https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-modern-utopia-by-h-g-wells/

I have to admit that I had not really heard of this Wells novel before. Of course, like the original Utopia, the fictional framework is not the point; the books is about the ideal way to run a society, and what it might look like if you were to be transported to that society while on holiday in Switzerland, to discover that everyone you know on Earth has a parallel equivalent in the Utopia, except that of course they are happier.

Utopia is preserved by a caste of self-dubbed samurai who are devoted to keeping society fair. Wells is clear about the evils of racism, and the importance of equality for women; somewhat less convincing on a utopian vision of marriage, and downright weird on animals (no meat-eating, but no household pets either). To be honest, I did not find the ideas awfully interesting, though Beveridge claimed that they had inspired his vision of the welfare state.

The bit that did grab me was where the narrator meets his equivalent on Utopia. Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Other” has fascinated me for many years – it’s the one where he meets his younger self, but discovers that in fact they don’t have much to say to each other. The interaction between the narrator and his double in A Modern Utopia is similarly awkward. Basically, we need other people for mental stimulation – our own thought processes are not different enough to be interesting.

Anyway, not my favourite Wells novel. ( )

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?

This was a rather strange, yet appealing, novel. The setting of the utopia is the thread that weaves all the components of the story together. It is written like a non-fiction treatise and this is the framework through which we read the work. The narrator imparts a personalized, but professional, P.O.V through which he relates the advent.

3.25 stars- worth reading, but VERY different. ( )

This was slow going and a little sloggy in parts but I enjoyed it overall. I've read enough Wells this year to be interested in the way this fits in with his novels, both early and late. I always enjoy his ideas about overlapping worlds or worlds that exist similtaneously. ( )

Wells was not satisfied with two previous books in which he had attempted to provide a blue print for a better more tolerant society for the future. [Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought] and [Mankind in the Making] had both suffered from being preachy and decidedly dry in places. They had both had passages of interest, but struggled to hold my attention. In [A modern Utopia] published in 1905, Wells is at it again in his attempts to put the world to rights, but this time by including an element of fantasy and some sort of narrative he hoped to make his medicine more palatable. He is only partially successful. I found myself a good third of the way through the book before Wells caught my attention and then my imagination, he held it then pretty much towards the end and it made me think about his writing in general.

After the early great science fiction novels [The Time Machine] and [War of the Worlds] I have found Wells a slow starter. I don't know if it's me or Wells, but I suspect it is a bit of both, but it seems that Wells gradually warms to his task and only when he is in full flow does his writing take off into something more special. Patience is needed and also a familiarisation with a writing style that can be a little condescending - it is always clear that Wells knows best. Wells introduces [A Modern Utopia] with a note to the reader, which is an attempt by Wells to take the reader into his confidence, but here that preachy tone is at its worst, he says:

"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."

The method Wells adopts is to imagine 'The Owner of the Voice' (a caricature of H G himself) and a botanist friend starting to walk down from one of the high Swiss Alpine passes. They have indulged in a good lunch and their heads are swimming a little as they look down at the world below and as they start to walk Wells realises that everything has changed and that they are on another planet. They have transposed themselves to earth's sister planet somewhere beyond the star Sirius; it is a planet that is identical to earth but has developed differently. The whole planet is an Utopia and Wells makes great play on the fact that his Utopia could only work if it was planet wide; one government, one society, universal education, a world unity, world wide travelling, a freedom of sale and purchase and a tolerant society. As they walk down into the first valley we learn that the botanist is suffering from an unrequited love and his only concern is to win the woman of his desire away from an abusive partner. He provides a counterpoint to the other voice (Wells) being completely wrapped up in his own affairs and hardly noticing the changed world around him and when they discover that there are doubles of everybody on Earth on Utopia then his concerns turn even more inwards as he searches for the love of his life. This extremely thin narrative is interspersed with the real author describing the society of Utopia as it is revealed to them by the people they meet. Wells meets his double who of course belongs to the ruling class. This thin framework to the novel is under continual strain and while it does introduce an element of fantasy it does not satisfy.

The meat of the book is of course a description of Utopia and the Utopians and chapters like "Concerning Freedom" and "Utopian Economics" allow Wells to expound on his vaguely socialist ideas which we may be familiar with, from his earlier books. It is when we get to the chapters on "Women in Utopia" and "Race in Utopia" that we find that Wells has become much more progressive in his views. Equality for women is now embraced and in a marked change of tack Wells goes into great lengths to expound his views on racial equality. It is the chapter entitled Samurai that causes modern readers the most concern. Wells saw a ruling class that that he labelled as Samurai, they would be of a certain mind and intelligence that could be tested from an early age and would be earmarked as a distinct ruling class, who would have a secure grasp on the reigns of power. As Samurai's tended to marry others of the same class then their children were more likely to be Samurai's themselves and Wells saw them as becoming an hereditary elite, although not exclusively so. The Samurai ruling class is just one element of The Utopian society that seems to lack the freedoms that we might wish to see and Wells cannot help but go into details that make his society appear as dangerously regulated as Thomas More's Utopia; for example here is a regime that the Samurai's must comply with:

Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the men must shave every day, they have precise directions in such matters, the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and nerves in perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the doctors of the order and give implicit obedience to the regime prescribed. They must sleep alone at least four nights out of five and they must eat with and talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversation for an hour at least at the nearest club house of the samurai, once on three chosen days in every week. Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one book that has been published in the last five years...........

It was perhaps Wells' idea that for two weeks of the year every Samurai must take themselves off into the wilds of the natural world without weapons or maps on a sort of survival course, that caught the attention of some members of the public in England and America and despite Well's strenuous denials that he should not be taken seriously in this respect; clubs were formed on his ideas of the way of the Samurai. How far Wells courted controversy is difficult to say, I am rather inclined to believe that he just got carried away with his ideas and rarely had second thoughts.

Well's imagination, his mind overflowing with concepts and ideas are not lacking in [A Modern Utopia] and it his ability to express them with wit and enthusiasm that makes this book worth reading. Who can resist thinking about his critiques of his own society, such as;

Work as a moral obligation is the morality of slaves

or his views on religious toleration and his ideas that religion or what we might call spiritualism should be a private thing:

A man may no more reach God through a priest than love his wife through a priest

Wells says in his introduction that he will not publish any more books on his ideas for Utopia or how the world should develop, but of course as we know he could not leave it alone and much more was to follow. In [A Modern Utopia] he tried something different, linking his critique of modern society with an element of fantasy. It was not entirely successful, but today is a worthwhile read for anybody interested in Utopias or H G Wells and at times it is entertaining. I would rate it at 3.5 stars. ( )