Jan 9, 2016

Blind Book #2: The Country of the Blind


One short story, told three different ways: print, radio, and animated film.

H.G. Wells mastered science fiction by generating stories from simple questions. Questions like, "What would a man do if he became invisible?" or "What if our planet were attacked by aliens?" or "What would life on Earth be like many millennia in the future?" yielded some the most well-known novels, radio plays, and films in over a century of sci fi. Wells' questions also spun into shorter stories, with "what-ifs" that, like The Time Machine, put an ordinary person from his day into another world. The exploration is twofold in these stories: the protagonist must contend with the strangeness of that world and its inhabitants who, in turn, try to figure out their unusual visitor. As readers, we become a third fold, interpreting the experiences on both sides of that relationship.

"The Country of the Blind" first ran as a magazine piece in 1904. Wells later published it with a very different ending, and every adaptation has hence taken liberties with it, leaving it up to readers (or viewers or listeners) to guess how any given version will end. The story lends itself to the sightless realm of audio theatre, and was perfect fodder for the radio suspense series Escape, which dramatized it in 1947. This restored version of that broadcast is pretty faithful to Wells' original, though the tagline about "a band of blind men who want your eyes" misses the essence of the piece by over-demonizing the story's blind populace. Listen and discern, as Wells did, how "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king."

This wordless 1995 Russian animation took even greater liberties with the original story and all sorts of stuff could be read into it as post-Soviet, post-Industrial, and even post-Medieval allegory. This all-pictures-no-words version makes for a nice counterpoint to radio, though any blind person who "saw" would think it funny how the people are depicted moving about in a place completely familiar to them: