Plentiful Desolations: Anthropocentric Bias and the End-World Ecologies of H. G. Wells and William Hope Hodgson
This article argues that the notion of a wasteland is determined by anthropocentric concerns over the human use-value provided by any given environment which are then overlaid by moral and aesthetic judgments, rather than recognizing the inherent value of the robust ecosystems that exist in these supposedly desolate environments. To demonstrate this, I turn to two extreme examples of fictional wastelands: the end-of-the-world, as imagined by fin de siecle authors H. G. Wells and William Hope Hodgson. The Time Machine and The Night Land are fantasies of Deep Time, in which the planet has been transformed into a supposed waste gradually enough to permit adaptation. The anatomically modern human narrators who venture into these far-future environments make use of the longstanding notion of a wasteland as hostile to human inhabitation and cultivation and overlay it with the newer conception of the wasteland as a desolation hostile to life altogether in their descriptions of the environments. Yet beneath their condemnatory language they acknowledge the presence and even the peril posed by the lifeforms that populate this environment, revealing the existence of ecosystems within the wastes. Additionally, they encounter forms of humanity that have evolved in tandem with the landscape and are suited to these environmental conditions, though they are at pains to condemn these alterations on humanity as monstrous degenerations. Both authors craft their narratives with inherent challenges to the reliability of their narrators, opening up the possibility of reading past the anthropocentric prejudices of the narrators to see the described environments as holding intrinsic value. Indeed, the destruction the narrators wreak upon the landscape and their inhabitants demonstrates the consequences of labelling an environment as a wasteland, as it places these characters in a false position of physical, moral, and aesthetic superiority.