A Modern Utopia Page 1 to 6

A Modern Utopia

 

Wells, H. G.

Published: 1905

Categorie(s): Fiction, Non-Fiction, Human Science, Philosophy,
Science Fiction

1

About Wells:

Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an
English writer best known for such science fiction novels as
The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man
and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of
both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different
genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social
commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later
works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his
early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along
with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred
to as "The Father of Science Fiction". Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Wells:

• The War of the Worlds (1898)

• The Time Machine (1895)

• The Invisible Man (1897)

• Tales of Space and Time (1900)

• The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)

• The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)

• The Sleeper Awakes (1910)

• The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (1902)

• The First Men in the Moon (1901)

• A Dream of Armageddon (1901)


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2

A Note to the Reader

This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings,
of which—disregarding certain earlier disconnected
essays—my Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended
Anticipations to be my sole digression from my art or trade
(or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote that book in
order to clear up the muddle in my own mind about innumerable
social and political questions, questions I could not keep
out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in a stupid
haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I knew, had
handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipations did
not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive hesitating sort
of mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I
had still most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in
the Making, therefore, I tried to review the social organisation
in a different way, to consider it as an educational process instead
of dealing with it as a thing with a future history, and if I
made this second book even less satisfactory from a literary
standpoint than the former (and this is my opinion), I
blundered, I think, more edifyingly—at least from the point of
view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several themes
with a greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and
came out of that second effort guilty of much rash writing, but
with a considerable development of formed opinion. In many
matters I had shaped out at last a certain personal certitude,
upon which I feel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this
present book I have tried to settle accounts with a number of
issues left over or opened up by its two predecessors, to correct
them in some particulars, and to give the general picture
of a Utopia that has grown up in my mind during the course of
these speculations as a state of affairs at once possible and
more desirable than the world in which I live. But this book has
brought me back to imaginative writing again. In its two predecessors
the treatment of social organisation had been purely
objective; here my intention has been a little wider and deeper,
in that I have tried to present not simply an ideal, but an ideal
in reaction with two personalities. Moreover, since this may be
the last book of the kind I shall ever publish, I have written into
it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism upon

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which all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain sections
reflecting upon the established methods of sociological
and economic science… .
The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, I
know. I have done my best to make the whole of this book as
lucid and entertaining as its matter permits, because I want it
read by as many people as possible, but I do not promise anything
but rage and confusion to him who proposes to glance
through my pages just to see if I agree with him, or to begin in
the middle, or to read without a constantly alert attention. If
you are not already a little interested and open-minded with regard
to social and political questions, and a little exercised in
self-examination, you will find neither interest nor pleasure
here. If your mind is “made up” upon such issues your time will
be wasted on these pages. And even if you are a willing reader
you may require a little patience for the peculiar method I have
this time adopted.

That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so
careless as it seems. I believe it to be—even now that I am
through with the book—the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness
which has always been my intention in this matter. I tried
over several beginnings of a Utopian book before I adopted
this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative
essay, the form which appeals most readily to what is called
the “serious” reader, the reader who is often no more than the
solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He likes
everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no,
because he does not understand how much there is that cannot
be presented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect of
obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever there is any levity or
humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation, he refuses attention.
Mentally he seems to be built up upon an invincible assumption
that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond two,
he deals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not
to attempt to please here. Even if I presented all my tri-clinic
crystals as systems of cubes?! Indeed I felt it would not be
worth doing. But having rejected the “serious” essay as a form,
I was still greatly exercised, I spent some vacillating months,
over the scheme of this book. I tried first a recognised method
of viewing questions from divergent points that has always

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attracted me and which I have never succeeded in using, the
discussion novel, after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr.
Mallock's) development of the ancient dialogue; but this encumbered
me with unnecessary characters and the inevitable
complication of intrigue among them, and I abandoned it. After
that I tried to cast the thing into a shape resembling a little the
double personality of Boswell's Johnson, a sort of interplay
between monologue and commentator; but that too, although it
got nearer to the quality I sought, finally failed. Then I hesitated
over what one might call “hard narrative.” It will be evident
to the experienced reader that by omitting certain speculative
and metaphysical elements and by elaborating incident,
this book might have been reduced to a straightforward story.
But I did not want to omit as much on this occasion. I do not
see why I should always pander to the vulgar appetite for stark
stories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in order to
make it clear to the reader that, however queer this book appears
at the first examination, it is the outcome of trial and deliberation,
it is intended to be as it is. I am aiming throughout
at a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion
on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other.

H. G. WELLS

5

The Owner of the Voice

There are works, and this is one of them, that are best begun
with a portrait of the author. And here, indeed, because
of a very natural misunderstanding this is the only
course to take. Throughout these papers sounds a note, a distinctive
and personal note, a note that tends at times towards
stridency; and all that is not, as these words are, in Italics, is in
one Voice. Now, this Voice, and this is the peculiarity of the
matter, is not to be taken as the Voice of the ostensible author
who fathers these pages. You have to clear your mind of any
preconceptions in that respect. The Owner of the Voice you
must figure to yourself as a whitish plump man, a little under
the middle size and age, with such blue eyes as many Irishmen
have, and agile in his movements and with a slight tonsorial
baldness—a penny might cover it—of the crown. His front is
convex. He droops at times like most of us, but for the greater
part he bears himself as valiantly as a sparrow. Occasionally
his hand flies out with a fluttering gesture of illustration. And
his Voice (which is our medium henceforth) is an unattractive
tenor that becomes at times aggressive. Him you must imagine
as sitting at a table reading a manuscript about Utopias, a
manuscript he holds in two hands that are just a little fat at the
wrist. The curtain rises upon him so. But afterwards, if the
devices of this declining art of literature prevail, you will go
with him through curious and interesting experiences. Yet,
ever and again, you will find him back at that little table, the
manuscript in his hand, and the expansion of his ratiocinations
about Utopia conscientiously resumed. The entertainment before
you is neither the set drama of the work of fiction you are
accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing of the essay you are
accustomed to evade, but a hybrid of these two. If you figure
this owner of the Voice as sitting, a little nervously, a little
modestly, on a stage, with table, glass of water and all complete,
and myself as the intrusive chairman insisting with a
bland ruthlessness upon his “few words” of introduction before
he recedes into the wings, and if furthermore you figure a
sheet behind our friend on which moving pictures intermittently
appear, and if finally you suppose his subject to be the
story of the adventure of his soul among Utopian inquiries, you

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will be prepared for some at least of the difficulties of this unworthy
but unusual work.
But over against this writer here presented, there is also another
earthly person in the book, who gathers himself together
into a distinct personality only after a preliminary complication
with the reader. This person is spoken of as the botanist, and
he is a leaner, rather taller, graver and much less garrulous
man. His face is weakly handsome and done in tones of grey,
he is fairish and grey-eyed, and you would suspect him of dyspepsia.
It is a justifiable suspicion. Men of this type, the chairman
remarks with a sudden intrusion of exposition, are romantic
with a shadow of meanness, they seek at once to conceal
and shape their sensuous cravings beneath egregious sentimentalities,
they get into mighty tangles and troubles with
women, and he has had his troubles. You will hear of them, for
that is the quality of his type. He gets no personal expression
in this book, the Voice is always that other's, but you gather
much of the matter and something of the manner of his interpolations
from the asides and the tenour of the Voice.
So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present the explorers
of the Modern Utopia, which will unfold itself as a
background to these two enquiring figures. The image of a
cinematograph entertainment is the one to grasp. There will be
an effect of these two people going to and fro in front of the
circle of a rather defective lantern, which sometimes jams and
sometimes gets out of focus, but which does occasionally succeed
in displaying on a screen a momentary moving picture of
Utopian conditions. Occasionally the picture goes out altogether,
the Voice argues and argues, and the footlights return, and
then you find yourself listening again to the rather too plump
little man at his table laboriously enunciating propositions,
upon whom the curtain rises now.