Fiction and governance

I was in high school when I fancied reading Classics Illustrated, an American comic book/magazine that featured adaptations of literary classics like my favorite Iliad of Homer and Ivanhoe of Walter Scott. Created by Albert Kanter, the series of his publication began in 1941. I bought my copies from the then Oriental Book Store for twenty centavos a copy from savings of my schooling allowance.

Today, two of the Classics Illustrated book/magazines that I remember having read and which seem to become relevant to present times are those novels which were written by English author H. G. Wells. The drawings done on the pages of the magazines made it easy for readers like me to connect to the voluminous texts. These are The War of the Worlds, a science fiction novel about an attempted invasion of Earth by beings from the planet Mars. The aliens possessed much greater intelligence and more advanced weapons than humans. The other book, entitled Time Machine, was a post-apocalyptic science fiction about a Victorian scientist known as the Time Traveller who travelled to the year 802,701.

The War of the Worlds, the book, finds a startling similitude to the discovery by the James Webb Hubble Space telescope of a bizarre glowing object which NASA and other scientists call as 31/Atlas. Travelling at an incredible speed of approximately 61 kilometers per second (137,000 miles per hour), this interstellar matter could be some kind of an alien probe sent to study our solar system not quite unlike Wells’ martian visitors. Harvard scientist Avi Loeb raised the concerns that it could be spacecraft powered by nuclear energy and possessed with vastly superior intelligence and far advanced technology. It can be either friendly or enemy. The H. G Wells fiction novel, written about 130 years ago, had the same characterization of possible aliens as theorized by Loeb. Are aliens, whose spaceship could probably be seen in November this year, coming? What shall earth people do then?

True to the OFF TANGENT nature of this column, permit me to say that while I am terrified by the comparison of the War of the Worlds and the 31/Atlas, it is the H. G. Wells book, Time Traveler, that continues to fascinate me. There are suggestions that alluded Wells to be the scientist and he travelled to the future. The traveler accordingly found that humanity had devolved into two races: the childlike Eloi like the Nepo babies of modern times and the monstrous Morlocks, not different to corrupt leaders who bagged billions of taxes thru corrupt ways.

If I had Wells’ time machine, I would travel to the times abundantly mentioned by Senator Panfilo “Ping” Lacson in his privilege speech “Flooded Gates of Corruption” and buttressed in scandalous detail by social media. With the time machine, I could go back to 2022 to verify Sen Lacson’s claim that at least 67 members of the House of Representatives were allegedly contractors of their own government-funded infrastructure projects. The senator from Cavite said that “flood control projects have become one of the ‘most notorious’ sources of corruption, especially dredging, where kickbacks reportedly reach up to fifty percent of project costs”. If I could validate Senator Lacson’s concerns over long-standing conflicts of interest and corruption in the national budget process, we could ask the 31/Atlas aliens, if ever they come, to take these lawmakers and their confederates in their interstellar travels.

I am most worried if H. G. Wells Time Machine would allow our people to visit the Russian society in 1917 and witness their economic hardship, food shortages and government corruption which led to the Bolshevik revolution and the massacre of their ruling elite. In such a situation, it will be a good idea for the 31/Atlas to haul these corrupt people to unknown destinations.

Really, if I recall here the plots of H. G. Wells’ much celebrated fictions, it is only because of my wish that his creative writing can somehow put some righteous sense to the realistically hopeless kind of governance taking place in our midst.