Just in time for "The War of the Worlds", an editorial piece about H.G. Wells in WSJ:
After interviewing Lenin, Wells called him "creative" and described communism as the best hope for reforming Russia. The man simply never met a collectivist movement that didn't intrigue him. "There is good in these Fascists," he said of Italians in 1927. "There is something brave and well-meaning about them." He despised Catholicism and mocked Jewish traditions as "nonsense." It was for views such as these that George Orwell delivered a blunt verdict in 1941: "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany."Orwell also was referring to the utopianism that distinguished so much of what Wells wrote. Whereas the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984" possessed a keen sense of how and why totalizing states go badly wrong, Wells was constantly drawing up plans for ideal societies driven by rationalist principles and governed by high-minded elites. This could lead to bizarre results: In "Men Like Gods," Wells envisioned a scheme of eugenic reproduction and centralized planning so perfect (in his mind) that everybody went shamelessly nude.
Not exactly ringing commendation. I've found that the couple works of his that I've read were bleak (although rational) and this does a little to explain why. Amusingly, in the first few pages of WoTW he predicts global cooling: The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour.
(Flying machine? They don't usually have walking legs.)
Posted by eric at June 23, 2005 01:43 PM
Comments
Have you read 'In the Days of the Comet'? The plot is, basically, that a comet swoops past the Earth and turns everyone into a commie. Its tone of wistful yearning for a world of enlightened socialists is embarassing; it's like an erotic novel, only about politics rather than naked ladies.
Ah, HG Wells - proof that with great intelligence comes great stupidity.
Posted by: blandwagon at June 23, 2005 08:51 PM