Star-Begotten - A Biological Fantasia

By H. G. Wells

A sequel to "The War of the Worlds", "Star Begotten" concerns another suspected attack by the Martians, this time using cosmic rays to change human DNA. Joseph Davis is a writer of popular books who becomes obsessed with the rumours of invasion, so much so that he fears his wife, child, and even him might have already been affected by the cosmic rays. Contents include: "The Mind of Mr. Joseph Davis Is Greatly Troubled", "Mr. Joseph Davis Learns about Cosmic Rays", "Mr. Joseph Davis Wrestles with an Incredible Idea", "Dr. Holdman Stedding Is Infected with the Idea", "Professor Ernest Keppel Takes Up the Idea in His Own Peculiar Fashion", et cetera. Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer who wrote in a variety of genres, including the novel, politics, history, and social commentary. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the science fiction genre thanks to such novels as "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Invisible Man" (1897), and "The War of the Worlds" (1898). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author. First published in 1937.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473345157

H. G. Wells

H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English novelist who helped to define modern science fiction. Wells came from humble beginnings with a working-class family. As a teen, he was a draper’s assistant before earning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science. It was there that he expanded his horizons learning different subjects like physics and biology. Wells spent his free time writing stories, which eventually led to his groundbreaking debut, The Time Machine. It was quickly followed by other successful works like The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds.

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STAR-BEGOTTEN

A BIOLOGICAL FANTASIA

By

H. G. Wells

Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

TO MY FRIEND

WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL

Contents

H. G. Wells

I. — THE MIND OF MR. JOSEPH DAVIS IS GREATLY TROUBLED

II. — MR. JOSEPH DAVIS LEARNS ABOUT COSMIC RAYS

III. — MR. JOSEPH DAVIS WRESTLES WITH AN INCREDIBLE IDEA

IV. — DR. HOLDMAN STEDDING IS INFECTED WITH THE IDEA

V. — PROFESSOR ERNEST KEPPEL TAKES UP THE IDEA IN HIS OWN PECULIAR FASHION

VI. — OPENING PHASES OF THE GREAT EUGENIC RESEARCH

VII. — THE WORLD BEGINS TO HEAR ABOUT THE MARTIANS

VIII. — HOW THESE STAR-BEGOTTEN PEOPLE MAY PRESENTLY GET TOGETHER

IX. — PROFESSOR KEPPEL IS INSPIRED TO FORETELL THE END OF HUMANITY

X. — MR. JOSEPH DAVIS TEARS UP A MANUSCRIPT

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England in 1866. He apprenticed as a draper before becoming a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School in West Sussex. Some years later, Wells won a scholarship to the School of Science in London, where he developed a strong interest in biology and evolution, founding and editing the Science Schools Journal. However, he left before graduating to return to teaching, and began to focus increasingly on writing. His first major essay on science, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, appeared in 1891. However, it was in 1895 that Wells seriously established himself as a writer, with the publication of the now iconic novel, The Time Machine.

Wells followed The Time Machine with the equally well-received War of the Worlds (1898), which proved highly popular in the USA, and was serialized in the magazine Cosmopolitan. Around the turn of the century, he also began to write extensively on politics, technology and the future, producing works The Discovery of the Future (1902) and Mankind in the Making (1903). An active socialist, in 1904 Wells joined the Fabian Society, and his 1905 book A Modern Utopia presented a vision of a socialist society founded on reason and compassion. Wells also penned a range of successful comic novels, such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910).

Wells’ 1920 work, The Outline of History, was penned in response to the Russian Revolution, and declared that world would be improved by education, rather than revolution. It made Wells one of the most important political thinkers of the twenties and thirties, and he began to write for a number of journals and newspapers, even travelling to Russia to lecture Lenin and Trotsky on social reform. Appalled by the carnage of World War II, Wells began to work on a project dealing with the perils of nuclear war, but died before completing it. He is now regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction writers of all time, and an important political thinker.

I. — THE MIND OF MR. JOSEPH DAVIS

IS GREATLY TROUBLED

§ 1

This is the story of an idea and how it played about in the minds of a number of intelligent people.

Whether there was any reality behind this idea it is not the business of the storyteller to say. The reader must judge for himself. One man believed it without the shadow of a doubt and he shall be the principal figure in the story.

Maybe we have not heard the last of this idea. It spread from the talk of a few people into magazines and the popular press. It had a vogue. You certainly heard of it at the time though perhaps you have forgotten. Popular attention waned. Now the thing flickers about in people's minds, not quite dead and not quite alive, disconnected and ineffective. It is a queer and almost incredible idea, but yet not absolutely incredible. It is a bare possibility that this thing is really going on.

This idea arose in the mind of Mr. Joseph Davis, a man of letters, a sensitive, intelligent, and cultivated man. It came to him when he was in a state of neurasthenia, when the strangest ideas may invade and find a lodgment in the mind.

§ 2

The idea was born, so to speak, one morning in November at the Planetarium Club,

Yet perhaps before we describe its impact upon Mr. Joseph Davis in the club smoking-room after lunch, it may be well to tell the reader a few things about him.

We will begin right at the beginning. He was born just at the turn of the century and about the vernal equinox. He had come into the world with a lively and precocious intelligence and his 'quickness' had been the joy of his mother and his nurses. And, after the manner of our kind, he had clutched at the world, squinted at it, and then looked straight at it, got hold of things and put them in his mouth, begun to imitate, begun to make and then interpret sounds, and so developed his picture of this strange world in which we live.

His nurse told him things and sang to him; his mother sang to him and told him things; a nursery governess arrived in due course to tell him things, and then a governess and a school and lot of people and pictures and little books in words of one syllable and then normal polysyllabic books and a large mellifluous parson and various husky small boys and indeed a great miscellany of people went on telling him things and telling him things. And so continually, his picture of this world, and his conception of himself and what he would have to do, and ought to do and wanted to do, grew clearer.

But it was only very gradually that he began to realize that there was something about his picture of the universe that perhaps wasn't in the pictures of the universe of all the people about him. On the whole the universe they gave him had an air of being real and true and just there and nothing else. There were, they intimated, good things that were simply good and bad things that were awful and rude things that you must never even think of, and there were good people and bad people and simply splendid people, people you had to like and admire and obey and people you were against, people who were rich and prosecuted you if you trespassed and ran over you with motor cars if you did not look out, and people who were poor and did things for you for small sums, and it was all quite nice and clear and definite and you went your way amidst it all circumspectly and happily, laughing not infrequently.

Only—and this was a thing that came to him by such imperceptible degrees that at no time was he able to get it in such a way that he could ask questions about it—ever and again there was an effect as though this sure and certain established world was just in some elusive manner at this point or that point translucent, translucent and a little threadbare, and as though something else quite different lay behind it. It was never transparent. It was commonly, nine days out of ten, a full, complete universe and then for a moment, for a phase, for a perplexing interval, it was as if it was a painted screen that hid—What did it hide?

They told him that a God of Eastern Levantine origin, the God of Abraham (who evidently had a stupendous bosom) and Isaac and Jacob, had made the whole universe, stars and atoms, from start to finish in six days and made it wonderfully and perfect, and had set it all going and, after some necessary ennuis called the Fall and the Flood, had developed arrangements that were to culminate in the earthly happiness and security and eternal bliss of our Joseph, which had seemed to him a very agreeable state of affairs. And farther they had shown him the most convincing pictures of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and had given him a Noah's Ark to play with and told him simple Bible stories about the patriarchs and the infant Samuel and Solomon and David and their remarkable lessons for us, the promise of salvation spreading out from the Eastern Levant until it covered the world, and he had taken it all in without flinching because at the time he had no standards of comparison. Anything might be as true as anything else. Except for the difference in colour they put him into the world of  Green Pastures  and there they trained him to be a simply believing little Anglican.

And yet at the same time he found a book in the house with pictures of animals that were quite unlike any of the animals that frequented the Garden of Eden or entered the Ark. And pictures of men of a pithecoid unpleasant type who had lived, it seemed, long before Adam and Eve were created. It seemed all sorts of thing had been going on before Adam and Eve were created, but when he began to develop a curiosity about this pre-scriptural world and to ask questions about it his current governess snapped his head off and hid that disconcerting book away. They were 'just antediluvian animals,' she said, and Noah had not troubled to save them. And when he had remarked that a lot of them could swim, she told him not to try to be a Mr. Cleverkins.

He did his best not to be Mr. Cleverkins. He did his best to love this God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as well as fear him (which he did horribly, more even than he did the gorilla in Wood's  Natural History) and to be overcome with gratitude for the wisdom and beauty of a scheme of things which first of all damned him to hell-fire before he was born and then went to what he couldn't help thinking were totally unnecessary pains on the part of omnipotence to save him. Why should omnipotence do that? What need He do that? All He had to do was just to say it. He had made the whole world by just saying it.

Master Joseph did his very best to get his feelings properly adjusted to the established conception of the universe. And since most of the scriptures concerned events that were now happily out of date, and since his mother, his governess, the mellifluous parson, the scripture teacher at school, and everybody set in authority over him converged in assuring him that now, at the price of a little faith and conformity, things were absolutely all right here and hereafter so far as he was concerned, he did get through

Reviews for Star-Begotten - A Biological Fantasia

[dlmorrese · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This short novel was first published in 1937, and seventy-five years later, I finally got around to reading it. It took me a while because I had to wait around for things like my parents to reach puberty, me being born, learning to read, and then realizing this book existed. I find this last thing surprising because, after reading it, I am amazed it does not have a cult following. There should be T-shirts and buttons for people who wish to identify themselves as Star-Begotten or Star-Born. Once you read it, you’ll know what I mean.

The story centers on Joseph Davis, a popular writer of romanticized histories, who comes to believe that some people differ fundamentally from most of us. They are more rational, possibly more talented and intelligent. Who are these people? Why are they different?

After what amount to BS sessions with his friends and associates, Davis entertains the hypothesis that genetic mutations caused by cosmic rays are responsible for this new step in human evolution. One of his compatriots suggests that since the mutations appear neither random nor harmful, they must be intentional. Martians (as a euphemism for aliens) are tagged as likely agents. There is an interesting contrast presented here in which people of today (well, people of 75 years ago) jump to unscientific, irrational speculation to explain how people are becoming more rational. Wells is indulging in a bit of dry, tongue-in-cheek humor with this, I suspect.

But the cause of the mutations is not the central point, it’s simply a dryly humorous plot device. The thought provoking question behind it is, ‘Is humanity really becoming more intelligent and more rational?’ And the other question is, ‘Should it?’

This is not your average kind of novel. In some ways, it’s a philosophical treatise on politics and humanity like Plato’s Republic or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, except, unlike the latter, Star Begotten is enjoyable, optimistic, and well-written. It’s one of those books that can make you think, if you let it. It can give you ideas. And this may be why it never rose to cult classic status. Ideas can be uncomfortable things. This is what Wells himself says about them:

‘A notion is something you can handle. But an idea, a general idea, has a way of getting all over you and subjugating you, and no free spirit submits to that. Confronted with an idea the American says: 'Oh, yeah!' or 'Sez you,' and the Englishman says: 'I don't fink,' or at a higher social level: 'Piffle—piffle before the wind.' These simple expressions are as good against ideas as the sign of the cross used to be against the medieval devil. The pressure is at once relieved.’ (Another case of Wells’ dry humor.)

There are about ten other sections, mostly assessments about the current state of mankind, that I marked because I thought they deserved to be shared. But this would make for a very long book review, or whatever this is, so I’ll refrain from doing that. I will, however, share this summation of how Wells says you can recognize these star-begotten people:

‘one characteristic of this new type of mind is its resistance to crowd suggestions, crowd loyalties, instinctive mass prejudices, and mere phrases, ... these strongminded individualists ... doing sensible things and refusing to do cruel, monstrous, and foolish things...’

Is humanity progressing? Is it overcoming its infancy? Is it becoming rational? I don’t know but I would like to believe so. I’ve met sane, intelligent people and I suspect there are a lot of them. If you think you may be one, Wells provides this cautionary statement in the voice of one of the book’s more cynical characters:

‘There are bad times ahead for uncompliant sane men. They will be hated by the right and by the left with an equal intensity.'

I found this short novel refreshingly different from popular contemporary ‘action-packed’ and largely idea-barren novels. It is a thought provoking social commentary about ideas, the evolution of ideas, and human potential. The charming characters, bits of dry humor, and the hopeful, optimistic outlook also appealed to me. I highly recommend it for those seeking something other than mindless entertainment.

[randystafford · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

My reaction to reading this novel in 1996. Spoilers follow.This 1937 novel by Wells evoked some of the same responses in me that his In the Days of the Comet did. First, I liked Wells’ satire against everything from women’s fashions to politics and the psychology of his characters – particularly protagonist Joseph Davis, who vehemently writes propagandistic works of history to defend a sociopolitical order he has doubts about; Harold Rigamey, an “ultra-heretic” (I wonder if Wells had Charles Fort in mind) who writes wildly speculative essays throwing pseudo-science and science together; Lord Thunderclap, a paranoid, conspiracy-mongering newspaper tycoon. I liked several bits. The public’s inability, due to the rapid rate of change even at the time of this novel’s writing, to give any but the most trivial and mundane reaction to even remarkable news (here the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence manipulating humans genetically) is mentioned. Wells sees Americans as too ready, in fits of anti-rational, anti-intellectual, misplaced egalitarianism, to denounce any new ideas and recognize no intellectual authorities over the common man and belittle ideas. Wells, by this time in his life, with Hitler in Europe and war seeming more likely – specifically mentioned here, getting more pessimistic and bitter, denounces the “common mind” as violent, brutal, ineffective for the present world, nationalistic and wandering between extremes of revolutionary or reactionary furor. To Wells, humanity is awash in self-deception which causes him to unquestioningly accept outdated, and sometimes contradictory, institutions, customs and traditions. However, though the main theme of his sf from 1904's The Food of the Gods is a call for the destruction of the old, outdated, dangerous order with a new one (usually a “world state” that is socialist and ruled by a technocratic elite), there is no specific proposals for the new order which not only shows the novel's failure as a call to reform but perhaps Wells’ increasing despair at being able to save the world. George Orwell, a Wells’ fan, perhaps drew some inspiration (though most of it came, no doubt, from his own experiences) for 1984 from Wells’ attack on “mystical personifications like the People, My Country Right or Wrong, the Church, the Party, the Masses, the Proletariat.” A bit of 1984’s famous nomenclature may have been inspired by Wells writing: “Our imaginations hang on to some such Big Brother idea almost to the end.” Wells’ also seems to have given up on his own former socialist comrades. Lord Thunderclap believes conspiring socialists have “a strong, clear plan for a workable human society … a hard, competent society”. Wells’ remarks, “He was probably the only man alive in England who believed in socialism to that extent.” Plot-wise, the novel follows the basic plot of The Food of the Gods: a group of exceptional children created by the intervention of an outside agency will create a better order. The sf idea of “mutant” (sometimes in the technical sense of the word, sometimes just exceptional) children ushering in a new (though not always better) world is a tradition continuing at least through John Brunner’s Children of Thunder and Nancy Kress’ Beggar series. This book is even mildly recursive sf in that one character mentions The War of the Worlds though he can’t remember the author. (Indeed, this novel is a variation on that novel’s story of Martian invasion. Here the invasion is done by changing men into Martians or whoever is sending the cosmic rays to Earth –and for our benefit as well as theirs.) Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men is explicitly mentioned. Ultimately, though, this novel fails both as a realistic working out of its sf premise and as an allegorical call for reform. Realistically, it fails on a couple of account. First, though the idea of aliens inducing genetic mutations in humans is interesting, surely Wells must have known, even with the knowledge of genetics circa 1937, that you can’t induce specific mutations that way, and without specific mutations the method is useless. Second, even after protagonist Davis suspects his wife may be “star begotten” and that the Martians who have induced the mutations may have sinister ends, he seems remarkably nonplussed by this. Indeed, Wells’ rarely deals with Davis’ marriage until the end when he finds out he’s “star begotten”. Third, the relationship between Davis’ wife and “her people” is never explained. Is this a community of “star begotten” who has already coalesced together? Or does an entire family of mutants exist? As allegory, the novel also fails. Not only is no specific plan for reform mentioned – somehow the clear-minded, consistent “star begotten” are just supposed to know to do something unspecified – but Wells undercuts his allegorical call for reform by explaining it in unrealistic terms. Is man’s only hope to wait for extra-terrestrials to genetically mutate his bestial side away? Evidently man is incapable of reform on his own. In effect, Wells says we are doomed if we don’t change our ways then says we can’t change on our own. There is a final bit of personal curiosity. Wells’ criticizes humans’ primal nature as being amongst other things, “over-sexed” which, for a man of such voracious sexual appetites, is curious. Perhaps, he was feeling guilty about this side of him or just realized (or maybe not) he possessed, like all of us, an animal nature.

[nwdavies-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating book - not really a story, more a discussion on an idea but one that holds the interest throughout.

[stephenbarkley · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Do you remember The War of the Worlds? This is a sequel, of sorts. In War, the Martians were defeated by their vulnerability to earth’s ecosystem. Star-Begotten explains plan B. What if, instead of invading earth, they used interplanetary rays to subtly change humans into their own spiritual children?This book is a lot more about philosophy than plot. If you assume that the Martians are technologically as well as morally superior to humans, how would their benevolent rule change the course of the planet?Star-Begotten is an interesting period piece, exploring optimism and fear on the eve of World War II.

[garrison0550 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Certainly not his best work.