The Time Machine and The Garrison State

Let me begin by saying that I have a special affinity for the classics. There are many writers of Sci-Fi and for that matter just about every genre imaginable out there today but I rank almost all of my favorites as coming from around the turn of the last century or earlier. Reading one of H.G. Wells' masterpieces as our first encounter for this adventure is one of the things that sold me on wanting to take this class. Even our blog title represents one of the many great incarnations of the legend. Mercury Theatre was the program on CBS radio in which Orson Welles and his actors performed a reading of The War of the Worlds setting off one of the greatest panics in American History as many listeners truly believed that aliens had landed and were wreaking havoc on the countryside. Any work that can have that sort of effect is by my standards the mark of a true genius.

The mastery of The War of the Worlds is well known. However to me the even greater story is that this was not his first great masterpiece. His legend began with our subject of discussion The Time Machine. Wells was one of the first people to publish anything having to do with traveling through time. While that is honorable it is not really all that special. The real importance of this story is not that it was the first of its type, but that it is still one of the leading themes in our times. Countless books, television shows, and movies have all centered around the concept of traveling through time. Focusing not on some alien invaders acting as the catalyst for change, instead the time traveling narrative is centered right here on earth and what humanity does to make things better or worse. In The Time Machine the dichotomy established in the future between the Eloi and the Morlocks in the future world that the Time Traveler arrives in is in many ways a comment on society around the turn of the twentieth century. At the time there was a divide between the haves and the have nots. Those who had everything enjoyed themselves carelessly during the day but always feared that one day those less fortunate than them would rise up against them.

This thought brings me to the film Metropolis in which the dichotomy is strikingly similar. On the surface of the earth the wealthy live in peace and comfort provided by the hard worker living underground. Just as the Eloi fear the Morlocks so too do the men like Frederson fear his workers. Frederson believes that if necessary he can employ his, for lack of a better word, brute squad he can suppress any sort of worker's rebellion. Clearly this does not happen but their is an implication that those are the methods he would have used if the Machine-Man had not been created.

The whole idea of the better-off in some way controlling the worse-off is exactly what Lasswell discussed in "The Garrison State" written in 1941. The sheer irony of the similarities in a German film said to be one of Hitler's favorites and an American scholar just before America joined the war is enough to suggest that indeed this military state is where the world appeared to be heading in the first half of the twentieth century. Of course many would argue that pattern is continuing.

In closing, the works we have begun with I believe serve as almost a teaser for the class. We have begun by taking on one of the longest lasting themes in Sci-Fi, that of time travel and more importantly, the impacts our actions have on the future, and yet our future has yet to be determined as we prepare to go where only a few have ventured before. The great adventure that is Social/Science/Fiction.