A Modern Utopia (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Wells imagines a world that resembles our own, but is much more humane and rational. In this utopian world everyone has a job to go to, everything is well organized, and peopel are well-mannered--a kind of full-employment Victoria era with central planning and plenty of monorails.

I find Wells' sci-fi works more compelling than his straight social commentary and vision, such as found in this book. He imagines human beings and the conditions of the modern world as being much simpler than they really are. And in this he is not alone. He is tempted by the sin of all utopians from Plato to Thomas More, to Karl Marx to believe in a simplistic schema of a solution for all social ills. Wells rejected Marx, but he was a Fabian socialist. He saw mcuh hard work and injustice in his life and sought a remedy, but his "modern utopia" is not the solution. He puts altogether too much faith in the rationality of the government and expects too little of all kinds of unpredictable events and unintended consequences.

I find that in the utopia he described life would be boring and imagination severely limited. I doubt that after a few months of life in his own utopia Wells would still want to stay. The world is not perfect, but it would be worse if it were more like "modern utopia."

_A Modern Utopia_ (1905) by H.G. Wells deals with two men who are transported instantaneously to a distant planet that is physically identical to Earth. However, this planet contains a worldwide, kinetic, and socialistic Utopian society that differs radically from that of our own world. Wells dispenses with some of the disbelief involved with a certain amount of charm:

The whole world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing storytelling, we may suppose that the language to be sufficiently our own to understand. (17)

Perhaps the first thing to note about _A Modern Utopia_ is that it contains some very perceptive criticism of Utopian literature:

There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively jejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised people. In almost every Utopia-- except, perhaps, Morris's "News from Nowhere"-- one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people... without any personal distinction whatever. (9)

Does _A Modern Utopia_ escape these problems? Perhaps not entirely. But it comes close to doing so. First, there are the characters. The visitors to Utopia are the narrator, a portly, middle-aged version of Wells and a rather petty botanist, who is constantly mooning about a shallow romance of his youth. Shortly after they enter Utopia, they meet a blond-haired, sandal-shod, back-to-Nature spokesman (modeled on William Morris), who has nothing good to say about Utopia. Shortly before their departure, the narrator meets his double, a member of the _samurai_, or ruling class of Utopia. Other members of Utopia include a bewildered innkeeper, a polite but efficient bureaucrat, assorted criminals and social failures, an amiable supervisor of a toy factory, various students and business people, and W.E. Henley (who proves to be as irascible in this world as in ours). Wells's point is that his Utopia is populated with _individuals_-- and not all of these individuals are noble, wise, and virtuous. There must be restrictions in this Utopia, but there also must be flexibility enough to allow for some freedom and individual differences.

Wells also gives a certain amount of attention to architecture and engineering. He describes in some detail an Alpine inn, a train, a hostel in continental Europe, and some streets and buildings in the city of London. Wells envisions all of these structures as essentially modern in style. We can understand why Wells, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, might have a strong reaction against the ugliness and dirtiness of Victorian architecture. But readers living at the turn of the twenty-first century have lived for some time with modern architecture. They may be forgiven for feeling less enthusiastic about this style.

Two chapters are still timely today. The first is chapter six, which deals with women in a modern Utopia. (Wells felt that there should be some restrictions on marriage, but that women should be paid for rearing children.) The second is the penultimate chapter, which deals with race in a modern utopia (or, to be more precise, racism in our own society). In this chapter, the botanist reveals some repulsive racist traits that were all too common in Wells's day. The modern reader should read these chapters and judge how far (or how little) we have progressed.

There are some other areas of controversy or interest connected with the modern Utopia. Capital punishment has been abolished, but euthenasia for babies with certain birth defects exists. Criminals and misfits may be eventually banished to selected islands. There is a hint that Wells was not altogether satisfied with this condition. The _samurai_ tells the narrator that he is currently engaged in a project to reform or improve the approach to dealing with the exiles, but he does not suggest a specific solution. A third area of interest is the economy of Utopia. The Utopians have abandoned the gold standard in favor of units of energy. We have gradually moved off the gold standard, though we have not adopted units of energy... or have we? In these days of oil-hungry societies, are we not moving in that direction?

Many readers and critics argue that Wells's utopian novels do not measure up to his scientific romances, such as _The Time Machine_ (1895), or his mainstream novels, such as _Tono-Bungay_ (1910). There is justice in this criticism. But such criticism should not cause you to ignore _A Modern Utopia_. It is well written and thoughtful. It is still fresh after over a century.

In narrative style, this is about the oddest Utopia story I've seen. It alternates almost seamlessly between the usual kind of Utopian fiction and a here-amd-now narrative in a voice that seems to be Wells's own. In the here-and-now, the speaker ponders the human state and reasons closely on an idealized world that still has room in it for fallible, real people. Then the thought gels, and the fantasy world comes to life to play out the points discussed. A companion joins our speaker throughout the story, fact-like and fantastic parts both, and embodies plenty of the human condition that would need to be accomodated: in need of immediate gratification, given more to involuntary emotional reaction than to thinking, and self-centered in a way that's blind, innocent, and pervasive.

As promised in the title, it's modern in ways that many more recent Utopias aren't. Wells considers the unavoidable inequality of child-bearing duties, and turns full-time motherhood into a paying profession. He acknowledges acquisitiveness and cupidity - rather than wide-open warehouses, his Utopia uses money to add wisdom (or at least thought) to the choices made in what to take home. He discusses race and racial superiority in terms that his 1905 audience would have found familiar. In the end, he argues for economic and legal equality not on the grounds of actual equality, a point that he leaves undecided, but on the grounds that no group in history has ever shown that it deserved to hold the upper hand.

There's more, much more, including a wealth of references to other Utopian literature - that by itself might almost have justified the cost of this book. Wells's interleaving of multiple levels of fiction also makes for an unusual reading experience. But it's the ideal world itself that stands out, mostly by not standing out. Real people didn't set out to create a bad world, so most of what we've worked out has a lot going for it. Above all, what we've got has room in it for many kinds of people, not all of whom will or can devote themselves to some moral ideal. "A Modern Utopia" is complex and layered in its presentation, but equally complex in what might look like banality of solutions to pressing social problems. Social improvement mattered too much to Wells for him to let it seem glib or impossible.

-- wiredweird