The Coming of the Biocrat: H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia

Originally published: 1904-5
Acquired and read: June 2021

A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells

Suppose then for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race as quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device [creating conditions that lead to "race suicide" from lack of reproduction] seems the least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that is to say, as we have already discussed [...], by its marriage laws, and by the laws of minimum wage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive – they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. (225)

I'm no Adam Roberts, but there are few significant Wells novels that I haven't read at this point. Out of the top twenty on LibraryThing (excluding omnibus editions), I've read fifteen. With A Modern Utopia, I can bring that number up to sixteen.* I picked up A Modern Utopia and read it because of my chapter on eugenicist novels; I cap that chapter off with a reading of The War of the Worlds as an anti-eugenicist novel, so it seemed important to read Wells's later books where he advocates for eugenics. The two prominent ones were Anticipations (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1904-5), and since it was easier to get ahold of A Modern Utopia, I read it first even though it was published later.

In this book, Wells's narrator (clearly a fictionalized Wells) and a botanist friend (based, the "Note on the Text" in my Penguin edition tells me, on his friend Graham Wallas, a lecturer in political science) are spontaneously transported to Utopia, a planet exactly identical to Earth in geography and inhabitants, except that it is, well, a utopia. This allows Wells to expound what he think a utopia would look like, contrasting it against our world. So short passages about what the two characters are up to are interspersed with Wellsian discourse on an ideal society. Wells is smarter than many when it comes to thinking these kind of things through, and he wants you to know it; he highlights how he rejects the fallacies of people like Comte and Bellamy, and he recycles his joke about utopian cicerones from The Time Machine. It's all very worthy, and Wells deploys some wit, but you know, don't come here looking for another War of the Worlds or even Love and Mr Lewisham.

The key bits for me were from the section I quoted above, when Wells lays out his eugenics idea. The main thing you can say about it is that Wells is much less racist and good deal more "rational" than many of his contemporaries, and indeed, even himself back when he wrote Anticipations. After the bit I quoted above, he goes on to say probably no race is worse than any other when in utopian conditions, but we won't really know that until we've got some. English intellectual society was swimming in this stuff then, so it's not too surprising Wells couldn't see out of it, even if War of the Worlds would seem to indicate he ought to have been able to. I guess he gets further than many.

Wells does not convincingly lay out a utopia I feel like I'd actually want to live in, but then, who does?

* I haven't read The Outline of History (#6), A Short History of the World (#12), Kipps (#14, though I do own it), and Mr. Britling Sees It Through (#19). Plus there are several I have read outside of the top twenty.