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War (1716) and Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God” (1682), both of which dealt with the clash of English and Native American in King Phillip’s War of 1675-1677. These last two narratives can be called the parents of the Western because they establish the Western’s basic dynamic of civilization versus savagery, its frontier hero standing on the border of two clashing cultures, the supporting cast—such as townspeople, noble savage Indians, and powerless authority figures—as well as the apocalyptic violence that frequently ends a Western tale.
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multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind.
And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water” (Stoker 1993, 178). As knowledge of Dracula grows among those who seek to thwart him, so does their perception of the threat he offers humanity. Dr. John Seward opines that Dracula may be “the father or furtherer of a new order of beings, whose road leads through Death, not Life” (251). Dr. Seward clearly expresses the threat of the Homo superior, that of existing humanity being replaced by a superior order of creation.
Homo nosferatu and the Frankenstein creature’s potential descendants draw from humanity originally, but dead humanity. Both Dracula and the creature are revived corpses, literally representing the death of the human being. Figuratively, through the threat of generational genocide, they represent the death of humanity as a whole, or the death of an independent humanity, living on merely as cattle to feed their vampiric masters. With the caveat of the source of his powers, Dracula fits the overall pattern of the Homo superior.
H.G. Wells gathered the strands of the Homo superior figure and laid out most of the themes that were to follow until the creation of Superman himself. Wells provides a bridge between the supermen of nineteenth-century science fiction and those of the twentieth, as his writing did for science fiction generally.
The Invisible Man (1897) fits neatly into the pattern laid out in Frankenstein and Dracula, while also providing a model for future Homo superior stories. Griffin, the invisible man, wants to establish a reign of terror but ends pathetically, kicked to death by a small-town mob. The vision here of the superman is small. Griffin discovers that the thing invisibility is best for is murder, but he is unable to find an accomplice to carry out his scheme. Like the creature and Dracula, the invisible man is, or becomes, inhuman; he ceases to perceive the value of human life outside of its immediate use to him, and usually human life serves only as an obstacle between himself and what he wants. He escalates from robbery to arson to assault to murder.
Homo superior here is monstrous and alien, incapable of existing in peace or equilibrium with Homo sapiens.
This alienness is at the core of Wells’ next foray into the Homo superior, The War of the Worlds (1898). The Martians are clearly alien and inhuman, but potentially the evolutionary future of would be harvested in nearly every SF superman novel ever to see
print. Victor Frankenstein’s unnamed creature, which might be dubbed Homo recreare—revived man or recreated man—possesses superior abilities gained from the “natural” processes of science fiction speculation and exaggeration of contemporary science, is set against humanity, and poses the threat of generational genocide—the replacement of humanity as the dominant form of life on earth with that of the next and more advanced version of the human genus.
The creature is endowed with abilities that are the produce of his scientific creation, not the result of supernatural intervention—
superior strength, speed, agility, and endurance—and these traits would exist in any creature similarly made (Shelley 1965, 139).
He is an outcast from society and poses the danger of generational genocide to Homo sapiens, the idea that he represents a separate and possibly superior species that could replace humanity. Right from the beginning Victor sees his creation as a member of “a new species [that] would bless me as its creator and source” (52). The creature himself recognizes his innate separation from humankind when he asks for a mate “of the same species” as himself (137).
Victor perceives the danger to humanity of producing a mate for his creature—they might spawn “a race of devils [...] upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (158).49 The creature himself never expresses a desire to reproduce and in fact pledges to live apart from humankind in the deserts of South America. But he also confesses a desire to return the brutal treatment he has suffered at the hands of human people, “I declared everlasting war against the species,”
although he ultimately revenges himself only on his creator (130).
Dracula, the other great figure of nineteenth-century horror, possesses the same characteristics and therefore fits in with the thrust of the SF superman. Dracula’s abilities range from super strength and shape changing to controlling the weather and commanding several species of animals. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, whose abilities are rooted in the speculative science of SF, Dracula’s powers come from some familial connection with the Devil and thus represent a more traditional source of superhuman abilities.
Like the creature, Dracula poses the treat of generational genocide. Dr. Van Helsing expresses this fear: “They [vampires]
cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and
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straightforward but is in essence only a metaphor for a concern about evolutionary theory itself. The timescale of actual, physical evolution reduces the realistic threat of Homo superior. The threat of the theory of evolution is much more direct.
Darwin’s ideas displaced humanity from the spiritual center of the universe and were hated and feared by religious figures, as Copernicus had been for displacing the earth from the literal center of the universe. Blind natural selection needs no God to explain or justify our existence. Humanity thus loses its special standing, becoming no different from other multicelled organisms, and God is eliminated as the prime mover of the universe. Without God as the motive force behind creation, we lose our humanity—which is based in original sin—and become like Satan, agents of our own will without moral check on our actions. The Homo superior embodies this fear—the fear of what we may become if we accept the theory of evolution. This basic argument has been made by religious conservatives about a whole range of issues surrounding the removal of religion from the public sphere. They argue that without religious guidance we lose our moral way.50
Wells’ The Food of the Gods (1904) brings home the idea of the Homo superior by making children the next evolutionary stage, and this novel also repeats the theme from Frankenstein of the creation that gets out of control, as often occurs in SF superman stories. Two scientists, Professor Redwood and Mr. Bensington, create Herakleophorbia, the Food of the Gods, which causes growth to proceed in a straight, smooth progression without the regular bursts and intermissions common to all living things. The Food gets out of the control of the two scientists; and a series of fungi, weeds, insects, and animals ingest it, growing to enormous size.
Children are raised on it and reach forty feet in height at adulthood.
Eventually, irreconcilable conflict drives regular-sized people and their enormous cousins to war against each other, because “you cannot have pigmies and giants in one world together” (Wells, Food 1904, 310). The pigmies fear they will become mere “feeble vermin under the heels of a new race” (229). The giants feel that they fight for their own survival but also for the animating principle of the world, growth.
The first giant, Edward Redwood, expresses the philosophy of growth thus, “It is not that we would oust the little people from the mankind. Wells establishes physical evolution as the source of the
Martians’ superhumanity:
To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being. (part 2, ch. 2)
As with the invisible man, the vampire, and the creature, the evolution of human to superhuman changes the Homo superior’s view of Homo sapiens, who are seen as mere cattle, beneath even the dignity of individual murder. Wells’ story is less one of the superman and more a transfer of the contemporary German invasion story to an expanded realm where England stands for the world.
The theme of inhumanity coming with evolution to the superhuman arises directly out of Friedrich Nietzsche’s treatise, Also Sprach Zarathusa (1891), and thus the SF superman is united with the Übermensch. One theme linking Frankenstein, Dracula, and The War of the Worlds is the inhumanity that evolution brings with it. The Homo superior’s emergence from Homo sapiens deadens the fellow-feeling in the superman, and the evolved creature comes to despise the inferior creatures he has evolved from. In Also Sprach Zarathusa, the prophet Zarathusa proclaims the existence of the superman, who asks, “What is the ape to man? A laughing- stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame” (part 1, section 3).
This Übermensch is a revolutionary figure, operating beyond the traditional notions of good and evil, following his will to power, and embodying the master morality while abandoning the slave morality of Christian teaching and Platonic ideals.
The existence of the SF superman represents concern about evolution, both physical evolution and the theory of evolution. The concern with physical evolution is that just as we evolved from apes and have conquered the animal kingdom, the superhumans who evolve from us will conquer the human world. This fear is fairly
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and inequality, and came to embody the pacifistic socialism Wells advocated. Unlike the other utopias Wells devised, this one did not pass through a cataclysm but evolved slowly and surely, and Wells clearly intended the novel to be taken as a program for enacting such an evolution in our own reality.
Free of disease, poverty, want, and worry and educated extensively, the Utopians surpass contemporary people in every way. They are all attractive, youthful in appearance, and intelligent, ever seeking challenge, and never resting on their accomplishments.
They represent an attainable state of superhumanity, which given the clean air, the political and artistic freedom, and the overall heritage and atmosphere of Utopia, “half the babies born on earth to-day might grow to be such gods” as the inhabitants of this perfect world (section 2). Wells’ Utopia offers an answer to the fears of the anti- evolutionists. Accepting of the theory of evolution and recognizing the positive future that social evolution can create might make possible a utopia in which every person is fully realized and lives a better, morally superior, and materially more prosperous life. The Utopian superpeople are the saviors of their society.
In The Overman (1907), Upton Sinclair dealt with the threads of spirituality and utopia that Wells took up in Food of the Gods and Men Like Gods. The Overman tells the story of Daniel, a musician who takes a sea voyage to restore his health but is shipwrecked along with the crew of the ship on an island. After some months with no sign of a ship, the sailors rig a boat with a sail and decide to risk themselves upon the ocean. Daniel declines this adventure, preferring the certainty of a ship’s eventual appearance and the prospect of devoting himself “to the work which loomed before me—the living of my life, the seeking of the power” that lay within him “without external assistance or reference whatever” (64). After eight or ten years of solitude spent contemplating the universe, he begins to feel that he has come into touch with something alive.
He has come into contact with another order of people living in an alternate dimension. It is a race that “communicate with each other by immediate spiritual union” and is to human beings as people are to animals (77). He experiences this contact as a sort of rapture, as if
“a man were to witness the springtime of Nature, but taking place in an hour instead of three months; and [...] comprehending it, not from the outside, but living it, as a bursting forth of song” (79-80). These world in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards
from their littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves” (316). Unlike War of the Worlds, which presents evolution as leading toward emotional deadness and a perversity of the human body, Food of the Gods presents evolution as improving the human condition. The giants enact a brotherhood of equality against the vision of the pigmies, embodied in Prime Minister Chatman, a creature of ambition only, concerned “not [with] the powers that held the fastness away there to the south, not defeat and death, but the effect of these things upon his Majority, the cardinal reality in his life” (290-291). The giants, as Redwood explains, wish to follow the natural law of growth:
To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! ... To grow and again—to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God.
Growing....Till the earth is no more than a footstool.... Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothingness, and spread....’ He swung his arm heavenward:—’There!’
(original emphasis and ellipses 316).
This natural law of growth is presented as a sort of spiritual principle underlying material reality, and is one of the few instances of a spiritual resolution of the problems presented by the Homo superior.
Unlike the Invisible Man and the Martians—both of whom use their abilities merely to destroy for their own benefit—the giants’ battle is forced upon them, and they provide a positive superhumanism, albeit one that means generational genocide for Homo sapiens as the Food spreads and creates more of the giants’ kind, eventually blotting out the pigmies.
In Men Like Gods (1923) Wells presents the superhuman utopia.
Often in these novels, the superman plans to institute a utopia, and his desire arises from his surpassing the current physical, mental, and often moral state of his fellows. Wells reverses this process and has the seeds of utopia emerge from the strivings of ordinary teachers, authors, and scientists, each working to improve the conditions of the people under their charge. Over many centuries, the utopian society that slowly developed eliminated disease, poverty, want,
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Beresford here proposes that our limitations make us human and make life worth living. Victor’s aristocratic patron asks the narrator,
“Don’t you see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—
the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death” (291).
Science can proceed slowly to reveal the world to us and put off that final day when all is known and we are like gods; but if an evolutionary fluke propels us forward too quickly, life will lose its savor. Beresford identifies the challenge authors have when writing SF superman novels, the challenge of limiting their heroes so as to provide them with meaningful challenges to overcome. Most authors meet this challenge by limiting their supermen to the merely physical and opposing them with “bigger Indians,” violent alien opponents whose overwhelming numbers or strength make the heroes’ victory sweet. Limiting the superman in this way provides another category of the type, the hero.
With John Carter (A Princess of Mars, 1911), Edgar Rice Burroughs created the first wholly positive SF superman and the model for science fiction heroes of the next few decades. John Carter’s super status arises from transportation, not transformation. The lesser gravity of Mars endows Captain Carter with greatly increased physical strength, enabling him to leap a hundred and fifty feet and to defeat green Martians many times his size. Carter’s muscular abilities would be available to any earthling similarly transported to Mars, and though his transport is accomplished through essentially magical means, his increased strength is founded upon sound science. His strength leads directly to his victorious battles against Martians of all colors and enables him to rescue the princess Dejah Thoris numerous times. These opponents and victories fit Carter into the hero category. He also acts as a savior when he restarts the atmosphere factory and saves the planet from asphyxiation.
Varick Vanardy’s Night Wind (Alias, 1913) is to the physical superman what Buck Rogers is to the Übermensch (see below), the emptying of the philosophical basis of a form and the use of an idea merely as the motive force behind a pulp plot. The Night Wind is Bingham Harvard, a bank clerk framed by a corrupt detective for a theft he did not commit. He is four times as strong and six people live in a paradise, unburdened by government or laws, having
complete control over their physical environment and therefore able to devote themselves fully to experiencing life itself. After twenty years, Daniel is found by his brother, who has been marooned by his mutinous crew. Daniel explains his miraculous new understanding of the universe to his uncomprehending brother and then refuses to leave his exile for what he sees as empty civilization when a ship crosses the sea lane of the island.
With The Overman, Sinclair creates an option for the SF superman that few authors would venture, the hermit. Typically science-fiction supermen fall into three categories: ruler, savior, and destroyer. The superman who withdraws from society to pursue a solitary spiritual quest provides a way of diffusing the disruptive nature of the figure. By exiling himself into a monastic state, the hermit figure precludes the necessary conflict with society that the SF superman’s superiority always brings. As an approach to the SF superman, the hermit seems to offer little in the way of dramatic possibilities because of the fewer opportunities for dramatic conflict, which may be why the hermit option is so rarely taken by authors considering the SF superman.
In The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), J.D. Beresford also found a thread of the SF superman that Wells overlooked: the bored superman who is unable to find any challenge worth pursuing. Victor Stott is the son of cricket superstar George “Ginger” Stott. Ginger Stott’s cricket career is cut short by an injury, and he originates a theory that his success could be passed on if he could find a youngster without any learned habits. Stott takes a wife and puts his theory into practice, focusing on the elimination of habits from the child’s gestation. The child is born without “the great restraining force in the evolution of man [...] the restriction imposed by habit” (60).
With nothing to hold him back, the son Victor is supernormal from birth. Physically weak and with a larger than normal cranium, the child possesses the ability to impose his will on ordinary mortals.
He drives his father out of the house, gains an enemy in a local clergyman whose doctrines he denies, and gains a patron in the local gentry who is fascinated by the boy’s abilities. At the age of seven, Victor is found drowned in a pond. The narrator implies that the boy committed suicide because he had solved all the mysteries of life and had no wonder or challenge to look forward to.