In the preceding chapters, I have examined how authors writing at the turn of the twentieth century utilized the representational capacities of romance and melodrama to narrate empirically observable realities on scales that seemed incompatible with the forms of daily lived experience articulated in realist novels. Here I argue that Joseph Conrad pursued a related strategy by repurposing horror (a genre steeped, as we will see, in both “fantastic” and horrific depictions of the colonies) and substituting its imaginary terrors with actual atrocities.

The cover image of this book is a detail taken from Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geological Chart (Figure C.1). It was originally part of a teaching kit, Yaggy’s Geographical Portfolio, a set of ten vividly colored chromolithographic prints housed in a large wooden box that could be unfolded as a display mechanism. Each of the ten charts in Yaggy’s Portfolio presents us with a slice of the planet, a resolving cut that brings it into focus on a specific scale.

In an unsigned essay published in 1923 – a year after modernism’s so-called annus mirabilis – Virginia Woolf declared the independence of a new literary generation. She did so not, as one might expect, on the grounds of its recent spate of creative energy. On the contrary, her essay complains of a “barren and exhausted age … incapable of sustained effort,” whose meager output is “littered with fragments, and not seriously to be compared with the age that went before.” What sparse praise she bestows on her “contemporaries” is qualified by assertions of their deficiency: a few phrases of T. S. Eliot might endure, and Joyce’s Ulysses, a “memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster,” might persist, but as a whole the “moderns” had produced little of value to offer to the canon.

“London. Four million forlorn hopes!” reads Thomas Hardy’s notebook entry for April 5, 1889. Two days later, still contemplating the despair amassed in what was then the world’s most populous city, Hardy wrote of the “woeful fact – that the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment.” The strain that London’s overdeveloped urban environment was clearly exerting on Hardy’s own nerves opens onto a wider lament on the misery of the “human race,” which must suffer collectively the biological burden of consciousness. “Even the higher animals are in excess in this respect,” he writes, expanding the already immense range of his speculations by questioning “whether Nature, or what we call Nature, so far back when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did not exceed her mission.” Hardy concludes, “This planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences.

Imagining what the earth might look like in the year 802701 seems absurd. The date is unfathomably distant: some 160 times longer than the roughly 5,000 years that comprise all of recorded human history. What could we hope to know about such a remote moment in time? What methods could we use to speculate so far into the future? How could any knowledge we generated in the process be made relevant or meaningful to our daily lives in the present? The sheer size of what this number signifies – the astonishing magnitudes of time it invokes – makes the task of narrating it seem inherently unrealistic.

Wells’s earliest works of fiction explore the dramatic possibilities suggested to him by the theories of Lyell, Darwin, and Huxley, both in their consistent foregrounding of the scientific experiment as leitmotif and in terms of their efforts to represent the scales involved in “scientific” reality. Wells’s secular worldview was grounded in the supposition that the conditions of life in the present could be grasped only by recourse to huge expanses of time and space – on scales that vastly exceeded the limits of subjective experience. However, working at these scales posed serious problems for the novel, whose narrative devices traditionally privileged subjective experience, and whose formal conventions, as I will discuss in this chapter, functioned at least in part as strategies for delimiting the potentially infinite horizons of modern life.