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"The Stolen Body" (1898)
*Having typed this, I am going to have Bryan Ferry's voice in my head all day.
This is a very good story, so thumbs up. We have a sort of journalistic narrator, a nameless person who has spoken to the two main participants in the drama the story relates and more or less gives the story from their point of view, first one, then the other.
A successful London lawyer, unmarried, spends his free time investigating psychic phenomena. Before TV, middle-class people had crazy hobbies--if it wasn't for TV, the Cold War world would have witnessed untold numbers of astounding discoveries and horrendous crimes. Anyway, the particular interest of this lawyer, Bessel, is in transferring thoughts and images from one mind to another. So Bessel recruits a pal, Vincey, who lives two miles away, to conduct experiments with him. At specific times, both will sit still in their London apartments and focus with all their mental energies on the other, trying to make psychic contact. Four or five times nothing happens, but on the fifth or sixth try Vincey actually sees an image of Bessel, but Bessel looks haggard and anxious, like he's in trouble!
Vincey rushes to Bessel's apartment to report success and see if his friend is OK. Bessel is absent, his room in terrible disorder, and a guy on staff at the apartment house reports bizarre behavior on the part of the lawyer. The story follows Vincey's efforts to find out what is going on and to help his friend, and then we get the story from the point of view of Bessel. There are various exciting events and compelling descriptions--Wells is a good writer and everything that happens is fun or disturbing or engrossing.
In brief, Bessel separated his soul from his body and found himself in a sort of parallel realm inhabited by floating spirits and the souls of mortal men who have gone insane or somehow become detached from their bodies. From this realm you can see everything going on on the real Earth, easily seeing through walls and floating around effortlessly, but you can't touch anything, and this parallel world is totally silent. The spirits native to this world watch the world of the living with terrible envy and longing--it is torture for them to see the living going about life, talking and touching and building relationships and so forth, when they are stuck in a realm of silence in which no physical contact is possible.
Because Bessel has left his body, one of these desperate spirits is able to fill the vacancy. Bessel's body, now controlled by the spirit, runs around London, crying out "Life!" and, in an ecstasy of joy, smashing, breaking, and setting afire property and people. The disembodied Bessel witnesses the atrocities committed and risks run by his body and feverishly tries to get help from Vincey and other people, but contacting them through the barriers between the worlds is difficult. After injuring many people and damaging much property, the piratical spirit sends Bessel's body falling down a deep hole at a construction site where nobody will think to look for him, shattering multiple bones in the process. Bessel's body will die down there if nobody finds it soon! Luckily, Bessel is able to contact his friend via a medium and his body is rescued, and is able to regain possession when the occupying spirit, unable to stand the pain of living in a broken body suffering dehydration and starvation, vacates the premises.
A very good story told in an understated but quite effective style. Wells is one of those big names that deserves his high reputation and is also accessible to ordinary readers. A good acquisition by Wright. "The Stolen Body" has been reprinted in many Wells collections and several anthologies.
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(We just read the Frank Belknap Long story from this ish, "The Sea Thing.")
Three men are in pursuit of someone, and ride into a queer valley. Wells is cagey about who these men are and who their quarry is, giving us hints in dribs and drabs, not letting us settle into hoping these men catch those they pursue or hoping they are evaded. We also don't know where they are, even what continent, just that they are in a wilderness where no people and few animals seem to live.
As we learn that the leader of the party is wealthy and everybody is afraid to defy him, we readers, aware that Wells is a socialist, begin to suspect this leader is the villain of the piece and the spiders of the title are going to kill him. One of the rich man's companions, silently, raises doubts as to the justice of a society in which some command and others obey. Maybe this guy, whom Wells calls "the little man," will kill the leader, who is often described as "the master"? Eventually this leader guy is called not just "master" but "lord," leaving us to wonder if he is a representative of the aristocracy or of the bourgeoisie. We also learn that the men are pursuing a "half-caste" woman who resisted the leader of the party, but is she fleeing of her own volition in the company of friends or has she been kidnapped or something?
The spider attack comes, and it is of an unexpected form, Wells unleashing some real creativity on us. The unusual nature of the monster attack earns "The Valley of Spiders" a thumbs up right there.
In the confusion of the fight, one of the men, the taller and more loyal of the two subordinates, is killed after saving the master's life. The lord and the skeptic of hierarchy escape the spiders with their lives. The little man accuses the lord of cowardice, of not helping his faithful subordinate. A showdown ensues. Wells does not show the showdown, but in the last part of the story we see that it is the lord who has survived.
Wells is not presenting here a left-wing wish fulfillment fantasy in which a rich guy gets killed. Instead, he is offering us left-wing allegory and metaphor--the rich are like venomous spiders! On the very last page of the story the "master" AKA "lord" is clearly identified with the killer spiders--the valley of spiders is the world! Realizing the half-caste girl has escaped him, the master resolves to emulate the spiders--"Next time I must spin a web." But Wells offers advice to those who would overthrow the upper and middle classes. The spiders' initial attack is effective because the eight-legged predators ride in tumbleweed-like balls of silk, bouncing and gliding at high speed when the wind is strong. But, when there is no wind, and the balls of silk are broken or still, the spider's ability to suck the blood of others is very limited. "From the ground without either a wind to carry them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could do him little evil." Is Wells telling us that the aristocracy and bourgeoisie can only push around the proletariat and peasantry because of their superior wealth and technology, and those advantages only obtain during periods of specific environmental (economic? political?) conditions?
Wells' science fiction and action content are good, and he weaves the political goop in with it quite well, so "Valley of the Spiders" is a good story, even if, like me, you spend every day with your fingers crossed hoping the bourgeoisie can maintain the liberal order in the face of threats posed by socialists and jihadis foreign and domestic. "The Valley of Spiders" served as the title story for an oft-reprinted Wells collection--among these reprintings is a movie tie-in edition promoting the Joan Collins film Empire of the Ants; "The Valley of Spiders" can also be found in various anthologies.
"A Dream of Armageddon" is sixteen pages, and feels kind of long. It tries to be powerful, tries to move the reader with its depictions of love and loss and its warning that high technology will make war terrible, or I guess more terrible, I mean, Waterloo and Antietam weren't exactly picnics, but "A Dream of Armageddon" is not very successful in getting across its message or in entertaining the reader, as the main story is choked with a lot of superfluous framing impedimenta, and the main character is more of a spectator to the plot than a participant, and the whole thing is pretty repetitive, the same points hammered at again and again, and they aren't even interesting points.
The first frame consists of our narrator encountering on the train a tired-looking guy who gets on the same car with him. After what we might jocularly call foreplay, this second guy tells our narrator about his recent vivid dreams in which he was, apparently, projected into the future to live out the tragic ending of the career and life of a major political figure in the high tech future. I am always skeptical of these stories in which, instead of the author just telling us the adventures of a character, we have to hear that a narrator meets a guy who then relates the adventures of a character, or, that the adventures of the character are in some other milieu that the narrator or protagonist enters while in a dream. Why not just tell us the character's adventures in the voice of the character or in that old standby the third person omniscient? Anyway, we get both of these framing devices here and I guess Wells does this to connect his polemical story to real middle-class English life at the end of Victorian era and the start of the 20th century, so it feels less like a fantasy and more like a warning or prophecy that 1901 readers should take seriously.
The future guy in whose body the train passenger found himself in his dreams was a big wig in politics, one of the good guys who was against "the Gang" that is corrupt. But he left politics to spend time with a beautiful woman on the island of Capri. Wells describes how beautiful Capri is and how beautiful this girl is in tedious detail, so that while I was reading about the sunlight on boats and the blue green of the water and the architecture of the dance hall I was thinking, "come on, let's get to Armageddon already." We can see how much of a utopian and an optimist Wells could be when he tells us that the music and dancing of the future will put the music and dancing of the 19th century to shame.
Anyway, in this first dream, a member of the protagonist's political party begs the protag to return to politics because war may result from the hash the hero's colleagues are making of things in his absence. But the hero refuses to leave his girl and reenter the dirty game that is politics, saying war is impossible. But in the second dream it looks like war is in fact likely. In succeeding dreams war erupts, war involving fleets of aircraft and long range artillery. I guess a Wells booster would call "A Dream of Armageddon" prophetic, seeing as World War I was all about long range artillery and World War II was all about fleets of aircraft, but this material takes up like one page of this long story and the few details Wells offers don't really predict how war in the air worked out in real life ("They were great driving things shaped like spearheads without a shaft, with a propeller in the place of the shaft....They fired the guns backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak.")
The protagonist and his girlfriend flee here and there, in and among throngs of fleeing peasants and marching soldiers (this is where Wells is less optimistic, his idea that the Southern Europe of two or three centuries from 1900 would still be inhabited by hordes of peasants) ending up in a picturesque location, the ancient temple complex at Paestum. I'm guessing Wells chose Capri and Paestum for the dramatic sections of his story because he figured his readers would be familiar with them, that English people of culture and means, the kind of people who could steer society away from mass high tech war, would have been there or known people who had been there and would talk their ears off about them. Anyway, the girl is killed by a piece of shrapnel when a shell explodes nearby, and the protagonist carries her melodramatically into one of the Greek temples, and, when enemy soldiers try to take the temple, the protag tries to stop them (not by fighting them, just with a demonstration of moral righteousness) and their officer just runs him through the heart with a sword.
His alter ego of the future now dead, the train passenger says he doesn't have those kinds of immersive and memorable dreams any more, just nightmares of large birds fighting.
I'm calling this story barely acceptable, as it is long and boring and it tries too hard (today's other stories made their points and wrung emotion out of the reader more subtly and effectively) and its message is boring and banal and ill-suited to entertainment. I did a class analysis of "The Valley of Spiders;" let's see if I can do a class analysis of "A Dream of Armageddon." The future guy is a member of the educated upper-middle class, a guy with tons of money and influence. We are told again and again that he has the power to prevent the cataclysmic war that ends up laying waste to the world. But he does not do this good thing--instead he turns his back on politics because he would have to leave the woman to do so. (One of the problems of Wells' story here is that he doesn't really specify why this guy can't marry this woman or keep her as a mistress while he is up in London or wherever the seat of power is while he is saving the world.) I am guessing Wells is suggesting that the world will go to hell if middle-class people refuse to keep society in line and instead become preoccupied with their private pleasures. Perhaps more interesting than the idea that a guy would shirk his responsibilities to the world at large for a dame, which is a big "no shit, Sherlock," is a hint that this successful guy has another reason for not doing what he, and only he, can do to save civilization:
Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no other than despise, from the stress and, anguish of war and infinite misrule?The hero of the future world, a man we are told "had been a master man away there in the north, with influence and property and a great reputation," a man who in politics had made of himself "a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group themselves about....Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to do things and risk things because of their confidence in me" despises the common people and basically says "the hell with them" and lets them get mixed up in a war, but then that war kills his girlfriend and himself. Wells is telling middle-class people that they are in the same boat as the stupid proles, that if they (the middle classes) don't shoulder the burden of leadership and steer society around disasters that they will suffer as much as the workers and peasants when the ship runs aground.
Not a very good story, but perhaps interesting and important if you are curious about fiction as a means of prophecy and as a tool for influencing public opinion.
"A Dream of Armageddon"'s first appearances was in serialization across four issues of the magazine Black and White Budget; you can see the appropriate issues of that magazine, including eight or so illustrations for the story, at these links:
"A Dream of Armageddon" would reappear many times in Wells collections and in a few anthologies like Peter Haining's The Nightmare Reader.
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Wells is a skilled writer with strong points of view, and "The Stolen Body" and "The Valley of Spiders" are quite successful. "A Dream of Armageddon," maybe not so successful. An interesting element in the history of Weird Tales.
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