 First US edition | |
| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Published | 1923 |
| Publisher | Cassell (UK) [1] Macmillan (US) |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
Men Like Gods (1923) is a novel, referred to by the author as a "scientific fantasy", [2] by English writer H. G. Wells. [1] [3] It features a utopia located in a parallel universe.
Men Like Gods is set in the summer of 1921. Its protagonist is Mr. Barnstaple (his first name is either Alfred or William [4] ), a journalist working in London and living in Sydenham. He has grown dispirited at a newspaper called The Liberal and resolves to take a holiday. Taking leave of his wife and family, his plans are disrupted when his and two other automobiles are accidentally transported with their passengers into "another world," which the "Earthlings" call Utopia.
A sort of advanced Earth, Utopia is some three thousand years ahead of humanity in its development. For the 200,000,000 Utopians who inhabit this world, the "Days of Confusion" are a distant period studied in history books, but their past resembles humanity's in its essentials, differing only in incidental details: their Christ, for example, died on the wheel, not on the cross. Utopia lacks any world government and functions as a successfully realised anarchy. "Our education is our government," a Utopian named Lion says. [5] Sectarian religion, like politics, has died away, and advanced scientific research flourishes. Life in Utopia is governed by "the Five Principles of Liberty", which are privacy, free movement, unlimited knowledge, truthfulness, and free discussion (allowing criticism).
Men Like Gods is divided into three books. Details of life in Utopia are given in Books I and III. In Book II, the Earthlings are quarantined on a rocky crag after infections they have brought cause a brief epidemic in Utopia. There they begin to plot the conquest of Utopia, despite Mr. Barnstaple's protests. He betrays them when his fellows try to take two Utopians hostage, forcing Mr. Barnstaple to escape execution for treason by fleeing perilously.
In Book III, Mr. Barnstaple longs to stay, but when he asks how he can best serve Utopia, he is told that he can do this "by returning to your own world". [6] Regretfully he accepts and ends his month-long stay in Utopia. But he brings with him back to Earth a renewed determination to contribute to the effort to make a terrestrial Utopia: "[H]e belonged now soul and body to the Revolution, to the Great Revolution that is afoot on Earth; that marches and will never desist nor rest again until old Earth is one city and Utopia set up therein. He knew clearly that this Revolution is life, and that all other living is a trafficking of life with death." [7]
Contemporary reviews of the novel were largely positive, [8] though some found the story weakly plotted. As is often the case in his later fiction, Wells's utopian enthusiasm exceeded his interest in scientific romance or fantasy (his own terms for what is now called science fiction). The novel was yet another vehicle for Wells to propagate ideas of a possible better future society, also attempted in several other works, notably in A Modern Utopia (1905). Men Like Gods and other novels like it provoked Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World (1932), a parody and critique of Wellsian utopian ideas. [9]
Wells himself later commented on the novel: "It did not horrify or frighten, was not much of a success, and by that time, I had tired of talking in playful parables to a world engaged in destroying itself." [10]
Several characters in the novel are directly taken from the politics of the 1920s. Rupert Catskill probably represents Winston Churchill, [11] as he was seen at that time: a reckless adventurer. Catskill is depicted as a reactionary ideologue, [12] criticises Utopia for its apparent decadence, and leads the attempted conquest of Utopia. Wells had once been a political ally of Churchill, who admired his novels and was a social reformer earlier in his career, and had endorsed him in the 1908 Manchester North West by-election. By 1923 he had become disillusioned with him over his role in the Dardanelles Campaign and the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. [13]
Men Like Gods is notable for a number of set pieces: a description of telepathy, [14] which has become the standard means of communication among Utopians and which enables them to communicate in the languages of the Earthlings (English and French); a meditation on mortality; [15] a reflection on the continuing distinctions between the races in Utopia, there being little interbreeding as a matter of individual choice, although social intercourse is free; [16] a description of how society could function without money; [17] a denunciation of Marxism; [18] a description of a wireless communication device; [19] and several discussions of multiple universes. [20]
First published 1923
January 1923
fails to work his material into a homogeneous product ... – + Boston transcript p2 My 26 '23 ... hardly likely to rank as ... greatest ... but it is difficult ... to find an effective argument against ranking it as the most beautiful ... + – Greensboro (N C) Daily News p19 Jl 29 '23 ... amusing ... so breathless an adventure ... revealing eloquence ... H. W. Boynton + Ind 110 379 Je 9 '23 ... clever bits ... amusing touches ... entertaining ... L M Field + Int Bk R p54 Je '23 ... not only inferior and commonplace, but a plagiarism of Wells's own earlier books ... obsessed by opinions ... M M Colum – Lit R p809 Jl 7 '23 ... right in his premises + Nature ... deftness and sense of the comic ... may taste like ashes and sawdust ... + – New Repub ... laziness ... – N Y Tribune ... richness of humor, of satire of description ... + N Y World ... not a rhapsody ... one of most delightful novels ... brilliant and inspired ... + – Spec
Men Like Gods public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Herbert George Wells was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared as an inversion counterpart to George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
Utopian and dystopian fiction are subgenres of science fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
Love and Mr Lewisham is a 1900 novel set in the 1880s by H. G. Wells. It was among his first fictional writings outside the science fiction genre. Wells took considerable pains over the manuscript and said that "the writing was an altogether more serious undertaking than I have ever done before." He later included it in a 1933 anthology, Stories of Men and Women in Love.
Island is a 1962 utopian manifesto and novel by English writer Aldous Huxley, the author's final work before his death in 1963. Although it has a plot, the plot largely serves to further conceptual explorations rather than setting up and resolving conventional narrative tension.
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells that was first published in 1904. Wells called it "a fantasia on the change of scale in human affairs. ... I had hit upon [the idea] while working out the possibilities of the near future in a book of speculations called Anticipations (1901)".
Social science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, usually soft science fiction, concerned less with technology or space opera and more with speculation about society. In other words, it "absorbs and discusses anthropology" and speculates about human behavior and interactions.
Antic Hay is a novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1923. The story takes place in London, and gives a satiric depiction of the aimless or self-absorbed cultural elite in the sad and turbulent times following the end of World War I.
The First Men in the Moon by the English author H. G. Wells is a scientific romance, originally serialised in The Strand Magazine and The Cosmopolitan from November 1900 to June 1901 and published in hardcover in 1901. Wells called it one of his "fantastic stories". The novel recounts a journey to the Moon by the two protagonists: a businessman narrator, Mr. Bedford; and an eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor. Bedford and Cavor discover that the Moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilisation of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites". The inspiration seems to come from the famous 1865 book by Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, and the opera by Jacques Offenbach from 1875. Verne's novel also uses the word "Selenites" to describe inhabitants of the Moon.
Many of the tropes of science fiction can be viewed as similar to the goals of transhumanism. Science fiction literature contains many positive depictions of technologically enhanced human life, occasionally set in utopian societies. However, science fiction's depictions of technologically enhanced humans or other posthuman beings frequently come with a cautionary twist. The more pessimistic scenarios include many dystopian tales of human bioengineering gone wrong.
The Shape of Things to Come is a science fiction novel written by the British writer H. G. Wells published in 1933. It takes the form of a future history that ends in 2106.
A Modern Utopia is a 1905 novel by H. G. Wells.
The New World Order is a non-fiction book written by H.G. Wells and was published by Secker & Warburg in January 1940. In The New World Order, Wells proposed a framework of international functionalism that could guide the world towards achieving world peace. To achieve these ends, Wells asserted that a socialist and scientifically planned world government would need to be formed to defend human rights.
A dystopia, also called a cacotopia or anti-utopia, is a community or society that is extremely bad or frightening. It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality, not one of simple opposition, as many dystopias claim to be utopias and vice versa.
Christina Alberta's Father (1925) is a novel by English writer H. G. Wells set in London and environs in 1920–1922 with two protagonists: Albert Edward Preemby and his daughter, Christina Alberta.
Peter Edgerly Firchow was an American literary scholar and educator. He wrote extensively on the relationship between British and German literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he was a leading scholar of the British writer Aldous Huxley. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota English Department from 1967 to 2008 and as director of the university's Comparative Literature program from 1972 to 1978.
The World of William Clissold is a 1926 novel by H. G. Wells published initially in three volumes. The first volume was published in September to coincide with Wells's sixtieth birthday, and the second and third volumes followed at monthly intervals.
The Bulpington of Blup is a 1932 novel by H. G. Wells. It is a character study analyzing the psychological sources of resistance to Wellsian ideology, and was influenced by Wells's acquaintance with Carl Gustav Jung and his ideas.