H.G. Wells: Traversing Time

Citation

Richardson, J. (2005), "H.G. Wells: Traversing Time", Foresight, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp. 53-54. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680510611840

This is the last book written by Warren Wagar (he died in December 2004), one might say the effort ne plus ultra of a teacher, historian and author who made Herbert George Wells (1866‐1946) his life's work. The volume is of special interest to foresight's readers because it combines the commemoration of an outstanding futurist, Wells, with Wagar's own worldview of how present becomes future.

While H.G. Wells is not a biography in the usual sense, the personal curriculum of the British futurist's life (sometimes turbulent) emerges through the detailed appraisal of his books presented by Wagar. The author stresses, throughout the assessment, Wells's modest origins, his training as a science teacher, and (despite the customary public evaluation) the fact that Wells was a science‐fiction writer largely because he hoped that humankind would improve its condition by concertedly bettering its circumstances. Prolific, Wells was (besides historian) novelist, working journalist, social and political commentator, and autobiographer. His formidable projections began with The Time Machine (published in 1895) and a tale of menacing warning, The War of the Worlds (1898).

The futurism practised by Wells took the form of entertaining and persuasive story‐telling: plots with credible characters, narratives that consistently unfolded with suspense for the reader, sometimes with astonishing turns in event (medical tampering with the human body, in The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1896), or the obstinately unbelievable (The Invisible Man of 1897). In 1898 The War of the Worlds raised further issues for the attentive reader: matters of right‐and‐wrong, strongly motivating popular presentations of ethics. The quasi‐autobiographical novel of 1908, Tono‐Bungay dwelt, on the other hand, with “the ultimate futility of all contemporary human striving” (p. 132).

A retrospective view of this kind might lead one to construe Wells as a conscience‐stricken variant of Jules Verne, himself a product of nineteenth‐century admiration for, and awe of, scientific progress. Not so. In Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902), the British futurist cautioned that “every act of man could be foretold to its uttermost detail if only we knew him and his circumstances fully” (p. 282, n. 15). The latter is what today's media pundits struggle so hard to get right.

Wells went so far as “to remake the world” (p. 20) during the 1920s, leaving us three classics: The Outline of History, The Science of Life, and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. When Wells published The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1932; later an excellent sci‐fi film), a captivated reader of both works was the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard. Szilard thus “learned” of the notion of an atomic bomb from Wells through specific mention of the conjectured device. Szilard became, in the 1940s, one of the developers of the nuclear arm.

A good dash of the negative with the positive

H.G. Wells succeeded in producing much prose besides his political journalism: 116 books, one of which (just mentioned) he co‐authored in 1931 with biologist Julian Huxley, The Science of Life. His The Open Conspiracy of 1928 was meant, too, to be a “blueprint” for the future – one that Wagar calls a “Wellsian canon comparable to The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx”, although it is remarkably short of specific strategies (p. 189). The two world wars evinced from Wells a progressively pessimistic view of the future, however, a negativism seasoned in more than one of his works with a sense of hopelessness. In 1928, for instance, Wells's The Open Conspiracy advanced a reason for such lack of promise. He ventured that “the fundamental cause of the breakdown of civilization in the twentieth century was the obsolescence of traditional religious belief and the tardiness of its inevitable successor, grounded in the discoveries of modern biology”, a failure, in other words, “to win a secure place in hearts and minds” (p. 190). This confessional theme is found in quite a few Wellsian writings, such as The Outline of History.

Wells's ultimate works, The Happy Turning and Mind at the End of Its Tether (both 1945) set in counterpoise “poignant and bittersweet” meditations with a disclosure that the “human race had doomed itself to extinction” (pp. 270, 1). Writings of the kind seem to have seriously affected Wagar himself, as a consequence. His penultimate effort he called The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution, published in 2002. The model depicter was reunited with his model.

Futurists of today will readily detect an element missing in both Wells and Wagar. Literary surmise of each Wellsian future depends wholly on fertile – and persuasive –imagination. Environment and economics (whether macro‐ or micro‐), charts and graphs, appreciative enquiry (a form of net assessment), well‐founded interpolation, scenario preparation, Delphi approximations: all these are conspicuously missing from the Wellsian and Wagarian brand of futurism. And yet Wells's novels, essays and newspaper articles of a century ago manage to keep today's readers spellbound. It is these qualities that should continue to mark H.G. Wells as a cautionary soothsayer in the management of change.