All Aboard for Ararat

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics; Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

A profound and witty Voltairian dialogue between a twentieth-century Noah and an Old Testament Deity, planning a new Ark in which the best of mankind may be rescued from the new flood of war and horror.

Release date: April 30, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

ALL ABOARD FOR ARARAT IS a 1940 allegorical novella by H. G. Wells that tells a modernized version of the story of Noah and the Flood. Wells was 74 when it was published, and it is the last of his utopian writings.

PLOT SUMMARY

GOD ALMIGHTY pays a visit to Noah Lammock, a well-known author whom the outbreak of war has convinced that “madness had taken complete possession of the earth.” At first God is thought to be a mental patient from a nearby asylum, but his dignified air earns him a reception in the writer’s study. God explains that he has been “surprised” and “disappointed” by humanity, and tells Noah Lammock: “What I propose is that you should construct, with my help and under my instruction, an Ark.”

Lammock is intrigued, but first, since God tells him that the Bible is “wonderfully trustworthy” and possesses “substantial truth,” demands an accounting for his decision to destroy the Tower of Babel. God has already explained that the creation of light entailed as well the creation of “a shadow,” and “since I had come into our Universe as a Person, it is evident that my shadow also had to be a Person.” Now God explains that he and Satan panicked at the prospect of “Man keeping together on the plain of Shinar in one world state, working together, building up and up,” and “together … acted in such haste that frankly the covenant with Noah and all that was completely overlooked.” God is repentant, however, and tells Lammock that still wants to “bring Adam into free, expanding fellowship with myself—that old original idea.” Lammock takes pity, in part because he notices the deity is “quivering on the very verge of non-existence.”

God returns to Noah Lammock a week later, and, after some literary chit-chat that reveals that God is under the misapprehension that Noah Lammock is the author of The Time Machine, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, and World Brain, the two discuss the plan for the Ark. God is enthused about the potential of microphotography, having met Kenneth Mees, but Lammock demands to know: are they to “reinstate or do we start afresh?” Lammock believes it is necessary “to begin over again,” because the “primary danger” to the new world is “that the élite will become a self-conscious, self-protective organisation within the State.” “It is a new religion and a new manner of life I am obliged to stand for.” “The core of the new world must be (listen to the words!) Atheist, Creative, Psycho-synthetic,” he declares, but God can come along as “an inspiring delusion.”

Choosing a crew for the Ark is an enormous problem because no one Lammock knows seems to be equal to the task, but before he has resolved it he awakens to discover that he is already in the cabin of the Ark, which is “thirty days out.” An excerpt from the ship’s log explains that a leak has delayed its landing, and that Jonah, a stowaway, has caused no end of problems. The novella ends inconclusively (“The final pages of this story do not appear to be forthcoming”) with a further conversation between God and Noah Lammock. They agree that they “will make Ararat,” and God says, “On the whole, I am not sorry I created you.” As for Noah, he declares: “No man is beaten until he knows and admits he is beaten, and that I will never know nor admit.” —Wikipedia

IT SEEMED BEYOND DISPUTE TO Mr Noah Lammock that madness had taken complete possession of the earth and that everything he valued in human life was being destroyed. Courage, devotion, generosity, still flamed out amidst the tragedy, but they shone only amidst a universal defeat. They were given no chance. They were caught and smashed flat under tanks; they were machine-gunned from the air. It seemed scarcely to matter whether the old governments which sent natural trustful men into warfare, ill-armed and ill-led, and were ready to sell and betray them for a transitory respite, or these new governments of frantic aggression, which loaded poor devils with drugs and thrust them forward by the million to die, for no rational end at all, arrived presently at some show of victory. Nowhere was there any finality. Either way a vista of wars, oppression and degradation opened before mankind.

It had taken a long time before this conviction of a final catastrophe was beaten into Mr. Lammock’s brain. His was an energetic and enterprising temperament, and he had lived most of his life in the conviction that a greater world order, a vast New Peace of universal opportunity and fulfilment, was unfolding before mankind.

Now it seemed that Brave New World of his was a distressful, dusty, hopeless refugee, pursued by inevitable death.

Intellectual apprehension had preceded conviction. He had said this collapse of humanity was coming long before he realised it was coming. Now he sat stunned at the truth of his own forecast.

“Men,” he said, “have no will whatever beyond the range of their accustomed activities. The idea of a creative world in which man might be master of his fate, has never touched their imaginations. They have had a phase of good fortune and it draws now to its end. They must follow all these other creatures which have rejoiced in the sunshine of the past, the Dinosaurs and the Megatheria and the like, to extinction. Their sun is setting. There is nothing to be done. Only those great beasts did not know, and this time, some of us know. And what is the use of knowing?”

To that he could find no answer. It was no good telling other people, if there was nothing one could tell them to do. Let them live out their little day until the final darkness overtook them. He carried on, with as confident a face as he could contrive, to hide the cold realisation of final defeat that closed about his heart. Maybe the end was coming, but at any rate it had not yet come. There might still be some idea…

But no idea came to him.

He sat at his writing table, writing nothing. He went into his study day by day, and sat there because it seemed to him to be as good a place as anywhere to await the end. He could divert his mind by no minor interest. Sometimes he was in a sort of coma; sometimes he found himself emerging from intricate dreams that evaporated tantalisingly as he awakened.

A visitor was announced, a most unexpected visitor.

“There is a gentleman downstairs,” said Mabel the parlour-maid, “and he says he wants to see you personally. Something very private and important.”

“Did he give a name?”

“I think, Sir, he must h. . .