h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Chapter 1

"An intriguing opening chapter (for flinch's benefit the book is in twelve chapters with a brief epilogue).

The language is strange, with many now obscure words and usages (eg recondite and fecundity), however it is well written with a nice rhythm to it.

Only one character is named, Filby, the rest are all described by their job or character type (Medical Man, Very Young Man, etc). I suspect that this is a carefully chosen characterisation. By specifying the character in this particular way, Wells draws on the reader's own perception of the type of character evinced by the name. The oddity, Filby, is curious, any thought on why he's different?

As Andy says, Wells introduces the concept of Space/Time with a fairly short but astute description. Just enough to lay the foundation of the novel without confusing the reader, but an important scientific concept that must have been new at the time. I wonder where Wells got it from?

Wells also raises some of the issues of Time Travel but quickly dismisses these. I think he does this to show that the narrative will not be about the obvious paradoxes of time travel, nor about taking advantage of it, thus opening the way for both he and the reader to focus on what follows. I believe that Wells may also give some indication of the direction this will take with some of the characters comments, such as his own character's suggestion that the future may be "a society erected on a strictly communist basis".

Any other thoughts, anyone?"

Just to start the ball rolling ...

What happened to the first Time Machine? By my reckoning, there is no one to pull the second lever, meaning the device would be travelling forward in time without end (unless there is some sort of fuel to run out). I know this is a minor thing, but it's the first thing that struck me. I just imagine a cold, dark and - most of all - dead universe with this tiny little Victorian machine in it.
Unless of course it reappears in the story...

Sorry. That last Entry was by Andy (I forgot to log out and back in as myself).

Well I just got a copy - £3.99 Everyman Edition, from Ottakers today. So hang on while I read it, eh?

Ben

I'm enjoying the book, but its had me dusting off my dictionary!

It's perhaps ironic that recondite is now itself a recondite notion. Perhaps it says a lot about our belief that we now know all!

Yeah, it's nice that Filby - the only character whom it is apparently not 'convenient' to name only by a single anonymous characteristic - is introduced as "Filby, an argumentative person". Perhaps there is the seed of a notion in this that it is his very argumentativeness which gives him this distinction. That perhaps it is through questioning, confronting and demanding that we define ourselves as individuals. As, surely, having a name is the most basic form of individuality.

It is of course the first person narrator of the story who says "To discover a society ... erected on a strictly communistic basis". Should we regard this as being the voice of Wells himself speaking his beliefs directly to the audience? I think it probibly is, we'll have to see how the first person character develops over the book.

The preceding comments are all based around travelling BACK in time, and i would suggest that this comment is also meant in that vein here. It was a commonly held belief, as it is now, that primitive man lived in a communist society, which was then compromised as that society and its technologies became more sophisticated. This was a driving principal of Marxism amongst other communist schools. Engels wrote a book on the subject and included the following footnote on the first page of the 1888 edition of The Communist Manifesto:

"In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes."

Indeed Lewis Morgan's Archaeological treaties "Ancient Society (or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilisation" of 1877 not only took, like Marx, the Hegelian notion of the inevitability of social progress, it also gave credence that a communist society was possible in the future as it had been possible in the past - Marx wrote an unpublished abstract on the book and Engels used it as a major theme in his "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" 1884. The establishment of such a precedent for communism, and a notion that this was mans 'natural state' rather than a contrived notion of society was key to many socialist thinkers of the time, hoping to use the new sciences to prove their political theories. When the Psychologist suggests "It's would be remarkably convenient for the historian" remember Marx himself was a historian, and derived his theories by analysing historical data.

The key tenets of Marxism, which we now take for granted as common sense: that over time societies evolve; that progress is inevitable; that in the distant past there was no ownership or hierarchy and these notions are artificial; that inequalities (or conflicts, or contradictions) must be resolved for progress to occur; were at the time Wells was writing, new and radical ideas, ideas which were only just beginning to be circulated throughout society, and which were looking for proofs. A writer who believed he would travel back in time to discover a communistic society, might be expected to believe that the distant (or even imminent) future would hold an equally communistic, but technologically superior (therefore progressed) society.

I think we should consider that the narrator is Wells. Wells doesn't identify the narrator in any way other than "I". He doesn't even have one of the other characters address himself directly. Yet in the second chapter he identifies himself by saying "And with that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth."

The subsequent narrative then also becomes first person as it is all directly quoted.

I think there is a definite undercurrent of belief in communism as a natural state for mankind both in the past and in expectation for the future.

The third chapter makes me a little confused though over Wells' own views. The Time Traveller appears to deduce that the society he has entered is communistic on the basis of the inhabitants dress, lifestyle and the conditions in which they live, that is a run down and poorly maintained environment. Is Wells in favour or against this.

I think that it's dangereous to assume that the first person voice is propagating the oppinion of the author, but given the little i know about Wells, his veiws must at least be similar. But authours will often act as agent provocateur, putting words into their first person narrators that they don't themselve believe, attempting perhaps to prompt the reader to disagree with the first person conclutions.

Does anyone know any more about Well's life than we already know?

Wells's other work never seems to mention communism. Perhaps he had recently read an article suggesting that such a system was inevitable and used that as the basis of the Time Traveller's views.

On a slight tangent, the first-person narrative with the TT's exact words being noted down, so as to give a narrative from a different point of view is remeniscent of Sherlock Holmes stories. It seems that until as late as the 50s or 60s authors just didn't conceive of writing in the third person, but focusing on one character's thoughts and actions or even having two different narrators without a device such as this. Two techniques which are relatively commonplace today.

A reasonably short biography is -

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hgwells.htm

although some of it has been plagiarised from MS Encarta. Shame on them.

I'm interested in where Wells got his notion of spacetime from. Einstein's breakthrough was a decade away, and yet here we have a pretty good explaination:
"Clearly," the Time Traveller proceeded, "any real body must have extension in FOUR directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and - Duration."
Any ideas? Was Einstein advancing theories that had already been published (influencing Wells) or did Wells come up with this on his own?

Marx's historical theories, whereby a Communistic future was "inevitable", were very popular with emminent thinkers in the late 19th century. Wells was a progressive socialist rather than a revolutionary, but his future in The Time Machine makes it quite clear that he believed that Marx would be proved right.

I seem to remember that Well's originally wrote The Time Machine as a "true" story. I think this is why so many of the characters are described by type. As for Filby, I have no idea.

What impressed me most about the book is how many things are left enigmatic (the Sphinx for example). I also love the part where the Time Traveller witnesses the Earth in it's last days. It's chillingly written.

Has anyone seen the film version where the whole thing is turned into some warning about Nuclear War?

I am definitely out of practice when it comes to analysing books and I shall have to read it more closely!

I'm just about to sit down and read Chapter Two - but one other thing i couldn't help noticing is how resonant of The Time Machine sections of Hitch Hikers are. I've never really thought that HHGTTG was particularly drawn from sci-fi (not like say Pratchett - where books and motifs are directly parodied). However it seems the language and phraseology is, possibily, drawn from this as a source.

Zagreb, seeing as how some people haven't read the whole thing yet, we shouldn't get into this too much, but I don't think Wells' writing shows a wholesale acceptance of a Utopian communistic future.

Let's see, Wells' understanding of space-time:

It's a good deal less sophisticated than Einstein's theory; we should understand that Einstein's insight wasn't that space and time are the same, but that they are mutable - an idea certainly not suggested in the Time Machine.

*searches internet for "Minkowski"*

"Raum und Zeit" (translates as "Space and Time") was published in 1907. Still a bit late for Wells.

*searches some more*

My apologes for running through a set of chapters in one go. But once you get past the actual start of the journey, I think these form a useful section of the book.

The second meeting at the home of the Time Traveller seems marked by an unusual change of cast. New characters are introduced in the form of an editor and journalist while others are discarded from the first meeting. I think this is done deliberately to change the emphasis.

Are the first group intended to challenge the theory presented and therefore matched to the topic? That is deliberately chosen to provoke skepticism and challenge the concept of time travel, thus dispelling the reader's own natural skepticism?

Would the second group therefore be intended to lend weight to the recording of the journey? Were there any contemporary news reports?

There seems little point in commenting on the journey through time itself, but the arrival in the future and the initial discoveries of the Time Traveller are interesting. He rapidly comes to the conclusion that society has advanced and declined from a peak. He also concludes quite quickly that it is communist in nature.

This is a markedly quick conclusion to reach on only 1 day of investigation.

The disappearance of the Time Machine rapidly takes on a sinister note. Who is behind it?

There then appears to be an interlude. Rather than discussing the society, Wells introduces Weena and begins a more detailed exploration of the society. This seems a more reasonable time to reach a conclusion of communism, so why introduce the concept so quickly?

There are other things that I would like to discuss, so I'll hold back from reading further for now.

What are your thoughts folks?

The book Flatland (by Edwin A Abbott, I believe) comments on this "time being a dimension" concept too.... The setup for that entire book is in a land of only two dimensions, instead of our three (they have no height--everyone is a two-dimensional figure; ie, triangles, squares, circles). The social structure there is really interesting, actually, but that's not what I want to bring out.

Their world is a plane. Now suppose that a sphere passed through this plane, and suppose that they could see the effect of the sphere on their world. What would they see? The intrusion would begin as a point, then gradually grow to its maximum, and begin to shrink back to a point again. The Flatlanders could not understand what was going on, having no concept of a third dimension, except as the passage of time. So having two physical dimensions, their third dimension becomes time.

Just an interesting concept and explanation of the "time-dimension" that popped up into my head as I read the beginning of Chapter 1... I don't know how relevant it will be once I read a bit further. (I've only got through Chapter 1 so far; hopefully I'll get further tonight.)


As has been mentioned , the first time the narrator speaks directly about himself (beyond the second-person "our chairs" in the first paragraph), and it states a pessimistic view having to do with communism and the loss of all one's possessions. I think I like this man.


I've just noticed the lack of week-long sentences: very nice. Does anyone know if that style of writing was past at the time that this book was written? If it was, not something to comment on.... If it wasn't, well then, bravo to Wells.

I think it's because he sees that they live communally rather than in seperate dwellings.

The copy that I picked up 'The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G.Wells' (AVENEL 1978 edition) has a preface that he wrote for it which has some answers to some of the questions asked here. I'll give a brief overview of some of what he said.

First, he said that this fiction doesn't pretend to deal with possible things, rather they are an exersize of the imagination. He considers the inventions to be devices that can hold the reader to the end by art and illusion instead of by proof and argument, and they're designed to provoke our natural reactions of wonder and fear and perplexity. His purpose was to get people to think about how they would feel and what they would do if it happened to them.

He wrote that in prior stories of that nature the fantastic element was brought in by magic, but "as it had become impossible to squeeze even a momentary belief out of magic an ingenious use of scientific patter might be accepted". He was just trying to make it as near as possible to actual theory, not making a comment on it. He said, "As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention. So as soon as the hypothesis is launched the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired."

Let' see.... what else...

He says "In my student days we were much exersized by talk about a possible fourth dimension of space; the fairly obvious idea that events could be presented in a rigid four dimensional space time framework had occurred to me, and this is used as the magic trick for a future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind..... Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation...... I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist at the bottom. This is an entirely indifferent world in which willful wisdom seems to have a perfectly fair chance."