uplift made reformers insensitive to the realities of life for immigrants and the poor. In the opening decades of the 1900s, a eugenics movement cropped up, and it lasted until World War II, with a majority of states passing compulsory sterilization laws aimed at people with disabilities, mental illness, and criminal records, which indirectly targeted minorities and the indigent.96 Sponsors of moral reforms like the “white slavery” law of 1910 and Prohibition in 1919 sought social control, betraying that hidden beneath the American faith in progress was the dread of usurpation.
In contrast to Americans who still expressed faith in a technological future, British fiction writers only became more pessimistic as the science fiction writer and critic Brian Aldiss notes.97 England’s famous mystery writer Arthur Conan Doyle offered up a narrative of the entire end of the world in a 1913 novel. Flammarion had proposed in Omega that a comet passing close to the Earth might result in the death of humanity. This idea inspired Doyle’s The Poison Belt. Its plot concerns the Earth passing through the tail of a comet, resulting in everyone on Earth, except for a group of friends of an incredibly prescient professor, taking on the appearance of death. The group, having survived passing through the “poison belt” because of a supply of oxygen, emerges from Professor Challenger’s house and believes that everyone else has died. Though the death of humanity has appeared to be painless—the poison has the effect of laughing gas—Challenger confesses to his friends that he “could sympathize with the person who took the view that the horror lay in the idea of surviving when all that is learned, famous, and exalted had passed away.”98 The professor is optimistic that evolution would ensure the survival of life on Earth, saying, in spite of the calamity, “you would see some few million years hence—a mere passing moment in the enormous flux of the ages—the whole world teeming once more with the animal and human life which will spring from this tiny root” (the amoeba).99 In the end, everyone wakes up, having experienced a condition the professor names “catalepsy.”100
Despite this exit strategy, this novel’s suggestion that a natural disaster could kill all of humanity—and at any moment—is an important development in how humanity saw nature, a theme that would come to dominate scientific apocalypticism during the last half of the twentieth century. The Poison Belt implied that nature could be indiscriminate in its effects. Aldiss, discussing Doyle’s ending, observes, “After the 1914–18 war, such meek reversions to the prosaic would no longer be possible [for British writers].”101 Nevertheless, in comparison to American visions of the future at the same time, Doyle’s image of a comet potentially affecting everyone on Earth—with no recourse to technological solutions—is much bleaker and anticipates the direction that science fiction would take first in Great Britain and later in the United States after 1945.
Aldiss says of the differences between the British scientific romance and American science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century that “much of the scientific romance had been sturdily dark in tone, just as a robust optimism dominated scientifiction [an American term used prior to “science fiction”]. In part, the marked contrast is attributable to different life-experience in Britain and the United States.”102 World War I couldn’t even the differences between the tones of speculative fiction in the United States, Britain, and Europe. As Aldiss notes, Britain had many more casualties in World War I, and afterward “economic decline in the one country was counterbalanced by economic ascendancy in the other.”103 The late nineteenth-century predictions of Verne and Bulwer-Lytton of growing American power seemed to be coming true.
The American recovery after the Civil War had misled world observers. If Europeans had paid closer attention to the casualties in the world’s first “great war fought with the tools and weapons of the Industrial Revolution,” maybe they would not have rushed enthusiastically to the front lines in 1914.104 World War I proved that modern technology had permanently changed the rules of warfare. The glory of heroism had always been available to soldiers who could prove themselves through hand-to-hand combat. Tanks, machine guns, poison gases, and submarines delivered mechanized, impersonal slaughter. At least ten million soldiers died, while over twenty million suffered battle wounds out of the sixty-five million who fought in that war.105 President Woodrow Wilson hoped American participation would result in a “peace without victory,” but the carnage blinded the victors with rage, and they merely humored Wilson at Versailles in 1919.
Even as Wilson failed to sell the American public on the League of Nations—the only part of his vision of a workable peace that survived negotiations—American science fiction writers retained their confidence in a U.S.-led future after World War I. The American intellectual historian Henry F. May suggests that the war undermined the notion of progress, one of several dominating doctrines in the United States prior to the war, for American intellectuals.106 This decline of faith in progress occurred even before Americans entered the war in 1917, as they watched Europe descend into a madness that contradicted the progressive nature of history and the essentially good nature of man.107 Elsewhere, May notes of the postwar period that “American writers had often been discontented yet there was something new in the discontent of the twenties. There was more of it, it was louder and sometimes more weepingly expressed, and it was noticed, and sometimes resented, by the optimistic majority.”108
Intellectuals like H. L. Mencken and “Lost Generation” authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald represented the rejection of optimism that May describes. The American expatriate poet T. S. Eliot captured the tenor of the period in poems like “The Waste Land” (1922) and “The Hollow Men” (1925). The final line of the latter poem—“This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”—may have been an entropic-inspired commentary on spiritual emptiness, but after 1945, Americans seized upon it as a prophecy of a society in existential crisis from man-made perils. The postmillennialism that had allowed Americans to see the brutal conflagration of the Civil War through to its end was a casualty of natural selection as well as of German higher criticism of the Bible; after World Wars I and II, liberal Christians tended to be amillennialists, viewing the millennium as a spiritual truth rather than a literal one.
American scientists in popular works on the future of humanity at times approached the pessimism of British and European scientists after World War I, even though, as Aldiss argues, science fiction in the United States remained more optimistic until the 1930s.109 The view that humanity could be displaced depending on the future course of its evolution was central to Stanton Arthur Coblentz’s work The Decline of Man (1925). A journalist and poet, Coblentz used evolutionary theory and language to describe what he saw as the social ills that would fell humankind. He alluded to the implications of Darwinism for the future of humanity, discussing the future in the context of the extinction of other species such as the dinosaurs. Examining the particular aspects of these species that may have made them “unfit” for survival, he concluded that the very same problems plague man.110
While Coblentz did mention environmental causes of extinction such as climate changes, deforestation, and epidemics, he did not discuss them in any detail. For Coblentz, the social situation of humans would determine whether they could respond and adapt to any such changes.111 He recommended birth control for the poorer classes and eugenics to direct the evolution of humanity so that it could survive.112 In his view, such remedies were vital because, unlike in the past, “it is no longer one race and one civilization that is threatened; it is all races and the civilization of all men.”113 His analysis was a mix of the racial fears of writers like Dooner and the worries over species displacement of Wells and Serviss, showing the connection between the two. The species, for Coblentz, could not survive without making sure “inferior” races did not reproduce.
The implication of evolution that humanity could be replaced was in direct conflict with the Christian belief that humanity is central to God’s plan for the universe. After World War II, science fiction writers in particular would struggle with the idea that humans were not special. For instance, aliens would either resemble humans or reject Earthlings for being especially destructive
