A Modern Utopia

Who else could dream up “A Modern Utopia” (1905) as a parallel world in the space of his mind, lightyears away in the Universe, with Utopian selves as inhabitants, but H.G. Wells? No one but this science fiction writer of all science fiction writers, although he is better known for other works, including “The Time Machine” (1895), “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1896), “The Invisible Man” (1897), and “The First Men in the Moon” (1901). It is a collection that is a tour de force.

We do not get to meet the storyteller’s Utopian self until well into the novel, after Wells has had good time to develop the idea of this geographically and biologically replicated Earth and what in his recounting makes it utopian. Then, when his protagonist does meet his Utopian self after a Utopian State-sponsored trip to London from Lucerne, it is transformative. That it is State-sponsored relates to a utopian world governance theme that underlies the story and is developed.

In Chapter the Eighth, the storyteller reflects in this deeply meaningful, and lovely, personal passage: “It falls to few of us to interview our better selves. My Utopian self is, of course, my better self – according to my best endeavors – and I must confess myself fully alive to the difficulties of the situation. When I came to this Utopia I had no thought of any such intimate self-examination.” And that is what he has thereafter, within a doubles dialogue about the Utopian State.

Wells surprises the reader often about what this Utopia is and is not. It is quite rigid, about marriage and childbearing for one example. For another, by design, it has no visible dogs or cats at all. The State has acted on the principle that these animals can carry communicable diseases, as rats do, detrimental to its utopian priority for the well-being of humans. Human well-being, defined by Utopian Founders, is centermost in the context of otherwise unhealthful London street scenes of Wells’ time.

Also, there is no meat to be had for food, but that is very much linked to the abhorrent slaughterhouse practices of the day, subject of Upton Sinclair’s contemporaneous and provocative “The Jungle” (1905); no mention here of other, plant-based health arguments of moderns. A rigid and unyielding prescription of “utopian,” again, but not based at all on the well-being of humans. It is, summarily, rejection of the slaughterhouse as brutal factory.

Wells just has this characteristic aptitude for projecting or imagining into the future, such projections being very prominent in his other works. It is what made H.G. Wells such a special author in his own time, and still does. We must allow him the freedom to imagine this rigid Utopia, his philosophical reflections, and go on with his premises, and he does.

In Chapter the Tenth he addresses forever conflicts among aggregations of peoples, which we today name tribalism. He speaks to race and bigotry based on artificial and only imagined differences among groups of people. The chapter is entitled “Race in Utopia.” As his books named above were characterized as a tour de force, so this intense, next-to-last chapter too. He does not mince words. The chapter is a must read for every aspiring Utopian, and un-Utopians for sure.

It mentally pulls at us, back towards real Earth, and then The Bubble Bursts fully, and a dream must end. How? Chapter the Eleventh.