ABSTRACT
Many of the supermen in utopian fiction embody one of the oldest dreams of man: the dream of man’s immortality. The writer of evolutionary fantasies is concerned with survival, the survival of man, the fittest and highest form attained by life. In After Many a Summer Aldous Huxley similarly stresses the survival of mere animal vitality while the mental and spiritual capacities are reduced to nothing. G. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet satirizes the frantic attempt in the person of Weston, the scientist struggling for mankind’s survival. As in the Time Machine the atmosphere pervading The War of the Worlds is one of doom. This is not merely a playful speculation, for if the hope of mankind’s survival seems real to the utopian, the danger of being conquered by beings from other planets must seem equally real.
