ABSTRACT
If the project of writing fiction is to explore the human condition by testing the reaction of characters to imaginary situations, then science fiction achieves the same by pushing the envelope out even further. Readers are invited to examine themselves by wondering what their reactions would be to ever more fantastic situations. Victorian ‘fantastic literature’ invited the fin de siècle generation to explicitly confront their fears through an artistic medium which rendered the dangerous and the unpalatable more acceptable. Because it was science fiction, it was safer. In this paper I will discuss how white middle-class English fears of atavism, the prehistoric past, and pull of bestial heredity haunted the Victorians and pervaded their scientific and imperial romances. Their writings, exemplified by H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad and others, were obsessed with the fear that the past sat alongside the present and that the membrane separating the two was permeable. The much-vaunted culture and morality of the Victorians would not save them when the beast called. Modernity was a shallow illusion. In archaeology this is best exemplified by the Löwenmensch, perhaps an early telling of The Island of Doctor Moreau.
