Hg Wells The Time Machine Essay

One book and author that influenced Conrad was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The book goes with him to a future world in which the human family has divided itself into two different species: the weak children of the upper world and the dark creatures of the underworld. The dark creatures turn out to be cannibals, and they have the power. The beautiful people on the surface are simply fattened cattle the cannibals capture, slaughter, and eat. Hatred and fear seize the traveler. He longs to kill the dark creatures, he wants to go straight into the darkness, killing the brutes. The time machine is an experiment with Spencer’s theory of evolution. The novel shows how mankind “commits suicide” by minimizing the pain that is of intelligence and

Criticism of colonialism in this book was even more pronounced, because it was written in the 1897 jubilee year, during the origin of self-satisfaction the British Empire was indulging in at the time. In Wells’s book, London is attacked by an extraterrestrial master race, the martians brains have been sharpened from living in cold and their brains enabled them to invent spaceships and death rays. They envelop London bit by bit in a cloud of black gas. The story has many words that also have a signaling function in Heart of Darkness: “darkness”, “extermination”, “brutes”. The Martians were superior to the British, like how the British were superior to the Africans. Just as British took over Africa, and thought they had a right to take over land, so did the Martians. The Martians considered the humans a lower species, like the Europeans considered the African people a lower

Scientific racism is the act of justifying inequalities between races by the use of science. One example of scientific racism started in 1796. Georges Cuvier went to Paris and held his first lecture. He spoke of the mammoth and the mastodon. He explained that they did not belong to the same species as either the Indian or African elephant, but species of their own, now extinct. When he explained extinction that horrified people. It took over a hundred years for people to accept the fact that a whole species could become extinct. Cuvier divided human races into three races. On the negroid races, he said that their protruding jaws and thick lips, they approached the primates. Cuvier didn’t believe that species evolved over time, but Darwin did. Darwin thought he had an explanation. The intermediate forms had existed, but they were forced out by new, better adapted species, so quickly that they didn’t leave any traces behind. Darwin thought that the improved and modified descendants of a species will generally cause the extinction of the parent-species. Darwin considered that this also happens in human races, that the less intellectual races become exterminated. This made the Europeans think that the extermination of Africans was logical. That the Africans were the lower race. Another example of scientific racism was in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. He said that human beings have no reason to feel guilty because our progress exterminates animals and plants. He