The Blackberry Walk

I've recently been reading some H. G. Wells, specifically at the moment The First Man on the Moon. The story recounts the memories of power-hungry poet with his companion, a navel-gazey genius, and their trip to the moon on a zero-gravity spherical space craft. There, they become lost, meeting moon-dwelling beings, moon cattle, and moon fungi, attempting to find their way home. Such is the potent imagination of Wells and other early science fiction writers that they brim with such great hope! Hope for future invention; hope for the way of the scientist; and hope for the great novelty waiting to be discovered. I haven't read too much science fiction of the era yet, but Jules Verne's Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea brims with this selfsame hope; Verne imagines a future pioneered by a slightly autistic scientific vanguard in the figure of Captain Nemo, and, reading the novel, the hope and excitement Verne feels for what lies waiting below the sea's surface is palpable. From what I've read, the science fiction of the era is potent, potent in a way unimaginable today. There is too much knowledge about the moon to believe in the mooncalves of Wells' imagination grazing upon the surface. There is too much knowledge about the sea to have not yet discovered a Nautilus beneath its depths. There is too much knowledge about any celestial body worth caring about to believe there are parallel communities of aliens and their civilisations. The science fiction of later dates is always tainted with a darkness and grittiness, where the scientist is no longer the ronin pioneer of genius on a private adventure, like a Dr Frankenstein; but rather a Dr Faustus who wields science as a kind of covenant to exercise power over his fellow man. In part, the reversion back to the evil genius archetype is a positive reappraisal of Original Sin, for the scientist in all his learned power can't help but be corrupted by it. The pre-Great War sci-fi attitude to the scientist as a kind of Platonic philosopher who cares for nought but knowledge is very much in line with the pagan-Nietzscheanite age of the Late-Victorian and Edwardian ages, which Chesterton fought against. But in the psychical reassertion of the age-old truth of Original Sin, something of the fertility of imagination for these fantastical worlds was lost. Two World Wars seemed to have salted the fields of hope found in progress, with the apostatical Calvinism of modern progressivism behaving as a castrated simulacrum of its Nietzschean parallel. The Apollo missions proved one very important thing to mankind: that the moon is a very boring place. The endless fields of rock would sustain no life, however many articles claim to have discovered what might appear to be rock formations shaped by flowing water. And as the Promethean light of knowledge bathes more of the known world, the mystery, the darkness, the elves, faeries, and nymphs, retreat further and further. H. G. Wells was a Fabian Socialist, after all, which was a kind of wedding of socialism and Western-focused internationalism, aiming to unify the world under Anglo-led free-trade and a brotherhood of nations. But as Chesterton rightly points out regarding Wells, 'there is only a thin sheet of paper between the Imperialist and the Internationalist; and the first Fabians had the lucidity to see the fact.' Sci-fi revels in the imperialism of other worlds, of the lone British explorer a la James Brooke of Sarawak; in The First Man on the Moon the protagonist in an intoxicated state quips that colonisation of the Selenites (the moon-dwellers) is part of the White Man's Burden. But the era of empire - at least explicitly, for the Fabian conception remains still widely in vogue - is over. Within later sci-fi, Star Trek brings the contention to consciousness, centrally dealing with the dilemma; for how can we explore alien planets without siding with Cortez? Without imperialism and with fewer and fewer places to explore, worlds of hopeful fantastical happenings can no longer happen in the future, within our timeline, but have been abstracted to other timelines in the form of fantasy. Fantasy is sci-fi in parallel worlds, with low fantasy constituting a world much like our own, and high fantasy one less recognisable. But it feels decidedly like a relegation. For again, man has been to the moon, and found no mooncalves. No longer may I permit myself in sincerity to dream of mooncalves and believe they're real. Ghosts are liable to disappear in bright light; and the Promethean light of science is no different. Much like the Eloi of The Time Machine, man is afraid of the dark, of the unknown; yet we fail to discern the darkness and hidden fertility of the womb from the microbe-ridding sterility of ultra-violet light. Thankfully whilst science can illuminate the material world, it has no jurisprudence over the world of the invisible. The Kingdom of God cannot be conquered by any imperium of man. One of the many tragedies of man is that the more we systematise the world in order to wield our understanding of it, the more boring it becomes. Some people I've talked to - for I work in science - tell me that to imagine the sunset as photons diffracting through the atmosphere enriches and enlivens their love for the sunset. For me, it can only ruin it.