Recently the Wall Street Journal published an unusual attack piece on H. G. Wells and his politics -- War of the Worldviews: H.G. Wells was a sci-fi pioneer, but his political ideas were abominable (June 21).
Maximus Clarke defends Wells in a post at Maud Newton's blog. Excerpt:
Presumably as a preemptive strike against any possible sympathy generated by the new Spielberg/Cruise "War of the Worlds," The National Review's John Miller spews eleven paragraphs of bile against the pioneering British author of speculative fiction. Wells, of course, was also a well-known democratic socialist -- and that's clearly his real crime, although Miller never breathes the S-word. Instead he tells us that Wells got bad grades in school, and that as a result, his writings were twisted by a "destructive urge."
Link: Maud Newton: Blog.
Another defense comes from Bryan Appleyard, science writer for the Times of London. Excerpt:
It is true that, politically and intellectually, he was often bewilderingly wrongheaded and naive. He seemed to embrace at one time or another every crazed utopian project around and he certainly did support eugenics — the compulsory sterilisation of the “unfit” to stop them polluting the gene pool — but so did Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Shaw of course, and many others.
[...]
None of which is of the slightest significance to posterity because, imaginatively, he was a titan, “the Prospero of all the brave new worlds of the mind”, as Brian Aldiss put it, “and the Shakespeare of science fiction”. He saw through Stalin because he had the novelist’s intuition of what that man’s ideas and character would mean in the real world. And, in four SF books written in successive years between 1895 and 1898, he saw through the seductive veneer of modernity to the horrors that might lie beneath.
[...]Wells wrote at a time when it was commonplace to imagine we were being watched by superior beings on Mars. But he also wrote in an age overshadowed by Charles Darwin. His On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. It showed that man was an animal like any other, that his supremacy over the Earth was a delusion and his existence was little more than an accident in a long chain of accidents. We were, in short, nothing special. And that is exactly what the most dazzling passages in The War of the Worlds describe. In one visionary moment, for example, the hero sees mankind though Martian eyes.
“I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.”
The klutzes at The Wall Street Journal who think that Wells was so “badly wrong” about the future should read this and ponder. With one deft flick he had slit open the corpulent body of Victorian optimism and exposed the diseased foetus that was the 20th century. “A sense of dethronement” was exactly what mankind felt when contemplating the Somme, Auschwitz, Nanking, Mao and the Gulag.
("The Plot to Hide HG Wells's Genius", from June 26 at the Times Online.)
I recommend reading the full articles if you're interested; they're hard to excerpt well. Appleyard also includes a short list of "Prime Wells", his most important works. Wells is often popularly misunderstood as being simply a cheerleader for science and technology, but in fact "many of Wells' futuristic visions were more dystopian than utopian," as Clarke wrote in the above post.
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