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Dan abitz Sinthomosexuality and the Fantasy of Travel in The Time Machine H.G. Wells begins the preface to Seven Famous No (1 ve9l3s4) by drawing a dis- tinct line between his “fantastic stories” and the pioneering science fiction of Jules Verne. “As a matter of fact,” reflects Wells on the comparison, “there is no literary resemblance between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies” (vii). Wells reiterates, “They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream” (vii). Though they may be fantasies, they are also “appeals for human sympathy quite as much as any ‘sympathetic’ novel” (vii). For Wells, the fantastic element of any of his novels is a “magic trick,” an “impossible hypothesis” in need of domestication, a smokescreen “used only to throw up and intensify our natural reactions of wonder fear or perplexity,” in order that the vastly more important “interest of looking at human feelings and human ways” from a new angle can indeed elicit a touch of “human sympathy” from his readers (viii). Time travel is the “impossible hypothesis” at
The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 11, 2021
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