03/16/02: Xur...

Posted By: Ringo_ate_my_baby


Have you ever actually *read* any H.G. Wells?

>>I suppose if you want to get really technical, Wells' work was closer to fantasy than science fiction, in that his explanations were scientific sounding but were no more than hand waving on close inspection. However, for Wells the technical details weren't important - he was more concerned with societal themes and trends, and the sci-fi part was more of a gimmick to explore these ideas than an attempt at describing future technology. In this he succeeded much better than did Verne, and in my opinion that makes his stories far more interesting.

As I mentioned in the my post, the science suffers a lot from the fact that it's comming from over a hundred years ago, when Wells' technical explanations in _The Invisible Man_ and _The Island of Dr. Moreau_ seemed a lot more reasonable than they do now. And _War of the Worlds_ is just fine.

>>As for the Eloi vs Morlocks, well, they both came from today's humans, so it seems more likely that the Morlocks (aka, underground dwellers, as they haven't evolved significantly yet) would simply take over the surface and kill all the Eloi, much like the Europeans invaded and killed the native americans and just took their lands/food/women/etc. There's just no evolutionary pressure for the Morlocks to become a separate race like that.

The Morlocks and Eloi seperated long before the one group began preying on the other. Society became increasingly stratified between the working and upper classes, with the working class spending more and more time below ground with the machinery they tended, and with the upper classes becoming more and more idle. The Morlocks already existed as a seperate race of light-shunning troglodytes, and the Eloi were already a race of child-like, inbred halfwits - it was from *after* that point that the Morlocks realized that they could flip the power structure and make cattle of their former masters.


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