comes into play in Wells's Men Like Gods. In this novel, individuals of our era and our type of society are confronted with a futuristic-like utopian reality that embodies deep social, ethical, ecological, and psychological transformations (relative to us). The individuals of our era almost universally react with horror, disapproval, and moral indignation to these utopian beings and their world. They try to conquer the world and destroy it. We may wish for something better in the future, but will our entrenched modes of thinking and behavior and desire to maintain the power of the status quo resist any fundamental change? Will we invariably see the changes as threatening and undesirable (dystopian)?

As another noteworthy feature, frequently found in these earlier science fiction tales, it never ceases to amaze me how many novels, presumably informed and inspired by a modern scientific attitude toward reality, are populated with spirits, spiritual realms, religious ideas, and Biblical archetypes. In Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds we find the ghosts or spirits of the dead (notably including the disembodied soul of a bishop) out among the planets of our solar system, in this case Saturn, providing human explorers from the earth with religious and ethical guidance on human destiny and the meaning of life. What is particularly striking is the juxtaposition of an immense factual overload of engineering details on the structure and workings of the space ship with a fully developed spiritualist Christian vision of the cosmos and human existence. Another similar example is Flammarion's Omega (1893-1894), which contains more mathematics than any other science fiction novel I have ever read, yet also contains mystical beings and a poetic and transcendental theory of eternity.

Using science to set the plot going, but eventually coming around to a religious center of gravity, The Messiah of the Cylinder is a Christian science fiction dystopian novel of the future, in which a time traveler from the nineteenth century journeys ahead a hundred years (to our time) and finds a scientifically governed society that has repressed Christianity (and presumably all that is good within us). Our time traveler emerges as the anticipated "messiah" who will defeat the tyrannical and heartless forces of science and reassert the central importance of the Christian message in life. There is also a love story in this tale, and science and religious prophecy get juxtaposed within this dimension as well.

   

Yet, on the other hand, another key feature running through many of these earlier books is the scientist as the heroic character, synthesizing personal qualities such as intelligence, courage, justice, compassion, and practicality in his personhood. Garrett Serviss, who was an astronomer and writer of popular science around the turn of the century (as was Flammarion), created admirable central protagonists in his novels A Columbus of Space (1909), The Second Deluge (1911), and his famous Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898). These characters were inventive and yet wise scientists, who invariably "saved the day" in these tales. In contemporary cinematic science fiction, the creative theoretical scientist is not so much portrayed as wise and heroic but rather tipped toward being mad and power hungry. In our present era, to what degree do we view the creative scientist as heroic, virtuous, and sane? Do we trust the scientist? Do we trust science? Even if in contemporary tales, the scientist is not evil or crazy, is the scientist the action hero of the story, combining intellectual and creative abilities with character and practical capacities? In the books of Serviss, the scientist combines brains, morals, and action (the basic components of wisdom), though perhaps lacking some humility.  In both Men LIke Gods and The Shape of Things to Come, science and scientists are critical to humanity's salvation. In the latter book, it is the psychological scientists who structure and direct the world. It is the capitalists, nationalistic politicians, and religious zealots who are the villains and enemies of progress and the good life.

Indeed, although the book has little dramatic tension, The Year 3000: A Dream (1897) by Paolo Mantegazza, not only includes the creative scientist as the central protagonist of the story, but it highlights the future wonders of science and technology within a very positive image of the future. Advances in science are key to a better future. But more so, Mantegazza's futurist vision pulls science together with social, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of reality, creating a balanced and holistic preferable future. Science and technology will not rob us of our humanity. This is a much different vision from Rousseau's novel, where science robs us of our ethics and our heart; it is a much different vision than contemporary fearful images in which computers or robots--as metaphors of the cold, hard logic of science and technology, possessing no feeling or compassion-attempt to take over the world. Humanism and science are necessarily united in Mantegazza's futurist story. 

As depicted in these various early tales, the future may be strange and eerie, as in The House on the Borderland, or contemporary human civilization may come to a sudden end and go up in flames, as in The Purple Cloud, but broadly what we find is a rich variety of futurist visions that sometimes sound naive and quaint, and other times sound very dissonant with our visions of today. "The future ain't what it used to be" is continually true (and will continue to be true), but this is good. Perhaps we are achieving some progress in our futurist visions; nonetheless, earlier images may remind us of things we have forgotten or failed to learn from history. History informs the future, and the history of the future doubly informs where we think we are heading or where we may want to head. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come was clearly the most high-powered intellectual work of the new batch of science fiction books I read, and it is a book deeply (perhaps even excessively) grounded in historical analysis of how we got to where we are and why. In that respect, the evolving science fiction library is a repository on the history of both wisdom and foolishness about the future. It reminds us that "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."