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living interest lies in their non-fantastic elements and not in the invention itself The thing that makes such imaginations interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human. As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real Any extra

fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention. So 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.

The significance of Wells' contribution to SF lies in this combination of fantasy and realism. Wells' SF is based on a process by which the original premise is combined with further, more genuinely scientific premises to produce conclusions which seem increasingly fantastic, though the reader is convinced by the narrative rhetoric that they are logical and necessary.

The basic situation of Wells' SF is that of a destructive newness encroaching upon the tranquillity of the Victorian environment. Wells translates some of man's oldest terrors the fear of darkness, monstrous beats, creepy insects, things outside tamed nature into an evolutionary perspective that is supposed to be validated by Darwinian biology, evolutionary cosmology, and the fin-de-sicle sense of a historical epoch ending. Wells, a student of T. H. Huxley, eagerly used alien and powerful biological species as a rod to chastise Victorian man.

The function of his interplanetary contacts is quite different from Verne's liberal interest in the mechanics of locomotion within a safely homogeneous space. Wells is interested in the opposition between the bourgeois reader's expectations and the strange relationships found at the other end: that is why his men do land on the Moon and his Martians on Earth. Science is no longer, as it was for Verne, the bright noonday certainty of Newtonian physics. For Wells, human evolution is an open question with two possible answers, bright and dark; and in his earlier works, darkness is the basic tonality.

Wells' novels are remarkable for the way they do justice to conflict. In his stories, Wells does not set out to defend a specific point of view or assume a position of advocacy; instead, he constructs contradictions and then explores their structures and possibilities. His imaginative strategy is to establish acute

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