[F]rom its very nature, and I am writing with the intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in this application [i.e., forecasting]. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of demonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of speculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific method. The very form of fiction carries with it something of disavowal; indeed, very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents. (1-2n)
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| Originally published: 1901 Read: September 2021 |
I read this after A Modern Utopia, even though Anticipations was published first—and even though Modern Utopia is clearly an intellectual sequel to it, if not an actual one. This is because it was much easier to get a hold of A Modern Utopia (in print as part of the very comprehensive set of H. G. Wells Penguin Classics) than it was Anticipations (last reprinted, in a decent edition anyway, way back in 1999). I was grumpy and indignant upon realizing this. We might remember Wells now for his scientific romances, but those were just the first, brief phase of his career. The thing that made Wells who he was in his day was Anticipations; it launched him on a career of being a social prophet and a widely read public intellectual. Yet Penguin Classics reprinted The New Machiavelli and not this!?
Well, upon reading it, it quickly became obvious why they skipped over it. As my quotation above demonstrates, Wells did not consider this a work of fiction. Thus, it has dated quite badly in a way that most of his other work has not, not even fictionalized future histories like The Shape of Things to Come. Wells may have been following "the scientific method" in his prophecies, whatever that might mean, but though I think he was good at identifying what many of the key issues might be, he was pretty bad at identifying how they might actually play out. In the post-Trump era, his claim about demagogues looks pretty bad:
It is improbable that ever again will any flushed undignified man with a vast voice, a muscular face in incessant operation, collar crumpled, hair disordered, and arms in wild activity, talking, talking, talking, talking copiously out of the windows of railway carriages, talking on railway platforms, talking from hotel balconies, talking on tubs, barrels, scaffoldings, pulpits–tireless and undammable–rise to be the most powerful thing in any democratic state in the world. (89)
I mean, that one was pretty much disproved within a few decades by the rise of Hitler! (But even in 1934, Wells was insisting he'd got this one right.) The book is filled with stuff like that: Wells thinks all of England will be a suburb (27), and it will be filled with lovely houses, built to order (36); that a group of scientific men will detach themselves from society and run it on rational lines (81, 86, 98, 155); that the lower classes will no longer be recruited for the military (107); that French is most likely to become the international language (134-37); that all of Western Europe will become one state (136), and all of North America, plus Scandinavia, another (146). There are long, dull passages about what houses will look like.
I mean, he's thinking about stuff no one else is really thinking about... but in a sense, he's not coming up with the right answers any more often than those who haven't thought about, even if he is asking the right questions. If you prophesy in the form of fiction, it doesn't matter if you get everything wrong, because fiction speaks to the reader no matter when they read it. No, The Sleeper Awakes did not come to pass, but I still get something out of it. But if this doesn't come to pass, there's little to get out of it.
Except, if like me, you need to know about science and morality in the long nineteenth century, because as always, Wells touches on everything. I read this book because of its discussion of the future eugenic state. Sorry, but I have to quote at length to give you the full effect:
[T]he ethical system which will dominate the world state[ ] will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity–beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge–and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things....
The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence. (167-8)
Yikes.
The nicest thing you can say about all of this is that he was less racist than most people like this. He suggests that the New Republic won't exterminate nonwhites just because they are nonwhites, but that they'll just exterminate the worst of society, and thus let nonwhites prove themselves (177). And he does actually make fun of scientific racists at times (124). On the other hand, he makes the occasional anti-Semitic jab (41).
It reads more like a dystopia than a utopia, and it always stings to see Wells—surely one of the smartest men of his time—get caught up in the very biocractic thinking he skewered in The War of the Worlds. A warning that many of us do not get smarter as we get older, I suppose.
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